Notion

Press
Old No. 38, New No. 6
McNichols Road, Chetpet
Chennai - 600 031

First Published by Notion Press 2017

Copyright © Sanghamitra Sharma 2017
All Rights Reserved.

ISBN 978-1-946515-06-3
This book has been published with all reasonable efforts taken to make the
material error-free after the consent of the author. No part of this book shall be
used, reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the
author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and
reviews.
The Author of this book is solely responsible and liable for its content including
but not limited to the views, representations, descriptions, statements,
information, opinions and references [“Content”]. The Content of this book shall
not constitute or be construed or deemed to reflect the opinion or expression of
the Publisher or Editor. Neither the Publisher nor Editor endorse or approve the
Content of this book or guarantee the reliability, accuracy or completeness of the
Content published herein and do not make any representations or warranties of
any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties
of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose. The Publisher and Editor
shall not be liable whatsoever for any errors, omissions, whether such errors or
omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause or claims for loss
or damages of any kind, including without limitation, indirect or consequential
loss or damage arising out of use, inability to use, or about the reliability,
accuracy or sufficiency of the information contained in this book.
 Dedication
To Arvind, Ishita and Jonathan, Akshay and Cristina - the best fan club any
author can have
 Prologue

T he bulldozer was moving with a roar, tearing down the walls of the old
bungalow, the last death throes of the already decrepit place, the painted
walls crumbling, the wood rotting, the weed-overgrown garden. The November
weather was perfect, the kind that overtakes Mumbai after Diwali, with warm,
dry days and beginning-to-be-cool nights. The only things that grew here were
the grass and flowers like innoxa and convolvulus that rampaged across the
garden. It was known as the Maheshwari Manor, although the Maheshwaris had
not lived here in a while.
The bulldozer started on the manor’s garden on the third day, the huge claws
digging in to the red Konkan earth and tossing aside in minutes a lifetime’s
worth of nature’s work. Finishing his tea break, the driver started the engine
again, the roaring and clattering filling everything around it.
A few miles away, a man waited to hear that a secret that he had buried
twenty-five years ago, and should never have been found, was out in the open.
He had tried so hard to stop the property from slipping out of the family hands,
but they had run out of energy and cash at around the same time and so the
inevitable happened. The assets were divided and Maheshwari Manor slipped
out of his control. The cousin who got the property got an offer from a builder
group that no one in his right mind could refuse. With developers rooting around
the property, he knew that the secret would come out sooner or later; it was only
a matter of time…
PART 1
 Chapter 1

I t was serendipity, thought Darius Mody, as he walked up to his office. My

inheriting Mody Manzil and meeting Mr. Kapoor; and even better meeting
Kavita. It was the second Friday of the month and he walked up to his office
with a spring in his step. They hadn’t handled a murder investigation as yet so he
couldn’t take a shot at being Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes, but Kavita and
he were beginning to have a lot of fun. In the privacy of his office he
occasionally twirled a non-existent moustache or started a ‘My dear Watson…’
speech to a non-existent audience, just in case…
The building did not look as decrepit as when he had first seen it, but it still
needed some major work done and right now he just didn’t have that kind of
spare cash lying around. He blessed his aunts every time he walked in and then
irritably wished they had left him more money to maintain the damn thing. It had
been cleaned and painted – Kavita, his partner and Valerie, his secretary, had
insisted on it. A pair of good bathrooms had been installed in his office. The
building had a new lift, but now he realized that he needed a long-term tenant
with deep pockets to help him keep the place going.
When he and his partner had started out they had a vision for what working
life was going to be like, but within a very short time it had completely
overwhelmed them. The timing of their entry into this world couldn’t have been
better. The detective business in India was fast turning into a multi-million dollar
business and they had come in when the ride was just beginning. What
astonished both of them was the range of their activities. Private intelligence
covered everything from corporate fraud and CV verification; tracking down
vanishing defaulters to digging up unpleasant truths about prospective A-level to
C-level hires; investigating godowns that mysteriously caught fire to ensuring
that company offices, particularly those belonging to senior executives, were not
bugged. Ditto for the boardrooms where they met.
Investigating cyber crime was the newest kid on the block. The coyly named
‘individual investigations practice’ which translated meant snooping on cheating
husbands and straying wives, was an older and nastier business but a real
money-spinner. Pre-marital verification was an even more lucrative one. Darius
and Kavita’s outfit was just one of over 700 outfits operating in India, many of
them mom and pop operations with the owner doubling up as a detective,
accountant and office boy. All you needed was street smarts, an office – not a
must but it did help to have a place to put your feet up occasionally – and a
painted signboard. Technology was helping the game; smartphones, the net,
good hackers, and people who could be persuaded to use very sophisticated
equipment to copy and photograph whatever you need. But in the end, whatever
the means used, you needed patience, persistence, networking, total discretion,
and a lot of hard work to thrive in this business.
Darius came in this Friday morning feeling good. The first week of the month
had been a good one. Two cheques in the mail from suspicious wives with their
worst fears confirmed, a deal with an investment bank that wanted to vet its
employees quietly and regularly, which meant good and regular earnings. On the
office front too, things had improved. Valerie, his secretary, was finally over her
heartbreak at the end of a two-year relationship, and he had been forgiven for his
unsympathetic suggestion that using Feviqwik might help. This had not gone
down well with her, and the atmosphere for a few weeks had been definitely
hostile. But to everybody’s relief things were back to normal. Valerie had been
with him for a long time, had migrated from his law office with him, was used to
his various eccentricities and put up with his occasionally tactless comments.
They both tolerated each other for a good working relationship. Besides, she had
one quality that was worth whatever her salary cost him and whatever her latest
heartbreak cost in terms of atmospherics - when it came to collecting payments
from his clients, she was persistent, ruthless and absolutely shameless. He had
had the best bill collection rate when he had been a lawyer and hopefully she
would make sure that that record continued unsullied.
So here he was on this pleasantly warm December morning, walking up old
wooden stairs to his spacious, not too tidy office on the second floor, knowing
that Valerie would have his tea and her scowl all ready for him to start his day.
The entrance to Mody Manzil was between a watch repairer and a pirated
DVD seller. One went through a small aperture; you could hardly call it a door,
into the building. The railings of polished wood held up the stairs, the stairs were
of unpolished teakwood, sagging in the middle, hollowed by years of use, and
the exquisite old mahogany banisters had been polished to a sheen with
generations of hands trailing on them.
He put his head around the door to check if Kavita Tandon, his partner, was in.
She was and was looking at the paperwork on her desk with an even bigger
scowl than Valerie’s. He grinned and decided he’d leave her to sort it out while
he reluctantly tackled his own collection. Lunch found them both sharing
sandwiches and soup in the tiny little room next to Valerie’s that they fancifully
called their conference room. In fact it had also become their de facto dining
room, as both disliked the smell of food in their respective rooms.
Kavita and he had always argued about who would play the second fiddle role
of ‘my dear Hastings’ or ‘my dear Watson’ when a murder case came their way,
the problem being that neither of them wanted to. This conversation was shelved
for good on this particular Friday when Darius got a call from his old law firm.
Mr. Hemant Dalvi, one of the best-known corporate lawyers in the city was on
the line, requesting a meeting. Darius was surprised – Mr. Dalvi had not been
happy about Darius’s decision to leave the firm and ‘go detecting’ as he had
called it. He thought Darius’s move had been impulsive and ill thought out and
quite unbecoming for a man of his education and stature. Curious to know what
Dalvi would have to say to a man that he had castigated as a fool, he set the
appointment for 4pm at his office. Dalvi immediately agreed.
He looked around his office and felt good. All the four rooms were scrubbed,
cleaned and painted. He had enough old furniture to fill the rooms and make a
nice showing; good paintings and prints on the wall; all his old law books in
their beige, red and gold binding filling one wall; and an exceedingly attractive
sparring and working partner with him, something that had seemed an outside
chance not too long ago. While he waited for Hemant Dalvi to arrive he looked
back on the start of this chapter in his life.
As his partner remembered it, their first meeting had not started auspiciously.
It was a rainy day in June of 2011. The damned taxi she had gotten into was the
most decrepit, dingy piece of wheels one could see on the road and of course it
was the only one free. She remembered cursing those big-mouthed politicians
who were going to turn Mumbai into a world-class city. It defied the imagination
because they couldn’t even ensure that the city had a halfway decent taxi service.
Kavita had been running against a tight schedule that whole week and was
feeling out-of-sorts and cranky as she settled into the flea-bitten interior of the
taxi and prepared herself for a rough day. The sales figures for the week had
gone south, the sales managers’ blood pressure was going north, and as far as she
was concerned she had stopped caring how much soap they sold. You should
care, said her inner voice. It pays your salary, gives you your bonus, enables nice
holidays on the beach. This is what she had planned, right? Good college – LSR,
Delhi; even better MBA – IIM Calcutta; much coveted job in much admired
MNC. Except that she was bored as hell.
This had started very shortly after she had reached Mumbai. Kavita figured it
was the city itself that set everyone’s dream machine cranking. Suddenly you
found yourself questioning what you were doing, and all kinds of life choices
that you had discarded along the way or not even thought about turned up again
like proverbial bad pennies. Should she jump on to a ship, and take off for Rio or
Freetown or Tahiti or wherever? It sounded so alluring except that she would be
travelling with just herself and so it would be stasis even in Paradise.
She reached the office thirty minutes late with so much of an atmosphere
around her that you could cut the tension with a knife.
Their legal firm had sent across a Darius Mody to represent them in the
meeting. He was tall, good-looking, and looked both very bored and slightly
distracted; this last irritated her because he was extremely expensive – came by
the hour, actually- and he obviously had his mind on something other than his
client’s problems. He needed reminding that she represented a very important
client who paid his fees and the firm’s retainer without making too much of a
noise. Kavita felt that she and her team deserved his undivided attention.
Unbeknownst to her, Kavita was doing him an injustice. From his college
years, Darius had perfected the art of doing what needed to be done in the
present while thinking of other more pleasurable activities he had in mind for the
near future. He was listening to their problem while simultaneously attempting
to untie a particular Gordian knot that had landed in his lap.
This particular Gordian knot was in the shape of an old dilapidated building
his two aunts were kind enough to leave him, one dying off very shortly after the
other. It was in a little lane leading off from D. N. Road; convenient but decrepit
(like his aunts) and desperately in need of repairs, plumbing, painting - in fact all
the things that add up to a big, fat bill.
He had checked out the building the first chance he had got. Everybody knew
he was the new owner and he was just waiting for them to start lining up outside
the office and start talking about repairs and painting. Surprisingly, nothing of
the sort happened. He guessed that they were trying to decide whether this
younger Parsi was going to spend one rupee more than he needed to. After all he
was Alo and Nazreen Mody’s nephew, right? And the only answer they had ever
got from those two was a clear ‘no.’
The property had been full of little cubbyholes of offices with frosted glass
doors and ostentatious brass doorplates; and over everything there was a
pervasive smell of damp, with whiffs of perfume, after-shave, tea and pohe.
Darius loved it - this smell of a Mumbai office replicated in hundreds of
decaying buildings across the city. Everyone laughed at him and called him a
crazy bawa. He couldn’t care less. All his tenants were gone; the last tenant
hanging on in the second floor; but even he had recognized that Darius was not
planning to do anything with the building. Darius hadn’t the faintest idea what to
do with his inheritance but he cherished the idea of owning this old mansion, in
the city that he loved.
So that is why Kavita had thought he was not paying attention. He had sat in
the meeting with a parallel conversation going on in his head.
I need to do something different, he thought. Something like his tenant on the
second floor was doing. It was an interesting thought – his tenant wanted to
move out but wanted to sell his private investigation practice as a going
concern, not close it down. Darius was tempted to make the old man an offer.
What a change that would be, Darius mused.
This was his Maharashtrian mother coming out in him. She had been daring
enough to abandon her conservative Saraswat Brahmin background to marry
Darius’s father all those years ago, and boy, what a dust up there had been. She
had ignored all the noise and they had a very happy forty odd years together.
What the hell will I do with owning a detective agency? Run it, said the
rebellious Imp inside his head; sure beats the hell out of sorting out boring
company messes like this one.
He knew why he had been getting the blues so regularly. Lawyering was
becoming tedious. He enjoyed it and the money that went with it. His father had
also been a lawyer, albeit a company one, and he was following in his footsteps
to the approval of all. But how could he tell anyone that his soul hankered to do
something completely different; possibly outrageous but nonetheless something
truly of his own choosing.
If he was going to do anything different he needed to do it now.
Think about what everyone will think, said the other sensible voice in his head.
There goes that crazy bawa who goes around snooping. And think of it, his
father Homi was such a nice man and such a nice gentleman, even if he married
Prabha who was not Parsi at all but nonetheless came from a distinguished legal
and Brahmin background and so that was all right. A proper Parsi for all that;
liked his food, liked his drink, and worked with the Tatas for 35 years!
What the hell do you know about running a detective agency? Said Mr.
Sensible inside his head.
No damn different than tracking down all the bits and pieces of paper and
people for the cases you handle, said the Imp inside his head.
Nobody who is anybody is a detective, said Mr. Sensible.
There is always a first time, said the Imp. You can always ask that nice looking
chick across the table to join you. She looks pretty bored too. Besides, said the
Imp, haven’t you noticed? Fraud and murder seems to be very much in fashion
nowadays. And the police are so busy lining the roads and saluting the idiots we
vote into power, that even if they want to they have no time to catch thieves and
solve murders.
Boy, you have really lost it haven’t you? And what do you intend to live on?
Asked Mr. Sensible.
Got enough to survive a year or two. It’s not like I’m a Scotch and gold
cufflinks kind of guy, am I? Old Monk rum is what I go for and that’s good
enough for me.
All those years spent in Law College and for what? To run around and pick up
cigarette butts, is it? Jeered Mr. Sensible.
At which point the legal beagle for the company entered the conference room
and the duet going on in his head had to be put on mute. But Darius couldn’t
help but notice that the good-looking chick was quite a smasher actually, did
look very bored, and if he had got the reading right, was ready for a change.
Changes yes but a drastic one like joining a detective agency? And how would
her family react? For that matter, what will my family say? Families, especially
those attached to eligible good-looking females do not like their girls joining
unknown lawyers in unfashionable jobs. It’s not enough for her to want the
change. She needs to want to do this with me. She needs to enjoy questioning
and verifying and doubting. She should enjoy getting her hands dirty; dealing
with cops, shady lawyers, unhelpful or totally uncooperative witnesses. What the
hell am I thinking? She is not going to join me. She is just looking for another
job in the MNC sector.
Darius was right in that Kavita was bored and ripe for change and no she
certainly did not have detection on her mind. She had started sending out feelers
to other MNC’s and the speed and enthusiasm with which they had responded
was embarrassing. She had just wanted to test the waters, not get drenched. It
was comforting though to know that if she needed to change her job it would not
be a problem. But the feeling persisted that she needed to do something
different; something not so ‘nice and proper’; something that took her
completely out of her comfort zone, something that would be unaffected by
interest rates and economic cycles, and would have a very high fun potential.
Join a friend’s start-up? Open a theme bar? Produce a movie? Join a TV
channel? Commit a crime? As all these alternatives popped into her head one by
one, she grinned, thinking of her family’s faces if she told them she was going to
do any of them. Absolute darlings, of course, but definitely on the straight and
narrow where life choices were concerned.
 Chapter 2

N ow she sat in her spacious office adjacent to Darius’s and remembered

those turbulent few months before she took the plunge, joined him and
gave in to what her family called ‘total madness.’ At the time, she had been
aware that her boss had unceremoniously dumped a mess in her lap. She figured
she had to sit down with that good-looking supercilious, bored looking lawyer
and figure out a less time-consuming and painful way to close the whole thing
down. Admittedly the product had left the factory flawed – the staff led by the
union leader refused to accept their responsibility, but it was true – and no one
had the patience nor frankly the energy to deal with it; ergo make it go away.
What was needed was a legal ‘hide and show’ so that everyone could walk away
without egg on their face. Instinct told her Darius Mody could not only be a legal
combatant, but when required a facilitator and peacemaker. He had a reputation
for understanding ground realities, and leveraging them for satisfactory
conclusions. She’d sit down with him and see if her assessment was right. She
picked up the phone and made an appointment with him for Wednesday morning
at her Saki Naka office.
While all this was happening her conversation with herself had continued. I
am twenty-seven years old and I trained for this, she thought, but I am four years
in the business and I am already bored. Selling soap does not inspire me or
motivate me to get up and hit the ground running six days a week. She reviewed
her choices, all negative – did not want to get married; did not want to sell soap
or diapers or cornflakes or whatever; certainly did not want to study anything
anymore; and did not want to leave Mumbai and go back to Delhi. Boy, that’s a
lot of nos. I had better find a ‘yes’ or I am in deep trouble. Kavita was aware that
she didn’t have too many days left to figure out this life-changing question.
Devang Suri, her sales director, wanted her to take over a larger area. The
rewards of success, thought Kavita, sell more soap or whatever. But I can’t do it
anymore- I need to get out.
Her meeting with Darius went well. She had judged him correctly; a
pragmatist with enough curiosity to get to the bottom of things without shouting
from the rooftops about what he had found until he had figured out the
consequences of shouting. In short a great investigator. She liked him. Shrewd,
well informed, a good lawyer with enough of the Parsi zaniness that shows up in
the best of them and that makes them such fun to be with and easy to work with.
They drifted into an easy uncomplicated work relationship with just enough
edges in it for both of them to not take each other for granted or get bored with
each other.
In the first week of July, after one of their meetings, he had shared with her the
problems of his inheritance. Curious, she went across with him to look at the
rickety structure. Like all the old buildings in Mumbai it was big, and musty and
desperately needed a good scrub and a lavish coat of paint. Just like the city,
thought Kavita. But it was straight out of a more gracious era in Mumbai’s life.
The ceilings were nice and high, the rooms – though broken up into mingy little
cabins and partitions – large and spacious, the wood was old Burma teak and
mahogany. Unfortunately there was no parking; the bathrooms were a horror;
and its ageing exterior desperately needed a lift.
She fell in love with it on sight.
She also met the tenant on the second floor; the only one left. Mr. Kapoor was
a very courteous gentleman, almost as decrepit and old as the building itself, but
nonetheless full of vim and vigour; a man who wanted to sell his detective
agency as a going concern, to someone who would really look after what he had
created, not cut and run at the first obstacle when things got rough. The business
was growing at a tremendous pace capable of providing not only bread and
butter but also a lot of jam.
He eagerly showed his financials to them. They were a huge surprise and bore
out what he had been claiming. Started in 1985, the profits had come in at a
steady 10 percent; then in 1993 he got a chance to take on some corporate
‘vetting’ of senior executives due for promotions and his profits jumped. A few
years later this was followed with the real icing on the cake – keeping eyes on
the competition for big industrial houses. His reward since then had been
exponential growth and a clear 25 percent profit year on year.
And then there was the ‘personal investigation’ business, which basically
meant suspicious men and women and their even more suspicious families
snooping on each other. He admitted, very disapprovingly, that this lack of trust
between couples - engaged, married or just together for the time - generated
tremendous earnings for him and his industry. Unfortunately, all this did not
always result in happy endings. Ugly break-ups and even uglier divorces were
the result, but then what do you expect?, he said. In our day we took our
marriage vows seriously and didn’t make a fuss over every little thing, he said,
looking like a very wise eighty-two year old gnome. Kavita thought he was a bit
of a darling. He had a different set of people to handle this practice, which also
included locating and following suspects in various types of ‘personal’ crimes,
tracing missing people and checking property and land papers.
Mr. Kapoor was willing to work with the new owner and make sure that all
these lucrative contracts continued. He had more staff that sat in a different
office near Victoria Terminus, renamed Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus, one of
Mumbai’s two main train terminuses. His main office was in Mody Manzil. He
had started here and the place had brought him nothing but good luck and
prosperity.
Darius was definitely intrigued; Kavita was just surprised that a business that
she mentally couldn’t take seriously was making the kind of money it was. A
few days after this encounter, one of the leading business papers had a cover
story on the private intelligence business. The article guesstimated, as there were
no hard figures, that this industry was worth well over 1500 crores and growing
at a real clip. Interestingly, the article also mentioned how the successful
companies were offering extensions that the Big Four consulting firms were also
offering; what were called ‘forensic services’ provided by teams of forensic
accountants, cyber forensic specialists, former law enforcement officials and
lawyers. These teams used the latest technology to detect fraud, get business
intelligence on partners before mergers, acquisitions and investments took place;
and of course, provide information on senior hires and company executives.
Kavita remembered Mr. Kapoor pointing out how this was becoming the bread
and butter of corporate investigations, like divorces were in personal
investigations. So Darius was not being foolish, she thought. He is probably
getting in on the ground floor of a business that is just beginning to boom. Well,
she had figured him for a very smart guy.
In the midst of all this, she got a distress call from a friend who was planning a
start-up in the product design space. She was in crisis - the family friend who
was supposed to be her backer had suddenly turned very inaccessible now that
talks had reached the ‘you will have to put this much down to start with and
accordingly this will be your share in the company’ bit. Curious and not really
believing anything would come of it, she persuaded her friend to hire Mr.
Kapoor’s detective agency to find out what was going on. The results were
astonishing, to say the least. It seems that the family friend had filed for divorce
and his wife who had seemed the long-suffering, accepting kind had turned
nasty, and got herself a very aggressive lawyer. Now he found himself facing a
very long-drawn out and costly battle. Over the course of their marriage, he had
put some property in his wife’s name and had given her shares in his companies,
which she now had no intention of giving back. Mr. Kapoor warned them that
this man was in an emotional and legal quagmire and advised Kavita’s friend to
look for other sources of funding or go back into the job market. Events
confirmed the accuracy of Mr. Kapoor’s report. Kavita was impressed in spite of
herself.
It was the last Saturday in September and the debate over her job change plans
was over, although she hadn’t shared her plans just yet. Darius and Kavita had
just finished with another long and frustrating meeting trying to negotiate
through the company mess when Darius invited her to lunch at Willingdon Club.
He told her that he had decided to abandon his legal life, take over Mr. Kapoor’s
business, rename it and run it. The business was sound and profitable and he had
had just about enough of legal wrangles and hair splitting to last a lifetime. If
required, he could always add a legal division to the various services being
offered by the company. That way he would stay in touch with the legal world
and could go back there if this venture failed. All that it would need of him was
to swallow his pride.
Would she like to join and partner with him in his madness? He needed a
partner and knew that she would make an ideal one. In all these months of
interaction they had found that they made a good team, functioning well
together. They both were ‘doers’; and enthusiastic, persistent, patient when
required, though she was less so. He had an eye for detail, she for the bigger
picture. He was networked into the government, police and legal world. She had
contacts across corporations and banks. The money would be his, though they
would be equal partners. Kavita had already made up her mind to join him and
would have asked him if he would like to have her as a partner, if he had not
asked her first.
Of course this decision had been preceded by many conversations with herself,
which tended to be acrimonious and included terms like ‘cop-out’ ‘wasting all
that money spent on me’ and ‘looking for thrills when you should be checking
out ground realities.’ But they also included terms like ‘great business
opportunity,’ ‘financials for this business from all sources look good’ and ‘what
the hell, if you are not going to try something new and take risks at 27 when the
hell are you going to do it? You own your own flat; you’re a workaholic and
almost never take holidays; you have a nice bank balance, and you are in good
health and great shape. And since when have you ever bothered about what
friends, family and peers say!’ Life is an adventure and it doesn’t hurt to take the
unplanned twists and have some fun along the way.
‘Sad to say, I can’t promise you’ll get to hide behind trees – they are a
vanishing commodity anyway – or lurk in doorways. But it will be such fun.
Looking for clues and hidden meanings and ugly motives and delving into the
dark side of human nature. You have seen enough of it when navigating the
shoals of company life. And who knows, we might even get to solve a few
murders.’
‘We can’t go wrong. Look at the headlines every morning- fraud, robbery,
kidnapping, extortion, murders. The unending parade of humans at their worst.
And the law of diminishing returns certainly does not apply here. Crime is
having a great season and is expected to have a steady upward rate of growth.’
She smiled at him. ‘I agree. Let’s do this. But there is one caveat – I must
invest in the partnership too.’ They argued back and forth on that point but she
finally overruled him.
With that out of the way, things moved rapidly. By Dec 1st 2011 both had quit
their eminently respectable jobs and were ensconced in their new office ready
and eagerly waiting for all kinds of new undertakings and exploits. After intense
discussion and debate, and with Val coming on board with some startling
suggestions of her own, they decided to abandon the previous name and call it
Mody & Tandon Investigations– MTI for short. What Darius had really wanted
to call it was Peephole Inc. and Kavita wanted to call it Inquisitive Ltd or Baker
Street the 2nd (in memory of Sherlock Holmes) but they realized that their bread
and butter would be their corporate investigation business, and corporations
were notoriously resistant to anything that could be perceived as frivolous. So
MTI it was.
They were in business.
 Chapter 3

H emant Dalvi arrived at their office at exactly 4pm. Trust the old man to be
punctual; they used to set the clock by him in Darius’s old office. Dalvi was
clearly surprised by the spaciousness of the office, and obviously bowled over by
Kavita. When he heard that Kavita was an MBA who had previously been at a
well-known MNC and had actually left her job to join Darius in this madness, he
looked slightly bewildered. Darius and Kavita chuckled over that moment later.
His expression was a mirror image of the one that had been on all of their
friends’ and relatives’ faces when they had learnt of this venture.
After a few preliminaries he got down to the matter that had brought him to
their office and unfolded an interesting tale to Kavita and Darius.
‘Years ago, when I was just a struggling lawyer two cases came to me at the
same time, although I did not know then that they were interlinked.’
‘The first one was from Rajesh Kapadia, a friend from Law College days, who
had joined one of the big industrial families as one their legal advisors. I still
remember how embarrassed Rajesh was when he came to meet me; he felt that
he had been sent on an errand that was more suitable for a ‘gofer’ than for a
lawyer.’
‘It seems that one of the sons of the family had got entangled with what the
father called the ‘wrong’ type of woman. Given that this was a Marwari business
family, any woman who was not a Marwari and who was not bringing in a fat
dowry and a few factories or companies with her would be seen as the wrong
type of woman. So the field was a very wide one. Rajesh was unwilling to tell
me anything more than the barest details, not even which son it was. He had
been instructed by the father to get me to draw up an agreement so water tight
that, once paid off, the woman in question would not be able to ask for another
rupee. The names would be filled in when the agreement was signed.’
Hemant smiled shyly and continued, ‘Even then I had a reputation for drawing
detailed and meticulous agreements. Rajesh was hazy on the timing of this deal
but he assured me that it would be within a week; I was to expect him with the
said girl in my office.’
 ‘That week passed’ continued Hemant, ‘and then a few more. Rajesh rang me
up and said the woman had left Bombay and gone back to her hometown. My
cheque was in the mail; and rather hesitantly, he requested that I keep quiet about
the whole matter.’
‘That must have irked you.’ Darius turned to Kavita, ‘Hemant has always had
the reputation for being one of the most tight-lipped lawyers in town.’
“I was amused and affronted in equal measure. “I rang off and made no
attempt to get in touch with Rajesh again.
About a week after this conversation, my clerk said that there was a lady
outside; a Mrs. Kashyap, who insisted that she meet me. Giving in, I told my
clerk to let her in to my room.
She was a lady– well dressed, obviously educated– but in great distress as her
daughter Manorama had been missing for over a month. That was how I found
out her daughter’s name. She said that she had come to me because she thought
that I was the lawyer who was pressuring her daughter to break off her
relationship with this Marwari boy she was seeing. She also did not approve of
this liaison but her daughter claimed she was in love with this guy and was
convinced that he was going to marry her. She had left her hostel in Colaba
about a month back saying that she was going to meet a friend. It seemed that
that was the last time anyone had seen her. She wanted me to find her daughter
and refused to listen to me when I told her that I did not find people. She was
certain I knew where her daughter was, and it took a lot of persuasion on my part
before she realized that I was speaking the truth.’
Hemant paused and sipped his tea and praised the cookies but they both knew
that he was back in the past, recalling these events.
‘She was in deep distress, you know. It really bothered me, so I made calls to
all the police officers I knew. I know that they did all they could, but they had
very little to go on. And it was made even more difficult for them because it
seemed she had vanished into thin air. No body-alive or dead. Heartbroken, Mrs.
Kashyap returned to her family home in Dehradun and I have not heard from her
again.’
‘What did you think had happened? You must have had some idea, some
opinion.’
 ‘It does not matter what I thought Darius, or what opinion I had. The point
was that her daughter was missing and there was no way to find out what had
happened to her.’
‘Anyway, to continue the tale - a week ago, I got a call out of the blue from the
same Rajesh, twenty-five years later, asking for my legal and police expertise.
The family, like a lot of business families, had broken apart and as part of the
agreed disbursal of the goodies a huge bungalow in Versova had fallen into the
hands of a cousin. This cousin promptly decided to go into the developer
business with this property as his first asset. He got an offer from a builder that
he could not refuse. Between them they got the necessary permissions and they
brought a bulldozer in to level the ground and tear down the bungalow.’
Hemant looked out of the windows for a moment and then continued. ‘When
the bulldozer was going through the property, it unearthed a skeleton in the
garden. This was a month ago…’
‘Oh I read about that’ interrupted Kavita, ‘that bungalow out in Versova,
right?’
‘Yes, that’s the one’ sighed Hemant, ‘The skeleton was found in remnants of a
fraying churidar kurta with bangles on her hand, and a purse lying next to her
which contained among other things some keys, cash, odds and ends and a badly
damaged college ID. The remains were taken to the crime lab for investigation
and DNA testing, but after so many years everyone thought it was a forlorn hope
that they would be able to identify the body. More than two decades of decay
would have ruined most of the material that could be tested and the forensic
markers would have been hopelessly compromised at the scene with the
workmen shifting the body and disturbing the part of the ground where she had
been so secretively buried. Nonetheless, the present Joint Commisioner of
Police, Crime Branch who had worked on the case of her disappearance as a
young sub-inspector went out on a limb and made an educated guess that this
was the missing Manorama Kashyap. The police department had to clean the
bangles, what was left of the purse, and the college ID, before a team of two
travelled to Dehradun to show them to Mrs. Kashyap. That’s where she lives.
They didn’t immediately tell her in what circumstances these items had been
found as they felt that could come later, but of course she immediately knew that
her daughter’s body had been found somewhere and the knowledge, even if it
just confirmed what she had believed, must have been devastating.’
He paused and they could see how distressed he was.
‘It must have been so very hard on her, seeing what they had taken to her for
identification. She has confirmed that the bangles and whatever was left of the
purse and the college ID were Manorama’s, and gave them her blood for the
Crime Lab to compare the DNA. The confirmation has come in. The body found
in the ground was Manorama Kashyap.’
‘You always thought that she was murdered, didn’t you?,’ guessed Darius. It
went against Hemant’s ingrained sense of discretion to make allegations without
any proof, but in this case he agreed with Darius, ‘Yes, I have always thought so.
It was just too pat, her disappearing like that all those years ago. If she had been
alive, she would certainly have gone back to her mother in Dehradun. I don’t
know if I thought one of them had got rid of her’ - he still couldn’t bring himself
to use the word ‘killed’ – ‘but daughters don’t disappear, particularly those from
good families - unless they are dead.’
Kavita was thinking- if even today, in 2012- people can kill young lovers in
the name of caste and community and gain, can you imagine what it was like in
1987?
‘So who are these people?’ asked Kavita.
Hemant was quiet for a while and then said quietly, ‘The family is the
Maheshwaris. They want me to investigate the case through my own sources,
separate from the police investigation. According to Rajeshbhai this request
came from the old man himself, Ramnath Maheshwari. I don’t think he wants
anything investigated and he is pretty clear this has nothing to do with his family
but he is under emotional pressure from someone in the family. I think it is his
daughter-in-law Anjali. She is very worried about her father who is in poor
health and is fretting about all this. The family is in a state of shock and wants
some quick answers.
I guess that’s why I was called in. A suspicion of unproved murder could have
huge repercussions for them. I think Shishir, the younger son, is planning a foray
into politics and I know political parties don’t give a damn about this type of
thing but Mumbai voters do.’
‘Why MTI?,’ asked Kavita. Hemant answered. ‘Honestly, I’m not sure. I gave
them a few options and they chose you.’ He continued. ‘Regardless, I am glad. I
know you Darius, although the Maheshwari’s don’t. You can’t be led or bullied
and once you get your teeth into something...’
Grinning at him, Darius told him he’d need names, phone numbers and a
briefing on the cast of characters.
‘This is not one of your plays in the NCPA, Darius.’
‘That’s where you are absolutely wrong. It is one – it may be badly written,
and the ending is not quite the one planned by the murderer, but it’s a story that
must be unravelled and then closed,’ said Darius, looking very cheerful. ‘Come
on Hemant, there’s a reason why you are glad the case has come to me. I’m
irreverent, perpetually asking questions and never let go till I get to the bottom
of anything, like the obstinate bawa terrier that I am.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Hemant, ‘that’s what I am banking on. You’ll have the list
of interested parties by tomorrow morning.’
Kavita interrupted him. ‘Mr. Dalvi you do realize that they are not going to
take well to being questioned and doubted. These guys have political
connections… their egos are even larger than their bank accounts and they have
a networked way of life that insulates them from all the consequences of their
misdeeds.’
Darius also had not finished with Hemant as yet. ‘Yes, we need to talk to the
Maheshwaris. Oh, we can look this way and that and run around the mulberry
bush but the reality is that a body is found hidden on a property that belonged to
them. It is that of a girl who was involved with one of the sons and who has been
missing an equal number of years. And no, in this case I don’t think the butler, or
shall we say the watchman, did it. Family fallouts and divisions of property were
not part of the foreseeable future all those years back. She was murdered and
buried in a piece of ground that the murderer thought would never be disturbed.
We will need to talk to the family
But first, about the question of fees?’
At which point poor Hemant Dalvi had another shock before he rallied to
settle down to a spot of bargaining. He made a valiant effort but his heart was
not in it; his mind was asking very uncomfortable questions and Darius was able
to pin him down to a good fee, part of it payable in advance.
 ‘I will give you all the information on who the key players are, but I can’t tell
you much more than that. It is best that you interview the Maheshwaris, assess
them, and draw your own conclusions. As a lawyer I have condoned many
things that my clients have done but I definitely draw the line at murder. That’s
why I never went into criminal law. I would like to look Mrs. Kashyap in the eye
and tell her the truth of what happened twenty-five years ago.’ This was such an
unexpectedly emotional speech from Hemant that even Darius was silenced.
Not for long, though. On Hemant’s departure, Valerie came in to find her two
bosses doing an impromptu jig in the office. She retired quickly, figuring that her
bosses needed to dance off their temporary fit of insanity.
Darius and Kavita came back down to earth pretty fast. It is one thing to talk
of investigating a murder but quite another to be suddenly handed a sensational
case involving the rich and powerful, who carelessly precipitate crimes and
disasters and then think they can watch the consequences from far away, sitting
on a terrace.
‘Okay, how do we go about it?’ asked Darius, ‘certainly not by sitting on the
terrace.’
‘We are not rich enough, idiot’ said Kavita.
Hunting a murderer was a new one for them but they had no doubts in their
minds that they would deal with this as efficiently as they were doing everything
else. It was an old murder. The methods of a CSI episode, as glamourized by
countless TV shows, would not work here. They both knew this case would be
solved by knowledge of the characters and the events around them. Darius also
knew, all too well, that they had to get people to talk. The only question was how
you made them do it. Some were amenable to alcohol; others liked being in the
spotlight; and most just responded whenever they were in close proximity to
another human being. There were very few exceptions to this rule.
‘Tell you what, let’s go and share a good lunch tomorrow with Vasu in Mahesh
Lunch Home.’ Mahesh Lunch Home in Kala Ghoda, of Mangalorean origin, was
one of Mumbai’s most famous seafood restaurants, like the equally famous
Trishna, which was also in the same area. For both Darius and Vasu the two
restaurants being so close to Mody Manzil was an added bonus. Darius was a
Parsi and therefore a dedicated foodie. To him if both his intellectual curiosity
and his internal hunger pangs could be satisfied together then that was the best
place to be. For both him and Vasu the two needs were so intertwined that they
were always meeting and working at all the eating joints in the city. Mahesh
Lunch Home was a particular favourite with both of them and since Kavita had
entered their lives she too was developing a taste for various foods far removed
from her usual Delhi-type cuisine.
Deputy Commissioner of Police Vasant Kulkarni, Detection1, Crime Branch,
had been promoted recently and was one of the youngest officers for his rank in
the force. Versova would be in Unit 9 of the west zone section under his charge
along with other units from North and East Mumbai. He was an old friend of
Darius’s from the days when he was a junior lawyer and had needed to get the
help of the police in serving notices and warrants and summons. When you have
successfully negotiated the lower rungs of the career totem pole together, have
had each other’s back on innumerable occasions and as a bonus are driven by the
same motivations, then you are bonded for life. Make no mistake; in spite of the
ridiculous portrayal of the police that Bollywood persists in dishing out, and the
failures that the media insists on highlighting with great glee, a lot of crimes do
get solved without the fanfare that all the botched messes get. Vasu and Darius
were in complete agreement with Kavita when she claimed that India had
become addicted to screaming about deficiencies and things going wrong. Quiet
competence and success without noise was not success at all and not worthy of
emulation. And of course nobody had any solutions to offer. As some silly
cricket commentators insisted on saying, when the cricket team played and won
without a nail biting finish, their performance was ‘clinical.’ Idiots, the word
they were looking for was ‘professional.’
Darius, Kavita and Vasu met the next day and by silent agreement stayed off
the topic of the murder till a great lunch was out of the way. Vasant didn’t want
to bring his file with him but surprisingly he did say that even all those years ago
the police had had grave doubts about Manorama’s disappearance. Regrettably
they did not have a shred of proof to back them and so had to let the matter drop.
Also hampering any attempt at an investigation was the fact that the whole affair
had been conducted as stealthily as possible and therefore other than some of the
key players nobody knew anything about what was going on. But in the present
context, he did warn them that there was going to be a political angle and
therefore a lot of pressure on the whole investigation. The Maheshwaris had
powerful connections, but having backed the wrong horse in the last election,
this mess would pose a few problems for Ramnath Maheshwari and his sons.
The cousin who had inherited the Versova bungalow where the body was found
was on the right side of the political divide at this particular moment. But as
Vasant cynically pointed out, there are no permanent allies in the political world,
just convenient bedfellows and permanent states of exploitation.
He promised both of them that he would let them know if there were any
further developments in the case and that he would let them have a copy of the
post mortem and forensic report. In the meantime Darius and Kavita could
indulge in some preliminary skirmishes with the main characters in the drama.
 Chapter 4

