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Girl, Intercepted
Indrani Bora nee Khanna came into the limelight like a bolt from the blue after her marriage to Peter Mukerjea. The couple left no stones unturned to project their compatibility and happiness to the world. Indrani’s Facebook page screams, “Here look at us, the very happy and young-at-heart couple.’
However, what is missing from her page is images from her past. The only one that Tehelka could manage was from her school days at St. Mary’s , Guwahati. She stands neatly dressed girl with her other classmates and poses rather formally for a class photograph.
Another alumnus two years her senior at school, Shrutimala Duara, now a lecturer and writer from Guwahati, remembers her as an extremely quiet girl. “In our school and especially our batch, we were very friendly with our juniors. But Indrani never liked to mingle; she kept to herself all the time. As far as I remember her, she was anything but fun-loving or naughty like one is at that age.”
From a quiet loner, Indrani surely changed to the extent of defying social norms when she decided to have a live-in relationship with a local boy, Siddharth Das. Duara adds, “Sidharth, we knew, stayed rather close to the school.”
Tehelka managed to speak to Sidharth’s younger brother , Shantanu. After some initial hesitation, he opened up and shared his thoughts on Indrani. “I was quite a kid when I first met her, but our entire family was struck by her style and up-beat ways.”
What exactly did he mean by style? “Well, she wore expensive clothes, was always made-up and spent a lot of time on [grooming] herself. She surely was very ambitious. She may have left my brother as her materialistic needs were much more than he could afford.”
Shantanu also confirmed that Sheena was Indrani and Sidharth’s daughter. “I had seen Sheena only once, when she was about six months old and then I see her on TV these days. This is shocking news to all of us at Karimgunj”, he adds.
Indrani and Sidharth, according to Shantanu, barely spent any time at their ancestral home in Karimganj. “They were living in Shillong. Indrani barely had anything to do with the family.”
Ratul, another acquaintance of Indrani’s from her earlier years, says he barely remembers her. “She did visit the town some 10 years back, I hear. Sure enough, Indrani has brought one small town at the extreme end of the country into the news, but in such a shameful way. We here feel so ashamed of what we see and hear of her on the TV these days,”
As far as her ambition to be ‘rich and famous’ goes, a friend of Sanjeev Khanna too shared his thoughts on condition of anonymity. This gentleman says, “Sanju was never into betting on horse races or crazy about being with the rich and famous of the city — till Indrani came into his life”.
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