by Monabi Mitra
‘Ghosh?’
Ghosh jumped. He had been secretly stealing glances at Bikram and wondering what Toofan Kumar had said that had upset him so. ‘We haven’t been able to fix on anything definite, Sir, because there’s been no time to go thoroughly into the case. But I would stick to the assumption that a murder has been committed and say it’s Final Report True and that it was murder.’
‘Bikram?’ The gentleness in Prem Gupta’s voice was unmistakable. Toofan Kumar frowned.
Bikram was not going to put up a fight. He looked up briefly at Prem Gupta and then looked away. Then, in a tone of complete indifference, he said, ‘You can say the doctor was pig-headed and I was wrong. You can say that it was all wildly off the mark and dismiss the case.’
‘I can do what I like, and so I will,’ Prem Gupta said with an edge to his voice. ‘But I asked for your opinion.’
There was another uncomfortable silence, till Bikram said wearily, ‘I feel sick of the whole thing. I had met the man a few days before his death at a … gathering, and he had looked perfectly all right to me. Full of life, in spite of his afflictions. Then, just days later, he dies, and I find empty foils of tablets stuffed under chicken bones and onion rings in a rubbish heap in the garden. I’d like to know how he swallowed them and why, whether someone had spiked his Horlicks with them, and whether that person or those people are walking around scot-free and laughing at us. I’m a realist, and there have been plenty of unsolved homicides in my career, but somehow this one is getting on my nerves. As Ghosh said, there’s something about that house and its inhabitants that gives me the shivers.’
Prem Gupta looked at his watch. ‘It is second May today, and, therefore, close to a month since the death of the unfortunate man. The municipal elections will be held in August and we’ll all be busy by July. Thank heavens we haven’t made any hasty arrests. I give all of you another month before I begin to officially lose interest in the case. Circumstantial evidence points to something sinister in this death, but, as Toofan feels, that could also be our bias, set off by a hyper-excited doctor. But then again, this Pyne is the sort of man who will dig his heels in and not give up. I can tell you, Toofan, that even if we were to declare the murder to be a mistake and ask for the case to be dismissed, the good doctor will refuse to be beaten. And please don’t forget the press. They will be baying for our blood, and the fact that both Bikram and Toofan have partied with the Bose family will be dug out and examined with great care. Either way, we’re stuck, and have to make the most of it.’
Prem Gupta looked at his audience who were now all looking uneasy, except Bikram, whose brow was knitted in a tremendous frown. Prem Gupta waited for a moment and said, ‘Well now, I think it’s time for a truce. All of you have been working very hard, yes, even you, Sheena, though I haven’t asked you your opinion yet, I know you’ve been helping all along. I’ll order some more coffee, and this time it mustn’t go cold.’ The coffee was a bad idea. Bikram’s annoyance had somehow vitiated the atmosphere and Chuni Sarkar and Ghosh remained quiet. Prem Gupta, who disliked scenes, turned to Toofan Kumar and discussed other departmental work with him. Bikram left his coffee untasted and sat brooding on his chair.
It was a relief when the meeting broke up. Prem Gupta tactfully asked Toofan Kumar to stay back, and worked hard at calming him down by judicious references to his past successes and his possible future ones. He asked about his attempts at bagging the United Nations assignment and promised to put in a word when in Delhi the next time. After Toofan Kumar had left, Prem Gupta tried to get Bikram on his cell phone, hoping to spend another ten minutes with him. This was impossible because Bikram’s cell phone was switched off and he was not to be found in his office.
‘That’s funny,’ said Prem Gupta to himself. ‘I didn’t know he was so unreasonable.’ Puzzled and pained, he went about his business trying to put the morning’s impromptu meeting out of his mind.
