Last Victim of the Monsoon Express

by Vaseem Khan

  ‘This has been a difficult investigation,’ Chopra began. ‘From the beginning, it has been about more than just a man’s death. This journey that we are on, the symbolic nature of what we hoped to achieve when we set off, everything might have been undone by Neil Bannerjee’s killing. It may still be. But that is out of my hands.

  ‘I now know certain facts, which I wish to set before you.

  ‘Firstly, Bannerjee was an unlikeable man. Arrogant, cruel, supremely selfish, ruthlessly ambitious. Was he a bad man? In the eyes of some, yes. To others, he was merely a product of his environment, a man of his age. What this meant, however, is that there are many on this train who might have wished him harm.’ He allowed this to sink in. ‘At first I wondered if his killing was a deliberate attempt to derail the peace initiative. But that would imply that someone came on this journey under false pretences, with the intention of sabotaging the mission. I rejected this scenario early on, because I chose to work on the assumption that your governments would not have sent you along if they believed you would undermine their efforts.’ Chopra paused. ‘This left me with a personal motive for Bannerjee’s killing. And there have proved to be many of you here with such motives.

  ‘James Fairbrother and Ellen Howe, who were being blackmailed about their affair. Justice Khan, who wished to strike a blow for Kashmir, where many had died as a result of an action ordered by Bannerjee during his time there. Bannerjee’s own wife, Kimi Rawal, who wanted a divorce that he was not prepared to give her. Mary Ribeiro, who had once been scammed by Bannerjee. Pravin Sharma, his deputy, angry at being pushed aside, and with everything to gain now that his boss is out of the way. And, of course, there is Hassan Sher Agha, in whose suite the murder weapon was discovered.’ He paused again. ‘In spite of all these motives, one vital piece of evidence bothered me. A bobbin found inside Bannerjee’s throat. With it was the word “Aparigraha”. An accusation. Someone knew Bannerjee for the man he was and blamed him for something, some misdeed vile enough to kill for. But what exactly was his crime?

  ‘I have since discovered that the bobbin belonged to a man who died in 1977 during the Emergency. He too was a victim of Bannerjee’s ambition, killed by police as Bannerjee led a local sterilisation campaign. That man was Subir Roy, a widower living in the Mumbai suburbs.

  ‘Roy had a child. After his death, that child ended up in an orphanage. In spite of this the child excelled at school before going on to college. Years later, that child joined the civil service. In time the child married, had a family, a child of their own. At some point the child crossed paths with Bannerjee again, who, by then, had become a big wheel in the Congress Party. Those old feelings of hatred, for the man who had taken away a father, condemning our killer to an orphanage, returned.

  ‘And then an opportunity presented itself. Bannerjee was selected for the Monsoon Express journey. Our killer found a way to get aboard the train, and last night murdered Bannerjee in cold blood. They left the bobbin there, as a reminder of everything he had taken from them.’

  ‘Who is this killer?’ asked Hassan Sher Agha.

  ‘Subir Roy had a daughter,’ replied Chopra. ‘In 1977, she was eleven years old. Today she is fifty-two. Her maiden name was Roy, but after her marriage it changed. It became Sen. Aparna Sen.’

  A collective gasp echoed around the carriage. In the silence that followed all that could be heard was the rattling of the train.

  Aparna Sen appeared frozen in place. All eyes focused on her, until, finally, she shivered back to life. ‘I loved him. My father was my whole world. Bannerjee took him from me. The idea of this man getting everything that he wanted, of becoming the leader of our nation . . . I could not live with that.

  ‘I came across him when I moved to Delhi with my husband – I was working for the civil service as a publicist for government initiatives. For years, I tried to control the rage that I felt, but as time went by I knew that I had to do something. I went to see him, requested a transfer to his staff. I became close to him, though it sickened me. He was the sort of man willing to keep women who fawned over him close to hand.

