Murder at School: The crime that shook the Capital also changed two families forever

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Surrounded by the small crowd, the boy, in jeans and a full-sleeved T-shirt, walks quietly into the courtroom, barely lifting his eyes to see through a slit in the cloth. His father tries to keep up. No words are exchanged.

Inside the court, where the media isn’t allowed, the 16-year-old finally uncovers his face, helped by the father. As he whispers “Papa”, the two briefly embrace. Over time the son has learned to compose himself, but the 42-year-old’s eyes well up. Soon, lawyers begin talking to the teenager, even as his father clutches onto his hands. The boy just nods.

A few minutes later, the proceedings begin and the 42-year-old moves towards where the judge is sitting, rising on his toes to catch the arguments being made by the CBI, which is investigating the high-profile case.

But it’s all in English. The father struggles to comprehend, looking from one side to the other, smiling faintly when he surmises that something funny has been said. The 42-year-old had initially hired a local Gurgaon lawyer for the case, but recently got a well-known Delhi one.

Meanwhile, the 16-year-old stands staring at the walls, once tightening the cloth around his face. After proceedings lasting 20 minutes, the lawyers tell the father the hearing in the case will begin on April 10.

On January 8, the same Gurgaon court, while rejecting the 16-year-old’s bail plea, had directed that he be henceforth referred to as “Bholu”, the killed 7-year-old be called “Prince”, and the school that was the site of the crime just “Vidyalaya”.

In a case that has played out in full media glare, the frenzy feeding on parents’ fears, in one of the few spaces still considered “safe”, it was the first such official acknowledgment that at the heart of it lay essentially two children. And, going by the CBI theory, also exams, the ghost that is any child’s nightmare.

As the juvenile is tried as an adult for the crime — in line with a new law — there are other things that bind him and the victim. A fact not denied by the two families themselves, despite the September 8, 2017, murder. Both belong to small towns or villages, who came to the NCR seeking a better future, and who picked the reputed English-medium school as the first step. Both now dig into certificates of the same school for clues to the lives their children led, to understand this end.  Both are also joined in loss — the family whose child died six months ago, and the other whose child hasn’t returned home in four months.

The juvenile

The 16-year-old’s greatest love was his Yamaha casio, on which he played western music and tunes from his school choir. A few days ago, after the teenager had been four months in the observation home in Faridabad, since his arrest on November 8, the mother took the casio to him there.

In the two-storey house in Sohna City where the family stays, with a living room and two bedrooms, the teenager didn’t have a separate room. He slept on a separate cot in his parents’ bedroom as he hated sleeping alone, the mother, 40, says. There are no posters on the walls indicating a teenager lived there. The second bedroom serves as a guest room, and has a study table that the teenager and his younger brother shared. His schoolbooks lie next to a computer on this table.

Every Tuesday and Friday, the visiting days at the observation home, the mother takes the juvenile his clothes to wear, and brings back dirty ones to wash. But not the underwear. “He had never washed clothes earlier. Now he has learnt to wash that.”

The parents got married in 2000 and had the 16-year-old a year later. When he was seven, the family shifted to this house from a village nearby. He joined the private school where the incident happened in Class 2, when he was the same age as the boy killed.

Bringing out a stack of report cards and certificates from their bedroom, the mother asserts to “his good character” — unlike what has been claimed. “His father was scolding me for not keeping them all at one place. But see, I have them all… Only the Class 8 report card is missing, I am sure I will find it too. He has all ‘A’s and ‘B’s and the remarks say he was ‘well-mannered’,” she says, almost desperately.

There is more — the certificates the 16-year-old won in ‘gift-wrapping’, ‘greeting-card making’ competitions, or for participation in school choir and sports competitions.

There are other things the 40-year-old hangs on to. The boy, the mother says, was their “connect to the world”. She points to a picture of the family at the mall on her phone. “This is how I looked four-months ago… Look at me now,” she says. In the image, her hair is streaked copper and she is wearing make-up. Today, the streaks have given way to grey strands, her eyes sunk inside dark circles.