H e stood in the balcony of his flat that Monday morning in December and
looked out at the sea. No answers there for my problems, Avinash thought
angrily. In fact, he figured his problems were beyond any solution. He knew his
wife Anjali was watching him from inside the bedroom, out of the corner of her
eye, pretending to tidy up the cupboard when in fact she was desperate to ask
questions- driven by both rage and fear. But the habit of Marwari women of
keeping quiet and staying in the background was so ingrained that her control
stayed in place. Avinash knew it would not be that way for long.
He was steeling himself to go to the office, getting past the speculative looks
and the whispers in the corridors and the corner offices. He was aware that the
information that the skeleton in the bungalow was Manorama’s had leaked out.
The newspapers and TV channels were all running the story that one of the
Maheshwaris had been involved with her and were implying that they almost
certainly had something to do with her murder.
How had they got a hold of this story? He had been successful in banishing all
thoughts about Manorama and those heady days with her in 1986 and ‘87 before
it had all gone horribly wrong. They had been so happy; and she was right when
she had told her mother that he had been desperate to marry her. But nothing had
worked out the way he had planned and in the end he had lost her and the life
that he had wanted. And now this?
A huge upsurge of rage and grief rose in him; for Manorama who had just
disappeared out his life; for the jettisoning of whatever dreams he had had of a
life together; for all the years he had forced himself not to think of her and
therefore added another betrayal to her short life.
He had gone into the family business as soon as he had graduated. There
didn’t seem anything else to do. The rest of the year after she had inexplicably
disappeared had passed in a daze. Did his father have anything to do with her
disappearance? He thought about how ruthless his old man could be in business
affairs and wondered at his own naiveté in not realizing that it could be
applicable to all aspects of his life. Once that insidious thought entered his mind
like a snake slithering into the house, he just could not get rid of it. God, what’s
wrong with me; I am actually speculating on whether my father was responsible
for Manno’s death.
But could I have done anything different? I let family considerations over-run
my life. I blamed Manorama for so many things when in fact it was I, only I,
who created the whole damned mess.
He came in to the bedroom, picked up his wallet and mobile, his briefcase
from his study and went down to the waiting car without exchanging a word
with his wife. She watched him go and realized with an ache in her heart that
now their marriage had become a threesome – her husband, herself and a ghost
from the past.
Another apartment, another balcony overlooking the sea. Shishir was smoking
a cigarette and remembering Manorama. Surprisingly, he did think of her from
time to time, even after all these years. He had never shared his feelings about
her with anyone, but in fact he had been as crazy about her as his brother. He’d
never quite forgiven his brother for taking her away from him although, in all
fairness, Avinash had not really done that. It was Manno who had fallen for Avi
almost at first sight. There still was the occasional morning when he’d wake,
remembering her. Then he’d remember the last day he had seen her and the
anger would return. Is it that you will never let me go or is it that I don’t want
you to? You messed with my heart in life then and you are doing the same in
death now. This is a damned cliché – the accusatory skeletal fingers from the
past seeking what - justice, maybe revenge? I should be sick with worry,
overwhelmed with remorse at the way your life ended and instead of that what
do I do? Remember how desirable you were, how much I wanted you, how
much of a challenge you came to represent, one I finally couldn’t overcome.
Why the hell did I walk away? At least I wouldn’t have spent all these years
remembering you with that twist of the heart that comes every time I hear the
name Manorama mentioned. He sat in the car on the way to office and gave
himself over completely to memories of the past and of the last day he had seen
her.
Ramnath Maheshwari was at the beginning of a week that he knew was going
to get progressively worse. Though how it could get worse than the news of the
last few weeks he didn’t know. A dead body on my property! And as it turned
out to be Manorama’s, a very bad situation was just going to get a whole lot
worse. But the real question that kept running through his mind was a
frightening one – ‘I had asked her to be paid off, not killed. And if she had to be
dumped in a hole, why, oh why, on my place?’
He knew he had to speak to his sons sooner rather than later. Putting off this
conversation would just make matters worse. We have had too much silence on
too many subjects through the years. He had presumed their guarded answers
and controlled silences arose from obedience and respect but lately it had begun
to dawn on him that their behavior arose from anger and dislike. And the only
way they could keep the lid on their anger was to stick to the formalities that the
relationship demanded. He went through the mechanics of the day but as he sat
in the car on the way to office, his mind was like a squirrel in a cage – running
round and round so fast that his tail was almost in his mouth.
Rajesh Kapadia, lawyer to the Maheshwaris, was sitting in his Nariman Point
office early that same Monday morning and thinking of his grandmother. He was
amused – he could not but remember all the clichés she would trot out on all
occasions, appropriate or not. But certainly one of her most oft-repeated ones
was about reaping what you sow and about lies coming back to bite you. He
wished she was alive so that he could talk to her in person. He had scoffed at her
when he was young. Go ahead, she would say, you will see that I am right. You
were totally right Dadi, and yes, that day has come. So go ahead and have a good
laugh at me, wherever you are. You have every right to do so.
I was supposed to be among the ones with the most common sense in law
college. When the Maheshwaris picked me to work for them it was considered a
very smart thing to do. A sinecure for life. Smart Rajesh! O yeah! About as
smart as the village idiot. He remembered his conversations with Hemant; the
ones many years ago and the one recently and flinched inwardly. I don’t want to
know what he thinks of me. He thought of all the choices he could have made –
why this one? A college friend who had gone on to become a star litigation
performer had told him once, looking at him sadly, ‘Safety, that’s what you are
looking for Rajesh! But remember, working for these families always has a
price. You will not only lie for them you may have to die for them.’ They had
both been discussing a notorious case that year when a lawyer for a family firm
had taken on the burden of his employer’s bastard child and had eventually
jumped to his death from his Marine Drive flat. Everyone had known who had
fathered the kid – everyone but the lawyer’s wife. When she had found out she
had escaped the mess and scandal by shutting herself up in an ashram. She never
emerged from her self-imposed seclusion, not even for her children’s weddings
or the birth of her grandchildren. One man’s choice to bear another man’s burden
and jump to escape it had devastated so many lives.
Rajesh thought of his life entwined with the Maheshwaris. There had been
good years but once that damned girl disappeared, it seemed a deep malaise had
entered the family. Instead of being the solution, it seemed she had left a
problem that no one talked about but of which everyone was deeply aware. He
stared unseeingly at his teak bookcases filled with law books, at the large picture
windows that defined his corner office, the view of the sea, the southern tip of
Malabar Hill and the Governor’s mansion, and felt totally miserable. ‘Could I
have done something different?’ he asked himself. ‘How sure was I that what I
was doing was the right thing? How could I have been so presumptuous as to
rush in to rearrange another person’s life? And at whose behest – that of an old
man who was protecting his moneybags, nothing else. At that time, protecting
Avinash from a mis-alliance had been the only thing. But now he was haunted by
the thought of Manorama lying in the ground rotting away while all the people
who had known her, whose lives she had touched, had gone on living theirs. She
should have got to live out her life like the rest of them.
Rajesh sat looking out of the windows, brooding over the events of November
’87.and answered the voice of his long dead grandmother in his head – yes you
are right Dadi, there is a price to pay. And it is a very heavy one…
 Chapter 5

T he Monday after Hemant’s briefing Darius and Kavita planned out their
interviews with the Maheshwaris.
‘The Maheshwaris are going to be hostile and uncooperative. You up for it?’
he asked her.
‘Of course. Everyone has a weak spot- we just need to find it in each of them
and exploit it.’
‘There speaks the hard-nosed MNC brand manager trained to sell ‘soap to a
guy living in the middle of the Sahara’ said an admiring Darius, tilting back
dangerously while contemplating the ceiling. Still speaking to the ceiling he
asked her, ‘Any ideas on how to go about it?’
‘Yep – you be the smiler with the knife and I’ll be the brash Punjaban asking
all the awkward questions.’
‘Sounds good to me.’
Darius suddenly straightened himself up and looked at her, thinking my
Punjaban is looking damned attractive today, should I tell her that and risk
getting my ankles kicked or hold my peace? He opted for the latter – theirs was a
quirky but zestful relationship, and he had not the slightest intention of bringing
any awkwardness into it. Professionally it was beginning to work out beautifully.
They decided they would start with the father who had called them in to clear
the matter up. Darius asked Valerie to set up the meeting and it was very clear
from Valerie’s responses that the telephone conversation was not going well. She
flounced into the room in a bad mood.
‘Who does she think she is’ she sniffed.
‘Who?’
‘That secretary of Ramnath Maheshwari, that’s who. Here you are trying to
help him out of the mess he and his family have made and she’s trying to play
catch –me –if-you-can. I gave her a piece of my mind.’
Darius and Kavita both flinched. Valerie giving anyone a piece of her mind
was a force of nature to behold. Darius attempted to explain to her that letting
people ‘have it’ was not considered a best business practice. She ignored him
and informed them that Ramnath Maheshwari would see them at his Fort office
at 5:30pm the next day.
5:30pm on Tuesday the 18th found them at Maheshwari House. Going by the
covert glances and sidelong looks they received as they walked through the
office they guessed that everyone was fully aware of who they were and what
they were doing there. The old adage still held true; good news travels fast but
bad news travels at the speed of light. They were first taken to Rajesh Kapadia’s
office – he had two – one at Nariman Point and one here at Maheshwari House
three doors down from Ramnath. They had never met him and both wanted to
get an idea of what terrain they would be navigating. The first impression that
they got was that he was a deeply worried and tired man. Prepared to dislike him
just based on the impression they had got from the Hemant Dalvi narrative, they
actually felt rather sorry for him. He was polite and patient in answering their
questions on all the Maheshwaris they would be interviewing. They discovered
that a couple of cousins and Avinash’s brother-in-law Ajay Kanoria were also
involved in the business and would have to be added to the interview list.
‘Should be classified as incest, if you ask me.’ Kavita muttered under her
breath. Plunging into her brash punjaban role straightaway, she asked Rajesh
whether he had known Manorama. ‘I just met her once to convey the family
wishes.’
‘Ah so you were Ramnath Maheshwari’s hatchet man!’
Flushing with anger, Rajesh informed them that it was a matter of some
delicacy and therefore could not be handed over to anyone to handle. ‘Yes,
buying someone off is always a matter of delicacy,’ said Kavita.
‘It wasn’t like that. Please don’t treat Mr. Maheshwari in the way you are
talking to me.’ Rajesh said sharply.
‘So what was it like?,’ said Darius quietly, ‘Listen to me. This is about murder,
and that too of a young girl. I suggest everyone in the Maheshwari clan answer
all our questions, whether they seem acceptable or offensive. The sooner we find
the truth the sooner we’ll be out of your hair and all the ugly talk will die down.’
Rajesh looked really annoyed for a moment until he got himself back under
control. ‘The ugly talk doesn’t matter. It will die down.’
Darius smiled sarcastically.
‘You think so? People will want answers so know that you won’t be able to
sweep this under the rug.’ Rajesh looked at them with anger and resentment, as
though they had brought the safe Maheshwari world crashing down. Finally with
an inward sigh of resignation he got up, spoke on the intercom and escorted
them to Ramnath Maheshwari’s room.
When they talked about the case later, when everything was done and dusted,
they agreed that their meeting with Ramnath Maheshwari was quite a surprise.
He was certainly not the clichéd Marwari businessman. He was tall, dressed in
an impeccably tailored suit that had Darius instantly envious, had a deep and
commanding voice. All this did not disguise the inherent ruthlessness of the
man. Kavita liked him for that. She had met too many deviously ambitious men
not to like the directness of the man. And another thought occurred to her – this
was not a man to cross unless you had a lot of firepower in your bag. She could
understand why Rajesh Kapadia had done what he had been asked to do in spite
of any reservations he would have had. Ramnath Maheshwari’s personality so
overshadowed his surroundings that Kavita, who always noticed interiors, could
never recall what his room looked like. Large, she remembered, and with a
subdued sense of grandeur about it. Very impressive, just like the man it
belonged to.
Kavita sensed he did not like her being there, and decided to plunge into
questioning straightaway.
‘You wanted us here, Mr. Maheshwari. Why?’ An intimidating look from
Ramnath, a flinch from Rajesh.
‘There is a lot of nonsense being talked about the skeleton of the girl found in
Maheshwari Manor. I want you to prove that the murder of that girl, can’t
remember her name, the one my son was involved with, has nothing to do with
us’ He exploded, ‘How dare they suggest that any of my sons had murdered her?
We don’t do such things and I want you to prove it to the world.’
Darius laughed, ‘Mr. Maheshwari, you know and I know that that is not why
we have been called in. Now that the bones have tumbled out, you want to know
who put her there. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Confirmation has come in that
these are Manorama Kashyap’s bones. Yes, you do know her name and you
know very well that one of your sons was in the same class as her, and the other
one knew her and was involved with her. You were the one who gave the
directive for her to be paid off; the property was very much yours at the time of
her disappearance. If you want the matter hushed up you have come knocking at
the wrong door. If you want to know what really happened all those years ago
then you have found the right people. We will go where the evidence leads us,
not stories and suppositions and theories. There will be no leaks from our office
and us to the press or anybody else – I can’t control your end. We will involve
the police because you can’t solve any case without them; and in the end we will
give you the answers we find. Whether they are the ones you want to hear, now
that is a different matter.’
A grim silence overloaded with unexpressed feelings fell on the room. Both
Darius and Kavita sat tensely waiting for his reaction until Ramnath eased back
in his chair, looked bleakly resigned and said, ‘Alright, ask away.’ The mood in
the room was instantly different.
Kavita felt this was her cue to start the ball rolling. ‘Why did you want
Manorama out of your son’s life? Bad influence? Bringing no money to the
family? Or just fury at the fact that your son had dared to go outside your
control?’ Another moment of silence and then he started talking, perhaps
relieved at sharing the feelings from that time. ‘No, Ms. Tandon, she was not a
bad influence. However, I certainly thought that she was in it for the money. But
you are right on the other two counts. The Maheshwari businesses were
expanding at a great pace in those days and I needed both my sons in the
business. If Avinash had married Manorama, as I believe he wanted to, he would
have moved away sooner or later. And about the money, you are right on that
count too. I was buying out some companies and needed strong alliances.
Marriage between Marwari business families gives us that. Not very admirable
from your point of view but that’s the way it was and is.’
‘Thank you Mr. Maheshwari. I appreciate your honesty.’
‘Tell me, Mr. Maheshwari, what exactly had you instructed Rajesh to do in
dealing with her.’ Rajesh answered this question. ‘Mr. Maheshwari had asked me
to explain to her that this marriage would not work and that he was willing to
give her a substantial amount to resettle in some other place like Delhi.’
 ‘And she agreed to this?’ asked Darius.
Rajesh replied ‘I only met her just that once. She left the meeting extremely
upset and she did not turn up for the second meeting. I just presumed she was so
upset or furious about the matter that she had left Mumbai, and that the matter
was closed.’ Rajesh flushed as he said this; even after so many years he was
acutely embarrassed about the matter.
‘And you never bothered to find out why she never turned up for the second
meeting?’
‘It has always worried me, Mr. Mody. I didn’t know how to find out her
whereabouts. I obviously couldn’t ask Avinash or Shishir and I didn’t want any
speculation around my enquiries.’
There was a brief silence in the room while both Darius and Kavita considered
his answer. Uncharitably, they decided he was just putting an acceptable face on
what was really his total lack of courage and initiative. They continued the
interview.
‘And you, Mr. Maheshwari? Had you ever met her?,’ continued Darius. ‘No,
but she had been pointed out to me.’ Darius raised his eyebrows in a question.
‘At a wedding of some friend’s daughter.’ ‘Who pointed her out to you?’ Mr.
Maheshwari answered reluctantly, ‘Ajay.’ ‘Ajay who?’ Darius persisted. It came
out in a rush, ‘Ajay Kanoria. Avinash, my elder son married his sister later.’
‘There, that was not difficult, was it?’ Darius smiled, ‘So a lot of people knew
about this relationship, isn’t it? Family, lawyers, your son’s friends. Interesting.’
He did not elaborate any further on it.
‘Tell me, you both had met her? What was she like? To look at I mean?’ asked
Kavita. A tiny silence and then reluctantly from both Ramnath and Rajesh in a
few words ‘Beautiful. And vivacious,’ and grudgingly from Ramnath, ‘I can
understand why my sons fell for her.’ ‘Sons?’ Both of them said it
simultaneously. And again stiffly from Ramnath ‘I believe she was in Shishir’s
class and they both went round together before she took up with Avinash.’
Darius and Kavita had the same thought simultaneously – dumps one, takes up
with the other brother. Murder has been done for much less. She asked if they
had a photograph; both said no and added that they would have to ask Avinash or
Shishir.
 Kavita turned to Rajesh and requested interviews with both of them –
preferably the next day, certainly as soon as possible. They thanked both
Ramnath Maheshwari and Rajesh Kapadia for their time and left, watched by
two anxious pairs of eyes.
 Chapter 6

U nusually, there was total silence in the car when they finished the interview
and were going back to their office. Kavita looked abstracted and Darius
had on what she called his ‘broody hen’ look. When they reached their office
they moved to the small room they rather grandly called their conference room.
Kavita called for marker pens, two fresh legal pads and a large carafe of black
coffee. This had become a tradition with them – each case was constantly
accompanied by these sessions in the conference room. Darius suddenly perked
up and looked much more cheerful. They compared notes of what each had
taken out of the interviews with Ramnath and Rajesh and agreed that one,
Ramnath was either guilty of the murder or thought that one of his two sons had
committed it; two, Rajesh, ditto, and guilty or not was desperately ashamed of
his role in the whole chain of circumstances; and third, the murderer was
definitely within the Maheshwari circle of family and friends. No mysterious
strangers were to play their part in this story.
‘So whom are you betting on – the dad, the two brothers, the family lawyer or
an unknown joker in the pack?’ he asked. ‘Don’t know’ said Kavita, ‘but this is
going to get crummier as it goes on and all the secrets start tumbling out of the
closet. The headlines will be straight out of a lurid bestseller – ugly secrets and
uglier deeds. There is one thing that is worth noting here. You noticed that the
whole family is operating on the presumption that one of them definitely has
something to do with Manorama’s death? There was a very feeble attempt to
pass the buck on to a conveniently ‘passing stranger’ but his heart was not in it.
The tension is coming from the fact that they are looking at each other out of the
corner of their eyes and trying to figure out who among them dunnit.’
‘I agree. Something is definitely not right – Ramnath is desperately worried
that one of his sons committed the murder and so is Rajesh. For him it is worse;
if he is not the murderer, and we will see how that goes, then he has to face the
fact that a member of the family he has served for almost three decades is a
murderer. But it is interesting, isn’t it, that there are more people involved in this
than we thought. She dated Shishir before Avinash and Avinash’s future brother-
in-law definitely knew her.’
 Kavita – ‘Why murder? The really rich know how to protect their investments
and sons are their biggest investments. There is a Standard Operating Procedure
for dealing with unwanted entrants to the inner circle. This sounds to me like
something personal.’
Darius agreed. ‘We will need a lot of one-on-ones with all the people involved.
I sense a lot of secrets. They may not be all about the murder but there was stuff
going on that we need to know about.’
‘It’s going to be difficult, you know. This is and was a closed circle and even if
they don’t like each other they will have each other’s back,’ pointed out Kavita.
‘Maybe, but like a festering wound, once the pus starts flowing out, you can’t
stop it – it might even be a kind of relief.’ said Darius.
‘For Rajesh, maybe. Even if he is the murderer and he gets found out. I think
this whole issue has really bothered him and things coming out in the open will
bring some kind of relief to him. He is probably the only one who will welcome
closure. The rest I am doubtful. They have a lot to lose. And I bet they will do
their damnedest to trip and mislead us at every step.’
‘You will almost certainly win this bet’ said Darius, ’but we just have to watch
our steps and hang in there. Remember I am a bawa and can be a very bloody-
minded one at that.’ Kavita told him that she had total belief in his bloody-
mindedness to see them through to the bitter end.
‘Okay, let’s look at what we know so far. One, a skeleton is turned up, literally,
by the bulldozer in the erstwhile Maheshwari seaside bungalow in Versova. This
skeleton is recognizable as a woman by the bangles on the hands and some
tattered shreds of what seemed to have been a churidar kurta. Two, there is a
badly damaged college ID card and a few things in the purse that the police use
to identify her as Manorama Kashyap, missing for around twenty-five years. Her
DNA profile matches her mother’s to give us a positive identification.’ He
paused and they both looked at each other with the same thought –what had been
Mrs. Kashyap’s reaction when the two-man police team sent from Mumbai had
turned up on her doorstep asking for help in doing a DNA profile for a skeleton
found in the Maheshwari bungalow in Versova. It would have been obvious to
her that the police thought it was that of her daughter Manorama. There would
be grief renewed but also a deep anger in remembering that they should have
pursued the whole matter more vigorously all those years ago.
 ‘Oh well, I am glad we did not have to face her. Three, there was a concerted
attempt to buy her off by old man Maheshwari but she never turned up for the
meeting.’
Kavita interrupted, ‘Could it be that this is a story concocted by the old man
and his lawyer to hide the fact that they knew she was already dead?’
‘Could be- that doesn’t sound that far-fetched’ said Darius slowly, ‘After all,
emotions were running high – any obstacle to Ramnath Maheshwari’s grand
family plan had to be removed, and removed quickly. Hubris can ensure that all
moral and ethical considerations can shut down.’ Kavita agreed but ‘but murder
is a big step. Either he decided to permanently solve his problem or he thinks he
knows who did. And the suspicions are eating him up.’
‘Right, so the fourth point is back to the first one - that Rajesh or his boss are
the murderers or know who is and don’t want to do anything about it. The old
man didn’t want us called in, but pressure from daughter-in-law and her father
made him do it. Incidentally, that is also noteworthy. Ramnath Maheshwari is as
susceptible to emotional pressure as anyone else. On consideration, he decides to
go along because he realizes that preemptive action will make everyone look less
guilty. He gets Rajesh to rope in Hemant Dalvi to help them out. By good luck or
design he chooses us. He knows that they can’t keep the police out but I think his
plan is to use our lack of experience to give him the answers he wants to hear.’
‘It’s not going to work’ shrugged Kavita dismissively, ‘We need to get at the
truth for two reasons Darius. We owe it to Manorama and our professional
standing is on the line.’
‘Relax lady’ he smiled at her, ‘I am not participating in any cover-up. But I
hope you have your dancing shoes all ready because they are definitely going to
make us dance.’
‘That’s all right, at least I am a better dancer than you,’ she retorted.
‘That you are, ma’am, that you are.’
The phone rang. It was Vasu Kulkarni – ‘Coming up; ask Valerie to organize
some tea. I am bringing some hot samosas from that corner shop in that lane off
Colaba Causeway.’ ‘You do have nice ideas Vasu,’ said Darius appreciatively.
‘But how come they always revolve around food?’ asked Kavita plaintively.
‘Hey, I heard that – I also come bearing gifts that you have been waiting for.’ ‘In
that case you are forgiven’ said Kavita. Vasu chuckled in reply.
DCP Vasant Kulkarni’s entrance into any room was an event. He was large and
tall and fair and made larger by his predilection for checking out everything in
the Good Food Guide. Having inherited a fair amount of money from his
landowning father and grandfather, he couldn’t be bought out. And as he had an
insatiable level of curiosity combined with a dogged, bloody-minded persistence
in following trails it made him an excellent criminal investigations officer. It also
explained why, from their very first meeting, Darius and he got along like a
house on fire. His work philosophy was that no file was closed, even if his
superiors had decided otherwise, until the criminal was caught. His bosses were
unaware that he had made surreptitious copies of all documents relating to any
unfinished or cold cases. Like all good detectives he’d keep digging, connecting
facts, and combining this with a comprehensive knowledge of human nature
which all added up to an impressive success rate in cases old and new.
He was also street smart enough to deal with all the politics around him and so
was not shunted around unnecessarily or denied his promotions. The channels
and newspapers might say otherwise, but the Mumbai CID has a fairly high
success rate. As Vasu explained, be successful but don’t seek out too much
public attention. Netas hate anyone getting more attention than them, and they
are quite capable of turning on you if you do.
Vasu had married at the age of 34 an artist who he had met in the course of one
of his investigations. Nilima was the perfect mate for him. She didn’t understand
an iota of what he did, supported him wholeheartedly and loved his erratic and
long working schedule because she could both paint and throw ceramic pots
without interruption for hours at a time. She did both amazingly well. Every
exhibition of her pottery and her paintings were sellouts. The Inspector was
immensely proud of her though totally uncomprehending of her art. In short they
were the perfect match.
The moment news had reached police headquarters that November morning of
a girl’s skeleton being unearthed, Vasu’s boss, the Joint Commiosioner of Police,
Crime, had called for the file on the young college girl who had gone missing
twenty-five years before. Because it was an old Maheshwari property being
pulled down, he instinctively felt that it was of the young college girl- he
couldn’t recall her name- who had been studying in Sydenham College and had
gone missing the weekend after Diwali. He had just entered the police force at
the time of Manorama’s disappearance but one of the senior police officers who
had trained him admitted years later that he had been haunted by their failure to
locate her. They had been doing an inter-departmental review of all the cold
cases in the city of Mumbai and this one had been one of the first ones his senior
had remembered. That the girl herself had been so secretive was no excuse. He
told Vasu that the team had missed something and he was convinced that
someone had got away with murder.
‘Right!’ said Vasu. ‘I know’ continued Kavita, ‘food first, talk later.’ Vasu and
Darius beamed at her’ ‘See, our training is finally paying off; you are getting
your priorities in the right order.’ They enjoyed their samosas and tea in an
amiable silence and when everything was cleared they turned their attention to
their laptops, yellow lawyer pads and all they had learnt till now.
‘One confirmation – she was hit on the head a couple of times. The fractures
in the skull can clearly be seen. Also her hand was broken. She would have
fought back when she was attacked.’ Vasu said – and both Darius and Kavita at
the same time said – ‘Poor girl, what a way to die.’ ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ There was an
almost involuntary silence for a few seconds, and then everybody shook their
heads to rid themselves of their dark thoughts and Darius said. ‘Right, let’s get to
it.’
‘I have some further gifts for you. I got you copies of the first set of interviews
the police did in 1987 and into ‘88. Keep them but you can’t use them in any
report you make. And for God’s sake don’t let the boss man know I am giving
you these bits of info. He does not like the private snooping business and takes
your existence as a personal affront.’ His boss was a great guy but he was an old-
style policeman with a choleric temper and some prejudices intact. ‘This is just
to make sure you have all the info you need going in to the rest of the interviews.
And incidentally, we are starting our interviews with them tomorrow.’
‘Good – pressure from both ends should see some cracks appearing in their
defenses.’ ‘And how are you going to handle the political pressure?’ asked
Darius.
‘Oh, some calls have already come in to handle the Maheshwaris very
carefully. I believe ‘we do not want to upset them.’ However, as you must have
read already, the papers have got hold of their connection to this case and the
mood in the city is ugly enough for our netas to ease off. That poor child in
Delhi who is in such hell from the horrific rape she suffered has lowered
tolerance for any kind of assault on women. And a young girl killed and thrown
into a hole to rot is not going to go down well with people right now.’
Kavita pointed out that they had all better put their heads together and solve
the case fast. ‘One does not, you will all agree, want a lynching party.’ ‘Good
God no,’ said both Darius and Vasu together.
They spent the rest of the evening carefully looking at all the papers given to
them by Vasu- the police interviews done all those years ago, the conclusions
drawn by the various officers and at the bottom of the file notations made by the
senior police officer in charge of the case in which his frustration and anger
clearly came through. They couldn’t let his opinion influence them but his
inference was clear. He thought one of the Maheshwaris had killed her but
because there was no body found there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
 Chapter 7

T hat Tuesday evening Avinash ate in the near-total silence that had become
the ruling feature of all meals. I wonder who is going to blink first, he
thought. Or is she going to explode like a pressure cooker gone wrong? What the
hell is wrong with me – my world is falling about my ears and all I can do is
make snide remarks to myself about us, about my wife? What amazing lives we
live behind the masks of our faces. What do I look like? A boring middle-aged
Marwari businessman with no thought in his head beyond figuring out where I
am going to make even more money. But once, for Manorama, I was willing to
give all this up. And now because she is back in our lives I may have to give all
this up, willy-nilly. Or have it taken from me, if the police decide that I am worth
pulling in for what they politely call ‘questioning.’ He was so lost in his thoughts
that the deafening silence on the table told him that dinner was over. He smiled
vaguely at his younger son, avoided looking at Anjali, and escaped to his home
office room muttering something about ‘a lot of work to do.’ He had put it off
but not escaped. But here behind those doors he was temporarily safe; safe from
the world outside but not enough to escape his thoughts.
Shishir was in his favourite refuge – the Belvedere Club in the Oberoi. Like
his brother, he too was seeking refuge from Sunita. Unlike Anjali, Sunita had
been aware of the Manorama story but had always thought it was all about some
silly entanglement his elder brother had got into. But the discovery of the
skeleton had set off tremors in all directions not least the one set off by Shishir’s
behavior after the news came in. He was not sleeping at night; sitting in the
balcony chain smoking, preoccupied and distant. When questioned he said he
was worried about Avinash but she knew that was a half-truth. With a sickening
lurch in her stomach she began to sense that it was not just Avinash who had
been involved with Manorama; there had been something between her husband
and that girl, which didn’t bother her as much as the thought that he may have
been involved with her murder. That really frightened her. They had had a silly
fight just before breakfast this morning and she realized that their life was now
out of their control and Shishir was definitely not on her side in this mess.
Sunita spent the whole of that week scrambling in her mind trying to find one
person, one name she could turn to find out what had happened all those years
ago. A small college-time episode had turned into an ugly life-threatening crisis
and she, it seems, had to stand on the sidelines and do nothing about it. But I am
not the woman my mother is and my grandmother was. I will not accept my
kismet blindly. I will find out what is going on and I will protect my children
from whatever storm is coming their way. I have to speak to Anjali first, she
thought. She has to know something. She rang Anjali up and told her she would
pick her up in half an hour on the pretext of going to the temple. It was
Wednesday the 19th – the day after those two detectives had interviewed Bauji
and Rajeshbhai, and even if it was not the day for going to Lord Shivji’s temple
at Babulnath, it didn’t matter. For conservative India, going to the temple was a
legitimate and socially sanctioned outing for women.
As she had expected, Anjali held out for half an hour before succumbing to
Sunita’s pressure. It all spilled out. Avinash’s strange behavior, Rajeshbhai
telling them that both the police and a couple called Darius Mody and Kavita
Tandon were going to interview everybody in the family about the skeleton of a
girl found in the property which Bauji had given to Udaybhai at the time of the
settlement. They were going be questioned about events that had happened so
long ago that she knew nothing about any of it.
‘Of course you do’ snapped Sunita, ‘and I have another piece of news for you.
My Shishir and your Avinash were both involved with her. So don’t bury your
head in the sand here, understand? Find out what’s going on – ask Avinash.’ She
looked at Sunita in horror. Coming from a far more traditional background than
Sunita’s, her marriage with Avinash was defined in far more formal and
straitjacket terms. It was an arranged marriage as had been Shishir and Sunita’s,
but the terms of engagement with each other were completely different. Sunita
accompanied Shishir to a lot of parties, travelled with him occasionally both in
India and abroad, even joined him in the clubs in the evening. Anjali’s
socialization was restricted to family occasions, absolutely necessary public
functions, all religious events. She never thought of going anywhere else with
him and it had certainly never occurred to Avinash to ask her to accompany him.
Anjali was pretty sure that there were other women. The whispers in the
family news system had reached her, as they were meant to, but the gaps
between were long enough for her to figure out that there was no serious
involvement. She didn’t like it but where she came from, discussing the subject
or even expressing objections was not an option. The same system had delivered
many more whispers about Shishir. Shishir was not the ‘faithful husband’ type
but when he was being a husband he was far more attentive and inclusive. There
had always been an edginess to him that had not decreased with age; and the
events of the last few weeks had certainly brought a lot of anger to the surface
that had been under control all this time.
They looked at each other. ‘And what about this couple? Why do we have to
answer their questions? Who are they anyway?’
‘According to Shishir’ said Sunita rather bitterly, ‘they were recommended by
Rajeshbhai’s friend Hemant Dalvi. Bauji brought them in because you insisted
he should. Your father is worrying about all this. He wants to know what
happened all those years ago. So does everyone else but really bhabhiji, was
there any need to bring these two detectives into our lives? I just hope everybody
can live with the answers that they get.’
This was the first hint that Anjali got that Sunita did not think the Maheshwari
brothers were all that innocent. With horror she faced the next question – what
did Sunita think one or both of them had done? Fallen in love or murder? Or
both?
They returned in silence to their homes, Sunita dropping Anjali off, both of
them with heavy hearts and aching heads.
 Chapter 8

