By Vani Nijhawan:
It was end of my graduation. A stage where every youngster steps into the next level of their lives, which is to start working and earning.
But for me it was a little different, as I had started working along with my college. I had seen a few people in my locality working in night shifts at call centers/BPO for easy money and that convinced me to do the same during my college days.
During my freshmen year, I started working in the night shift of a BPO.
This went on for three years and luckily I did well at work. It was 2014 and also my last year of graduation, and I decided that I would not be working any more after this year of college. During this time, I made a lot of friends. One of them was Kunal (name changed), who was working in the same company as me. He became a very close friend, he was all that a person would want a friend to be like. He treated me with a lot of care, respect and love.
He was elder to me, I was then 20 years of age and he was 26.
He had been in this industry for almost 6 years whereas I was in this industry for only 3 years. But now that we were professionals at what we were doing, we thought, why not to make it our main thing in life?
It had been a year since I had known him, I trusted him completely, even he trusted me blindly. As I was about complete my graduation as well, we decided that by May 2015 we would set up our own software company.
One of my very good friends, Neeyam (name changed) also showed interest and wanted to invest, so he convinced us to start our own business wherein he would be the investor and we two would be the main people handling it, and gradually things started. It was a new thing in my life and I was too convinced then that I would like to pursue my career in the BPO industry. It was all going very well, Kunal, Neeyam and I shared a good bond and the company was getting good profits too.
As Neeyam had other work to handle and I was a bit young to handle accounts, all the responsibility was given to Kunal, from handling our financial records to our accounts and we trusted him with whatever he said and never cross-checked the files. After almost two months we were about to get our first profit from the company of almost 4 lakh rupees. At least this is was what Kunal announced to us. Everything was going perfectly fine, but just a day before the payment had to be transferred, Kunal informed us that he would be out for some work so it should be an off day for the company. Neeyam and I agreed, and though he sounded a bit weird over the phone, I preferred not talking about it and thought I’ll meet him and ask if something was wrong.
An hour later, Kunal informed me that he had to meet his friends as he had some work and would return late at night. At 6 in the morning, I suddenly got a call from Kunal where he informed me that he is in a big mess and might not ever return. Saying this, he disconnected the call.
I was blank, I tried calling him, but his phone was switched off. I went to his place, but it was locked. I decided to check the office premises and when I reached there, I saw that there were no laptops, office equipments, internet dongles, anything. The office was emptied of everything.
Everything was gone. I then recollected that the payment we were about to get which was received by him was also gone. He came out to be a fraud. I was speechless, I informed Neeyam, he too went through shock. We could have never expected him to do this, was all the friendship and trust we had between us fake?
Is it so easy in this world to fake love and friendship? Maybe it was, for him. We held ourselves up and went to a nearby police station to lodge an FIR. Now, after writing a complaint at the police station, we expected them to be active enough to work upon the FIR, but the police were busy giggling over the fact that we were in such a situation. It took them 48 hours to file an FIR and then they asked questions, like what does your father do? What is his monthly income? And when I told them in a rude tone to not ask me a question unrelated to the matter at hand, they told me something that left me in shock. Madam, khali pet kaam nahi hota humse (we don’t work on an empty stomach). Indirectly, they wanted to be bribed, which I never was in favour of. I mean, are these policemen stupid? We came to them to file a complaint that we have been robbed and they wanted to rob us off our money again to fill their stomach?
Kunal ran away on 13th October, 2015 and on 15th October, 2015 we filled an FIR. Following that, every day for the next five days we kept visiting the police station and every time they used to ignore the case and in some or the other way talk about bribing them.
Neeyam and I tried tracking Kunal through his email and Facebook account, but we failed every time.
We are in such a loss that we can’t even think of bribing the police as we desperately just want justice.
Frauds like Kunal do anything they wish to in our country just with the thought that our country’s police is least bothered to even look at such criminals.
Today, I am fighting for justice and the police is least bothered. I am not a daughter of some neta (politician), neither do I belong to a filthy rich family. I am a citizen of this country, don’t I deserve justice? I have tried my level best to get justice, since I was born I was told that the police is like a parent, given to every city, town and village, to protect people and give them justice when they are wronged.
But it turns out that these policemen are just hungry souls, hungry for money.
Today it has been more than a month and policemen are least bothered, they are way too busy with their nuisance of filling their stomach. I am still denied justice, Kunal is still missing. I am helpless and I hope that no one ever suffers like I did by putting my trust into someone who didn’t deserve it in the first place.