THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The dark-coloured, brooding youth who occupied Room no: 101 at Malankara Hostel, Kannammoola, had never seemed to the other inmates of the hostel as a lurking danger. For them, Venkat Subrahmaniom was a moody young man. A never-smiling, mysterious man who barely talked to anyone. But not for once did his stout frame and morose face portend a blood-smelling menace to them.On Sunday, Venkat let a chill run down their spine as the police scurried into Malankara Hostel to scour the room of a Tamilian who had broken into a palatial home in the city and chopped down a family in a fit of feverish impulse."The police rushed in and asked if any Tamilian lived here. Venkat was the only man from Tamil Nadu and we just showed his room. But we were shocked, because we never thought he could do something so unpleasant,’’ says Anirudhan, the warden of the hostel.The room where he lived seemed crammed and cluttered. The small, stuffy room smelt heavily of sweat and cigarette smoke. An unzipped dull black carry bag lay over the bedsheet hastily flipped over the bed. Dirt-stained, crumpled clothes hung loosely over the plastic rope. On the floor were silver and golden-foiled cigarette packets and fully squeezed out tubes of fairness enhancers.Close to the bed was a table littered with a few strips of tablets, long-sized notebooks with legibly jotted notes on organisational behaviour and management ethics and a pack of fresh-smelling textbooks on Principles of Management and Business Law published by Anna University, Tirunelveli.A small television set was placed right amid this turmoil on the table and by its side rested an unfilled bill book of ‘Mathews Institution’, which never existed. It was this fabricated bill that Venkat would show his father to fetch money and to convince him that he was a student.Though Venkat had been at Malankara Hostel for nearly three months, nobody knew exactly what he did and where he went every day. The warden remembers Venkat leaving as early as five in the morning and coming back in the dead of night."We thought that he was employed in a reputable company somewhere in the city. We never asked him about his profession. The truth is, we never met too often. He would leave early and by the time he returned, everybody would be asleep,’’ says an inmate of the hostel.The only time he would converse with the inmates was when the occupants of the neighbouring room went to his room to watch TV. Even then, Venkat kept himself aloof, recollect the inmates. "He would sit silently, puffing his cigarette and when we left, he would nod. He was never interested in talking,’’ they say.
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