Death in Mumbai (17 page)

‘I, not my mother, not my mama, should have died that day… I have so much guilt. After the funeral I haven't had the courage to see my father. My father, who was so opposed to my coming to Mumbai, asked me only one thing, “Did you do anything wrong?” When I said no, he told me, “You must stay on in Mumbai and fulfil all your mother's dreams.” When I first came here this city represented freedom but now to establish myself here has become a goal.'

She crammed her days with work: Morning 10 am–12 pm was reserved for Bollywood dance class, 2–4 pm was spent gymming at Sykz, 5.30–8 pm was for the acting class. ‘I have now become really serious about work, I will do whatever it takes to improve myself and live down this scandalous image. Once I have cleared my name I will go back to Calcutta, adopt a child, and live with my father. I am no longer interested in men.'

Unfortunately for Moon, the reverse was not true. One day while indulging in that other vanity, Googling
herself, Moon discovered a website dedicated to her:
www.moondas.com
. The site was maintained by a man she had briefly befriended during her search for a manager. ‘But this man tried to act oversmart, so I dropped him.' Now she discovered pictures of herself and a couple of fanzine-style articles that labelled her a call girl on this site. Unsurprisingly, there was a roster of comments that sickened her. She filed a complaint with the Cyber Crime Investigation Cell of the Mumbai police, asking for the site to be blocked and action taken against the site's manager. The cops did little, telling her they could not locate him, which was a joke because just a few days later she found the man (who had previously been booked for defrauding women through a dating site) sitting in a cyber café.

‘I ran to the Oshiwara police station where they know me well, got two cops who arrested him and handed him to the cyber cell. But there,' she paused, looking incredulous, ‘they let him go. Report at eleven o'clock the next morning, they told him.' Dutifully she also went to the cyber cell office located in the Fort area of south Mumbai, the other end of the city for Moon. ‘I kept waiting but just as I had feared, the manager did not turn up. I was so tired, so angry, so frustrated.' When she complained to a policeman she was told insolently, ‘If you're getting so harassed, why don't you go and catch him for us.'

‘I just snapped, I turned around and told him, “Sir, that's exactly what I did but you let him go.” So this man, Parmar or something, looks me up and down and says, “No point in waiting here. Why don't you go and watch some film. There is
Drona
and
Kidnap
playing. Watch a
movie for a few hours and come back, then we'll see what we can do.”

‘I felt so helpless, so humiliated, I came out of there and started crying.'

She contacted a friend in the media, who suggested that she go and complain to Rakesh Maria, then chief of the Crime Branch, since she was in the vicinity of his office. ‘Maria sir heard me out, then he picked up the phone and in front of me he lambasted those guys and instructed his people to arrest the manager.'

A few days after my meeting with Moon, I met Rakesh Maria at his office to discuss Neeraj's killing. I was hoping to get more details about the investigation and the prosecution's case. It was a Saturday, and despite the frequent phone calls and chits from visitors, he was relaxed and inclined to talk. We discussed the case, Neeraj's father, the psychology of criminals, and the changing value system.

‘The small-town kids coming in to the big cities have no cocooning effect of the family. The old system where families collectively took decisions has given way to children making all the calls. Kids are like gladiators, left to perform, and so they do anything to succeed,' said Rakesh Maria. ‘I see so many girls coming from outside to make it big in the film industry. Typically they get in touch with the light men, cameramen, make-up artists, PRs, and on their assurance they just land in Mumbai without any support system and get into all kinds of traps. Just the other day this girl—' he struggled for a few seconds—‘the one whose boyfriend killed her mother… Moon Das, she came to me with some similar problem…'

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.'