A vinash and Shishir were both in the office early on the Wednesday that
Darius and Kavita were supposed to interview them. While their wives met
in the temple, they met in the corridors of their Fort office but exchanged
nothing other than a nod and a mumbled greeting. Outwardly calm, inwardly in
turmoil, they still had not talked to each other about what had happened in the
last four weeks, and certainly not of Manorama or of events from twenty-five
years ago. Lids were being opened on feelings and memories that both the
brothers thought had been safely put behind them.
This is ridiculous, thought Avinash. This has nothing to do with us. But it
does, doesn’t it? She was there that night to meet you. Everything that happened
has stemmed from that fact and don’t deny it. You were a coward Avinash, weak
and a coward. All that is happening today is because of this and you have to stop
running and come to terms with that. You didn’t just run. You also did an
automatic amnesia number on yourself and that was that.
Shishir, on the other hand, was suddenly swamped by memories of Manorama.
He had convinced himself that the choice she had made was her loss more than
his. When she had not turned up in college on that long-ago Monday, and as the
days had turned into months he had thought she had lost her nerve and run away
and gone home. He ignored what Avinash must have been going through. Avi
had always been quiet but after Manno disappeared he withdrew completely
from everyone and everything. But this Wednesday morning, sitting in his office,
Shishir told himself that he had simply fooled himself. He still wished she had
made her choice differently and he had been her choice. And that he had been a
completely selfish s.o.b where Avi was concerned. But all these thoughts and
regrets didn’t deal with the here and now. Now we are facing questioning by the
police and thanks to my Dad’s stupidity, he thought with a sudden spurt of anger,
we will also have the pleasure of two busybodies sanctioned to poke and pry and
turn over all the stones in our lives.
The two busybodies reached Maheshwari House in Fort a little before their
11am appointment with Avinash. Again, sidelong glances and sudden silences
accompanied them as they passed people in the halls and again they were first
taken straight to Rajesh Kapadia’s room. He was the filter for most Maheshwari
meetings and from their first meeting Kavita asked herself whether he was also
their hatchet man? Adviser, yes, but enforcer? Time would tell.
Rajesh wanted to know what Darius and Kavita were planning to ask
Avinash– he got a polite smile and a vague look from both of them. ‘I can’t
arrest him, you know,’ Darius told him ‘only the police can.’ But Rajesh’s
response revealed what he was worrying about. ‘But you can set it up for them to
do so.’ At which Kavita, who had been silent through the interchange, tersely
told him. ‘We are not here to deal with some silly family embarrassment Mr.
Kapadia. We are talking about murder here. The college ID card inside the purse
next to the body is hers. And the moment the DNA results matched the samples
her mother gave the police, speculation became a confirmation. The forensic
laboratory has confirmed that the skeleton is hers. Even the dental records from a
Dr. Mistry who conducted a dental camp in the college matched and confirmed it
is Manorama. And finally forensics has confirmed that she was murdered – two
or three very hard blows to the head. So just let us do what we have been asked
to do – find answers to a very ugly question. Who among the people who knew
her, murdered a twenty year-old girl?’
Unable to delay the interview any longer he took them to Avinash’s and
reluctantly left them there outside the door.
On first meeting a person you have dubbed a villain in your mind, it is always
a surprise to discover that, regardless of how villainous they may turn out to be,
they are also so human. This was her initial reaction to Avinash. Impassive like
his father, without the accompanying personality, her first impression was that of
a man she could like but a man deeply controlled. Which of course simply meant
that when that control broke he was capable of any violence. But then, thought
Kavita, he may seem very human, but so is murder and mayhem, isn’t it? Don’t
let all this distract you, she told herself; you are looking for a murderer - find
him. The real question to be asked was what he was controlling– fear, guilt,
anger, anxiety or a little bit of all. Not nice for you, is it my friend – what you
guys thought was a bit of a nuisance that had been dealt with then has now come
back to become a nightmare. And this one will not be taken care of by
Rajeshbhai or whomever else your Dad has got working with him, she told
herself silently. These will all be individual interactions, either with us or with
the police.
His room reflected his personality. It was unusually elegant, with neutral
shades and wood predominating, a beautiful Shergill and a Hussain on the walls,
one wall full of books, and a total lack of religious artifacts. Kavita got the
distinct impression that this room was not only his office but also his refuge. An
extremely comfortable sofa and two armchairs in a lovely shade of oatmeal
confirmed this. An antique cupboard in the corner had almost certainly been
converted into a bar.
Darius started the ball rolling. ‘So tell me about Manorama.’ Avinash stared at
him. ‘Tell you about her?’ ‘Yes’ he said impatiently, ‘what was she like? Did you
like her or just lust after her? Do you even remember her after all these years?’ ‘I
find your questions offensive Mr. Mody’ said Avinash quietly. ‘Not as offensive
as the questions the police will put to you shortly, Mr. Maheshwari,’ Darius
informed him brutally. ‘Remember, this is not 1987. Like it or not the press are
already all over this one and it is just going to get worse. So let’s start this again.
Tell me what you remember about her.’
‘What I remember? I remember how beautiful she was. She would light up
any room she entered. You could warm your hands at the energy she gave out.
No, Mr. Mody I would never have killed her. I did not kill her. Oh, I know you
think I did. And I guess you will say all murderers say that, don’t they?’
So there is life there after all, thought Kavita. Banked fires maybe, but
nonetheless there.
‘So you were going to marry her.’
‘Yes.’
‘So what stopped you?’
‘She went away without telling me. We were to meet on that Saturday, it was
the 14th. College had just opened after the Diwali break. She was supposed to
meet me that evening at 8:30pm but she never turned up. I went to the women’s
hostel in Colaba first thing in the morning to find out what happened but the
warden said she had taken permission to be away for the weekend and had no
idea where she had gone.’
A raised eyebrow from Darius. ‘And so finally you just accepted that mildly
and meekly.’
 There was the first sign of anger from Avinash. ‘No, damn you, I did not. In
fact I hired some ex-policemen to search for her. But she had vanished into thin
air.’
‘But what really happened is that she was killed and thrown into a hole in the
ground,’ Kavita said drily ‘and we have to find out who put her there.’
There was silence in the room for a few seconds and then she took up the
thread of questioning. ‘Why then? Why not after the year ended?’
‘Because….’
‘Yes...? Look we need to know so just help us. That is if you want her killer
found.’ Hanging in the air was the unspoken statement….’unless you are the one
who killed her.’
‘My parents were in the process of arranging my marriage. I had to present
them with a fait accompli.’
‘I see…Tell me about the years she was around. How did you both meet?’
‘In 1986. I was in my second year of college, in Sydenham.’
‘Then?’
‘She was in Shishir’s class, actually.’
‘And?’
Again a pause, an uncomfortable one this time.
‘We are going to find out, Mr. Maheshwari. Why are you dragging this out?’
‘I met her when Shishir brought her to his friend’s place for a party. Yes she
did know him initially but after that we spent all our time together. And no, I
don’t know what my brother felt about it. They were not dating or anything like
that. I would have known.’
‘Really. How close were you?’
Avinash almost glared at Darius. ‘What are you implying?’
‘Even your father very reluctantly admitted to the fact that you and your
borther were not and never have been close. So let’s see, Shishir brings her to the
party, which certainly in those days would have implied a degree of friendship.
And then elder brother swans in and takes over. Not very conducive to good
brotherly relations, wouldn’t you say?’
Kavita moved in at this point. ‘So you went out with her from then on.
Chances were you were aware your family would have been dead set against this
match. What was it going to be? The college romance before you returned to the
family-fold and fell in line?
Avinash stood up. ‘This interview is over.’
‘I have a piece of news for you Mr. Maheshwari. This is not over. We’ll be
back again and again to all of you until we find out what happened that
November. Have a great day.’
Darius smiled amiably at him and Kavita gave him a deadpan look. They had
decided that at each meeting they would play the bad cop – good cop routine.
And to further unsettle everyone they would switch their roles from time to time.
They nodded politely to him and left.
Back like good children to Rajesh Kapadia’s room. The next on the list was
Shishir Maheshwari. Their perception of him was beginning to change. From
being an unknowing bystander he was beginning to move centre-stage along
with the rest of the clan. This time around, Rajesh did not bother to ask them
what their line of questioning was going to be. He just took them to Shishir’s
room and left them at the door. They grinned at each other as they entered.
Shishir saw that smile and felt a stab of anger. Careful, he told himself; that’s
what they want, you losing your cool and walking into their traps. Both Darius
and Kavita saw him visibly bring himself under control. Interesting, thought
Kavita, a lot of anger there. Enough for him to stave in a girl’s head? We’ll find
out.
Again Shishir’s room was different from Avinash’s. One wall in blue, the
furniture lighter and more modern, furnished in a very pleasing shade of yellow;
the paintings on the walls by Tyeb and Gaitonde. Both art lovers though, and
enough money to have originals hanging on the walls. An extrovert’s room like
she suspected Shishir was. It had one thing in common with his brother that she
found interesting – no religious statues or a puja corner in the room, unlike what
you’d usually find in most offices of Marwari businessmen.
The same preliminaries and then Darius asked the same question he had asked
his elder brother – what did Shishir remember of Manorama?
 ‘She was beautiful. And very lively.’ Word for word almost the same answer
as Avinash’s.
‘So you cared for her too.’
‘Only as a friend.’
Again the raised eyebrow from Darius. ‘Oh really! So it didn’t bother you that
she dumped you and took up with your brother.’
A sudden spurt of anger, ‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘So tell me what it was like.’
Suddenly, Shishir fell silent. He got up and walked away to look out of the
window. ‘Mr. Maheshwari?,’ prompted Kavita. He turned round and looked at
them and they both realized that they were looking at a man in pain. Good God,
thought Darius, he was in love with her and losing her to his brother hurt. But
whether it was losing a woman he loved or just his pride that was dented
remained to be seen.
‘So let’s stop pretending, shall we?, said Darius. ‘ You were in love with her.
Did you kill her?’
‘No damn you, I didn’t.’
‘When did you last see her or meet her?’
‘How does that matter? All this has nothing to do with us.’
‘Oh please, Mr. Maheshwari. You really think this has nothing to do with you?
We will find out, so get smart and tell us now. Rather this than have some
policeman drag it out of you.’
Both Darius and Kavita were gearing themselves up to push the interview one
step further when Shishir came back and sat down.
‘I met her the Saturday evening of the weekend she disappeared but that was
to find out what she really felt about both of us. She told me very clearly that she
cared much more for my brother than me and that, yes, they were planning to get
married. By running away if necessary.’
‘Where did you meet her?’
‘In the coffee shop of the ‘Sun ’n’ Sand Hotel in Juhu.’
 ‘What was she wearing?’
‘Some kind of a silk top and jeans and she was carrying a small bag. I thought
she was going to spend a day or two with a friend of hers who lived in Andheri.
No, truthfully I was not thinking of anything other than getting her to change her
mind.’
‘How did you get her to meet you?’
‘I sent her a note through one of her friends in college the day before.’
‘Who? The same friend who lived in Andheri.’
‘I guess so.’
‘You guess so? You mean you don’t remember?’ Both of them were beginning
to be very skeptical of his whole story.
Shishir burst out angrily. ‘Okay, I remember her name. It was Kareena
Menezes. But the rest, I really don’t remember.’
‘And then.’
‘I was very upset so I just left the same time as she did. If it makes you any
happier I am bitterly regretting that. I should have made sure that she got safely
to wherever it is that she was going.’
Both Darius and Kavita didn’t tell him that she had reached her friend’s place
safely but that she was planning to meet his elder brother later in the evening and
run away with him. There were large gaps in his story. He probably just didn’t
go away. He could have followed her, could have killed her, and could have
covered up for his brother who probably had killed her. They left his office with
more questions than answers.
 Chapter 9

‘E ver thought about murder? I mean really thought about it and what it does
to you?’
Darius asked this question when they were driving back after a rather
unfriendly meeting with the family lawyer. They had to point out to him that
they didn’t have a choice in either whom they interviewed or what questions
they asked – the way things were going the media had decided to be prosecution,
judge and jury all rolled into one, and conviction by the media would not only be
a travesty of justice but also one in which no one would have any control over
what happened. Before leaving a very unhappy Rajesh in his office they
confirmed a second round of appointments with everybody in two days’ time, on
the coming Friday.
Darius continued ‘you cross a certain line when you do and the problem is that
you can never go back. You have taken someone’s life and in the process have
given up part of your soul. Once you get into this moral quicksand it is amazing
how quickly you sink in.
‘And then you spend all your time scrabbling to get on to firmer ground. You
may bury it deep inside but it will always be there to nibble at the edges of your
memory and conscience. A lot of murders are committed on the spur of the
moment for a perceived immediate gain. And the murderer is often a weak,
cornered person striking out blindly. And like all weak people they revert to
being the pleasant person they normally are once the deed is done.’
Kavita demurred. ‘What about the sociopath and the psychopath? They are
completely unaffected because they are unable to empathize with their victim in
any way. They are unaffected because they don’t care and can’t care.’
‘But in this case this killer is not one of those Kavi. This, in my opinion, is a
personal crime, maybe a one-off. We’ll see.’
‘Oh I agree. Someone she knew and trusted enough killed her. She was
persuaded to go to the bungalow that night or taken there on some pretext or
another. Either way she was not fearful.’
 ‘No… you might have something there. Avinash was clearly planning to run
away with her and get married. It would be impossible to do this on his own. He
would have had to have help. And that help may have assisted in a cover-up. I
am also beginning to look at the other scenario of someone killing for reasons
yet unknown.’
‘Yes, right now all we know is that her death benefited the father who was
busy trying to arrange his son’s marriage to a couple of factories or whatever,
and gave a kind of vicarious satisfaction to the brother who she had turned
down. Who else Daru? We have to find out who else gained or rejoiced in her
murder.’
By this time, they both had resorted to calling each other by the nicknames
they had been known by all their lives. Of course they had to put up with a fair
amount of ribbing about ‘daru’ meaning alcohol inspiring the ‘kavi’ meaning
poet. They just ignored all of it. As Kavita pointed out if alcohol was the
inspiration for writing poetry, half the world would have been on a bloody awful
poetry-writing binge.
There was a hiatus of a few days while Darius and Kavita put together all the
information they had to date. Which, as she pointed out, was damn all compared
to what they needed. Darius pointed out the pluses.
‘Plus one – Forensics had confirmed that the skeleton found in Maheshwari
Manor was Manorama’s.
Plus two – Ramnath Maheshwari, under pressure, has spearheaded a separate
investigation into those long-ago events. He and Rajesh Kapadia both admitted
to trying to buy her out of Avinash or Shishir’s life.
Plus three – Both the Maheshwari brothers admitted knowing her; in the case
of Shishir, meeting her the day she disappeared, in the case of Avinash that being
the day he had planned to run away with her.
Plus four – Shishir’s admission that he had met her on 14th November at the
Sun ‘n’ Sand Hotel pins down the date she disappeared. According to the police
interviews we read, she reached her friend’s house, but went out shortly
afterwards and was never seen again. Obviously she was murdered that weekend
or close to it.
Plus four– This is a closed circle murder. Rajesh thinks one of the
Maheshwaris did it; Ramnath thinks that either one of his sons did it or Rajesh
carried his instructions too far; and I am betting my boots that each brother
thinks the other did it or in the worst case scenario the father arranged it.’
Darius rubbed his hands in glee and grinned at her. ‘Manorama and Shelley,
that is what this is.’
‘Really - both of them together? What the hell has Shelley to do with this
murder?’
‘Ah, remember his poem: -
‘Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth,
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind.’
Darius declaimed, striking a pose, and her looks clearly said he had lost it.
Amused at her expression, Darius told her that what he meant was that
Manorama was talking to them from her untimely grave. Fate or chance or
whatever you want to call it brought her out in the open and now events and
people were conspiring together to tell her story and bring closure. It may not be
the closure her murderer or murderers want but it’s the one they will get. And
certainly Mrs. Kashyap deserves to know what happened to her daughter. She’s
waited a long time for this.
‘I know but how are we going to go about it? We need to instigate someone
into thinking we know more than we know so the murderer can’t take the
pressure and breaks. Remote chances both as everyone has their defenses up.
We’ll figure something out.’
‘I know,’ Kavita continued, ‘what we need to do right away. We need to track
down everyone the police interviewed all those years back and speak to them
again. I better get Valerie on to it straightaway. Give her something to do and
stop her brooding on the sins of her employers.’
‘Great idea. Good luck with Valerie.’
They reached the office to find a pile of emails and phone calls to answer. To
make it worse Valerie had arbitrarily decided that today was the day in this
month when everybody – which basically meant Darius and Kavita – updated
their expense sheet and submitted all bills and vouchers. They had tried
wriggling out of her accounting days a couple of times but Valerie had not
worked in a large successful profitable law firm for nothing. They were
supposed to have done this on the first Monday of the month and now they had
no choice. Submission, they had discovered, was infinitely preferable to
rebellion or avoidance. Lepidorists who pinned butterflies to the board paled in
comparison to Valerie in her ‘accounting mode.’
Today was the nineteenth, and in Val’s book far too late and so they submitted
with some minor grumbling which she very rightly ignored. As a break from the
case they decided to clear all the paper work that had piled up. It didn’t quite
work out that way since both of them kept wandering into each other’s rooms
throwing ideas at each other and constantly interrupting each other. This made
Valerie very unhappy and since it was impossible to avoid her, they were in for a
few rocky days before life got back to normal.
Vasu rang up in the midst of their ordeal and wisely decided to meet them for
dinner at one of their favourite restaurants – Mast Malwani near the SPCA
Hospital in Lalbaug in Parel. This place is an institution in Mumbai and
generations of aficionados of good Malvani cooking in Mumbai have come to
rely on it for an excellent and authentic meal to be savoured and enjoyed.
All talk of the case was deferred till the Prawn Koliwada and the Kottayam
Curry had been demolished (incidentally, the latter dish is from Kerala not the
Malvan coast, but coastal anyway). When Kavita had started working with
Darius she used to have a real problem with the preponderance of fish items
ordered in all the meals they had but now she had become an enthusiastic fish
eater and her belief that tandoori chicken made in Delhi was the only thing to eat
was fading into the background. ‘Just watch, we’ll get all that Punjabi brashness
out of you before long,’ Darius and Vasu teased her. ‘Like hell you will and you
had better not,’ she said ‘it’s my Punjabi brashness that is going to help you get
answers to questions you would never dare ask.’
All of them agreed that Ramnath Maheshwari thought one of his sons had
committed the murder, that definitely Shishir was still in love with Manorama
when she decided to dump him for Avinash or took up with him, that of the two
he had a shorter fuse and so was more capable of murder, but that Avinash was
an equally good candidate, and that Rajesh Kapadia was a deeply unhappy man
and probably a guilty man, whose unhappiness and guilt centred around the
Maheshwaris and this murder. The last scenario was that Ramnath had lost
patience and arranged to have her murdered and that Rajesh and his sons
suspected him. They felt that they needed to cast the net wider. It was clear that
this death was not a crime of opportunity by a stranger. The murderer had been
known to her and had lashed out to remove her but why? Because she didn’t
want him or because she was not getting out of the way? Because Manorama
alive was a bigger threat than a Manorama who disappeared? It was also clear
that he had calculated that the very secrecy of her relationship with Avinash
would protect him. Which made Avinash the favourite on the list. She had not
shared her secrets with anyone and that fact had stymied all the police efforts to
find any links, any leads they could follow up. Even her mother had not known
anything further than his name, that he was from a very wealthy Marwari
industrial family and that the family did not approve of the relationship. Neither
did she but that had been irrelevant. Twenty-five years was a long time but
Darius and Vasu were both convinced that stirring the pot would bring out buried
facts and feelings.
 Chapter 10

A few days after their temple visit Sunita tried to talk to Anjali again but got
stonewalled. Exasperated, she went across and pulled Anjali out for
another ‘temple’ visit. It was a Monday, the 24th of December and Mumbai was
in the throes of Christmas celebrations. Calcutta always was the place to be
around Christmas like it was for Dussehra but Mumbai didn’t do too badly in the
Santa Claus, tinsel and trees, and general ‘let’s have a party’ stake. It had nothing
to do with being Christian; in fact most of the people celebrating were not
Christians at all. Schools and colleges closed for the Christmas holidays and the
balmy weather helped. All this was for everyone else. For the Maheshwaris it
was a bad time, and even more so for the wives. Though Sunita managed to get
Anjali out it wasn’t much use. Anjali had decided to go into the three monkeys
phase – hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil. She refused to believe that
Avinash had anything to do with all this ‘horrible stuff’ and that there had to be
some mistake.
‘What mistake?’ asked Sunita, ‘Property was theirs at the time that girl
disappeared.’ Even she couldn’t bring herself to mention Manorama’s name. ‘It
now turns out that both our husbands knew her. I don’t know what else went on
but recognize this. There was an involvement and we had better find out what
the hell it was before it blows up in our faces.’
‘But Bauji….’
‘Really bhabhiji, you actually believe that bauji is going to tell his daughters-
in-laws what went on? No. The only way we are going to find out is by asking
them directly. Okay there will be a little noise but so what? We are the people
who will be most affected. And you know what? I don’t know about you but I
am not going down with Shishir without a fight.’
Anjali was really alarmed. She just couldn’t get her head around the way her
safe and secure world was crumbling right in front of her eyes. Newspaper
headlines! Inquisitive neighbours! Servants giving them sly meaningful looks!
And a husband who was to her horror behaving in her eyes like a very guilty
man! And now here was Sunita all set to go to war over this.
 Sunita realized that Anjali was really stressed out by what was happening
around her and decided to gentle her tone. ‘Come on bhabhiji, let’s go have a
coffee somewhere and figure out a few things.’ Anjali let herself be taken to the
Barista in Colaba next to Regal Cinema. For her, going out for a coffee was a
novel experience. She had been married to Avinash when she was twenty and
since then had devoted herself to hearth and home. To Sunita she was a perfect
symbol of what was wrong with the Marwari social structure. Men went out and
did their thing. Women stayed home and waited for them. Sunita ordered two
cappuccinos for them. She needed to get Anjali on her side for the media storm
that had descended on them and was going to get worse. She suddenly felt very
protective about her elder sister-in-law and realized in a flash of anger that
Avinash had not talked to her at all, leaving her out in the cold while he
glowered and brooded. Not that mine’s any better, she thought cynically. He just
drinks in the Belvedere and tries to make out that all this has nothing to do with
him.
But even Sunita had to ask herself – what exactly had happened all those years
ago?
‘Listen Bhabhiji, the police have zeroed in on the probable date of her
disappearance, sorry, I guess we will now have to call it murder. They say it was
the weekend of 14th and 15th Nov 1987, right after all the colleges had opened
after the Diwali vacation.’
Anjali looked at her blankly – she didn’t know what Sunita was talking about.
‘Oh come on!’ said Sunita in irritation, ‘Doesn’t Avinash tell you anything?’
She saw tears rolling down Anjali’s cheeks.
‘No’ she sobbed ‘nothing. He has stopped talking to me completely. The little I
know I have learnt from bauji, Rajeshbhai and the papers.’ Really furious with
Avinash by now, Sunita realized Anjali was going to be no help at all. Her
assessment had been right – she will need all the protection I can give her,
because nobody else is going to do it in the family. Sunita handed her tissues,
encouraged her to finish her coffee, and decided to drop her home. There is no
point in alarming her further, she thought. She is just about holding on, but
Shishir has to talk to bhaisahib. Nothing in our lives has prepared us for this and
if we don’t hold it together as a family it will be the end of us.
The ride back home was in total silence.
 Chapter 11

I n the meantime the tempo of work in MTI had picked up considerably. A

whole team was into locating people who had figured in the investigation in
1987 and setting up interviews with them. They had been treated as peripheral to
the case earlier, but taken all together they could yield vital information. Darius
decided to go through all the copies of the files they had and figure out where the
gaps and loopholes were. In the meantime Kavita decided to please Valerie, who
was still mad with them, by updating all their travel expenses and billing issues.
Valerie was devoted to Darius and after a period of careful standoffishness,
had begun to warm up to Kavita. But she knew that her relationship with Val was
still work-in-progress and it needed an occasional overture from her. Valerie
promptly grabbed her chance and in the blink of an eye she had Kavita pinned
down for at least two hours of paperwork. To give Valerie credit, she was
relentless in all of this for their sakes; she had decided that if her crazy bawa
boss had decided to team up with this equally crazy Punjabi partner and indulge
in this quixotic stuff about detecting, then she would certainly run this place as it
should be run. Her job was to make sure their administrative and financial life
was in order and if that meant bullying them and their clients sometimes, so be
it. Darius and Kavita were in total agreement – putting up with occasional bursts
of irritation was a small price to pay for complete devotion to their interests.
Manorama’s body had been disinterred on the 19th of November. By the time
Hemant Dalvi had met them it was Friday the 14th of December. Today was
Wednesday the 26th of December. Interviews were in progress, DNA test results
were in, and the forensic evidence could confirm the how if not the exact when
or who. Christmas had proved a timely distraction so the newspapers and TV
channels were busy with the usual end-of-year stuff but everyone knew that the
moment 2013 was in they would be back to hounding the Maheshwaris and
everyone else connected with the ‘bones’ found in their bungalow.
While practising putting on the office carpet and breaking glasses with the golf
balls in preparation for his occasional round of golf at Willingdon, Darius
reviewed the list of people they had decided to re-interview. There was the
mother grieving the loss of her daughter. There was the friend who carried
messages for Manorama in her secret life. There were the staff members of the
YWCA hostel in Colaba where she had stayed. Her professors, her classmates.
Dammit somebody somewhere just had to remember something. In any case the
reappearance of her body would have reminded them of her and what they
remembered of her disappearance.
Kavita was thinking about Mrs. Kashyap while doing all the paperwork. She
had sent her daughter to study in Mumbai because she wanted to encourage her
to spread her wings. Instead she lost her child to a murderer. All she had left
were memories and rage and grief at her failure to find answers. Just this and her
few possessions which were returned to her by the police when enquiries were
dropped into the disappearance of her daughter.
Her possessions…suddenly Kavita’s mind came to a full stop on that one.
What things had been included on the list of items returned to Mrs. Kashyap?
She relooked at the list that Vasu had given them – of the items listed as returned
to Mrs. Kashyap. Clothes, college books, note books, closely written diaries
(two) and a bundle of letters. The police notations said that the diaries had a lot
of gibberish in them and all kinds of numeric notations that nobody could make
sense of. A cowboy yell brought Darius, Valerie, Dattu the peon and the tea-boy
all to the doorway of her room. ‘Daru, this stuff in the diaries wasn’t gibberish, it
was in code. Even the numbers stood for stuff written in code. Look at the list
here and the police note on the contents of the diaries. See?’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because she couldn’t have filled two diaries with gibberish. She was not an
idiot. She was leading a secret life because of the nature of her relationship with
Avinash. There is only so much you can and want to tell a friend. She must have
had her lonely or anxious moments so she talked to her diary.’
‘Well I’ll be damned. You may very well be right.’
Daru hugged her, Valerie gave a worried look at the certainly diminished but
not cleared papers on the desk, Dattu grinned happily because his employers
were so happy about something, and the tea boy gave a round of his masala tea
to everyone.
Suddenly both of them came back down to earth. Code?
 ‘We need some expert advice here.’
‘Could be a simple one,’ said Kavita.
‘Come on you aren’t a member of the secret service, Kavi.’
‘Exactly – so she must have used one of those codes that girls used to pass on
messages to each other.’
‘Girls did this on a regular basis?’ asked Darius in surprise.
‘Yup, when they didn’t want anyone else to know. Now you have cellphones,
email, SMS, WhatsApp. Then you had nothing.’
‘Good God Kavi! You are telling me that girls lead such secretive lives that
they need to put it into code?’
‘No, no it is not so much a secret life as the fact that whatever they did and do
is always under scrutiny so they learn to hide things from everybody. It’s kind of
fun – passing notes to each other and pretending to have great secrets. Or
sometimes even actually having them. Think about it Daru, girls are never left
alone. They are constantly being questioned about where they are going, who
they are meeting, when will they be back. The majority are trained by their
mothers to button down all expressions of feelings, any spontaneity because
what will the bloody in-laws say when they get married. Everything in their life
is a preparation for getting married and what they call ‘adjusting’ to life with the
in-laws. That is why there is so much bitching about daughters-in-law nowadays.
They don’t adjust, which is a nice way of saying that they don’t submit to the
dictates of their husbands’ families. And they dare express some opinions of
their own!’
‘Oops! Touched a nerve, did I?’
‘What a typical male reaction. It is not about strong feelings, and incidentally
why should I not have them? I am a girl, aren’t I?’
‘Oh yes that you are! Very much so!’ said Darius very fervently.
‘Ass! I am giving you a reason why she may have put things in code. Either
she was doing it for the fun of it or she knew that getting involved with Avinash
was wrong and she needed to be damn careful about it or there was some other
reason that we will know only when we get our hands on those diaries. Where
are they? Did the police bring them back with them or are they still in Dehradun
with her mother? If they’re with her mother, you had better hope to God she
didn’t destroy them.’
‘No,’ said Darius, ‘I don’t think she did. She had so little left of her daughter’s
life with her that she would hang on to everything she had.’
Kavita rang up Vasu to check where the diaries were. They were with Mrs.
Kashyap in Dehradun. It was felt that they were of no particular importance and
therefore left with her. The next question– send someone to collect them or go
themselves? They reached the same conclusion- meeting the mother was on their
to-do list and an important part of understanding what happened all those years
ago. They could spare three or four days from the investigation in Mumbai. They
asked Valerie to get them on a flight to Delhi, and were lucky enough to get two
seats on Friday because of some last minute cancellations. The interviews
planned for that day were postponed to the 2nd day of the New Year. They also
requested Vasu to call her mother, explain who they were and why they were
involved in the case. The police reassured her that Kavita and Darius would not
take the diaries away; just examine them and make copies of only those pages
they thought were relevant to their investigation.
Getting to Dehradun involves flying to Delhi, and then either flying to Jolly
Grant Airport in Dehradun or driving up. They opted to drive to Dehradun
because according to Kavi it was really worth it...Both of them hated sitting in
airports waiting for flights. They had done enough flying in their earlier avatars
to last them a lifetime.
A Spicejet flight to Delhi, a car and driver to take them to Dehradun, another
one for use in Dehradun and to get them back to Delhi airport on the 29th or
Sunday 30th depending on how things worked out, and bookings in a Hotel
Aketa on Rajpur Road not too far from Mrs. Kashyap’s bungalow completed the
arrangements. Time would tell whether all this was useful or a waste of time and
money.
 Chapter 12

R ajesh Kapadia informed the family that the two investigators had gone to
Dehradun to meet Mrs. Kashyap and would meet them first thing 2nd
morning. Shishir remembered meeting the mother just once – she had been on a
visit to Mumbai and had stayed with some friends she had in Navy Nagar. He
had picked Manno and her friend Kareena from there once for some get-
together. He remembered Manorama telling him that her father had been in the
air force and had been killed in the ‘71 war with Pakistan when they had
attacked India suddenly on the western front on 3rd Dec. I haven’t given a
thought to her mother and what she must have gone through. How selfish can
one be? First she loses her husband and then she loses her only child, but none of
us gave it a thought.
The mention of their trip also reminded Avinash that he had never met Mrs.
Kashyap. With all the tension surrounding their relationship, meetings were
definitely out. He did remember seeing her photographs and thinking that she
was quite a beauty herself. No wonder Manno was so lovely. And like Shishir,
he too recognized how selfish he had been – he had certainly not thought of her
even once through these years. Not that I could have comforted her. She didn’t
like her daughter’s involvement with me and certainly holds me responsible for
her daughter’s death. As would I.
Sunita was at a standstill. Anjali was crumbling under the weight of the
scandal, all the men in the family had gone into silent mode and neither the
police nor those two snoopers brought in by bauji were saying a damn thing. On
the other hand, the newspapers and TV channels were having a field day and
saying pretty much whatever they wanted. It is going to get much worse, she
thought, we have to do something. But what!
Anjali was sitting in her puja room and railing against God. For the first time
in her life, she was giving vent to her anger and despair. She had moved out of
the numbed zone she had been in and like someone grieving she had gone
through the whole gamut of emotions. Not necessarily in the order they were
supposed to happen and unexpectedly with an intensity that overwhelmed her.
She had moved from denial to depression and a total absence of any hope to
acceptance. And finally a deep anger was beginning to stir in her. She
acknowledged to herself that she was in fact mourning the death of her marriage
as it used to be.
Rajesh Kapadia had gone back to his family home near Rajkot. He needed to
be away from Mumbai and the Maheshwaris and the bitter regretful thoughts
that continued to swirl around in his mind. What was wrong with me? How
could I have even agreed to Ramnathji’s ridiculous demand of paying her off? A
girl from a good family and I go along with treating her like a slut. What the hell
was wrong with me? Rajesh walked his fields, sat on the terrace of his old family
haveli, brooded on the past and searched for a way to make amends to the
memory of a dead twenty-year old.
Like his daughter-in-law, Ramnath was doing his puja and also railing against
God. He was dwelling savagely on the mess that had descended on the
Maheshwaris from the day the skeleton had been discovered in their old Versova
bungalow. Ugly suspicions had settled like a stone in the pit of his stomach. She
didn’t take my money, or so Rajesh says; but instead disappeared. He imagined
the murderer bludgeoning Manorama to death and in turn imagined everyone in
the role. Rajesh - he had been instructed to get her out of Avinash’s life at any
cost, so had the ever-loyal Rajesh gone the whole way? Did he kill her himself
or use others to do so - those without any scruples about using violence to
further their ends. Or was she killed after a fight with either of his two sons?
What was really frightening was the fact that he could see it happening all too
clearly. Nice place to be, he thought, suspecting your two sons and a trusted
family lawyer of murder. I should not have treated Manorama the way I did. It
was offensive and cruel. It dawned on him that his actions had precipitated this
horrid mess, that he too could be suspected of murdering her. I did not put my
mind to the problem to find other solutions; I was so obsessed with the
Maheshwari name and fame that I lost a part of my humanity. And even worse
both my sons not only dislike me but probably also suspect me of this foul deed.
I have caused great unhappiness to all the people who mattered most in my life.
No wonder the Gods have seen it fit to punish me with this scandal.
 Chapter 13

T he drive to Dehradun that Friday after the Christmas weekend was an eye
opener for Darius. Being the quintessential urban child, his travels out of
Mumbai were restricted to short trips to Lonavla, Khandala, Alibag and when
very young, reluctantly to Udvada with his parents and assorted aunts and
uncles. After he started working, all his travels was restricted to cities on legal
missions, and only when he holidayed abroad did he have the time to look at
anything other than offices and hotels. Kavita, who had spent her early years in
the north, had not forgotten how beautiful it was driving to the Doon Valley.
Some of her cousins and friends had studied in Doon School and Welhams and
she remembered the fun-filled weekends there. It was bitterly cold but with the
car heaters on they didn’t feel any of that. From the plains of Delhi and UP the
road starts rising to the Garhwal Hills and as the road leaves the plains, and its
unplanned sprawl of urbanization, it begins to climb through a green and
forested land. One drives through a patchwork quilt of the green of winter wheat
and the yellow of mustard fields. The road begins to wind up through the hills
but the turns are nothing like the twisted road, Kavita said, from Dehradun to
Mussoorie. She was looking particularly lovely that morning. Eyes sparkling,
skin glowing, Darius thought ‘my Punjaban is looking gorgeous today.’ And
stopped his thoughts right there. Any attempts to get any closer, even ones
heavily disguised in jokes or humourous asides, were treated with withdrawal on
her side. Did someone hurt her that bad? I would like to wring his neck, the
stupid sod. And on the heels of that thought came another one – am I falling for
her? Probably am; probably did the first time I saw her in that conference
looking beautiful and bored. You are in an amazing place- your partner is the one
person you can’t wait to see in the morning. That’s as good as it gets, Darius.
Don’t muck it up.
Kavita was remembering the first time they met. She had been in a bad mood
and hadn’t bothered to be too friendly or pleasant. I was being a bit of a bitch
and yet Darius put up with it. I really like this guy and I am pretty sure he likes
me but be careful. This is a beautiful partnership; you don’t want to mess it by
letting ‘luv shuv’ get in the way.
 Dehradun was no longer the leisured, pleasant government and education town
it used to be. In its latest avatar it now was the capital of the newly formed state
of Uttaranchal, carved out of the northwestern part of the state of Uttar Pradesh
on 9th November 2000. It still had a sterling roster of illustrious establishments
that were instantly recognizable - the Indian Military Academy (the Indian
equivalent of Sandhurst and West Point), the prestigious Doon School and the
Welham School for Girls, the Forest Research Institute of India, various
regimental headquarters, other government institutions. Based in the valley of
the River Tons, with little plateaus and escarpments, with groves of forests and
tea gardens spreading to the foothills of the road leading to Mussoorie, the Doon
Valley, away from the town of Dehradun, is a visual delight and a paradise for
trekkers, campers and anglers.
It was eight in the evening when they reached their hotel and settled into their
rooms. They decided to ring Mrs. Kashyap to tell her of their arrival and fix up a
time they could meet in the morning. It was a well-educated voice, clear as a
bell, reserved and cold. She does not want us here, thought Kavita. She lost a
daughter, and reconciled herself to her loss. And now it is all back but it is much
worse for her; she knows her daughter was murdered and that the murderer got
away with it for years and lived out his life while her child rotted in the ground.
Hemant Dalvi is right; we need to deliver closure on this one to her.
They had dinner downstairs in the restaurant and for the first time in many
weeks and by mutual consent relaxed and talked of everything but this case.
They had handled a lot of work over the last few months, not just this case, and
even all the lunches and dinners they had with Vasu or others had been a
continuation of meetings in the office. They talked of books read (one over many
months); movies seen (generally in bits and pieces when flipping through
channels late at night) and Kavita felt the time had come to take a break once
they had closed the book on Manorama’s story. He said it was time he paid some
attention to the family property he had in Udvada, Gujarat and she thought a
long do-nothing-whatsoever week in some place like Alibag would be kind of
perfect.
‘Sai Inn is the place to stay if you want a pool,’ said Darius. ‘Unless you like
five star comfort all the time,’ he grinned at her.
‘Actually I am planning to go and stay in this little place that has some
cottages for rent – Vasu told me about it.’
‘Hey, he never passed on this information to me. Vasu never takes holidays
himself – so how does he know what kind of a place it is?’
‘But Nilima does. She goes across and spends weekends there, particularly
when Vasu takes off and is out of Mumbai after the bad guys.’
‘Okay, okay, Alibag for you, Udvada for me; but only when we have cleared
this particular mess up. So how do we approach her tomorrow?’
‘I don’t know about you but I am a little nervous about this one. Life has not
been kind to Mrs. Kashyap and I certainly don’t want to bring more
disappointment to her.’
‘But we have to look and work on those diaries. It may come to nothing, but it
may give us a clue as to what was going on in 1986 and 1987. I don’t expect
anything dramatic but certainly pointers telling us in what other directions to go.
If nothing else, it will shed some light on all the people involved. So meet you
for breakfast at 8:30am? Goodnight Kavi.’
The next morning, they drove down to Mrs. Kashyap’s bungalow which was a
little beyond Jakhan on the Rajpur road. It was an old style bungalow, well
maintained, with an outstanding garden. Dehradun’s climate and location is
superb; and all the flowers that grow in the English summer flourish in the Doon
Valley winter. This is where she has channeled her energy and her grief and rage
– into this garden, thought Kavi. I hope to God that I have not brought both of us
on a wild goose chase. Darius, sensing the turmoil going on in her, squeezed her
hand reassuringly as they pressed the doorbell.
An elderly Nepali manservant opened the door. Darius announced who they
were and told him they had an appointment to see Mrs. Kashyap. There was a
flicker of some emotion on his face but he bowed and led the way inside. She
was waiting for them in the verandah leading out of the sitting room; it
overlooked the garden and it was a bit like stepping into a canvas by Renoir or
Monet. But it was her beauty that made them pause before moving forward to
meet her. Age and grief had put lines on her face but that had just accentuated
her beauty. I would die to have that bone structure, thought Kavita, and then
flushed at her unfortunate choice of words. We were so focused on Manorama
that one did not check whether she had any other children. Did she? Kavita
didn’t remember seeing any mention in the police files, and now she didn’t know
how to ask.
They introduced themselves and Darius went straight to the point. ‘Ma’am
there are two diaries of Manorama’s that you have with you. We need to look at
them. It could help us find out what happened to her.’ There was a moment’s
silence and then she said quietly, ‘Why don’t you have some tea or coffee, and
tell me why is it so important that you find the person who killed Manorama?’
‘Because it is ma’am. It matters to both of us and, you may not believe this,
but it matters to the police officers who kept the file alive all these years. The
officer in charge of her case didn’t believe she had just disappeared. He was
convinced that she was murdered but he had absolutely nothing to go on. You
didn’t know anything, and neither did anybody else. Nor did anybody come
forward to volunteer any information or share any suspicions they had. On his
retirement, the police officer passed on the file to his junior who is now a Chief
Inspector in charge of the case. I don’t know how to put this kindly – I am not
very good at this kind of thing, Ma’am, so please forgive me if I come across as
harsh – but we both intend to find who put your daughter in that piece of ground
– and bring him, or her, to book.’
Just for a moment they thought she would lose control and let her grief
overflow; but she belonged to a generation that believed self-control was the
most important part of one’s behaviour, so she collected herself and kept her
emotions in check. ‘Thank you’ she said with a tremulous smile, and at that
moment both of them would have done anything to bring that smile back to her
face. They had tea quietly and then asked if they could explore the garden while
she located the diaries. Kavita who herself was an army brat and had seen her
mother create so many gardens out of all the temporary homes they had lived in,
revelled in walking around and showing off her knowledge of names of the
flowers. Darius was frowning angrily at the flowers. ‘What’s up?’ asked Kavita.
‘Just getting madder by the minute. All of them, whether they did the murder or
not, took away Manorama’s life and her mother’s. I know, I am getting
emotional and thereby breaking one of the prime rules of being a good detective.
Okay let’s go figure out if there is anything of value in those books.’
Mrs. Kashyap was waiting on the verandah with the diaries in her hand. She
seemed to hesitate before handing them over to them. ‘Don’t worry’ said Kavita,
‘we will take good care of them. We will make Xeroxes of only those pages we
think relevant and then return them to you.’
They said their goodbyes and left for the hotel. Kavita was itching to find out
if she could figure out what Manorama had written – something of value or just
girlish chat and confidences. Both were thinking of the effect Manorama’s
disappearance had on her mother.
‘She is a very courageous woman; has not let herself go to pieces and
continued with her life such as it is.’ said Kavita, in admiration.
‘I agree – you know Kavi, Ramnath Maheshwari is a bloody fool.’
She turned and looked at him and asked ‘Oh I know that but which particular
area of his stupidity were you thinking of?’
He replied broodingly ‘If Manorama had half the steel her mom has it would
have been the making of Avinash and the Maheshwari clan. They are in decline
and I am convinced that Manorama’s death is actually one of the causes.’
‘Yes’ she responded, ‘carrying a load of guilt around does tend to slow down
your life-handling abilities. They deserve it though, so I don’t care if they close
down. Just so we find the murderer before they do.’
He laughed. ‘Well you’d better get your head down and figure out what that
gibberish means, or if it means anything at all. Right now, we could do with all
the breaks we can get.’
Reaching the hotel they headed for Darius’s room. The diaries were not of a
very long duration – she had started them when she had entered Sydenham in
1985. She had just turned eighteen. Mrs. Kashyap had confirmed to them this
morning that she had been born on June 11th 1967, which made her twenty at the
time of her disappearance. They ignored all entries till they reached an entry for
the date of March ‘86 in plain English, in which she mentioned that she was
going with Shishir and a gang of friends to Santosh’s house for his annual Holi
party. The gibberish entries started very shortly after so this must be the party
that Avinash had talked about – the one where she came with his brother and left
with him, metaphorically speaking.
She initially felt extremely uncomfortable flipping through the diary. An
extremely private person herself, she felt as though Manorama were hovering
over her shoulder and objecting. ‘I am doing this for you;’ said Kavita silently,
‘somebody took your life away and hid you and we have to find the bastard who
did this.’
Darius was enlisted to help. She had done her homework and had come
prepared. She explained to him that kids basically used one of three ways to hide
what they were writing or when they were sending coded messages to each
other.
The first one was called the ROTI system where each letter of the alphabet is
replaced by the following one. For example: -
J XFOU UP NFFU IJN translates as – I went to meet him.
Then there is the TRANSPOSITION method in which words are written
backwards, which is the simplest of all. So ‘ I went to meet him’ becomes ‘I
TNEW OT TEEM MIH.’
‘There is one more system that is easy to use before we move on to more
complicated and time - consuming ciphers,’ she said. ‘This is the LASER SHIFT
cipher. In this one, you need to identify the letter that is used as A in the
message. For e.g. if G is the cipher word then A becomes G, B becomes H, C
becomes I and so on and so forth.’
They discovered very quickly that she had not used either the Roti or the
Transposition system. They then looked at her using the Laser Shift Key. And
that is what she had done. They looked at the messages with the letters S (for
Shishir, Sydenham), B (for Bombay), D (for Dehradun), K (for Kashyap). But in
the end it was really quite simple – she had predictably used M as in Manorama
or future Maheshwari? as her Laser Shift letter. So Kavita wrote out the alphabet
as Manorama had used it:
A m B n C o D p E q F r G s H t I u J v K w L x M y N z
O a P b Q c R d S e T f U g V h W i X j Y k Z l
Now they got down to the serious business of decoding what she had written.
Both of them hoped it would yield some thing worth their while, something that
would get them further down the road to finding a killer. Darius got on the phone
with Vasu and checked out if the police had discovered anything further while
Kavita got down to working on the coded part of the diary.
 Chapter 14

