A Murder Analysed, A City Revealed

Journalist Meenal Baghel manages to make a thrilling read of one of the most over-reported crimes of our times

In Meenal Baghel’s fascinating account of a modern day murder, Death in Mumbai, there is no deep, dark secret that leads to the killing of TV executive Neeraj Grover. He is involved in a rather straightforward love triangle where the girl Maria Susairaj, a struggling Kannada actress, is trying to use him to pressure her reluctant fiancé to marry her. A TV executive on the make and former talent scout for Balaji Telefilms, Grover is living his Kanpur boy fantasy—dabbling in drugs, and peddling dreams to young starlets. Maria has just moved into a new apartment. Neeraj has helped her with the move.

In walks the jealous fiancé, Naval Lieutenant Emile, who has the advantage—and misfortune—of the body and temperament of someone whose aim in life is to become a marine commando. “Oh, so is this the fiancé?” Neeraj remarks from Maria’s bed. A knife appears out of nowhere and soon you have blood on the floor of
the new apartment. It sounds like a house move gone wrong. It’s all very logical, everyday tragic maybe, but quite ordinary.

But what about the horrendous fact that the victim’s body was hacked to pieces (and the mystery of how many pieces it was hacked into took on as much importance as the motives of the killer)? The hacking of the body is, again, merely a practical detail. If you kill somebody in a Mumbai apartment building, you can’t really throw the body out of the window, nor can you call in the municipal corporation people to help out. Cutting it into manageable bits is as logical as dissembling a double bed before moving it into a fifth floor apartment. And when Emile took a bread knife, dragged the body into the bathroom and told Maria not to come in before shutting the door, was he doing something inhuman or being a caring fiancé? 

How do you tell such a gruesome story, especially when it has been covered non-stop by TV news channels, when all the grisly details have been splashed in the newspapers? When an almost filmi cop has appeared and said the filmi thing to the girl: “You, lady, are my number one suspect.”

One way of doing it would be to stay with the story after everyone has moved on to the next promising piece of gore in the city. You could linger a little after the court hearings, take the lawyer into a corner and ask the question that nobody seems to have asked. You could go looking for the murderer’s friends, who could tell you—even if on condition of anonymity—what a champion swimmer their friend was, and what impeccable manners he had. You would take copious notes and then go looking for back stories on the dead boy, the girl who didn’t quite love him and the killer who didn’t really set out to kill. You’d pick up some local colour and then sit down and tell your story. And since your material already has too much masala in it, you would tell it simply.

Sounds straightforward enough? Maybe it isn’t.

Actually, I have no idea how Meenal Baghel manages to make such a compelling, unputdownable book out of material that essentially consists of metropolis clichés of sex, fame and struggle. Okay, it’s Mumbai, so a famous film personality is always in the next room, but such item numbers don’t really help a narrative. Like all brilliant books you can try and deconstruct it and yet fail to find that magic architecture that makes Death in Mumbai such a unique, thrilling reading experience.
One can try and guess, though.

It is not a book about how someone was killed, who killed him and why— all the bits amply covered by Mumbai’s media. The book is about how some people lived. What they lived for, how they fell in love, and how hard they fell. The book walks us through the headquarters of carnal commerce, till we reach a point where a murder becomes almost necessary so that normal life can go on. What comes after the murder—the investigation, the trial, the trauma of friends and families, the feeding frenzy in the media and film industry—is the currency of everyday life in a city like Mumbai.

After crimes like these, families of the victims, as well as those of the perpetrators, are left to play dignified extras who are expected to parade their resilience. In Death in Mumbai, the portraits of the families and towns they inhabit are drawn so vividly and with such humanity that we can see beyond their hopes and dreams, we can feel their bewilderment as their children reject the lives that they had built for themselves and move not into just another city but a parallel universe where fame is the only family they want to have. Neeraj’s father is bewildered at his son’s Rs 500 haircuts and penchant for flashy motorbikes, but his hopeless father’s love doesn’t allow him to say anything. When he compares his own life as a travelling salesman (who spent hundreds of evenings in small towns staring out the window) with his son’s, the father cannot fathom what it is that his son wanted in life.

When the murder is finally committed, Meenal holds readers by the scruff of their necks and shows them some gory details. And those details are not all about how many pieces and who wiped the blood off the floor. She takes us to the conference rooms of Balaji Telefilms, and the grim offices of Ram Gopal Varma’s production headquarters where a race is on about who can first make a film about this murder of passion. More than once, Meenal visits numerologists and palmists who work as HR advisors for Mumbai’s glamour capitalists. Even here, the supernatural is reduced to a career choice; one of the numerologists is a bored
accountant. After you have met enough of these characters, that naval lieutenant locked in a bathroom hacking away at a young boy’s body comes across as just another guy trying to survive a big city.

Meenal’s eye for ordinary detail brings this book alive. For instance, after the murder, Maria goes to Hypercity mall to buy new curtains and a bread knife, then gets into an argument at the cash counter because the guy does not have the right change. She borrows an acquaintance’s car and dumps the body at a desolate spot.

And when the police start to close in on her, what does she do? She tells her friends: “Yaar, please pray for us.” As if she is not facing murder charges but going for yet another hopeless audition for a Star TV soap. By chronicling one death, Meenal Baghel manages to illuminate the lives of multitudes that make up Mumbai.

About The Author

Mohammed Hanif