Dangerous liaisons : Chanda with her husband P. Ratna Rao in a snapshot from a family album (above); Chanda being interrogated (left); a smiling Shivnarayan Yadav (centre) after his arrest. Photos: Uma Shanker Dubey

In the hot and dingy cell she shares with 11 other women prisoners, Chanda Rao weeps while she pores over smuggled newspapers. “Believe me, I didn’t get my husband killed,” the 35-year-old mother of three — arrested on charges of conspiring with her paramour to kill her husband — keeps telling her cellmates. Except for her fellow prisoners and a few sympathetic jail officials, hardly any one believes her.

For Chanda, lodged in the overcrowded East Singhbum district jail in Jamshedpur, has already been declared guilty, less than a week after her husband was killed. There is nobody who wants to hear her side of the story, and few who are ready to believe her. Not her brothers. And certainly not the police.

Superintendent of police Arun Kumar Oraon, a 1992-batch Punjab cadre IPS officer on deputation to Jharkhand, seems to have already closed the file.

“I have absolutely no doubt that she is involved,” says Oraon, with an air of finality. “She had her husband murdered.” The investigation into the June 19 murder has just begun, but the police have already reached a conclusion. And the assertion of the law enforcement agency is not based purely on evidence.

Chanda Rao — Dolly to her friends and family — was arrested and thrown into jail after Shivnarayan Yadav, a next-door neighbour she was having an affair with, named her after he was apprehended by the police. Yadav, in his so-called confessional statement, says that he had hired three shooters to “bump off” Chanda’s husband, P. Ratna Rao, a former basketball player with Tata Steel. He says he did so at the instigation of Rao’s wife, an accusation that Chanda staunchly denies.

Yadav, according to Chanda, is seeking revenge by attempting to frame her because she ended their affair. She also accuses Yadav of “threatening and intimidating” her.

The police have no problems believing Yadav, despite the gaping holes in his testimony. But Chanda’s denial is, as far as the police is concerned, just empty words.

Take, for instance, Yadav’s claim that Chanda had given him Rs 32,000 by cheque from her account as an “advance” for killers to take out Ratna Rao. A week after the murder, the police haven’t been able to establish if the payment was made. They don’t even know if Chanda has a bank account, apart from the one she holds jointly with her husband. “We haven’t got any evidence so far that she paid that amount by cheque. But we are investigating,” Oraon says.

The couple had a joint savings account with the State Bank of India but no cheque for Rs 32,000 was drawn by Chanda from that account.

In the Steel City, rocked by the murder, there are few who are ready to give a hearing to Chanda. For, a woman who says she committed adultery — goes the common wisdom — can kill her husband as well.

Chanda, one of four children of a former Tata Steel employee, was born in November 1968 in mineral-rich Nuamundi. After graduating from a local school, she moved to Jamshedpur and got enrolled in Shyamaprasad College. She left college midway after getting a job as a trainee nurse at the Tata Main Hospital in 1988.

This is where she met Ratna Rao — Johnny to friends. Rao, who did his schooling in Visakhapatnam, started his career with Tata Steel at Nuamundi after getting the job on a sports quota. He was later moved to the Tata Main Hospital as a health officer. Though neither family was happy with the relationship, they did not object when the couple decided to get married in 1996.

“We — I mean the two families — hit it off. Johnny was a decent fellow and we took to him,” says Chanda’s brother, Debasish Mukherjee. P. Ramchandra Rao, Johnny’s father, says he was happy with his daughter-in-law, even though “she was a Bengali and did not know much of our Telugu culture”. They lived in the Raos’ family home in Sitaramdera, a middle-class neighbourhood in Jamshedpur.

Their lives changed as time took its toll. After Johnny’s mother died in 1999, Chanda took voluntary retirement from Tata Main Hospital to take care of the family, which now included her son, Mohitraj, born that very year. And as Johnny, ambitious and driven, started climbing the corporate ladder and rose to be a manager in Tata Steel’s sports department, he had less time for his wife or family.

“I became very lonely. He would work late or spend his evenings socialising with people who mattered. I kept calling him on his mobile,” she told the police and reporters immediately after her arrest.

