RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2011
Copyright © Meenal Baghel 2011
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EPUB ISBN 9788184002751
For my parents, Manjula and Kumar Singh
‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.’
—Janet Malcolm in The Journalist and the Murderer
CONTENTS
Cast of Characters
Preface
BOOK I: The Journey: From Mysore to Mumbai
1. The Killing
2. Maria
3. Emile
BOOK II: Oshiwara—Three Characters in Search of a Film
4. Ekta Kapoor
5. Moon Das
6. Ram Gopal Varma
BOOK III: Death and Dénouement
7. Neeraj
8. The Unravelling
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Neeraj Grover: Television executive from Kanpur who was killed on May 7, 2008 in the apartment of his lover, a Kannada film actress called Maria Susairaj.
Maria Susairaj: Kannada starlet and aspiring television actress. Neeraj Grover was killed and dismembered in her flat in Malad, a Mumbai suburb. She has since been convicted by a Mumbai civil and sessions court for destruction of evidence, and has appealed for exoneration in a higher court.
Emile Jerome: Emile was a naval lieutenant, and Maria’s boyfriend, when he killed Neeraj Grover in Maria’s apartment. He was convicted of culpable homicide not amounting to murder by the same sessions court, and has since appealed against the decision in the Bombay High Court.
Amarnath Grover: Neeraj Grover’s father. He owned a photocopying shop in Kanpur, and now devotes his energies to pursuing justice for his son.
Neelam Grover: Neeraj’s mother.
Nishant Lal: A television writer-producer, and one of Neeraj’s closest friends in Mumbai. He was a key prosecution witness.
Deepak Kumar: Also works in the television industry. Neeraj’s friend and chief troubleshooter in matters of the heart.
Haresh Sondarva: Neeraj’s flatmate, who worked in the apparel industry. Haresh left Mumbai after Neeraj’s killing.
Sushant Singh: Neeraj’s flatmate. He came from Chandigarh to Mumbai to make his mark in Bollywood as a music director.
Deepak Singh: Choreographer and Maria Susairaj’s friend. She was his houseguest when she came to Mumbai from Bangalore in April 2008, a few days before Neeraj’s death.
Kiran Shreyans: Dance instructor. Maria was acquainted with Kiran in Bangalore, and borrowed his car to dispose of Neeraj’s body parts in the jungles of Manor. He was also a prosecution witness in the trial at the city civil and sessions court.
Pavan (His name has been altered upon request): Dance instructor and Maria’s former boyfriend.
Richard Susairaj: Maria’s brother. Works at their father’s construction firm in Bangalore.
Jitesh Saini and Vasanth Kumar: Naval officers and Emile Jerome’s friends and course mates. Vasanth, who was Emile’s roommate at the naval base at Kochi, was also a prosecution witness.
Ekta Kapoor: India’s most successful television producer, and an astute observer of social mores. Neeraj had worked at her company Balaji Telefilms, and while he was there he met Maria Susairaj and promised her a role in the Balaji serial Mahabharat.
Moon Das: A television and stage dancer who aspired to work as an item girl in a big-budget Bollywood film. She was approached to play the role of Maria Susairaj in a movie that was eventually abandoned. Her life was indelibly marked by tragedy when an overly possessive boyfriend went on a shooting spree, in which he killed Moon’s mother and uncle.
Ram Gopal Varma: Maverick filmmaker who has directed a film ‘inspired’ by the Neeraj Grover killing, called Not a Love Story.
Rakesh Maria: He was the Joint Commissioner of the Mumbai Crime Branch when Neeraj’s father approached him to help trace his son, who seemed to have disappeared overnight. The Crime Branch, along with the local police, finally solved the mystery of Neeraj Grover’s death. Rakesh Maria has since moved out of the Crime Branch, and at present heads the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad.
Inspector Satish Raorane: The chief investigating officer in the case. He is now attached to a police station in Mumbai.
