Touted as one of the biggest double-murder mysteries in India, is the story of 13-year-old Aarushi Talwar and her family’s domestic help, Hemraj. These are the facts, as we know them. When temporary domestic help Bharti Mandal came to work on Friday, May 16, 2008, the house of the Talwar dentist-couple was locked from outside. Nupur, the wife, threw the keys down to her from the balcony, and Mandal on entering the house saw the daughter, Aarushi, lying dead in her blood-splattered bedroom, her throat slit; Hemraj was missing.
The case immediately became breaking news. The headlines were about the danger ‘servants’ posed to their wealthy employers. The next morning, after Aarushi was cremated, a retired police officer noticed drops of blood on the staircase; and when the door to the terrace was forced open, Hemraj’s partly decomposed body was discovered. This had the nation in a tizzy.
Over the next few years, the case remained in the news with some sensational discovery reported every few months. The Talwars were part of an orgy circle, we read, or Aarushi and Hemraj were in a sexual relationship and the father killed them in a bout of honour rage.
Like most of you, I too have been following the Aarushi murder case with great interest. Even though I knew there wasn’t enough evidence, I preferred to believe the version that held the parents responsible. I would much rather make peace with the fact that a crazy kind of father did this in a moment of rage than believe that it is possible for someone to come into the house and kill a child while the parents slept through it in the next room. Therefore, when Avirook Sen’s book on the investigation and trial,
Although Sen’s book starts off with the murder, it is in the second and third sections — the investigation and the trial of the Talwars in the Ghaziabad district court — that it truly comes alive. That the investigation was bungled from the beginning is well-known, not only from the fact that nobody even bothered to check Hemraj’s room when he was a suspect on the first day, but also that famous press conference at which UP Police’s Gurdarshan Singh puzzlingly and tantalisingly described to the country that Aarushi and Hemraj were found in an ‘objectionable but not compromising position’. The case was then handed over to the CBI, where further discrepancies arose. Sen looks quite closely into the time AGL Kaul of the CBI was assigned to head the investigation. While not everyone in the CBI approved of his methods, Kaul was known as a man who could get the job done at a cost, Sen reports. Kaul also had a preference for prurience.
“Kaul and Dahiya (a deputy director at the forensic science laboratory in Gandhinagar, whose help Kaul requested for the case) set out to accomplish two tasks: settle on a new murder weapon — the khukri was now out, since a surgical instrument had to be the weapon, so that a doctor could be the suspect (even if he was a dentist, not a surgeon and so were the suspects associated with it); and to establish a motive — here they had Gurdarshan Singh’s earlier statements to fall back on. But this would require leavening and kneading the dough again. The central theme in the new theory relied heavily on the personal details of the Talwars; their profession, lifestyle, their relationship with their daughter — and crucially, her relationships with boys. To accomplish this, Kaul turned his attention to, and there isn’t a more delicate way to put this, Aarushi’s vagina,” Sen writes.
Through a series of events, golf clubs that go missing and then found again, bloodstained pillow covers which are ignored at first and then incorrectly tagged and named (and thereby rendered inadmissible as evidence), and emails to the Talwars sent from an email account named after Hemraj, Sen amply proves that even though it is unclear if the parents were the killers, the CBI at least was simply out to get them.
In the third section, the Talwars run into further fortuitous trouble. Their case lands in the court of judge Shyam Lal, popularly known as Sazaa Lal. He was a hard worker, his court would work when others’ often wouldn’t; if the stenographer did not turn up, Lal would take down testimonies by hand. “But there was something about the Aarushi-Hemraj trial that made 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,” Sen writes. Often, the Talwars weren’t allowed to introduce evidence because it would lengthen the proceedings, and under no circumstances would Lal allow the case to go beyond his last working day, the book suggests. Sen’s description of what happens in a courtroom crawling with gun-toting security guards and lawyers who frequently come to blows with each other is shocking to read.
If the account in the book is true, and Sen makes many convincing arguments, it is clear, even to someone who preferred to believe the parents guilty, that the Talwars have faced not just a travesty of justice, but also a travesty of fate. Aarushi does not have all the answers one hopes it does about the case. But it is to its credit that it raises several new and important questions. For followers of the biggest double-murder mystery in contemporary India, this one is a must-read.