At first he attempted to get his wife abort her pregnancy under the cover of a medical check-up. She refused, moving from Bangalore to her mother's home in Chennai and delivered a baby girl four days ago. He reached Chennai yesterday and, after playing with the child in the evening, allegedly threw her into a 30-feet deep well past midnight when his wife was fast asleep. He then returned to bed. The four-day-old child's body was recovered this morning after the father owned up, police said.

"I didn't want a child now. I had told all of them about this many, many times," Niranjan Kumar, a software engineer with a leading IT company in Bangalore, told Chennai police officials who arrested him this morning. None understood his assertion about not having a child for the next two-three years; not his or her parents, not even his wife Sangeetha, he told police.

Niranjan (30), said to be a gold medallist in Mechanical Engineering from BITS, Pilani, and Sangeetha (25), a BE graduate, got married last year and settled in Bangalore where he worked. Keen to pursue his career and higher education, he insisted on not having a child for the next few years. Police suspect he also wanted to spend enough time with his wife before her attention was grabbed by a child. But she conceived within three months of their marriage.

Sangeetha realised he was serious about not wanting a child when he tried to get an abortion done on the pretext of taking her for a check-up. She refused and informed her parents. Relatives said her mother Maragatham rushed to Bangalore to fetch her.

Not being able to come to terms with the reality of a child, Niranjan refused to meet Sangeetha in the months before the delivery, even feigning an official trip to China to avoid visiting Chennai to see her, said her relatives. He never called, never mailed  communication was restricted to infrequent chats.

... contd.

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