  ‘When the Monsoon Express mission came up I saw my opportunity. I went to his home, pretended that I was willing to have an affair with him, if he could get me on the delegation. I told him we could consummate our affair on the train. The idea appealed to his sense of vanity, I suppose, because he managed to pull the necessary strings.’ Her eyes had glazed over. Chopra thought that she might even be talking to herself, finally relieved to be able to confess her unspeakable crime. ‘I still didn’t know if I had it in me to do it, not until the last moment.

  ‘Some time in the evening, after dinner, I went to the galley and stole the knife. I had almost summoned the courage to act when Kimi Rawal came to my suite wishing to stay with me. I thought my chance had gone, but then, in the middle of the night, she got up and left. That was my moment. I followed her, saw her enter Bannerjee’s suite, then come out again just minutes later. She went straight out onto the viewing platform. I rushed into the suite, saw Bannerjee with his head in his hands. I asked him to come to the bed. He stumbled towards me. When he was lying down on it, I looked into his face and told him who I was. And then I stabbed him.’ She stopped. ‘I stayed to watch the light go out of his eyes, then placed the bobbin in his throat, took the knife and left. The next morning, when I saw the searches beginning, I panicked. My plan had been to take the knife with me when the train stopped at Delhi. But now I knew I could not hold on to it.

  ‘I saw Hassan Sher Agha leaving his suite. I had already stolen a master key the night before from the security officers’ room – I thought I might need it to get into Bannerjee’s suite. I had gone to see Singh, pretending that I wished to go over the security arrangements for Delhi. While I was there I saw the key on a peg on the wall. I took it while he was distracted.

  ‘I left the knife in Agha’s cabin, knowing he would be the perfect suspect. It was the reason I chose the train for my revenge, instead of killing Bannerjee earlier. I knew the presence of the Pakistani delegation would muddy the water.’

  A stunned silence greeted the matter-of-fact confession, broken by Chopra. ‘Why did you leave the bobbin?’

  ‘Because it was the one thing that connected me to my father. He taught me how to thread bobbins onto his sewing machine. I would always do that for him. This was the bobbin I had threaded for him the day he was killed.’

  Chopra stepped forward. ‘I am sorry for your loss. But you have committed murder and for that a price has to be paid.’ He turned to Singh. ‘Please confine her to her cabin.’

  When she had been led away, Pravin Sharma approached. ‘Thank you, Chopra. You may just have saved this mission.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘This mission was never in any danger from the murder, but rather from the reflex hatred that it aroused. In all of you. You don’t need me to rescue it. It is in your own hands.’

  Sharma considered these words, then turned to Hassan Sher Agha. ‘The man has a point,’ he said. ‘If we allow Bannerjee’s death to derail us, we will truly have failed. As Chopra says: it’s in our hands. Literally.’

  He held out his hand.

  Agha stared at it, then took it in his own. ‘We’ll be at the Wagah border soon. We’ll have to say something about what has happened.’

  Sharma smiled. ‘I’m sure, between us, we can come up with something. Whatever happens now, we shall all hang together.’

  The others watched the two men walk away, already bent in conversation.

  The romance of the railways

  ‘People talk about the romance of the railways,’ said James Fairbrother, ‘but the truth is that railways are built on blood, sweat and tears. My grandfather knew that. I suppose I’m learning it the hard way.’

  They were out on the viewing platform at the front of the train, Fairbrother, Chopra and Homi Contractor, watching the town of Wagah edge closer as the train looped around in a gentle arc through low-lying cropland.<
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  ‘Dead bodies turn up on the trains all the time,’ said Homi, flicking ash from his cigar over the railing. ‘Of course, they’re usually lower on the food chain than a future prime minister.’

  ‘The British built these railways to bring progress to the subcontinent,’ mused Fairbrother. ‘Without them India wouldn’t be what it is today.’

  ‘The British built the railways to enable them to loot and pillage with greater ease,’ said Homi sharply. Fairbrother did not venture a reply.

  Chopra remained silent. With the investigation over his thoughts were moving ahead to what lay in store for them across the border. Above them, a starry night was unfolding.

  ‘Do you think it will ever happen?’ asked Fairbrother. ‘India and Pakistan united in spirit, if not in actuality?’

