In the absence of a strong emotional connection, sex became a tool to navigate the relationship, and with it came the attendant urge to inflict cruelty on one another. ‘There was a girl in the class I ran at Indira Nagar who was attracted to me, and I casually went out with her a couple of times. This made Monica jealous and she immediately got back at me by flirting outrageously with my friends.’ Remarkably open about her past relationships, she would tease him with details he had no wish to hear. ‘She had no regrets about any of them, saying it just happened. I’d often tell her, “Leave it, Monica, I don’t want to hear any of this,” but she would just laugh.’
Exhausted by these skirmishes, the couple began to drift apart. When a year later, in 2005, Maria announced that she wanted to move to Mumbai to pursue a career in Bollywood, Pavan did not ask her to stay. By this time two of her other films, Excuse Me and OK, Sir, OK, released in 2003 and 2004, had also failed, and she had begun doing item numbers. ‘I thought she had a better chance of succeeding in Bangalore than in Mumbai, where the girls are better and the competition far tougher, but I chose not to say this to her.’
Instead, playing the solicitous boyfriend, Pavan called up his old friends from Studio 5678, Deepak and Kiran, who had since shifted to Mumbai, and asked them to help her find her feet in the city.
These days Maria’s maternal grandfather Philomen Raj is rarely seen around Bannimantap, the posh enclave in Mysore that he helped build. Neighbours say old age and ill health keep him inside his sprawling corner bungalow, but his presence can still be felt in town. Aside from the buildings he has constructed, most of his nine children still live in the vicinity—his corporator son Santunesan’s house with his red-beacon cars is right next door, and Maria’s parents live across the road.
Philomen Raj had migrated from Pondicherry to Mysore in the 1950s to tap into the first boom of nation-building, and set up his own construction firm soon after he arrived. Some years later he was joined by his wife’s impoverished cousin Joseph Susairaj, Maria’s father, who came from Bangalore to improve his circumstances and support his five siblings. Though Joseph started as a mere writer—industry jargon for accountant—their partnership prospered, and so did the company. Raj Constructions soon became one of the leading building firms in southern Karnataka and it seemed logical to Philomen Raj to deepen his relationship with Joseph. Unlike in north India, where it would be considered incestuous, the alliance between maternal uncle and niece is seen as most auspicious in Tamil culture. The niece is ‘mora ponnu’, literally translated as ‘my girl’.
So Joseph married his cousin’s daughter Nirmala in 1976, but just two years later he fell out with Philomen Raj and broke rank with his father-in-law to set up his own company. There is no evidence of subsequent acrimony, but when Hindu–Muslim riots broke out in Mysore in 1986, Joseph Susairaj had wanted his immediate family to leave Bannimantap, and stayed on only at his wife’s insistence.
‘While we were growing up, Father constantly shuttled between Mysore and Bangalore, working terribly hard to establish the business,’ Maria’s older brother Richard told me. At thirty-one, he was the eldest of Joseph Susairaj’s three children, followed two years apart by Maria Monica and Maria Veronica, or Moni and Roni as the sisters were called. Richard, who is petite like his sisters, sketches a picture of an idyllic childhood spent with a large extended family. ‘Several of my aunts are nearly of our age so we were a large group, often going to Ooty for family picnics, and to the church every Sunday.’
Although Joseph Susairaj was often out of town on business, he compensated for his absence by indulging his children. ‘Everything we wanted, we got.’ Except there would be no wriggling out of catechism class. Already religious, Joseph’s belief grew as his new company earned a slew of contracts from churches and other Christian institutions. Though himself a Roman Catholic, his clients cut across denominations. ‘We’ve built for Jesuits, Protestants, Anglicans, CSI Dioceses, as also secular institutions like the National Aerospace Laboratories,’ Richard said. His wife and his mother Nirmala also run a primary school in Mysore, St Peter’s Educational Institution. The emphasis on religiosity was extraordinary, he explained, smiling wryly, his cognac-coloured eyes—remarkably like Maria’s—softening at the memory. ‘Our parents were very strict about Sunday Mass, special religious classes, and everyday evening prayers. In each and every walk of life we were made to know our limits.’
