Aarushi (12 page)

The top echelons of the UP bureaucracy had their own traditions; those lower down had theirs, even if these were less known. There are two informal indexes that aid decisions regarding transfers and postings in the UP police. These help superior officers place the right people in the right areas. One is the ‘HLI’ or ‘high loot index’, which rates a locality. For instance, a part of town that is full of markets and businesses would be a ‘high loot index’ area. In other words, a lucrative place for a policeman to be.

The other index is the RHI, or the ‘Robin Hood index’, and this rates personnel. A cop who has a high ‘RHI’ mark isn’t someone who, as the name might suggest, robs from the rich and gives to the poor. He simply robs. That is, extorts. When decisions regarding assignments are taken, superior officers try to keep in mind HLI and RHI and find a balance. If, for instance, a high RHI station house officer is posted to a station that’s in a low HLI area, chaos could ensue. Low HLI means fewer extortion opportunities, and a high RHI cop’s appetite would not be satisfied. So the few businesses in the area would be put under an unfair amount of pressure. Police officers from Uttar Pradesh talk about these indexes without irony.

Gautam had immense respect for his senior. Now he sought Kumar’s advice on how to escape the situation he found himself in. He told Kumar that he was being trapped into changing his testimony.

Kumar asked him the details. Gautam was initially reticent, but grew increasingly desperate in subsequent calls till he finally told Kumar what the problem was. What was at stake wasn’t just a lie or two about his visit to the crime scene. Kaul had confronted him with information of a deeply personal nature. He had also communicated he was eager to use it unless Gautam agreed to change his statement. Arun Kumar heard him out, and then told him there was nothing he could do to help. I checked with Gautam who confirmed the calls but was non-committal about what had happened.

Two weeks after the encounter with Chaddha, Gautam made his fresh statement to Kaul incriminating the Talwars. There was no further probe by the CBI on his alleged visit and Kaul had got another piece of the puzzle whose complete picture would be the indictment of the Talwars.

Gautam’s companions’ visit to the two washrooms was a reminder of something else that was seldom recalled during the investigation and the trial. This was that the door to Aarushi’s bedroom was not the only way to enter her room. The guest washroom allowed access to her toilet, and thereafter into her bedroom. To this day, very few people are aware of this fact. But does it not open up the possibility of an assailant entering Aarushi’s room through her toilet without having a key—or being ‘allowed in’?

***

In the third week of May 2010, the scene shifted to Dehradun, where Neelabh Kishore had summoned the Talwars. In the course of this conversation, Nupur Talwar told Kishore that in 2009, before the golf kit was seized, she and a family friend, Ajay Chaddha, had gone to the Jalvayu Vihar flat to supervise pest control and do some cleaning. The Talwars had moved to Azad Apartments near IIT Delhi, and their old home had been lying vacant and neglected for many months. As they emptied a loft, said Nupur, they found a golf club, some of Aarushi’s toys and some junk. The club was carried back and placed along with the others in Rajesh’s kit. At the time, it had been over a year since Rajesh had last played golf.

Three things happened in quick succession. The first was a report in the
Pioneer
dated 24 May quoting ‘top-ranking’ and other nameless CBI sources, who were all convinced that the Talwars had committed the crime. In journalistic parlance we call such a story a trial balloon, and this was the first one that mapped out the CBI’s new case. This story, with its various inaccuracies, read less like a news report and more like a charge sheet and did the job of reviving interest in the case, putting the CBI in a positive light and cementing public perception of the Talwars as the killers.

The story contained the same wrong information about Hemraj’s blood being found in Aarushi’s room—on her pillow. It had other shades of Dahiya: ‘Somebody was desperate to ensure that the crime did not look like a case of honour killing,’ a CBI official told the paper.

It also said that the victims were hit by ‘a golf club, or similar object’. Another detail was added when the
Pioneer
reported that a golf club was ‘missing’: ‘Sources said that the CBI was looking for a missing golf club which could be Talwar’s. “So far he has denied that any club from his golf set is missing, but we are not convinced,” said a CBI official.’

