Aarushi (27 page)

I found myself wondering why anyone would subject themselves to frequent assaults the way Yadav did. I had met him, in the sweltering heat of his chamber, early in the trial. His shirt unbuttoned, he was leaning forward to let the sweat drip while explaining to a hanger-on that the secret of his fair complexion was a daily dose of dry fruits and milk. Above his chamber, opposite the court post office, hung a large signboard with a portrait of his. It described him as a ‘nationally renowned advocate’.

Others emerged. Lawyers for each side. Lawyers for no side, court staff and policemen. On the faces of the Talwar family—Nupur’s aged parents, Rajesh’s brother Dinesh and many others who had negotiated their way through the deep wall of reporters at the court’s entrance—there was bewilderment. Inside the court, the Talwars had broken down as they heard the judge. They were taken into custody immediately. They released a brief statement saying they were disappointed—and innocent. The sentence would be announced the next day. The CBI had asked for the death penalty.

Judge Shyam Lal’s 210-page judgement would also be made public on the 26th. This was an eagerly awaited document, because it was expected to have the ‘whole truth’.

***

Tanveer Ahmed Mir had argued that there were at least 19 circumstances that pointed to the Talwars’ innocence; Judge Shyam Lal listed 26 that confirmed their guilt.

With its Latin, French and a version of English, the text was difficult to decipher, but as I read it on the evening of the 26th, I thought it was, first and foremost, perverse.

Judge Shyam Lal said his court had reached the ‘irresistible and impeccable conclusion’ that only the Talwars could have committed the ghastly murders because of his 26 reasons.

 

1. ‘That irrefragably, on that fateful night . . .’ the Talwars were last seen by their driver Umesh Sharma at 9.30 p.m.
   
2. That Aarushi’s bedroom was separated from her parents’ bedroom only by a partition wall.
   
3. That Hemraj’s body was found on the terrace, whose door was locked from ‘inside’.
   
4. The intervening time between when the Talwars were last seen and when the murders took place was too brief for anyone but them to be the authors of the crime.
   
5. That the click-shut lock on the door to Aarushi’s bedroom could only be opened from the outside with a key. That Rajesh Talwar had told the police the key was with him when he had gone to sleep around 11.30 after locking the door.
   
6. The Internet was active through the night, which meant at least one of the accused was awake.
   
7. That there is nothing to show that an outsider(s) came into the house after 9.30 p.m.
   
8. There was no disruption in the power supply that night.
   
9. That no person was seen loitering suspiciously near the flat.
   
10. There is no evidence of forcible entry into the flat.
    
11. There is no evidence of any larcenous act in the flat.
    
12. Nupur Talwar gave Bharti Mandal the false impression the door was locked from outside by Hemraj although ‘it was not locked or latched’ from the outside.
    
13. That ‘Bharti Mandal has nowhere stated that when she came inside the flat both accused were found weeping’.
    
14. That Nupur Talwar did not tell Bharti Mandal about the murders when she reached the flat, and deliberately told her that Hemraj had gone to fetch milk . . . ‘This lack of spontaneity is relevant . . .’
    
15. That the clothes of the accused were not found soaked in blood.
    
16. That no outsider will dare take Hemraj to the terrace in a severely injured condition and then try and find a lock to be placed on the door.
    
17. ‘It is not possible that any outsider(s) after committing the murders will muster the courage to take Scotch whisky knowing that the parents of the deceased Aarushi are in the nearby room . . . his top priority will be to run away . . .’
    
18. No outsider will bother to take Hemraj’s body to the terrace. Moreover, a single person cannot take the body to the terrace.
    
19. ‘The door to the terrace was never locked prior to the occurrence . . . the accused did not give any key . . . to the police despite being asked.’
    
20. That the Talwars had told the court Hemraj had started locking the terrace 8–10 days before because workers had started taking water from the tank, and that the key remained with him. ‘If it was so then it was easily possible for an outsider to find out the key of the lock . . .’
    
21. That if outsiders had left the flat after committing the crime ‘then the outermost door or the middle mesh door must have been found latched’.
    
