Vish Puri 02; The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing

by Tarquin Hall

  “Don’t worry, Chubby,” she said. “There’ll be plenty of food.”

  ♦

  The contrast between the sedate Metro and the feverish world above left Puri wondering if he had not imagined the underground journey.

  It was not uncommon for him to experience such a sense of dislocation when working in Delhi these days. The India of beggars and farmer suicides and the one of cafes selling frothy Italian coffee were like parallel dimensions. As he slipped back and forth between them, he often found himself pondering the ancient Indian axiom that this world is but maya, an illusion, a collective dream.

  Riding in the back of Tubelight’s auto rickshaw as it bumped, shuddered and zigzagged along the turbulent byways of Shadipur quickly snapped the detective out of his reverie, however.

  The slum, one of Delhi’s largest, was inhabited almost entirely by street entertainers: puppeteers, snake charmers, bear handlers, acrobats, musicians, troupes of actors who performed plays with social messages, the odd storyteller and jadoo wallahs. But the view through the scratched, convex windscreen was depressingly familiar: a sooty ghetto of ramshackle brick houses smothered in cow dung patties. Plastic sheeting, chunks of concrete and twisted scrap metal were draped over roofs. Canvas tents were pitched amidst heaps of garbage, where filthy, half-clad children defecated and played.

  Eyes – curious, anxious, searching, cloudy with cataracts – stared out from doorways; slit windows; smoke-filled, pencil-thin alleyways. Puri caught glimpses of dark-skinned women with half-veiled faces cooking chappatis over open fires. Families crouched on charpoys eating from shared bowls with their hands. Young men stood out in the open in their underpants, washing themselves.

  Like any jungle, it was infested with animals. Mangy mutts ran snarling alongside the auto rickshaw; chickens and ducks clucked and squawked as they scurried out of the way of the oncoming vehicle; monkeys hanging from electrical cables illegally tapping the power grid screeched overhead at the intruders on their territory.

  Tubelight pulled up outside a narrow, ramshackle house.

  “This is the place,” he said in Hindi, looking around nervously. “I’ll have to wait outside.” He added quickly: “To keep an eye on my auto.” And then: “Someone might steal it.”

  “I am to face the jadoo wallah alone, is it?” mused Puri in English. “Let us hope he does not turn me into a frog.”

  “Let’s hope, Boss.”

  “But he said he is willing to talk to me, is it?”

  “I told him you wanted to see some magic and were willing to pay. The rest is up to you.”

  Puri knocked on the door. A young boy answered, looked the detective up and down and motioned him inside. They crossed a small, drab room and stepped out into a courtyard. From there, they mounted a flight of concrete stairs that curled around the outside of the house like a python.

  Akbar the Great, descendant of courtly magicians, was sitting on a charpoy on the roof. His eyes were those of an anxious man, one who had lived his life by his wits and expected trouble around every corner. Still, he greeted his visitor with a respectful salaam and his right hand placed over his heart.

  “Please forgive the conditions in which we must welcome such an honored guest,” he said in a lyrical Urdu rarely heard in Delhi these days. Akbar the Great’s wrinkled face was surmounted by an impeccably clean topi. His white beard reached his chest. “Once we entertained Mughal emperors. Babur, Humayan, Aurangzeb – all loved our magic. In those bygone days, they rewarded us with precious stones – rubies from Badakhshan, diamonds from Golkonda. But now we are reduced to performing on the streets for a few rupees, constantly harassed and beaten by the police. Earlier today we were outside the Red Fort and they chased us away and hit us with their lathis.”

  “There is no need to apologize on my account, Baba,” said the detective, who knew only too well that India’s Muslims, the largest minority in the world, were amongst its most marginalized. He sat down on a chair facing the magician. “It is an honor to meet you. I am told that you are the greatest magician in all of India.”

  Akbar the Great acknowledged this praise with an assuming nod.

