Whose grief was greater

Demonising the killer is easy, but confronting his family can be tough

Shibu Thomas TNN

Aportly middle-aged man with a receding hairline that accentuated his age stood on the crowded verandah of the high court. The wrinkles on his forehead had crunched and almost merged into the floral and bestial motifs carved on the massive pillars of the gothic building.
Dominic Waravale had just come out of court room no 28 where the judges had ruled that his teenage son Ashish would “hang by the neck till dead’’ in the Borivli double murder case that had shocked the city three years ago. Even as he stared into apparently nothing, I was reminded of an afternoon barely an year ago when a lower court had handed out the same sentence to Ashish.
Covering the legal beat for the last three years, I was settling into the inherent cynicism and air of detachedness that comes with seeing Bollywood actors, underworld dons, murderers, scamsters, terrorists as well as petty thieves act out their parts in the courtroom drama.
It is easy to demonise the killer, but confronting the killer’s family can be harder. I thought of this as I remembered Waravale standing alone outside the trial court room, while the family of Clint Fernandes (another teenaged co-accused) crowded around the grandmother, suddenly reduced to a helpless and inconsolable old woman from the matriarch whose writ must have run the family all these years.
“I cannot allow him to see me break down,’’ Waravale had said. It was a father’s grief you saw and it was easy to forget that Ashish and Clint had stabbed 54-year-old grandmother Leticia Mendes to death two years ago. They then slashed her daughter Glenda Lobo and left her for dead. And, finally, they hanged Glenda’s one-and-a-half-year-old son Dylan to the ceiling fan with a telephone cord.
Tolstoy’s dictum of ‘unhappy families being different in their own way’ was what came to mind. But Dominic’s family could not have been different from any other family in the city.
It was difficult to say whose grief was greater—that of Waravale or that of Glenda. A year after the murder, I was chatting with the public prosecutor in the case for a story on why she was not putting Glenda, who had witnessed the murders, on the stand early on. The prosecutor placed before me the gruesome pictures of the murders. “Every time she comes to the part of her son’s hanging, she breaks down,’’ said the prosecutor.
I pushed through the crowd to where Waravale stood. A quiver rose on his lips; perhaps a sign of recognition that I had spoken to him in the same circumstances a year ago. Robbed of words, I muttered and nodded to him. Without waiting for a question he answered, “I may not appeal now.’’ Then, suddenly, a father’s emotions took over and he hastily corrected himself, “I will have to see the judgment. We have to appeal...’’ In mid-sentence he rushed toward the doors as he saw his son coming out of the court room. “How are you?’’ Waravale managed to say as he tried to touch his son’s hands before the police led him away.
Later in the day, I called up Xavier Mendes, Leticia’s husband and conveyed news of the judgment. “Justice has been done...,’’ his voice trailed off over the phone. I duly put it in my copy.
Months later, when I see the name Dominic Waravale stored under ‘D’ in my cellphone, it is the image of a father inspite of his quiet middle class dignity, trying to coax the cop to allow him to speak to his son for a moment, that comes to my mind.

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Thats what it is.. there are surely more good people than bad.. still they are harder to find.

And grief and love are not like peices of bread.That can be broken and compared and measured.