Aarushi (29 page)

Shyam Lal smiled. What did I want with him? ‘The bail hearing is tomorrow,’ he said, ‘why don’t you just attend that? That will be enough.’ I explained to him that I was writing a book and that it was vital that I interviewed him. In the end, he agreed to meet me and be interviewed that evening, in his house in Jhalwa, a poorly lit part of Allahabad that is being rapidly taken over by new housing with charmingly descriptive names. Shyam Lal lived with his family in a part designated ‘mini HIG’ (high income group), as though galloping real estate prices had cut ‘high’ income down to size.

A smog of suspended concrete dust from half-constructed homes hung in the air, lighting up only bits of the streets. Addresses were difficult to find.

The house was new, and close to a street light. Shyam Lal stepped out on to the small porch to welcome me. We sat in the first room: the lawyers’ chambers he shared with his son Ashutosh, whose mainstay was also criminal law. Its shelves were lined with bound Supreme Court case records, but weren’t full. Many of the volumes were still sealed in plastic covers—the classic signs of a practice that was yet to take off.

***

In the days after the verdict on 25 November 2013, Judge Shyam Lal exiled himself from the media. He turned down every request to appear on television or be interviewed for print. Having met him on some occasions in his office, and observed him in the courtroom he presided over, I had formed some opinions about the man. He was someone who worked very hard, took pride in what he did.

Lal was born in a village 18 kilometres from Chitrakoot. ‘This is the place where Lord Rama was in exile. This is also the place of Tulsidas. My village name is Sarayna.’

He attended the primary school there. It was like any other subdivisional primary school. The medium of instruction was, of course, Hindi. ‘But I have command in both the languages, English, Hindi.’ He would keep reminding me of this through the conversation, but now he reached for a paper on his desk and pushed it towards me.

It was a court order. He had just secured bail for a client in an attempt-to-murder case; he appeared pleased with his day’s work.

I was just beginning to ask him how different it was for him to start practising post-retirement when his phone rang. It was a client, but one with whom Shyam Lal shared a familiarity. I could hear only one side of the conversation, and it sounded like a man boasting of his connections.

‘Aisa hai, brother, isi Holi mein jaoonga Justice S.K. Singh ke paas jaoonga . . .’

There was concern at the other end. Holi was a week away: it would be too late to approach Chief Justice Singh, as the ‘matter’ would already have been decided upon.

Shyam Lal, who had been in the system long enough, wasn’t convinced:
‘Tab tak kanhaan taye ho jayega?’

‘Brother’ informed him that an order would come in a day or two—the meeting would have to be sooner.

‘Theek hai, kal main lunch mein milta hoon, Justice S.K. Singh se . . .
He will be seized of every fact. I will convey him.
Mil ke shyam ko aap ko batata . . . theek hai, brother?’
(Okay, I’ll meet Justice S.K. Singh for lunch tomorrow and then tell you . . . okay, brother?)

Chief Justice S.K. Singh was in fact a Patna judge. He had been transferred to Allahabad, before being elevated to the Supreme Court.

We returned to the topic of our conversation: him. His elder brother was already in Allahabad when he arrived in 1971. Their father was a ‘simple farmer, 8th pass’ but always inspired his sons, said Shyam Lal, instilling in them the importance of hard work. He read English literature, Hindi literature and Hindi for his bachelor’s degree, continuing on to a master’s in English literature. By 1975, this was done, and he began studying law.

Law was his thing; he became animated as he spoke about completing his degree: ‘Mean-the-while, mean-the-while I started my practice in Allahabad, but fortunately I got the government job, as upper division assistant in the civil secretariat. I continued there for six years.’

And through these years, he repeatedly applied for competitive government jobs of higher station. In 1978, he got through the written exam, but stumbled at the interview stage. This would happen again.

‘In 1983 I topped in the written exam, but in the interview, not very good marks were given. So I did not get the post of deputy collector. Rather I was given job like inspector of jails, district inspector of schools, etc. I wanted deputy collector.

‘In the same year I also got my selection in the munsib . . . you know munsib? Munsib means one who does justice. Then my guru was Mr R.K. Agarwal, since deceased . . . he advised me to join judicial service. Because of my temperament. He was knowing it very well. That I cannot succumb to any person, whosoever he may be.