  ‘In some ways Bannerjee’s death has made that more of a possibility,’ said Homi. ‘A man like that, you couldn’t trust him to do the right thing.’

  ‘It takes only a moment to divide people,’ remarked Chopra, ‘but a lifetime to bring them together again.’

  ‘Very pithy,’ said Homi. ‘You should write fortune cookies.’

  ‘What do you think they’ll say?’ said Fairbrother. ‘In Delhi and Islamabad, when they find out what happened to Bannerjee?’

  ‘I don’t think there’ll be too many tears shed,’ replied Homi. ‘Besides, these things have a way of working themselves out.’

  The Monsoon Express rattled through the green fields of the border region, the lights of the town of Wagah floating into view.

  ‘Seventy years of hatred,’ mused Chopra. ‘And for what?’

  ‘There’s no legislating for the human condition, old friend,’ said Homi. ‘But you know what they say. If you choose violence, you create enemies; if you choose peace, you . . . don’t.’ He frowned.

  Chopra smiled and leaned over the railing. A feeling of excitement was gathering in his stomach. Soon he would enter Pakistan for the first time. In a way, it felt no different to coming home.

  The three men lapsed into silence and watched as the train pulled slowly into the future.

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  The palace by the sea

  Perched on a rocky outcrop thrusting dramatically into the Arabian Sea halfway up the city’s western flank, the Samundra Mahal – the ‘palace by the sea’ – seemed to Inspector Ashwin Chopra (Retd) to encapsulate everything he had come to associate with the Parsees of Mumbai. There was a sense of lofty idealism about the old place, a magnificent grandeur, somewhat dulled now by a creeping decay. Time’s inescapable embrace shimmered around the mansion’s marbled façade: in the crumbling plasterwork, the faded paint, the creepers that wound unhindered between the rusted railings of the wrought-iron gate.

  Truly, thought Chopra, with a twinge of sadness, all things must wither and die.

  He recalled Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias, which he had encountered in his youth. A similar feeling of poignant loss overcame him, for he had always staked some part of himself to the past, even as the future had taken hold of his country, rampaging her along the tracks of modernity like a runaway train. There was still much to be gained, he felt, by reflecting on the millennia-long journey that had laid the foundations for the glittering new society he saw around him.

  In Mumbai, foremost among those who had paved the way for this transformation were the Parsees. Over the span of three centuries their industry and acumen had brought wealth to the great metropolis, and with it the lifeblood of commerce. They had worked for and with the British, then strived just as tirelessly for the Independence movement. In post-colonial India, Parsee philanthropy had shaped social welfare, the arts and, to a large extent, the city’s cosmopolitan mindset.

  Yet, for all this, the Parsees were at a crossroads.

  Once heralded as the grand architects of the city, now fewer than forty thousand remained, an ever dwindling population besieged by the twin onslaughts of intermarriage and their own insularity.

  In a very real sense the Parsees of Mumbai were dying.

  Which made the murder of Cyrus Zorabian, one of the community’s most respected grandees, all the more shocking. For if death could so unceremoniously take a man like Cyrus, then what hope remained for those left behind?

  Chopra had parked his sturdy Tata Venture beneath a succession of coconut palms lining the narrow road that snaked past the mansion. He stepped out now and walked to the rear of the van. A puff of hot air escaped as he swung open the door and let out his companion, the one-year-old baby elephant that had been sent to him almost a year earlier by his long-vanished uncle, Bansi. In the letter accompanying the little calf, Bansi had failed to explain his reasons for sending the enigmatic gift to Chopra, suggesting only that: ‘this is no ordinary elephant.’

  In many ways, his words had proved prophetic.

  The elephant’s arrival had coincided with Chopra’s own retirement from the Mumbai police service, a departure forced upon him by a heart condition known as unstable angina. For a man yet to achieve his fiftieth year, a man who for three decades had known only a singular purpose – the pursuit of justice in khaki – the loss of his post, and with it his allotted place in the grand scheme of things, had been devastating.

  He had wasted little time in self-pity, instead steeling himself to rise swiftly from the ashes of his former life.

