‘Talvar’, the 14-year-old girl killed in her bed in the dead of night, is called Shruti Tandon. But we know that it is the thinly-disguised story of Arushi Talwar, whose murder still remains the foulest of them all: her parents Rajesh and Nupur, both doctors with a flourishing practice, were convicted and sent to jail.
The double murder of Arushi and the Talwars’ live-in male servant Hemraj shook us all. Because it involved people like us: respectably middle-class, solidly professional, living with other middle-class professionals. Children from that sort of background go to good schools and graduate from good colleges, not found with their throat slit, opening up a Pandora’s box of swirling salacious rumours about sexual proclivities( theirs’ as well as their parents’) . Widespread outrage and shock rippled outward, and it still laps around us, because, really, how can any parent kill their child?