Inside the twisted mind of a hired rapist

There are some things ‘Pulsar’ Suni will not talk about. “I will never tell you, or anyone else, where the phone is,” he said matter-of-factly. “Okay, but can you tell me if it still exists somewhere, or did you destroy it?” I asked. He smiled, drank some water, and swatted a mosquito. “I’ve already told you too much. This is a promise I made to someone — that I will not speak about the phone. And I always keep my word.”The phone in question is no ordinary device. It is a crucial but missing piece of evidence in a case where Gayathri* (name changed), a leading Malayalam actor, was sexually assaulted by Pulsar Suni — once a driver to several Malayalam film elites. On December 8, 2025, a Principal District and Sessions Court convicted Suni, along with five other men, for kidnapping Gayathri in February 2017.

During the abduction, Suni sexually assaulted her in the backseat of her own car while the group drove through the bustling streets of Kochi.This is a crime that stunned and polarised Kerala. At the nucleus of this case was one man — Malayalam superstar Dileep, who now stands acquitted.The prosecution’s argument was that Dileep had commissioned Suni and the others to carry out the rape as an act of revenge against Gayathri for revealing his extramarital affair to his then wife, Manju Warrier. The court, however, ultimately did not accept the prosecution’s theory of conspiracy, and Dileep was acquitted. Suni was found guilty of charges including that of abduction and gangrape.

The unsettling questions of who hired Suni and what motivated this crime remain unanswered by law. At 11.03 am, as the judge read out the charges against Suni, he revealed no expression. As the media followed Dileep out of court, Suni sat down, signalled to a friend and told him, “Find me some alcohol. Pour it in a regular bottle and give it to me before the police take me away.” The police waited for the media frenzy to die out before taking Suni to Viyyur jail.

Suni has already spent seven years, nine months, and four days in jail for the case, before he was granted bail by the Supreme Court in September 2024..He was released under strict bail conditions that forbade him from interacting with the media. A month later, Suni consented to be interviewed by me. Towards the end of our first brief phone call, he calmly added, “If by any chance word gets out that I spoke to you, it won’t just be bad for me but for you as well. Don’t misunderstand me, it is a threat.” Over the next thirteen months, Suni spoke to me over multiple phone calls and four in-person meetings.

This was the first — and so far, only — time he consented on record to provide a detailed account of his role in the assault to a journalist. The only other time Suni spoke with the media was in April 2025 when Reporter TV, a Malayalam TV channel conducted a sting operation on him.When I asked him why he had spoken to a TV journalist, Suni said he was aware of the conversation being recorded all along, but didn't think it would be immediately telecast. It was hard to tell if Suni was being honest, or if he was simply embarrassed about being caught on camera.During our conversations, he admitted to his crime in no uncertain terms. He had abducted Gayathri.

He had used the phone — the one he refused to speak about — to record eight clips of himself sexually assaulting her. And, he claimed, he had done this on the instructions of the man who hired him: Dileep.But this is where Suni’s contradictions lie. In court, he has denied any role in the conspiracy and refused to reveal details of the plot or the money trail, ultimately weakening the case. While speaking to us, Suni consented to be repeatedly interviewed for a text story. But on camera, he refused to say the same things. When we first met in October 2024, he did not want to get into details of the crime.

He was yet to give his statement in court and insisted that he planned on being honest with the judge. His yoga teacher in jail, he claimed, had changed his life. He said his practice taught him to “start telling the truth.” His lawyer, he added, was not pleased.Days later, he appeared before the judge, swore under oath, and lied. He told the court that he wasn’t even in the car with Gayathri when she was assaulted but had been aware of a conspiracy to attack her.

He admitted to being in touch with Dileep, and said he often worked for the actor’s wife and friends. “In court, you can only speak like that,” he said casually, when I asked why he had lied so blatantly.Over the course of one year, in Suni I met a man fuelled by a life of crime — restless to talk about it, and eager to be liked. “Abducting someone is not a big deal. It’s like picking up a chicken from the street.

There’s no real risk,” he once said, grinning. Conversations with him offered me not just a glimpse into the mind of an unrepentant criminal, but also exposed how his chilling confidence was enabled by the Malayalam film industry. That is precisely what makes Suni’s world view indispensable to understanding this case. Our interviews revealed more than just the contours of the crime he was hired to commit; they also opened a window into the world that made such a man possible..An orchestrated nightmare: A sexual assault that unmasked Malayalam cinema.Chapter 1: ‘Helping nature’The first time I spoke to Suni over the phone, his curiosity overtook his skepticism. “I heard you met ‘that man,’” Suni said, clearly referring to Dileep.

“What did he say about me?” Suni was talking about my meeting with Dileep in February 2024. I had interviewed Dileep for part one of this story: ‘An orchestrated nightmare: A sexual assault that unmasked Malayalam cinema.’I told him that my conversation with the actor had been generic, and that he had emphasised on how he respects women a lot. This made Suni laugh. “Actually, what I don’t understand is why people say that I don’t respect women. I also respect women. Right?” A week later, I flew to Kochi to meet Suni. I always met him with my colleague Maria, never alone. Most times, Suni was dressed exactly the same — blue jeans, a white shirt, a silver chain, and white Crocs.