“Bahut shaukeen bachcha tha (He was a child interested in everything). He urged me to colour my hair. He wanted the family to look good. A few months earlier, he had joined the gym, and told me, ‘Bahut aunties aati hain, aap bhi chalo (Many aunties come, you too join)’,” she says, constantly breaking down.

“Once, we were visiting a water park and he took me shopping for T-shirts. When I refused to wear jeans, he said I could wear my leggings. He also booked for me my first taxi.”

Swiping through more photos on the phone, she stops at images of a recent Jaipur family vacation. “He chose the hotel online and booked it… He would correct our English (the parents went to Hindi-medium schools). His father said ‘s-kool’, and he would say ‘Papa school hota hai (It’s school),” she says.

On the sixth birthday of his younger brother, he convinced her to get a ‘Pokemon’ cake. “He loved his brother,” she says.

“Hum toh ghoonghat ke peechche rehne waale the (I led a life behind the veil),” she adds. He changed it for her.

Why doesn’t the world see this side of the boy, asks the mother. “How can they say he was a drug addict? That he watched porn? That I am his stepmother? That we fought all the time?” she says, referring to reports in the media and some mentions in the CBI chargesheet. The reports “made a joke of our lives”. “If he was spoilt, why didn’t the school raise it with us? Why didn’t the neighbours?”

It has also been hinted that the parents neglected the teenager. Wiping his tears, the father, speaking in his chambers at the Gurgaon court, says the 16-year-old was their only child for 10 years. “I got him a casio when his teachers said he liked music, I took him for shooting competitions, for swimming… Look at his Class 10 character certificate… Nowhere does it say he was emotionally unstable. Why did the investigators miss this?”

He admits the 16-year-old’s grades fell in Class 9, but adds that they immediately took note of it. “We took him to a career counsellor in Sohna. I was concerned like any other parent. I worried he was spending too much time on music. After three sessions, my son said he wanted to become a lawyer. I was relieved.”

After his arrest, the CBI said the juvenile had admitted to killing the boy to get ongoing exams postponed, as he didn’t want to face a parent-teacher meeting. The father questions this. “There had been two PTMs in Class 11. We had attended one, but missed another because we went out on a family holiday.”

The mother says her children were her life. “From 5 am to 9 pm I was involved with them… cooking, taking them to their classes, looking at their homework… There is a void now. I haven’t slept in months.”

They have stopped being a family, she adds. “My husband doesn’t come home from court before midnight. I hardly cook. Chai-parantha kha lete hain (We just have tea and paranthas).”

In his small chambers, where he sits behind a table stacked with papers, photocopies and pictures, and pores over the ‘evidence’, the 42-year-old asks how the boy can be tried as an adult. After allegedly confessing to the CBI, the juvenile has retracted his statement. His bail has been denied three times.

Talking about the day of the arrest, the father says, “I received a call at 11.30 am and was asked to come to the CBI headquarters with my son. They kept him for over eight hours… At 11 pm, I was called inside and told, ‘Murder aapke bete ne kiya hai (Your son has committed the murder)’. I went cold. Then I saw my son, his face was red, eyes swollen. He said, ‘Papa galti ho gayi (I made a mistake)’. I immediately knew he had been coerced.”

They have had little chance to interact with the teenager since, the parents add. “I met him for the first time after the arrest on November 13, at the juvenile home. He hadn’t showered in five days, he said. He told me the CBI had threatened to kill my wife and other son and so he confessed. He wailed… That sight broke me,” says the father.
Over a fortnight after the arrest, the family decided to hire as their lawyer Tanveer Ahmed Mir, who had successfully defended Rajesh and Nupur Talwar in the murder case of their daughter Aarushi. The father says he couldn’t trust his own skills, having mostly practised law in the village. “When my lawyer earlier spoke in court, the CBI lawyers would laugh at us. Now, with a big lawyer defending, our case has more heft.” Adds the 42-year-old, “The media has been saying we have property worth  Rs 5,000 crore, that we fixed the Gurgaon police. We are from a farming community and have land, but we are not as wealthy.”

The parents fear time is running out. “Two minutes at the court, two minutes at the juvenile home…,” that is all they are allowed with the 16-year-old, the father says. “Why is everyone forgetting he is a child too? Why treat him like a hardened criminal?”

They also fear for their younger son. The father points to a few lines scrawled by the seven-year-old in his notebook: ‘Why my mumma is crying… where is my brother… please everyone help for my brother… my brother is very good.’

Even in his grief, the father notes his son’s writing. “Both my sons are very good in English. Even CBI officials say, ‘Your son speaks such good English, even we can’t comprehend at times’,” he says.

The mother notes that their younger one is as old as the child who was killed. He didn’t go to the same school. Asked why, she hints for the first time at some discomfort with the school, over the way they had handled an earlier incident involving the 16-year-old. The CBI chargesheet quotes a student as saying that one of the juvenile’s classmates had said the juvenile had purchased “poison” and put it in his bottle to avoid exams in February 2016.

The mother only says he fainted after having water from the bottle, and adds, “I understand the pain (of the mother whose boy was killed). But my son didn’t kill him… The court has aptly named him ‘Bholu’. He will be proved ‘bhola (innocent)’.”

She stops mid-sentence to attend the doorbell. The younger one has returned from school. Running into the living room, the 7-year-old yells ‘Hola!’. For the first time, the mother breaks into a smile. “He is learning Spanish at school… I have been using Google Translate to teach him,” she says. Falling silent, she adds, “He has been told his brother is at a hostel.”

The victim

The postmortem of the seven-year-old son said he died within 2 minutes of being cut across the throat, from “excessive bleeding”. Those “2 minutes” haunt her, says his mother. “My son would have writhed in pain, cried out for help. He would have thought, ‘Kahin se mummy, papa ya didi aa jayein (If only my mother, father or sister would come)’. Those 2 minutes have kept me awake for six months.”

Sitting at their home in Bhondsi, her eyes on a glass of water on the table, the 32-year-old adds, “A few days before the incident, he had got a small cut on his leg. He kept showing it to us. How could he have borne the pain of having his throat slit?”

Her hands clenched, she continues, “We sent our children to the international school near Gurgaon as it had a good academic record. The fees was hefty — Rs 23,000 per quarter — but we wanted to give our children the best.”

The family hails from Madhubani in Bihar. The father, 36, who has a diploma in fashion designing, moved to Bhondsi in 2001 in search of a job. Marriage followed three years later and the seven-year-old was born in 2010, three years after his elder sister.

The family moved into the Bhondsi house four years ago. A kuchcha road leads to the two-storey structure, nestled between wheat fields. There is no number to mark the address, while the nearby shops are plastered with advertisements of ‘Learn English Speaking’ and coaching classes. But all families here, like that of the seven-year-old, send their children to plush, English-medium schools in neighbouring Gurgaon.

Inside the house, the walls, racks, rooms are all filled with memories of the seven-year-old. The mother shows a purse he made in a ‘Purse Making Competition for Mom’ at school; a box he made out of chart paper; the birthday and anniversary cards he made. In one box, he kept his prized wallet. “He liked to play ‘papa’ and insisted on having a wallet. Then he wanted ‘cards’ and money. So I gave him my grocery store cards and a Rs 10 note. Everyday after school he would come and check his wallet,” she says, sobbing.

She no longer knows what to do with her time, she adds. “I would cook for them, look at their homework, attend their school meetings, pick them up on my Scooty after school… He had all ‘A’s in his report card. He wanted to excel in whatever he did,” she says, pulling down his report cards from a shelf, which say the seven-year-old was a “diligent worker”. There is a thick pile of certificates too — for ‘Presentation on Native Food’, for which she made him litti-chokha; for ‘Role Play of National Leaders’, for which he went dressed as Bhagat Singh; and for the time he ‘conducted’ the Teacher’s Day programme.

