[Transcript of statement given by Kabir Menon to Sub-Inspector Priya D'Souza, Anjuna Police Station, November 12, 6:15 PM]
I should tell you upfront that I'm not going to be clever about this. Rohit will have been clever — he can't help it, it's how he's built. Kavya will be clinical — she's a psychologist, she analyses everything, including her own grief. I'm just going to tell you what happened, and if it sounds raw and disorganised, it's because that's how the truth sounds when you haven't had time to polish it.
I loved Meera. I need you to know that first, before anything else, because everything that follows hangs on it. I loved her in the way that terrifies you — completely, irrationally, with the full understanding that it was going to end badly and the complete inability to stop.
We met seven months ago, at an art show in Panjim. I was exhibiting — photographs of the fishing communities in Chapora. Documentary work, the kind that galleries like because it combines aesthetic value with social conscience, which is the art world's version of having your cake and eating it. Meera came alone. She spent forty minutes with my photographs — longer than anyone — and then she found me at the bar and said: "Your work is honest. That's rare."
We talked for three hours. About photography, about journalism, about the specific loneliness of creative people who've married pragmatists. About Goa, and how it seduces you with beauty and then traps you with isolation. About the gap between the life you're living and the life you thought you'd live.
She told me about Rohit. Not cruelly — she wasn't a cruel person. She described him the way you'd describe a building you'd lived in for years and were watching deteriorate: with sadness, not anger. "He's not a bad man," she said. "He's an absent man. And absence, over time, is its own kind of cruelty."
I didn't pursue her. I want that on the record. The affair didn't start because I seduced a married woman. It started because we kept accidentally being in the same place — Goa is small — and each time, the conversation picked up exactly where it had left off, as if the intervening days were just a pause in a sentence that neither of us wanted to finish.
The first time she came to my cottage in Vagator, it was to see my darkroom. That's not a euphemism — I actually have a darkroom, I develop film, I'm that kind of analogue pretentious. She sat on the stool while I developed a roll, and the red light made her look like she was underwater, and she said, "This is the most peaceful place I've been in months," and I said, "You can come anytime," and she said, "Can I?" and there was nothing physical about the exchange but everything intimate, and we both knew what was starting.
The affair began a month later. I won't give you details — they're private, and Meera deserved privacy even in death. But I'll tell you this: it was not casual. It was not recreational. It was the most serious, most honest, most terrifying relationship of my life, and it was made more terrifying by the fact that it could never be fully real. She was married. I was the other man. Every moment we spent together had an expiry date printed on it, and the knowledge of that made each moment feel like the last scene of a film — beautiful and unbearable.
