From: udcrusd@meaddata.com (Sylvia D'Cruz)
Subject: Love, Marriage, Caste, Family, Suicide
Organization: Mead Data Central, Dayton OH
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1992 17:38:30 GMT
Distribution: usa

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                         Copyright 1992 Southam Inc.
                             The Gazette (Montreal)

                      June 7, 1992, Sunday, FINAL EDITION

Star-crossed lovers; A few weeks ago Dharam Hinduja, the 22- year-old son of 
one of Britain's wealthiest Asian families, set fire to himself as his bride 
watched. Why did he end his life in such a terrible way?; He was a Hindu and 
heir to a billion-d

BY: JULIE FLINT; LONDON SUNDAY OBSERVER

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 BODY:
   The Rossignol Nightingale Hotel is a typical little back-street hotel in the
centre of Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius. Its name is the only romantic
thing about it.

   But for the son of Britain's wealthiest Asian industrialist it was a
bolt-hole, a stepping stone to a jump that was to have taken him half a world
away from the problems of color, class and creed that separated him, even in
marriage, from the woman he loved.

   On Saturday, May 16, his cover was blown. Dharam Hinduja saw his photograph
on the front page of the local newspaper and learned that a dozen relatives were
hot on his trail, lodged only a few miles away in another more expensive hotel.

   He must have feared discovery, despite having faked a kidnapping in  India
and having laid a false trail in Mauritius that baffled the island's police
force. With nowhere left to run, and head and heart in fatal conflict, he bought
a bottle of paint-thinner, poured it over himself and set it alight, watched by
his wife of four months.

   Neither of them shouted for help as the flames covered 75 per cent of his
body. He died in a London hospital three days later at the end of a love story
more tragic than that of Shakespeare's star- crossed lovers, who managed to die
together when everything else had failed.

   The Hindujas cremated their 22-year-old son on May 21, even more silent in
their private tragedy than in the business dealings that have catapulted them
into the ranks of the world's super-rich. Their acknowledged interests include
import-export, primarily with Iran, oil trading, fertilizers, financial services
and films; their unacknowledged interests, arms dealing.

   The four ultra-secretive brothers who run the Hinduja empire - Srichand, the
eldest, Prakash, Gopichand and Ashok - are based like the Rothschilds of old in
different financial centres around the globe. In Britain, all have apartments in
the same block in St. James's in central London. Their glittering parties
combine the front benches of Parliament with half of Who's Who.

   A family spokesman in Bombay said of Dharam: "You couldn't imagine a better
human being than this boy. He had all the qualities - consideration, modesty, a
mind and a heart. I couldn't dream of having a better son than him."

   Dharam Hinduja was the youngest of the three children of Srichand Hinduja. He
attended Westminster School, perfecting the English his London-based parents
never quite mastered, and graduated from Wharton Business School in the United
States last year, remembered there as "a very good  student,  well-liked and
well-mannered."

   Had he lived, he would doubtless have completed his law studies at
Washington's Georgetown  University.

   If his education, however, was wholly Western, his upbringing was that of a
highly conservative, close-knit Hindu family. Vegetarian, teetotal and
non-smoking, his parents wanted nothing but an arranged marriage for their only
son. "It has worked for me and my wife," his father said recently. "We have been
happy. . . ."

   But Dharam had already met his Juliet, Ninotchka Sargon, the youngest of 11
children of anglo- Indian  parents who would have been regarded as half-castes
or chichis by families such as the Hindujas.

   Ninotchka's father was Jewish; his parents had emigrated from Russia to
 India.  He had been a fighter-pilot in World War II, a wing-commander in the
 Indian  air force, and later a pilot with Air-  India.

   When he died, his wife, of German Catholic origin, followed her eldest son to
Perth, Australia. Back in Bombay, another daughter, Chantella, began dating
one of the Hinduja boys in the mid-'80s.

   Thus Ninotchka met Dharam. On Jan. 18, the young couple married secretly at
the Chelsea register's office, a ceremony witnessed not by family members but by
two London friends.

   "Doesn't that say it all?" a family friend said after Dharam's death.

