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Indrani Mukerjea: When facts are stranger than fiction

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Kaveree Bamzai
Kaveree BamzaiAug 26, 2015 | 19:36

Indrani Mukerjea: When facts are stranger than fiction

If Indrani Bora Mukerjea's story bears eerie similarities to both Sunanda Pushkar's case and Aarushi Talwar, it is also remarkably familiar to anyone who has read the three biggest bestsellers of the last three years -Gone Girl, The Girl on a Train and Luckiest Girl Alive.

All three books, feminist noir, as I'd like to call them, are about women reinventing themselves to fit the ideal wife stereotype. In Gone Girl, the heroine remakes herself as the cool girl because that is how she thinks she can win a man. “Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl.''

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It doesn't go very well, and the marriage shatters the minute the new York jobs go. The ruination of a marriage brings out the authentic selves. And they're not pretty. As Gillian Flynn writes, “We weren’t ourselves when we fell in love, and when we became ourselves – surprise! – we were poison. We complete each other in the nastiest, ugliest possible way.”

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It's the same in Paula Hawkins' The Girl on a Train, where a woman who has seen her marriage disintegrate becomes obsessed with what she believes is a happily married couple. She has let herself go, becoming something she is so embarrassed by that she invents an alternative life for her friends--her job gone, her figure gone, she may well have committed a murder. But the only thing really dead in the book is the idea of a happy marriage where two people can be their real selves. Brrr. Yes that's the chill down my spine. “I am not the girl I used to be. I am no longer desirable, I’m off-putting in some way. It’s not just that I’ve put on weight, or that my face is puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it’s as if people can see the damage written all over me, can see it in my face, the way I hold myself, the way I move.” That, according to The Girl on a Train, is what marriage can do to you if you're not truthful to each other.

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And in Jessica Knoll's Luckiest Girl Alive, advertised charmingly as her perfect life was a perfect lie, the heroine, a survivor of a school shooting and gang rape, spends years trying to land the perfect husband in New York, till she JUST. CANNOT. LIVE. A. LIE. ANYMORE. As her heroine says, "By the end of it all I just assumed no one ever told the truth, and that was when I started lying too."

So what does that have to do with Indrani Bora Mukerjea? Everything. So much of modern marriage is about presenting our best selves to each other, that we don't quite remember who we were before we entered the relationship. But how long can the farce continue? Something gives, some time. Chidlren, carefully tucked away back home in Assam, turn up, want to be claimed, but cannot, and have to be presented to a new society as siblings. Husbands from another life, carefully set aside, are dug up by the media beast.

Parents, forgotten and forbidden to cramp the new style, are hounded.

Current husbands say they never really knew you, that they took your word for odd relationships, even odder disappearances.

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All that effort to be someone else, someone successful, someone better, find the perfect partner for a new life, and then how quickly it can all go south. So ask yourself tonight, do you really know your spouse? Or better still, ask Indrani and Peter. Who were they? And who have they become?

Last updated: August 27, 2015 | 12:27
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