Sheena Bora’s ‘murder’ that has held the nation in its thrall for almost a week now, has not been so much about the material evidence, as it has been about the motive. Consumers of hyperbolic media and the directors of the choreographed nautanki on TV channels are equally guilty of fanning our voyeuristic pleasures, as veteran journalist Shekhar Gupta recently pointed out in his article.
In the end, we see only what we want to see. In this theatre of the macabre, all our eyes can and want to see is a pattern emerging out of the millions little dots, that suits our idea of what is acceptable, and what is not. So we see a woman who has allegedly confessed to her crime, who has had several marriages (a crime? Even if they never overlapped?), has been ambitious (crime if you are a woman), good looking (dangerous?), flirted with money, fame, danger (a male prerogative) and a couple of corporate sugar daddies.
We have hurried to write her off as ‘that kind of woman’ who has been an ‘unwed’ teen mother, who is so power hungry and desperate to reclaim her fortunes, that she does not hesitate to ‘kill’ her daughter/sister and perhaps tried to kill her son too. You know, she is exactly the kind of woman Mahesh Bhatt warns you about by luring you to the theatres with curvaceous gown in backless slinky gowns.
Just pointing at the serious amounts of money and so-called reputation at stake cannot answer the question that has been plaguing everyone -how could she do it -. But something no one is talking about. Or talking about it the way it should be.
While Indrani’s crime should not go unpunished, I think it is time we paid attention to those little theories about her past and her present that deserve a Prime Time slot on their own. Not because one is trying to understand the point where a young, impressionable girl turned into this allegedly cold-hearted killer.
According to veteran journalist Vir Sanghvi and some media reports, the girl from Guwahati was allegedly abused by her (step) father. This is where we should pause and take a deep breath to understand the full import of the ‘revelation.’
Not enough can be said or written about the issue of child sexual abuse. Most of the times, the criminals are known to the victim and prey upon their trust. In this case, the man and the teenager were living under the same roof and as father-daughter. It is being said that Sheena was born of this abuse. And that, Indrani’s mother, who should have and could have stood by her daughter, turned the other way. Perhaps a reason why the adolescent mother walked away from the house of horrors and harboured no tenderness towards the child who grew up to be her nemesis?
There has been yet another theory – that Sheena had probably tempted fate when she got intimate with a man who was “very, very close” to Indrani. The Quint suggests that the young girl, a spitting image of her outgoing mother, was not only dating her step brother, she may have crossed the line with a much older man.
Did this relationship have shades of abuse or was it by mutual consent?
Did Indrani, who was probably running out of time and resources to resuscitate her career, see a reflection of her own troubled past in that of her sister/daughter?
We will never know what really went on in the minds of the accused in the hours, minutes leading up to the crime. But we do know that whatever has happened is tragic. It takes a lot more than money to turn a woman into a killer, that too of her own flesh and blood.
The seeds of Indrani’s evidently warped life view were perhaps sown at the time she was subjected to abuse and learned to fend for her self. If she was manipulative, it was because she had learned very early on that to better the men, you have to beat them at their own game. Would things have been different had Indrani’s mother and other members of the family stood by her when she first needed them? Did she let down her own family – however dysfunctional – because she was let down by her own? Can we trace her evident lack of compunction and remorse at having killed a young girl – whatever be the relation or the history- to the murder of her own innocence?
There can be no justification for murder. Just as there can be no justification forgiving sexual predators either. Criminals – molesters, killers, paedophiles – are not people outside our so-called civilised society. They are products of our times, our twisted families.
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