Journal (a difficult tenant named Sanjay in Delhi) - January 22, 2021

February 2020: On a weekday morning, I received a phone call from Tri Nagar that a new prospective tenant would like to take the room on the first floor. This person Sanjay Kumar offered to pay ₹3000 for the bigger room facing the wider 75th street.
This man turned out to be a fraud. 
He said he would pay ₹2500 in the first month and would pay ₹3000 next month onwards. 
It never happened. He had joined in the second week of February. In March, he started delaying the payment and offered that he would get the bathroom door renovated in ₹1500 that I can reimburse from rent. It was the second time he was asking me to trust him for something. The first one was about the rent amount of ₹3000. The March payment didn't happen until 22nd, 23rd when I had to cancel the plan for bathroom door renovation and tell him to pay in full and immediately.
He paid about Rs 1500 and said he’d pay the rest the end of the month and the rest amount will come in a timely manner. This was the third time he was asking me to trust him.
A point to note is that he had also not paid any security, which is a fault on my part.
Following the 23rd, March, the lockdown happened. Sanjay Kumar is a fruit seller. He would have a castor for selling his fruits that he would sell in the market and earn a daily wage. Before this, he had said he was working for a travel agency where the owner died and his son didn’t run the business well and due to personal circumstances, he had to quit. Sanjay was living in our house with his son and wife. His son was in high school (9th or 10th) and his wife was a homemaker. His daughter was not staying here, and she was studying somewhere in a university.
It was a complete mess. In the month of April, there would be regular calls about his payments. It was very frustrating. The amount he was paying was not fixed and was like pennies to mevaried between 50 to 150 Rupees. Mom was not communicating it clearly to me about his total to-date payment and he would often come home late after she had gone to sleep so there would be no communication with me at times. 
I would have to make calls to try and reach him at time continuously for 30-40 minutes. I would have to call home on his wife’s number to know of his whereabouts, or I would have to call mom to help me reach them. His wife would ask me to not call her or ask her anything as she did not have anything to do about the payment and that only Sanjay would have to answer. 
By the end of the month, the situation had badly escalated and my Manju bua was aware about what was happening. Amma was aware. Mom had informed of Sanjay’s behavior to neighbors and mom had started to ponder if she should report about him to the police. My own tenor in Panchkula had become aware of problem at home and I was asked to not raise my voice in my room while being on call from home.
My bua asked me to be assertive but she refused to provide any significant help. She rather seemed distant and disinterested even to the ideas of accepting any money for the help I was asking. I was on my own. I had to hire a lawyer for this problematic tenant.
A thing to note about Sanjay was that he had a clear speech in Hindi, something I have not seen in our tenants so far. 
In May, Sanjay and I had reached a point when he would start using threats such as telling me about his wealthy and powerful relatives. At times, he would go on to insult me. Sanjay had left by the May end. The lockdown had been a factor that he was not able to move out earlier. Sanjay might have done a fraud of roughly 3000 to 4000 Rupees by not paying the rent for last month of May and making part payments for the rest of the previous months.