The Masala Murder: Reema Ray Mysteries

by Madhumita Bhattacharyya

  ‘Terrence, I need your help.’

  ‘Do you, now? After the way you spoke with Ojha, I don’t know if you are welcome in the group.’

  ‘Did he tell you what he did to deserve it?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Then stop acting like an outraged mother hen. People could be in danger.’

  He sighed. ‘What do you need?’

  ‘I have some video footage. I need to enhance it.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘God, Reema, you don’t ask for much. The office is closed.’

  ‘Look, I know it’s late. I wouldn’t have asked you if it wasn’t important to do this right away.’

  ‘Geez. Okay. You know where my office is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Meet me there in half an hour.’

  After a detour to the Face office to collect the tape, we met Terrence outside the offices of World Wide Eye, the detective agency for which he worked, under a slightly surreal winking logo of the Earth, half of which was covered by a rather stoned-looking eye. It was one of the biggest detective agencies in the city.

  Terrence gave me a smug smile before he spotted Shayak.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘A friend. He’s helping me on the case.’

  ‘A PI?’

  I looked at Shayak for the answer. ‘Not quite,’ he said.

  Terrence tried staring some more information out of the unexpected guest. He got nothing but a stonier stare in return and, bravado sufficiently withered, he turned around to open the copious numbers of locks protecting the door.

  ‘From an agency of this calibre, I had expected something a little more hi-tech than—what is it, ten? —locks.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with a lock,’ replied Terrence. ‘Imagine what happens to those fancy electronic alarm systems when the power goes out.’

  ‘Power back-up,’ Shayak mumbled under his breath.

  Terrence finally had the door unlocked and we followed him into the dark hall, at the end of which was a room. Terrence flipped on the light to reveal three computers with large screens, scanners, audio equipment and other paraphernalia.

  I handed him the DVD and paced the small room as the system started up.

  ‘What will we be looking at here?’

  ‘Aloka Mohta’s ransom video.’

  ‘Why bother, just turn on the TV. It’s been playing all day.’

  ‘I need an enhanced view of what’s going on in the background.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Terrence, opening the file.

  ‘It has been ten days and we have been very patient with you,’ I heard Aloka say again, for the nth time. ‘Just because we have chosen not to make threats of violence, you seem to think you will get your daughter back somehow, without making the payment.’

  And the unsaid message: anything happens to Aloka and the whole world knows that it is because Kishan Mohta was too greedy and selfish to pay up the ransom.

  As the video approached the end, the handheld camera shifted an inch or two. ‘Here it is, freeze this frame,’ I said.

  The shaking hand holding the camera had inadvertently provided the briefest glimpse of the window behind Aloka.

  ‘Blow up the part of the frame with the window.’

  It only took a few seconds to bring it into view, but I still could not be sure what I was seeing. ‘Can you enhance this green area?’

  Terrence got to work and in a couple of minutes, he had cleared things up as best as he could.

  When he finished, my hands were shaking.

  ‘This isn’t as easy as they make it look on TV, you know,’ he said, defensive in the face of my silence.

  ‘No, it’s not, but you’ve given me exactly what I need,’ I said softly.

  ‘A palm tree is what you need?’

  ‘A palm tree, and this grey protrusion,’ I said, pointing at the screen.

  ‘It looks like a dirty rock.’

  ‘And I know exactly where it is.’

  ‘This rock is enough to tell you where this woman is being held?’ asked Terrence with surprise.

  But I was already on the move, ‘Thanks Terrence, I owe you one.’

  ‘A big one!’ he shouted after me.

  Shayak followed me out.

  ‘Thanks for your help tonight,’ I said.

  ‘I’m coming with you.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To get Aloka.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘It could be dangerous.’

  ‘I’m not going alone.’

  I pulled out my phone.

  ‘Who are you calling?’

  ‘The police.’

  ‘Sharma?’ Shayak asked with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Sharad Kumar?’

  ‘Is there anything you don’t know about me?’

  ‘Plenty, I’m sure. Tell him I am here. And that I am coming with you.’

  I was shaking my head in a loud ‘no’ when Uncle Kumar picked up.

  ‘I need your help,’ I said. ‘I know where she is.’

  ‘Who, my dear?’

  ‘Aloka.’

  ‘And here I was in the middle of a dinner party.’

  ‘Sorry, but this can’t wait.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  I gave him an outline of what I believed had occurred.

  ‘Sweetheart, it pains me to say this but it’s not me you should be calling, it’s Ravi Sharma. This is his case.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘He’s not a bad cop, Reema.’

  ‘I thought you hated each other.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it that way. Our politics don’t match, but that is about it.’

  ‘That’s not what I’ve heard from Baba.’

  ‘People make more out of professional disputes than there is.’

  ‘But Sharma won’t listen to me. He hates me.’

  ‘Why would you say that?’

  ‘He arrested me today.’

  ‘What! Why am I hearing about this now?’

  ‘I couldn’t call. He took my phone away.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He found me where I shouldn’t have been.’

