[Transcript of statement given by Rohit Kaul to Sub-Inspector Priya D'Souza, Anjuna Police Station, November 12, 3:47 PM]
Let me start by saying that I am making this statement voluntarily. My lawyer has advised me not to speak without representation. I am choosing to speak anyway, because the truth is more important than strategy, and because Meera deserved better than a careful, lawyered silence.
I killed my wife. Not with my hands — I want to be clear about that. I didn't push her. I didn't strike her. But I killed her, because the events that led to her death were events I set in motion, and the guilt of that is a weight I will carry for the rest of my life.
Let me go back. To understand the night, you need to understand the marriage.
Meera and I met in 2016, at a media conference in Mumbai. She was a journalist — print, not television. She wrote longform investigative pieces for a national magazine, the kind of work that wins awards and doesn't pay rent. I was three years into my startup — a fintech company, payments infrastructure, the kind of thing that sounds boring until you see the revenue. We were, on paper, entirely incompatible. She thought tech people were soulless. I thought journalists were self-righteous. We argued at the conference bar for two hours and then kissed in the parking lot.
We married in 2018. Two years of the particular intoxication that happens when two strong personalities collide — the arguments were as electric as the making up. We were good together. Not easy, but good. The kind of good that requires effort and repays it.
The problems started when the company grew. I'll spare you the business details, but the summary is: success happened faster than I could manage. Investors, board meetings, international expansion, the constant pressure of a machine that I'd built and that was now building me. I was in Mumbai five days a week, travelling internationally two weeks a month. Meera was alone.
She didn't complain. That was the thing about Meera — she never complained. She adapted. She quit the magazine, started freelancing, built a life around my absences. But adaptation isn't happiness. It's architecture. She was building a structure around an absence, and I was the absence.
The move to Goa was my idea. I sold it as a lifestyle choice — work remotely, slow down, reconnect. In truth, it was a bribe. I was offering a postcard life in exchange for the real life I wasn't providing. Meera knew this. She was too smart not to. But she agreed, because she wanted to believe in the postcard, and maybe because she wanted to give me one more chance to be the man she'd kissed in the parking lot.
Villa Saudade was perfect. Portuguese colonial, ocean views, the kind of house that Instagram influencers would kill for. We renovated it, moved in, played the roles of a happy couple rediscovering each other in paradise. For six months, it almost worked.
Then I found the messages.
Not through snooping — through carelessness. Meera left her laptop open while she went to the market. I wasn't looking for anything; I was looking for a browser to check my email. The messages were open. Chat window. Kabir Menon.
The messages were — I'll be direct. They were intimate. Not just sexually, though there was that. Emotionally intimate. The kind of writing you do when you're sharing the parts of yourself that your partner doesn't see. She told him things she'd never told me. About her childhood, about her father, about the specific loneliness of being married to someone who's always arriving or leaving but never staying.
I didn't confront her. This is the part that matters, Sub-Inspector. I didn't confront her, and I should have. A healthy person, an honest person, reads those messages and says: we need to talk. I read them and calculated. That's the tech founder in me — every crisis is a problem to be solved, every betrayal is a data point to be managed. I didn't feel the pain of what I'd read. I processed it.
