An Excerpt From Chandan Pandey’s Chilling Novel, ‘Legal Fiction’

Writer Arjun Kumar’s life is upended after he receives a late-night phone call from his ex-girlfriend Anasuya. Forced to leave his home and travel to the mofussil town of Noma on the UP-Bihar border, he now has to investigate the disappearance of Rafique Neel, Anasuya’s husband. But when Arjun begins to dig deeper, what he finds endangers him and everyone around him…

Read an excerpt from Chandan Pandey’s novel Legal Fiction, translated from the Hindi by Bharatbhooshan Tiwari.

It must have been sometime around eleven at night when my phone rang, and Mohammad Rafi’s pitch-perfect voice called out: ‘Mujhe apni sharan mein le lo Ram…’.

The phone was with Archana. I was at my writing desk at home, going through a book that had been lost for several years among my bookshelves. I was often reminded of the book, and after suddenly finding it today, I tried to understand why I had made so many marks and underlined the text in several places. The underlined passages were still fascinating, but why had I marked them up? What had been on my mind when I did that? I had even put down a few exclamation points, but I couldn’t remember why. So, I wanted to read the book all over again, taking notes this time, in order to imbibe the text fully.

When Archana entered the office and stood between the desk and the light, I realized she had brought the mobile phone with her. She handed it to me.

‘Is that Arjun Kumar speaking?’

The voice had a Haryanvi brusqueness. I sensed an anxiety in its tone, as if it urgently wanted to tell me something.

‘Yes. And you?’

Archana was standing in front of me. The voice rang out in the quiet of the night. It was a woman, and Archana could also hear her.

‘This is Anasuya,’ the woman said.

‘Anasuya who?’ I asked, but I immediately remembered who she was. ‘Oh!’ I blurted out. Archana looked at the whirling emotions on my face. ‘You!’ Then, after a pause, I said, ‘Long time…’

I could sense she was relieved that I had not forgotten her. Perhaps that was why she got rid of the honorary ‘aap’ in the very next sentence and became more informal. ‘You are Arjun Kumar the writer, yes?’

‘Yes, if people consider me to be one.’ I had no idea whether I said this for Anasuya’s benefit, or for Archana’s, or for a world that had an unwarranted hold over language. Anyway, that was a larger question. At that moment, however, I couldn’t understand why she had called, and that too, so late at night.

‘I read a short story of yours in a newspaper, perhaps in Dainik Jagriti, many years ago.’

‘That was around five years ago.’ I grew worried about the impression she would have formed of me had she read only that one story. When she became silent, I felt she might be crying. Archana continued to stand right there, looking at the bookshelf.

‘Arjun, my husband has not returned home since yesterday morning.’

Dear reader, I should tell you that I have completed her sentence here, for she had begun to sob almost as soon as she started to speak. Hearing her sobs, Archana gestured at me to turn on the speaker phone.

‘What are you saying?’ I asked but got annoyed at my ridiculous question. She was simply telling me about her situation.

‘I have been to the police station twice today. But no one’s telling me anything.’ She paused as her voice choked up with emotion. I heard her take a deep breath before she resumed, ‘Three policemen just came home. The landlord literally begged them to go away. They’ve searched the entire house twice already.’

‘Where are you?’

Such a strange question. Someone you’d spent a long period of your life with – after a while, you don’t even know whether they exist or not.

‘Noma,’ she said. Then, thinking I wouldn’t know where Noma was, she added, ‘Salempur’, then ‘Deoria’. Perhaps she still wasn’t satisfied, so she finally said, ‘It’s near Gorakhpur.’

‘He will come back. Why don’t you go to a friend’s place and wait until tomorrow morning?’ I wanted to ask if her husband was an addict, but I couldn’t muster the courage. Such questions cut deep – even if he wasn’t an addict, it would have hit her hard.

‘Nobody from the police is listening to me.’ She began to wail. The room reverberated with the sound. They were the sort of cries that could make you forget who you were.

‘Wait until the morning,’ I repeated.

‘You don’t understand, Arjun. I’m in big trouble. I don’t know anyone with connections in the police force. They’re not even filing a missing-person report—’ And the call got disconnected.

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