by Jigna Vora
The same week, we ran a front-page exclusive story about the Crime Branch’s suspicion and Bhagat’s fear of a life threat that the cops had not taken seriously. With my story, we ran the exclusive photograph of Jaya and Roge posing together happily in the pool. A few weeks after I broke the story, the police arrested eight people for Bhagat’s murder, including Jaya, her son Hitesh and her alleged lover Roge.
I told Paromita about the story I had written on Jaya in great detail. Despite my lawyer’s reservations about sharing stories about my past with other inmates, I had grown close to Paromita and had begun to trust her a little, though I couldn’t trust her wholeheartedly. When she heard about my history with Jaya, a worried expression descended upon her face.
‘Will Jaya remember I wrote a front-page article against her?’ I asked.
‘Jaya Maa never forgives,’ Paromita said. ‘And she never forgets.’
‘What should I do then?’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll set things right.’
I mentally steeled myself. I worried until I realized I had nothing more to lose. What more could she put me through? That thought gave me a sense of fearlessness, but I didn’t relay this to Paromita.
One monotonous night at the end of January 2012, I had grown bored of watching Doordarshan and retired to my space around 9.30 p.m., preparing to sleep. I had a clear view of the entrance, and in the dim light, I saw Jaya walking down the veranda wearing a crisp, peach-coloured dress. She had lost weight due to the bariatric surgery, but she was unmistakably recognizable from the swagger in her stride. She was a short woman in her fifties, but not a single strand of white was visible in her dyed black hair. She crossed over to Barrack No. 1, which was a common barrack reserved for inmates who arrived in jail after the evening headcount so that they could be repatriated to their assigned barracks in the morning. In a world where others used their clothes as makeshift pillows, Jaya had the privilege of using a thick mattress, a fluffy cotton pillow and even a quilt; all of which had been moved to Barrack No. 1 for her impending arrival. The way she looked around it seemed like she was the queen of the jail.
The next morning, after breakfast, a large group of women queued up outside Barrack No. 1. Hardened inmates bowed at Jaya’s feet as if she was the high priestess of a holy land. Usha Maa, the warden who had been jailed for scheming with her lover to kill her husband, made a special visit from Barrack No. 5 to pay her respects. Paromita grabbed my arm and asked me to come along to greet Jaya Maa. Politely, I excused myself and assured her that I would go when the time was right. Paromita seemed to understand. From a safe distance, I saw her bow down to Jaya Maa. Paromita hugged her tight, and she reciprocated, a little too closely I thought.
Over the next few days, many of the people under trial, including Tania, stopped talking to me, especially when Jaya was around. A few months before my arrest, Tania had given birth to a daughter in jail, whom the inmates had named Duggu. After Jaya came back from the hospital, Tania would get very uncomfortable if I got anywhere close to the child. One day, when Jaya was out on a court visit, I asked Tania about the change in her demeanour. She sought my forgiveness but made it clear that inside Byculla Jail, upsetting Jaya Maa was a cardinal sin she couldn’t afford to commit. The court was hearing Jaya’s case on a regular basis, but I remained wary of the days she did not have a court visit scheduled. I made conscious efforts to avoid ‘her’ areas. It was my way of staying out of trouble.
Jaya was a shrewd manipulator. Because of her weight loss surgery, she could barely eat. She had managed to get a court order issued that allowed her delivery of home-cooked food, three times a day. Edible food was a rarity inside Byculla Jail, but Jaya received multi-tiered tiffin boxes every single day, filled with hot chapatis, basmati rice, dal tadka, various types of curries, pickle and salad. Clean drinking water was a scarce commodity, but Jaya could arrange bottles of Bisleri and cans of fruit juice. She could even arrange pizza from Domino’s if she pleased. Like the ruler of her fiefdom, she distributed her food to the less privileged undertrials and won over the undying loyalty of many hungry women. Eventually, Paromita again asked me to pay my obeisance to Jaya Maa. She assured me that Jaya would not harm me. Running out of time and excuses, I played along.
