The Masala Murder: Reema Ray Mysteries

by Madhumita Bhattacharyya

  I was the first to arrive, and Mallika and I sat down with our glasses of red wine. Today she was dressed in a becoming black-and-white crepe sari, and I was thankful that I had decided to pull out my solitary dress for the occasion. Black, of course.

  ‘I’m so happy you came,’ smiled Mallika.

  ‘Thank you for having me.’

  ‘It’s just a small dinner for some close friends. Abhimanyu will be along in a bit. He is looking forward to meeting you.’

  ‘You said your home is attached to your restaurant?’

  ‘The old owners had planned the restaurant as a two-level, but we didn’t need such a vast space. So while the restrooms of the restaurant and my office are upstairs, we converted the rest of the space into our home.’

  ‘Are they connected?’

  ‘You can get into the restaurant through the office.’

  ‘It’s amazing how quiet it is in here when there is a restaurant down there,’ I said.

  ‘We had the entire place soundproofed, even though Middle Kingdom is hardly a boisterous sort of establishment.’

  I was just about to ask after her husband when the doorbell rang. Mallika went to answer it and returned to the living room accompanied by a man in his fifties. He looked decidedly put out and, judging from the deep lines in his forehead, it was a chronic condition.

  ‘Where is Vineeta? Will she be long?’ asked Mallika.

  ‘Busy with the restaurant, as usual. She said she is just about to reach home, which was about five minutes ago. Given how long she takes to get ready, I would say another couple of hours.’

  ‘Manish!’ Mallika chided with a laugh. ‘Anyway, I am glad you came on ahead. We may as well get started. Manish, this is my friend Reema, she is a journalist.’ As she glanced at me, I saw the hint of discomfort in her eyes. ‘Reema, Manish and his wife Vineeta run the restaurant Khana Khazana on Ritchie Road.’

  Manish continued to appraise me unsmilingly, without any attempt at a greeting. I had no problem staring back till I sensed Mallika’s growing unease.

  I picked up my glass of wine. Vineeta. Hadn’t that been the name of the woman Mrs Agarwal had described as her husband’s friend?

  ‘What can I get you to drink, Manish?’ asked Mallika.

  ‘Whisky.’

  As Mallika disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, Manish sat down on a sofa opposite me and turned his face resolutely towards the window, head resting on his hand. Thankfully our hostess reappeared soon, armed with a generous pour. I hoped it wasn’t the good stuff; it seemed destined to be a waste on this bulldozer of a man.

  ‘How have you been, Manish?’ Mallika asked once she settled down on the sofa beside me. ‘It’s been a long time since we last met.’

  ‘I have been in Assam for a while. Just got back,’ he said.

  ‘It’s been busy at the factory?’

  ‘Yes, but I am not as much in demand as my wife. It’s a surprise if I see her at all these days.’

  I glanced at Mallika, and saw she was struggling to keep the conversation afloat.

  ‘Factory?’ I asked.

  ‘I have a vegetable oil and lubricant factory in Assam,’ said Manish.

  ‘Castor beans,’ added Mallika.

  ‘But make no mistake—I’m not as important as my wife,’ said Manish.

  ‘The restaurant must be doing well,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard good things about it.’

  He scoffed. ‘Who knows?’

  ‘How long has it been around?’

  ‘About five years.’ He paused to take a sip of whisky.

  The conversation stopped and started for another ten minutes or so, till the doorbell rang again. This time Mallika brought back Vineeta, looking flustered.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said.

  Mallika introduced us.

  ‘Where is Siddhartha?’ asked Vineeta.

  ‘Surgery,’ said Mallika. ‘There was some sort of emergency.’

  ‘That’s too bad,’ I said. ‘I remember you mentioned he practised at Calcutta Medical.’

  ‘Among other places.

  ‘He won’t be joining us?’ I asked, trying to hide my disappointment.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him,’ said Vineeta.

  ‘Yes, it’s been impossible to coordinate our schedules, hasn’t it?’

  Vineeta gave a shaky little laugh. ‘It’s the restaurant ...’

  I stole a glance at Manish, but thankfully he seemed not to be listening.

