Mumbai BMW hit-and-run | ‘Kaveri could have been anyone’s mother’ Premium

Mumbai BMW hit-and-run: In another hit-and-run, the language of money and power screams louder than the voices of the vulnerable.

Almost everyone in Mumbai’s Worli Koliwada’s Tare Galli locality, knows Kaveri Nakhwa as a generous, kind, hardworking woman, who always wore a bright smile. Nakhwa, a Koli (fisherwoman), and her husband, Pradeep Liladhar Nakhwa, 50, had gone to buy fish from the fresh catch at 4.30 a.m. on July 7 from Crawford market’s wholesale market. It was a 25-minute ride from her home.

Kaveri and her husband, who had been married for 25 years and had two adult children, had taken their scooter out to buy a basketful of fish. They were headed back to Worli Koliwada to her regular selling spot. It was about 5:15 a.m.

Kaveri never returned 

Mihir Shah, 24, had allegedly been drinking with his friends at a bar in Juhu. The legal drinking age in Maharashtra is 25. He allegedly dropped his friends home in a luxury car, then took another one out, and went for a drive with his driver, Rajrishi Bidawat, in the passenger seat. 

The police say that Mihir has admitted that he hit the couple, saw their bodies fly up in the air, dragged the woman from anywhere from 100 metres and 1.5 kilometres. Then he swapped seats with his driver, took an auto-rickshaw from Kala Nagar area of Bandra East in Mumbai and went to a friend’s home in Goregaon, say the police. The friend informed his sister who then arrived there and took him to her home in Borivali.

Pradeep says what happened that night is embedded in his head. “I was riding the scooter at 30-40 kilometres per hour. Suddenly, near Ceejay House, our scooter’s taillight was hit at such a speed that within seconds, we were thrown up in the air. We fell on the bonnet of a car, but Kaveri slipped off and fell in front of the car,” remembers Pradeep, who has not been able to sleep since that day. “The visuals, her voice, and the crushing sound of the car is stuck with me forever; I cannot close my eyes and sleep for a minute.”

He says he slipped off on the side, but despite him begging, the man drove over her body, dragging her along. “I tried to run after the car, but he drove away,” he says. He boarded a kaali-peeli (taxi) to reach her, but could not find her body.