M For Macabre:
A man kills his wife by burying her alive, and till he is caught, he literally dances on her grave at parties he hosts. This ghoulish image gave the title to the true crime series, directed by Patrick Graham, that Amazon Prime has introduced, following the interest in Netflix’s Indian Predator docu series.
To grab eyeballs, the case chosen has to have an element of sensationalism which this one did, becoming the talk of Bangalore in the 1990s, as much for the crime committed as for what preceded it. Shakereh Khaleeli nee Namazie, belonged to a wealthy, aristocratic, privileged family and was married to an IFS officer, Akbar Khaleeli, with whom she had four daughters.
Since her husband was out of the country a lot, perhaps loneliness or the deep-seated desire to have a male child made Shakereh fall into the clutches of a godman, Swami Shradhanand aka Murli Manohar Mishra. It must have shocked high society in Bangalore that a rich, beautiful and sophisticated woman, divorced her husband and married a man much below her status. Which is what her friends and relatives say, in their interviews, still holding vestiges of outrage that this unworthy man carried away their princess.
When she vanished, Mishra kept lying about her being abroad, till one of her daughters, Sabah (the only one who participates in the series), finally filed a missing person’s report. The case was cursorily investigated and years passed before Sabah’s tantrum outside the police station led to the cops seriously looking into Shakereh’s disappearance and finding her body buried in the courtyard of her own house, located in a posh locality in the heart of Bangalore. A dramatic case and death sentence, followed by appeals, and Mishra found himself incarcerated for life, proclaiming his innocence. His confession, he maintained, was obtained by torture. He claimed that he found Shakereh dead in their home, and for fear of what her family might do, quietly buried her. That did not, however, explain the nail marks on the inside of the box in which was buried, nor the sheer morbidity of going on living in the house and partying over her grave. There was also the matter of him appropriating her property and emptying out her bank accounts.
The team of Dancing On The Grave has managed interviews with the cops, lawyers, journalists involved with the case, plus some members of her family and circle of friends. The scoop is getting the perpetrator to speak on camera– now he is a sad old man, living with no hope of ever getting out of prison and pleading for mercy. Shakereh Khaleeli’s exhumed body was not even allowed a proper burial in a Muslim graveyard, on account of her transgression in marrying outside her religion.
Along with the very articulate interviewees, the four-part series uses photographs, archival footage, news clips and reenactments of key scenes using blurry images of actors and slick editing. Still, there is a lurking suspicion that the series intends to introduce a seed of doubt in the mind of the viewer—was Mishra guilty or a victim of upper class snobbery, and media scandal-mongering.
The case, though hazy in the minds of those who may have followed it when it happened, has so many elements—romance, seduction, deception, treachery, murder—that it is just begging to be turned into a fiction web series, if not a movie.
(This piece first appeared in seniorstoday.in)