When I approached her, Jaya showed no upfront signs of hostility and offered me a bowl of aam ras laced with saffron. I had grown up in a Gujarati household where mango pulp was a staple for breakfast during the mango season. Tempted, I reached for the pulp, but realized my mistake and pulled back. Jaya coaxed me with a smile, and I gave in. I scooped up a spoonful, and it was the finest Alphonso pulp I had tasted in my life—in Byculla Jail of all places. Jaya smiled with the calmness of a god, as if she had bestowed a favour and turned a sceptic into a believer.
‘Mahale arrested you?’ she asked, in her Kutch dialect.
‘Yes.’
‘I can get you out in no time.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘First, we’ll get them to drop the MCOCA charges.’
I tried to appear impressed, answering in Gujarati and humouring her brouhaha. Senior Inspector Ramesh Mahale was also responsible for Jaya’s arrest, and all her talk of being able to get me out was nothing but a cock and bull story. If that were true, why was she still in jail? But ticking off Jaya would be the wrong move inside the walls of Byculla Jail. I tactfully displayed my acceptance of her superiority by making her feel she ruled the place, and she appeared pleased by the end of our conversation.
*
Two days later, a huge commotion broke out inside the barracks. Inmates banged their aluminium mugs on the walls, screaming and shouting. They refused to queue up for breakfast. I asked Paromita what the fuss was all about.
‘The inmates are going on a hunger strike,’ she said.
‘Hunger strike? Why?’
‘To protest against the strip search.’
‘Huh?’
Paromita whispered into my ear. ‘Jaya Maa was strip-searched when she returned from a court visit. She has instigated them.’
‘Should I join?’ I asked, with no intention of doing so.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Stay away.’
The jailer arrived and quoted the rules and the manuals of the strip search procedure. The inmates protested with all their might, but the strike fizzled out by the evening. The rest of the day, I kept to my corner and chanted the Hanuman Chalisa, a practice I had been following for a while. Clearly, Jaya thought she could get away with anything.
Around the same time, my lawyer obtained an order from the court for getting home-cooked food delivered to me, but only one tiffin box a day was granted. My cousin would deliver it to jail in the morning. With no refrigeration, the food would become inedible by afternoon. After opting for home-cooked food, I was also no longer eligible for my portion of the food served in jail. Paromita would share her dinner with me, but I could not bear the guilt of eating from her plate and feeding myself. So, I started going hungry to bed.
Also, as much as my family loved me, travelling daily from Ghatkopar to Byculla was no easy arrangement for people who had jobs and businesses to attend to, and bills to pay. I asked my lawyer to put in an application in court for cancelling the home food order. The judge was aghast that an undertrial wanted to eat the food served in jail, but the order was finally rescinded. I had three square meals to eat again.
The African undertrials, with an enormous amount of strength, acted like hired guns for Jaya. Jaya would often use the Africans to send across a message to other inmates and warn them off from acting against her. Jaya would never directly say anything to an inmate, but she liked to show her strength through the Africans. They had turned into mercenaries, all for the want of good food. Jaya could not bear it if any other inmate was revered. She still held a grudge against me for writing those stories against her, and especially for publishing her photo along with Roge. So, there was no way I could be in her good books. Behind that angelic
smile on her round face, she was a master strategist, who could get what she wanted without getting her hands dirty. Inside the prison walls, there existed only one mantra for survival: J for Jail, J for Jaya.
7
JOINING MUMBAI MIRROR
After ten months in the Free Press Journal, I started looking for another job. A colleague in FPJ had moved to Mumbai Mirror, and he asked if I was interested in joining the newspaper as a court reporter.
Mumbai Mirror had launched with a bang. On 29 May 2005, a day before its first issue was published, actor Abhishek Bachchan and the then chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh had launched the compact newspaper at the Gateway of India in an elaborate ceremony. The fireworks, laser shows and lighting unveiled the red-and-black Mumbai Mirror logo in the south Mumbai sky. The tabloid’s launch also marked the city’s most aggressive print rivalry. Mid-Day was already popular in the tabloid space and there were two new broadsheets coming up—Daily News and Analysis (DNA) and a Mumbai edition of Hindustan Times. There was a sudden spurt in journalism jobs. It was a good time to be in journalism as reporters were poached at almost 80–100 per cent salary hikes by rival newspapers. Mumbai Mirror’s editor, Meenal Baghel, too was poached from Mid-Day, along with many other reporters.
