'Matter of shame... wasn’t even aware of Anvay Naik’s story till case was reopened'

Author Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, whose debut novel “The Last Song of Dusk” won the Betty Trask Award, the Premio Grinzane Cavour in Italy, and was nominated for the IMPAC Prize in Ireland, and was translated into 16 languages, has argued that the tragedy is not Arnab’s arrest but architect Anvay Naik’s decision to kill his mother Kumud, and then himself, from fear of lifelong debt after he was “refused” payment of dues for his work.
A short Facebook post by Sanghvi, 43, where he says this, is being seen as a new angle and interpreted as a “very erudite and thought worthy by the writer:

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The tragedy is not Arnab Goswami’s arrest, or how it was done (questionably, legally speaking). The tragedy is Anvay Naik’s decision to kill his mother Kumud, and then himself, from fear of lifelong debt. So no, this is not some fun story about ‘Arnab’s karma catching up’. This is Anvay Naik’s story -- of his death, his mother’s death; and it is the story of his widow and his daughter, who went from pillar to post for justice after Naik’s suicide note blamed Arnab Goswami (and two others) for his death. 

It is a matter of shame, for me, that I wasn’t even aware of this until Naik’s suicide abetment case was reopened. This is how deep rot runs in the system: a famous actor’s suicide is manipulated to shift narrative light away from a failing economy and a raging pandemic while an anonymous interior decorator’s suicide is ironed entirely out of the plot line. 

The Japanese believe a thin window divides the dead from the living: our inability to see them doesn’t mean the dead are not all around us. A soul that leaves the body without completing its business will scream out from the other side – this is Anvay Naik raging and railing from the other side, and if we don’t hear him now, we will become permanently deaf to our humanity.
Buddhism advocates compassion toward all while writing fiction means you learn to sympathize even with villains. How could I not feel sympathy for Arnab Goswami? Imagine, as the police waited outside his house, his calls to lawyers, to his colleagues, perhaps to the political establishment who he assumed would rescue him only to discover, far too harshly, far too late, there are no friends in politics.

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

When in 1856 Margaret Garner, a runaway slave woman was eventually caught, she rushes to an outhouse where she had a child. Lifting an ax, she slaughters her baby because she does not want her child to live as a slave – having tasted freedom, her life is incomprehensible without it. Toni Morrison used the bones of this incident to recreate the murdered child’s life in her glorious, shape-shifting, realm-embracing novel Beloved. 

When asked to weigh in on Garner’s decision to kill her child rather than impose slave life on her, Morrison observed: “It was absolutely the right thing to do, but she had no right to do it.” These words return to me as I think of Naik killing his mother and then himself. 

If some part of Arnab Goswami experiences even a sliver of Anvay’s Naik despair in custody, he will recognize and bow before the giant sorrow of Anvay Naik and Kumud Naik, and the circumstances that drove them to kill themselves. While they are no longer in the same realm to affect reconciliation, there is still space for him to repent, and to beg forgiveness.
That is a start.
And this story, truly, is only ever about Anvay Naik.