I t took almost the whole day but finally she isolated and decoded the excerpts
that she felt mattered. The first one was dated 29th March 1986, a Saturday.
‘…yqf etuetude ndaftqd fapmk mf emzfate. U wuxq tua ygot yadq ftmz etuetud.
U my swmp u iqzf.’
‘… met Shishir’s brother today at Santosh’s. I like him much more than
Shishir. I am glad I went.’
A few days later there was an interesting entry.
‘dqqzm fawp yq tq paqe zaf wuxq yq.Itk?’
‘…. Reena said he does not like me. Why?’
Who was he? And who was Reena? They figured it was the Kareena D’ Souza
mentioned by Shishir in their first interview with him. There was no further
reference to this conversation in the diaries nor was it possible to figure out
whom ‘he’ was referring to? A college friend, somebody from Avi’s family,
somebody on the periphery of the investigation who should be pulled into the
centre of the investigation? Reena was mentioned frequently.
A little later, this was around July of 1986, when Manorama and Shishir were
in second year and Avinash in his third year –
‘u pupzf dqmxulq etuehud iagwp nq ea ftue gbeqf iuft yk wuxuzs mhu yadq
ftmz tuy.’
‘I didn’t realize Shishir would be so upset with my liking Avi more than him.’
She deciphered on. A lot of it was about where they met, in coffee shops, in
hotels, in little restaurants in Colaba, the movie they saw, and more daringly the
weekends they spent in some friends’ houses in Lonavla and Khandala.
And then in August of 1987 –
‘u omzf nqwuqhq uf! mhu imzfe fa ymddk yq. At sap tai iuww iq pa uf?’
‘I can’t believe it! Avi wants to marry me. Oh God how will we do it?’
There was an entry in the second week of October dated 13th –
 ‘U pazf xzai tai ngf mhu’e pmp saf fa xzai mnagf ge. Fapmk ime ftq yaef
taddunwq pmk ar yk wurq’
‘I don’t know how but Avi’s dad got to know about us. Today was the most
horrible day of my life.’
Tears blotted the next few words but they were still legible –
‘eayq wmikqd omwwqp fa eqq yq uz ftq taefqw & tmp ftq otqqx fa fqww yq ftmf
uf u wqmhq mhu mwazq & sa tayq tae rmftqd ue iuwwuzs fa bmk yq m tgsq egy
ar yazqk.’
‘Some lawyer called to see me in the hostel & had the cheek to tell me that if I
leave Avi alone & go home his father is willing to pay me a huge sum of money.
Some more tears blotted the next few words. Then -
‘….uf ime ea tiyuwumfuzs ea puesgefuzs ympq yq ea taddunwk mzsdk. U rqqw
wuxq wqmhuzs mhu & sauzs tayq. Fa tqww iuft ftqy mww.
‘…It was so humiliating, so disgusting, made me so horribly angry. I feel like
leaving Avi and going home. To hell with them all.’
A little later an entry for 16th Oct, a Friday.
‘u fawp mhu fapmk mnaif ftq arrqd tue rmftqde rwgzxk tmp ympq. Tq ime
metmyqp & riduage. Itmf mdq iq sauzs fa pa?
‘I told Avi today about the offer his father’s flunky had made. He was
ashamed and furious. What are we going to do?’
Then an entry just after Diwali of that year, which was around the 22nd of
October –
‘ufe tmbbqzuzs. omzf nqwuqhq uf. mhu & u mdq sauzs fa dgz mimk. u my ea
qjoufqp & m wuffwq mrdmup. Etagwp u fqww yay zai?
‘It’s happening. Can’t believe it. Avi and I are going to run away. I am so
excited and a little afraid. Should I tell Mom now?’
And poignantly the last entry, dated 13th November …yqqfuzs tuy mf 8:30pm
az ftq 14th zqmd ftqud eqmeupq bwmoq mf hqdeahm. Tq emke tq tme mddmzsqp
m omd rad ge fa sa paiz fa sam ftmf zustf .
…meeting him at 8:30pm on the 14th near their seaside place at Versova. He
says he has arranged a car for us to go down to Goa that night.
 There was a silence in the room as she finished translating and reading out all
the excerpts to Darius, particularly the last two entries. It seemed as though a
young girl’s voice echoed in the room.
‘She didn’t have a chance, did she? When you look at all this it looks like a
script from a Hindi potboiler but the ending was not the expected happy one.
The last message, Daru, that’s significant, isn’t it? It looks like it was Avinash
who got her to the bungalow to be killed.’
‘Hmm…I agree with you. These are the ways I look at it: Avinash killed her
for reasons unknown or Shishir killed her for rejecting him, or somebody knew
what was going on and had an agenda of his own. This unknown somebody also
knew about the system by which they communicated with each other.’
‘Which means,’ Kavita said ‘that if the Maheshwari brothers or the father
didn’t have her killed, then it was somebody close to them or somebody she
knew and trusted.’
‘But damnit, Daru, what was the motive. What kind of a threat did she
represent, a twenty-year old in her second year of college? We are missing
something here. It’s not just a crime passionel.’
‘You could be right – maybe the killer had the hots for Manorama. And
Avinash’s decision to marry her…old man Maheshwari thought it was serious
enough for him to buy her off. Somebody told him what his elder son was up to,
because Avinash certainly wouldn’t have talked to him. That’s why he was
running away. He wanted to present the family with a fait accompli.’
She thought about this for a while. ‘So it was more than family pride and all
that bullshit. Disobeying the diktats of the paterfamilias was just a small part of
it. You are saying that there is a profit and loss angle here and Avi and
Manorama marrying meant that particular account would be skewed in favour of
the loss column. Interesting. You do realize that we have to look at this case in a
completely different way.’
‘We return the diaries to Mrs. Kashyap tomorrow and get back to Bombay (to
Darius Mumbai would always be Bombay) as fast as we damn well can. The
answers lie there. We just have to dig harder and push tougher.’ Darius’s eyes lit
up with glee thinking of the encounters and battles to come with all the dramatis
personae of this particular story. The rest of the evening was spent getting their
travel details organized– the car back to Delhi, the late night flight back to
Mumbai. They rang Mrs. Kashyap to tell her that they were returning the diaries
to her in the morning. She hesitated and then asked ‘Were they of any use?’ ‘Yes,
ma’am,’ said Darius quietly and then he felt compelled to say it even though he
knew it sounded totally clichéd, ‘We’ll find whoever did this to Manorama.’
There was a little silence on the other side and then Mrs. Kashyap’s voice saying
‘Thank you. I’ll see you both in the morning. I’d like it if you both could have
breakfast with me before leaving. Would 7:30am suit you? No’ she said before
Darius could interrupt her ‘I am an early riser. It would be no trouble at all.’
‘Thank you ma’am’ said Darius, ‘It would be our pleasure.’
They looked at each other when he put the phone off. ‘We had better find her
daughter’s killer as we promised. Otherwise we will break her heart all over
again.’
They went down and had their dinner in almost total silence.
The breakfast with Mrs. Kashyap on that Sunday morning was one of the more
pleasant memories of the Maheshwari case. They sat in the verandah looking at
that beautiful garden and like Alice in Wonderland talked of ‘ships and seals’
and many other things. As they rose to leave Mrs. Kashyap said, ‘I would really
like it if I could bring Manorama home and carry out all the rituals properly.
When do you think that will be?’
‘The moment the case is over.’ said Darius, ‘I will see to it that the police
release her body as fast as possible.’
And driven by some unknown impulse unsentimental Kavita leaned over, held
her hand and said, ‘and we will accompany her home. That is a promise.’
Darius looked startled but didn’t say anything. They said their goodbyes and
got into the hired car for the drive back to Delhi and onward flight to Mumbai.
 Chapter 15

T hey both reached office on Monday, the last day of 2012, an hour ahead of
everyone else. Wisely, they avoided trouble with Valerie by promptly giving
in their expenses, airline boarding passes and hotel receipts straightaway. Valerie
looked astonished and well she might – Darius had been known to give in such
details a year later, and only when he had been nagged enough so that he
couldn’t take it anymore. She figured correctly that Kavita was the one leading
this change. The rest of that Monday was spent recording every single scrap of
information they had on the case and updating Vasu on their Dehradun visit.
They were spending New Year’s Eve with Vasu and Nilima; it was a subdued
one as both of them were in no mood for partying. They left for Alibag on
Monday evening and saw the New Year in on a quiet note.
As they entered their office on the 2nd, Valerie met them looking very pleased
with herself. She had tracked down all the people originally interviewed and had
set up meetings with most of them. Since Monday had also seen them clear all
the pending paperwork relating to other cases, the atmosphere of smug virtue in
the two partners’ offices would have probably stifled a saint.
Valerie had tracked down four people who had hung around with Shishir in
college – Anil Patil, Vinay Kapoor, Santosh Singh and the fourth was Ajay
Kanoria, now Avinash’s brother-in-law. She had also located one Ramesh
Krishnamurthy, who had not only been close to Avinash in college, but now was
the finance director with a group of Maheshwari companies. It was obvious that
the elder Maheshwari brother was not a very sociable or gregarious man like his
younger brother Shishir; his circle of friends was much smaller. The only person
she still had to contact was Kareena D’Souza, the Reena mentioned in
Manorama’s diaries.
‘Tribal lot, aren’t they?’ remarked Kavita, ‘don’t they even want to get to
know other people besides relatives and school and college friends?’
‘These people are not capable of it. To them being with the familiar is the most
important thing in life. And loyalty gets precedence over competence any day of
the week and in a month of Sundays. Not that I am saying that this Ramesh guy
is incompetent, but just that in family businesses loyalty is priority. Okay Val,
tell us what you have found out about these guys and then we’ll tell you about
our trip to Dehradun. Valerie looked at her notes of collected information and
gave the relevant bits.
‘Anil Patil, building contractor and nephew to a minister… Lots of good stuff
both ways. The Maheshwaris benefited from the ministerial connections, he
benefited from a lot of building contracts on land owned by them. Besides of
course what he does independently. Married his college sweetheart. Surprisingly
accessible. You have an appointment to meet him day-after-tomorrow.’
Valerie continued.
‘Vinay Kapoor. Works in an investment bank. Very proper and very terrified
that the Maheshwari scandal will brush off on his suited and booted self.
Claimed not to know Shishir so well. Still have to pin him down to an
appointment. Oh! He’ll give it, don’t worry.’ Looking at the steely glint in her
eyes and knowing her as they did they were extremely sure that he would fall in
line.
‘Then there is Santosh Singh, a businessman. Located him, though judging by
the reaction of his secretary, not quite so eager to claim that relationship right
now, just like Vinay Kapoor. He is in London and will be back by the end of the
week. Will set up an appointment with him on Monday the 7th onwards.’
Both figured that this was the Santosh from her diary whose party she had
gone to that fateful March evening in 1986.
‘And now to Ajay Kanoria. Married. Works with the Maheshwaris after his
sister Anjali married Avinash. Was and is very close to Shishir. As bonhomous
as Shishir though right now very polite and not very cooperative. But then none
of them are. However, I spoke to Rajeshbhai who sorted him out. He will meet
both of you today at 4pm at their Byculla factory office. It seems he sits there.
Spoke to somebody I know,’ at this point Valerie looked delightfully vague and
Darius knowing the vast network of secretaries, office managers, and legal staff
she was tapped into tactfully did not ask who, ‘and it seems he is liked but
everybody also thinks he is riding on his sister’s coattails. He does perhaps drink
a little too much, like Shishir, and reaches home two/three nights of the week
after 2am or 3am. There is some talk of seeing some other women regularly but
then they all do, don’t they?’
 Valerie moved on to Ramesh Krishnamurthy. ‘Typical finance guy. Quiet,
hardworking, teetotaler, vegetarian.’ Valerie sounded most suspicious of him but
Darius knew that this reaction came from her deep-seated distrust of anyone who
didn’t have some human failings or was too religious. Having worked for a long
time in a law firm she knew all too well how an outer cover of rectitude could
conceal a multitude of sins. ‘Water-cooler gossip says he is very attached to
Avinash. He sounded upset when I spoke to him and I think that is because he
thinks him completely incapable of murder. He’ll see you anytime you want. He
sits at Maheshwari House.’
‘And I found her,’ said Valerie in triumph.
‘Who?’ asked Darius and Kavita together?
‘Manorama’s friend from college days; the Reena of the diary; the one she
used to stay with overnight and spend weekends with and who was the go-
between between her and Avinash throughout their relationship. She is Kareena
D’Souza now. She was Kareena Menezes then. She is an only child and inherited
her parent’s bungalow in Versova and lives there now with her family. Her
husband is a shippie. She is both furious and unhappy about what happened to
Manorama and she is completely happy that the Maheshwaris are in trouble over
it. According to her all of them got together and killed her, which’ Valerie
admitted with a sigh, ‘is highly unlikely. She wants to meet you guys and will
help in any way she can.’
They both got up and hugged her. ‘Atta girl! Now we are getting somewhere.
Transcripts – we need copies of the interviews the police had with them.’
And both of them could almost see the halo around her head as she informed
them that they were in a green folder on their desks. Kavita and Darius called up
Vasu and told him to meet them at Gajalee in High Street Phoenix for dinner that
night. They then sat Valerie down and brought her up to speed on the Dehradun
trip.
The first order of the day was to meet Ajay Kanoria and they were at the
Byculla office of the Maheshwaris a little before the 4pm appointment. Part
textile mill, part mall, it had been cleverly redeveloped by them. They learned
later that it was Ajay who was largely responsible for the re-development. He
had added the commercial utilization of their real estate holdings on to the list of
active Maheshwari enterprises. It seems Ajay Kanoria had a talent for spatial
design.
Ajay’s office was plush, but unlike Avinash and Shishir’s, also had the
statutory puja corner. Pleasant and polite in manner, like all the Maheshwaris he
made it clear that all this was a total intrusion on the family’s privacy.
They went through the initial formalities and had to go through their usual
spiel about how Ramnath Maheshwari had brought them in and that it was in
their best interests to really find out what happened. And then Kavita asked him,
‘Mr. Kanoria what did you think of Manorama?’
He hesitated and then said with a great deal of reserve in his voice ‘I barely
knew her.’
‘Really Mr. Kanoria do you seriously want us to believe that? That you barely
knew her?’ she asked in irritation, ‘This was the girl who was in your class in
college, who by all reports was very pretty, and who both your brother-in-law
and his brother went round with in a world where this would have been noticed
and been a matter for lots of gossip and speculation.’
‘Oh alright I knew her, even liked her but I thought she was wrong for Avi.’
‘Why? Because he was supposed to marry your sister and she was in the way.’
‘No – there was no talk of their marrying at that time’ he said with a flash of
anger, ‘if you really want to know it’s because she didn’t belong in our world.
Business families have their own protocol and she wouldn’t have fitted in.’
‘That’s a very conservative view for someone who was what, nineteen,
twenty?’
‘Well that’s what I thought then, Ms. Tandon and still do. If that makes me an
ultra-conservative so be it.’
‘Oh, I don’t know about conservative but certainly financially prudent.
Marrying outside the Marwari business world would have a very harmful effect
on the ‘I am worth this much’ situation. Very harmful indeed’ and much to
Ajay’s annoyance Kavita smiled at him very sweetly.
Darius chipped in at this point. ‘Tell me Mr. Kanoria do you remember the
events around the time Manorama disappeared?’
‘Not much. As I told you I felt that Avinash should not have got so involved
with her. When she stopped coming I thought she had left and gone back home
to the north. And yes, I felt that on the whole it was a good thing.’
‘So you didn’t care what her disappearance did to Avinash or Shishir
emotionally?
‘Shishir?’ He sounded really startled, ‘What has Shishir to do with this?’
‘Oh, you didn’t know. It seems he was pretty fond of her too.’
They could see that this was new to him. Obviously Shishir had not confided
in him, and Val had picked up from her gossip gleanings, that though very
friendly in the early years, Ajay and Shishir saw much less of each other now. It
seems it was Ajay who had pulled away. They now met mostly at family
functions. Kavita continued, ‘You remember a fellow student of yours called
Kareena Menezes?’
Yes, yes I do. Lived in Santa Cruz or some place like that, I think. What about
her? I expect she thinks Avinash murdered Manorama.’
‘She lived in Andheri. Oh, don’t worry Mr. Kanoria. All of you are under
suspicion until proved otherwise. So you see all of you can share the burden
equally.’
Ajay Kanoria was really annoyed- they could see that. ‘I dislike the
implications of your comments. I had nothing to do with her in life or anything
to do with her death. Is there anything else? I have a lot of work to do.’
Darius responded cheerfully. ‘We won’t take up anymore of your time right
now. We know you are a busy man. But we will have to talk to you again as the
case develops so I am afraid we will be meeting again.’
They smiled at him, left the office and decided that they might as well meet
the finance man if he had a little time. It seemed he did and that he would wait
for them. They drove as fast as they could but with all the evening rush hour
traffic the drive from Byculla to the Maheshwari office in Nariman Point took
well over an hour.
 Chapter 16

H is co-operative attitude surprised them. So far everybody they had

interviewed had met them with hostility, overt or covert. So, speculated
Kavita, either he is trying to buy our goodwill for the Maheshwaris or he
genuinely thinks the murderer is someone outside of this circle and therefore of
no particular concern. The office was humming with activity with far fewer
people hanging around gossiping. The company drums had let them know who
Darius and Kavita were; but this office, probably because the Maheshwaris came
less often, was more focused on work first and gossip second. The sideway
glances and excited whispers that had greeted their visits to the other offices
were conspicuously absent here. If they were gossiping and speculating it was on
their own time, not company time. Someone ran a tight ship here. As it turned
out, Rajesh Kapadia also had an office here, but though in, expressed no desire
to meet them. They both smiled when they heard that – they guessed accurately
that he had had about as much of them as he could take right now.
Ramesh Krishnamurthy looked like a very fit and athletic finance man. He
was slim, well dressed and though not pleased to have them poking around in
this matter, was too polished a hand to be openly hostile. But it was also clear
from the outset that Ramesh had decided to fight a rearguard action on behalf of
his old friend and employer. His first question clearly showed that.
‘I don’t know why Ramnathji thought anybody had to find out anything. It has
nothing to do with them.’
Kavita reminded him sharply, ‘the property was theirs at the time the murder
happened. She had close connections with both the brothers, which, incidentally
they have confirmed. And please don’t tell me that you didn’t know that Avinash
was planning to marry Manorama.’
He looked a little startled at Kavita’s reaction but had to agree with her, ‘No I
didn’t. But I refuse to believe that he killed her; sorry I know him too well for
that. Let me repeat – he is not a killer as the newspapers are suggesting.’
‘Maybe not’ she said in a much milder tone, ‘but then I would suggest you
help us find who out who did kill her. Otherwise this ugly suspicion will always
remain hanging over him and the rest of the family.’
‘Somebody who knew her killed her, Mr. Krishnamurthy’ pointed out Darius,
‘and the sooner we know why the better it will be.’
‘So let’s ask the question differently’ Kavita put in. ‘Who benefited from her
death and who lost by her being alive.’
‘Nobody’ was the almost automatic response, ‘Let’s face it, we were all young.
Chances are Avi would have got over her eventually. And I don’t think he would
actually have married her. He recognized that he had a lot of responsibilities and
that he just couldn’t chuck them and take off.’
‘So you both did talk of his marrying Manorama.’
‘Yes, Mr. Mody we did. We were and are good friends. But as I said, in the
end he wouldn’t have done it. After all, he had a business empire to run.’
‘Maybe it didn’t matter to him.’
At which Ramesh laughed, ‘Of course it mattered. You are looking at that
situation from the prism of today’s world. This obsession with love and all that.’
Both realized he was unaware of all the arrangements his friend Avinash had
made to marry Manorama. Darius went back to his original question. Who
benefited from her death, who lost by her marrying Avinash? He decided to tip
the scales a little. ‘He was going to marry her, you know’ he told him, ‘he had
made all the arrangements including driving down to Goa and getting married in
the Shanta Durga temple there.’
Ramesh was totally shocked. He had always thought this obsession with
Manorama would pass and that Avi would come back on the straight and narrow
path laid out for him. And to Ramesh, that was the correct thing to do. His
orderly and conservative mind revolted at the idea of a man throwing up his
world for love. So he didn’t know Avi as well as he thought he did. When Darius
and Kavita repeated the question about benefit and loss he realized that he
needed to look at this matter from a very different perspective.
Kavita decided to try a little flattery. ‘You have a very organized mind, Mr.
Krishnamurthy. Can you recall the events of the weekend of November 14th/15th
1987?’
‘Of course not.’ He retorted.
 ‘Well, did you spend a lot of time with Avinash?’ asked Kavita.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Was there a property in Goa he had access to?’
‘No, not that I know…’
‘Yes, you have remembered something, haven’t you?’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Let’s decide that. Please understand that anything, however seemingly
inconsequential, may be relevant to the case. At the same time, as we reassured
Mr. Maheshwari, nothing of what we discuss goes out to the press and anything
that is not relevant to the case will not be released. We are good at what we do
and we are trusted by a lot of people because of how we handle confidential
matters. You just have to trust us.’
‘We had a friend from Goa studying with us. I remember we had all planned to
go to his house in Goa after Diwali and before college opened. Everything was
organized when he suddenly cancelled the plans citing some problem with roofs
and leaks. None of us gave it much thought then. I am not even sure that it was
that year.’
‘What was this friend’s name?’ asked Darius.
He hesitated and then told them that this friend’s name was Umesh Ratnakar.
They both recognized the name; a product from one of those old industrial and
landowning families who had been in the news recently for all the wrong
reasons, the main ones being his drinking and a very messy divorce.
‘Could you do us a favour?’ asked Kavita, ‘could you please check with him if
he remembers which Diwali holidays it was? Or better still, let us talk to him.
Check it out with him, please. Where does he live most of the time, in Mumbai
or Goa?’
Ramesh Krishnamurthy admitted that Umesh Ratnakar spent most of his time
in Mumbai but he was very reluctant to talk to Umesh. However, his concern for
Avinash’s interests overrode his reluctance and he picked up the phone to make
an appointment for both the investigators. Ramesh looked totally surprised when
Umesh immediately agreed to meet them on Friday evening around 7:30pm. In
keeping with his reputation, the meeting place was the Opium bar at the Trident.
 They thanked him and she returned to the question Darius had asked him
earlier – who benefited. He hesitated at this point – clearly reluctant to answer.
Darius continued to push him, ‘Come on Mr. Krishnamurthy you know the
answer to that one. You are the money man for the family.’
With a flash of irritation he answered, ‘It would be obvious to anybody that
there would have been a great financial loss to the Maheshwaris if Avinash had
married Manorama. His father was in talks with two or three families about his
marriage and of course, that would also have meant an amalgamation of business
interests.’
They couldn’t help smiling at the way he put it. ‘You mean’ said Kavita with
slight sarcasm, ‘the girl would have brought in a huge dowry.’
‘Yes’ he said defensively, ‘and why not? That was the practical and smart
thing to do. It’s not as though he was in love with any of them.’ He flushed as
soon as the words were out of his mouth, realizing how crude and unfeeling they
sounded.
‘Yes, Mr. Krishnamurthy we know. And according to you it was not necessary
for him to love his wife. He just had to love what she brought him.’
He sighed and said quietly, ‘Look all I am saying is that Avinash would never
have murdered Manorama. He was being totally foolish about her but even if he
didn’t marry her he would never hurt her. Never.’
‘And what about the rest of them – Shishir, Ajay, Rajesh Kapadia, Ramnathji?
Can you stand guarantee for them too?’ asked Darius.
Ramesh Krishnamurthy just shook his head, ‘Now you are being very foolish
Mr. Mody – you know that. Anyway I just hope that all this ends quickly; all this
media spotlight is really hurting them.’
She turned towards the door and then turned around, ‘You know what I find
very interesting about all of you is that there has never been a thought spared for
Manorama in all this. It seems that only the trouble that the Maheshwaris are
suffering is of any consequence.’
She nodded to him coldly and politely and left the room, not waiting for his
reaction. As Darius was following her she heard Ramesh advise him to be in
time for the appointment with Umesh Ratnakar on Friday, as after 9pm the
chance of no interview happening was very high. They didn’t say anything as
they left. And Kavita thought – love is never enough, there is just so much
baggage that goes with it that I am surprised it survives and reemerges time and
again the way it does.
They had agreed to meet Vasu at 9pm in the Phoenix Mall in Parel. Kavita said
she needed to have a beer or two before eating anything so they first made for
the Irish Pub before going down to Gajalee to eat. When they had finished eating
they compared notes, updated each other, and all three agreed that catching this
murderer would be most satisfying. Vasu had to leave early the next morning for
Nagpur for some work but decided a nightcap or two was in order and so all of
them went back to the pub.
The conversation drifted on to love and money. Vasu said that the mainspring
of all personal murders and 90% of criminal murders, within gangs and so forth
was finally for love and/or money, ‘That’s what it all boils down to. Unreturned
love, unfulfilled love, desperately-out-of-whack love. And then there was money
– lack of it, getting it, losing it, greed for it.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Darius, ‘but it is also because the two never run in a straight line,
do they? When love stories go wrong it is either the absence or presence of
money that tips the scales.’
‘Really Daru’ exclaimed Kavita, ‘that’s about the most unromantic statement I
have heard in a long while.’
He grinned at her, ‘Trust me, love is highly overrated. I think there was an
English author my mother used to read who wrote that she would choose good
teeth, good digestion, and a healthy bank account over all this nonsense and
damn right she was too,’ retorted Darius.
‘No wonder you Parsis are dying out,’ returned Kavita.
‘Parsis, sweetheart, are dying out because they have shut the world out, the
damn fools,’ replied Darius calmly.
And feeling much refreshed after this pas-de-deux they reapplied themselves
to having a few more drinks. The next morning would find them back at the
unenviable task of further probing and breaking down the defenses of all those
involved in the Manorama story. They told each other that they would crack this
case to find a killer–the pugnacious Parsi legal beagle and the never-say-die
Punjaban.
 Chapter 17

K avita called the following week the most ‘trudgy’ of her life. They went
from one interview to another – the trudginess was figurative so to speak as
they drove everywhere – but it was the overall impression she had. Valerie, who
was nothing if not persistent, had a tough time pinning some of the ‘friends’ to a
time and a day for interviews, but they did finally happen. They also actioned
enquiries into all the little details that had been uncorroborated so far, of bits and
pieces of information that seemed random but had to be connected in some way
to the main theme.
They were meeting the first of the friends, Anil Patil, on Friday, the 4th of
January. Their journey took them back to Nariman Point where Anil had one of
his offices. He was, as Valerie said, friendly and co-operative. It was a beautiful
day, blue skies, warm but not hot, a day to be chasing waves in Gorai or lazing
on one of the beaches in Alibag, one of those days that come in Mumbai
Januarys and make up for the sweating of the summers and the mess of the
monsoons. Certainly not a day for interviewing people about an ugly murder that
happened two decades ago.
Truth be told, where Darius really wanted to be was in bed with Kavita,
preferably for the rest of his life. I wonder if there are any self-help books on
keeping your mind on your work when all you are doing is lusting after your
partner and having Technicolor fantasies of what both of you could be doing
between cool linen sheets in a candle-lit bedroom. He was beginning to get
exhausted with this constant battle between his thoughts and his outward
behaviour. He was aware of her all the time and driving somewhere or the other
for work. It took all the self-control he had to not blurt out what he was feeling.
But a residue of reason told him that if he precipitated any kind of emotional
turmoil in her life he would lose her. That was an unbearable thought.
He came into her room before leaving for the meeting, and she was completely
absorbed in whatever she was reading, looking totally adorable and very
desirable. The smile he gave her startled her. He had a variety of smiles that
conveyed a gamut of emotions – a cranky and unfriendly Parsi he definitely was
not – but this one threw her. Wonder what he’s up to. Though I must admit he’s
looking good today. It was just as well for her that she couldn’t read Darius’s
thought processes.
Kavita noticed Anil Patil offered them tea and coffee, in contrast to his friends
the Maheshwaris, who certainly had not. He started by saying how sorry he was
to know what had happened to Manorama. He had liked her, he said, not as
much as Shishir or Avinash, but she was an attractive girl and very likeable.
‘And yet Mr. Patil’ said Darius, ‘she was murdered.’
‘Yes she was, and the reason you both are sitting here in front of me is that
you think either Avinash or Shishir did the deed.’
Kavita leaned forward and said, ‘Look Mr. Patil’ – ‘Anil, please’ – ‘okay Anil,
this was a murder done by someone who knew her. The reason lies in her
relationship with the Maheshwaris. So either they murdered her or someone who
knew both her and them did. There is an intersecting point here. You all need to
talk to us. We want to find the truth. We don’t know any of you; we have no axe
to grind. And if nothing else it will help your friends. No resolution means that
there will always be a cloud of suspicion over them. And by association all of
you.’
A moment’s silence and they knew that what she said had hit home. They had
at least one person in the group who, if not totally on their side, would not
behave like a clam. They spent the next hour with him but nothing new came to
light, except that a lot of people knew about the Avinash-Manorama
involvement. And that Shishir was much fonder of her than he ever let on. And
that old man Maheshwari was dead set against this match, and had said so on
one or two occasions within the hearing of Anil and his friends when they had
been hanging around with Shishir in his house.
‘Who were these friends, Anil and how often did this happen?,’ asked Darius
‘Well if I remember it correctly, just twice. Once it was Ajay and me, and the
second time I think Vinay was with us. I remember this because we had never
heard him lose his temper, and on both these occasions he was pretty mad.’ He
answered the question he saw on their faces, ‘Yes Ajay Kanoria whose sister
eventually ended up being Avi’s wife and Vinay Kapoor the banker.’
‘Did any one of you tell Avinash about all this?’
 ‘Good God, no. I certainly did not. I felt it was none of our business and
anyway none of us were that close to him.’
As they were leaving Anil Patil’s office Darius turned around and asked him
suddenly, ‘Tell me, Anil, would you say Mr. Maheshwari feared her presence in
Avinash’s life so much that he would go to the extent of murder? Or that anyone
else would have for that matter?’
Anil was initially shocked and then laughed out loud at this, ‘Of course not.’
But as they turned away to leave, Kavita noticed that he was suddenly looking
very thoughtful.
She pointed this out to Darius when they were in their car. He figured that Anil
had certainly remembered something or some suspicion had cropped up in his
head.
We’ll give him a day or two and pile on again. We are on the right track. So
when are we meeting the bank chap, what’s his name?
‘Vinay Kapoor. We still have to get an appointment with him but Val will take
care of that. We have got some time before we meet Umesh Ratnakar at the
Trident. You know what we need- we need someone who can help us with the
financials of the Maheshwaris – both history then and present state now.’
‘Aaha, anticipating your wishes, my lady I have already talked to someone- he
will meet us at the office tomorrow. He’s a CA who worked in a bank that was a
major lender to the Maheshwaris and then worked with one of the companies
that did their financial audits. Needless to say I had to lean on him and promise
him that his name would never crop up in anything we do with the information
he gives us.’
Valerie rang Darius just then to say that the CA had confirmed that he would
see them at 4pm in their office on Saturday. ‘He sounds worried’ she told them,
‘Given half a chance I am sure he will skip the meeting.’
‘Ring him back Val and tell him we will be there and how important this is.
Make a few reassuring noises. Don’t want him bolting. Okay let’s get back to the
office and look up Mr. Ratnakar’s colourful history before we join him in the bar
this evening.’
As they reached the office there was a call from Vasu. ‘Need to let you know.
Some political bigwig is going after these guys, not in the interest of truth and
justice etc. but definitely for financial reasons. It seems that he and his favoured
friends have lost out to them a few times on lucrative contracts and now they
have the perfect stick to beat the Maheshwaris with. We need to close this up fast
before some fresh blood gets spilt.’
They left around 6:30pm for the Opium bar in the Trident. They wanted to
check out Umesh Ratnakar on the quiet before they met him. They found a
corner away from the TV screens and sipped a soda while waiting for him. They
had left a message for him with the bar manager and they didn’t have long to
wait. He was as described, fair, of medium height but Ramesh Krishnamurthy
had forgotten to mention that he had a drinker’s florid face, but without the
drinker’s weight problem. Darius went to greet him and get him to their table
while Kavita pondered on the theory spouted by all dieticians that all alcohol
was only empty weight-adding calories. Certainly they had not added any to
Umesh who was lean and stringy. He came over to their table smiling genially
and she could not help liking him. He looked an agreeable person, and would
make the kind of friend who would be there for you when required. They
thanked him for agreeing to talk to them and once the alcoholic preliminaries
were over – Laphroaig on the rocks for him, and club soda for them – they got
down to talking. In answer to his raised eyebrows on the soda order Darius
explained with a smile that they were on duty in a manner of speaking, and that
they would join him a little later.
He fell into a reverie when the drinks arrived and both of them waited a
moment before beginning to probe into his memories of that long-ago Diwali
November.
‘Mr. Ratnakar…’
‘No, no. Umesh please. Mr. Ratnakar reminds me too much of how my
Principal in Mayo College used to address me when I had to appear in his study
to be hauled up for something or other. And I did appear in front of him rather
frequently.’
‘Okay Umesh do you remember what happened that November?’
‘Oh yeah, pretty clearly even today. Avi rang me up around the third week of
October– I was in Goa at that time- and told me about his decision to marry
Manorama. What really surprised me was his going against his father’s wishes in
the matter. There was a lot of money involved and chances are that he would
have had to give it all up. Avi really surprised me on that one.’
They all paused to take a sip and then he continued.
‘He wanted me to arrange a marriage ceremony in the Shanta Durga Mandir in
Ponda for him and Manno on the 16th or 17th of November. He asked me, I
remember, whether I minded doing all this and of course I didn’t. He thought my
parents would object but mine were a different lot – my father was more tolerant
and less controlling than most of his peers and my mother was totally into all her
social work and paid very little attention to all this. As long as I did well in my
studies, was in good health and not in any kind of headline - making trouble they
generally gave me what in modern parlance is now called ‘my space.’ So I went
ahead and arranged everything for them. The priest would marry them and
register the marriage under the Hindu Marriage Act. It was all in place for the
17th.’
He ordered another large Laphroaig for himself and this time insisted they join
him. ‘You know I haven’t talked about what happened to anybody else all these
years. Except to Avi when I came back after the Diwali holidays and he was in a
really bad state. I just left it alone after that.’
He shook his head to shake off the memories but Darius looked at his watch
surreptitiously and gently prompted him. ‘So it was all in place…’
I got a call from Avi on the 16th morning saying it was all off. He was both
distraught and furious. He said she had left Mumbai and gone off without a
word; that she had not turned up where they were supposed to meet on the 14th;
and that her friend Reena was telling a strange tale of her going off in a car to
meet with him at 7:30pm. But that can’t be, he said. He had a lot of things to
arrange so he had arranged to have her picked up at 8pm from Reena’s place and
they would meet at an Irani café near their Versova bungalow where he would be
waiting for her. She never turned up. He couldn’t understand it at all. After that
he never mentioned her name or talked of her again.
In spite of themselves, and even though he might turn out to be the murderer,
for a moment they all felt a wave of sadness for all that had gone wrong for Avi
and Manorama.
‘He didn’t kill her you know.’ Another one saying this, thought Kavita, ‘He
was crazy about her.’
 ‘Did you like her?’ asked Kavita. He thought about it for a moment or two and
then said, ‘Up to a point, absolutely. But I like my women a little more worldly -
wise and a little less dependent, and I would have probably found her a little
boring in the end. I know, I know, maybe I should change my mind on that given
the amount of trouble I have got into’; he was obviously referring to his
headline-hitting divorce, ‘though Kavita, I can see, does not like what I am
saying. But then’ grinned Umesh, ‘Avi is not exactly a ball of fire himself, is he?
They would have suited each other perfectly. And maybe she would have
changed with age. People do.’
Kavita gave him a look but didn’t say anything.
By this time he was on his third large drink and when he sighed suddenly and
lapsed into silence they guessed he was reaching a point when any further talk
with him would not be of any value. Meeting them had obviously triggered a
whole lot of memories that he was unlikely to share with them. Besides, he
wasn’t in Mumbai and hadn’t been there for at least a week before that fatal
weekend in November. This needed confirmation but he had no motive and no
opportunity and the role he had played in these events was off-stage, waiting in
the wings.
They thanked him and left the bar. Darius asked her if she would like to join
him for a drink in Dublin, the bar in ITC Grand Central right in front of her
place.
‘Yes I need a drink or two or maybe even three.’
‘Excellent. That’s exactly the mood I am in.’
Darius loved it when she decided to let her hair down. It didn’t happen very
often but she sparkled even more than normal when she did. He had realized a
while back that he had fallen in love with his partner shortly after their first
meeting. Just what the hell he was going to do about it he didn’t know but he
was damned clear about two things by now. He was not going to lose her and he
had no intention of spoiling by word or deed the really enjoyable, amazingly
productive professional relationship he had with her. What I’d really like to do,
he said to himself silently, is spend the rest of my life loving you. And
astonished with the way his mind and heart was going, he wrenched his mind
away from all those enticing possibilities and concentrated on ordering the
drinks and cooling himself down. Kavita noticed that he was looking flushed and
was rather quiet but she didn’t have a clue as to the turmoil going on behind his
calm demeanour. Which was just as well for the long-term health of their
excellent partnership.
PART 2
 Chapter 18

