India (50 page)

“We were driving along,” he recalled, “and the driver started abusing me. ‘You’re the bastard who did this.’ I was really scared. I said, ‘You can’t say things like that.’ They gagged my mouth. I was abused by these policemen the entire way, and after reaching the shabby courtroom, two of them held my hands and dragged me to a room by the side of the court. I was presented before the magistrate. There were a huge number of people present, and I pleaded with this man to at least let me make a phone call or call a lawyer. I said, ‘I’m entitled to it. It’s my fundamental right as a citizen of this country.’ The magistrate just looked at me in disgust. ‘Ja yahan se’—‘Get out of here.’ They’d chosen Friday to arrest me, because we wouldn’t be able to apply for bail until Monday. The policemen produced a paper and asked me to sign it, and I had the presence of mind to tell them I will not sign anything. They threatened me with dire consequences. I was dragged back to the car by the police while I kept screaming that I was being framed. By this time the TV channels were all over the place. My mind had gone completely numb. A policeman was saying, ‘Hum tere ko maar denge’—‘We will kill you.’ I just said they could kill me wherever they wanted.

“We reached Dasna jail. It’s a different world in that place. Time just stopped. I was told to sit in a line on the floor. They frisked me with aggression. There are thieves, drug addicts, all spitting on the floor. I was crying. I was sent to barrack number 7, bed number 60. But there’s no bed, only a stone floor. It’s a big, noisy room, filled with half-naked people, with hardly enough room to move. You get watery dal and chapatti. I was given a sheet and it was stinking, but you have to put it over your face to keep the mosquitoes and flies off you at night. I kept thinking that someone would come
and say, ‘Sorry, we made a mistake.’ When I went to the toilet, I slipped a bit and realized there was no toilet, just a layer of shit on the floor. I puked there.”

Rajesh stopped speaking. Nupur was looking at him. It was the first time he had ever told his wife about this aspect of his incarceration. All through the Saturday and the Sunday, Nupur had waited outside Dasna jail to see her husband, together with Rajesh’s brother Dinesh, an ophthalmologist at AIIMS.

“I managed to see him on Sunday,” said Nupur. “It was the day after Aarushi’s birthday. He was banging his head on the bars, shouting, ‘Get me out of here.’ He was crying all the time, saying, ‘Where’s my Aaru, where’s my Aaru?’ It was a forty-minute meeting. During the day, we got a call on someone’s cell phone. A man said to meet him in the dhaba by the prison. He explained he would be able to provide food and good treatment for Rajesh in jail. I gave him Rs25,000. We never saw him again. Later we heard about another person who could provide this service for him, a convict who was trusted by the jail administration. These men are called numberdars, and they wear a yellow kurta pyjama. So we slipped him money.”

“Without him, I couldn’t have survived in there,” said Rajesh. “He showed me kindness, got me some mosquito repellent and some fruit. Before Aarushi died, I had been reading a book about Iraq which described what happened in their prisons. I remember thinking at the time, at least that couldn’t happen in our country, in India.”

Dr. Talwar was to be dragged through a netherworld of courts, jails, lies, insinuation and state harassment. The process would last not for days, but for years, and the second Dr. Talwar—Nupur, Aarushi’s mother—would be drawn into the cavalcade too, harassed alongside her husband as both he and their murdered daughter were accused of various retrospective offences. At a bizarre press conference, an inspector general of police from Meerut stood in front of the cameras and said Rajesh Talwar was “prime accused.” He was supposedly in a relationship with a fellow dentist and family friend, and had committed an honour killing. “The doctor’s extramarital affair was known to both the girl and Hemraj. The two used to discuss this and had come close. Dr. Rajesh could not tolerate this even though his own character was not good,” the officer announced in Hindi. It sounded like a story from one of the badly printed “shocker” magazines on sale at street corners, like
Crime & Detective
with its lurid headlines: “Acid Treatment for Malady of Love” or “Queen of Nefarious Designs.” “Dr. Rajesh came home,” the inspector general continued, “and found his
daughter and Hemraj in an objectionable position—but not in a compromising position. Dr. Rajesh took Hemraj to the terrace and killed him. He then drank whisky and killed Aarushi … He killed her in a fit of rage even though he is as characterless as his daughter.”
¹⁴

