Mother of all crimes

In my time as a journalist, I was a silent witness to fair amount of shouting, some of it directed at me. One of the fiercest was when the editor of the newspaper where I worked at the time let it rip — not at me, praise the Lord! — when the edition had a poor coverage of the Sheena Bora murder case.

This was the second half of 2015. The editor was an otherwise reasonable man, whose usual tool of team management was wanton sarcasm, not shouting. But that day, he could not hold back. In the coverage of the Sheena Bora murder case, you could not afford to come second best, not by a wide margin anyway.

Such was the frenzy around the case involving the murder of a good-looking young girl, obviously from a highincome group, allegedly by her mother, who was a queen of Mumbai’s high society! And that was just the beginning. As a popular WhatsApp forward of the time — reproduced in this book — put it: “A 2nd wife of her 3rd husband is charged along with her 2nd husband of killing her daughter from her 1st husband who was having an affair with the son of her 3rd husband from his 1st wife!!!”

It was such a fascinating case the nation felt compelled to know all about it. It dominated the settle-down chatter in my newspaper’s office every morning, and I rose in my colleague’s esteem because, with a well-hidden ambition to write crime thrillers, I used to pore over the coverage every morning and knew just the odd “fact” more than the next guy.

Even at that time, it was clear that one day the case will become a book. Readers of newspapers wanted more and more of the case and “true crime”, as a publishing genre, had begun to rise in prominence and popularity. Avirook Sen’s Aarushi, based on the trial of a double murder case in which Aarushi’s parents were the prime accused, had begun to fly off the shelves. The case eventually became a movie and continues to make waves, such as when the accused were recently acquitted.

However, two-and-a-half years later, true crime as a genre is still fledgling. And that may be because of the challenge a news reporter faces in converting a front page story into a book. The two are different animals.

A hot news story is driven by its topicality and novelty, and the shock, awe, amazement, and wonder it evokes among readers. They look for answers to questions, and are willing to give their time to television shows and news reports if they purport to provide some enlightenment. They are more forgiving and take in their stride the gaps in television and newspaper reportage.

A book is different. It is meant to be more authoritative. It may not, need not, cover the latest in the saga, but must answer questions instead of raising them.

This book is a valiant attempt to get into the details. The well of the book is a transcript of phone calls involving Indrani Mukerjea, one of the prime accused, her husband Peter Mukerjea, and Rahul, Peter’s son from a previous wife who was also Sheena’s boyfriend. This could be great for a reader looking for delight in the primary source, without the adulteration of the author’s narrative. But that is not what books are about. Books are about the narrative built up by the author, and her ability to make the reader dive deep into a character and feel for her. Transcripts, as a narrative, spurt and start and meander, and give the reader less than the value of the pages.

Ironically, despite the deluge of details in the call records and emails, this book, right from the beginning, dabbles a fair bit in questions. It talks about a tip-off that broke open the case three years after the crime was committed, without revealing too much about the nature, source, and delivery of the tip-off. It talks about mysteriously silent cops without unravelling the mystery. Even after reading the book, we are none the wiser about why Indrani detested her firstborn, Sheena, while showering her love over her other daughter, from another husband, Vidhie. And why, despite that, she chose to keep Sheena in Mumbai while dispatching her son, Sheena’s brother Mikhail, to Bengaluru. If she disliked having Sheena around so much she made the daughter address her as sister, she could have packed off the young girl to boarding school in a remote part of the country, or of the world.

Even if you ignore the occasional lapse of grammar, you wonder why the author is so strongly against Indrani. He talks in amazement about a chance meeting between Indrani and a journalist during a plane ride because Indrani behaved normally. This was some three years after Sheena’s murder. Come on, she couldn’t have behaved as if she had just walked out of a car after strangulating her daughter, trembling from the experience.

Now, please do not misunderstand me. If Indrani indeed killed her daughter, she is a terrible person. But she is a fascinating character for an author. Gabbar Singh was a terrible human being, but Salim and Jawed must have loved creating him. Only then could they infuse him with so much that he outshone — and out-laughed — all the other strong characters of Sholay. As the Joker tells Batman, “You complete me.

THE SHEENA BORA CASE

Manish Pachouly Roli Books 230 pages; ~395