  ‘Reema,’ he said. ‘Breaking in, were you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ve lost my sympathy, seeing as how you are not in the slammer any longer. I’ll call him and alert him to your news. If he doesn’t respond, I’ll go over his head and come in myself. Give me five minutes.’

  ‘Okay. And one more thing,’ I said, moving to the side. ‘I am with Shayak Gupta. He says he knows you.’

  ‘Shayak is there? Take him with you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’ll keep you safe.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts. That’s an order, young lady. Get moving—you’ve already wasted enough time yapping with me. In fact, get Gupta to call Sharma on the way. He knows him better than I do.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked.

  Uncle Kumar had hung up. I stared at the phone before turning around and glaring at Shayak.

  ‘I told you he knows me.’

  ‘Oh, stop.’

  ‘Just stating a fact.’

  ‘What the hell is Titanium Securities anyway?’

  Shayak smiled.

  ‘Uncle Kumar said you should call Sharma.’

  ‘Good idea. But we should get going.’

  We got into the car and Shayak plugged in his handsfree before pulling out of his spot. I listened to him telling Sharma what we knew.

  ‘He’s on board, he’ll meet us there. He’s asked us to wait before we go in.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Reema, when all this is over, I will give you a long lecture about the merits of working within the system. But for now, please stop asking questions and tell me where the hell I need to go.’

  We started our drive in silence; Shayak seemed to realize that I didn’t want to speak about t
he case just yet. He played music, extracted as much back story he could about me. He had guessed that food was the best way to soothe me, so he rolled out story after story about his world travels and the crazy things he had eaten. Antarctica to Antigua, he seemed to have been everywhere and tried everything. But he still had told me as little about himself as possible.

  Finally, after about three hours on the road, we arrived outside a narrow lane that was overgrown with trees and shrubbery. It had been years since I had been here last—over a decade—but I still recognized it. ‘This is it,’ I said.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Shayak. ‘There doesn’t seem to be anything here.’

  ‘The house is at the end of the lane. Right by the beach.’

  ‘Okay, let’s wait.’

  ‘Shayak, I really need to do this myself.’

  ‘That’s out of the question. It could be very dangerous.’

  ‘I think it would be safer. They wouldn’t harm me,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  My silence, more than anything I may have said, seemed to convince Shayak how much I needed to see this through on my own.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. But just in case, back me up.’

  Shayak nodded reluctantly. He didn’t give me grief about what Sharma might say, I knew he would handle it. ‘You’ll be unarmed,’ he said, pulling his own gun from a compartment under his seat. ‘But I’m right behind you.’

  I got out of the car. It was an all but uninhabited stretch of coastline. In the darkness, Shayak and I walked along the narrow pathway. Soon we came into view of the house, which was just as I had remembered it.

  The rusty gate was locked, but we had no trouble scaling the boundary wall. The small garden had been abandoned to the elements. The grass was overgrown in places and dead in others, the rows of bushes crowded with weeds, palm trees heavy with unwanted coconuts. Underneath one tree was an old water feature, a rock which had been forced onto the sandy landscape.

  When I had come here as a teenager, the iron-laden water had already discoloured the stone, streaking it with red rivulets. Now, it stood there dry and barren. It was so out of place and so grotesque, it was a dead giveaway, poking its rusty presence into the ransom video.

  I pushed the main door; it was unlocked and I let myself in. It was a shoddy job all around: kidnapping wasn’t for amateurs.

  The house was musty and there was no sign of life as I entered. But I followed my ears and they led me to a room at the rear of the building.

  Raised voices. A woman. ‘You said it wouldn’t go this far!’

  ‘How would I know they would guess so soon!’ replied a man, voice hoarse with anger. ‘I thought it would be over long before this! But anyhow, what does it matter now? The money is coming, isn’t it?’

  ‘So now what?’

  ‘We wait!?’

  The woman was silent.

  ‘You aren’t thinking about giving up, are you? We’ll go to jail!’

  ‘He wouldn’t—’

  ‘Your blessed father wouldn’t have to do anything. The police would—’

  I pushed open the old wooden door and it announced my entry with a creak. The room was lit by a flickering hurricane lamp and there stood Amit and Aloka, aghast and exhausted but otherwise none the worse for wear.

  ‘Amit is right. The police can take action, even if your father doesn’t, Aloka,’ I said.

  Aloka let out a cry and covered her mouth, the flickering light accentuating her horror.

  Amit closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were drained of every emotion, as though somehow, he had been waiting for this moment. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘She gave it away, not you,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Aloka asked.

  ‘You once had a birthday party here, remember? We must have been about fourteen years old, you brought us all to your fab beach house near Digha. Then I saw that picture of the two of you, here, on your bedside table. The ransom video you took, Amit, was fine till the end, but your shaky smoker’s hands eventually gave you away. You provided just a glimpse of a window that revealed a palm tree and that hunk of rock that I recognized as being part of the travesty of a waterfall in the garden. But you really should blame it on the TV channels; they played your little sketch so many times that I couldn’t help but notice at some point.’

