What a Britisher named French thinks of India

Naipaul's biographer Patrick French is a traveller who began to ask uncomfortable questions like 'Why is India the way it is today?' The result of his curiosity is a book that tries hard to offer some answersu00a0

At its very best, Patrick French's India A Portrait: An Intimate Biography of 1.2 Billion People, offers insights into Indian polity and the social fabric that escape s our notice given our proximity and perhaps, complicity, to things happening around us.

The book sets out to understand why India is the way it is, and given that we are talking about a highly complexu00a0 nation riven by layers of difference and inequality that go well beyond gender and class, it won't do to expect simple answers. In fact, it is wholly to the credit of the author that the book makes for a highly enjoyable and uncomplicated read, given its complex premise.

Rajesh and Nupur Talwar during a peaceful procession demanding
justice in their daughter's murder case, at Jantar Mantar,
New Delhi on January 6, 2011. On February 8 the CBI special
judicial magistrate pronounced Rajesh and Nupur Talwar accused
in the Aarushi-Hemraj murder case. The Talwars have been charged
with murder, criminal conspiracy and destruction of evidence.
The next date for hearing has been fixed as February 28.
Pic/Imtiyaz Khan

At its very worst, the book offers anecdotes from the past and tells us of incidents that most of us don't know. For instance, Indira Gandhi's husband Feroz Gandhi is fleshed outu00a0-- almost, at any rateu00a0-- as a life and blood character, who, contrary to popular myth, didn't become Mr Indira so that Mahatma Gandhi's name could remain married to the Congress dynasty. Indira, we are told, married him for far less political and more personal reasons.
The book is divided into three sectionsu00a0-- Rashtra, Laxmi and Samaju00a0-- and traces the growth of India from Partition and its concomitant chaos to its emergence as the world's largest democracy.

What's refreshing about the book is that it acknowledges loose ends without attempting to tie them. Rigged elections and criminal candidates go hand-in-hand with massive organisation by the election commission; the caste system that thrives in master-servant relationships in urban households co-exists seamlessly with the sympathy generated by incidents like the Khairlanji killings; no one remembers that our sterling constitution was written by an 'untouchable' who studied in England more than 60 years ago; economic aspiration and parochial or nationalistic pride is accompanied by irritation at the slowness of corrupt officials.

Everything co-exists and the book makes no apology for, or even celebrates the country. It only holds up a mirror to the various edges, faultlines and landmines of India, and traces the path of the author through his many journeys and conversations.

Pick it up: If you want to hear Aarushi Talwar's parents' side of the story: Chapter 10 is devoted to them.
Don't read it: If you are looking for economics, graphs and pie charts.

A Portrait: An Intimate Biography of 1.2 Billion People by Patrick French is published by Penguin. Available at all leading bookstores for Rs 699.

Extract: Chapter 10, 4Ever. The Aarushi Talwar case

For Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, a middle-class couple who employed a cook and a maid, the lack of knowledge about the people in their home was to destroy their livesu00a0-- aided and exacerbated by the administrative dystopia of the state of Uttar Pradesh.

Their daughter, Aarushi Talwar, was murdered in her bedroom on the night of 15 May 2008. She was a few days short of her fourteenth birthday, a star student at Delhi Public School in Noida, a talented dancer and a keen reader. She had suffered stab wounds to her head and neck. The story of what happened to Aarushi, as reported by a voracious media over the two days following her death, was presented as a salutary tale for every middle-class Indian parent.

It was presumed her killer was Hemraj Banjade, a Nepali household servant who had drunk most of a bottle of whisky, broken into Aarushi's bedroom, assaulted and murdered her. He was missing, and a cash reward of Rs 20,000 was offered for news leading to his capture.

The killing was said to have been done with a khukri, a curved Gurkha knife. In the words of one report, the case was 'an eye-opener to the vulnerability of Indian homes and the murderous tendencies of the domestic servants'. It listed examples of respectable families who had been attacked by their own staff: a child slain by a driver, an old woman killed by a greedy maid.

The moral, according to the author of this article, was that police verification of a new servant's identity was essential and that 'domestic servants are exposed to temptation when the dwellers talk of money or jewellery or other financial secrets in their presence.

