Lapata lady: How Archana, Madhya Pradesh lawyer with dreams of becoming a judge, orchestrated vanishing act to escape marriage

For nearly two weeks in August, the 29-year-old lawyer had turned the state’s railway lines, forests, and highways into the backdrop of an elaborate escape. Her last phone call was at 10:16 pm on August 5, telling her aunt she was near Bhopal.

When the Narmada Express pulled into Katni South the next morning, her family waited on the platform. The bag she had carried, filled with rakhis and festival gifts, would be found later, abandoned.

But Archana was not gone. She had slipped away with two men, a 24-year-old Indore resident she had befriended on New Year’s Eve, and his driver. Together, they had allegedly plotted her disappearance down to the last detail.

Archana had carved out her own life in Indore, practising at the High Court while preparing for civil judge examinations. She had practised in Jabalpur and then Indore the year before, and her professional ambitions often collided with her family’s expectations.

“At home, her family had different plans. They wanted her to get married. They sent her three or four proposals, all of which she refused. When they fixed her match with a patwari, there was a big fight. The family asked her to give up her studies. She was in no mood to do that,” Lodha said.

It was around this time that she met the 24-year-old, who had dreams of starting a drone company. “She told us during questioning that she trusted him,” Lodha said.

In early August, after attending a case in Harda, Archana began putting her plan into motion. This was around the time her family served an ultimatum to marry a revenue officer.

“She had a clear idea of how police investigations work,” Lodha said. “She thought that if she vanished on a train, it would be the GRP’s responsibility. She believed we wouldn’t be able to trace her. She thought she could change her identity, live elsewhere, and return one day.”

The driver suggested Itarsi as the escape point. “It was a junction with limited CCTV coverage,” Lodha said. “Archana agreed. They even discussed how to dispose of her phone and watch so no trace remained.”

On August 5, she boarded the Narmada Express as if nothing was unusual.

“At Narmadapuram, her friend was waiting in an SUV with a fresh set of clothes,” Lodha said. “She handed over her phone and smartwatch to the driver, who threw them away in the forests near Midghat. That’s where we spent days searching, believing she might have fallen or been harmed.”

Her abandoned bag, filled with rakhis, was meant to mislead investigators. “She wanted us to think she had fallen off the train or met with an accident,” Lodha said. “It was an intentional ploy.”

From Itarsi, Archana and her friend slipped away through backroads to Shujalpur, carefully avoiding toll booths and cameras. “They thought the missing persons report would eventually die down,” Lodha said. “But the media picked up the case, and it became a big issue. That’s when they panicked.”

With pressure mounting, Archana and her friend decided to leave Madhya Pradesh altogether.

“They thought of Hyderabad first, because it’s a city where Hindi is not widely spoken, so they could blend in,” Lodha said. “But with relentless coverage, they abandoned that plan and decided to leave India.”

Their route took them from Burhanpur to Jodhpur, then Delhi, before Archana boarded a flight to Kathmandu. Her friend stayed back and kept his phone on flight mode, using his father’s SIM card to keep in touch while faking his location as Indore.

“She thought she had beaten us,” Lodha said. “But then the driver was picked up by the Delhi Police in an unrelated cheating case. That was the turning point. Then we questioned her friend, and the whole plan came out.”

With her friend in custody, police finally made contact with Archana. “We reached her through his phone. She agreed to come back. She flew from Kathmandu to Delhi, and then to Bhopal,” Lodha said.

As of now, Archana faces no criminal charges, though police are taking legal opinion. “We are considering how to proceed. Technically, she staged her own disappearance,” Lodha said.