Book review: 'Death In Mumbai'

Book: Death In Mumbai
Author: Meenal Baghel
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 161

Considered as an abstract idea, murder is like the face of a beautiful, amoral woman — endlessly fascinating. It is one of the essential ideas of civilization. Without the concept of murder, there can be no morality. A tiger doesn’t murder a deer, any more than a soldier murders an enemy combatant. For a killing to qualify as murder — culturally, if not legally (the law has its own specialised nomenclature — homicide, manslaughter, etc) — it needs the stamp of individual, human volition, which neither tiger nor soldier can claim to possess.

It is this element of human volition that gives murder its moral dimension, and society, its pretensions to civility. Without the discourse of murder, there would be nothing to back up our cherished platitudes about the value of human life, particularly in a world that is willing to offer very little in exchange to those who possess nothing else.

Thus murder has always held pride of place in that favourite activity of civilized people — story-telling. It even has a genre to itself in literature, and murder mysteries and crime thrillers have traditionally been among the largest selling book categories. Writers seeking to plumb the depths of human nature need look no further than murder. Tragedy, for Shakespeare, as it was for the Greeks, was unthinkable without a good murder. For Dostoevsky, murder was the divining rod that guided him in his search for a moral centre in Crime And Punishment.

And for Meenal Baghel, editor of the tabloid, Mumbai Mirror, the Neeraj Grover murder case is the ultimate tabloid story — it had a gruesome killing, sex, and tremendous glam quotient in the form of three beautiful, young people involved in a complex game of deceit, ambition and betrayal.

In Death In Mumbai, Baghel sets out on a two-fold endeavour: one, a narrative reconstruction of the killing and its investigation, and two, to provide an understanding of the milieu that shaped the characters and perhaps primed them to act in the ways they did. While she does a thorough job of the former, her attempt to go beyond hard facts and weave a socio-cultural web of causation around the three characters involved in the crime remains engaging without being satisfying.

Through extensive interviews with their friends and family members, Baghel does an efficient job of fleshing out the main characters: Neeraj Grover, the flirtatious, small town boy with big town dreams; Maria Monica Susairaj, the ambitious, manipulative starlet with Bollywood ambitions; Emile Jerome Mathew, the handsome, upright navy lieutenant who falls for the wrong woman; and Inspector Satish Raorane, a canny Crime Branch detective who wears down his suspect with an adroit mix of patience, intimidation and cunning.

The section titled ‘Unravelling’ offers a riveting account of how the cops cracked the case. “The perfect crime lies not in the execution, but in the cover-up,” observes Baghel. You end up wondering whether the naval officer’s militaristically efficient cover-up of the crime — cutting up the body into pieces with a bread knife, re-painting the bedroom, burning the victim’s remains at a remote picnic spot — would have succeeded if his emotionally fragile lover hadn’t betrayed him.

Baghel tries to unearth some tangential insights on her subject by interviewing people whose lives were indirectly touched by the murder case — Moon Das, a Bollywood wannabe who got an offer to play Maria’s character in a film based on the murder; Ram Gopal Varma, who actually made a film based on the murder, titled Not A Love Story; and soap queen Ekta Kapoor, who was Neeraj’s boss when he worked in Balaji Telefilms. The chapter on Moon Das, for instance, serves as a case study of the kinds of pressures and insecurities that must have plagued Maria when she landed in Mumbai, trying to make headway in the hyper-competitive entertainment industry.

Death In Mumbai alludes to, but doesn’t explore, the hollowing out of culture and prospects in small town India, which in a way sparked the migration of its brightest talent to the metros. This evisceration of small town India coincided with the liberalisation of the Indian economy, a process that gave a handful of metros a monopoly on economic opportunity, at the cost of the rest of India.
Concomitant with this hollowing out, the advent of satellite television enabled the mass dispersal (and consumption) of a deadly cocktail of consumer values and traditional stereotypes, often through serials like the ones purveyed by Kapoor and the ads that accompanied them, leading youngsters like Neeraj and Maria to entertain exalted aspirations about themselves, to think beyond their small town roots, and embark on a feverish pursuit of the good life they saw on TV, a life that only India’s dream factory Mumbai can offer.

In the words of Neeraj’s friend, Deepak Kumar, “He (Neeraj) was very clear about what he wanted —fame, money and pretty girls. Our ultimate aspiration was to be like Vijay Mallya. We wanted the yachts and the models floating around us.”

Maria, too, was in search of quick fame and glory, and Neeraj presented himself to her as someone who could make it happen for her. She comes across as possessing that special brand of manipulativeness that comes naturally to women who project vulnerability. Men who don’t like independent, aggressive women presumably find this vulnerability attractive, and Emile Jerome, in Baghel’s account, is a victim of such manipulation. And yet, Maria herself seems to have been taken for a ride by Neeraj, who was happy to partake of her physical charms without fulfilling his promise of getting her a break in television.

All said and done, in Baghel’s sympathetic yet unsparing portrait of the three characters, it is the one who, on the face of it, seems to be the most worthy of condemnation — the killer, the one still in jail — who suffers the least injury to his dignity. He was not a killer, in the sense that Maria was a manipulator or Neeraj a womaniser, and yet he killed.

At the heart of a book like this is the search for some clue in the person’s past history, that he or she would go on to kill someone, or get killed, or betray a loved one. But even if Baghel were to compile a mammoth encyclopaedia containing all the facts about every single day of Emile and Neeraj and Maria’s lives, and all the facts about every single day of the lives of every single person they ever came into contact with, we would still not be able to ‘understand’ the murder. (It is perhaps worth mentioning here that Emile was convicted only of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder” and therefore, though a murder was committed, technically, in this case there is no murderer as such.)

So how does one understand a murder? A murder is both an event (somebody gets killed) and a narration (someone kills someone, covers it up, then a cop investigates, and either catches the guilty, or fails to do so). As a narrative, a murder is an endless search for causes. Usually, the cause takes the form of a credible motive, which serves to arrest the chain of culpability at the level of the individual or a group of individuals. But to make sense of the crime in its totality, one would either have to write a philosophical tract, or a novel like Dostoevsky’s. Baghel’s ambition, understandably, is more modest. Her book is none the worse for it.