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“It is incredible how quickly the whole thing unraveled,” said the editor, who was present when the photographer’s colleague picked the first of the five men out of a lineup. A second victim, the call-center worker, came forward, inspired by the first, and said she was ready to testify. The suspects confessed to the other rapes under questioning, the police said.
The public prosecutor selected for the case is famous for prosecuting terrorists, with a résumé of 628 life sentences, 30 death sentences and 12 men, as he put it, “sent to the gallows.”
Much news coverage over the next days zeroed in on the defendants’ poverty, but Mr. Roy shrugged off that line of inquiry. After interrogating the five accused men personally, he said they were “social outcasts,” not indicative of any deeper tensions in the city.
“They were deviants, sociopaths, predators,” he said in an interview. “If there was a larger socioeconomic framework, these crimes would be happening again and again. It was only these guys. I’m 100 percent sure that this kind of crime doesn’t happen in Mumbai. I’ve been here all my life and have been born and brought up here.”
But in a constellation of neighborhoods around Mumbai, people are still trying to match up the crime with the ordinary men they knew.
Shahjahan Ansari, the wife of the oldest accused man, Salim Ansari, looked terrified when a stranger appeared at her door, at a hulking, trash-strewn public housing complex beside a petroleum refinery on a distant edge of the city. The neighbors had started to shun the family since Salim’s arrest became public, and she dreaded the extra attention.
“We can’t even walk on the street. You don’t understand,” she said. Inside the apartment, she calmed down a little. The whole story baffled her; she said she had no idea who her husband’s friends were or what he did during the day when she went to work cleaning houses. All she knew was that until his arrest, he came home for dinner every night, “He was to me like any husband is to his wife,” she said.
“How do I know how he got into this mess? It must be the Devil,” murmured Salim’s mother, who was sitting on the floor, one eye blind, cloudy white.
Ms. Ansari was remembering better days before her husband lost his job, at a factory that made cardboard boxes. He was so proud of the factory, with its big machines, that he brought his sons to watch him on Sunday shifts. Tonight the younger one was streaked with dust; the older one watched from a cot, glassy-eyed and much smaller than his 10 years, bony limbs folded under his chin. She would try, Ms. Ansari said, to move them somewhere else, to a place where no one knew who their father was.
“I want my children to grow up to be good human beings, that’s all,” the mother said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/w...-routine-and-invisible.html?pagewanted=3&_r=0
