India

by Patrick French

  “They found an email she had sent me a year before,” said her father, “apologizing and saying she had just wanted to try out something with her friends. So the police take it and flash it on TV. All the channels are asking, ‘What was Aarushi going to try out? Why did she say it wouldn’t happen again? Why does a daughter send an email to a father?’ Well, she didn’t send emails to me, it just happened one evening when she was twelve years old, and Aarushi wanted to go to the cinema in the mall to watch Namaste London with a group of friends—just the girls together. We didn’t want her going without an adult, but in the end we gave our consent and dropped her off and collected her from the cinema. It was peer pressure that made us agree, because her friends were allowed to go. Aarushi knew we weren’t happy about it and that’s why she sent me the email. She had a very sensitive nature. Not even once did I have to raise my voice to her. If there had been an occasion, I would have raised it.

  “It was no issue if we had a boy or a girl,” he continued, referring to the social pressure in the north of India to have male children. “From a young age Aarushi wanted to be a ‘baby doctor’—she said that before she knew the word paediatrician. She loved babies. Her friends told her she was being a geek, studying too hard. I put money aside as an investment, put it into a flat and told her this is not for your marriage, it’s for your studies. She would tell family: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get into AIIMS [a prestigious medical college], but Dad has kept this for my education.’ ”

  “She was good from the first standard,” said Nupur. “At her school, if you get above 85 percent for three years consecutively, you get a blue blazer. Only one or two children get it each year. There was no question of Aarushi not getting a blue blazer. She was fond of dancing. She went every Sunday with other girls to a class at Danceworx studio in Noida and danced for hours, learning Ashley Lobo jazz dancing. She and her friends made a dance group and called themselves the Awesome Foursome.” Nupur showed me a photograph of the girls on which Aarushi had written: “AWESUM 4SUM!”

  We sat in silence together. “Aarushi was an avid reader too, always reading, her iPod headphones stuffed in her ears, and texting as well, sending messages on Orkut at the same time.” Rajesh stood up and went to Aarushi’s bedroom and brought back some of his daughter’s books to show me: Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone, Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, Jean Sasson’s Love in a Torn Land, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth—sophisticated books for a girl of her age. “She preferred Anne Frank,” he said. “She didn’t like fantasy so much.”

  “I can’t listen to songs or watch movies any more,” said her mother. “I never watched a movie without Aarushi. Our life has been taken away from us.”

  “When she was small,” said her father, “she used to clutch a sari which belonged to my mother. She had picked it from a collection of my mother’s saris which Nupur had, and went to sleep with it. In fact she went with it everywhere and used to call it her ‘papamummy.’ By the time she outgrew it, it was completely in tatters.”

  Rajesh and Nupur Talwar had been raised in an older India. She was from an air force family and had lived in military housing wherever her father was posted. Rajesh’s father was a cardiothoracic surgeon. “When we both finished the Bachelor of Dental Surgery course in Maulana Azad Medical College,” he said, “we married and went to Lucknow for our postgraduate. We both came from liberal families, and they had no hesitation about our marriage. At our wedding we had one Punjabi pandit and one Maharashtrian pandit, and because we [Punjabis] like to get married early in the morning and they like to marry in the evening, we did it in the middle of the day. We waited a bit for children because we were studying, and had Aarushi on 24 May 1994. We only had one child, because we wanted to be able to give her the best possible.”

  “Initially Rajesh was a bit of a weekend father,” said Nupur. “By the time he got back from work, Aarushi was asleep. We thought it would be better for her if she grew up near her grandparents, where we would have a support system, which is why we moved to Noida. My mother brought her up. She always did her cooking and cared for her with her own hand. Even at weekends, Aarushi would ask to see her grandparents—‘Ajja [a diminutive of aaji, the Marathi word for mother’s mother] isn’t feeling well, let’s go to see her.’ When Aarushi’s life ended, she was in a stage of transition. It was all about friends, friends, who had fallen out, who had broken up with someone else, breakup-patchup.”

