Death in Mumbai (23 page)

Here, he was to again meet Rakesh Maria, then the deputy commissioner of police. This was a little before the 1993 blasts when Maria got the lead to Tiger Memon and moved out of traffic to take over the blasts probe. ‘Boss,' said Inspector Raorane admiringly, ‘works with an inspector's instinct. He is not an ivory-tower man; he has great grasp of the grassroots as also a detective's skills.'

He himself picked up some of those during a stint with the Special Branch, which was considered a ‘punishment posting' within the force as it entailed mostly paperwork, and almost no opportunity to skim cream. ‘I once got an application for an arms licence; while checking the applicant's antecedents I found police files on his family dating back to the British. It was an instance of very fine record-keeping. I realized that's how those people were, meticulous, detailed, and mind you, this was before computers and typewriters. I was greatly inspired, thinking that if you are honest to your job this is how well you can do it.'

When Unit IX senior inspector Ashok Borkar returned from Rakesh Maria's office on the night of May 9 (hours after Amarnath Grover had met him) and told his men about a missing complaint that needed to be investigated, Inspector Raorane didn't pay much heed. ‘I thought it was for someone else to follow.'

But as he lived closest to Malad where the missing complaint was registered—in this city of impossible traffic, that was an important consideration—he was nominated to lead the investigation. Helping him were the others in the unit: Assistant Inspector Sunil Ghosalkar, Sub-Inspectors Mahesh Tawade, Sagar Shivalkar, Sanjiv Gawade, Dilip Deshmukh, and Dilip Bhosle, Police Naik Nandkumar Naik, and Head Constable Sadanand Gurav.

They were a fine mesh—each man bringing his own special skills to bear on the case eventually.

Borkar, who was proceeding on a brief vacation, warned Inspector Raorane before leaving, ‘Boss is really keen to find out what happened to this guy.' Ghosalkar and Naik had already begun the hunt for Neeraj, accompanying Amarnath Grover to mortuaries, hospitals and even to the Borivali National Park. Inspector Raorane, still sceptical about what he could bring to the case, began with a visit to the Malad police station to get copies of any statements recorded. The case was still at an inquiry stage, and a senior IPS officer had already called the Malad police asking them to go slow on Maria.

Inspector Raorane saw that a missing complaint had been registered by Neeraj's cousin, and the police had recorded the statements of Neeraj's friends, among them Nishant Lal, as well as Emile Jerome and Maria Susairaj. Maria was the last recorded person to have seen the missing man. An FIR for kidnapping by unknown persons was eventually filed by Amarnath Grover only on May 20, when it seemed certain that something dire had happened to his son.

Neeraj, Maria had told the police, had come to her house after 10.30 pm on the night of May 6, but left at 1.30 am following several calls from his friends. One of these, she alleged, was from Nisha, a former colleague at Balaji Telefilms, who insisted that Neeraj come over, saying to him, ‘Aa jao, naya maal aaya hai' (Come, fresh stuff is here). Maria was to later insinuate that Neeraj was hooked to recreational drugs.

Before leaving Dheeraj Solitaire Neeraj ordered dinner for them from Sai Sagar Hotel and attended to several other calls, including the nightly call from his mother. It was only in the morning she realized, Maria said, that Neeraj had left his cellphone behind, which was charging in the bedroom. ‘I scrolled through the phonebook, found Nishant Lal's number and informed him that Neeraj had left his phone behind.' Neeraj's phone then became the most vital clue in the police investigation.

Emile also later told Inspector Raorane that ‘Maria was alone in the flat' when he arrived at Dheeraj Solitaire on the morning of May 7 a little after seven in the morning, adding that he had ‘never seen Neeraj Grover'. The first and the only time he had spoken to Neeraj, he said, was when he had called Maria from Kochi, and she had asked him to call on Neeraj's phone as her phone battery was dying. This would be Emile's legal stance right through the trial.

The statements were straightforward. ‘But,' said Inspector Raorane, ‘it struck me as quite odd that someone like Neeraj, by all accounts a very sociable guy, would leave his phone behind and not even call. He could have done that
from anywhere, a friend's cellphone, a public booth. If he had mistakenly left his phone behind he would have definitely called Maria to check.'

On the morning of May 12, six days after Neeraj's disappearance, Inspectors Raorane and Ghosalkar stopped by at Maria's house on their way to work. This was standard practice, he said. ‘The last person with whom a missing or dead person has been seen is a natural suspect, that's textbook training.'

Maria's tiny flat was full. Apart from her, Inspector Raorane counted her mother, an aunt, Veronica, and Richard. The actress had summoned her family as soon as Emile left for Kochi on May 9, telling them that the police was harassing her because her friend Neeraj had gone missing. At that point the Malad police had only recorded her and Emile's statements just as they had the statements of the rest of Neeraj's friends. Perhaps the idea of going back alone to the flat where Neeraj had lain dead forty-eight hours ago was unpalatable.

Inspector Raorane, his keen eyes missing nothing, played the mild-mannered cop. ‘We were in the flat for about twenty minutes, asking routine questions.' But once the formalities were over there came the pointed questions about the deep gashes on both her palms, and the bruises that had so distracted Kiran earlier when she and Emile had gone to borrow his car. Maria explained away the injuries to her hands saying they were sustained while using a grater to scrape vegetables. ‘I thought to myself, if this is what can happen cooking just one meal, how will this girl manage for the rest of her life?'