M aheshwari House at 8:30 in the night on a Friday evening was a quiet

place. The owner, the lawyer, and a few dedicated-to-working-late types
were there. Ramnath had called Ramesh Krishnamurthy for a late evening
meeting. Waiting for Ramesh to join him, he thought - it never rains but it pours.
It’s not only skeletons out of the ground that I have to deal with right now but
also other skeletons which are getting ready to tumble out of all my cupboards. I
got sideswiped by the return of Manorama into our lives, but there are other
messes lying in wait to trip me up. Increasingly, as the days went by, he saw that
he won’t be able to control events in his personal life as he had in the past, and
that it wouldn’t take too much for everything to get completely out of hand.
The telephone rang as he was brooding on the mess his life had become. His
secretary informed him that Ramesh had arrived. He asked him to come in, and
although he was aware that the two detectives, in the past two weeks, had been
interviewing everyone in the family and their circle of friends, he refused to
discuss the matter. Shutting the murky Manorama-Avinash-Shishir tangle out of
his mind, he got down to grappling with problems that he could identify and deal
with. Some of the group companies were bleeding money because of unwise
investments and sloppy management and the rot had to stop. Further, two major
projects that the Maheshwaris had bid for and were certain to get, had slipped
through their fingers. Obviously their adversaries were beginning to move in for
the kill. Ramnath smiled grimly and thought about all the battles he had fought
and won. And I will win this one, he thought. Crises bring out the best in me and
this is one of the worst of my life, so ergo, I will be at my best now.
In his office in another part of Mumbai, Ajay Kanoria was mentally reviewing
his interview with Darius and Kavita and felt he had handled it well. He was
very aware that he was there in the Maheshwari group because his sister Anjali
had married Avinash. It didn’t bother him at all - he worked as hard as any of the
brothers. He brought value to the table, he knew that, but recently things had not
being going so well for him and other companies in the group. That their ‘bad
luck’ could be his bad judgment and impulsive decision-making had not
occurred to him and instead he chose to believe that it was because their business
rivals were springing nasty surprises on them. What worried him is that he didn’t
know from which direction the next attack would come. Generally pleasant in
manner, all this tension and disquiet was making him both inaccessible and
unfriendly. He would have been even more irritable if he knew that his
performance was one of the reasons Ramnath and Ramesh were sitting in
Maheshwari House poring over the financials and trying to figure out how to
stem the rot.
Avinash was home and trying to atone to Anjali and his younger son for all
that had happened ever since Manorama had re-entered their lives. His elder son
was doing his undergrad from the University of Warwick in England and hadn’t
come home this past Christmas as he and all his friends had decided to go skiing
in Europe. He knew what was happening but was unaffected because of distance.
So Avinash sat and watched ‘Dabangg’ with them even if he privately thought it
was one of the stupidest movies he had ever seen, just an updated and much
better produced version of all the potboilers of the seventies and eighties. At
least he got his girl, he thought bitterly, unlike me who lost her.
Shishir, moved by the same impulse as Avinash, had foregone his usual
alcoholic Belvedere evening to take Sunita and his daughter to a movie at Eros
theatre. They were going on to dinner at Umame, an excellent pan-Asian cuisine
restaurant above Regal, another theatre close by.
Kavita and Darius by mutual consent decided to drop all talk of the case and
for a change went home early. Darius lived in an old spacious building off
Colaba Causeway, which needed all its six flat owners to give an inordinate
amount of attention and money to the upkeep of their property. The building,
with six flats, was equally divided between three married couples and three
bachelors so things ran better than in most buildings as the bachelors were
generally agreeable and absent and the wives of the three married men were
present and efficient. Everybody was in agreement on what needed to be done to
live in one of the best-run properties in Mumbai and paid up the money needed
ungrudgingly.
Kavi had purchased a two-bedroom place in Ashok Towers, opposite ITC
Grand Central in Parel, in the nick of time when the rates were still affordable.
She blessed her good sense every time she walked in after a hard day’s work and
had a comfortable flat to return to. She had been recording all sorts of
programmes in her TV box and decided that this was the perfect evening to open
a good bottle of wine, eat a heated-up dinner and catch up with serial watching.
Inspector Vasant Kulkarni was sitting at home on the dining table and
reviewing every shred of evidence that had been put together in the Manorama
case and another murder case he was handling. He realized he was getting
obsessed about the Kashyap case but could not help it. It enraged him that a
murderer had got away with it all these years. What had they missed earlier?
What had he missed this time around once the body had been found? What were
Darius and Kavita missing in their search for answers to a twenty-five year old
mystery? In any case with the media scavenging around and the political
pressure building up to find answers all were coming under huge pressure.
Later that night, about 11:30pm the telephone rang in an apartment, when
everyone was asleep or on their way to bed. It was picked up on the fourth ring.
‘Hello, who is this?’
A chuckle at the other end, ‘Yeah, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?’
‘Who is this? And how the hell did you get my home number?’
‘It doesn’t matter how I got it. And you’ll remember me when you meet me.’
‘And why the hell should I do that?’
‘Because, my friend, we have to discuss some events that happened a long
time ago in an isolated bungalow on Versova Beach involving a very pretty
young thing called Manorama. Beginning to remember?’
There was a silence and then
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow night, at Sun ’n’ Sand. You remember where that is.’
‘Yeah I remember. Why there? If I have understood you properly you don’t
need people around. They might see you counting the cash.’
Again that chuckle, ‘Good to see you haven’t lost your sense of humour.’ Then
the tone sharpened, ‘Don’t try anything smart.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Good. See you tomorrow at 11pm. Park outside in the hotel parking area on
the opposite side. I would have preferred that lane leading down to the beach but
unfortunately this city’s Municipal Corporation has imposed the joys of Pay and
Park there and so we won’t be as secluded as I am sure you and I want. Don’t
worry, I’ll find you. I remember you very well even if you, rather sadly, have
forgotten me completely.’
 Chapter 19

T he beach in the early mornings outside Juhu hotels is a hive of joggers,

walkers and strollers. On Sundays it’s even more crowded. There is a rash
of cars parked all along the Juhu roads starting from Chowpatty to the last of the
hotels past Prithvi theatre. The hotels attempt to keep their individual patches of
beachfront as clean as possible but they have to wait for the morning rush to
dissipate to do so. So it was well past 10am on that Sunday morning– it was the
6th of January- that the staff of Sun ‘n’ Sand Hotel had finished cleaning up the
hotel surrounds and noticed a slightly battered Maruti parked at the end of their
parking area with apparently no driver. The poor watchman who went to
investigate was in for a rude shock. A man who had been sitting in the driver’s
seat was lying on his left, staring with open eyes at the windscreen, with a small
hole in the side of his head where it shouldn’t have been. He got back as fast as
he could and had the good sense to blurt all this out to the manager in the
privacy of his office, instead of in the lobby surrounded by hotel guests. Nothing
kills the hotel business quicker than the addition of a dead body to the premises.
The manager raced to the car to check it out for himself. Yes, there was a dead
body. He got back to his office even faster than he had reached the car and got
on to the Juhu police station that had jurisdiction over this area. They were there
within half an hour, and from then on the police procedures that accompany the
discovery of a violent death were in process. Carrying them out were the scene-
of-crime officers, the government medical doctor who doubled as the Medical
Examiner and the sub-inspector from the crime branch unit attached to the
station. In this case it was a young Sub-Inspector Sushil Sawant.
Obviously the first worry for the hotel was that he was a hotel guest, as his car
was parked in the hotel parking area, which in the case of Sun ‘n’ Sand is
opposite the hotel. You turn left off the Juhu-Tara Road to take the road to Hotel
Novotel and then you have to turn right again to reach the Sun ‘n’ Sand. The left
turn that you take off Juhu-Tara Road to go to these hotels actually ends up on
the beach. In days gone by one could park there and cuddle up with the girlfriend
of the moment. Unfortunately an officious government seems to think that
catching lovers is more important than catching criminals so the joys of that
quiet canoodling corner has been thoroughly spoilt.
The moment it was discovered that there was no missing guest, or no room
with luggage present and occupant missing, everybody from the manager to the
doorman heaved a great sigh of relief, and got back to the primary task of
looking after the hotel and its guests. But the police were still left with the
problem of identifying the victim. His wallet was missing; so was his cell phone,
and there was nothing else in the car or on him that gave them any clue as to
who he was. The glove compartment was empty, so was the boot, but they were
able to pick up some fingerprints. There was an outside chance that the victim’s
prints were in the police database. The car engine numbers would indicate whom
it was sold to. Even if the OTT (One Time Tax) document and registration
papers were missing, the Regional Transport Offices would have the details and
the ownership could be traced. It just meant a lot of tedious detail work
involving long hours and lot of legwork. It may not make for exciting reading,
but many cases do get solved through this method. In instances like this, the
police troll through all the missing person reports that are on file on the off
chance that the victim had surfaced just to get killed.
And then on the third day after the body was found, which was Tuesday the
8th, two alert young police-inspectors connected the dots. The police station in
CBD Belapur in New Mumbai had an enquiry about a missing Mr. Larry
Fonseca and a car missing along with him. In the ordinary way it would never
have been noted, except as an enquiry to be followed up. But the police in
Mumbai have weekly updates on all enquiries concerning missing persons and
vehicles and of unsolved cases of robbery, rape and murder that are shared with
all the police stations in Greater Mumbai. These updates very often turn out to
be a mine of information and are always checked by the senior police officers of
each station. Even then, it would have remained a missing person case if an alert
Sub-inspector Sawant in the Juhu station had not noted that the FIR (First
Information Report) mentioned that the family member who had filed the
enquiry– in this case it seemed to be the brother- had specifically mentioned that
his brother had talked of meeting an old friend in a hotel in Juhu. Taking a
photograph of the victim and the number of the car with him, the sub-inspector
took off for the police station in Belapur before going to the address mentioned
in the FIR.
Sub-inspector Sushil Sawant was a passionate motorcycle enthusiast. Limited
means prevented him from buying what he really wanted to own which was a
top end model of Harley-Davidson. That ran into lakhs and it was unlikely he
would ever own the object of his dreams but in the meantime he lavished all his
love and care on the Enfield Classic he owned. He cleaned it, polished it, and
according to his mother, even crooned to it. She wanted him to look at girls with
a view to matrimony; he only looked at the specs of all his fantasy motorcycles
and dreamed of owning one of them. He decided that as he was going to Navi
Mumbai he would first indulge himself with a fast ride down the Palm Beach
Road, a delectably smooth 10 km six lane road that connects Vashi and Belapur
through Sanpada and Nerul and runs parallel to Mumbai Harbour on the opposite
side. After a blissful ride Sub-inspector Sawant turned to the real task of the day.
He reached Belapur Police station to find that the officer he had come to meet
had gone out to interview a witness; the constable on duty told him he would be
back in half an hour. In the meantime and in the Indian tradition, tea was offered
along with some glucose biscuits, which for some reason Indians are convinced
are full of goodness and energy. The most successful demonstration of
advertising repeated ad nauseum till it is accepted as the truth. He was soon
sitting with some other constables and sub-inspectors, all of them swapping
stories about crime and punishment in each other’s respective beats. Sub-
inspector Hussein had returned by this time, having successfully located and
questioned the witness. He briefed Sawant on the brother who had enquired – an
Errol Fonseca who lived in Sector 6 of Belapur and owned a garage. They went
across to the garage first, figuring that he might be more truthful and
forthcoming about his brother’s activities away from familial eyes. Errol it
seems was more irritated with his brother’s presence in his life than filled with
love for his sibling. The missing Mr. Larry Fonseca in any language would be
classified as a bit of a waster and a loser.
‘No I don’t know where he has gone in Juhu. All he said was that he was
meeting an old friend. He seemed very cheerful but then he always looked
cheerful when he was planning to cadge some money off somebody,’ said his
brother bitterly. ‘And to top it all he has taken a car from my garage which I
have to repair and deliver by this Saturday. Now what do I do?’ The two sub-
inspectors exchanged glances and had the same thought- if the murdered man
was Larry Fonseca, had he gone to shake down someone? If so things had gone
terribly wrong. But murder? Who had he gone to meet? A career criminal or
someone under such pressure that he had snapped and killed Larry rather than
pay him. Both of them realized that there was a problem with the second theory
– the killer had brought a gun with him and so it was a pre-meditated step, not a
murder of impulse. Perhaps it was someone who had killed before and he or she
would not hesitate to do so again. They got as much information as they could
from Errol, which in the end didn’t amount to much. When they asked for a
photograph of his brother all doubts were laid to rest. It was indeed the missing
ne’er-do-well of the family. Sub-inspector Sawant gently informed him that a
dead man very similar looking to his brother had been found in a car very much
like the one he claimed he took three nights ago. He would have to come in to
the morgue to identify him. Shocked at this turn of events, he was a much more
subdued man when the duo left him.
Sawant thanked him, dropped Sub-inspector Hussein back to his station, and
with Larry Fonseca’s photograph in his possession took off back to Juhu. At
least the murdered man was no longer a John Doe in the file he was building on
the case. In the chain of command SI Sawant reported to his station-in-charge, a
police inspector. In Sawant’s case his boss was a very political gent by the name
of Atul Pandey. When he came in he immediately went into Pandey’s cabin to
report to him and bring him up-to-date on the case. This was where Pandey
plotted and planned on how to get promoted and get out of the Juhu station to the
Crime Branch headquarters, though how he thought this would happen with the
reputation he had of being only a ‘photo-opportunity’ cop was a matter of
conjecture. It helped him that Sushil Sawant was enthusiastic and energetic and
loved his job after, of course, his motorbike. Once Pandey had been the same,
but somewhere along the road doing a good days work had been passed up and
politicking had become the order of the day. The constant interference of
politicians in the working of the police force can take fifty percent of the credit
for this sorry state of affairs. In the meantime he had the indefatigable Sub-
inspector Sawant to do all the work. Yeah unfair, but who said it had to be
otherwise!
 Chapter 20

V asu loved his Mumbai, and to refresh himself when he was feeling jaded or
frustrated he would take the rounds of his beloved city at night. He’d drive
from police chowky to police chowky, talking to friends and colleagues and
picking up the beat of the city. He always said that all great cities are at their best
and worst at night. At their best because the darkness hides their flaws and the
majority of people out on the street are law-abiding citizens who have worked
hard during the day and deserve to have a trouble-free evening out. They are at
their worst because it is also the time for the law-breaking inhabitants to come
slinking from out of the shadows to rob and kill and bring grief to the rest.
Vasu had worked for some years out in various districts. Dealing with the local
mafia, political thugs of assorted shapes and sizes, and even handling an
incipient Maoist insurrection in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra, had given
him knowledge of the murkier side of life in the state as few people had. He
knew that sooner or later, most criminals start the drift to Mumbai for easier and
richer pickings, and that’s where he trolled for all his bits and pieces of
information that he put into his laptop and used later to get breakthroughs that
solved cases.
On Wednesday evening, Vasu decided to go roaming through the streets of
Mumbai while SI Sawant was sitting at his typewriter and diligently typing out
the case report as it stood so far. His reports were always concise, precise,
relevant. His thoughts were organized in a clear and lucid manner. Being a ‘two-
finger’ man his speed was not the best, but unlike the older cops who insisted on
writing their reports or were totally dependent on the station typists Sawant liked
to type his out, neatly and in order.
While he did this, Vasu was trawling through the darkness looking for a
whisper here, a hint there, anything that could throw some light on what was
going on in the shadows of the Mumbai nights. The Mumbai police have a
network of informers which is an integral part of their policing system, and is in
fact a part of policing anywhere in the world. They may not meet the law-
abiding citizen’s approval but they help policemen innumerable times with bits
of crucial information. He parked in the shadows of some broken–down
buildings in a by-lane of Byculla and waited for the local informer to approach
him. His informer approached him carefully but had nothing substantial to
report. Thanking him and slipping him a few notes from what Vasu called his
‘grab-bag-fund,’ he moved through Mahim and Bandra on to the Juhu suburbs,
where the ‘Maruti Murder,’ as the press with a singular lack of imagination had
named it, had taken place.
Vasu knew Atul Pandey of the Juhu station very well though now he didn’t
care much for what he had become. He wondered when the rot had set in – Atul
had been a damned good officer at one time. He was thinking sadly that it
happened more often than he wanted to admit – too many losses in the courts,
too many compromises, too much interference from venal politicians and from
those senior policemen who sell themselves for a whiff of that elusive and heady
scent called ‘power.’ And in this country, the staggering backlog of cases in the
courts ensured that justice delayed very often became justice totally denied. But
in spite of all of this, murderers do get caught, more and more rapists do get
punished (even though all good policemen would tell you that they would like
the numbers of rapists getting punished to exponentially increase), robberies do
get solved. Unfortunately, like the media the world over, they only highlight the
ones that go wrong. Vasu was remembering what a reporter friend used to tell
him – good news puts you to sleep, bad news and others’ failures sell, and
scandal, murder and political shenanigans among the rich and famous sell the
most. Murder among the poor and lowly merits two lines in the inside pages,
murder among the prosperous and powerful is what every editor dreams of,
running it right on the front pages with a wealth of salacious details, most of
which exist only in the reporter’s fertile imagination. The papers were having a
field day with the Maheshwaris; the old man, who was known for being one of
the most private of individuals, would have been cringing every time he read
each new headline.
We have to solve this murder and do it quick, thought Vasu. Need to meet
Daru and Kavi and find out how we can use each other to push it to a resolution.
He saw the lights of the Juhu Police Station up ahead and put an end to his
philosophical musings. Time to stop and have a drink or two with Atul for old
times sake. As long as I don’t go with him down the road he has chosen, who am
I to sit in judgment on him? He is ten years older and probably feels time is
running out for him. He has not even made ACP as yet. He parked the car inside
the station precincts and stopped to chat with a constable here, a sub-inspector
there. One of the reasons the Vasu Kulkarni was such a good policeman was that
he didn’t have an ounce of conceit in him; friendly and outgoing he never forgot
a face though he occasionally slipped up on the names. He had a fearsome
temper dreaded by all, but it was more like a blast of wind clearing everything in
its path than anything ugly and malicious. He never bore a grudge but all knew
that he could be very unforgiving of procedural inefficiencies that let criminals
walk out of courts on technicalities.
One wonders how many policemen acknowledge the role that serendipity
plays in the unraveling of lies and the cracking of cases. A call taken or missed, a
report read or filed away, a throwaway bit of information that turns out to be so
crucial. Everyone who has seen the American serial ‘The Killing’ would have
been haunted by the scenes where the calls from ‘Bullet’ (a homeless child on
the streets of Seattle) are missed by Detective Stephen Holder and which
ultimately results in her tragic end. No cop wants that kind of ‘If only’ file to lie
on his mind, waking or sleeping.
Vasu Kulkarni reached Atul Pandey’s cabin to find him brooding over
something with his feet up on the desk and a glass of what was definitely not a
cup of tea in his hands.
‘Join me?’ asked Atul with a smile.
‘Sure. What are you thinking about so seriously? You know you are not good
at it.’
‘Life in general,’ said Atul back to his brooding ways. ‘It’s a bitch. Remember
how uncomplicated life was when we started out? Crack the case, celebrate with
chilled beer and fried fish and go home to sleep.’
‘It’s still like that you know’ said Vasu quietly, ‘It’s we who have changed, not
life as it was and is. Oh sure in some things’ he said impatiently, ‘we have put on
weight, lost some hair – in your case quite a lot of it – and acquired wives. But
robbers rob, murderers murder and the whole damn mess goes on. Come on, let’s
get some good food and drink inside us.’
‘Yeah I guess so’ was Atul’s answer with a deep sigh, ‘but just let me talk to
Sawant before I leave.’ Vasu made as if to leave the room but Atul waved him
back in his chair, ‘This will take just five minutes.’
Vasu liked Sub-Inspector Sushil Sawant on sight. A tall young man- lean and
fit, neatly dressed and judging by the report he had prepared, meticulous in
evidence gathering and clear in writing up the case file. I need to get him away
from Atul otherwise he will spoil him and another good officer will go down the
drain, thought Vasu. We are losing too many good officers to sloth and
politicking and this has to stop. His secret ambition was to restore the police
force in Maharashtra to the pre-eminent force it once was in the country.
He listened to what Sawant had to say and somewhere a little warning bell
went off. He asked for the details and said he would like to be there when Errol
Fonseca came the next day to the Cooper Hospital morgue to identify the body.
He was also thinking that he needed somebody to help him over the next week
or two. He was a man short as one of his inspectors, a good chap, was away
dealing with a very tangled wife problem, and he required everyone he could get
at headquarters to help him with his ever-growing caseload. This had grown
exponentially over the last few years as people looked to murder rather than
reason to settle any dispute. He decided to use Sawant for a few days- the tough
part would be to get him away from Atul. He got a lot of suspicious looks from
Atul who like a lot of lazy people was a deeply suspicious man and very
territorial, but his sloth won out over his curiosity. In any case he knew Vasu
could pull rank on him if required so finally objections petered out and he gave
in reluctantly. Sawant on the other hand was thrilled. Vasu Kulkarni may be a
workaholic and a slave driver but he was also one of the best officers in the
Crime Branch Division and to be able to work with him, even temporarily, was
more than what he could ever have hoped for.
Agreeing to meet the next day Vasu left Juhu police station with Atul Pandey.
He could not explain to himself how the death of a man in a decrepit old car
could possibly be connected to any of his cases on hand but he had a very strong
hunch it did and he had every intention of following it up till either it petered out
or he was proved right. Both of them had a most satisfactory meal at Mahesh
Lunch Home near the Marriott on Juhu Tara road and Vasu ended the day feeling
a little better about himself and with life in general.
 Chapter 21

D arius and Kavita’s meeting with the CA on the previous Saturday had been
interesting. Very nervous to begin with he had relaxed enough to give them
some glimpses into the financial life of the Maheshwaris. That was important in
itself but what Darius was looking for was the gossip, the buzz around
unexpected inflows or outflows of cash, of any suspected financial wrongdoing
or jugglery from long ago, from around the time Manorama disappeared. It was
a tall order but the CA’s father had handled the Maheshwari account for a long
time. It took some persuading and a little gentle bullying for him to agree to find
out what he could. No names though, he insisted, just some general information.
He said he would get back to them in a few days.
On Friday morning, which was the 11th, Kavita was found in her office staring
so fixedly at the file in front of her that anyone, in this case Valerie, would think
that she was memorizing every bit of it by heart. Valerie hesitated before
disturbing her but finally decided to risk it.
‘She didn’t wait for you guys to meet her. She is here.’
‘Who?’ asked Kavita, startled from her reverie.
‘Manorama’s friend. Kareena D’Souza, known as Reena, who at that time was
Menezes.’
‘Where’s Darius? I think we should talk to her in his room. The conference
room is full of our stuff on the boards and there is no need for her to see all that.
I’ll be there in a minute. I’ll just get the file of her initial interview with the
police and join them.’
Both Darius and Kavita liked Kareena on sight. She was a plump well-dressed
Goan Catholic. At the moment she was bristling with indignation at what had
happened to her friend and would have willingly perjured herself in any court to
bring all the perpetrators to justice, as she believed the Maheshwaris to be. They
knew that they had to cool her down before they could get accurate and reliable
information from her.
‘Really grateful to you for coming in to see us. Thank you.’
 Kareena looked at both of them very indignantly. ‘Not come in? I have been
trying to figure out whom I could talk to from the moment the news broke in the
papers. Can you imagine? They killed Manno and then threw her into a pit as
though she was a piece of garbage. How dare they? How could they?’
They let her run on till she had most of the rage and spleen out of her system
and then Darius interrupted her in a soothing voice, ‘Yes it was terrible. But you
know we still don’t know if it was the Maheshwaris who killed her.’
She snorted her disbelief, ‘Oh yeah?’ Who else, tell me, who else?’
Kavita interrupted at this point and asked her if she would like tea or coffee or
Valerie’s specialty- cold coffee and some home made cookies that were to die
for. She opted for the last and Kavita went out to tell Valerie, pulled Darius out
of the room with an SMS and warned him that ‘we need to get accurate info
from this lady and not a bag full of prejudicial suppositions. We will get blown
out of the water if we place any credence on the latter.’
‘Well, at least Valerie’s coffee and cookies should cool her down. She’ll be in
a better mood when she finishes them.’
He was right. Kareena was in a slightly less indignant state of mind after the
refreshment break. They then invited her to tell them about those long-ago years
in college and her impressions of all the leading characters. It needed patience
and a degree of skillful extraction of various facts but in the end they had a fairly
vivid picture of all of them.
Manorama was beautiful and vivacious but ‘she shouldn’t have got involved
with the Maheshwari brothers.’
Avinash was a nice guy, crazy about Manno, but not the type to stand up to
anybody for too long. (Read father for ‘anybody.)’
Shishir was more outgoing, with lots of friends, a bit of a charmer, but ‘she
could never figure out what he thought of Manno transferring her affections to
his brother.’
She didn’t know Vinay Kapoor the banker or Anil Patil the builder that well,
as they were really Shishir’s friends, not Avi’s. Santosh Singh was another friend
of Shishir’s. ‘The only thing I remember about him was that he didn’t like
Manno too much, I always wondered why.’
 Ajay Kanoria used to hang around with Shishir. ‘He’s a friendly guy but not
too talkative. Not quiet like Avi, just a little standoffish. If I am not wrong his
sister married Avi.’ Darius and Kavita nodded their confirmation of this.
‘There was a South Indian guy, very buttoned-up, who was very close to Avi.’
‘You are referring to Ramesh Krishnamurthy, aren’t you?’ asked Kavita. ‘That’s
the guy’ Kareena confirmed, ‘He also didn’t like Manorama too much. Probably
a little jealous of her relationship with Avi.’
Darius and Kavita noted that the ‘he’ referred to in the ‘he doesn’t like me’
entry in Manorama’s diaries could be one of two people - Ramesh
Krishnamurthy or Santosh Singh. And of course there was the old standby in
Avi’s father Ramnath Maheshwari.
‘What about that Saturday? Do you remember anything?’ asked Darius.
‘A lot, you know’ said Kareena musingly, ‘It was the last time I saw Manno.
She had come from Juhu and seemed quite upset after her meeting with Shishir. I
asked her why he had wanted to meet her. She said he wanted to know what she
felt about him and that she had to tell him that she was in love with his brother.
She said it didn’t go down well with him and that he was very upset. She then
said she didn’t have much time but she had something very important to tell me.
Manno then went on to tell me that Avi was sending a car to pick her up and that
they were going to Goa to get married. Avi’s friend Umesh was waiting for them
there and had made all the arrangements. (That was confirmation of Umesh’s
story). Before they could ask her, she admitted she was often the go-between
between Manno and all their friends as Manno lived in a hostel and it was quite
difficult to get in touch with her.
‘We were all young then and did some pretty silly things.’
‘So a lot of people knew that a note from you would be the way to get in touch
with her?’
‘Yes I’d get down at Charni Road and then we’d both go on to college together
so it was easy for me. I had a phone at home, you see.’
She continued. ‘She was carrying a small bag with her that day. She later
changed into a red churidar-kurta outfit. And I remember how beautiful she
looked. She told me their plans for that evening – that they were supposed to
meet up at a café near the Versova house at around 8:30pm – as I said Avi was
sending the car to pick her up. They’d go to Goa from there. On 17th morning
they were to go to the Shanta Durga temple at Ponda where their marriage would
take place. She was happy, excited but also a little scared about what they were
planning to do.’
‘Then what happened?’ asked Kavita
Kareena said that around 7pm someone came to the door. The man – he
looked like a driver – told her that the car was waiting for her. He said Avinash
had advanced the programme by one hour as he was finishing his work earlier
than expected and so he would meet her at the Irani café at 7:30pm instead of
8:30pm as agreed earlier. As she left, she hugged me and told me that she would
be in touch with me the moment she reached Goa. That was the last time I saw
her.’
Kavita interrupted again at this point. ‘A car? Do you remember anything
about it?’
‘Nothing except it was a dark colour and I think it was an Amby. You know,’
she continued, ‘She and I both thought it was Avi who had sent the car to pick
her up as planned and so I was really surprised when a driver turned up at my
door at 8:30–9pm I can’t remember exactly and asked for Manno. He said that
she was to meet Avinash at a small café near their Versova bungalow and that he
was waiting for her. I had to tell him that there was some mix-up, that she had
left earlier in a car sent for her at 7pm. He looked very surprised but went. A
little later Avi turned up asking where Manno had gone. That got me totally
confused. I got upset and told him he had no business playing all these games
with such a lovely girl. I told him that it was he who had changed the timing to
7:30pm and sent the car to pick her up at 7pm so what did he mean by saying
that she hasn’t turned up? She had always joked about being in time everywhere
– being a service officer’s daughter it was ingrained in her. She had been smiling
while she had been remembering and talking but now her face darkened with
anger. He insisted that he had not sent the car and that he was at the meeting spot
at 8:30pm exactly as agreed. But of course that is what he would do - if he had
murdered her and was covering his tracks. We quarreled and parted badly. I
barely spoke to him again.’ There were tears welling in her eyes, ‘I thought he
loved her; I really did.’
They both did not know how to comfort her except to reassure her again that
they would get to the bottom of it and find her friend’s killer.
 Chapter 22

O n Thursday morning Sub-inspector Sawant waited for both Errol Fonseca

and the DCP Kulkarni to join him outside the morgue in Cooper Hospital
in Vile Parle, a suburb of Mumbai close to Juhu. Sawant looked around him and
wondered why all government hospitals had to be such depressing places.
Hospitals were bad enough, government ones in a class of their own. There
would be dusty parking places, the ubiquitous Ashoka trees with their long
drooping dark green leaves and a long drooping appearance, a few acacia trees
with yellow flowers if it happened to be the flowering season, groups of worried
looking relatives, and a constant coming and going of vehicles and people and
nurses and white-coated doctors.
The DCP reached first in a police jeep, and then Errol Fonseca from New
Mumbai very shortly afterwards in a battered Maruti. It seemed battered cars
were a feature of the Fonseca life. He introduced them to each other and then
took them inside to the morgue where the Medical Examiner was waiting for
them with the corpse on a trolley covered with a white cloth. Sadly, Errol did
identify it as that of his brother Larry so that the connection made by an alert SI
in the Belapur police station turned out to be a correct one. Even if you are on
bad terms with your brother seeing him laid out on the morgue table covered
with a white sheet and with a hole in his head would distress anybody and Errol
was no exception. Tactfully, Vasu took both him and Sawant across to one of the
Udipi restaurants near the hospital to restore him to some normality. He needed
to question Errol Fonseca and you certainly cannot swing from corpse-viewing
to answering questions in the blink of an eye, even if TV shows suggest
otherwise.
After a round of coffee was drunk and idli and medu-vada taken, Errol had
recovered enough to have a conversation.
‘Mr. Fonseca, do you mind if we ask you some questions? We need to find
your brother’s killer and any information you give us will help us enormously.’
‘Of course – I will do anything to help. Though I have to tell you I know very
little of his life after we all graduated from college. He first went to work in
Dubai in some advertising agency and he stayed on there for many years. I
should tell you that Larry and I were never close’
Vasu smiled and said, ‘That’s not as uncommon as you think, Mr. Fonseca.
There is nothing wrong in it.’
Errol Fonseca sighed. ‘In our case there was a reason for it. Larry had
borrowed some money from me before leaving which I could ill-afford to lend.’
And then years of resentment came bubbling to the surface. ‘And of course he
never thought of returning it. It never occurred to him that I may need it and that
I had no other source of income. Oh!’ he said impatiently, ‘we own a piece of
land in Goa which is of no use to anybody as there are a dozen other Fonseca’s
who co-own it with us and nobody can get all of us to agree to sell it.’
‘So when did he come back from Dubai?’
‘At the beginning of this year. He had some savings, I am told, which of
course he promptly proceeded to run through. Then he turns up on my doorstep
two weeks back hoping to borrow some money again. I had to say no this time. I
have a wife and two kids to support.’
‘What about him?
‘He married a Goan girl in Dubai. But given his spendthrift habits she left him
and came back to Mumbai to live with her sister and work here. They are not
divorced – we are Catholic and that is not possible – but they lead separate lives.
There was nothing ugly about the break-up; just an amiable parting of ways.
They still meet occasionally – she’ll be cut up about this.’
‘Where did both of you study?’
‘Oh, I went to a technical institute in Dadar. Larry was better at his studies so
he studied commerce in Sydenham’s – that was from 1985 to 1988.’
‘85 to 88? Had a lot of friends did he?’
‘Oh lots of them. He was very likeable you know – affable, gregarious, an
extrovert.’
‘Did you know any of his friends?’
‘Not really, but I do remember hanging around with them when they’d come
down to Goa. You know the family that is in the news right now for that poor
girl’s skeleton being found in one of their properties? I remember both of them
coming down with three or four other guys. Can’t remember their names but I
remembered their surnames.’
His gut had played him right – there was a connection and it had just landed in
his lap.
‘So he knew them all,’ repeated Vasu in a very thoughtful voice. Sawant
recognized that an important piece of information had been given to the DCP
and a piece of a puzzle had fallen in place.
‘The evening he borrowed your car and went to meet someone in Mumbai –
did he tell you who and where?’
Errol shook his head, ‘I remember he seemed very excited and made some
silly remark about finally hitting the jackpot. But then he was known for making
many such remarks through the years so everyone in the family stopped paying
attention. I have to get back to work; is there anything else that you need to ask?’
Vasant Kulkarni realized that he had got as much as was possible from Errol.
Errol wanted to know when he could make the funeral arrangements for Larry
and when the car would be released. He had to repair and return it to its rightful
owner. Both Vasu and Sawant promised him that they would try to have his
brother’s body released as soon as possible. They thanked him for his help, did
warn him that they might need to talk to him again, walked him to his car and
watched him drive off.
Sawant turned to the Vasu and asked him, ‘Sir, what he said is of importance
to the Maheshwari case, isn’t it?’
Vasu turned and smiled at him, ‘Indeed, it is. Come on Sawant, I’ll get Atul to
release you from the station so that you can work with me for a few days. The
two cases are connected, I’ll bet two months’ salary on it.’
He took off in his jeep and Sushil followed on his motorcycle.
Nilima had called Kavita and Darius for lunch on the following Sunday,
because as she put it, ‘you three are dying to chew the case over like dogs
chewing bones and so you might as well do it here with some home-cooked food
inside you.’ Which though not very flattering was a very accurate description of
what they often did together. And Darius again thought how lucky Vasu had
been to get Nilima. Though it must be admitted that luck had little to do with it.
Vasu chased her with the same single-minded intensity that he brought to
chasing wrongdoers and was as successful in ‘capturing’ her. It was a good
marriage and it made people feel good to be around them.
They reached his place in Dadar, a spacious first floor apartment overlooking
Five Gardens, at around 11:30am and settled for chilled beer and bouncing their
theories not only off each other but more importantly off Nilima who had a
refreshingly commonsensical view of life. She saw people as they were;
perfectly comfortable with the various shades of human thought and behavior. It
was difficult to shock her.
Before they had some excellent Malvani fish and rice to aid their thought-
processes, Vasu brought them up to speed on all that had happened in Juhu over
the last one week and how it tied in to the Maheshwari case; the finding of the
body in the car, the quick work of Sawant and Hussain in connecting the links
and thus helping in identifying the body, the confirmation from Errol that his
brother Larry Fonseca studied in Sydenham at the same time as all the players in
Manorama’s murder. He had set Sawant to dig deeper into Larry Fonseca’s
connections with the Maheshwaris and it turned out that he had studied with
Shishir in Sydenham’s; and Shishir had confirmed to SI Sawant that on two
different occasions he and his friends had gone down and spent time in the
Fonseca property near Betolim in south Goa. So immediately, the three of them
asked themselves the same question – wasn’t it a 99% chance that the cash-
strapped Mr. Larry Fonseca had known something about that long-ago murder
and decided to cash in with some blackmail?
‘So I am not going out on a limb here when I say that he was hoping to
blackmail someone he thought had something to do with the murder of
Manorama. It means two things – he actually signed his death warrant when he
thought he had hit the jackpot, and the murderer is alive and well,’ Vasu looked
at everyone in the room for agreement.
‘We need to trip him or her – though there is no ‘her’ in the scenario so far –
into confessing. This one is a cool one. A confession is the only answer and it
has to be rooted out. A bit like a dentist pulling out a tooth, only we won’t use
any painkillers. Just the opposite, in fact,’ pointed out Kavi.
‘But still, a murderer so desperate that he is willing to kill again to maintain
the status quo. He has kept quiet for twenty-five years and nothing would ever
have been known if a bulldozer had not thrown up his well-buried secret. And if
we are correct, he has killed again,’ agreed Daru.
They still had some people to interview – Vinay Kapoor the skittish banker,
the businessman Santosh Singh, who inadvertently was the deux ex machina of
the Avinash-Manorama entanglement all those years ago. And of everyone they
interviewed they asked themselves the same question – what reason would this
guy have had for murdering Manorama? By all accounts they had no romantic
entanglement with her but murder has so many reasons other than love. That
Avinash should fall so deeply in love with Manorama was unplanned and
unexpected. In the 80’s the majority of college romances did not end in
marriages. The pairs involved went on to marriages arranged by their families.
These college romances were for nostalgia and a sentimental sigh or two. The
sea change that has swept the younger generation in their sexual and social lives
was certainly nowhere on the horizon when Avinash was falling in love with
Manorama. Marriages by choice were the exception rather than the rule and
harsh economic pressures ensured obedience to parental decrees.
When they had taken on the case in early December their presumption was
that Avinash had succumbed to parental pressure and ‘or else’ decrees.
But it was clear when they put everyone’s narrative together that it was the
opposite – he had certainly planned to marry her but the murder had nixed their
plans. Whether he was the murderer, or someone who had been threatened by
her presence in his life had stepped in and nipped his marriage plans in the bud
in the most brutal manner, remained to be seen. The Maheshwaris and their
coterie had circled the wagons the moment the skeleton was discovered. The
interviews were revealing that some of them had not believed that Manorama
had just conveniently gone away. They had had doubts, they had suspicions:
nothing that was put into words but it was there, hanging in the air, refusing to be
blown away. It all came back to the same questions in the end – who gained from
this, who was in the right place at the right time to strike the blow, and who kept
his head and successfully kept her body hidden all these years.
They finished the afternoon with masala tea. Darius asked Kavita if she would
like to walk on the beach at Dadar – it had been cleaned up, he promised her –
and Vasu was all set to join them until a quick SMS from Nilima who had gone
into the other room made him discover that actually he was rather sleepy and in
the mood for a late afternoon nap.
 Chapter 23

