New Delhi: In a sordid end to an extramarital affair, a lady killed her three-and-a-half-year-old son and the wife of her lover in West Delhi’s Moti Nagar.
According to reports, Reena Taneja, at around 2.50 pm, arrived at the house of Sudesh Kumar, a married woman she suspected of having an affair with her husband Manoj, a builder, with a knife.
Sudesh’s husband, Anil Kumar, is the chief of corporate communications at a leading English newspaper. She was at home with her toddler son Aarav and daughter at the time.
“I clicked this before leaving the house for work this morning,” Anil Sharma said, pointing at three-year-old Aarav’s picture on his phone screen. “I recently got a calendar of his pictures made. They delivered it right about the time I was supposed to go.”
That it would be the last time he would see his child playfully chuckle at his larger-than-life picture was the last thing on Sharma’s mind when he left his house on Thursday morning.
A few hours later, Sharma, who works as the external communications manager for The Pioneer newspaper, received a phone call that would shatter him.
Three-year-old Aarav had been killed by his mother Sudesh for supposedly being the “love child” of a man whom she (Sudesh) had been seeing outside her marriage for the last four years.
“I do not understand,” Sharma trailed off, evidently in denial about the fact that his wife Sudesh had admitted to having mercilessly hacked Aarav with a surgical blade, as he waited outside the operation theatre of AIIMS Trauma Centre.
“She was just helping our neighbours Reena and Manoj iron out differences in their marriage over the last week. We have known them for the last five years. Manoj helped us get the house we live in,” Sharma insisted, before relapsing into a stony silence.
But, police officers investigating the case said, there was more between Sudesh and Manoj than met Anil’s eye — or what he chose to believe about their relationship.
Police officers probing the case said that a scuffle ensued after Reena came to Sudesh’s house. A note has also been found, allegedly scribbled by Sudesh, which stated that Aarav was Manoj’s son, not Anil’s. The letter had reportedly been written in blood by Sudesh after she stabbed Reena to death and slit her son’s throat with a surgical knife.
Sudesh, a nurse with Delhi government’s Acharya Shree Bhikshu Government Hospital, wanted Manoj to marry her but the latter believed that it would now be difficult for Aarav to accept him as his father.
Sudesh and her daughter are currently admitted in AIIMS.