While Richard pursued a diploma in civil engineering before joining his father’s firm, and Veronica a master’s in computer science, Maria Monica was the artist of the family, and in turn was entitled to the licence that comes with being one. Time with her father may have been at a premium but Maria grew up to be a daddy’s girl. ‘She talked a lot about him coming up in life the hard way, often saying, “I really love my father, if it weren’t for him we would not have this life”,’ Geeta Narayana, a neighbour who grew up next door to Maria told me. When Geeta’s father, Mysore’s acclaimed inlay-work artist P. Gorraiya, visited the family after Maria’s arrest, he found Joseph distraught. ‘Susairaj just kept weeping and saying he wished he were dead. He always completely supported Monica in whatever she had wanted to do; he wished for all his children to become self-sufficient.’
‘When we were growing up Monica would be always busy. Arangetram, singing, correspondence courses, modelling for jewellery showrooms, belly dancing, it was always something or the other,’ Geeta recalled. That, and Geeta’s own preoccupations prevented them from being close. This strain comes up in all interviews about Maria—she was friendly but had few friends, and most attribute this to her secretive nature. ‘Even my parents would knock on my door before entering my room, but that’s the respect they afforded us children,’ she said once. Her closest confidante remained her sister Veronica. ‘In the time I was with her I didn’t meet a single of Monica’s friends,’ Pavan recalled. ‘Which was a bit strange because most people have a best friend, but she told me she liked to be alone.’
Only Richard hints at a contrary impulse. ‘Moni was an outspoken girl, very free with her expression.’ It is something he said several times during our conversation, at one point almost with wonder—perhaps grappling to better understand his own sister and later events, especially in the two weeks between Neeraj’s disappearance and her arrest, when the police hounded them every day. And yet despite all his protests, Maria had been secretive with Richard too. Her brother admitted that throughout the ordeal she had kept the family in the dark about Neeraj’s death.
Richard and Veronica had taken the first flight out to Mumbai after Maria called home complaining of police harassment. When they landed, Richard asked Maria what Emile had been doing there, and she told him he had come ‘to see the new house and to spend a couple of days with me’. Richard, who spent most of his time with his father in Bangalore, claimed he had never even seen Emile until the trial began. After Maria’s arrest, he put his life and career on hold, flying to Mumbai every few weeks to visit Maria in jail, or to see her in the court. ‘She’s our girl, it’s not easy being inside the jail.’
On the day of her release from prison when a frenzied media chased her all over Mumbai, it was Richard who stood by her side. Yet, for all their apparent closeness, there are gaps in the family narrative. When they left for Mumbai on May 8, 2008, Richard and Veronica told their father that they were going to Mumbai because Maria was unwell. He was kept in the dark even when his wife joined her children in Mumbai a few days later. ‘I just thought that since Moni drives fast quite often she may have had an accident or something,’ Joseph said, claiming he didn’t know that Maria did not have a car in Mumbai. ‘I came to know of what happened when I read the newspaper on May 22 like everybody else.’
He seems more baffled than angry by the truancy of his daughter. ‘It seems you cannot say anything to children these days. Her lifestyle changed after she came to Mumbai. We were not keen on Monica joining films. The film line is very different; they have no fixed timin
gs, they shoot at odd hours. I was doing business and was very busy, so some servant would go with her to the set, but she would often get lonely after she’d come back from work. The problem is when your children have some talent, you can’t not allow their talent to grow. She wanted to be famous from very early on. From our end we did everything we could, we kept her busy with many classes, we gave her a vehicle, we gave her a driver.’
‘We thought she’d do one or two films and then settle down. When she told me she liked Emile and wanted to marry him, I said okay, and sent one of my friends to talk to his parents—but they refused. “What can we do,” I told her, “they’ve refused, forget him.” But she wanted to shift to Mumbai again; they both had plans to settle there.’ Mysteriously Joseph Susairaj too says that he himself never met Emile. When I asked him if he had ever spoken to Maria about Neeraj’s death, he said: ‘I thought I would hurt her feelings if I spoke to her about the incident, so I never did.’
