Aarushi (18 page)

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court reviewed the progress made in the examination of the 13 CBI witnesses. On 17 September it heard that some witnesses had been dropped, others were yet to be found, and so on. Additional Solicitor General Sidharth Luthra argued for more time, and said the trial would be over by the year end. Not much time to go, so why not keep Nupur in jail?

To which Harish Salve, appearing for the defence, said wryly: ‘Let’s keep the trial in Ghaziabad.’

By then, the court’s mind appeared to have been made up. Bail would be granted. So Luthra begged for more time for the examination of his witnesses. The CBI got eight more days. Nupur Talwar would be out on bail on 25 September.

Salve viewed this seeking of an extra week of detention as mean-spirited. Outside, he told Luthra, ‘Cry baby CBI asks for just a few more days. Cry baby CBI.’ Luthra didn’t know how to react, and mumbled something about winning some and losing some.

It seemed to me an interesting exchange. Salve was one of India’s leading lawyers; Luthra wasn’t in the same bracket as him. That Salve would react in this manner told me how polarizing this case was. A month earlier, there had been much fist-pumping in the Supreme Court on the other side, when Nupur Talwar’s stay in jail was extended till the examination of the 13 witnesses was done. But the reactions in the Supreme Court were barely remarkable in comparison with the bitterness that by now was on view daily in Ghaziabad.

***

K.K. Gautam, the retired policeman, arrived without warning just after B.K. Mohapatra’s lengthy cross-examination had been completed.

Gautam did exactly what the prosecution hoped for. He testified that Dinesh Talwar’s friend Dr Sushil Choudhry had called him to ask whether he could use his influence to prevent the word ‘rape’ being mentioned in the post-mortem report. He also told the court that he hadn’t conducted any ‘formal inspection’ of the crime scene, and that he had no idea why the CBI investigators from the earlier team had included so many things in his statement to them that he had not, in fact, said.

And what about the fact that he had lied to investigators in the first place? That his involvement began on the morning after the murders, and not a day later [with the discovery of Hemraj’s body]? Gautam coolly replied that his statements were the ‘same’, but with ‘some differences’. The court was satisfied. R.K. Saini was beaming.

***

On 3 September 2012, Bharti Mandal turned up in court, as usual without warning to the defence. Her testimony was vital to the CBI and her importance was explained to me by the CBI inspector Arvind Jaitley. Jaitley was a tall man in his late thirties with an air of casual calm about him. He stood out among the prosecution’s team because of his sense of propriety. He was convinced about the Talwars’ guilt, but he didn’t see this as a reason to get nasty. At the tea stall outside the court, a lawyer was asking Jaitley about his belief in the parents’ guilt. Jaitley told us he didn’t want to get into the merits of the case. But the CBI, he felt, had just one task to accomplish to win it:
It had to convince the court that the Talwars’ flat was locked from the inside when Bharti Mandal rang the bell at 6 a.m.

Once the court was made to understand this, the prosecution was home. This was perfectly reasonable. If the door was found locked from the inside in the morning, it would stand to reason the murderer was still in the flat. The burden of explaining the murders would now shift to the Talwars. It would be up to them to tell the court the story behind every bloodstain, fingerprint, bottle of liquor, missing key, lost phone. The CBI didn’t have to prove anything, not even a motive or what the murder weapons were. Four in the house. Two are killed. Either or both the survivors were therefore responsible for the murders. It was like one of Agatha Christie’s closed-door mysteries.

This is why Bharti Mandal’s testimony had so much riding on it. It was she who had rung the doorbell that morning. It was she who was the first witness at the crime scene. It was she who could tell the court whether the Talwars’ door was locked from within.

***

Bharti hadn’t been issued summons. She said that CBI personnel had simply picked her up and brought her to court. This was done in secrecy, through an access from the rear to avoid any chance encounters with the media. Dressed in a bright yellow sari, Bharti looked tentative. This was an ‘event’ in her life, but she wasn’t sure whether it was a good one or a bad one. She began her deposition. She had been on leave the previous day, but arrived at the flat at 6 a.m. on 16 May and rang the bell, she told the court. And then:

I touched the iron [outermost grill] door but it did not open . . . Then I pressed the bell again, whereupon aunty [Nupur Talwar] opened the wooden door and stood behind the [second] mesh door and started talking to me.

