What killed Jacinta

Jacinta Saldhana did not die out of shame as her brother contends but of fear of a possible enquiry into her role in letting the world in on a pregnant princess’ condition. Unable to cope with the ignominy she imagined would definitely follow — reprimand and dismissal would have crossed her mind — Jacinta possibly took her own life. Such is the imagined terror of mouth-drying authority bearing down on an individual. I should know. My father, an upright civil servant in his time, endured a living death for over thirty years, agonising over another indiscretion that was not.

The unfortunate trigger

None of us could make sense of my father’s dread of the Income Tax Department, and that too for an imaginary breach over a paltry amount that had come his way from OUP as his share of royalty for a book by my late grandfather. The unfortunate trigger for his life-long misery was from an innocuous query from the finance wing of his ministry, to which he had mistakenly declared the receipt of the amount way back in the Sixties. It wanted to know if he had reflected the amount in his income tax returns. My father had not. Anxious to correct any breach of the law, my father sent in a revised return soon enough but heard nothing from the tax authorities; that worried him no end. To the rest of us at home it was obvious that the IT department had nothing to ask and therefore did not. But not so obvious to my father. This non-brush with the law made my father sink into a kind of deep depression from which he never recovered.

The years rolled by and small amounts of royalty kept coming his way, which he, now chastened and terrified, kept declaring in his returns. However, the IT department continued to maintain a ‘sinister’ silence, leading my father to believe that it was just biding its time to spring on him, resulting in his recall to India followed by disgrace — a short trial, a guilty verdict and incarceration in one of Delhi’s terrible jails. The scenarios began to get more bizarre.

Sphinx-like silence

Posted overseas in distant Ghana, my father lacked advisers or friends who could help him cope. In a mad moment, unable to keep his ‘crime’ to himself, my father confided in an ever so pusillanimous Mani, an even more jumpy colleague sweating out a small indiscretion of his own. We later came to know that Mani had crashed an official car, damaging it slightly and got his chauffeur Kofi to take the rap for a small consideration. Kofi, of course driven by an insatiable thirst for pito and Star beer, continued to be a regular drain on Mani’s purse for a long time. Mani and my father often met and terrified each other to stuttering incoherence. Instead of one, we now had two Jean Valjeans on our hands.

In time, my father retired and returned to India. The inscrutable IT department continued to maintain a Sphinx-like silence on his IT returns he no longer was required to submit but which he anyway did. While in New Delhi, my father haunted Jain Book Depot which had all sorts of books on income tax, many of which my father invariably ended up buying. IT ready reckoners and books on IT case law as well as clippings from newspapers reporting IT raids on corporates and rich individuals began to fill up every available space of the small house my parents lived in. Every meeting with my father would result in an endless discussion on his income-tax returns. We began to avoid him.

Long memory, longer reach

My father also became a real-life tyrant. My long-suffering mother briefly endured his ban on refrigerators, gas stoves and telephones before rebelling and getting those essentials on her own. With these luxuries at home my father felt even more compromised — how was he to explain all this ‘living beyond his known sources of income’ when — not ‘if’ — the IT Department came calling?

After my mother’s death, my father continued to live by himself in their house in Palakkad to which they had finally shifted after a peripatetic life ‘fleeing’ the law. Try as we did there was nothing we could do to get him out of his scare of the income-tax department, its long memory and even longer reach. Poignantly, on the day he passed away, the postman called with a small packet. It was the Income Tax Guidelines and Mini Reckoner – 2006 from, yes, Jain Book Depot New Delhi. I wept.

(The author is with the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.)