Aarushi

by Avirook Sen

  ***

  With the typographical error now accepted by the high court and acknowledged by the Hyderabad forensic lab, the road ahead was barrier-free. Kaul and his team had returned to the honour killing story first floated by the UP police, but they had fleshed out a set of circumstances that led to it. On the basis of photographs supplied to him, and the crucial nugget of false information that Hemraj’s blood was found on Aarushi’s bed, the Gandhinagar forensic scientist Dahiya had woven his epic around parents capable of filicide. He had taken cues from the Talwars’ lifestyle and their profession to settle on the murder weapons: a golf club and a scalpel.

  Two doctors had agreed with Dahiya’s ‘findings’. Two years after examining her, one suggested that Aarushi was sexually active, and that her private parts had been cleaned to erase any evidence. An important witness had turned—saying that the Talwars had approached him to use his influence to get the word ‘rape’ omitted from their daughter’s post-mortem report.

  It now looked as if the CBI had an imagined motive with speculative weapons to go with it. It had no hard evidence. The hard evidence pointed at someone else. But that was due to a typist’s mistake. The road to Judge Shyam Lal’s court in Ghaziabad was clear.

  Postscript: The Case of the Pillow and the Pillow Cover

  These photographs are of two case-turning pieces of forensic evidence: a pillow and pillow cover seized from Hemraj’s room in the Talwars’ flat, and a purple pillow cover seized from Krishna’s bed at L-14 Jalvayu Vihar, a few houses away.

  They were flashed before an Allahabad High Court judge by the CBI in 2011. The agency argued that there was a typographical error in the reports on the two covers. The original report said Hemraj’s blood had been found on Krishna’s pillow cover, pointing to his involvement in the crimes. When the Talwars pointed this out, the CBI said the findings had been swapped, offering the photographs as proof.

  Here are the questions the agency did not answer about the photographs:

  The pillow covers were under seal. No court authorized the opening of the seals, so on whose authority were the pictures taken?

  Who took the pictures?

  When were they taken?

  The CBI’s A.G.L. Kaul gave no clear responses to any of these questions.

  But how were these pictures passed off as ‘official’ before the Allahabad High Court when there were obvious discrepancies?

  The official laboratory label on Hemraj’s pillow and pillow cover read: CFSL-2009/E-1025 Job No. 333/09 RC 1 (S)/08/SCR-III CBI DL Y204 CL-14

  The official label on Krishna’s purple pillow cover read: CFSL-2009/E-1025 Job No. 333/09 RC-1(S)/08 SCR 3 CBI ND Y204 CL 10

  These descriptions are clearly different from those read from the scraps of paper held down by a pencil in the photographs. Who wrote the descriptions by hand? Who authorized this? How is the integrity of the evidence protected if seals are broken to take pictures? These are the questions that the CBI did not answer.

  Part Two

  The Trial

  On 4 June 2012, I was on the road to Ghaziabad, a distance of about 50 kilometres from Gurgaon, where I live. I was going to attend the first hearing in the trial. In the preceding months the Talwars had pleaded desperately to have the case shifted to a court in Delhi. They gave reasons as disparate as distance (they had moved to Delhi) and their fear that they would not get a fair trial in Ghaziabad. Higher courts slapped them around for doing this and the Supreme Court was particularly scathing.

  So Ghaziabad, a settlement struggling in that odd pace between village and city, it was going to be. On my way, I passed scores of towers under construction, and hundreds of hoardings trying to sell a thousand square foot piece of heaven. Their names were pregnant with promise: Imperia, Laurel, Riviera and Wave City, whose tagline on billboards read ‘The city that thinks for you’. There were also a disproportionately large number of billboards of educational institutions peddling degrees, claiming things like ‘recognised under the “B” category by govt.’ Ghaziabad was trying to ‘get there’.

  On the roads, both drivers and pedestrians seemed to take just a few more risks—or were they just liberties? When I entered the court complex, I found a minor traffic jam had resulted in casual calls to vandalize a car (which, incidentally, had a policeman sitting in it). No damage was actually done.