T hey reached the office early on Monday morning. The walk on the beach
had started a conversation that both didn’t know whether to continue or
close. Though she never talked about it, Kavi had been engaged to a batch mate
from IIM Calcutta. On a memorable weekend in Mussoorie he had drunk more
than he should have and had shown a frighteningly violent side to Kavi. They
had been staying in a small boutique hotel and unable to figure out what to do –
it was 12:30 at night and she was much younger then – she had prudently opted
to sit in the lobby. The night duty clerk and the doorman eyed her curiously but
didn’t approach her. An American couple staying there who had come in late
weren’t that diffident. They had immediately sensed that something was wrong
and wisely decided to join her in the lobby and introduce her to the joys of a card
game whose name she could not remember, try as hard as she might. She would
always remember them with gratitude – the wife came along with her to pack
and she got out, cabbing it down to Dehradun and then bussing it back to Delhi.
She had not offered any explanation to her parents, but the engagement was over.
For Kavi it was a closed chapter. She never referred to the matter again but it had
certainly coloured her attitude to dating and made her more cautious.
Until yesterday.
She had told Darius about the episode, making a joke about it as they had
strolled along. She was surprised to see how upset and annoyed he was about it
and he was surprised by the strength of his reaction. He thought back to of the
few relationships he had had. In all of them, it had been a case of ‘a few
skirmishes around dinners and movies, bedding them and moving on after a
while.’ In fact, thought Darius in self-disgust, I had become an expert in wasting
time on meaningless relationships that weren’t going anywhere. Now here I am,
working and spending almost all my time with a girl I can’t wait to see in the
morning and I am scared even to hold her hand in case I scare her away. Great!
Valerie sensed something was different the moment she saw them together.
She couldn’t put her finger on it but the best way to describe it would be to say
they had gentled towards each other. Normally there was an edginess in their
interactions – that was missing today.
As long there is no falling out, she thought, I like them and I like working for
them together. On which thought the ever-practical Valerie got on to the phone
and started chasing those unfortunate souls who had dared delaying paying their
bills.
As he was the proud owner of the whole building, and all the tenants had
moved out, he had moved the rest of the staff he had inherited from Mr. Kapoor
to the floor immediately below theirs. It made for better supervision, quicker
responses and updates, and a much-curtailed ‘travel expenses’ bill. They spent
the first part of the morning reviewing progress on the rest of their caseload; the
Maheshwari case was taking a disproportionate amount of their time and they
couldn’t take the risk of falling down on their work for other clients.
Vinay Kapoor was not in the least interested in meeting them and was doing
his damnedest to avoid doing so. He had even managed to wriggle out of
Valerie’s indefatigable abilities to pin people down to a time and place and had
sent a message through his secretary that he was very busy with an international
conference and would be unable to meet them throughout this week.
‘International conference!’ snorted Kavita ‘who does he think we are? The
come-up-from-the-village-yesterday type so that we would be overwhelmed by a
couple of big words?’ She picked up her phone, dialled into her network which
included the bank that Vinay worked for and discovered that the so-called
international conference would be over in a day and that he was totally free by
Friday. This time around it seems he was off to Lonavla on Friday afternoon at
which point Kavita stepped in and informed him that they were also in Lonavla
for the weekend and when would it be convenient for him to meet them? A
grudging agreement to meet at 11am Saturday morning was wrung out of the
banker.
‘Now all we have to do is find a place to stay. I was getting tired of the run-
around he was giving us.’
‘No problem’ said Darius, looking very smug, ‘I have a place. We’ll stay
there.’
‘You have a place there?’ blinked Kavita.
‘Sure – courtesy of my parents who disappeared to Lonavla in the summer
months every year. That’s what all Parsis did. Either that or go to Matheran. I
don’t know which was more boring, but that’s the way it was. All I wanted to do
was to hang around in Mumbai and chill out with my friends and that was
exactly what my parents didn’t want me to do. Mind you, this was when Lonavla
was a hill station and not a tree-denuded, ugly ‘villa’ place for everybody from
Mumbai whose idea of a hill station is an extension of Lokhandwala market, just
placed at a little more of a height than where they live normally.’
‘Wow, didn’t know that you felt so strongly about it.’
‘Kavi, you have no idea how beautiful that place used to be. Luckily our place
is still inside and overlooking a valley. Pack some warm stuff – it will be cold in
the evenings. What say we drive up Friday morning? Okay with you?’
‘Sounds terrific.’
In the meantime, Santosh Singh, the businessman friend who all those years
ago had held that fateful Holi party where Manorama had come with Shishir and
left with Avinash, metaphorically speaking, had come back from his business
trip and was free to meet them Tuesday evening in the Willingdon Club at
around 7pm. Darius asked Kavita if she would like to continue the evening there
with a dinner – he was a member there – and she smiled and said ‘Of course.’
Darius being a fair Parsi, the slightly red kind, could turn red very fast. He
steeled himself to ask the dreaded question; suddenly it was very important that
he know the answer, ‘If you have someone you would like to call please do. This
case is eating into your evenings a lot.’
Kavita looked at him steadily for a moment and then smiled what Darius had
begun to call her ‘heartbreaker’ smile, ‘If that was an attempt to find out whether
I have a boyfriend the answer is no. For a detective you didn’t handle that very
well, did you? What about you? Some ‘love of your life’ lurking in the
background?’
‘Absolutely not’ was Darius’s response, given so vehemently that Kavita, used
to all his moods and expressions was again surprised. So the cool Darius Mody
was not so cool after all. Luckily for both of them Valerie entered the room with
letters and cheques to sign and both of them turned their attention to the needs of
the day with an inner sigh of relief.
A case of industrial espionage, a delicate matter of an industrialist who wanted
information on one of his senior executives before bumping him up the
promotion ladder, and all the dirty details for two high profile divorce cases
filled their time till Tuesday evening. Initially both of them were quite fastidious
and had thought they would avoid handling the divorce cases, but they
discovered very quickly that they were just too lucrative to pass up. It seemed
that men and women would pay any kind of money to get the dirt on a partner
who they had once promised to love and cherish; once love died and they were
headed for splitsville it became a murky, ugly story. MTI actually subcontracted
this work out to a very small, efficient and discreet agency that had been
specializing in this work for twenty years. So far it had worked out very well for
them and the business was growing exponentially. Hate, anger and payback, like
crime, were seemingly always in season.
Tuesday evening found them heading to the Willingdon Club after a hectic
two days. They were curious to meet the Santosh of Manorama’s diary- one of
the two characters left on their list of people to be interviewed.
Darius and Kavita were convinced that Larry Fonseca’s shooting was
connected to Manorama’s murder, that he had tried a spot of blackmail once he
had figured out events of that long-ago November weekend, with fatal results for
himself. Being convinced was one thing but getting proof to back this belief was
needed.
The precipitating event for murder had been Avinash’s decision to marry
Manorama. At that time there was no discernible entanglement in his life. The
family had not run out of money. He was not engaged to someone else, there was
a spare brother around to continue the male-centric business empire, there were
no death-bed promises to keep. In fact, the only entanglement if you could call it
such was the one with Manorama and the only disadvantage was they were all so
young. As Kavita pointed out, it was and to a lesser degree still is almost a rite of
passage – parental disapproval of any girl you wanted to marry. And of course if
one of them was rich and the other was not, there was even more noise and
confusion. But murder? That was different. It involved an abdication of both
social and personal morality on the part of the murderer. And that meant that
among all those young men all those years ago there was someone with a dark
side who had given in to his ugliest promptings. And Larry Fonseca’s murder,
though they didn’t have all the ins and outs of it, certainly was a confirmation to
them that their theory about the presence of a very black wolf among a lot of
privileged sheep was the correct one.
Santosh Singh turned out to be a courteous man but one who was definitely
wary of both of them. The idea of two detectives sniffing around his life and that
of his friends’ was horrifying to him, and he visibly resented it.
‘So Ramnathji asked you to get involved– to do what exactly?,’ looking at
Darius and avoiding meeting Kavita’s eyes. She sighed inwardly; he was going
to be another difficult one and it looked like she would have to replay her brash,
aggressive role once again.
Kavi answered, ‘To find out what happened twenty-odd years ago and who the
killer is.’
‘Are you suggesting that one of the Maheshwaris did this? That is a ridiculous
notion.’ His voice was cold and disapproving as he answered her, still avoiding
her eyes.
‘Alright then, it was one of you!’ Kavita told him amiably.
Santosh got up in anger, scraping his chair back so loudly that people started
to turn around to see what was happening. ‘How dare you!’ He was outraged.
‘Look Mr. Singh, sit down and calm down’ said Darius irritated, ‘If you will
stop being emotional you will realize that the only person who could have killed
Manorama had to be someone from the circle of family and friends that made up
the world of the Maheshwaris. If,’ said Darius sarcastically, ‘a passing stranger
had killed her as has been suggested by everybody we have interviewed in this
case, then how the hell did he know that there was a hole in the ground to hide
her? That is the knowledge of an insider. You can hardly dig a pit large enough
to hold a dead body with your bare hands and on the spur of the moment. He was
passing through, right? All he had to do is just get away and no one would have
been the wiser.’
There was a moment’s silence and then Kavi asked quietly, ‘I guess what we
are really asking you is to tell us all that you can remember of the events and
relationships in that year. And we are asking you whether you feel good about
letting a murderer get away with it all these years.’
He relaxed slowly and sat back and they knew that they had won round one.
They exchanged glances of satisfaction and got right down to it. They had
decided earlier that they would not bring up the murder of Larry Fonseca, his
college classmate from Sydenham days and see if he mentioned it or talked
about it. The shooting had been so much in the news in the last few days that
someone in that circle had to have recognized him as their old classmate. If he
didn’t talk about it, then they were both curious to see how he was going to react
when they eventually told him. Either way it was interesting – if there had been
no telephone chatter of the ‘hey, isn’t that the Larry we knew in college?’ variety,
someone, specifically the murderer, was keeping very quiet and hoping that the
connection was not made. They had checked out if Avinash had hob-nobbed
with the Fonsecas in Goa. He hadn’t but he had confirmed that he knew Larry as
one of the many friends his gregarious brother had collected around him in his
college years.
It turned out to be a two-hour session with a few digressions into unrelated
areas and a few pauses for refills. Of all the people they had interviewed from
their first involvement in the case, Santosh Singh was the most skittish.
Emotionally he felt that by the very act of talking to Darius and Kavita he was
betraying his friends. And it was very obvious he had remained very close to
Shishir. The thought that any of them could have committed a murder was
completely repugnant to him. And yet he admitted, very reluctantly, that things
looked black against the Maheshwaris. ‘Mind you, it just looks that way. I am
telling you that neither Shishir nor Avinash did this. In any case, Avi was crazy
about Manno.’ He gave a wry smile, ‘And she was worth being crazy about. Of
course, a lot of us were a little gone on her. She was a beauty and full of life.
Even Ajay had the hots for her even if he won’t admit it now, particularly in
front of his brother-in-law.’
‘I didn’t want her dead, you know. We thought Avi was making a big mistake
marrying her but none of us wanted her to suffer the end she did.’
‘Why?’ asked Kavita, ‘Why did you all think he was making a big mistake?’
Santosh looked at her for a few moments, ‘They came from different worlds.
He, though he didn’t want to acknowledge it, was basically conservative and she
was a free child from a much more open and liberal background. It would have
divided them rather than bonded them. I know what I am talking about, Miss
Tandon. I have seen it happen with my friends and people I know. Love doesn’t
conquer everything after all.’
‘Yeah I know,’ said Kavita, sounding suddenly tired and a little cynical. She
found both the men staring at her in a very odd way. For the first time Darius
actually saw her blush and quite enjoyed her moment of discomfiture.
Santosh continued, ‘You know how marriages among a lot of business
families are like – I’ll give you two companies and this distributorship, you give
this company and an infusion of cash.’
‘So Mr. Singh, tell me what do you think happened? You must have an
opinion on who killed her.’
Santosh was silent for a little while. They all sipped their drinks and waited for
him to share his thoughts with them. He shook his head in what was denial and
looked at them.
‘Ever since the events in November– he still hesitated to mention the word
skeleton and murder- that’s what a lot of us have been thinking about. All I know
is that it wasn’t Shishir and it wasn’t Avinash. You have to believe me,’ he said
in near desperation. They both knew they were not going to get an opinion from
him. It was time to take a different tack.
‘Do you remember a classmate of yours called Larry Fonseca? He was from
Goa.’ For a moment he looked bewildered and then his face cleared.
‘Oh yes I remember him. He was a great friend of Shishir’s. In fact I
remember going down with him and some others to his place in Goa a couple of
times. He had a brother or two – can’t recall exactly. What about him?’
Darius looked at him for a few moments. ‘He was found shot dead in a car in
Juhu about ten days back.’ Santosh looked totally astonished. Darius had
interviewed enough people to know total surprise when he saw it. So people
within the group had not made the connection and the murderer was certainly
not talking.
‘Good God! You mean the car murder victim they have been making such a
noise about in the papers and on TV is the Larry we knew?’ And then they could
almost see the gears shifting in his head, ‘And you think one of us, who is the
murderer, killed him because he had incriminating information about one of us.
That’s what you think, isn’t it?’
They neither agreed nor disagreed with him. They just waited to hear what
else he had to say. He was silent for a few minutes, ‘We all liked him, you know,
partly because he was so helpful.’
 ‘Helpful? How?’ asked Kavita.
‘You know- with foreign booze, which was so difficult to get in those days. I
think he had a shippie cousin who used to make a pretty penny out of all our
parties. Then he had a brother who ran a garage so we were able to get cars when
we didn’t want to use our own.’
He looked a little embarrassed as he said this. Kavita raised her eyebrows in a
question. ‘When we wanted to take our girlfriends to Marve or Khandala for the
weekend.’
‘So if any of you had wanted a car on the quiet you would have gone to this
brother of his?’ ‘Yes,’ he hesitated and then admitted that at one time or another
most of them other than Ramesh Krishnamurthy had used Larry’s brother to
solve their transport difficulties.
‘Why not Ramesh?’ continued Kavita.
‘Because he partied much less than all of us, and had no girlfriend to speak of.
More serious and all that. And Avinash also- once he started going round with
Manno, we saw much less of him. But of course he did turn to Larry for help
once in a while. Look’ he said with intensity, ‘we were young, having a good
time and certainly nobody had murder on their mind.’
‘And yet murder did happen. Did Shishir resent that? That she switched to
Avinash? After all she went round with him first.’ Darius wanted to know.
‘Actually I think he did’ Santosh admitted very reluctantly, ‘I was always
under the impression that he cared rather deeply for her. But he did not murder
her.’ The last statement was repeated again, very fiercely. ‘You have to believe
that.’ He hesitated and Darius noticed that, ‘I think you have something else to
tell us Mr. Singh.’
‘I was with Shishir the day he met Manorama in a Juhu hotel. Okay I did
know that he was pretty crazy about her. She had a small bag with her – I guess
she was going on to Kareena’s place.’
‘Did you know where her place was?’
‘Of course we all did Ms. Tandon. We had picked them up and dropped them
there after parties.’ He paused a few seconds and then continued, ‘She told him
that she loved Avinash and that was that. She left and I proceeded to stick close
to Shishir as he had decided to get blind drunk. He had nothing to do with her
death, I was with him the whole evening.’
‘And that Mr. Singh is precisely why both of you could have murdered her.
You knew where she was going; you figured that the bag meant she was going
away with Avinash for the weekend. You could have called on the ever-helpful
Larry Fonseca to provide a car so that Shishir could continue his conversation
with her at the Versova bungalow. He killed her in a drunken rage and you
helped him cover it up. And then after all those years along comes Larry
remembering things he shouldn’t have and then of course he had to die too.’
He scraped back his chair and said in a savage tone, ‘You are wrong Ms.
Tandon. We had nothing to do with her death and nothing with Larry’s and don’t
you two try pinning it on us. Otherwise…’
‘Otherwise what Mr. Singh? Going to kill us too?’
They waited but he got himself under control, said he had a dinner
appointment and walked off.
Darius and Kavita felt completely drained by the time this interview had
finished. ‘Come on’ said Darius, ‘I tell you what we need – we need the bar first.
Let’s go and knock back a whole bunch of Bloody Marys. And then I’ll treat you
to some great Indian Chinese food. I need to cheer you up. If you cheer up so
will I. Otherwise you will have a depressed bawa in the office tomorrow and
trust me, you don’t want that.’
Kavita, who had suddenly got an attack of the blues and was in fact feeling
completely out-of-sorts, cheered up in spite of herself and followed him. It
turned out to be a great evening with a large amount of drinking and followed by
a very good dinner. Darius was right – the Indian Chinese food was great. The
evening ended with a chaste kiss on the cheek from him, which required a
remarkable amount of self-discipline on his part.
 Chapter 24

F riday came in a rush of work with three new cases that needed their
attention. They planned to take off for Lonavla in the morning, to interview
the elusive Mr. Vinay Kapoor. They had asked Rajesh Kapadia to lean on him, to
make him more compliant. He had certainly used his friendship with Shishir
Maheshwari in past years to great advantage for himself and his bank and he
needed to be reminded of the fact. So he was far more accommodative when Val
called to reconfirm the appointment Darius and Kavita had with him on Saturday
morning. Both of them grinned at Val’s caustic description of his comedown.
She enjoyed puncturing the poses and pretensions of successful men and women
she had to deal with. She supported Kavita’s contention that as a rule successful,
powerful women were generally politer and more amenable than their male
counterparts. She left her two bosses arguing fiercely on the subject.
Among the new cases that had landed on their desks, two were about checking
senior executives selling inside information on the company finances to a
broking house. The third was a wife who suspected that her husband’s too-
frequent visits to Poona were prompted by something other than a too diligent
attention to work. All the three were money spinners and they realized that this
detecting gig might end up giving them more than bread and butter, it might give
them jam and a dollop of cream too.
In spite of herself, there was a flutter of excitement in Kavita when she set out
with Darius to Lonavla. Strangely, for almost the two years they had worked
together they had never visited each other’s apartments. In fact, it was one of the
things that Kavita loved about Mumbai, that it left you alone if that’s what you
wanted, and if you wanted to socialize then that was on tap too. And what was
even better, you could mix and match. This city was probably the only one in
India that understood and supported the concept of ‘I want to spend time with
me’ and did not think you were rejecting them or the world by doing so. When
Darius called she was still packing and she called him up to the apartment to
share a coffee and some fresh croissants she had picked up the evening before.
He, it seems, had picked up some blueberry muffins for the journey in case they
died of hunger before they reached there. They finished half of them before they
even started out and so they were certainly safe from starvation. Turned out to be
a rather fun breakfast with him offering to wash the few dirty dishes so that she
wouldn’t have to face them on her return. She dried while he washed, he
gallantly picked up her strolly and both of them went down to the car.
The Mumbai-Pune expressway has been a real boon to inter-city commuters.
Travelling time has been cut and the food stops have become most attractive. But
all the people who used to go to Poona by National Highway 4 miss the
picturesqueness of the journey almost as much as they don’t miss the fabled
traffic jams that used to occur with monotonous regularity. Darius had decided
not to take Krishna, his driver, with him. He told him to take two days off, which
was not greeted with the joy that one would expect. Krishna’s worry was the car.
He was passionately devoted to Darius’s red BMW and constantly cleaned and
polished it, and a small scratch or dent would fret him until it was dealt with. A
very anxious expression descended on his face and it took the combined
assurances of Kavita and Valerie to placate him.
‘Damn it, it’s my car, isn’t it?’ Darius said irritated. ‘Yes’ answered Kavita,
‘but he’s the one who looks after it and spends maximum time with it. The good
thing is that you seem to have only one of the two obsessions bawas are famous
for.’ ‘The other one being?’ ‘Food.’ Darius didn’t rise to the bait and just grinned
amiably at her, his flash of irritation gone. He agreed to Kavita’s suggestion that
he would treat Krishna’s worry with all seriousness and look after the car as if it
was his own.’ Which, I might remind you, it is,’ he said dryly.
They were in Lonavla by lunchtime and Kavita had to admit that the drive had
totally relaxed her. The music was the retro stuff they loved, and Darius drove
well with no jerks and sudden stops and silly attempts to overtake other cars
when there was no need to do so.
Once they got off the expressway the drive turned even more delightful.
Darius’s property lay in that ever-decreasing part of Lonavla that has withstood
the ravages of builders and their villas. The road curved around and then dipped
in to a small valley before climbing on to the other side. Here it became magical.
The road ran for about a mile between large properties with crumbling high
walls and branches of trees hanging over the wall and shading the road. They
finally turned to their left into a pair of ornate gates in need of a little painting.
The road was in reasonably good condition and came out in front of a spacious
bungalow that faced a valley and a steep slope on the other side. Aptly, the
property was called ‘Valley Vista.’ The view was stunning. Kavita got out of the
car and went straight to the retaining wall across the small lawn, drinking in the
fresh air and delighting in the view. Darius just stood by the car and watched her
pleasure with total satisfaction. She turned around and found him smiling at her
in that wry, loving way he had developed of late.
What do I do? I want to be with him and yet do I want to be with him? Yes,
yes I do. So what do we do now? Kavi had reached Darius by this time so she
closed this one-sided silent conversation with herself, handed her bag to the
caretaker and moved with him into the bungalow, glowing with a sense of
anticipation she had not known for a long time. She saw the surprise on the faces
of the caretaker and his wife but didn’t know that this was because this was the
first time Darius had brought any girl by herself up here. The only girls that had
come up here over the years were always part of a larger group. Darius, aware of
what the caretaker and his wife were speculating, and desperately anxious that
Kavi should not be hurt or embarrassed in any way, introduced her as his
business partner and friend. They got the message – this lady was going to be an
important and long-term part of Darius’s life. They were devoted to him and
were prepared to be devoted to her. They took away the bags and fussed over her
in a manner that told her that they approved of her.
Lunch prepared by the caretaker’s wife was very Parsi and very good. They
had brought all the case material with them – most of it was on their laptops
anyway – and after lunch they climbed the few steps to the mezzanine floor to
what Darius called his study and what could best be described as a bookroom
and workroom combined with the added bonus of huge windows overlooking
that tremendous view. It faced the front of the house, running from one side of
the drawing room to the end, with wooden floors, beautiful fading Persian rugs
on the floor, books galore, a long wooden work table on one side with four
chairs placed around it, and a few deep, comfortable sofas placed strategically
either by the windows or in front of the fireplace. The fireplace charmed Kavita.
It was so reminiscent of all the service bungalows of her childhood and so very
comforting.
Snapping out of her nostalgia trip she settled down on the table with Darius for
a few hours of very hard and monotonous work, relooking at every interview, at
the implications of every nugget of information collected, at every timeline
given and checked, and every assessment they had done. The only interview that
was pending was with the elusive Vinay Kapoor. This elusiveness intrigued
them. Was it caused by a guilty conscience, a desire to avoid a potentially
embarrassing situation or a genuine falling away from the Maheshwaris and their
circle? But the last could not be true. They had found out through their sources
that he and his bank were still benefiting from his association with them. As
Kavita had said earlier- this was a very close-knit, almost incestuous world- they
had not only stayed in touch but had looked out for each other.
On their way up to Lonavla, they had talked about each other’s probables in
the murder sweepstakes and how to zero in on the concerned person. They both
knew that the only way they would catch this murderer was to jockey him into a
corner where he was forced to give himself away. A twenty-five year-old murder
leaves little on the ground to go on. And the motives still remained vague and
inconclusive. They had started a lot of work on the ground around the Larry
Fonseca murder. They had a team fanning out, showing pictures of the various
characters to barmen, doormen, paanwalas, parking space guys in and around
Juhu - anybody who could pin down some face to a time, place, date. The
answers lay in the second murder unless Vinay threw some real surprises their
way. But looking back at all the conversations and interviews they had had,
Vinay was never mentioned except in passing and by all accounts was seen as a
very ambitious but careful young man, not liked much but unlikely to either
approve or assist a runaway marriage or go anywhere near a murder. Well
tomorrow would tell.
In the evening they explored one of Darius’s favourite walks. This would take
them down into the valley and up the slope where they could sit on a rocky
outcrop and see the lights come on all over the Lonavla hills and valleys.
Walking back both were quiet, with an inexplicable tension between them. Not a
bad one, just an anticipatory tingle and the same kind of broody silence you get
just before a thunderstorm in a Mumbai monsoon. By mutual agreement they
agreed to defer all conversation on the case till after the interview the next day.
Dinner was a long drawn-out affair with wine before, during and after. Darius
was quieter than she had ever seen him and Kavi decided he was probably very
tired and was just waiting for her to go to bed. Darius walked her to her room,
checked that she had everything she wanted, kissed her on the cheek and went
into his room. They then did exactly the same thing – changed and lay in bed
wide awake, longing for each other but completely unable to take the first step.
‘Is this how it is going to be from now on between us?’ thought Kavi and Daru
thought, ‘This hurts. This really hurts. How the hell am I going to deal with it.’
Kavi was lying in bed, half asleep, when there was a knock on the door. She
opened to find him there. ‘I can’t bear it darling Kavi. I just want you …,’ he
couldn’t finish the sentence. She was in his arms, soft and desirable and
everything he had been obsessing about for almost all the time he had known
her. They could never remember just how they reached the bed and got their
clothes off but they did. The first time with someone you love. Something
special, always remembered. The feel of their bare skin against each other.
Loving hands exploring each other. Darius thrusting within her. Her body
holding him. The aftermath of loving sex: exhaustion and completion and
contentment. Darius lay there afterwards, holding her, delighting in her body in
his arms, overcome by a tenderness that was unexpected as it was
overwhelming.
 Chapter 25

T hey had met at breakfast, just happy to be together. She was looking
gorgeous even by her standards and he was just happy to sit there, looking
at her and loving her with his eyes and his smile, both of them occasionally
touching hands to reconfirm the magic of last night.
They finally caught up with Vinay in his luxurious villa in a gated community
of the variety Darius particularly disliked. Vinay was the archetypical banker,
and as Kavita noted, a typical Punju to boot. He could have stepped out of the
pages of any bankers’ magazine, modeling ‘a day of leisure’ ad. An open
collared t-shirt in deep blue combined with grey shorts (the Bermuda kind) and
black moccasins. He was also extremely cold and polite, making it quite clear
that if Rajesh Kapadia had not leaned on him he would have avoided this
interview completely. The distaste was clear in his voice, ‘I don’t know anything
about this business. I hardly knew Manorama, and after she started going around
with Avinash one only saw her in class and the occasional get-together. Besides,
I was Shishir’s friend, not Avi’s. I really don’t know why you want to talk to
me.’
At this point Kavita got really irritated, ‘We hear you Mr. Kapoor, but now
hear us. This murder concerns one of you. Let me repeat what we have told
everybody else connected with the case. A stranger did not murder her,
conveniently. Someone she knew murdered her. And we were brought in by
Ramnath Maheshwari to find out who did this. We are telling you what we told
him. We’ll go where the facts will take us. Murder is not an acceptable solution
to any problem. Let’s accept that as our working hypothesis and move forward.
Are we in agreement on that?’ It had been a while since anyone had spoken to
Vinay like this and on seeing the banker’s expression Darius had to bend down
to pick up a non-existent pen to hide his grin. Kavita’s aggression worked. He
eased up and they knew that while he may continue to be unfriendly he also
would not be totally obstructive or just plain cussed.
He had the grace to look a little shame-faced and spoke in a far milder tone,
‘Look don’t get me wrong. I just don’t like being connected to all this as I did
not have anything to do with her or her murder. And please call me Vinay.’
‘All right, I am Kavita and this is Darius. I can understand what you are
feeling but the fact remains that you were there and a part of that circle.’ smiled
Kavita, ‘but I guess what I am really asking is what do you think happened all
those years ago.’
‘I don’t know but expecting Avi to dump everything and marry her was very
foolish, wasn’t it? He was going to inherit part of a business empire. What were
they planning? Love in a cottage? She was a very beautiful and intelligent girl
but definitely naïve in this one.’
He sounded cynical and his disapproval of the whole relationship came
through very clearly, ‘It works in Hindi movies, Kavita, not in real life.’
‘Oh yes, I agree with you on that. But maybe not all that naïve. It might come
as a surprise to you to know that he was planning to marry her. He had it all
fixed up.’
‘Well, I’ll be...’ They could see he was really astonished to know this.
Darius chipped in at this point, ‘She disappeared over a weekend and was not
seen anytime after that in college. Weren’t you even a little bit curious as to
where she had gone? Why she was not being seen in class?
‘Truthfully, I thought she had taken Mr. Maheshwari’s offer and gone back
home.’
Both Darius and Kavita looked at him in surprise, ‘Are you telling me’ asked
Darius ‘that all of you knew about this offer?’ Vinay looked uncomfortable. ‘Not
all of us. And it was by pure chance – the three of us overheard a conversation
between Mr. Maheshwari and Rajesh Kapadia.’ Vinay hesitated for a second or
two and went on, ‘He was really angry and was speaking louder than he
normally did.’
‘Angry at whom Vinay?’ When he didn’t answer Darius asked the question
again.
‘At Avinash and his involvement with Manno. He wasn’t there of course, but
he was venting and poor Rajeshji had to listen.’
‘And who were the other two with you while this venting was being
overheard?’
 Again the slight pause and then very reluctantly ‘Shishir and Ajay Kanoria.’
‘This Ajay being the one whose sister was later married to Avinash. And
Shishir being the one who is his brother,’ Darius asked in a cold voice. ‘Yes,’
confirmed Vinay in a small voice.
At this point all three of them felt that the entrance of his wife Coomi with tea,
biscuits and some sandwiches was a much-needed and well-timed break. She
was an attractive and smart woman in her forties who also did not approve of her
husband being interviewed in connection with this long-ago murder. But like a
good corporate wife, you could not fault her manners. Vinay was quiet while
having his cup, brooding over something while Darius and Kavita were trying to
run all the conversations they had with Shishir through their minds and neither
of them could recall him admitting to any knowledge of this attempt to buy
Manorama off by Mr. Maheshwari. Ajay Kanoria had also been in the know but
had neglected to mention this fact.
Darius brought up Larry Fonseca’s murder, but Vinay seemed genuinely
surprised at this piece of information. Right now they couldn’t find a link. He
wasn’t off the hook for after all a lot of murderers are first-class actors, but at
this point Vinay as Larry’s murderer seemed a bit of a long shot.
‘Tell me Vinay did you like her?’ asked Kavita as they finished their tea.
‘I liked her and like I said she was beautiful, but I was definitely not looking
for a steady girlfriend at that time. I was not in love with her though she was
worth falling in love with. I can understand why Avinash fell for her like a ton of
bricks.’ This was almost an echo of the words Santosh Singh had used when they
had interviewed him on the Tuesday in Willingdon Club.
‘Nonetheless’ commented Darius, ‘someone killed her. Avinash loved her;
given her beauty one or two of you definitely had warmer feelings towards her
than what you claim to have – your friend Shishir almost admitted as much –
and yet someone saw it fit to kill a 20-year old. There must have been a very
nasty side to her for this to happen.
‘Not necessarily. You can also be killed for monetary gain or for being in
someone’s way.’
‘Now that’s an interesting observation. So whose way was she in? Either
someone was gaining monetarily by her death or she had refused someone
fuelling a lot of rage. The Maheshwaris? We know that already. Anybody else?
An outsider, maybe.’
‘Maybe someone from outside who wanted in and saw his chance slipping
away in this marriage.’
‘Come Vinay, a little more clarity and a little less of all these elliptical
references. If you know anything this might be a very good time to tell us.’
A silence as he mulled over whether he should go any further with this
conversation. Finally he started speaking.
‘I can’t imagine what it is not to marry the woman you love. I can’t imagine
life without Coomi. When Manno disappeared we all thought Avinash would fall
apart. He changed, became totally withdrawn and unapproachable. And you are
right, Shishir was pretty gone on her too, and took it equally badly. But some of
us were quite relieved. I am going to be honest with you. I was definitely one of
them because though Manno was a lovely girl she would never have been
accepted and Avinash would have eventually realized that losing his world and
inheritance for love may not have been worth the price paid.’
Very intriguing- so there is a human being beneath that very proper banker’s
exterior, thought Kavita, as she listened to him.
He continued, ‘Ramesh felt like I did. He always thought the relationship very
imprudent.’
‘And who else?’ asked Darius. But he was back to being the reserved man
they had met at the beginning. He probably felt that he had said too much. ‘If
you want to help the Maheshwaris, you need to tell us what you know.’
But Vinay had decided to clam up and denied having anyone in mind. They
knew he did but he wasn’t going to tell them anything more.
Later Kavita would remember their first weekend together in Lonavla for three
things - one-third lust and loving, one-third laughter, and the remaining one-third
when they started putting the picture of a murderer together. They wished that it
were as easy as it all seemed in the assorted T.V. series that one saw. In real life
it was a far tougher obstacle course; not impossible, just more difficult.
They left Vinay’s place a little before one. Darius had decided to take Kavi to
a small Maharashtrian restaurant behind one of the larger, brasher resorts that
had come up in recent years. Kavita noticed a change in him which she found
very amusing – he was broody and protective, even holding her elbow while
crossing the lane, which made her laugh aloud. When he looked at her
questioningly, she let him know that she had crossed roads earlier all on her own
and that going forward she could at a pinch carry on doing the same. He laughed
and said he was just looking for an excuse to hold her hand.
Over lunch, they discussed the interview. It was not particularly productive
though one or two bits of information that had unintentionally been let slip could
prove to be useful. Darius had not liked him; he found him prissy and too eager
to cover his ass, but the information he had given them was worth following up
and pretty much in line with what they were thinking. Kavita felt that finding the
financial dealings of all these inter-locked lives could reveal the motive of the
murder. Perhaps it was love that had started the story rolling but it was money
that had provided its brutal end. The chartered accountant they had talked to had
come back with a lot of material, some verifiable and some pure speculation.
They drove back to Valley View and it didn’t take them long to be back in bed
together. Sated, they slept in each other’s arms till the shadows were crossing the
lawn in front of the house. The speed with which their relationship had changed
gears came as a revelation to both of them. This was a scenario both had longed
for, Darius certainly far longer than Kavita, but when the moment came it still
took both of them by surprise. Now that it had happened they realized they
needed to talk about the effect it would have on their partnership. Kavita felt that
it might be smarter and practical to keep both their establishments going so that
they both had places they could retreat to in times of stress, and in Kavita’s case,
deal with the issue of visiting out-of-town family and friends. They knew that
their professional life would not be affected; both were grown up enough to have
some kind of control over a sudden onrush of love or lust or anything in
between. Besides they had had a lot of practice over the last two years. But on
one thing they were clear – what they were doing together as a team was too
enjoyable and important for anything, even their love for each other, to come in
the way. They were probably so good as a team because they cared about each
other. The only difference now was that that love and care was acknowledged
and out in the open, and certainly for Kavita the way Darius was as a man was
also very comforting. They sat on the lawn wrapped in their happiness until it
was time to go in for dinner and a night of loving. Just as they were going to bed
they got a most welcome call from Vasu. He rang up to check if he could join
them the next morning. They agreed immediately. He said he had to be in Poona
on Monday for a meeting and as Lonavla was mid-point the logistics worked out
perfectly. Rather unfairly, he said Nilima had deserted him for the weekend, to
conduct a pottery class for a bunch of beginners in Alibag. They could spend a
relaxed Sunday together and figure out how to take the case forward to its
conclusion.
Darius was an early riser. He got out of bed very carefully so as to not wake
Kavita and went away to get ready. He could not remember the last time he had
felt so happy and so complete. It was as though he had not known that a part of
him was missing but now that it was found he knew that this was exactly how it
was meant to be.
He called Vasu at around 7:30am and found him already on the move. At that
time on a Sunday morning he said he would probably not take more than an hour
and a half to reach them. He was true to his word. He turned in to the gates of
Valley View by 8:45am. Vasu had stopped to have his breakfast at his favourite
Dattu Snacks at the Panvel corner, before he got on to the expressway from
Panvel. It was a beautiful day in January, the air cold and crisp and the sun warm
without being uncomfortable. They decided to spend the day out on the verandah
alternating between working and feasting on the superb view. Vasu looked at
them and noticed Kavita’s glow and Daru’s air of contentment and the way they
touched each other in passing and knew that a Rubicon had been crossed. Nilima
had been worrying about them – both such independent and private people that
there was a chance that they might end up spending the rest of their lives tip-
toeing around their true feelings and wasting time in the bargain – but now he
could call her later and tell her that she could stop worrying about her two
favourites. Sensibly, they had decided to put aside all notions of independence
and dump whatever baggage they were carrying and get on with living their lives
together. Nilima had insisted from the beginning, actually as soon as she had
seen their interactions, that they were meant to be together. Vasu, having found
the love of his life, hoped she was correct. He was deeply attached to Daru and
over the last two years had come to be very fond of Kavi. However, having spent
a lot of time with both of them, he was also aware how cussedly independent she
was and how fiercely Daru protected his privacy. Seeing them together he knew
a great sense of relief. He had envisaged a scenario where Nilima would bully
him into banging their heads together, figuratively speaking, and being an
unemotional and private man by nature, the whole prospect filled him with
horror. He was very thankful that these two had preempted things and saved him
from that fate.
Vasu had personally interviewed the entire Maheshwari circle a couple of
times and on comparing notes with Kavi and Daru it seemed that their stories
still matched, the defenses were still holding up. Whatever they said had been
consistent with their earlier interviews. A few more nuggets of information were
thrown out but not much. The three of them were convinced the same murderer
had killed Larry Fonseca, quickly and swiftly to protect himself. This time,
however, they vowed the killer would not get away.
The rest of the day was spent wining, dining and regaling Kavita with some of
the funnier episodes of Vasu’s life in the police. It was a perfect ending to a most
memorable weekend.
 Chapter 26

