by Monabi Mitra
‘And so, would you say he was especially depressed that night?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that too,’ said Tara slowly, ‘and I feel that there was a definite change in him that evening. He had always been resentful and fussy, but that night, he was unusually quiet.’
‘And no obvious enemy of his comes to mind, at all?’
‘I see what you’re getting at. But aren’t we jumping to conclusions? I mean, was he murdered at all?’ Tara’s voice was quiet and measured. ‘He was always very excitable, and the strain of having to keep up with Nisha might have got to him.’
Bikram stood up and said briskly, ‘I will keep that in mind. Thank you very much for coming all the way and for your cooperation.’
Tara hesitated and then said softly, ‘If I think of anything else I’ll let you know. May I have your telephone number?’
Bikram scribbled on the memo pad, tore out a page, and handed it to her. He said, ‘If you can’t get me, there’s a Mr Ghosh handling the investigation along with me, here’s his number, you can give him a call too.’
Tara reached out and put the chit in her bag without looking at it, then turned and walked out of the room. Her father rushed at her but Tara walked on, ignoring him. Outside the thana, cars stopped, doors slammed, bus conductors shouted and horns blared, but Tara barely noticed the noise and bustle.
The first thing Bikram did on returning home was ring up a lawyer—a former schoolfriend—and spend ten minutes with him.
‘Had the dead man made a will?’ he asked after Bikram had explained the circumstances of the case to him.
‘Would it matter if he had?’
‘He might have got fed up with his wife and left his share of the house to his uncle and cousin and that might make it look really bad for the cousin. She spent a lot of time with him too. Got him to sign away his end of it and then bumped him off.’
‘And if he hadn’t?’ asked Bikram.
‘Then the wife, what did you say her name was?’
‘Nisha Bose.’
‘Nisha Bose and Bimal Bose are equal inheritors, one as the widow and the other because of his ancestral right. That will mean a lot of squabbling and bitterness once they start dividing up the property.’
‘Can Bimal Bose and his daughter take half-possession of the house?’
‘They can, leaving an equal share for the wife. The other option would be to sell off the old bungalow to a third party and divide the money equally, perhaps get two flats once the high-rise comes up. Ballygunge, did you say? That’s a lovely area, near my club. Keep me informed and maybe I’ll collect an apartment out of Robi Bose’s misery!’
Inheritance is a tricky thing, mused Bikram that night. After the tears and the formal courtesies of death, come the often troublesome profit and loss of life, all excellently jointed in the matter of succession. Too often had he seen prim sons, daughters, brothers and wives turn ugly the moment the body was sent to its maker.
In his room with the television on, lights off, sound muted, Bikram leaned back on his bed and gazed at the ceiling unhappily. He wondered if he was going wrong somewhere. Was the cousin, Tara, correct in assessing that Robi Bose had simply dosed himself to death and that they were making a mountain out of a molehill? Pretty girl, he thought. His thoughts soon began to wander and, in a minute, he had fallen asleep.
10
The next day was Mistry’s day off. Even as Bikram was being driven to office by Dorjee, the replacement driver, Mistry lounged around in his official two-roomed driver’s quarters in a blue-checked lungi till 10 a.m. His CD player blared soulful Bhojpuri songs while his nephew brewed strong, sugary tea and placed it on a rack beside the bed before slipping out of the room to catch the Metro to his college. Mistry had married late but preferred to leave his wife and children in his village in Bihar. His residence in Calcutta was a useful, informal hotel for the lucky few from his village who could gain access to it. Mistry was choosy and waved away the taxi and truck drivers, the chauffeurs and the courier company peons. He preferred students—boys who came from his village to acquire a degree in some nameless college or those apprenticed to shops in the older portions of the town. He charged them five hundred rupees per month and gave them a roster of household jobs, including cooking, washing clothes, sweeping the rooms and a quick head-and-shoulder massage at night if he happened to be let off early.
