Mother kills, chills nation: Who is Suchana Seth, Bangalore CEO arrested for killing 4-year-old son

Suchana Seth's social media describe her as CEO of The Mindful AI Lab. (Source: X/@suchanaseth)

A woman killing a child has sent shockwaves across the country for various reasons, the main being that the murderer is the mother. First, the details. The victim was four years old, his parents were separated, his father got weekend visitation rights… None of it the boy’s fault. Death by strangulation or suffocation in a service apartment in Goa, body kept for 36 hours till it was packed into a suitcase and loaded into a cab for a cross-country drive to Bangalore.

The rest – how Suchana Seth was caught – reads like a whodunnit. After the cleaners found bloodied towels, they alerted the police. Her cabbie, guided by the police, drove her to a police station. They found the boy in the box. Now Suchana is a household name. We know where she studied, where she works, whom she married, when they filed for divorce. It is even said she is only a self-claimed CEO of a company, that there is no such firm. We are looking into her past and claiming to find patterns.

Was it post-partum depression, mental health issues, sudden despair – people are debating this furiously. A Bengali married to a Malayalee… hmmm. Filed for divorce, main custody of child with the mother. Gender activists are studying the general attitudes in legal separations: custody grants of minors and visitation rights favouring one parent over the other. One pays the bills, one gets to…kill?

There are many shock factors here. The murder itself. The murderer being a murderess. The actions after the murder. No one can get over the image of her sitting with the body – 36 hours, we are told – for so long and then stuffing it into a bag. Many are hoping that she did it when he was sleeping, that it was over fast, that he didn’t suffer too much. Others are hoping a Netflix documentary will soon shed light on it all. And before that of course the book.

For the media, which is supplying us with the gory details on a loop along with animated visuals of what could have happened, it is about putting in overtime. When the same news is being telecast by all channels, how to stand out? With shrillness, reiterations, evoking much drama and disgust, they are competing with each other to point out the most heinous part of the crime.

That the mother tried to commit suicide – which accounts for all the blood on the floor and towels – is overcast by the fact that she did not succeed. If she had, we would have another kind of news. Some say what about Gaza then, where children are being massacred. The baby clothes in Auschwitz camps... A murder like this steers us into subjective ruminations of our own.

For the little boy who was killed far away from his home, it was a personal tragedy that affected him the most. He who could have lived to dream, play, study, grow old is now no more.