Indrani Mukerjea tells her tale | Telling tales

Murder-accused Indrani Mukerjea’s life story makes for unpleasant reading, but there are at least three things to admire.True grit, for one. The daughter whose murder Mukerjea is accused of was the result of being raped as a teenager by her own father. A male friend offers to legitimise the birth while offering to marry her. A year later, she has a son by him, but remains unmarried. She does well at school and college, abandons the friend, and at barely 19, cedes custody of both children to her parents. She goes to Kolkata, completes her degree, begins her working life with the Diners Club and soon marries Sanjeev Khanna, a businessman. Has a daughter by him, grows disenchanted and moves to Mumbai. There she meets Peter Mukerjea, eventually marries him and they fly up the corporate totem pole together.Second, there’s her steely disregard for society’s double standards. Throughout this narrative, wherever any other young woman would have been crushed beyond repair, Mukerjea raises her head and pushes past “what will people say” to reach the blessed freedom of “I don’t care”. She talks openly about the treacheries she has faced, from parents, lovers, husbands and her children. But even as she describes her tears, her rage and extreme isolation, she presents herself as a warrior, not a victim.Third, her description of six and a half years in prison is startlingly clear-eyed and positive. The humiliation of being stripped naked at the time of entering jail and the loss of such basic amenities as a flush toilet are described alongside the camaraderie and the plain but apparently healthy food. The prison authorities are not vilified, and neither is the justice system, however snail-paced.It should come as no surprise that almost nothing is said about the murder that Mukerjea is accused of. She’s out on bail and not exonerated, so there are limits placed on what she can reveal about the case. According to her, the daughter may not be dead at all. She mentions a sighting at Guwahati airport of someone who might be the missing girl. There seems to be no credible motive. Strangulation as a method seems too bizarre for even the most demonic of mothers.Mukerjea’s authorial voice is thick with clichés of the “pale as a ghost” kind. If not for the incendiary subject matter, she might be writing high school essays. Her portrait of family life is devastating in the crude banality of conversations, the fixation on money and property. However unbroken the author claims to be, she leaves the reader shuddering with distaste. And pity.Edited By: Shyam BalasubramanianPublished On: Aug 11, 2023

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