by Jigna Vora
5
FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE POLICE
May 2004
I rushed down the busy streets of Ghatkopar with my neighbour to head for the Pant Nagar police station. Onlookers stared at me as if a mad woman had escaped from a mental asylum. My dishevelled hair flew all over my face. Sweat dripped down my neck. I was wearing a salwar kameez, but in the panic, I had forgotten to drape a dupatta. I had never visited a police station before and had to ask my neighbours for assistance. The uncle who lived next door was kind enough to help.
A week before, while I was at my husband’s home in Gujarat, I had packed my bags and informed my in-laws that I was going on a vacation to my mother’s place in Mumbai along with my son. He was four years old then, and his nursery school was closed for the summer vacations. I held him close during the lonely train journey back home. When I arrived in Mumbai, I told my grandfather that I had no intention to go back to live with my husband. My grandfather informed my mother-in-law over a phone call.
A few days later, my mother-in-law came down to my maternal home in Ghatkopar, accompanied by my sister-in-law, who lived in Mumbai. Our families met in the living room, and my in-laws seemed accommodating of my decision to separate. I was on friendly terms with my sister-in-law. She was emotionally attached to my son as well. So, when she asked if she could take my son downstairs for a walk, I saw no reason to deny her request. After twenty minutes, she sent word that she wanted to take him to her place in Wadala for two days. Again, I didn’t see why she couldn’t. In fact, I packed my son’s clothes, and his favourite toy—a tiny yellow plastic autorickshaw—and kissed him goodbye.
But as soon as my in-laws left, I wondered if I had made a huge mistake. What if they used my son as a tool to pressurize me back into the marriage? What if they refused to give me custody of him? I was unsure if the divorce would be mutual or if it would turn ugly. Panicking with these terrible thoughts, I decided to approach the Mumbai Police. A complaint would maintain a record of the events that had occurred.
At the Pant Nagar police station, we approached the reception desk and asked about the procedure to file a complaint. A weary cop looked up from the police register and pointed towards a desk. The policeman at the desk asked what the complaint was about. I narrated the incident.
‘Madam,’ the cop said, ‘if you allowed your sister-in-law to take the kid, we can’t file a complaint. You can register a non-cognizable (NC) case.’
I agreed.
‘But why do you not want to go back to your husband?’ he asked.
‘My husband is an alcoholic,’ I said. ‘He drinks at least one bottle every day. Then, he turns into a monster.’
‘Where is your husband?’
‘In Bharuch.’
‘How can he drink, then?’ the cop said in a deadpan manner. ‘Not possible. Gujarat is under prohibition.’
‘Ask anyone in Bharuch. The entire city knows how much he drinks.’
I married my husband on 4 December 1998. It was an arranged marriage. I had completed studying law from Ruparel College, and my parents thought it was the perfect time for me to settle down. I gave up an internship with a reputed law firm and married the man my parents had chosen for me. I was told my husband was an engineer and ran a printing press in Gujarat. But after we returned from a honeymoon in Kerala, I found his mark sheet in the cupboard while unpacking the suitcases. He had failed in the tenth standard. I felt cheated, but was convinced by my family to uphold the sanctity of my marital vows. What if my husband had lied? I was still supposed to treat him like a parameshwar.
Soon, my husband started restricting my interactions with my family. I wasn’t allowed to meet my mother. My father had given them a brand new Indica car, on an agreement that my husband would make the car available for my father whenever he would visit India on a vacation from his workplace in Dubai. I never saw what the Indica looked like on the inside because my husband never allowed me to sit in it.
My father would call from Dubai every Thursday to check on me. In those days, the landline telephones would chime a longer ring than usual for ISD calls. As soon as my husband would hear that long ring, he would throw the handset at my face and say, ‘Tere baap ka phone aaya hai.’ Those rings evoked such fear inside me that I would mute the ringer around the time my father would usually call. I even forbade my mother to call me while my husband was at home. My husband and in-laws sold all of the 100 tola of gold I had received from my parents and relatives as gifts within the first three months of my marriage.