Even Richard is cautious. ‘She needed to know Neeraj better before taking his help and expecting him to get her roles. She understands what we are going through and what we expect of her.’ When I asked him what that is, he said somewhat abruptly, ‘We expect her to know what has happened is wrong.’ When I persisted, he clammed up. ‘Please,’ he pleaded, ‘all these emotions are new, there is nothing else I have to say.’
Maria was not yet five when she started lessons in Bharatanatyam, and she took to dance naturally. She gave several performances and was written about in the local newspapers as ‘Baby Monica’. By the time she was an adolescent at her middle school in St Mathias (which was built by her father), Maria was the school star. In addition to her prosperous family background, she was a talented singer, reasonably good at her studies, and a Bharatanatyam dancer of exceptional grace. She carried herself with the toffee-nosed confidence that such knowledge gives adolescent girls.
But even in those days, Maria didn’t want to focus on one thing alone. ‘Full-fledged dance can also consume your life,’ she said. ‘I have many interests and I wanted to be a freelancer for myself.’ So she also trained as a Carnatic vocalist while still at school before going to Europe and China on a cultural exchange programme. She was studying for a BA in journalism, but cut it short for her film career that began when she was still in her second year of university. ‘She didn’t attend any classes that year,’ recalled her classmate Hemanth Kashyap. In all she worked in four Kannada films, Jhooth, Excuse Me, OK, Sir, OK, and Ekdant, in which she played a journalist. Her acting was stilted, reflecting none of the fluidity that marked her dance.
‘None of her films were big hits,’ Richard said. But while she often spoke of joining her father’s business as an interior decorator, and struggled to find roles, Maria never thought of giving up her showbiz dream. Her brother agreed: ‘Were I to compare myself with Moni, I’d say if I didn’t do well at something, I’d try and do something else. But she was very ambitious in what she wanted to do. It’s not a bad quality,’ he said, his face opaque, ‘to perfect yourself.’
Richard himself had been against Maria’s acting career, and when she still went ahead he stopped speaking to her. ‘In that entire year when Jhooth was being made, he did not speak to me. But once the film released, he went to a cinema hall all by himself and came back and hugged me, saying, “Well tried”,’ Maria told me as we stood talking outside the court a few days before the verdict.
Through all of this their mother Nirmala remained a shadowy presence in the background. The one time she did break her reticence to protest was in 2005, when Maria announced that she was moving to Mumbai for what would be her first stint there. Nirmala Susairaj had watched Maria become her own woman, stubbornly pursuing her ambitions, but while the Kannada film industry was in their backyard—Maria’s father could keep an eye on her in Bangalore—Mumbai was a foreign country. ‘She asked me if there was any way I could stop Monica from going there,’ said Saurav, a Mysore boy who starred opposite her in Jhooth. He called Maria’s mother the gentlest of women. ‘Her mother would say, “Tell Moni there is nothing wrong with working in Kannada films. You too are working here, aren’t you?” She was most unwilling to let her go to Mumbai.’
But Maria prevailed, as she so often did. What’s more, she got her mother to accompany her to Mumbai where the acting coach Asha Chandra would not accept students unless they arrived with a guardian. ‘I told her, “You’re already an actress, why do you need classes, and if you want to improve yourself, use Kannada films as training, and learn,”’ said Saurav, who himself went on to do small parts in Hindi films with Zayed Khan and Emraan Hashmi. When he bumped into Maria at Juhu beach a couple of years later, he said he was shocked by her drastic physical transformation from the time they had debuted together. ‘But at that time I could see she was quite set on going to Mumbai.’
