It was a beautiful and nippy Bangalore night. I cuddled into my comforter and while admiring the contours of the husband’s face in the darkness, asked him, “If you murder someone, how will you erase the trail?” For the next one hour, we debated on many game plans and discussed the logistics. It was a conversation I never thought I would have.
The recent Sheena Bora murder case made many of us play Sherlock Holmes and badger our Watsons with indigenous conspiracy theories and deductions. We’ve had a penchant for murder mysteries since childhood. This gruesome crime was, until recently, India’s biggest reality show. At 9 pm every day, 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 the ‘flames’. We, who constituted the nation that ‘demanded’ the answers, critiqued it but yet watched from the comfort of our armchairs. Amidst all the cacophony, lurking in a corner was Ram Gopal Varma, or his protégé, quietly penning 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 around 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 from their vehicles, straining their eyes in the sun to get a clear view of something or the other. Pedestrians are congregating in groups. For a moment, your mind imagines a radioactive monster going on the rampage and then you hear a string of cuss words. It is a fight between a neatly dressed man in a Swift and an extremely irritable autowallah. Everyone is busy squeezing in to get ringside tickets. The fight has jolted awake a truck driver’s assistant and he is now filming the scene on his mobile phone. Life grinds to a halt for 20 whole minutes. The same people who until five minutes back were expressing their tearing hurry with some ferocious honking now cannot peel their eyes off the spectacle.
Sounds familiar? We Indians are a quirky lot and are extremely voyeuristic. We love drama, especially when it involves others. After enjoying the show, we like to nod our heads in a dismissive manner and walk away. News channels that played the role of the Judiciary and taught the police which way to steer their probe are not going to shoulder all the blame. Everyone 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 one never really participates in, I read a joke. “How did Indrani manage to convince an ex-husband to murder when I can’t even get my current one to pick the towel from the floor.” I showed it to my husband. He too loves to leave the wet towel on the bed. We sniggered at not only the dig at the husband species but also 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 page 12. We shall wait in anticipation for something more scandalous or heinous.
My phone beeps. ‘Three 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 every day. Obviously not as exciting as the ‘mother of all murders’!