India

by Patrick French

  Liberal, urban India, the face foreigners often see, is held up by an edifice of staff. A while ago I was dining with an eminent communist in Delhi and found he had sent for his cook from his home town by train for the evening—a journey of around forty-eight hours—rather than risk having his dinner party spoilt by a replacement chef. It is not unheard of to be having a conversation about, say, the evils of colonialism or child labour, and realize midstream that your interlocutor is serving you a cup of tea via the hand of a fourteen-year-old servant. In another house, a boy of ten is spoon-fed apple pie by a member of staff, not because he cannot do it himself but because he is tired after a tuition class and sees nothing strange about being treated like a little prince. A girl of sixteen will order her maid to serve every last item on to her plate, and even to squirt the tomato ketchup on the side. Then, midway through the solo meal, she will shout: “Replace it! It’s cold!” or “Bring me more ice!” During an evening in Mumbai a while back, the host, a normally affable person, interrupted our dinner to shout across a roomful of people at his elderly uniformed bearer or butler: “Narayan, why the hell are you looking at me? Don’t you look at me.” And Narayan, in his white turban, turned his face away.

  The relationship between servants and employers can be cruel, but equally it can be a happy one, the richer party contributing towards the cost of family weddings and even paying for the education of children, the encounter leading in some cases to the offspring of the poorer party joining the professions themselves and employing staff in turn. In some houses, the servants are wholly integrated into the life of the home, and it is like a successful and friendly working collaboration, with everyone having their own assigned role. Servants sometimes live in quarters attached to the houses of the better-off or in lodgings constructed on the roof, with men and women in segregated dormitory-type rooms. In some residences, they nest in storerooms or alcoves. I came down in the morning while staying in one house (though this was in truth in Dhaka, which stopped being Indian in 1947) to find two servants asleep on blankets on the kitchen floor, and a third sleeping in the tight little corridor leading to the kitchen. They had their home villages, miles away, but this floor was now their accommodation.

  Since the cost of employing servants is low, staff will not usually be there to demonstrate wealth, only to make a certain form of living easier. Those with a social conscience might keep the servant-employer ratio at 1:1, so that a couple with one child may have a cook, a cleaner and perhaps a driver. The ratio will sometimes be closer to 3:1 or 4:1. So a wealthy couple with one child might have a driver each, a pair of rotating security guards, a cook, assistant cook, maid, laundry maid, cleaner, ayah and gardener. In extended families, the servants will form a complete shadow world. A cook told me he had worked for a joint family of forty members, with constant counter-instructions coming to the servants from brothers, aunts and feuding sisters-in-law; his sole job had been “atta cook”—making things out of flour like chapattis, puris and paranthas. In one Nagpur family, a rich young woman was preceded wherever she went by a maid of about her own age. “We’re just like sisters,” she said. But would your sister sit on the floor beside you and press your feet and rub them with oil while you chat away to your friends, some of them carrying bags that cost exactly twice the maid’s annual salary? When travelling abroad, these practices can cause complications. A drinks distributor who went on a free trip to the Swiss resort of Interlaken was shocked to find he could not treat the staff at his hotel like his household servants back home. Grabbing a young receptionist by the collar when his demand for fresh towels was not met late in the evening, he was disconcerted when the man called the police. “He was scared stiff when they took his fingerprints,” the tour escort reported later, gleefully. “He behaved perfectly after that.”6

  Servants are everywhere, even when they are doing their best to disappear. A maid on a stairway will press herself against the wall in a way that is so self-effacing she might not be there. An old man takes his belly for a walk in a park, tailed by a phone-carrying attendant, who is doing nothing but being present in order to show his master’s connectivity. In DLF Emporio, a Delhi mall which has Jimmy Choo, Rohit Bal, Just Cavalli, Salvatore Ferragamo, Tod’s and all the rest, you can see maids and ayahs gathered by the fountains, waiting. In restaurants you can see them seated on benches near the entrance, dandling infants, and you can sometimes see the ayahs disappear with their charges into the bathroom, for fear the child’s noise might disturb the parents. The omnipresence of dispensable servants, seen through doors you may not pass through, makes a certain kind of existence possible. Servants fetch, carry, polish, iron, sweep, wash, shop, fix; they are slimmer and darker than their employers; they look childlike but profoundly adult, as if they have had to work like adults since they were children. They move without assurance, and the expectation is that they will always be there, to facilitate a certain way of life.

