Death in Mumbai (19 page)

Simmering public ire over the insensitivity of politicians boiled over at what seemed like an actor and director's recce trip for a film, that too at a time when Mumbai was still traumatized. Punsters immediately jumped into the act as Vilasrao Deshmukh was forced to abdicate his post. ‘Ramu ne do
Sarkar
banai, aur ek girayi.' It's the kind of gallows humour he appreciates.

‘I was supposed to meet Riteish at his home that morning for some work. When he asked me if I wanted to accompany his dad for a tour of the Taj, I said yes. Is there anyone who would have said no to such an invite?' he responded mildly.

Though he moved to Mumbai in the early nineties to make
Rangeela
, a candyfloss romance, Ramu has been entranced by Mumbai's underbelly. The same curiosity that landed him at the Taj Mahal Hotel also led him to underworld informers, encounter cops, and hardened IPS officers. He has since become cinema's equivalent of an ambulance chaser, its tabloid hack. ‘To me, this sleazy
Mumbai appears like a fairyland,' he said, ‘and I am like the kid in that fairyland—everything about it excites my interest.'

He recalled his first ever flight into Mumbai. ‘As the aircraft readied to land, I was astonished to see the shanties of Dharavi. From the air, it seemed as if there were a million homes under one continuous roof.' That impression was to have the most unlikely resonance. In his slick underworld film,
Company
, he used a chase through the slums, shot extensively from top angle. A similar sequence was used by one-time Ramu acolyte Anurag Kashyap in
Black Friday
, his cinematic recreation of the 1993 Mumbai blasts—which inspired Danny Boyle to open his
Slumdog Millionaire
with a memorable sequence shot in Dharavi itself.

It's fashionable to trash Ramu's recent films, as it should be given his fall (the film critic Mayank Shekhar calls his new work V-grade cinema) but Ram Gopal Varma captured the anomie of urban life, the thrum of anxiety that underlies life in the big city before anyone else did. ‘All my life I had lived in a bungalow in Hyderabad; I experienced the curious world of the apartment for the first time when I came to Mumbai. Just a one-foot-thick wall, sometimes not even that, separates us from the intimacy of the other, and yet there is such alienation. The idea of
Satya
came to me from something a friend of mine had told me. He used to live in a seventeen-storey high-rise in Oshiwara. Off and on he would bump into this man in the car park or the elevator. They would exchange a hello, hi and go their own way. Then one day my friend's wife read in the papers that this very man had committed murder back in his hometown, and the police had finally
traced him to Mumbai, and arrested him. I was chilled by the account, and it became the starting point for the story of this simple girl who unwittingly falls in love with the gangster, Satya.'

The bare apartment—with a dominant poster of Aishwarya Rai on the wall and a single mattress on the floor—is as much a character in
Not a Love Story
as Emile or Maria or Neeraj. That it was shot in Dheeraj Solitaire in the flat above 201-B, where Neeraj was killed and dismembered without anyone suspecting anything amiss, adds to the eeriness—and also the cheesiness—of the narrative.

After living in one apartment block for almost twenty years, time enough for a generation to grow up and be gone, Ramu would be hard-pressed to recognize anyone from his housing society. What he does recognize astutely are the changes sweeping through India's urban society, the rapidly shifting sexual mores, and the altering equation between men and women, with technology as the catalyst.

With great candour, he lists himself as a test case. Long separated from his wife, he has enjoyed a string of liaisons, but says he enjoys his freedom far too much to ever get into a deeper emotional commitment. ‘But there's no one in this world who loves women more than I do. If I am attracted to someone I come right out and say, “I'd rather have sex with you than conversation.”

