Death in Mumbai

by Meenal Baghel

  I saw Moon again that evening. I had come to enjoy our meetings. She was sharp and disarmingly candid, letting me into her world with a touching level of trust. She was all smiles, and the small victory with the cops gave her faith. ‘I feel I am getting stronger, I am in a position to protest. Now I need to get my base right, and things will be fine. I am so grateful to Maria sir, he is such a gentleman.’

  As part of her resolve to create a new life for herself, Moon decided to assume a new identity, a new name. She had decided to call herself Anushkaa Daas, to lose weight, and to focus on featuring in a music video. ‘You must understand the importance of music videos. Rakhi [Sawant] did one, ‘Pardesia’, and look where she is now, likewise Meghna Naidu did ‘Kaliyon ka Chaman’ and she became famous overnight. I need something like that.’ However, she conceded in the same breath that her timing might have been slightly off. ‘The novelty of the raunchy music video has worn off. Now you have to pay the music company before they’ll do a video with you rather than the other way round. But you know, my numerologist has told me that with my new name things are bound to change. Moon ka number 4 is not compatible with my destiny number.’

  Just as Soho has its sex shops, Charminar its bangles, Castro its gay community, and Ginza its boutiques, Oshiwara has its clairvoyants, astrologers, vastu consultants, gemologists, tarot card readers, rune readers, aura diviners, and numerologists. A favourable horoscope will have greater equity at Ekta Kapoor’s Balaji than mere talent, Karan Johar will not make any moves without first consulting his confidante-cum-tarot reader Sunita Menon, the actress Kirron Kher will only travel on certain seat numbers of an aircraft, and Rakesh Roshan, his talented son notwithstanding, will only title his film with the letter K.

  ‘A tarot reader and a personal numerologist are the industry’s new status symbols,’ Rajorshe P. Das told me when we met at Indigo, Andheri’s hip new café, whose design and cuisine aspire to New York standards. When I asked for directions, I was told it was located bang opposite the office of a famous palmist.

  Das was the man behind Moon’s name change, the one who told her to never wear a diamond, for it would be like zeher (poison) for her. ‘There’s a sparkle inside her and the added sparkle of the diamond will make men behave aggressively towards her.’

  Das looked like he had not bathed in days, and there was a shifty-eyed smarminess to his manner that raised my hackles. People born under the numbers 8, 17, 26, 4, 13, 22, 31, 2, and 20 were bound for a troublesome life, he said, scratching his unshaven cheek, while those with numbers 10, 20, 30 were very unlucky. ‘That hardly leaves anyone happy, does it?’ I couldn’t help but laugh openly. ‘The future of Mumbai is not good, he continued calmly. ‘I foresee bloodshed and regionalism. Bombay was a better name, the numbers 4, 6, 4, 2, 1, 1 that represent Mumbai are not auspicious.’

  ‘In that case, why did you bother to come here from Calcutta?’ I asked, now flaunting my scepticism. Rajorshe P. Das, desperately hoping to distract his hostile interviewer, asked for my birth date to predict my future—I curtly refused, bringing the doomed interview to a close.

  Diwali fell a few days later, and I got this text message from him: ‘Let this deepawali be a connotation between u and n positiue energies. U will never surrendes to any evil forcfs. – Rajorshe p das’. I spent a few happy minutes contemplating the future of a person whose business depended on spelling-based predictions.

  I also made the reporter’s cardinal error of being blinkered by my own biases. Less than a month after my meeting with Rajorshe, ten men wafted into Mumbai in a dinghy, holding it hostage for three days. I recalled his prediction about bloodshed in the city. So we met again, this time on his turf and on his terms. Ever the unctuous salesman, he glossed over our previous unpleasant interaction and readily opened up about his life.

  Rajorshe Das had enrolled to study science at Dibrugarh University in Assam, but quit before he could complete his degree, instead joining the Indian Air Force as ground staff in the accounts and logistics department of the airbase. It was a monotonous life, he said. ‘You know the type where each time, unfailingly, two plus two would be four, and never another variant.’ He took an early discharge and moved to Calcutta to learn occult sciences from a guru. He also started making predictions. ‘By reading books you can become a wise person but to be able to predict you need to be a spiritual body.’

