Because of its colonial past and excellent educational institutions, Kanpur saw itself as a big city, but its physical reality no longer supported the aspirations and ambitions of its young. ‘As the nucleus of the city disappeared—industrial production dropped, the grain and cloth markets moved away—so did its talent,’ said Subhashini Ali.
Writers and intellectuals shifted to Mumbai to work in the film industry, or to academia in Delhi, leaving behind a largely mercantile culture. Other than malls, multiplexes, food, gossip, and ostentatious weddings, the city had little to offer by way of a productive life. ‘Don’t forget to mention the jagrans, we’re big on jagrans,’ she added.
Subhashini had since faded into the fringes of electoral politics, and went on to head the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA); her mother, the ninety-plus Lakshmi, a doctor by training, continued her practice in the city. Shaad had moved to Mumbai, where he spun shiny yarns that lured young people like Neeraj from all over the country.
When it dawned on him that he was expected to sit at the dukaan, and in the not-so-distant future take over the running of the family’s thriving photocopying shop on Mall Road, Neeraj Grover felt the kick of desperation. His life would not echo his father’s. He rebelled. ‘I will achieve something, I will become someone,’ he shot back at his mother each time the subject of the shop came up.
‘Yeh kahaan se upper class bachcha paida kiya hai?’ (Where have we produced this upper class child from?) Amarnath Grover often despaired to his wife. Perhaps it was their fault, sending him to Jaipuria High School, where the kids of Kanpur’s ‘cream class’ studied, the children of bureaucrats and businessmen. For Neeraj was shaukeen like no one else in the family. He would only fly, refusing to take trains when they travelled. He insisted on wearing international brands, dismissing local companies as producing ‘sastaa maal’, and patronized Profile, Kanpur’s most expensive hair salon, where he paid Rs 500 for a trim. ‘I have not paid that much for all my haircuts put together through my entire life,’ Amarnath Grover complained. But he always gave his son the money.
At school, Neeraj was for the most part an average student. When his mother would ask him how he had fared in his exams, he’d say, not always in jest, ‘I wrote down everything that my neighbour knew.’ But after his indifferent degree in commerce from Christchurch College, during which he also assisted his father with the business, Neelam Grover noticed a change in her son. ‘I could sense his frustration, his desperation to get out of Kanpur. He took career counselling, started looking up all sorts of advertisements and taking entrance tests.’ During this time he read in the local youth paper, Josh, about a degree in mass media and applied for it at Jamia Millia and Amity in Noida. He qualified for both but chose Amity, a private university which has skilfully marketed itself as an institution aspiring to international standards. Certainly, the fees at Rs 9 lakh for the two-year course, was on dollar parity. Against their better judgement, overriding financial constraints, and fighting every protective impulse, the Grovers agreed to fund the course at Amity.
I travelled to Kanpur by car from Lucknow, crossing the Ganga spread out like a creased sari on the river bed. A little over an hour later I was in the city, lost in the maze of the many nagars—Dada Nagar, Govind Nagar, Nirala Nagar, Kidwai Nagar. Finally Saket Nagar, where past the mounds of sand and cement and the unfinished buildings, I finally found Ma Saraswati Apartments. Having sold their largish single-storey bungalow because they were going to relocate to Mumbai to be with Neeraj, the Grovers had now shifted into a flat. The building was still under construction, but they had no option but to move in.
The Grovers, who had shifted just two days before I visited, were already known in the neighbourhood as the family that had been marked by tragedy. Though they had not entirely settled in yet, the kitchen was fully functional. There was the ceremony of the visiting journalist—chai, nashta, the old-world courtesy that would not permit resentment at the intrusion; in fact the extended family had been invited for lunch so that everyone could talk about Neeraj.
Neelam Grover handled everything with efficiency. I got my tea, and at last she sat down, wiping sweat off her face with the edge of her synthetic sari. It was a mild October day and not that warm, but her blouse was saturated. ‘Neeraj and I spoke to each other at least twice a day. He would tell us everything about his life…’ she tapered off, ‘Except about Maria.’
