Death in Mumbai (7 page)

In a small town, a whisper travels further than a shout. In Mysore, rumours about Maria will not be shushed, and bear with them all the prejudices of gender, colour, and class.

But the disparagement extends to both sides. ‘I never encouraged Mysoreans,' Maria once told me, alluding to the men. ‘Their whole attitude is: “Uper se tapki hai, kha lo isse” [Women are to be plucked, like low-hanging fruit]. Any woman who goes out to work there is fair game.'

For nearly three years I had been trying to persuade Maria to do an interview for this book. While always pleasant, she never fully acquiesced until a few days before the sessions court judgment in which she would be convicted. The tension in the courtroom had been thickening over the days as Emile's and her lawyers spun their competing narratives, pitching the lovers as adversaries.

The morning that she finally agreed to speak to me, Emile's advocate Wahab Khan had made his final arguments with considerable flourish. In the sparsely attended courtroom, Wahab, a man of formidable physical heft, pulled the small tabletop lectern towards him and rested his weight on the fragile prop. Next, he pulled one foot out of his scruffy, unpolished shoes, the backs of which were bent out of shape from frequent abuse, and balanced it on the wooden chair in front of him.

Poised like a combative wrestler, he raised his voice and launched into the most compelling argument he would present as Emile Jerome's attorney. There was nothing to prove that Neeraj Grover wasn't already dead when Emile walked into his girlfriend's Mumbai flat on the morning of May 7, 2008.

‘Who lived in the flat? Maria!'

‘Who knew Neeraj Grover? Maria!'

‘Who had Neeraj last been seen with? Maria!'

His rising decibel level startled the pigeons cooing on the lintels outside the windows, and shattered the postlunch torpor of the courtroom. Special Judge and Additional Sessions Judge M.W. Chandwani widened his eyes imperceptibly. The onus was now on the prosecution, Wahab thundered, to prove that Neeraj had been alive at 7.30 am when his client entered the building.

‘They have not been able to prove any motive so far as Emile is concerned, and if there was any motive to commit murder, it was Maria who may have had one.'

At the end of proceedings that day, Maria agreed to talk. I wondered if Emile's turnaround had made her change her mind. ‘Even a monkey, when cornered, drops her baby,' she said with equanimity. ‘We're human beings. A man and a woman.'

She spoke as if delivering catechism—‘I live for today; tomorrow if I don't wake up forgive me for my sins'; ‘Never act in life in such a manner that you leave no room for second chances.' Later, going through my notes, I realized she hadn't been speaking so much as reviewing her life.

Vanity and affability have long been twin features of Maria's persona. An old boyfriend, Pavan Kumar, described her as kind and caring, and excellent with children. Like some of Maria's other boyfriends he is also tall, with a dancer's athleticism. It was through Pavan that she met the choreographer Deepak Singh, in whose flat she stayed in Mumbai, and Kiran Shreyans, whose car she borrowed. ‘She could be a doll. While we were in a relationship, she would often sing for me—in those moments I felt something like love for her,' said Pavan. The two met in 2004, two years after
Jhooth
was released, when she came to Studio 5678—the dance training centre he ran in Bangalore—wanting to learn salsa. She was working on a music video for a private album of her songs and was in a hurry to learn the dance, insisting on private tuitions.

Her debut film had failed, but the currency of its songs gave her enough recognition for Pavan to offer to train her himself. ‘She was a good-looking girl—graceful—she dressed up really well and she stood out in class. What people could learn in three–four months, she learnt within a month. Before long, we were in a relationship.'

They were together for a year during which time Pavan came to believe that she had rebounded into their relationship after breaking up with another choreographer from the Kannada film industry who had abused her. Though physically intimate, Pavan found it difficult to connect with Maria emotionally. ‘She was a bright girl who only liked to talk about herself. She liked herself very much and spent a lot of time in front of the mirror.'

There's the hint of iron filings in his hair and stubble, and he speaks with a candour borne of confidence, but the
thirty-six-year-old recalled a younger, more uncertain self when Maria's mercurial temperament had him at odds. ‘She would be quite romantic with me in the evening but if I brought it up the next morning, she would grow cold, saying, “I don't want to hear anything about that”.' He was hurt by her refusal to publicly acknowledge him as her boyfriend. He was introduced to her family—she took him home to Mysore for Christmas, and would also take him along to auditions and business meetings, ‘But if anyone asked whether we were seeing each other, she always said, “No”.'

‘Monica never liked being part of a group. I, on the other hand, liked to hang out with my friends. She'd join us but contribute little to the conversation.' Even when she was alone with Pavan, Maria liked her space. ‘Though we were going steady, she didn't want us to be together at all times. “I just wanted you in my bed,” she told him once. But [she] then immediately held my hand, and said she'd been joking.' What Pavan found most difficult to accept was her secrecy. ‘Often she'd go out but refuse to tell me where she was going or who she was meeting.' She was playing an unfair game, he felt, where only she knew the rules.

In the absence of a strong emotional connection, sex became a tool to navigate the relationship, and with it came the attendant urge to inflict cruelty on one another. ‘There was a girl in the class I ran at Indira Nagar who was attracted to me, and I casually went out with her a couple of times. This made Monica jealous and she immediately got back at me by flirting outrageously with my friends.' Remarkably open about her past relationships, she would
tease him with details he had no wish to hear. ‘She had no regrets about any of them, saying it just happened. I'd often tell her, “Leave it, Monica, I don't want to hear any of this,” but she would just laugh.'