  ‘In those days I didn’t charge money but found that if you offer something for free, people don’t value it.’ Still unhappy with his stagnant life, Rajorshe decided to take drastic action and add a ‘P’ to his name—becoming Rajorshe P. Das—and he changed his signature from Bangla to English.

  With a flourish, he took my notebook and demonstrated the two signatures. ‘Can you see the one in Bangla is all scattered whereas in English it’s compact, focused? As I changed my sign, my energies too started getting focused.’ His long-pending divorce came through (‘If I go for marriage now it’ll only be with a woman whose number is 2 or 7.’ What’s more important, I asked, the right woman or the right number? He did not hesitate: ‘The right number’).

  He was also told by his guru that if he lived by the sea somewhere in the west his life would change. So Rajorshe P. Das came to live by the sea, in an ocean of anxious, insecure, ambitious, competitive, vulnerable, and often rudderless people. He set himself up as a numerologist, charging Rs 2,500 for three sessions, and a thousand extra for house visits. As predicted by his guru, business flourished; from changing names, dictating licence plates, and cell numbers to changing addresses, his writ runs large.

  ‘Now you can get homes that are numerologically compatible.’ He did not have an office (‘According to my prediction, I shouldn’t have an office’), and instead operated from the cafés and coffee shops that dotted Andheri. He met clients at Rivedo café, the Barista at Versova, and Shreeji restaurant right below Nirvana, where Maria’s friend Deepak Singh held auditions. Usually the clients footed the bill, but in case they didn’t it was just the coffee he had to pay for.

  ‘All my clients are twenty-five and below. Hundred percent of them have bad emotional lives, I have not yet met a single client who is in a stable relationship.’ He called this the peril of a ‘polygamous life’.

  ‘You see these kids, they look so smart, they wear branded clothes and they walk and talk as if they will conquer the world in a chutki. But when they come to me, all it takes is ten seconds for them to crumble.’ With the exception of one or two, his clientele consisted almost entirely of people who had come from outside Mumbai. ‘These small town men and women, they make the money but they have no emotional back-up.’

  ‘Everything is different here. The men come to me for relationship advice and the women for better lifestyle and finances.’ He said he wanted to learn Kabbalah next, since that was ‘the new status symbol’. Aside from clients who come to him through word of mouth, house parties were Rajorshe’s happy hunting ground. ‘It’s very important to network, to know people and through some reference to get invited to house parties where you meet even more people.’ He said he never introduced himself to people as a numerologist; instead he got someone else to introduce him that way. ‘That has more effect. Then once I get their date of birth I take over because I am good at what I do.’ But there was a flip side to networking at parties, he said: ‘You can’t have fun. You have to be constantly alert for a possible client, hold your drinks, and make an impression… There is so much music and sex in the air, woh sab ko dabaa ke [to suppress all that], to be conscious is a punishment.’

  As much of a counsellor as a numerologist, he was gung-ho about his future in Mumbai. ‘If I continue with this I can shine like anything.’ But at the moment he was unhappy with Moon aka Anushkaa. ‘Just see the difference… Mooooon,’ he made a low sound, ‘it sounds so weak. Then say Anush-kaa,’ he continued, throwing his voice. ‘Isn’t that full of impact? But she hasn’t been following my advice.’

  But Moon, who knew the perils of anonymity and
the importance of perception, swiftly understood the value of her name. Much as she may want to escape her notoriety, the name Moon Das had also given her recognition, a toehold in the glamour world. The name evoked vague recollection, curiosity, and at least got her past the security guards at studios. As Anushkaa she was just another face, another lithe body running on the treadmill at Sykz, clocking the kilometres but getting nowhere.

  With the prospect of a music video seeming increasingly remote, Moon had a new ambition—to participate in a reality TV show like Bigg Boss. If Monica Bedi, starlet-turned-moll to the gangster Abu Salem, could get on that show, why couldn’t she? Even Maria Susairaj was likely to be offered a slot on the show after her release. ‘Mere saath to crime hua hai. If I can get on the show the world will be able to see the real me. I just want them to know that I am not a cheap girl.’

