Death in Mumbai (11 page)

‘When Emile told me of his problems at home, I felt a bit bad for his father because Emile is a determined guy and once he'd decided that Monica was the girl for him, then it would be she and no other.' I met another of Emile's friends secretly, away from the naval base in Kochi, and he too spoke on the condition of anonymity, afraid of adverse action from his bosses if his name came out.

When I asked him why he would take such a risk, he said, ‘Because he is the guy least heard in your story. Neeraj is the victim, Maria is the actress'—a slight curl of the lip more evocative than his words—‘and besides, she has already given a confession before the magistrate putting all the blame on Emile, so where does that leave him? I know he'll not do anything undignified to defend himself.'

This was a theme that came up with everyone I talked to about Emile. Maria had few intimates to speak of, and Neeraj's friends' accounts of him—though fond and warmly spoken—often ended with caveats. It was only from Emile's friends that I got a sense of unconditional loyalty. Maybe it's the years in the navy where they are trained, if need be, to die for a brother officer. A course mate from Emile's division recalls his extraordinary sensitivity. ‘While we were at Lonavla, Emile had a very public showdown with one of his peers and things became quite awkward between them until one day the other guy came and apologized to Emile, who was so remorseful that he started to cry.'

After failing to crack the Indian Institute of Technology's joint entrance exam, which he sat for along with Vinay, Emile cleared the Naval Engineers Course in 2000. He was sent to Goa for a six-month orientation where he met
his course mates who now defend him. By the time they eventually settled at the INS Shivaji, Lonavla, for the B.Tech., friendships had been forged—especially between the nineteen cadets, Emile included—from the C division.

At Lonavla, Emile, often ribbed as Emily, stood out as a brilliant all-rounder. He was a tri-athlete, achieved good grades with practised ease, did cross-country running, water skiing, and sailing, but saved his best efforts for swimming. ‘He would swim up to ten kilometres without a break, often participating in endurance swimming competitions organized at the National Defence Academy at Khadakvasla and winning the blazer,' said the course mate. ‘If there was one word to capture Emile's personality, I'd say he was a stud.'

There are two criteria for cadets to get to the next semester. They have to clear tests and get past a gruelling physical exam. ‘He managed to do both in the first attempt, every semester. I am making a mention of this because only fifteen per cent of the class manages to do so.' For his accomplishments Emile was chosen to lead his division, an honour known as Appointment. He proved to be an excellent leader and teammate. ‘The navy's rules can test the mettle of any man but Emile was always relaxed, he never snitched, and could be trusted even in the weirdest of situations. If there was any issue, it was with his temper.'

Emile, it seems, did not like being crossed. ‘If someone did not follow his instructions despite warning, he was capable of grabbing them by the collar and cuffing them.' I was told that while this was not a common thing on the base, it was not entirely unheard of either. Emile's battle with his temper began in his childhood.

‘At St Mathias we used to have this game, one of those stupidly cruel games only boys would play, where one person crept up from behind and shut a boy's eyes while the rest just piled on to him, hitting and kicking,' recalled Vinay. ‘It was a good way to rag those we didn't like. Though Emile was my closest friend, a whole group of boys once convinced me to shut Emile's eyes as he returned from a water break. His fury when I did so was unbelievable. Even as I held him I could feel his body shivering with the force of his anger. Okay, so you're with them, he told me freeing himself in one heave; he was such a strong boy that instead of the others beating him it was he who lashed out at them. Within minutes those boys had all fled and I was left writhing in pain for he had kicked me also in the bargain. His anger that day was terrifying. After that episode, though we patched up soon after, I was always wary of provoking him. I was a little afraid of him, I guess.'

Another time, a social science teacher they disliked—‘she was not very bright and we let her know that'—singled out the two boys in front of the class and assigned them a project on China. ‘It was out of the syllabus and out of our league. We were given some ridiculous deadline of a day or two to complete it and I was sure we would fail, but Emile, angry and humiliated at being singled out, dragged me to the Mysore Central Library. I'd never ever been there and we spent hours poring over books on China. Then through his father, he spoke to someone who knew all about the country. The teacher was stumped when we submitted the project on time. She tried to regain ground by saying she would be asking us questions, but Emile who could be
polite and insolent at the same time shot back, “Miss, read the project and you will have no question that has not already been answered.”'

His friends in the navy call him a ‘polished guy, but one who could not bear to be fingered'. Strains of this were already apparent in his adolescence. When Emile was finishing high school at Marimala Pass—after having completed his middle school at St Mathias—recounts another classmate, there was a very popular boy who was contesting for class representative. ‘For some reason he and Emile got into a scrap. Almost at the last moment, when this boy's victory seemed certain, Emile propped up another candidate against him, a complete underdog, and championed his case so persuasively that the guy won, beating the favourite by one vote.'

Though the navy was a perfect fit for his temperament, if not necessarily his temper, it could not quite contain Emile's ambition. He studied to be an aircraft engineer; at the time of his arrest he was a specialist in the maintenance of the Russian aircraft Ilyushin at the Naval Institute of Aeronautical Technology in Kochi. But his heart was set on becoming a marine commando.

When he heard of a vacancy he trained strenuously for months to qualify, but was not selected. The navy, combating a shortage of trained technical staff and having spent considerably on his engineering education, was unwilling to have him move streams, according to his friends. Emile himself told Vinay when he last met him in the coffee shop that he was really depressed when they turned him down and it had taken him two months to
emerge from that low. He grew close to Maria during this time, and the two of them even made desperate plans for Emile to quit the navy after his engineering so they could go live abroad.

