Chennai: Since Wednesday morning, inspector Periyapandian’s family members have been attending to hundreds of calls from grieving kith and kin to officials from the city and state police after news about the cop’s murder broke out.
Periyapandian’s wife Banurekha too learnt of the horror from one such phone call. She was too drained to remember if it was a relative or a colleague.
She rues not receiving one phone call though, the one from her husband every morning.
Phone calls are not mere gestures of expressing affection in the policeman’s family. For someone who is in a profession where spending time with family is a luxury, phone calls are a way of life.
Banurekha works as a teacher at a government primary school in Avadi and she wakes up to her husband’s phone calls on most days. "When I didn’t receive his phone call in the morning itself, I felt something was bad," she said.
Her teenage sons, Rooban, a first year student at Loyola College and Rahul, a class nine student wore a composed look throughout the day. The boys had to attend to the who’s who of the City police including Commissioner A.K. Viswanathan, who expressed condolences to the family in person.
Rooban remembers last seeing his father on December 8 before he left to Rajasthan. “Most days, he is away at work or just leaving home as I return from college. He wakes up the whole family however with his phone calls every morning, wherever he is,” Rooban said.
His younger brother, Rahul celebrates his 14th birthday in six days (Dec.19). Bereavement brings out raw emotions, unmindful of those around us. From asking the commissioner whether he could have sent a thousand men to Rajasthan to apprehend the burglars to imagining numerous possibilities that could have avoided the tragedy, Banurekha was expressing grief only to receive that one phone call from her husband the next day and everyday forever.
Cop who died for a cause
A native of Moovirunthalli village in Sankarankoil taluk, Tirunelveli district, Periyapandian joined the Tamil Nadu police as a sub inspector in May 2000. He was promoted as an inspector in January 2014 and served in the Avadi Tank factory police station. He was appointed as the Maduravoyal law and order Inspector only two months ago- October 10.
Periyapandian was part of the team sent to apprehend burglars who drilled a hole through the first floor of a jewellery store near Kolathur and escaped with 3.5 kg gold jewellery. On November 16, the shop owner went for lunch when the gang who had rented a portion on the first floor of the jewellery store made way into the store by drilling a hole through the ceiling. Police had already recovered CCTV footage, which showed the men escaping with the jewels. Two days later, police released photographs of two suspects supposedly involved in the robbery- Nathuram (28) and G Dinesh Choudry (20) of Rajasthan. Periyapandian was killed when he tried to apprehend Nathuram.
