Death in Mumbai (3 page)

Nishant Lal was already bored.

After she left Café Coffee Day, Neeraj's friend ribbed him, tickled that Maria had auditioned for no less than Draupadi's role in
Mahabharat.
‘She's a modern chick. She speaks in SMSs, 120 characters and no more. Ha, ha!' And so on, the sophomoric jokes continued.

Neeraj smiled, ignoring them. ‘Hum logon ke beech mein sab kuch hota hai,' he told them as if nothing else was relevant.

Maria Susairaj had landed in Mumbai on April 29, 2008, and reconnected with Neeraj. He had organized a
couple of auditions for her and they immediately fell into a relationship, as if fast-forwarding an old spark to its logical end.

Neeraj did seem quite taken with Maria, Nishant observed. Soon after Maria's arrival in Mumbai he stopped hanging out with his friends, preferring to spend all his time with her. At night, instead of dropping her off at her choreographer friend Deepak Singh's house in Borivali he took her to his two-bedroom flat in Andheri, which he shared with his cousin and friends—Haresh, Sushant, and Sushant's wife and children.

It was well past midnight when Neeraj's roommate, Haresh Sondarva, was woken from his deep slumber. It was Neeraj, with that guilty entreaty that Haresh had come to dread.

‘Not again!'

‘Please yaar. Please, she's waiting outside.'

Without another word Haresh rolled his lean frame out of his bed. A petite girl waited in the darkened room outside. They exchanged hellos in theatrical whispers. Neeraj, after backslapping his thanks, guided her into the bedroom. After half an hour of sleeplessness and staring at the dark ceiling, Haresh plumped the pillow, tossing about like a fish thrashing on the beach, and resolved to speak to Neeraj and the others in the house the next morning.

Haresh had moved to Mumbai in October 2006 after receiving his diploma in fashion design from NIFT, Gandhinagar, and short stints in Pune and Delhi, to join
that lowest species of Mumbai's single male populace—the sub-subletter. An aspiring filmmaker had been the original tenant of the spacious two-bedroom flat at Jyoti Apartments, Seven Bungalows, Andheri. He had taken in Haresh's friend as a subletter, who in turn had invited Haresh to rent from him. A flat by the sea, he had been told. While you couldn't quite see the sea you could smell the fish, so Haresh couldn't quibble about semantics.

When Neeraj started living with them three months later, Haresh was happy, imagining that he had moved up a notch in the tenant hierarchy. Besides, he liked Neeraj. They were the two smokers in the flat, and both shared pleasant memories of haunting Delhi's Saket Market.

When Haresh's friend and the filmmaker moved out after a few months, he and Neeraj took over the lease. But Neeraj's stream of girlfriends had not gone unnoticed. There were mutterings from members of the housing society about the goings-on at A-10. That's when Sushant, an aspiring music director from Chandigarh, was roped in. Sushant's biggest qualification was that he was married. The lease was redrawn in his name, giving him automatic access to one of the two bedrooms, leaving Neeraj and Haresh to share the other.

Sushant, at thirty-five, the oldest among them by several years, brought with him the baggage of marriage and domesticity. The bare bachelors' pad was soon furnished. He bought a fridge, stocked it with juices, fruit, vegetables, and cooked food, and insisted that they all eat at least one meal together. Months later, when his wife and their two children moved in, the house lost all the vestiges of a
bachelors' pad. The morning after Haresh was rudely awoken, Sushant's wife put her foot down. ‘I don't like this girl's vibe,' she informed them.

Neeraj pleaded with his flatmates to let Maria stay on for a few days until she got her own place. ‘She has no place to go to, I am helping her find a house.' Haresh found himself caught between guilt for complaining, and embarrassment at the broadsides directed at Maria by the others—until he found an ATM slip lying on top of Maria's handbag, and against his better judgement picked it up. Her bank account showed a deposit of Rs 55,000. If she had so much money, he wondered, why did she not stay in a hotel and save herself the humiliation?

Maria's choreographer friend Deepak Singh had also taken note of the mysterious movements of his houseguest. Not because he was troubled by her—on the contrary, she had been an impeccable guest.

Other than the three or four pieces of luggage that had been neatly stacked in one room, there was little evidence of her in his apartment. He had been prepared for forced conviviality, for long, boring reminiscences about their Bangalore days, but Maria was a fleeting presence. She stayed out the entire day—house hunting, she told him—only to return in the evenings to freshen up and go out again at night.

‘Where do you go every evening?' he was curious to know.

‘To Café Coffee Day at Fun Republic with Neeraj,' she replied matter-of-factly, looking him straight in the eye. He didn't ask her about the nights, and she didn't volunteer information. He did wonder about this new man Neeraj,
and where that left her fiancé the naval officer, but once again, he restrained himself. It wasn't his place to probe. It sufficed that when he woke up in the mornings she was returning home.

With great attentiveness she would make him coffee and breakfast, and they would stand leisurely around the kitchen, yakking in Tamil instead of the Kannada they spoke with their other friends. She could be a comforting presence, and he wouldn't have minded if she were around more often, Deepak Singh thought, surprising himself.