I was not allowed to go out of the house alone or socialize—my sister-in-law or mother-in-law would always accompany me. This ploy ensured I would not reveal my troubled married life to others in the community. I was confined to the house and did all the work in the kitchen. I was nothing more than a maid in that house. I wasn’t even allowed to read English newspapers.
Very early into the marriage, I conceived for the first time. Walking out of the marriage was all the more improbable now. In September 1999, I gave birth to a very beautiful baby girl, whom we named Sanjana. The girl was only thirty days old when a terrible fever engulfed her. Her stomach bloated inordinately. We rushed her to a hospital in Bharuch but the lack of good medical facilities forced us to shift the baby to a better hospital in Surat. The girl was in a lot of pain, and the medical treatment left puncture wounds all over her body. Despite our best efforts, she succumbed on 19 October. The cause of death was said to be septicaemia.
I thought this terrible incident would change my husband, but his alcoholism continued unabated. He would drink when his business suffered losses. He would drink in times of happiness, on festivals like Diwali. I started fearing all festivals because my husband would call a horde of friends and I would have to cook dinner for all the men as they enjoyed their drinks and snacks. My husband did not even realize how many of his drunk friends leered at me.
In December 1999, my father-in-law was diagnosed with last-stage cancer. He would often climb the stairs to the first floor, and knock on my bedroom in the middle of the night and request to be taken to the bathroom. I did all I could for him because he was the only one who treated me well. He often counselled my husband to stop misbehaving with me. He was the father figure I had missed growing up. But he passed away on 9 February 2000, and I lost the only person I cared for in that house. We cremated him in Nasik.
A few months later, I conceived again. My blood group is A–, and my husband was AB+. My mother-in-law was convinced that the ‘negativity’ of my blood group had caused my daughter’s death. My husband seemed to agree with his mother and taunted me endlessly. They subjected me to such mental trauma that I started to believe this would turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. What if my second child met the same fate as my first? I did not want to put another child, and even myself, through such physical and mental pain again. I decided to undergo a thorough medical examination in Mumbai. My husband accompanied me. The test reports from a maternity home near my place in Ghatkopar proved that there was nothing wrong with my blood type, and I had even been given Rh injections. The doctor said that my baby daughter had most likely contracted an external infection. I convinced my husband to get tested too. His medical reports suggested that the survival of a girl child between us would be extremely precarious on account of a chromosomal abnormality in him. I was just four weeks pregnant. Sex determination had legal ramifications. The doctor suggested that medical treatment could help in this situation.
In the fifth month of my pregnancy, I developed severe pain in my stomach. My cervix was under pressure from the baby’s weight, and I had to be immediately hospitalized. I spent many days in the hospital, and after I was discharged I was recommended complete bed rest. This was not possible at my in-laws’ place as I was as good as a maid there. My mother-in-law decided to send me back to my maternal home. Not out of concern or love, but to ensure that they would not have to take the fall should something go wrong again. If I was with my parents, a
ny unfortunate incident would be solely my responsibility.
But with the blessings of Lord Krishna, I gave birth to a healthy boy in August 2000.
I hoped that a son would make my husband happy and improve my equation with my in-laws. But my hopes were dashed soon. Things only got worse, and I continued to endure, now for the sake of my child. The following year, my husband got so drunk on Holi that he urinated on our bed thinking it was the toilet.
As my son began learning his first words, he also picked up the abuses my husband hurled at me with regular abandon. When he was four, I scolded him one day for misbehaving. His expression completely matched his father’s when he said, ‘Chal nikal ja ghar se!’ Tears flowed down my cheeks. It wasn’t his fault that he was living in such an environment. But if this continued, he would grow up to be like his father and treat other women the same way I was being treated now. I couldn’t let that happen. We had to leave. I packed our bags and walked out of an irreparable marriage, for good.