15
Bikram had given Raja a photo of Buro taken on the night of Robi’s death. Mistry had surreptitiously taken Raja to the Bose residence and dropped him at the corner, so he could follow Buro’s movements. Raja, at first, overpowered by the detective impulse, religiously watched the house from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. This was quite an effort for him, because Raja was a creature of the night, and felt quite unwell in the incandescence of day. He carried chips and nuts in one pocket and packets of cigarettes and spiced chewing tobacco in another. For five days, he relieved himself in the bushes, slapped mosquitoes off his neck, listened to dial-in programmes on his cell phone radio and cleaned and dug his nose and ears. But Buro seemed to shun the outside world. Once a day, he walked to the grocery shop at the end of the road and came back with a bag of vegetables and soda bottles. Raja, tailing him from a distance, also had to buy things from the shop and, on the third day, felt that the shopkeeper looked at him significantly. Accordingly, on day six and seven, Raja took it easy and reappeared for duty on day eight. He spent a whole day on the pavement. At about 4 p.m., Buro drew up on a motorcycle at the Bose residence with a small bag strapped on to the passenger seat.
‘How was your trip, Buro?’ shouted the watchman cheerfully. ‘We missed you these two days!’
‘Fine! I don’t think I need to go out again for some time.’
Raja stared, dismayed. Could it be, then, that Buro suspected? In spite of his playful ways, Raja was a professional criminal and knew his job. He gave up his post immediately and reported to Bikram. ‘Trouble, Sir. I think the rat knows I’m tailing him. He wouldn’t stir out of the house all the while I was there and drove off for a two-day trip the minute I wasn’t. Came back carrying a black bag.’
‘Did they have any guests or parties on the days you were on guard?’
‘Not a thing. All they did was buy vegetables.’
‘Did you see anyone who looked like masseuse or a tailor?’
‘I saw a pretty young girl come in on foot on the third day I was there, and she could have been the masseuse, but I didn’t see any tailor. The lady goes out a lot, that she does. Drives out on her own. Cars come to the house in the afternoon. Big, expensive cars with tinted windows. All stylish people, looks like.’
You’ve been a great help, thought Bikram gloomily, especially in tipping off Buro and Nisha Bose. But he thanked Raja in honeyed tones and told him to lie low till fresh orders. A relieved Raja loped off to the Savoy Hotel for a drink or two.
Tara hadn’t quite realized how tired she was until she faced the long climb up the stairs to her house. The roar of the evening ride back still echoed in her ears. Without pausing to talk to anyone, she went in for her bath. Towelling her hair, she surveyed herself in the mirror. A narrow face, a little lined, framed by straight dark hair with a pair of enormous eyes looked back steadily. That evening, like many evenings before, embarrassing, almost, in the regularity of monotony and loneliness, Tara gulped down her evening mash of vegetable curry and a shrivelled onion-and-chilli omelette before fleeing to the seclusion of her room. She sat on the bed and eyed the table, then flung open the drawer and extracted a leather bag whose contents she tipped out on to the bed. Tara looked at the tablets and capsules scattered before her. Her hands had begun to tremble already and the bottles of brandy wrapped in newspaper at the back of the drawer seemed to be beckoning compellingly. She hesitated. Then, on an impulse, she slammed the drawer shut, picked up her purse, dug out a piece of paper, dialled the number written on it and waited. Would he pick it up?
He did.
Tara almost choked when she heard his voice and tears sprang unbidden to her eyes. ‘Is that Bikram Chatterjee speaking?’ The connection was faulty, for the sound was echoing and, to Tara, her voice seemed hoarse and strange over the telephone.
‘It is.’
‘I’m Tara, Robi Bose’s cousin.’ Always a crisis of identity, she thought grimly. Even though the bastard’s dead.
‘Yes.’ His voice sounded cool and distant.
‘I have something to say, to �
�� to confess … no, inform. About the Boses.’
There was silence and then the voice came back, stronger and certainly warmer. ‘This connection is not very good, Tara. Would you like to come to my office tomorrow and discuss the matter? Unless, of course, it is something you would prefer to talk over the phone, and I can ring you back.’
‘It’s something very personal and it cannot be said in the office. In any case, I don’t think I can trust myself till tomorrow.’
‘Then this is what I suggest. I’ll be at your place in half an hour. And thanks for calling. I know what an enormous effort it takes to ring up the police if you’ve got something to say. You’re very brave.’