  ‘How are the kids?’ Mallika asked.

  ‘Never let them hear you call them that!’ said Vineeta, with a hint of a warm smile. ‘Hitesh has settled down in his new job, and Himani is visiting after her first semester at Leeds.’ She chattered on, and at least while on this subject Manish retracted his claws, preferring a rather disinterested silence to outright belligerence.

  Then the last guest arrived: a man in his forties, unusually tall, with salt-and-pepper hair and a slight stoop.

  ‘Chef Abhimanyu,’ said Mallika, ‘this is Reema Ray, the reporter I was telling you about.’

  We shook hands and he gave me a warm smile. My spirits were buoyed by the hope that conversation with Manish would no longer be necessary.

  ‘Sorry I missed you yesterday. When are you coming back for a proper meal?’ he asked.

  ‘I already had one before I started research for my story.’

  ‘When?

  ‘It was about a week ago. It wasn’t my first at your restaurant, of course.’

  ‘You should have called.’

  ‘That would have defeated the purpose. We like to do unannounced reviews. It keeps everyone honest.’

  ‘And how did you find it?’ Vineeta asked.

  ‘Fantastic. As close to perfect as I expect to get in Calcutta,’ I said.

  ‘Come on,’ said Abhimanyu with a laugh. ‘That’s seems rather generous.’

  ‘I mean it. It’s been a while since I’ve had such a satisfactory meal anywhere.’

  ‘So why have we never seen you in our restaurant?’ asked Manish.

  I cringed. ‘How do you know I haven’t been there?’

  ‘I would have remembered if you had come by.’

  ‘How could you when half the time you are away in Assam?’ said Vineeta, just short of snapping at him.

  I smiled politely and glanced at the glass in his hand. It was empty again. He seemed to notice it too and walked in the direction of the kitchen, presumably to help himself.

  ‘But you should come,’ said Vineeta.

  ‘I will, certainly.’

  ‘Not for a review, but just to see the restaurant,’ she added quickly. ‘We’ve recently redone our menu.’

  Manish returned, fortified with a generous volume of amber. ‘You write for a magazine?’ he asked, glancing at me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, though I would have thought that this fact had been well established in the course of the evening.

  ‘About food?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘What a job!’

  ‘And why do you say that?’ asked Vineeta sharply.

  ‘All she does is eat and write, eat and write,’ he laughed.

  ‘And what we do is so much better—cook and feed?’ said Abhimanyu.

  Ordinarily I may have agreed with Manish, but that evening I sat there somewhat awkwardly, not wishing to add fuel to the loaded exchange.

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Manish. ‘I am a manufacturer.’

  ‘Of castor oil,’ Abhimanyu said under his breath, but loud enough to be heard.

  ‘Yes, not that there is anything wrong with that. And just in case the chef doesn’t find that impressive enough, we’ve just signed a contract with a pharmaceutical company to supply compounds for cancer research.’

  ‘Manish!’ said Vineeta.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought that was confidential information.’

  ‘I don’t expect a bunch of r
estaurant owners, or a food writer, to sell my secrets to the competition.’

  Vineeta closed her eyes and let out a deep breath. A tense silence fell around the circle, till Vineeta seemed to flip some sort of internal switch and shoot me a smile. ‘Tell me, Reema, when can you come to the restaurant?’

  ‘Why don’t I call you to set a date?’ I said.

  ‘But before that, you must come back to Middle Kingdom next week for our dim sum promotion,’ said Abhimanyu.

  ‘Dim sum! My favourite!’

  ‘We have a guest chef who specializes in it coming by for a few weeks. If it works, we might introduce it in our brunch and tea menu.’

  He started explaining the intricacies of what he had pegged as the highlight of the selection, the Shanghainese xiaolongbao. ‘Usually, since dim sum is a Cantonese tradition, the world outside of China only gets to eat dumplings from that region. I thought it would be interesting to have a representation from elsewhere.’

  ‘I don’t think I have had that one,’ I said.

  ‘It is a pork dumpling with soup inside.’

  ‘Soup! How does that get in there?’