The policeman at Pant Nagar police station showed little emotion as he heard my tale, and took down the NC report. The entire process took two harrowing hours and I returned home. The next day, my sister-in-law called and listened to my concerns. Her fiancé called me from Australia and tried to tell me that my son could have a good future in Australia. I was furious and demanded that I wanted my son back home in the next hour. My sister-in-law eventually dropped off my son at my building. She did not come up to my door.
My divorce was settled mutually. I did not ask for any alimony. My husband promised he would return 100 tolas of gold in reasonable time. That never happened.
Slowly, I started picking up the shattered pieces of my life and also arranged my son’s admission to a school. A law internship for me was out of the question. My earlier stint with a law firm had not paid enough to sustain a thirty-one-year-old single mother and her child.
I researched a few career options and settled on the media. I joined a one-year evening diploma course at Somaiya College, which was close to my home. I made sure my son went to school in the morning, and in the evening, while he would play with his friends, and his grandparents would look after him, I would attend college. Velly Thevar, my faculty at Somaiya, was a well-known crime reporter working for the Times of India. Her lectures sparked my interest in crime reporting and I began to idolize her. She often said that the Free Press Journal (FPJ) was the best place to start a career in journalism.
As a result, I started reading the Free Press Journal. In a matter of days, I saw an advertisement in the paper that they needed trainee reporters. Mr Singh interviewed me at the FPJ office in Nariman Point. The sprawling view of the city from his cabin enthralled me. The editor asked me to join from 19 November 2005, at a salary of Rs 3,000 per month. Lack of any experience meant I couldn’t be a crime reporter yet. So, they assigned me to court reporting.
My first assignment was to cover gangster Abu Salem’s case at the TADA court situated inside Arthur Road Jail. Ujjwal Nikam, the public prosecutor, opened his statement with a Sanskrit shloka to demand custody of Abu Salem. I noted the measured movements of his hands, the command of his voice and the choice of words, and covered it all in an article that made it to the front page of the Free Press Journal. It was my first byline too, a term I was unaware of until then. Ujjwal Nikam personally called to congratulate me on a well-written report.
I would travel in the second-class compartment in the local trains, pursue leads at the sessions court, file my stories, and rush back home to be with my son. My course at Somaiya College suffered, but for good performance at work, my salary at FPJ was increased to Rs 5,000 in the following month. In ten months, my salary touched Rs 7,500. Things were finally beginning to look up.
6
RULER OF THE JAIL
I counted each day spent in jail. Days had turned into months and it caused turmoil within me. In the first two months, Paromita protected me from a lot of trouble. She stood up if someone tried to misbehave. She warned me in case someone tried to hoodwink me. She was always there. The other inmates always discussed Paromita’s sexual preferences, but it didn’t bother me.
It was mid-January when Paromita and I were chatting over a tasteless plate of poha in the morning when she first mentioned Jaya Chheda.
‘Jaya Maa is coming back from the hospital,’ she said. ‘You’ve heard of her.’
‘Oh yes. Of course, I have,’ I replied.
Jaya Chheda was the ex-wife of Suresh Bhagat, Mumbai’s matka king who had a thriving 3,000-crore-rupee business. Jaya, known for her aggression, and her son Hitesh were being tried for murdering Bhagat in an orchestrated road accident. A speeding truck had rammed straight into his SUV, mowing it down to pieces, and all the occupants had died. It was proved in court to be a well-thought-out plan to gain control over the vast gambling business that Bhagat had inherited from his father and grown.
‘Jaya Maa is very powerful,’ Paromita said. ‘Not a leaf moves inside Byculla Jail without her consent.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She is away, on a vacation at the Saifee Hospital.’
‘Vacation?’
‘What else do you call a long stay at an air-conditioned room in a private hospital?’
Jaya had always been on the heavier side. Before being imprisoned at the Byculla Jail in 2008, she had undergone a bariatric surgery, called sleeve gastrectomy. The procedure involved surgical removal of a part of her stomach to reduce its size. The weight loss surgery ensured that she ate only a little, but it came with the risk of food leaking out of the tube. If she ate a type and amount of food that was not permitted, it would cause severe complications. Jaya used this to her benefit and she would hop from one hospital to another while she was at the Byculla Jail.