22. The motive of the commission of the crime has been established.
    
23. That it is not possible that after the commission of the crime outsiders will dress up the crime scene.
    
24. That golf club no. 5 was thrown in the loft after the crime was committed and produced many months later.
    
25. The nature of injuries on both victims is similar, and can be caused by a golf club and a scalpel.
    
26. That accused Rajesh Talwar was a member of the Golf Club, Noida, and golf clubs were produced by him before the CBI and scalpel is used by the dentists and both the accused are dentists by profession.
    
 

In the list that Judge Shyam Lal had presented, there was just one circumstance where the explanation of the defence was open to doubt. This concerned the key to Aarushi’s room, which the Talwars first said was kept in their bedroom, and which Nupur at the trial claimed she might have left in the door. Their memory on this was fuzzy, and in the circumstances suspicious.

The rest of Judge Shyam Lal’s hypothesis had cogent alternative explanations. The wall between Aarushi’s bedroom and her parents’ wasn’t a mere partition as Judge Shyam Lal had said. His court had recorded that it was brick overlaid with wooden laminates. The judge had been under the impression that there was only a partition, and I remember him being surprised the day he learned that it wasn’t. This fact was part of the sound-test report presented during the trial.

Bharti Mandal, found Judge Shyam Lal, had ‘nowhere stated’ that she found her employers weeping.

This is an excerpt from Bharti Mandal’s testimony before the judge: ‘I felt some thief had entered the house and that is why uncle and aunty are crying . . . Aunty threw her arms around me and started crying, when I asked her why are you crying so much . . .’

From Bharti’s evidence, Judge Shyam Lal had deduced another critical circumstance pointing to the Talwars’ guilt. That if outsiders were involved, then at least one of the two outer doors leading into the flat needed to have been latched. Neither the outermost grill door nor the middle mesh door was either locked or latched, so the Talwars had not been confined by any outside assailant, concluded Judge Shyam Lal.

Bharti had told his court: ‘I opened the latch of the inner mesh door and stood in the flat . . .’

In the context of Bharti Mandal’s testimony Judge Shyam Lal also did something that appeared unprecedented. One of the first things Bharti had said was that she was ‘taught’ to say the things she was telling the court.

While considering this admission of schooling, Judge Shyam Lal observed:

One must not forget that Bharti Mandal is totally illiterate and bucolic lady from a lower strata of the society and hails from Malda district of West Bengal who came to Noida to perform menial jobs to sustain herself and family and therefore, if she has stated that she has given her statement on the basis of tutoring, her evidence cannot be rejected.

What Judge Shyam Lal was saying was that it was acceptable to tutor witnesses, provided they were from a low background.

The apparently simple finding that the motive of the crime had been established perhaps hid behind it the grossest perversion. To establish that Rajesh Talwar had killed Aarushi and Hemraj because he saw them having sex in her room, one had to first prove that Hemraj was there.

The source of this ‘motive’ was M.S. Dahiya’s report, with its flawed assumption that Hemraj’s blood was found on Aarushi’s pillow. Dahiya and Kaul had stubbornly insisted that in a forwarding letter written by an officer called Dhankar, three days after its recovery on 1 June 2008, the pillow cover was described as being found in Aarushi’s room.

Tanveer Ahmed Mir had allowed Dahiya to stand by his report and not challenged it on its premise. The source of the pillow cover bearing Hemraj’s blood was proved in court over a year ago: the exhibit was displayed and its original tag, signed by CBI officers, read out. It was found on Hemraj’s bed, in the servant’s room. Not in Aarushi’s bedroom.

This was perhaps the most critical piece of evidence in the prosecution’s case, the missing keystone. If Hemraj’s pillow cover had indeed been found in Aarushi’s room, the case against the Talwars was solid. But it wasn’t.

Judge Shyam Lal had watched these dramatic events unfold in his courtroom keenly the previous summer. In his judgement, while evaluating the forensic report on the pillow cover, Judge Shyam Lal added this line: ‘. . . it becomes abundantly clear that Hemraj’s DNA has been found on the pillow cover which was recovered from the room of Aarushi as per letter dated 04.06.2008 of SP CBI.’

