by Avirook Sen
One of the measures of the popularity of a news story is how it compares with cricket ratings, which are usually very high. The Aarushi Talwar case got higher ratings than Indian Premier League games. The reason for this was not just the fact that the murders disturbed some kind of middle-class idyll, it was also that wafting through the story was the aroma of sex. The idea of the teenager and the servant engaged in coitus intrigued middle-class Indians. They wanted to know more.
I was out of the country working on my first book when the incident took place in 2008, and had very little interest in it. My involvement in reporting the story began with a phone call from Meenal Baghel, the fine writer and editor of the Mumbai Mirror, in May 2012. Meenal and I have known each other for more than 20 years, and she usually gets straight to the point. She said the Talwars’ trial was to begin in a week. It made for a great narrative, and would I like to report it for her paper?
I took on the assignment.
I did not know the Talwars, or any of their friends or family. I began meeting the Talwars in court in 2012 just as frequently as I met officers and lawyers from the CBI. To make my work easier, I wanted a set of all documents related to the case, and this the Talwars readily gave me.
What I was clear about from the outset was this: my job was not to try and solve a crime. I was there to report on a trial. To me, this meant looking at the evidence for logic and authenticity; and perhaps finally answering a question quite different from the one I am still asked. It wasn’t about who did it. The real question was whether there was convincing evidence that the Talwars did it. It was not for me to pass judgement, but equally, I felt it was my duty to examine the course of the investigation, read the documents that were in the public domain, access those that were not, and talk to people connected with the case. I did all of this in order to record facts, not to offer an opinion. Nor do I hold a brief for anyone connected with the case.
I can say with some confidence that I covered the trial proceedings with due diligence and have tried to tell the story accurately and faithfully. To that end, I resolved not to rely, for instance, on unnamed sources. All significant interviews in this book are on tape. The rest are recorded in carefully taken notes, or email exchanges between me and the interviewees. Public documents quoted are mentioned clearly. Although I believe I have done the best I can, and done it in good faith, I cannot rule out the possibility of errors in this book and would gladly correct them if they are pointed out.
Over the two and a half years that I worked on this book, I realized that the facts I gathered were also a commentary on the country we live in. When the astronaut Rakesh Sharma went to space in the early 1980s, the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, asked him what India looked like from up there. Rakesh Sharma’s response was memorable: Saare jahan se achha (better than all the world). This book is about what it looks like from the ground.
Part One
The Investigation
At about six in the morning on Friday, 16 May 2008, Bharti Mandal rang the doorbell at L-32 Jalvayu Vihar. This was her temporary workplace, and the home of the Talwars, Rajesh, Nupur and their teenage daughter Aarushi. A couple in their early forties, they were beginning to make a name for themselves as successful dentists. Aarushi, who was about to turn fourteen, was a star student at Delhi Public School, Noida.
The Talwars had moved to Jalvayu Vihar after Aarushi was born because Nupur’s parents, the Chitnises, lived in the same complex in an identical flat. Like many middle-class working couples the Talwars needed the support of Aarushi’s grandparents as they brought up their child. In a way, Aarushi had two homes in the same neighbourhood and this worked for everyone.
The Talwars weren’t wealthy by Delhi’s high standards. Their suburban housing complex was built in the early 1990s and originally intended for air force and naval officers, who received the land at a concession. It grew into a crowded middle-class settlement with four thousand flats and more than ten thousand residents, either paying rent or servicing that ubiquitous albatross around the neck of middle-income India, the home loan.
Jalvayu Vihar’s pink apartment blocks were standard issue, its common areas just a little less tended to than its homes, which servants like Bharti swept and dusted. One of the thousands of invisible domestic workers who have flocked to Delhi and its suburbs from places as far as Malda, West Bengal, 2000 kilometres away, Bharti Mandal had come into the Talwars’ lives only the previous week. Their regular maid, Kalpana, was on leave and had found Bharti as a replacement. She came in twice a day, once early in the morning and again in the evening. The Talwars’ live-in servant, Hemraj, usually opened the door for her.
