Once a mill,now a den

Before entering the compound themselves,the police first shut down all the stalls and restaurants along the narrow lane leading to the mill. With the police working on various leads,different sets of officers entered the mill from the lane and from a small entrance close to the Mahalaxmi railway station.

The entrance from the lane is opposite the Turf Estate building,a commercial property from where a narrow path in the knee-high grass leads to the mill. The path opens up into a cavernous structure that locals say was gutted in a huge fire years ago.

Police officers trying to reach the crime scene had to navigate in near darkness,an uneven surface littered with stones and infested with snakes and other poisonous reptiles.

Additional Commissioner of Police (Central Region) Pravin Salunke and Deputy Commissioner of Police (Zone 3) Vinayak Deshmukh led another team,retracing the footsteps of the victims taken only hours before. The officers has taken the victim’s colleague along with them to reconstruct the crime.

Locals say that gangs of thieves and drug addicts who frequent the compound walk on an unused railway track stretching roughly 500 metres from Mahalaxmi railway station and can enter the mill from an opening in the wall where it has crumbled. The officers had to walk through this opening in single file,with the senior officers leading the party.

Past midnight,the victim led the police onto the zig-zag path,which is even more treacherous than the entrance from the lane. The officers had to tread very carefully,making way through low-hanging branches and vines on the ground.

The terrain became increasingly uneven and hilly the deeper the officers walked in. Five minutes into the trek,the police stopped at a flat concreted expanse of ground,with two open manholes on either end. An hour into the trail,the police concluded the night’s search,apparently satisfied with the victim’s account. While the senior officers did not enter the room where the crime is alleged to have taken place,another team entering from the lane extensively photographed the area,which is accessed via a steep incline.

By daylight,the police had cordoned off a 100-metre perimeter around the crime scene while forensic experts examined every inch.

An INSIDE VIEW

Within its crumbling 30-feet-high boundary walls,the worn-out stone structure that was once a defunct synthetic yarn mill,is in a total state of disrepair. It is surrounded by thick overgrown grass and foliage,with a couple of hawks flying low and crows gliding in and out.

“No normal person bothers so much as to even look inside,let alone stepping inside the mill. It is only the riff-raff that go inside the compound,” said a security guard at the neighbouring railway printing press.

Locals live in constant fear of the people who frequent the compound. A man in his late twenties who also lives at Dhobi Ghat says he was recently assaulted by one of them while he was having dinner with family. “My cellphone was stolen by one of them and I tried speaking to him. We got into an argument. The same night,he came to the hotel where I was eating dinner and stabbed me in the stomach,” he said. Fortunately,he escaped with minor injuries.

Remnants of rolled joints,packets of cigarettes,cardboard boxes of playing cards and even papers keeping score lie in the debris of fallen-off plaster across the burnt floor of the three-storeyed building.

To the right of the charred basement,a crumbling staircase leads up to the upper levels. A distant corner on the first level appears cleared recently. The floor here is free of debris.

While the rest of the structure is a morbid grey,the roof and two pillars in a corner that indicates recent human presence bears black and white paint in a psychedelic pattern. There are newspapers dated August 13 and August 16 strewn in a corner of the vast floor that makes up the first level of the mill.

The passageway on the other side of the staircase has little or no sunlight,and the walls are covered in barely legible handwriting in Hindi and English. One of the rooms leading off the passageway bears signs that the people frequenting there have made some efforts to make it homely.

A far wall has a drawing of Lord Shiva next to a fish,a parrot and the distorted face of a woman. Another sign of recent habitation are two cloth bags with the words’ Sabka Malik Ek Hain,’ printed across them.

Further on the second level,an open terrace facing the skyline of high-rises of Lower Parel beyond the suburban railway line,there are paper plates and spoons,and sachets of Chinese chilly sauce.

The second level is frequented by locals who play cricket every Sunday. Locals also say films are regularly shot there,owing to the view it provides of Parel. “A lot of us play cricket on the roof every Sunday,even as the addicts occupy the lower levels. One week,a few policemen in plain clothes officers came there and rounded all of us up. They took pictures of each of us individually. I guess they have kept our pictures as part of their record too,” said a person living in nearby Mahalaxmi Dhobi Ghat.