What Aarushi Talwar book reveals about us

Aarushi Talwar would be 21 this year. That fact alone is enough to send a chill down your spine. Fourteen is a transformative age, but it is most likely she would have continued as she was: bright-eyed, a top student, an avid reader and an even more avid dancer. She would have definitely graduated from Orkut to Instagram, from Facebook to, perhaps, Snapchat, from having two boys vying for her attention to having many young men interested in her, and probably be on her way to a post graduate degree in some fascinating subject or just about to enter the workforce in some job she had always dreamed of.

As most of urban India knows by now, that was not to be.

As most of urban India knows by now, she died at 14 and her parents are now convicted of having murdered her.

That is what makes the tragedy of Aarushi's murder (and that of her family servant Hemraj) so terrible.

It is a tragedy that is every middle class family's worst nightmare and taps into our deepest, darkest anxieties and obsessions.

Families where both parents work.

Families where servants live in and are yet invisible.

Families which take middle class privileges for granted, having little or nothing to do with the nether world of police or the judicial system.

Families where most household chores are outsourced, whether it is cooking, cleaning or driving the car.

Families which are just like us.

Patrick French's India: A Portrait: An Intimate Biography of 1.2 Billion People was the first book, which swooped in on the core of why the Aarushi murders held a morbid fascination for most urban Indians. It was everything the middle class thinks happens to other people, everything that they believe they can fix with some "'connection" in high places, and everything that they are sure can be resolved with the right amount of money being directed in the right people.

If the Jessica Lall murder was all about justice for the murdered girl, with an identifiable villain, which ensured that urban India started caring about the deeply flawed criminal justice system which sometimes allows those with money to walk free, the Aarushi murder case was terrifying because the killer was one - or rather two - amongst us. In the Jessica Lall case, Manu Sharma was the object of hate, a typical entitled child of a powerful father who thought he could manipulate the system and failed; it was the battle of a strong middle class woman, Jessica's sister, supported by a media that was still untainted by tapes and untrammelled by TRPs. The enemy was the rich, connected politician. In the Aarushi case, the would-be victims were the suspected killers, those who should have hated were the ones who were hated. There was no powerful, provincial politician to hate. The enemy was us.

Avirook Sen's new book Aarushi tries hard to dispel that notion, pointing out wide gaps in the CBI's case work and even wider gaps in judge Shyam Lal's verdict. We still don't know who committed the crimes or even why, and probably never will. But what we do know is that the middle class lost its innocence forever. About its children and their private lives; about their servants and their private lives; and about the all devouring police-judicial system that poor people struggle with every day, as they try to eke out their living as vendors, auto drivers, shopkeepers, domestics. We, who thought money could buy us insulation, were left exposed, wounded and winded. We, who thought we were insulated, are still exposed.

Sen's book takes us deep into territory the middle class would rather ignore:

1. The invisible servants: The phones that are discarded by the memsahibs, sahibs, babyjis and babajis, given to servants who pass them on to friends and friends of friends; the old T-shirts that are outgrown, most often with their incongruous labels intact; and the lack of background checks that are endemic as the search of servants becomes ever more problematic. Hemraj, Krishna and Rajkumar were textbook cases of servants who were trusted too much by their masters.

2. The police: The CBI is an abstract concept to most Indians, used to fix the really corrupt, and considered the ultimate authority in fairness and justice, whether it is investigating the Vyapam scam or probing into Coalgate. Sen's less than flattering account of how the agency handled the double murder is chilling, with its attendant acronyms of HLI (High Loot Index) and RHI (Robin Hood Index); and investigating officers who could run circles around their bosses.

3. The way we parent: Keeping a watch on their virtual selves, checking on their friends, looking into what they read and what they watch, while also maintaining busy professional and social lives. This is the stuff parents have to deal with every day. What happens when despite your best intentions, circumstances fail you? How do you live with the guilt? How do you live? As Sen says in the book: "She really was taken care of." And yet.

4. The way we consume the media: Our deadly fascination with the lives of others can sometimes have feral consequences. Today it is Nupur and Rajesh Talwar who are in the dock, what if tomorrow it is us? Do we reject the wall to wall coverage? Do we ignore it? Do we live with it?

5. The hunger for English: Judge Shyam Lal's judgment is a masterpiece of overwriting and malapropism. Sen traces much of his aversion to the Talwars to his fascination for as well as dislike for "English-speaking types". Could it be that it was one of the reasons he lacked empathy for their situation?

Like much else in the Aarushi case, we will never know.