  As family structures that have been in place in India for centuries alter and fracture, and social mobility increases, household arrangements are changing. People complain it is impossible to recruit a reliable maid, and that word-of-mouth recommendation no longer works. Home loans are making it feasible for couples to set up independent households in a way they could not have done a generation ago. In the 1980s, if you wanted a home loan you had to open a bank account and pay in a monthly sum for an agreed term before the bank manager became convinced you had the “savings habit” and would process the application. From 2002, banks began to sell mortgages more vigorously, with loans of up to 100 percent of the value of the property, using floating interest rates. Demand grew, and most of the borrowers were young. Residential property was becoming more affordable than ever: in 2006 a house in a Mumbai suburb typically cost five times a person’s annual income, as against twenty-two times in the mid-1990s.7 As more people moved to two- or three-bedroom apartments, building developments and new towns and cities sprang up across India.

  With the different housing arrangements came a fresh demand for servants, who were demanding higher wages. The spread of smaller households meant it could no longer be assumed that a member of the extended family would always be present to keep an eye on the various members of staff. Often people found themselves employing servants who had come from far away—from the south to the north, or from the north to the south. In some cases they had come from outside India’s borders. Despite new forms of technology and communication, the practical mechanisms to check who they were, and whether they were trustworthy, did not exist. For Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, a middle-class couple who employed a cook and a maid, the lack of knowledge about the people in their home was to destroy their lives—aided and exacerbated by the administrative dystopia of the state of Uttar Pradesh.

  Their daughter, Aarushi Talwar, was murdered in her bedroom on the night of 15 May 2008. She was a few days short of her fourteenth birthday, a star student at Delhi Public School in Noida, a talented dancer and a keen reader. She had suffered stab wounds to her head and neck. The story of what happened to Aarushi, as reported by a voracious media over the two days following her death, was presented as a salutary tale for every middle-class Indian parent.

  It was presumed her killer was Hemraj Banjade, a Nepali household servant who had drunk most of a bottle of whisky, broken into Aarushi’s bedroom, assaulted and murdered her. He was missing, and a cash reward of Rs20,000 was offered for news leading to his capture. The killing was said to have been done with a khukri, a curved Gurkha knife. In the words of one report, the case was “an eye-opener to the vulnerability of Indian homes and the murderous tendencies of the domestic servants.” It listed examples of respectable families who had been attacked by their own staff: a child slain by a driver, an old woman killed by a greedy maid. The moral, according to the author of this article, was that police verification of a new servant’s identity was essential and that “domestic servants are exposed to temptation when the dwellers talk of money or jewellery or o
ther financial secrets in their presence.”8 The fact Hemraj came from Nepal was an additional lesson, since north India had many Nepalese household workers, and there was a porous border between the two countries.

  The Talwars lived in a second-floor apartment in a housing colony populated largely by naval and air force families in the “green city” of Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi. Aarushi’s parents were both successful dentists in their mid-forties, and had met and fallen in love at medical school. Her mother, Nupur, was an orthodontist, and her father, Rajesh, was a dental surgeon. Aarushi’s maternal grandparents lived nearby. In the family photographs and video clips that were shown by the media, they appeared to have been a particularly happy unit—the mother, father and only child. As television channels broadcast and rebroadcast their story, the Talwars looked like everyfamily, the one that had suffered the inconceivable fate other families feared. Viewers of the rolling news could watch mother and daughter holding parrots at a bird park, father and daughter playing by a swimming pool, Aarushi dancing with her school friends and flicking her hair shyly when she saw she was being filmed. Her distraught friends set up a page on Facebook: “R.I.P. Aarushi.”