   "If you're going to bring up  Indian  children in a foreign environment you
cannot expect they are going to mix only with  Indian  people. The Hinduja boys
have fantastic cars and top-of-the- line clothes, but they are kept on too tight
a leash. They are expected to be more  Indian than the Indians. "

   It is not clear whether the family knew of the marriage on May 13, the day
that Dharam's burned-out car was found on a road near Bombay airport with
charred shreds of his clothes inside. The family feared a kidnapping, but others
believed Dharam was faking his own death and building a new identity, perhaps,
for a new wife.

   This thesis is strengthened by the couple's behavior in Mauritius, where they
arrived on May 14 - he on a flight from Bombay, she from Paris. Although their
immigration cards listed their destination as the Pirogue Hotel, one of
Mauritius's best, they made their way to the humble Rossignol.

   They identified themselves as  students  from England, pleading that they
were unable to show their passports because they were awaiting visas at the
Australian high commission, and then registered under false names. Dharam had
lost a mustache and gained glasses.

   The difference in their behavior made a vivid impression on hotel staff. "The
woman obviously loved him a lot. She was always smiling and explained that they
were tourists on their way to Australia to see her parents. But he never smiled.
He was always nervous and anxious. He got no phone calls and only came down in
the evening for dinner."

   They refused to let the chambermaid into their room, but asked for clean
towels and sheets every morning.

   On Thursday evening, Dharam Hinduja wanted to telephone England. Since
international lines were bad in the hotel, he was advised to go to the central
exchange. But it was already late and he said he would wait until morning. Was
it to have been a last attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable?

   If it was, it was doomed to failure. For unbeknownst to him, his family had
learned that he was alive - Air- India  had found his name on the flight out of
Bombay - and were on their way to Mauritius.

   They arrived the following morning - father, uncles, aunts and a private
detective - and established their headquarters in the exclusive Royal Palm
Hotel, designed in marble and stone to allow the  Indian  Ocean breezes to
filter through. The Mauritius police, who had been searching for the couple for
the past 36 hours, received a "stop search" order.

   Their names had been found on the evening flight to Singapore; Dharam's
father would be waiting there when he arrived at the airport.

   At this point, the best-laid plans went astray. An afternoon newspaper, Le
Mauritien, ran a front-page story about the family's presence, hinting at a
bitter feud. The prime minister, Sir Aneerood Jugnauth, was furious, fearing
Dharam Hinduja would not now come out of hiding.

   Srichand Hinduja, believing his son might be suicidal, asked the prime
minister to get the story retracted, to muzzle the press, anything. He was
politely turned down, told that "the press is free in this country," but advised
to "plead as a distraught and unfortunate father, on humanitarian grounds, for
the press to use discretion in its reporting to save his son's life."

   At 5 p.m. that day, Dharam went out to telephone London. The hotel
receptionist noted that he took an empty bottle with him and returned with a
full one - paint thinner. At 7 p.m., a taxi arrived at the hotel to take the
couple to the airport but drove away without them. At 10 p.m., Srichand Hinduja
watched the Air Singapore flight take off without his son. His worst fears were
coming true.

   Early on Saturday morning, Dharam Hinduja asked the hotel reception for a
newspaper. On seeing his photograph, "he immediately folded the paper up and
went upstairs," a receptionist later reported.

   "After a moment, the chambermaid came downstairs and told me smoke was coming
out of the room. I ran up and saw the bedroom door wide open and the young man
and his wife in the corridor. He was burned from head to foot. The flesh was
falling off him. He ran and tried to throw himself over the balcony. His wife
tried to restrain him, crying: "Don't do that. I love you. I love you. We will
take you to the hospital.' "

   A quarter of an hour later, Dharam Hinduja walked into Port Louis's Jeetwo
Hospital, assisted by his wife and the hotel manager, and gave his name as
Dharam Sargon.

   "He was in agonizing pain," says a doctor who attended him. "He was screaming
and she was screaming as well. She was asking us to give him an anesthetic to
put him to sleep."

   But the doctors saw the gravity of his burns and gave him only strong
painkillers and a drip before rushing him to the burn unit at Victoria Hospital,
24 kilometres away.

