Ramesh is not in our class group photo. He had already vanished from school by the time it was taken. We didn't know why then. A few weeks later, we did, recalls Binu Alex.
Key Points
- Ramesh Jain allegedly planned the kidnapping to raise money after believing he could buy examination marks and become a doctor.
- The abducted boys recognised their uncle's voice and later identified Ramesh, leading him to murder them to avoid exposure.
- An Ahmedabad court convicted Ramesh Jain in 1990 on multiple charges, including murder, kidnapping, conspiracy and destruction of evidence.
A new crime series on Amazon Prime brought back a memory I had filed away for 35 years -- of the boy who sat next to me in science class.
I have been watching Raakh on Amazon Prime. Good show. Grim, but good. The kind that makes you stare at the ceiling after the episode ends.
And then it hit me.
I know this story. Not from another series. From the 12th standard.
Ramesh Jain was the boy I became friendly with in 1986 when we were thrown together in class. He was sharp in science. I was not. He had a family business waiting for him, the kind that sons are quietly expected to walk into without being asked. He wanted none of it. He wanted to be a doctor. He said this with the certainty of someone who had already decided, even if the exams had not been informed yet.
For a while, everything was ordinary. The way school mostly is -- a long corridor of identical days punctuated by test papers and tasty cream rolls from canteen that I could hardly afford daily.
Then came the 12th standard. And the tests got serious.
Ramesh was not going to make it through. He knew it. And somewhere in that panic, he found people -- the kind who exist in the margins of every exam season -- who told him that money could fix his marks. Pay in advance, before the prelims, and high scores would be arranged. Clean, simple, invisible.
He knew his father would say no.
So Ramesh made another plan.
On the evening of 19th April 1988, he masked himself, sedated two small boys -- his own cousins, Rakesh and Harsh, aged four and seven -- and took them to a quarter somewhere in Meghani Nagar, Ahmedabad. He had borrowed the key from a classmate, who was later named in the charge sheet but eventually cleared. The ransom demand went out to his uncle. Five lakhs. Negotiated down to two. The exchange point fixed at Rupalee cinema.
What his uncle had not accounted for was that Ramesh was sitting at home through all of this. Listening to his uncle discuss the ransom call. Watching the family panic. He was right there, in the house, which is why he obviously could not show up at Rupalee cinema to collect the money. The police were already there, waiting in plain clothes.
The money was not paid. The boys were in confinement. But for how long? After a couple of days, they recognised their uncle's voice.
And then the boys ran to their uncle and held him -- and in that moment, confirmed the man behind the mask.
They were four and seven. But they knew.
Ramesh knew they knew.
He killed both of them. Then dumped the bodies in a bush nearby.
On 2nd January 1990, the additional city sessions judge, Ahmedabad, convicted him in Sessions Case No. 296 of 1988 under multiple sections of the IPC -- kidnapping, wrongful confinement, murder, destruction of evidence, criminal conspiracy -- and sentenced him to life imprisonment.
I had cut out the report from The Times of India and kept it.
I was too young then to fully understand what I was holding. Now I understand it better, and I understand it less.
Ramesh is not in our class group photo. He had already vanished from school by the time it was taken. We didn't know why then. A few weeks later, we did.
I don't know where he is now. He is probably in his fifties, somewhere. He never became a doctor.
I keep thinking about the psychology of it. Not the crime -- crime has a terrible logic once you trace it back. I mean the specific shape of that panic. A boy who wanted one life, got cornered by one exam, and decided that the only exit was through something monstrous. There are people who, when the road ends, sit down and wait. And there are people who -- apparently -- do this.
Raakh is a good series. But some stories don't need to be written. They just wait, quietly, in a cutting from a newspaper you kept for no good reason.
You can read the judgment here (external link).
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff
