Confessions of a Charge Sheet Writer

Crime Fiction -- Short Story: In our teens, we called ourselves the ‘Crime Syndicate’. We were experts who could advise professional criminals on committing foolproof crimes. We imagined murders, kidnappings, hacking computer systems, robbing financial establishments, and stealing personal data. Then we drew up detailed plans to execute these crimes.

By Ajith Pillai

M was in his late twenties when this interview took place. Though no one outside the police and security agencies knew him, he was considered an upcoming star among law enforcement officials. This status was conferred on him because, for the last five years, M had proved himself to be the best charge sheet writer in the country. Understandably, this meant he was much in demand. Wherever the police or other enforcement agencies required a case to be fabricated, M was summoned to “exercise his imagination and do the needful”.  

When he spoke to ‘Vox Populi’, the underground voice on the Dark Net, he had already decided to end his association with law enforcement of every hue and description. In this candid interview, he discussed his childhood, his early fascination with crime fiction, his brief career as a charge sheet writer, and the reasons for giving up a very high-paying job. Excerpts:

How did you get into this line of work? Perhaps a peep into your budding years could be instructive…

My childhood memories are dominated by my paternal grandfather (Dadaji), who used to tell me stories. Not the kind narrated to children, but tales full of gore and violence. These were not mythical stories of gods and demons but of ruthless gangsters and murderers operating in the urban jungles of the twentieth century. Each narrative was punctuated with car chases and daredevilry and ended with the good guys (almost always policemen) emerging triumphant in the tussle between good and evil.

I always thought my Dadaji was endowed with a very fertile imagination till I realised that while regaling me with stories, he was merely rehashing and adding masala to the old CID serial on TV and some Bollywood films he had seen in his youth. But hearing his tales of crime and punishment was fun, and I decided to grow up and become a storyteller.

Did you ever attempt to write crime fiction?

I did. I wrote my first story when I was eight. Then, I attempted three more between ten and thirteen. Perhaps, it would have helped my early attempts if Dadaji had entertained me with some classic crime or spy fiction – the kind associated with authors like PD James, Henning Mankeli, Raymond Chandler, John le Carré, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell, Ian Rankin, or newer writers. That might have been a more inspiring initiation. But as things stood, my head was full of retro C-grade themes full of absurdities, which I furiously transcribed into words. I was too young to know any better.

I did get to read the great writers in later life, but it was too late. I could not shake off the potboilers in my head, so I churned out two pathetic novels, which didn’t do much for my aspiration to become a writer.

How would you sum up your childhood?

I grew up in the extended suburbs of Mumbai, more than halfway to Pune. Some of our wealthier neighbours took a Rely Kwik (a robot chopper service) every morning to reach their offices in South Mumbai. My life revolved around the suburb where I lived. South Mumbai was far away and scary. The few times I went there, I wanted to rush back home. It was too intimidating. I felt like a stranger lost among all the tall skyscrapers.

Moreover, most of the landmarks in Dadaji’s stories had disappeared. So, the run-down tenements and ghettos on Mohammed Ali Road, where his gangsters operated, had given way to swank high-rise apartments. One was called ‘Beyond Vertigo’, which I thought was a strange name for a 290-storey skyscraper.

It was the same in Dadar, Parel, Dharavi and Chembur—once the domain of several Hindu and Muslim gangsters, they had become the tony addresses of the city’s elite. I soon gave up looking for locales in my grandfather’s stories. They had been defaced and rebuilt with no strand of history left in them.

Anyway, much of my free time between the age of thirteen and twenty was spent in the neighbourhood park with a group of friends. We called ourselves the ‘Crime Syndicate’ and imagined we were experts who could advise professional criminals on committing foolproof crimes. We imagined murders, kidnappings, hacking computer systems, robbing financial establishments, and stealing personal data. Then we drew up detailed plans to execute these crimes.

It was lots of fun and was basically like playing chess. Sometimes, two of us would be on the same team, committing the crime, while the other two played the cops. At the end of it, we would enter the details of every such adventure and the moves made by either team in a diary I opened on my laptop.

Did these games lead to any actual crimes?

No, we were too scared to do that. But we often toyed with the idea of getting rich quickly. While we were in college, our crime games became much more complex, involving stealing or diverting funds from the accounts of billionaires and trillionaires.    

If your group committed no real crimes, how did you guys come to the notice of the police?   