But on the morning of the 16th, when Bharti rang the doorbell situated next to the outer grill gate of the flat, no one responded. So she pressed the doorbell again and went to fetch the bucket and mop kept on the stairway to the terrace at the flat’s entrance, thinking Hemraj would let her in shortly. But he didn’t. Instead, Nupur Talwar appeared at the inner door of the flat.
To enter the Talwars’ flat you had to get past three doors. The first was the iron grill door which opened on to a short passage. At the end of the passage was a pair of doors built into the same frame. Of these, the one on the outside was a mesh door. Behind it was a wooden door that led to the drawing room of the flat. The wooden door had a standard mortise lock—that is, it locked when the door was closed, and could only be opened from the inside or with a key. The mesh door had a two-way lock. It could also be bolted from the outside.
Nupur Talwar was woken by the repeated ringing of the doorbell. Letting the maid in was Hemraj’s responsibility but that day he didn’t seem to be around. When Nupur opened the innermost wooden door, she found the mesh door shut from the outside. She told Bharti that Hemraj may have gone to fetch milk and had probably bolted the door as he left. Bharti suggested that Nupur go to the balcony and throw down the keys in any case so that she could come back up and let herself in.
Meanwhile, Rajesh Talwar woke up. When he walked out of his bedroom he saw a bottle of Ballantine’s Scotch whisky on the dining table. The family had retired at about 11.30 the previous night, and no one had had a drink. Alarmed, Rajesh asked Nupur what the bottle was doing on the dining table. The two of them then went towards Aarushi’s room, found the door ajar, and entered.
The walls of the room were spattered with blood, but the soft toys on the bed including a large Bart Simpson were undisturbed. Aarushi lay on her bed covered in a white flannel blanket with a cheerful—and now completely incongruous—pattern of multicoloured rings on it. When Nupur Talwar lifted the light blanket they discovered that their only daughter’s throat had been slit, and her skull, just above her forehead, crushed. Her pillow was soaked in blood which had dripped on to the mattress and the floor below. Her head had been partly covered by her favourite camouflage-print tote bag. Her mobile phone, which was always on the bedside table, was missing. It was a scene made more macabre by her untouched belongings: a few currency notes lying on a side table along with an iPod, its headphones attached as if someone had just taken them off, and the soft toys, which, with their button eyes, had seen everything.
Aarushi’s head was hanging loose to one side, as if about to fall off. Even though he would have known his daughter was dead, Rajesh lifted her head and straightened it. At the time, he thought, she looked like a red doll. But he couldn’t get himself to touch her face. In a daze, he walked in and out of the room, sitting on her bed and then getting up and banging his head violently against the wall.
In the meantime Bharti Mandal had climbed back up, pushed the outer grill gate open, and found the second mesh door bolted. She undid the latch and walked into the flat and found her employers hysterical. Bharti thought there had been a theft. ‘Aunty threw her arms around me and started crying, when I asked her why are you crying so much, she said go inside and see what has happened. I went with Aunty and stood outside Aarushi’s room.’
As she stood at Aarushi
’s door and took in the scene, not much except the slit throat of the teenager and the blanket that covered her body seems to have registered. In three statements to the investigators, the first of which was recorded the same day (the last on 11 June 2008), she could not recall, for instance, any details concerning the blood in the room.
When she had recovered from the shock, Bharti asked the Talwars whether she should inform the neighbours and security guards. They said yes. She hurried down to the Tandons’ flat. Puneesh Tandon, who lived in the flat below, informed the security guard, who called the police. They arrived about an hour later. The first investigating officer (IO) on the case, Dataram Nanoria, of the Uttar Pradesh police, would interview Bharti later that day.
***
Just a week into her job, Bharti Mandal found herself at the centre of one of India’s most bewildering murder mysteries—as its first witness. But as she left the flat that morning, she had no clue that she had seen only one half of a crime sliced in two. Concerned about where Hemraj may have gone that early in the morning, Nupur Talwar had called his cellphone when Bharti arrived. The call went through, and after a few seconds of silence, the person at the other end disconnected.
