Death in Mumbai (14 page)

I got the drift of her mercurial style one evening when she called me over to her house. ‘I'll be relaxed there and we can chat at leisure.' But the meeting was rescheduled four times before she sent a message saying that she would definitely be home by 11 pm. These days Amitabh Bachchan might woefully blog about waterlogging at his house each time it rains heavily, but until recently, the Juhu Vile-Parle Development Scheme was one of the most elegant addresses in Mumbai. A generation of movie stars—Dharmendra,
Amitabh Bachchan, Rakesh Roshan, Shatrughan Sinha, and Hema Malini—live in plush fenced-off bungalows there. A few years ago, when Hema Malini decided to reconstruct her home, she looked around for a temporary apartment in the vicinity—but quickly dropped the idea when she discovered she was expected to share the elevator with the other residents of the building.

Her contemporary, and one-time suitor, Jeetendra has a house which stands out in the neighbourhood as one of the largest. It also resembles a Jain temple, built as it is in blinding-white marble. But the presiding deity was not in.

Instead, I was ushered in with my
Mumbai Mirror
colleague Vickey Lalwani into a high-ceilinged room so large that it looked unused. In a far corner, Ekta's photographs in various poses lined the shelf—she has a sweet face and a lovely smile, but the hauteur in the eyes is unmistakable. A sprawling chandelier hung over a bare dining table; Grecian-style pillars and a forlorn-looking marble nymph added to the mausoleum-like feel. The same tinny-voiced Gayatri mantra was playing here too, though there didn't seem to be a soul around. As the minutes elapsed, Vickey and I silently stared at Ekta's black pug desperately humping a velvet sofa cushion.

Suddenly, Jeetendra glided noiselessly into the room, looking dressed for a night out. After solicitous small talk he called out, conjuring a flurry of liveried attendants, as he did Ekta who arrived within seconds. It was past midnight, but she had been out jogging. ‘The three most important things in my day are: exercise, prayer, meetings, in that order of priority.' She would jog anywhere, any time,
which explained her perennial uniform of T-shirts and track pants. Very different from her growing-up years, when she favoured hip clothing.

‘I was 84 kilos when I was eighteen, that's the heaviest I've ever been. That happened because when I'd be at home, I would do nothing but sit in front of the TV or talk to my friends on the phone, and eat tubs of ice cream. That too full cream—there were none of the 96 percent fat-free gelatos in those days.' She laughed. ‘One of the reasons I partied so hard was to get slim. It was my way of keeping away from junk. I wanted to get into “fashionable” clothes,' she rolls her eyes and makes the quote sign, ‘dance like crazy, and just hang. By the time I was twenty, I was drinking hot water twenty times a day and my weight had come down to 51 kilos.'

That must have made her happy.

‘I can't say about that but I do know I looked ill. I remember my friend, the former actress Neelam, was hospitalized with meningitis; when I went to see her at the hospital her mother was berating her for not eating properly, and then she whipped around to stare at me and said, “You're falling sick next.”'

The partying and the skimpy clothes, Ekta said, were a passing phase. Recently, she tried to stop her friend's sixteen-year-old daughter from going off with a television actor after a late night party, and was snubbed for her efforts. ‘The young these days are so at ease with their sexuality, and they know what they want in life. They have the drive and the ambition, but I find many of them are so happy with their limited forty-thousand-rupee-a-month lifestyle that they will not work harder to get into the one-lakh-rupee
bracket. They need to inculcate the value of hard work.'

Her own strong work ethic and her faith guide her life. Apart from visiting Siddhivinayak Temple every Tuesday, a Shani temple every Saturday, and the Tirupati Balaji temple before launching a show, Ekta said she needed to pray for ‘just seven minutes' every day.

