CHAPTER 5-Jeffrey’s File
The prior case took two calls and forty minutes of a records clerk’s patience to surface: Jeffrey Emmanuel Rajaraman, twenty-five, arrested three years earlier on a complaint filed by a nineteen-year-old classmate at a different college, for what the FIR had described, in the flattening language such documents always used, as “unethical recording and threat of circulation.” The case had ended in a compromise before trial — the complainant withdrawing, the way so many such complaints were withdrawn, for reasons the file did not record and SN did not need to guess at.
“That’s one girl we know about,” Meena said, reading over his shoulder. “If he’s done it before and gotten away with it once —”
“Then either it never stopped, or it escalated,” SN finished. “Neither one is good.”
What worried him more than the old case itself was the shape of what came after it in the file — a scattering of loosely connected reports across three states, filed over four years, none of them naming Jeffrey directly, all of them sharing a pattern SN’s instincts recognised before his conscious mind could articulate why: young women, early twenties, vanished without the usual noise a disappearance makes — no ransom demand, no witness who heard an argument, no forced-entry report. Just an absence, arriving quietly, and staying.
He spread the printouts across the table — Odisha, Goa, Maharashtra, Assam — twelve names in total, dates spanning nearly four years, none of the cases formally linked to any other, because no single investigating officer in any single state had ever had reason to look at all twelve side by side.
“Sir,” Meena said, very quietly, looking at the spread the way you look at something you already suspect you won’t be able to un-see. “If even half of these are connected to him — this isn’t a missing-person case anymore.”
“It was never only that,” SN said. “We just didn’t know it yet.”
He drove home past midnight that night — home being, for the duration of the case, a rented room two streets from the outpost that he had barely unpacked into — and found himself, for the first time in days, thinking not about Jeffrey’s file but about his own sister, about a phone call he owed her and kept postponing because he did not yet know how to explain, even to Tamilselvi, the particular weight of the twelve names now spread across his desk.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
DEAR READER,
If you’ve made it this far, thank you. ❤️
Five chapters have passed, but perhaps, somewhere between these pages, a small piece of this story has found its way into you.
I would love to know what you felt while reading—not just whether you liked it, but what stayed with you after you closed the page. A character you connected with. A line that made you pause. A moment you loved, questioned, or even disliked.
Your thoughts matter to me because every story begins with one person writing it, but it truly comes alive when another person feels it.
So, if something in these chapters made you smile, hurt, wonder, remember, or simply stop for a moment… tell me.
You can share your thoughts in the comments or reach me on Instagram: @sn1425
And if you have a theme, emotion, memory, or even a single thought you would like to see become my next poem, send it to me. Maybe your thought will become the next piece of ink.
Let’s make this more than just reading.
Let’s make it a conversation between your emotions and my ink.
Until the next chapter,
keep reading, keep feeling, and keep a little space in your heart for stories.
With love,
~SN ❤️