Whoever received and disconnected that call had Hemraj’s phone. And Hemraj hadn’t gone out on an errand—he had in fact been dead for several hours. The Talwars though had not yet found Hemraj’s body and the fact that the call was received and cut off confirmed their suspicions that it was their servant who had killed Aarushi and fled.
The Talwars called the three couples closest to them: Nupur’s parents, Group Captain (retd) Bhalachandra Chitnis and his wife Lata; Rajesh’s brother Dr Dinesh Talwar and his wife Dr Vandana Talwar; and the Durranis, also dentists who shared a garage-turned-clinic with them in Jalvayu Vihar, and whose daughter, Vidushi, was one of Aarushi’s closest friends.
The Chitnises got to the flat first—all they had to do was walk across a few rows of buildings. Group Captain Chitnis was silent in shock. When Puneesh Tandon arrived he saw the old man sitting in the drawing room, devastated, saying nothing. The Durranis and Dinesh and Vandana Talwar came at about 6.45 a.m. None of them could say much either. Vandana Talwar, an anaesthetist, took Aarushi’s pulse, but the act was bereft of hope.
Within hours of the discovery of Aarushi’s body, the flat was swarming with people. Policemen, the press, family, friends, curious strangers—everyone seemed to have descended upon the Talwars’ home. And everyone seemed to be running amok. There was no effort on the part of the police to cordon off any area. Visitors conducted their own investigations. Two doctor friends of Rajesh, Rohit Kochar and Rajeev Varshney, arrived and chanced upon what they thought were bloodstains on the stairs leading up to the terrace, and on the lock of the terrace door.
They told the police and asked Rajesh for the keys to the terrace. In a daze, he went up a few steps, then turned back into the house. Hemraj had recently begun locking the terrace and Rajesh didn’t seem to know where the keys were. The seniormost policeman on the scene, Mahesh Kumar Mishra, asked the constables to break the lock. But they couldn’t find a locksmith. There was talk of getting the dog squad but the dogs were busy too. The prime minister of India was to visit Noida the next day, and everyone was busy. Rajesh and Nupur in the meantime walked around their flat in a state of shock. ‘Find Hemraj’ was their only coherent refrain. On the instructions of the police, Rajesh Talwar dictated an FIR, the first information report, in which he said he suspected Hemraj had committed the crime.
Meanwhile, there was morbid business to be taken care of. Aarushi’s body had been taken for an autopsy. Dinesh Talwar and Rajesh’s friend Ajay Chaddha reached the post-mortem house at nine. There was no doctor there, and the place was filthy. Chaddha went to fetch disinfectant and soap to get the post-mortem room cleaned. Dinesh Talwar worked his phone while the battered body of his niece lay in the open.
Dinesh called a doctor friend of his from his All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) days. The friend called a Noida ophthalmologist, Dr Sushil Choudhry, who in turn called a patient of his—a recently retired Noida policeman called K.K. Gautam. Gautam was known to be an influential man; anyone who had any dealings with the police in Ghaziabad invariably had dealings with him. Gautam’s interests went well beyond crime—he was involved in cricket administration and served as patron and president of Invertis University—and he loved the limelight. But he was a useful person to have on your side.
When his eye doctor requested him to see if he could have the post-mortem speeded up, Gautam made some calls without hesitation. Sometime after 11 a.m., Dr Sunil Dohare, the doctor who was to conduct the post-mortem, received a call from a superior saying ‘some VIP person’ had been murdered, and that he should hotfoot it to the post-mortem house.
According to Dohare, Dinesh Talwar also called up Dr T.D. Dogra, the head of department for forensic sciences at AIIMS. ‘Why don’t you speak to the doctor directly?’ Dinesh Talwar told him and handed him the phone. Dr Dogra asked Dohare to take Aarushi’s blood samples. The post-mortem doctor listened to Dr Dogra and assured him that ‘whatever needed to be done would be done’.
Dohare completed his task sometime after 1 p.m. He inspected the wounds, found no injuries to Aarushi’s private parts, wrote out a report saying ‘nothing abnormal detected’ in respect to her sexual organs. But he also took swabs of Aarushi’s vagina and sent them to the pathologist at one of Noida’s government hospitals to rule out sexual assault or rape.
