India (49 page)

Under pressure from above, poorly trained and badly paid officers fell back on methods they could get away with in Mau or Kanpur and applied them in Noida. Their investigation was haphazard, absurd and defamatory, targeting those who were closest to the murder scene. They informed the press now that the killing of both victims had been done not with a khukri or a knife, but with “a sharp-edged surgical instrument,” suggesting it might be the handiwork of a medical professional.
¹¹
Next, a police officer went on the record: “The way in which the throat of Aarushi was cut points out that it is the work of some professional who could be a doctor or a butcher.”
¹²
The family were unaware of this statement and its implication.

“I had banned TV from our house by this time,” Nupur said bitterly two years later. “Whenever we turned it on, there was always news about the murder. So I hid the remote. Then the mother of Aarushi’s close friend Fiza, who had a contact at NDTV, warned me the police were saying they were suspicious we were involved in the killing, and were gunning for us. I took no notice, and I was quite angry and upset with Fiza’s mother. The police had told us not to talk to the media, so we didn’t. Then the same police officer who had said this to us, the SSP [Senior Superintendent of Police], gave a press conference saying they were looking at the family.”
¹³

Nupur’s husband, Rajesh Talwar, was now the prime suspect. I had been Dr. Talwar’s patient, and had sat in his dentist’s chair. I knew him only as a bearded, avuncular man who had gentle hands, even when he was probing your molars.

“I had lost my beloved child, so why were they doing this to me?” he asked. “The cops thought we were an ‘immoral’ family because Aarushi made 300 calls a month to her friends and went on Orkut and Facebook. These people are backward. They are not fit to do their job. They said I did an honour killing because she was having an inter-caste relationship with the servant. My wife and I had an inter-community marriage, so how on earth would I think of doing what they call an honour killing? I told them Aarushi was reading two books,
Shantaram
and Chetan Bhagat’s
3 Mistakes of My Life
. So the police say, ‘Hah, you’re saying she was reading this book because she has made three mistakes in her life? What are the three mistakes?’ She had joined the ‘I Decide’ club at school, and the last project she did was on addiction—in fact she won the first prize for her effort but was not there to see it. She had looked up addiction on the Internet, so the Noida police then say on television: ‘We think there was some addiction in the family. She may have had a drug addiction, or she may have thought members of her family needed help with it.’ I told them, go to her school and look at her project or talk to her teachers. I wondered if this was my destiny, and if the universe was conspiring against me, or if I had been caught in a whirlpool.”

We were in the sitting-room of the Talwars’ apartment in south Delhi. It was nearly two years since Aarushi’s murder. They had left Noida and moved back to the building they had lived in during the first few months of her life, when she was a baby. She was all around us, in blown-up photographs on the wall, in the crystal ornaments on a low table, in their memories. Her bedroom had been faithfully reconstructed in the new home with
her clothes, desk, cushions and toys. Propped up on her bed was her favourite stuffed Bart Simpson, which she liked to have beside her at night. They had the mementoes: the photos of Aarushi growing up, as a little girl, as a teenager with kohl around her eyes sitting in the back of a car with her school friends. They had the cards, the one saying: “MOM … L.O.V.E. you 4ever!” and the one saying: “Dad u r da bestest dad any1 can have. U rok ma world.”

“For her birthday weekend,” said her mother, “we’d planned a sleepover for four–five girls on the Saturday night.” Dr. Talwar was a nice-looking woman whose face was marked by deep shadows beneath her eyes. She wore a silver kameez over black trousers, and her watch was turned to her inner wrist. “The CBI [Central Bureau of Investigation] say to me, ‘What is a sleepover? Were there adults involved?’ I had to explain what a sleepover was—chatting, music, raiding the fridge while we stay in the next room. I explained that the kids would say, ‘Go from here,’ in the way kids do, and again the police were saying to me, ‘Why would you have to go, why would your daughter not want you there?’ They wanted to know why Aarushi had deleted some of the pictures on her new camera. ‘Who has deleted these images? Why has she done this?’ I had to explain, that is just how kids are, they take some pictures of themselves, they delete the ones they don’t like.”

