Death in Mumbai (27 page)

Unknown to Mayuri, they were back soon after from Kiran's house with his blue-grey Santro. The luggage was packed. Two suitcases and three large plastic bags which carried Neeraj, his clothes, the curtains, the mattress cover, and everything in the room that had been bloodied and was disposable. They took three turns carrying it all down, both of them holding the final bag from either side only to find the watchman Satish Kumar Singh standing by the car and looking curious. Maria was the first to recover her poise. ‘Kaise ho?' she smiled, sliding into the driver's seat as she caressed Emile's cheek, before introducing him to the security guard.

Then they drove out of the gates of Dheeraj Solitaire.

It was 6 am. Maria had been talking to the police for over three hours continuously, sparing no detail for her spellbound audience. Inspector Raorane, exhausted but exhilarated, had one concern now. They needed to recover the body. Without a body there would be no case, no conviction.

‘Maria,' he said encouragingly, ‘can you show us where you took Neeraj's body?'

She nodded tiredly.

‘Are you ready?' He wasn't just referring to the trip ahead. By now she understood him well. ‘Yes, I know the consequences are harsh.'

Half an hour later, said Richard, they left the Unit IX office at Bandra. ‘The police kept me back in the Unit IX
office saying I'd have to stay put till they all returned.' On his way, Inspector Raorane picked up Inspector Nalawade and the others from the Malad police station. Their destination was the picnic spot of Manor, 92 kilometres north of Mumbai.

While they were posted at INS Shivaji, Lonavla, Emile and his batchmates sometimes went for picnics to Bordi, a sylvan spot close to Manor. ‘That's where we will go now,' he had told Maria. But before that he had a couple of errands to run. Within minutes of their leaving Dheeraj Solitaire he made Maria pull up on Link Road, not far from the Parkar petrol pump. The attendant there, Vinod Kumar Mishra (who later identified Emile in jail), said, ‘He came to the petrol pump between 5.30 and 6 pm carrying a yellow-coloured five-litre Saffola Losorb jerry can and said his car, parked on Malad Link Road, had run out of petrol. “My wife is in the car and I really need the petrol,” he said.' When Mishra told him they were not allowed to sell loose fuel, Emile brought out his identification card. ‘I am an officer with the Indian navy and a responsible man,' he said. ‘Please help me.'

‘The ID card convinced me of his intentions and I decided to sell him petrol worth Rs 250,' said Mishra. Later, much further north, they stopped again at the paan-beedi stall of Amar Bahadur Yadav to buy a lighter. It was nearly 7 pm and twilight had fallen. ‘I remember him because I had only one lighter left in my shop which I couldn't locate and this man was getting impatient. ‘Jaldi karo,' he kept saying. Yadav eventually found the lighter and sold it to Emile for five rupees.

Beyond Borivali, the suburbs get shabbier, dirtier, the refuse of Mumbai lining their streets. The high-rises give way to unpainted three-storey dumps, and most doctors' degrees here read not MBBS, but the non-allopathic BHMS. This world is captured in beautiful detail in the urban landscapes of the artist Sudhir Patwardhan.

Unlike Oshiwara, bulldozing its way into a shinier, brassier newness, the battle with modernity seems to be lost here, except for some feeble defence provided by wayside motels—there's Hotel Haveli advertising Raw: The Disc, and Hotel Hollywood, and the Vegas Hotel. But cross the detritus of urban India at the toll naka—it was for fear of the cameras installed here which capture all passing vehicles that Maria had initially lied to the police about her and Emile travelling in a taxi—and the beauty of the landscape begins to reveal itself. All around are thickly carpeted hills, the verdure of summer, and the cool waters of the Surya river. The police team could have almost fooled themselves into believing they were headed out for a picnic.

They drove 85 kilometres straight up until the junction called Ten Naka without mishap, but as they took the right turn next to the Manor police station on the Wada-Kalyan highway, Maria seemed to lose her bearings. ‘We took a small left somewhere here.' But where, she could not locate. The police team drove down that road three times with no success. ‘We were sleepless, exhausted, and I thought she was pulling a number,' said Inspector Raorane. At one point he stopped both the cars, got down, and roared at Maria, threatening her with dire consequences. ‘But then Veronica came to me and said, “I know my sister
really well, she is not lying, she really can't remember, give her some time and she'll find the right spot,”' said Inspector Raorane.

Maria stayed put there, thought hard for a while and then asked the driver to go back to the turn from Manor police station. ‘From here drive at 60 kmph,' she instructed. After ten minutes she ordered the driver to stop. On the left was a small kachcha path going in. The paddy fields all around had been set on fire—for the next season's crop—and there, next to some bushes, under a large tree, she pointed the police team to a heap of bones which lay there, plain for anyone to see.

‘I was really surprised to see the place, it was almost as if it was there for the explicit purpose of disposing of a body,' recalled Inspector Raorane. In utter silence, broken only by the whistling sound of the truck tyres hitting macadam on the far-off highway, they looked at the half-burnt remains of Neeraj Grover. The skull lay some ten feet away from the ribcage. As they scrounged around they discovered bones, incinerated clothes, a chain with a locket, the soot and the ash.