Movie buffs of a certain vintage are familiar with the acting coach Asha Chandra, who regularly graced the pages of film glossies in the company of her protégés Dimple Kapadia, Sunny Deol, and Jackie Shroff in the 1980s. She stood out for her bumblebee frames and crescent-like eyebrows, which hung over mildly surprised bug eyes. But an encounter with Osho, and the demise of the ‘formula’ in Bollywood—brothers separated at a mela, or the hero and the heroine dancing around trees—saw her fade from the public eye. However, her past successes ensure a steady trickle of aspirants from towns like Mysore, Tonk, and Ratlam to her Juhu office—a cavernous room behind a black soundproofed door with black curtains, black sofas, a black marble floor, and marble walls on which hang pithy sayings framed in, well, black—‘To Be Trusted Is A Greater Compliment Than To Be Loved.’ ‘If You Tell The Truth You Don’t Have To Remember Anything.’
It was in this bizarre all-black apartment which had been converted into an actors’ studio that Maria and Nirmala Susairaj found themselves, and Nirmala watched her daughter excitedly complete the admission formalities, fluttering away from her like a breakaway kite.
I went to see Asha Chandra four years later to talk about Maria. She sailed into the same room in which she had met Maria and her mother. Dressed in a flowing lavender caftan, she was perched primly on a moulded plastic chair behind a schoolteacher’s desk—only the ruler was missing.
‘Madam, how can I help you?’
‘Do you remember Maria Susairaj,’ I asked.
‘You bet.’
‘She came to me four years ago with her mother. I insist that applicants be accompanied by guardians, because I do not want any runaways.’ She rummaged through the drawers and fished out a folder with Maria’s application form along with a picture of her and Nirmala Susairaj, who looks clearly discomfited. ‘Maria was very ambitious but not terribly talented. But I don’t look for anything before accepting students, madam, because these days anyone can become a star.’
However, in her prospectus she issues a somewhat dire warning to those with misguided aspirations: ‘No rosy picture is drawn of the film industry for students and they are told that if they work hard and have respect for the film industry, the industry has place for each one—hence if they are here just to while away time and money, they may as well go home.’
She went on to give me a grand tour of the Asha Chandra Acting Institute, which was spread over two floors of the middle class apartment block. On the higher floor were the living quarters for outstation students. ‘Separate for girls and boys,’ she rapped out sharply. On the lower level two flats had been merged to create the workshop floor. We walked past a tiny kitchen heavily stacked with steel utensils into a large hall that was as brightly lit as the office was dark. A mirror hung across the length of a wall further accentuated its brightness. On the remaining walls hung life-sized posters of her star students—an unknown hunk lounging James Dean style in tight jeans and vest, caught my eye.
She looked at the poster and sighed dramatically, ‘That’s Manish. You must know about him and Maria.’ I feigned deep insight and hazarded a non-committal line, ‘Um… Hmm. Quite sad, no�
��’
‘Terrible. That boy was heartbroken.’ Manish (this is an assumed name to protect his identity) was in the same batch as Maria. He came from a well-to-do family in Tonk, Rajasthan, and bore a striking resemblance to John Abraham. After winning a male beauty contest, he was selected by the director Saawan Kumar Tak for a film. Tak sent him to Asha Chandra’s class for the three-month course.
‘He was promising, that boy, and then he got involved with Maria. She manipulated boys. Was always friendly with the men in the group but hardly interacted with the girls. Manish told me they later moved in together, but before that, while she was still in the hostel here, there was a small scandal when she went off to Goa for a holiday with another boy, the son of an influential police officer. She had told me she had to go home to Bangalore. I always found her clever but not intelligent.’
‘Was any action taken against the transgression?’ I asked.
‘Darling!’—within twenty minutes I had gone from a starchy ‘madam’ to a filmi endearment—‘I restrict my interest to the professional, to what’s happening in class. That hole down there, I am not its keeper.’ Maria needed to correct her yin and yang, the new-age spiritualist and Osho acolyte said. The last Asha Chandra heard from Maria was some months after she finished the course. ‘She called me one day and said she had some auditions this side of town, and could she come and stay at the hostel for one night. “I’ll pay the rent for one night,” she said, but disappeared the next morning without doing so. After that I only read about her in the newspapers.’ When I asked Maria about Asha Chandra, she said tartly, ‘She was dumped by a man and has turned bitter and crazy since.’
Death in Mumbai Page 5