Only once, he was wearing a blue coloured sweater. It was blistering hot in Kochi and I asked him if this was practical. “I’m not like you. I always sit in air conditioning,” he clarified. His hair was always buzzed short on both sides, his eyes shifty. His voice never rose above a quiet, even tone, even as he claimed, more than once, to be in the middle of an anxiety attack. “Can you help me calm down?” he often asked.Our very first meeting was at a nearly empty restaurant in Kochi.Since the age of 19, he has repeatedly found himself in and out of jail.

Narcotics, theft, robbery, money laundering, kidnapping, and now finally, rape, he said. For more than a decade, he’s either been behind bars, on the run, or trying to live life between jail time. “This is who I am now. I don’t know how to be anything but a criminal,” he told me. “I just have to make sure I don’t commit another crime before the verdict. I don’t want my bail to get cancelled.”Suni had a way of being evasive — he became distracted and vague when he did not want to divulge something.During our initial conversations, I asked him the same question each time. “So, Suni, what really happened that night? Did you do it?”“Yes, I did,” he said once.

“I will tell you about it…but first I must tell the court.”I asked him why he committed the crime. “You see, I have a problem. I have too much of a helping nature. If someone asks me to do something, I can’t say no,” he said. .This case unfolded over eight long years. We have reported it from the beginning. Now that the verdict is here, we look at the key figures who shaped the case, and bring you in-depth profiles. Click here to read..I was confused. It’s not like he was asked to buy groceries.

“You were asked to rape…”He cut me off, saying he would elaborate after giving his statement in court. Chapter 2: The crimeBy the end of November 2024, Suni had finished giving his statement in court. I travelled to Kochi again to meet him.We met at an empty news office and settled down across a table from one another. We had spent weeks going around in circles. I was impatient, and got straight to the point. He leaned back and smirked, raising his eyebrows. “Let’s not make this an interrogation, shall we?”.He suggested we stand up, said he wanted a change of room, and asked to turn off the lights. He preferred to speak in the dark, he announced. We went from room to room.

Then he suggested we chat in his car and asked if Maria or me knew how to drive. We refused.This is Suni’s way — constantly distracted and disruptive.After 15 minutes of negotiating with his relentless, mindless demands, we settled down on the verandah, with the lights off. “I didn’t think all of this would come out in the media, if I’m honest,” he said. “It’s you people. You are the problem.” "Why did you think that?" I asked.

"Wouldn't someone file a case if something this big happened?" He cut me short. "What do you mean something so big … nothing really happened … I also assumed that when there’s a video like this, you can’t file a case, right?” said Suni, referring to the footage recorded on the phone that he refuses to talk about. He truly believed that the existence of the rape visuals would be enough to shame Gayathri into silence. Suni started over. “Yes, I kidnapped her,” he said. He also claimed that none of the other men who were with him that night — Martin, Vijeesh, Saleem, Manikandan, and Pradeep — knew who their target was, or that the objective was to assault Gayathri.

“They thought this would be one of our regular kidnappings where we’d ask for money,” he said, casually. This was not Suni’s first abduction. Within the industry, although he worked as a driver for nearly a decade, he was more in demand to commit crime — a fact, he claimed, was well-known to everyone in the film circles.In 2012, he abducted senior actor Menaka because her husband, Suresh Kumar, owed money to someone in the film industry. A prominent film producer, Suresh Kumar is also the vice president of the Kerala Film Producers Association (KFPA). “We just forced her to sit down,” Suni said. “I only do this to people who have money and owe people.

If I know that they have it and aren’t paying, I immediately kidnap them.” He was acquitted in that case four years later after Menaka herself deposed that Suni did not abduct her. When Suni abducted Gayathri, he had covered his face with a piece of cloth.But Gayathri recognised him immediately. A month before the crime, he had driven her from the Goa airport to a shoot for the film Honey Bee 2: Celebrations.Didn’t she want to know who commissioned the crime, I asked. She did.“But we can’t reveal ‘our man,’ right?” Suni told me, matter-of-factly.

“So I changed the gender for it to not go towards Dileepettan [elder brother, Dileep].” So to Gayathri, Suni said, a “madam” had commissioned the crime.This was the first time Suni had taken Dileep’s name in our interviews.On many occasions, while recounting that night, he would often interject himself to say, “It didn’t go exactly as planned.” What does that mean, I asked, finally. He deflected, stood up, sat down, attended phone calls, gulped water, and wiped his face over and over again.

