I guess I belong here, but then again maybe not. ‘Here’ is the Tihar jail where I may be for some time … well at least until the trial is over, anyway. Why am I here, you may ask? Well, I guess they think I killed my wife and son. Again you might ask, why? Well, let me explain.
I’m Rajnish Harjo and I have been married to my beautiful wife, Yasmine, for seventeen years. We have … er had a son who had turned eighteen just last month. It seems he had a unique birthday wish, that only he and his mother knew about. She gave him his wish the day after his birthday. Yeah, I’ll get to that wish in a minute. Let me tell this my way, OK?
I met Yasmine in college and we dated off and on until we married in our final year at Mumbai University. Yasmine received her degree in education and physical education, while mine was in business and accounting. I wrangled a job at a very prestigious accounting firm here in our home town of Pune. Yasmine started teaching at the middle school. Then, when our son, Ketan, moved up to high school, Yasmine followed him over as the their vice principal.
We had some trouble when we started to have a family. I could get Yasmine pregnant at the drop of a hat, but she couldn’t carry them to term. Something in her blood treated the fetus as a foreign body, and attacked it. After losing two pregnancies, the doctor finally found the problem and prescribed some medicine for her, almost immediately after the last D & C.
Lo and behold, six weeks later Yasmine was pregnant again, and this time she was able to carry Ketan to term. The doctor did say that she shouldn’t try to have more children as it was very risky for both her and the baby, so she had her tubes tied right after the delivery.
Because of all the trouble we had in getting Ketan, he was doted on by both of us. I really wanted a girl so I could express the same kind of love Yasmine showered on Ketan but, alas, it was not to be. We talked of adoption, but Yasmine was dead set against it. Why I don’t know. Anyway, it didn’t hurt my love life much until Ketan turned nine or ten. We had been married for almost thirteen years when our sex life slowly dwindled to maybe once a week, and before our fourteenth anniversary it was over, it was down to maybe once every other month.
I tried to talk to Yasmine about it, but she said she was too busy with everything else in her life, and besides, we were getting older and my work was getting me down as well. I asked her to go to the doctor to get checked out. She told me he said it may have something to do with early menopause due to her being on some replacement hormone medicines because of her tubes being tied for so long. Anyway, our sex tapered off to the point of nothing. I was back to Rosie Palm and her five sisters for relief.
Since I had advanced in my company, I was now a chief accountant and had eighteen people working under me. My stress at work was mounting, but I was getting paid quite well for my services. So when April came around this year, Yasmine approached me. She asked if we could continue living as we were if she took an extended leave of absence for a year or two. She wanted to tutor Ketan and get him into the advanced classes for his last three years in high school. That way he would have a good chance for scholarships to college which would put less of a burden on us. Maybe we could travel, once he was safely ensconced in college.
We had always promised ourselves that when we were able, we would like to cruise the Laxwadeep and also up the coast to Mauritius. The cruises we wanted were either three weeks or a month long. Yasmine could swing that with her being off during the summer, but I just couldn’t commit to being away that long from my job, and still expect to have it waiting for me when I got back. So we put it off till I was much higher in the company and Ketan was in college or out on his own.
The way Yasmine presented her theory; it looked like a sound idea. It would allow us to travel sooner if Ketan could get a good scholarship. So I let her take the time off and I buckled down and worked as much as I could so that we wouldn’t miss the extra income. Yasmine stopped working on May 28th. She stayed home with Ketan for the summer to get him prepared to test out on several subjects, so he could skip at least one grade … maybe two. Me, I usually came home about eight, exhausted and tired. I ate a light supper and headed to bed. What else was there for me to do? On the weekends, I helped with Ketan’s subjects in math and business. Other than that, things were the same; no sex and tired all the time, but I knew that I could see a faint light at the end of the tunnel. Little did I know that that light was the damn train that derailed my life, rather than the end of the tunnel.
Things progressed well, or maybe not so well, but we got through the days; and I slept the nights next to my wife. Then Ketan’s birthday came up on the 18th of October. We got Ketan a new backpack, and some video games, but it was mostly clothes. He was already outgrowing the stuff we’d bought in August for the start of school.
Ketan seemed to act a little funny around me right before, and just after, his birthday. It was almost as if he knew a secret and wanted to tell me, but couldn’t. I passed it off as teenaged angst, and left it alone. He would tell me when he felt the time was right, I hoped.
Two days ago, we had a problem with the power in our office building. It seemed that some idiot driver crossed in front of a semi, and the semi plowed into the power substation that provided power to our building, as well as several others in the area. At 1:25 PM, we were told to go home. We would be called when we could come back to work.
I headed to the grocery store to pick up our weekly groceries. I picked up a bouquet of flowers to give to Yasmine, hoping that I just might ‘get lucky’ this afternoon before Ketan came home. I arrived home about three and started putting groceries away. I though it funny that Yasmine didn’t hear me come in the back door. Oh well, she might be napping. She didn’t come to bed last night until almost midnight, saying she was helping Ketan study.
I finished up with the groceries, put the flowers in a nice vase and put them on the kitchen table, along with some candles for atmosphere. I then went up to our room to change.
