by Avirook Sen
One of the many things that troubled me during the course of the trial was that every key witness for the prosecution had told one story at the time of the investigation and a substantially different one in court. Bharti Mandal had been questioned by three different investigators within a month of the crime. Yet she had never mentioned to any of them that she had ‘touched’ the iron door on the outside and it would not open. Neither had she told any of them how the door behaved when she returned: ‘I returned to the door and put my hand on it and it opened.’
The door in question was a tricky one: Shashi Devi, the laundrywoman who visited the flat regularly, had said so to investigators. Shashi Devi was dropped as a prosecution witness, but the CBI’s Hari Singh testified that he had recorded her as saying: ‘The outermost door of the flat used to remain open all the time. If nobody came out after pressing the bell, I used to push the door open which used to remain jammed in the frame [emphasis added] and I used to keep the clothes there.’
Could anyone who merely ‘touched’ it, as Bharti said she had, figure out whether it was locked from inside?
The answer to that question was probably the difference between a conviction and acquittal, but it wasn’t what troubled me. In June 2008, Bharti Mandal’s memory still fresh, the CBI’s Vijay Kumar recorded a statement by her—her third—in which she said clearly that it was only the middle mesh door that was latched. At the trial she said: ‘I had not stated [emphasis added] to the investigating officer that “I first pushed the outer iron door and saw that the inner [middle] mesh door is closed and latched.”’
Bharti’s testimony opened up the possibility that the outer door to the Talwars’ flat was indeed locked from within. The CBI was confident that this would be enough.
Except that there were a few problems. The biggest of these appeared at the very beginning of the court record from Bharti Mandal’s cross-examination: ‘Jo mujhe samjhaya gaya hai, wahi bayan main yahan de rahi hoon’ (Whatever was taught/explained to me, I’m saying here).
Bharti said this in the first minutes of her cross-examination, almost at the stroke of the lunch break. The rest of the examination would continue half an hour later. The stern-looking policewoman who chaperoned her to and from court whisked her away. Saini and company, beaming the day before, followed agitated.
When the hearing resumed, the defence objected to the witness leaving the court without permission before the cross-examination was completed. This was against court procedure. (All other witnesses in the case had remained in court during breaks. Mohapatra, the forensic scientist, for instance, had a fixed seat where he sat patiently through breaks.) In an application made right after the break, the defence alleged that the witness was taken away so that she could be schooled.
Judge Shyam Lal, usually so concerned about decorum and procedure—giggling policewomen, ringing cellphones and the like—ignored the application. And when Bharti returned to court, the proceedings took a surreal turn. Her statements to investigators were read out to her line by line. These were recorded in 2008, and were documents that the CBI had told the court it relied upon. Almost without exception, Bharti said she hadn’t told the CBI any of the facts attributed to her by the investigators of the time.
From her cross-examination, it appeared the CBI may never have interviewed her at all. That she was saying whatever she had to say for the first time, and only to the court. Including: ‘Jo mujhe samjhaya gaya hai, wahi bayan main yahan de rahi hoon.’
***
Bharti Mandal lived in Noida’s Sector 8; her 10 foot by 8 foot room was in the Baans Balli slum. Her friend Kalpana Mandal—the person she replaced in the Talwar household—lived there too, in another room. The settlement is behind a dedicated bamboo market, hence the name. Its presence and sly expansion over the years speaks of the stunning bifurcation of life in Delhi’s suburbs.
Across the streets from it are large corporate towers with their signature tinted-glass fronts. Several monuments to the suburban middle-class idyll, such as Jalvayu Vihar, with gates and guards and parks and pools, are within walking distance—for the slum dwellers, that is. Others would take cars or rickshaws to avoid the longish trek.
The slum is enclosed within a ring of busy markets that hawk the leftovers from others nearby that have wealthier patrons. Here, the meat and fish stalls sell innards and claws and heads and offal. The provision store offers the option of buying ingredients measured exactly for a family’s next meal: oil carefully poured from the bottle into small pouches tied with string, spoonfuls of spices. The vegetable vendor has the tomatoes from the bottom of the pile—for buyers at the bottom of theirs.
