Aarushi (32 page)

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. I never touched the door.’

‘You didn’t try to open it?’

‘No. I just stood there and waited, and then aunty came to the inner door.’

‘You remember this clearly?’

‘Yes. I didn’t touch the door. I did what I would do on other days. I rang the bell and stood there, waiting for Hemraj to open the door.’

‘Like every other day?’

‘Yes. Servants don’t just barge into people’s homes. We have to wait to be let in.’

That morning Bharti Mandal had done at L-32 exactly what she did every other day, at every other home. She rang the bell and waited. She made no attempt to open the outer door.

Why then did she say she touched the door at the trial?

The reason the record shows what it does isn’t hard to see. It came down to how the clerk sitting to Judge Shyam Lal’s right typed out transcripts.

In Ghaziabad, as in many other lower courts, the record doesn’t reflect what lawyers say. The questions or propositions put to witnesses are not recorded. What is put down is only the response of the witness, not a Q&A.

In one long sentence, the CBI counsel R.K. Saini gave his slightly awestruck witness a grocery list of facts she had to verify about her arrival at the Talwars’ flat.

‘Touched the door’ was one subclause in the narrative of the first events of the morning. It was part of a longer story of Bharti arriving at six, ringing the bell, waiting, ringing the bell again, fetching the bucket from the stairs and finally finding not Hemraj, but Nupur Talwar at the innermost door.

Almost all parts of this sentence were undisputed, but one, about her ‘touching the door’, was not. To Bharti, most of the sentence was true, and the gravity of the small falsehood in its midst was beyond her. She said it was all true.

R.K. Saini at her side, she either agreed with what he said, or repeated it. The noise the defence made about this isn’t part of the record, but that Bharti ‘touched the door’ and it did not open, is.

This is the fact that Judge Shyam Lal would use in his judgement. This is the fact that shifted the burden of proof entirely on to the Talwars: they had locked the flat from the inside, it was up to them to explain how their daughter and servant were killed.

But a year and a half after her testimony, Bharti was telling me that she made no attempt to open that door. She had no idea that this detail had sent two people to jail for the murder of their daughter.

She went back to her ‘existence’. She told me that a film crew had recently come to shoot at the slum. It was a film about the murders, and some of her neighbours pointed her out to the film-makers. ‘There is the real Bharti! they said. I ran away from there.’

K.K. Gautam

One afternoon in October 2014, I met K.K. Gautam at his office in congested Karol Bagh, near Sir Ganga Ram Hospital. This was Gautam’s base in Delhi, the place from where he managed his interests in education and social work. ‘I am retired, one must remain occupied,’ he told me.

He was a fairly big man, in his mid- to late sixties, but looked younger. He was initially reluctant to speak with me, saying the CBI counsel R.K. Saini had advised against it. This told me I should get to the point right away.

I asked him first of all why he had changed his initial statement to what he told A.G.L. Kaul. Gautam responded by asking blandly whether there was a change at all. I told him both of us knew that there were substantial changes, crucially, the introduction of the phone call from his eye doctor, and the angle of a rape cover-up which counted so heavily against the Talwars in the trial.

‘Sushil Choudhry called me and said a girl has died, the family’s reputation may be affected. I said nothing can be done about that, the doctors will write what they have to write. I just said whatever they think is right, they will do.’

‘What were the actual words he used? Did he use the word rape?’

Gautam gazed at me for a few seconds and, after giving the question some thought, said: ‘Yes.’

‘What were his actual words?’

‘He said the girl has died. If rape is mentioned in the post-mortem the family name will suffer. I said now the girl is dead, how does it matter what happens to the family name? Whatever the doctors find, they will write. Leave it. The girl has died, why are you talking about these minor things?’

‘The post-mortem said nothing about rape, assault or anything of that kind. So it was correct?’

‘Look, I have not seen it. And I don’t know about it . . . But when this whole matter is settled, in the high court and Supreme Court, we can sit down and talk about many things.’

A young boy came in, Gautam asked for tea for me, coffee for himself. It seemed to me he had become more comfortable talking.