It was through the diary I maintained on my computer. I used to forward copies of every new entry to the other three guys. It was the electronic surveillance unit that spotted my emails, which had crime written all over them. The Special Branch was alerted, and an officer was assigned to investigate. So, Circle Inspector Kadam came home to chat me up.

He took me to the Police Commissioner, who was obviously impressed by our work. He said the police could make good use of our minds, not to solve crimes, but to frame people who needed to be framed. He was candid and said that a crucial part of police work involved implicating “undesired elements” in heinous acts and putting them away in jail. But the police often failed in this endeavour because the cases were weak and never stood up in court. Bright sparks like us, he said, could bring some out-of-the-box ideas to make the charge sheets more convincing.

The long and short of what he said was that we could join the police force as charge sheet writers and consultants. Apparently, the police had never hired anyone in that category.  We would be the first.

Since the pay and perks promised were too good to be true, I jumped at the offer. However, my three friends in the Crime Syndicate were not interested in anything to do with the police.

Were you given any formal training?

No, I was given several charge sheets from the last century to study, and one officer taught me the laws relating to crime and “anti-national activities”. As a law student, I took six months to get accustomed to the process, and I was soon assigned my first charge sheet to write.

And you tasted success immediately…

Yes, my first effort created a sensation and won the investigating officer a medal! I remember that case; the cops were asked to charge an innocent man with the murder of a prominent businessman. Everyone knew that someone high up in the government had hired the killers. But the young man the cops conveniently picked up from a gambling den called the Crypto Club had to be framed. And believe it or not, the investigators made a mess of it because they had no evidence and no murder weapon.

So how could they possibly prove the fatal stabbing? Of course, they had a few tutored witnesses, but it was doubtful whether they could survive a strong cross-examination in court.

So, I was given the case. I cracked it in 24 hours!  My story was that the accused had killed the deceased with a knife fashioned from a block of ice. So, the weapon melted inside the body of the dead man and vanished.

The evidence the prosecution presented in court was an empty ice bucket. The verdict went against the innocent man.

A weapon that melts…how did you hit on that one?

Nothing ingenious about it. It was a side story from an old Tamil film about a villain trying to commit the perfect murder. My grandpa told me the story, and I just filched it.

But your big breakthrough was in the charge sheets you filed against the so-called Naxals… 

Well, in the last five or six decades, the law enforcement agencies had got hold of the term ‘urban Naxal’ with which they labelled anybody and everybody they wished to charge for so-called “anti-national activities”. When the courts began to throw out some of these cases, they changed the label to suburban Naxal, university Naxal, scientist Naxal, sociologist Naxal, metro Naxal, small-town Naxal, taluk Naxal, farm Naxal, minority Naxal, filmy Naxal, mountain Naxal, coastal Naxal and even pseudo Naxal. When they saw that the judges were not buying this unimaginative classification, they rushed to me.

I spent an entire week on that assignment. For a start, I decided to junk the urban Naxal idea and come up with something other-worldly.  Finally, I hit upon a crazy idea which came to me in an opiate dream.

Like Coleridge dreamt of Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure dome, I saw a vision of the cosmic Naxal—someone who had been brainwashed on Starship ZNA9, a craft from a distant galaxy.

In my dream, the spaceship in orbit around Mercury sent out an Earth module from the mother ship. It picked up candidates for indoctrination from minority communities or from states ruled by Opposition parties. Once brainwashed, these men and women were sent to commit heinous crimes against the State—poisoning the water supply, hijacking a spaceship, or hatch a conspiracy to assassinate a top politician.

But the funny part is that they never committed any crime. The cops always caught them in the nick of time.

How did they manage that?

Well, I figured out that the accused could be caught before they acted if the police could intercept their interactions with their extra-extraterrestrial minders. So, I got the R&D chaps at the defence lab to create two impressive-looking devices with flashing lights, dials, and meters that gave meaningless readings. One device supposedly transmitted messages from Earth to outer space, and the other received messages from the great beyond. Once we had the fake communication set up, all that was needed was a special app that deciphered the coded messages supposedly exchanged between the cosmic Naxals and Starship ZNA9. Surprisingly, these were entertained as hard evidence by the courts, and the police managed a record number of convictions.  

Did it ever trouble your conscience that you were responsible for many innocents wasting away in jail?