You enter the slum through what appear to be merely gaps between the shops that form its facade. The lanes are no more than three feet wide, including the drains that run along or cut across. There are temples in the slum but not enough toilets for its 1,50,000-odd inhabitants, so these passages are lined with the droppings of children.
Most disconcerting, however, was that Bharti Mandal’s home was deep inside a wickedly intricate maze. After just a few yards, all lanes would split into two or three, inviting wrong turns every few seconds, each one costlier than the last.
A year after her deposition, I had tried to reach Bharti Mandal and Kalpana Mandal. Bharti lived a few yards away from a temple, and Sanjay, Kalpana’s husband, had escorted me there. Bharti wasn’t home, and we decided to return after killing some time in the market outside. There, I lost Sanjay, and thinking that he might have returned to his room, I attempted to reach it on my own. This was pure misadventure. Within minutes, I was lost inside the slum and trying to get out. But each turn I took sucked me deeper into it. Half an hour passed before Sanjay finally found me, slightly dizzy from the experience.
In their home, Kalpana made tea, and began talking about the Talwars.
***
Kalpana Mandal came to testify right after Bharti, except that she didn’t testify. She had continued working at Nupur’s parents’ place after the murders, and the CBI had listed her as one of the witnesses Nupur Talwar could influence while arguing against her bail.
In court, the prosecution moved an application saying that it had ‘reliably learnt’ that the witness had been ‘won over’ by the defence, which is why she wasn’t required to testify. R.K. Saini wasn’t in court that day, so his underling B.K. Singh moved the application. I asked Singh what had made the CBI change its mind after bringing the witness to court and guarding her the way they had guarded Bharti. And who exactly had won Kalpana over? Nupur Talwar was in jail.
‘Woh to maine achar dala, thoda . . .’ I did that to add a bit of spice, he said smiling.
Sipping tea in her home, I asked Kalpana about her day in court.
‘They [the CBI] came in a Gypsy. They came in the morning about 9.30. They dropped me back also. In the afternoon.
‘On the way they asked me . . . “What were they like? Were they good people or bad? Were they fighting?”
‘I said they never fought in front of me. It was a good family. To me, they were very good. They have never slapped me, or even scolded me. Never did anything to me . . .
‘They then asked about my routine, when I went, what I did.
‘In some other homes, they scold you, they keep complaining—this isn’t done, or that isn’t done. This house they would never say anything. And their parents’ house is the same. I’ve worked there for fourteen years.
‘How could I say that they were a bad family? Bad parents? The father would go to drop Aarushi to school every morning at 7.30. So how can I say he was bad? Some days he would go to drop her at private tuitions at 4.30 in the evening. She was never alone. If they were not at home, her grandmother was there. She was really taken care of.
‘I saw her grow up . . . She was like my daughter [points to her daughter] and I saw her grow up in front of my eyes. Their children grow up so well, so fast . . . I don’t know what they feed them!
‘They would always be together, eating toget
her, going out together. They would take Aarushi everywhere. So why wouldn’t I make out that they were a happy family?
‘I would say in court as well that they were good people. I’d say it in front of everyone. I am not afraid to say it, because that is what I know. And sahab was an “India pass doctor”, India pass, he was doing so well, opening clinics everywhere.
‘They didn’t ask me anything in the court. Whatever little they asked they asked in the car. I just told them they were a good family, what else will I say?
‘They [the CBI] never gave me anything to eat in court [laughs]. I came back home and ate.’
Kalpana didn’t really know what to make of her day in court, so I asked her about Aarushi.
‘She was a very good girl, she would call me Kalpana didi. She would stay at her grandmother’s place in the afternoon. When she came back from school she would go there. That is what I saw for three years.’
Did she believe any of what the CBI was saying about her having sex with Hemraj?
‘Even we were wondering how they were saying all this. She was a good girl, everyone in the cluster would say that as well . . . When we heard the news we were shocked.
