environment, wanted to be—well known and popular? Pretty, bright and well spoken, Aarushi made all the polls. There was even one just about her: ‘who is d perfect person for Aarushi?’ 21 per cent of her friends voted Sankalp, 18 per cent Arnav.
A friend of Aarushi’s wrote back to express surprise (if tinged with a little adolescent excitement) about ‘Sanki’ being linked to her, saying she had voted for Arnav. Aarushi’s response:
‘Ahem . . . hello delete this thing rite away . . . lol.’
The most important part of that message is the one that the more prurient among the older generation will miss, and those of Aarushi’s age will get instantly: it’s the LOL. Laugh out loud. This is just a bit of juvenile fun. And Aarushi wasn’t the only one indulging in it.
Now that they are young adults, Aarushi’s friends look at these messages and smile, they understand what was going on, and that none of it was sinister. Rajeshwari, a friend of Aarushi’s, blogged: ‘Didn’t we all have these streaks in us when we were fourteen? How abnormal is it for an urban, public school-educated fourteen-year-old of the twenty-first century to own a cellphone, use it to text a friend of the opposite gender and put up a few harmless pictures of a birthday party on a social networking website?’ And was it a crime to have a ‘boyfriend’? And isn’t the meaning of boyfriend at thirteen a fair order removed from what it is at thirty?
Mixed in with the so-called adult stuff on the social networks that Aarushi was part of was a lot of pure childishness. Like a chain mail that said the reader would be kissed by the love of their life if they forwarded the mail to ten other people, and cursed in love if they didn’t. This was, and largely remains, the online life of the teenager. And through all the boys and polls and chain mails, she remained focused on her studies. Her friend Vidushi said, ‘Of all of us at that age, Aarushi probably had the firmest sense of right and wrong.’
That, though, was not the way the police saw it. They took things literally, and in their eyes Aarushi’s ‘character’ painted itself. One message from Sankalp made reference to a ‘booze party’ in the future. This was then tied to an email Aarushi had sent to Rajesh which had no connection to alcohol, but contained an apology: ‘I wnt do it again.’ The mail ended with the daughter making up with her parents, telling them how much she loved them. And in fact, it had to do with her going out with some friends unaccompanied by an adult.
This is not what the investigators understood it to be. They would not bother with the cards and letters that were in the scrapbooks of the Talwars. They preferred looking at Facebook and Orkut.
The pictures Aarushi deleted on the night she died became a cause for suspicion. Why would she do that? The simple explanation that kids with digital cameras often do this was not enough. The police could have mined the data card to possibly recover the pictures, but the lab it was sent to wasn’t equipped to do this.
Vidushi had talked about a ‘sleepover’ at Aarushi’s place planned for the 19th. What was a sleepover? Did adults also participate? Why not? Again, the explanation that kids that age wanted to be left alone in each other’s company—and that there were no boys—wasn’t good enough. Every answer the Talwars gave was held against them, just as much as the answers they did not have.
The police, looking at Aarushi’s bedroom door during the investigation, wondered: What type of parents kept their child locked up? Aarushi’s casual remark to her friends about physically not being there for the outing the following day was now treated by the UP police as a premonition. What would make her say something like this on the day she would be murdered?
The police were alarmed by the language in the social media exchanges. For kids in their early teens, profanities such as slut or bitch are of no
A friend of Aarushi’s wrote back to express surprise (if tinged with a little adolescent excitement) about ‘Sanki’ being linked to her, saying she had voted for Arnav. Aarushi’s response:
‘Ahem . . . hello delete this thing rite away . . . lol.’
The most important part of that message is the one that the more prurient among the older generation will miss, and those of Aarushi’s age will get instantly: it’s the LOL. Laugh out loud. This is just a bit of juvenile fun. And Aarushi wasn’t the only one indulging in it.
Now that they are young adults, Aarushi’s friends look at these messages and smile, they understand what was going on, and that none of it was sinister. Rajeshwari, a friend of Aarushi’s, blogged: ‘Didn’t we all have these streaks in us when we were fourteen? How abnormal is it for an urban, public school-educated fourteen-year-old of the twenty-first century to own a cellphone, use it to text a friend of the opposite gender and put up a few harmless pictures of a birthday party on a social networking website?’ And was it a crime to have a ‘boyfriend’? And isn’t the meaning of boyfriend at thirteen a fair order removed from what it is at thirty?
Mixed in with the so-called adult stuff on the social networks that Aarushi was part of was a lot of pure childishness. Like a chain mail that said the reader would be kissed by the love of their life if they forwarded the mail to ten other people, and cursed in love if they didn’t. This was, and largely remains, the online life of the teenager. And through all the boys and polls and chain mails, she remained focused on her studies. Her friend Vidushi said, ‘Of all of us at that age, Aarushi probably had the firmest sense of right and wrong.’
That, though, was not the way the police saw it. They took things literally, and in their eyes Aarushi’s ‘character’ painted itself. One message from Sankalp made reference to a ‘booze party’ in the future. This was then tied to an email Aarushi had sent to Rajesh which had no connection to alcohol, but contained an apology: ‘I wnt do it again.’ The mail ended with the daughter making up with her parents, telling them how much she loved them. And in fact, it had to do with her going out with some friends unaccompanied by an adult.
This is not what the investigators understood it to be. They would not bother with the cards and letters that were in the scrapbooks of the Talwars. They preferred looking at Facebook and Orkut.
The pictures Aarushi deleted on the night she died became a cause for suspicion. Why would she do that? The simple explanation that kids with digital cameras often do this was not enough. The police could have mined the data card to possibly recover the pictures, but the lab it was sent to wasn’t equipped to do this.
Vidushi had talked about a ‘sleepover’ at Aarushi’s place planned for the 19th. What was a sleepover? Did adults also participate? Why not? Again, the explanation that kids that age wanted to be left alone in each other’s company—and that there were no boys—wasn’t good enough. Every answer the Talwars gave was held against them, just as much as the answers they did not have.
The police, looking at Aarushi’s bedroom door during the investigation, wondered: What type of parents kept their child locked up? Aarushi’s casual remark to her friends about physically not being there for the outing the following day was now treated by the UP police as a premonition. What would make her say something like this on the day she would be murdered?
The police were alarmed by the language in the social media exchanges. For kids in their early teens, profanities such as slut or bitch are of no
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