From the India Today archives (2014) | Sunanda Pushkar: A fairytale life and sudden end

Did she have a premonition? "I have, at the most, two years to live, so I need to speed it all up," she told friends at a beachfront villa in Goa even as she danced with characteristic abandon to ring in the New Year on December 31. Seventeen days later, Sunanda Pushkar, 51, the exuberant businesswoman from Dubai who refused to conform to Delhi's political etiquette, was gone, just as suddenly as she had arrived to stun the Capital's glitterati. The death, in a Delhi hotel suite on January 17, ostensibly caused by an accidental or deliberately administered overdose of sedative pills, was possibly instigated by a deep conviction that her husband was cheating on her. The mystery that now shrouds the events is decidedly contrary to a life lived uninhibitedly in the public eye.

Once celebrated as Delhi's 'dream couple', Sunanda and Union Minister of State for Human Resource Development Shashi Tharoor, who wed in August 2010, were clearly past their extended and widely publicised honeymoon by early 2013. She was increasingly distressed by the attention he showered on other women. "He looks deep into a woman's eyes while talking to her, blanking out everything else around, including me. It makes me feel like s***," an evidently troubled Sunanda, who was perhaps herself no stranger to the toxic relationships of Dubai's swish set, confided to a friend last September. She was upset most by Tharoor's friendship with Mehr Tarar, 45, a Lahore-based columnist who interviewed the minister in April last year and published an adulatory article comparing him to Shah Rukh Khan.

Convinced Tarar nursed more than a "professional" interest in her husband and that he reciprocated the sentiment, Sunanda told a friend that she had seen "CCTV footage of them together in a Dubai hotel". Fashion designer Bina Ramani, present at the New Year's Eve soiree at Vijay Mallya's Kingfisher villa near Calangute beach in Goa, also got the sense that something had "snapped" in what had been a loving relationship. "Usually a vivacious and ebullient woman, Sunanda seemed somewhat withdrawn," says Ramani, recalling that even Tharoor, who had specially flown in from Delhi to spend time with his wife, was not up to the festivities. "Twice that evening they stepped onto the dance floor," says the designer. But the magic just wasn't there.

The final straw for Sunanda was the chance discovery, on a flight from Thiruvananthapuram to Delhi on January 15, that Tharoor was still in touch with his Pakistani friend despite promising to end the liaison last July. "He had saved Tarar's number under the name 'Harish'," she told a friend who was witness to both their blossoming love and more recently, the near-complete erosion of trust.

"Sunanda flipped," the friend told INDIA TODAY confirming accounts of an angry showdown between the couple on the flight home to Delhi. According to the friend, "Shashi had put an end to the affair but Tarar was not willing to let go. Even Sunanda could make out from the exchange of messages on her husband's BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) that he was trying to distance himself. But she was completely devastated by the realisation that he had tried to deceive her by secretly keeping Tarar's number."

To many of their friends, however, the growing rift and Sunanda's anguish were not apparent at all. "All this sounds very odd to me," says former Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh, who met her at the airport in Goa on January 3. "There was nothing amiss. Sunanda was affectionate as always and mostly spoke about Shashi and their plans together," he says, adding that he was looking forward to having the couple over for dinner in the third week of January when they planned to visit her family in Patiala. "We even spoke about travelling to Bhutan together this summer," he says. Delhi-based lawyer Atul Nanda, who first met Sunanda and Tharoor at actor Feroze Khan's sister Dilshad Sheikh's 60th birthday celebrations in Srinagar last year, says, "They seemed so completely in love. One couldn't imagine there was room for anyone else in the relationship."

Ramani says that while she loved the sense of power that came with being a minister's wife, Sunanda had begun yearning for the glamorous life she had in Dubai before she met Tharoor. It became difficult for her to balance the two lives, say friends who were witness to increasing squabbles over Tharoor's reluctance to be seen at society events that he believed were unsuited to his career prospects as a politician. Ironically, Sunanda, the confident entrepreneur who unfailingly turned heads all the way from Dubai to Delhi and, in her own words, "never needed any man to get anything" for her, had reduced herself to an insecure woman desperately clutching to retain what she imagined were the fading affections of her man. It wasn't sustenance that Sunanda wanted from Tharoor. Her personal assets, duly listed on the PMO website, include 12 apartments in Dubai, one in Canada, real estate in Jammu, jewellery and designer watches worth Rs 7 crore and an equal sum in bank deposits. At last count, she was worth Rs 113 crore apart from an unevaluated sword, an artifact all the way from Mughal emperor Humayun's reign.

In April 2010, when her not-so-secret romance with Tharoor, then minister of state for external affairs, first became glaringly public amid allegations that she had received disproportionate sweat equity worth Rs 75 crore in the Indian Premier League (IPL) franchisee for the Kochi cricket team as his proxy, Sunanda had hit back. She surrendered the stake but vehemently asserted her independence as a working woman. "That's so insulting. Can't I make my own money?" she said in an interview to a weekly, likening the flurry of negative news reports to "a medieval witch hunt".