If you read just the judgement, and not the dozens of references to the true source of the pillow cover in the pile of papers on Judge Shyam Lal’s table, you would think he was right because of that line: Aarushi and Hemraj were having sex in her room. The motive had indeed been established.

If this was an error of omission, then it was a grave one. But was it plausible that Judge Shyam Lal was unaware of all that went on around this important piece of evidence in his court?

That question is best asked of Judge Shyam Lal, among several others that his judgement threw up.

The judge’s summary dismissal of every defence witness as either biased (by their friendship with the Talwars) or unreliable is his prerogative. The forensic expert Dr R.K. Sharma, DW-4 (defence witness 4), is dismissed out of hand, but then, Judge Shyam Lal writes:

DW-4 has admitted in his cross-examination that in the shop of his father mobile sets are being sold and mobile set of Ms Aarushi was pre-paid and used to get it recharged at the instance of Dr Rajesh Talwar. He also admitted that his father’s sister lives in Punjab. A specific suggestion has been thrown before this witness that data of mobiles of Ms Aarushi and Hemraj were deleted by him and mobile set of Hemraj must have got sent to Punjab . . .

Dr R.K. Sharma’s weeklong testimony made no reference to his father, or to any deletion of data or an aunt in Punjab to whom the phone was sent. Where had Judge Shyam Lal got all this from? Perhaps it was an honest mistake; maybe the DW-4 is a typographical error.

But the following passage suffers from no such handicap. Judge Shyam Lal describes how the post-mortem doctor Sunil Dohare was being pressured by the Talwars through Dr Sushil Choudhry and K.K. Gautam. Not just that, Dr Dinesh Talwar handed him his phone to speak to Dr T.D. Dogra of AIIMS, just as Dohare was about to begin Aarushi’s autopsy.

Judge Shyam Lal writes:

Although Dr Dohare had only stated that Dr T.D. Dogra had told him that blood samples of deceased Aarushi be taken but it appears that Dr Dogra had asked him not to mention in the post-mortem examination report about the evidence of sexual intercourse and this fact has been deliberately suppressed by Dr Dohare.

Dr Dohare never told the court this. Dr Dogra never testified, so the question of his telling the court didn’t arise. The conversation was never recorded.

This is what Judge Shyam Lal believed:

The accused persons disposed off/destroyed the scalpel, blood stained clothes worn by them during the commission of the offence, dressed up the crime scene, cleaned private parts of Ms Aarushi, covered the dead body of Ms Aarushi with a flannel blanket and that of Hemraj with a cooler panel, placed a bed sheet on grill dividing two roofs, locked the door to the terrace, concealed or destroyed the key of the terrace which has not been found till yet, wiped the blood stains on stairs, secretly hid the murder weapon—one golf stick in the loft, cleaned the two golf sticks, concealed and threw away the mobile sets of both deceased.

A few pages after that paragraph came Judge Shyam Lal’s 26 circumstances—his summing up of why the Talwars were guilty. And finally:

Now is the time to say omega in this case. To preorate, it is proved beyond reasonable doubt that the accused are the perpetrators of the crime in question. The parents are the best protectors of their own children—that is the order of human nature but there have been freaks in the history of mankind when the father and mother became the killer of their own progeny. They have extirpated their own daughter who had hardly seen 14 summers of her life and the servant without compunction from terrestrial terrain in breach of Commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill . . .’

Judge Shyam Lal made no mention in his 200-plus-page judgement of Satyaketu Singh’s demonstration, before the judge, of how Aarushi’s room was too small for the kind of fatal swings of the golf club that were alleged. He demonstrated it by swinging a golf club in the courtroom.

Satyaketu Singh responded by sending the by then retired judge a legal notice alleging mala fide intent and deliberate suppression. Nothing eventually came of the notice, but it was clear that Singh felt personally affronted by Judge Shyam Lal’s attitude towards his arguments.

For him it was final proof of what he had been telling the Talwars for several months leading up to the verdict: seek a transfer out of Judge Shyam Lal’s court, you will never get justice there.

The decision to seek a transfer or not wasn’t an easy one. But it was Mir’s line—of not antagonizing Judge Shyam Lal any further—that was taken. The result wasn’t pretty, but could there have been, given all that had taken place, any other outcome?