I quickly sent in my résumé and was called for an interview. The visit to the Times of India building at Fort, opposite CST, was like a dream come true. A journalist reveres that building as much as a cricketer reveres the Lord’s cricket ground at London. The Mumbai Mirror office was on the fourth floor. C. Unnikrishnan, the city editor of Mumbai Mirror, conducted the first round of interview. A few days later, I was called for a second round. I sat in front of Meenal Baghel, who interviewed me inside her carpeted cabin with wooden interiors. I had less than a year of experience in journalism. Meenal asked if I would be able to deliver ‘page-one’ stories—sensational, front-page, exclusive stories that became the talking point of the day was Mumbai Mirror’s USP. An exclusive for Mumbai Mirror meant that the story should not be in any other newspaper, not even in the Times of India.
‘But Mumbai Mirror and Times of India are part of the same group?’ I asked.
Meenal reiterated her stance on exclusivity and asked me to expect a call from HR. Over the next few days, I waited anxiously for the phone to ring. When I did get the call, I could not believe my ears when the HR offered me a salary of Rs 16,000 a month. That was about twice of what I was making in FPJ. I filled up forms for a new bank account and was sent for a medical check-up near the Breach Candy Hospital. I joined Mumbai Mirror just around the time when the tabloid celebrated its first anniversary. On my first day, the office was abuzz with gossip from the anniversary party. Coming from a conservative family, it was new for me to see female reporters smoking openly in the smoking bays. I could barely walk to the coffee vending machine in the corner of the office with confidence. FPJ was a small, informal set-up of five to six reporters. Though one of the best places to learn, it hadn’t prepared me to mingle in a large corporate office. Mumbai Mirror had a much bigger team. There were a city team, crime team, features team, and a battery of news editors and designers. I was excited as well as intimidated.
I had stumbled upon a good story while serving my notice period at FPJ. I had decided to work on it after joining the Mumbai Mirror. I wanted to deliver a page-one story as early as possible. The story was about a man named Arif Lakdawala, who owned a petrol pump near Pydhonie. Lakdawala was wanted as a witness at the Sara Sahara trial. Iqbal Kaskar, the brother of fugitive don Dawood Ibrahim, was an accused in this case. The court was summoning Lakdawala for deposition. But he was seemingly untraceable as per records, even though he was very much in the city. I discussed the story with Meenal and she thought it was a page one. But she wouldn’t accept the story unless I had a photograph of Lakdawala.
‘How do I get his photograph?’ I asked Meenal. ‘I have never visited the shady areas around Dongri all my life.’
‘No photograph, no story,’ Meenal said. ‘Take a photographer along. Get a good picture.’
I sighed. I found the address of the petrol pump from the court documents. By late evening, I reached the place along with the photographer. I asked the photographer to keep a safe distance from the petrol pump and click the photo at the first opportunity. ‘Call for help if I don’t come back in fifteen minutes,’ I said, and walked to the petrol pump.
Though situated in the midst of a bustling area, the petrol pump was dark and seedy. Three men were sitting on plastic chairs, discussing something in low voices.
‘Is Arif Bhai here?’ I asked.
They looked up at me suspiciously. I gulped before one of them eventually replied that bhaijaan would arrive in fifteen minutes. I waited. Across the street, the photographer was trying to blend into the crowd. I called him up and spoke in a low whisper. ‘Arif will be here soon. Click the photograph at the first opportunity.’
Arif Lakdawala arrived wearing a cream-coloured pathani suit. He was tall, in his mid-forties, and sported a moustache. My heart thudded loud as I walked up to him and introduced myself as a reporter from Mumbai Mirror, though I did not reveal I was doing a story on him. ‘Why are you not showing up in court despite multiple summons?’ I asked.
He appeared amused, and from the corner of my eye, I saw the photographer clicking a few shots. Lakdawala did not bother answering me. Before I could get into trouble, I ended the conversation and rushed out as fast as I could without turning around to look at him. Back at the office, Meenal okayed the photograph. It was my third day in Mumbai Mirror, and I had delivered a page-one story.