  The Talwars were, before their tragedy, the successful family next door. Instead of one of the parents being a popular dentist, they both were. Instead of having a child who did all right at school, they had a pretty daughter who topped 90 percent in her exams. Their home, Noida (New Okhla Industrial Development Authority), was an aspirational city that had been planned sector by sector for a modern middle-class lifestyle. Noida had a huge mall called The Great India Place, several new metro stations connecting to Delhi, and restaurants like Domino’s and Papa John’s. It was full of children, many of them slipping in and out of tuition centres after school and going gaming at Future Zone, or playing pool or table tennis at the many kids’ clubs.

  Aarushi’s body was found by her parents on a Friday morning. “Rajesh started shouting and screaming,” her mother, Nupur, said later. “The maid came and called some neighbours, and the police came. The police were fine then. They were so certain about what had happened that the senior officer said, ‘It’s an open-and-shut case. The servant has done this. Send a team to the housing colony where the Nepalis live, send a team to the railway station and send a team to Nepal to his village, to see if he’s gone there.’ I was senseless, I couldn’t cry or scream. I was inanimate, like a stone. People were in and out of the place: police, neighbours, relatives, onlookers, the media. There must have been a hundred people in our home that morning.”9

  The next afternoon, a retired police officer who lived nearby came to pay his condolences. In India, after a death, a house will fill with friends, neighbours, acquaintances and family, all come to pay their respects. Diyas—burning wicks floating in bowls of oil—will be set in front of garlanded pictures of the deceased. In this case, the officer appears to have been just plain curious, or ghoulish, since the Talwars did not know him and they were not at the apartment when he visited. He found his training taking over while he was there: he reconstructed the sequence of the crime and noticed bloody marks in unexpected places. It seemed to him something was wrong. “I checked Hemraj’s room and the bathroom and then noticed the bloodstains on the stairs leading to the terrace,” he said later. “When I reached the door, I saw that it was locked and then I broke open the door [with the assistance of the police] and found Hemraj’s body lying in a pool of blood on the floor. He had a slit mark on his throat and many injury marks on his body. His body was severely decomposed.”10 Hemraj Banjade, the servant, had been lying dead on the roof terrace in the scorching summer sun for almost two days, and the police had failed to notice.

  Once again, reporters and film crews from Delhi were swarming around the property: a faithless servant had become a murder victim, and a tragedy had become a mystery. The country grew riveted by the case. It was a growing media obsession, and everyone became an expert, with their own explanation of the double homicide. Endless theories were constructed as to what might have happened. Since there was no sign of forced entry, the presumption was that Hemraj had known his killer or killers. There seemed two likely explanations. The first was that Hemraj had been trying to protect Aarushi and been killed for his pains. The second was that Aarushi had seen somebody attacking Hemraj and been killed as a witness.

  The pressure on the Noida police to solve the case was intense. They had to find the murderer, and fast. Their failure to investigate or even to secure the crime scene the previous day was a shocking demonstration of incompetence. It became known the police had allowed the media and even passers-by to enter the Talwars’ apartment after Aarushi’s body was found. All forensic evidence had been compromised or destroyed, leaving them with no leads. They were assailed by questions: Why had they not bothered to check the terrace? How could they have bungled so badly? Two years earlier, the Noida police had been in the news for failing to detect a serial killer who was murdering children, and now they needed to get a quick result if senior officers were to avoid a transfer to some obscure rural posting. Although the city was next to Delhi, it fell in the jurisdiction of Uttar Pradesh, where police had a reputation for being criminals in uniform who did nothing unless they were paid a bribe.