  Husband and wife stared at me without motion, without words.

  ‘It was a good plan,’ I continued, ‘except that Aloka’s father guessed what was going on from the get-go. You’ve got to give him credit for that, Amit. He could see right through you. And then you had another brilliant idea—you could turn the story around by going to an ex-girlfriend with convenient connections and allege persecution. Who wouldn’t lap it up?’

  They still said nothing, not even looking at each other.

  ‘In fact, you had prepared for trouble, months in advance. When you started planning this operation, the two of you realized that help might be needed, at some point. Amit, you called to test the waters, to revive our friendship, so you could come to me as a route to Uncle Kumar and the influence and information he could provide, if and when required. When things started off so wrong, you landed up on my doorstep.’

  He hadn’t counted on getting found out so quickly, however, or on me asking him to move in. No, that had been even beyond his imagination. He couldn’t refuse for fear of arousing suspicion.

  ‘When I foolishly allowed you into my home, you thought you’d unnerve me, throw me off balance with your sudden intensity every time I asked uncomfortable questions. Did you really think I’d fall for that?’ I said with a coldness I did not feel.

  ‘There must have been someone guarding this place. A caretaker. What did you do to them?’ I asked. ‘Pay them to leave or will we find them locked up somewhere? Or dead?’

  ‘We didn’t hurt anyone,’ said Amit.

  ‘So you paid them. At any rate, I can think of a few people you did hurt—Aloka’s mother, for one.’

  ‘And you,’ said Amit, still clinging to his badge of defiance.

  ‘You needn’t worry about that. I had too little faith in you left for hurt.’

  The rest would remain unsaid: though my emotions were unscathed, I would never admit to him that he had me shaken to the core. How could I have been deceived of the very fibre of which Amit was made? How could I have trusted him now, loved him then?

  ‘You staged the break-in at your house for my benefit alone?’

  ‘Just a little insurance in case you had doubts.’

  ‘You chose a bad way to do it. It only served to make me suspicious. Why would a kidnapper break into his victim’s house? It’s too risky. And then when I went back, I found a pair of jeans missing, the hairbrush gone.’

  Aloka slouched back on the bed, face in her hands.

  ‘You wanted your wife to be comfortable. You love her, though you have strange ways of showing it. My only question now is why.’

  When Amit spoke, his veil of languorous irony was back in place. ‘I always knew money couldn’t buy me happiness, but desperation—something my father-in-law taught me—was not something I had ever known. He ensured that every path I could have honestly taken was closed to me. Believe it or not, this was almost the only alternative we had.’

  ‘What about starting afresh in another city where he couldn’t get to you? Like you’d said?’

  He let out a brief, derisive laugh. ‘We couldn’t even put together enough money for a security deposit to rent a house.’

  ‘And I guess it would have been far too bourgeois of you to have asked someone for financial assistance rather than stage-managing your own wife’s kidnapping.’

  ‘It was my idea,’ Aloka said, finally finding her voice and injecting far more spirit into the statement than I had imagined her capable of.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m pregnant.’

  I saw shame come over Amit’s face like a baby’s blush.<
br />
  ‘We need the money. I can’t let my child suffer because my father is too stubborn.’

  ‘Does he know?’

  ‘No. No one knows.’

  ‘You don’t think if you told him he might have softened his position?’

  ‘Who gives him the right to decide when to accept me? His opposition to our marriage was always about controlling me and my choices, no matter how personally Amit takes the rejection. Why should he have that kind of power over me again?’

  ‘This is your way of getting back at him?’

  ‘Not of getting back,’ said Aloka. ‘Of breaking free. Of taking what’s mine; what I am entitled to.’

  ‘It’s your father’s money and he has every right to dispense with it as he chooses.’

  She shook her head impatiently. ‘I would have agreed with you at one time, till he left us without any means to support ourselves. Even your own father doesn’t have the right to doom you to a life of penury. I wasn’t looking for a paid holiday for life. ` 2 crore isn’t so very much for him, but it is enough to set us up somewhere so we could start afresh, make our own way in the world and keep something aside for our child.’

  ‘But what will happen to the baby now?’

  Aloka shrugged. ‘It’s no worse than when we started out.’

  ‘What if you both end up in jail?’

  ‘On what charges?’

  ‘Fraud, extortion, who knows what else.’

  A look of contempt came over Aloka’s face, and she shrugged.

  ‘We’ll see about that. Maybe daddy darling, who didn’t want to cough up the ransom, will pay to keep his daughter out of jail and scandal away from the family.’

  ‘I think it is a little late for that.’

  I had heard what I needed to. I turned to the door behind me; it was the signal Shayak had been waiting for to enter the room. There was not a word of protest as husband and wife were led away.

  I think it was the intensity of my gaze that forced Amit to look at me. All I saw staring back in those bleak eyes was confusion and perhaps a little fear.

  twenty

  As Shayak led Amit and Aloka away, I fell in behind them. Before stepping out of the shadows of the house, Shayak turned to me. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I will be.’

  ‘You did well in there.’