  “I’m known from one part of India to the next!” he declared with a flourish of his worn hands. “There is not a village or town where I have not performed. Ask anyone and they will have heard of Akbar the Great – he who can pull thorns from his tongue, swallow steel balls whole and bring the dead back to life!” His patter sounded well rehearsed; he delivered it as he might to an audience on the street. “But nowadays people are not interested in magic. They all want to stay at home and watch TV, an invention of the evil one, Shaitan!”

  The boy who had answered the front door, one of Akbar the Great’s great-grandsons as it turned out, served tea in chipped cups as the Muslim call to prayer sounded over the slum. Beyond the roof’s precipitous edge lay the jutting, irregular rooftops of Shadipur – homemade TV aerials, laundry lines and plastic water tanks superimposed against the setting sun.

  “I was told you have come to see me perform,” said Akbar the Great, as they began to sip their tea. “My fee is five hundred rupees.”

  “Forgive me, Baba, but I did not come here to see your show,” said Puri.

  “Oh?”

  “I am seeking information. And for this I am willing to pay one thousand.” Puri took the money from his wallet.

  “What kind of information?” Akbar the Great sounded suspicious, but his eyes were fixed on the crisp hundred-rupee notes in the detective’s hand.

  “Baba, I need your guidance. I am investigating the murder of Dr. Jha, the Guru Buster. You must have heard that he was killed yesterday morning on Rajpath. I believe the so-called Kali apparition was nothing of the kind. It was an illusion. I would like to understand how the levitation in particular was achieved.”

  Akbar surveyed him with a deep frown.

  “You’re a policeman?”

  “No, Baba. I am Vish Puri, the private investigator.”

  “You’re working for someone?”

  “Only for myself. The victim was a friend of mine.”

  Akbar the Great thought for a while, stroking his long beard, and then said something in a strange language to his great-grandson. With a nod, the boy stepped forward, held out a hand for the money and took it. Then the magician said: “How it was done is irrelevant. Perhaps it was real jadoo! Perhaps it was only a trick. Who knows? It’s what people believe that is the important thing.”

  “What do you mean by real magic?”

  “Genuine miracles performed by those with genuine supernatural powers, of course.”

  “You believe such things are possible?”

  “The Holy Koran is full of examples. So are the Bible and Ramayan. Water can be turned to wine. Many things happen in this life that cannot be explained.”

  “Do you have these powers, Baba?” asked Puri.

  The old man smiled for the first time. It was a kindly, avuncular smile, the detective thought to himself.

  “Alas, I’m only a humble magician,” he said. “I do simple tricks and entertain people. But what the audience believes… well, that’s another matter. When I bring a chicken back to life – as I often do – they ask me how it is done. If I tell them it is a magic trick, a sleight of hand achieved by distraction, they get very angry and accuse me of hiding something from them! To appease them I have to say that I get my powers by sleeping at the cremation ground. Then they’re satisfied and stop accusing me of being a fraud!” The magician smiled indulgently. “You see,” he added, “people need to believe in these things. They want to be fooled, but they do not want to be made fools of!”

  A thought suddenly occurred to him.

  “I will perform a simple trick for you,” he said. “It’s not part of my normal routine, so I don’t mind explaining how it’s done. It might help you understand how easily people’s eyes are deceived.”

  Soon Akbar the Great was lying on the roof’s solid concrete surfac
e. The boy, who was regularly chopped to pieces on the streets of Delhi only to be miraculously reassembled again, announced in a loud, confident voice: “Make obeisance to the feet of Indra, whose name is one with magic, and to the feet of Shambara, whose glory was firmly established in illusions!”

  Puri watched with rapt attention.

  “During his travels across the length and breadth of India, my great-grandfather Akbar the Great has collected many magical objects. Rings, cloaks that can turn you invisible, a bottle that houses a terrible djinn – heaven forbid that it should ever escape!”

  The boy held up a dirty blanket.

  “It was high up in the Himalayas that he was given this from a man with three eyes! Now, it may look like an ordinary blanket to you. But anyone lying beneath it will float off the ground and up into the air!”

  He draped the blanket over his grandfather.

