NEW DELHI: When Narottam Prashad changed his surname to Lal, shaved off his beard and vanished from the city a few days before his wife's body was found in their Jahangirpuri house 15 years ago, little did he know the long arm of law will eventually catch up with him.
Narottam, who had been working as a manager at a cotton mill in Gujarat for the past few years, meticulously prepared the ground to orchestrate his own disappearance, Delhi Police, which nabbed him from Vadodara this Wednesday, said.
Just before a PCR call from neighbours led cops to the partially decomposed body of Kamlesh, his 25-year-old wife, on May 31, 2010, Narottam had penned a note addressed to his parents and left it near her body: "Mummy aur Papa, Kamlesh pehle suicide karegi. Lekin meri body aap ko milegi bhi nahin (Mum and dad, Kamlesh will first kill herself. But you won't even find my body)".
However, Kamlesh's post-mortem report, which revealed she had been strangled, nailed Narottam's lie. A murder case was registered against him. "He was declared a proclaimed offender, and a reward of Rs 10,000 was announced for anyone providing information about him," said deputy commissioner of police (crime) Aditya Gautam.
What ensued was a cat-and-mouse game, one in which the former displayed extraordinary patience. After fleeing Delhi, Narottam kept changing his location. As years passed and he presumed the case had gone cold, he took up odd jobs at different places in the country, eventually becoming a manager at the Vadodara mill.
And then he took a misstep, one that blew his cover.
He remarried, telling the woman he had met in Gujarat that he was a divorcee. He called up his family to share the news. Little did he know a Delhi Police team, led by Inspector Manmeet Singh, had put the phones of his parents under surveillance. His carefully laid plans quickly unravelled, leading to his arrest.
Narottam, now 38, told the cops he married Kamlesh in 2010 after they fell in love. However, things soon turned sour, and the couple used to frequently quarrel over petty matters. During one such heated argument, he lost his temper, murdered Kamlesh in their Mahendra Park house and tried to pass it off as suicide, police said.