That is when my life ended. I opened the bedroom door, and there spread out on the bed was my wife, naked, and my son plowing my field. I stood there and just gaped at the scene, I never said a word. I left, quietly closing the door, and went back downstairs and turned the gas one of the burners on. I grabbed an old pot that had been left on the stove one too many times and burned the bottom and left a residue inside the pan. I let some water spill on the burner and it went out leaving the gas on.
I then went back out of the house and drove away.
I went to the diner down the street and waited. About forty-five minutes later, I heard a big bang. Then about ten minutes later several fire trucks, an ambulance, and police cars raced up the street toward my house. I waited another ten minutes and left the diner after giving the waitress a very nice tip.
I slowly drove home, well as close as I could get to home and looked at what was left of my house. The detached garage was still standing, although charred in places, Yasmine’s car was still in the garage and seemed unharmed, but the shrubs and small trees around the smoldering remains of where our house had stood was just charred and wet ruins. It seems that a gas leak had found an ignition source, and blown the kitchen up into the upstairs master bedroom.
The two people in the bed upstairs were burnt to a crisp. It seems that when the kitchen blew, it weakened the floor, and the bed came crashing down into the inferno. The two on the bed were turned into almost instant crispy critters. There was no fabric other than the bed clothes found on either body, so they had to have been naked at the time of the explosion. Of course, that didn’t come out until the next day, when they asked me to come in for questioning.
Needless to say, I was distraught. I had just lost my wife of seventeen years and my eighteen year old son. I was inconsolable, I cried, I shivered, and shook. They postponed questioning until a doctor gave me something to calm my nerves. They tried again the next day to see what I knew of this horrible tragedy. After I had settled down some, they finally told me that it appeared that the two of them had been on the bed, nude, and they were pretty sure they had been intimate.
I explained that that was not possible. My wife could not have relations anymore; I said check to check with her doctor. We hadn’t had sex for almost six years now. I said the doctor told us it had something to do with the hormone medicine she had been taking, since Ketan was born. They finally let me go back to my motel room.
They were back banging on my door at six that night, asking me to please come back to the station as they had more questions. They had talked to Yasmine’s doctor and he said there was nothing wrong with her. Why had I lied, what could I gain by lying. I demanded a polygraph to say I was innocent of lying about what I was told. But I think my vehemence let them know I wasn’t lying about that. After all, what thirty-eight year old man in his right mind would say such a thing about having no sex in almost six years, if it wasn’t true?
I was arrested two days later on suspicion of multiple homicides, i.e. the murder of my wife and child. So here I sit in isolation, until my trial. I can’t convince anyone I am not a flight risk and no one I know has the money for a two million dollar bail.
My hearing was attended by most of Yasmine’s friends and they had talked to the prosecutor before hand and said I was a bad parent and lousy husband forcing my wife to find love in someone else’s arms. No one believed me when I said we hadn’t had sex in six years. Audrey, Yasmine’s best friend and confidant said that Yasmine glowingly talked about her sex life saying that her lover was fantastic. She was speaking about her son, but everyone thought she was describing me. Hah what a laugh. Somehow it was never brought up in court that they were found nude in bed and I couldn’t get that prick of a lawyer to challenge the assistant DA on why that information was not brought up during the hearing. I heard that that evidence was still pending corroboration by the lab. If it was true it would be brought up at the trial. Yeah, right!
They had talked to the grocery store clerk and the waitress at the diner and I guess my contrived alibis weren’t convincing anyone. Then too my nosy neighbor saw me come home and then leave a little while later. I guess that gave me a window of opportunity to kill them. But there were no marks on their bodies and no bullet holes so they figured that I purposely left the stove on and lit a candle. There was candle wax found all over the kitchen walls. I guess I wasn’t awfully smart in that regard.
I guess I can’t really blame anyone for that. They all think I’m guilty. I did get some sympathy from Detective Arnold, after he learned the truth about my wife and son having sex since I had been without for so long. After talking to some of Ketan’s friends, they think this had been going on for probably the whole six years I had gone without. It was pure conjecture and was not admissible as evidence, but he did feel sorry for me. I finally got a lawyer to come to see me today, he was a court appointed one, as my family lawyer would not take the case. He had been one of Yasmine’s boyfriends in high school, so he was biased against me.
Detective Arnold saw me today. He said that they found other teachers and a couple of students that said they also had sex with my wife. Even with all this, it still didn’t bode well for me at the trial. They told me that since the trial will not convene for another three months, I may have to go into the general population in the next couple of days. My lawyer was going to try for a crime of passion defense, but not to keep my hopes up too high. With the other teachers and students testifying, I might get manslaughter instead of Murder 1, but not to hope for that.
I went into genpop (general population) just after lunch today, and was knifed with a makeshift spoon not an hour later. I bled out before they could get me to the infirmary.
Oh yeah, my son’s birthday wish? He wanted to get my wife pregnant with his child. It seems he had been having sex … first oral, then full penetration with my wife … since he was ten years old. Some life, huh? Mine’s done and so are theirs.
The funny thing was that I stayed around for another month drifting in the ether. Within five days of my death it came out that everything I had said about my wife and son was right. They also found out everything they got from others was proven to be right as well and I would have gotten off with justifiable homicide due to a crime of passion. Yeah, I got my last laugh, but it didn’t do me a whole lot of good, now did it?