The hours stretched lazily ahead as he considered his options. He would abandon himself to Bijlirani and her charms, of course, in the afternoon, after lunch at his favourite biryani place. He would visit the temple in the evening and secure the god’s blessings for continued prosperity in exchange for a hundred-rupee note. But first, there was business to be dealt with—the routine weekly trip to a narrow lane deep in the heart of the city, where the roads got smaller and tighter, like the core of a cabbage, and the people looked shabby and sweaty but held, nevertheless, most of the keys to the vast floating underbelly of the chaotic metropolis. Mistry finished his tea and went for a bath, humming the Bhojpuri song under his breath.
He alighted near his destination an hour later and paid off the cab driver, after cautioning him about the dangers of overtaking from the left when the car ahead had its indicator lights on. Occasionally, he took a bus but, this morning, he felt like some luxury. Besides, Bijlirani had mentioned the new outfit on which she had splurged and it would not do to be hot and smelly when he reached her. Mistry covered his nose with a handkerchief sprayed with a foreign perfume he had wangled out of a smuggled-goods shop in the dock areas of Calcutta, and picked his way through the clogged roads. He turned down one lane selling brilliantly coloured saris, then another selling beads and sequins to be sewed on to dresses, and finally vanished through the doorway of a house that seemed bent under the burden of innumerable sign-boards.
Shiv Ram Prasad Tewari was resting when Mistry arrived. He was a short, fat man with a pockmarked face, a drooping moustache and flaming red hair. Mistry frowned. ‘Why did you colour your hair? White suited you better. This makes you look like a thug.’
‘Oh, it was just one of those things. The henna will grow out in time.’ Shiv Ram Prasad spoke airily enough but looked troubled.
‘Shave off your hair and pretend your uncle’s dead.’
‘Impossible! I’ll have to live on fruits.’
Shiv Ram Prasad Tewari lifted one buttock, let out a low rolling fart, then punched a cordless bell. A boy with long hair tied into a ponytail appeared. ‘Usual stuff, right?’ Shiv Ram Prasad Tewari looked at Mistry who grunted in assent.
The boy reappeared with a bottle of beer and two glasses.
Mistry asked, ‘Where did you pick this one up from?’
‘His dad deposited him here, to learn how to work hard and all that. From Siliguri. Mother’s from the hills but father’s a Bihari settled there.’
‘That ponytail is all wrong, like your red hair. Have all of you been watching too many cheap films?’
‘What can we do? We don’t have beautiful heroines to drive around like you and your sa’ab do! You get to see the real thing, we can only make-believe.’
Shiv Ram Prasad Tewari raised his glass to his lips and drank noisily, but his eyes were glued to Mistry’s face, anticipating a reaction. Mistry, loyal, said nothing.
‘How’s work going?’
‘Same as ever, there’s nothing new.’
‘Your sa’ab couldn’t get Babul, I hear.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Is it very important to get him?’
Mistry shrugged his shoulders.
‘Babul’s getting worse day by day, I know.’ Shiv Ram Prasad sighed. ‘Getting out of hand, in fact. I’ve warned him but he feels confident enough to strike out on his own. Let’s see, if it gets too bad, I’ll let you know.’
‘What does he deal in nowadays?’ asked Mistry casually.
Shiv Ram Prasad looked at him with a twinkle in his eye. ‘As if you didn’t know!’
Mistry fro
wned. ‘I really don’t. I just have a feeling he’s moved on from liquor and gambling.’
Shiv Ram Prasad looked evasive.
‘You know, don’t you?’ Mistry had refilled his glass and decided to take the first step forward.
‘I might.’
‘So out with it.’
‘All right, but I want something in return.’
‘Like what?’
‘Get your sa’ab to put some people who are troubling me out of the way. Put them behind bars for some time.’
‘All right, I’ll put in a word. Mind you, I can’t promise anything, but I’ll try.’
‘Oh you can do anything if you want to, Mistry bhai.’
Mistry tried to look modest.
‘So what about Babul?’
Shiv Ram Prasad Tewari scratched his back and looked thoughtful for a moment.
‘I’m not sure, but I think it’s drugs. Cross-border, of course.’
‘What kind? Heroin and all that?’
