Death in Mumbai (26 page)

Maria came to Mumbai from Bangalore on April 29, nine days before Neeraj's killing. She had been in Mumbai a month ago, auditioning for a Balaji show. Neeraj Grover, whom she had befriended, had been calling her in Bangalore—television roles, he suggested, were aplenty in Mumbai, and his non-stop banter, laced with delicious double entendres, often reduced her to helpless laughter. After the last few weeks with Emile—his inability to commit, his caginess, and possessiveness—such levity must have been a relief. Neeraj also offered the comfort of the familiar: most men she dated had been from the entertainment industry. It was easy for her to slip into the insidious role-playing—looking into his eyes for that fraction longer, the hint in the smile. It may have been the same for Neeraj, phoning her several times a day, his hand on the small of her back when they met. From such gestures they manufactured intimacy.

But as her first week back in Mumbai went by, there was no word from Balaji Telefilms. The name of the actress who would play Draupadi was also soon announced. Neeraj, who she learnt had been making fun of her diction, was not the all-powerful television mandarin he made himself out to be, and she began to doubt his intentions. She had been seduced, she soon realized. Emile and Neeraj, the two men she was romantically attached to, seemed ironically to mirror their lack of commitment to her. Between them, was she going to remain unmarried, unsuccessful, and unfulfilled?

Call logs show that Emile and Maria spoke twenty-four times on May 6. Lieutenant Vasanth had said that Emile
was speaking to Maria ‘incessantly'. Emile called her at 11.31 am, 4.30 pm, then again at 6.15, 6.30, 9, 10, and 11.30 pm. Vasanth, who left the room for a party on the naval base at 7.30 pm, recalled Emile talking to Maria as he left.

‘At 10.30 when I popped into the room to drink water, I saw Emile pacing in the room, still talking to Maria on the hands-free. As soon as I returned to the room after the party at 11.15 he asked me for the keys to my bike so he could head out to the airport,' Vasanth later told the police. When he protested, Emile told him, ‘Yeh meri life ka maamla hain' (It's a matter of my life). He was trembling and distraught as he said this. ‘Earlier too Maria had pressured Emile for marriage so I said, “Speak to her again, get her to see sense,” and he said, “This time she is serious.”'

It was too late for afterthoughts, Emile added, as he had already booked his ticket. ‘She is psychologically down and I need to be there, I'll come back and face the consequences,' he said urgently. Their course mate and neighbour, Lieutenant Ajay Sham Pandey, who had been dining out in town that evening, told the police that he got a telephone call from Emile at around 9 pm asking for the PIN number to his VISA credit card. The police in their charge sheet quote Pandey as saying, ‘I said I'd give it to him but he should not write it down anywhere, and even if he did, to tear the paper right after he had used the PIN number. I did not feel the need to ask him why he needed it.' Emile used Pandey's credit card to book a seat online for the next morning's Air India Flight 691, which left Kochi for Mumbai at 3.45 am.

What is crucial is the timing of Emile's call to Pandey. He called him at about 9 pm, almost half an hour before Maria had interrupted Neeraj's dinner, insisting that he come over to her house to help her shift. Telephone records from that evening show she had called Neeraj at 9.28 pm and then again at 9.55 pm.

Had she and Emile already planned something, as the prosecution alleged, or was it, as Emile later told Vasanth, that he had to go to Mumbai because Maria had given him an ultimatum? If Emile did not make up his mind about marrying her, he would have to choose once and for all between her and his parents. Then why, when she knew that Emile would arrive the next morning, did Maria invite Neeraj over? This mystery was at the unfathomable core of the events that followed.

Maria told the police that when she spoke to Emile at around 11.30 pm on the night before Neeraj died, she had also told him that Neeraj was ‘acting funny' with her that day. ‘Emile then asked me whether he should come down and I said, no, he will be leaving after dinner.' Again, the statement did not match the facts. Emile had already booked his ticket to Mumbai by then. Was she not aware that he was coming over? And if he was ‘acting funny' why did she let Neeraj stay the night?

None of her distress was reflected in Maria's behaviour with Neeraj that night. After he reached her flat, Neeraj spoke to his mother who said he sounded his usual happy self. He also spoke to his friends Barsha and Nisha, not saying anything untoward about Maria's state of mind to either of them. In fact, he put the phone on speaker mode
and made Nisha speak to Maria, who promised to throw a party for her birthday on the 17th.

