Aarushi

by Avirook Sen

  Any reasonable background check on the Talwars tells you that they were a snug, happy unit. This is the opinion of all those who know them. These are the people who don’t authoritatively describe them as depraved and degenerate. Aarushi has left behind a fair amount of proof of what her life was like with her parents. A Mother’s Day card to Nupur four days before she was murdered says: ‘Mom . . . what should I say. . . You are the B.E.S.T. . . . We have had a gazillion fights, a million “I will never talk to you”. But after all u r the one who will always be there for me.’

  The ease of communication in the family can be seen by the way that Aarushi, who was often dropped or picked up from school by the rotund Rajesh, teasingly threatened her father that she would forbid him from coming to her school unless he went to the gym and shed some pounds like the other dads. She would write, in school essays and cards to her parents, about humorous and happy things that happened in the family when she was an infant. Like the time Nupur slipped on the stairs while carrying her: ‘My father just took me with him and forgot my mom . . . Then we found that my mom had a broken leg and I was fine with not even a scratch!!!’ There were parties and holidays with friends like the Durranis. Trips to Kasauli and Manali and a memorable one to Singapore and Malaysia a year before her death.

  Her demands from Santa on her last Christmas distils who she was:

  Dear Santa,

  Merry Christmas to you. I know you will be tired from running here and there giving children what they wanted but I want something totally different. I want the well-being of my family. I want no harm to reach them. Please fulfill my wish. My second wish is that I want my parents to always be with me and my friends too!!

  My third wish is a bit silly—I WANT A DOG. Not from you but from my parents. I wish they agree!!!

  Merry Christmas.

  ‘He didn’t fulfil even one of her wishes, did he . . . ?’ Rajesh asked plaintively as he and Nupur recounted their memories to me in their flat in Delhi.

  The Talwars had reason to be proud of their daughter. ‘She was always in the first three in her class, first, second or third . . . Below that was too much to handle for her,’ Nupur said.

  In an essay about her schooldays, Aarushi berated herself for slipping from 92 per cent in one year to 89 in the next. She got her precious scholar badges every year, and having done so consistently well over three years, she was awarded a blue scholar blazer by the school.

  She was intensely proud of this, but Nupur said, ‘She never used to wear it . . . She’d say she wanted to be like everybody else.’

  Yes, there were boys. But having a boyfriend at thirteen or fourteen did not mean physical intimacy; that was something Aarushi’s schedule did not allow in any case, going from school straight to her grandparents’, and then to her own home when her parents returned home for the day. Having a boyfriend was, instead, a gauge of popularity, something played out in polls and other means on social media networks. It wasn’t as if the parents didn’t know about the boys. They were protective—Rajesh a little more so—and often insisted that she went out with her friends in the company of at least one adult, but there were times they gave in. She would go through the highs and lows of puppy love like any other teenager from the same milieu, but her biggest, most serious crush, Nupur told me smiling, was on Johnny Depp.

  ‘We had a tree growing outside, a big tree. So she used to call it Johnny Depp. And every night it would be “Good night Johnny Depp”. This was a ritual in our house. In school she was asked to write about her room, so she wrote that she had this tree and she called it Johnny Depp, and her teacher sent it to every class to be read out . . . She must have been in class six or seven.’

  We were sitting in the drawing room of the Talwars’ South Delhi flat. Nupur across from me, Rajesh to my right, Aarushi on every wall. It was 24 November 2013, the day before the court judgement, and our conversation was subdued. I had interviewed the Talwars many times and was having trouble thinking of new questions to ask.

  I chose to just listen. In the past, Nupur usually spoke when she had a point to make, and she seemed to relish the tough questions. I remembered asking her earlier about the strain the murders might have put on her relationship with her husband. Did it ever cross her mind that he might have done it? She’d looked me in the eye and said that if she had even a decimal point of a doubt, she would have led the way to prosecute Rajesh. Her daughter had been murdered, what possible reason could there be to protect her killer?

  Nupur would always look people in the eye—and this troubled some—but today, I found her looking away a lot. Rajesh went through his usual cycle of indignation and despair—his pitch would rise as he spoke of injustice, he was often close to tears, and then he would become quiet and stare blankly, perhaps at a future that was bewilderingly real and inconceivable all at once.

