Kochi: Latha was not like her husband, Sathyanarayanan. On Friday, she was where Sathyanarayanan was six days ago – the Special CBI Court at Kaloor in Kochi. On December 28, Sathyanarayanan was at the court to hear the verdict on the case relating to the murder of his son Sarathlal and his friend Kripesh, two active Youth Congress workers.

After the court found 14 accused, all CPM leaders or supporters, guilty of the brutal murders, Sathyanarayanan, a land-owning farmer, sounded like a father who had come to terms with the tragedy that struck his family. Six years of interactions with the judiciary and journalists had taught him the language of media bytes.

He spoke to reporters, who approached him either in groups or individually and termed the verdict a warning against ‘murder politics’ and a message for coming generations. On Friday, when the court pronounced the quantum of the sentence, Sathyanarayanan, however, stayed home.

Instead, Latha, a homemaker, was at the court to hear what punishment the killers of her son would get. Ten of them were sentenced to life imprisonment and four to five years in jail. Latha, unlike her husband, had nothing to say. It seemed like she, a villager, had brought to the court in the heart of the city the silence of her lifetime. Perhaps the language in which the mothers of murdered children speak.

Latha and her daughter Amrutha were in court with P V Krishnan and Krishnapriya, Kripesh's father and sister. A few of their neighbours had also accompanied them. They waited in the room of CBI prosecutors even as the sentencing procedures were on at the court upstairs.

The final hearing on sentencing started at 11, and it went on for nearly 30 minutes. The sentencing was scheduled for 12.15 pm. During the next 45 minutes, the convicts waited outside the court, chatting to each other and the comrades from Kasaragod. Former CPM MLA K V Kunhiraman sat on a bench in a corner, scrolling on his smartphone.

In between, the court witnessed a strange meeting between the main convicts in two sensational political murders in the state. M K Sunil Kumar, aka Kodi Suni, the notorious hitman convicted in the T P Chandrasekharan murder, happened to be at the court even though Peethambaran and his fellow convicts were awaiting their fate. Suni greeted Peethambaran with a shake hand. The two were no strangers to each other.

Senior criminal lawyer C K Sreedharan, who took up the case for nine accused after quitting Congress and joining CPM, was seen interacting with the convicts. In 2001, he contested the assembly poll against Kunhiraman as the Congress candidate and lost 9,664 votes.

Justice Seshadrinathan N read out the sentence sharp at 12.15 pm. He did not make any observations. After the charges and the respective sentences of the convicts were pronounced in English, he briefed the convicts in Malayalam in a couple of sentences. There was no visible change in their faces.

A floor down, December 28 was played again, with channel reporters rushing to the families of the victims and prosecution lawyers. There was disappointment on the faces of the kin of the killed youth. They had expected a death sentence for the key convicts.

Krishnan, the daily wage labourer, expressed the concerns in a feeble voice. Hibi Eden MP and other Congress leaders, including KPCC working president V P Sajeendran and DCC president Muhammed Shiyas, soon arrived at the court premises and joined the families.

The newly-elected Palakkad MLA Rahul Mamkoottathil also arrived at the court then. When he was addressing the media, Sarathlal’s mother, Latha, stood next to him. However, she could not say anything and soon withdrew to the prosecutors’ room.

Latha, Krishnan, Krishnapriya, Swathi, and others from Periya were taken for lunch in Hibi’s car. The mother sat in the car, looking down and wiping her eyes. Latha was not like her husband, Sathyanarayanan. She was like Balamani, the other mother who stayed back in Periya, silent and sobbing at her son's tomb.