It is difficult to say whether this was a mistake the paper made or whether the CBI official, who was the source of so much information, wasn’t aware that Rajesh Talwar’s golf kit—with all its 12 clubs in it—had been seized by the agency in October the previous year.

In the public mind, however, an impression had been created that Rajesh Talwar was behaving suspiciously about his golf clubs—he was hiding one of them.

This worked very well for Kaul as he segued into his next step. This was yet another interview with Dr Sunil Dohare. His fifth statement to the CBI was recorded four days after the
Pioneer
story appeared and was still fresh in everyone’s mind.

Kaul asked Dohare whether a golf club could have killed Aarushi. Dohare answered: ‘The injury on the forehead of Aarushi was V-shaped and had been made with a heavy blunt instrument. It is possible that the injury could have been caused by the golf club.’

There was just a little more work for the CBI to do, now that suspicion had been raised about a golf club and two experts, Dahiya and Dohare, had agreed that it could be the murder weapon. This task centred on the golf club found in the loft, which Nupur Talwar had mentioned in Dehradun.

Kaul (or ‘Hemraj’) wrote to Ajay Chaddha on the matter, and received a detailed reply on 1 June 2010. Chaddha corroborated what Nupur had said. That they sorted the stuff, discarded some things, placed some back and kept the golf club, an iron, aside.

He also wrote:

I clearly remember, looking at the head of the golf stick to see whether any blood or such stuff was there but it did not appear as there was anything. Later on Rajesh visited the house and we mentioned to him about the stick, to which he remarked that the whole golf kit had been lying in the loft and one of the sticks may have got left behind. He too had a look at the sticks and had the same view as us.

To summarize, Rajesh Talwar had a golf set of 12 clubs which he kept in a loft near the drawing room of his apartment. At some point, when the golf kit was being taken out, one club was left behind, but it wasn’t an absence sorely felt by Rajesh Talwar since he was not an advanced player of the game. A few months before the murder, he used two clubs and then had them sent back with his driver Umesh for Hemraj to keep with the rest of the kit. Some months after the murder, while cleaning out the flat, Nupur found the 12th club and had it put back with the kit. Thus, when the CBI seized the golf kit, it had the entire set.

Kaul saw the whole story differently: Chaddha was an old friend of the Talwars, and meant well, but this email was spun as proof that the Talwars had hidden an incriminating piece of evidence. On the record, there is nothing to show that the Talwars were asked about the golf clubs before 29 October 2009, when the CBI told them the kit had to be handed over. But the impression created in the media, and carried through to the trial, was that the failure to report the ‘recovery’ of the club when the flat was being cleaned in early 2009 was an act of concealment.

It is reasonable to assume that even if the fatal blows were struck with a golf club, it would have to be a particular golf club. There are four types of clubs: the driver, the wood, the iron and the putter. Each has a distinct shape, with the driver and wood having large heads, and the putter having a flat head. Each bears a number; in fact there are eight irons in a set, each with the head at a lower angle. So was the club found in the loft the murder weapon? What marking did it bear?

The CFSL said the examination of the 12 golf clubs, under a microscope, ‘reveal[s] that negligible amount of soil was found sticking in the cavity of the numbers engraved at the bottom portion of the head of the golf clubs marked exhibits 3 and 5’ in comparison to the soil found on all the other clubs. One of the two ‘cleaner’ clubs was a wood, the other was an iron.

That this report came eight months after the seizure and all manner of handling, by various people at the CBI and the CFSL, didn’t matter. The iron that had less dirt had to be the murder weapon: it had been cleaned. This is the story that the CBI put out, and stuck to.

But which golf club was it? According to Kaul’s authoritative December 2010 closure report, it was the club bearing the engraving number ‘5’.

There was one problem with this that Kaul had failed to notice: the club bearing the engraving ‘5’ wasn’t the iron that appeared to have been cleaned. The two ‘cleaner’ clubs were a 3 wood (which wasn’t a suspect) and a 4 iron.

When the discrepancy was pointed out in the course of the trial, the 4 iron became the weapon of offence. No explanation was offered. This was the fourth time the weapon responsible for the blunt injuries had changed. The police initially suspected a hammer; the AIIMS medical committee said it was a khukri; Kaul said 5 iron; the trial court was told it was a 4 iron.