  They seemed to know that a guilty verdict was coming, that for now the fight was over. It was the only time Nupur let her guard down in front of me. In the silences during that conversation, I could almost hear her counting her losses. It was the first time I saw her weep.

  As I read the press, it seemed to me the CBI had made the Talwars out to be killers as sharp as their scalpels. Geniuses of a kind. Daring, clever, and almost successful. But I felt that if they were guilty, their genius lay not in the execution of the murders or the meticulousness of the alleged cover-up. It lay in keeping up, for five years, the impossible pretence that they were innocent. It lay in sticking together as a couple. This was a broken family—its most vibrant, beautiful part had been lost. But the two people left in it genuinely loved each other. That was true whether they were guilty or not.

  ‘Just three days ago I was going through her things, small small things she’d written. On the 11th she had written a Mother’s Day card . . . She never believed in buying cards. She’d make, draw, write. She’d do it for everyone, Nana, Nani.

  ‘In fact I found a small diary, two–three pages only. One her hisaab, like chips, Kurkure, she had her account of what she had spent. Her pocket money was Rs 200, which never included phone and clothes. She used to say “phone and clothes yours”.’ Both parents laughed at that memory, as if it were a private joke.

  ‘One place she’s written, “Mom doesn’t know . . . but I didn’t feel like drinking milk that day, I threw it in the pot . . .”

  ‘I was reading it and thinking “she doesn’t know still . . . threw it in the pot . . .”’

  Nupur Talwar trailed off, and looked down, overcome by emotion at the thought of this childish deception. Rajesh began to weep. ‘It’s very very painful what they are doing to her . . . I’m not saying because it’s my child. I’m saying because she was a good soul. All children are good souls . . . But you know, she never demanded anything or threw a tantrum. Never. Not even once.’

  Nupur recovered her composure. ‘I remember one Christmas, 2006 or 2007, we decided to buy her an iPod. We told her, you have to go to Nani’s house, we have to go to the other flat to see what work is going on. I think she thought that there was something suspicious, but she said okay, I’ll go. We came back, we kept the packet somewhere. Next day we gave it to her. She was so excited, and she finally said, “I have a big stomach ache, so I have to tell you something.” I said, what? She said, “I knew you had gone to get something for me. So I even saw what you had got for me.”’

  Nupur was smiling again. ‘So she did this whole drama about being excited about it . . . And then Rajesh one anniversary told her, come let’s go buy Mom earrings. So she told me that Dad wants to buy you earrings . . . she said she couldn’t keep the gift a secret.

  ‘You know, she may have been on Facebook, Orkut whatever, but there was an innocence about her. They’ve made her out to be secretive, hiding things . . . she was never like that.

  ‘They’ve made her out to be a 35-year-old. I remember, when I got bail and I was coming out, there was a jailor, he says I never say this to anyone but I am going to say you’re not
going to come back. Then he says, “Sunne mein aya aap ki bitiya tees saal ki thi.”’ (We heard that your daughter is 30 years old.)

  ‘Hmm u hate me . . . I noe ma fault m such a frekin slut . . . I noe.’ The same girl who wrote to Santa also wrote this. It was a reply to her thwarted teenage suitor, Sankalp Arora. Sankalp had found out about Aarushi’s intention to ‘break up’ with him on social media. Trawling through her Facebook and Orkut accounts, the police found many such messages from Aarushi. Sankalp was persistent: his messages are filled with ‘ooo jaanu, lubh you, muah muah’—the kind of language that at a certain age may seem the best form of expression.

  Aarushi had many male admirers. There was Ishan, there was Arnav, there was Sankalp after him, and Anmol after Sankalp. She indulged them in the way a 14-year-old would. A glimpse into her Orkut world is telling.

  ‘Which is the best couple in 8th?’ The polling numbers were out on Orkut under ‘kool 10th studentz of DPS’. The forum wasn’t restricted to just 10th graders; ‘popular’ girls and boys from other classes found a place too.