M TI had decided to concentrate on finding Larry Fonseca’s murderer. The

only tenable reason they could find for his murder was that he had been
attempting to blackmail someone. Neither of them approved of blackmailers –
Kavita considered them the scum of the earth, but murder is murder, she said and
must be punished. Since both were convinced that murder past and murder
present were linked, solving this one would give clear answers to the older one.
Closing the case had become a personal crusade now. Any time they faltered
they just had to remember what Mrs. Kashyap had gone through the years and it
revitalized them. The relentless media scrutiny continued, but luckily a fresh
scandal had broken out involving a star, a producer’s wife and a politician, so
thankfully the Maheshwaris had slipped to the second page. The newshounds
hadn’t given up; just dividing their attention between the two stories.
Before leaving for Lonavla on the Friday they had directed their operatives to
intensify their search for any clue as to who had been the man Larry had met in
the hotel parking lot. A retired policeman called Vinod Joshi, from the Mumbai
Police Crime Branch, who worked with them now, led their team. As they had
discovered early on, he was a great networker and had kept all his contacts
active. Unstated of course was also the race, albeit a good-natured one, between
the police team led by Vasu and the two private detectives to find the culprit and
reach a resolution.
They and the police were trying to jog the memory of the watchman on duty in
the Sun ‘n’ Sand hotel the night of Larry’s murder. His job was to show the way,
salute the customers, make sure that car thieves didn’t intrude into the hotel
premises, and keep an eye out for potential troublemakers. He cynically
informed his questioners that there were probably more of the last two varieties
inside the hotel than outside, but that was the manager’s problem, not his. They
had to laugh and agree.
Armed with photographs, car numbers, and credit card details the team spread
out; in the end all the legwork paid them big dividends. The numbers of all the
cars that came into any hotel are always noted; no luck there. It had occurred to
Joshi that the murderer wouldn’t have driven there in his own car. He probably
cabbed it to the hotel. Exhaustive checking failed to elicit any such fare taken
from any of the residences of the various suspects to the hotel in Juhu. He
decided to widen the search to all the nearby hotels. He was in luck. One of the
cars with a specific number had been parked at Hotel Sea Princess on Juhu Tara
Road and a fare fitting a specific description had cabbed it from there to the Sun
‘n’ Sand Hotel. The same fare had returned to the Sea Princess about an hour
later, sat in the bar for about an hour – having a celebratory drink on another
kill? - paid by cash and left. The barman had confirmed his presence. So now
finding the gun became the other most urgent task.
Knowing that getting rid of the gun would be priority number one for the
murderer, Darius and Kavita’s team let it be known among all the garbage truck
teams that if anyone had found a gun recently in the weeks around Larry’s
murder, they could contact them and hand it over. It was made clear that they
would not be punished for not handing it over to the authorities earlier; instead
they would be suitably rewarded. Some garbage dumps in the by-lanes of Juhu
are cleaned once in a week. As luck would have it, a rubbish bin a couple of
kilometers away from the hotel on Juhu Tara Road had not been cleaned for a
while, but when cleaned, a small pistol, wrapped in a dirty cloth, was found near
the bottom of the bin. It was discreetly handed over to Vinod. A quiet ballistics
check had identified it as part of a bunch of firearms that had disappeared in a
firefight between two gangs several months ago, and the bullet found in Larry
head matched the dumped gun.
Touching on his underworld sources for information, Vinod found himself on
Wednesday morning in front of a small auto parts shop in a dingy lane near
Byculla station. The shop was run by a small time crook who was universally
known as Bhigu. He was a fence for stolen goods, ran errands for the bigger fish
in the Mumbai criminal world and quietly dabbled in under-the-counter small
arms sales, cash on the barrel, and no questions asked. He was generally left
alone by the Crime Branch and other law enforcement agencies, as he was a very
useful source of information on movements in and out of India to Pakistan and
Dubai. With one menacing ex-cop in front of him and encounters with more cops
to come, he was too scared to bluff Vinod on this matter. He picked out the buyer
without hesitation from a bunch of photographs spread out in front of him. He
told him that the purchase had taken place a couple of months back and that the
buyer had come to him recommended by some Dubai connections. When
pressed he gave up the name of this ‘connection’ from Dubai. By this time,
Vinod Joshi knew he had been given a vital piece of information and he needed
to make sure that Darius and Kavita got this real fast. Once the police picked
Bhigu up he would start chattering to his cronies and the cops in the police
station. It would not take long for the Dubai connection to be alerted, and in turn
the murderer could be forewarned. So Vinod advised him to go on holiday,
immediately, unless he wanted to be arrested as an accessory to murder. Bhigu
decided this was excellent advice, and acted on it the moment Vinod left his
shop. Given his precarious lifestyle, this was the work of an instant. He decided
to visit his relatives in Kolhapur whom he had not seen for a while. Whether
they would be as happy to see him was a moot point but he didn’t care. At this
moment he had a jail-free card, and he was not going to pass it up.
The other stumbling block was the one about how Larry had got in touch with
the murderer. His cell phone had disappeared but they had his number from his
brother Errol and estranged wife. Finding out which number he had called was
very simple- they checked all calls into the Maheshwari company switchboards
and discovered that a cell phone number is easily gulled out of any secretary if
she is worried about offending an old friend of her boss. The cell phone
company confirmed a late night call from Larry’s cell phone to the murderer.
A lot of things were falling in place but there still was not enough to warrant
an arrest. All this was circumstantial evidence; any good defense lawyer could
pull most of these carefully collected pieces of information to pieces in court and
both Darius and Kavita were sure they didn’t want the murderer walking free on
a technicality. Confession would be the only clincher in this case.
DCP Kulkarni and Sub-inspector Sawant were between them working on three
cases at the same time, but because of the continuing media obsession the
Maheshwari case took a large part of their time. It was not clear to anybody how
it happened, but Sushil was still in Crime Branch headquarters, much to his joy
and Atul Pandey’s indignation. Larry’s death was proving to be the pivot on
which the case was beginning to unravel. Vasu persuaded his Deputy Inspector
General (Crime Branch) that Sawant was needed to connect the dots and do the
running around. Besides they both agreed that he was wasted on Atul and would
be a huge bonus to the team at headquarters.
 They had decided to call everyone in for official questioning and calls went
out to all those connected with the deaths of Manorama Kashyap to come into
Crime Branch headquarters at Crawford Market on Wednesday 23rd January to
make their formal statements. They were asked to go to the DCP’s office on the
first floor. Irritated or embarrassed or worried, they trickled in one by one. Sushil
Sawant was on hand to soothe them, shepherd them, and take them into a small
conference room next door, where Vasant Kulkarni waited for them in uniform,
looking pleasant but forbidding. He was even more courteous than normal,
which if he had but known it, really intimidated all those facing him.
From Ramnath Maheshwari to Shishir’s skittish banker friend Vinay Kapoor,
they trooped in and recorded their statements, signed them and then got out of
that room as fast as they could. Kareena came face to face with the Maheshwaris
and chose to totally ignore them. In some cases they were meeting each other
after a long time, like Umesh Ratnakar and Avinash; they sat together waiting
but there was too much to say, so in the end nothing was said.
There were some other people there but though the family saw them, they
were interviewed elsewhere. Among them was Errol who came in to record his
statement separately. He saw the Maheshwaris, but none of them recognized
him, and he didn’t want to say anything to them or have anything to do with
them.
The police had given no indication that they believed that Manorama and
Larry’s murder were connected. There was no doubt in Errol’s mind- he had a
murdered brother because of them, even though he suspected it was Larry’s own
actions that had precipitated his death. The Maheshwaris had a lot of fancy
lawyers in tow but not one of them could fault the police in the way they handled
their clients or conducted the interviews.
 Chapter 27

T he Thursday of the week started out innocuously enough for the

Maheshwaris. They had all undergone more police interviews, always polite
but each time more aggressive and nastier in the questions asked. Then there
were the official statements taken yesterday, which had been both worrisome and
frightening. One could not blame them. The noose was tightening and there was
nothing anyone could do to prevent it. The media had relished the story of the
skeletal remains of a young girl murdered and buried in the grounds of the
bungalow. The inference was clear – their family were the murderers enjoying
the good life while that poor girl rotted in the ground. Mumbai was beginning to
demand a quick and just closure to this ugly tale.
To make matters worse the police interviews had alternated with sessions with
the two detectives. Even they were harder, colder, far more hostile. Separately
and together the message was the same; the murderer is one of you and we will
get you. All their friends had been interviewed by this pair, something that had
not gone down well with some of them.
As soon as Ramnath Maheshwari was sure that everyone was in, he picked the
phone and asked everyone to join him for lunch at 1pm and to clear their
calendar of anything they planned to do in the afternoon. Everyone included
Rajesh and Ajay. A bad week just got worse. Both Avinash and Shishir were
pretty clear that this was not going to be one of their usual business discussions.
This was going to touch on topics they had avoided completely. Coming as they
did from an extremely conservative Marwari business family, the relationship
between the generations was very formal and followed a clearly laid out
behavioural model. It is not that conservative families in India are not changing
and pretty rapidly at that. Access to all kinds of communication and a much
more assertive younger generation is forcing the pace. But it had passed the
Maheshwaris by – wealth is a great adhesive and a great ally of maintaining the
status quo. They had never bridged the divide between them and their father.
Ramnath came across as harsh and forbidding and their mother, who had passed
away two years before, had been a distant figure, totally absorbed with the
rituals and observances of her faith. Although Avinash had known all those years
ago, and had been furious about Rajesh being sent by his father to buy out
Manorama, he had never broached the topic, either with Rajesh or his father.
Shishir being the second son, and like all younger siblings far less in awe of
authority than the older one, talked to his father occasionally on topics other than
business but that too was a rare occurrence. The conventions and rigidities of a
lifetime were not that easy to break.
Rajesh was dreading the afternoon. His role in those long-ago events still
bothered him and the discovery of Manorama’s body had made it worse. He
walked around nowadays with a heavy load of guilt. He had recently attended a
Maheshwari family wedding and he had found everyone low in spirits. This
situation was affecting everyone, even Anjali and Ajay’s father Deven who was
deeply worried; he had a daughter married into the family and a son who worked
with them. The fall-out of the investigations was beginning to impact their
business life. Contracts had slipped out of their hands, banks had started
murmuring about outstanding loans, albeit discreetly, and the most telling factor
of all, calls from the Maheshwaris to their political friends were now being
answered on the third or fourth attempt. Bastards, all of them. The first hint of
anything wrong and how quickly they put their tails between their legs and ran
for cover. Come election time and I am sure that all of this will be forgotten, he
thought cynically; they’ll be back with their hands out and their false bonhomie.
Ajay was dreading it the most. All his units were running at a loss, and in a
tense meeting last week he had stormed out of a meeting with all these issues
unresolved. He was worried and angry in equal measure not only because of the
losses but also because of the attitude that Ramnath Maheshwari had taken
towards him and his explanations. Polite but critical. After all that I have done
for you, dammit. Worked at whatever you asked me to. Played the subservient
role to your sons, even if they didn’t deserve it.
A lot of very angry people walked into lunch that Thursday.
It was quiet in the company lunchroom on the seventh floor of Maheshwari
House. The staff was extra careful while serving, because it was obvious that
everyone was on a short fuse. Ramlal the headwaiter noticed that the sahibs were
not even looking at each other, and thought longingly of luncheons past where at
least they had all talked to each other and somebody had even cracked the
occasional joke. Babuji is really annoyed today, he is going to scold all of them
and then everyone will have to tiptoe around the office for at least a week after
this. And all that mess about those haddis found in their beach bungalow, of that
girl that Avinashbabu had been involved with all those years ago. Ramlal, along
with everyone else, had read what those lying newspapers were suggesting, that
one of his employers had killed her. His mind shied away from all such
conjectures and rumours. He had worked for this family for over thirty-five
years and the whole idea was completely sacrilegious. He was so distraught just
thinking of all this that he found his hands were trembling and he had to take a
few seconds to collect himself before continuing to serve the lunch.
Ramnath made no attempt to make small talk or put anyone at ease. There
were no after-lunch sweets served as everyone was on a health kick and
Ramnath already had diabetes. He asked the staff to clear the table, everyone’s
laptops came out and an ugly meeting began. And everyone knew what was
fuelling the angst and anger. There was an eight hundred pound gorilla in the
room and had been from the day the bulldozer had turned up the skeleton in the
grounds of the Maheshwari Manor. Shishir was curious to see who was going to
break the silence on this topic. How typical of our family, he though cynically.
Our world is falling apart but we mouth platitudes and talk of everything other
than what we really should be talking about. He tried to pay attention to the
heated discussion but found his mind wandering back to ’86/’87, his memory
bank running a kaleidoscope of snapshots through his mental viewfinder.
‘I am sorry that what we are discussing is of no interest to you,’ Shishir was
startled to hear father looking at him in that steely, cold way he had perfected
through the years. ‘Perhaps there is somewhere else you would rather be.’
‘Actually, I was thinking of Manorama.’ Stunned silence in the room.
‘This is a business discussion.’
‘No bauji it is not. This is about her, about how she died, about how, in spite of
being under police scrutiny for the last month and a half, in spite of being
questioned by those two detectives you let loose on us, we have as a family
refused to talk about it. When are we going to do so – when one of us or all of us
are in jail?’
Ramnath exploded. ‘How dare you?’
‘Yes bauji, I dare. We have to talk about this. About everything that happened
all those years ago and what is happening now. We owe it to ourselves and to
Manno and most of all to Avinash.’
Avinash had pushed his chair back and was standing with his back to them
near the window. Shishir turned and talked to his back.
‘Avi I am sorry but we need to do this.’
‘I agree.’ Avinash said quietly. He turned round and looked at them, his face
drawn and strained. ‘Bauji actually more than anyone else I need to do this. I
have to talk to you and Shishir. Ajay and Rajeshji, if you don’t mind, could you
leave us for a little while? Thank you very much.’
There was silence in the room when they walked out. Ajay had a speculative
expression on his face but Rajesh just looked deeply worried.
Avinash sat facing his father and brother. There was no warmth in his
expression. His eyes were completely cold. For the first time Shishir saw the
resemblance in personality between his brother and his father. He will grow into
as formidable a man as bauji is, and the thought both startled and impressed him.
The apple didn’t fall that far from the tree after all.
Used to deference from his elder son, Ramnath Maheshwari looked at him
uneasily. He always liked to be in control of all situations and this one, it
seemed, was out of his.
‘I hope this conversation stays between us’ Avinash started and both his father
and his brother looked at him in horror. He smiled wryly and continued, ‘No, I
did not kill her. I loved her and probably have not felt like that about anyone else
in my life, even Anjali. I can’t lie and say I still miss her constantly but I do
grieve for what we had and which you bauji, in no small way, helped destroy.’
There was an inarticulate sound of protest from his father that Avinash ignored.
‘No, I don’t know whether you killed her or had her killed but you certainly
insulted and humiliated her. Yes, I know about your disgraceful offer of money
to her. If you must know that is what hastened my decision to marry her. Tell me,
I am curious, did you think that was what she was, a gold digger?’
Ramnath had by this time recovered from his shock on being questioned in
this manner by his son. ‘Look…’ he started.
‘No,’ Avinash interrupted him, ‘I want to hear. You owe it to me and to her.
All these years I have alternately grieved for her and cursed her for deserting me
when I had put everything on the line for her. So, yes, I need to know.’ Shishir
stirred as though he was going to say something and Avinash turned to him and
asked him, ‘was it you?’
Shishir understood that he was asking him whether he had killed Manno. ‘No
Avi not me. I couldn’t.’ Avinash looked at him strangely.
‘I know’ he said quietly, ‘you loved her too, didn’t you? Why didn’t you say
something? I didn’t realize then. I am sorry.’ Shishir gave a crooked smile.
‘Because she fell for you, not me, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do
about it.’ Avinash just looked away for a moment and then turned back to look at
his father.
‘I am waiting bauji. I know love is not a part of your world and was not
supposed to be a part of ours. It must have been quite a shock to you to discover
that your son was a little too human for your taste…’
Ramnath found both his sons looking at him with a degree of dislike and
hostility that he never faced before. ‘I did all this for you.’ He ignored the
derisive sound that Avinash made. ‘Yes I did. You didn’t know what you were
doing.’
‘And it never occurred to you that she would have adjusted to being a
businessman’s wife? That she may not have brought factories and companies
like Anjali did – most of them incidentally good for nothing except the land they
stand on – but that she came from a good family, that she was beautiful and
smart and intelligent and could have been a real bonus to the family. After all,
other Marwari men, some rather famous ones, have married women who didn’t
come bearing gifts.’
There was silence in the room for a heartbeat or two. ‘I sent Rajeshji with the
offer. In any case she not only rejected it but also told him she didn’t want to see
us again. That was all.’
‘That was all?’ Avinash exploded, ‘Bauji, she was twenty years old, for God’s
sake. She disappeared without a trace. And through all this it never occurred to
you to talk to me, your son.’ He couldn’t sit anymore.
He suddenly turned to Shishir, ‘Who else knew about this infamous offer?’
‘I did, so did Ajay and Vinay.’
 By this time his eyes were blazing with anger. ‘Oh, so it was a nice cozy
discussion between all of you, was it?’
‘Of course not. Bauji was talking to Rajeshji at home and we happened to
overhear because the door was not properly closed. He was really mad.’
Ramnath was stunned by the revelation that the three of them had overheard
what had happened. Shaken by all this he blurted out without thinking. ‘I am
sorry – ever since her body has been discovered I have been thinking horrible
thoughts; no beta, I did not kill her or have her killed. I am hoping and praying
that both of you or Rajesh didn’t. Where does that leave us?’
‘I met her the day she disappeared, Avinash, on the 14th.’ Shishir didn’t look at
his brother as he said this, ‘I wanted to find out how she felt about me. She made
it quite clear that you were the one for her.’ He continued though he still could
not meet his brother’s eyes. ‘I met her at Sun ‘n’ Sand at around 4:30 or 5pm.
She was carrying a small case with her. I had sent a note through Kareena to her
to meet me. Yes I knew about your system of communication. Truth be told,
seeing her with that case, I thought she was off for an illicit weekend with you.’
Seeing Avinash’s spasm of pain he put out a hand to his brother but Avi jerked
himself away. With a blank expression on his face, he said, ‘I was to meet her at
8:30pm on the 14th and both of us were going down to Goa to Umesh’s place. He
had arranged for us to get married at the Shanta Durga temple near Ponda.
Everything had been arranged for the 17th. When she didn’t turn up I went to
Kareena’s looking for her. Kareena told me that supposedly I had sent a car to
pick her up at 7pm and she had left in the car.’ Avinash stood and went back to
his vigil by the window.
There was silence in the room. Shishir got up and walked to stand next to his
brother, being careful not to touch him. ‘If I knew that Kareena would pass on
any message that needed to be given to Manno, then you do realize that others
may have been in the know. If you didn’t send her the car then the murderer did,
the person who lured her out to the bungalow, on the pretext of meeting you.’
Avinash had still not turned around to look at his brother or father. Ramnath
felt that he was an intrusion into this personal conversation between the two
brothers but he couldn’t move. He was out of his depth and hadn’t the faintest
idea on how to deal with the situation. This was becoming a recurring
occurrence in his life, he who had been in complete control of everything and
everybody around him. Shishir continued to talk to Avinash even if there was no
response, ‘I didn’t hurt her, you understand. I never would. But we have to find
out who did. Did you tell the police and those two detectives all this?’
Finally there was a response from him, ‘They didn’t believe me. Why should
they? Now Larry Fonseca was shot outside Sun ’n’ Sand the week before last
and they are pretty sure that whoever killed him is Manno’s killer.’
‘Yeah, they spoke to me too. Well then’ said Shishir, ‘we’ll just have to make
sure they do believe us, that’s all. It’s getting bad. Our lives are getting affected,
not to mention the business, and I certainly don’t want one of us to be served up
as a sacrificial lamb to the media. We did not behave well, and for that I am truly
sorry.’
Finally Ramnath stirred at these words, knowing that they were really meant
for him to say, ‘I was trying to protect all of us, the family.’
Shishir interrupted him, ‘Well bauji, you really did a great job of that.’
‘He was thinking only of the Maheshwari empire, weren’t you?’ Avinash was
still addressing him in a manner that he had never done before. He was used to
respectful agreement from everyone, and that his two sons should adversely
judge his actions, and say so was quite a shock for him. His actions had been
propelled by a belief that Avinash marrying Manorama would have been a
horrible mismatch.
‘We have responsibilities, Avinash.’
‘And how were you so sure that I would be irresponsible?’
‘Irresponsible?’ exploded his father ‘you were running away with her, for
God’s sake. How much more irresponsible can one be than that.’
Avinash found himself glaring at his father, ‘Why? I had to do it - do you
know what she felt like after your insulting offer which Rajeshji was kind
enough to convey to her? She was not a gold-digger, she was just young and in
love with me and we killed her, between all of us.’
Ramnath sat down and looked at his hands for a minute or two, ‘I am sorry
that I caused you so much of pain, beta. I just thought she was a passing fancy
and that I was saving you from a bad mistake. I am truly sorry.’ He continued
after a moments pause. ‘But I am not convinced that someone we know killed
her. Still, we must find out who did or we will all go down with this. I think we
need to involve Rajesh in this. Please don’t take it out on him. He was just
following my orders.’
He looked at his sons with an expression they had never seen before – he was
pleading with them. Avinash picked up the intercom and requested Rajesh to join
them. The three of them waited in silence.
 Chapter 28

R ajesh entered the room expecting what was to come. He had always been
very uncomfortable about his dealings with Manorama, and he knew that
someday he would be asked to answer for it. What he had certainly not expected
was that Avinash would run the conversation and that Ramnathji and Shishir
would take a step back. They asked him to sit down and there was a second’s
pause before Avinash continued.
‘We have been talking to Bauji,’ began Avinash, and Shishir had to hide a
smile at this masterly understatement. ‘You do realize that we have to resolve
this. We have to find out who killed Manno. The police, the detectives and the
whole world thinks we did. We have to prove we didn’t; just saying so is not
enough. All murderers say so.’ There was an odd note in his voice and everyone
in the room realized what dealing with the return of Manno into his life was
costing him. Ramnathji thought of his daughter-in-law Anjali at this moment.
She has a ghost back in her husband’s life and therefore by default in her
marriage. How will both of them deal with this? So much of waste and pain, and
he had certainly been responsible for part of it.
‘Tell me’ asked Avinash, ‘did you ever talk about all this to any one else?’
‘Certainly not,’ Ramesh was shocked.
‘You talked to the lawyer, Hemant Dalvi?’ Avinash’s voice was still cold.
‘Yes, I had asked him to draw up the agreement for Manorama to sign.’
Avinash looked at both his father and lawyer in a way that made them
inwardly cringe. Things are never going to be the same again in Maheshwari
House or in the Maheshwari family, thought Ramesh. Like Shishir, he
acknowledged that Avinash had more of his father in him than anyone realized.
‘So how did Darius Mody and Kavita Tandon get into the act. Who called
them in?’
‘I did’ interrupted Ramnathji, ‘I asked Ramesh to talk to Hemant and asked
him to engage these two. Ramesh shared a list of possible private investigation
agencies that he had got from Hemant. I picked MTI because I had head about
these two from someone else, but knew they were inexperienced in the realm of
criminal investigations. I thought they would be more malleable in the event that
the investigation did not turn out the way I hoped it would from the family
perspective,’ Ramnathji paused, obviously feeling guilt over the admission that
he thought the murderer may have been a part of the family. ‘I had no choice.
Anjali was very upset about all that was happening, and Deven was making
himself even more ill with all his fretting.’ Shishir thought Avinash would ask
him who had recommended them and what else they had worked on, but
Avinash let it pass. Shishir realized that he had never seen his brother in this
queer emotional state between anger and anguish, but he couldn’t help but
admire his self-control. Shishir suddenly reached out and touched his arm and
Avinash flushed in acknowledgement of his brother’s support.
‘And you thought one of us had killed her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did it occur to you that I might think you had arranged to have her killed?
You people tried to buy her off, she disappears the day I am supposed to meet
her, but in the days that have followed finding her body I have to confess bauji
that this has been my main preoccupation. We are a nice lot, aren’t we?’ he said
cynically, ‘you suspect your sons of committing murder and certainly this son
suspects you of arranging to do the same, even if you didn’t dirty your hands
yourself.’
You could have cut the silence with a knife. Rajesh inwardly flinched, waiting
for the explosion. It didn’t come. Ramnath Maheshwari stood up and walked out
of the room, not deigning to reply to this accusation. Avinash and Shishir made
no attempt to stop him. A few seconds later, Avinash turned around and looked
at Rajesh but it was as though Ramnathji was talking to him.
‘We have a crisis here you understand, Rajeshji. I have something to tell you.
Twenty-five years ago I was supposed to pick up Manno from Kareena Menezes
bungalow in Juhu’ –Shishir noticed that he had slipped back to calling her by her
dimunitive – ‘at around 8:30pm and take her down to Goa to Umesh Ratnakar’s
place. We were to get married at the Shanta Durga temple. As we all know now
she was picked up an hour early by a car purportedly sent by me and taken away
to be murdered. I…I thought she had deserted me and chickened out and all the
time…Shishu’ – his nickname for his younger brother, now so rarely used – ‘do
you think she thought I had sent her murderer to kill her? Please God let that not
be so.’
He pushed back the chair violently and started walking restlessly around the
room. Rajesh sat in stunned silence and thought ‘Dear God what did we do? We
just presumed this was a passing fancy and instead we broke his heart.’
‘No, no. Don’t even think on those lines. Look Avi I think we need to talk to
those two detectives, all three of us. They are very sharp, very shrewd, and don’t
miss a trick those two. I think we need to give them every single piece of
information we have. We have been regarding them as the enemy. They probably
still are. They certainly think one of us murdered her and who can blame them?
But we still need to talk to them. This is urgent. This is affecting everything.
Look at the servants, even those who have been with us for years. Even they are
beginning to wonder.’
Avinash nodded his head in agreement and left the room. Shishir and Rajesh
just sat there, struggling with an overload of emotions. Finally Rajesh called
Darius on his mobile and set up the meeting with the three of them the next day
in the company office at Nariman Point.
Kavita and Darius were on the verge of going home after an extremely
satisfying day when there was a call from Vinod Doshi. The chain of events in
Larry’s murder was pretty clear; just a few missing links remained to be found.
Who and how were known for the second murder; the who, why and the missing
links to Manorama’s murder were needed. Did the same person murder her or
was the Larry Fonseca murder an unrelated case for some completely different
reason? They had enough to get Larry’s murderer pulled in for questioning but
should they wait it out a little more and see what else they could dig up? They
were debating all this when the call came in for the meeting.
‘So they want to meet us Saturday at Rajesh Kapadia’s office at Nariman
Point. They meaning Avinash, Shishir and Rajesh.’
‘Confession you think?’ asked Kavita
‘I wish. No…no, I don’t know. I think they have decided to pool all their
information together and share it with us. In short, decided to be co-operative
rather than unhelpful. But it’s interesting, isn’t it? It looks as though they have
had a discussion amongst themselves and have come to certain conclusions. Or
they have put their story together and are presenting it to us to see how we take
it. Either way it’s good for us. We can pick their brains and see what comes of
it.’
Ajay was seething when he was asked to leave the room after the lunch
meeting. His first impulse was to leave the office and head for the nearest bar but
wiser counsels prevailed. Inside looking out he could deal with things; outside
looking in he would be cut off. He went and sat in Rajeshji’s room and let his
anger cool. He had to remind himself that his sister was married to Avinash; that
there was a legitimate reason for everyone to be mad at him for the way the
companies in his charge were performing; and given how deep a mess he was in,
the real question was when he would swallow his pride and seek their help for
his problems. To add to all this he had noticed that his father was suddenly
looking frail and tired. They barely spoke to each other but for various reasons it
worried him.
The moment Rajesh was called back into the conference room Ajay left to go
back to his office. He realized that the agenda for the day was to rehash the past,
not to deal with present problems. He spent the drive back to the office thinking
of the family his sister had married into. Avinash, his brother-in-law, remote and
cautious, with absolutely no warmth there and no desire to take the relationship
forward. Shishir, his brother, gregarious and far more friendly, but again their
meetings were confined to business matters and family functions. We were much
friendlier in college. It is after I came into the family that he distanced himself a
little. Was it I or was it him? Avinash in any case was never very close to me,
and marrying my sister just made it worse. I guess he still hadn’t got over
Manorama. We all thought it was a passing fancy, but judging by the way he has
been from November, it was a little more serious than that. We’ll never know
and I sure as hell am not asking him. Though I can never understand why you
would give up what you have for a woman, however much you loved her. No
love was worth a business empire. His thoughts drifted to Ramnathji and
Rajeshji, both always courteous and polite. But neither of them had ever made
any attempt to spend more time with him other than what was essential. Though
in all fairness, Ajay had to admit that they were like that with everyone in the
family, not just him.
Ajay had reached his office by this time. He liked being away from the rest of
the group – only the three companies he ran had their offices here. This is what
he felt on his good days. On bad days he looked at it like a punishment; more a
variation of Little Jack Horner sent to sit in a corner. He sent everyone away,
planning to sit and work for a few hours in the ensuing peace and quiet. He
would then pay a late night visit to his latest involvement, a page three wife of a
SoBo neighbor, who was as bored with her husband as he was with his wife.
Bumping into her on social occasions and pretending to be just casual
acquaintances just added a little more spice to the affair. But he continued sitting
in the darkened office, and instead of working, remembered the past and brooded
on the present. One thing was sure; wherever his thoughts went they certainly
did not go to his wife Chitra, patiently waiting for him at home. She was there,
like muted background music in a movie, something which didn’t need your
attention, and not actively missed if not there.
He fixed himself a drink from the bar he had concealed behind a bookshelf- if
Ramnathji had found out he would have been livid – for all his bravado Ajay
was a little scared of the old man. He went back to his musings.
He thought of the startling news of poor Larry’s death! Larry was always very
curious; he remembered that about him. Very helpful, very curious and very
hospitable. Loved to find out secrets and then laughingly toss them out, always
at a moment when it was to his advantage. But nothing too big – he definitely
didn’t know the fine art of extortion, just used some gentle blackmail now and
again for some quick immediate gain.
Ajay remembered some of the great weekends they had enjoyed at Larry’s
family place in Goa. He had a brother there too, but for the life of him he
couldn’t recall his name. A violent end for a harmless guy. What a mess we are
in, nothing has gone right since November. Being interviewed by the police, who
were clearly suspicious of all them. Ditto by the two busybodies that Ramnathji
had actually invited into their lives, would you believe it, and who were both
suspicious and hostile. He was angry and depressed in equal measure by the turn
of events. He thought, I should go home and spend some time with Chitra. I
should go home and see my father and bhaiya and bhabhiji. I haven’t talked to
them in a while. We live just a few buildings away but one might as well be in
another country. All my father and I do is spend most of our time devising
elaborate stratagems so that we don’t have to talk to each other. I am a
disappointment to him, and he irritates me. What is there to say?
 He was into his third drink of the evening when his reverie was interrupted by
two calls. One was from Chitra, rising anxiety and fear in her voice, telling him
that the police had talked to all the wives that day and would be back. The other
one was from Ushabua, his widowed aunt, who lived with his brother and looked
after bauji, informing him that his father was even worse than usual and wanted
to see him. Why for God’s sake, reacted Ajay in irritation? We have said all that
is to be said all those years back. For both of us silence would be truly golden.
He left the office for his brother’s house, a lifetime of obedience ensuring that he
would see his father before going home, even if all they had for each other were
stilted clichés and uncomfortable silences.
 Chapter 29

