On February 8, 2011, it will be the 16th Anniversary of my father passing away in a road accident and the day that I began to thank Noida Police and do so off and on in my mind.
My dad on that fateful day, took a bicycle to a post office less than a kilometer from home and was hit by a truck on his way back. All he had on him was the receipt of the letter he had just sent by registered post and the change from the fifty bucks he gave the post office for the same. He was hit close to a doctor's clinic and was taken their immediately. Dr. Chauhan administered what he could and called for an ambulance and the police. By the time Dad reached the hospital he was no more. Stuck with no identification, Cop Extraordinaire R S Singh, actually had the brainwave of using the registration receipt to trace a return address and though about three hours after the accident, did knock on our doors to check if anybody had gone out and not returned. He even showed the sensitivity of first asking to see a picture of the person who was out, before asking me to accompany me to the hospital. Only after I refused to go with him unless he told me what this was all about, did he break the news. I still shudder at the thought that if he had not found us, i would have had to go from morgue to morgue to find my dad.
In these days when the Noida Police is maligned for their bungling the Aarushi Talwar case, i think often of RS Singh and wonder if anybody ever thought of training him regularly on new techniques. If any of them had ever been exposed to what to do at a crime scene? If they were so used to taking "politically correct" calls that they had lost any ability to do a clean job of anything?
Aarushi's family deserve closure that they may never get. I feel for them. I knew her uncle Sameer in our younger days and some of my friends know Nupur well. I do understand what they all are going through. But a part of me is thankful that on one fateful day, Noida Police did do its job well enough for me.
And no, they did not trace the truck that hit my dad, because none of the bystanders managed to catch the license plate. But you know what, I somehow don't care about that. I am just thankful for small mercies.