‘Even if the God will say me . . .
ki
you do this, if my conscience does not permit I will never do, whatever the consequences may be.

‘Nineteen eighty-five, 5th August, I joined up judicial service having secured 4th position. I was sent for training to administrative training institute, Nainital . . . you see the photograph there . . . this one, it has got faded now . . .’

The photograph was indeed faded, and scabs on it obliterated some of Shyam Lal’s coursemates. It was placed above a high bookshelf behind him. I looked at it blankly, my mind summing up this man’s entry into the judicial services: the clerk burning the proverbial midnight oil to rise above his station. The repeated failures at the interview stage where, to a discerning selection panel, a single ‘mean-the-while’ would mean the end of prospects, specially if it was preceded, as I suspected it was, by the pathological need to say he had command over English. After three months’ training, he entered the judiciary, where his ‘temperament’ found its vessel.

The Aarushi case gave Shyam Lal the opportunity to write a judgement which would be widely read, one that he would be remembered for. And one that, most crucially, would be in English. The opening lines of the most awaited murder trial judgement in modern India were:

The cynosure of judicial determination is the fluctuating fortunes of the dentist couple Dr. Rajesh Talwar and Dr. Nupur Talwar, who have been arraigned for committing and secreting as also deracinating the evidence of commission of the murder of their own adolescent daughter—a beaut damsel and sole heiress Ms. Aarushi and hapless domestic aide Hemraj, who had migrated to India from neighbouring Nepal to eke out living and attended routinely to the chores of domestic drudgery at the house of their masters.

The high colour style continued through the text. The victims were ‘jugulated’. (At one time, jugulated did indeed mean killing by cutting the throat, but this was about 400 years ago.) The crime was ‘fiendish and flagitious’. On the morning of the discovery of Aarushi’s body, neighbours heard ‘ululation’ and ‘boohoo’. And though Rajesh Talwar was wearing a T-shirt and ‘half pant’, Nupur Talwar wasn’t merely in a nightdress, she ‘was wearing peignoir’, as the ‘bucolic’ maid Bharti arrived on the scene that morning.

An entire document seemed to have been written with Shyam Lal’s favourite refrain playing in the background: ‘I have command in English.’ At times this became ridiculous: there were phrases like ‘warp and whoof’; Aarushi’s bag was filled with ‘whim wams’. And, believe it or not: ‘to repeat at the cost of repetition’.

Then there were my favourites: synonyms for penis.

Hemraj’s ‘willy was turgid’; his ‘pecker was swollen’.

‘What were you thinking when you used words like willy and pecker in your judgement?’

Lal betrayed a little discomfort, and then smiled and had a question of his own: ‘Do you think it was not proper?’

‘I just want to understand why you would use these words in a judgement . . .’

‘There was no special reason.’

‘But you once told me that you think about every word you write, for appropriateness . . . so you must have thought about this.’

‘Yes, yes, certainly.’

‘So why did you use those words?’

‘Was it not proper?’

‘I found it odd . . .’

‘This is your perception . . .’

‘Yes, it is. You didn’t find it odd to be using these words?’

‘No.’

‘Have you seen it used in any other judgements?’

‘Look, this is very difficult . . . how can I say, where I might have seen this . . .
kahin na kahin to padha . . . dekha isko . . .’

‘But synonyms for penis aren’t exactly common in judgements . . . do you use these words in your daily dealings?’

‘Why not!
Dekhiye
. . . I told you that I have done my MA in English literature . . . I know many words like this . . .’

I realized, talking to him that night, that this wasn’t about semantics, or about the correct use or otherwise of the language. Profound as the consequences of that can be (we have only to look at the Supreme Court’s poorly drafted Hindutva judgements of 1994), there was something deeper at play. And ‘command in English’ was a big part of it.

Shyam Lal was excluded from the ‘privilege’ of English early on in life. But he believed he had overcome this handicap. This was reflected in his repeated assertions that he had command over English.

To those, like the Talwars, who he felt were more equal than he would like them to be, he had ‘English’ reactions. These were expressed in scathing (if often incomprehensible) attacks in orders he passed through the trial.

