Guwahati/Mumbai, Aug. 27: Indrani Mukerjea's a.k.a Pari's roller-coaster ride had begun sometime around 1982. That was the time she had fallen out with her parents and run away from home in Guwahati, her former classmates told The Telegraph today.

The Class X girl was, however, caught at Guwahati railway station and brought back home. One fallout of the episode was that she could not sit for the board exams from St Mary's School, the premier English-medium school for girls in Guwahati those days.

Indrani then appeared for the exams privately. "We know she didn't sit for the finals with us," said a former classmate.

(Assuming that Indrani did not spend any extra year in any class - other than the one year students in the state lost in the early 1980s because of the Assam agitation - the Class X story suggests that she is now at least 50. Indrani's son Mikhail has been saying his mother is in her fifties although reports from Mumbai had put her age in the early forties.)

Pari, now Indrani Mukerjea, is in police custody in Mumbai on the charge of murdering Sheena Bora, her daughter.

Some of the St Mary's alumni said Indrani was not the most popular of girls in their class. One described her as "someone you'd generally stay away from".

After Class X, Indrani had headed to Shillong and enrolled herself for a pre-university course at Lady Keane College, a well known institution in Meghalaya's capital.

It is in Shillong that she is believed to have met Siddhartha Das, who has been described as the father of Sheena and Mikhail although doubts exist whether he was fronting for someone else.

It is not known whether they were legally married but one family friend said that was the impression that the couple's behaviour conveyed. "A gorgeous girl who got married early" is how the family friend in Guwahati remembers Indrani. "She would move around with her husband in Guwahati on a Kinetic Honda, carrying her child, Sheena, who was then around two years old, on her lap."

The family friend said Indrani's "husband" mostly lived at her home. "Indrani's father Upendra Kumar Bora had helped them set up a small fast-food joint at Ganeshguri, near the capital (Dispur)," he said.

The family friend said: "The eatery flopped badly and had to be closed down after a few months. Pari then appeared for job interviews in some private companies here. I got to hear from a close neighbour that she simply disappeared without telling anybody anything, leaving behind her two children. Sheena must have been about three then. Indrani's parents then brought up both Sheena and her brother Mikhail."

In the nineties, Indrani moved to Calcutta and married Sanjeev Khanna, who has also been charged in the Sheena murder case. But the family friend in Guwahati said: "As for her marriage with Sanjeev Khanna in between, maybe 90 per cent of their neighbours and friends in Guwahati didn't know about it."

The family friend in Guwahati recalled: "In 2002, we came to know about her marriage with Peter Mukerjea. It was only after that, that she visited her house in Guwahati a couple of times."

But through her years of absence from Guwahati and the lives of her children, Indrani was never really completely out of touch with her mother Durga, a relative said.

"Upen was not her biological father. She was closer to Durga and would contact her once in a blue moon, but never her children. Neither did Durga encourage her to do so. In fact, Peter and Indrani's marriage was not a surprise for Durga, she seemed to know about him. But she did not know who he was till the marriage was splashed in the papers," the relative said.

In April 2002 - less than seven months before Peter married Indrani - the births of the children were registered, apparently afresh. Sheena was aged over 13 years then. Durga and Upen had put in their own names as parents of the children in the birth certificates.

"When they came to the school and submitted these freshly made birth certificates, we were surprised as the earlier records with the school showed Indrani as the kids' mother and Siddhartha Das as the father," said a former teacher of Guwahati's Disneyland school where the children studied. The school is now known as Sudarshan Public School.

"The kids called Durga and Upen ' aita (grandmother)' and 'koka' (grandfather) and we all knew them to be so. When we questioned them about these certificates, they said it was being done so that they do not face any embarrassing questions about their parentage later," said the teacher.

Indrani was going around with Peter at the time and got married to him later that year, in November 2002.