The Fall

An old TV spot for Tehelka shows a politician addressing a crowd in a village square in gobbledygook interspersed with random words such as "education" and "unemployment". As the speech goes on, the square gets infested by a murder of cawing crows, who sit on trees, electricity wires, and hand-pumps, until one of them perches on the microphone, forcing the politician to stop talking. The appearance of the tagline "Jhooth Bole Kauwa Kaate (utter a lie and the crow shall peck you)-an old Indian proverb" is followed by the grainy bearded face of Tarun Tejpal, printed on the top band of Tehelka, which was then a weekly tabloid. The implication is simple. The three Ts are synonyms-T for Tejpal, T for Tehelka, T for truth.

Tejpal's face once again monopolises front pages and prime-time news bulletin-not as a champion of truth but as a violator of the ideals he stood for. In a career which in retrospect was a performance that matched ideas with idealism, activism with attitude, romance with rebellion, flair with finesse, Tejpal starred as wordsmith, iconoclast, impresario, inquisitor, debunker, entrepreneur, aesthete, lie-buster, controversialist, and conscience keeper. His appearance as an alleged sexual offender marks the lowest point in the tale of a man who has excelled in creating his own mythology.

It all began in a scene befitting his profile. In a carnival of ideas on the sunny beachfront of Goa, showcasing global icons such as Robert De Niro and Garry Kasparov, the dark story of sexual assault allegedly played out on two occasions on November 7 and 8. Two years ago, in his opening remarks at the same festival, Tejpal had told the audience to eat, drink, be merry, and "sleep with whoever you want". Tejpal has been accused by a junior colleague-who had been assigned the enviable task of chaperoning De Niro-of forcing himself on her in an elevator despite her protest. It's almost surreal that one of the topics on Day 1 of the festival, on surviving rape, was 'The beast in our midst'.

In an email sent directly to the journalist on November 19, a day after she had reported the incident to Tehelka's managing editor Shoma Chaudhury, who has since resigned, Tejpal said, "The context that ill-fated evening, of our conversation, as you will recall, was heavily loaded. We were playfully and flirtatiously talking about desire... It was in this frivolous, laughing mood that the encounter took place. I had no idea that you were upset, or felt I had been even remotely non-consensual."

The next day, November 20, the 27-year-old woman, in her only direct correspondence with Tejpal since the charges became public, sent a stinging reply to his unofficial confession, in which she rebutted his version of the events point by point. She told Tejpal that the conversation on the night of November 7 was not "heavily loaded" or "flirtatious"-"you were talking about 'sex' or 'desire' because that is what you usually choose to speak to me about, unfortunately, never my work". She went on to write: "This is what non-consent constitutes: The moment you laid a hand on me, I started begging you to stop. I invoked every single person and principle that was important to us-Tiya (Tejpal's daughter), Geetan (Batra, his wife), Shoma (Chaudhury), (name deleted, her father who is Tejpal's former colleague), the fact that you were my employer-to make you stop. You refused to listen. In fact, you went ahead and decided to molest me again on the following night. We have often spoken of 'what turns men into beasts' at Tehelka edit meetings. It is this-not being able to take no for an answer."