House Of Secrets:The Burari Deaths(Netflix , 3 Parts)
Directed by Leena Yadav & Anubhav Chopra
Rating: ***
There is plenty happening at any given time in this 3-part exploration of the anatomy of self-annihilation.
It happened on 30 June 2018. 11 members of one family in a locality known as Burari in Delhi committed mass suicide. How could so many members of the same family agree to end their lives simultaneously?
Leena Yadav and her co-director Anubhav Chopra have constructed what can be called a whydunnit. Because we all know whodunit. That leaves us with the question of why the family chose to end its life so suddenly? What was the impetus for this self-inflicted brutality?
“I don’t think anyone has seen such a crime scene in his life,” brags station officer, cop Manoj Kumar as his subordinate Naresh Bhatia concurs. Kumar was the first cop to reach the scene of the crime. That is perceived by him as some kind of an achievement.
I was quite taken aback to see Mr Manoj Kumar laughing as he recollected the gruesome tragedy in all its gory details… how the bodies were hanging like tendons from an ancient banyan tree…Cut to a live tree with the eerily swinging tendons.
The docuseries for all its incontrovertible integrity, cannot help giving into literal renditions of the real-life crime just to ensure everyone’s watching and getting the point.We don’t want this documentary to suffer the fate of its ilk.
When I heard Barkha Dutt talking about how the crime was subverted in the media to indicate a salacious underbelly to what was the most horrific self-inflicted crime Delhi has ever seen, I wasn’t impressed by her self righteous indignance.
To the docuseries’ credit, it attempts to cut through the hysteria hype and bullshit to try and get close to the doomed family by talking to neighbours relatives and friends.I specially liked the interview with the Sardar boy from the neighbour who was very attached to a daughter of the Bhatia family.
If the truth be told, only his emotional response seemed genuine. The rest of the neighbours, cops and media persons seemed to lose a grip on the sheer barbarism of the act and were busy replicating rather than feeling the grief.
The docuseries doesn’t try to take away the sting from crime.What ever get to know of the snuffed-out family when they were alive is frightening in how “normal” they were in their everyday conduct. Sure the second-eldest son Lalit had suffered a traumatic physical assault where he was almost killed. But did that incident scar him from life. How did a family collectively decide to end its life without anyone saying, “No,I’ve got more to live for?”