Middle class and the Sheena, Maria, Aarushi syndrome

Like Sheena Bora’s murder, there was something about the Aarushi and Neeraj Grover cases that gripped public attention. Avirook Sen’s book on the Aarushi murder case and Meena Baghel’s on the Grover incident thread out the nerve and sinew of those investigations.
At the Times LitFest session titled ‘Murder she wrote: Aarushi, Maria Susairaj and Writing on death in the city’, Sen and Baghel told a riveted audience why they thought these cases had blown so big.
Grover was a young TV executive having an affair with aspiring young actress Maria Susairaj, whose naval lieutenant boyfriend hacked him to pieces.
Though heinous crime isn’t uncommon, Baghel said this one starred three goodlooking people in a salacious drama. “Sexy woman makes good copy,” she summarised. Sen jumped in to say that Nupur Talwar is often asked her daughter’s age, because the kind of sexualised behaviour attributed to Aarushi in many reports makes her seem like a woman in her 20s.
But these cases resonate across families. The Maria case featured young people who came from small towns to make their mark on Mumbai but got marked by it more, specifi cally by an Ekta Kapoorcentric business. Baghel said, “The parents of all three in this case had no idea what their children had become.”
The authors spent time inveighing against ‘off-therecord’ feeds in criminal cases. Baghel complimented Sen for detailing how the police plant information to run a media trial, which is ultimately intended to infl uence judges. Sen said, “Ask the question, if it’s so important, shouldn’t the source put his name to it?”
As an example of how some of this planted information defi es logic, Baghel pointed to stories about Sheena Bora’s pregnancy. Scattered skeletal remains found three years after the murder can hardly provide suffi cient forensic evidence of pregnancy, Baghel said. So this is just salacious speculation based on questionable sources.
Sen called out the evidence that convicted the Talwars, saying 96% of it amounts to reasonable doubt, the remaining 4% is unreasonable suspicion.
The session offered potential writers ideas for their books. Baghel said because much of court reporting is of a basic standard at best, a lot of promising narratives are going unexplored. Readers would like a book based on court proceedings in terror cases.