AARUSHI
Avirook Sen
Penguin
302 pages; Rs 299
On the morning of May 16, 2008 news came in that a teenage girl had been murdered in Noida and the male domestic help was missing. A colleague at the news channel where I worked then remarked, "This is what happens when you have a male help in a house with a growing girl." The next morning as news broke that the domestic help's body had been found on the terrace of the house, all hell broke loose. The same colleague, eyes glinting, exclaimed, "How exciting! This has suddenly become such a thrilling case!" The insensitivity of that remark was astounding.
In the seven years that have gone by since, what has stuck out most in the handling of the Aarushi Talwar-Hemraj double murder case is the insensitivity and casualness of the investigation, the trial and the media reporting.
Through painstaking investigation and meticulous reporting, Avirook Sen's book, Aarushi, takes us through this unfortunate case that is today a lamentable commentary on how investigators and courts function in our country. While doing so, it also holds the mirror to us as a society.
Barely a few pages into the book, the chill settles in. The battered body of a 13-year-old child, who would have turned 14 in eight days and who had just got her birthday gift, a camera, the night she was murdered, is lying in the open outside the post-mortem house. The place is so filthy that her father's friend gets the disinfectant and soap to clean it up, while her uncle tries to call in a doctor for the autopsy.
ALSO READ: The Prisoners of Dasna
With that post-mortem begin the many twists and turns the investigation and consequently, the case take. (Incidentally, sweepers also double up as post-mortem assistants). The first post-mortem report states that "nothing abnormal" is detected in Aarushi's sexual organs, which is to say that there is no rape and that she was not sexually active. Four months down the line, the doctor who conducted the post-mortem changes his testimony to say that the murdered girl's "vaginal opening was prominently wide open" and he hadn't mentioned this in the earlier report because, in his utterly unscientific explanation, the findings were "very strange". The doctor who conducted the post-mortem on Hemraj would also change his testimony later to say that the khukri, which he initially thought to have been the murder weapon, could not have been it and that the injuries pointed to those by a sharp-edged, light instrument by "a surgically trained person". The fact that Aarushi's parents, Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, are dentists and "surgically trained" people doesn't escape many.
Step by step, as investigators make one blooper after the other, one conspiracy theory after the other is floated - that the Talwars were part of a wife-swapping club; that Aarushi's murder was an act of honour killing; that Aarushi was an adopted child and so on. Mr Sen's research for his book reveals how ridiculously each of these theories came about and became the subject of drawing room gossip.
The book also speaks of how the narco and brain mapping tests of the Talwars and the servants, who were the initial suspects, are ignored. Though not admissible in court, these could have helped direct the line of investigation. The lack of knowledge about the people who worked for this middle-class but successful couple and how it destroyed their lives is also revealed.
But what comes out most starkly is the vast chasm that exists between the world that the constabulary comes from and the world that middle-class people like the Talwars inhabit. How do you explain to an investigating officer that it is perfectly normal for a teenage girl like Aarushi to use the kind of language she does on social media with her friends? That teenage crushes do happen and yet do not define a person's character? That a "sleepover" is not a dubious activity?
Mr Sen also goes into the past cases that the investigators handled to get a sense of how they functioned. And it turns out that there are many who would first draw their conclusions and then manipulate witnesses and evidence to arrive at that conclusion - fair investigation be damned.
Opinion has been sharply divided on who really killed Aarushi and Hemraj. Some say the parents did it. Others indignantly say that the thought itself is preposterous. Mr Sen, a journalist who set out to merely report the case but got sucked into it, says today he doesn't think the Talwars did it. The book, which is divided into three sections - The Investigation, The Trial and The Dasna Diaries (the Talwars are now housed in Dasna jail) - has enough in it to indicate that Aarushi's parents are more like victims than criminals.
Aarushi is a well-written, but difficult book to read. It chills your insides. It makes you want to shake your head and say that these things don't happen. So while it is unputdownable, it is also traumatic.
If there is one problem with the book, it is with its cover. In a blog on NDTV, Nupur Talwar's cousin writes that "the sight of drops of blood around Aarushi's name on the book cover was simply too distressing" for Nupur who "could not bring herself to pick it up when she first saw it". That's precisely it. The cover is, well, insensitive.
