By Kulbhushan Kain
On the night of May 12, 2026, a 33-year-old model and actor named Twisha Sharma died at her matrimonial home in the upscale Katara Hills locality of Bhopal. She had been married to Samarth Singh, a lawyer, for barely five months. Her family has alleged murder. The local police registered an FIR for dowry death. Her mother-in-law, Giribala Singh – a retired district judge – has claimed she died by suicide, further alleging that Twisha had a history of drug abuse. The initial autopsy found no drugs in her system. The Madhya Pradesh government has since recommended a CBI probe. Her husband who was absconding has since surrendered and has been arrested.
This is not, at this moment, a story about guilt or innocence. Those are determinations for the CBI and the courts. This is a story about what the electronic evidence – and only the electronic evidence actually tells us. It is also a story about one clock that lied, and one set of records that cannot.
First about the “The Clock That Lied”.
The home of Giribala Singh in Katara Hills was equipped with eight CCTV cameras connected to a Digital Video Recorder. When this footage entered the public domain and was examined, it showed Twisha walking up the stairs at 7:20 p.m., and three individuals, including her husband, carrying her motionless body back down one hour later, at 8:20 p.m., apparently attempting CPR.
The problem, confirmed under oath and on record, is that those timestamps were completely false.
The CCTV installer, Vinod Vani, confirmed to investigators that the DVR system at the residence had not been regularly maintained, and as a result its internal clock was running exactly two days, two hours and twenty minutes behind real time. This was a software error, not tampering — but its consequences for reading the footage are enormous. In her own petition before a Bhopal magistrate, Giribala Singh herself acknowledged this discrepancy, stating that the wrong date on the footage was causing confusion among the general public.
When we apply this correction, the footage that showed Twisha walking upstairs at 7:20 p.m. on what appeared to be May 10 was, in reality, footage from approximately 9:40 p.m. on May 12 — the actual night of her death. The footage showing the three men carrying her down, stamped 8:20 p.m., translates to approximately 10:40 p.m. in real time. It is this corrected CCTV footage, cross-referenced with the one set of records that cannot be manipulated, that gives us the true sequence of that night.
And now about “The Records That Cannot Lie”.
Unlike a home DVR, global telecom networks and WhatsApp server logs are digitally absolute. They are timestamped by international servers, independent of any device and form the spine of the real-world timeline.
They tell us the following. At 9:45 p.m., Twisha initiated a live WhatsApp video call to her mother. With the corrected CCTV placing her at the top of the stairs at approximately 9:40 p.m., this means she had barely five minutes between entering her room and placing that call.
What she said during that call, lasting from 9:45 p.m. until 10:05 p.m., has been widely reported and forms part of the evidence contested before the courts. Her family states she was in a state of high emotional distress, describing the domestic pressure she was facing and pleading to be taken away. They further state that her husband entered the room, began shouting angrily, and the connection was cut at 10:05 p.m.
It is at this point that the phone records deliver their most devastating entry.
After the call cut off at 10:05 p.m., Twisha’s parents made frantic attempts to call back. For ten minutes, no one answered. At 10:15 p.m., it was Giribala Singh -the mother-in-law – who picked up the phone. The family informed her that Twisha had been in distress and asked her to check on her daughter-in-law immediately.
Five minutes later, at 10:20 p.m., Giribala Singh called back to say that Twisha was no longer breathing.
Twisha was then driven to AIIMS Bhopal, where attending doctors formally recorded her as “Brought Dead” at 10:50 p.m. This is consistent with the corrected CCTV, which shows the three men carrying her downstairs at approximately 10:40 p.m. – meaning CPR was likely attempted at the scene for some minutes before she was lifted and taken to the car.
The entire final sequence, from the moment the call was cut to the moment the family was told she was no longer breathing, spans fifteen minutes. This fifteen-minute window – between 10:05 p.m. and 10:20 p.m. – is now the central focus of the investigation.
Two significant forensic anomalies surround the case. First, the initial post-mortem at AIIMS Bhopal was conducted without the nylon rope that had been recovered from the scene. Bhopal Police seized the rope but failed to present it to the medical board during the autopsy, preventing doctors from matching the ligature to the marks on Twisha’s neck at that time. The rope was submitted a day later. Twisha’s family has subsequently moved the Madhya Pradesh High Court for a second post-mortem, permission for which has now been granted by the court.
Second, the initial autopsy, while confirming the cause of death as hanging, also documented multiple injuries to the body, including fresh bruising on the arms, wrists, and scalp. Whether these injuries point to a sudden solitary act or to a physical struggle prior to the hanging is a question that forensic analysts are now tasked with answering- and one that the second post-mortem may help resolve.
Beyond the forensic record, a parallel line of inquiry has emerged around the events immediately after Twisha’s death. Twisha’s family’s legal team has released documents showing that Giribala Singh- within hours of her daughter-in-law dying -made over forty calls to a range of individuals including serving judges, senior IAS and IPS officers, and technicians associated with the very CCTV system that would become central evidence. Giribala Singh has characterised many of these as condolence calls. The family has questioned, pointedly, why technicians linked to surveillance equipment became recipients of condolence on the night of a death.
Stripping away allegation and counter-allegation, what the verified electronic record establishes is this: a young woman climbed the stairs to her room at approximately 9:40 p.m., called her mother within minutes, spoke for twenty minutes in visible distress, and was dead within fifteen minutes of that call being cut off. The weapon was not produced at her own autopsy. Her husband fled. Her mother-in-law made dozens of calls to influential people and CCTV technicians before investigators could secure the scene.
These are not theories. They are documented facts, drawn from server logs, court filings, AIIMS records, and statements made by the accused’s own legal representatives.
Whether Twisha Sharma was driven to take her own life under sustained pressure, or whether something more was done to her in those fifteen minutes, is a question I cannot and should not answer. That determination belongs to the CBI, to forensic science, and ultimately to a court of law.
What can be said- and what must be said- is that a thirty-three-year-old woman is dead within months of her marriage. That the clock in her home lied about when it happened. And that the only records which cannot lie are pointing, with quiet and terrible precision, at fifteen minutes that have yet to be explained.
(Kulbhushan Kain is an award winning educationist with more than 4 decades of working in schools in India and abroad. He is a prolific writer who loves cricket, travelling and cooking. He can be reached at kulbhushan.kain@gmail.com)
