Masala Dosa To Die For:dark Side Of Saravana Bhavan

[siru]

NewYork Times Article on Saravana Bhavan's owner RajaGopal


At the conclusion of Rajagopal’s appeal trial in 2009, the Madras High Court issued a 30,000-word document that served as its definitive statement on the case. “By and large, a witness cannot be expected to possess a photographic memory to recall the details of the incident and the actual words uttered,” the court warns. “It is not as if a videotape is replayed on the mental screen.” But this is the version of events that the court found most credible.

According to the document, Rajagopal — possibly on the advice of his astrologer — became determined to marry Jeevajothi, the young daughter of one of his assistant managers. That would have made her Rajagopal’s third simultaneous wife: In 1972, he married the mother of his sons, and in 1994, he married the wife of one of his employees.

Jeevajothi was not interested in Rajagopal. She was in love with her brother’s math tutor, Santhakumar. In 1999, Jeevajothi and Santhakumar eloped, but Rajagopal’s fixation persisted; he gave her jewelry, dresses and several installments of cash to help her open a travel agency. While Jeevajothi accepted the gifts, she continued to resist Rajagopal’s advances. On Sept. 28, 2001, Rajagopal came to Jeevajothi and Santhakumar’s house at midnight and warned Santhakumar that he had two days to sever their relationship. He told Jeevajothi that his second wife, too, had at first rejected him, but now she was living “a queen life.”

The young couple tried to flee to a place where they hoped Rajagopal wouldn’t find them, but five of Rajagopal’s employees, led by a restaurant manager named Daniel, intercepted them. The henchmen forced the couple into an Ambassador car and drove them to a Saravana Bhavan warehouse in KK Nagar, where Rajagopal appeared. According to the court’s narrative, Rajagopal hiked up his dhoti and gave Santhakumar a beating. Jeevajothi fell at Rajagopal’s feet and begged him to stop. Rajagopal told his men to take Santhakumar to the next room and continue beating him. Jeevajothi sat in the corner and wept.

The next day, Daniel called Jeevajothi to apologize and suggested that she go to the police.

Though Rajagopal’s men held Jeevajothi and Santhakumar under a kind of house arrest, they escaped on Oct. 12 under the pretext of going out to attend a “felicitation function” for Rajagopal. Instead, they went to the city police commissioner’s office to file a complaint. Six days later, Rajagopal’s employees kidnapped the couple again and forcibly separated them. They pushed Jeevajothi into a Mercedes with Rajagopal, who brandished a photocopy of her police complaint and asked her mockingly about its contents.

Jeevajothi didn’t know what became of Santhakumar. He reached her by phone two days later, telling her that Rajagopal had paid Daniel 500,000 rupees ($10,000) to kill him, but Daniel had instead let him escape and advised him to hide out in Mumbai. She urged Santhakumar to come home to her; together, Jeevajothi said, they’d plead with Rajagopal to leave them alone. “It is obvious,” the court wrote, “that their overwhelming love for each other persuaded them to take the risk.”

Later that night, the couple, joined by Jeevajothi’s parents and brother, went to Saravana Bhavan headquarters to meet Rajagopal. He told them to wait in a nearby room. Then he interrogated Daniel about what happened to Santhakumar. Daniel lied and said that he had tied him up on a railway track, where a train ran him over, and then he burned his clothes. With a dramatic flourish, Rajagopal then called Santhakumar into the room. Who’s this then, he asked Daniel, Santhakumar’s ghost? Daniel started beating Santhakumar there in the office, enraged that he’d revealed his betrayal of Rajagopal. Jeevajothi and her family tried to intervene. Eventually Rajagopal and his henchmen put them all into a van, which, according to the court, took them to a specialist in a faraway village “for removal of witchcraft.”

Two days later, Rajagopal’s men forced Santhakumar into a car with Daniel, and they drove north. On Oct. 31, high up in the Western Ghats mountain range near a resort town called Kodaikanal, forest officials discovered a body. An assistant surgeon at the local hospital concluded in his post-mortem that the cause of Santhakumar’s death was “asphyxia due to throttling.” The police later found the alleged murder weapon — a sarong — under the seat of Daniel’s car.

Daniel was convicted of murder along with Rajagopal and has also been released on bail, but I was never able to track him down. Jeevajothi, too, has made herself impossible to find.

[Doola]

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