reason to be proud of their daughter. ‘She was always in the first three in her class, first, second or third . . . Below that was too much to handle for her,’ Nupur said.
In an essay about her schooldays, Aarushi berated herself for slipping from 92 per cent in one year to 89 in the next. She got her precious scholar badges every year, and having done so consistently well over three years, she was awarded a blue scholar blazer by the school.
She was intensely proud of this, but Nupur said, ‘She never used to wear it . . . She’d say she wanted to be like everybody else.’
Yes, there were boys. But having a boyfriend at thirteen or fourteen did not mean physical intimacy; that was something Aarushi’s schedule did not allow in any case, going from school straight to her grandparents’, and then to her own home when her parents returned home for the day. Having a boyfriend was, instead, a gauge of popularity, something played out in polls and other means on social media networks. It wasn’t as if the parents didn’t know about the boys. They were protective—Rajesh a little more so—and often insisted that she went out with her friends in the company of at least one adult, but there were times they gave in. She would go through the highs and lows of puppy love like any other teenager from the same milieu, but her biggest, most serious crush, Nupur told me smiling, was on Johnny Depp.
‘We had a tree growing outside, a big tree. So she used to call it Johnny Depp. And every night it would be “Good night Johnny Depp”. This was a ritual in our house. In school she was asked to write about her room, so she wrote that she had this tree and she called it Johnny Depp, and her teacher sent it to every class to be read out . . . She must have been in class six or seven.’
We were sitting in the drawing room of the Talwars’ South Delhi flat. Nupur across from me, Rajesh to my right, Aarushi on every wall. It was 24 November 2013, the day before the court judgement, and our conversation was subdued. I had interviewed the Talwars many times and was having trouble thinking of new questions to ask.
I chose to just listen. In the past, Nupur usually spoke when she had a point to make, and she seemed to relish the tough questions. I remembered asking her earlier about the strain the murders might have put on her relationship with her husband. Did it ever cross her mind that he might have done it? She’d looked me in the eye and said that if she had even a decimal point of a doubt, she would have led the way to prosecute Rajesh. Her daughter had been murdered, what possible reason could there be to protect her killer?
Nupur would always look people in the eye—and this troubled some—but today, I found her looking away a lot. Rajesh went through his usual cycle of indignation and despair—his pitch would rise as he spoke of injustice, he was often close to tears, and then he would become quiet and stare blankly, perhaps at a future that was bewilderingly real and inconceivable all at once.
They seemed to know that a guilty verdict was coming, that for now the fight was over. It was the only time Nupur let her guard down in front of me. In the silences during that conversation, I could almost hear her counting her losses. It was the first time I saw her weep.
As I read the press, it seemed to me the CBI had made the Talwars out to be killers as sharp as their scalpels. Geniuses of a kind. Daring, clever, and almost successful. But I felt that if they were guilty, their genius lay not in the execution of the murders or the meticulousness of the alleged cover-up. It lay in keeping up, for five years, the impossible pretence that they were innocent. It lay in sticking together as a couple. This was a broken family—its most vibrant, beautiful part had been lost. But the two people left in it genuinely loved each other. That was true whether they were guilty or not.
‘Just three days ago I was going through her
In an essay about her schooldays, Aarushi berated herself for slipping from 92 per cent in one year to 89 in the next. She got her precious scholar badges every year, and having done so consistently well over three years, she was awarded a blue scholar blazer by the school.
She was intensely proud of this, but Nupur said, ‘She never used to wear it . . . She’d say she wanted to be like everybody else.’
Yes, there were boys. But having a boyfriend at thirteen or fourteen did not mean physical intimacy; that was something Aarushi’s schedule did not allow in any case, going from school straight to her grandparents’, and then to her own home when her parents returned home for the day. Having a boyfriend was, instead, a gauge of popularity, something played out in polls and other means on social media networks. It wasn’t as if the parents didn’t know about the boys. They were protective—Rajesh a little more so—and often insisted that she went out with her friends in the company of at least one adult, but there were times they gave in. She would go through the highs and lows of puppy love like any other teenager from the same milieu, but her biggest, most serious crush, Nupur told me smiling, was on Johnny Depp.
‘We had a tree growing outside, a big tree. So she used to call it Johnny Depp. And every night it would be “Good night Johnny Depp”. This was a ritual in our house. In school she was asked to write about her room, so she wrote that she had this tree and she called it Johnny Depp, and her teacher sent it to every class to be read out . . . She must have been in class six or seven.’
We were sitting in the drawing room of the Talwars’ South Delhi flat. Nupur across from me, Rajesh to my right, Aarushi on every wall. It was 24 November 2013, the day before the court judgement, and our conversation was subdued. I had interviewed the Talwars many times and was having trouble thinking of new questions to ask.
I chose to just listen. In the past, Nupur usually spoke when she had a point to make, and she seemed to relish the tough questions. I remembered asking her earlier about the strain the murders might have put on her relationship with her husband. Did it ever cross her mind that he might have done it? She’d looked me in the eye and said that if she had even a decimal point of a doubt, she would have led the way to prosecute Rajesh. Her daughter had been murdered, what possible reason could there be to protect her killer?
Nupur would always look people in the eye—and this troubled some—but today, I found her looking away a lot. Rajesh went through his usual cycle of indignation and despair—his pitch would rise as he spoke of injustice, he was often close to tears, and then he would become quiet and stare blankly, perhaps at a future that was bewilderingly real and inconceivable all at once.
They seemed to know that a guilty verdict was coming, that for now the fight was over. It was the only time Nupur let her guard down in front of me. In the silences during that conversation, I could almost hear her counting her losses. It was the first time I saw her weep.
As I read the press, it seemed to me the CBI had made the Talwars out to be killers as sharp as their scalpels. Geniuses of a kind. Daring, clever, and almost successful. But I felt that if they were guilty, their genius lay not in the execution of the murders or the meticulousness of the alleged cover-up. It lay in keeping up, for five years, the impossible pretence that they were innocent. It lay in sticking together as a couple. This was a broken family—its most vibrant, beautiful part had been lost. But the two people left in it genuinely loved each other. That was true whether they were guilty or not.
‘Just three days ago I was going through her
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