Once one of Guwahati’s poshest neighbourhoods, Sundarnagar, where Indrani Mukherjea, main accused in the murder of her daughter, Sheena Bora, grew up, is now in a state of decline. A long, narrow alley, Bylane One, is lined on either side by brick bungalows with kitchen gardens, stylish in their heyday, now marked by shabby-gentility. “Many top government officials lived here and the houses were well-maintained,” says a resident. “But once their children grew up and moved out, the elderly parents rented their premises out or found it difficult to look after them.” But the one house that stands out in utter neglect is Number 8, or Chanakya Neer, in which degeneration, it seems, has crept up on the inhabitants themselves. Upendra Kumar Bora, Indrani’s father, is suffering from dementia and his wife Durga Rani, say neighbours, is an Alzheimer’s patient “on her deathbed”.
Many of the Boras’ relatives, however, suspect that they are “feigning mental illness so that they don’t get dragged into this murder,” as a distant cousin puts it. She tells Outlook, “When I met them last, they seemed to be perfectly sound of mind.” But that, she says, was three years ago and wonders if Sheena’s disappearance had brought on the shock that unhinged them. “That’s the only explanation I can think of, as they loved Sheena very much...maybe they were psychologically affected by her sudden disappearance. It was they who brought her up after all.” Interestingly, almost all the friends or relatives of Boras whom Outlook spoke to said everyone in the family was always spinning fanciful tales. A distant aunt of Indrani, or Pori as she was called then, says: “They would make up stories about expensive vacations, which we could tell were not true, or about how much they were spending on Pori’s education, just to show off. The rest of us always laughed at them behind their backs. They were the kind of relatives you wanted to avoid.”
Indrani in police custody in Mumbai. (Photograph by Amit Haralkar)
Indeed, all those who knew the Boras in Guwahati are convinced that Indrani’s “cut-throat ambition”, as manifested in her spectacular rise, is rooted in her parents’ “unnatural obsession with wealth and social status”. Sheila Bora, Guwahati-based retired professor and daughter of scientist Prabhakar Bora, remembers how the Boras would love to associate themselves with her family because of her father’s position in society. “They, especially Pori’s father, would drop in every so often and bring their daughter along.” Sheila, 67, recalls Pori as a pre-teen girl who was “extremely rowdy”. “My mother could not stand her,” she says, reminiscing how even at that early age she was an incurable brag and throw tantrums. “As the only child, she was the centre of their attention and they spoilt her. She got the best of everything—from education to clothes—and she showed it off. She would wear these frilly lace dresses and the parents would talk about how expensive her clothes were.” Sheila laughs about how her parents often debated whether to discourage them from coming. “My mother wanted to put a stop to their visits but my father used to say tolerantly, ‘What’s the harm if they want to come and spend a little time?’”
It is said that Indrani’s parents, both of whom came from the backward Tezpur and Lakhimpur districts in Assam, were desperate to fit into Guwahati’s upper-class circles. “Babul Bora (Upendra’s nickname) was the son of the Tejpur post master and one of five brothers...,” says a Guwahati entrepreneur who grew up in the same village as Indrani’s father. He says that he remembers the family as ‘dishonest’. “None of the families of our villages were well off. I had gone off to study in Shillong and was working part time. I managed to save up about Rs 10,000, which was a lot in those days, put it in an envelope and sent it home by registered mail. When it was delivered, it was empty. The envelope had the post office’s stamp on it and was resealed. We are convinced that the post master opened it, something he regularly did with letters and other mail. But I couldn’t imagine that he would steal the money.”
Past imperfect House of B.P. Chaudhury, Indrani’s first husband in Guwahati. (Photograph by Sandipan Chatterjee)
These acquaintances and relatives, however, dismiss rumours and reports that Upendra is not Indrani’s biological father or that he abused and molested her. “If Pori claims this, she is lying,” says another family member. “My husband and I know both sides of Pori’s family—Upendra and Durga—from before they were married. We attended their wedding and we know Pori is their daughter. She may be trying to play the victim now that she has been accused of this murder. Her parents doted on her, though they were a little strict about her timings and wanted to control her movements and the people she mixed with. But to call Upendra a molester is wrong. He may be a show-off or dishonest otherwise, but wouldn’t sexually abuse anyone, far less his own daughter. That’s not him,” she says.
Something which almost everyone who knew Indrani since her childhood vouches for is her ruthless lack of compassion for anyone, not even the parents who loved her. This is what makes people in Guwahati believe that she “is not beyond” committing a crime as horrific as filicide. “There was always a sense of cruelty about her—she thoughtlessly dumped one boyfriend after another without any guilt,” remembers a classmate. In fact, she is said to have left her first husband, Bishnu Prasad Chaudhury, a Guwahati-based lawyer with whom she reportedly eloped while still in college, only four months into the marriage because she wanted to pursue higher studies. “When she got into Lady Keane College in Shillong, one of the best women’s colleges in the Northeast, she just upped and left Guwahati. She was very intelligent, not to mention extremely ambitious and would not let marriage drag her down,” says a former classmate from Cotton College, Guwahati.