“They found an email she had sent me a year before,” said her father, “apologizing and saying she had just wanted to try out something with her friends. So the police take it and flash it on TV. All the channels are asking, ‘What was Aarushi going to try out? Why did she say it wouldn’t happen again? Why does a daughter send an email to a father?’ Well, she didn’t send emails to me, it just happened one evening when she was twelve years old, and Aarushi wanted to go to the cinema in the mall to watch
Namaste London
with a group of friends—just the girls together. We didn’t want her going without an adult, but in the end we gave our consent and dropped her off and collected her from the cinema. It was peer pressure that made us agree, because her friends were allowed to go. Aarushi knew we weren’t happy about it and that’s why she sent me the email. She had a very sensitive nature. Not even once did I have to raise my voice to her. If there had been an occasion, I would have raised it.

“It was no issue if we had a boy or a girl,” he continued, referring to the social pressure in the north of India to have male children. “From a young age Aarushi wanted to be a ‘baby doctor’—she said that before she knew the word paediatrician. She loved babies. Her friends told her she was being a geek, studying too hard. I put money aside as an investment, put it into
a flat and told her this is not for your marriage, it’s for your studies. She would tell family: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get into AIIMS [a prestigious medical college], but Dad has kept this for my education.’ ”

“She was good from the first standard,” said Nupur. “At her school, if you get above 85 percent for three years consecutively, you get a blue blazer. Only one or two children get it each year. There was no question of Aarushi not getting a blue blazer. She was fond of dancing. She went every Sunday with other girls to a class at Danceworx studio in Noida and danced for hours, learning Ashley Lobo jazz dancing. She and her friends made a dance group and called themselves the Awesome Foursome.” Nupur showed me a photograph of the girls on which Aarushi had written: “AWESUM 4SUM!”

We sat in silence together. “Aarushi was an avid reader too, always reading, her iPod headphones stuffed in her ears, and texting as well, sending messages on Orkut at the same time.” Rajesh stood up and went to Aarushi’s bedroom and brought back some of his daughter’s books to show me: Anne Frank’s
The Diary of a Young Girl
, Chetan Bhagat’s
Five Point Someone
, Khaled Hosseini’s
A Thousand Splendid Suns
, Jean Sasson’s
Love in a Torn Land
, J. K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
, Jhumpa Lahiri’s
Unaccustomed Earth
—sophisticated books for a girl of her age. “She preferred Anne Frank,” he said. “She didn’t like fantasy so much.”

“I can’t listen to songs or watch movies any more,” said her mother. “I never watched a movie without Aarushi. Our life has been taken away from us.”

“When she was small,” said her father, “she used to clutch a sari which belonged to my mother. She had picked it from a collection of my mother’s saris which Nupur had, and went to sleep with it. In fact she went with it everywhere and used to call it her ‘papamummy.’ By the time she outgrew it, it was completely in tatters.”

Rajesh and Nupur Talwar had been raised in an older India. She was from an air force family and had lived in military housing wherever her father was posted. Rajesh’s father was a cardiothoracic surgeon. “When we both finished the Bachelor of Dental Surgery course in Maulana Azad Medical College,” he said, “we married and went to Lucknow for our postgraduate. We both came from liberal families, and they had no hesitation about our marriage. At our wedding we had one Punjabi pandit and one Maharashtrian pandit, and because we [Punjabis] like to get married early in the morning and they like to marry in the evening, we did it in the middle of the day. We waited a bit for children because we were studying, and had
Aarushi on 24 May 1994. We only had one child, because we wanted to be able to give her the best possible.”

“Initially Rajesh was a bit of a weekend father,” said Nupur. “By the time he got back from work, Aarushi was asleep. We thought it would be better for her if she grew up near her grandparents, where we would have a support system, which is why we moved to Noida. My mother brought her up. She always did her cooking and cared for her with her own hand. Even at weekends, Aarushi would ask to see her grandparents—‘Ajja [a diminutive of aaji, the Marathi word for mother’s mother] isn’t feeling well, let’s go to see her.’ When Aarushi’s life ended, she was in a stage of transition. It was all about friends, friends, who had fallen out, who had broken up with someone else, breakup-patchup.”

“On the 15th,” said Rajesh, “I had bought her a Sony 10-megapixel camera for her birthday. It was better than the one she was expecting. I showed it to Nupur and she said let’s give it to her now. We went to Aarushi’s room. She was so happy, clicking some pictures of herself, trying out the camera. That was our last evening together.”

