Death in Mumbai (21 page)

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.

Of all his friends and family only Haresh Sondarva, his other flatmate, picked on the strains of Neeraj's fixation with women. ‘His obsession with girls was a sickness. He never wanted to be alone, and he couldn't bear to be without a girl for long. If we were a group of guys watching a film or just hanging out, Neeraj would be there
with us but he'd get bored after a while and call a woman friend over.'

The fashion designer, twenty-nine, who shared, and just as often not, the room with Neeraj, says he never asked him why he brought so many women home. ‘Somebody had to adjust, and it was always me.' But he did get a good sense of Neeraj's problem. ‘Once he took Ecstasy after which he told me that the drug's impact lasted on him for two or three days. For the first time, he said to me, I feel relaxed and I am not constantly thinking of women, it's such a relief.'

After Neeraj's death, Haresh along with Neeraj's cousin conducted a small shanti path for him. They packed some of his belongings and brought them to the Versova beach where, amidst the waves dissolving by their feet, producing that strangely intimate sound, they immersed Neeraj's belongings, and offered a prayer to the retreating sun. Neeraj's cousin told Haresh, ‘We had come to Mumbai with such hopes but what have we ended with?'

Shattered by the tragedy the small group has since disintegrated. Neeraj's cousin has moved to Delhi, the woman Neeraj introduced to his parents as the one he wanted to marry has gone back to her hometown unable to deal with either Neeraj's betrayal with Maria or his killing, and Haresh himself is looking to leave. ‘This city is so inhumane. Have you tried boarding the local train? You may—if you struggle long enough—get somewhere here, but you lose a lot in the bargain. There's no breathing space. It affects your mental health,' he said intensely, still deeply affected by the events.

‘After Neeraj's death I came to realize the unethical things that go on in the name of so-called modernity. I have begun to question all that.' Several months later when I called Haresh to check a quote he told me he had relocated to Pune and was the happier for it.

Shaken by the tragedy, one of Neeraj's women friends too offered a public forgiveness, writing on his wall: ‘I didn't know the last time I saw you would be The Last Time I'd ever get to see you… I pray and hope that your mom and dad gather the strength required to sail through this fierce storm. All this is still so unbelievable. Violence to this extreme? I don't understand how their [criminals'] conscience would have allowed them to lie and live even if they'd never been caught. May you be blessed with Moksha. You weren't a bad man, Neeraj, you didn't deserve this. Not an early death, and not a disgraceful end.'

Even though there was some laughter, thanks to their grandchildren, it would take a long time for peace and happiness to find a place in the Kanpur home of the Grovers. It was a full house the day I visited. Shikha was there with her two children and husband. Neelam Grover's brother Satnam Arora, the family's steadiest support in those dark days when Neeraj was missing, was present with his wife and teenaged daughter, as was Amarnath Grover's sister-in-law, whose son had lived with Neeraj in Mumbai.

There was plenty of chatter, the scraping of spoon against plate, and the gurgle of young children being tickled by their Naanu. But the skein of grief ran thick.

Amarnath Grover moved around the house a diminished man, shorn of the light of life. There's an untranslatable word in Hindi for it, shree-heen. His wife's eyes tailed him anxiously. ‘He's so distracted, forgetful,' she complained to her sisters-in-law as he moved out of earshot. ‘He goes to get dahi, will pay for it but forget the packet. He'll see a boy of Ginni's age on the road and start to cry. I have forbidden him from driving the scooter because his eyes well up. Then he can't see and may have an accident.' The family has now hired a driver for the white Santro they had bought for Neeraj after he passed out of school.

‘For twenty years he never missed opening the shutters of the shop at 8.30 am sharp,' Neelam Grover turned around to tell me. ‘But now, he just doesn't want to leave the house, or he'll go really late. Some boys are running it indifferently. When I chide him he finds excuses and then says, who should I go for now? What is the point?' Her face crumpled as she spoke.

Later when he and I were out of the house, Amarnath Grover said he'd stopped going to the shop because he didn't want to leave Neelam all by herself in the house. ‘God knows what all she will keep thinking. As it is she has lost so much weight, become half of her size.'

It was here, in this simple home, in this unremarkable town, where the high-decibel big-city case distilled into the purest tragedy for an ageing man and his wife.

But it was more than the loss of a beautiful, vibrant son; it was the promise of his future cut short that had broken
the Grovers. To use a phrase from Kafka in an altogether different context, Neeraj's death had hit Amarnath Grover like an ice-axe that broke the frozen sea inside his soul. This is what psychotherapists call the onset of awareness. As the shards disintegrated and collapsed, so did his notions about his perfect son. On more than one occasion through that day he had asked if I had, during my interviews for this book, learnt anything adverse about Neeraj.

On one occasion, an aunt interjected, sailing into hyperbole. ‘What's there to ask? Itna seedha bachcha tha, working hard all the time [He was such a simple child]. Kabhi naa smoke naa drink [Never smoked or drank]. In our family toh bachche call and complain [In our family, kids call and complain], how come you never taught us any wiles, how are we to deal with this world?'

But Amarnath Grover continued to look searchingly, expectantly, as if he already knew something and now only needed corroboration. What could I tell the grieving father? ‘Nothing unusual, except for the women,' I offered weakly. ‘Oh, that we know about!' Shikha and the cousin let out a gust of relief. ‘He was so good-looking and the TV industry is full of girls.'

‘Especially in production, there are no handsome boys,' Amarnath Grover spoke up slowly. ‘You know, while he was still studying in Kanpur,' he said, ‘Ginni had a friend and one day he brought her to the shop. This girl, well, she came in wearing tight jeans and a T-shirt, her hair was shorter than mine. I told Neeraj, do you think someone like her can really take care of you? Believe me; from the next day on he stopped meeting her. That way he was very obedient. He wanted to marry a homely girl.'