Next morning, my phone didn’t stop ringing. Television reporters wanted to follow up on the story and wanted more details. At the office, Unnikrishnan congratulated me for the fabulous start. Meenal too appreciated the good work. I was on cloud nine. It was then that I met Hussain Zaidi for the first time. He was heading the crime team at Mumbai Mirror.
‘Oh, so you are Jigna Vora?’ he said with a sarcastic smile on his face. Perhaps, the veteran in him had sensed that I might be driving recklessly in the fast lane. ‘The Arif Lakdawala story is creating a lot of ripples.’
The next day, Iqbal Mamdani, a reporter with India TV, called me. ‘Do you have a death wish?’ he asked.
When I asked for a clarification, he informed me that Arif had called him and threatened to file a defamation case against me and my organization. I got jittery. I would even make sure to check no one was following me during my daily commute. But the fear wore off after a few days.
The sessions court at Kala Ghoda, opposite Jehangir Art Gallery—where, ironically, my trial would be held years later—was my assigned beat. I would take a train from Ghatkopar to CST, and then take a bus to the sessions court. The court campus had an old building, and a new building with five floors. There were fifty-eight courtrooms in the entire complex. Mumbai Mirror had taught me to look at the peculiar details in stories, be it a new story being reported for the first time or an ongoing development that could have an edgy, unusual angle to it. Within the next few days, I wrote a story on the various tricks that the prosecution employed to prolong trials. The judges would merely impose fines ranging from Rs 20 to Rs 200. The story had a very catchy headline: ‘Tareekh pe tareekh’.
After spending 4–5 hours every day in the court premises, I would return to the Times of India building around 4 p.m. Gradually, I started interacting with many accused and known criminals in the court. For me, the line between court reporting and crime reporting slowly began to blur. One day I found out that Iqbal Kaskar had made an application in court to get his meals from home because the potatoes served in jail resulted in an allergic reaction, which led to itching. This would not be a worthy story in the minds of many, but for a tabloid, Dawood’s brother feeling itchy due to the potatoes served in jail was a fun story that made it to page one.
In 1993, I covered the bomb blast trials meticulously. Once, Yakub Memon shouted in court that the CBI had failed to
adhere to the terms under which the Memon family had agreed to return to India. This apparently included a pact that women would not be punished. Yakub’s wife had been acquitted, but Rubina Memon, his sister-in-law, was convicted because a car used in the bombings had been registered in her name. Yakub wanted to point out that his sister-in-law was unaware that her husband had purchased a car in her name. Subsequently, Suleiman Memon, Rubina’s husband and Yakub’s brother, was acquitted. I reported all the developments in this case.
In 2007, I met Sanjay Dutt several times during his trial. He spoke to me in fluent Gujarati. ‘You speak Gujarati better than I do,’ I would tell him. Once, he winked and replied that he had had to impress a Gujarati co-star early in his career. Learning her language seemed the best way to go about it. Dutt wore the same pair of stylish shoes for most of the trial. The reporter in me was curious if they’d make a story. Like a fool, I asked him where he had purchased the shoes from.
‘Bangkok,’ he replied.
I could not resist asking him, ‘How much?’
He rattled off an absurdly high figure, and I nearly fainted. He would always chew tiny mints and offer me some. I took a liking to the strong flavour.
‘Where do you get this mint?’ I asked.
‘Abroad, mostly,’ he said. ‘But you can get them in Bandra. I’ll arrange for you?’ I thanked him and decided to find them myself. I scoured Bandra for three days until I found the mints in an imported chocolate shop near a popular eatery.
Sanju Baba was funny at times. He once joked that he used Bacardi for mouthwash. I still remember the day of his judgment. I was in court when O.P. Chatwal, who was then a superintendent of police with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), received a call and attended to it away from the public glare. He returned and whispered something in Ujjwal Nikam’s ear. Nikam, the public prosecutor, toned down considerably while demanding the quantum of punishment to be given to Sanjay Dutt. And that was my story. Who was Chatwal’s mystery caller? Sanjay was shivering and sweating during that hearing. He pleaded with the judge to be able to speak with his daughter once. The image of such a towering personality under so much stress remains entrenched in my memory to this day.