“You know, people usually drink water to buy time to think?” he asked, like he was trying to  teach me to be a better interviewer. He had an alcohol problem, he then said, as if that was supposed to answer my previous question. “Whenever I do something, I do it with a cool mind. Even if I’m going to do ‘terror’,” he said, and quickly added, “But this kind of thing is not a terror… This was just a small thing, pick up a person, do it.” He watched me carefully and quickly figured that his alcohol justification did not work. So he started over. “Remember I told you about my lover?” Back then, Suni was in a relationship with a married woman named SreeLakshmi.

It was a tumultuous affair because her husband had quickly discovered them.In fact, by tracing his call records, the police found that on February 17, 2017, an hour before the crime, he had spoken to his girlfriend six times. Suni told me that, during their relationship, he had promised her he “won't touch any other girl.” A flicker of something that resembled guilt washed over his face. He paused as if to search for the right words to describe his night of crime, then looked up and flatly said, “You know how when you’re trying not to eat sugar, all you can think of is sweet food?

And then if it’s someone’s birthday, then you think, ‘Okay, this I can eat, there’s nothing wrong with having a little.’”He said that, on that night, he had gotten progressively angry with Gayathri, and threatened her into complying with him. Even though she had said no, Suni said, she had little choice but to agree eventually. In fact, he went a step further and said, “See, I made the videos only after I told her. With her full consent. It all happened in moments.”With a steady gaze, Suni described the rape as if he were helping us visualise a movie scene. (TNM will not go into details of his description.)At the time, he truly believed that he would get away with it.

“In my mind, I thought, the matter is over. We'd told her that the person [who commissioned this] will call the next day.” According to Gayathri’s account to the police, when she initially pleaded with Suni to let her go, he lost his patience. He told her that if she continued to make a fuss, they would take her to an apartment where more men were waiting to gangrape her. Fear froze her. She told the police that the only option she saw for herself was to endure what was about to transpire and get out of the car as quickly as possible. Suni claimed that he had not been forceful with Gayathri. He gently grabbed his own forearm to illustrate his grip on her. But this was not true.

According to the images submitted by the police to the court, Gayathri had bruises on her wrist and feet. He even went on to shift some of the blame on to her. “She was sitting in the back seat. If she wanted, she could have run out, right?”This, in fact, was a question that lawyers repeatedly posed to Gayathri in court as well. Maria and I sat still. What Suni had done was not only confess, but distort. He admitted to raping her, but somewhere in his telling, he twisted the narrative until he could present it as consent.

Worse, he edged towards the suggestion that she had somehow invited it. It was tough to tell whether Suni’s recollection was built on staggering audacity or if this was the product of a twisted mind that had come to believe its own delusions. He, however, seemed not to notice our shock. He continued to speak of the assault and said that he had probably done more than what had been planned that night. “It was supposed to be the other kind of video,” he said.

“Everyone in the tempo traveller with her…group sex.” What he meant was chillingly clear: that unless the assault involved multiple men, the humiliation wouldn’t be effective enough.In his mind, the fact that they did not gangrape was a favor he did – one that he imagined she would be grateful for. Suni had an astounding need to explain himself. He read every pause or twitch of mine as a signal to talk more, clarify further, and elaborate. Back during the period when the crime was committed, he was a “very proud” 28-year-old man, Suni recalled.

“If we had met back then and you told me you needed something or that someone had cheated you, then I would want to do something about it,” he said. Soon after he described the rape, Suni dove into his childhood, as if that was the natural direction the conversation would take.He spoke of his family’s poverty, their low expectations of him, his strained relationship with his father, who, he said, was an alcoholic and hit him. He explained how he earned the nickname “Pulsar Suni” — after using ill-gotten money from a job to buy himself a Pulsar brand bike.Returning to his crime, I asked if he feared the prospect of going to jail — a question I had asked him on different occasions.

Sometimes he said “not really,” and sometimes he said he was. A week before the verdict, he began to feel increasingly anxious.“I thought I’d have more time outside. I am not ready. I didn’t think the verdict would be announced so quickly,” he said to me on the phone. This time, he knew he was going to jail for a longer time.Back in 2017, according to his calculations, he thought he would go to jail for abduction and be bailed out in about a hundred days.  I looked at him, puzzled, wondering how he had arrived at that number. “I didn’t realise that what I did to her counted as rape.

Now I know, but as a 28-year-old hot-blooded man, how can you expect me to know all that?” Suni asked. Chapter 3: Murder and memorySuni never thought that his incarceration would last seven years. “I used to believe that you can get bail for anything, even murder…” he said. Have you committed a murder? I asked him. “No! Why murder when you can talk it out?” he quickly retorted. But he has considered it. On February 23, 2017, six days after the crime, while Kerala was on high alert and police were on a massive manhunt for Suni, he whizzed into the district court complex in Kochi on a Pulsar bike. Vijesh, one of the co-accused in this case, was with him.