The police had no basis for the character assassination of a dead thirteen-year-old girl and her grieving father. They had no witnesses, no murder weapon, no forensic evidence and no reason for deducing that Aarushi had been in an “objectionable position” with a recently hired servant who was himself a grandfather. Nor did they have a plausible motive for this savage double murder. For much of the media, in particular the English-language tabloids and Hindi news channels, this was less important than the sensation. Repeatedly, they showed footage of a dishevelled Rajesh Talwar shouting: “They’re framing me!” as he was dragged roughly through the gate of a jail. When Nupur, glazed and dazed, gave a television interview the following day, people complained she was not in tears. As a viewer wrote on a message board: “The reporter looks much sad then Aarushis mother.” Then there was the email message Aarushi had sent to her father, which the police released: “I just wanted to try it out coz I heard from mah frndz … so wotz da harm … I wnt do it again n I kinda noe hw u r feelin.”
¹⁵
What did it mean? And could her parents, who were in the next room with a whirring air-conditioner on, have slept through the killing?

More “proof” arrived when the police claimed the Talwars were part of a “wife-swapping racket” run by a “kingpin industrialist” in Noida. A newspaper,
Mid-Day
, quoted an unnamed police officer saying that “whenever such meetings happened the Talwars kept Aarushi locked inside her room. That happened only when the members of the club met at Talwar’s residence. But Hemraj knew everything and shared the details with Aarushi.”
¹⁶
The newspapers reported these stories, although no evidence was given to support the claims. Old-fashioned extortion had landed at the edge of the capital, in a modern world of shiny malls, where middle-class children lived a very different life to the children of the police. The inhabitants of Noida might feel as if they were in Delhi and could lead a progressive, metropolitan life, but they faced Uttar Pradesh street justice, in which nobody was protected from wrong. Taking shreds of evidence and gossip, and making assumptions about a social world they were not able to comprehend, the police had concocted a story in the hope they could close the case. They nearly succeeded. Much of the media ran with the idea that Rajesh Talwar must be guilty, and blogs and websites were filled with foul insinuations. To quote just one: “This is a simple case of sexual perversion, maybe incest,
and pedophilia that got integrated with a culture of swinging between families and swapping. Matter of family honour thus comes first and foremost.”

The police interrogations continued, as did the Kafkaesque form of investigation.

“You never knew where you were with the police,” said Dr. Talwar. “Some were fine. A policeman read the Hanuman Chalisa [a devotional hymn] and started to cry, saying, ‘Doctor, a very bad thing has been done to you.’ Another time, they took me back to Hardwar in a Jeep and I was troubled the whole way by two young policemen. The vicious guy who had threatened to kill me was singing as if he was going on vacation. They forced me to sign a confession. I wrote on the piece of paper in English—which they couldn’t read—that it was not true. I was in the prison for fifty days and nights. The numberdar in the yellow pyjama helped me. He would arrange for my clothes to be washed, and would send a boy called Goli [bullet] to make nimbu pani [lemonade] for me. Goli had been in and out of prison all his life, for small thefts, and so on. Apparently he would be picked up by the police whenever they needed a suspect for some crime. I found it hard to talk to most of the prisoners because they were from a very different social group to me. Some would come and say, ‘I hear you’re a tooth doctor.’ So I started seeing patients in the prison hospital. I arranged for proper medicines, antibiotics, painkillers to be brought in. I found a broken dental chair and fixed the compressor on it. I succeeded in getting a mirror, a probe, tweezers, a handpiece. I had hoped to get zinc oxide eugenol, to do temporary fillings for the prisoners. The prison authorities were very grateful. I would like to go back and do more work there now, but it would be impossible, with the media.”

During these days, Nupur stayed at her parents’ house. She did not return to the apartment. She endured what her husband endured, not knowing if he would be released. “Grieving for Aarushi took a back seat, because I was running from pillar to post the whole time. I didn’t turn on the AC the whole time Rajesh was in prison, because I couldn’t bear to think of him being in that heat, lying on the floor. All the time was spent going to lawyers, going to courts, trying to set him free. I felt I was losing my sanity and I wanted to kill myself, to go away from this world, but I knew I had to keep strong for him. Over the weeks, people melted away. On the day he was arrested, Fortis Hospital, where he was working, threw him out. A lot of our dentist friends didn’t want to know once Rajesh was in jail. People don’t like to come close to a tragedy. I would sit alone. I only cried for Aarushi when her father came home.”

