Was Indrani’s Past Catching Up With Her When Sheena Was Murdered?

The probable motive for Sheena’s murder appears to be Indrani’s desperation to keep her daughter’s parentage secret.

Even as the Mumbai police’s preliminary suspicion is that a property dispute could be behind the alleged murder of Sheena Bora, the daughter of Indrani Mukerjea, wife of former Star TV CEO Peter Mukerjea, details are emerging that the deceased was her daughter from her first marriage to a tea garden magnate.

The motive for the murder for which Indrani was arrested by Mumbai police on August 25 evening, could be personal rather than a property dispute. The trajectory of the investigation suggests that the police know much more than they are willing to reveal at a time when they have Indrani in their custody for sustained interrogation.

Was Indrani a Teenage Unwed Mother?

The police have sent out probe teams to Guwahati and Kolkata where some of the missing links of the case lie. Sheena disappeared in the early months of 2012 from Mumbai where she had begun to live after spending her childhood in the company of Indrani’s parents in Guwahati. The parents live in Bhangaghar locality of Guwahati.

Sheena’s friends The Quint spoke with revealed that she attended nursery to Class X in Disneyland school in Guwahati. Besides Sheena, Indrani had a son, Mikhail, born out of her first marriage to Siddhartha Das who owned tea estates in Tripura. Indrani’s first marriage took place when she was 21. Some others in Guwahati said that Indrani was in her teens when she gave birth to Sheena, raising the question whether she was an unwed mother before her first marriage.

That relationship soured and the couple split up before Indrani married a second time to Kolkata-based Sanjay Khanna. A daughter, Vidhi, was born to Indrani and Khanna. Vidhi lives in the UK now, but the focus of the investigation has shifted to Mikhail and Indrani’s parents who have considerable details on what precise motive Indrani might have had to allegedly take her own daughter’s life in connivance with her driver Shyam Manav Manohar Rai.

Sheena Was In A Relationship With Peter’s Elder Son

Sheena’s friends suggest that she was in a relationship with Peter’s eldest son Rahul (the younger one is called Robin, the two were born from a previous marriage to a lady called Shabnam) which might have incensed Indrani to commit the ghastly act of setting her own daughter on fire and then burying the remains in the ravines of Raigad, about 115 kms from Mumbai. Or it could be that Sheena had begun to seek social recognition as her daughter. The Mukerjeas live in a British-era building called Marlow in Worli.

Did Sheena Threaten To Expose Her Mother?

What is equally puzzling is that why would Indrani pass off her daughter as her sister and what could have triggered the murder. Was Indrani’s dark past catching up with her? Had Sheena begun to expose her “mother” whose marriage with Peter was falling apart when he began to get a whiff of her past which she had tried to conceal socially?

For sure, Rahul, who had come to terms with Sheena’s disappearance in 2012 would know a great deal about the motive of murder. Sources in Mumbai claimed that Rahul and Sheena were quite “cool” about their relationship and it was not some hush-hush affair.