PREFACE
IN THE SECOND week of May 2008, the inside pages of the Mumbai newspapers reported the story of a twenty-five-year-old television executive from Kanpur who had gone missing. He was last seen on May 6 at the suburban home of his lover, a little-known Kannada film actress named Maria Monica Susairaj.
The story moved to the front page two weeks later, when Rakesh Maria, the savvy boss of the Mumbai Crime Branch, held a press conference in which he announced that the missing television executive, Neeraj Grover, was dead. It was, the officer enunciated with customary deliberation, allowing the scribes to take down each word, the case of a love triangle gone horribly wrong. Neeraj Grover, he alleged, had been killed by Maria Susairaj, aged twenty-eight, and her naval officer fiancé Lieutenant Emile Jerome, aged twenty-five. After killing Neeraj the couple had cut his body up into ‘several bits’, and disposed of it in the jungles of Manor, a picnic spot on the outskirts of Mumbai.
The story could not have been more dramatic had it been scripted. It had all the key ingredients for a media frenzy—young, beautiful, ambitious people involved in a gruesome killing. It became the year’s biggest crime story, with each emerging detail lapped up by an avid audience. The press outdid each other with wild speculations. When one young reporter at a leading television channel called up his bosses in Delhi to alert them to the news, they didn’t ask him about the who, what, when, where, why, and how—those classic cornerstones of reporting—but a more Gabbar-like question: ‘Kitne tukde the?’ (How many pieces were there?)
When the reporter, quoting Rakesh Maria, responded with ‘several bits’, the television bosses added three and three and came up with three hundred. ‘If a chicken can be cut into ten, twelve pieces, it follows that a five foot eleven inch man would be cut into three hundred pieces,’ they insisted before running the headline.
The effect of this revelation was sensational. The killing suddenly seemed more vivid; the criminals more monstrous. Neeraj had not simply been killed. He had been hacked into three hundred pieces. As Neeraj’s distraught mother Neelam Grover said when I first spoke to her on the phone: ‘Just see how they cut up my son, that’s not the work of ordinary folks but evil sorcerers.’ They were ‘chudail, pishach’, she said, ‘not human beings’.
Killing is rarely a sophisticated act. It arises out of too many unbridled passions—anger, greed, jealousy, lust. Here were three people blessed with many favours through their lives—they were young, educated, each talented in their own way, beautiful, and from comfortable middle class backgrounds. What dark undercurrents in their personalities drew t
hem to one another? What really transpired through the night of May 6 and 7 that led them to lose control, and erase the possibilities that life offered?
Several comparisons have been drawn between this case and the famous Nanavati murder case of 1959, in which a naval officer, Kawas Nanavati, killed his English wife’s lover, a wealthy Mumbai businessman called Prem Ahuja. Nanavati, having learnt of his wife’s infidelity, confronted Ahuja about the affair as he lay in his bathtub, eliciting the response, ‘Am I supposed to marry every woman I sleep with?’
Similarly, Lieutenant Emile Jerome rushed from Kochi to Mumbai when he found out that Neeraj Grover was at his girlfriend’s house late on the night of May 6. He arrived at Maria’s door early in the morning, and went straight into her bedroom to verify his suspicions. Neeraj Grover, allegedly lying in a state of dishabille, opened his eyes and looked at Emile, then at Maria: ‘Oh, so this is the fiancé?’ he remarked.
Grover’s and Ahuja’s impulse to provoke may have been the same, but what followed is what separates the two cases entirely. After shooting Ahuja dead, a repentant Nanavati immediately went to the police and surrendered. Emile and Maria allegedly dismembered Neeraj’s body for quick disposal, and for two weeks thereafter behaved as if nothing was amiss. They exhibited none of the remorse that follows a temporary loss of control—the guilt which lent a certain nobility to Dostoevsky’s murderer Raskolnikov.