Paromita commanded a lot of authority in the jail. But she spoke of Jaya with the reverence of a demigod, and this unnerved me. As a reporter I had a history with Jaya, which I made Paromita aware of. During my stint in Mid-Day in 2008, I was approached by a lawyer who worked for well-known advocate Harshad Ponda. The lawyer asked me if I was interested in a good story.
‘About what?’ I asked him.
‘Our client, Suresh Bhagat, fears that his ex-wife is hatching a conspiracy for his murder,’ the lawyer said. ‘He recently wrote to the Mumbai Police seeking protection.’
‘How can I help?’
‘The police are hatching eggs over his application,’ the lawyer said. ‘Bhagat plans to file an application in the Bombay High Court.’
‘So,’ I said. ‘A story in the newspapers will help his cause?’
The lawyer nodded. From his black robe, he pulled out a white envelope. It contained a copy of the application to be filed in the court. Inside, there was also a photograph of an overweight woman in a swimming pool, in the arms of a bare-chested man.
‘Who is this woman?’ I asked.
‘Jaya Chheda, the ex-wife of my client,’ the lawyer said. ‘They divorced four years ago.’
‘And the man?’
‘He is Suhas Roge,’ the lawyer said. ‘Apparently, in a relationship with Jaya Chheda. He is playing his part in the conspiracy.’ Roge was a member of the gang of Arun Gawli. Gawli, just about 5 ft 2 in tall, was an underworld Maharashtrian gangster-turned-politician who used to operate his gang from his home in Dagdi Chawl on Saat Rasta in Byculla. Gawli had created his own place in the underworld by running extortion rackets and trade unions, among other things.
‘Okay.’ I folded the envelope into my purse. ‘I’ll think it over.’
When I returned home that day, I put the envelope into one of the cabinets above my writing desk, where I stored many important documents. I didn’t pursue the story as it looked like it would be pushing Bhagat’s agenda. Bhagat himself was no saint, and I had no way of making sure he was speaking the truth. Even if I had his court application, I had an inkling that there could be some agenda behind it. So, I left the story on the back burner.
In March 2008, I joined the Asian Age. On 13 June 2008, about six months after my meeting with the lawyer, Bhagat died in a ghastly road accident on the Alibaug–Pen road. He was returning after attending a hearing in Alibaug court in a 1997 narcotics case. As his Scorpio jeep reached the Dharamtar Bridge, it had a head-on collision with a truck. All seven occupants of the SUV, including Bhagat, died in the fatal collision. The lawyer who had met me died too.
As soon as I heard the news of Bhagat’s death, I ran to my editor Hussain Zaidi’s cabin to tell him about my meeting with the lawyer. I was suspicious about Bhagat’s sudden death and told Zaidi sir that there could be more behind the accident. He advised me to keep the document and the photograph handy in case the investigation developed some new angle. He also asked me to confirm the identity of the man who was in the photograph with Jaya Chheda.
I went home and found the envelope between two stapled stacks of papers. My next task was to confirm Roge’s identity. The next day I carried the photograph to the office of Rakesh Maria, who was then the joint commissioner, Crime Branch, and explained the purpose of my visit. The tall, lean man who had broken hardened criminals with his clinical interrogations leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on the centre of his desk. He balanced the frame of his spectacles perfectly along the bridge of his nose and considered the audacity of my request.
I placed the photograph on his desk. ‘Is this Suhas Roge?’
He cast a cursory glance at the photograph and looked away. For a moment, his face gave away nothing. Then he stared at me in his ice-cool demeanour, and leaned back into his chair, and paused in a measured manner before he nodded his head, only once. That was all the assurance I needed, and I called Zaidi sir on the way back to the office to confirm that the man in the photograph was Roge indeed. There were already murmurs about investigators considering the angle of foul play in Bhagat’s death. I extracted more from my sources in the Crime Branch and it turned out that they were already probing Roge’s role in the accident along with Jaya Chheda.