Beware the middle class murderer: Why we suspect the Talwars

“Murder most foul, as in the best it is, But this most foul, strange, and unnatural,” proclaims the ghost in Hamlet of his death at the hands of his brother and wife. We now live in the age of foul murders, each day brings fresh news of strange and unnatural acts. Sometimes it’s the details that shock: bodies chopped into bits, stuffed into suitcases or cooked in a tandoor. In others, it’s the cast of characters who grip the imagination. The sexy starlet who conspires with her fiance to dispose of the body of her lover. The straying housewife who hires a contract killer. The college kids who stab some techie for jumping the queue at a dhaba. Say hello to the “new criminal”: nice, middle class type who may be in the next cubicle, right next door, or – worse – in your own home. These aren’t reliable repeat offenders, petty criminals who graduate to greater offenses, but precocious first-timers who resemble ticking time-bombs, filled with unconscious murderous rage that can be triggered without warning, or often sufficient cause. To the average newspaper reader, the unfolding saga of the Aarushi case is just one more instance of this new “trend.” The Talwars maybe guilty or not – the evidence uncovered by Firstpost suggests not – but more striking is the ease with which we’ve accepted the very possibility of such a crime: respectable, well-educated, professional parents club their only child to death in anger over an alleged liaison with a male servant – and her “lover” too boot. [caption id=“attachment_186607” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The Talwars maybe guilty or not but more striking is the ease with which we’ve accepted the very possibility of such a crime. CNN-IBN”] [/caption] It sounds crazy, even incredible and yet we don’t flinch. We now believe – rightly or otherwise – that the middle class home is no longer the safe haven of stringent morality and social repression, but a dark, unseen underworld where anything is possible. That globalisation has unleashed our voracious, unruly id, an insatiable, inner monster willing to kill to satisfy an immediate need. Or, at least, that’s what the media tells us, over and again, implicitly or otherwise. There’s no shortage of rapes, assault, and murders in India, but it’s the middle class murderer who grabs the lion share of the headlines. Maria Susairaj, Sumit Handa , Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, each comfimation of a dissolute, new world where respectable, achche khathe pithe log gone bad. A recent Open magazine story, titled “ The New Criminal ,” neatly summarises this hypothesis:

A fast changing society, says sociologist Patricia Uberoi, experiences what she terms “normlessness”, where old ways of life no longer operate. It renders the middle-class particularly vulnerable… When a new pathology takes hold of urban society, such as the current craze for celebrations, be it over a new flat, car, computer or even mobile phone, there could arise corrosive feelings such as status anxiety. “There is a dark side to it, an underbelly that is not easy to cope with: failure, frustration, dejection and rejection,” says Uberoi. Left unaddressed, these can metastasise into violent urges in some cases… It starts with a loss of fear of the law, and draws upon a kind of discontent that is typical of a society in transition, where old social norms are abandoned even though people are not yet ready for the new. Aggravated by work and relationship pressures, all this results in a case of raw nerves and gnawing insecurities. If something snaps, it could suddenly spiral into a fit of murderous rage.

We’re all potential murderers now because we want that elusive iPad. It’s just a matter of receiving the right cue. The materialism theory of murder sounds compelling but is so conveniently elastic that it can explain almost any crime, from the shopkeeper who kills a customer to the yoga teacher who chops his Israeli ex-girlfriend into bits. While Open steers clear of the Aarushi case – perhaps because they’ve loudly supported the Talwar cause – such leaps of logic lend themselves to their indictment. If we the middle class are now capable of killing anybody for any cause, why not the Talwars? The latest India Today cover features a blood-splattered photograph of Aarushi, accompanied by the headline: The New Art of Domestic Murder: Hatya Shastra . The story inside amps up the sensationalism, taking the Open magazine thesis to the next level of ludicrous:

Across urban India, bedrooms have become dangerous arenas, of war, not love. The enemy is within, waiting to strike… An epidemic of domestic murders has broken out over the past five years, peaking in 2011. Police files show intimate partner violence, driven by unrequited obsessions, hidden desires, illicit relations, jealousy, or a sense of being wronged. In the midst of a busy news year, while headlines got bigger over the 2G scam, Anna Hazare’s protest or the rupee crisis, quietly, in the privacy of the home, the “ordinary” Indian was busy honing the extraordinary art of murder. Not criminals, not psychopaths, not dowry assassins or honour killers. Just friendly next-door neighbours who, until the day they killed, looked perfectly normal.

Continues on the next page For starters, where the epidemic? It may well be true that the number of middle class offenders has indeed ticked up, but neither story has numbers to confirm this is so. The India Today story points to a climbing rate of “crimes of passion and provocation” – up from 7 percent in 2007-08 to 35 percent – where 93 percent are first-time killers, which includes everyone from “MBAs to auto drivers.” The Open article is based on one study conducted on 122 “severely violent” offenders housed in Tihar. Both rely instead on a series of gruesome examples which may or may not be representative – at least of the urban middle class. More alarming, however, is the constant underlining of the “ordinariness” of the perpetrators. The very appearance of normalcy becomes ominous. Here’s how the India Today story damns the Talwars, for instance:

Her parents projected the image of a happy family. “We were such a nice family,” Nupur Talwar said in a television interview eight days after her daughter’s death. “I always used to think I must have done something good in my last life to get such a nice family.” She portrayed her husband as a doting husband (“We were about to celebrate her birthday. Rajesh told Aarushi to call as many friends, even if it were to become expensive.”), maintained that she “trusted” the murdered domestic help, Hemraj, 45, and insisted that at the end of a heavy work day, it was quite possible to sleep through a murder at home with noisy ACs and fans."

The article abruptly switches in the very next paragraph to describing Pune’s “own version of such a crime” where a father strangled his four children and committed suicide. The Talwars are damned by juxtaposition. The details of their everyday, middle class life – birthday parties, sleeping with the AC on, trusted servants – acquire a peculiar, unwarranted dubiousness. She says they were happy. Too happy, perhaps. It surely suggests that there must have been something terribly awry. If friends and neighbours confirm that they looked happy, that too becomes grist for suspicion. Never mind that rumours of domestic strife would be fodder to raise the very same doubts. In the matter of happiness, the Talwars are damned if they were, and damned if they were not. Such then is tautological reasoning of the middle class murderer paradigm. All “normal,” “regular,” “ordinary” people now fit the profile. What’s more alarming is our eagerness to buy into this bizarro view of our world. We have swung from idealizing middle class family – denying the reality of incest, domestic violence, infidelity – to viewing it as a depraved Frankenstein. In believing the worst about the Talwars, we confirm our darkest fears about ourselves – and those around us. A thought that ought to give us pause before we join the gathering media lynchmob. Something is indeed rotten in the state of Denmark. But paranoia offers no cure for this rot.