  You enter the CBI’s special fast-track court through a narrow iron gate situated at one corner of the maze of tin and concrete that is Ghaziabad’s ‘kacheri’. To the right of the gate is a public toilet with limited facilities—the urinal sees heavy use and no cleaning; the two private stalls are padlocked, one of them with a bold sign on its door saying, for some reason, ‘notice board’.

  To the left of the gate is a large crate where rubbish is dumped (it was finally removed as the trial came to a close). The waste came mainly from the eateries that lined the lanes of the complex, or anyone else who wished to contribute. Sprinkled among the food stalls are stand-alone Xerox machines, plugged mysteriously into invisible power supply points. Then there are the stalls for typists and passport photo specialists. This could be a court complex in any other provincial town.

  Once you get past the excrement on the right and the waste to the left, you enter a walled compound with a courtyard, scarring whose middle is an open, often brimming, three-foot-deep drain, in whose depths lies the backlog of many years of filth. In the early days of the trial, Dinesh Talwar neglected to ‘mind the gap’ and fell into the drain. He escaped without injury, but one leg of his trousers had muck till the thigh.

  The culture (work or otherwise) in Ghaziabad is defined by the most powerful body on the premises: the Ghaziabad Bar Association, whose pink building you pass as you take a side entrance into the court premises. There is a chhole-kulche wala at hand, and a statue of Chaudhary Charan Singh, in which the former prime minister appears positively simian. His arms are folded in front of him at knee level, as if the sculptor, having been on course till then, suddenly discovered he’d run out of stone for the bottom half of his work. Charan Singh’s statue, with its orangutan arms and dachshund legs, nevertheless seemed to smile benignly at whatever went on in court.

  Towering over the courtyard is a water tank into which a monkey may or may not have fallen to its death some years ago. (The veracity of this story is disputed: some veteran advocates swear it is true and only use a nearby tube well; shopowners who use and peddle the water laugh off the suggestion.) At any rate, the tank overflows with unfailing regularity, the spill gathering exactly at the foot of the steps of court no. 2. Here, a layer of slime forms in the wet season—and it fells prosecutors and defendants without bias. A few weeks after the drain got Dinesh Talwar, Group Captain Chitnis escaped a nasty injury when an agile young policeman grabbed him just as he was about to hit his head on the steps after having slipped on the slime. The octogenarian has trouble with depth perception. At lunchtime, the steps, the slime, the drain would often seem like an obstacle course to him, as he brought back cold drinks or biscuits for his daughter and son-in-law.

  There are about two lakh cases pending in Ghaziabad. All ‘under one roof’, according to the court website. But the CBI special courts are in an annexe. Here, ‘high-profile’ cases are moved along with urgency. For instance, the accused in the Nithari killings appear in the same courtroom as the Talwars. In the court opposite, a scam involving retired judges is being heard.

  Our court system is three-tiered. While a case is usually first heard by a lower court, any orders that are passed during the trial may be challenged, but this must be done one level up, which is the high court of the state (Allahabad in the case of UP, as the crime was committed in Noida). If the high court’s decision is to be challenged, this must be done the next level up, which is the Supreme Court of India (and even here, the Supreme Court may, if the case warrants it, review its own decision). There are times when an appeal can be made directly to the Supreme Court, without having to go to the high court, th
rough what is known as a Special Leave Petition (and the Talwars took this route once). The legal battle is fought on many fronts, and the prizes from these must be displayed in the trial court in the most favourable light, and the scars hidden as best as possible. The rigid hierarchy of the judiciary means lower courts take their cue from the ones above.

  On my first day at the Ghaziabad complex, I was slightly alarmed by the number of guns and gunmen (apart from the police) that I saw on the premises. They were there in so many of the tiny lawyers’ chambers that I lost count. There was also a casual menace about them that I found a little unsettling. I wondered why a court needed so many guns.

  A Ghaziabad regular told me the guns were required ‘for protection’.

  ‘From whom?’

  He laughed, almost spitting out the samosa he was eating. ‘From other lawyers.’