‘Traditionally,' he continued, spilling his seduction secrets, ‘women want to be loved for everything except their bodies. But really! Should I love you for your handicrafts or that Fabindia kurta or for your mind? I once told an actress
who wanted to come to my house for a business meeting, “By all means come, but if you do I'll have to first kiss you, else I'll be distracted all through, and the meeting would have been a waste.”' Charm may be at a premium, but his strike rate, he assured me cockily, is ‘a hundred percent'. We don't pursue this line of conversation further but later, going through his tweets—he tweets as compulsively as he shoots movies—I find more of Ramu's expositions on women: ‘I any day prefer a vodka drunkenness to a womans wakefulness' [sic]. And then again: ‘Women nd God are two things I love to talk about becos I hate both of them.' He finds the sexuality of porn actresses liberating as they come ‘completely edited and also with a remote control'. In
Not a Love Story
, the woman inspired by Maria is blemishless. Neeraj's character is vapid, a Mr goody-two-shoes, swiftly done away with, while Ramu has veered the farthest for Emile's character, showing him to be a near-psychotic lover. What remains with the audience after the hurried-through ending is the camera, like the director's eye, forever darting, resting sometimes on the heroine's breast, between her legs, on her bare arm, caressing her derrière. In his film Ram Gopal Varma made no moral judgement about Maria, seeing her as a sexual creature—edited and remote-controlled by him. Maria, her lawyer later told me, had refused to see the movie.

B
OOK
III

Death and Dénouement

7

N
EERAJ

‘He was seemingly sweet, but the boy liked to play dangerous games.'

—Ekta Kapoor

N
EERAJ'S ONLINE AVATAR
was ‘Rebel' and he described his passions as ‘nethn [anything] dat involves adventure… risk b it @ work or in life'. Asked to describe his favourite activities, he wrote in his profile, ‘wat kinna activities r v talking about???'

Good question.

His relationship status said, ‘Committed', prompting a friend, presumably a woman, to expostulate in a flurry of red and blue emoticons. ‘You are committed!!! Kuttey, Kaminey…' before lapsing into that feminine endearment of helpless love, ‘Dogggggggie.'

More than a year after his death, Neeraj's friends had kept his Orkut account alive. From fond reminiscences to hysterical exhortations for Neeraj to ‘come back', the scraps were a vivid account of his friendships.

There was Priyanka writing: ‘v heard dat news dat u r no more its been a yr ……… bt idiot still i wud reqst u to cm bck ginni ………… i wil slap u …… jaldi aao.wat r u testng??? bolo ……… kb aaoge? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
???????????????????????'

Another friend, Virat Bhargava, wrote: ‘Neeraj bhai… i ve got married, tu tou nahi aaya…busy hai kya kahi…? itni bhi kya jaldi thi bhai jaane ki…miss u a lot…rest in peace.' (You didn't come for my marriage, are you that busy … how could you leave us so soon.)

And then there was someone who identified themselves as Maverick: ‘Used to hate you …… i still do…really hate you neeraj grover…still…i do not like the way ur life ended…it was cruel and i wish ur soul rests in peace… but mind you…i still hate you.'

For these friends, most of whom kept in touch only virtually, Neeraj's online presence was a pleasant deception. In this floating space we are all eternal. But away from Orkut, Neeraj had another cyber identity on Yahoo Messenger as Karan Oberoi, where he described himself as the scion of Oberoi and Oberoi Constructions. It helped that there is a multi-million dollar real estate company in Mumbai called Oberoi Constructions. ‘He thought the name Karan Oberoi had a posh ring to it, and it would help him snare girls,' said his friend ‘J'. ‘I can vouch that it worked for him, too.'

J, who did not want to be identified, was a close friend of Neeraj's at Amity University at Noida, and had preceded him to Mumbai to work in television. On the day of Rakesh Maria's press conference, he was in Kanpur and saw the news of Neeraj's killing on television. ‘I had known he was missing,' he said, ‘but about his death, that's where I heard it first.'