A vinash had still not left for office at 11am on Friday morning. This was so
unusual that Anjali plucked up enough courage to ask him if he was well.
What worried her even more was that he answered her quietly, instead of
snapping at her, which had been his normal response for the last two months. He
told her he had decided to work from the house that day. Two months ago this
would have delighted her. Now it worried her even more. And then she laughed
at herself – she had changed enough to actually do that. It doesn’t really matter
whether he’s here or in the office. He was never mine and now never will be.
She would have been even more worried if she had guessed what he was really
mulling over. He wanted to sit down with Anjali and tell her about Manno and
his involvement with her all those years ago. He had hurt her so deeply; more
than anyone else he had to redeem himself in her eyes. He guessed that their
relationship would never be the same; anger and recriminations on her side,
regret and emotional inadequacy on his. He had realized over the last few weeks
he didn’t want to lose her; love may be missing but affection and a shared life
were there, and they both loved their two sons. Though given my behaviour over
the last two months, Avinash told himself, no one would believe it. He sat in his
study and thought about their years together. Marriage in ‘92. The arrival of their
first child in ‘93, the second in ‘96 along with a host of complications for Anjali.
Dr. Nausher Katrak who had delivered all the Maheshwari children had advised
against any more children, which was just fine by Avinash though he would have
liked to have a daughter. His mind ranged over all the minutiae of their lives
together – festivals, marriages, family get-togethers and holidays, school open
days, sports days, all the paraphernalia of your children’s growing-up years. I
wonder how the children Manno and I would have had would have turned out;
the thought hurt so much that for a moment he felt his heart was in a vice-like
grip. He had to force himself to turn away from these thoughts. Stop it, he told
himself, this is not helping you. It’s over; it was over when someone killed her
and put her in the ground. She’s been gone all these years. She didn’t desert you,
her murderer took her away from you. And for the first time after the grisly
discovery of that November day Avinash sat and grieved for Manno and for
himself. He sat unmoving with the study door locked, forcing himself step by
step out of a black hole of despair, knowing that he had to find the means to
revert to being a functioning, productive human being again, to find meaning in
his life. And, with deep rage, to find a murderer.
Not today, I can’t talk to Anjali today, but soon, very soon. He got up,
plastered a smile on his face and went outside to join his family.
Saturday was Republic Day. Avinash and Shishir accompanied by Anjali and
Sunita went to their kids’ school for the morning programme – Avi’s sixteen-year
old was giving a speech and Shishir’s daughter was a flag bearer in the school
march past. Parental duties done, and families dropped home, the two brothers
left to meet the two detectives in their Nariman Point office. They would be
waiting with Rajesh in his office. Shishir was trying to find some way to comfort
his brother who was clearly in a dark, unhappy place. Bloody hell, how many
years have we wasted!, thought Shishir. Can one mend such wide cracks – does
anything even work? But one has to try otherwise our family will implode and it
will be a case of Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall, with no one, absolutely no
one, able to put the pieces together again.
Looking at Avinash’s face as they walked in, Kavita felt a twinge of sympathy
for him. Murderer or not their enquiry would tell, but there was no doubt this
had been the hardest on him. Self-righteous anger and someone to blame always
helps to keep grief and regrets at bay. Even that had been taken away – she
hadn’t run away in a funk, she had been brutally murdered. Shishir was looking
at Kavita and thinking what a beauty she was. He wondered how Darius kept his
hands off her, which if only he knew was a tribute to their professionalism- not a
hint of their relationship showed on the surface.
Avinash took the lead in getting things going, a fact noticed by both Daru and
Kavi. His opening was unambiguous, ‘I know both of you think that either I or
Shishir murdered Manno or my father and Rajesh between them arranged it.’ An
inarticulate sound of protest from Rajesh was ignored, ‘It doesn’t matter – what
we say doesn’t matter. But I agree with you that someone in our extended circle
either did the deed or arranged for it to be done. We have to find out who did
this: it’s tearing my family apart.’ He looked at both the detectives for a moment
and continued bitterly, ‘Ask us anything you want, even if I hate what you are
doing. This includes all those areas that I happen to think are none of your
damned business but I guess you have good reason to poke and pry and turn our
world upside down. We deserve it.’
Kavita agreed with him cheerfully and said that was exactly what they had
been doing and would continue doing so which earned her glares from three in
the room and a grin from Darius.
‘All right let’s start. We have a host of questions, some of which may seem
irrelevant or unconnected or downright bloody-minded…’
‘Like we have a choice!’ this from Shishir.
‘That’s right, you don’t,’ said Darius as cheerful as Kavita.
What followed was the most exhausting three hours Avinash, Shishir and
Rajesh had known for a long time. Kavita thought to herself, Daru must have
been a really good lawyer, no wonder Hemant Dalvi thought he was a damned
fool to leave and get into the detective business. But the same qualities are
needed to succeed in both professions – a good working knowledge of human
nature, persistence, attention to detail and enough bloody-mindedness to hang in
there for long enough to get a resolution. I love this guy, how lucky we are to
have found each other. And she had to lower her eyes quickly lest she betray her
thoughts.
Once they had finished with the three of them and left them feeling limp and
rung out, they drove back to their office where Vinod Joshi was waiting to meet
them. He had put the word out on the street – anyone who could give any
information relevant to both the murders, old and new, could contact him or
Darius. He felt there was no need to put Kavita’s number out – didn’t want a
bunch of nutters ringing her up and hassling her. The two big strands of the two
murders, separated by twenty-five years needed to be brought together in one
comprehensive whole.
They had not been able to talk to Vasu after the Lonavla weekend – all of them
had been busy and Vasu often had to go out of town on work and remained
incommunicado for weeks on end. It was over two months since Manorama’s
skeleton had been found and it was time to give closure to her tragic story. A
cold case is always the most difficult and the most satisfying case to close,
bringing certainty where there were only questions, clarity where there was a
murky fog, and catching a criminal who had got away scot-free all this while.
 Vinod brought them up-to-date with all that he and his team had found out,
with a little bit of help from his police friends. Tracing the story of the gun
backwards from Larry’s murder to its purchase in Bhigu’s shop in the by-lanes
of Byculla; how and when Larry made the fatal call to his killer was one part of
it. Putting the chartered accountant to find out the financial wheelings and
dealings of the people concerned was equally rewarding though the passage of
time made it less quantifiable. He had also got some additional information on
the Dubai connection. The exhaustive three hours spent with the two
Maheshwaris and their lawyer had yielded some interesting links in the chain.
Everyone was working flat out, but these things took time. Vasu had
complained on several occasions how all the glamorous TV serials have spoiled
the public, so now they believe that most crime detection work is done at the
speed of light. Unfortunately, good detective work still involves working the
phones, checking details yourself and wearing out your shoes in following each
promising lead. He had once pointed out that Kavi’s good looks was the only
thing they had in common with those fancy serials. Vasu rarely complimented
anyone and a disconcerted Kavi turning red as a beetroot was a very enjoyable
sight for both of them
‘Okay boss how do we do this?’ asked Vinod, ‘We have to have to find a way
to turn this around; get him out in to the open – by this time it was pretty clear
that the killer was a ‘him’ – if we can get him cornered it might crack his self-
control.’
‘What about hinting to all of them that the police are on the verge of making
an arrest?’ said Kavita, ‘That should set off some interesting reactions. Could
panic the killer into doing something or saying something that trips him up.’
‘And what happens when that does not happen?’ Another instance of police
incompetence and our case gets that much shakier. No way I am letting that
happen, sorry. No we have to get a confession and we use the police as our
bludgeon,’ Darius sounded quite fierce.
‘Okay, relax, we’ll figure out a way.’ Kavita calmed Darius down, ‘besides
with a crime so far back in the past, I have to agree with you. I think we have all
that we are going to get, in terms of opinions, facts, timeline, who was where
and when it all went down. We have a pretty clear idea of what Manorama was
like, what Avinash and Shishir felt about her, what their friend’s circle thought
about her. I am sure many of them wouldn’t have minded becoming involved
with her but the Maheshwaris pre-empted that. If any one lusted after her, and
was mad enough with jealousy and frustration to kill her it has not come to the
surface. It seems she was killed because she was getting in the way of someone’s
plans. Someone would have been in deep trouble if Manorama had married
Avinash.’
‘I have been thinking about it. Well, one thing could be that if this marriage
went forward then there might have been a division of assets and property. Due
diligence happens when that happens and a lot of dirty financial secrets would
have come out. So Avinash marrying Manorama could have been a huge
liability. Better a dead body hidden than a scandal. Shishir we know likes to
gamble and an infusion of cash from convenient marriages is a great way to
settle debts. Maybe contrary to the impression he has created, Ramnath
Maheshwari needed his elder son to make a good marriage to fill the emptying
family coffers. Manno’s murder was about love and money, Larry’s because he
attempted to blackmail her killer.’
Vinod got an SMS on his phone while he was briefing them, ‘Look, there’s
something I have to check. I got a call from someone who wants to tell me
something. I’ll meet you first thing Monday morning. Bye.’ And the next
moment he had gone, leaving Daru and Kavi staring at each other in surprise.
Sensibly they both wrapped up in half an hour, gave Valerie and the office boy
the rest of the day off, and took off for Alibag for what they thought would be a
very blissful weekend. The weekend got curtailed unexpectedly but both Darius
and Kavita didn’t mind that at all.
 Chapter 30

‘I need to speak to you.’

‘Why?’
‘Because bauji is desperately worried about something, and I think it has
something to do with you.’
‘You would think that.’
‘Yes I would. I am tired of being bullied. Come home around 3:30pm and
don’t make excuses about work.’

‘Sushil just look at this. Picked this up on my round of the city the night I met
you. I always make notes of what my informants tell me.
What am I looking for… okay I see what you mean.’
They looked at each other.
‘It’ll need checking. Come with me, and I’ll introduce you to the denizens of
the underworld who help the police from time to time. This is urgent.’
‘Right away sir.’

‘You are falling behind with the payments.’

‘Damn it, I have always paid. What more do you want?’
‘This is about now, my friend. Not our past history. I don’t want to make that
call, you understand, but I may not have a choice much longer. One more week,
that’s all.’
‘Go to hell.’
‘I think that’s where you will be going my friend, not me.’

‘I think the matter is heading for a resolution.’

‘Have they said so?’
 ‘Not in so many words, but I think they have most of the answers they are
looking for.’
‘I don’t know whether to be glad or worried.’
‘I’m relieved. The thought of her lying in the ground haunts my dreams at
night. And I don’t even want to think of what her mother is going through,
waiting for the truth.’
‘I wonder how many of us will be able to live with the truth when it comes
out.’
‘We will have to, won’t we? We don’t have the luxury of turning our backs on
this and walking away as though nothing has happened. I had forgotten one of
the fundamental rules of life, that in the end you pay, one way or another. For
sins of omission or commission.’
‘Yes we are certainly doing that, aren’t we? Good night.’

‘They know who did it, don’t they?’

‘Yes.’
‘Wonder if I will be able to bear knowing.’
‘Same here. Too late though. Just so sorry the way things worked out.’

‘Yes, hello?
‘I need to speak to Mr. Mody.’
‘Speaking. What is it about? And who is this?’
‘Who I am and where I live is in the SMS I am sending to you. It is about the
murder that you are investigating. An old one. ‘
‘Manorama Kashyap’s. I see.’
‘Yes. Can you and your partner come and meet someone? He wants to talk to
you, and he wants to do it in front of me. Vinod Joshi, who works for you, has
known me for a long time and gave me your number. I have asked him to be
present. Shall we say 9:30pm after dinner tomorrow? There is a small little
restaurant at the end of my street. I’ll see you there.’
‘We’ll be there.’
 Chapter 31

T uesday morning… all the TV channels had something new to feed on; an
old watchman had been found murdered in the Maheshwari factory
complex in Vasai, a town 30 kms north of Mumbai, now of course part of the
ever-growing city limits. The moment they heard this, Darius and Kavita took
off for the murder site. All their worst fears were confirmed - it was the
watchman who had talked to them on Sunday night. The old man had been
found by the early morning shift, his head beaten in; the rusted steel pipe piece
carelessly thrown aside as though it didn’t matter. Darius and Kavita, looking
down on him thrown like a rag doll on the ground, were hopping mad.
They updated Vasu on this development – they had talked to the murdered
watchman on Sunday night in the presence of Vinod and a small-time advocate
who had set up the meeting. The information they got was the last piece in the
puzzle; the killer identified; all the proof needed in their hands to nab him, but
they wanted the official arrest done after he had also confessed to Manorama’s
murder. It could not be a coincidence that he was murdered immediately after
talking to the two detectives. Which begged the other question – how had the
murderer known? Darius put Vinod on to this immediately – find out who talked.
This latest murder meant they had no time to lose. The murderer needed to be
cornered, a confession got out of him, so that the official arrest by the police was
by the book. With all i’s dotted and all t’s crossed. Given all the political
ramifications on this case the police were not going to move unless they had a
confession in their bag. Careers had been ruined for far less.
‘How do we get him into a place where he is vulnerable? We have to catch
him off-guard, and he should not suspect we are on to him. And at the same time
we need the police near-by. Can’t take a chance on him making a run for it. And
we can’t take a chance on someone helping him, either,’ Kavita asked Darius as
they were driving back from Vasai.
Darius smiled grimly, ‘So a little plotting and planning is the need of the hour.
We need to nab a killer, the police have to arrest him, and that will be the
successful conclusion to our first murder case.’
 ‘But what if he refuses to come or does not succumb to pressure of any kind?’
asked Kavita worriedly.
‘Oh we can play him a little, make sure his wife, perhaps his brother is there.’
‘Hmm… and how do we do this?’ she asked skeptically.
With some bullying and harsh words cloaked in dulcet tones and reasonable
requests. You don’t believe me, my lady. But just see how well I take care of it
all.’
In the end Darius did not have to manoeuvre at all. Furious and panic-stricken,
Ramnathji requested that Rajesh have Darius and Kavita meet him as soon as
possible. His nice safe organized world was falling around his ears and he
needed to lash out at someone. Why not this inquisitive, persistent pair who he
had been forced to bring in due to his daughter-in-law’s angst and worrying, and
her interfering, ailing, busybody of a father…Darius told Rajesh that they would
like all of the Maheshwaris be present. Rajesh immediately objected, pointing
out to Darius that since a murdered body had been found on their factory
premises, this was hardly an appropriate moment to trouble the entire family.
‘Here’s how it is, Mr. Kapadia. There is no good time for dealing with this.
There are going to be more bodies found in the various Maheshwari properties if
we don’t put a stop to it. ‘
Rajesh was furious, ‘This is just a nasty coincidence.’
‘Rajesh, there are no nasty coincidences in life. Speak to Ramnathji. We agree
we need to meet. You set up the time and place - I don’t care where it is but it
has to be today. Kavita and I were entrusted with a task and we feel this is the
right time for a progress report. And we feel the wives should also be present if
only to have the record straight in their minds.’
‘Absolutely not,’ was Rajesh’s angry rejoinder, ‘Ramnathji will never agree to
that.’
Darius continued to be patient with the upset lawyer, ‘Would you like us to ask
the wives ourselves? If they don’t want to attend we can’t force them but I still
think it would be advisable. I will wait for your call back.’
It took about two hours and a lot of angry calls back and forth before the
meeting was set for 4pm at Ramnathji’s Altamount Road flat. Avinash and
Shishir, burdened equally with fear and suspicion, were resigned to what was
coming. Ajay objected but fell in line finally, as always. Surprisingly all the
wives would be there – Avinash’s Anjali, Shishir’s Sunita, even Ajay’s Chitra.
Ramnath had told Rajesh that he didn’t want the wives there but Rajesh had
warned him that the detectives would certainly ask them directly if they didn’t
inform them. As it turned out Ramnathji’s dictate was ignored, and Avinash and
Shishir were told by their wives in no uncertain terms that they had every
intention of being present. Avinash had never encountered a furious Anjali
speaking through clenched teeth… They had been subjected to rumours,
innuendo and hearsay; endless interviews by the police and the detectives and
now they deserved explanations and clarity. Darius had got this one completely
right. There have been too many secrets between us, he was told, time to end this
and start afresh. If we are able to…she added ominously. The two wives then
went and picked up Chitra to make sure Ajay wouldn’t bully her into staying
home. The two of them were well and truly angry and in no mood to listen to
any male in the family.
 Chapter 32

D arius, Kavita and Vinod Joshi reached Altamount Road to find a very
hostile Maheshwari clan waiting for them. The moment Ajay saw them, he
started railing at them, claiming that because they were unable to find the
answers they were hired for, all this was happening. Both Rajesh and Ramesh
Krishnamurthy, who were also present, tried to cool him down but Kavita
ignored him and Darius responded calmly, ‘I know how you feel, Mr. Kanoria.
That’s why Kavita and I are here – to fill in all the blanks that have been
troubling everybody for such a long time. Please…’ Kavita smiled to herself as
she saw Darius being so polite to all of them. Lambs to the slaughter she thought
to herself, or more appropriately the spider inviting all the flies to come into his
parlour.
Anjali and Sunita pointedly ignored their husbands and sat as far away from
them as possible. Aha, thought Kavita, the worms are turning. Their father-in-
law and Rajesh Kapadia also noticed this behavior and their unease increased
ten-fold.
Darius started the proceedings, at his politest and alarming best, ‘I have to
thank all of you for coming in on such short notice and for being so co-operative.
And I really appreciate the wives joining us. Thank you.’
A pause and then quietly, ‘If no one minds we will talk about a man called
Larry Fonseca first.’ There was a startled noise from someone in the room but
both of them ignored it. ‘All three of you, Avinash, Shishir and Ajay knew him
in college. In fact, if we have it correct, you have all been down to his family
home in Betolim in Goa, Avinash certainly once, Shishir and Ajay more than
once. On the night of January 4th he rang up one of you and a meeting was set up
at the Sun ‘n’ Sand hotel in Juhu for 11pm on the night of January 5th.’ There was
pin drop silence while he paused for a moment.
‘Larry’s body was found in his car the next morning. He had been shot.’
‘Are you suggesting that one of us in this room is responsible?’ asked
Ramnathji angrily.
 ‘I am not suggesting anything! I know it!’ answered Kavita coldly, ‘The
murderer thought he had hidden all traces of his crime by removing the mobile
phone and any papers that would help us identify him, dropped the gun in a
rubbish dump far away from the murder site and sneaked out of the hotel parking
lot. But you know the saying - the best-laid plans of mice and men and all that.
We were able to identify him faster than expected, the gun was found, the seller
traced and the buyer identified and the call traced. It was enough for us to pull
the killer in but we needed to tie up any loose ends before we moved forward.’
She turned to Darius to continue. Darius looked at Ramnath Maheshwari and
Rajesh Kapadia, ‘You will recall we had said we will find out the truth for you.
You didn’t want to call anyone in but, against your better judgment, you gave in
to emotional pressure from Anjali and her father. You hated the intrusion into
your lives. I know, although you may not admit it to us, that you called us in
because you thought you could use our inexperience to manipulate our findings
and us. You suspected your sons and Rajeshji but you weren’t willing to admit it.
And that’s why I wanted the wives here. They have had the hardest time of it and
they should know, must know what happened all those years ago. It’s the only
way forward, trust me.’
Both Avinash and Shishir stirred restlessly but didn’t say anything. Anjali sat
up straighter as though bracing herself for what was to come. Sunita alternated
between looking at Shishir fearfully and down at her clasped hands as though
her life depended on it.
‘Manorama Kashyap’s skeleton was found in the grounds of Maheshwari
Manor on Nov 20th, 2012. She was identified by the purse lying in her grave with
her, which contained her Sydenham College ID card among other things. We did
a DNA match with her mother. She lives in Dehradun. As you can imagine it
was one of the worst days of Mrs. Kashyap’s life. Her daughter was just twenty
when she was killed.’ Darius looked around at his captive audience, totally quiet.
Only Avinash glanced at him with such anguish in his eyes that it hurt to just
look at him but Darius and Kavita studiously ignored that.
‘I won’t go into details but from what the police investigating team and we
were able to put together she was killed on the night of Saturday November 14th
1987. She had packed a small bag with her and was going to her friend
Kareena’s house in Andheri. On the way she made a detour – she stopped at the
Sun ’n’ Sand Hotel in Juhu to meet Shishir. He had sent a message through
Kareena to meet him there. It seems that quite a few people in Avinash and
Shishir’s circle of friends knew that Kareena could be used to get a message to
Manorama, although Avinash was the one who used this arrangement most.’
There was a choking sound from Anjali and Sunita put her arms around her.
Darius looked at them directly and continued, ‘I am not enjoying this ma’am, but
please understand that it is better that you hear all of this in this room rather than
some garbled rubbish from the papers and channels.’ He turned away and
addressed the whole room again. ‘This weekend was significant for another
reason. Avinash was taking Manorama down to Goa to be married at the Shanta
Durga temple in Ponda. His friend Umesh Ratnakar had made all the
arrangements. Avinash was supposed to send a car to pick her up at 8pm from
Kareena’s place and bring her to a small Irani restaurant near their Versova
bungalow. They were planning to leave from there. As we all know now none of
this happened.’
Darius took a sip of water and looked at them all once before continuing. ‘Her
friend Kareena confirmed that she was sent a car, seemingly by Avinash, asking
her to meet him at 7:30pm instead of 8:30pm as agreed to earlier. We suspect
that whoever picked her up took her straight to the bungalow, telling her that
Avinash was meting her there instead of the restaurant near by. You have to
remember a couple of things – this was an era of no cellphones and landlines
were few and far between. So there was no way Manorama could have called
Avinash to check in on the change in programme. On a November evening it is
usually dark by 6:45pm or 7pm so by the time she reached the bungalow it was
dark. Also worth remembering is that Versova was not what it is today. It used to
be almost deserted by the time it was evening and was not considered safe. And
with good reason,’ he added grimly.
‘She was found with her skull cracked and her hand was broken in at least one
place.’ This was too much for Avinash. He covered his face with his hands and
now it was Shishir’s turn to go to him and hold him tightly by the shoulder.
Kavita watched Anjali’s ravaged face and the anger in Sunita’s and thought, ‘this
is going to get worse before it gets better.’
‘When looking through the list of what had been found in her room there was
a mention of two diaries with what someone had described as gibberish written
in it. The police had returned these to her mother with all the rest of her personal
property when they were unable to trace her. We took a trip to Dehradun to meet
Mrs. Kashyap and she let us have a look at them; they were written in a code
which lots of kids, particularly girls use to write stuff and pass messages to each
other. She was very young, you know.’
Darius paused for Kavita to take over. She looked at Ramnath Maheshwari
and Rajesh Kapadia, ‘We got confirmation that Mr. Maheshwari was aware of
his son’s involvement with Manorama, disapproved of it completely and had
authorized Rajesh Kapadia to offer her money to stay out of his son’s life. She
not only refused but when his son heard of what happened it had the opposite
effect. He realized that he had to marry her to protect her against such
contemptuous and insulting behaviour.’ She stared at Ramnathji with such
animus that he turned red and had the grace to look shamefaced. Kavita had been
waiting to get this off her chest and it helped that the whole clan was there. She
still burned with indignation when she thought of how miserable Manno would
have felt after her encounter with the family lawyer.
‘When the case came to us we thought nobody had bothered about her
disappearance. But we were wrong. The policeman in charge of the case kept her
file open because he always believed that she was murdered. That policeman is
now the Joint Commisioner of Police who heads the Crime branch. He has
instructed the Deputy Commisioner of Police Vasant Kulkarni, whom you all
know so well, to pay a lot of attention to this case.’ Having reduced everyone to
a state of acute discomfort, she smiled and continued, ‘Avinash continued to
look for her many months after her disappearance. We confirmed this from the
team of ex-policemen and other people he had employed. Of course this was a
good cover if he had murdered her. So it seemed she had vanished into thin air,
until a bulldozer dug up her remains on a November day twenty-five years later.’
Darius picked up seamlessly from where she left off, ‘We now know that the
two murders are connected, one happening now because of the one that
happened all those years ago. Larry Fonseca was murdered because he
connected the dots between some events that had lain dormant in his memory
and came to the right conclusion. What he should have done is come straight to
us. Instead he got greedy and decided to blackmail a murderer who had hidden
his dark deed all these years and who was certainly not going to give anyone a
hold like this over him.’
 He continued, his manner even more formal than before, ‘Who killed her? A
passerby as the family rather desperately claimed? Avinash because he was tired
and wanted to get rid of her?
All that searching for her could have been a means to hoodwink everyone.
Maybe Avinash figured out that giving up his world for love was not worth the
cost and now he wanted out and she wasn’t listening. Sending the car early and
changing the timing of their meeting could have been a ruse.’ Avinash raised his
head and glared at her and looked as though he was going to say something but
Darius raised his hand to stop him.
‘Or did Shishir murder her for dumping him for his brother? Because she
mattered to you, even if you feigned indifference over her rejection, didn’t she?’
Shishir said nothing, and made no protest as Sunita glared at him from across the
room. ‘The meeting at Sun ‘n’ Sand on the day of her murder was a last ditch
attempt to find out where matters stood. You have said that after she left, you sat
in the bar drowning your sorrows but that would certainly not have prevented
you from following her and killing her, would it? Also you are a gambler and
maybe you dipped once too often into the family till. You could have needed a
cash infusion from Avinash’s marriage to strengthen the family finances.
Or had someone been hired by Mr. Ramnath Maheshwari to get rid of her
when she spurned the money offer?
As you can see, we have a whole cast of you clamouring to be the villain. It’s
possible that we would never have found out. But three things happened - Larry
Fonseca was murdered, a man remembered and understood the significance of
certain events, and an old man’s conscience bothered him enough to talk to us.’
You could have cut the tension with a knife. Old man? Did he mean Mr.
Ramnath Maheshwari who was sitting here with them? In spite of themselves
everyone’s eyes turned towards him sitting grim-faced among them.
‘If you are talking about me then say so.’
Darius continued, ‘We’ll come to that. Your conscience is bothering you for
the way you treated that young girl and the way you blatantly ignored what
Avinash felt about her. I know, I know, the majority of parents still think that
they know what’s best for their children and maybe sometimes they do and
sometimes they don’t but I am telling you this - as a society we should stop all
this. Age and infallibility, age and wisdom do not always go together. Do you
how many suicides we deal with as a society because of this stupidity? Ask the
police… they’ll tell you.’ He glared at everyone and then snapped back to his
controlled and polite self.
‘Anyway let’s get back to these two murders. I started with Larry Fonseca’s
murder but the cause lay in Manorama’s murder in 1987.’ He took a few
moments looking at everybody, ‘that’s why he had to be killed. He remembered
giving a car with a driver from his bothers’s garage with instructions to pick up
Manorama at 7pm from Kareena’s place and bring her to Versova. The driver
was told to drop her and wait at a near-by bus stop. And why was he never
located or interviewed? Because he got a job in Dubai immediately after her
disappearance, probably at the same time as Larry. Since then, we have found
out that the driver’s father was a watchman for the Maheshwaris, at their
residence and then later at this factory. His son, the driver, worked for Larry’s
brother Errol who ran and still runs both a garage and a car-hire company. He
picked Manorama up from Kareena’s place, dropped her at the bungalow, and
then waited at the bus stop on Versova Beach road as he had been instructed to
do. He thought this was a tryst and just forgot about it. He had already applied
for a job in Dubai and got the call almost immediately after this assignment. He
went away to Dubai and completely forgot about the events of that day until the
sensational story of the skeleton in the Versova bungalow hit all the TV
channels. However, the constant media coverage did the trick. He realized that
he was sitting on information that the police ought to have. He was too scared to
go to them so he spoke to his father about ten days ago. Our team had already
interviewed all the staff connected to the Maheshwaris and left contact numbers
in case anyone had information to give. The father plucked up his courage and
rang Vinod who works with us. Anyway, to cut a long story short, we met the
father on Sunday night. Vinod had brought along an advocate friend with him.
We spoke to the son on the phone in his presence and are arranging for him to
come back and testify to the events of that day. He claims that the man who hired
him and was waiting for Manorama at the bungalow told him that she had left in
an auto because she had been in a hurry. So she would not have to be dropped
anywhere. The media coverage at the time of Manorama’s disappearance was so
low-key that it was unlikely that he would ever have known that she was not
seen after that weekend.’
 Darius paused for a few seconds. He needn’t have worried – he had
everybody’s attention, ‘With the finding of the skeleton, he made the connection
and realized that the story he was fed was false. He realized that Manorama
never left in any auto; in fact she didn’t leave at all. And as he has now realized,
where would she have got an auto in those days at that time, and from the beach
road? This driver will be landing later this evening and very sadly we have to
greet him with the news that his father has also been murdered.’
The sound of two chairs crashing to the ground was shocking in what had been
pin drop silence. Darius moved swiftly to push Avinash back in his chair while
SI Sawant, who in the meantime had come in quietly to stand at the back of the
room, moved a little closer to the family. Ramnath, white-faced with anger was
shouting, ‘All this is rubbish. You are not looking for the murderer. You just
want to pin it on one of us because it is convenient for you to do so. You have no
real proof and that is why you are not giving us the name.’
‘I want everybody sitting down quietly. You wanted resolution and so did I.
This may not be the resolution you wanted but it is the one you are going to get.’
He turned to Anjali who was sitting in the corner, unable or unwilling to make
any kind of protest. ‘Tell me ma’am,’ Vasu asked her directly, ‘how long have
you known about your brother’s gambling addiction?’
‘I just found out’ she cried, ‘You have to believe me.’
‘Oh, I do but when was ‘just’?’
She sat up straighter, ‘Last week. I had gone to see my father. He has been
ailing for some time and he confided in me saying that he was worried about
Ajay’s debts. I couldn’t understand what debts. I knew about his womanizing
and his heavy drinking’ she said bitterly, ‘but not his gambling. I was furious but
I suppose not surprised. I called him to the house on an afternoon and got it out
of him. He said he was in control of the situation but then all gamblers say that,
don’t they? But…’ and to everyone’s surprise she turned fiercely on Darius and
Kavita, ‘that is a long way from murder.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. Your family was arranging your match at the time of
Manorama’s disappearance. Avinash was one and there was another boy from
another Marwari family, though not as well off as the Maheshwaris. Isn’t that
true?’
 ‘Yes.’
‘They didn’t have as many assets and companies as the Maheshwaris. And at
the beginning it didn’t bother your family because the plan was that you were to
be given to Shishir if the Avinash connection didn’t work out. But then new
whispers began to circulate that said that Shishir was more inclined to one of Raj
Poddar’s daughters – Sunita to be precise – and then of course a real problem
presented itself.’
There was total silence in the room. DCP Kulkarni had come in by this time
but he made it clear that he would wait for Darius and Kavita to finish. Darius
continued talking to Anjali without looking at anyone else in the room. ‘You see
we know your family were already deeply in debt by this time and this marriage
was very important to them. Your father’s health has suddenly taken a turn for
the worse from the middle’ of this month isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ The room could barely hear her answer as she wept. Avinash stretched
out his hand to her but she jerked away.
‘And this happened when he realized the real extent of how much his son
owed, isn’t it? The Dubai betting syndicate had passed this information to him,
making it clear he would have to pay if his son didn’t.’
Darius was relentless. For Anjali, a horrible period of two months was
reaching its apex point today. There was nowhere for her to go. Her grief and
pain was painful to watch. By this time Anjali was looking so white that Kavita
moved quietly to SI Sawant and told him they better have a doctor close at hand.
Darius turned to Ajay who suddenly seemed to have shrunk in his seat,
‘Perhaps more than anyone else you were the first one to realize how serious the
Avinash-Manorama involvement was, and that if they got married the
consequences would have been disastrous for you. It’s not Shishir who is the
hardcore gambler, it’s you. That’s the reason the companies in your care never
make much of a profit. You have been dipping into the Maheshwari cashbox,
isn’t it? Betting syndicates have some very nasty ways of collecting if you don’t
square your debts by the agreed time schedule. The more money you have or
claim to have the longer the rope they give to you to hang yourself, symbolically
speaking, but they always collect. So you made a deal with the satta syndicate
you liked to waste your money on. You told them that your sister was marrying
Avinash Maheshwari and that in the ensuing financial arrangements you had
persuaded your father to angle for your running some of the Maheshwari
companies. In the Indian family system one never questions relatives too much,
and certainly not one’s brother-in-law…’
There was an impatient interruption from Ramnath, ‘Yes, his father had talked
to me about him working in one of our companies, but all this was all up in the
air. Nothing had been finalized.’
‘Ah! But you see that is one of the characteristics of an addicted gambler. A
half fact is the whole truth, the beginning of the story is enough for them to jump
to the end. They spin their stories not just to others but also first to themselves.
He disliked Manorama, and didn’t try to hide his antagonism; her friend Kareena
was aware of it and so was Manorama - a fact she talks about in the secret
diaries she kept. Unfortunately she never named him, just noted the fact that ‘he’
disliked her.’ Turning to Ajay he continued, ‘I don’t know how you found out
that Avinash was planning to take Manorama with him to Goa and marry her
there…’
There was an interruption from Avinash, ‘Damn you to hell, I never liked you
and to think you became a part of my family.’
‘Please Avinash, we need to finish this… I am sure you were aware that
Avinash was dragging his feet on the marriage proposal with your sister. So if
the rumour about Shishir marrying one of the Podar girls were true, then both the
Maheshwaris would be lost to your family. By this time you were desperate; you
had to stop this marriage at any cost. You already knew that the attempt to buy
her off had not worked. So in a black pit of anger and frustration you decided to
kill her. You knew Avinash had just come back from an out-of-town trip and
there was no way he would contact her before the stated time in the evening. You
followed her that Saturday to her meeting with Shishir and then when she went
to Kareena D’Souza’s house in Versova. You had arranged with the ever-helpful
Larry for a car and driver to be on call and then you put your plan in motion.
Manorama had no way of knowing whether the change in plan was genuine or
not. She thought Avinash had changed the plan; and trustingly went along in the
car to the bungalow in Versova to meet her death. You had done a lot of work
beforehand. There was a ditch half dug which you intended to use. You also
knew that the watchman– yes the same one who is lying dead here in the
factory- went for a leisurely hour-long tea break around 7:30pm to a chai stall a
little up the road and you knew there was no one around in the house. Versova
village was an outlying place in those days, and this bungalow was at the fag end
of the sea road and was only used as an occasional weekend place. I suppose
luck favours the brave as well as the evil and it certainly favoured you that
weekend. And that is also why Larry had to die twenty-five years later. He
decided to blackmail you when it all came together in his head – the instructions
for the driver of the car that day, the timing and the discovery of Manorama’s
skeleton so many years later…’
There was a funny sound from Ajay. ‘How do you know all…’
‘How do I know all this? Come, come Mr. Kanoria do you think the police and
we work in a vacuum? It is amazing how much of information can fall into your
lap if you know which tree to shake hard enough. So would you say I am fairly
on track?’
Suddenly he was snarling, ‘Lies, all lies. Go on tell us how much the
Maheshwaris have paid you to pin it on me.’
Kavita and Darius didn’t even bother to respond to this wild accusation, ‘We
don’t have to do anything to pin this on you. We have all the proof we need to
prove that you shot and killed Larry. Where the earlier murder is concerned, the
last bit of confirmation came in on Sunday evening when we talked to the old
watchman and made a call to his son in Dubai. Unfortunately, that was why he
died. He wanted to tell your father that he couldn’t in all conscience keep quiet
anymore about what his son had told him and that he had talked to us in the
presence of an advocate. He rang up to tell your father what his son had told
him, but because your father is so ill he couldn’t talk to him. You took the call
and the old watchman must have given himself away somehow. You told him
that he could meet your father today, but that he had to meet you at the factory in
Vasai for some ‘work.’ Years of obedience to the family held good…he came to
meet you in good faith and his reward was a cracked skull. You used an iron rod
lying nearby. Old habits do die hard.’
‘How dare you? How dare you say that?’
Kavita moved towards him and said fiercely, ‘Sit down Mr. Kanoria. And we
dare say it because we know it. You were too confident. You thought you could
get away with it this time, the same way that you have got away scot-free all
these years. The security guards noted your entry into the factory with him. They
noticed it particularly because you do not go there very often. This particular
unit is not part of your responsibility. You didn’t even bother to wipe your
fingerprints off the rod. You figured no one would bother to check on the death
of one poor old man.’
What Darius and Kavita and the police were hoping for was that the presence
of the whole family would put enough pressure on him to lose control. They had
him for the murder of Larry Fonseca and would shortly have confirmation of the
murder of the old man; but all of them wanted the satisfaction of seeing him
incriminate himself for Manorama’s murder.
As Vasu Kulkarni signaled to SI Sawant to take Ajay Kanoria into custody and
he was being led away he stopped at the door and looked at everyone in the
room.
‘Yes, I killed Manorama. The two of you would have spoiled everything.’
There was no remorse in his voice. He didn’t look at anyone as he was led away,
ignored Anjali completely and made no reference to his father or his wife. In the
self-delusional and totally selfish world of a gambler and a murderer none of
them mattered.
Moved by some impulse that she didn’t understand, Kavita moved to Anjali’s
side. ‘I am so sorry. I wish this could have been different for you but we had to
find out who killed her. This is not your fault. You could not have known.’ Anjali
didn’t respond and just clung to Sunita’s hand. She didn’t look at Avinash even
once as she was helped away. The doctor and the woman constable took care of
Chitra, who was near collapse.
 Chapter 33

T he newspapers and TV channels had a field day. This was manna from
heaven to them – a twenty-five year old murder linked to two brand new
ones, skeletons found in a seaside bungalow, one of the rich and notorious doing
dark and deadly deeds within his own family; one hysterical outburst was
matched by another until Kavita thought they would all choke on themselves.
She didn’t want to think about what the Maheshwaris were going through.
Rajesh Kapadia had come to their office with Hemant Dalvi to meet them and
pay the balance of their fees and expenses. This time there was no evasiveness or
hostility. He thanked them for bringing closure, hugely relieved that the
murderer was not a Maheshwari, but Darius and Kavita both knew that it would
be a long time before he would see them in any capacity whatsoever.
Vasu had informed them that Ajay had finally collapsed – his perfidies being
exposed to the whole family had been too much for him – and he had in the
presence of his lawyer given a detailed confession to the police. The matter was
now in the hands of the courts and there was no attempt on the part of the family
to get him off – just arrange, as best as possible, if he could spend a minimum
permissible amount of time in prison. DCP Kulkarni had written an official letter
to Manorama’s mother in Dehradun, detailing everything and letting her know
that instead of her coming to claim her daughter’s remains, they would be
brought to her accompanied by two police officers. Keeping a promise made to
her, Kavita and Darius would go with them and see Manorama home.
Among the Maheshwaris the first concern was for Anjali and Ajay’s wife
Chitra. The family rallied around to protect them, and in the case of Chitra a
suicide watch was kept on her. She had collapsed completely and needed
constant care and attention. Strangely Anjali’s father rallied after his son was
found out. The burden of a very ugly secret that he had carried had almost killed
him but now he was free of it and he could help his family reconstruct something
out of the mess. He and the whole Kanoria clan had to come to terms with the
fact that one of their own had turned a murderer. Ramnath came to visit him and
no one knows what they said to each other, but if the doomsayers were expecting
a dramatic family break-up it didn’t happen. Anjali moved back to her father’s
house for a few months, ostensibly to look after him and Chitra. The two
brothers took over the running of the Maheshwari businesses completely. And
every week Avinash would go to the Kanoria house and sit with Anjali and they
would talk, both groping very tentatively for some kind of understanding and
accommodation for all that had overtaken them in the last few months.
When Kavita and Darius, along with the police officers reached Mrs.
Kashyap’s home in Dehradun, the house was full of relatives and friends. It was
the same Nepali servant who opened the door to them, but this time there were
tears rolling down his cheeks and he thanked them in a broken voice. The next
ten minutes with Mrs. Kashyap were among the toughest anyone of them could
have gone through, and in a very painful way the most rewarding. Kavita had
made a promise and it had been kept.
They decided to drive back to Delhi immediately after and get back to
Mumbai as fast as possible. It was time to go home and pick up the other threads
of their working life at MTI. And to savour and enjoy what they had together.
Val as usual had the last word.
‘That was good but yesterday while you were away a Mr. Mehra called. And
where are the boarding passes? I have to put them under expenses…’
 About the Author

Based in Mumbai but at home anywhere in the world, Sanghamitra is an army

officer’s daughter and a postgraduate in English from Miranda House, Delhi.
She has worn many hats before donning this one – of a crime fiction writer.
Before bringing the adventures of the detective duo – Kavita Tandon and Darius
Mody to her readers, she has been an All India Radio announcer, an advertising
executive, editor of an NRI magazine for an international bank, writer of social
commentaries for Femina, Cosmopolitan, Zeba and business satire for The Asian
Age. She wore the hat of a scholar and researcher when BPI published her non-
fiction work on Buddhism entitled The Legacy of the Buddha.
To the question, “Why crime?” she says, “Why not? Emotions in extremis are
always more interesting than any other state of the human condition.”
When she’s not writing, she reads, travels, enjoys theatre, spends time at her
farmhouse in Alibag, and does voluntary work at an NGO.