From ASP Verma to CBI
Radha cleared the UPSC Civil Services Examination on her second attempt. She was allocated the IPS cadre, Indian Police Service, which was her first choice, the same service her father had given his life to. Vikram Verma, who had spent a career telling his daughter that investigative work was unsuitable for women, stood in the audience at her passing-out parade at the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy in Hyderabad and wept without embarrassment.
She saw him from the parade ground and almost broke formation. Almost.
Her first posting was in Lucknow as Assistant Superintendent of Police. Then in Agra. Then a counter-intelligence unit in Delhi. She moved through the ranks with the combination of academic rigour and intuitive intelligence that her childhood of detective fiction and dinner-table crime stories had built in her. She understood not just the law but the architecture of how crimes were conceived and hidden, the logic of the criminal mind that her father had described and her mother had studied in clinical terms.
She later became the Superintendent of Police in Delhi, known among colleagues for her ability to untangle complex financial crimes that had been deliberately obscured in layers of corporate documentation. Her unit had cracked two major money-laundering cases and a hawala network that stretched from Delhi to Dubai. The CBI had noticed.
The Central Bureau of Investigation. The agency that investigated the most sensitive, most complex, most politically charged cases in India. It handled corruption cases against senior government officials, economic crimes that crossed state lines, and murders or crimes of exceptional national significance. Its headquarters at CGO Complex, Lodhi Road, New Delhi, that building that Vikram had described to two fourteen-year-olds over evening tea, was where India’s most consequential investigations were born.
One morning, Radha received her deputation order to CBI.
She read it twice. Then she went to her room, took out her diary, and opened to the page where the Dream Pact lived.
“One of us made it,” she said aloud to nobody.
She thought of Shyla. Wondered where she was. Whether she still remembered their dream pact. Whether she had become a doctor.
Of course she had become a doctor. She was Shyla. But, she didn’t know what Shyla had specialised in. She had lost touch with her. No writing letters. They moved around too many cities to keep track.