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across him. There was something about her eyes that bothered him.
    â€˜What’s your name?’
    â€˜Maria Susairaj, I am also a friend of Neeraj’s.’
    â€˜I know, he disappeared from your house. You, lady,’ Rakesh Maria leaned forward, stared hard and, pointing a finger straight at Maria Susairaj said, ‘are my number one suspect.’

    Amarnath Grover left Rakesh Maria’s office and began the traumatic process of looking for Neeraj. He visited railway tracks, hospitals, mortuaries, and one evening even went to the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, foraging through parts of the forest spread over a hundred kilometres. Each trip began with dread and ended in momentary exultation: none of the bodies he was shown were his son’s. The relief lasted but a few minutes.
    He asked the local cable channel to run a ticker scroll offering a one lakh rupee reward to anyone with information on Neeraj, and personally went to each of the shanties on the road leading to Dheeraj Solitaire, stacked up against each other like uneven teeth, with Neeraj’s picture to ask if anyone recalled having seen him. An urchin was lowered into the septic tanks of Maria’s building to check for a body.
    Amarnath Grover and Satnam Arora had a hundred posters printed with Neeraj’s picture, with the word ‘MISSING’ in bold lettering. On a May afternoon of long shadows, Neeraj’s father went to Dheeraj Solitaire and painstakingly put them up—on walls, on pillars, on thegates of neighbouring buildings, under car wipers, on shop shutters, on telephone poles, as if turning the area into a shrine for his missing son. Wherever the eye travelled there was Neeraj looking down, smiling gently.
    That afternoon he saw Maria emerge from the building accompanied by her brother and sister; it was only the second time he had seen her. She looked around and then at him, standing there with the poster in one hand and a bottle of glue in the other, and got into an autorickshaw and rode past without saying anything.
    There were also things about Ginni that he was just beginning to discover. As if by going missing, Ginni was offering an invitation to get to know him better. The girls. The smoking. The possibility of drugs. All the things that parents spend a lifetime living in denial of.
    Maria had told the Malad police that Neeraj used ecstasy and crystal meth recreationally. At a friend’s behest a police officer was sent to the Osho commune at Pune to find out if Neeraj had checked himself in.
    Ginni’s credit card details were scanned—they revealed nothing. They examined his bank account. The last withdrawal was for Rs 1,000 on May 5, two days before Ginni’s disappearance, and the last deposit had been the Rs 10,000 that he himself had sent his son. Amarnath Grover called up his wife in Kanpur, unable to keep the despair out of his voice. ‘Ginni bas gayab ho gaya hai’ (Our son has just disappeared). He took to waking up and heading straight to the Unit IX office on Hill Road in Bandra day after day, his anxious presence reminding the police that his son was still missing.
    But all this while, without Amarnath Grover’s knowledge, Inspector Satish Raorane, the investigating officer in the case, and his team were working on their suspect. On May 17, her twenty-eighth birthday, Maria was called to the police station in Bandra and questioned for over ten hours.
    Two days later, Amarnath Grover walked into the Unit IX office as usual. As he sat sipping chai and waiting for the officers in the corridor outside, he saw Satish Raorane emerge from one of the rooms. Before he could go up to him with his daily plea, Raorane walked up to him, smiling. ‘Mr Grover, please relax. I request you, don’t come here for the next few days. I will personally inform you of the developments.’
    Buoyed, he immediately called Neelam. ‘The inspector told me to relax. I think they are getting