So that evening when he bumped into an old Bangalore friend who was passing through Mumbai, Deepak decided to host an impromptu party. He also invited another old Studio 5678 mate, Kiran Shreyans. When Maria returned from house hunting he asked her to stay. ‘You go out every evening… Everyone is coming here, and we'll all be meeting after a long time. Why not stay at home tonight? Let's have a party.'

When Kiran, who now worked in Andheri as a dance instructor, walked in, he briefly lost his smile, surprised to see Maria. But the flash in his large dramatic eyes was quickly banked. When Maria had come to Mumbai in 2005 to try her luck in films, she had been friends with the curly-haired young man and his girlfriend; but Maria, whom Kiran was to later call ‘shrewd and manipulative', had created problems between the couple, leading to a bitter break-up. Kiran had not forgiven Maria for it, but for that evening the vivacity and the warmth of his other friends dispelled all unpleasantness.

Soon, the Bangalore gang was carousing happily. One of the girls sang, her beautiful voice soaring through the quiet night, with Maria's more mellow but sonorous voice joining in. They ate copious amounts of food, they laughed, sang their old favourite, ‘Moongda'. Then, drunk on spirit and happy memories, the old friends danced around Deepak's living room, crashing out in the early hours like dorm-mates, oblivious to the upheaval snaking around the corner.

Maria knew her audition for the role of Draupadi had not gone well—all those Sanskritized dialogues:
‘Upasthit samast gurujan, aaj Hastinapur mein mera apmaan hua hai. Draupadi jo Panchal naresh ki putri hai
' (Elders, teachers, Draupadi, daughter of the ruler of Panchal, has been humiliated in your august presence in Hastinapur today), etc., etc., were a mouthful. Her old friend, the actor-director Sachin Pilgaonkar, had been recommending a diction class, but Neeraj had been sanguine.

Balaji Telefilms had tied up with the now-defunct baaja.com for a talent hunt, where aspirants were invited to post their pictures on the site. Maria, who had sent in her photographs, wrote obsessively on the site enquiring after a response. But she did not hear back from them.

Later, when he joined Synergie Adlabs, Neeraj got her an audition for one of the shows Synergie was producing, but nothing came of that either. Jaldi hi something will work out, he said, stalling her persistent queries. His
promises to get her work soon were so baroque that she began to wonder if he took her seriously at all.

Another visit, this time to actress-turned-producer Aruna Irani's office, also yielded nothing. They had taken her portfolio pictures, looked at them cursorily, and then tossed them aside without even the pretence of politeness. When she told Neeraj's friend Nishant Lal about her disheartening day, he asked to see her portfolio. There were pictures of a plain girl, plainly shot, that would get her nowhere. The photographs were a stark reminder of the difference between Bangalore's fledgling glamour and Mumbai's airbrushed world.

‘Don't you have any others?'

‘None with me right now but there are some on Orkut.'

She logged in on her laptop and showed him photographs of her family, her younger sister whom she was closest to in the family, her Mysore and Bangalore friends, and some solo snapshots from her days as a Kannada film actress.

‘This one,' he tapped the monitor. It was the picture of a younger, fuller Maria, with a different, more flattering hairstyle, and an alluring smile. It hinted at a confident beauty, a far cry from the shrunken, hollow-eyed girl in front of him.

‘This is the picture you must circulate.'

Two days later Neeraj was at Café Coffee Day with the Nomads when Maria came over to their table, her angry flounce an indication of which way the conversation was
going to go. She drew Neeraj to one side to speak to him in private. Girl trouble, sniggered his friends, and when he returned to the table Neeraj looked downcast. At 11.45 pm, he called Nishant Lal, who was having dinner with his girlfriend at Zafran, a restaurant in Oshiwara, wanting to discuss the Maria problem.

‘What's the stress about?' asked Nishant.

Maria had realized that Neeraj did not have the clout to get her roles, and now she also doubted his romantic intentions. Following another altercation she had gone off to a pub, Firangi Paani, to drink by herself, expecting that Neeraj would follow. They had also bickered over his flatmates' refusal to let her stay with him. ‘We've finalized a house for her in Malad, it's a matter of a couple of days,' he said, asking Nishant if he and Maria could come over to his flat and spend a night.

Despite their disagreements, it was understood that Maria would spend the nights with Neeraj. When they came to Zafran to pick up the keys to his flat, Nishant noticed her swollen eyes and the tension sitting thickly between the young couple.

The evening was pleasant with a drowsy breeze, and when Nishant got back home the lights in the house were dim. He went to his room, leaving Neeraj and Maria alone and switched on the radio. Almost as if in keeping with the sombre mood, one of his favourite songs came on air, ‘
Raat hamari to chand ki saheli hai, kitne dinon ke baad, aayi woh akeli hai
…' (The night is a friend of the moon, but after a long while she has stepped out alone…) from the film
Parineeta
. As he sat back, a sweetly piercing voice joined in
from the other room. He had no idea Maria had such a beautiful voice. He switched off the radio and leaned against the door looking into the room where she sat with Neeraj. ‘
Andhera rootha hai, gumsum sa kone main baitha hai
…' (The darkness sulks in a corner…). She sang with great poignancy and Nishant, looking at her, her beauty protean in the lamp light, her voice deeply affecting, found himself involuntarily drawn to this slight girl. In the silence after the song ended he cleared his throat, asking for an encore.