‘The Fallen City’: Gutted Once Again

Delhi is a city ravaged and resurrected many a time in the course of history. Sudeep Chakravarti’s Fallen City, the first full length book about the gruesome murder of Geeta and Sanjay Chopra in late August 1978, presents another instance of this phenomenon. On 26 August 1978, Geeta left from home to go to All India Radio (AIR) for a recording, accompanied by her younger brother Sanjay, but they never returned. The siblings were abducted and murdered by Billa and Ranga, with whom they had hitched a ride to reach AIR; the perpetrators of this heinous murder were subsequently arrested, tried and finally hung in Tihar Jail. The horrific crime is placed against the backdrop of the turbulent political climate of Delhi from the late 1970s to early 1980s. Fallen City is about the murder of these two teenagers, but in the process, it presents an exposé of the murky depths to which the city has fallen.