Anu looked up at Ravi again waving her mobile at him beckoning him to pick up her call. The phone rang for several seconds but Ravi seemed oblivious to its ringing. He simply looked at Anu and smiled. She grew tired of his smiles and it seemed odd and stupid. Why was he not picking up her call? She wanted to walk up to him and ask him what was so funny and why he had not got the last transaction of Mr. Mehta verified, but the crowd of customers waiting outside her counter had her glued to her seat.
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Ten days ago, Mr. Mehta had come to the bank to change some foreign currency. He had arrived in India with his wife and son a month ago and had planned to go to Kerala for a week’s stay before they returned back to Qatar. They would be travelling from Trivandrum directly and not coming back to Mumbai. Anu smiled at the opportunity and went through her rehearsed routine of mismatched signatures and new cheque. After Mr. Mehta had left she checked his account and was pleasantly surprised to see 12 lakhs in his account. ‘ I’ll transfer the entire amount after about 10 days,’ she thought, ‘anyway this is our last time here and I do not want any goof ups.’ And she had kept the cheque carefully with her. Today, it was almost ten days since she had been holding the cheque. She assumed the family would have left for Qatar and made the transfer entry using Kavita’s id and passed on the cheque to Ravi for verification.
And here Ravi was sitting on the goldmine without acting on it. Didn’t he realize it would take her a long time to withdraw the entire amount in parts and deposit it into the other account? She didn’t want to be caught at this stage when everything had happened so smoothly without any suspicions or enquiries.
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There had been a few glitches here and there, but Ravi had always taken care of it as he promised. The office boy, Yoga, had been the first to smell that something was amiss. Yoga had been filing the daily vouchers for cash receipt and withdrawls when he casually mentioned to Ravi over lunch that some of the employees were not putting their initials properly on certain high value cheques, and the mandatory letters for withdrawl of large sums were also missing. He wanted to report it to the branch manager. Ravi had convinced him to stay away from it and had assured Yoga that he himself would report it to the BM. Within a few days Ravi misplaced some important files on purpose and framed Yoga resulting in his expulsion from the branch. Of course Yoga never suspected Ravi was behind his termination.
Neetu, a new joinee had once observed Anu making entrees from another employee’s id and had pointed out that it was not ethical. Soon enough, she was committing errors with even simple transactions and was directly in the line of fire. Shortly she was shifted to a bigger branch to learn the process under senior colleagues.
Rohit was another colleague who had chanced upon Anu putting his initials on a cheque and had mentioned it to Ravi. He didn’t seem threatening, but Ravi paid an old friend who was into gang wars and the like, to injure Rohit in a bike accident. Rohit was out of action for almost 6 months and yet to return back to the office. He would surely have forgotten about it by the time he came back.
Anyone who had the slightest doubt were always ‘taken care of’ by Ravi. But of late, harmless incidents had been giving way to serious ones. Anu had been averse to causing bodily harm to anyone. We don’t want anyone’s blood on our hands, she had pleaded. Ravi had assured her it would not happen again.
Unfortunately, Sheenu the girl in charge of account opening had an eye on them since the day Sanghamitra Ghosh’s account had been opened. She had wondered why the old lady had needed two accounts when managing one was painful for her. She had quietly been keeping track of the transactions happening in the account with the help of a friend in another branch of the bank. She had initially been aghast to learn of the huge amount of money coming in and moving out of the account. She now had a full inventory of the fraud happening in the account and knew who was committing it but she did not have proof against the two. It was purely by luck that Ravi chanced upon her diary and realized their game would be up soon. He had therefore decided to quit and go to Dubai with Anu before it was too late.
