Dilemma of Qualms
On their way back to his place in Gautam’s Rolls Royce, Mehrotra was mad with Suresh for undoing his hard work.
“Didn’t he handle the ball on 99?” he said with irritation.
“How are we to make the umpire look the other way?” said Gautam feeling helpless.
“Justice Sumitra is known to err on the side of the accused,” said Mehrotra pondering over the turn of events. “But what can be done when your son wants to hang himself?”
“Hide the rope,” said Gautam characteristically.
“Oh, how I’ve put my prestige on the line,” said the indefatigable lawyer.
“On the line of my son’s life, that is,” said Gautam. “And I know with you around it’s not over as yet.”
“Now it’s left for Dr. Prakash Gupta to give a psychic turn to it all,” said Mehrotra contemplatively. “How that god-dam dame turned the case upside down!”
Soon Dr. Gupta was pressed into service to heal the fresh wounds of the emotionally stressed under-trial. It was not long before the specialist detected the altered undercurrents in the accused’s psyche induced by the damning testimony of that woman. It seemed as if his live encounter with his past misdeed induced myriad images of life and death in his afflicted mindset. In his altered perception, the courage to face the calamity showed by her seemed to have put his own cowardice to stand trial in a poor light. Further, compared to her conviction to overcome her trauma, his inability to handle his life shamed him no end. The more he looked for the differences in their personalities, the more he saw the poverty of his own character. Moreover, he could see how her spirit to uphold justice contrasted with his father’s cunning to subvert the same for his acquittal. As the conflict got crystallized in his mindset, his outlook towards life underwent a radical change.
‘Why am I hankering for life after all?’ he thought at length. ‘Going by my past, it’s worth nothing, isn’t it? And what value addition acquittal by trickery would bring in? Why not face a fair trial and take the sentence as it comes? If they spare me the rope, I would rebuild my life; otherwise, it’s a journey into the unknown. Let me see what life has in store for me.’
But Dr. Gupta was not the one to buy the argument. He said that one owed to one’s life to preserve it at all costs. He took pains to convince the afflicted that it was not he per se but his misogamist mindset that was behind his crimes. It was only appropriate that he saw his own commissions and omissions in that light. It was time he desisted from his psychological self-flagellation. Why his true redemption lay in living a life of a reformer. At last, the psychiatrist succeeded in infusing in the afflicted the desire to overcome the present to sort out his life in the future. But, as the good doctor made a compelling case for Sneha to testify in the court so as to earn him a lenient sentence, Suresh was thrown into a dilemma of qualms.