Unlike Oshiwara, bulldozing its way into a shinier, brassier newness, the battle with modernity seems to be lost here, except for some feeble defence provided by wayside motels—there’s Hotel Haveli advertising Raw: The Disc, and Hotel Hollywood, and the Vegas Hotel. But cross the detritus of urban India at the toll naka—it was for fear of the cameras installed here which capture all passing vehicles that Maria had initially lied to the police about her and Emile travelling in a taxi—and the beauty of the landscape begins to reveal itself. All around are thickly carpeted hills, the verdure of summer, and the cool waters of the Surya river. The police team could have almost fooled themselves into believing they were headed out for a picnic.
They drove 85 kilometres straight up until the junction called Ten Naka without mishap, but as they took the right turn next to the Manor police station on the Wada-Kalyan highway, Maria seemed to lose her bearings. ‘We took a small left somewhere here.’ But where, she could not locate. The police team drove down that road three times with no success. ‘We were sleepless, exhausted, and I thought she was pulling a number,’ said Inspector Raorane. At one point he stopped both the cars, got down, and roared at Maria, threatening her with dire consequences. ‘But then Veronica came to me and said, “I know my sister really well, she is not lying, she really can’t remember, give her some time and she’ll find the right spot,”’ said Inspector Raorane.
Maria stayed put there, thought hard for a while and then asked the driver to go back to the turn from Manor police station. ‘From here drive at 60 kmph,’ she instructed. After ten minutes she ordered the driver to stop. On the left was a small kachcha path going in. The paddy fields all around had been set on fire—for the next season’s crop—and there, next to some bushes, under a large tree, she pointed the police team to a heap of bones which lay there, plain for anyone to see.
‘I was really surprised to see the place, it was almost as if it was there for the explicit purpose of disposing of a body,’ recalled Inspector Raorane. In utter silence, broken only by the whistling sound of the truck tyres hitting macadam on the far-off highway, they looked at the half-burnt remains of Neeraj Grover. The skull lay some ten feet away from the ribcage. As they scrounged around they discovered bones, incinerated clothes, a chain with a locket, the soot and the ash.
Inspector Nalawade called Unit IX senior inspector Ashok Borkar, who in turn called Rakesh Maria to let him know that the missing boy’s case had finally been solved. Within hours, a fortnight after Neeraj Grover’s disappearance, the Crime Branch boss was on national television hosting a press conference and giving out the sensational details of Neeraj Grover’s killing.
What did it feel like seeing Neeraj’s remains, I asked Inspector Raorane. ‘Relief. I thought finally I can go back home and get some sleep.’
The team returned to Mumbai at 8 pm. Two weeks ago, Maria and Emile had returned to Mumbai from Manor at about the same time. The first thing the couple had done was stop at a mattress shop. Kamlesh Jain, proprietor of the Sunshine Foam Furnishing shop, recalled Maria coming into his shop and asking him to send two of his workers to pick up two mattresses from her flat which were in urgent need of fresh covers.
Then she called up a painter, Dhiraj Kumar Shukla, asking him to send his men to her flat the next morning as she needed to get the flat painted immediately. When the painters arrived at flat 201-B in the morning, Maria, disregarding their advice to start work first on the living room, told them to paint the bedroom. ‘And it needs to be done by today itself,’ she instructed, leading them inside. Shukla said he was taken aback by the ugly blackish stains all over the wall near the bathroom. ‘What happened here?’ he asked wonderingly.
‘They’ve been there since before we moved in,’ Maria responded shortly. She gave him Rs 2,000 as an advance, insisting once again that the bedroom had to be painted in a day. But as soon as the bedroom and the passageway were painted, she called him to say she had changed her mind about the rest of the house.
As soon as Maria had finished her harrowing narration at the Unit IX office, Inspector Raorane asked Assistant Inspector Mahesh Tawade to go to Kochi to arrest Emile. Vasanth Kumar said he had no idea anything was amiss until he went into his room after class and found Emile sitting there. He had been detained there by the naval authorities.
