Death in Mumbai

by Meenal Baghel

  Intrigued, Maria summoned the visitor. ‘There was something moving and dignified about Mr Grover, and as I heard the details of how his son had gone missing, an instinct told me this was not a simple case,’ he was to later say in an interview.

  Rakesh Maria, who saw the rise and decimation of the Mumbai underworld at close hand, is one of the most high-profile officers in the Mumbai police. He is a tall, burly man of middle age with a brisk, energetic manner and large eyes that miss little. His instinct, renowned in the criminal world, is extraordinary. One such hunch had led him to unravel the Mumbai blasts case in 1993, and is well documented in both Hussain S. Zaidi’s book Black Friday and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City.

  On March 12, 1993 a series of blasts had ripped through Mumbai. It was the biggest case in Mumbai’s crime history and the police commissioner had asked Rakesh Maria to investigate it. He was then the deputy commissioner of police, Traffic. Two days after the commissioner called him in, his men had defused a bomb found in a scooter abandoned at Dadar railway station.

  Maria held a late night meeting with twenty of the best police investigators in town and set them to work. Within five hours he had his first suspect. A Maruti van had been found abandoned with detonators near the Siemens office at Worli. The policemen who found the car had not paid heed to it, thinking the driver had abandoned the vehicle just before the checkpoint. Maria asked for the van to be checked, and to see its papers. The registration papers showed the van belonged to Mushtaq ‘Tiger’ Memon. When a team of investigators reached Memon’s house in Mahim, they found the house was empty, and the cops found nothing except the key to a Bajaj scooter. As Rakesh Maria stared at that key, something clicked. He remembered the scooter bomb that had been defused at Dadar station two days ago. One of his men was asked to go and try the key on that scooter. It fit—nailing the little-known mastermind of the Mumbai blasts.

  He had no answers to Neeraj Grover’s mysterious disappearance yet, just a gut feeling. Rakesh Maria decided then and there that the Crime Branch would get involved in the investigation. ‘I could see that Mr Grover was in distress and I did not want him to run around further, so instead of directing him to Unit XI which handles all Crime Branch cases between Goregaon and Gorai further north, I sent an aide to call back the Unit IX team which had just left after briefing me about the murder at Lokhandwala.’

  Mumbai police owes the legend of the force being second only to Scotland Yard, to an Englishman, Stephen Meredyth Edwardes, Mumbai’s police commissioner in 1909. Edwardes, having studied the workings of Scotland Yard at first hand, set up the Criminal Investigation Department, which later became the Mumbai Crime Branch. The Crime Branch, divided into twelve units along the length of the city for administrative reasons, has the authority to do a parallel probe on any case registered in any Mumbai police station.

  Freed from the often time-consuming administrative work of a police station, Crime Branch cops, usually to be found in plain clothes, work exclusively as detectives and have distinguished themselves by solving some of the most talked about cases in recent history, including the Gulshan Kumar murder and the J.J. Hospital shootout case. The notorious serial killer Charles Sobhraj was also arrested in a Crime Branch operation.

  On May 13, four days after he ordered the probe, a group of Neeraj’s friends came to see Rakesh Maria to complain about the lag in investigation. Among them was a young woman who sat right across him. There was something about her eyes that bothered him.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Maria Susairaj, I am also a friend of Neeraj’s.’

  ‘I know, he disappeared from your house. You, lady,’ Rakesh Maria leaned forward, stared hard and, pointing a finger straight at Maria Susairaj said, ‘are my number one suspect.’

  Amarnath Grover left Rakesh Maria’s office and began the traumatic process of looking for Neeraj. He visited railway tracks, hospitals, mortuaries, and one evening even went to the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, foraging through parts of the forest spread over a hundred kilometres. Each trip began with dread and ended in momentary exultation: none of the bodies he was shown were his son’s. The relief lasted but a few minutes.

  He asked the local cable channel to run a ticker scroll offering a one lakh rupee reward to anyone with information on Neeraj, and personally went to each of the shanties on the road leading to Dheeraj Solitaire, stacked up against each other like uneven teeth, with Neeraj’s picture to ask if anyone recalled having seen him. An urchin was lowered into the septic tanks of Maria’s building to check for a body.