When I was writing those charge sheets, I viewed them as pieces of fiction. I thought I was crafting stories and was happy that the absurd stuff I was churning out was finding favour in the courts.  I was pleased with my work.

I guess I was like those admen who write copy glorifying a product without thinking about its quality. Admen also don't think about the consumers they lure and con into buying some silly product. They take up the challenge of marketing a product and have fun playing around with words and images. There are no principles involved other than the principles of marketing and pushing up sales.  

I confess I knew nothing about the innocent folks being targeted in my charge sheets. They were just names in the case file. I had never met or tried to meet any of them.

I also never followed the news in any form or kept track of the cases I worked on. The prosecutors briefed me on the verdict and congratulated me on proving my mettle.              

But then what finally made you quit a job you were enjoying so much?  

Well, I happened to meet one of my prospective victims. I was forced to see him. He was almost 90, and the cops wanted me to draft a reply to a petition filed by the ailing and ageing accused, praying that the bowl and spoon confiscated from him be returned. For some reason, the police refused to oblige, and they had to provide the court with a convincing explanation. That’s where I came in.    

I quickly figured out that the cops could say they suspected the under-trial might send messages to his extraterrestrial mentors via veggie soup in the bowl, sipped with a special spoon, which has built-in features, with the spoon doubling as a transmitter.

I thought that was a good story. The science involved could be presented convincingly in court using some equations and terms from quantum physics—you know, the kind of stuff no one knows but everyone pretends to understand.  

But before finalising the reply, I felt I must confirm if the lead character of my story, fighting multiple diseases, including severe amnesia, could sip soup from his bowl.

So, I went to the prison hospital to see the gentleman. What I saw sent me into a state of shock and depression. On the bed lay a fragile and emaciated man in the evening of his life. He looked nothing like the cosmic Naxal the cops had labelled him as. The cruelty of it all struck me in an instant. But more than anything else, when he smiled beatifically at me and said, “Sit down, son, I will tell you a story,” he reminded me of my grandfather.

I quietly left the room, shaken and ashamed of myself. An intense feeling of guilt seized me. Suddenly, it all came back to me: the countless innocents I had helped to get convicted. I realised I had not been writing stories but scripting charges that caused irreparable harm and pain.

I spent a sleepless night deep in thought. When dawn broke, I knew what I had to do. I dashed off a note saying that my services would no longer be available for the police or any prosecuting agency. I stated that I could not cope with the stress of writing charge sheets.

The home ministry was most upset when they heard of my resignation. It sent a senior officer to meet me. But nothing, including a better pay packet and a holiday in Israel, could convince me to retract my decision.

Well, now that you have quit. Do you think you have done enough to wash away your sins?

No, that alone does not absolve me from all the injustice I am responsible for. I thought a lot about it and concluded that the least I could do was to come clean and let the world know how the system frames people and keeps them in prison without bail and without a trial. This interview is part of that effort.

I thought I should speak to Vox Populi before I spoke to the mainstream press, which may choose to ignore me. You see, I wanted something on record in case something happens to me… I still have a lot more to share, but in due course. For now, I think I have said enough. 

Postscript: A few days after this interview was posted, M was found dead, in mysterious circumstances. A police statement noted: “The deceased was poisoned intravenously with a substance unknown to chemical or medical science.  An extraterrestrial hand is suspected in his untimely death. We are investigating the case.”

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Editor’s Note: All characters, content and contexts in this short story are a work of fiction authored by the writer. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental and fictitious. The views expressed in this story solely belongs to the author, and do not necessarily reflect the editorial opinion of this media portal – independentink.in.

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A seasoned journalist working in the profession for 40 years, Ajith Pillai has reported out of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Andhra Pradesh and Kashmir on a broad spectrum of events related to politics, crime, conflict and social change. He has worked with leading publications, including The Sunday Observer, Indian Post, Pioneer, The Week and India Today, where he headed the Chennai bureau. He was part of the team under Editor Vinod Mehta that launched Outlook magazine and headed its current affairs section till 2012. Under his watch, Outlook broke several stories that attracted national attention and questioned the government of the day. He has written two books—'Off the Record: Untold Stories from a Reporter’s Diary,’ and a novel, ‘Junkland Journeys’. He is currently working on ‘Obedient Editor’, a satirical novel on the life and times of a ‘compromised’ journalist. The short story presented here is from a collection that is awaiting publication.