  He had opened a restaurant, and, shortly afterwards, a private detective agency.

  The restaurant had been a deliberate attempt to embrace the future, but the agency had materialised by happenstance in the wake of a case that Chopra had continued to pursue after his retirement, ultimately unravelling a major criminal network in the city. The agency’s name he owed to his new ward. He had christened the animal Ganesha, after the elephant-headed god that inspired such maverick devotion around the country. During that first investigation he had discovered that his unusual inheritance possessed depths of intelligence and resourcefulness he could not have guessed at. A year later there was still much about his new companion that he had yet to fathom. But there was little doubt in his mind that his uncle had been right: there was something extraordinary about the creature. He would never claim that the elephant was, in any way, his partner at the detective agency – for that was most assuredly not the case – but he had quickly fallen into the habit of taking the little calf along with him on his peregrinations about the city. Ganesha needed the exercise, and, though he would be loath to admit it, Chopra had become so accustomed to his presence that he sometimes forgot just how ludicrous it might seem to others, a grown man wandering around the crowded metropolis with an elephant in tow.

  Then again, this was India.

  There were stranger sights on the streets of the subcontinent’s most fabulous city than a baby elephant.

  Ganesha trotted down the ramp into the bright haze of mid-morning.

  The temperature was already in the high thirties; heat shimmered from the tarmac and came rolling in off the sea in warm gusts that rustled the leaves of the palms lining the road.

  Gulls cawed in the silence, a rare commodity in Mumbai.

  The little elephant waggled his ears.

  For a brief moment he appeared to contemplate the expanse of blue water glittering before him, sweeping out to a sparkling haze in the far distance, then turned and followed Chopra towards the Samundra Mahal.

  They were met inside the gates of the Zorabian mansion by a tall, severe-looking white man who Chopra guessed to be in his early forties. Introducing himself as William Buckley, personal secretary to the murdered man, he led them through a formal garden and into the mansion. Buckley, with his blond crew cut, watery blue eyes, sunken cheeks and spare fr
ame put Chopra in mind of an ascetic of the type India had in abundance.

  The interior of the mansion was lavishly appointed. Yet, once again, Chopra had the feeling that these fixtures – Carrara marble, Bohemian chandeliers, teakwood sideboards – were the legacy of past grandeur.

  Buckley swept them along a wood-panelled corridor, lined with a succession of baroque, robber-baron family portraits: the Zorabians of Mumbai, staring down upon them through a haze of constipated myopia. Chopra knew that the Zorabian dynasty – beginning with old ‘Bawa’ Rustom Zorabian – numbered among the original group of Parsee families to settle in Mumbai, having fled their ancestral homeland in Persia to protect their faith from an emergent Islam. Combining native intelligence with an unstinting work ethic, they had quickly found their feet in the teeming metropolis, subsequently prospering under British rule. Venerated for their philanthropy and business acumen, the Zorabians, like many Parsees, had managed the enviable trick of amassing great wealth in a land distinguished by its poverty, yet continuing to enjoy the general goodwill of those around them.

  When Independence finally arrived – with a cataclysmic political thunderclap – their close ties to the British had not, to all intents and purposes, earned them lasting opprobrium. Indeed, most Indians had a healthy respect, even an affection – if sometimes grudging – for the lovably eccentric Parsee community, heirs to the legacy of their forebears who had created much of Mumbai’s wealth, and built many of the city’s visionary institutions.

  It was no wonder, then, that Cyrus Zorabian’s death had made headlines around the country; particularly so because of the shocking nature of his passing.

  At the end of the corridor Buckley paused.

  He nodded up at the portrait before him. ‘Mr Zorabian,’ he said simply.

  Chopra examined the painting with a critical eye: Cyrus Zorabian in his pomp, a tall, fleshy man with the glossy cheeks of the ancestrally wealthy, an impressive whisky-drinker’s nose, and a head of swept-back, darkly dyed hair. Dressed in an ivory-coloured three-piece suit, he cut a dashing figure on the front lawn of his home. Here, the portrait suggested, stands a man of rare influence and power. A man used to bending fate to his whim.