  ‘Come and try it and I will tell you.’

  ‘I must! I have to include this in my story.’

  Mallika disappeared into the kitchen, returning with a tray laden with crackers with blue cheese, walnuts, fig and balsamic drizzle, baba ganoush and homemade pita and lamb and vegetable skewers. Not only was the food delicious, but I was also grateful for the distraction it provided from the strained conversation. But the reprieve did not last long. Manish kept drinking, and rather rapidly seemed to lose whatever control he had over his tongue.

  ‘When will the good doctor return?’ he said.

  Mallika shrugged slightly, her pretty earrings bobbing up and down. ‘Later tonight.’

  ‘Is he ever here?’

  ‘He works with so many hospitals. You know that Manish,’ said Vineeta, urgency creeping into her voice.

  ‘But how can he bear to leave you alone so often, Mallika?’

  ‘Manish!’

  ‘What, Vineeta? A man with a wife like Mallika should stay home more.’

  I concentrated on my food as silence descended over the coffee table, the only sounds coming from the cutlery and Manish’s glass clinking as he set it down.

  Manish’s performance over the next half hour was enough to leave the rest of us squirming. Abhimanyu, clearly used to the drill, drew me to a corner where he continued to tell me about the regional variations of Chinese food. We shortly relocated to the dinner table, where I would have been more than happy to not say a word and savour the grilled haloumi with vegetables and lamb tagine with mint and lemon scented couscous. But that was too much to ask for.

  ‘Reema, do you ever write about Indian food?’ asked Manish.

  ‘Yes, of course I do.’

  ‘But you just aren’t as interested in it as you are in Chef Abhimanyu’s pig dumplings.’

  ‘Dim sum is unusual for me, for Calcutta, so yes, I would say that I find it more intriguing than chicken tikka masala. And more newsworthy.’

  ‘I would say that is the same for your new friend here, Mallika. See, she never cooks us Indian food, though I am sure she knows I hate anything else.’

  This stretched even the impeccable Mallika’s hospitality to the limit and she tried her hardest to pretend she hadn’t heard.

  But Manish was relentless. ‘Isn’t it nice how every cook in a western restaurant gets called “Chef ”? Nothing else. Just Chef. Like Doctor. Ha!’

  I waited for Abhimanyu to rise to the bait but when I looked at him, he was watching Mallika anxiously.

  ‘Will you be coming to the restaurant tomorrow morning? I wanted to show you some samples a new vegetable supplier has brought in,’ Abhimanyu asked Mallika.

  If he thought shop talk would deter Manish, he was wrong.

  ‘Mallika,’ he continued. ‘We are all a little beneath you, aren’t we? Me, my wife, the rest of the Indian restaurant owners. You stay far away from us all. But then, I suppose it’s not just us. You seemed to stay furthest away from Prakash Agarwal, who made every last rupee by selling imported trash from across the world to every substandard restaurant in the city. What was it about him that you just couldn’t stand? Especially when he was so popular with everyone else! My wife seemed to like him very much!’

  ‘Manish!’ exclaimed Vineeta, standing up, sweat beading her brow. ‘I think it’s time we went home.’

  ‘Yes, we may as well. What does it matter anyway, now that he’s dead?’

  And yet Manish Solanki showed no inclination to join his wife. ‘And isn’t it strange,’ he continued, ‘that the good Dr Siddhartha Mitra was the one who treated him at the end? He was on life support for a while, wasn’t he? Was it Mitra who finally pulled the plug?’

  ‘Now, look,’ said Abhimanyu, standing up.

  Mallika sat absolutely still, staring at the wine, blood red, in her glass.

  ‘Don’t worry, Chef. I am leaving. I wouldn’t dream of making any of you uncomfortable with the truth,’ Manish spat out, rising from the table on unsteady feet. ‘Hypocrites, the whole bunch of you are hypocrites!’ he slurred as he stumbled out of the room, jerking away from his wife as she tried to lead him by the elbow.

  On my way home, any reluctance I had about looking into the death of Prakash Agarwal slipped away. After that little performance it was hard to remain aloof, especially since Agarwal seemed to inspire enough hate all around to harbour half a dozen motives for murder.