  Amarnath Grover and Satnam Arora had a hundred posters printed with Neeraj’s picture, with the word ‘MISSING’ in bold lettering. On a May afternoon of long shadows, Neeraj’s father went to Dheeraj Solitaire and painstakingly put them up—on walls, on pillars, on the gates of neighbouring buildings, under car wipers, on shop shutters, on telephone poles, as if turning the area into a shrine for his missing son. Wherever the eye travelled there was Neeraj looking down, smiling gently.

  That afternoon he saw Maria emerge from the building accompanied by her brother and sister; it was only the second time he had seen her. She looked around and then at him, standing there with the poster in one hand and a bottle of glue in the other, and got into an autorickshaw and rode past without saying anything.

  There were also things about Ginni that he was just beginning to discover. As if by going missing, Ginni was offering an invitation to get to know him better. The girls. The smoking. The possibility of drugs. All the things that parents spend a lifetime living in denial of.

  Maria had told the Malad police that Neeraj used ecstasy and crystal meth recreationally. At a friend’s behest a police officer was sent to the Osho commune at Pune to find out if Neeraj had checked himself in.

  Ginni’s credit card details were scanned—they revealed nothing. They examined his bank account. The last withdrawal was for Rs 1,000 on May 5, two days before Ginni’s disappearance, and the last deposit had been the Rs 10,000 that he himself had sent his son. Amarnath Grover called up his wife in Kanpur, unable to keep the despair out of his voice. ‘Ginni bas gayab ho gaya hai’ (Our son has just disappeared). He took to waking up and heading straight to the Unit IX office on Hill Road in Bandra day after day, his anxious presence reminding the police that his son was still missing.

  But all this while, without Amarnath Grover’s knowledge, Inspector Satish Raorane, the investigating officer in the case, and his team were working on their suspect. On May 17, her twenty-eighth birthday, Maria was called to the police station in Bandra and questioned for over ten hours.

  Two days later, Amarnath Grover walked into the Unit IX office as usual. As he sat sipping chai and waiting for the officers in the corridor outside, he saw Satish Raorane emerge from one of the rooms. Before he could go up to him with his daily plea, Raorane walked up to him, smiling. ‘Mr Grover, please relax. I request you, don’t come here for the next few days. I will personally inform you of the developments.’

  Buoyed, he immediately called Neelam. ‘The inspector told me to relax. I think they are getting some news of Ginni, why don’t you also come to Mumbai?’ He ignored Raorane’s advice but found the office of unit IX mostly deserted over the next two days. ‘Where’s everybody?’ he asked the chaiwallah he had befriended. ‘Aap hi ke kaam se gaye hain’ (They are out for your work), he was informed.

  It was the evening of May 21. Amarnath and Neelam Grover had just left the Unit IX office, looking at another restless night stretch ahead when Amarnath’s phone rang. It was Rakesh Maria. ‘Mr Grover, where are you?’

  ‘Just outside the Unit IX office in Bandra, sir.’

  ‘Why don’t you please go back, sit there for a while.’

  Rakesh Maria had just finished briefing the media about the Neeraj Grover case. It was imperative to speak to Amarnath Grover before he switched on the television. None of his boys had the heart to speak to the old man, and the task fell to the boss. ‘Mr Grover, please go
back to the Unit IX office. I am sorry but your son is dead. We have found out what happened.’

  In the blur that followed there were moments of piercing clarity. Neeraj’s friends rushing over to get them home, the clutch of Neelam’s hand threatening to crack his knuckles, and the avid faces of television reporters, on channel after channel.

  This, above all.

  Sometime after Neelam Grover’s nightly conversation with Neeraj, and before her morning call to him, their son had been stabbed to death in Maria Susairaj’s flat, his body violated. The police claimed that Maria along with her fiancé, the naval officer Emile Jerome, had killed Ginni—after which they had dragged his body into the bathroom and hacked it up. ‘Into bits,’ said Rakesh Maria. Television reporters, citing their own sources, claimed it was into three hundred pieces.

  Returning dazed to the flat their son had inhabited until a few days ago, Amarnath Grover and Neelam watched the reporters hyperventilate on screen. ‘Aur uske baad, they hacked the body into three hundred pieces, stuffed it into three large carry bags, and dumped them in the jungles off Manor and set them on fire.’ This end for their beautiful son?