“I heard the doorbell ring in the morning,” said Nupur. “It rang a second time. I knew it was the maid, and wondered why the servant hadn’t opened the door for her. It was a little while after six o’clock. I got up and realized the door of the flat had been locked from the outside. So I phoned the servant, and the call was cut. I phoned again, and it was cut. By this time Rajesh had got up and noticed a three-quarters empty bottle of whisky lying on the dining-table. We got worried as we always kept alcohol in the cupboard. He said, ‘Go and see Aarushi.’ I went into her room just ahead of Rajesh. The first thing I saw was the blood on the wall behind her. She was lying on the bed covered with a blanket. I put my hand on her head. Rajesh began to scream.

“Later in the day, I had to write the FIR [police report] in Hindi,” said Rajesh, “and I hadn’t written the language for twenty years. I just couldn’t write it. The principal of Aarushi’s school had come to see us. She used to be my own class teacher when I was a boy at another branch of Delhi Public School, and in my mind I was saying, ‘Ma’am, get her back. Ma’am, get her back.’ I didn’t say it out loud.”

“At about 1 p.m. they brought back Aarushi from the autopsy,” said Nupur. “We put her in the drawing-room. It was a hot day. At about 4 p.m. we took her for the cremation. When we got back home from that, the police were there and the media had broken our doorbell. They kept on trying to push the door open. I couldn’t sleep or eat.”

“I thought it was Hemraj and he was on the run,” remembered Rajesh. “I said, I hope they get this guy and kill him. The next day we collected her ashes from the cremation ground early and drove to Hardwar to immerse the ashes in the Ganges. While we were driving, Hemraj was found on the terrace. We were asked to come home and identify him. We parked the car a few blocks away, since according to Hindu custom you should not take ashes into the home. Nupur waited in the car with Aarushi’s ashes while I went back in. They asked me to identify the servant’s body. It had been decomposing for nearly two days in the heat and the face was swollen. I couldn’t be sure, but I said I think it looks like him. Later, the police said I had refused to ID him positively, and used that against me. We went to Hardwar and did the religious rituals, fed some poor people and had a bath in the Ganges, like you are meant to do.”

“Hemraj liked cooking and doing things around the home,” said Nupur. “He was not an ambitious Nepali. He would call her ‘Aarushi Baby’ and she would call him ‘Bhaiyya’ [literally “brother”—the usual way a girl and a male servant would address each other]. We would give him her old clothes for his grandchildren. He’d been with us for eight months and had been highly recommended by the previous fellow, who had been with us for ten years. I know now that Hemraj let some people into our home, and I ask why, why, why? It was a case of trusting too much. Obviously the company he kept was not good. We realized later he had lied to us—he said he had been doing a job in construction in Malaysia, but he had never been there, and was a rickshaw driver. But we trusted the servant who recommended him, so we didn’t check.

“On the next day, which would have been the day of Aarushi’s sleepover, we had a puja and a havan, the lighting of a sacred fire. Her friends came to the house and they all sat in her room, touching her things. We served them food in the room. They took out her clothes and her books and were looking at them, all crying, grieving.”

The police now asked the Talwars to come with them to identify a suspect. They found a Maruti Zen car waiting outside the gate of their apartment, so they got in their own car and followed it, as instructed, pursued by a flock of media vehicles. The couple drove behind the police Maruti Zen at high speed for about four kilometres before being told to go home again. When Rajesh Talwar was taken to the police lines the next day, one of the pieces of evidence offered against him was video footage of this car chase—proof that he intended to flee and should be denied bail when he
was arrested. Another cause for suspicion was that in his pocket he had the business card of one of his patients, Pinaki Misra, a Supreme Court lawyer. If he were innocent, asked an investigator, why would he need to be in touch with a hotshot lawyer?

By this time, Nupur and Rajesh had been separated into different rooms. She received a telephone call from a family member to say that television channels were reporting that her husband had been arrested. At first she could not believe it was true, and reassured the caller that he was only having a conversation in the next room. Then, after some hours had gone by, the constable who was guarding her said, “Arrest ho gaye”—“He’s been arrested.” Rajesh, meanwhile, was manhandled into a car and driven to Ghaziabad, an industrial city in Uttar Pradesh, to be remanded in judicial custody.