Although they felt abandoned, Rajesh and Nupur Talwar were also aided by a public outcry by their own and Aarushi’s friends. Several hundred children from Delhi Public School in Noida took out a march with banners saying: “Justice for Aarushi,” lit candles in her memory and condemned the police for maligning their fellow student. National child protection charities and even a cabinet minister spoke out against the defamation of the dead girl and her father. Nobody spoke for Hemraj, the dead servant; he became just another crime statistic. Patients at Rajesh’s practice gave their support, including a high-ranking Delhi policeman, B. K. Gupta, and the lawyer Pinaki Misra, whose card had been found in his pocket.
¹⁷
Misra pressed for the case to be transferred away from the Uttar Pradesh police to the federal Central Bureau of Investigation. Once the chief minister—Mayawati—agreed to this demand, the prospects for Dr. Talwar’s release grew and the chances of evidence being fabricated were reduced. It would not have been hard for the police to give the suspect an object and “discover” it a few days later as a murder weapon, covered in his fingerprints.

Rajesh Talwar was eventually released on bail, but the investigation was far from over. By now the police had arrested three more men, including a compounder or dental assistant named Krishna who worked at his clinic, and whose family came from Nepal. Over the succeeding months and years, the harrowing of Dr. Talwar continued as he was subjected to polygraph tests and narcoanalysis (the drugging and interrogation of a suspect, which is illegal in many countries). The investigators continued to come up with outlandish stories, destroying his name, which were happily repeated by the media with scarcely a murmur of dissent. One improbable report suggested he had somehow ordered medical staff to destroy evidence following Aarushi’s autopsy, another that Nupur was now the principal suspect and would shortly be arrested. Next it was claimed that Rajesh’s brother was also involved, as was the passing policeman who had found Hemraj’s body on the terrace.

“I was released on 11 July 2008,” said Rajesh Talwar. “Before my court appearance, I was put in a prison van with the other three accused.” He was referring to Krishna and the young men who were detained with him, who worked locally as domestic servants. At this point, Rajesh had no way of knowing whether they were guilty or were being framed too. But their behaviour made him believe the worst. “Krishna didn’t say anything at all to me. He had no reaction. This man had worked as my own dental assistant. He looked as if he was relaxed. One of the others pointed at him and made a sign with his hands, as if to say, ‘It wasn’t me who did it—it was Krishna.’
I panicked. I was in the police van, knowing this man might have done this thing to my child. They handcuffed me with Krishna. I was asking them to not do it, but they said they had only one handcuff. They removed the handcuffs when we reached the court. The heat was terrible. When I was attached to Krishna, I was literally begging, I was saying, ‘This man has killed my child.’ The policeman said, ‘I don’t have another handcuff.’ That was the worst moment I have ever had. I felt I was dying. I was taken back to Dasna jail from the court and released the next day. When I came out of the jail, the media surrounded me completely. My brother and my wife had to pull me into the car. We went straight to the Shirdi Sai Baba temple and prayed.

“You have rights as a citizen of India,” he said, speaking calmly but passionately, “but in certain places like UP and Bihar, unless you are a politician or a very rich person, you have no protection at all. We have suffered at the hands of the institutions that are there to protect you. We thought India was a good place to live, but there is so much of incompetence everywhere that people don’t know what they are doing.”

Rajesh was shown the results of the narcoanalysis tests done on the three men. They contained incriminating information, some of which was corroborated independently. To date, no one has been charged with the murder of Aarushi Talwar.

“Each day,” said Nupur, “you wake up and you think, oh no, I’ve got another day to go through. We never did anything wrong. No police and media have admitted they were mistaken. If I go somewhere, everyone will stare at me. You can see people recognizing us and spreading the word. I go only to two or three shops, where they know us. Our work is the only thing that has kept us going. The people we saw as a social group when Aarushi was alive—how do you talk to them? When the three girls from the Awesome Foursome came round, I couldn’t communicate. I feel jealous that something so special has been taken away from us. Our support now is mainly from people who have also lost children. I’m an orthodontist, so when a child gets up from the chair, I see her hairstyle, her shoes, and think—would Aarushi be this tall, this thin now? Her friends are still my patients. She used to say to me: ‘Mummy, my friends are coming for braces. Don’t charge any money.’ So I don’t charge them. We have had two lives in one lifetime.”