  ‘Will we get something to do a cremation with?’ Amarnath Grover asked the policeman accompanying them to the Nagpada Police Hospital the next day, where he and Neelam had to give DNA samples, before going on to answer his own question, ‘After three hundred pieces what would be left?’

  Later, back at the Malad police station, where Maria Susairaj and Emile Jerome had been brought before being taken to jail, the media was like a panting beast. Neelam Grover had spent the night surfing for news of Ginni’s death, astonished to see it being discussed so authoritatively. Motive? History? Consequence? Equations? They knew nothing. She knew nothing.

  Through a small barred window in the room where she waited at the Malad police station, she saw Maria and Emile being brought in. Their faces were covered with black hoods. In the darkened room, the only illusion of light was their pale-coloured clothing, and they looked disembodied, but only until a policeman came in and switched on the tube light. For a moment, just a moment, Maria Susairaj lifted her hood and blinked.

  2

  MARIA

  ‘I live for today; tomorrow if I don’t wake up forgive me for my sins.’

  —Maria Susairaj

  JHOOTH, MARIA’S 2002 debut film, opens with the camera lingering on her swaying posterior as she walks to college with an exaggeratedly sexy gait, dressed in a form-fitting micro-mini, big platform shoes, and cheap flesh-coloured tights—a legacy of the egregious eighties. When the camera finally pans on her face, it reveals a plain broad visage, an oddly flattened nose, and a mouth full of teeth. Yet, undeniably, she exudes a certain ripeness playing a spoilt young girl who toys with the boys. Crudely, the film approximates her image both in Mysore when she was in college, and later in Bangalore during her brief stint in the Kannada film industry.

  Her looks have changed considerably since that time: her teeth have been fixed, drastic weight loss has reduced her from voluptuous to petite, the hair is longer, and her nose appears noticeably sharper. But through the changes she has retained the ineffable sensuality that leaves men either uneasy or completely disarmed in her presence.

  ‘She was sentimental, flirtatious—most of her friends were male—and she often wore sexy dresses. In short, I can say, she was a complete woman,’ recalled Hemanth Kashyap, an old classmate from Mysore with touching naïveté. While describing her lifestyle in Mysore, she told a former lover: ‘When everybody was walking, I was on a cycle, when people were on cycles, I was on a bike, and when people were on bikes, I was riding in a car.’

  ‘Actually she drove a Kinetic to Mahajana College,’ retorted former classmate Abhinanth Kumar. ‘She was very conscious about wearing branded clothing and while she was no doubt sweet and helpful, one always got the feeling that she only wanted to mingle with the elite, like the wealthy sons of coffee planters from Coorg.’ Rumours of her liaisons with the Coorg gang boys, who were called Ka12 because of their licence plates, enlivened Mysore for many. Yet, push for details and the stories don’t hold up.

  When Emile asked his parents for permission to marry Maria, they declined strenuously.

  Prominent Mysore dentist Dr Anil Thomas, who was once a close friend of Maria’s uncle Santunesan, offered an explanation quoting the parish grapevine: ‘She was older than him, an actress, and then there was the whole issue of the family—Emile’s parents are old Malayalee Christians from Wayanad. They may be wealthy, but Monica’s family’s Christian roots barely go back two generations; they are converts,’ he told me as he downed a chhota peg at the Mysore Golf Club. At that his friend, who is from the same parish as Maria’s family, interjected, ‘Also, have you seen her? So dark! She used to wear weird clothes; she was no match for Emile.’

  In a small town, a whisper travels further than a shout. In Mysore, rumours about Maria will not be shushed, and bear with them all the prejudices of gender, colour, and class.

  But the disparagement extends to both sides. ‘I never encouraged Mysoreans,’ Maria once told me, alluding to the men. ‘Their whole attitude is: “Uper se tapki hai, kha lo isse” [Women are to be plucked, like low-hanging fruit]. Any woman who goes out to work there is fair game.’

  For nearly three years I had been trying to persuade Maria to do an interview for this book. While always pleasant, she never fully acquiesced until a few days before the sessions court judgment in which she would be convicted. The tension in the courtroom had been thickening over the days as Emile’s and her lawyers spun their competing narratives, pitching the lovers as adversaries.

