On the morning of 27 April 1959, the handsome, 6ft-tall naval commander Kawas

Nanavati and his beautiful English wife, Sylvia, ran some chores together. Kawas
had just returned, nine days ago, from a two-month voyage at sea. Together they
took their dog to the veterinary hospital in Bombay’s Parel, bought tickets to the
matinee show, and returned home to their spacious flat in Colaba for a lunch of
gravy-cutlets and rice-prawn curry. But all was not well. Sylvia was distant, cold
and aloof. As she would tremulously tell the court later: “My husband came and
touched me. I asked him not to do it as I did not like him."
Then she was forced to make a brutal confession: She had been having an affair
with their flamboyant and rich Sindhi businessman friend, Prem Ahuja. Later that
afternoon, Kawas went to Ahuja’s home, armed with a revolver. He barged into
Ahuja’s bedroom, and shut the door behind him. Ahuja had just emerged from a
bath and was combing his hair in front of his dressing table mirror; he had nothing
but a towel on. Three gunshots were heard going off inside the room. When Kawas
came out, Ahuja was sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood.
As modern India’s first upper-class crime of passion, the Nanavati case held the
nation in thrall. I was a schoolgirl in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1959, and, from
across the subcontinent’s breadth, I followed the epic tale of love, betrayal and
vengeance as told by its unabashedly biased sutradhar, the weekly tabloid Blitz. It
didn’t send only runaway teenage hormones into overdrive. Adults too could talk
of little other than the “heroic" Parsi naval commander and the “villainous" Ahuja,
who had lured Sylvia, the unwitting victim, to his bed.
She, really, was the key player. Her adultery triggered a murder case which ended
the jury system in India; set off a fractious turf war between the judiciary and the
executive after the Bombay governor suspended the high court’s sentence;
necessitated the sitting of a full constitution bench of the Supreme Court to clarify
the boundaries of the governor’s powers of pardon; and even forced prime
minister Jawaharlal Nehru into that maelstrom.

Her extramarital engagement went deeper than the adventurism of lunchtime sex.
The court was told of her visits to his flat. There was an overnight trip to Agra,
albeit with Ahuja’s sister Mamie as “cover". Ahuja’s employees spoke of her
coming to his office. A member of Mumbai’s United Services Club spoke of her
being closeted in its phone booth for long, low conversations.
Her plaintive missives to Ahuja, submitted as evidence, show that she was deeply
in love and hoped for a future with this unapologetic playboy (in open court, she
had to read out the letter of 24 May 1958, “Last night when you spoke about your
need of marrying, about the various girls you may marry, something inside me
snapped and I knew I could not bear the thought of your loving and being close to
someone else"). She clearly wanted more than what she was getting in her own
marriage.