From the time it broke, the story of the killing of Neeraj Grover was owned by television. Crime, not Bollywood, is our salutary entertainment. We end our days with Sansani, Vaardaat, and Dus Tak, in the company of hirsute anchors, each noisier than the other. I too came to the story through a visual medium. Late one evening, I walked into the photographers’ bay at the office of Mumbai Mirror, the newspaper I edit, to see my colleague Raju Shinde produce a series of powerful pictures of Neeraj’s parents breaking down upon seeing their son’s assailants at the police station.
Their grief-strained faces, and their fight for control, were immensely affecting. But, most of all, as Raju reported, it was Neelam Grover’s ringing question to her son’s killers—‘Why? Why did you kill Neeraj?’—that arrested attention. There has been no answer.
MEENAL BAGHEL
July 2011, Mumbai
BOOK I
The Journey: From Mysore to Mumbai
1
THE KILLING
‘You, lady, are my number one suspect.’
—Rakesh Maria, Head of the Mumbai Crime Branch,
to Maria Susairaj
THE HEART OF Oshiwara lies on land reclaimed from slushy backwaters in the late seventies. Large swathes of Mumbai have been ‘reclaimed’, as if the sea were an encroacher against whom a case had been filed and won. When Ekta Kapoor moved here in 2000 to set up Balaji Telefilms, Oshiwara was in her words, a ‘dump’. ‘I was quite horrified at having landed in such a rotten place. All you ever saw were arty-type people with big bindis.’ Television’s most famous backroom girl wears her hair stylishly cut, and is dressed on a working day in a tracksuit. It hints as much to her get-up-and-go attitude, as it does to her preoccupation with her weight.
In the decade since Ekta’s arrival, this North Mumbai district has become the nerve centre of the entertainment industry, renewing Mumbai’s sagging energy after most of its manufacturing industries moved to other parts of India, offering cheaper real estate and investor-friendly policies.
In reality, the nation’s popular culture filtered out from just one unremarkable, potholed back alley of the Shah Industrial Estate, where Balaji Telefilms and the Yash Raj Films (YRF) studios stand at right angles, surrounded by a foundry, a derelict warehouse, and an unkempt ground that is hired out for receptions during the wedding season.
While the snooty guards at YRF shoo away aspiring stars for daydreaming at its impenetrable gates, Balaji, in keeping with the more democratic nature of its medium, has a notice at the door that spells hope: ‘Leave two photographs with the watchman, if we like them we will get back in two days.’
Aside from the shiny, glass-fronted buildings that have mushroomed on the marshes, there has also been a sartorial sea change from those big bindi days that so horrified Ekta. Now the neighbourhood was full of mini-skirted brides flaunting their choodas along with their stilettos, and men in distressed jeans and sleeveless ganjis baring bench-press biceps and showing off fake tattoos. In India’s capital of make-believe, even rebellion is a ‘look’.
On a sullen, clammy April evening in 2008, television executive Deepak Kumar was sitting at the coffee shop at Fun Republic, a one-stop entertainment centre, a few yards away from these dream factories. He sprawled into a steel and rattan chair and ran a hand over his buzz-cut as he discreetly observed the ladies. He was waiting for the rest of his gang to arrive. The ‘Coffee House Nomads’, as the group called itself, met at this Café Coffee Day each evening after work. The waiter knew their preferences, and the café offered them a chance to sit under the open sky, escape the dingy sets and frigid editing suites. Here, they could pretend that the great Mumbai obsession, ‘time pass’, was a legitimate pursuit.
Deepak Kumar and his closest friends, Nishant Lal and Neeraj Grover, were in their twenties and had come to Mumbai within a few years of each other, united in their ambition to work in television. They had a common link to Delhi—they shared its Hindi heartland sensibilities, and also a camaraderie that is particular to young bachelors.
Deepak Kumar worked with a television production house, Shreya Creations, steadily rising to become an executive producer. Neeraj, the lean and hungry hop-skip-jump man, had just quit Balaji Telefilms and joined Cinevista as creative producer, but was already in talks with Synergie Adlabs; while Nishant, the long-haired leader of their group, was his own boss, conceptualizing shows for different channels.