Just fifty-five, her neck had wrinkled like the folds of a collapsed accordion, as if the battle to hold her head up had been surrendered. A deep groove ran down the centre of her forehead. She rattled off facts about her son mechanically. The year he was born (1983); his educational background; what kind of a boy he was—‘Loving, fun, funny, very close to the family, dog lover…’ She sat straight, then sideways, shifting on the sofa, first away from me then towards me. Her restless grief wouldn’t allow her to be still. It would not have been out of place if she had suddenly let out a primordial scream.
Amarnath Grover’s family had migrated to Kanpur from Bannu, near Peshawar in West Pakistan, during Partition. He married Neelam in 1979 and the couple had two children, a girl and a boy in quick succession, both of whom inherited their mother’s good looks.
While Neelam stayed put in Kanpur with her in-laws and the children, Amarnath Grover travelled around the country for his job as an officer with the Cotton Corporation of India. He took voluntary retirement in 1988 and returned to Kanpur to set up a successful stationery and photocopy shop in the city’s business centre.
Travel can either liberate you, or bind you closer to home. Amarnath Grover’s years of living alone and moving around the country had produced in him a wariness of the world and a mistrust of ambition. He could not understand his young son’s desire to leave Kanpur, or his abhorrence for managing the shop. ‘I had to, at the age of forty, wash my own clothes, survive on paani-waale aaloo, and spend solitary evenings staring out of the window; it was not pleasant. I wanted to spare Ginni all that,’ he said; his gaunt face and thin flanks marking him out as much older than his fifty-nine years.
Like the young prince Siddharth’s parents, who tried to defy prophecy by creating an idyll for their son within their palace, Amarnath Grover strove to bring the world to Neeraj. Whatever he wished for, Neeraj got. Whether it was a kennel for his pet Silky, a Rs 35,000 Nikon though Neeraj had precious little to do with photography, expensive clothes, a motorbike, a car. ‘He was a demanding kid. I remember we bought him an LML Freedom, but within six months an upgraded bike—Bajaj Pulsar—was launched. He then wanted that,’ said Neelam. Resolved not to let his son step out of his radius, and perhaps guilty for it, the father succumbed to each demand.
‘Main uski aankh tarasti nahin dekh sakta tha’ (I couldn’t see him want for anything), he said.
Often this came at the cost of their own desires. ‘Kai baar apna man dabaa ke Ginni ki ichcha poori ki’ (Often we sacrificed our own desires to fulfil his wants), said Neelam. Of the two she appeared more realistic in her assessment of their son.
As his father’s life got smaller, and his love more suffocating, Neeraj’s resolve to leave Kanpur strengthened. The offer from Amity was his key to escape. Father and son played out an old game—Neeraj demanded, and Amarnath Grover conceded. The one thing he had tried to prevent all these years had come to pass. The opening act of the tragedy was laid out.
Jolly, clever, and helpful are words that are used without exception to describe Neeraj by everyone I spoke to. Hitank, his junior at Amity, who is now based in Mumbai, and was at the Grovers for lunch during my visit, reminisced, ‘On my first day away from home, I got lost in Delhi. I had to meet my mother some place, but I had neither the address nor a phone. Neeraj bhai, a stranger then, stayed with me for four hours helping me locate her.’
The two young men went on to become roommates and firm friends over the next two years. ‘He was protective of me, easy-going, and he cracked terrible PJs. Because of all his qualities he was
a big hit with the girls too.’
Since this was being said in the presence of Neeraj’s parents, Hitank measured his words but conceded that Neeraj was a bit of an attention seeker—‘but in a nice way’. ‘He couldn’t bear to be alone and was forever looking for company. He was particular about the good life, and his quota of partying. He loved to eat chicken momos, the shawarma at Al-Bake at New Friends. Even developed a bit of a tummy though he was only twenty-four. We used to joke that there was a little Gautam growing inside.’
Neeraj also insisted on maintaining his own living space, despite spending most of his time in a privately run hostel with Hitank and his friends. ‘I often told him that he should let me manage his money since he squandered it, but he would say that at no cost would he compromise on his lifestyle.’