In between he had also briefly spoken to Emile who called on his number at 11.41 pm and then again at 11.55 pm. This, Emile told the police, was on account of Maria's phone battery running out.

The Air India flight was on schedule. By 6.30 am, Emile was out of the airport and on his way to Maria's home in an autorickshaw. En route he called Neeraj's phone. He did so, he told the police, because he was not sure of the way and he couldn't get through to Maria's phone. But this was not his first visit to the building. He had spent a night at Maria's neighbour Mayuri Prajapati's flat in Dheeraj Solitaire just five months ago, when he had come to see Maria off to the UK.

Was he calling to confirm his suspicions about Neeraj and Maria? Because he disbelieved her when she had told him that Neeraj would leave after dinner? When he went back to the naval base, Emile told Vasanth that he'd felt insecure about Neeraj's presence in Maria's life.

We know what happened next only through Maria's recorded confession to the magistrate, not through Emile's version of events. In her confession Maria said that her doorbell rang some minutes past seven that morning, and when she opened the door she found Emile standing there, a knapsack on his back. Without saying a word he walked straight into the bedroom where he found Neeraj fast asleep and in his underpants. When Neeraj opened his eyes he looked at Emile, and then at Maria. ‘Oh, so this is your boyfriend,' he said. Provoked, Emile began raining
blows on Neeraj. As both men grappled with each other, Maria said she tried to intervene but could control neither.

‘They pushed me, I fell down and by the time I got up I saw Emile had stabbed Neeraj with a knife he'd got from my kitchen. I tried to hold the knife and stop him and thereby sustained injuries to my palm. But Emile pushed me again, and stabbed Neeraj once more who fell down. I then saw Emile kicking him. I was screaming but Emile turned to me and shut my mouth, threatening to kill me also.'

Dheeraj Solitaire is one of those faux-modern multi-storeyed constructions that make up so much of the landscape of North Mumbai. The façade is posh, with a large lobby and elevators, but the bulk of the space is taken up for these appearances. The apartments that so fascinated Ram Gopal Varma are matchbox-sized themselves, with thin walls and grille windows, piled next to one another, offering little privacy. But Dipak Sherawat, whose flat is in the building right opposite Maria's, separated by an alley (‘We can look into their bedroom, their hall, and their kitchen') recalled waking up at his usual time of seven on the morning of May 7. He and his flatmate Divyaprakash came into the living room, where they read the newspapers till 8.30 but during this time neither man heard any screaming.

Police investigations suggested that within minutes of Emile's arrival at the flat Neeraj lay dead on the floor. His blood had turned the small bedroom into a soggy mess, soaking the couple too. Emile and Maria stared at one another and in the onrush of emotion drew close. But then Emile stepped forward and hit her, and even as the blood
around them congealed, he forced her to have sex with him. After which Maria said she went to have a bath to wash off the stains, leaving Emile in the room with Neeraj's body. But the sight of his dead adversary spreadeagled on the floor played havoc with Emile. He banged on the bathroom door, and as Maria unlatched it, he pushed his way in and they had sex again.

She called it rape. Tactical, was Rakesh Maria's verdict. ‘It was a way of cementing an unspoken deal. They were in this together now.'

For the next three hours, they washed and mopped, pulled off the mattress covers, the bedsheet, the pillowcases, the rose-coloured curtains that Maria had purchased the previous evening from Hypercity mall with her neighbour Mayuri, and which had just acquired a darker hue. Together they stripped the room of everything that showed any signs of a bloodstain. And yet, for all the care they took, they missed the outer latch of the bedroom, the specks on the television speaker, the discoloration on Maria's jeans with the label Skinny stitched on the inside.

In the midst of all this, Emile answered Vasanth's call wanting to know why he had still not spoken to their course officer. ‘Yaar, I tried, his phone was unavailable,' he fobbed off his roommate, working around the flat with military precision, already thinking ahead as he upturned Maria's suitcases on the floor.

He instructed her to go get a carving knife, a fresh set of curtains, a large duffel bag, and a room freshener as he dragged Neeraj's body into the bathroom.

