“Nupur Talwar cried; in fact, she cried copiously! Her mistake - she did it off camera; my mistake - I didn’t keep the cameras rolling to record what I felt was a private moment of heartbreak,” says Sonia Singh, NDTV’s Editorial Director in a weekly column, The Newsroom.
Nupur Talwar, currently in the Uttar Pradesh jail, was convicted of the murder of her daughter Aarushi, appeared on an interview on NDTV after her husband Rajesh Talwar was arrested by the Noida police.
Hitting back heavily at long drawn speculation that Nupur Talwar’s lack of visible grief was somehow unnatural, and the assumption that, that itself was enough evidence against her, Singh recalls,
What came through to me while I was interviewing her was unimaginable grief and trauma. It was one of the most difficult interviews I have ever done because of the pain I felt my subject was in. The interview ended, she got up, went to a corner of the studio, and broke down. She cried and cried. My director, the camera crews were on standby. We could have recorded her breakdown. We didn’t. It seemed intrusive and unnecessary.
Singh recently interviewed the crew of the film Talvar: Meghna Gulzar, the director, Vishaal Bhardwaj, the script writer, Irrfan Khan who plays the investigator and Konkana Sen who plays Nupur Talwar.
The conversation, Singh says, seems to have come full circle when Vishaal Bhardwaj said something that was reminiscent of what Nupur Talwar told Singh in the interview that took place seven years ago.
It’s bigger than a Shakespearean tragedy but there’s also another point. Look at the lifestyle difference between Bombay and Delhi, and a person in Etawah or a small town. During the interrogation, when the mother says that she was supposed to go for a sleepover to a friend’s place - so that becomes an issue with the police...that what do you mean by the sleepover, you say the friends, they stay in a house, which is very common in our metros now. So, they ask what do they do without parents when they sleep... so these kinds of things when they come up actually tells you the class divide or the divide of life, the kind of lifestyles we have in one country.
– Vishal Bhardwaj to NDTV
Bhardwaj’s point, Singh says, was echoed by Nupur Talwar seven years ago when she talked about how much she regretted moving to their Noida flat. But it was all the couple could afford at that time. This meant when the murders happened, it became a UP police issue and cops asked them salacious questions about Aarushi, her friends, her SMSes.
Konkana Sen Sharma, who plays Nupur Talwar in Meghna Gulzar’s film, said (about Nupur),
She is not how women are depicted. This is not how we see women in the media. Whether it is films or you know television stories and things like that. Firstly, we rarely really see an older woman, and such complex emotions portrayed in a realistic way, you know, so she’s not conforming to various conventions, which is then difficult for people to accept.
Singh wonders if Nupur Talwar was judged by all, even in the final court verdict, just because she didn’t conform to a Bollywood image of a grieving mother.
This, Singh writes, prompted her to put the record straight.
Yes, Nupur did cry. Now, can we change our verdict of her?
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)