During vacations, when he was not going home to Kanpur, Neeraj tried his hand at multiple jobs—hawking a newly launched mobile phone at shopping malls, event management, working with the audience research cell at NDTV, where his brief was to get and manage the audience for various shows. ‘He was even-tempered, hard-working, and quick on his feet; but he wasn’t focused, and he couldn’t last anywhere for too long,’ said Hitank. ‘He was preoccupied with becoming rich and famous somehow.’ He uncannily shared these traits with Maria. She too flitted from one thing to another, incapable of staying the course in either Bangalore or Mumbai.
Given his ambition, it was natural that Neeraj would gravitate to Mumbai, arriving in the city towards the end of 2006. The quicksilver world of television suited his personality. Over the next year and a half Neeraj changed five jobs, averaging roughly four months at each. He had joined Siddharth Basu’s Synergie Adlabs just a week before he was killed.
Though he himself has stayed put with one production house for almost six years, Deepak Kumar, Neeraj’s fellow Coffee House Nomad and relationship troubleshooter, termed these jumps as ‘normal’ in the television industry.
‘Neeraj was sharp, hard-working, and responsible the minute he reached the sets. If he put in four hours and someone else put in eight, they would get the same results. He always moved jobs for better money or greater responsibility at work. He was very clear about what he wanted—fame, money, and pretty girls. Our ultimate aspiration was to be like Vijay Mallya. We wanted the yachts and the models floating around us.’
Back in Kanpur the Grovers were delighted with Ginni’s progress and increments, seeing nothing amiss with his rapid job changes. ‘The feeling these days is that the golden opportunity must be taken, whatever the cost,’ said Crime Branch chief Rakesh Maria. ‘Salary has become the new yardstick of value. As children come into their own considerable money, parents don’t care about much else. Look at Maria Susairaj, she was staying with different boys when she came to Mumbai. I remember when I went to Delhi for my UPSC exams my dad called his friends to come and pick me up and made sure that I stayed with them, and I was a guy. Children these days have become like gladiators, left to deal with the beasts on their own.’
Independence and early affluence can also inhibit parents from speaking their mind to their children. Add to that the sense of spurious intimacy created by the speed-dial button. The Grovers, who spoke to Neeraj twice a day, were lulled into a false comfort that they knew everything that was going on in their son’s life. They listened to his words, yet were unable to read his voice—caught up in the superficialities of Hello, How are you? How was your day, dear?
It was his friends in Delhi and Mumbai who had a better measure of Neeraj. And one of the things they all speak about is his fascination with women. ‘When he disappeared and we started looking for him, girlfriends turned up like finds at an excavation at Mohenjodaro,’ said Nishant Lal.
‘He made women feel very comfortable, which is why they trusted him and were drawn to him, but Neeraj could also spontaneously switch from one woman to another without wasting much emotion,’ added Deepak Kumar. ‘Once the relationship was over he would just text or call them and say that they were through, and that he did not want to meet them again. Or, I would have to field their calls during the transition phase and make excuses on his behalf. We had a whole list of them. I did occasionally get the feeling that some of these women were emotionally involved, which is why they gave of themselves to him.’
J, who perhaps saw Neeraj most closely in Delhi, and loved him as a brother, had this to say: ‘He was terribly insecure and was always trying to prove that he had achieved something. This extended to his relationships with women as well. He tried his luck with every girl he met. He was also very open about his relationships. So, if he met a new girl, he would talk candidly about his past girlfriends with her, including the ones who had dumped him.’
‘By doing so he conveyed that he was transparent and open, and women would love him for that. He was a very good player. His problem was that while he could dump all the girls he wanted to, his behaviour would turn self-destructive if some woman were to do the same to him. He would bitch her out, saying things like, ‘I am much better looking, us bandi ka boyfriend is so ordinary, she has no class,’ and so on. When his first girlfriend in Delhi left him, he took to drinking heavily and bad-mouthed her everywhere. It became a pattern with him.
