Looking through the lens of Manohar Kahaniyan, the ultimate chronicler of the Indian underbelly, 2014 seems to have been a year of passion and plotting. The stories remain the same, some surpassing the others in the degree of the passion or the plotting.
Love crimes remained on top this year, too – men and women killed with abandon anyone who came in the way of their love or lust. Women stayed true to their image in the world of true crime – stopping at nothing in the pursuit of money and power. They stuck to the traditional method of beguiling innocent men and using them to do the dirty work. Petty crooks devised ever new strategies to cheat people out of their money, from fake Kaun Banega Crorepati calls to Hollywood-inspired bank robberies. But what all of them learnt, as every Manohar Kahaniyan writer took pains to emphasise, is that no matter how clever you think you are, the police is onto you.
Here are three stories from Manohar Kahaniyan that show you the other side of 2014.
1. Rich Kids and Their Games
It was the kind of story Manohar Kahaniyan would have killed for, with its irresistible mix of money, power, love and desperation. Piyush Shivdasani, the son of Kanpur’s millionaire biscuit king, with 12 luxury cars and a hotline to the Yadavs, meets Manisha Makhija, a party-loving, champagne-guzzling rich girl, at a club and they are promptly in love. Soon they are making out everywhere, from the backseats of their cars to the empty rooms in their lavish mansions, their secret entrusted to her driver.
Marriage seems to be the natural next step to both, but the families dutifully inform them that the horoscopes do not match. To distract Piyush from the trauma, he is married off to a complete stranger, Jyoti, the daughter of an industrialist from Jabalpur, and packed off to Switzerland. After the honeymoon is over, Piyush crawls back to Manisha, and Jyoti starts wondering who her husband might be talking to over four-hour phone calls in locked bathrooms. The affair soon reaches a point where someone must leave Piyush’s life. Piyush and Manisha decide that person would sadly have to be Jyoti.
The old driver is summoned and handed over a fat supari. Now it is a matter of logistics: Piyush takes Jyoti out to expensive dinner, and while they are driving back home, the couple is met by a group of mysterious men who throw Piyush out of the car and drive off with his wife. A panicked Piyush shows up at a police station only an hour late, and with his entire family in tow, demanding immediate action and threatening to pull their famous political connections. A few hours of search later, a dead Jyoti is found in the backseat of the car, parked in a neighbourhood far away, with multiple stab wounds.
Piyush breaks down beside the body and his father starts making phone calls. The Kanpur police have never felt more pressure to solve a case, and a team of the state’s most efficient cops is formed at the spot. There is only one hitch before the team, though. They have only one suspect: Piyush. The cost of getting it wrong are scary, but the cops dig up his phone records, round up the driver and his associates, and it is only a matter of time before Piyush makes a full confession and leaves the town stunned.
2. Love Turns Woman into Naagin
It was always suspected of Rachna, the famous beauty of the village of Mangroli in Mathura, that she would be up to trouble when she grows up. And that is exactly what she did before she had even turned 18. She started fooling around with the most attractive young man in the neighbourhood, Rameshwar. The families, both of the same caste, went back a long way, but it was unacceptable to either set of elders to feed this brazen romance, so Rachna was asked to stay at home and Rameshwar sent elsewhere.
Marriage being the time-tested way to restrain misled youth, Rachna was set up with a slightly older man from a nearby village, a straight-talking farmer named Bihari, who happened, amazingly, to be an uncle of Rameshwar’s. When Rachna told her lover of the family’s plan, he assured her that it did not seem to be the end of the world. He would still be around her as it was his relative’s house, and he could use the time to make some money that they could use for the eventual elopement.
Everything fell in place with the plan, and within a few months of the marriage, Rachna had opened up the path to her escape with a truly ingenious idea. One day, she woke up and went straight to her mother-in-law with an expression troubled enough to alarm the old woman. Rachna proceeded to tell her that she was a naagin in her past birth, a fact that had become clear with repeated dreams in which a naag appeared and asked her to be ready to come with him. The woman laughed it off and carried on with her day. Rachna was on a mission, though, so she went around telling everyone the same story. No one believed her. And then one day, her husband “caught her in a compromised position” with Rameshwar and forbid his entry into the house.
The next week, Bihari woke up to find her wife missing from the bed. Her sari, bangles and mangalsutra were lying in the same spot, however. There was also a folded piece of paper that turned out to be a letter from her. It informed him that her moment had come. If he were to find a naagin in the room, she wrote, he should leave her in the jungle so she could be located by her mate from the previous birth. Looking around him, Bihari indeed saw a dark snake coiled up in a corner of the room, and decided to hand it over to his in-laws to do the right thing.
