The Day Indrani Mukerjea Was Missed

'On August 22, 2015, Shyamvar Rai disclosed to you that he had committed the murder of Sheena Bora along with Rahul Mukerjea'

How would Indrani Mukerjea have reacted to this?

The hero of the cross-examination in Courtroom 51, Bombay civil and sessions court, south Mumbai, in the Sheena Bora murder trial, is not defence lawyer Ranjeet Vishnupant Sangle. Nor witness Dinesh Parshuram Kadam. Or Public Prosecutor Chetankumar Jawahar Nandode.

It is Mr Hippocampus and his absolute powers.

Not heard of him so far?

He's a dapper, seahorse-looking fella. A bit self-important. Not always steadfast. Sometimes more of a villain.

But he dominates the room as the star of the show.

Doesn't matter whose hippocampus it is, because regardless, this anatomical character gets all the attention.

That's because, by nature, a cross-examination is a Long Rewind. And a Test of Memory.

It is about challenging long-term memory capabilities processed in the brain's Hippocampus.

And spooling back events surrounding a murder of April 2012, investigated in 2015, requires on-the-ball, muscular hippocampi for all parties concerned. Hippoji plays his own little games, bouncing victoriously between witness box, the lawyers' table and accused enclosure, seeking one upmanship.

Who has the better recollection of events -- the prosecution or the defence? Every so often the defence pulls out a triumphant ace to once again demonstrate that their fact-recall is superior.

And since, in this murder case we are going back 11 years to a Nokia-landline-sms-es-ruled era, everything is about the past -- it feels sort of like watching one of those fuzzy, black-and-white history reels.

Everyone is dredging the depth of their memories to recall times, places, routes, faces, names, sequences, numbers -- most of all Prosecution Witness 146 Mumbai police officer Dinesh Kadam.

He is the man in the box, in the hot seat. Through every twist of the cross, his hippocampus must whirr overtime to answer a continuous stream of detailed questions like:

At what exact time did he first encounter Shyamvar Pinturam Rai, the Mukerjea driver implicated in the murder of Sheena, on that lonely road in Khar-Danda, northwest Mumbai -- the very first incident that unravelled the case?

What time IST did he handcuff him 21/08/2015?

When was Rai's phone confiscated that pm? Was it turned off after seizure? Its model?

Where was he taken from Khar-Danda? How many/who were the policemen present at the arrest? In which vehicle? License plate?

When was Shyamvar Rai's wife called? From which instrument? How was her number obtained?

How many shops were around the place of Rai's arrest?

Given that most of us can barely remember our three-item grocery list on an average day, you can't help feeling sympathetic on Kadam's behalf.

It's like he is writing the JEE for IIT entrance. The questions don't stop coming, relentlessly day, after day; this was his 14th day.

Kadam's cross began January 30, after several days of giving his testimony. I have been able to dip in and out of No 51, hoping to catch the most relevant bits of this crucial cross, since Kadam was the initial investigating officer assigned to probe the crime, from Khar police station in 2015.

Defence Turns Up Heat with Suppression Charge

The proceedings began February 23, on a super theatrical note when Accused No 1 Indrani Mukerjea's advocate, Sangle, quite out of the blue, said to Kadam: "I put it to you, that on August 22, 2015, Shyamvar Rai disclosed to you, before the arrival of the panch, that he had committed the murder of Sheena Bora along with Rahul Mukerjea... You willfully suppressed his statement implicating himself and Rahul Mukerjea, with the help of Suhail Buddha (an ex-police officer), on the instructions of then CP (commissioner of police) Rakesh Maria."

You've got to hand it to Kadam.

He didn't miss a beat. Blink an eye. Or show even a hint of surprise. With a deadpan, impassive cop-face, he merely shook his head, denying the accusation.

After another question or two in this vein, Sangle moved onto a more innocuous subject about which lock-up Rai had been held at after arrest.

Sangle is the kind of lawyer who likes to not just exuberantly stir the pot incessantly, but keep it simmering, bubbling, boiling over if need be.