‘What are you doing here in the room?’ Vasanth asked. ‘Yaar, it’s about Maria’s friend Neeraj Grover, he can’t be traced and Monica is not reachable. I had gone with her to register the missing complaint, and now the police is here to take me to Mumbai and question me in that regard.’
‘That same guy who is a druggie and who sleeps around?’ Vasanth now recalled Emile returning from Mumbai and telling him about Maria’s missing friend. This is what Emile had told him, further perpetuating his and Maria’s story about Neeraj being into drugs: ‘Neeraj had gone to her house on the 6th on the pretext of helping her but when one of his friends called him to say, “naya maal aaya hai,” he left immediately and has been missing since.’
It was only when he got a call from one of his superiors later that night asking him to separate all of his roommate’s things and make an inventory of them, that the full horror of what had happened hit Vasanth. ‘Why an inventory, sir?’
‘Why? Have you not been seeing TV?’
Vasanth then switched on the television, tuning in to Sansani on Aaj Tak. On the same programme which had given him and Emile so many hours of amusement, he saw the report of Neeraj’s death, and Rakesh Maria, with a row of cops standing proudly behind him, giving the gruesome details of the killing. On a split screen Vasanth saw Maria in a black salwar kameez, her face covered by her dupatta, surrounded by cops, trying to evade the cameras she had so avidly sought all through her adult life.
In Kochi, the body receipt (military terminology for handing over a suspect) from the naval authorities took longer than expected. As a result Assistant Inspector Tawade and Emile missed their flight to Mumbai. All through the journey Emile maintained a stoic silence. ‘I am an officer with the Indian navy,’ he kept reminding his civilian captor.
In the Crime Branch lock-up, he pleaded with Inspector Raorane to let him meet Maria ‘just once’.
‘He was sure that Maria would never, ever betray him,’ said Inspector Raorane. “Whatever Monu has told you is the truth. I have nothing more to add to that,” he said.’
Unknown to him, on May 27 Maria had gone to court and recorded a detailed confession before a magistrate in which she blamed Emile for killing Neeraj, hacking up his body, disposing of it in the jungles of Manor, and of also raping her twice. This could, unlike her police confession of six days ago, be used in court.
Inspector Raorane did not tell Emile that Maria had accused him of murder and rape. Emile was to discover this several weeks later, when the charge sheet was filed. In the meantime he helped them recover the two knives with which Neeraj was stabbed, hidden in the drain of one of the bathrooms of Maria’s flat, and the bread knife with which the body was cut, buried some distance away from Neeraj’s remains.
Inspector Raorane later remembered meeting Emile in the sessions court as soon as the murder trial began. He walked up to him and said, ‘In life you must know whom to trust and how much.’
‘I know, sir,’ Emile looked him in the eye. ‘I have learnt it the hard way.’
But the following year, on October 26, 2009, Emile and Inspector Raorane had another encounter which he reported to both Rakesh Maria and the trial court. That day Emile, evading the police constables accompanying him, walked up to the investigating officer and said, ‘Why are you pursuing this case? Am I some Chhota Rajan or Dawood Ibrahim that you need to follow up on this case so insistently?’
‘Whatever you wish to say, tell it to the court,’ the stunned officer told Emile.
‘That I will, but I will also see you; it’s not like I am going to be behind bars for my whole life.’
EPILOGUE
ON JUNE 30, 2011, three years a
nd twenty-three days after Neeraj Grover was killed and his body hacked to pieces, the trial court convicted Emile Jerome and Maria Susairaj.
Judge M.W. Chandwani began to read his judgment aloud. The courtroom was densely packed with reporters, with not even standing room on offer. In the dock, the tension was suffocating as former lovers Maria and Emile refused to look at one another.
An audible gasp went around the courtroom as the judge exonerated Maria Susairaj of the charge of murdering Neeraj Grover. Relying extensively on her confession—the only account we have of what transpired on the morning of Neeraj’s death—Maria was convicted of destruction of evidence, and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.