Shiv Ram Prasad Tewari shook his head. ‘Pills for the rich folk. Tied up with fake money, of course. Money from across the border to Calcutta, and tablets and stuff from here to there. Fifty per cent of the stuff circulates here of course. But there’s so much of it that I think he must have made a good contact here, someone who’s really manufacturing the stuff in good quantities and quickly. I do not like it either. He is getting too big. Also, he’s slipping under my radar too often.’
‘You can always let me know if you want him out of the way,’ said Mistry softly.
Shiv Ram Prasad Tewari smiled. ‘That’s what you came for today, didn’t you? You are really fond of your sa’ab. But he’s a good guy, so I can understand why.’ Tewari drained his glass, then ambled across to a steel desk, took out a bunch of keys from his pocket, fitted one into the bottom drawer, opened it and took out a large brown envelope. He fished out a bundle of notes, then waddled back to the sofa and put the bundle down before Mistry.
‘I hope you’re not passing off some of those fake notes to me,’ said Mistry warily.
‘We’ve been together for years, Mistry bhai. How can you even think of something like that!’
‘Times are changing, my friend.’
‘You can check it out if you want to,’ said Tewari in an offended tone.
‘No, of course not. Just joking.’ Mistry slipped the packet into the pocket of his trousers and rose. ‘I really wish you would dye your hair black. You’re conspicuous like this, and Babul might decide to have you put out of the way.’
Shiv Ram Prasad Tewari pointed to the rings on his finger. ‘I have a long way to go yet. That rat will go before I do.’
‘Let me know if anything new turns up.’
Mistry belched, took out his handkerchief and pressing it to his nose again, exited, leaving a heady trail of perfume behind him.
He took a different route on the way out, passing shops with cool interiors and gaudily dressed mannequins offering lacy crimson nightdresses and sequinned saris. The shops spilled out on to the pavements where bamboo staves created a canopy of more saris and nighties. The shopkeepers picked their noses or shouted into their cell phones as they came out for a quick smoke or a cup of tea. Mistry ducked under a jumble of electric wires hanging dangerously from the electric poles from which they had been illegally tapped and surreptitiously linked to the pavement shops. He stood near a paan shop, mopping his brow and debating whether to buy Bijlirani a present when he started in surprise. A familiar face was hurrying down the very road from which he had come. It was Buro, from Nisha Bose’s house.
Mistry hesitated, taken aback, then drew breath and plunged into the swarming crowds before him. This was an area he knew well, a broth of vice that simmered and sputtered behind the gaily decorated shops and their colourful ware. Flushed with beer and the excitement of a potential catch, Mistry panted on. Mistry’s curiosity reached fever pitch—Buro was taking the same lanes he’d just walked. Finally Buro stopped, looked around him and vanished inside a doorway. Mistry stopped. The building was the one in which he had been only minutes before. Abandoning discretion, Mistry climbed recklessly up the stairs, using his handkerchief as a partial cover. Buro walked slowly ahead of him, halted before a door, looked around one final time and darted through a doorway. Mistry gaped, shocked. Buro had entered Shiv Ram Prasad Tewari’s office.
11
Nine thirty a.m. was still too early for police headquarters to begin functioning. As usual, Bikram was the first to arrive and went up the three storeys in the ancient lift that creaked and groaned. He passed by the control room, the wireless set inside spasmodically issuing instructions to an empty chair, past the stenographers’ room, with its muddle of wooden chairs and desks and computer wires, past the visitors’ room with its picture of Mahatma Gandhi staring sadly down at the mess, and into his den. The air conditioner had been switched on and a constable with a red flannel cloth in his hand was enjoying himself before it. When Bikram swung the door open, he jumped to attention and stood as if graven in stone. The morning post was on his table, along with a heap of free gift vouchers, invitations, two telephone bills and three anonymous letters written in a melancholy scrawl on yellow postcards. Bikram tossed the file he was carrying on to the sofa, selected a violently coloured envelope promising a warm cultural evening at a musical soirée, put it into the astonished constable’s hands and propelled him out of the room. He said, ‘Give your wife a break, take her out to this programme and tell me how it was. And change the duster you’re using.’