They were dressed like lawyers, clad in white shirts and black jackets. Their intention had been to sneak into the court and surrender before the magistrate — a common tactic used by criminals to evade police interrogation.To Suni’s dismay, the judge had just adjourned the courtroom for lunch. The police barged into the room and dramatically arrested the duo. Between the night of the crime and his surrender, Suni had spent six days travelling across Kerala. “I joined a group of college students on a bike trip.

At one point, we missed the police by an arm’s distance,” he said and laughed. This was when he contemplated murder. Before he had surrendered, Suni said he wanted to kill his girlfriend’s husband. He couldn’t stand the idea of them together while he was in prison. “The plan was to stab once, pour petrol, and burn him. Then, we’d take the bike and go straight to the court and surrender,” he said. The execution required precision and Suni said he missed his chance by a moment. Since his release, he said he had seen his girlfriend twice, from afar. He wanted clarity from her about their relationship.

“I want to ask her husband for one hour with her.”“But you won’t kill him?” I cut him off. No, said Suni, but he leaned in and added, “Initially, I was angry. My problem is, I really struggle when someone says no.” So, what happens if her husband refuses to let Suni meet her? A slow smile crept up on his face. “Then…well, I know how to kidnap. I know how to lock someone in a corner for ten minutes,” he said. On the night of Gayathri’s assault, after committing the crime, by 10.30 pm, Suni and his co-conspirators dropped her off at the house of Lal, a popular Malayalam actor and director. Then, Suni said, the gang went to have “dinner and drinks” about 10 kilometres away.

Around two hours into their meal, Suni got a call from senior film producer Anto Joseph. “Even before I picked up his call, I knew things had slipped out of my hand.”According to Suni, Anto told him that Gayathri had filed a case and identified him to the police.Two, he said, he had to hand over the rape visuals. Suni said that hours after the crime, he had gone near Dileep’s house but didn’t go inside because he “felt odd.”The group then dispersed. Suni — along with Vijeesh and Manikandan — stuck together.

They drove 50 kilometres south of Kochi to Alappuzha. When asked what they did there, Suni said they “made copies and came back.” He meant creating backup copies of Gayathri’s assault video. I asked him if he had ever shown the video clips of the rape to anyone else. “You think I’m an idiot? Isn’t it bad to show?” He leaned forward and added, “But so many people asked me to show it.”After a few hours in Alappuzha, Suni came back to Kochi in the early hours of the next day. He went to an advocate’s house, to whom Suni handed over a bag with some of his ID cards.

Inside, tucked into a corner was one memory card on which he had copied the rape videos.When arrested, a person is usually expected to hand over their belongings to officers at the station. To avoid losing his ID cards to the police after his arrest, Suni said, he told the lawyer to keep his bag safely. Suni knew him from before and intended to collect the bag once out on bail. He did not tell the lawyer about the hidden memory card, assuming that it would not be found. But the lawyer got nervous. Suni’s face and crime was all over the news. He immediately handed over the bag to the judicial magistrate court in Kochi.

That’s where the memory card with the visuals of the rape were found. Five days later, on February 22, Suni who had continued to evade the police, visited a clothing store in Kochi named Laksyah. This was run by Dileep’s wife, Kavya Madhavan, who is also an actor in the Malayalam film industry. Here, he handed over a copy of the memory card to an employee who later admitted this in court. At this point in our conversation, Suni began to hesitate. “I don’t know if I can say all this. Let the case get over. I’ll tell you…” “But then you’ll be in jail,” I told him.

It made him laugh. While some of what Suni said has been established through CCTV footage from Laksyah and witness testimonies, Suni himself had never told the police or the court about any of this. All he said was that he had worked for Kavya Madhavan previously.Kavya told the police that she did not know who Suni was nor had any knowledge of the conspiracy. During the trial, she turned into a hostile witness and refused to respond to any questions. So far, the investigation and media reports had accounted for a possibility that there were two copies of the rape videos — one in the custody of the court, and the other that Suni had handed over at the clothing store. But during our conversation, Suni claimed he had made not two, but three copies.

“Well, of course, if one does something like this, wouldn’t I keep one copy for myself?”Suni reasoned that he made a copy for himself “because even if the phone [on which the videos had originally been recorded] is lost, I should not lose the visuals.”The last time he spoke to Dileep, he claimed, was two to three weeks before the rape. “When you’re going to do something like this, we should not be talking. It will be a problem for him, right?” Suni added. Till date, Suni has never told the police that he received money for the crime. During our conversation, he said that three-fourths of it was handed to him “much before the crime,” he said. “Payment and all, I got,” he told me.

A sudden worry came over him. He leaned in, lowered his voice, and said, “See, all this I really can’t say anywhere.” “Three crore rupees?” I asked, quoting a number that had been reported in the media.He sat back. Whatever fear he seemed to have felt a minute ago suddenly vanished. “No, 1.5 crore,” he clarified, adding that he is yet to receive part of the payment. The prosecution in this case has not been able to show any clear financial transaction between Dileep and Suni. During one of our conversations, when I again broached the subject of money, he said, “I’ve already said too much, now I can’t tell you through which means I got the payment.