  “On the 15th,” said Rajesh, “I had bought her a Sony 10-megapixel camera for her birthday. It was better than the one she was expecting. I showed it to Nupur and she said let’s give it to her now. We went to Aarushi’s room. She was so happy, clicking some pictures of herself, trying out the camera. That was our last evening together.”

  “I heard the doorbell ring in the morning,” said Nupur. “It rang a second time. I knew it was the maid, and wondered why the servant hadn’t opened the door for her. It was a little while after six o’clock. I got up and realized the door of the flat had been locked from the outside. So I phoned the servant, and the call was cut. I phoned again, and it was cut. By this time Rajesh had got up and noticed a three-quarters empty bottle of whisky lying on the dining-table. We got worried as we always kept alcohol in the cupboard. He said, ‘Go and see Aarushi.’ I went into her room just ahead of Rajesh. The first thing I saw was the blood on the wall behind her. She was lying on the bed covered with a blanket. I put my hand on her head. Rajesh began to scream.

  “Later in the day, I had to write the FIR [police report] in Hindi,” said Rajesh, “and I hadn’t written the language for twenty years. I just couldn’t write it. The principal of Aarushi’s school had come to see us. She used to be my own class teacher when I was a boy at another branch of Delhi Public School, and in my mind I was saying, ‘Ma’am, get her back. Ma’am, get her back.’ I didn’t say it out loud.”

  “At about 1 p.m. they brought back Aarushi from the autopsy,” said Nupur. “We put her in the drawing-room. It was a hot day. At about 4 p.m. we took her for the cremation. When we got back home from that, the police were there and the media had broken our doorbell. They kept on trying to push the door open. I couldn’t sleep or eat.”

  “I thought it was Hemraj and he was on the run,” remembered Rajesh. “I said, I hope they get this guy and kill him. The next day we collected her ashes from the cremation ground early and drove to Hardwar to immerse the ashes in the Ganges. While we were driving, Hemraj was found on the terrace. We were asked to come home and identify him. We parked the car a few blocks away, since according to Hindu custom you should not take ashes into the home. Nupur waited in the car with Aarushi’s ashes while I went back in. They asked me to identify the servant’s body. It had been decomposing for nearly two days in the heat and the face was swollen. I couldn’t be sure, but I said I think it looks like him. Later, the police said I had refused to ID him positively, and used that against me. We went to Hardwar and did the religious rituals, fed some poor people and had a bath in the Ganges, like you are meant to do.”

  “Hemraj liked cooking and doing things around the home,” said Nupur. “He was not an ambitious Nepali. He would call her ‘Aarushi Baby’ and she would call him ‘Bhaiyya’ [literally “brother”—the usual way a girl and a male servant would address each other]. We would give him her old clothes for his grandchildren. He’d been with us for eight months and had been highly recommended by the previous fellow, who had been with us for ten years. I know now that Hemraj let some people into our home, and I ask why, why, why? It was a case of trusting too much. Obviously the company he kept was not good. We realized later he had lied to us—he said he had been doing a job in construction in Malaysia, but he had never been there, and was a rickshaw driver. But we trusted the servant who recommended him, so we didn’t check.

  “On the next day, which would have been the day of Aarushi’s sle
epover, we had a puja and a havan, the lighting of a sacred fire. Her friends came to the house and they all sat in her room, touching her things. We served them food in the room. They took out her clothes and her books and were looking at them, all crying, grieving.”

  The police now asked the Talwars to come with them to identify a suspect. They found a Maruti Zen car waiting outside the gate of their apartment, so they got in their own car and followed it, as instructed, pursued by a flock of media vehicles. The couple drove behind the police Maruti Zen at high speed for about four kilometres before being told to go home again. When Rajesh Talwar was taken to the police lines the next day, one of the pieces of evidence offered against him was video footage of this car chase—proof that he intended to flee and should be denied bail when he was arrested. Another cause for suspicion was that in his pocket he had the business card of one of his patients, Pinaki Misra, a Supreme Court lawyer. If he were innocent, asked an investigator, why would he need to be in touch with a hotshot lawyer?