He snapped the door shut after the constable, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. He remained like this for five minutes while the clock ticked on ponderously. Then the door flew open and Ghosh stamped in. ‘I’ve finished with the cell phone and thought you might like to take a look at it,’ he said. ‘I keep forgetting to hand it over. The laptop, I didn’t touch. I’m too old for it.’
‘What about the pills? Did you trace the dealer?’
Bikram’s eyes were still closed and he had laced his fingers over them. Ghosh looked at Bikram with paternal fondness and noticed the furrows beside his nose. He thought of Shona with some irritation. What was she waiting for? Couldn’t she see that what Bikram needed was a home and children and some properly cooked meals? What was all this nonsense about courtship and weekend trysts? Bikram looked up suddenly and their eyes met. For a brief second, both men understood and acknowledged the unspoken bond between them. Ghosh then fiddled with the file he had with him and fished a paper out of it. ‘A list of as many names and addresses of contacts as I could get is here,’ he began. ‘The servants were so uncommunicative that you would think it was one of their own families I was trying to trace. Too much solidarity there, I couldn’t break down any one of them.’
Bikram reached for the paper and glanced through the addresses. He knew, more than anyone else, the amount of hard work it had taken Ghosh to compile that list. Ghosh had also put Nikki Kumar in right at the end, almost as an afterthought. Bikram put the list away and turned to the laptop. He plugged in the charger and turned it on, then handed Ghosh the foolscap sheet he had been working on the night before. ‘The best way out, of course, is the suicide theory,’ he said. ‘A sick man, depressed, an array of medicines within easy reach, a party at which his wife was enjoying herself, and rather indelicately too; the anger, the helplessness and the final push over the edge. What do you think?’
Ghosh said nothing for a moment and then scratched his head. ‘But what about the pilfered money? It could have been one of the servants too. Perhaps he was caught by Robi Bose, and before Robi could tell everyone about him, the servant decided to do away with his employer. Given Bose’s condition, it wouldn’t be difficult to fake a murder.’
‘Why “he”?’ mulled Bikram. ‘The house had maids too.’
‘Okay. Then the maid and the servant together,’ said Ghosh. ‘But how are we ever going to prove all this? How are we ever going to connect the theft to the murder?�
�� Ghosh asked mournfully. ‘Then again,’ he continued, bent on mining all the ghastly possibilities of the case, ‘it could also be the cousin, the girl who was being pressurized to sign away her claim to their house, and she was the last one with him.’
Bikram frowned and picked up the paper with the cell phone numbers. Robi Bose seemed to have spent a lot of time on the phone. He’d called doctors, physiotherapists, acquaintances, men and women who worked for firms, had well-known businesses, Chinese and Continental restaurants, diagnostic labs, the Flower Power Boutique, Tara and Bimal Bose and a lawyer six times in the days before his death. On the day of his death, Robi had made six calls, all morning and noon, one to the lawyer, the other four to a Mr Nandi, Amal, Bunty and Nikki Kumar. After Nikki Kumar, the last call had gone out to Tara in the evening, presumably to ask her over. Had Robi’s wife kept that evening’s party a secret from him? Why? The man adored her, she would have no trouble doing what she wanted, and yet, Robi Bose had his moments of irascibility. The house, too, looked a little too luxurious for an invalid with a wife who had no reliable source of income. And as hard as Nisha tried to seem an enigma, Bikram understood exactly what she was—a hardened gold-digger.
He turned his attention to the laptop that Ghosh had recovered. The desktop background was a photograph of Nisha Bose on holiday, wearing a sleeveless top and a pair of capris, a cliff looming in the background and palm trees behind her, waves dashing in and curling around her feet. Bikram clicked through the icons desultorily. Under games, he found solitaire and a bad version of snooker, with no indication that the user had much use for them. The contacts folder was empty, and the folders containing photographs had a couple more of Nisha Bose on holiday, wearing the capris and the top. The phone rang as he clicked the Word Documents folder.
It was Prem Gupta. ‘In office early, Bikram, as usual?’
‘Well yes Sir, a little time to myself.’