Beneath all this, there were two things about Shyam Lal which became clear in interactions outside his court. The first was his celebration of his eccentricities—some of which have been mentioned earlier—and his belief that all of them were virtues, that they made him, somehow, ‘better’ than everyone else. That night in Allahabad, he reeled off a few:

‘I have hardly seen four or five films in my whole life . . . My entertainment, my joy is in law journals . . . I have never been on an aircraft . . . I have not been to any metro except Delhi. I have never gone to Kolkata, Mumbai, Madras. Abroad, no question, I don’t even have a passport.

‘I have taken no holidays . . . my father had said “work is worship”. I have not taken medical leave in entire service life.’

But there were underlying aspirations. As Shyam Lal repeated his biodata to me, telling me about postings in Farrukhabad, Kanauj, Bareilly, Ghaziabad and so on, he made a special mention of his shortest posting. It was in Mohammedabad, Ghazipur district. ‘I stayed only one and half months.’

‘Why?’

‘I applied for transfer on ground that there was no English medium school, for my children.’ Shyam Lal’s request was granted.

Lal’s obsession with English remained the theme of our conversation.

‘High court ka judgements nahin padhta hoon . . . dekhiye . . . saare Supreme Court ke cases hain . . . Mere paas Hindi ke kitaabein shayad hi koi mile . . . saare English ke honge . . .’
(I don’t read high court judgements . . . see . . . there are so many Supreme Court cases . . . you might not find books in Hindi here . . . all are in English).

‘What are you reading now?’ I asked.

‘Time kahan hai?’
He pointed to a small pile of papers.
‘Jab time milta sirf law hi padhta hoon.’

‘But your vocabulary . . .’

‘I have read Shakespeare,
Merchant of Venice, Tale of Two Cities, Two Gentlemen of Verona
, Milton, Dryden, Shelley, Keats.’

‘So you liked the Romantic poets? Who was your favourite?’

‘I am giving the reply what you want to elicit from me . . . I have studied
Rape of the Lock
. . . that is a mock epic, written by Dryden, it is a very good novel . . . He had said “coffee makes a politician wiser”.’

‘What is the last book you have read?’

Shyam Lal contemplated for a while, and said, ‘Last book . . . was at the time of my MA. That time.’ This would be 1975.

‘But newspapers I read regularly.’

He then pointed me to his collection in one of the lower racks of his book case. ‘Chambers, Oxford . . . Father Camille Bulcke . . . has done a tremendous job . . . English to Hindi . . . here is Law Lexicon.’

Shyam Lal was enjoying showing me his books, but he wasn’t saying much. He was chewing paan, emitting sounds and smiling each time he pointed to a title. There were books by Fali Nariman, Justice Krishna Iyer, more law books and, then suddenly, a book definitely post-1975, Chetan Bhagat’s
Five Point Someone
tucked in between.

‘Have you read it?’

There was no real answer. Just more nodding and more smiling.

I now asked the retired judge about his writing: ‘How long does it take you to write a page?’

‘One page? Ten minutes, maximum. Only ten minutes.’

His lawyer son Ashutosh, who had joined us, spoke: ‘But the situation was different in the Aarushi case . . . We had to use some good words in the judgement . . . We have to go through that page again and again, so there is no mistake. So it took some time.

‘The difficulty was finding a typist. Because, you know, in Ghaziabad all typists are for Hindi language only. Only one or two stenos are there who can type the judgements in English. We had to make special arrangements. In fact I was the one who typed the beginning personally. First ten pages.’

The judgement was 210 pages, and although much of it was cut and pasted off other judgements, I was interested in how long it took to write. Ashutosh Yadav, who was extremely happy to have made his own contributions to the document, unwittingly let a secret out:

‘It took more than one month,’ he said.

‘So you had gone to Ghaziabad more than a month before to help out . . . ?’

‘Yes, I was there,’ said Ashutosh.

I took this information in, and did my best to appear deadpan. Because the facts were these: Judge Shyam Lal pronounced his judgement on 25 November 2013. Tanveer Ahmed Mir, counsel for the defence, began his final arguments on 24 October. Over the next two weeks he would argue on a total of 24 circumstances that he felt should lead to acquittal. Seven of these were major points. As Judge Shyam Lal and his son sat down to write the judgement, Mir had not even begun.