‘But he also had great charm, I have seen him pick up girls just standing on the road, or at a market in Malviya Nagar. He hardly studied while at Amity; most of his projects would be done by some girl or the other. Often he would pick up very plain-looking or even downright ugly girls and chat them up.’
However, both J, who vouched for Neeraj’s excellent professional reputation, and Deepak Kumar emphatically refuted rumours of Neeraj abusing his position as associate creative director at Balaji Telefilms to seek sexual favours from aspirants like Maria Susairaj.
‘He was charming, he didn’t need to resort to that. Also, there are about a thousand assistant creative heads in TV in Mumbai, Neeraj was one of them. All he could do was pass on the aspirants’ audition tapes to his superior in the production house or to the channel; he did not have the clout to cast someone.’
‘Though,’ Deepak Kumar said after a pause, ‘he was a big mouth, and could convey the wrong impression. We went to Goa in December 2007 where he had a drag from a joint and he pretended for the whole day as if he was high. If he went to a nightclub at Andheri, he would boast that he had gone to a swishier one in South Mumbai. He was good at that, but we, his friends, always knew when he was being a cartoon network.’ Perhaps it was this boasting that led Maria to later claim that Neeraj was into drugs. Save for the odd experimentation there was no evidence to suggest that he ever did so.
Ekta Kapoor, Neeraj’s boss at Balaji where he put in his longest stint, was characteristically more forceful. ‘He was a wasted little boy!’ She waved her bejewelled hand in an expansive, dismissive sweep. ‘After he quit us I learnt he used to go around boasting about his proximity to me. He was a cute boy, smart, smooth operator who talked too much. A couple of times I had to tell him to keep his mouth shut. But he wasn’t a bad sort and in my presence he would sit quietly, legs crossed demurely like a bride, which is why,’ she said chuckling with the relish of a born gossip, ‘I was really surprised to know that he had a reputation as something of a stud.’
During his five-month stay at Balaji, Neeraj was involved in successive relationships with three of his colleagues. He wriggled out of one of them by telling the woman that being with her was making him forget a former girlfriend who’d died, which in turn made him feel unfaithful! ‘Later we found out he had a dog who’d died, but never a girlfriend. Ha ha ha…’ Ekta doubled up in laughter but was quick to sober down. ‘He was seemingly sweet, but the boy liked to play dangerous games,’ she remarked perceptively. ‘He often hit on women whom he knew to be already involved. It was some kind of a sexual power trip for him, and many guys hated him for that.’
One of these relationships turned sour for Neeraj after the woman scorned was promoted as his boss at Balaji. She began to keep tabs on
his work. And the one time he tripped up, trying to pass off some old audition tapes for Mahabharat (the same serial for which he had auditioned Maria Susairaj) as fresh ones, she alerted Ekta Kapoor. When the woman with the most feared temper in the entertainment industry was told she was being fooled, she put him on a deadline of one night to rustle up eighty fresh auditions. Neeraj chose the easier option. He found another job.
Only once, says Deepak Kumar, did he see Neeraj distraught over a woman. ‘She was a common friend’—the one he had given the fake engagement ring to. ‘He thought she was two-timing him with her old boyfriend.’ After a public blow-up with her he retreated into a sulk and even wrote some maudlin lyrics:
Dil phir kyon itna bechain hai
Phir sookhe mere ye nain hain
Dil janta hai tu kahan mere pas hai
Phir bhi ek kasak na
Jaane kyon bechain hai…
(Why is the heart so restless,
and my eyes bereft of tears.
You’re not near me and yet
I feel a twinge. Why this restlessness,
I know not)
‘I cheered him up by setting it to music,’ said Sushant, Neeraj’s music director flatmate. ‘Neeraj, Haresh and I sat till 3 am making a scratch recording. It was the most fun we’ve had. Neeraj had the talent to become a sensitive lyric writer.’ Sushant plugged in his keyboard in the living room and played the melody for me. After he’d bounced back from the break-up, Neeraj would often get women friends to the flat and ask Sushant to play ‘merawala song’. Sushant said he was now in talks with Sonu Nigam to get him to sing it in Neeraj’s memory.
Death in Mumbai Page 14