  So along with Utkarsh–Vanita, Vaibhav–Surabhi, Dhruv–Avani and sundry other ‘couples’ is Aarushi–Arnav, who got a healthy 38 per cent of the vote. But that wasn’t all: Aarushi’s name was linked with Sankalp as well in the same poll (18 per cent).

  That bit of ambiguity tells its own story. Was there a procession of boys courting Aarushi? Was she, therefore, ‘fast’? Or was she just what every other kid that age, in her environment, wanted to be—well known and popular? Pretty, bright and well spoken, Aarushi made all the polls. There was even one just about her: ‘who is d perfect person for Aarushi?’ 21 per cent of her friends voted Sankalp, 18 per cent Arnav.

  A friend of Aarushi’s wrote back to express surprise (if tinged with a little adolescent excitement) about ‘Sanki’ being linked to her, saying she had voted for Arnav. Aarushi’s response:

  ‘Ahem . . . hello delete this thing rite away . . . lol.’

  The most important part of that message is the one that the more prurient among the older generation will miss, and those of Aarushi’s age will get instantly: it’s the LOL. Laugh out loud. This is just a bit of juvenile fun. And Aarushi wasn’t the only one indulging in it.

  Now that they are young adults, Aarushi’s friends look at these messages and smile, they understand what was going on, and that none of it was sinister. Rajeshwari, a friend of Aarushi’s, blogged: ‘Didn’t we all have these streaks in us when we were fourteen? How abnormal is it for an urban, public school-educated fourteen-year-old of the twenty-first century to own a cellphone, use it to text a friend of the opposite gender and put up a few harmless pictures of a birthday party on a social networking website?’ And was it a crime to have a ‘boyfriend’? And isn’t the meaning of boyfriend at thirteen a fair order removed from what it is at thirty?

  Mixed in with the so-called adult stuff on the social networks that Aarushi was part of was a lot of pure childishness. Like a chain mail that said the reader would be kissed by the love of their life if they forwarded the mail to ten other people, and cursed in love if they didn’t. This was, and largely remains, the online life of the teenager. And through all the boys and polls and chain mails, she remained focused on her studies. Her friend Vidushi said, ‘Of all of us at that age, Aarushi probably had the firmest sense of right and wrong.’

  That, though, was not the way the police saw it. They took things literally, and in their eyes Aarushi’s ‘character’ painted itself. One message from Sankalp made reference to a ‘booze party’ in the future. This was then tied to an email Aarushi had sent to Rajesh which had no connection to alcohol, but contained an apology: ‘I wnt do it again.’ The mail ended with the daughter making up with her parents, telling them how much she loved them. And in fact, it had to do with her going out with some friends unaccompanied by an adult.

  This is not what the investigators understood it to be. They would not bother with the cards and letters that were in the scrapbooks of the Talwars. They preferred looking at Facebook and Orkut.

  The pictures Aarushi deleted on the night she died became a cause for suspicion. Why would she do that? The simple explanation that kids with digital cameras often do this was not enough. The police could have mined the data card to possibly recover the pictures, but the lab it was sent to wasn’t equipped to do this.

  Vidushi had talked about a ‘sleepover’ at Aarushi’s place planned for the 19th. What was a sleepover? Did adults also participate? Why not? Again, the explanation that kids that age wanted to be left alone in each other’s company—and that there were no boys—wasn’t good enough. Every answer the Talwars gave was held against them, just as much as the answers they did not have.

  The police, looking at Aarushi’s bedroom door during the investigation, wondered: What type of parents kept their child locked up? Aarushi’s casual remark to her friends about physically not being there for the outing the following day was now treated by the UP police as a premonition. What would make her say something like this on the day she would be murdered?

  The police were alarmed by the language in the social media exchanges. For kids in their early teens, profanities such as slut or bitch are of no consequences; they are merely words in a world where language is increasingly sexualized. The threshold for the use of such adult words has lowered; film censors permit more and more sexual words in films without certifying them as ‘Adults only’. For my generation, such language is alternatively alarming or indecipherable. The police is even more removed from their casual usage. It thus seized upon the profanities (real or imagined) and the mention of sleepover and the use of phrases containing multiple ‘partners’ as something more sinister than the kids themselves ever intended.

