The evening Sun had started to visibly lose its brightness and people as they looked up at the sky, saw what was to come ahead, a restful end to the day or a very busy one. Mr Chabra was busy too, quietly pasting fliers of his business around. He looked around for any approaching police vehicle and then was on his way further.
Mr Chabra was a property dealer and not a good one. He used all the shady means there could be to grab a good commission. Double brokerage, overvaluing property, ghost listing, etc, he had done them all or most and somehow got away with it for years.
This was a time when the internet was not so widely used and people of many kinds took advantage of this lack of any easy means to gain information and people like Mr Chabra had exploited it quite well.
Mr Chabra made quite the fortune and had a luxurious house, multiple cars, the yearly abroad vacations, wealth which his whole family flaunted all the time it seemed. I remember how he once tried a lot to get his father’s bust installed at a park gate, with him offering money to people who could make it happen. It might have happened if not for the protest by the people of the neighbourhood.
Then it went away one day, Mr Chabra and his family were gone without the neighbourhood realising. The police came and investigated; nothing could be ascertained at that short moment. Mr Chabra did not return, but his family did for a while after Mr Chabra got caught by the police.
You see a boy in the neighbourhood grew up and at an appropriate age his marriage was fixed to a girl living in another state, and when he went to the state to meet the girl, in what could be called a big coincidence, he saw Mr Chabra running a grocery store, at one place there. Mr Chabra could not recognise the man whom he had last seen as a boy and thus he did not realise that he had been found.
No one knows clearly what exactly was Mr Chabra caught for, but slowly bits of his shady dealings came out, just enough for people to get an idea.
Written by Anuran Chatterji
Early Morning Memories 