  Some months later, I would know exactly what he meant when the adjacent main building saw a scene out of a Bollywood gangster movie being played out. A western UP gang war had spilled into the premises. The target was a Meerut goon called Udham Singh who ran from one courtroom to another to escape bullets. He was seriously injured, as were four other people—there were pools of blood in courtrooms and verandas.

  Udham Singh was an undertrial charged with several murders. His three assailants were gangsters he was expected to testify against. They arrived in court dressed as lawyers, in black jackets and white trousers—their leader, Yogesh Bhadoria, had made the cinematic additions of a bowler hat and a false moustache to his attire. The gunmen walked right through the long-out-of-order metal detectors of the court with a range of weapons, and opened fire once Udham Singh was brought to the first-floor courtroom in the main building.

  Three other litigants were injured as the gunmen chased their mark. A security man opened fire and hit one of the assailants; another was apprehended. But Bhadoria, of the moustache and hat, jumped off the first floor on to a waiting car and made a dramatic escape.

  In Ghaziabad, no one was surprised, least of all the lawyers or the gunmen on guard (or having tea). Over the past ten years or so there had been at least five potentially fatal attacks on the premises. Rajesh Talwar was the victim of one in early 2011. That is how it worked in western Uttar Pradesh.

  But as lawyers and litigants ran for their lives from the court on the day of the Bhadoria shoot-out, the trial in the annexe’s ‘Fast Tract [sic] Court No. 2’ where the Talwars’ case was being held soldiered on—the only court to keep functioning through the day’s bizarre events.

  The courtroom was about the size of a standard ‘drawing-cum-dining’ in Delhi’s suburbs. The dock was in the corner, its railing was broken, so was a leg, giving the impression that it might lean forward too far some day, keel over at the judge’s feet, pleading to be repaired.

  The judge was Shyam Lal. He was a small man, his grey, balding head just about visible beyond the tall desk he sat behind, the judge’s high chair dwarfing him. He seemed unexceptional. In the Ghaziabad courts, he had acquired the reputation of being honest and firm. There was one other thing about him—he would usually convict. The Ghaziabad regulars had a name for him: ‘Saza Lal’. Or sometimes, just ‘Saza’.

  Judge Shyam Lal was an anomaly in Ghaziabad for yet another reason: his work ethic, which in the Ghaziabad context especially was outstanding. Although the courtroom shoot-out was an extreme circumstance, Judge Shyam Lal’s court often worked when others wouldn’t. Daily power cuts through the summer, for instance, which left the court’s computer dead. When the stenographer didn’t turn up, the judge would take down testimonies by hand. He even ignored a strike or two, called by the bar association.

  But there was something about the Aarushi–Hemraj trial that made Judge Shyam Lal work just a little harder. The reason was fairly obvious: this was the biggest case he would adjudicate, India’s most anticipated murder trial in recent memory. And when it commenced the judge knew he had just under a year and a half to wrap it up. He was due to retire in November 2013.

  From the outset Judge Shyam Lal’s relationship with the lawyers who appeared for the defence wasn’t the best. The Talwars’ advocates Satyaketu Singh and Manoj Sisodia were old Ghaziabad hands who knew him well. Often there would be loud slanging matches in court, mostly directed at the CBI counsel R.K. Saini, but partly directed at the judge. Saini, on the other hand, appeared to have good relations with Judge Shyam Lal. While waiting for the transcripts of the proceedings at the end of the day, I often saw Saini spend a good half-hour with the judge in his chamber behind the courtroom.

  ***

  Today, 4 June, was also the first time I saw Nupur Talwar. Rajesh was already out on bail, but Nupur was in custody in Dasna jail. Over the two-and-a-half-year investigation, Nupur was never an accused. That changed after the Ghaziabad magistrate Preeti Singh issued summons to both Rajesh and Nupur to stand trial in early February 2011. Over the year that followed, the couple ran from court to court to challenge the Ghaziabad magistrate’s order, without success. In its orders in early 2012, the Supreme Court rejected their pleas to quash Preeti Singh’s summons, upheld the non-bailable arrest warrant the magistrate had issued against Nupur and ordered her to appear before the lower court. When she did that, on 30 April 2012, Nupur Talwar was taken into judicial custody and sent to Dasna.