Definitely not through a bank, that would become evidence, right?”Chapter 4: The lieIn November 2024, Suni finally took the stand in court and testified. Over a span of 15 days, he was asked 6,185 questions. He explained himself with four standard answers — “I don’t know; maybe; that could be right; yes, that’s right.”He had said in court that he was neither in the car, nor did he assault Gayathri, though the visuals presented in court would suggest otherwise.

In fact, the most clinching and undeniable evidence against Suni is that his semen was found on her clothes. Much of what he said in court, he told me, were lies.Suni framed his dishonesty to the court as a compulsion of law — as if it wasn’t in his interest to lie, but rather that his lawyer and the system demanded it from him.“I had no choice. I cannot appeal in the High Court if I say I did it, right?” he said, as if to help me understand how the truth barely had any room in a trial. What he did tell the court was that he had met, and been at the same location as Dileep on multiple occasions.

He testified to working for Dileep’s family and friends, such as his wife Kavya and senior actor and CPI(M) MLA Mukesh. In effect, Suni contradicted much of what Dileep told the court about their association. The actor testified to never having seen, met, or known Suni.Despite everything Suni denied in court, he is well aware that he will not escape being convicted. However, in his own moral universe, he has entirely absolved himself because he is convinced in his lack of motive.To him, this was his job and someone else’s crime. In fact, earlier in 2023, his mother told me that during one of her visits to jail, Suni defined his own position in the crime as that of a victim.

“Amma, nothing is going to happen in my case. I’m in now. This is a case about an elephant playing a squirrel,’” he had said, referring to himself and Dileep. On occasion, he even equated his situation to that of Gayathri’s. “This has been exhausting. She must also be tired of this long trial now,” he said. Chapter 5: Missing motiveMost rape trials are centered around a lone perpetrator. But then there are cases like this, so embedded in the public conscience, that the violence becomes just the entry point.

It brings to the surface not one man’s crime, but a series of pathological social dysfunctions — not just a single rupture, but a map of systemic decay. Typically, whenever a rape is reported, a protocol unfolds — the survivor is whisked away for medical examination. Her body, the site of crime, simultaneously functions as both witness and testimony. A forensic team arrives. The scene is sealed, photographed, and documented. Statements are taken, evidence is gathered, and the media descends. Then the process widens: everyone in and around the case is pulled into the enquiry.

All of it to determine one thing — what ties a person to the crime and why.For the investigating team, a few odd moments from the night stood out: If this was an act of impulse, why was Suni so particular about the manner in which the visuals had to be recorded? Why did he say ‘this was a quotation’? And if he was acting alone, why did he not immediately blackmail her?TNM spoke to three police sources within the investigating team. The police said that even though the six men involved were questioned for hours, not one of them confessed to having any personal vendetta against Gayathri.The next inevitable question the police pursued was — then who had reason to bear a grudge or harbour anger towards her?When the police asked Gayathri, her family and several people within the industry, everyone could only think of one name — Dileep. Gayathri’s relatives informed the police that she and Dileep used to be friends until 2012, when their relationship soured after she revealed his affair with Kavya Madhavan to his then-wife, Manju Warrier.

In 2014, Gayathri lodged a complaint with the Malayalam artistes’ association claiming that Dileep was trying to sabotage her career. Almost immediately after the crime, media reports suggested that a “prominent actor from Aluva,” a town near Kochi, may have been involved in Gayathri's assault.Less than a week after the crime, on the same day that Pulsar Suni had visited Kavya Madhavan’s store, Dileep posted on Facebook, “I feel the need to clarify — as an actor who is a permanent resident of Aluva, let me state that this actor is not me.”In April 2017, Dileep gave an interview to Manorama Online,addressing his alleged involvement. His anger was palpable.

He claimed to be the victim of a targeted attack. “It’s just that nobody touched my body, but I’ve been entirely tortured, right? I’ve even thought of suicide,” he said. He described how he had played god in Gayathri’s career, and then questioned the credibility of her complaint.But despite his well-known rage towards Gayathri and his overzealous attempts to absolve himself, there was no evidence linking Dileep to the crime.So on April 18, 2017, when the police filed their first chargesheet, the motive remained a glaring mystery. What the investigating team did not realise is that their own colleagues were covering up and destroying crucial evidence. Chapter 6: Impulses and calculationsWhen the police arrest a suspect in a high-profile case, their first priority is to ensure the person does not die by suicide.

As soon as Suni was taken into custody, a constable named Aneesh was assigned to watch him.According to the prosecution, Suni quickly won Aneesh’s confidence and told him that Dileep had orchestrated the crime, and even asked him for help to contact the actor.Suni had allegedly used Aneesh’s device to record a voice message for Dileep. Separately, the probe team found that Aneesh had called Kavya’s store from a phone booth.Aneesh did not disclose any of this. It was Suni himself who told the police.