  One afternoon during the trial, I met three of Aarushi’s friends at the Durranis’ home in Noida, not far from where the Talwars lived. Their apartment was not unlike the Talwars’ with simple seating in the drawing room, where a desert cooler whirred. Vidushi Durrani had been like a sister to Aarushi. The two other girls were Manini Mathur and Fiza Jha. Fiza’s mother Masooma also joined the conversation. The girls were now nineteen, and in college, each pursuing a professional degree. As her mother looked on, Fiza, poised and articulate, told me about their growing-up years.

  ‘None of us really had a “boyfriend”. But we could spend hours talking to a boy. I sometimes wonder now what it is we talked about. It’s almost silly. We could be on the phone while watching some television show, not saying anything at all, for hours. We really didn’t know what a relationship was.’

  Those were the early days of social media, and platforms like Orkut were unsophisticated by today’s standards. But the kids were drawn to them nevertheless—there was a thrill in being able to have a connected group. Juvenile activities, such as voting which was the best ‘couple’ in their class, or just exchanging ‘endorsements’, were fun.

  Vidushi and Aarushi were close enough for them to share passwords. Because of this Vidushi had a harrowing time explaining to the police why Aarushi had ‘threatened’ her with an ‘I’ll kill you’. ‘It was just a prank, I posed as her and posted something, and she got mad at me, in the way that you do when someone plays a prank,’ said Vidushi.

  Of the lot of them, Aarushi was the most protected, they said—and always the one with the greatest sense of responsibility, of right and wrong. ‘That’s how she was,’ said Vidushi, ‘even when we played with dolls as kids.’

  Fiza and Aarushi went to dance classes together. They loved music. Got joy from trivial things. Aarushi and a few other friends would reward themselves with an ear-piercing each time they achieved a milestone. They talked about boys, what with Aarushi being so popular, but it wasn’t anything different from what they might have read in a young-adult novel.

  But did the same girls speak the kind of language that was found on Aarushi’s profiles?

  A round of mild laughter rippled through the room. Masooma Jha spoke: ‘I couldn’t
imagine this when we were growing up, my parents would be horrified! And when I discovered the way these kids spoke, I wasn’t that happy either. But that’s how it was, I understood that it didn’t mean my child had been corrupted. Or that she had changed into someone loose. They were still kids. Our kids, and they’d be fine.’ The thing about language is that it catches on in groups: members begin to express themselves in a similar way. ‘At that age, we never thought about appropriateness when among friends, maybe we should have, but we didn’t. It didn’t make any of us a worse person though,’ said Fiza.

  This nuance was well beyond the comprehension of the constabulary, to whom using the word ‘slut’ about oneself was confessing one’s promiscuous nature.

  When I brought up the question of sex, everyone laughed. ‘Believe me, if one of us was, all of us would know.’

  That the question had come up in their dear friend’s context made everyone serious. ‘Specially not Aarushi. It’s unimaginable, she was the best of us in many ways.’

  Vidushi and Aarushi used to spend a lot of time together beyond school hours and on holidays, so I asked her whether she knew Hemraj. Of course she did. She thought of him as someone old, quiet and benign, never felt even a hint of a threat. They never really interacted that much. But if she or Aarushi ever wanted anything—a glass of water, or coffee, say—he’d always bring it to them. It was almost as if he was there, but not quite. It may sound politically incorrect, but they never really noticed Hemraj.

  Just as we have a new generation of kids with their own language and behaviour, we also have, almost unnoticed, a new generation of servants. The old manservant or cook or maid who is ‘part of the family’ is well and truly a thing of the past. The mobility of the middle class, smaller family units and smaller living spaces have ensured this. In India’s metros and their suburbs the demand and supply of this cheap labour seems to have found some kind of equilibrium. Those in such jobs are usually at least informally organized—there is a network which provides information about vacancies and better pay. On the employer’s side there is enough of a supply of domestic help that they can be tried and replaced with ease. There could be temporary discomfort, but the servant is someone fairly easily replaced.