  “I will now make Akbar the Great, greatest magician in all of India, float up above the roof!” he declared – and as an aside, he added with the cheeky humor characteristic of Indian street jadoo wallahs: “Let us hope Baba did not have too large a lunch or he will be too heavy!”

  The boy closed his eyes, held his hands over his greatgrandfather’s body, moved them around as if he was divining for water and spoke the magic words, “Yantru-mantra-jaala-jaala-tantru!”

  Nothing happened for ten seconds. He repeated his incantation. And then Akbar the Great’s body began to shudder and rise upward.

  The magician floated to a height of roughly three feet and remained there, suspended in midair.

  For the life of him, Puri could not see how the trick was done. There were no wires connected to the blanket; no one was holding Akbar the Great up; no box had been slipped under him; there was no trapdoor. “You’ve got some kind of lifting device under there?” he asked after the magician had gently floated back down to earth.

  “The jasoos is clueless!” cackled Akbar the Great with delight. “Where are your powers of detection now, sahib?”

  There were hoots of laughter from the five or six other members of Akbar the Great’s family who had by now gathered on the roof. Puri bristled; he did not like to be made a fool of.

  “Are you going to tell me how it is done?” he demanded.

  “I told you earlier, I got my powers at the cremation ground!”

  The laughter reached a crescendo and then the magician pulled back the blanket.

  Beneath lay two old hockey sticks, one on either side of him. A pair of shoes and socks identical to those Akbar the Great was wearing were attached to the ends.

  “As the blanket was laid over me, you were distracted and didn’t notice when I made the switch. Then I raised the sticks under the blanket and, at the same time, elevated my head. My feet and backside remained on the floor the entire time.”

  “By God! I would never have imagined it could be so simple,” exclaimed the detective in English, clapping enthusiastically. And then reverting to Hindi again he said: “But whoever killed Dr. Jha yesterday was not under a blanket. The video taken by the French tourist shows Kali floating free. How was that done?”

  Akbar the Great shrugged. “That I cannot answer,” he said.

  “Can you at least tell me who is capable of such a feat?”

  Puri’s question was met with a stony silence. Akbar the Great said something to the boy, who in turn told Puri politely but firmly: “My great-grandfather is getting very tired and needs to rest.”

  The audience had come to an end. But the detective managed to get in one last question.

  “Tell me, Baba. Could a rationalist have pulled off this illusion?”

  Akbar the Great shook his head. “Rationalists learn simple tricks that are done by traveling sadhus, like holding pots of boiling oil in their bare hands or piercing themselves with needles. The man you are looking for is no rationalist. He is an illusionist. Or perhaps someone who knows real magic.”

  ♦

  Puri and Tubelight made their way back through the slum.

  The meeting had proven useful but also frustrating.

  “Could be Akbar the Great is knowing the identity of the murderer,” said Puri. “Question is: Why protect him?”

  “There’s probably some kind of magician’s code, Boss,” suggested Tubelight in Hindi. “If they’re anything like my family, they’re sworn never to reveal the identity of another member of the clan. Maybe the murderer’s a blood relative. In which case they’ll never give him up.”

  It was only after the auto rickshaw had pulled into the main road that Puri discovered a piece of paper in one of his trouser pockets.

  It had a name and address written on it.

  “Manish the Magnificent. Hey Presto! GK1 M Block Market.”

  He showed it to Tubelight. “Someone slipped it into my pocket!” marveled Puri.

  “Want to go to GK, Boss?”

  Puri checked his watch. It was nearly eight. “Jaldi challo!” he said.

  ♦

  Manish the Magnificent’s picture appeared on a board on the pavement outside the entrance to Hey Presto! – “magic, comedy, music and more.” He was wearing a maharajah’s garb: bejeweled turban, silken robes and fake whiskers. Puri recognized him instantly nonetheless. His real name was Jaideep Prabhu.

  “So you’ve been reincarnated after so many years, is it, Jaideep?” said the detective to himself. “Takes a master of disguise to see through one, huh.”