***

Ajay Chaddha was central to the story of the golf club. Chaddha was born in Amritsar, where Rajesh’s mother was from, and the families knew each other well. Chaddha had started a medical supplies business and Rajesh allowed him the use of a cabin in his Hauz Khas clinic for this.

Although his email was crucial and he was listed as a witness, Chaddha was never asked to testify for the prosecution. Tall, light-eyed and blessed with North Indian good looks, Chaddha would, however, turn up in court on many dates. He was one of the first friends of the family to reach the Talwars’ flat on the day of the murders, and spent the night there, helping with the post-mortem and the cremation. The next day, he was returning home in the morning when he heard about the discovery of Hemraj’s body. He took a U-turn at the DND flyover and came back to the flat. Chaddha was a source of support to the Talwars through the investigation as well. In May 2010, for instance, he had accompanied them to Dehradun, where the issue of the golf club came up.

Chaddha had had a couple of interesting interactions with Kaul before the exchange of the golf club emails. In January 2010, the investigating officer summoned him to his office to record a statement. Chaddha says Kaul began by showing him photographs of the crime scene and reminding him of the brutality with which the murders were committed, but soon enough he was on to another theme.

‘He told me, “You know they have done it, why defend them and make more trouble for yourself? Testify for us.” I told him that I was convinced of their innocence and had already told investigators what I knew of the events of that day,’ Chaddha told me.

Nevertheless, he said, he was willing to answer any questions Kaul may have had. Kaul appeared to have the impression that Rajesh Talwar and Chaddha were related. Chaddha clarified that they were not. Towards the end of a meandering interview, during which Kaul repeatedly reminded Chaddha that he was only inviting trouble if he stood by the Talwars, Kaul pulled out what to me was his cheapest trick.

During her narco tests, under the influence of a cocktail of drugs, Nupur Talwar had said many things of a personal nature, including her love for Rajesh. In one line, she had also said that she had, on one occasion, had physical relations with Chaddha. This was when Rajesh was in jail, and Chaddha was the only one among their friends who had stood by their side.

The scientists who conducted the test didn’t judge the statement on whether it was true or not. Unlike brain-mapping, in which an experience a subject has participated in and one the subject has only heard about produce two different brain-states which can be directly measured, the effect of narco analysis is a lack of inhibition in expressing both thoughts and experiences. Narco analysis cannot determine if what Nupur said was true or false; only that she was being honest about her feelings for Chaddha. Scientists call this transparency; it is common in narco narration.

In the servants’ narco analysis, to put this in perspective, the scientists found no transparency at all, and repeated attempts at deception. The servants’ narco analysis in fact confirmed the brain-mapping, in which they placed themselves at the scene of the crime.

Kaul, of course, had read the report and latched on to this juicy bit. ‘He told me he would tell my family that I was having an affair with Nupur, that he had proof,’ said Chaddha. ‘I told him, go ahead, do your worst.’ In the statement recorded that day, Kaul asked Chaddha whether he was having an extramarital affair with Nupur. Chaddha’s reply was, ‘That is a stupid question.’ He wasn’t having an affair.

Nuggets like these were great fodder for the media. The more important aspect of the scientific tests on Nupur (and Rajesh) was that there was no deception in their answers. But with a swirl of rumours about the allegedly promiscuous lifestyle of the Talwars already in circulation, the suggestion of an extramarital affair was seen as too juicy to ignore—even if it were circulated as an additional rumour. The last question to Chaddha, according to his January 2010 statement to Kaul, was whether he knew anything about a golf club that had gone missing. Chaddha purportedly replied that he had faint memories of some inquiries in this regard in the early part of the investigation.

I asked Chaddha why he didn’t tell Kaul that, in early 2009, he and Nupur had found a club in the loft. ‘I was never asked this question at all,’ he said. I pointed out that the January statement bore an ‘ROAC’ (read over and corrected by the witness). Didn’t he do this? ‘Absolutely not. I am not just certain, I am two hundred per cent certain,’ Chaddha said.