Call of the New Sirens
Scandal and death are generating more headlines than ever before. Each has at its centre a young, enterprising woman leading a controversial life.
Scandal and death are generating more headlines than ever before. Each has at its centre a young, enterprising woman leading a controversial life.
GEETIKA SHARMA23, Delhi Former air hostess, manager
AUGUST 2012 Committed suicide. She blamed former Haryana home minister Gopal Goyal Kanda and aide Aruna Chadha in her suicide note.
Iam ending myself today.” Geetika Sharma’s last handwritten note, neat and tidy with ‘ t’s crossed, ‘ i’s dotted and “Suicide Note” underlined carefully, looks prim rather than tragic. But the 120- word note, evocative with rage, reveals despair as it repeats key words: “Trust”, “misused”, “cheated”, “innocent”. Found inside a bedside diary at Geetika’s home in northwest Delhi on August 5, it ends with a last request from the 23- year- old former air hostess, to “punish” a man called Gopal Goyal Kanda and his aide, Aruna Chadha: “They have made my life abnormal.”
This “abnormal” life is the new normal within India’s smart new set. Scandals and death increasingly dominate headlines. There is a pattern around an ambitious young woman feeding her dreams through an affair with a man of means. The women seek to rise, quickly, and follow the scent of quick money. They get sucked into a world of crime, blackmail, exploitation, and worse. Some win and some lose in the dangerous game.
Geetika lost. On August 5, when news broke that the Delhi Police had charged Haryana’s influential home minister, Kanda, 46, for driving her to suicide, Geetika’s erstwhile colleague, Sandeep Kumar ( name changed on request), screamed, “It’s her, it’s her”. The former employee of Kanda’s Rs 30- crore Casino Rio in Goa had not seen Geetika for nearly three years, but remembered her as “warm, quiet and innocent”, always dressed formally in black suits and long skirts. “But she often looked uncomfortable with the demands Kanda made, especially his public displays of affection.”
Nupur Mehta, 31, hit the headlines in March, after the British daily, The Sunday Times, alleged she was used as a “honey trap” to fix cricket matches between India and Pakistan in the 2011 World Cup. Even as an aspiring model, Nupur was known for her “princess attitude”, wrote anthropologist Susan Dewey in Making Miss India Miss World, 2008, which documented the 2003 Miss India contest in which Nupur took part. She moved on to films after that, facing the infamous Bollywood ‘ casting couch’ while meeting directors, and signed two films, Jo Bole So Nihaal and Abracadabra, both of which flopped. It was between 2004 and 2006 that she started meeting cricketers, notably Yuvraj Singh. “Wherever I go, cricketers happen to be around,” she said in an interview in June. It was during the 2009 T20 World Cup in England that her friendship with cricketers ripened. She was at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, where the cricketers were staying. Although she claimed to have met them only at the lobby and the casino, her name got entangled with Sri Lankan player Tillakaratne Dilshan. She slapped two defamation cases worth Rs 10 crore against The Sunday Times and then said on television, “I am a diva.”
Beauty opens doors. Kumar says, “Geetika was stunningly beautiful.” Nupur, with her heavily madeup face and cat’s eye lenses, gets adoring messages from men on the Internet: “You are a beauty, lovely and stunning hot girl,” says one message on her website. Such attention can be heady. Ask Simran Sood, 36, an aspiring actor who was arrested in April along with her partner for alleged involvement in a series of murders. A product of frequent cosmetic surgeries, she “is obsessed with her looks”, say the police.
And beauty matters most around the new hubs of quick money. “The moment we are back from a match, we
find hotel lobbies full of young women,” says Abhijit Sarkar, spokesperson of Sahara Group, sponsors of Team India. “I used to wonder where they come from.” They move around the cricket stars, hoping to be noticed, and are willing to do anything for a slice of fortune, fame and flash. The biggest thrill is the ability to say, “He’s a very close friend”.
A perfect example is little- known Mumbai model and starlet Leena Kapoor, 21, who this month accused ICC elite panel umpire Asad Rauf of sexual exploitation. He had gone back on his promise to marry her, refused to buy her a flat and a car, she said. While Rauf denied it all, she lodged a police com-
plaint and broadcast her claims of intimacy on national TV: “We had sex 15 times”. If she was counting, she probably wasn’t in love. Rauf accused her of using him to get a place on reality TV show Bigg Boss. “Glamour, entertainment and sporting industries are attractive playgrounds all over the world, though new to India,” says fashion designer Suneet Varma. “It’s easy to get one’s 15 minutes of fame here, but to turn that into 15 years, one needs more than physical charm. One needs some integrity, intelligence and patience.”
Sometimes even patience doesn’t pay. Like Delhi girl Simran who moved to Mumbai in search of fame when she was 15. She tried to get a break in films but when success eluded her, she descended into a life of crime. She met her nemesis, dreaded criminal Vijay Palande, in 1998. For 14 years, she enticed men and he abused or murdered them serially— for a swanky flat, a BMW car or credit cards. Both managed to evade the law through cosmetic surgeries and fake identities, hobnobbing with top actors, politicians and cricketers. In April, the two were finally put behind bars in Mumbai. In a very similar case in March, smalltime actor Tara Choudary’s arrest in Hyderabad opened a can of worms: A high- profile prostitution network, sexual abuse and political blackmail. Tara, 35, alleged her desire to be a star was exploited by senior Guntur MP Rayapati Sambasiva Rao.
Why do these women take to such short cuts? “To escape the monotony of middle- class life would be an obvious answer,” says Dr Shobini L. Rao, former head of psychology at NIMHANS in Bangalore. Geetika grew up at the congested, middle- class Ashok Vihar colony in Delhi. Her father Dinesh Sharma worked at a printing press in Karol Bagh and her mother was an accountant at the Ministry of Finance— just as regular as her education at the local Kulachi Hansraj Model School. But with beauty as her passport, she may have hoped her association with someone as influential as Kanda would be her ticket to a better life. And indeed it was: She rose up the ladder and travelled the world. “What’s at work is the inability to resist the exploitation of their desire for success,” says Rao.
Each of these women wanted to strike out as a professional; each ignored moral censure and resisted social pressure to conform. And almost all paid the price. The murder of actor Laila Khan, who went missing in February 2011, was confirmed in July. Mystery continues to stalk the unnatural death of Fiza aka Anuradha Bali, the estranged second wife of former Haryana deputy chief minister Chander Mohan. Her decomposed body was found at her house on August 6.
It’s a story of the average girl failing to reinvent herself. “Women’s sexuality in India works through socially- accepted relations,” says CPI( M) leader Brinda Karat. “Our so- called modernisation has never challenged the social norms of women’s autonomy. That is the problem of India’s growth story.” But there can be a happy ending. “When a society negotiates its way between tradition and modernity, people don’t always stick to assigned roles. Some will be spectacularly successful while others may fail,” says Dr Alok Sarin, psychiatrist at Sitaram Bhartia Institute in Delhi.
They all want to make it. Unfortunately for Geetika, she didn’t.