Ekta puts in sixteen hours a day—her friend, the Bollywood scriptwriter Mushtaq Shaikh, is writing a book on her called
Holidays Not Allowed
—working through the night, and very often clearing an episode that's scheduled for telecast later that evening at 4 am. When Balaji Telefilms became a public listed company, the joke in the Star TV office was that the risk factor in the share prospectus should mention ‘Possibility of Ekta getting married'. Neeraj, who often complained to his roommate Haresh Sondarva about the ‘inhuman working conditions at Balaji', and fretted about the long and irregular hours, nonetheless greatly admired Ekta's drive and success.

‘I have no family time,' she admitted. Four years ago she built herself a multi-storey bungalow a few hundred metres away from her parents' home. ‘I wanted to know what it was like to live by myself.' She shifted into the house with three household helpers, but didn't last beyond a few days. ‘It was beautiful, but awfully quiet… Here, I know that I have my space but also the knowledge that my parents are floating about somewhere.'

At thirty-six, she is in a ‘happy space: I have satisfying work, friends, my own time, I lead a cocooned life.' But things at Balaji have been getting worrisome. News came
in that their ambitious show
Mahabharat
on 9X channel (for which Maria had auditioned) would go off the air mid-narrative. The expensive period sets erected cannot be used for any other show, and the money owed to them is unlikely to be paid.

Elsewhere, reality TV shows were flourishing, contributing about 25 percent of the total programming. During a trip to Mysore I met Maria Susairaj's journalism teacher Shabana Mansoor, who has since quit teaching to pursue research on the ‘Priming Effect of Television on Young Female Adults'. The research was inspired by a train conversation with a young woman who said she would never want to marry a man whose mother was alive. She had been convinced that mothers-in-law were terrible creatures after growing up on a staple of Ekta Kapoor's trademark ‘K'-serials. ‘But when I went for my fieldwork I found that most young women now watch the soaps mainly for fashion and interior tips, and their real interest lies elsewhere.' In the villages of Kerala and Karnataka, Shabana was repeatedly asked why she had omitted asking questions about
Roadies
and
Splitsvilla
, the two most popular reality shows on television.

Balaji had been unable to cash in on this brash new phenomenon, still stuck with heavy duty drama. But Ekta had a plan to expand her business, which was soon revealed. As a first step she made up with Star TV, producing new shows for them. After parting ways with her mamaji, Shobha Kapoor's brother and the well-known film distributor Ramesh Sippy, Ekta became firmly in charge of the family's film business. A new CEO was hired, and five
films had already been green lit. Three of these were based on real-life incidents, trying for a touch of realism that Ekta could not bring to her television programmes. The film on Neeraj Grover's death never got made, though Ekta produced one of the most celebrated movies of 2009,
Love, Sex Aur Dhoka
, an edgy triptych about sexual betrayal, cinematic aspirations, and parental disapproval—themes that deeply resonated with Neeraj's killing.

But none of the stress from the dwindling bottom line was evident at the party the day after Diwali. It was the annual card fixture the Kapoors hosted to celebrate the festival. Invites had been texted that morning, but it was expected to be a full house. At 1 am the road leading to Ekta's house was crammed with gleaming Mercedes and Beemers. In that darkened lane, Ekta's bungalow was lit up like a piece of jewellery. The lift inside the house carried us to the third floor, and into a hall marked by its quietness. On a cluster of large round tables, Jeetendra, Rakesh Roshan, Sunita Menon, Sawan Kumar Tak, and Manish Malhotra were playing cards with serious intent.

Nobody looked up as other guests walked in and went past. The only sound was the clink of ice in the glasses of single malt and the rueful phew! of a substantial loss. In the adjoining hall, dominated by a stunning chandelier that descended from a dome at least fifty feet high, the scene resembled a Las Vegas casino more than a Mumbai house party. Certainly the décor bore out the excesses of Las
Vegas. The room I was in favoured the ladies—Rakesh Roshan's wife Pinky, Karan Johar's mother Hiroo, Dimple Kapadia (stunning in green), and the actor Akashdeep were dealing with wads of thousand and five hundred rupee notes. Currency was spread out like a tablecloth.