Four months later, she happily moved on to wed the by then out-of-job MP (Tharoor was forced to resign in the wake of the IPL allegations) at his family home in Elavanchery near Palakkad in Kerala. "I thought what everyone thinks when they meet him-he's so damn intelligent! I was impressed," Sunanda said in a TV interview two days after their wedding. She recalled the first time she set eyes on Tharoor at a party Dubai-based Malayali entrepreneur Sunny Varkey threw for him in June 2009 at his lavish villa on Emirates Hills, an exclusive gated community for millionaires which also houses Pakistan's Bhutto-Zardaris. Tharoor was on his first overseas visit soon after taking over as minister of state for external affairs.

Five months later, Sunanda had surfaced in the Omani capital Muscat. Tharoor, then still married to his former UN colleague Christa Giles, was there to attend a meeting. The two met at a hotel. They were like besotted lovers. Tharoor wound up at least one important meeting early to spend time with her. It was the start of a whirlwind courtship that would lead to Tharoor's divorce from Giles later that year.

The fairy tale had only just begun. To her, he was the incurable romantic who penned odes to her beauty. The good-looking, suave and eloquent Tharoor, who almost made it to the UN secretary general's office in 2007 and became a minister in the UPA Government in 2009, was clearly smitten, unabashedly breaking into Ricky Nelson love songs and old Bollywood numbers while holding her hand on national television.

They delighted many with what Sunanda happily described as their "PDA (public displays of affection)". But in the politically correct and hierarchy-obsessed capital, the couple also shocked an equal number. She was the outsider who laughed too loudly and shared too many intimacies. He was the prize catch, destined for greater prominence, a magnet for any ambitious social climber. When BJP leader Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi took a dig at them in 2012 stating that the UPA ought to consider making Tharoor in charge of a new 'ministry of love affairs', quick as ever on the draw, Sunanda retorted, "BJP leaders have nothing else to attack but love. If they were real men, they would raise issues." Days later, she also attacked Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi on virtually every news network after he described her as the "Rs 50-crore girlfriend". Asked if she expected the Gujarat Chief Minister to apologise, she said, "If he was the type to apologise, he would have apologised to his people for 2002", fearlessly stepping onto the unfamiliar terrain of politics.

It was almost too good to be real. Sunanda, who breezed through intensely masculine preserves in tourism, information technology and real estate across the Emirates and North America, had never been lucky in marriage. Barely 18 and still a student of economics at the Government College for Women located just off Lal Chowk on Srinagar's Maulana Azad Road, she got part-time employment as a hostess at The Centaur Lakeview, a state-owned hotel on Dal lake. Her first husband had all the requisite qualifications- a graduate from the Institute of Hotel Management, Catering and Nutrition at Pusa in Delhi, Sanjay Raina was a Kashmiri Hindu just like her and had a good job as Centaur's front-office manager to boot.

Their marriage in 1986 was Sunanda's first rebellion, defying the wishes of her Army officer father Col. Poshkar Nath Dass and quieter counsel of Jaya, her ever-discreet mother, who possibly equipped Sunanda with her obstinate genes. "Jaya Aunty was the eternal Kashmiri mom. She refused to learn Hindi because she was firm on going home to the Valley after most Kashmiri Pandits exited after 1989," says Rekha Sadhu Mattoo, the daughter of a family friend who spent part of her childhood in awe of Sunanda.

Always proud of her capacity to "pick up and put the pieces back together", three years after parting ways with Raina, she married his Malayali businessman friend Sujit Menon in 1991, two years after she moved to Dubai. "He gave me strength, as a friend, to quit a very painful marriage," she said in an interview trying desperately to set the record straight in the wake of the Kochi IPL allegations in the summer of 2010. In November 1992, Menon gave Sunanda her only enduring joy-their son Shiv. But this marriage too was doomed. Five years on, even as their boy had turned four, Sujit was killed in a car crash in Delhi's Karol Bagh in March 1997 amid speculation of depression and suicide. Rejecting all the suicide theories, she did however admit that her husband "had run into some financial trouble".

Now 21 and combating a speaking disorder he developed after his father died, Shiv Pushkar Menon was his mother's absolute focus to the exclusion of everything else. Her migration to Canada in the late 1990s, forsaking the familiarity of the Emirates, was essentially to get him the best available medical help at the time. More recently, she confessed to MAIL TODAY at IIFA 2011 that she wanted the glamorous world of Bollywood for her boy rather that the academic pursuits of his adoptive dad.

She actively befriended film stars and directors in Mumbai and even got Shiv enrolled in Anupam Kher's acting school in the hope of helping him make it in films. He misses her the most. "She was an angel. She didn't belong here. She is in a cleaner place now and looking upon us with a smile," Shiv said, his eyes brimming with tears at a solemn memorial service on the gardens of Tharoor's Lodhi Estate residence on January 20, two days after he lit her pyre.

Contrary to some news reports, Shiv appears to have made his peace with the belief that Tharoor was not responsible for his mother's death. In a statement issued on the day doctors at Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences attributed the demise to "poisoning", he blamed "media stress, tensions and a wrong mix of different medication" for his great personal tragedy. "Anyone who knew my mother knew that she was too strong to commit suicide," he said, adding that his stepfather was "incapable of harming her".

In a TV interview two years ago Sunanda Pushkar had said: "Two people are in a marriage because they understand and respect each other. It shouldn't be a one-way street... it wouldn't last." It didn't.

—With Sandeep Unnithan

(The article was published in the INDIA TODAY edition dated February 3, 2014)

Subscribe to India Today Magazine