  Post the saas–bahu sarson-da-sagas, Indian television was awash with tacky reality TV programmes, formats imported from the West. Most of these shows hosted an assortment of P.T. Barnum-style circus freaks, and encourage bickering, bitching, and bad-mouthing. Moon, with what she called her ‘back story’, thought she was a perfect fit for some of these shows. But before that, there were other challenges to be dealt with.

  The first anniversary of her mother’s death was approaching, and she couldn’t summon the nerve to return to Calcutta to face her father and neighbours. She fell ill with severe gastroenteritis, brought on by poor eating and stress, and had to get herself admitted to a nursing home in the middle of the night. She told me all this on the phone one day, sounding rather depressed. I invited her for lunch to Oh! Calcutta, hoping it would cheer her up. We ordered cold beer, aloo dum, bhetki, and loochi. She was clearly tempted—‘I really miss Bengali food’—but she wouldn’t touch more than a few morsels, as always, leaving food on her plate. She discussed her anxiety about meeting her father. ‘I respect him a lot but don’t share much with him, it was different with my mother. But then, who else is there to guide me? Sometimes it’s so tiring, I have to take all the decisions by myself.’

  We sat in companionable silence until she spoke up again in a low voice: ‘Mujhe Ishu ke sharan mein aana hai’ (I want to be under Jesus’ shelter). I did a quick alcohol check, but we were still on our first pint. Her friends, the actress Vaishnavi and the singer Jimmy Felix, had been reading to her from the Bible and demonstrating His miracles.

  ‘Vaishnavi showed me the dengue report of a girl which was positive in the morning but after prayers turned negative. Likewise Rakhi Sawant’s mother had gallstones which disappeared overnight after prayers. My father has been diagnosed with high blood pressure and gastroenteritis, I worry for him, and generally I want peace. I am told confession is good for the soul. The pastors told me that maybe my mother and mama have not forgiven me for causing their deaths, so I need to seek forgiveness. My entire family is suffering. Pastors told me that often there is doubt followed by fear but all that is mitigated if you leave everything to Jesus.’

  She then called Vaishnavi and arranged to meet her in the evening at the church. A few days later I got a call from Moon, who said that she had been shortlisted by Synergie Adlabs, where Neeraj last worked, to participate in Sach ka Saamna, modelled on the format of Moment of Truth, where contestants were put through a polygraph test. They got paid for accurately answering a set of questions and there was a jackpot at the end. But as the stakes went up the questions got more personal, more intrusive. ‘I am not afraid of these questions, it’ll give me a chance to clear my name. I think it’s a miracle of God that I got this call. Once I get a clean chit and people know that I didn’t use Avinash, that I am a good girl, I can go back to live in Calcutta.’

  I did not hear from Moon for some time after that meeting. Three months later I saw billboards all over Mumbai announcing a new dance competition on television called Dancing Queen, with Moon striking a pose in the line-up of contestants. I called to congratulate her and she invited me to her new apartment. She opened the door dressed in a buttoned-up nightie and Daffy Duck slippers. Her hair was in a ponytail and she looked well scrubbed, healthy, and happy. ‘This flat has positive vibrations and is considered a lucky house in Shastri Nagar. All the previous residents like Gracy Singh, Rahul Roy, Vaishnavi, Deepak Tijori have gone on to buy their own apartments.’

  As we caught up she told me that she did go to Calcutta for the anniversary of her mother’s death, and stayed on for eighteen days. ‘I looked after my father, got his checkups done, bought him new clothes, organized the house, and helped my brother shop before he left for Illinois.’

  ‘My father,’ she looked up, ‘he behaved very well with me. There was a guy who has been wanting to marry me, despite everything that has happened. But my father told him now is not the time, that I was doing things with my life. Imagine! He said that. Which is why, though the prize money was Rs one crore I decided against doing Sach ka Saamna. They ask all kinds of questions. It’s okay to answer questions on Avinash, but there would also be questions like how often I have sex, how many boyfriends I have had. I can’t answer those in front of my father.’

