Who Was The Fifth Victim?

What is better than racy crime fiction? Well, racy crime non-fiction, based on a real case and a true story. Goosebumps and voyeurism aside, Puja Changoiwala’s The Front Page Murders provides an all-round take on Vijay Palande, alias Karan Sood, who drove the police, journalists and his victims’ families up the wall in these cases dating from late ’90’s Bombay, but which came to light in 2012. The city’s crime beat reporters would discuss the case often and invariably conclude that it is too complicated to keep track of. To that effect, Changoiwala tells the story spread over a period of almost twenty years in a way that the reader keeps pace with what goes on and yet, she stops short of diluting the suspense after every imp­ortant development in the case.

Vijay Palande, a bright, suave, smooth-­talking serial killer befriended all his victims, killed and disposed their bodies in a cold-blooded, calculated manner, defended himself in court, never lost his cool in custody, was once a police informer and used everyone who trusted him to fuel his frightening ambition and greed for money and power. His four victims, Anup Das, his father Swaranjan Das, Karan Kakkar and Arun Tikku, father of a struggling actor, Anuj Tikku, who luckily survived, all fell to his guile. His alleged partners in crime are Simreen Sood, Dhananjay Shinde and Manoj, the last two are in jail facing trial.

Changoiwala, who was a crime reporter with Hindustan Times in 2012 when Tikku was killed, has reconstructed her reporting assignments and collected add­itional information all over again to reconstruct Palande’s life, his crimes and the crime scenes with minute detail, complete with cigarette butts, trickles of sweat and cold glares. The police stations, apartments, the neighbourhoods all come alive, as do the characters, complete with their mannerisms. But some things are left out too. For instance, Changoiwala touches upon the tribulations and compromises that strugglers in Bollywood have to go through, but doesn’t really dive into the dark underbelly of glitzy Versova, Oshiwara and Juhu. The focus, for better or worse, is sharp on Palande, the police and a little indulgently on herself as a crime reporter. “I could feel a chill running down my spine. In the course of the officer’s explication, I felt close to Palande, to the twisted nerves in his brain, to their perverse workings, closer than I ever desired to be....”

The structure benefits the first-time author and the reader too. The 300-page book is a series of diary entries, interspersed with factoids that move in the past and future. The details of standing around police stations and descriptions of those stake-outs, conversations with cops and accused at courts may not seem extraordinary to journalists. But to the general reader, shielded from the blood and gore, these anecdotes are interesting peeks into the lives of this unique breed.

She is also tongue-in-cheek when des­cribing how journalists function—their desperation for stories, their fear of a miss, their investigations and the toll it takes on their personal lives.

Changoiwala weaves in details about other serial killers from the West, such as Ted Bundy and, of course, Charles Sobhraj. There are attempts to understand the serial killers’ psyche, though these are things we have been told before—that they are not madmen, are ordinary looking as any aam admi, they could be your friend, relative or colleague. She spends a lot of time talking to the victims’ family, to understand what made them trust someone like Palande. She also talks at length to the police and psychologists, trying to unravel how Palande and others of his tribe are wired.

But, above all, she also focuses on how the case affected her. “The story, to a lot of us, had now moved beyond headlines. It had been able to penetrate our skin, affect us, and we for once allowed journalism to serve its purpose—let it make us feel.” This book may not be a deep psychological or philosophical treatise, but it is an honest and gripping account of one of the many cases that made Mumbai what it was—“a seductress, a teacher and an assassin”. It also introduces Palande to people outside the city, for though the case made headlines it did not become a national obsession like Sobhraj, the tandoor murder or more recently the Sheena Bora saga. There is also an immediacy as some of the accused, apparent accomplices of Palande, are yet to be sentenced. And in true thriller style, the end is left open. Yes, there was a fifth murder too, but the skull is yet to be identified.