TRACING SUNANDA PUSHKAR’S ENIGMATIC LIFE

Sunanda Mehta talks about her book "The Extraordinary Life and Death of Sunanda Pushkar"

Sunanda Mehta is a prolific journalist with over twenty-five years of experience, who divides her time between Pune and Mumbai. A graduate of Lady Shri Ram College for Women where she studied History, she also has degrees in Education and Journalism. From 2010 to 2017, she was Resident Editor of the Pune edition of The Indian Express, which made her the first woman editor of a national English daily in the city. She has recently come out with the book “The Extraordinary Life and Death of Sunanda Pushkar”, in which she has described about the enigmatic life and turbulent end of Sunanda Pushkar, drawing on material from personal archives, interviews and investigation across continents. Chirdeep Malhotra connected with the author on email for an exclusive interview, in which she talks about her latest book, her writing process for this biography, and the misconceptions about Sunanda Pushkar’s life that she hopes she has cleared with this book. Read on!



Please tell us more about yourself.

I have been a journalist for the last 30 years. Out of these 30, I worked for over 20 years with The Indian Express and was the Resident Editor of the Pune edition for seven years. Academically, I am a triple graduate, a gold medallist in History, a Chevening fellow and my short story was published by Penguin some years back in a collection of humorous short stories. “The Extraordinary Life and Death of Sunanda Pushkar” is my first book.



Can you tell our readers about your relationship and acquaintance with your namesake Sunanda Pushkar?

I knew her from school, as we studied in Convent of Jesus and Mary, Ambala. We were not thick friends as she was senior to me. In fact, she was my house captain so there was more awe than friendship. But 5-6 years later when I met her again in Jhansi, where both our fathers were posted, we became good friends. Though she was studying in Srinagar at that time, she would come down to Jhansi for her breaks and at that time we hung out together a lot. She would often be over at my home and we kept in touch for a couple of years after the Jhansi stint too. When I visited Srinagar in 1985, we spent a considerable time together. We lost touch thereafter, but I ran into her twice- once in Mumbai and once again in Pune, but those were short meetings. After she shot into limelight in 2010, I kept thinking I would reconnect with her someday but never got around to doing so, and then it was far too late.



The book “The Extraordinary Life and Death of Sunanda Pushkar” chronicles Sunanda Pushkar’s phenomenal life and her turbulent end. How did the idea of writing this book originate?

While I had always thought I would want to write a book someday, I had never really imagined this would be the one. This book happened more by chance than pure choice. I had written a detailed piece on ‘The Sunanda Pushkar I knew in our school days’ for The Indian Express after she passed away, since I used to know her well during school days. The piece elicited a lot of interest since this was a little-known facet of her life. Three years later, over a phone chat, a former college mate and fellow journalist suggested I do a book on her. Initially I wasn’t sure but encouraged by her, I wrote out a brief and sent it to literary agent Kanishka Gupta. Very soon Pan Macmillan wrote back to say they would be happy to back the project and I decided to go for it. What also contributed to my decision was the fact that I saw this as an extension of the work I had done as a journalist- of interviewing people, gathering facts and putting together a story in a readable, yet objective format. Also the subject was intriguing because the Sunanda I knew and the Sunanda the world seemed to know were two different people. I thought it would be good to provide the context to her life that few seemed to be aware of and most had in fact misconstrued. It was not as though I chose to write about a school mate- I chose to write about an unconventional woman who happened to be my school mate.



How was Sunanda Pushkar in her early life? How was her personality during school days?

As I said she was a very different person in her school days. Quiet, unassuming, reserved and a bit of a plain Jane. Academically she was bright, but would more or less keep to herself. She wore these long red threads in her ears typical of Kashmiri girls. But later when I met her again in Jhansi she had started to come into her own. She was by then studying at the Government College for Women in Srinagar and I guess that helped develop her personality. So she was this gawky teenager in Ambala and a gorgeous collegian in Jhansi.



How did you go about your research for the book? What were the challenges that you encountered?

