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| Hard times: Anuj Bidve’s parents and brother-in-law; and (below) a photograph of Anuj |
Two little words — why and if — continue to haunt Anuj Bidve’s family. Why did Anuj have to die? And, if only the killer had come a minute later...
“I can’t sleep at night. I plunge into work and come earlier than usual because my wife feels alone,” says Anuj’s father, Subhash Bidve, a retired air force officer. The Bidves returned to their home in Pune last Saturday from Britain, where their son’s killer — 21-year-old Kiaran Stapleton — was handed a 30-year prison sentence last week. Anuj’s parents were in the court when the sentence was read out.
Anuj, 23, was shot dead at point blank range in the head while he was on his Christmas break in Manchester with a group of Indian friends. In the early hours of December 26, Stapleton asked Anuj’s group for the time. He then walked to the back of the group, whipped out a handgun and shot at Anuj’s left temple. Anuj had enrolled for a masters degree in microelectronics at Lancaster University only in September.
“Their GPRS system had failed and they were lost,” says Nehal Sonawane, Anuj’s elder sister. “Had Stapleton arrived only a minute later, they could have reached a nearby busy highway and Anuj would have been saved.”
Stapleton, who told the judge his first name was Psycho, pleaded guilty to manslaughter with diminished responsibility. After a five-week-long trial that ended on July 26, he was pronounced guilty of murder.
“It was the worst moment of my life, when I first saw him (Stapleton),” says Bidve. “I will never forget it.”
Right through the trial, Stapleton was seated in a glass box that was opaque on three sides and visible only to the judge, jury and lawyers. When she first saw him in the witness box, Nehal was filled with anger. “I asked why,” she says. “Kiaran was a young person like my brother and did not appear dangerous — until he spoke. His words were hurting and depressive and his manner was casual and even mocking. He didn’t look sorry for what he had done.”
Stapleton, dressed in either track pants or jeans with a hoodie, smiled, swiveled in his chair, tapping on its armrest and fiddled with the mike, as if to show he was insane, says Nehal. “He’d smile at us with sarcasm and even pride, which was disturbing, especially for my mother who’d frequently break down in court,” she says. “But our family liaison officers, who were simply wonderful, had warned us of such provocative acts,” she says.
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For the Bidves, the hardest moments in court came when Stapleton described the killing. When the prosecution called Stapleton a coward for shooting Anuj, who was at the back of the group, he retorted that he had chosen his victim for the largest head.
“This statement disturbed me and my parents greatly,” says Nehal. “Anuj did have a large head, but that was certainly no reason to kill him,” she says, glancing at his laminated photograph in the family home.
Dealing with Stapleton’s large and boisterous family during the court proceedings was far from easy, even though the Bidves were separated from them by a glass barrier. “They were a rowdy lot and frequently waved out to Kiaran in the witness box,” says Nehal. Stapleton, for his part, would run a thumb down his lips and turn to his family at the end of each statement during the cross-examination.
When a tattoo artist testified openly (most testimonies were made behind a curtain) about Stapleton asking for a teardrop to be inked under his eye a day after the killing, Stapleton abused him, while his brother laughed aloud.
Nehal returned home three days before the verdict. “But somebody who had promised to let me know the verdict as soon as it was announced promptly sent me a text message that read ‘guilty’,” says Nehal. When her father called to tell her the news, tears took over. “I was sobbing the entire day, trying to inform friends and relatives,” she says.
The Bidves keep rewinding the past, looking for telltale signs of imminent death. Anuj, they say, was uneasy for weeks before he was killed. “He told my mother about wanting to get himself insured, but she dissuaded him as he had been medically insured,” says Nehal. Days before he was shot, Anuj had confided in his cousin about feeling homesick, bored and disinterested in travelling to Manchester for Christmas.
Anuj, his father adds, loved cricket and football and had a great memory for the dates of matches and players’ scores. “His forte also lay in organising college and family events and driving us to holiday destinations.”
His mother, Yogini, regrets sending her son to study in the UK. “After securing an engineering degree from the Sinhgad Institute of Technology in Pune, Anuj applied for a job on a US cruise liner but was twice rejected a visa,” says Nehal. “So when he decided to study further, we zeroed in on the UK, as Australia, his second choice, was in the news for racist attacks on Indian students.”
Seven months later, Nehal misses chatting with Anuj over the phone and on Skype. “There are certain things you can only share with a brother,” she says. “If someone hurt me, he’d advise me not to hurt the person back but to do good instead. He was my baby brother, but he was the one to carry me everywhere. I needed him all the time — even in the market and beauty parlour,” she smiles.
“We thought he’d return to India, work and get married,” she says. “We had so many dreams for him, but now it’s all gone.”