Though he couldn't become a Marco—they were the first line of defence when terrorists laid siege on the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai on 26/11 before the National Security Guards flew in—Emile independently took the gruelling divers' course which was part of the commandos' training programme. Of the thirty-odd applicants from all over the country only five or six made the final cut. Emile was one of them. ‘In the navy, divers are looked upon as special people, as someone who is tougher than the rest,' admitted one of Emile's senior officers. The course calls for immense physical courage, and a level of fitness far higher than in a regular navy man. The divers are trained to deal with different situations under water—from combat to rescue ops. ‘They push you to extreme limits,' said one of Emile's admiring course mates.

Willingdon Island in Kochi, where Emile was posted at the time of his arrest, is a man-made legacy of the British. The INS Garuda sprawls in the middle of it, offering an idyll full of old-world courtesies, exquisitely manicured flower beds and quaint cottages. Agile young officers wake up at dawn for the morning drill before going to class to study, followed by gym or basketball. The evening's excitements can entail a trip into Kochi town for a few
beers, watching the lambent twilight, or a film maybe. It is also a man's world, with little role for women other than maintaining house or participating in the occasional navy social.

Emile and his roommate Lieutenant Vasanth often spent their evenings surreptitiously cooking in their room, watching films like
The Da Vinci Code
and
American Pie
on Emile's laptop, or simply reading. Emile read voraciously, especially favouring books on Christianity. Pope Joseph Ratzinger's
Jesus of Nazareth
was a particular favourite. When not reading or watching films, the young men relieved the tedium of the evening watching the crime show
Sansani
on Aaj Tak. ‘It is so melodramatic, so ridiculous that it often afforded us a good laugh… I wasn't to know that one day I'd see Emile featuring on the same show,' Vasanth told the police.

This was more or less Emile's life from the time he finished school, stepping out of the security of home straight into another cocooned environment. The regimentation, the elaborate formalities, the puff and pageantry, left him utterly unprepared for the fluid mess of relationships with complex women. ‘He was aware that women appreciated him, but while he could have—I've seen girls hovering around him—he never took advantage of them,' said a friend.

Emile found himself undone by Maria's petite charms, her maternal instincts, and reassembled by her feminine playfulness and her seeming vulnerability. ‘She stood by me when I was going through a low phase,' he once told me from jail, referring to the time when he failed to get
into the commando course. The enforced distance also meant their exposure to one another was selective; the few times they came together each presented their best selves for the delectation of the other.

In March 2008, a month or so before she went back to Mumbai, Maria went to Kochi to spend a few days with Emile. It was to be their last holiday. During the trip, he introduced her to his course mates. ‘I saw her, and said to myself—is this one a heroine! Then I thought, maybe… Kannada films,' one of them jested. Maria had evoked a similar reaction in Neeraj's friends, who had also been underwhelmed by her looks. I remember his roommate Haresh Sondarva looking at Maria's smiling photograph in the newspapers, a month or so after the killing, and saying dismissively, ‘Pata nahin kaun si jawaani ki photo hai' (It's a photograph from her bygone youth).

Regardless, Emile was besotted.

He talked with Maria daily, keeping her appraised of every bit of his day down to what meals he had had, and he expected the same detailed accounts from her. Though they spoke in Kannada, a course mate said he often caught Emile asking her in English, ‘Where are you, who are you with?'

‘Sometimes, I could make out from his tone of voice that they were having a fight over her whereabouts. He was so possessive about her.'

A senior police officer who was part of the investigation into Neeraj's disappearance revealed that Emile did not like the implications of Maria being an actress—he did not even want his course mates to see her films. ‘I remember
asking him if he kept any DVDs of Monica's films and him refusing curtly. I could tell he did not want to talk about those movies,' recalled one of his navy friends. And yet, says the police officer, Emile was taken up with the idea of having a glamorous woman as his girlfriend—though it seemed he had little idea of her romantic history.

But within a year of their meeting, this possessiveness coupled with his inability to offer her a firm commitment began to undermine their relationship. The Maria who came to Mumbai in April 2008 was a different creature from the woman who had arrived three years before. She had lost weight dramatically, shrinking to mousy proportions, her pronounced dark circles caused comment, and her ambition had the edge of desperation. The woman whom Kiran described as ‘no go-getter' now clung to Neeraj's casual promises as if to a lifeline, seeing highways to glory in the feeble trails he offered.

And what of Emile caught between his parents implacable ‘no', and his lover's soft persistence? Every strenuous objection his parents made added to Maria's appeal, and also to Emile's guilt and feelings of obligation towards her. After she arrived in Mumbai on April 29, 2008, Maria started to bring Neeraj into their conversation with disturbing frequency.

Past evidence suggests a pattern in Maria's behaviour, but unlike her openness with her Bangalore boyfriend, Pavan Kumar, she did not disclose to Emile the extent of her involvement with Neeraj, for she desperately wanted a marriage with him. But the merest hint of another man was enough to create malignant doubt. On the night of
May 6, when he called Maria, Emile heard Neeraj's voice in the background. It was well past 11 pm, early hours in Mumbai but extremely late for sleepy Kochi. What was Neeraj doing in Maria's flat at that hour, he demanded to know. Maria had just moved into the new flat at Dheeraj Solitaire that morning and she had called Neeraj over to help her shift, she told him. As the lovers bickered, Maria told Emile her phone battery was dying, and asked him to call her on Neeraj's number. The two men spoke. One, a glib flirt; the other, a conservative, possessive man with an enormous sense of propriety and a temper.