On his way to the lift, Bikram rang up Ghosh. ‘The cousin’s cracked.’
‘Dead?’
‘No, for god’s sake! We don’t need another corpse. She’s got something to tell me. I can tell you it’s going to be good. I’ve asked Sheena Sen to be in the house, too, but …’
‘But talk to her alone,’ Ghosh completed Bikram’s sentence. ‘And give them the Bikram touch. Metaphorically speaking, that is,’ he added.
‘Your humour is reaching new limits nowadays,’ said Bikram. ‘Goodbye.’
Tara was waiting for him on the balcony. Bikram saw her as soon as he turned off the car engine. Without waiting to see him alight, she disappeared from view and reappeared as Bikram was struggling with a rusted iron padlock on the ancient gate. Bikram took a good look at her then, as she fussed with the latch and let them in. Though she was not plain, it was difficult to say whether she was attractive or not. Certainly her eyes, deep pools of black, gave her a curious Madonna-like quality. At present, those eyes were filled with distrust.
Tara took them up the stairs quietly. Bikram could hear a television blaring and a woman coughing in an inside room.
‘Your father?’
‘Does not know as yet.’
She motioned Sheena Sen down to the sagging sofa in the drawing room.
‘I’d like to talk to Mr Chatterjee alone, in my room. If you could please sit here.’
Bikram looked at Tara with surprise and interest. Gone was the diffident young lady sitting coyly in the Tollygunge police station with her father ranting beside her.
Tara climbed up to her room on the roof, pulled out a rattan chair for Bikram and sat on the bed. She could hardly believe the events of the last half-hour or so. Was it really she who had phoned and made him come here, he, whom she had dreamed and hallucinated about on the very bed before which he now sat? Then she took a deep breath and began. ‘For a start, I am addicted to prescription medicines. I’ve been hooked for the last year or so. If what I have to say here today is not worth anything because it’s an addict’s testimony then you’d better let me know.’
Bikram said nothing.
‘Well?’
‘Tara, swallowing a few alprazolams and codeine tablets does not classify you as an addict. There are worse things than that.’
‘But …’
‘For that matter, I take valium myself once or twice a week to help me sleep.’ Bikram who, Shona complained, needed nothing more than a flat surface to fall effortlessly into a sound sleep, hoped he was making the right noises.
‘Then you will perhaps understand the terrible compulsion of having one’s life ruled by the absolute necessity of having … how did you know?’
Bikram pointed to the bedside table drawer. In her excitement, it had been left partly open by Tara, displaying its contents. ‘They had rave parties, didn’t they?’ asked Bikram gently.
Tara nodded dumbly.
‘Were there drugs involved?’
‘I think so. I’m not sure. I wasn’t ever asked to those parties, but I suspected.’
‘Did Robi Bose know?’
‘He was sharp enough never to discuss it with me. People thought he had lost his senses along with his physical well-being, but he was remarkably quick. He would have gone on for years, had it not been for Nisha.’
‘Why Nisha?’
‘Because she began this dangerous business. When Robi had his stroke Nisha had a kind of nervous breakdown. Her doctor friends prescribed her a whole array of mood lifters and tranquillizers. At first she stuck to the prescription, but she soon succumbed to the thrill of it. That’s where I came in. The chemist in our locality gives us medicines without prescriptions. Nisha’s fashionable neighbourhood chemist wouldn’t do that. She used me to get herself a steady supply of painkillers and tranquillizers, and got me hooked in the process.’
‘And did Robi too have access to all those medicines?’
‘He did. I almost think Nisha hoped Robi would overdose himself on them accidentally and make things easier for her. She’d made that house a chemist’s shop with all those medicines, or rather, a house of the dead. Never any laughter there, or joy. Only plotting and complaining, phony friends and wickedness. That house is fashioned in the image of its mistress and she is all-consuming, all-devouring. She finished Robi.’
‘Do you think she murdered him?’
‘Yes, I do. She was tired of waiting. She and the servants fed him all those painkillers and would have passed it off as a natural death, had it not been for that doctor. I know that because she made me buy three strips of painkillers just two days before Robi died.’