‘Look, I said what Dr Choudhry told me. Now he got irritated. He said he would have nothing to do with me. He was just an eye doctor. It is not as if he was treating me free.’

Gautam let out a short laugh, and continued, ‘There are many eye doctors, I go to someone else.’

I said, ‘Your first statement was very detailed, it talked about how you noticed the impressions on Hemraj’s bed, indicating several people had sat on it, the toilet appeared used by many people, there were glasses. You went back on all of this in your testimony . . .’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Remember what?’

‘Remember what I said when.’

‘So what did you see when you arrived at the scene and had the terrace lock broken? What was the scene like? Did you know anyone there?’

‘Look, the fact is that I did not know Dr Talwar or anyone in his family. The CBI has used the call records from the day to say this, but the fact is I did not know any of them. I did not know whether they were good or bad. How could I? I had nothing to do with them.

‘I went there because Dr Choudhry asked me to. Even then, I told him, I don’t know these people, it isn’t as if there is a feast there that I have been invited to. But he insisted, so I went along.

‘I saw Dr Rajesh Talwar for the first time the day I went to court to testify [in 2012].’

I asked, ‘But what did you see at the scene on the morning of the 17th?’

‘There was a big crowd there when we reached. Dr Sushil Choudhry started talking to Dr Dinesh Talwar. I left them alone and began looking around and talking to people. I noticed that on the railing outside [of the stairs to the terrace] there were bloodstains. On the railing, not on the stairs. I saw no stains on the stairs.

‘The press all reported there was lots of blood on the stairs. But I’m telling you, there was none.

‘Now, see. There are blood spots on the railing, but nothing on the stairs. But the prints of these stains were not taken. So I saw three or four stains like this and I asked, why haven’t prints been taken, there are so many policemen, officers, on the spot?

‘Slowly, I climbed up the stairs. Then I saw the terrace door was locked. They had not tried to open it. There were bloodstains there too. Means: the murderer had gone up. And I thought, this was great evidence, why weren’t prints taken? There were so many officers there!

‘From there I called up the SP City, Mahesh Mishra. I told him, you had come here, and you had also told me to help out, but what have you done so far? You don’t deserve my help.

‘He said, “
Arre bhaisahab
, I had told the SHO, he must have forgotten.” Then he came over, and Dataram Nanoria, the first IO, was also there. We asked him, why didn’t you open the door yesterday? He said, “Sir, we could not find the key.” And I said
“Saale, yeh koi State Bank ka taala hai?”
That you cannot open it without a key, you need permission from headquarters? He was a duffer, that Nanoria.

‘And right there, he brought a brick, and in one blow, the lock broke. I had a feeling that perhaps the murderer had hidden the weapon on the terrace. It happens that way in villages, knives and things they hide in the fields.

‘Nobody had imagined that there would be a dead body there! And the blood. Just all over the terrace.

‘Now I will tell you the real story. Pay attention. Now where a murder takes place, that is where you find a pool of blood. That is where most of the blood is released. Now if we take a body and dump it on a road or in a jungle, there won’t be much blood there. The blood flows out at the spot where the murder takes place. Right?

‘Now this body was on the terrace. There was blood all over the terrace. Even under the body there was a lot of blood. It had been lying for 36 hours in the heat.

‘Hemraj’s throat was slit. And every few seconds, there were bubbles and liquid escaping from the wound.’

Gautam now used his palms to show me how swollen Hemraj’s face was. ‘It was huge, nobody was able to recognize him. Then more policemen arrived on the scene, and I was asking them, what investigation have you done in the last 36 hours? There were palm prints on the walls. It meant a scuffle must have taken place. Hemraj must have struggled with his assailants there.’

‘So, according to you, Hemraj was definitely killed on the terrace.’

‘I’ll tell you. Then these people got a bed sheet from downstairs, and they placed the body in it. So much blood just went on to the bed sheet. It was soaked in blood. Four policemen picked the body up, two on each side, he was a healthy, heavy man. And they rested on each stair as they took the corpse down.

