The Aarushi-Hemraj murders took place at the very beginning of my career. The case was widely & wildly reported at the time and it really unsettled me at the time. One read about the progress of the case in newspapers etc, but it was just all too confusing. Especially because all the information was so scattered. The recent film Talwar was getting rave reviews and so was the book by Avirook Sen. I wanted to know this side of the story.
The written word means more to me. A book stays with you longer and allows you to assimilate information slowly. That’s why, I wanted to read the book before I watched the film.
The book is an easy read, where Sen puts together all the information he has collected over the years from documents, reports and from interviews he conducted while he covered the case for a leading publication. The picture his words paint, is scary. It makes you realise that the most educated of us are legally unaware. And that our concept of justice is naive.
You realise that justice is not the straightforward concept we imagine it to be. The road to justice through the Indian law & order and judiciary is a meandering one that is laden with obstacles created by ‘procedure’.
The book won’t answer the question ‘who killed Aarushi?’ But it does tell you how, slowly and steadily, the Talwars were sacrificed at the altar of ‘public image’ by the CBI.
If the reader’s blood boils upon reading the last few pages where Sen interviews the witnesses who sealed the Talwars’ fate, and where Sen reproduces the servants’ (Krishna, Vijay Mandal & Rajkumar) narco test reports, I can’t imagine what it must do to the Talwars and those who are related to them, know them and care for them.
Does it matter who killed Aarushi? What matters is that a young life was lost. A vibrant life with a bright future was snuffed out.
And that’s why, this will be one of the most emotionally disturbing books I’ve read…
Read alert: Armed with a brand new Kindle, I have started reading a lot more in the hope that it will inspire me to write more. Under the title, Read Alert, i’ll post thoughts about the books I manage to read on or off the kindle.