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J Dey: His tapes weren’t fake, nor was he

Dey had dug deep into the police, the builders’ cabal and the rival gangs to get a better picture of what makes this city run.

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J Dey got the tapes and we sat for around three days in the resident editor’s Bandra flat transcribing them.

During breaks we chatted about how he had started life not as a crime reporter but as an executive in some company.

Amazing. And this accidental journalist had got a story that most other reporters only dream of, a story with which we launched Hindustan Times (HT) in Mumbai six years ago, based on a series of taped conversations between two film actors, exposing the Bollywood-underworld link. (Yes, the government got their forensic lab to say the tapes were fake. I listened to them hour after hour and I know that Dey got us the real stuff. An intelligence chief advised me to authenticate the tapes abroad, but the HT management was unwilling.)

Dey had dug deep into the police, the builders’ cabal and the rival gangs to get a better picture of what makes this city run; a snapshot a bit grimier but more telling than the ones we like to see in glossy films or read about in best-selling novels. Though Dey was a lone wolf (he even sat in a corner, away from the other city reporters) he and I got on well, perhaps because I too had been a crime reporter, though in another city and only for the first three years of my career. He lived and breathed this city and perhaps that’s why he remained essentially a crime reporter. Yet he was far beyond most crime reporters in what he could and did dig up; trust me.

Though I soon returned to Delhi we kept in touch. Similarly, when I moved to Chennai, he sent me copies of the two books he wrote, the second one, Zero Dial, last September. And when I returned to Mumbai in January he messaged me, but I did not find time to call him back; I’m ashamed to say I was worried I would have to give him a job.

One day DNA’s crime bureau chief told me that Dey had spoken warmly of our days transcribing those tapes. The government may have declared the tapes fake, but Dey was certainly no fake. I wish I had spoken to him. Now he is no more, and I feel like shit.

The writer is the editor-in-chief, DNA, based in Mumbai

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