His cross has dizzyingly changed directions umpteen times, going forwards and backwards in time bindaas, hopping gleefully between locales and incidents -- like watching the episodes of a Netflix series in jumbled order, without subtitles and you need to constantly keep up with the plot.

Granted that the stage is mostly his -- with Nandode usually on mute, or piping in at the strangest moments, to be cut down rudely by Sangle, and Kadam is an unemotional witness, with zero thespian ambitions -- this drama series has just one Amitabh Bachchan and that's Sangle.

Last fortnight a gent named Sandeep Patil, who had been in court as PW12 in 2018, surfaced in this cross (not in person) while Sangle was on one of his happy rompings back in time.

Patil was a resident of Mohpada, a village somewhere in Raigad, not far from the Sheena Bora body/skeleton recovery spot at a mango copse in Gagode Khurd.

He set out to visit a friend in Tirawali village April 25, 2012. While travelling there -- an incident crucial to this case -- on his motorcycle happened to see a group of three people and an "expensive car" on the side of the road and their presence was incongruous in rural Raigad.

The trio was allegedly Indrani Mukerjea, Sanjeev Khanna, Shymavar Rai, who had just finished allegedly burning Sheena's body on a hot, dry April night in this brush. How leaving a suitcase and body burning in a jungle in Raigad didn't set off a forest fire, no one can tell us.

It was Sangle's job to bring out the mystery and strangeness of this very key "chance witness" whose statement had more inconsistencies than the poorly-answered math paper of 10th fail student, that Kadam, though the investigating officer, blissfully, never noticed.

The lawyer established a few vital things:
1. Patil and Kadam were unsure, bizarrely, whether Patil had seen the group of three while going to his friend's house or on his return.
2. The village where his friend lived did not exist and was actually Shiravli and Gagode Khurd did not fall on this route.
3. It is wholly unclear where Kadam, who had travelled out to Gagode Khurde in a police jeep, recorded Patil's account, without (why was that?) carrying out the required panchanama, with panch present, but we know where he did not record it. It finally transpired he had done it, oddly enough, on the side of the road at the Gagode Khurd spot on his laptop.

Sangle boomed, playing up his total outrage, "You did not prepare a panchanama with respect to a spot connected to a kidnapping, a murder and disposal of a body?"

Kadam had this to say, feebly, in his defence: He did not follow the usual formalities for recording this witness' evidence because often at the initial stages many lead a cop on a wild goose chase and there is nothing to record.

At a cross, a few days later, Kadam's Gagode Khurd trip with Patil re-surfaced, because of a missing entry for the trip in the vehicle's log book. There was quibbling about distances too. Sangle grandly told Judge Jyoti Darekar, "Your ladyship will note the blatant lies being told in court!"

Another stand-out tripping up of the witness related to Sheena's laptop and the cellphone numbers she used. Kadam admitted to not checking how many numbers she had (she had three) -- he was weirdly foggy about the records recovered from them. He rejected the accusation that he had not surrendered the laptop Sheena used to the CBI, when the agency took over the investigation.

Kadam and Sangle are still warming up to each other in the courtroom. There are many days of cross to go. It's very drawing room polite, pehele-aap stage, with each calling the other Saheb respectfully, affectedly. When Kadam has been standing in the box for too long, Sangle will enquire solicitously if he needs to sit or requires water.

Sizing up goes on. Body language does much of the talking. The hail-fellow-well-met comradery yet dictates the mood.

For how long? When will this game, which we earlier described as a merry pastime of skipping rope, turn into a more pugnacious sport?

Mobile Tower Mystery and Post-Arrest Calls Under Scrutiny

February 18 cross-ex was largely devoted to Rai's mobile records, recovered to analyse its use.

Sangle meticulously walked Kadam through three calls on Rai's phone right after his arrest, August 21, 2015. They were all between him and wife Sharda Rai. Their timing ranged between 17.34 and 18.51 on the evening of his arrest.

The first was an outgoing call, the second an incoming call and the last an outgoing call for which the cellphone tower location had changed from Khar-Danda to Union Park, Bandra.

