Where have they gone?

Mystery Cities|An increasing number of disappearances are being reported from cities. Why are smart, happy men and women going missing?

Viju B and Rucha Biju Chitrodia report

Twenty-seven-year-old Denny Vellore John lifted his hand and made a sign with his fingers. His friends guessed that he wanted to smoke, as they watched him get up from his seat and make his way out of Neelkamal restaurant in Belapur, Navi Mumbai. They haven’t seen him since he walked out of the door into the cold night of December 31, 2004.

“It was New Year’s eve and we had decided to have a small party at the bar,” recalls 26-year-old Anil, one of the seven friends who were partying with him. After drinks, they decided to head to the restaurant for the ill-fated dinner. When Denny did not return from his smoke, a long search began.

Denny, a computer graduate, was a regular upper-middle-class guy. According to his friends and family, he was quiet, obedient and non-obtrusive. He was new to Mumbai and had reached the city only in September 2004 from Dubai, where he had hunted for a job for six months. In vain.

A day after he went missing, his parents Leelamma, 54, and John, 59, rushed from Kottayam and searched Mumbai. They filed a missing complaint at the local police station and put up his photographs in newspapers. Then began the most traumatic phase for any parent. They did the rounds of all possible police stations, hospitals and morgues for three months, till March 31, 2005. The only information they found about him was by omission — his bank account and credit cards were untouched. What happened to Denny that night is between him and his fate.

He is a part of statistics now. Of sudden mysterious disappearances. Another white-collared individual who was supposed to be back in 10 minutes has vanished. Two or three such cases are reported every month. Far greater number of slumdwellers go missing but, according to Amitabh Gupta, deputy commissioner of police, 90% of the missing are found. Of the 11,876 who disappeared in Mumbai in 2005, 9,440 were traced or returned home.

Cases like Denny are disturbing because they do not fit the regular pattern of disappearances. There is no bank or credit card transaction, a relieving ransom call, or a body to be identified.

“In many of the cases, we don’t have any clue,” a senior police officer says, who insists that only very few disappearances are crime-related, like kidnappings. Most are due to personal and family frustrations. But you can never tell. All cases look alike.

Piyush Sharma, 27, has been missing for more than two months now. He was a software programmer with Pune’s Cybage Software, and used to travel from Pune every weekend to Mumbai, where his family lived. On January 28 this year, like any other weekend, he took the by-now infamous Mumbai-Pune expressway in his Maruti Esteem. Recently the body of one Infosys project manager, Vikram Poddar, was found in a ditch at Pen along the same route. Piyush too did not reach Mumbai.

``Usually he would start early in the morning on Saturday and reach in time for breakfast,” recounts B Kumar, his father-in-law. But that day, he left at around five in the evening. That he started out in the evening is curious in itself.

In many such cases, there are no good answers to what could have happened. If it was a robbery case, what exactly was taken from the seeming victims and if they have been killed, why their remains cannot be found.

Twenty-seven-year-old Jayan Pillai had got married in January this year. A tiff with his boss made him quit as assistant manager of a top bank in Mumbai. After which, he went to live with his parents in Pune. One day, he left home wearing trackpants and a T-shirt to see his colony’s water tank being emptied for cleaning. He apparently wanted to see the gush of the water. At around three in the afternoon, he called up his wife from a telephone booth saying, “I don’t have money. I was asked to get off the bus by the conductor. I don’t know where I am”. They have not heard from him again. His father Krishnakutty does not understand how that could have happened to his healthy, footballer son.

It is possible that family and friends do not reveal the complete picture of the missing person. And that greatly adds to the mystery. There have been cases where a person has vanished just to have a good time. In 2004, when the 20-something grandson of governor of Maharashtra Mohammed Fazal went missing, more than 2,000 policemen were deployed to trace him. He was found in south Mumbai in less than eight hours after the filing of the complaint. He was with his friends and in good spirits. Perhaps if such a huge force could be deployed in every case, something may invariably turn up. But not everybody is a governor. TNN
(Inputs by Mateen Hafeez and Baiju Kalesh)

Denny went out for a smoke and never returned

The Times of India, March 26, 2006