The house of Rachna’s parents was now swarming with people wishing to catch a glimpse of the shape-shifting naagin. Its fame lasted for only two days, however, until a snake charmer appeared and proclaimed it to be a naag. It was a male snake, he announced to the swelling crowd, not female. The husband was back and furious, and the police on the trail of the missing girl. She was found in Bhopal, living in bliss with the lover. It would have been the perfect deception, Rachna admitted on being brought back, if they had not been deceived by the man who sold them the snake.
3. The Baazigar with the Perfect Plan
Young police constable Rupa Tomar was found hanging in her rented room in Bulandshahar a month before her wedding. The police found a suicide note in her handwriting in which she held herself accountable for taking the step. The post-mortem report revealed murder, but the handwriting was indisputably hers. The cops were confused, but they had to begin somewhere. There had to be a man.
There were three she knew intimately. Rahul, the Central Industrial Security Force trainee her parents had fixed her marriage with. Sushil, the older man in the city’s police force she was in a relationship with until she found out he was married with children. And Vishesh, the school friend who had always liked her but had no chance of getting her because of his joblessness and poor background.
The police zeroed in on Rahul, who denied having any connection with her death. He loved her and was going to marry her, after all, he claimed. On further questioning, he revealed to have been in touch with Vishesh and Sushil. Both of them had been calling him up recently to tell him about their past with his betrothed. Vishesh hated to see Rupa get married to someone else, so he had found the phone numbers of Sushil and Rahul, and convinced Sushil to join him in sabotaging the wedding. The phone calls infuriated him, Rahul conceded. It also caused vicious fights between the couple, he told the police. He did, in fact kill his fiancée, he confessed after further interrogation.
But what about the suicide letter, then? That, he said, was an idea lifted from the Shah Rukh Khan thriller Baazigar.
Khan’s character in the film convinced the girl he was about to throw off a tall building to write her own suicide note to prove her love for him. “I had watched the film for the first time just after I got engaged and had decided that if my woman betrayed me, that’s exactly how I would kill her,” he told the police. When Rahul reached Rupa’s room on the day of her death, it was to make up with her after a series of fights, but he changed his mind after noticing the number of calls she was getting on her phone. Pretending to be enchanted by her, he wrote a suicide note that he gave her as a romantic gesture and dared her to do the same. And then he choked her to death, hung the body from the fan with her dupatta, and checked out. That simple.
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Love crimes remained on top this year, too – men and women killed with abandon anyone who came in the way of their love or lust. Women stayed true to their image in the world of true crime – stopping at nothing in the pursuit of money and power. They stuck to the traditional method of beguiling innocent men and using them to do the dirty work. Petty crooks devised ever new strategies to cheat people out of their money, from fake Kaun Banega Crorepati calls to Hollywood-inspired bank robberies. But what all of them learnt, as every Manohar Kahaniyan writer took pains to emphasise, is that no matter how clever you think you are, the police is onto you.
Here are three stories from Manohar Kahaniyan that show you the other side of 2014.
1. Rich Kids and Their Games
It was the kind of story Manohar Kahaniyan would have killed for, with its irresistible mix of money, power, love and desperation. Piyush Shivdasani, the son of Kanpur’s millionaire biscuit king, with 12 luxury cars and a hotline to the Yadavs, meets Manisha Makhija, a party-loving, champagne-guzzling rich girl, at a club and they are promptly in love. Soon they are making out everywhere, from the backseats of their cars to the empty rooms in their lavish mansions, their secret entrusted to her driver.
Marriage seems to be the natural next step to both, but the families dutifully inform them that the horoscopes do not match. To distract Piyush from the trauma, he is married off to a complete stranger, Jyoti, the daughter of an industrialist from Jabalpur, and packed off to Switzerland. After the honeymoon is over, Piyush crawls back to Manisha, and Jyoti starts wondering who her husband might be talking to over four-hour phone calls in locked bathrooms. The affair soon reaches a point where someone must leave Piyush’s life. Piyush and Manisha decide that person would sadly have to be Jyoti.
The old driver is summoned and handed over a fat supari. Now it is a matter of logistics: Piyush takes Jyoti out to expensive dinner, and while they are driving back home, the couple is met by a group of mysterious men who throw Piyush out of the car and drive off with his wife. A panicked Piyush shows up at a police station only an hour late, and with his entire family in tow, demanding immediate action and threatening to pull their famous political connections. A few hours of search later, a dead Jyoti is found in the backseat of the car, parked in a neighbourhood far away, with multiple stab wounds.