  The morning that she finally agreed to speak to me, Emile’s advocate Wahab Khan had made his final arguments with considerable flourish. In the sparsely attended courtroom, Wahab, a man of formidable physical heft, pulled the small tabletop lectern towards him and rested his weight on the fragile prop. Next, he pulled one foot out of his scruffy, unpolished shoes, the backs of which were bent out of shape from frequent abuse, and balanced it on the wooden chair in front of him.

  Poised like a combative wrestler, he raised his voice and launched into the most compelling argument he would present as Emile Jerome’s attorney. There was nothing to prove that Neeraj Grover wasn’t already dead when Emile walked into his girlfriend’s Mumbai flat on the morning of May 7, 2008.

  ‘Who lived in the flat? Maria!’

  ‘Who knew Neeraj Grover? Maria!’

  ‘Who had Neeraj last been seen with? Maria!’

  His rising decibel level startled the pigeons cooing on the lintels outside the windows, and shattered the postlunch torpor of the courtroom. Special Judge and Additional Sessions Judge M.W. Chandwani widened his eyes imperceptibly. The onus was now on the prosecution, Wahab thundered, to prove that Neeraj had been alive at 7.30 am when his client entered the building.

  ‘They have not been able to prove any motive so far as Emile is concerned, and if there was any motive to commit murder, it was Maria who may have had one.’

  At the end of proceedings that day, Maria agreed to talk. I wondered if Emile’s turnaround had made her change her mind. ‘Even a monkey, when cornered, drops her baby,’ she said with equanimity. ‘We’re human beings. A man and a woman.’

  She spoke as if delivering catechism—‘I live for today; tomorrow if I don’t wake up forgive me for my sins’; ‘Never act in life in such a manner that you leave no room for second chances.’ Later, going through my notes, I realized she hadn’t been speaking so much as reviewing her life.

  Vanity and affability have long been twin features of Maria’s persona. An old boyfriend, Pavan Kumar, described her as kind and caring, and excellent with children. Like some of Maria’s other boyfriends he is also tall, with a dancer’s athleticism. It was through Pavan that she met the choreographer Deepak Singh, in whose flat she stayed in Mumbai, and Kiran Shreyans, whose car she borrowed. ‘She could be a doll. While we were in a relationship, she
would often sing for me—in those moments I felt something like love for her,’ said Pavan. The two met in 2004, two years after Jhooth was released, when she came to Studio 5678—the dance training centre he ran in Bangalore—wanting to learn salsa. She was working on a music video for a private album of her songs and was in a hurry to learn the dance, insisting on private tuitions.

  Her debut film had failed, but the currency of its songs gave her enough recognition for Pavan to offer to train her himself. ‘She was a good-looking girl—graceful—she dressed up really well and she stood out in class. What people could learn in three–four months, she learnt within a month. Before long, we were in a relationship.’

  They were together for a year during which time Pavan came to believe that she had rebounded into their relationship after breaking up with another choreographer from the Kannada film industry who had abused her. Though physically intimate, Pavan found it difficult to connect with Maria emotionally. ‘She was a bright girl who only liked to talk about herself. She liked herself very much and spent a lot of time in front of the mirror.’

  There’s the hint of iron filings in his hair and stubble, and he speaks with a candour borne of confidence, but the thirty-six-year-old recalled a younger, more uncertain self when Maria’s mercurial temperament had him at odds. ‘She would be quite romantic with me in the evening but if I brought it up the next morning, she would grow cold, saying, “I don’t want to hear anything about that”.’ He was hurt by her refusal to publicly acknowledge him as her boyfriend. He was introduced to her family—she took him home to Mysore for Christmas, and would also take him along to auditions and business meetings, ‘But if anyone asked whether we were seeing each other, she always said, “No”.’

  ‘Monica never liked being part of a group. I, on the other hand, liked to hang out with my friends. She’d join us but contribute little to the conversation.’ Even when she was alone with Pavan, Maria liked her space. ‘Though we were going steady, she didn’t want us to be together at all times. “I just wanted you in my bed,” she told him once. But [she] then immediately held my hand, and said she’d been joking.’ What Pavan found most difficult to accept was her secrecy. ‘Often she’d go out but refuse to tell me where she was going or who she was meeting.’ She was playing an unfair game, he felt, where only she knew the rules.