Taint of killing wife gone but life has fallen apart

New Delhi: It has been over five months since Raj Kumar, 42, walked out of Tihar Jail. He had been locked up there for barely two-and-a-half months but for him it’s a lifetime of ignominy and humiliation tinged with tragedy. In a case of life imitating art, he was accused of killing his wife and her lover — remember ‘Shawshank Redemption’ — despite his protestations.Had a gang not owned up to the crimes later and red-faced cops not moved court for his release, he would still be rotting in jail.
That is little consolation to Raj Kumar. He has turned a recluse. He spends his day confined to his one-room house in Kanjhawala in north-west Delhi. He has lost his job as a sweeper with the corporation and the family is struggling to meet both ends meet. Had it not been for his two sons, he says, he would have killed himself. “My in-laws, who too believed that I killed my wife, don’t talk to us any longer as they feel ashamed to have believed that I was guilty,” he says, clutching a photograph of his wife close to his chest. The fact that she was unfaithful to him seems to be lost on him.
Recalling that fateful day in February which changed his life forever, he says: “I was away at work when my wife told my sons she was going to the market and left. They kept waiting but she did not return. When they sensed something was wrong, they called me. I went around looking for her but could not find her anywhere...That was the moment when the worst phase of my life began.”
After waiting for her all night, he decided to go to the police on February 19. “I noticed a big crowd in a park near my house and went to check what had happened. There I saw my wife lying dead,” he says, breaking down. When the cops present at the site asked him if he knew the woman, he said it was his wife. “One of them slapped me hard. I asked why they had turned on me but all they wanted to know was where the other body was. I had no clue what they were talking about. It was only later that I got to know that my wife’s lover too had been murdered,” he said. “Wouldn’t I have run away if I had killed her!”
He alleges that within minutes he had been taken to a room where his nightmare began. “I was beaten black and blue. I was being forced to accept that I had killed my wife and her lover but I kept insisting that I was innocent,” says Kumar. “Days passed and I couldn’t keep track of time. A few policemen would turn up every day and beat me up. After a while, I was so fed up that I asked them to kill me in an encounter.”
Finally, on March 5 he was shifted to Tihar. “I was jailed for killing my wife, the woman I loved dearly. Now I was with hardcore criminals and it was very scary. I keept to myself and got severely depressed. I was made to believe that I would be convicted soon and hanged for killing her,” he says.
Meanwhile, his family was facing a lot of hardship. His two sons – 16 and 19 – were forced to leave school as their classmates taunted them. “They called us names and our father a killer. We had no option but to leave school,” said Kumar’s elder son. “I tried to become a DJ but had to leave because the stigma of being a murderer’s son followed me there. My younger brother continues to live at home, not doing anything,” he added.
Kumar couldn’t believe his luck when on April 29, an inmate came running to him and told him that three members of the Rajesh Bawania gang had owned up to killing his wife and her lover after gangraping her. “I didn’t know whether to feel happy or not. My wife had been gangraped and killed,” he says.
“I walked out of jail on May 22 but my scars will last a lifetime,” says Kumar. He has gone to the north corporation several times to reclaim his job but has been repeatedly turned away. The family is staring at a dark future.