Then came a time when she was “convinced” that his work mattered more to Johnny than she did. This was the time she says she got into a relationship with Yadav, who lived just next door.

Their houses lie cheek by jowl, with a common roof. One evening in January this year, Johnny caught them together on the terrace. He was devastated and beat her up which, Chanda reasons, any husband would do. He called up his brother-in-law, Subrata — the eldest of all the Mukherjee siblings. Debasish and Subrata, businessmen both, rushed to their sister. “We spoke to Chanda and Johnny for days on end, and finally they made up,” says Subrata.

The Raos did their best to make the relationship work. Johnny made it a point to come home early and Chanda gave her paramour a wide berth. But in an attempt to teach Yadav a lesson, Rao lodged a complaint with the Sitaramdera police station, accusing him of harassing his wife. Yadav was called to the police station, “thrashed” and held overnight in the lock-up. He was released the next morning with a warning.

Chanda says that Yadav had called her up on returning home and vowed revenge. “He even threatened to abduct our children.” Her relationship had anyway ended on a bitter note. When she had tried to call off their affair, Yadav would not let go of her. She says he kept calling her at home, forcing her to call him back.

Yadav, she maintains, troubled her even after he got married to a local girl six months ago. “He would continue to call me and pester me to call him,” she says. The police, of course, has its own take on Yadav’s marriage. They believe that Chanda had “forced” Yadav to get married, to allay her husband’s suspicions. But Uma Devi, Yadav’s sister, says it was the family that had arranged for her brother to get married.

“We had even got him to go and see the girl with us before marriage. We also sent them on honeymoon to Puri,” she says. (The Yadavs own one of the biggest tent houses called Laxmi Tenthouse in Jamshedpur.)

But things started looking up for the Raos after the Mukherjees stepped in to make the marriage work. In fact, in the last four months Chanda’s brothers and Johnny’s father say that they looked “the perfect couple” that they once were.

A couple of months ago, they threw a birthday party in one of Jamshedpur’s posh clubs for their twin daughters born a year earlier. “We were all relieved that the crisis had finally blown over,” says Debasish Mukherjee.

Barely a week before the murder, Debasish found “Johnny and Dolly smiling and joking and the children playing” when he visited their home. “No one would believe it now,” he says.

On the morning of June 19, Rao got into his car, a Maruti Esteem, to get to work. He rolled up the windows and was about to start the car when two men approached him. One man handed him a scrap of paper with an address on it and asked him for directions. And the other man pulled out a revolver and shot him through his right temple.

Chanda, standing in the doorway to say goodbye to her husband, screamed out and ran after the assailants, who raced off on a motorbike parked nearby, neighbours say. With the help of a neighbour, she took Johnny to the Tata Main Hospital. She sat through the hours as doctors operated on him unsuccessfully. “She was a picture of grief,” a hospital employee says.

The police had no clue to the affair till Subrata Mukherjee, Chanda’s elder brother, broke it to the district superintendent of police. Yadav was immediately arrested. Chanda was picked up after Yadav named her “as the main culprit”.

What’s most surprising is that within a couple of days, both brothers virtually held a news conference and pronounced their sister guilty, again without any evidence.

It’s not clear what prompted the brothers to do so. In public, they say it was because of their love for Johnny. But the brothers admit that the sensational murder had nearly turned them into social pariahs. They also did not “want to get into trouble” with the police.

Now, in true police style, Chanda’s character is being torn to shreds. She is a “bad character,” the police argue, quoting her brothers, because as a nurse she was in love with a doctor in the hospital before she met Rao.

“They had a deep physical relationship, but the doctor left his job and Jamshedpur when she started pestering him to marry her,” a senior police officer says.

The evidence that the police have is flimsy. There is a record of a call made by Yadav to Chanda on the day before the murder. Barely 10 days before the murder, Rao took out a life insurance policy worth Rs 3.75 lakh in his name, with his wife as a nominee.

The police insist that Chanda had forced her husband to do so — but there is no evidence to back that. A fortnight before Rao was murdered, the police says she removed all her jewellery from her husband’s house. But there is no trace of that.

Nobody has applied for bail on her behalf. And nobody is going to see her in jail. For Chanda has already been tried and sent to the gallows.