Piyush breaks down beside the body and his father starts making phone calls. The Kanpur police have never felt more pressure to solve a case, and a team of the state’s most efficient cops is formed at the spot. There is only one hitch before the team, though. They have only one suspect: Piyush. The cost of getting it wrong are scary, but the cops dig up his phone records, round up the driver and his associates, and it is only a matter of time before Piyush makes a full confession and leaves the town stunned.
2. Love Turns Woman into Naagin
It was always suspected of Rachna, the famous beauty of the village of Mangroli in Mathura, that she would be up to trouble when she grows up. And that is exactly what she did before she had even turned 18. She started fooling around with the most attractive young man in the neighbourhood, Rameshwar. The families, both of the same caste, went back a long way, but it was unacceptable to either set of elders to feed this brazen romance, so Rachna was asked to stay at home and Rameshwar sent elsewhere.
Marriage being the time-tested way to restrain misled youth, Rachna was set up with a slightly older man from a nearby village, a straight-talking farmer named Bihari, who happened, amazingly, to be an uncle of Rameshwar’s. When Rachna told her lover of the family’s plan, he assured her that it did not seem to be the end of the world. He would still be around her as it was his relative’s house, and he could use the time to make some money that they could use for the eventual elopement.
Everything fell in place with the plan, and within a few months of the marriage, Rachna had opened up the path to her escape with a truly ingenious idea. One day, she woke up and went straight to her mother-in-law with an expression troubled enough to alarm the old woman. Rachna proceeded to tell her that she was a naagin in her past birth, a fact that had become clear with repeated dreams in which a naag appeared and asked her to be ready to come with him. The woman laughed it off and carried on with her day. Rachna was on a mission, though, so she went around telling everyone the same story. No one believed her. And then one day, her husband “caught her in a compromised position” with Rameshwar and forbid his entry into the house.
The next week, Bihari woke up to find her wife missing from the bed. Her sari, bangles and mangalsutra were lying in the same spot, however. There was also a folded piece of paper that turned out to be a letter from her. It informed him that her moment had come. If he were to find a naagin in the room, she wrote, he should leave her in the jungle so she could be located by her mate from the previous birth. Looking around him, Bihari indeed saw a dark snake coiled up in a corner of the room, and decided to hand it over to his in-laws to do the right thing.
The house of Rachna’s parents was now swarming with people wishing to catch a glimpse of the shape-shifting naagin. Its fame lasted for only two days, however, until a snake charmer appeared and proclaimed it to be a naag. It was a male snake, he announced to the swelling crowd, not female. The husband was back and furious, and the police on the trail of the missing girl. She was found in Bhopal, living in bliss with the lover. It would have been the perfect deception, Rachna admitted on being brought back, if they had not been deceived by the man who sold them the snake.
3. The Baazigar with the Perfect Plan
Young police constable Rupa Tomar was found hanging in her rented room in Bulandshahar a month before her wedding. The police found a suicide note in her handwriting in which she held herself accountable for taking the step. The post-mortem report revealed murder, but the handwriting was indisputably hers. The cops were confused, but they had to begin somewhere. There had to be a man.
There were three she knew intimately. Rahul, the Central Industrial Security Force trainee her parents had fixed her marriage with. Sushil, the older man in the city’s police force she was in a relationship with until she found out he was married with children. And Vishesh, the school friend who had always liked her but had no chance of getting her because of his joblessness and poor background.
The police zeroed in on Rahul, who denied having any connection with her death. He loved her and was going to marry her, after all, he claimed. On further questioning, he revealed to have been in touch with Vishesh and Sushil. Both of them had been calling him up recently to tell him about their past with his betrothed. Vishesh hated to see Rupa get married to someone else, so he had found the phone numbers of Sushil and Rahul, and convinced Sushil to join him in sabotaging the wedding. The phone calls infuriated him, Rahul conceded. It also caused vicious fights between the couple, he told the police. He did, in fact kill his fiancée, he confessed after further interrogation.
But what about the suicide letter, then? That, he said, was an idea lifted from the Shah Rukh Khan thriller Baazigar.
Khan’s character in the film convinced the girl he was about to throw off a tall building to write her own suicide note to prove her love for him. “I had watched the film for the first time just after I got engaged and had decided that if my woman betrayed me, that’s exactly how I would kill her,” he told the police. When Rahul reached Rupa’s room on the day of her death, it was to make up with her after a series of fights, but he changed his mind after noticing the number of calls she was getting on her phone. Pretending to be enchanted by her, he wrote a suicide note that he gave her as a romantic gesture and dared her to do the same. And then he choked her to death, hung the body from the fan with her dupatta, and checked out. That simple.