Inspector Nalawade called Unit IX senior inspector Ashok Borkar, who in turn called Rakesh Maria to let him know that the missing boy's case had finally been solved. Within hours, a fortnight after Neeraj Grover's disappearance, the Crime Branch boss was on national television hosting a press conference and giving out the sensational details of Neeraj Grover's killing.

What did it feel like seeing Neeraj's remains, I asked Inspector Raorane. ‘Relief. I thought finally I can go back home and get some sleep.'

The team returned to Mumbai at 8 pm. Two weeks ago, Maria and Emile had returned to Mumbai from Manor at about the same time. The first thing the couple had done was stop at a mattress shop. Kamlesh Jain, proprietor of the Sunshine Foam Furnishing shop, recalled Maria coming into his shop and asking him to send two of his workers to pick up two mattresses from her flat which were in urgent need of fresh covers.

Then she called up a painter, Dhiraj Kumar Shukla, asking him to send his men to her flat the next morning as she needed to get the flat painted immediately. When the painters arrived at flat 201-B in the morning, Maria, disregarding their advice to start work first on the living room, told them to paint the bedroom. ‘And it needs to be done by today itself,' she instructed, leading them inside. Shukla said he was taken aback by the ugly blackish stains all over the wall near the bathroom. ‘What happened here?' he asked wonderingly.

‘They've been there since before we moved in,' Maria responded shortly. She gave him Rs 2,000 as an advance, insisting once again that the bedroom had to be painted in a day. But as soon as the bedroom and the passageway were painted, she called him to say she had changed her mind about the rest of the house.

As soon as Maria had finished her harrowing narration at the Unit IX office, Inspector Raorane asked Assistant Inspector Mahesh Tawade to go to Kochi to arrest Emile.
Vasanth Kumar said he had no idea anything was amiss until he went into his room after class and found Emile sitting there. He had been detained there by the naval authorities.

‘What are you doing here in the room?' Vasanth asked. ‘Yaar, it's about Maria's friend Neeraj Grover, he can't be traced and Monica is not reachable. I had gone with her to register the missing complaint, and now the police is here to take me to Mumbai and question me in that regard.'

‘That same guy who is a druggie and who sleeps around?' Vasanth now recalled Emile returning from Mumbai and telling him about Maria's missing friend. This is what Emile had told him, further perpetuating his and Maria's story about Neeraj being into drugs: ‘Neeraj had gone to her house on the 6th on the pretext of helping her but when one of his friends called him to say, “naya maal aaya hai,” he left immediately and has been missing since.'

It was only when he got a call from one of his superiors later that night asking him to separate all of his roommate's things and make an inventory of them, that the full horror of what had happened hit Vasanth. ‘Why an inventory, sir?'

‘Why? Have you not been seeing TV?'

Vasanth then switched on the television, tuning in to
Sansani
on Aaj Tak. On the same programme which had given him and Emile so many hours of amusement, he saw the report of Neeraj's death, and Rakesh Maria, with a row of cops standing proudly behind him, giving the gruesome details of the killing. On a split screen Vasanth saw Maria in a black salwar kameez, her face covered by her dupatta,
surrounded by cops, trying to evade the cameras she had so avidly sought all through her adult life.

In Kochi, the body receipt (military terminology for handing over a suspect) from the naval authorities took longer than expected. As a result Assistant Inspector Tawade and Emile missed their flight to Mumbai. All through the journey Emile maintained a stoic silence. ‘I am an officer with the Indian navy,' he kept reminding his civilian captor.

In the Crime Branch lock-up, he pleaded with Inspector Raorane to let him meet Maria ‘just once'.

‘He was sure that Maria would never, ever betray him,' said Inspector Raorane. “Whatever Monu has told you is the truth. I have nothing more to add to that,” he said.'

Unknown to him, on May 27 Maria had gone to court and recorded a detailed confession before a magistrate in which she blamed Emile for killing Neeraj, hacking up his body, disposing of it in the jungles of Manor, and of also raping her twice. This could, unlike her police confession of six days ago, be used in court.

Inspector Raorane did not tell Emile that Maria had accused him of murder and rape. Emile was to discover this several weeks later, when the charge sheet was filed. In the meantime he helped them recover the two knives with which Neeraj was stabbed, hidden in the drain of one of the bathrooms of Maria's flat, and the bread knife with which the body was cut, buried some distance away from Neeraj's remains.

Inspector Raorane later remembered meeting Emile in the sessions court as soon as the murder trial began. He walked up to him and said, ‘In life you must know whom to trust and how much.'

‘I know, sir,' Emile looked him in the eye. ‘I have learnt it the hard way.'

But the following year, on October 26, 2009, Emile and Inspector Raorane had another encounter which he reported to both Rakesh Maria and the trial court. That day Emile, evading the police constables accompanying him, walked up to the investigating officer and said, ‘Why are you pursuing this case? Am I some Chhota Rajan or Dawood Ibrahim that you need to follow up on this case so insistently?'