‘What painkiller was that?’
‘Tramadol.’
Lily Lahiri was correcting answer papers when the telephone rang. Only a few of her closest associates knew that she gave lessons in Math and English to schoolchildren of grades five, six and seven, in a discreet tutorial group that met at her house twice a week. Lily Lahiri maintained a car and two servants, had memberships in two clubs and occasionally travelled, but all that created a financial strain and she could use the extra cash.
‘Lily here,’ she drawled.
‘Madam, I am Roy speaking.’
‘Yes?’
‘I was given your number by Nisha Bose.’
‘So?’
‘We have an excellent collection of Bangladeshi saris, pure cotton, intricate designs, gossamer-fine …’
‘I am not interested.’ Lily Lahiri banged down the phone.
She went for her bath, leaving the answer papers on the table. The full-time maid was on leave and the daily would be in any time. When she reappeared, wearing a printed kaftan with an expensive satin fluting that showed only a hint of raggedness, the doorbell rang. Lily Lahiri went to open the door for her maid. Two men stood on the doormat. They were short and stocky, each carried two black bags, and kept smiling.
Lily Lahiri’s heart froze. She had never seen them before and wondered how they could have got past the security desk at the entrance. She thought of all the stories in the newspapers and wondered if she, too, was to become the subject of one of those stories.
The men had pushed in and shut the door. They were still smiling.
‘Why did you hang up on us so rudely, Aunty? Didn’t we say that we have some interesting things to show you?’
As if to illustrate his point, one of the men hoisted the bag on to a low coffee table. Lily’s heart sank. His fly was unzipped and she turned her face away with a strangled moan. Was it to be the other thing too?
The bag was opened and out tumbled saris. Lily panicked, thinking the worst, and in that moment, she blurted the first thing that popped into her mind: ‘Get out!’
‘It’s all right.’
‘Leave at once.’
‘Look at this sari, the colour of spring leaves!’
‘How dare you!’
The men continued to pull out saris and strew them on the carpet, settling down comfortably, patting and unfolding their wares.
Lily Lahiri considered running out to the landing and ringing her neighbour’s doorbell, but that would mean leaving the men inside which was, perhaps, what they wanted. What a mess! Where was her cell phone? She remembered it was in her kaftan pocket, for she had taken her phone in with her, in case the maid was too l
ong at the door and could give Lily a missed call from her number.
With shaking hands Lily took out the phone and dialled Toofan Kumar. The phone rang and was disconnected. Poor Lily Lahiri could not possibly know that Toofan Kumar was at a meeting with senior bureaucrats over anti-government demonstrations scheduled to rock Calcutta through the whole week and had no time for Lily Lahiri.
The men were throwing saris on to the sofa. One of them asked her whom she was calling.
‘Nisha, to find out if she really knows you.’
‘Of course she does.’
The men were now giggling. ‘Nisha is close to our hearts, we have a long association with that family, you can ring up and find out all you want to know. May we use your bathroom?’
Lily Lahiri, who was sweating with fright, signalled them towards the service toilet and dialled Bikram Chatterjee’s number. The man with the unzipped fly had left. Lily walked to the window. A cool voice answered the phone and Lily quavered, ‘Bikram Chatterjee, is that you? I’m Lily Lahiri, I had come with Toofan Kumar’s reference that day, for god’s sake help me, two men have entered my flat saying they want to sell Dhaka saris, they just forced their way in, no, I did not ask them to come, I thought it was my maid, I’m all alone, they might kill me, I can’t even go to the lift and scream … it’s …’, here she gave her address.
Fortunately for her, Bikram knew the voice of genuine terror when he heard it.
Lily finished her phone call and looked around. The men were patting the saris, but this time they were folding them away and putting them back inside the bag.
‘Really, Aunty, you shouldn’t worry so much. Calling the police and all! Did you think we came to rob you, or tease you, or have a look around or a bit of fun?’
Pat, pat, pat went the saris. Bits of the tissue covering had rolled on to the carpet but the men took no notice.
The men stood up and smiled.