One investigator recalled a particularly frustrating day when Suni said, “Sir, you’re working so hard, but I had already told one of your men everything during the early days.”Baiju Paulose, the lead investigating officer of this case, immediately went looking for Aneesh. A source within the team recalled that as soon as Aneesh saw Baiju, he simply hung his head and climbed into the police vehicle. “He knew his time had come,” the officer said. But the damage was done. Aneesh had smashed the memory card and thrown it into a stream. “All forensic evidence had been lost,” said the source.

The recording, which allegedly could have linked Suni to Dileep, was gone.Aneesh later admitted in court that he destroyed the card out of fear and had even contemplated suicide. His testimony, however, became easy for the defense to challenge, particularly because he was a serving officer at the time.  Weeks into his arrest, with no word from anyone outside and once Suni learnt that his girlfriend had been questioned by the police, he “lost it,” he said. “I was on the verge of suicide. I was worried about her. I couldn’t even manage to kill her husband.”Suni had begun to unravel.

He became increasingly desperate. A month after the crime, he smuggled a phone into jail and tried reaching Dileep through his manager and a friend. Both turned him away. He then wrote a letter to the actor that was eventually leaked to the media. “I have not betrayed you…I have always kept you safe, until this moment when you read this letter,” he had written. “I wrote the letter on the spur of the moment,” Suni said.Soon after receiving the letter, Dileep called state police chief Loknath Behera four times over a span of ten days, claiming Suni was blackmailing him. The information emerged months later, only because Dileep disclosed it to the media.

Loknath refused to comment when TNM reached out.With the probe team unaware of what transpired with Aneesh and Loknath, the first chargesheet filed in April 2017 did not name Dileep as an accused.Suni was well aware that the police focused so strongly on Dileep only after Suni had tried to call and write to him from jail. If he showed any remorse at all, it was for this. Which is why, he explained, “What I’ve told you, I’ll never admit in court. I want the label of being an unreliable man.” “Wait, you want that?” I asked. “Yes, for sure. Some people think Dileepettan (brother)’s name came into the case because of me.

But tomorrow, I want people to think that I am such an idiot that there is no way this verdict could have been decided based on my statements.” It was a convoluted calculation. I could not tell if this was a pre-planned course of action or if this is his flailing attempt to narrativise his own impulsive actions.. Chapter 7: Surviving Suni In sixth grade, Anjana was assigned one of the school’s most important duties — reading the daily news at morning assembly. Evenings, however, she dreaded. Her father drank, her mother struggled, and her older brother slipped away.

Each night, she went to bed looking forward to the assembly — the few moments when she was the center of her world. One morning, she picked up the underlined newspaper and froze. An article described a few boys arrested for possessing a gun. Among them was her brother — Suni.“He must have been about 18 or 19 years old then,” she told me over a call. She ran to her teacher and asked if they could skip that headline. Her teacher refused and assigned the assembly task to another student. “I will never forget that painful day,” she said.Talking about Suni gave Anjana a headache.

Once when we spoke of survivors of sexual violence, she got very quiet and added, “In a way, we women who love and are related to these [accused] men are also survivors, no? We have to survive them, their crime, the reality that we grew up with this person,” she said.Suni, on the other hand, never fully understood why I wanted to speak to his sister. “Obviously, any sister of someone like me will be sad, what else?”Suni quit school after ninth grade. He got into bad company and left home.“It was he who used to bathe me, take care of me, feed me. He was very protective of me. But one day, he was just gone,” said Anjana. They grew distant. Suni did not even attend her wedding.

But when Anjana had a baby girl, he came back. He told her he had found a job in the movie industry. On February 17, 2017, hours before assaulting Gayathri, Suni had called Anjana. “He asked me to recharge his phone for 300 rupees. I teased him and told him that he was a lost case,” she said. “But that day, he told me, ‘Tonight all our problems will be over forever.’” Anjana didn’t take him seriously. Late into the night, she and her husband rushed to the police station after Gayathri filed her case. “Initially, I told the police that my brother didn’t do it. But if I’m honest, I couldn’t be fully sure,” she said.When Suni surrendered, Anjana returned to her life.

“I had decided not to visit him in jail,” she said. “I couldn’t look at him. I needed to gather myself.”The same year, her marriage collapsed. Bills, her daughter’s school fees, her ailing mother’s care, and Suni’s legal costs fell on her. She moved to Chennai for work. “I live a strange life now. My boss knows who I am but has told me not to tell anyone else at work. I don’t make many new friends because I can’t tell them who I am,” she said.“What do you mean by ‘who I am’?” I asked her. “I mean, who my brother is. That’s what I am now, right? His sister,” she said. Anjana’s world oscillates between these two undeniable facts — that she is a woman and that Pulsar Suni is her brother.

