How we pour our poison into the lives of our children
What happens when a mother strangulates her daughter in a car with the help of her ex-husband and driver? Your dwindling faith in the goodness of humanity takes another dive. What crime could the child have committed that could have surpassed the ignobility of the life meted out by such parents to her anyway? Was it "family honour" that was "worth killing for"?
Such real life thrillers, dotting the social milieu, are making it hard for an average mother who adores her children. Such a mother’s soul must be shrinking every time she sees the beautiful face of a smiling Aarushi flash on the television screen, years after the innocent child is gone.
The moot point: who is failing here? Society in general, or parents in particular? Salman Rushdie has written that children are the vessels into which we adults pour our poison. Are we becoming a human-eat-human society, where we would consume our own offspring to cover up our unabated hunger for power, money, lust or still unheard of motives? As far as I know, only some bears and felines devoured their own progeny. What have we come to?
In Indrani Mukherjea’s case, the story of the parents failing does not start with Indrani who made her children live a fake life to hide her follies. It actually starts with Indrani’s parents who could not rise up to their responsibility and influence their daughter to live a life that was “free” and bereft of deceit. The indifference of a husband to matters so crucial in a wife’s life (some call it giving space), a brother who did not care about the whereabouts of his sister and maybe even the boyfriend who was mutely accepting of the sudden disappearance.
Nobody should have a problem with the number of times Indrani married or did not marry; one wishes if she would only have had the courage to be truthful about all her relationships. It would have taken less courage to own up to them than to allegedly kill her daughter and burn her body. Or would it?