  By this time, Nupur and Rajesh had been separated into different rooms. She received a telephone call from a family member to say that television channels were reporting that her husband had been arrested. At first she could not believe it was true, and reassured the caller that he was only having a conversation in the next room. Then, after some hours had gone by, the constable who was guarding her said, “Arrest ho gaye”—“He’s been arrested.” Rajesh, meanwhile, was manhandled into a car and driven to Ghaziabad, an industrial city in Uttar Pradesh, to be remanded in judicial custody.

  “We were driving along,” he recalled, “and the driver started abusing me. ‘You’re the bastard who did this.’ I was really scared. I said, ‘You can’t say things like that.’ They gagged my mouth. I was abused by these policemen the entire way, and after reaching the shabby courtroom, two of them held my hands and dragged me to a room by the side of the court. I was presented before the magistrate. There were a huge number of people present, and I pleaded with this man to at least let me make a phone call or call a lawyer. I said, ‘I’m entitled to it. It’s my fundamental right as a citizen of this country.’ The magistrate just looked at me in disgust. ‘Ja yahan se’—‘Get out of here.’ They’d chosen Friday to arrest me, because we wouldn’t be able to apply for bail until Monday. The policemen produced a paper and asked me to sign it, and I had the presence of mind to tell them I will not sign anything. They threatened me with dire consequences. I was dragged back to the car by the police while I kept screaming that I was being framed. By this time the TV channels were all over the place. My mind had gone completely numb. A policeman was saying, ‘Hum tere ko maar denge’—‘We will kill you.’ I just said they could kill me wherever they wanted.

  “We reached Dasna jail. It’s a different world in that place. Time just stopped. I was told to sit in a line on the floor. They frisked me with aggression. There are thieves, drug addicts, all spitting on the floor. I was crying. I was sent to barrack number 7, bed number 60. But there’s no bed, only a stone floor. It’s a big, noisy room, filled with half-naked people, with hardly enough room to move. You get watery dal and chapatti. I was given a sheet and it was stinking, but you have to put it over your face to keep the mosquitoes and flies off you at night. I kept thinking that someone would come and say, ‘Sorry, we made a mistake.’ When I went to the toilet, I slipped a bit and realized there was no toilet, just a layer of shit on the floor. I puked there.”

  Rajesh stopped speaking. Nupur was looking at him. It was the first time he had ever told his wife about this aspect of his incarceration. All through the Saturday and the Sunday, Nupur had waited outside Dasna jail to see her husband, together with Rajesh’s brother Dinesh, an ophthalmologist at AIIMS.

  “I managed to see him on Sunday,” said Nupur. “It was the day after Aarushi’s birthday. He was banging his head on the bars, shouting, ‘Get me out of here.’ He was crying all the time, saying, ‘Where’s my Aaru, where’s my Aaru?’ It was a forty-minute meeting. During the day, we got a call on someone’s cell phone. A man said to meet him in the dhaba by the prison. He explained he would be able to provide food and good treatment for Rajesh in jail. I gave him Rs25,000. We never saw him again. Later we heard about another person who could provide this service for him, a convict who was trusted by the jail administration. These men are called numberdars, and they wear a yellow kurta pyjama. So we slipped him money.”

  “Without him, I couldn’t have survived in there,” said Rajesh. “He showed me kindness, got me some mosquito repellent and some fruit. Before Aarushi died, I had been reading a book about Iraq which described what happened in their prisons. I remember thinking at the time, at least that couldn’t happen in our country, in India.”

  Dr. Talwar was to be dragged through a netherworld of courts, jails, lies, insinuation and state harassment. The process would last not for days, but for years, and the second Dr. Talwar—Nupur, Aarushi’s mother—would be drawn into the cavalcade too, harassed alongside her husband as both he and their murdered daughter were accused of various retrospective offences. At a bizarre press conference, an inspector general of police from Meerut stood in front of the cameras and said Rajesh Talwar was “prime accused.” He was supposedly in a relationship with a fellow dentist and family friend, and had committed an honour killing. “The doctor’s extramarital affair was known to both the girl and Hemraj. The two used to discuss this and had come close. Dr. Rajesh could not tolerate this even though his own character was not good,” the officer announced in Hindi. It sounded like a story from one of the badly printed “shocker” magazines on sale at street corners, like Crime & Detective with its lurid headlines: “Acid Treatment for Malady of Love” or “Queen of Nefarious Designs.” “Dr. Rajesh came home,” the inspector general continued, “and found his daughter and Hemraj in an objectionable position—but not in a compromising position. Dr. Rajesh took Hemraj to the terrace and killed him. He then drank whisky and killed Aarushi … He killed her in a fit of rage even though he is as characterless as his daughter.”14

