Gustad at a Mumbai station. (PTI)

Mumbai, June 1: The cloud on the death of Nadia Khan, the assistant director working with Kaizad Gustad on his latest venture Mumbai Central, is refusing to lift.

The 27-year-old British national apparently died after being hit by a passing train while shooting on the tracks near Mahalaxmi station. Unit hands, including Gustad, have been accused of lying that Nadia died in a road accident. They retracted the story under intense grilling by police yesterday.

But police are flummoxed that if the accident happened in daylight, why none of the 16 motormen and guards manning the eight trains that passed along track number five between 12 and 1 pm on May 25 — when the accident allegedly took place — reported it.

“That is really strange,” a railway police officer said. A motorman and a guard man every local train and at the end of each trip they have to write a report about the journey.

“But there is no mention about anything. Absolutely nothing. There is no entry about any accident in the register of the stationmaster at Mahalaxmi. Nothing at the Mumbai Central railway station either. Even the RPF have no report. These men hold the key to further investigations,” he said.

A list of the 16 railway personnel has been sent to divisional manger Kaushal Kishore and investigations will begin tomorrow.

Trouble is mounting for Gustad, the maverick director of Boom, on other fronts, too. Ashish Udeshi, the line producer of Mumbai Central, has been charged with misleading the police and falsifying evidence. The entire crew could face the same charges.

Udeshi had taken a bleeding Nadia to the Nair hospital and lied to the attendant doctor that she was hit by a truck.

He told Tardeo police he lied because he thought there would be many more formalities if he told the doctors at the hospital and the sleuths later that the death happened on the train tracks. Nadia had died shortly after she was admitted to the hospital.

Nadia’s London-based elder sister Ruby Rizvi says she is not convinced with Gustad’s story “because he lied to us about the real story in the first place”.

Her family is contemplating criminal action against Gustad and may shortly decide on an India lawyer to take him on.

Then there is the question of Gustad exceeding his brief. He was given permission to shoot on track number one but he was shooting on track five, a busier line. A railway official said a scene was being shot on the Up fast line to Churchgate, “a heavy-density track”, in contravention to rules.

Railway bosses have already said Gustad’s permission to shoot on the Western Railway will not be renewed as there was a breach of trust.

Mumbai Central, a movie about Mumbai’s famous dabbawallahs, is not just bloodied and battered, its fate is in jeopardy.

The directors of sound and photography are reported to have quit the movie on moral grounds.

Shankar Raman, the chief of photography, and Vinod Subramanian, the man in charge of sound, are believed to have told Gustad that the manner in which the unit went about things was “very unfortunate”.