“Isn’t the accused young, handsome and wealthy?” was another Mehrotra poser to the defiant girl. “Won’t that make him an eligible bachelor otherwise? I’m sure you cannot dismiss that as rubbish.”
“Well, it’s possible.”
“Were it possible for some scheming girl to induce him into sex to blackmail him into marriage?”
“Speaking for myself,” she said, “I had no such idea.”
“I allege that you resorted to the very same tactic,” said Mehrotra with such finality that would have veered the vacillating towards him. “Since you failed to force him into your wedlock then, now you want to see him led to the gallows.”
“That way, you can hypothesize anything and everything, can’t you?” she said exposing Mehrotra’s faux pas. “But, if it were the case, why could he not even recall who I am?”
“What if he had paid sex with you?” Mehrotra continued recovering from his unusual error. “I allege that you, knowing the value of your client, preserved the proofs of that coitus for future exploitation. As the Mehrauli Murder Case made the headlines, you began boasting to your clientele that the accused slept with you. With the word of mouth, it reached the men behind Shanti’s murder and they made a deal with you to implicate my client. I tell you that you are acting at the behest of the real perpetrators of the crime in the guise of aiding justice.”
“Didn’t we see all this coming?” said the woman spiritedly. “The day after the incident, I moved as a paying guest with an elderly couple whose credentials even you might not question. If summoned, they would testify to the fact that I received none at home, except my fiancé, that too in their presence. They would vouch that I never left home once ever since. For the first time, I came out straight here, that too with that old man in tow.”
“Well, that still does not disprove it was not a consensual sex after all,” said Mehrotra shifting the burden of proof on the witness.
“You can get a measure of my consent from the entries in the relevant diary,” she said, pulling out ten neatly bound diaries from her handbag. “I’ve been maintaining a dairy for ten years now.”
As Mehrotra responded in wonderment, she showed him the blank space against 01 December 1974 and the entry of the next day that she asked him to read aloud.
'Oh, God how could this happen to me?' read Mehrotra hoping to find a loophole still. 'What an accursed day yesterday had been. How can I ever forget my shame in spite of ‘his’ understanding? How have I been dreaming a love drive on the highway of sensuality? What a cruel fate that ordained a head-on collision with a rapist’s lust! How was I fantasizing the ecstasies of lovemaking when the hammer of lust shattered my soul? May God bless me to forget that beastly experience, that’s all I ask for in life.’