Frankly the work and effort involved was quite humungous and often daunting too. As part of the research I had files made in soft and hard copy of almost all the material available in public domain on Sunanda- which was immense. I spent the first few months just reading it all and making notes and drawing up a list of people I needed to speak to (dividing them into family, friends, cops, lawyers, IPL officials, journalists, etc.) which came to a good 150. Of which half refused to speak!
But I was very fortunate that her family co-operated purely because they knew me from earlier times. I flew to Dubai to meet her son Shiv, who is such a mature and evolved young man. I met both her brothers too in India and talked to them about her early life- her childhood, youth, etc. I also obtained many old and precious photographs from the family album.
In this day and age of social media it was not difficult to trace her old school friends, especially since I hailed from the same school. I contacted many of them including the teachers who taught her and they spoke with me of their memories of her.
I was very sure the book must have at least 65-70 percent original first-hand information that is not available in public domain. Hence I decided to know more about her time in Canada as the information about her stay of about 5 years in Canada was a complete blank. I had just one contact of a friend there, and a couple of numbers given by Shiv. But every contact led me to another and I consider the Canada chapters in the book as the most fascinating and interesting ones.
By a stroke of luck and through a friend in the Indian Navy, I could trace her second husband Sujith’s sister and get valuable information about that part of her life. Otherwise there is hardly anything available on Sujith, who was probably the most important man in her life for her. I flew to Kochi to meet his sister for just an hour and then did another day trip to Thiruvananthapuram to meet the KIMS director only to get to the bottom of the Lupus mystery. There were other trips I made- to Chandigarh, Delhi and Goa in pursuit of interviews. Weeks were spent poring over the medical reports, the post mortem reports and other documents and extracting relevant information from them. Wherever the police was not forthcoming with information, which was almost always, I filed Right To Information applications. The difficulty was also about ensuring the veracity of all the information that I received, separating the truth from exaggerations, dispensing with whatever seemed devoid of substantial credibility.
The main obstacle though was the wall of silence that I encountered when I set out to do the interviews- many people refused to talk as they didn’t want to get involved in a controversial subject.



You have told Sunanda Pushkar’s story in a very humane way, though it is very easy to sensationalise her story, as media often does. How did you steer clear of this?

Both my publishers and I were very clear that we did not want to sensationalise this story. The intent was not to write a salacious or scandalous story but to document, with complete honesty and fairness, the life of an extraordinary woman as well as her untimely and mysterious death. We handled each page with kid gloves- analysed each quote, ensured all the information was backed by credible sources, checked and rechecked dates and timelines, had a number of legal readings done since the case is sub-judice, and exercised extreme discretion and sensitivity in using the information gathered. Everything written in the book is backed either by a credible source on record or extracted from information already there in the public domain. In fact, even the information in public domain has been closely scrutinized and not merely picked up and reproduced. There are no reckless conjectures or even insinuations. Anything that did not seem to have a ring of truth to it or seemed like salacious gossip was promptly dropped from the narrative.
Not to forget the very detailed and perceptive cross-checking done by Teesta Guha Sarkar, the book editor. We would agonize over every little detail to ensure that it was both factually correct and fitted into the narrative without sounding insensitive or inelegant. This is how almost every contentious issue in the book has been dealt with- on the basis of documents, verified facts or credible sources, with every quote double and triple checked. Incidentally the book also went through three legal readings.
I must add that I am really glad and grateful that this effort has been duly recognised as every review has appreciated the book’s respectful and non-judgmental tone, which is what we tried so hard for.



The book blurb quotes Shobha De “Some women marry the wrong man. This one married the wrong city”. Was Sunanda Pushkar really a misfit in Delhi’s society and political circles?

Absolutely. Because Delhi is a lot about pedigree and power and Sunanda was greeted with a lot of whispers and gossip about her Dubai background and the work she did- the small real estate empire she had built for herself, and her and Shashi Tharoor’s very diverse backgrounds and personalities. Sunanda was a spontaneous person who acted more with her heart than her head. She was also gregarious and warm. Most importantly she was a woman who refused to be like other politician’s wives.
To quote a passage from the book: “The conservative, contrived and complicated world of Indian politics in general and Delhi in particular had an axiomatic slot for politicians’ wives. There was a set mould they had to squeeze themselves into. They were rarely seen, almost never heard. Sunanda broke both these rules. Unapologetically. She was seen everywhere; spoke much louder than Shashi and commanded absolute attention at every soiree, from the exclusive dinners in Lutyens’ Delhi to the many book launches, movie premiers and fashion shows, where Shashi and Sunanda became absolute regulars.”
While she did make many friends in Delhi and carried herself with aplomb and confidence, deep down she craved the acceptance that Lutyen’s Delhi never quite accorded her.



You have said in an interview “I wanted to put some things straight about her life.” Which misconceptions about her life do you think you have managed to clear with this book?

Quite a few. For one, I have highlighted her life as a struggling single mother, as a responsible daughter and doting sister, as a warm friend- qualities people did not quite equate with her as they judged her merely on the basis of those three and a half years of her life as Mrs. Tharoor. The book shows a very different side of her personality too, rather than that of a socialite.
Then there are some factual errors that I’ve tried to correct. Like her age. When she died everyone put her age between 51-54, but she was just 49. Yet even after the book was published there were some who alleged that the book had got her age wrong. But I had this information from a number of sources. Her brother Ashish told me that she died five months short of her 50th birthday. Her son sent me a snapshot of her passport where her DOB was June 27, 1964 and her age was also put as 49 on the post mortem report. On top of it, as she was a year senior to me in school, so I myself could do that Math too.
Also a lot of details about her life in Dubai and Canada, and very importantly, the sequence of events leading up to her death have been detailed and put in a proper context.



Finally, any other literary projects that you’re presently working on?

Right now, I am still involved in the book’s promotion and attending literature festivals and book readings. It’s been a difficult and draining two-year long labour, researching and writing the book. So I will take a bit of a break and then embark on the next literary project.