  Dancing Queen approached her because ‘everybody on that show had a story, and they liked mine’. Other participants included a former dance bar girl who had fallen on bad times, a girl who was dancing to save her AIDS-stricken friend, and yet another participant with leucoderma, fighting to gain acceptance in society.

  Though she was knocked out of the competition halfway through, she performed to the chartbuster of the time, A.R. Rahman’s ‘Masakkali,’ in a special episode. It’s a song about setting a caged bird free. ‘It couldn’t be closer to my life. Dancing Queen has really set me free.’

  ‘Ever since Jesus has come into my life, my life has changed. My equation with my father improved, I’ve started getting good work, my brother got his visa to the United States, I got this house…’

  The house had a sofa, a couple of mattresses piled up on the floor, a television and a stereo system covered by a sheet, and a teetering rack of CDs. On one of the walls was a large framed poster of Moon in her oomphy avatar, lips curled in an exaggerated pout; and in the same room there was a picture of her without make-up posing with her brother. Finally, the two Moons coexisting in the same space without conflict.

  As she watched me looking around the room, she said, ‘All my earlier houses were just places to shack up because I always believed that I was here in Mumbai for a short while and then I’d go back to Calcutta. But see how I have done up this house—Mumbai is home now, and if that is to be so I must live in it properly.’

  6

  RAM GOPAL VARMA

  ‘Power and sex are the only two realities of life.’

  —Ram Gopal Varma, director of Not a Love Story,

  inspired by the Neeraj Grover case

  RAM GOPAL VARMA’S office is at the edge of Oshiwara, where the middle class ghetto of Millat Nagar tapers into the swamp. It’s distinguished by the director’s personal vehicle, a Land Rover that is nearly as wide as the street, and his slew of young male assistants.

  Inside the office, bereft of any feminine presence, Ramu, as he is known in Bollywood, sits in a chilled, windowless, vault-like room. Thick glazed paper, patterned with globes and assorted world maps, covers the walls. From behind a formidable desk, the master of this universe was waging a battle for the many virtues of Maria Susairaj.

  In appearance he may be closer to Sancho Panza, but Ramu is Bollywood’s Don Quixote, tilting at the windmills. Appalled by the media vilification following the court verdict, he tweeted endlessly in defence of Maria, taking on irate anchors, even mischievously offering to cast her in a film.

  This is the kind of impishness that made him rename one of his biggest duds Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag, and get into a Twitter war with the director Karan Johar who said the promos of Phoonk 2 were so ‘scary’ that he’d have to see the film with the director—to which Ramu snidely responded saying he was fine as long as Karan did not i
nsist on holding his hand.

  While he was at school in Hyderabad, he was often bullied, he told me. Now that he is all grown up (though his one-time collaborator Mani Ratnam insists he still isn’t), Ramu has developed the appetite for a good scrap, and a near-obsession with the psychology of violence. His last happy film—not necessarily for the distributors—was the delightful caper Daud in 1997.

  While others hemmed and hawed and cast and canned, the prolific director, who often churns out up to three films a year, finished Not a Love Story, ‘inspired’ by Neeraj’s death, in five months flat. His budget: Rs three crore, the same amount Ekta had planned to spend on her Neeraj Grover film. Emile Jerome’s lawyer, Wahab Khan, who Ramu interviewed for his research, could not believe the film had been finished so quickly. ‘But he just met me two months ago!’

  On the other hand, Maria’s lawyer Sharif Shaikh, who refused to cooperate on the film, said he was contemplating legal action against it and asked Ramu to show him the film before release.

  On the morning of the court verdict, there were full page advertisements for the movie in the newspapers, and by afternoon, as judge M.W. Chandwani read out from his 175-page-long judgment, Ramu had released a trailer. It was an arresting teaser, featuring a man and a woman swabbing blood from an apartment floor before going on to make love, while an inert foot jutted into the frame. The catch line read: ‘In the summer of 2008…two lovers did a terrible thing…’