  There was only one way I could think of proceeding: if I was going to investigate this matter on my own, I would need resources and I would need some access to information. I dialled Santosh da’s cell.

  ‘Bolo, Reema,’ he said cheerily. ‘How can I be of help?’

  ‘There is a matter I would like to discuss with the group, and I thought you might be able to call a meeting.’ I outlined the suspect circumstances surrounding the death of Agarwal, the role of the doctor in the whole business and Mrs Agarwal’s remarks.

  ‘It is very strange indeed,’ Santosh da agreed.

  ‘Yes. I thought perhaps the group might be able to get involved, provide some support.’

  ‘Why not? Why don’t you call them?’

  ‘Santosh da, you know that they don’t take me seriously.’

  ‘If that is the case, then why not do this on your own? I can help.’

  ‘There is no client here. I need resources. I am broke,’ I admitted. I didn’t need to remind him that so was he.

  Santosh da let out a deep breath. ‘Okay, Reema. Let me call them to my office tomorrow. Does 9 am suit you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I hung up and thought about what I had just begun. Not one but two cases were now on my plate. I felt a thrill of excitement, marred by a mild but undeniable vein of panic.

  ten

  The next morning, I was woken up way too early by my phone.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, groggily.

  ‘Sorry, did I wake you?’

  ‘Yes, who is this?’

  ‘Paresh Patel. It’s 7 am, I thought you might be awake by now.’

  ‘I clearly wasn’t,’ I said. I was surprised myself. I must have turned my alarm off. As I sat up, I felt like a lorry had driven over my head. I hadn’t drunk enough to blame it on the wine. I remembered tossing and turning most of the night.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Patel, without sounding like he was.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘There has been a development in the Agarwal case that I thought you’d like to know about. The police have dropped the investigation.’

  That woke me right up. ‘What? Why?’

  ‘The doctor changed his statement. He said it seemed to be a routine case of food poisoning after all, and the police are taking his word for it.’

  ‘They are probably just happy to have one less case to work on.’

  ‘Could be. Who knows?’

  And then
I remembered Manish’s accusations last night. ‘What was the doctor’s name?’

  ‘Siddhartha Mitra. Cardiologist.’

  I closed my eyes. ‘Who took the call to drop the case?’

  ‘It must have been Ravi Sharma. It was his case.’

  Why wasn’t I surprised that in both my cases it was Sharma I was dealing with? ‘Thanks, Paresh.’

  ‘I’ll let you know if there is any change in status.’

  I got out of bed and homed in on the coffee maker. Everything seemed awry: doctors changing their minds overnight about the possibility of foul play; the police dropping a murder investigation based on such a fickle opinion. And if the involvement of Ravi Sharma wasn’t enough to convince me something was amiss, everything seemed to hinge on the doctor, who in fact was Mallika Mitra’s husband, who in turn had a severely strained relationship with Agarwal. Now the question was, why?

  Far sooner than I expected, I found myself staring at the uncooperative faces of the CCC once again. They listened as I explained how Agarwal had died, how the case had been picked up and dropped, how, according to Mrs Agarwal, they hadn’t been exactly thorough with their investigation in the first place.

  ‘Has the wife asked you to investigate?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Terrence.

  ‘She wanted information from me in my capacity as a journalist. I don’t think she even knows I am a detective.’

  Terrence started to laugh and, as he saw me glare at him, converted it into a cough behind a discreet hand. Not discreet enough.

  ‘The question is, can we take it up as a case?’ I asked.

  ‘What case? The police have said it is not a murder,’ said Terrence.

  ‘On the strength of a verdict from a doctor who is connected to the victim.’

  ‘Have you established motive? A doctor just knowing the victim is not enough. Half of Calcutta must know Agarwal.’

  ‘Worse still, half of Calcutta knows each other. That is many motives for many murders,’ said DDG with a condescending smile.

  ‘I said there might be a murder here. I think it is worth looking into. The doctor seemed suspicious enough to involve the cops in the first place. What changed his mind? No autopsy was performed.’