‘And now they say the Talwars killed him downstairs and took the body up. So where was he killed? Where is Hemraj’s blood downstairs?’

Gautam’s words were filled with regret: no one seemed to value experienced policemen any more. ‘The things we can see, people who have been around for five years or ten cannot. But they do not realize this.’

‘But what was the motivation of the CBI to twist the case the way it did?’ I asked.

‘There was no motivation, whether it was UP police or CBI. Just that these people had crossed all the limits of stupidity.

‘In the beginning, when I saw them [the Talwars] on TV, I may have felt their behaviour was abnormal. Then the investigators started saying no one saw them crying. But to base a conclusion on this? That way, no one saw Indira Gandhi cry when Sanjay died!

‘Now, look. What is the story you read? That Aarushi was in her room. Dr Rajesh went there. What did he see? Now, whatever he saw, what would a normal person do? Suppose he had found out about some illicit relations. Would he not simply sack the servant and deal with his daughter? Say he was very angry, would he kill the servant there? In the house? In the same room? Wouldn’t he just get him killed outside and dump the body in drain?’

Gautam had by now made it clear that he did not believe a word of the CBI’s story. Yet he had helped the CBI. I asked him about the police officers he knew on the case, and what he thought of them. He had the highest regard for Arun Kumar, he said, while suggesting that many of the younger IPS officers on the case were incompetent. He emphasized that he fraternized only with people of ‘highest, spotless reputation’.

‘What about Gurdarshan Singh? Did you know him?’

‘He was a very senior officer.’

‘What was his reputation like?’

Gautam gave me a sly smile, thought for some time, and said, ‘Medium.’

I turned to a far more serious subject, his interactions with A.G.L. Kaul. I told Gautam that I knew he had called Arun Kumar for help. Why did he need help?

‘It was more advice.’

‘That is not what I heard.’

‘What did you hear?’

I asked him whether he was under pressure from Kaul to change his testimony because Kaul had some personal information on him.

Gautam gave me another long look. ‘It is best we don’t discuss this.’

‘So were you put under pressure?’

‘Why not drop this subject?’

‘It is important that I know from you.’

‘You know everything already. Please let us not discuss this any more.’

M.S. Dahiya

It was November 2014. A thin, stooped man ambled through the gate of the Forensic Science Laboratory building in Gandhinagar. This was Mohinder Singh Dahiya, who had retired from his position of deputy director, Directorate of Forensic Studies, that very week.

Dr Dahiya took me to the first-floor foyer, in one corner of which was a well-used sofa. As we talked his former colleagues walked past, each one greeting him respectfully.

I began by saying he must be looking forward to some rest after a 35-year career.

‘No, no. I continue as director of the Institute of Forensics, at the Forensic Science University [next door]. And I will be reinstated here as deputy director very soon. Government has taken a decision. Formally, communication may come later.’

‘But you know you will be back?’

‘Yes, yes. They have indicated to me that I will continue to hold both positions.’

Dahiya was in his late sixties, and this would be his eighth extension—very unusual for a government servant, but so were most of the seven he had been offered in previous years.

‘You must be highly valued by the state,’ I said.

‘Yes. Because I have solved many mysteries. Like Godhra, recently Goa, then Aarushi murder case, so many mysteries. Police were confused, but I was able to solve.’

‘Yes, Aarushi . . .’

‘That was only one. But it was a major one, whole country wanted to know. All police, CBI, everyone had failed, but I succeeded.’

Mohinder Dahiya was a success. He was born in the village of Didlan, in Sonepat district, Haryana, the son of a farmer. He grew up in a joint family that depended solely on agriculture and went to the village primary school till standard eight, and then to secondary school in Sonepat, about 20 kilometres from his village.

Thereafter, he travelled to Sagar University in Madhya Pradesh, where he remained until he completed his PhD. And from then began his seemingly interminable career in forensic science.

Dahiya told me solving crimes started with getting a plausible idea. This, he said, comes from experience and study. ‘I have many books in my house. I study. Here I work during office hours, and then at home another two or three hours, I study and work.’