‘The Beast Within’: A startlingly true-to-life Delhi Police drama

“Cause of death: Haemorrhage and shock due to penetrating injury to heart as a result of piercing by metal spikes.”

A servant girl is found dead in Srivastavas’s plush mansion in South Delhi’s elite Panchsheel Park. No more than 17 years old and a confirmed orphan with no family, Jyoti’s death should cause no ripple in the city’s vast and terrifying crime scene. Moreover, her “friendliness” with the Srivastavas’ driver, Rajesh, makes the death an even trivial matter – it must be a case of spurned love, and now discarded by a rogue man, the girl has killed herself. Plain and simple. On top of everything, Rajesh is fleeing. There is no case at all – of course, this is suicide; at most, abetted.

At first, the Srivastavas’ impressive wealth and connections safeguard them from aggressive scrutiny of the law but Prashant Kumar of Delhi Police’s Crime Branch suspects something is amiss. A brief look at the dead child’s photograph overwhelms him – this was a girl who had her whole life ahead of her; her death, however, convincingly explained, does not make sense to him. Haunted by his own ghosts, Kumar’s instinct says that she died in a house of horrors and the...

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