  The Talwars’ entry into court was dramatic that first day as it would be in these early stages. They appeared separately but suddenly, through the tall shrubs under the water tank, accompanied by policemen. This part of the court was out of bounds for everyone except the police and officials, and the route avoided the cameras situated at the common entrance near the toilet. It was also safer, considering Rajesh Talwar had been attacked in the more crowded part of the court on the other side.

  Their ‘entry point’ was a breach in the wall of the annexe’s courtyard. But as a seasoned reporter put it: ‘In Ghaziabad, holes in the wall always expand.’ Nupur Talwar made her entrance through that hole in the wall on the first day of the trial. There were policemen ahead of her, policewomen by her side, policemen behind, but she gave the impression that she was outpacing all of them. Bar the occasional darting of her eyes, as if a mental camera was taking Polaroids of the scene around her, she showed no anxiety.

  She passed her parents during her brisk walk into court. Her father stood there about to speak, but got no more than a sideways glance from her. He held out his hand, but this gesture too went almost unacknowledged: his palm barely brushed her arm. She looked ahead, at the door of the courtroom.

  In the year and a half that I followed the trial, I saw many defendants in other cases enter and leave the court premises. In the eyes of most, guilty or not, you could almost read the words ‘show mercy’. In their bearing, you saw the less-than-equalness that we associate with the ‘accused’ in our courts. There was none of that in Nupur Talwar. Despite her washed but not pressed salwar kameez, a clue to where she might be coming from, she seemed to walk in as if the police around her were props, that she was coming to the court on her own terms. If you were searching for emotions on her face, the only one that you might have found was determination. This mismatch had a strange effect on the people watching: they seemed to stiffen up, even make way for her. Nupur Talwar was not just another accused; she wasn’t like any other accused.

  On this day though, Nupur and Rajesh’s trial would not begin. The prosecution was to have called its first witnesses, but the untimely death of a member of the Ghaziabad Bar Association meant the court had to stop working. An advocate tangentially involved in the case told the waiting cameras: ‘Condolence ho gaya.’ This was not to be taken lightly. Just after his arrest, for instance, Rajesh Talwar had to make an appearance on a day when members of the Gujjar community had called a strike. This incensed a mob—work was being done in court despite their call. A group of men vented their anger by thrashing Nupur Talwar’s brother and Ajay Chaddha.

  The first witness, the photographer and fingerprint
expert Constable Chunnilal Gautam, would have to appear four days later.

  ***

  Constable Chunnilal Gautam, a man with light, smiling eyes, had the sort of respectable portliness that you might associate with a regular patron of one of Ghaziabad’s decent Vaishno dhabas. He had joined the UP police in 1987, and was resigned about his work. ‘Who likes taking pictures of dead bodies every second day?’ he asked me. To get away from this he had decided to become a lifelong student. On his own initiative he had successfully completed an MA and a law degree. He was now pursuing a PhD in Hindi literature.

  Chunnilal was one of the first policemen on the crime scene; he had taken the first photographs and lifted fingerprints. When he arrived at the Talwars’ Noida home on the morning after Aarushi’s murder, Chunnilal testified, this is what he saw: Aarushi’s body covered with a white sheet, which when pulled back revealed her fatal wounds. Blood spattered on the walls but no traces of red on the toys on her bed. Her pyjamas low around her waist, the cleft of her buttocks showing, untied string dangling on each side.

  The details were what made his testimony potent. Blood spattered on the walls, but unsoiled toys (implication: placed later by killers who had feelings for Aarushi). Pyjama strings untied, buttocks showing (implication: someone pulled the pyjamas up after the murder). Only the couple in the dock could have had a hand in this alleged rearrangement of the crime scene. In the absence of any hard evidence, Chunnilal’s testimony was seen as the first links in an incriminating chain of circumstantial evidence.