The fact that Hemraj came from Nepal was an additional lesson, since north India had many Nepalese household workers, and there was a porous border between the two countries. The Talwars lived in a second-floor apartment in a housing colony populated largely by naval and air force families in the 'green city' of Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi.

Aarushi's parents were both successful dentists in their mid-forties, and had met and fallen in love at medical school. Her mother Nupur was an orthodontist, and her father Rajesh was a dental surgeon. Aarushi's maternal grandparents lived nearby....

The Talwars were, before their tragedy, the successful family next door. Instead of one of the parents being a popular dentist, they both were. Instead of having a child who did all right at school, they had a pretty daughter who topped 90 per cent in her exams.

Their home, Noida (New Okhla Industrial Development Authority), was an aspirational city that had been planned sector by sector for a modern middle-class lifestyle.

u00a0Noida had a huge mall called The Great India Place, several new metro stations connecting to Delhi, and restaurants like Domino's and Papa John's. It was full of children, many of them slipping in and out of tuition centres after school and going gaming at Future Zone, or playing pool or table tennis at the many kids' clubs. Aarushi's body was found by her parents on a Friday morning. 'Rajesh started shouting and screaming,' her mother Nupur said later.

'The maid came and called some neighbours, and the police came. The police were fine then. They were so certain about what had happened that the senior officer said, "It's an open-and-shut case. The servant has done this. Send a team to the housing colony where the Nepalis live, send a team to the railway station and send a team to Nepal to his village, to see if he's gone there." I was senseless, I couldn't cry or scream. I was inanimate, like a stone. People were in and out of the place: police, neighbours, relatives, onlookers, the media. There must have been a hundred people in our home that morning.'

The next afternoon, a retired police officer who lived nearby came to pay his condolences. In India, after a death, a house will fill with friends, neighbours, acquaintances and family, all come to pay their respects. Diyas ufffd burning wicks floating in bowls of oilu00a0-- will be set in front of garlanded pictures of the deceased. In this case, the officer appears to have been just plain curious, or ghoulish, since the Talwars did not know him and they were not at the apartment when he visited.

He found his training taking over while he was there: he reconstructed the sequence of the crime, and noticed bloody marks in unexpected places. It seemed to him something was wrong. 'I checked Hemraj's room and the bathroom and then noticed the bloodstains on the stairs leading to the terrace,' he said later. 'When I reached the door, I saw that it was locked and then I broke open the door (with the assistance of the police) and found Hemraj's body lying in a pool of blood on the floor. He had a slit mark on his throat and many injury marks on his body. His body was severely decomposed.'

Hemraj Banjade, the servant, had been lying dead on the roof terrace in the scorching summer sun for almost two days, and the police had failed to notice. Once again, reporters and film crews from Delhi were swarming around the property: a faithless servant had become a murder victim, and a tragedy had become a mystery. The country grew riveted by the case.

It was a growing media obsession, and everyone became an expert, with their own explanation of the double homicide. Endless theories were constructed as to what might have happened. Since there was no sign of forced entry, the presumption was that Hemraj had known his killer or killers. There seemed two likely explanations. The first was that Hemraj had been trying to protect Aarushi, and been killed for his pains. The second was that Aarushi had seen somebody attacking Hemraj, and been killed as a witness.

The pressure on the Noida police to solve the case was intense. They had to find the murderer, and fast. Their failure to investigate or even to secure the crime scene the previous day was a shocking demonstration of incompetence. It became known the police had allowed the media and even passers-by to enter the Talwars' apartment after Aarushi's body was found...

Next, a police officer went on the record: 'The way in which the throat of Aarushi was cut points out that it is the work of some professional who could be a doctor or a butcher.' The family were unaware of this statement, and its implication.

'I had banned TV from our house by this time,' Nupur said bitterly two years later. 'Whenever we turned it on, there was always news about the murder. So I hid the remote. Then the mother of Aarushi's close friend Fiza, who had a contact at NDTV, warned me the police were saying they were suspicious we were involved in the killing, and were gunning for us. I took no notice, and I was quite angry and upset with Fiza's mother.

The police had told us not to talk to the media, so we didn't. Then the same police officer who had said this to us, the SSP (Senior Superintendent of Police), gave a press conference saying they were looking at the family.'