Death in Mumbai (10 page)

‘We were in a coffee shop talking, as men often do, about girls, specifically the ones we knew. I don't know what prompted me, but I said to him, “Can you imagine that Monica who was our senior, has become an actress. How she managed that I don't know.” I was aiming the camera at him while I was talking, and something in his face altered, alerting me.'

‘So I asked, “Are you in touch with her?” and he said, “Sort of. I meet her sometimes when I am in Bangalore.” Three months later I was reading about the killing in Mumbai.'

Aside from the shock at St Mathias that two of their star students were embroiled in such a scandal, another question—unasked by some; articulated by others—hums through the corridors: What drew the earnest, orderly, go-getter naval officer to the restless, worldly, ambitious actress?

‘Everyone at school knew Monica, because she was such a good dancer,' said Vinay, who was three years her junior. ‘Even us kids in the primary section.' Emile, who joined the navy after class twelve in 2000, is remembered as the boy marked for a future. ‘He was an extraordinary student always stood first in class—excelled at debate, essay writing, general knowledge—and he was so polite and well behaved.' Mary Anthony, who taught him maths and physics at St Mathias was nearly rapturous in describing Emile's
accomplishments. ‘He won the school many laurels and was a superb athlete as well.'

‘Girls from our school used to purposely wander around Emile's house in the hope of bumping into him, but he was choosy and arrogant. Not in a bad sense, but because he was so accomplished at everything he did. A girl's good looks were not enough, he wanted her to have everything, and which is why we were shocked when we came to know that he went after Monica.' Vinay used the phrase ‘went after,' implicitly believing it was Emile who wooed her, and not the other way round.

On their first date, Maria told Emile she was meeting him with only marriage in mind. ‘If you are looking to flirt or have an affair, go look elsewhere.' Emile had laughed. ‘How can you say such things in a first meeting?' They had so far only exchanged a few emails.

‘Marriage was nowhere on his mind,' Maria told me. ‘But when you behave in a manner of certain expectation, the other person starts responding accordingly.' They met on Orkut where she had liked his pictures, she told me. One of the photographs that Emile posted was a picture of him standing guard in dashing whites behind President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam during his visit to their naval base.

Emile and Maria met in early 2007, when Emile was posted at Vizag and Maria had returned from Mumbai from her first year-long stint in the city, unable to make it in Bollywood. ‘I did not care for him much at that first meeting, even though I told him I was meeting with marriage in mind. He'd worn jeans and some khadi shirt, while I am very particular about clothing, and like to dress
well.' She said this in that flirty way where criticism is to be read as coded desire.

The verdict in the case was barely some days away and their lawyers were pitching a cut-throat defence inside the courtroom. One morning Maria's lawyer Sharif Shaikh announced in court that his client was a virgin, and there was no question of a relationship with any man, be it Neeraj or Emile. Maria, who had not been consulted before this line of argument, was chagrined, and wanted to know if the court would insist on a medical test. But while Emile grew increasingly terse and businesslike with her, she retreated into submission, her feelings for him evident. ‘I have come to know him better in these last three years during our court meetings than I did in our one year of courtship. Given time and space I feel we can work out our relationship.'

After their first date, they met each other only seven or eight times in the year they were together, but fuelled their long-distance romance with extended telephone calls every day. A month before Neeraj's death, Maria told Emile's friend and course mate who had insisted on speaking to her: ‘Watch out for me on TV. I am soon going to be in a Balaji serial.'

She had travelled to Mumbai, met Neeraj and auditioned for Draupadi's role in
Mahabharat
on March 16, and in spite of her poor audition believed, or was led to believe, that she stood a good chance of getting the part. She even mentioned Neeraj to Emile's course mate asking if he had heard of him. ‘I was quite surprised and told her the only person I knew from TV was Smriti Irani.'

‘Emile often worried about her negotiating her way through the film and TV world all alone,' the same course mate said. He agreed to an interview, but service rules prevent him from giving his name. ‘Monica had told him that a music director in Bangalore was holding up her dues for some songs that she had recorded with him.'