‘I’ve cleaned their house even after Aarushi was killed. But it feels empty . . . I used to get a bad feeling. There was no one around.’
As I was leaving I asked Kalpana and Sanjay about their life in Delhi. Did they like where they lived? There was no living to be made where they came from, said Sanjay. Kalpana offered a more evocative answer: ‘Eikhane standard jaiga achhe . . . Deshe dhulo mati . . . kada. Eikhane standard jaiga,’ she said. In the village there was dust and muck, here there was a ‘standard’ (of living).
This is why the squalid maze of Baans Balli was expanding, and would continue to grow. It was less about what the migrants found here, more about what they had left behind. Sanjay and Kalpana Mandal were happy they were where they were.
Ironically, there was also some comfort in where they were not on 15/16 May 2008. Kalpana Mandal and her husband had gone on leave—to the dust and muck of their rural home—at the time of the murders. They received calls from the CBI when they were there, but one thing was clear, they were far away when the murders happened. There could only be so much pressure the police could put them under.
They were not in the position that Bharti found herself in. Kalpana had known Bharti from their growing-up years in Gourangatala, a little north Bengal village, but they were not friends any more. ‘Bharti avoids us,’ Kalpana told me.
The murders had cost the Talwars many of their friends; their servants had lost some too.
***
Tanveer Ahmed Mir came into the trial in mid-October 2012. Several significant witnesses, including Bharti Mandal, K.K. Gautam, Dr Sunil Dohare and Dr B.K. Mohapatra, had already testified by then.
Karanjawala and Co., the firm involved in the Talwars’ Supreme Court matters, believed that the Talwars required a specialist criminal lawyer in Ghaziabad. Satyaketu Singh, who had held things together competently enough till then, was a civil lawyer by profession.
On the advice of the Delhi firm, the Talwars engaged Tanveer Ahmed Mir. Mir wasn’t a stranger to the lower courts—these were the first courts where he had defended many of his clients—but his manner was noticeably different from that of the Ghaziabad regulars’.
Mir was a hard-core criminal lawyer; he believed that those who earned their living the way he did must master the ‘art of concealment’. Yet there was a disarming openness about him: outside court, he would talk freely about murderers he helped acquit—and equally about the cases he’d lost, often lacing his stories with colourful profanities. He seemed to live his life as if he was in a game, and like a seasoned player, he accepted that he’d win some and lose some.
Inside the court, he was a different man. Despite the commute from Delhi and very often several hours at a stretch in court, he always appeared fresh and distinguished. Ghaziabad’s dust never seemed to settle on him. Also, in contrast to his opposite number, the prosecution counsel R.K. Saini, his manner—towards everyone in court—was extremely respectful. He had a quaint way, part feudal, part Indian army, of addressing people—especially those of lower station—as ‘sahab’. He was tough in his cross-examination, but also brought up to be mindful of what the Indian Supreme Court had once called the ‘majesty of the court’. Saini, on the other hand, often flew completely off the handle.
There was something else about Mir that reporters especially liked. After the 2011 attack on Rajesh Talwar, the press wasn’t allowed to enter the court—apparently because of a security threat. So we would huddle at the open door straining our ears to hear what was going on, always careful to remain out of the somewhat temperamental judge’s line of sight. Some of the lawyers, and many of the witnesses, were frequently inaudible. This was in part because proceedings were often like a private three- or four-way conversation between the judge and the opposing sides before him, their backs towards us. Add to this the constant din outside the court, where we stood—policewomen complaining bitterly about extra PT; litigants arguing with lawyers; court officials shooting the breeze (loudly); and so on. Their combined efforts would submerge the words being spoken inside.
But when Mir was on, his stentorian voice carried to us clearly; he was also in the habit of summing up what the witness had said. When Mir first came on the scene, he was seen as another in the long line of ‘Delhi’ (the Ghaziabad synonym for ‘high-flying’) lawyers the Talwars had employed. This cemented the widely held belief that they were both wealthy and guilty. How else could they afford these people? And who but the guilty would spend all that money?