‘And these bruises?' Ghosalkar chipped in. There wasn't a hint of coyness in her response: ‘Those are love bites. My fiancé Emile was in town, and we got romantic…'

‘But you know,' Inspector Raorane said rolling his eyes, ‘we are also married people hanh!'

Something was amiss—what exactly he couldn't put a finger on—but he'd been reeled in. ‘I was hooked to the case.'

One by one, the officers of Unit IX began calling in Neeraj's friends—Nishant, Deepak Kumar, Haresh—grilling them for hours, and also trying to get a sense of Neeraj's personality. All their stories were of a piece. Police Naik Nandkumar, who was still hunting for Neeraj with Amarnath Grover, told Inspector Raorane, ‘He doesn't seem the kind of man who will just go missing. He likes his work, his girlfriends, family, and friends. He belongs too much to this world.'

Nandkumar was sharp, patient, and hard-working, and usually his observations were germane. Inspector Raorane paid heed. ‘We were working by elimination. If Neeraj was not the sort to wander off then someone else had to be involved in the case. If so who, and why? I began to concentrate on that.'

Rakesh Maria's instincts, as usual, proved razor sharp. When Neeraj's friends, frustrated by the police's inability to locate him, went to the Crime Branch boss to complain, he confidently pointed a finger at Maria Susairaj. ‘You, madam, are my suspect number one.'

‘It set them aflutter,' he recalled, smiling at the memory. He repeated his claim a few days later when Maria, this
time accompanied by Richard, met him again to ask for permission to leave Mumbai for a while. ‘Our parents were anxious back home in Mysore, and our grandfather was ailing,' recalled Richard. ‘Give us time, we told him, and we'll come back whenever you need us. But Rakesh Maria just looked at us and said there was no way he could let us leave town as Moni was his prime suspect.'

‘How can you say that? What proof do you have against me?' Maria had remonstrated. Rakesh Maria's attention, like the others before him, was arrested by the darkening bruises and gashes on her hands. ‘Get a medical done on that Susairaj girl,' he called Unit IX as soon as Maria and Richard walked out of his office. The medical reports indicated that the injuries came from a sharp object like a knife, and not the serrated surface of a vegetable grater.

Amarnath Grover, meanwhile, was becoming tired, anxious, suspicious, and very, very afraid. It had been six days since Ginni had gone missing, and the police had nothing to offer: no clue, no comfort. After some private sleuthing, he arrived at his own deductions. When Inspector Ghosalkar, befriended during the long fruitless search across Mumbai, asked if he suspected anyone of wanting to hurt Neeraj, Amarnath Grover told him of his terrible suspicions about Nishant Lal.

Neeraj was a strapping fellow and of his friends only Nishant Lal was big enough to harm him physically, he said. Also, he was disturbed by the mumbo-jumbo that Nishant had told him the previous day about a tarot card reader whom he had consulted for Neeraj's whereabouts.

‘The tarot card reader pulled out a death card and said that Neeraj was tied up somewhere and crying out for
help,' he had told Amarnath Grover. Then, seeing the old man overcome with emotion, Nishant had leaned forward and requested him to return to Kanpur. ‘The police is doing everything they can and we're here to keep a tab on them. Uncle, please go home and you can come back as soon as there is any information.'

‘I find his talk strange,' confided Amarnath Grover, his sense of reason clouded by his anxiety. ‘Neeraj is so popular with girls; perhaps Nishant is jealous of that.'

At Ghosalkar's instruction he invited Nishant Lal to Neeraj's flat at Seven Bungalows the next evening where, following a prearranged signal, a team of eight plainclothes policemen grabbed and bundled the young man into a waiting Bolero.

It was to be the only misstep in the entire investigation.

Amarnath Grover was woken up the next morning by a furious Deepak Kumar, who accused him of causing harm to Nishant when all he had done was try to be kind and helpful. The police had detained Nishant through the night, Amarnath Grover realized, with all its attendant implications. ‘I am sorry,' he told Deepak. ‘But the police asked me for suspects, and I was forced to comply.'

Nishant himself never spoke of it again, and was one of the strongest prosecution witnesses.

The morning after Inspector Raorane's visit to her flat, Maria was asked to appear at the Unit IX office in Bandra. It is a smallish space with warren-like rooms, tucked away
behind the sprawling police station on a main thoroughfare almost as an afterthought. Maria arrived at 10.30 am ‘like a star on a film set', recalled Inspector Raorane, with minders Richard and Veronica in tow. She was directed to a hard wooden bench in the corridor outside and made to wait for the next four hours.

Interrogations are at their heart about power, and the interplay between the interrogator and the interrogated. Physical intimidation is the standard tactic, and employed on poor, petty, or hardened criminals, though after the outcry raised by human rights organizations cops are more careful to camouflage their efforts. For instance, a suspect will be wrapped in a cold towel before he's caned so that there are no visible marks on his person. At other times just a few words delivered with the right amount of menace can suffice. There's the story of a famous encounter cop with a dizzying body count against his name who just had to walk in, cock an eyebrow, and ask, ‘Cooper, ya upar?' for the other person to start blabbering. (Cooper is a large municipal hospital in suburban Mumbai.)

But brute intimidation is also unsophisticated and has its limitations, forcing policemen to evolve more refined methods. When he was probing the 1993 blasts Rakesh Maria was known to offer suspects kilos of jalebi, but he'd stop his hospitality at that, refusing them even a drop of water thereafter. Try eating several jalebis without a sip of water to know what exquisite torture that is. ‘All this maar-dhaad is outdated,' Inspector Raorane told me. ‘You have to read the profile of the person you are questioning and raise yourself to that level.'