   An hour after Dharam left Jeewto Hospital, his father arrived there
"shaking," according to Dr. Abu Kasinalli, who later accompanied the family to
London and whose devotion to them runs deep.

   "They are very fine people," he says. "Obviously they were upset about what
had happened, but they wanted only to ensure the welfare of their son. The
father said he had already accepted what he had done; he was going to tell him
it was all right. They showed a lot of humanity."

   At the burn unit, where father and son were reunited, doctors decided against
heavy sedation. "Communication with the patient would have been lost," a doctor
there explains.

   "His sedation was quite light. At the beginning he was reluctant because he
was in such dreadful pain. But he was very brave, very co-operative. He was a
very obedient, very nice boy. He was fighting for his life. He apologized for
his fault; he revered his father. But he loved the girl."

   In the few hours that Dharam was in the burn unit, the full extent of the
pressures on him became clear.

   "In Mauritius he was facing a critical period where he needed support and the
girl was all he had," says a doctor who spent many hours at his bedside, seeking
to reconcile everyone there.

   "She was very beautiful, but she was immature. The family were accepting her,
but she had European thinking and they wanted her to learn Asian habits. They
were prepared to teach her, in their home, but she told him: 'I don't want to
live with your family.'

   "She wanted to get everything. She has lost everything now."

   On Saturday night, Srichand Hinduja flew to London on a regular Air Mauritius
flight, his son with him on a well-screened stretcher at the back of the
aircraft.

   At Queen Mary's Hospital in Roehampton, the patient was finally heavily
sedated. The toxins produced by his injuries made surgery inevitable. But it was
the end of the road. Kidney failure set in, then multi-system failure and
finally respiratory failure.

   On Tuesday, May 19, Dharam Hinduja died. An inquest into his death began last
Wednesday.

   On Friday, May 22, a woman who identified herself as Ninotchka Sargon's
mother collected her daughter's belongings from the two- bedroomed basement flat
in Earl's Court she had shared with a girlfriend for the last year.

   Doctors say Ninothchka refused food for the first three days after Dharam set
fire to himself.

   When the Hindujas flew to Bombay with their son's coffin, Ninotchka was
conspicuous by her absence. She may now share in the inheritance although a
close friend of the Hindujas says, "where there's great wealth there's also
great tax planning" but she did not share in the cremation ceremony in Bombay.

   Although the Hinduja family have gone to extraordinary lengths to cover over
their traces, they seem to have treated their daughter- in-law with kindness.

   "They are very nice people personally," says Gida Piramal, a Bombay
journalist who first encountered the family in 1976, when she was stranded at
Tehran airport, six months pregnant, with no hotel room and no luggage.

   "They were the only  Indians  I knew of in Tehran. I contacted them at 3 a.m.
and they phoned around to find me somewhere to sleep. They badgered the airline
to give me compensation for my lost luggage. It was one  Indian  helping another
 Indian  in trouble."

   The Hindujas' business character, however, is less clear. In New York, they
have offices in Trump Tower and a multimillion-dollar apartment on Fifth Ave.
Their lawyer is Theodore Sorenson, an old Kennedy liberal; their advisers
include former CIA director Richard Helms and William Clark, a former head of
the National Security Council.

   In  India,  says a longtime Hinduja watcher, "they have good relations with
all parties. I wouldn't be surprised if they fund even the Communist Party."

   The Hinduja Foundation pours hundreds of millions of dollars into hospitals,
schools, sports and cultural activities.

   But critics claim their declared interests could never produce such fabulous
wealth and so fast.

   The  Indian  press has published documents showing they have received huge
kickbacks from Sweden's Bofors. There have been arms deals with Iran, where
their wealth originated, and others. There have been threats of lawsuits, but no
action.

   Their mourning over, says a longtime family friend, the Hindujas must study
the lesson of their tragedy - a lesson that confronts a growing number of Asian
families in foreign environments.

   "They still have about 10 kids of marriageable age. How are they going to
treat these kids? Are they going to push them all into a corner? Or are they
going to talk to them so they are not driven into such awful actions?