The Death of Mr Love, page 33
Twenty-six letters had been found under the bed. Three were from S, the rest were from five other women, each of whom must have been living in dread of being exposed. What was it Sybil had written? ‘. . . the ammoniacal taint that clung to me in those months after his murder, the constant terror that I would be uncovered.’
Only three letters were from Sybil, but these were the letters which Mister Love had so disobligingly read to S. Perhaps this is why the one woman S chose to expose was Sybil. Why she chose to make an issue of none but Sybil’s letters.
Sybil, in her Last Journal, wrote that she could almost hear her rival gloating, ‘You really thought you’d got away with it, didn’t you, dear Sybil?’
MYSTERY MRS ? INTRUDES INTO NANAVATI TRIAL
BOMBAY: A mysterious woman – Mrs ? – who wrote three frantic love letters to Prem Ahuja at a crucial moment of his intimacy with Sylvia Nanavati dramatically crashed into the sensational trial this week when Defence Counsel Mr A. S. R. Chari began his argument before Mr Justice Shelat and Mr Justice Naik at the Bombay High Court.
WHO IS THIS MYSTERIOUS LADY? WHAT RELATIONS HAD SHE WITH AHUJA? WHY DID SHE WRITE THESE LETTERS TO HIM – ALL ON THE SAME DAY? WHAT WERE THE CONTENTS OF THOSE LETTERS? WHERE IS THIS WOMAN NOW? WILL SHE COME FORWARD TO REVEAL HER IDENTITY?
All that has been revealed at the moment is that Mrs ? is a married woman with children. She has reportedly admitted that she has had no relationship with her husband for a long time and she talks about ‘five years of celibacy’ in her letters. Mr Justice Shelat, after reading the letters, remarked, ‘She must be a voracious writer.’
Submitting that the handwriting of these letters written by this mysterious Mrs ? had been identified by Sylvia Nanavati, wife of Commander Nanavati, who stands charged with the murder of Ahuja, Defence Counsel Chari, in his loud, stentorian voice, argued that the Sessions Judge Mr R.D. Mehta had committed a grave error in wrongly ruling out those letters on the grounds of their being irrelevant, and having prevented them from being filed as exhibits.
Sybil’s letters were passed round in court, the latest prodigy in this case of skulls and scandal. She was identified only as ‘Mrs ?’, but the letters were hers, without a doubt. Long extracts were published in Blitz. In places they match, word for word, passages from her 1958 diary. The defence, seeking to prove that Ahuja had played fast and loose with S (as indeed he had), pounced on the letter in which Sybil ironically gave L permission to sleep with S. She had talked of ‘marriage’. This was obviously a euphemism, but nobody could build a legal argument on what it might have meant. Sybil’s letters made no difference to Nanavati. There was never any point in dragging her into the case. It was a needless piece of cruelty.
To whip up popular support for the failing defence, Blitz held public meetings and organised a petition signed by thousands of readers. But this time there was no jury to be swayed. Justices Shelat and Naik, agreeing with the judge of the lower court, found Nanavati guilty of murder and sentenced him to transportation for life (to the penal colony in the Andaman Islands). His lawyers promptly announced an appeal to the Supreme Court and, pending the outcome of that appeal, Mr Sri Prakasa, Governor of Bombay State, promptly suspended the sentence. Some editors and lawyers were worried by this apparent disregard for the court’s judgement.
Blitz wrote:
Wails of ‘Democracy in danger!’ are being raised by editorial writers and legal pundits forgetful of the fact that their campaign seeks to demolish the very basis of Democracy which is the Sovereignty of the People as expressed through the Jury and other manifestations of Vox Populi in the Ahuja Murder Case.
Middle-Class Morality
. . . All we propose to do here is to underline the human and democratic aspects of the incident. These are based on that greatly derided and heavily ridiculed thing called middle-class morality. The plain fact is that almost every other person belonging to the middle-class and indeed all the other classes exclusive of the sophisticated upper-class strata of society or the amoral minority of the intelligentzia [sic], hails Nanavati as the man who fired those shots on HIS BEHALF – that is, on behalf of the sanctity of his home and the honour of his family – against the plague of corruption, be it of the financial or moral variety that is eating into the body, mind and soul of the nation.
