It was a
beautiful and nippy Bangalore night. I cuddled into the comforter, and while
admiring the contours of N’s face in the darkness, asked him, “ If you murder
someone, how will you erase the trail?” The next one-hour, we debated on many game
plans, and discussed the logistics of this morbid question. It was a conversation
I never thought I’d have.
The recent
Sheena Bora murder case made most of us play Sherlock Holmes and badger our Watsons
with indigenous conspiracy theories and deductions. We’ve always had a penchant
for murder mysteries since childhood. This gruesome crime was until recently
India’s biggest reality show. At 9 pm everyday, life came to a standstill as
our conscience keeper rattled away question after question and hollered the answers
himself. His panellists squabbled in vain while getting engulfed in ‘flames’. We,
who constituted the nation that ‘demanded’ the answers, critiqued but yet watched
from the comfort of our arms chairs. Amidst all the cacophony, lurking in a corner
was Ram Gopal Verma, or his protégé quietly penning away the screenplay of his
next magnum opus.
Thanks to
marathon media coverage spruced up with lascivious details, stereotypes such as
the ‘she-devil’ and ‘gold diggers resurfaced. Many were upset that the
‘sanctity of motherhood’ had been tainted. Apparently a lot of men also started
wondering how to protect themselves from the many ‘Indranis’ swirling them like
sharks. Yes, men please be scared!
But picture this.
It’s a nice sunny morning and you are driving to work. Your mind flits between
what you want to eat for lunch and if it’s someone’s birthday that day when your
right leg jams the brake. Bumper to bumper traffic and people are alighting out
of their vehicles, straining their eyes in the sun to get a clearer view of
something. Pedestrians are congregating in groups. For a moment your mind imagines
a radioactive monster going on a rampage and then you hear the string of cuss
words. It’s a fight, between a neatly dressed man in a Swift and an extremely
irritable autowallah. Everyone is busy squeezing in to get the ringside
tickets. It has jolted a truck driver’s assistant awake and he is now filming
it on his mobile. Life grinds to a halt for twenty whole minutes. The same
people who until five minutes back were expressing their tearing hurry with some
ferocious honking now cannot peal their eyes of the spectacle. Sounds familiar? We Indians are a quirky lot
and extremely voyeuristic. We love
drama, especially when it involves others. After enjoying the show, we like to
nod our heads dismissively and walk away. News channels that played the role of
the judiciary and taught the police where to steer their investigations in the
Sheena case are not going to shoulder the entire blame. Everybody loves a good
fight they say. Maybe we are watching too many thriller TV shows and B- grade
movies that are fuelling our imagination. More the masala, greater the fun.
The other day,
in one of those Whatsapp groups where one is an awkward spectator, I read a
joke. It read, “How did Indrani manage to convince an ex -husband to murder
when I cant even get my current to pick the towel of the floor.” I showed it to
N. N too loves to leave the wet towel sprawled on the bed. We sniggered at not
only the dig at the husband species but the fact that we have become such
shallow creatures.
Of course, the
show is now over. The case has been handed over to the CBI, which is our cue to
erase all memory of the crime. From breaking news to no news. From front-page
splash to snippet on pg. 12. We shall wait in anticipation for something more scandalous
or heinous to lap up.
My phone
flashes. “ 3 Militants killed in Poonch District, Jammu and Kashmir, One jawan
dead,” NDTV. Today, we can rattle away all of Indrani’s boyfriends, but the name
of the lone soldier who died? The channels don’t bother to find out. Arbitrary
jawan. Many people die in Kashmir everyday. Obviously not as exciting as the ‘mother
of all murders’!
-Originally published on 3rd October 2015, in The New Indian Express, Bangalore
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