NEW DELHI: Former media executive Indrani Mukerjea, who spent more than six years in jail on charges of murdering her daughter Sheena Bora, has come with a bare-all memoir in which she claims that the person she is accused of killing is "alive and out there".
The Supreme Court had granted Mukerjea bail on May 18 last year, saying her time in prison was too long a term and the trial in the case won't be completed anytime soon. She has throughout denied the murder charge.
In her book "Unbroken: The Untold Story", Mukerjea "strips away the layers of sensationalism that surrounded me and reveal the raw truth of my experiences".
Through the book, she says she wants to "reach out to anyone who has faced adversity and believed they were beyond repair".
Mukerjea says though she and Sheena looked really similar and even liked similar food, they didn't have a conventional parent-child relationship.
"I discovered what Sheena was like only when she was 15 years of age. Right from the start, we bonded like friends. Sheena considered my mother as her parent because she grew up with my parents; she saw me more as a sibling," Mukerjea writes in the book, published by HarperCollins India.
She goes on to say that both she and Sheena invested in creating a bond.
"Over the years, our bond intensified. We shared everything - from food to jewellery to clothes," the book says.
But that was unfortunately short-lived, claims Mukerjea.
"I didn't know the challenges of being a parent to a 21-year-old. The minute I stopped playing the cool parent and became the strict one, things changed," she writes.
Mukerjea claims she never expressed her rage to Sheena. "She was my kid who could do no wrong. I treated her like an adult and respected her decisions. I was strict but I also trusted her to handle her life and conflicts with maturity and tenacity. So, when she decided to not stay in touch, I respected her space. I knew badgering her would get us nowhere. Just like the first time, the effort to reconcile had to come from her end. And then, 2015 happened," she writes.
On August 25, 2015, Mukerjea was accosted by a team of Mumbai Police on the charge of murdering Sheena.
"And what about Sheena? The child of mine I allegedly throttled with my own hands. Sheena and I have the same soul. We carried the same pain, with a smile big enough to hide all of it underneath the shine. She was bright and warm, loving and kind. She had inherited my strength of spirit," she writes.
Then making the startling claim, she says, "I am now at peace after Sheena was spotted at the Guwahati airport by my friend - Saveena. Being an advocate herself, her quick thinking got us the footage of Sheena from the airport."
She goes on to add: "Something changed in me after this information came to the fore. The person I am accused of killing is out and about, while I was rotting in jail. Why hasn't she come out openly? I don't know. I am sure there are reasons and pressures holding her back. But this is the second time I have been told Sheena is alive. When I was in prison, an inmate at Byculla Jail too claimed to have seen Sheena in Kashmir. She was a 'female government official'. I, through my lawyer Sana (Raees Khan), urged the CBI to probe this. It went nowhere. But when Saveena saw her, recently, we knew we had to look for her."
A special court in Mumbai asked the Airports Authority of India (AAI) to secure the CCTV footage of Guwahati airport and find out the identity of the girl who allegedly looked like Sheena.
"Special CBI judge S P Naik Nimbalkar asked, 'What is the harm?' He directed the AAI to hand over footage of January 5, between 5.30 am and 6 am near the boarding gate of Guwahati airport. This gave ground to what I was feeling all along - Sheena is alive and out there," writes Mukerjea.
In the book, she also alleges that more than men, women tried to pull her down.
"After the first charge sheet came out, people from all corners of our social life descended upon me with their claws out. In all my years in Mumbai, I had never felt any animosity against me, maybe because I didn't ever focus on other people."
She also says that the moment she was arrested, "it seemed like people came out and said everything they had been feeling about me for a decade and more. It felt like they were waiting for me to fall", adding, "And what was really jarring was that most of these people didn't really know me, but aired their opinions freely about me, anyway."