Somehow Prem Ahuja, much as we regret and condemn his killing, has become a symbol of those wealthy, corrupt, immoral and basically unsocialist forces which are holding the nation and its integrity to ransom, while Nanavati, despite public repudiation of the violent solution he found to the tragedy of his shattered home, has come to represent in the popular mind the avenging conscience of humanity.
Nanavati’s appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court, which confirmed the life sentence. However he served just three years. India’s Defence Minister had appeared in his defence and now the baying of Vox Populi disturbed even the Prime Minister’s peace.
Nehru’s sister, Mrs Vijaylakshmi Pandit, was the new Governor of Maharashtra, the Marathi-speaking part of the former Bombay State. She gave Nanavati a State Pardon. He emigrated with his wife and children to Canada and vanished from history.
I finished reading as the calm light of a Sussex summer evening was touching, one by one, the spines of the books in my sanctum sanctorum, lighting them like candles.
I was thinking, Why do I feel such anger?
A few days later I had occasion to ring Srinuji. Maya had appointed him as executor of her will – the will she had had no time to execute herself. The flat in Sloane Square had finally sold, there were things to be discussed. He said he had a cheque for me and some papers to sign. I offered to come to London, but he said no, he would visit me. When I arrived to open the shop next day, I found him waiting outside. Strange to confess, when I saw him, in his guru’s get-up, shawled against the morning air, I experienced something akin to affection.
‘So Bhalu,’ he said in his beautifully-modulated Urdu, after I had brought him in and given him a cup of tea, ‘how have you been keeping?’
‘I miss her.’
‘As do I,’ he said. ‘I suspect none of us realised how remarkable she was. One of the things you and I have to discuss is a modest sum to be sent annually to a bank in Ambona. It seems that all these years, without saying a word to anyone, she’s been paying the salary of a village schoolmaster.’
He opened a battered briefcase, a relic presumably from his time as an accountant, and brought out a sheaf of papers.
‘First, here is your cheque.’
I stared at the enormous figure in disbelief.
‘And I will need your signature on these.’
I began reading through the papers. Srinuji picked up a copy of Blitz from my desk, looked at it and put it down as if it had bitten him. At first I thought it was odd that he made no comment. Then it struck me.
‘You knew about this business, didn’t you?’ I said, putting down the pen. ‘This murder, in Bombay. The Nanavati case. You knew that Maya was mixed up in it.’
A curious expression flitted across his face. What was it? Alarm?
‘Yes. But may I ask how you know?’
‘Phoebe Killigrew had a diary of her mother’s.’
‘I should have guessed it would happen, once Mademoiselle Phoebe appeared on the scene.’
He had actually used the word bibi, which rhymed with her name. It sounded odd, Phoebe-bibi.
‘She said her mother, Sybil, was blackmailed.’
‘Not just Sybil,’ said Srinuji.
‘What?’
Thus, at last, I came to hear the hole-shaped story.
‘I do not know his name,’ Srinuji told me. ‘Only that he was an official in government service. Whether police, judiciary or some political department, I can’t be certain. My impression, and it is no more than that, is that he was a senior policeman.’
Within three days of Ahuja’s murder, this man called Sybil to his office. Sybil recalled later that the place she visited was in ‘a big government building’. An unremarkable room, a table covered with manila folders, a couple of chairs, a fan revolving slowly in the grimy air.
The official was extremely polite. He offered Sybil a cup of tea and expressed regret at having to inconvenience her. He showed her the letters she had written Ahuja and asked her to confirm that they were hers. Sybil, in great fear, asked if she was going to be exposed. The man replied that since there was no question about who had killed Ahuja, he saw no reason why her letters should be made public. (In fact, apart from S’s, none of the letters ever did figure in the prosecution case.) But he could guarantee nothing. It was not his decision. He could not predict what the defence might do. Sybil, filled with dread, left his office and fled to her friend, my mother, in Ambona.