St Mary’s school. (Photograph by Sandipan Chatterjee)
What happened in Shillong is another story. Says a neighbour of Indrani, “In 1987 or 89 she returned to Guwahati to her parents’ home with this man in tow and introduced him as her boyfriend Bablu, who we now learn is called Siddhartha Das. She was pregnant. He was the son of a shopkeeper in Shillong and we considered him ‘not up to her standards’, but he was quite handsome.” According to her, Indrani and Siddhartha seemed to be happy for a while. “They drove around town in a flashy Honda bike with little Sheena in their lap.” Indrani’s father reportedly set up a shop for him at Guwahati. But barely a year after Sheena was born, when Indrani got pregnant for the second time, things suddenly changed again. “She came crying to our house, saying how much she hated the idea of having another child,” the neighbour and former friend told Outlook. Her son Mikhail was born. Bablu’s business was not doing well at all. Pori left Bablu, and the children with the grandparents, and went off to Calcutta, where she got married to businessman Sanjeev Khanna, who was part of the metropolis’s elite circles. Indrani now had a toehold in the urbane upper classes and would consolidate her position for the next few years. After that marriage ended in divorce, Indrani walked out with the custody of their only daughter, Vidhie. The next rung on the ladder of social success, a glitzy highlife in Mumbai, beckoned. The apotheosis of Indrani’s social ambition came in 2002, when she got hitched to the powerful media tycoon, Peter Mukerjea.
In Guwahati, her alma mater is abuzz with the news of an alumnus who has brought them disgrace. A group of girls at Cotton College are discussing her. One of them says, “Her showy lifestyle doesn’t fit in with the image of what Cotton College women are like, which is more toned down.” Another adds, “She seems cold, calculating and cruel.” A third girl says, “My mother refuses to watch the news because it is only about Indrani.” When pointed out that she is as yet under trial, one girls snaps, “True, but we are not shocked to hear the news; she is not beneath murdering anyone for her own gains.” At St Mary’s Convent, where Indrani had studied, the administration would not make a comment. Nor at Holy Child School, where the girls are saying their evening prayers during the Outlook visit. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the time of our death...,” they repeat in a chant, pacing the school courtyard, now wreathed in the softer shadows of waning daylight. A breeze blows across the Brahmaputra flowing nearby. “It is hard to imagine someone who has been inculcated with the values of love should commit a crime of this proportion,” mutters a nun who doesn’t want to be named.
In Indrani’s footsteps Students at Cotton College, Guwahati. (Photograph by Sandipan Chatterjee)
Evening descends at the house at Sundarnagar too. The old man and woman are locked up inside. Throughout the day mediapersons clamour for a ‘darshan’, as one of them called it, but were disappointed. Three rooms at the back of the house have been let out. Money from the rent is supposed to be the main income of Mikhail, who stayed back in Guwahati to look after his grandparents, even as Sheena moved to Mumbai. Mikhail, say tenants, has left them in charge of his grandparents while he is away in Mumbai for the police interrogation. One of them, Krishna Bahadur, tells Outlook, “He has left strict instructions not to allow anyone in. Even the police have not gone up to meet them. Only two nurses are allowed in. Mikhail has organised ‘bouncers’ to come in and forcibly remove anyone who tries to get in.”
Verily, a group of men are called in when journalists refuse to leave. On the first day after the news broke, the nurses claimed that the “house is in a mess, with hundreds of liquor bottles strewn around”, giving rise to speculations about Mikhail’s associates. One police officer at the Dispur police station says he found discrepancies in Mikhail’s accounts but would not comment now.
Indrani’s house in Guwahati. (Photograph by Sandipan Chatterjee)
Mikhail claimed that he did not want to break the news of Sheena’s murder to his grandparents, fearing it would deliver a terrible blow to their fragile minds. In fact, in the old couple’s isolation creeps a sense of their being forcibly confined. Upendra had reportedly made a brief appearance shouting from the balcony, “I am Indrani’s father”. He is said to have watched the news on television and wanted to refute claims that he is a step-father. It was he who named ‘Mikhail’ after Russian president Gorbachev.
Sheena’s biological father, Siddhartha, who has held a press conference in Calcutta, said he had named Sheena after the movie Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. It’s only her terrible end in the forests of Raigad that bore a pathetic, tangential resemblance to that script.
By Dola Mitra in Guwahati