A sudden shriek from the corner of the room had the others rushing over—Dimple had won her first big hand—Rs 50,000. The Juhu film aristocracy was out to play.

I spotted the now-familiar faces of Ekta's associates Tanushree, Vikas, and some of the other girls—her young team was always invited to her parties—not participating yet, but absorbing the opportunities their new world offered; relishing the idea.

In the centre of the third enclosure, Shobha Kapoor presided over a mammoth table in white make-up, a white sari, and gothic lipstick. She wore rubies and emeralds the size of some exotic animal's eggs. But there was something troublingly familiar about her. An attendant stood patiently behind her holding a crystal bowl of black grapes that she absent-mindedly picked at every few minutes. At one point she stretched out her hand and frowned when she couldn't reach him, and suddenly I knew why she looked so familiar—all the vamps in Ekta's shows, from their clothes down to their intricate bindis—looked remarkably like her mother.

There was no sign yet of Ekta. I was told she liked to make dramatic appearances. Familiar faces from television serials were killing time playing for far lower stakes near the bar. The scalloped ecru curtains had been drawn back, and from across the French windows there was a curious
sight. In the adjoining building, standing at the window of their unremarkable two-bedroom flat through which the mussed-up bed and drying towels were visible, Ekta's neighbours were lined up and looking in, stargazing.

At around 2 am a little buzz went around the party. Belying her reputation, Ekta had slipped shyly into the room, dressed in a zardozi lehenga with a pouch dangling from her wrist. For the television crowd, many of whom were there to mark their presence rather than play the great stakes, the party had just gotten underway.

‘This is my parents' party, I am just being dutiful here… the bashes I throw are more fun, I assure you!'

‘But surely this was not going to last long,' I suggested.

‘Oh, I don't know, the last time round, because there was no place for me here, I went to my own house and when I returned at eleven the next morning these guys were straggling out.'

She then made her way around the room, stopping at the various tables, asking her friends whether they were winning or losing. When someone made a little pout signalling loss, she took out a fat wad of notes from her batua and gave it to them with a benevolent command, ‘Come on, play.' Another wad was similarly offered at another table. Irrespective of losses, the party must continue.

5

M
OON
D
AS

‘You may not be a celebrity, but you have to behave like one.'

—Moon Das, who was approached to play

Maria Susairaj in a film

O
F THE TEN
films that were registered on the subject of Neeraj's killing, the quickest off the block was Shakir Shaikh's
Oh! Maria
. Shaikh, fifty-three, is a writer, producer, and director who specializes in making low-budget movies based on sensational real-life events.

His last film,
Mudrank
, was based on the multi-crore stamp paper scam. Abdul Rahim Telgi, the mastermind of India's most audacious financial scandal, was unimpressed by the film's poor production value. ‘Had you bothered to meet me earlier, aapki film bade budget ki ho jaati' (Your film would have become a big-budget movie), he told Shaikh the one time they met in jail.

The moderately successful film—in what's called the ‘B' circuit—was also endlessly delayed due to legal issues. Yet Shaikh, who continued to favour the all-white uniform popular with Bollywood directors in the eighties, wanted to make another movie on a case that was under trial. He explained why. ‘I am not a big moviemaker, and I can never afford to work with stars like Aamir or Shah Rukh Khan. If I make a film on a regular subject, no one will buy it; in such a situation the subject of the film has to be the hero. Logon mein attraction create karna padta hai…'
Oh! Maria
, he said, had that potential. He promised the film would be a ‘glamour thriller'.

Shakir Shaikh mentioned an actress called Moon Das, whom he wanted to play his leading lady in the role of Maria Susairaj. ‘It would be a casting coup,' he was convinced.

Moon Das had already been a tabloid sensation—the showgirl whose spurned boyfriend had killed her mother and uncle, before turning the gun on himself. The third bullet had been intended for Moon, who escaped because she'd been out to dinner with friends.