For a few weeks there was quiet. Then one day, a phone call came from Bombay for Sybil. The same man, the same obsequious regret. He had bad news. Her letters. Certain unscrupulous types. Impossible to control. He very much feared . . . No need to spell it out. In Sybil’s imagination, tormenting spectres were already doing his work. Disgrace, they whispered, public humiliation. Not just her own, her husband’s and daughter’s. Sybil begged him to help her. He was reassuringly sympathetic. Of course, he said, he would do whatever he could. And while officially he could do nothing, there was an unofficial possibility, which he had hesitated to mention . . . It was abhorrent, went against his principles. It made him ashamed to say it, but Sybil understood, did she not, the way things were done in India? ‘Oh thank God,’ she cried. ‘If it’s just a bit of money he wants, tell him. No, please settle it for me. I’ll pay you back.’
‘She told your mother what she had done,’ said Srinuji. ‘It was Maya who informed her that she had just been blackmailed.’
‘ “No, he’s a friend,” Sybil insisted.
‘But Maya said he would prove to be a devil. She called him Mr Shaitan.’
‘You were wrong,’ Sybil told Maya as the summer passed with no more calls. But Maya shook her head.
It began again after Sybil returned to Bombay. Alas, said the official, the forthcoming Nanavati trial was arousing huge interest. It had revived the trouble. He deplored the venality of his unscrupulous colleague, and hated to suggest, but . . . The demand, once again, was relatively modest, but after this he called frequently. Sybil paid and paid. When she had nothing left, she stole from her husband, and borrowed from friends. The first trial passed and her letters had not been mentioned, but the blackmail did not stop and as the second trial approached, the official’s demands became more and more rapacious. Then Sylvia Nanavati identified Sybil’s letters – Blitz announced the existence of ‘Mrs ?’ and Sybil had to cope with the prurient interest of Killy, who commented on the case at breakfast. ‘An Englishwoman, mark you. Serves her bloody well right. Should never have married an Indian in the first place.’
Sybil thought she would go mad. Her love affair had collapsed. She had been jilted in the most contemptuous way by the man she had idolised. She had lost her baby and the foetus had been disposed of on a garbage heap. Her escape to Europe with her husband brought the unlooked-for hope that her marriage might revive. She was struggling to put the traumas behind her. Nanavati’s bullets shattered her illusions as surely as Ahuja’s skull.
The second trial finished as inconclusively as the first. Nanavati was at liberty, pending the appeal to the Supreme Court. For Blitz it was a dream come true. The public queued to buy each new issue. New angles were needed. It was at this time that Ahuja’s ghost began to stalk the city in its bloodstained bath towel. The identity of ‘Mrs ?’ was a secret worth its weight in blood. The blackmailer called almost daily. Gone was any trace of politeness. There was a new, leering tone in his voice. He was peremptory, rude, no longer pretending that he was acting in her interests. His demands increased. Maybe the man sensed that Sybil was at the end of her tether. The goldmine was about to be exhausted. She tried to make a last stand. In desperation she told the man that if he did not stop calling she would go to the press herself. His reply was to take Phoebe from school one afternoon. It must have been the day she went swimming at the beach of the Governor’s House. Bringing Phoebe and the ayah with her, Sybil fled for the third time to Ambona.
‘This is when your mother intervened,’ said Srinuji. ‘And this was the act which determined the future for you all. A phone call came. The usual voice asked for Sybil. Your mother saw her friend’s hand shake as she took the receiver. Maya seized it and said, in a rage, that the man had done enough, that he should not only leave Sybil alone but return the money she had paid him. Or else she, Maya Sahib, would personally see to it that he was exposed . . . Maya said that she had got Sybil to write down everything: his name, the things he had said, the amounts he had extorted, dates, times, methods and places of payment. Sybil could describe the inside of his office. She knew things that would ruin his career. All this was in writing, your mother said, and unless the calls stopped, it would be used.’
The man’s reply filled Maya with fear.