And, for no fault of hers, she’s forced to find a way to exist between the two realities. A year later, she finally visited Suni in jail. Suni cried through most of it, she said.“I only asked him once,” she said. “After that, we never spoke about it. Because I’m scared he’ll tell me the truth. And to be honest, I don’t want to know.” When Suni was granted bail in October 2024, I called Anjana again. She seemed quiet that day. “I know what he did is wrong. There’s not a single day that goes by when I don’t think of it. But I don’t know how to explain to you…he’s my brother, you know,” she said. She is terrified of the day that her six-year-old daughter will learn the truth.

“Right now, Suni is her world. It will entirely crush her,” she said. A few weeks after he came home, I asked Anjana what it felt like. They hardly talked about the case, she said. Then, she paused and added with disarming candidness, “You know, Nidhi, my father was a useless man. But only after his death did I realise how important it is in our society to have a man in the house, even if it is just a useless male body.”Throughout her life, Anjana had watched her mother bear the burden of running the house. She paid for her education, dowry, and childbirth. It was because of the women that food was served and bills were paid.

“Even loving each other was possible only because we women at home still chose to,” she said.Chapter 8: A criminal’s creedSuni spoke of the last seven years he spent in jail as one might speak of a retreat. He wrote, he meditated, he did yoga, watched movies and introduced other prisoners to Karate Kid. In his jail diary, he noted dates for court appearances and doctors’ appointments; names of medicines; paragraphs from different books he'd read and names of the books he wanted to read including, Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt and An Autobiography of a Yogi by Hamsa Yoganandha.  .Occasionally, he jotted down his own thoughts, which were mostly observations of the world of prison and himself. In one entry, he noted, “The angel in black coat in the courtroom is not showing me the kind of mercy that even a butcher would show to the buffalo that’s about to be slaughtered.” He signed off with, “Always a sinner in memory.” As an afterthought, he seems to have struck off the word “sinner” and replaced it with “Suni.” On the very last page of his journal was a drawing of a woman, looking sideways — a sketch that bore an unmistakable and eerie resemblance to Gayathri. Suni described himself to me as a man with severe anger issues.

He didn't like being teased or spoken to casually, and had even gotten violent with officers, he told me. It took three steady years in prison and consistent yoga practice, to calm down, he said. Whenever we spoke, I always struggled to ascertain whether he was telling the truth or simply vying for the protagonist’s part.Although he was initially angry with Dileep, he had now had a change of heart, he told me.I sat back. “You’re going to jail for a long, long time. What kind of loyalty is this?”His answer was jumbled. “I’m a middle class guy…” he said.

“People like you won’t understand it.”The industry, he explained, worked on the basis of trust and reputation, particularly when it came to the kind of crimes he used to be contracted for. But Suni was unwilling to say more. Even if he spoke about himself to the media, he did not want to be known as a gangster who gives away the names of the “top actors” who trust him. Because "it could ruin my future opportunities,” he said. He often got impatient when we spoke for long. “See, everyone who has hired me, including Mukesh, knows my history. They know I create trouble and what cases I have,” Suni said.

“So, while it’s easy for you to say I’m the bad guy, it’s not like they didn’t know who they were associating with… In fact, Mukesh knew what I’d tried to do with Menaka,” he added, referring to the earlier abduction case he was involved in.Suni spoke to me like an adult explaining the world to a child — the world here being the universe of Malayalam cinema. To him, this was the game of the rich and famous. In this world, something like an act of kidnapping was more of an inconvenience than an offence — a way to strong-arm one wealthy player so another could cash in.He had a peculiar knack for confessing and absolving himself in the same breath.

In his eyes, the powerful lived in a galaxy of their own, with rules of their own. And he, as an outsider, had managed to break into their orbit. And in this world, he built his own sphere of morality and revelled in it.During one of our conversations, Suni asked me if I had read the Hema Committee report. In 2017, in response to the outrage post Gayathri’s assault, the Kerala government had constituted the Hema Committee to document first hand accounts of gendered injustices and abuse in the Malayalam film industry. The report was made public in August 2024. Since its release, nearly 40 FIRs had been filed against powerful men in the industry for allegations of harassment.

The report and what followed revealed what women in the industry already knew: Gayathri’s assault reflected the darkest side of the Malayalam film industry’s misogyny, but it also reflected a pattern of behaviour that had long been normalised.“90% of what’s in there is true,” he said. The only difference is that, to him, the findings were the norms of the industry, not violations of gender or human rights.The new girls in the industry are usually the ones who are most exploited, he said, and added that he’d been asked many times by “top people” to get videos of different producers in compromising positions. This is to have leverage to blackmail them. Suni had a convoluted view of consent.

“See, there’s no need to force any actress. If they don't agree, they're out of the film,” he said. Most of the new actresses, he said, end up having to comply. However, he said, he had two principles that he swore by. One, he claimed that he had never slept with girls younger than 18. But, he added, he has helped arrange minors for others in the industry.Two, Suni said that, till date, he has never sent any money home. When I visited Suni’s home a year ago, his mother held my hand and tearfully showed me their house, which was falling apart. It did not reflect any luxury.Suni, however, always arrived in a big car, fresh clothes, expensive shoes, and jewellery.