That report came by the evening and said she was neither sexually assaulted nor raped.
The Talwars then readied themselves for the task of cremating their daughter’s body. They left the house to the devices of whoever happened to be there: police personnel, media, friends. The house was in a mess, so a few women got together to get it swept and cleaned. All the while, the police looked on as the crime scene was wiped of possible clues. They did not find a locksmith that whole day or try to prise open the terrace door.
***
The next morning, the Talwars left for Haridwar to immerse Aarushi’s ashes. But within minutes of setting out, they received a call from Dinesh Talwar, who was manning the flat in their absence: a body had been found on their terrace. Dazed, they returned. As Nupur waited outside the building with Aarushi’s remains—Hindu custom forbids the re-entry of the ashes into the home—Rajesh made his way up the stairs.
K.K. Gautam was the man in command there. After making the phone calls the previous day, he had turned up at the autopsy centre to follow up on the post-mortem. The next day he had decided to drop by the Talwars’ as a ‘courtesy call’, though to the media he appeared to be directing investigations.
When Gautam arrived at the flat on the morning of 17 May, Dinesh Talwar had complained to him that the bloodstained lock to the terrace door still hadn’t been broken. Gautam noticed marks that suggested someone or something had been dragged across the terrace door. Though Aarushi’s room had been a bloody scene, no one had noticed blood anywhere else in the apartment. There was no record of blood anywhere else inside the flat—except for traces on the bottle of Ballantine’s whisky. Gautam knew every policeman on the scene and he was able to prevail upon them to break the lock on the terrace door.
Hemraj’s putrefying body lay in the May sun to the left of the terrace door. It still had slippers on the feet. The corpse was partially covered by a cooler panel. A bed sheet had been hung on the other side, to prevent anyone from getting a clear sight of the body from Puneesh Tandon’s adjacent terrace.
Rajesh Talwar was asked to identify the body, its face heavily swollen. Stunned by the revelation of a second murder in his home, he called Nupur to ask about Hemraj’s T-shirt, and he looked at his hair. He confirmed to the police that it was Hemraj. The prime suspect had turned out to be a victim. So the question now was, who were the culprits?
For the Talwars, the week that followed was a blitz they would rather forget, but never will.
There were many factors that made the Aarushi murder big news: the gruesome crime had somehow located itself in an otherwise quiet middle-class neighbourhood. Aarushi’s parents weren’t celebrities, but were fairly well known in South Delhi circles; she went to a good school, was young and pretty. All in all there was an element of shock—‘such things didn’t happen to people like these’. The murder was newsworthy because it was exceptional.
But there was yet another factor at play. Those were boom years for the Indian media, the number of news channels had suddenly multiplied, and everyone was chasing market share. The easiest route to this was sensationalism.
The first headlines were straightforward. On 17 May, the Delhi tabloid Mail Today said: ‘Schoolgirl Killed at Noida Home’; ‘Finger of Suspicion Points at Missing Servant’. But even as that paper was being read that morning, Hemraj’s body was discovered on the Talwars’ terrace. Television had already covered the story non-stop the previous day; now the channels went berserk.
While the press intensified, the Noida police appeared to be doing very little. The only piece of overt investigation at the time involved a 15-year-old boy. Anmol Agarwal had been vying for Aarushi’s affections and the two had exchanged several phone calls and texts in the days leading up to the murder. On the night of the murder, Anmol had tried calling Aarushi both on her mobile and on the landline, but had got no reply. He was thus the last person to try to contact Aarushi.
Anmol was picked up by the police, without the consent of his parents, on 22 May and put through a harrowing interrogation, where the police confronted him with the fact that he had exchanged 688 text messages with Aarushi and that he had tried to contact her on the fatal night. Anmol was frightened and he broke down and told the police that Aarushi had lots of boyfriends like him with whom she exchanged messages. When the police wondered if Aarushi was easy with her affections, Anmol readily agreed.