Exhausted by these skirmishes, the couple began to drift apart. When a year later, in 2005, Maria announced that she wanted to move to Mumbai to pursue a career in Bollywood, Pavan did not ask her to stay. By this time two of her other films,
Excuse Me
and
OK, Sir, OK
, released in 2003 and 2004, had also failed, and she had begun doing item numbers. ‘I thought she had a better chance of succeeding in Bangalore than in Mumbai, where the girls are better and the competition far tougher, but I chose not to say this to her.'

Instead, playing the solicitous boyfriend, Pavan called up his old friends from Studio 5678, Deepak and Kiran, who had since shifted to Mumbai, and asked them to help her find her feet in the city.

These days Maria's maternal grandfather Philomen Raj is rarely seen around Bannimantap, the posh enclave in Mysore that he helped build. Neighbours say old age and ill health keep him inside his sprawling corner bungalow, but his presence can still be felt in town. Aside from the buildings he has constructed, most of his nine children still live in the vicinity—his corporator son Santunesan's house with his red-beacon cars is right next door, and Maria's parents live across the road.

Philomen Raj had migrated from Pondicherry to Mysore in the 1950s to tap into the first boom of nation-building, and set up his own construction firm soon after he arrived. Some years later he was joined by his wife's impoverished cousin Joseph Susairaj, Maria's father, who came from Bangalore to improve his circumstances and support his five siblings. Though Joseph started as a mere writer—industry jargon for accountant—their partnership prospered, and so did the company. Raj Constructions soon became one of the leading building firms in southern Karnataka and it seemed logical to Philomen Raj to deepen his relationship with Joseph. Unlike in north India, where it would be considered incestuous, the alliance between maternal uncle and niece is seen as most auspicious in Tamil culture. The niece is ‘mora ponnu', literally translated as ‘my girl'.

So Joseph married his cousin's daughter Nirmala in 1976, but just two years later he fell out with Philomen Raj and broke rank with his father-in-law to set up his own company. There is no evidence of subsequent acrimony, but when Hindu–Muslim riots broke out in Mysore in 1986, Joseph Susairaj had wanted his immediate family to leave Bannimantap, and stayed on only at his wife's insistence.

‘While we were growing up, Father constantly shuttled between Mysore and Bangalore, working terribly hard to establish the business,' Maria's older brother Richard told me. At thirty-one, he was the eldest of Joseph Susairaj's three children, followed two years apart by Maria Monica and Maria Veronica, or Moni and Roni as the sisters were called. Richard, who is petite like his sisters, sketches a
picture of an idyllic childhood spent with a large extended family. ‘Several of my aunts are nearly of our age so we were a large group, often going to Ooty for family picnics, and to the church every Sunday.'

Although Joseph Susairaj was often out of town on business, he compensated for his absence by indulging his children. ‘Everything we wanted, we got.' Except there would be no wriggling out of catechism class. Already religious, Joseph's belief grew as his new company earned a slew of contracts from churches and other Christian institutions. Though himself a Roman Catholic, his clients cut across denominations. ‘We've built for Jesuits, Protestants, Anglicans, CSI Dioceses, as also secular institutions like the National Aerospace Laboratories,' Richard said. His wife and his mother Nirmala also run a primary school in Mysore, St Peter's Educational Institution. The emphasis on religiosity was extraordinary, he explained, smiling wryly, his cognac-coloured eyes—remarkably like Maria's—softening at the memory. ‘Our parents were very strict about Sunday Mass, special religious classes, and everyday evening prayers. In each and every walk of life we were made to know our limits.'

While Richard pursued a diploma in civil engineering before joining his father's firm, and Veronica a master's in computer science, Maria Monica was the artist of the family, and in turn was entitled to the licence that comes with being one. Time with her father may have been at a premium but Maria grew up to be a daddy's girl. ‘She talked a lot about him coming up in life the hard way, often saying, “I really love my father, if it weren't for him
we would not have this life”,' Geeta Narayana, a neighbour who grew up next door to Maria told me. When Geeta's father, Mysore's acclaimed inlay-work artist P. Gorraiya, visited the family after Maria's arrest, he found Joseph distraught. ‘Susairaj just kept weeping and saying he wished he were dead. He always completely supported Monica in whatever she had wanted to do; he wished for all his children to become self-sufficient.'

‘When we were growing up Monica would be always busy. Arangetram, singing, correspondence courses, modelling for jewellery showrooms, belly dancing, it was always something or the other,' Geeta recalled. That, and Geeta's own preoccupations prevented them from being close. This strain comes up in all interviews about Maria—she was friendly but had few friends, and most attribute this to her secretive nature. ‘Even my parents would knock on my door before entering my room, but that's the respect they afforded us children,' she said once. Her closest confidante remained her sister Veronica. ‘In the time I was with her I didn't meet a single of Monica's friends,' Pavan recalled. ‘Which was a bit strange because most people have a best friend, but she told me she liked to be alone.'

Only Richard hints at a contrary impulse. ‘Moni was an outspoken girl, very free with her expression.' It is something he said several times during our conversation, at one point almost with wonder—perhaps grappling to better understand his own sister and later events, especially in the two weeks between Neeraj's disappearance and her arrest, when the police hounded them every day. And yet despite
all his protests, Maria had been secretive with Richard too. Her brother admitted that throughout the ordeal she had kept the family in the dark about Neeraj's death.