As I got to know Mir better, I would sometimes offer him a ride back to Delhi so I’d get his perspective on the day’s proceedings. We had each, for our respective purposes, got to know the case—and the Talwars—a little better. A bit frustrated with circumstances, he said that he sometimes contemplated exiting.
I asked him what made him continue.
‘This is a beautiful case to argue,’ he said. It had acquittal written all over it, and should he be able to take the case, it would be a substantial achievement—it was being watched closely by the legal fraternity.
Mir had a thriving practice, and a great reputation, but hadn’t yet made it to the major league. With his characteristic candour, he would say that, in Supreme Court matters, he would be called upon as a ‘junior counsel’. (It happened to him in this case too when a matter was before the highest court.) He didn’t mind assisting—or perhaps he did, just a bit—but there was no question that he loved to argue.
This case went to the heart of why he wanted to become a lawyer. He had taken on the case because he had worked hard to get such an opportunity. He came to Delhi from Kashmir in the early 1990s. His family were erstwhile feudal lords, and his father was a politician; they probably had more than their fair share of power and privilege in the valley they loved. But Tanveer Ahmed Mir belonged to that generation of Kashmiri youths who were born at the wrong time. When he came of age, the Kashmir agitation was at its height. The winds of those times blew away a lot of ambitions, and as many futures.
He said he got a B.Sc. from the university there, but ‘learned nothing’. He came to Delhi to ‘achieve something’. For this, he braved its mainland bigotry: no landlord would rent him a house, and he managed the initial years thanks to the kindness of a (Hindu) professor who took him in. At Delhi University, he was a serious student, but sociable enough—an attribute that one day, quite suddenly, would make him part of the story in another sensational Delhi murder, that of Priyadarshini Mattoo, a student who was raped and murdered in her Vasant Kunj flat in the mid-1990s.
‘I didn’t know Priya that well . . . Just hi, hello terms . . . But one day she walked up to me and requested me to accompany her around campus. There was a bunch of boys bothering her. There was this Bihari gang (the DU campus is notorious for such divides) . . . She felt she would be safer if she
had a guy around her. I agreed.’
Young Tanveer woke up the next morning to find the story in the papers. ‘Fuck, I said, this can’t be true, I was with her the whole day yesterday!’
He hotfooted it to the crime scene and told investigators this. The CBI came calling at his hostel door. They asked him whether there was a thwarted suitor in the picture and when he confirmed this the investigators wanted him to testify.
The news spread and he would find notes threatening his life slipped under his door. ‘I was in two minds about whether it was worth it to put myself in the box. I felt troubled, afraid even. I called my dad.’
Tanveer’s father heard him out. ‘He paused for a while, and then started laughing. After that he said something that I’ll never forget. It’s why I do what I do. He told me, “You want to become a criminal lawyer . . . and you don’t have the courage to be a witness?’’’
He appeared in court, of course, as prosecution witness 9. He told the court what he knew without fear, and his testimony helped convict Priyadarshini Mattoo’s killer. But it was that day in the witness box, the cross-examination that he had to go through, that gave him a taste of real criminal law. He was addicted. He’d got into that court for the right reasons, but once in it, he loved the game. He began to play.
And here he was, a decade and a half later, defending the Talwars. Had he done it for the right reasons? Did he believe they were innocent? Mir’s conviction about the innocence of his clients became deeper as he dug further and further. The Talwars would spend eight to ten hours in his Defence Colony office on many days as the trial commenced—basically being grilled. It became clear to me that Mir felt that after a year of dealing with him, the Talwars had left any ‘concealing’ to Mir. And that whatever it was they had to conceal, if anything, he could deal with comfortably.
This attitude was different from what I had seen on those early drives back from court, when he and I separately wondered if the Talwars had something to conceal. ‘So, Tanveer,’ I asked one day, ‘what was your gut reaction to the Talwars when you first met them?’