Who killed the Kabuliwalah's Bengali wife?

Mini: Kabuliwalah, O Kabuliwalah, what is inside your satchel?

Rehmat: An elephant!

That little snatch of conversation is from Rabindranath Tagore’s short story, Kabuliwalah. The story of the relationship of a little Bengali girl with a burly Pathan money-lender: a tender, hot-headed man; a father who missed his child; a murderer. If anyone could carry an elephant around in a satchel, Rehmat could. Besides, ‘a Kalashnikov’, would have been a truly outlandish answer at the time.

Sushmita Banerjee, better known in Kolkata as Kabuliwalar Bangali Bou (A Kabuliwala’s Bengali Wife, the bestselling novel she wrote in the late 1990s), was perforated by bullets from AK-47s last week in Sharana, the capital of Afghanistan’s Paktika province. As yet, no one quite knows who murdered her, or why. Information that has come in after the crime reveals more about the victim than about her assassins. And one thought is inescapable: Sushmita Banerjee was the kind of person who would believe that an elephant could indeed be hidden in a bag.

Her story begins in the late ’80s in Calcutta. There, she met the strapping Jaanbaz, one of a couple of thousand Afghan money-lenders who ply their trade in cash and nuts in the city. These men are accepted as traditional curiosities: in season, they add colour to a town that has always craved it. But they aren’t exactly the type Bengalis would seek in the matrimonial section. Congenitally adventurous, Sushmita overcame the resistance she faced and married Jaanbaz. He took her to Afghanistan, where she discovered he had another wife.

Imprisoned behind the bars of a culture she didn’t quite understand, she tried to make the best of her circumstances. But these changed dramatically when Jaanbaz returned to India shortly afterward, leaving her behind with his family. And then, the Taliban arrived.

Sushmita planned her escape, and finally managed to flee, after several attempts, she says. But her own version of events differs dramatically in different retellings. In her book, she writes she grabbed a Kalashnikov off a wall as her Taliban executioners (15 men) gathered to pray having kept their weapons in the courtyard, and got out alive. In an article in Outlook, she writes that she was arrested and interrogated, but managed to convince her captors that she had the right to leave. They took her to the Indian embassy in Islamabad.

Once back in India she was reunited with her husband and embarked on a literary career. Her description of Afghan society (women were treated as ‘baby making machines’ and so on) would not have gone down very well with the Taliban, but her books sold. However, from all accounts, she was always in deep financial trouble. Acquaintances say her rented flat was without electricity for months just before she left for Afghanistan again in January.

Once there, she found her husband in another relationship: this time with his recently deceased brother’s wife. Sushmita escaped once again, this time to play ‘Second Life’, but with real people in it. In July, she made a trip to India thinking she had won a 13 crore prize on the internet (a scam she couldn’t see).

She entered into a virtual relationship with a married Delhi man on Facebook (and even set a date for a September wedding). On 6 September, she told friends that she would be back in India to work out a business deal.

Two people, allegedly with links to the Haqqani network have been arrested in connection with the murder. But this wasn’t a Taliban-style execution. It seems much more about the Kalashnikov in the Kabuliwalah’s satchel. The government of India should use the considerable leverage it has in Afghanistan to get to the truth about what happened to one of its citizens — even if it doesn’t have a great bearing on geopolitics.

In Tagore’s story, Rehmat’s refrain was to ask little Mini: “Won’t you go to your in-laws?” Sushmita did, for a second time. That may have been a bigger mistake than writing about the Taliban.

The writer is an author, journalist and consultant editor with dna