What to watch on Netflix | Buried Truth uncovers ‘real’ Indrani Mukerjea

Directed by Uraaz Bahl and Shaana Levy, four-part series Bitter Truth dropped on Netflix on February 29, 2024. (Screen grab/Bitter Truth trailer/Netflix India)

Like many contemporary crime dramas, docuseries The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth is based on an unfinished story. The verdict is not yet out, the guilty have not been sentenced – and yet here is a summing up with interviews, actual phone recordings and recreated scenes on the small screen. Even though the series takes care to present, and not judge, the real events when sequenced in a particular way do take a certain stand. Events unfold as they perhaps did – or did not. No one really knows the truth.

Directed by Uraaz Bahl and Shaana Levy, this four-part series dropped on Netflix recently, exciting all those interested in the bizarreness of the case – Indrani Mukerjea was arrested and jailed for allegedly killing her sister, who turned out to be her daughter, who she says in her memoir Unbroken is actually the result of a rape by her own father. Nothing about the case’s timeline is in Indrani’s favour. No one has seen Sheena after Indrani met her on April 24, 2012. At the age of 25, a girl simply vanished off the Earth!

As a crime series, Buried Truth is open-ended. There is no satisfactory closure, but then that could be a possibility only after a judgment is out, and the villains and vamp neatly named. As of now, there is only the carefully put together collage of what we already read about but never got to see in one place. Indrani’s youngest daughter Vidhie faces the camera with confidence and self-awareness; she even candidly mentions a suicide attempt. Rahul – Indrani’s stepson and Sheena’s fiancé – is a voice, a very insistent one, demanding again and again to know where Sheena is. To Indrani’s claim that Sheena has broken off with him and gone to the US on a whim, he only says that the latter’s passport is with him.

The series reiterates the key points of the headlines that once gripped the nation with its attention to sleaze and scandal among the rich and mighty. But in doing so, a narrative starts to emerge. Of greed, family politics and power play. Of short cuts, social climbing and overconfidence. Indrani, who was arrested along with her driver Shyamvar Rai (the first to divulge details of the ‘killing’ after he turned approver), ex-husbands Sanjeev Khanna and Peter Mukerjea, was the only one among them to agree to be interviewed for this. Vidhie and the journalists, including Rajeev Sardesai and Kaveree Bamzai, speak well in their allotted slots, but Indrani and her lawyer are shot before the camera officially starts to roll, so that they are caught off-guard in a way that is rarely flattering.

If anyone had any doubt about Indrani’s culpability, this four-part series pretty much paints a damning picture. She may keep saying Sheena has been sighted here and there, and that Sheena is a ‘naughty girl’, but the lack of visible maternal feelings on her face works against her. That and the smile.

Things don’t look good for Indrani. They never did, and now more so.