  The police had no basis for the character assassination of a dead thirteen-year-old girl and her grieving father. They had no witnesses, no murder weapon, no forensic evidence and no reason for deducing that Aarushi had been in an “objectionable position” with a recently hired servant who was himself a grandfather. Nor did they have a plausible motive for this savage double murder. For much of the media, in particular the English-language tabloids and Hindi news channels, this was less important than the sensation. Repeatedly, they showed footage of a dishevelled Rajesh Talwar shouting: “They’re framing me!” as he was dragged roughly through the gate of a jail. When Nupur, glazed and dazed, gave a television interview the following day, people complained she was not in tears. As a viewer wrote on a message board: “The reporter looks much sad then Aarushis mother.” Then there was the email message Aarushi had sent to her father, which the police released: “I just wanted to try it out coz I heard from mah frndz … so wotz da harm … I wnt do it again n I kinda noe hw u r feelin.”15 What did it mean? And could her parents, who were in the next room with a whirring air-conditioner on, have slept through the killing?

  More “proof” arrived when the police claimed the Talwars were part of a “wife-swapping racket” run by a “kingpin industrialist” in Noida. A newspaper, Mid-Day, quoted an unnamed police officer saying that “whenever such meetings happened the Talwars kept Aarushi locked inside her room. That happened only when the members of the club met at Talwar’s residence. But Hemraj knew everything and shared the details with Aarushi.”16 The newspapers reported these stories, although no evidence was given to support the claims. Old-fashioned extortion had landed at the edge of the capital, in a modern world of shiny malls, where middle-class children lived a very different life to the children of the police. The inhabitants of Noida might feel as if they were in Delhi and could lead a progressive, metropolitan life, but they faced Uttar Pradesh street justice, in which nobody was
protected from wrong. Taking shreds of evidence and gossip, and making assumptions about a social world they were not able to comprehend, the police had concocted a story in the hope they could close the case. They nearly succeeded. Much of the media ran with the idea that Rajesh Talwar must be guilty, and blogs and websites were filled with foul insinuations. To quote just one: “This is a simple case of sexual perversion, maybe incest, and pedophilia that got integrated with a culture of swinging between families and swapping. Matter of family honour thus comes first and foremost.”

  The police interrogations continued, as did the Kafkaesque form of investigation.

  “You never knew where you were with the police,” said Dr. Talwar. “Some were fine. A policeman read the Hanuman Chalisa [a devotional hymn] and started to cry, saying, ‘Doctor, a very bad thing has been done to you.’ Another time, they took me back to Hardwar in a Jeep and I was troubled the whole way by two young policemen. The vicious guy who had threatened to kill me was singing as if he was going on vacation. They forced me to sign a confession. I wrote on the piece of paper in English—which they couldn’t read—that it was not true. I was in the prison for fifty days and nights. The numberdar in the yellow pyjama helped me. He would arrange for my clothes to be washed, and would send a boy called Goli [bullet] to make nimbu pani [lemonade] for me. Goli had been in and out of prison all his life, for small thefts, and so on. Apparently he would be picked up by the police whenever they needed a suspect for some crime. I found it hard to talk to most of the prisoners because they were from a very different social group to me. Some would come and say, ‘I hear you’re a tooth doctor.’ So I started seeing patients in the prison hospital. I arranged for proper medicines, antibiotics, painkillers to be brought in. I found a broken dental chair and fixed the compressor on it. I succeeded in getting a mirror, a probe, tweezers, a handpiece. I had hoped to get zinc oxide eugenol, to do temporary fillings for the prisoners. The prison authorities were very grateful. I would like to go back and do more work there now, but it would be impossible, with the media.”