Leena Yadav on her critically-acclaimed documentary House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths

Families that eat together, pray together or celebrate together — we are told — stay together. The Chundawats were a picture of this harmony. That was until one day when all the 11 members of the family — including the octogenarian matriarch, two sons, their wives, a widowed daughter and their children — were found dead at their Burari home in Delhi. They had all hanged themselves to death. The CCTV footage showed that no outsider had entered the house, but the members themselves had been preparing for what seemed to be a ritual. Were they actually heeding to the call of a cult? That seemed to be the easy answer — one that was repeatedly dramatised on primetime news — till such time a diary was discovered that offered another picture of the family. House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths reconstructs as well as deconstructs the family that everyone had deemed perfect. Rigorous research, nuanced storytelling and exploration of the case from various prisms (gender, mental health, class, media representation) have already earned the Netflix documentary high praise from all quarters. In an interview with wknd., co-director Leena Yadav talks about peeling off the layers to unearth the real tragedy of the Chundawat family.

What about the subject drew you in?

What got my attention was the fact that I didn’t get answers. I just knew that there was a lot that remained hidden. Take, for example, this whole idea of a perfect family. Everybody said they were just perfect. Even when we are praising someone, we say he is an amazing guy but is short-tempered. You need that kind of mild criticism to humanise someone. But this family was just perfect. It just felt like there was something more to the story. Also, I was intrigued by this whole thing about us giving people greater respect when they are dead; suddenly, they become even more perfect.

The great aspect of the documentary is how it explores various possibilities. Viewers often tend to like definite answers. As a documentarian, did you ever feel overly pressured to find pieces of the missing puzzle?

I wanted to know so many more things and wanted to investigate every angle. I did not want to come up with 50,000 answers. I wanted to deal with what we already knew — and delve further into it. Once you get to know the story of the family and what really happened, that itself gave a lot to dissect. It led us to some very interesting journeys, which have made their way into the documentary.

You draw an intimate portrait of a family. Is the story of the Burari deaths also an indictment of the Indian middle class?

Totally. As an artiste, it is important for me to take the judgment out of storytelling. So, even if someone is the villain of the story, I’d like to understand his mind. I related to so many things in this story. For example, the lengths to which we go to put up a front. Growing up, I would think everyone else had it easy because they looked happy, while I had it tough. That’s the extent to which we put up appearances. That’s why, when I see the most perfect projection of people, I know there’s more inside. Our inner and outer worlds are much more demarcated than people living in other parts of the world. We wear a very different face on the outside. That is something we need to break. In India, people find it so difficult to talk about mental health. We have probably learnt to say mental health is important, but do we really practise it in our own households? Are we able to tell each other that you need therapy?

What kind of role does class play in conversations on mental health?

In India, we cannot generalise on anything. I have seen upper class, educated people being just as uncomfortable talking about it. We cannot have a blanket rule for anything.

Lalit comes across as an impenetrable figure. Even people who have known him only offer snatches of what he could have been like. But he is your principal protagonist. How difficult was it for you to get into his mind?

This was something we realised during the process of doing interviews. He comes across as someone who actually no one knew completely. They only had pieces of him. Analysing what his journey could have been gave us various perspectives. The accidents he’d had went totally unaddressed. The first thing we tend to do in our families is not talk about uncomfortable things. Even in Lalit’s case, his friend says, “Mummyji said no one will talk about the accidents because it bothers Lalit.” When we interviewed the family in Indore, I questioned my sensitivity so many times because those were difficult to do. It’s like telling someone, I know you have a wound, can I scratch it? That’s what we were doing. And because there was a cult angle given to the story, people actually asked them, “Oh, your family used to follow a cult?” This shut them further. The family in Indore thanked us because they thought it was a huge burden off their chest.

Which character were you most fascinated with?

anamika@khaleejtimes.com