Aside from grief there was the shock of recognition. ‘I had once told him that if he continued to behave the way he did, he would go to hell.' But that was an innocuous phrase, I said offering consolation. Shorn of venom, the words were just things friends said to each other. For instance, there was another friend of theirs from Amity, a young woman called Mona, who had this to say about Neeraj on Orkut: ‘O ma god d guy who luks lyk a bhoot n druggy…no sense of humour, shameless, duffer, mad, etc etc etc etc…v were 2gether in coll bt v hardly had a wrd wid eachodr I gotto knw him in our coll fest whr I startd tlkin to dis duffr…hes gem of a prsn…I wish his aall dreamz may cum true n plz god giv him 1 single gal in lyf…always looks for new pataka around…hes a big kamina in dat case…'

Pretty fine testimonial, I thought. ‘You don't understand.' J was not amused by my attempts to soothe him. ‘When I said he'd go to hell, I had MEANT it.'

Our fascination with the criminal mind is such that we often associate the crime with the perpetrator, seldom the victim. Recall the famous Nanavati murder case of 1959, several incorrect parallels to which had been drawn with this case. In that murder a naval officer, Kawas Nanavati,
discovered that his wife, an Englishwoman named Sylvia, was having an affair. In a fit of jealous rage Nanavati shot dead her lover while he lay in the bathtub. It was the cause célèbre of its time, and even turned into a film called
Yeh Raaste Hain Pyar Ke
. But few people today remember the name of the victim, Prem Ahuja, a South Mumbai businessman. The tragedy of Neeraj's killing had been overtaken by a fascination with Maria Susairaj and the naval officer invariably described as ‘dashing'. It was as if by dying, the young television executive wrote himself out of the story.

Five months after his death, I travelled to Kanpur to find out more about who Neeraj was, and what his world was like.

‘The first STD call in India was made from Kanpur,' Shaad Ali told me. It's the sort of trivia entire generations learnt by rote, reading
Competition Success Review.
But the film director, no contender for the Civils, was using the fact to explain Kanpur's ‘no-culture culture'.

After his parents divorced, Shaad moved to Kanpur with his mother, the communist leader Subhashini Ali, to live with his grandmother Captain Lakshmi Sahgal, a leading member of the Indian National Army and a close associate of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.

Kanpur, he said, became his refuge in the interim between ‘getting into trouble' at Lawrence School, Sanawar, and the Welham Boys' School. ‘Lucknow is just 83 kilometres
away, separated by the river, but none of the nawabi tehzeeb impinged on Kanpur's consciousness. We have our “own-bred” milieu, and are not ashamed of it. If anything, Kanpurias have the chaap of not being easily impressed.'

The city's jugaadu, can-do spirit, and at the same time its insularity, inform Shaad's 2005 hit film,
Bunty Aur Babli
, a hi-jinks caper about two youngsters desperately looking to flee the claustrophobia of their small-town existence, to seek fame and the good life at any cost. It represented the ambition, the ennui, and the sense of entitlement of the post-1980s' generation, and their efforts to escape their constricting lives.

Three years after they crushed the Mutiny of 1857 and established Cawnpore as a garrison town, the colonial British set up the Harness and Saddlery Factory here to supply leather to the army across the country and then Cooper Allen and Co., which manufactured blankets for the army. The textile behemoths, Elgin Mills and Muir Mills, followed soon after. Kanpur, smug in its prosperity, positioned itself as the ‘Manchester of the East'.

After Independence, the seths took over the mills, and old families like the Kejriwals, the Singhanias, and the Jaipurias added sugar and gutka factories, textile and steel mills to Kanpur's industrial growth. The leather and autoparts industry flourished, and mimicking its British past, the owners of Lal Imli Woollens built a replica of the Big Ben to ring in the hour. ‘Till the 1960s there was a huge administrative upper class in Kanpur that kept out the others, much like the British did,' said Shaad's mother Subhashini Ali.

Her own family's trajectory seems twined to the fortunes of the city. Subhashini's parents, Captain Lakshmi and Colonel Prem Sahgal, were both members of the Indian National Army. In 1945, Prem Sahgal was arrested by the British for abetting the Japanese. Prem, along with two other men, a Muslim, Shah Nawaz Khan, and a Sikh, Gurdial Singh, was subjected to a public trial at the Red Fort.