Bullet-riddled bodies don’t make a crime reporter cringe. I did today, a bit late in the day after 16 years of crime reporting. The six-foot body of J. Dey in a gurney at the casualty ward at HiranandaniHospital is an image that seared my being.
Jyotirmoy Napien Kumar Dey, known only as J. Dey to others and Jyoti to me, started his career in journalism when Behram Contractor took some of his freelance stories on NGOs working in red light areas. I am told the girls in the Afternoon Despatch & Courier were smitten by his height and lean physique. In the early 90s he looked very fit. He was an outdoor person, a trekking enthusiast, who came back and wrote about his travels in the afternoon.
Once his appetite for journalism was whetted, he joined the Mid-Day where he did general reporting. In 1995, he joined the Indian Express that had just launched its Newsline section. This is where we met for the first time. It was an association that lasted right unto his death. Those were the years when J. Dey was still trying to find his footing in journalism and I was reporting on crime along with Chandramohan Puppala.
For a six-footer, J. Dey was very inconspicuous in his presence. He merged with the background. He didn’t like attention and kept to himself. But it didn’t take me much time to realise that he was interested in my beat. We soon got talking and I realised that he loved crime reporting. He was surprised that I actually encouraged him, even when the bosses didn’t want another reporter on the beat. We became good friends and I am guilty of sharing my passion for crime reporting and writing with him. Would he have been alive, if I had not encouraged him? There is something about crime reporting that is addictive. You just don’t write about the crime, but the criminal. You pare him down to his soul, and in the process gain access to an unsavoury world that you cannot abdicate in a hurry. It is your bread and butter.
The trade-off for sharing my crime reporting secrets was of course fitness advice that J. Dey doled out. He was into body building and introduced me to weightlifting. We worked together for five years and not once was there a whiff of a rivalry. When I left Indian Express in 2000, he was an established crime reporter.
We, however, stayed in touch. We even travelled to Goa once. He just loved the place. He stopped by a church to light candles. “Have you converted?”, I asked him, “I love Jesus Christ, but I want to be cremated as a Hindu”.
As a crime reporter, he got his moment in the sun when he got his scoop on the Aishwarya-Salman transcript in the inaugural issue of The Hindustan Times’ Mumbai edition.
A couple of years ago, after I had published Black Friday, I told him to write a book. He did that in six months! Khallas, a great reference material on crime.
After Khallas, he came back again and brainstormed on ideas. I told him to write on female dons. He was not enthused. He wanted to write on hardcore criminals. So he wrote about informers — Zero Dial. I got the honour of the first copy of the book.
By now, Jyoti’s information network had extended beyond Mumbai. In fact, Jyoti was in the process of writing his third book called Chindi on characters of Mumbai’s underworld who rose from rags to riches.
He always wanted to co-author a book with me, but we could not get around to doing it. When I ended up doing a book with someone else, he did not like it. But we both cherished our friendship. When I reciprocated his gesture and gave him my first copy of Mafia Queens of Mumbai, he said that he regretted not taking my advice and writing it himself. Thatwas a compliment.
Whoever killed J. Dey should know they cannot stub out the spirit of crime reporting. There will be more J. Deys; may their tribe flourish.