He brought out his guitar and started to sing a song with gospel undertones at a table where Anne Ketteringham sat with her friends. “Suddenly, everyone was quiet and listening to this young man’s gentle voice. His presence and passion hit like an electric shock and the words struck home like a thunderbolt. He finished on a gentle breeze, bringing those inevitable tears to my eyes that sometimes appear when I hear or see something beautiful,” says Ketteringham, a retired British aeronautical engineer.

That was in January. This summer, Manu Dileep hung up his guitar and killed himself. The musician of the Bangalore-based band Aum, who had mesmerised the party at Art Escape, a place for artistes in Benaulim, Goa, ended his life on an abrupt note.

Ketteringham, who lives half the year in Goa, says that deep down, as she heard him sing, she feared for him. For some inexplicable reason, she knew that the young man with the sad, gentle eyes that filled with passion and hurt as he sang was going to take his life. Acting on the hunch, she tried to be in touch with him, though with little response.

People who commit suicide often leave messages — and not necessarily in writing. Dileep’s message was in his song. Did anyone understand the angst of Viveka Babajee, the Mauritian-born Mumbai-based model who was found hanging in her flat a little over a week ago? Right now, there is a slugfest going on between her boyfriend and her family over whether she was depressed. But whatever be the truth, the fact remains that people who knew Viveka missed the signs which, if acted upon, could have saved the 37-year-old model.

Just like Mohan Kumar (not his real name) would perhaps have lived if his friends and colleagues had understood that he was attempting to sign off.

Last year, Kumar told his senior about his marital problems. The senior gave him a pep talk and assured him that all would be well. A couple of months later, Kumar, known to be a quiet and conscientious employee at the Mumbai-based accountancy firm where he worked, completed his pending work, handed over the keys to his boss, taking pains to explain the contents of his files to him. The senior found it all unnecessary, as Kumar was expected at work the next day. But Kumar went home and hanged himself, leaving behind his then pregnant wife.

“Those who plan their suicide tend to prepare by completing unfinished tasks, draft their will or even give or ask for forgiveness,” says Dr Yusuf Matcheswalla, a psychiatrist in Mumbai.

Often, though, the signs are difficult to read. Mumbai-based media-legal consultant Gajanan Khergamker had a long encounter with a woman who had suffered from severe child abuse and had gone on to develop a multi-layered personality. “At one time, she’d be all caring and loving and at another, she’d snap into a selfish being who cared for nothing beyond herself,” he says.

With little provocation, she would overdose on sleeping pills or slit her wrists. But she survived. “At first, everyone panicked. But later it was dismissed as a blackmailing tactic,” says Khergamker.

But even such signs, warns Dr Matcheswalla, should be taken seriously. “When a person displays suicidal tendencies, he or she must be given professional help, or in serious cases, even be admitted to hospital,” he says. Instead, he rues, when people planning their own deaths discuss it with family or friends, they are either not taken seriously or given a pep talk. Some are even reprimanded, as model Nafisa Joseph was. She hanged herself in 2004.

“It is only in hindsight that you see the signs,” says Kavita Shivdasani, an educationist in Mumbai, who has known three people who ended their lives over the last two decades. One of them would speak very little but spend long hours before the mirror, grooming herself. After her divorce, she returned to her parents’ home, with her two-year-old son and six-year-old daughter. One day she jumped off the top floor of the high-rise building in Mumbai after pushing down her son. Her daughter fought free and ran back to her grandparents.

Some believe that people are in too much of a hurry to be able to understand that a person they know is on the brink of death. “The signs are always there for anyone willing to see. But with everybody going so fast, nobody, nowhere stops to look a person in the eye and see if all is well,” says Cyrus Merchant, a media professional and well known Mumbai-based film and fashion journalist of the 80s and 90s. “There is no real connectivity — even with all the social networking sites,” he adds.

Indeed, like many others who’ve ended life on a desperate note, Dileep was not short of friends. Even after his death, he has 547 friends on Facebook. In his profile, Manu describes himself as “unworthy”.

The depths of unhappiness are difficult for a layperson to gauge. Some, who are in depression, tend to brood; some become hyper. Delhi-based fashion designer Ravi Bajaj, who last met Babajee “five to eight years ago”, says she was an emotional person, which he adds, was not unusual in people in their profession.

Bajaj doesn’t agree with those who say models tend to lead unhappy lives, pulled down by drugs and alcohol. “People in my profession are full of joie de vivre and far from suicidal,” he emphasises. But Merchant argues that the “freshness and innocence” of modelling in the 80s — when mothers accompanied their daughters to photo shoots — are gone.

“Models were having a good time even then but were not stressed out. Now everybody is called a supermodel. And the balloon has become so big that models have lost their visibility — which is what kills them,” he says.

Babajee voiced some of her angst in a 2006 interview posted on a blogspot (desibabesandhunks. blogspot.com) in which she contrasts Mauritius, “the land of down-to-earth people,” with modelling, which she says, is “a world of glamour and glitz”. It quotes her as saying, “One tends to lose oneself here. But thanks to my roots and upbringing, I always remembered who I was and where I came from.”

International models, Babajee said, were sometimes pushed before they were ready. “You will see that after a time, the same persons who had egged you on are eager to pull you back.”

Babajee may not have lived to tell the tale of how it felt while throwing it all away. But Satish Verma (not his real name), an advertising professional who survived a suicide bid, still recalls that day with horror when he and a friend attempted a suicide pact ten years ago.

Verma watched as his friend neatly arranged everything on a table. “He placed 30-odd strips of sleeping pills on the table, chilled orange juice, a bottle of Vodka (‘We should die in style,’ he said), chicken tikka for himself and onion pakodas for me because I was a vegetarian,” he says. “I worked myself into a silent frenzy by remembering all the good times I had had with my woman, and was surprised that I was weeping.” Verma had just been dumped by his girlfriend, a married woman.

Four days later, Verma woke up in hospital. “My neighbour said he had seen a suspicious looking man coming out of my flat in a drunken state, and came in to check on me. He saw my door was open and I was unconscious. He called for an ambulance and got me to hospital.”

Verma has moved on, and can talk abut the alcohol-driven unhappy cloud that enveloped him then. But Dileep was too impatient to let life run its course. At the age of five, he asked his father, “Why are we here, growing up, going to school, working to earn money to survive, get older and then die?” Some two decades later, he answered it himself.