Murder She Wrote

Around half a million murders happen every year on our little planet. 1 in 10 is carried out by women. And roughly 1 in 100 of these is a filicide (parent killing offspring). So that’s less than 500 cold blooded female murderers in a population of 7 billion. At any point in time, there may not be more than one jet-setting, multi-millionaire media baroness in this Elite Murderess Club. That kind of explains why the Indrani Mukerjea saga has hogged all the headlines.

While the media has generously fed us every morsel of minutiae about Indrani that may paint her as being a stereotypical gold digger, there’s still one well-camouflaged trait that the talking heads haven’t yet commented on. It’s to do with her naming.

The prime accused in the Sheena Bora case was originally christened as Pori Bora. At some stage in her life, when she decided to cast away her old persona, the lady picked a new identity for herself. She chose ‘Indrani’, a nod to the wife of Lord Indra, the ruler of heavens. That was her first public statement of intent on the type of lifestyle she wanted to lead.

Even when she gave birth to a baby girl, she didn’t settle for the usual Seetha or Geeta. She picked Sheena, a rather diva-like choice for a girl-next-door from Assam. Sheena (meaning: god’s gift) was perhaps inspired by Sheena Easton (a pop star of the eighties) or ‘Sheena: Queen of the Jungle’ (again, a movie from the eighties). For her second child, she chose Mikhail (meaning: god like). Vir Sanghvi revealed in an interview recently that Mikhail was derived from Mikhail Gorbachev, the then overlord of USSR. Mikhail Bora was another clue of the benchmarks she set for herself. Vidhie, her third child, is named after the ‘goddess of destiny’. A relatively conventional name – perhaps, influenced by her second husband Sanjeev Khanna. Still, the name was not-your-average goddess.

So the running theme of her nomenclature was powerful figures who dominate their domain. Even her executive search firm INX (Indrani Executive = IN-EX) was fairly eponymous. Not many founders name their companies after themselves, these days. That’s one more instance of her megalomania.

Also, Indrani Mukerjea’s name number is 9, which indicates the bloody influence of Mars, the god of war. Usually, the life journey of 9 numbered people is riddled with danger and Indrani was no exception. The amazing aspect however is that all the four protagonists in the episode (namely: Sanjeev Khanna, Indrani Mukerjea, Shyam Rai and Sheena Bora), had the same name number 9! Which brings us to the question: who scripted the murder? Was it Indrani or her destiny?