Crime Of Passion

 

- Jay Bhattacharjee

IN ONE OF those delectable examples of how the laws of probability function, this assignment from the Swarajya editor brought back memories of very happy childhood days this writer spent in a part of Bombay where a significant portion of the Nanavati episode took place.

In the early 1950s, Nepean Sea Road was a tranquil part of the city, where boys of seven or eight were freely allowed by their parents to take their cycles all the way to Petit Hall, where the road started its climb to the top of Malabar Hill. Just two houses away from where we lived was Setalvad Lane, a short thoroughfare that connected Nepean Sea Road to the seafront. Jeevan Jyot, the magnificent LIC-owned mansion, right next to the rocks bordering the sea, had not yet come up.

Four years after we left Bombay in 1955, Jeevan Jyot was to be the scene of one of India’s most well-known crimes of passion. It was the building where Commander Kawas Nanavati shot and killed his wife’s lover, Prem Ahuja.

The Nanavati affair was even covered in the pages of the iconic New Yorker magazine, at a time and age when India featured in the US media only as a land of cows and elephants.

The 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s were years that showed up the country’s western metropolis in a very favourable light. Bombay was spared the post-Partition trauma that Calcutta underwent. Even the arrival of Sindhi refugees from West Pakistan was a relatively minor burden on the thriving city. The original brown sahibs (actually pale white) of the Indian subcontinent, the Parsis, were completely untouched by independence and Partition, and merrily carried on with their dhanshaks, regular obeisance to the Raj in the form of “