She asked me where Hemraj had gone and I replied that I didn’t know . . . Thereafter, aunty told me that Hemraj must have gone to fetch milk from Mother Dairy . . . She also told me that Hemraj must have
locked the wooden door
[mesh door; emphasis added] and gone to fetch milk . . .

Aunty told me that you sit down, when Hemraj comes back he will open the door for you . . . I then told aunty you give me the keys I will open the door and come in . . . Aunty said all right you go down I will throw you the keys.

I went downstairs and from the balcony aunty told me that the door isn’t locked, it’s only bolted . . . But I told aunty that she better give me the keys, because if it is locked then I will have to come down again . . . Then aunty threw the long key [to the middle mesh door] from the balcony.

Thereafter, when I came up and put my hand on the outer [grill] door, it opened . . . Then I unbolted the mesh door.

Nupur Talwar had left the innermost wooden door open, and Bharti entered the flat. ‘I felt some thief had entered the house and that is why Uncle and Aunty are crying,’ she testified. ‘Aunty threw her arms around me and started crying, when I asked her why are you crying so much, she said go inside and see what has happened . . .’

The CBI scenario emerged. The reason the outermost grill door wouldn’t open was that it was locked from the inside. ‘I touched the door but it would not open,’ Bharti had said. Nupur Talwar threw the keys down to her maid and, in the couple of minutes Bharti took to come back up, she used the door in Hemraj’s room, entered the passage, unlatched the outer door, and bolted the mesh door to make it appear someone had locked them in their house from the outside. She then walked back exactly the way she came.

When Bharti Mandal reached the flat again, she said, ‘I returned to the door and put my hand on it and it opened.’

Case solved. Or was it?

***

There were some obvious circumstances that everyone seemed to have overlooked. The first was that even if the Talwars were guilty, it really wasn’t necessary for Nupur to play out the elaborate door-latching/key-throwing scene with Bharti Mandal. If her aim was to give the impression that someone had bolted the middle mesh door from the outside, locking them in the house, this could have been achieved far more simply, at leisure and without risk.

Why wait for the maid to turn up? Wouldn’t it have been much easier to bolt the middle door well before she arrived? What if the maid had turned back up the stairs for some reason and found Nupur locking and unlocking doors? Would she not be running the risk of confirming guilt right there? The Talwars were cast as sharp, calculating killers. If that were the case, surely they would have realized the worthlessness of the deception. There was easy access to the outer grill door and the middle mesh door through Hemraj’s room. Wouldn’t it be naive of them to think that nobody would notice this? And did that not make the bolt on the middle door irrelevant?

It did, but the CBI’s case was that the outer grill door had been locked
from the inside
, presumably by the killers who could only be the parents. ‘I touched the iron door and it did not open,’ Bharti had said, as had been suggested to her. There was one more thing to consider about that morning’s exchange between Bharti and Nupur. It was Bharti who suggested that Nupur throw down the keys from the balcony. She knew the house,
but she did not suggest Nupur use the access through Hemraj’s room to let her in.
The simple explanation is that it didn’t occur to her—or to Nupur—because that access was never used.

One of the many things that troubled me during the course of the trial was that every key witness for the prosecution had told one story at the time of the investigation and a substantially different one in court. Bharti Mandal had been questioned by three different investigators within a month of the crime. Yet she had never mentioned to any of them that she had ‘touched’ the iron door on the outside and it would not open. Neither had she told any of them how the door behaved when she returned: ‘I returned to the door and put my hand on it and it opened.’

The door in question was a tricky one: Shashi Devi, the laundrywoman who visited the flat regularly, had said so to investigators. Shashi Devi was dropped as a prosecution witness, but the CBI’s Hari Singh testified that he had recorded her as saying: ‘The outermost door of the flat used to remain open all the time. If nobody came out after pressing the bell, I used to
push
the door open which
used to remain jammed in the frame
[emphasis added] and I used to keep the clothes there.’

Could anyone who merely ‘touched’ it, as Bharti said she had, figure out whether it was locked from inside?

