Missing techie victim of black magic?

PUNE: Meghana Subhedar, the 29-year-old techie who resurfaced in Pune on Friday, told the media that she did not remember anything that happened in the six months after she went missing in CST station in Mumbai on April 11.

When asked how she managed to contact her father, the disturbed-looking Meghana said, “Somebody hit me on the head with a cement block after which I regained my memory. I then called up my dad.”

According to her father, ENT specialist Mohan Subhedar, who reached Pune on Saturday, Meghana had parcelled over 1,000 books on witchcraft, necrology and related topics to their home in Chattisgarh when she was preparing to leave Bangalore after quitting her job.

“We have no idea how she developed the habit of reading such books,” her father said.

The family suspects that Meghana may have started believing in tantra-mantra. “All the books have warning messages,” he added. “I spoke to her for a while but she cannot recall what happened to her at Mumbai or in Goa.”

Meghana was pronounced dead by the Goa and the Mumbai police after a body that washed ashore the Calangute beach in Goa was presumed to be hers. Meghana had resigned from her Bangalore-based job at Genesis in the first week of April and had decided to go back home to her parents.

She is currently staying with her maternal uncle at Paud Road. Her father said that the family was happy to have their daughter back. “When she called up yesterday, I told her to go to her maternal uncle’s house in Kothrud but she told me that she had only Rs3 with her. I told her to hire an autorickshaw and that her uncle would take care of the fare,” he said.

On Saturday, assistant commissioner of police with the Government Railway Police, Mumbai, Bapu Thombre who visited Kothrud and spoke to Meghana, said that the woman seemed depressed due to various factors. “We came here on Friday and questioned her but she seems disturbed,” he said.

He added that had Meghana left Bangalore on April 10 and taken a flight to Mumbai, from where she was supposed to go to her native place at Korba in Chhattisgarh. “The family said that she was to board the Geetanjali Express to Korba from Mumbai,” he said. During her journey from Bangalore to Mumbai, she was in constant touch with her family. “At around 6am on April 11, she lost touch with them,” Thombre added.

During the course of inquiry, the police came to know that on the night intervening April 12 and 13, Meghana withdrew money from an ATM in Andheri. “She was last seen at Calangute beach in Goa. She withdrew money from an ATM and the CCTV had recorded her images on April 15. She looked upset in those images,” Thombre said.
The Goa police also found out that her cellphone was in use at Calangute beach. The man using it told police that a boy had found it on the beach. Later, the police recovered a decomposed female body from the beach with features resembling Meghana’s. The body had a tattoo on the arm. “The family members suspected something amiss and demanded DNA tests, which turned out to be negative,” he added.

Her two bank accounts had deposits of Rs68,000 and Rs11,000 respectively and after April 15, there were no further withdrawals, Thombre said.

A Bachelor of Engineering in Computers from a Nagpur college, Meghana completed her schooling at Korba. She has a younger sister. Her father and mother are medical practitioners and own a hospital at Korba.

About three years ago, she got married. “Meghana was in Mumbai and fell in love with a youth, also a software engineer, after chatting with him. The marriage lasted six months and she moved to Bangalore after the separation. Prior to her Mumbai job, she had worked in Pune-based software companies Lion Bridge and Cybage Software and lived in Kondhwa. At Mumbai, she worked with BSES, now Reliance and Tata Consultancy Services.