Shreya settled down in her comfy couch one sunday night after a relatively tiresome week of work with a warm cup of tea with extra cream and a novel as she reflected on the cases they had come across this week. The bank robbery, the kidnapping and a series of thefts that resulted in a murder. These cases weren't exhausting because they baffled them. They were pretty regular cases but they required a lot of running around and generally resulted in cramps which were a literal pain in the neck.
But there was a particular case that had been reported this afternoon which had caught her attention. It was a rather odd case. A woman in her early forties had been murdered inside a room closed from the inside. Her body had been discovered by her sister, who had entered her house with the help of a spare key. Rohini, the victim Namrita's sister, had found it suspicious when Namrita had not come out of the room for a while and did not respond to her banging or shouting. Fearing for her sister's safety, she immediately called the neighbours for help who broke down the door to discover her seemingly unhurt-but-dead body.
When they (the CID) reached there, their first impression was that she was probably poisoned with a slow poison, but two hours later, when her body showed no particular signs to signal a death caused by poison, Shreya started weighing her options. What were the odds that this murder was not a regular one? What Shreya meant by this was that what were the odds that a wizard or a witch had committed this crime? Still, she told herself, she couldn't jump to conclusions until their forensic experts, and Dr. Tarika gave up and declared that they were at complete loss as to how the victim died.
What caused her to have the silly idea that wizards and witches exist, you ask? The fact that she was, in fact, a witch herself. Her team did not know this, of course, for the sake of keeping the wizarding society hidden. Her father and mother were both a part of the wizarding society. Her father, Shubhankar, a halfblood wizard, was a curse breaker at Gringotts and her mother, Sharmila, was a healer at 's. Shreya was the only one in all of her family and extended family and her magical friend circle and her family's friend circle who lived in India or, for that matter, the muggle society itself.
There were mainly two reasons for this, the first one being that India didn't have a wizarding society of it's own, because there weren't many wizards or witches there. The second was that since it had been under British influence for so long, the few Indians which were, indeed, magical, were registered in the British Ministry of Magic, and attended Hogwarts school of Witchcraft and Wizardry. So naturally, the wizardkind prefered Britain to India. Shreya herself would have been residing in London, had it not been for her job as an Auror.
She had always wanted to be an Auror, and, apparently, when she had applied for the job, the Auror Department and the DMLE+ were looking for someone of Indian origin to work in a particular city of India with the muggle police. The job was to keep a lookout for illegal wizarding activities while undercover, as a muggle policewoman and if the case called for it, an auror. Like she thought this one did.
Shreya had almost considered herself to be a muggle CID officer, for since the ministry had started positioning aurors around India, the baddies had all cleared out (except for those other two, Well, that's another story). Her boss, ACP Pradyuman, knew her true identity, as did every ACP in the city, so that they could refer to her when needed. The Muggle Indian government and the British Ministry of Magic both paid her a handsome salary, so it was safe to say that she was rather well off. Shreya didn't regret her decision to take on this career because the CID was almost like her family and her own family wrote to her thrice a week, as they did when she was at Hogwarts.
Shreya smiled. She loved going to Hogwarts. Staying with friends and learning to use her abilities properly. She was one of those who were there when the Golden Trio were in school. Her maternal first cousins, Parvati and Padma Patil, were in the same year as Harry, Hermione and Ron, whereas she herself was sorted in Ravenclaw four years later. She had been in Dumbledore's Army and wanted to fight in the battle of Hogwarts- and she would have too, if her cousins had not sent her off.
She admired Hermione Granger the most, the current Minister for Magic, for all of wit and courage she had. She was inspired by how the Golden Trio fought against the Dark Lord and, now that she came to think of it, it was possibly what had motivated her to become an auror and/or a CID officer, whichever way you put it.
And that would bring her back to pondering about Namrita's murder. Why would a wizard want to kill a muggle businesswoman? Shreya sighed. There was a possibility that she was a witch. She'd have to talk about this to her boss. But, of course, that would be if the forensic doctors didn't find some sort of poison in her body. But she'd find that out tomorrow morning so it was no use thinking about it right now. Especially when she was getting sleepy. She drained the remaining tea in her cup and sent them both to their proper places with a flick of her wand before retiring to bed.