But Emile's real, if unspoken, concern was Mumbai's infamous casting couch. It was also one of the reasons Emile's conservative parents objected to his relationship with Maria. ‘They'd call me up and ask me to tell Emile to stop seeing her, until finally I told them, “You're his parents, you have greater control over him, and if you can't stop him, how can I, a mere friend, do anything? He has set boundaries for me that I cannot breach.”'

Once, when Maria was unable to reach Emile, she called his course mate to leave a message and he mentioned the family's fears to her. ‘I know the casting couch exists in Mumbai but I don't need to get down to it, my father is well-to-do and influential, and no one can force me,' she had assured him. ‘And I got convinced. At least in real life she seemed to be a good actress,' he said. ‘Still, I wanted to watch out for Emile so I pressed further: “You're a movie star, you can get any hunk, why settle for Emile, he's just a regular naval officer”.' At this, he said Maria became sentimental and told him Emile's profession or his lack of wealth was not important to her. ‘I really love him, and you must believe that.' Though the couple was never formally engaged, she always introduced Emile as her fiancé. He was the only man she ever acknowledged to her family as her boyfriend. Like Maria, Emile had never publicly
acknowledged a lover—and he too introduced Maria to his friends in the navy as his girlfriend.

When Maria was flying out to the UK to visit Veronica in December 2007, Emile took leave of absence and came to Mumbai to see her off. He took her to the hill station of Lonavla, where he had spent four years at the naval base INS Shivaji acquiring a B.Tech. in mechanical engineering. He also introduced her to one of his closest friends, Lieutenant Jitesh Saini, at Navy Nagar in Mumbai. It was a brief meeting suffused with the formality accorded to a brother officer's spouse or girlfriend, but Emile did pull Jitesh aside to say that he was ‘serious about Monica'.

‘After one of his interminable phone calls to Monica, I'd asked him: “Are you serious or just having mazaa with the actress?” said the course mate, ‘And he told me, “nahin yaar, I really want to marry her.”' Maria too reciprocated with serious intent. ‘“I am a very good dancer, he has two left feet, I sing really well, he can't hold a tune, he can't even paint,” she told me with an indulgent smile.'

So what was it that she liked about him? ‘For one, he looked my age though his mother thought I looked older than him. He had good etiquette. It's really important to me. For instance, in jail, I can't stand it when people speak to me using tu, tum, or re. I always say, aap is such a beautiful word, use it! I also noticed he wielded a fork and knife very neatly. Manners, discipline, and humbleness are important to me, and he had all of that.'

‘I wasn't looking for financial stability, my father had enough money. What I liked about him was that he was from Mysore, his house was a few minutes away from ours,
he was a Roman Catholic like us, everyone knew his family. I thought if something did go wrong between us, the families would be there to take care of it. I made sure all the boxes ticked. You know,' and here she paused for a long time, ‘my mother had even planned the theme and the colours for our wedding.'

What she had not accounted for was that her reputation from the film world would spill over into the small town of Mysore—and reach Emile's mother. ‘When her family sent a proposal in early 2008, Emile's parents had already done a background check on the girl, and decided against the match,' said a relative of Emile's who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The stand-off with the family was a first for Emile. As the model, super-achieving son, he was only ever used to unqualified love and appreciation from his parents. ‘They had been extraordinarily protective of Emile,' remembered Vinay. ‘As kids, on the rare occasion we got to go to a classmate's home after school, his mother would always take the phone number of that boy and then call his home to find out if Emile had reached, and when he would leave. Whereas most of our mothers couldn't be bothered as long as we got home in the time we said we would.' His father always accompanied him when he went for a swimming class at the pool in the Mysore University campus, and later, when he joined the navy, they would speak to him every day that he was available on base.'

But after he told them about Maria, their daily phone calls were used to pressure him to leave her. Emile would politely hear them out, trying without much success to convince them that she was indeed a suitable girl for him.
‘As compared to his personality, the girl was no match for him. If you just look at her you'll know what I am talking about.' Such was the animosity that Emile's relative felt for Maria, that he would not even take her name, referring to her throughout our conversation as ‘the girl'.