  Under pressure from above, poorly trained and badly paid officers fell back on methods they could get away with in Mau or Kanpur and applied them in Noida. Their investigation was haphazard, absurd and defamatory, targeting those who were closest to the murder scene. They informed the press now that the killing of both victims had been done not with a khukri or a knife, but with “a sharp-edged surgical instrument,” suggesting it might be the handiwork of a medical professional.11 Next, a police officer went on the record: “The way in which the throat of Aarushi was cut points out that it is the work of some professional who could be a doctor or a butcher.”12 The family were unaware of this statement and its implication.

  “I had banned TV from our house by this time,” Nupur said bitterly two years later. “Whenever we turned it on, there was always news about the murder. So I hid the remote. Then the mother of Aarushi’s close friend Fiza, who had a contact at NDTV, warned me the police were saying they were suspicious we were involved in the killing, and were gunning for us. I took no notice, and I was quite angry and upset with Fiza’s mother. The police had told us not to talk to the media, so we didn’t. Then the same police officer who had said this to us, the SSP [Senior Superintendent of Police], gave a press conference saying they were looking at the family.”13

  Nupur’s husband, Rajesh Talwar, was now the prime suspect. I had been Dr. Talwar’s patient, and had sat in his dentist’s chair. I knew him only as a bearded, avuncular man who had gentle hands, even when he was probing your molars.

  “I had lost my beloved child, so why were they doing this to me?” he asked. “The cops thought we were an ‘immoral’ family because Aarushi made 300 calls a month to her friends and went on Orkut and Facebook. These people are backward. They are not fit to do their job. They said I did an honour killing because she was having an inter-caste relationship with the servant. My wife and I had an inter-community marriage, so how on earth would I think of doing what they call an honour killing? I told them Aarushi was reading two books, Shantaram and Chetan Bhagat’s 3 Mistakes of My Life. So the police say, ‘Hah, you’re saying she was reading this book because she has made three mistakes in her life? What are the three mistakes?’ She had joined the ‘I Decide’ club at school, and the last project she did was on addiction—in fact she won the first prize for her effort but was not there to see it. She had looked up addiction on the Internet, so the Noida police then say on television: ‘We think there was some addiction in the family. She may have had a drug addiction, or she may have thought members of her family needed help with it.’ I told them, go to her school and look at her project or talk to her teachers. I wondered if this was my destiny, and if the universe was conspiring against me, or if I had been caught in a whi
rlpool.”

  We were in the sitting-room of the Talwars’ apartment in south Delhi. It was nearly two years since Aarushi’s murder. They had left Noida and moved back to the building they had lived in during the first few months of her life, when she was a baby. She was all around us, in blown-up photographs on the wall, in the crystal ornaments on a low table, in their memories. Her bedroom had been faithfully reconstructed in the new home with her clothes, desk, cushions and toys. Propped up on her bed was her favourite stuffed Bart Simpson, which she liked to have beside her at night. They had the mementoes: the photos of Aarushi growing up, as a little girl, as a teenager with kohl around her eyes sitting in the back of a car with her school friends. They had the cards, the one saying: “MOM … L.O.V.E. you 4ever!” and the one saying: “Dad u r da bestest dad any1 can have. U rok ma world.”

  “For her birthday weekend,” said her mother, “we’d planned a sleepover for four–five girls on the Saturday night.” Dr. Talwar was a nice-looking woman whose face was marked by deep shadows beneath her eyes. She wore a silver kameez over black trousers, and her watch was turned to her inner wrist. “The CBI [Central Bureau of Investigation] say to me, ‘What is a sleepover? Were there adults involved?’ I had to explain what a sleepover was—chatting, music, raiding the fridge while we stay in the next room. I explained that the kids would say, ‘Go from here,’ in the way kids do, and again the police were saying to me, ‘Why would you have to go, why would your daughter not want you there?’ They wanted to know why Aarushi had deleted some of the pictures on her new camera. ‘Who has deleted these images? Why has she done this?’ I had to explain, that is just how kids are, they take some pictures of themselves, they delete the ones they don’t like.”