A MURDER AND A MYSTERY

CHAPTER 3: SHIPRA GOES MISSING

Shipra went to work one day and failed to return home. The family was in a fix as they all wondered about her strange disappearance. At first, they thought that she had been delayed by work. When more than 24 hours passed without Shipra returning, they enquired from people where she worked. They knew nothing about her whereabouts.

The Waghmare family had lived in a chawl in Parel, Mumbai. Parel was once the hub for textile mills but after the demise of the textile industry in Mumbai, began transforming itself as a high-end urban residential and commercial center. Most of the mill lands were sold off to be redeveloped, but the chawls remained along with it's poverty stricken inhabitants. Tall and majestic structures today stand cheek-by-jowl with the shabby and decaying Chawls. Most of the inhabitants know that they will have to move out of the place in the near future, yet they wait for lucrative offers from the builders. Many of the chawls are in a precarious condition, dangerous to be inhabited; they could just crumble under their own weight any time, but people still live to survive.

Waghmare represented the remnants of the once flourishing textile business in Mumbai. He used to work in a mill long years ago. During his time the place was part of what was known as Girangaon, or "mill village". Girangaon covered about 600 acres of land in Mumbai to accommodate about 136 cotton and textile mills which employed about three hundred thousand people.

The burgeoning cotton business in the sixties and seventies led to large scale migration of workforce from all over the state and country into the city. To create living quarters for the workers, chawls sprang up. They are buildings, four to five-storied, having about twenty Kolis each, literally meaning "the room". Each Koli consisted of a multipurpose room and a kitchen. Five to six people were crammed into each Koli, sometimes more.

Waghmare moved into one such Koli in Parel and had stayed there ever since. Initially, he shared the accommodation with six of his friends who had migrated from his village; later he married and still recalls his first night spent in the kitchen. The kitchen incidentally also served as a space for newlywed couples to have some privacy. Later, his friends moved out one by one to different Kolis until finally, Waghmare became the owner of the house.

Mrs. Waghmare delivered three children in the Koli; two girls and a boy. All of them got married and moved out. Their youngest daughter, Kanta, returned to her parents after six years of an unhappy marriage. When she came, she had a two-year-old son in hand and another one ( a daughter as it turned out to be) in her belly. She had stayed with her parents ever since.

Kanta came home to her parents at a time when Mumbai was in strife. Dr Datta Samant, or Doctor Saheb as he was popularly known amongst the mill workers, had just declared a strike to demand better wages and living conditions for the workers. The strike would forever change the destinies of the mill workers. It went on and on, with the workers confident of winning their demands. Even as the workers stayed away from work, the mill owners, tired of constant strikes, downed shutters one by one and moved out of Mumbai. After more than a year of striking, the workers lost; not only the strike but everything. It was then that Kanta gave birth to Shipra.

Today, the excitement in Waghmare's Koli was about Shipra. In fact, the family had been in a state of excitement ever since Shipra failed to return home for 48 hours. A missing person complaint had been lodged with the local police, but there was no news yet of Shipra. Kanta was aware that Shipra was in some kind of trouble for quite some time now. Like her, Shipra had been in a bad marriage and had returned to her mother and grandparents a year ago. She did not have any children. Waghmare had too many mouths to feed without any source of income. His wife and Kanta worked as a domestic help which income was the only means of survival. Waghmare, devastated by the loss of job and subsequent closure of mills took to bed with bad health. Subsequently, he suffered a paralytic attack which reduced him to an invalid. His only son had long since abandoned him. The other daughter was happily married and settled down, and had long since moved out of Mumbai.