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daily media briefing, dubbed ‘The Durbar’ by cheeky reporters, for his imperious style of communication, when his aide brought in a chit from a visitor.
    In place of the name of the visitor it read: ‘Father of Missing Boy.’
    Intrigued, Maria summoned the visitor. ‘There was something moving and dignified about Mr Grover, and as I heard the details of how his son had gone missing, an instinct told me this was not a simple case,’ he was to later say in an interview.
    Rakesh Maria, who saw the rise and decimation of the Mumbai underworld at close hand, is one of the most high-profile officers in the Mumbai police. He is a tall, burly man of middle age with a brisk, energetic manner and large eyes that miss little. His instinct, renowned in the criminal world, is extraordinary. One such hunch had led him to unravel the Mumbai blasts case in 1993, and is well documented in both Hussain S. Zaidi’s book Black Friday and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City .
    On March 12, 1993 a series of blasts had ripped through Mumbai. It was the biggest case in Mumbai’s crime history and the police commissioner had asked Rakesh Maria to investigate it. He was then the deputy commissioner of police, Traffic. Two days after the commissioner called him in, his men had defused a bomb found in a scooter abandoned at Dadar railway station.
    Maria held a late night meeting with twenty of the best police investigators in town and set them to work. Within five hours he had his first suspect. A Maruti van had been found abandoned with detonators near the Siemens office at Worli. The policemen who found the car had not paid heed to it, thinking the driver had abandoned the vehicle just before the checkpoint. Maria asked for the van to be checked, and to see its papers. The registration papers showed the van belonged to Mushtaq ‘Tiger’ Memon. When a team of investigators reached Memon’s house in Mahim, they found the house was empty, and the cops found nothing except the key to a Bajaj scooter. As Rakesh Maria stared at that key, something clicked. He remembered the scooter bomb that had been defused at Dadar station two days ago. One of his men was asked to go and try the key on that scooter. It fit—nailing the little-known mastermind of the Mumbai blasts.
    He had no answers to Neeraj Grover’s mysterious disappearance yet, just a gut feeling. Rakesh Maria decided then and there that the Crime Branch would get involved in the investigation. ‘I could see that Mr Grover was in distress and I did not want him to run around further, so instead of directing him to Unit XI which handles allCrime Branch cases between Goregaon and Gorai further north, I sent an aide to call back the Unit IX team which had just left after briefing me about the murder at Lokhandwala.’

    Mumbai police owes the legend of the force being second only to Scotland Yard, to an Englishman, Stephen Meredyth Edwardes, Mumbai’s police commissioner in 1909. Edwardes, having studied the workings of Scotland Yard at first hand, set up the Criminal Investigation Department, which later became the Mumbai Crime Branch. The Crime Branch, divided into twelve units along the length of the city for administrative reasons, has the authority to do a parallel probe on any case registered in any Mumbai police station.
    Freed from the often time-consuming administrative work of a police station, Crime Branch cops, usually to be found in plain clothes, work exclusively as detectives and have distinguished themselves by solving some of the most talked about cases in recent history, including the Gulshan Kumar murder and the J.J. Hospital shootout case. The notorious serial killer Charles Sobhraj was also arrested in a Crime Branch operation.
    On May 13, four days after he ordered the probe, a group of Neeraj’s friends came to see Rakesh Maria to complain about the lag in investigation. Among them was a young woman who sat right