The lawyer wondered, mock wide-eyed, how Rai, forever the Walking Riddle of this case, had the temerity to be making calls in front of police officers that day, when he had recently been arrested? And why had the towers started changing?

Kadam said the phone was only seized at 7.30 pm, because several other procedures came first, and didn't assign much importance to the fact that calls had come in/gone out (because that could happen without any conversation too, if buttons got accidentally or deliberately pressed, if a phone started ringing at the wrong moment).

The retired police officer, in his calm, unruffled manner, never pushed to anger, explained that if a cellphone tower was overly busy, calls could get "diverted" automatically to "baju tower". "Baju tower call ko pakarta, ho shakta," attempting to put to rest any new-fangled puzzling theories about why Rai had moved from Khar-Danda to Union Park.

Sangle, waving his beringed hand in irritated dismissal: "I am not interested in hoshaktas. I put it to you that since Shyamvar Rai's phone was fully operational still for 33 seconds at 18.54, you deposed falsely that after you took Rai into custody you did not allow him to use the phone."

Kadam's explanation was ignored, nor did it go on the court record, which Nandode did not object to either.

The cross moved once more to how/what had been communicated to Sharda Rai about Shyamvar's arrest. There was no police station diary entry about Kadam informing Sharda over the phone about Shyamvar's arrest. Nor was she notified in writing about the grounds of his arrest.

Further documents pertaining/vouching for both hadn't been passed onto the CBI. Kadam volunteered the info that since Rai had been arrested first for possession of an illegal firearm, his arrest documents related to that and were not given to the CBI.

Sangle yet again dwelled on the defence's long-held suspicion that Rai had been inexplicably held by Khar police much before August 21 and from August 19 onwards, which Kadam, as expected, denied.

On February 23, after starting up the cross with the stagey accusation about Rahul Mukerjea's complicity in Sheena's murder, Sangle doggedly poked, dug, rooted around for much of the cross about what Kadam had or had not done/asked Rahul about the case -- like a forensic investigation of Sheena's Maruti Alto or their false marriage certificate or their rent agreement.

The cross also dwelt on statements Maria had made to the media, that after recovery of Sheena's passports, her skeletal remains and the suitcase, it laid to rest theories that she could have gone to America.

Sangle quizzed him: "Did you have any conclusive scientific evidence that the skeletal remains belonged to Sheena?"

Kadam agreed that they didn't then, but the case got tied up with discovery of all three -- these remains, the half-burnt "briefcase," passports.

Sangle: "Had you recovered the full skeletal remains during exhumation?"

When Kadam said yes, Sangle asked: "Do you know that the human body has 206 bones?!"

Kadam quietly smiled.

Sangle: "You exhumed 86 bones. It is wrong to say you had recovered a full skeleton."

Kadam, correcting himself: "86 major bones" as per the doctor (forensic).

Then came Monday's most astonishing tableaux -- a frozen moment of flabbergasted amazement, with Sangle looking at Kadam shocked, the judge watching alert, and even Nandode looking unsure, when Kadam declared he was unaware that a team from Khar police station had gone to Rahul's Dehradun home to collect Sheena's passports plus other things.

Kadam categorically said: "None of the officers from Khar police station accompanied Rahul Mukerjea to Dehradun to bring back Sheena's passports and other articles."

Sangle genuinely puzzled to be unexpectedly handed an ikka: "But didn't CP Rakesh Maria say an investigation team accompanied Rahul Mukerjea to Dehradun??"

Kadam insisted lack of knowledge about any such team. If you look back at Rahul's testimony he doesn't remember the name/description of the person who went with him either.

Hectic argument ensued. Sangle demanded it be put on the record that Kadam said Maria had given a false statement.

Sangle emphatically: "Khote (false) statement!!"

Kadam: "Khote kai? (What falsehood?)"

Nandode hopefully: "Incorrect."

Sangle: "It has to be recorded like this -- khote!"

The judge laughed, but Sangle won the day.

Indrani's absence in court on Monday was sorely felt. She would have, no doubt, beamed ear to ear listening to the proceedings, telegraphing her excitement with flashing eyes.

• THE SHEENA BORA MURDER TRIAL

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff