Aarushi

by Avirook Sen

  No outsider will bother to take Hemraj’s body to the terrace. Moreover, a single person cannot take the body to the terrace.

  ‘The door to the terrace was never locked prior to the occurrence . . . the accused did not give any key . . . to the police despite being asked.’

  That the Talwars had told the court Hemraj had started locking the terrace 8–10 days before because workers had started taking water from the tank, and that the key remained with him. ‘If it was so then it was easily possible for an outsider to find out the key of the lock . . .’

  That if outsiders had left the flat after committing the crime ‘then the outermost door or the middle mesh door must have been found latched’.

  The motive of the commission of the crime has been established.

  That it is not possible that after the commission of the crime outsiders will dress up the crime scene.

  That golf club no. 5 was thrown in the loft after the crime was committed and produced many months later.

  The nature of injuries on both victims is similar, and can be caused by a golf club and a scalpel.

  That accused Rajesh Talwar was a member of the Golf Club, Noida, and golf clubs were produced by him before the CBI and scalpel is used by the dentists and both the accused are dentists by profession.

  In the list that Judge Shyam Lal had presented, there was just one circumstance where the explanation of the defence was open to doubt. This concerned the key to Aarushi’s room, which the Talwars first said was kept in their bedroom, and which Nupur at the trial claimed she might have left in the door. Their memory on this was fuzzy, and in the circumstances suspicious.

  The rest of Judge Shyam Lal’s hypothesis had cogent alternative explanations. The wall between Aarushi’s bedroom and her parents’ wasn’t a mere partition as Judge Shyam Lal had said. His court had recorded that it was brick overlaid with wooden laminates. The judge had been under the impression that there was only a partition, and I remember him being surprised the day he learned that it wasn’t. This fact was part of the sound-test report presented during the trial.

  Bharti Mandal, found Judge Shyam Lal, had ‘nowhere stated’ that she found her employers weeping.

  This is an excerpt from Bharti Mandal’s testimony before the judge: ‘I felt some thief had entered the house and that is why uncle and aunty are crying . . . Aunty threw her arms around me and started crying, when I asked her why are you crying so much . . .’

  From Bharti’s evidence, Judge Shyam Lal had deduced another critical circumstance pointing to the Talwars’ guilt. That if outsiders were involved, then at least one of the two outer doors leading into the flat needed to have been latched. Neither the outermost grill door nor the middle mesh door was either locked or latched, so the Talwars had not been confined by any outside assailant, concluded Judge Shyam Lal.

  Bharti had told his court: ‘I opened the latch of the inner mesh door and stood in the flat . . .’

  In the context of Bharti Mandal’s testimony Judge Shyam Lal also did something that appeared unprecedented. One of the first things Bharti had said was that she was ‘taught’ to say the things she was telling the court.

  While considering this admission of schooling, Judge Shyam Lal observed:

  One must not forget that Bharti Mandal is totally illiterate and bucolic lady from a lower strata of the society and hails from Malda district of West Bengal who came to Noida to perform menial jobs to sustain herself and family and therefore, if she has stated that she has given her statement on the basis of tutoring, her evidence cannot be rejected.

  What Judge Shyam Lal was saying was that it was acceptable to tutor witnesses, provided they were from a low background.

  The apparently simple finding that the motive of the crime had been established perhaps hid behind it the grossest perversion. To establish that Rajesh Talwar had killed Aarushi and Hemraj because he saw them having sex in her room, one had to first prove that Hemraj was there.

  The source of this ‘motive’ was M.S. Dahiya’s report, with its flawed assumption that Hemraj’s blood was found on Aarushi’s pillow. Dahiya and Kaul had stubbornly insisted that in a forwarding letter written by an officer called Dhankar, three days after its recovery on 1 June 2008, the pillow cover was described as being found in Aarushi’s room.

  Tanveer Ahmed Mir had allowed Dahiya to stand by his report and not challenged it on its premise. The source of the pillow cover bearing Hemraj’s blood was proved in court over a year ago: the exhibit was displayed and its original tag, signed by CBI officers, read out. It was found on Hemraj’s bed, in the servant’s room. Not in Aarushi’s bedroom.

  This was perhaps the most critical piece of evidence in the prosecution’s case, the missing keystone. If Hemraj’s pillow cover had indeed been found in Aarushi’s room, the case against the Talwars was solid. But it wasn’t.

  Judge Shyam Lal had watched these dramatic events unfold in his courtroom keenly the previous summer. In his judgement, while evaluating the forensic report on the pillow cover, Judge Shyam Lal added this line: ‘. . . it becomes abundantly clear that Hemraj’s DNA has been found on the pillow cover which was recovered from the room of Aarushi as per letter dated 04.06.2008 of SP CBI.’

  If you read just the judgement, and not the dozens of references to the true source of the pillow cover in the pile of papers on Judge Shyam Lal’s table, you would think he was right because of that line: Aarushi and Hemraj were having sex in her room. The motive had indeed been established.

  If this was an error of omission, then it was a grave one. But was it plausible that Judge Shyam Lal was unaware of all that went on around this important piece of evidence in his court?

  That question is best asked of Judge Shyam Lal, among several others that his judgement threw up.

  The judge’s summary dismissal of every defence witness as either biased (by their friendship with the Talwars) or unreliable is his prerogative. The forensic expert Dr R.K. Sharma, DW-4 (defence witness 4), is dismissed out of hand, but then, Judge Shyam Lal writes:

  DW-4 has admitted in his cross-examination that in the shop of his father mobile sets are being sold and mobile set of Ms Aarushi was pre-paid and used to get it recharged at the instance of Dr Rajesh Talwar. He also admitted that his father’s sister lives in Punjab. A specific suggestion has been thrown before this witness that data of mobiles of Ms Aarushi and Hemraj were deleted by him and mobile set of Hemraj must have got sent to Punjab . . .

  Dr R.K. Sharma’s weeklong testimony made no reference to his father, or to any deletion of data or an aunt in Punjab to whom the phone was sent. Where had Judge Shyam Lal got all this from? Perhaps it was an honest mistake; maybe the DW-4 is a typographical error.

  But the following passage suffers from no such handicap. Judge Shyam Lal describes how the post-mortem doctor Sunil Dohare was being pressured by the Talwars through Dr Sushil Choudhry and K.K. Gautam. Not just that, Dr Dinesh Talwar handed him his phone to speak to Dr T.D. Dogra of AIIMS, just as Dohare was about to begin Aarushi’s autopsy.

  Judge Shyam Lal writes:

  Although Dr Dohare had only stated that Dr T.D. Dogra had told him that blood samples of deceased Aarushi be taken but it appears that Dr Dogra had asked him not to mention in the post-mortem examination report about the evidence of sexual intercourse and this fact has been deliberately suppressed by Dr Dohare.

  Dr Dohare never told the court this. Dr Dogra never testified, so the question of his telling the court didn’t arise. The conversation was never recorded.

  This is what Judge Shyam Lal believed:

  The accused persons disposed off/destroyed the scalpel, blood stained clothes worn by them during the commission of the offence, dressed up the crime scene, cleaned private parts of Ms Aarushi, covered the dead body of Ms Aarushi with a flannel blanket and that of Hemraj with a cooler panel, placed a bed sheet on grill dividing two roofs, locked the door to the terrace, concealed or destroyed the key of the terrace which has not been
found till yet, wiped the blood stains on stairs, secretly hid the murder weapon—one golf stick in the loft, cleaned the two golf sticks, concealed and threw away the mobile sets of both deceased.

  A few pages after that paragraph came Judge Shyam Lal’s 26 circumstances—his summing up of why the Talwars were guilty. And finally:

  Now is the time to say omega in this case. To preorate, it is proved beyond reasonable doubt that the accused are the perpetrators of the crime in question. The parents are the best protectors of their own children—that is the order of human nature but there have been freaks in the history of mankind when the father and mother became the killer of their own progeny. They have extirpated their own daughter who had hardly seen 14 summers of her life and the servant without compunction from terrestrial terrain in breach of Commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill . . .’

  Judge Shyam Lal made no mention in his 200-plus-page judgement of Satyaketu Singh’s demonstration, before the judge, of how Aarushi’s room was too small for the kind of fatal swings of the golf club that were alleged. He demonstrated it by swinging a golf club in the courtroom.

  Satyaketu Singh responded by sending the by then retired judge a legal notice alleging mala fide intent and deliberate suppression. Nothing eventually came of the notice, but it was clear that Singh felt personally affronted by Judge Shyam Lal’s attitude towards his arguments.

  For him it was final proof of what he had been telling the Talwars for several months leading up to the verdict: seek a transfer out of Judge Shyam Lal’s court, you will never get justice there.

  The decision to seek a transfer or not wasn’t an easy one. But it was Mir’s line—of not antagonizing Judge Shyam Lal any further—that was taken. The result wasn’t pretty, but could there have been, given all that had taken place, any other outcome?

  Privately, the Ghaziabad lawyers—and some people close to the Talwars—saw the failure to stretch the trial beyond Judge Shyam Lal’s tenure as Mir’s greatest failing. They felt this is what denied the Talwars a fair trial. The casual remark to Mir about Judge Shyam Lal’s birthday thus wasn’t that casual at all. It may have seemed mischievous, a dodgy tactic, but the point was it was one way of preventing this judge from pronouncing the Talwars guilty.

  In the end, the judge did just that. The Talwars were sentenced to life imprisonment. Judge Shyam Lal retired four days later.

  Part Three

  The Dasna Diaries

  Several months after the conviction I was bound for Ghaziabad once again. But this time I went past the town, down the highway for another half-hour, crossed the railway tracks to the left, and arrived at Dasna jail, the main prison serving the Meerut–Muzaffarnagar range in western UP.

  On the short road before the high walls and large gate was the customary shop that sold shirts, handicrafts and condiments made by Dasna’s inmates. There were no customers, just a bored salesman who must wonder constantly about the wisdom of a store in the fields that surround Dasna’s walls. Its purpose seemed to be to tell visiting VIPs that inmates were being useful. Dasna had many ‘VIP’ visitors.

  Once let in, I was led to the visitors’ area to the left of the gate. The part of it that was used for visits had the look of a narrow junior school classroom. It had the standard bench-cum-desks, where inmates and visitors sat. A ‘sardar’ (a supervisor from among the inmates) was around, but seldom interfered.

  Vikas Sethi, an employee of the Talwars, had taken me to Dasna. Although the rest of the family did their best to visit once a week, Vikas was Rajesh and Nupur’s only regular visitor. It was important that he went. He took with him small supplies of food, books and, of course, money. This trickle of money and goods was the accepted system in Dasna—and the Talwars were grateful for it.

  Nupur Talwar greeted me with a smile, and before I could even finish saying ‘how are you’, laughed and said with her customary irony: ‘We are veterans here now. We’re experienced! We are doing fine . . .’

  Rajesh was quieter. ‘We have to make do . . . what choice do we have? I am trying to understand why we are here, trying to understand destiny,’ he said, as Vikas slipped him a few 500-rupee notes.

  Nupur matter-of-factly explained that small comforts were all for sale in Dasna. There were inmates who washed clothes and dishes and cooked. ‘You just need to pay,’ she said. That’s how they always were, the Talwars: Rajesh, emotional, his anger and despair scarcely hidden; Nupur, getting on with life—giving it a good fight.

  The Talwars had become Dasna celebrities. Once Rajesh set up a dental chair in the prison clinic, many VIPs in the area—police officers, magistrates—drove down for dental work. They were also brought out and exhibited before VIP visitors to the jail.

  As I was leaving, Rajesh Talwar told me he was keeping a diary to pass his time and express his thoughts because the atmosphere in jail was choking his spirit out of him. I wanted to read his diary and, a week later, I received a brown spiral notebook with a plastic cover about the first two months of Rajesh’s sentence. I sat down to read it immediately. Afterwards, I decided that the prison diary should speak for itself, and so I will share some excerpts here. Midway through the diary Rajesh lists several of his inmates. For the sake of clarity here is this list, as it appears in the diary, at the very beginning.

  Mantriji (Mr Khushwaha): He’s been here almost two years, caught in a political web, and may get bail now in a few days. He’s a very good person and it is probably because of him that all of us are in this barrack. Most are worried that if he gets bail then what happens to us? Do we move from here or do we stay here?

  Faujis: Vijay and Vivek: They came in due to a bank robbery. And an armyman in a bank robbery becomes a very serious thing. They operate both the kitchens in the jail.

  Birbal: He’s from Bihar and misses home a lot. He’s in for smuggling of drugs. He’s what’s called a numberdaar and looks after Mantriji and also some of the other inmates of the barrack like me, Dr Verma, Guptaji and Shashikant.

  Jagdish: He looks after everyone’s clothes and the dishes and is paid 2500 a month along with food for the duties.

  Sundarji: Also an ex-armyman he is the superintendent numberdaar. A powerful man as far as inmates go due to his connection with the authorities.

  The builders: They have just come. Some problem with the society they were making. UP has a lot of land problems. Out here one realizes how much lawlessness there is in UP.

  Rakesh: Also a numberdaar. Doesn’t talk at all. Haven’t heard him talk at all unless spoken to.

  Shashikant: He’s a customs officer in for corruption. Will probably get bail soon.

  Mr Gupta: He’s a businessman who was caught along with Shashikant for giving a bribe.

  Dr Verma: Part of the NRHM scam, will probably get bail by next week.

  Dr Rajesh Talwar: That’s me. Convicted for the murder of my own child and servant. It seems so strange and unreal, but that’s what it is.

  The diary begins on 25 November 2013, the day of the verdict.

  We could not believe what was being said. He was saying we were guilty of murdering our own child and Hemraj. Had everyone gone mad? For the media, excellent news.

  27 Nov: Met Nupur at about 1 pm. She was looking very ragged and tired. Wanted to meet someone from home, she was worried about her dad. But the place is so far . . . how can they come every day? I knew once both of us go in less people will visit, maybe not more than once a week. No one can stop this world.

  Hope we can meet someone together tomorrow. The things that one takes for granted outside . . .

  Want to talk very badly with my own people, but can’t . . . It’s only been three days.

  Cold water baths.

  Had to put a thumb impression on paper which showed us as convicted prisoners.

  28 Nov: Came back and played some chess to pass some time and lost to Vivek.

  Met the deputy jailer, he is a nice man and is always cracking some joke.

  It is Friday, I don’t thin
k it’s going to be easy. The lawyers and Dinesh will meet on the weekend and if they work like this then we will take a long time.

  29 Nov: Met the jail superintendent [JS] regarding something to do for Nupur and myself. He really shocked us by saying that the media is asking why we were not being sent to Agra [jail]. That if it happens will completely finish us. Anyway gave an application and hope that does not happen.

  30 Nov: It’s been five days and this is going to be an endless punishment, feeling quite tired already.

  Some correspondence regarding shifting [to Agra] and I hope that does not happen. That will be complete death, in fact, worse than death. I just don’t understand why our life is going from bad to worse.

  1 Dec: Where we were last Sunday, and where we are today. Extremely depressed getting up . . .

  Met Ajay and Radhika and Nupur all together just now. For some time it felt that we were meeting together somewhere till one comes back to the barrack and reality hits you again.

  Supposed to have had some good food today because Dr Yadav is leaving tomorrow.

  3 Dec: Still can’t understand how this happened to us. If only I would have gotten up . . . I could not even save my dear Aaru. Very difficult to live without her.

  Met with the JS along with Nupur and Mantriji. He promised he would let us do some work at the hospital.

  He was talking about exactly what happened that night. Told him about what the first team had said, about the narco etc. He also found the whole honour killing thing very vague.

  4 Dec: Ajay and Dinesh will come tomorrow. I hope Dinesh is not too negative. Just can’t understand God’s ways.