Why Indrani can be her child's murderer
As I write this column, the Sheena Bora murder case is unfolding like a TV soap opera on news channels. It has been three days that the curious case of a socialite-turned-media-honcho passing up her daughter as her sister in the social circuit has kept people hooked; and it is getting murkier with every passing hour.
Questions are many: What kind of mother asks her children to behave as her siblings? How can she have murdered her daughter and be so cool about it? How did she manage to hide it for three years and not be remorseful about it? How can everyone buy Indrani's story of Sheena being in US?
That Indrani Mukerjea is a super rich, influential woman - the designer dresses, stiletto wearing types - adds to the shock value of the case. Otherwise, answers are around us: the many cases of honour killing where parents kill their children for making a dent on their carefully carved social image; whatever the reason for Sheena's murder - an unapproved affair, money, a threat to leak the carefully hidden sister-daughter secret - this case too could be about avoiding that dent in the polished up social life.
Perhaps in the quest for answers, Indrani's character and her past is being dissected over again and again, by friends who played cupid in her and Peter Mukherjea's love story, by angry ex-employees she is accused of firing, by the son she abandoned, and by the people who know nothing about her past.
The disgust, the surprise, the gossip factor, the curiosity increase manifolds because of Indrani and Peter Mukherjea's social status; because she ruffled many feathers as she climbed up the social ladder from a middle class family to glossy Page 3, and because in the end she turned out to be the socialite with a closet full of skeletons.
The murder, irrespective of whether the details in the press are correct or not, calls for a thorough investigation. The murderer deserves to be written about. But I fail to understand the connection between cold-blooded murder of a daughter and the professional failings of her mother, the alleged murdered in this case.
If some "insightful" pieces on the alleged murderer are to be believed some have figured out why a rich mother can kill her own child. Sample this:
Because she was "A bimbo-ette".
Because she was "Fiercely aggressive and very ambitious"
Also, a "Person who worked with her did not rate her leadership skills much".
And look "She bought herself an Audi RS8 within three months of the company (INX) being launched".
These have to be very relevant revelations about a woman charged with murdering her child. Or is it the usual she-is-too-ambitious-to-be-a-good-woman tune that is being played up over and over again.
Let's face it. Many women kill their children, take up countless cases of honour killings where mothers have conspired with their families to kill daughters for giving bad name to the family. Many of them are not "fiercely independent and ambitious", they don't cruise around in an Audi, neither do they belong to the glossy rich class. Through this 'Oh! These rich but morally corrupt people' angle let us not trick ourselves into believing that only the rich live these hollow lives with no sense of parenting. That only the rich are capable of going to any length to protect their social status. There are many horrible parents, in every class, in every society.
The sad part of the current case - the lonely daughter forced to live as her mother's sister before being killed in cold blood, burnt and left to decay in the jungles. Even in her death Sheena Bora's story has become about her mother, who refused to acknowledge her.