  The hostess at the door led him into a restaurant-cum-bar bedecked with mirrors, rotating disco balls and velvet-upholstered booths. It was packed with good-looking young people. Laughter and cigarette smoke filled the air.

  Puri sat down at a small table near the stage, where a jazz pianist and saxophonist were playing Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’.

  “By God! Eight hundred for whisky!” he exclaimed out loud when he read over the drinks menu. “That’s for the entire bottle, is it?”

  The young waiter, who had a ponytail and an overly familiar bearing, eyed the man in the safari suit, Sandown cap and aviator sunglasses with undisguised bemusement.

  “Hey, man, what time are you on tonight?” he asked.

  “Pardon?” replied Puri sharply.

  “You’re one of the stand-ups, right?”

  The detective, who rarely lost his temper, could barely restrain himself. “Listen, Charlie, I am a private investigator and I am here to see your boss,” he growled through gritted teeth. “Give him this.” He handed the insolent young man his card.

  “‘Vish Puri, managing director, chief officer and winner of six national awards, confidentiality is our watchword’,” read the waiter out loud. “That’s hilarious! I can’t wait to see your act.”

  The detective banged his fist down hard on the table. “I am not an act!” he exploded. “Now go tell Jaideep Prabhu that Vish Puri is here!”

  The other customers were all staring.

  “OK, dude,” said the waiter, holding up his hands defensively. “I thought you were… so you’re for real. Wow! I’ll give the boss your card. Relax, OK? Now what can I get you?”

  “Bring one peg whisky and soda. No ice. And don’t call me ‘man’ or ‘dude’! You should call elders ‘ji’ or ‘sir’!”

  “Fine, sir. But just so you know… my name’s not Charlie.”

  The waiter headed off to the bar to fetch his drink.

  Puri sat back in his chair, fuming. Some of the other customers were still eyeing him. They looked amused. Why exactly, the detective could not fathom. Self-consciously, he checked his cap to make sure it was sitting squarely on his head.

  How he hated these new ‘trendy’ haunts! Like the malls, they were indicative of a crass materialism and hedonism undermining the family values that underpinned Indian society.

  Take those females at the next table, for example, Puri thought. Baring their legs in public, drinking alcohol, using gutter language: totally disgraceful. Or those two nancy boys over there, the ones in silk shirts and
big sideburns. By God, they’re holding hands actually! What the bloody hell kind of place you’re running here, Jaideep? he wondered.

  Puri felt a letter to the editor of the Times of India coming on. Perhaps he would juxtapose his views with those of the late Dr. Jha. The rationalist had not been a fan of this crass, Americanized culture, either. To him education and knowledge had been all-important.

  But they had held opposing views on the role of religion. Dr. Jha had often referred to dogma as the ‘root of all evil’. The detective, on the other hand, regarded a belief in the divine as essential. Without it, in his view, society would disintegrate.

  “The boss says to tell you he’ll be backstage after the show, sir,” said the waiter when he returned with Puri’s drink.

  The jazz musicians finished their set, the lights were dimmed and then a mist began to creep across the stage.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said a voice offstage. “Tonight you will be astounded and spellbound, taken to new heights of expectation and reality! Prepare your mind to travel to new frontiers, beyond time and space! Prepare to be dazzled by the greatest magician in all of India!”

  A flash and a puff of smoke and Manish the Magnificent appeared onstage. His sudden appearance engendered a round of applause and he bowed regally.

  “For my first death-defying trick I will need a volunteer from the audience,” he announced.

  One of the leggy women at the nearby table was chosen and made her way up to the stage, sniggering and exchanging looks with her friends. The magician produced a pistol.

  “I would like you to examine this and tell the audience if it is real.”

  She did so and agreed that it certainly looked real, and then Manish the Magnificent made a show of loading the weapon with bullets. To prove these were ‘live ones’, he asked that a paper target on a stand be placed at the back of the stage. Once it was in position, he fired three times. The target, drilled with three round holes, was then shown to the audience.

  “Now it’s your turn,” he told his young volunteer. “Only your target will be this tin can, which I will balance on top of my head!”

  “Are you crazy?”