It had taken a little over that long for the trial to conclude, and Maria had already finished her term. She could walk out of jail the next morning—which she did amidst unprecedented media frenzy in Mumbai.
On her first evening out of jail in three years, Maria chose to hold a press conference. She would not talk about her confession or entertain questions about her relationship with either Neeraj or Emile, her lawyer stipulated. In the full heat of the media’s glare, he then whipped out a photograph of the dismembered remains of Neeraj Grover found at Manor.
‘Mr Umesh Kumawat,’ he directly addressed the reporter who had first run the story of Neeraj’s body being hacked into three hundred pieces. ‘Where are the three hundred pieces? I can see only five or six,’ he said before handing over the photograph to whoever cared to count, while Maria shuddered delicately.
If he was seeking relief for his client from public opprobrium, it wasn’t forthcoming. Neeraj Grover’s friends, incensed by this travesty, walked in to disrupt the press conference, shouting their protest. In the mêlée that followed, Maria was escorted out, held protectively by her brother and lawyers, while the media trampled over one another to chase her for photographs and sound bytes.
It was great theatre for the actress manqué—only this time she occupied centre-stage.
Emile Jerome was convicted of ‘culpable homicide not amounting to murder’, and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. Citing Exception 1 of Section 300 of the Indian Penal Code, Judge Chandwani read out: ‘Culpable homicide is not amounting to murder if the offender, whilst deprived of the power of self-control by grave and sudden provocation, causes the death of the person who gave provocation.’
While Maria Susairaj walked free, Emile Jerome went back to Taloja jail, on the outskirts of Mumbai, where he is Qaidi no C-31.
Emile’s stint in jail so far has been a fraught one. He got into demonstrative scraps with the authorities at Arthur Road jail, where he was first lodged as an undertial. He complained of assault and that he had been denied basic amenities. When he came to court for his trial, he often spoke to reporters about the pathetic prison conditions. In turn, jail officers charged Emile with unruly behaviour. When he protested about being shifted from the barracks he shared with, among others, the gangster Abu Salem, they moved him to another jail on the outskirts of Mumbai. There he was put in charge of a teaching programme to train his illiterate fellow prisoners. His minor rebellions effectively subdued, gaolers now describe him as a model prisoner.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I OWE AN enormous debt to all my colleagues at Mumbai Mirror for their indulgence, resourcefulness, and assistance.
Grateful thanks also to Ramananda Sreenivas and Nagaraja Dixit for making the trip to Mysore so memorable.
Saira Menezes, Namita Devidayal, Aakar Patel, and Bachi Karkaria for their generous friendship and encouragement.
Priya Gupta who can, and did move mountains.
My dearest friend and first reader, Tushita Patel, whose affections and unfailingly crisp advice have seen me though the years; her friendship is most cherished.
My brother Aditya whose sense of humour and equanimity keep the peace at our home.
The idea for this book started with a phone call one afternoon from Chiki Sarkar. She has since nurtured it with her sharp instincts, kindness, and enormous belief. Without her persuasion, gentle or otherwise, this book would have never been written.
My publisher and editor, Meru Gokhale, whose meticulous eye has made this a sharper book. Thanks for the attention and care with which she has seen this book out into the world.
An endeavour like this depends entirely on the cooperation of the people interviewed. A great many of them gave generously of their time, often trusting me with their personal histories. To everyone I have spoken to for the book, on or off the record, my profound gratitude.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Meenal Baghel, editor of Mumbai’s leading newspaper, Mumbai Mirror, uncovers the true story of one of the most sensational crimes to hit the maximum city in recent years. Using exclusive interviews with the police, the friends and families of the victim and the accused, Baghel draws a riveting picture of a death whose mystery has not faded, even though the killers may have been found. Gripping and hard-hitting, Death in Mumbai is a fascinating insight into a new type of crime affecting the Indian city.
Death in Mumbai Page 19