Exhausted by the abrasive battle with his parents, Emile called his friend Jitesh to complain. ‘Ghar pe maan nahin rahein hain' (They are not agreeing at home). Briefly, to ease the pressure, Emile even told his parents that he had broken up with Maria. They believed him until Maria started turning up at the same church as theirs.

‘But his mother would snub me every time I made an effort to reach out to them,' said Maria, unable to hide her hurt even after all these years. When she returned from England after visiting Veronica, she got a gift for Emile's mother who refused it, insisting churlishly, ‘We have everything we need, why don't you give it to one of your friends?' Maria, who read special prayers at the Basilica at Vailankkani for her and Emile's marriage, says whatever Emile's parents said about her character hurt her family ‘badly'.

‘Monu, just give me some time, they'll come around,' Emile kept pleading with Maria, while at the same time telling her he could not decide between her and his parents, who remained adamant. ‘She's not right for our family, don't talk to her,' they kept insisting, still treating him like a little boy. ‘Whenever they called me to talk Emile out of his infatuation,' said his course mate, ‘they'd just say one thing. She's not from our world, she will not fit in with our family.'

Unlike the Susairajs, whom he saw as arrivistes from Tamil Nadu, Emile's father, also called Joseph—Jerome Joseph—counted his family, the Mareths, among the old genteel Malayalee Christians of Wayanad where they owned a small coffee plantation. He himself had worked in the junior management of the Bank of Maharashtra's Bhandup branch in Mumbai, but transferred to the more tranquil city of Mysore when his sons began to grow up. The family settled in NR Mohalla, a modest neighbourhood five kilometres from the plush Bannimantap, where Maria lived with her parents and went to school.

Deeply religious, Emile's father was proud of his two sisters who became nuns, one of whom went on to head the highly respected college of Home Science, Nirmala Niketan. His older brother was a brigadier in the Indian Army, while Emile's grandfather had been the postmaster general of Kerala. Following his own voluntary retirement from the Bank of Maharashtra, Jerome Joseph dabbled in shares, selling LIC policies and liaising for those interested in buying or selling property in and around Wayanad. But these were diversions for him. His life's project was his two sons—the younger Nirmal, or Tuttu as he is called at home, pursuing his masters in psychology and criminology at university in Chennai, and Unni, which is Emile's pet name. Even as he was growing up, Jerome Joseph knew that his elder son was exceptional. Beautiful, dutiful, of a serious mien—whatever Unni set his mind to, he excelled at.

‘But the person Emile was closest too was his mother. I've often seen him, this full-grown man, this smart naval
officer, lying down resting his head in his mother's lap,' his relative said. ‘She was too distressed to even visit him in jail for the first couple of years. Instead, she kept exhorting her kin to tell Emile to just, pray, pray, and pray…'

On May 8, 2008, the day after Neeraj's death, Jerome Joseph landed up unexpectedly at the naval base in Kochi. Emile was not yet back from Mumbai, and had not been answering calls for three days. That, and some parental instinct, prompted the surprise visit. ‘He was awfully disturbed to know that Emile was not at the base. “Will it not get him into trouble with his superiors?” he kept asking me,' said Emile's course mate.

‘When I called Emile in Mumbai to tell him that his father had arrived and what I should say to him, he said, “Just tell him that I have gone to meet Monica.”' The next morning when Emile arrived at the base, father and son had a blazing row. ‘How could you just leave like that and go to Mumbai? You will lose your career for this girl,' Jerome Joseph screamed with helplessness. ‘You know your mother has not been doing well but you are spoiling your life for that girl. She has money, but you, you will lose everything,' he said, unaware how prophetic his words would be. Emile, his son, his thew and sinew, his hope, his lament, stood with his head bowed, that cupid mouth set firmly without offering any defence.

It should have been a happy realization to Jerome Joseph, but it came to him as a shock—his son had become his own man, and he no longer had the right of way with him. Any deference was mere gesture, like those men who hide their cigarettes behind their backs when an elder goes by.