“He used to have stage fear. But recently, he had overcome it,” says the mother.

His success at the school meant a lot for the parents, especially his English skills. “He once asked me, ‘Mummy aap mere ma’am se English mein baat kar loge (Can you talk to my teacher in English)?’,” she recalls, proudly.

For the seven-year-old’s father, his birth meant “the family was complete”. His day began with getting the son ready and dropping the children to school. “And in the evening, when I returned, he would come running to the gate… This Holi, I kept looking at his pictures from last year. He loved the festival.”

The day of the murder was like any other, he adds. He went to wake up his son around 7 am, and he initially resisted. “Then I told him it is his friend’s birthday and he jumped out of bed. He told his mother to buy his friend a Beyblade toy,” says the father.

“He also said the sandwich I had made him wasn’t nice, and that they would eat nicer things at the party,” adds the mother.

She recalls receiving a call from the school within an hour of her husband and children leaving, and rushing to hospital. She saw her husband “holding my son’s feet and crying”. “His ear and throat were bandaged. I thought he had got hurt while playing.”

The father stopped her from entering the hospital room and told her to go home. “When I returned, the entire colony was at our house. I realised we had lost our son,” she says.

A few days ago, the mother, a B.Com graduate, resumed taking tuitions. Till her son’s murder, she taught about 12 neighbourhood children. “I have started with only one child. He was my son’s close friend… Even today when he buys chocolates, he keeps my son’s share aside. I see my son in him… His mother insisted I return to the job to keep busy.”

The father spends all his free hours after work, as a Quality Manager at an export firm in Gurgaon, talking to investigators, his lawyer the media, and attending to visitors. “Iss haadse ne sabhi parents ko andar se jhijhor diya hai (The incident has shaken parents). The other day a couple from Kasganj in UP visited us. They went to the police and school to get our address,” he says.

He has all the relevant documents, including the voluminous CBI chargesheet, on his phone should these be needed. Recalling the first few days after the murder, he says, “We were a simple family… Everyone expected us to take quick decisions. We were so confused. We could barely grieve.”

They can understand the grief of the juvenile’s family too, the parents add, saying they have “nothing against the kid or them”. “But the CBI has shown us the CCTV footage. He is seen putting his arm around my son. Later the two go into the washroom, and only the teenager comes out… Maybe he faced a lot of pressure for the exams and my son became a victim,” says the mother. “My son was very sincere. Agar bhaiya ne bulaya hoga toh woh chala gaya hoga (If a senior student had called out to him, he would have gone).”

The parents also blame the school, which is not mentioned in the CBI’s first chargesheet, though the Haryana Police had initiated some action against the authorities. “Why didn’t the school act against the juvenile earlier? We have been told he often created mischief. We need to set a precedent so that no other child goes through this,” the father says. “If I had lost my son to an illness or accident, we would have got closure. But not like this.”

CBI spokesperson Abhishek Dayal says, “The probe is still underway and we will soon file a supplementary chargesheet.”

After the murder, the seven-year-old’s parents pulled their elder daughter out of the Bhondsi school. She now attends one in the neighbourhood. “We couldn’t have kept her there. In the new school too, several students asked her if her brother had been murdered. She was quite disturbed,” says the mother.

“Earlier, on way back from work, my husband would often get chocolates for the children. But since our son’s death, he stopped. I have been asking him to get something for our daughter at least, but he says that makes him miss our son more,” adds the 32-year-old.

The daughter is down with fever today, and back from school, has been lying listlessly in her grandmother’s lap, staring at her mother as she talks about her brother. She doesn’t say anything. The mother says the 10-year-old understands everything. “She tries not to bring up the subject. She knows it distresses me.”