‘You are foolish to threaten me,’ he said. ‘Your own position is not impeccable. Your connections with foreigners and subversive elements have been noted. We are aware of your latest activities, stirring up discontent among villagers. You should be careful. A woman like you can make enemies. You live in a wild place. Your son roams all day over the hills unsupervised. Who knows what might happen?’
Some weeks later, Rosie fell to her death.
‘Your mother did not believe it was an accident,’ said Srinuji. ‘And neither did Sybil. Immediately after the Killigrew ayah’s death the police ransacked your house in Ambona. Why? What were they looking for? Sybil could bear no more. Within days she and her daughter were on their way to England . . . Once Sybil had left, things quietened down. Nanavati ran out of appeals and in the end – after the judgement of the Supreme Court had been set aside by politicians determined to free him – he too left the country, unaware of the second crime, blackmail, built on the foundations of his own. Bhalu, no one was aware of it. Not the lawyers, the courts, the press. Only two people left in India knew. One was the blackmailer and the other was your mother.’
It was soon Maya’s turn to feel the pressure. Calls came asking her to ‘deliver the package’ or face the consequences.
‘She refused, believing, I think,’ said Srinuji, ‘that safety lay in holding on to it . . . You, Bhalu, were sent out of harm’s way to a boarding school a thousand miles away.’
Over the next few years Maya continued to receive calls, but fewer in number and the message now was ‘glad to see you are still demonstrating sense’.
‘Actually, she was not,’ said Srinuji. ‘She had written a script for a movie. One that would tell the whole story of the blackmail. It would be woven as fiction around the Nanavati murder. She had planned to call it Gunah-e-ishq. The Crime of Loving.’
‘What happened to it?’ I asked.
‘No one was willing to produce it. Your mother believed it was the influence of this man she called Shaitan.’
‘But who was he, this Shaitan?’
‘Whoever he was, he was a very powerful man.’
‘There is no sign of it among her papers.’
‘Let me finish the story . . . You went on to university in Delhi, and it was many years before you returned to Bombay. One night you became involved in a fracas in a Muslim bazaar area. You were arrested and spent a night in the police station.’
‘Yes, but I was released after a few hours.’
‘What you did not know was that your mother received a phone call. The same feared voice. “Your son is in custody, arrested last night in a Muslim area. Seems he is a troublemaker like you. Forget your stupid script, your film career is over. Give me the thing I want. This is your last warning.”
‘And that, Bhalu, is why your revels were cut short and why you were sent, with a speed which must have surprised you, to study at a university on the other side of the world. It is why your mother followed with your sisters and would not go back. She wanted none of you to set foot in India again until this man was dead.’
‘And is he not dead? He must be very old.’
‘From the way she spoke, I would guess he is still alive.’
‘His name is in a notebook. But where is the notebook?’
‘Who knows if it ever existed?’ said Srinuji. ‘It may have been that she invented it to scare him off. But once she had mentioned it, the fact of its existence or non-existence made no difference. It could exist.’
‘Maybe it’s what Sybil was looking for,’ I said. ‘When she went back to India to find Maya.’
‘It may be,’ he said. ‘Suffering. Desire for revenge. These things can be carried not just for one lifetime, but many.’
A picture came to my mind. Phoebe at our lunch, saying, ‘What happened was so evil that it can never be forgotten, or forgiven.’
So I took a deep breath and decided to tell him. ‘Phoebe wants me to go to India with her, to find the man who did this.’
‘And will you go?’
‘What is your advice?’
‘I have already given it. Remember our game of moamma?’
WILD SILK (LONDON, JUNE 1999)
‘Hello?’ I said into the phone. ‘My wife and I were staying with you recently. About three weeks ago – Phoebe Killigrew.’
There was a pause. ‘Oh yes?’ Slight surprise in the voice.
‘She left her lighter behind . . . a gold lighter, with her initials on. You were going to post it, but it hasn’t arrived. Can you tell me, what address did you send it to?’
‘Just a minute, sir.’ Susurrus at the other end.
‘We were in the white bedroom. The Corfiot, I think.’
