Sensing how that would impoverish the community further, and to forestall that fate, they evolved a bizarre custom but of practical wisdom. It was ruled that only the eldest son would marry for his wife to be of service to him and his brothers as well in the bed and all. So, the land needed no partition to set up nucleus families which effectually denied the right of the brothers to have a wife of their own. But, Nam Dev, the youngest brother of Ram Dev, failed to develop neither a taste for the custom nor an appetite for the elderly sister-in-law on offer. Thus, when the junior Dev wanted to break from the tradition and itched for his wedding, the senior Dev made way for his funeral.
‘How man resorts to murder to protect his interest or avenge an insult!’ contemplated Suresh. ‘Well, power too augments man’s caprice to kill. But man seems to be innately cruel. What a shame the rule of yore winked at the rich abusing the poor. Well, now even the high and mighty men are made to pay for their crimes. Are we not living in the best of just times? Yet, the ignorant eulogize the times gone by.’
Passion of the heart and the greed of the mind make the theme of crime. And on occasion, a black comedy even. He understood that while the crimes of passion were hard to avert, the misdeeds of ignorance could be greatly reduced. He realized that the criminals and their victims suffered alike by the after-effects of the crime. Feeling sad, he vowed to make it his mission to help the victims of crime, nay ignorance. Seeing the families of the Tiharians suffer in myriad ways, he made his first moves in the philanthropic direction at the Tihar itself.
But he thought that the remarkable feature about the petty thieves was that they were all unremarkable. Within or without Tihar, they seemed an unobtrusive lot to him. The jail food seemed to address the very need that drove them into thieving. It was as though the consequential loss of freedom was indeed a temporary relief from their existential anxiety. Besides, the triviality of their offence made them feel nonchalant about the outcome of the trial and the sentence as well. Indeed for them, the stint at the gaol appeared a welcome change from their wretched routine.
Impressed with his zeal to examine life, Tiwari granted Suresh a free rein at Tihar except for interaction with the Punjabi terrorists rotting in their solitary confinement. All the same, Suresh had avoided Charles Sobhraj, the notorious prisoner of the bikini murders. When he saw that Sobhraj’s jailors were at his disposal, he thought he was his own man in incarceration. Seeing the way he lorded over the warders, he could see the abuse of money to defeat the purpose of the sentence. And that made Suresh think Sobhraj was the Beelzebub of Tihar. But, when it came to the terrorists, he felt that having been indoctrinated by others for a cause there never was, they were not their own men even when they were free.