But before she went out shopping Emile wanted Maria to call up one of Neeraj's friends and tell them that Neeraj
had left her house at 1.30 am and that he had forgotten his phone. ‘Tell them that they should come and get it from here at night.' Maria found Nishant Lal's number and called him.

The appropriately named Hypercity mall, with its gleaming chrome and steel walls, and young patrons—men and women fresh off some call centre shift—was fifteen minutes away from Dheeraj Solitaire. On a weekday afternoon like May 7, one could get there in under ten minutes. A police chowki fell on the way, which Maria ignored as her autorickshaw rattled past.

‘All the while I was out of the house, Emile was on the phone with me,' she told the magistrate in her confession.

Vivek Tiwari, one of the cashiers, recalled Maria coming to his kiosk at about noon that day with a double bedsheet and a comb. ‘She gave me her HSBC debit card, but as I was totalling the bill she changed her mind about buying the comb. I cancelled Rs 49, tallied her signature and asked her why there was no photograph affixed on her debit card.' He remembered looking carefully at her face before scanning the card.

Vaishali More, working on cash counter number 14 on May 7, recollects Maria for quite different reasons. Maria reached More's counter with another bill of Rs 1,776, for which she wanted to pay in cash. Was it so that there would be no account of these purchases? The bill was for a travel bag, a large bread knife, room freshener, and rose-coloured curtains identical to the ones she had bought the previous evening. She gave the cashier Rs 2,000. ‘Do you have six rupees in change? I asked her,' recalled More to
the police, ‘but she suddenly lost her cool over the nonavailability of change.'

‘What's the point of running such a large mall if you do not make small change available. I have no change, if you want to give me the money, give it, else keep it,' Maria said in a raised voice. ‘I took the money from one of my colleagues and gave it to her after which she left the mall.'

This small, irrational outburst was the only sign of strain Maria showed throughout that day. Vishal Vijay, a television actor who was an acquaintance of Neeraj's, had just finished checking his email at Cyber Masti on Malad Link Road and was going home when he spotted Maria on the other side of the road. They had met at the party at D'Ultimate. She was sitting in an autorickshaw surrounded by large Hypercity bags. ‘Hell-lo!' Maria beamed at him as they exchanged pleasantries from their respective autos. She told him she had just rented a place close by, and as the three-wheeler moved ahead, she leaned out and chimed, ‘We should meet up sometime.'

When she got home Neeraj's body was already in the bathroom. Emile had emptied her two suitcases and also lined up the large plastic bags in which she had purchased stuff for the house the previous evening. ‘Do any of your friends have a car we can borrow?' He told her he had already tried Jitesh's number but it was unavailable. Jitesh was then serving on a ship where there was no mobile network.

Maria remembered her meeting with Kiran at her choreographer friend Deepak Singh's house; he had a car. Kiran was frosty and unwilling but Maria, in desperation,
cast all dignity aside and began to plead. ‘Kiran, please please please please…'

‘Emile had in the meantime unpacked the large knife she had bought. Then he asked her to clean up the living room, and as he disappeared into the bathroom, knife in hand, he gave her the final instruction: ‘Do not come in.'

The weight of human life, prana, is said to be a mere twenty-one grams, but the human body with its joints and muscle, bone and tissue is a far hardier thing. It took Emile three hours and every ounce of his formidable strength to cut up Neeraj's body; not into three hundred pieces as was sensationally reported, but into a more scientific dismembering at the joints: the head, the torso, the elbow joints, the joints at the knees, the ankles.

After this Herculean exertion Emile and Maria cleaned themselves up and set out for Kiran's house to fetch his car just short of 4 pm. But before that Maria dropped in at Mayuri Prajapati's flat, 203-B.

The previous evening the two women had gone shopping at Hypercity where, over a sandwich in the food court, Maria had told her about her friend Neeraj Grover who was going to get her a role in a television serial. Later the same night Maria had used Mayuri's facilities for a bath, since her own bathrooms were still dirty. As she had stepped out, Neeraj whom she had called over, emerged from the lift. Maria introduced Mayuri to Neeraj, just as she later did Emile. ‘You remember him, don't you? My fiancé…' Emile had smiled shyly as Maria and Mayuri spoke briefly. Maria then told Mayuri that they were going out on a date, and the two walked away, hand in hand.