The answer to that question was probably the difference between a conviction and acquittal, but it wasn’t what troubled me. In June 2008, Bharti Mandal’s memory still fresh, the CBI’s Vijay Kumar recorded a statement by her—her third—in which she said clearly that it was only the middle mesh door that was latched. At the trial she said: ‘I had
not stated
[emphasis added] to the investigating officer that “I first pushed the outer iron door and saw that the inner [middle] mesh door is closed and latched.”’

Bharti’s testimony opened up the possibility that the outer door to the Talwars’ flat was indeed locked from within. The CBI was confident that this would be enough.

Except that there were a few problems. The biggest of these appeared at the very beginning of the court record from Bharti Mandal’s cross-examination:
‘Jo mujhe samjhaya gaya hai, wahi bayan main yahan de rahi hoon’
(Whatever was taught/explained to me, I’m saying here).

Bharti said this in the first minutes of her cross-examination, almost at the stroke of the lunch break. The rest of the examination would continue half an hour later. The stern-looking policewoman who chaperoned her to and from court whisked her away. Saini and company, beaming the day before, followed agitated.

When the hearing resumed, the defence objected to the witness leaving the court without permission before the cross-examination was completed. This was against court procedure. (All other witnesses in the case had remained in court during breaks. Mohapatra, the forensic scientist, for instance, had a fixed seat where he sat patiently through breaks.) In an application made right after the break, the defence alleged that the witness was taken away so that she could be schooled.

Judge Shyam Lal, usually so concerned about decorum and procedure—giggling policewomen, ringing cellphones and the like—ignored the application. And when Bharti returned to court, the proceedings took a surreal turn. Her statements to investigators were read out to her line by line. These were recorded in 2008, and were documents that the CBI had told the court it relied upon. Almost without exception, Bharti said she hadn’t told the CBI any of the facts attributed to her by the investigators of the time.

From her cross-examination, it appeared the CBI may never have interviewed her at all. That she was saying whatever she had to say for the first time, and only to the court. Including:
‘Jo mujhe samjhaya gaya hai, wahi bayan main yahan de rahi hoon.’

***

Bharti Mandal lived in Noida’s Sector 8; her 10 foot by 8 foot room was in the Baans Balli slum. Her friend Kalpana Mandal—the person she replaced in the Talwar household—lived there too, in another room. The settlement is behind a dedicated bamboo market, hence the name. Its presence and sly expansion over the years speaks of the stunning bifurcation of life in Delhi’s suburbs.

Across the streets from it are large corporate towers with their signature tinted-glass fronts. Several monuments to the suburban middle-class idyll, such as Jalvayu Vihar, with gates and guards and parks and pools, are within walking distance—for the slum dwellers, that is. Others would take cars or rickshaws to avoid the longish trek.

The slum is enclosed within a ring of busy markets that hawk the leftovers from others nearby that have wealthier patrons. Here, the meat and fish stalls sell innards and claws and heads and offal. The provision store offers the option of buying ingredients measured exactly for a family’s next meal: oil carefully poured from the bottle into small pouches tied with string, spoonfuls of spices. The vegetable vendor has the tomatoes from the bottom of the pile—for buyers at the bottom of theirs.

You enter the slum through what appear to be merely gaps between the shops that form its facade. The lanes are no more than three feet wide, including the drains that run along or cut across. There are temples in the slum but not enough toilets for its 1,50,000-odd inhabitants, so these passages are lined with the droppings of children.

Most disconcerting, however, was that Bharti Mandal’s home was deep inside a wickedly intricate maze. After just a few yards, all lanes would split into two or three, inviting wrong turns every few seconds, each one costlier than the last.

A year after her deposition, I had tried to reach Bharti Mandal and Kalpana Mandal. Bharti lived a few yards away from a temple, and Sanjay, Kalpana’s husband, had escorted me there. Bharti wasn’t home, and we decided to return after killing some time in the market outside. There, I lost Sanjay, and thinking that he might have returned to his room, I attempted to reach it on my own. This was pure misadventure. Within minutes, I was lost inside the slum and trying to get out. But each turn I took sucked me deeper into it. Half an hour passed before Sanjay finally found me, slightly dizzy from the experience.