Neeraj had been the last to join the Coffee House Nomads, a year ago, in 2007. He had stood out in the Fun Republic foyer for his good looks, talking up a storm as he paced around the flyweight tables, nervously transferring an unlit cigarette from his fingers to his lips and back, making loud references to working with Amitabh Bachchan, for whoever cared to listen.
Nishant, blowing smoke rings in the air, his large, gentle eyes missing nothing, had watched the boy with amusement. Neeraj had turned up again the next day, approached their table for a light, and introduced himself.
A Kanpuria!
As they had suspected, Neeraj had landed in Mumbai just a few months ago. He was working on a Kannada ad film for Dabur with the superstar. The three young men got talking. Neeraj turned out to be a jolly, witty boy who got all the jokes. Nishant, who had been working on a show called Aaghaz, urgently needed an actor for a day and Neeraj, with his clean-cut good looks and lean frame, fit the bill. The three began to hang out after the shoot, revelling in the warm flush of sudden and deep friendship. No topic was exempt from their boisterous discussions: movies, sport, cars, bikes, Vijay Mallya (whose lifestyle they aspired to), parents, friends, travel, gizmos, and—with Neeraj around—inevitably, women.
With the awe that is characteristic of ordinary monogamous mortals, Deepak Kumar watched a succession of young women sashay into their lives, offering him vague, glassy-eyed hellos before transforming into animated, honeydew goddesses around Neeraj. ‘Mere hisse ki ladkiyan bhi tumhare hisse mein rehti hain!’ (Your lot includes my share of women too), the thickset young man often grumbled good-naturedly, by now resigned to taking vicarious pleasure in his friend’s amorous triumphs. Though sometimes these could get him into trouble. Neeraj had recently violated the sacred code—don’t dip your nib in the office ink—by getting involved with a young woman who worked with him at Balaji, and who was a part of their gang. When he turned his charms on her and presented her with a bauble as a ‘pretend’ engagement ring, she hadn’t been able to resist his proposal, risking her relationship with her steady boyfriend.
When Neeraj got bored after a couple of months and moved on, the jilted woman, sullen, hurt and ang
ry, had blamed Deepak for not warning her about the new girl. But he really hadn’t known. Neeraj made his moves faster than Vishwanathan Anand did playing speed chess.
For the last few days, Neeraj had been talking about an actress from Bangalore called Maria Susairaj. He had helped her audition for Balaji’s big upcoming show, Mahabharat, that March. The two had met earlier in 2007 and had recognized the spark of attraction between them—but before it could blossom into something deeper, Maria had shifted back to Bangalore to work on a Kannada film, Ekdant. After they reconnected for the Mahabharat audition, they kept in touch regularly over the phone. Maria, Neeraj told his friends, was coming back to Mumbai in the last week of April, and today’s coffee house discussion was devoted to Neeraj’s opening gambit.
Nirvana lies less than a kilometre away from Fun Republic, past the offices of film producers and big movie posters that dwarf the sky; between a police station so small that cars confiscated from criminals have to be parked illegally on the road, and a petrol pump modelled on Delhi’s Baha’i Lotus Temple. The soot, the exhaust fumes, and the film of fuel have left the petrol pump looking like an overripe cabbage instead.
Beautiful, skinny, young white women limber across the dirty open corridor that leads to the dance rehearsal hall like welcoming apsaras, oblivious to the April heat, pirouetting, pouting, and arching a leg in the air while the peon from the next door office passes by without a second glance.
Behind thick, soundproof walls lay Nirvana, a hall where auditions for Bollywood films and reality TV shows were held. Inside, the air conditioner was on full blast, and the music system blared ‘Mauja hi Mauja’. ‘1-2, 1-2 Kick! 1-2, 1-2 Kick!’ A young choreographer instructed like a drill sergeant shaking her head—the Caucasians didn’t get it. They danced stiffly, using their shoulders—the Indian girls danced with their hips, much more sensually; but they weren’t white-skinned.
Death in Mumbai Page 1