After his release on bail, several media organisations had raised questions about how he was able to afford this lifestyle. His logic was clear. He believed that the money he made was “not good money.” When Suni had to buy things for his mother, he said he earned extra money by doing menial labour or driving a bus for a few days. “The money I make, I use it for things like prostitution,” he said, before adding that he ordinarily spent around 1 lakh or 50,000 rupees to solicit sex work. He also lent money to friends who couldn't afford sex workers. “I was willing to spend as much money as needed for women.”During one of our meetings, Suni said he was scared — not of jail, but of himself.

“I don’t want to end up doing another crime before this verdict. I’m too impulsive,” he said. But six months after his bail release, Suni ended up in prison for a day. He had gone to a restaurant and turned violent when the waiter refused to take his order.How does he plan to curb this impulse post the verdict?He found my naivety amusing. “You think I can’t do all of this sitting inside jail?” In what he calls his “criminal career,” he believes that he has “at least two to three more crimes” left to do. The threat of violence always seemed to loom around Suni. Once, my colleague Maria and I said half-jokingly, that we hoped to leave Kerala safely.

He leaned in and said, “See, no matter what, until this case is over, I won't do anything.”“What do you mean ‘until then’?” I asked. “I mean, after that I can't promise anything,” he replied.Chapter 9: Guilty, not sorryAll that the courts can do is declare guilt, not induce it. The law is limited in its reach into the human conscience.One day, Suni said that he wanted to meet Gayathri and sent word through a friend. “You wanted to say sorry?” I asked. No. “I didn’t hurt her, right? She also didn’t think it would become such a big deal. Can I blame her for this? She didn’t want to put me in trouble.

All this was created by you people, the media, and now she’s forced to go along with it,” he said. Suni often said that he “wanted to talk to her about this,” because he wondered if she had been “forced” to file the case against him.The verdict against Suni cannot be called justice. At best, it can be termed an ‘inevitability.’ Suni is aware of this inevitability. In fact, he understands that a judicial exercise like this is part of his reality. The court has just sent an entirely unapologetic, unrepentant man to prison. Meanwhile, despite the long judicial exercise, the mystery of the master conspirator remains unresolved.Every time Suni got paranoid during our conversations, he would stop and plead with me to see things from his perspective. Once I cut him off, “I am not a criminal, Suni.” He immediately became playful, leaned back, raised an eyebrow, and asked, “But there’s a little bit in everyone, isn’t there?”Whenever we met, he elongated our interactions for three to four hours.

He was erratic — needed a lot of juice, then food, then he’d have anxiety attacks, needed a lot of reassurance and then more juice, cigarettes...it went on. At various points during our conversations, I asked him why he had decided to speak to me at all. Each time, he said the same thing — that, like everyone else involved in the case, he wanted to “tell his story.” But the truth is, it's hard to deduct what Suni’s “story" really is. Once he told me that “being known for a high-profile crime would help increase his market value,” and at other times, he would say, “I also want my side to be heard.” If there’s one thing that stayed consistent, it was that Suni wanted a movie made on himself.

He said that he had used his time in jail to write two movie scripts on his life. “Now that I’m on bail, I’m showing it to different producers,” he said. “Will you be able to find any actors to play your role?” I asked. “Will I? Name anyone. They will. People in the industry owe me,” he said. More than the case itself, he was keen to talk about philosophy, books, and the changing world. “You know, previously, if girls even went to a hotel room with a boy, their reputation is scarred forever. Things have changed now. Society recognises that girls have needs too. That’s good, right?”“Right,” I said, not knowing where he was going with this. He turned to me and asked, “So, what about you?

Don't you have needs? Desires?”He did this often. Pushing his luck to know whether I drank alcohol, or partied or went out with friends. It wasn’t any kind of real curiosity that seemed to drive his questions. It seemed as if all he wanted to know was what kind of woman I was, so he could decide what kind of man to be at that moment. Throughout our interactions, even when he was fumbling for answers, Suni was deeply invested in making his story captivating. He also took an unsettling interest in mine. It seemed imperative to him that he seem both — interesting and interested. He’d often call on the phone to ask things like: How’s the pollution in Delhi? Are you working from home?

Or the office? I checked your Facebook profile. Do you have a lot of life problems? Why have you changed your hairstyle so many times?One evening, he called and asked, “Do you happen to know a good therapist? I think I need to start seeing someone. I don’t know why, but everyone seems to see me only as a criminal.” “I wonder why,” I said.He barely heard me, going on about how therapists “only want to talk about the past,” while he was more interested in the future.

“Maybe only the Pope can fix me,” he said. *Name changed to protect identity.Editorial inputs: Nikita SaxenaEditor’s note: In the first version of the story, we had not added the name SreeLakshmi, as she was a married woman and not named as a witness. We have added her name as of December 15.Read our detailed coverage of the Kerala actor assault case over the years here.