The Case of the Love Commandos

by Tarquin Hall

  A sense of hopelessness, of defeat in the face of insurmountable corruption, swept over her. The village headman skimming the children’s only meal was but one of thousands doing the same across the country. The whole system was as rotten as that heap of potatoes. Little wonder that the Mao-inspired Naxalite movement was gaining ground across huge swaths of the country. But violence wasn’t the answer. She’d learned her lesson the hard way as a young idealistic teenager when she’d joined the Maoists in Nepal in their fight against the state. Change could only come from the grassroots, from people producing their own legitimate leaders and then holding them accountable. For that to happen, there needed to be universal education. The words of Rabindranath Tagore came to mind. Even for those at the extremes of poverty, he’d once written, “there can be no question of blind revolution.” By far preferable was a “steady and purposeful education.”

  The thought reassured her, and she walked over to the banyan tree to address the children. Class would begin tomorrow, she announced, and asked that they spread the word through the village.

  Between then and now, she would stock up on chalk and slate tablets. That was all that was needed in terms of equipment, Facecream reflected, remembering the example of biochemist Hargobind Khorana, who had received his early schooling from village teachers under a tree and went on to win a Nobel Prize.

  She also resolved to do something about the food situation. A visit to the pradhan was on the cards.

  But there was no forgetting why she had come to Govind in the first place, of course.

  Ram’s mother had been found dead in a canal a mile from Vishnu Mishra’s ancestral home, Puri had informed her. Facecream’s priority was to find out what had possessed Mrs. Sunder to leave the village on foot last night and to retrace the unfortunate woman’s final earthly steps.

  Six

  The body lay on a table in a crude surgical theater that doubled as an autopsy examination room. A Lucknow Government Hospital bedsheet was draped over it. Where the crisp cotton had come into contact with the skin, damp stains had formed.

  That the deceased was a woman was immediately obvious to Puri. A shock of long hair, leaves and bits of twig caught in its gray tresses, hung over one end of the table. A petite hand, wan after hours lying in muddy canal water, and a set of pigeon toes, deformed by a lifetime of walking barefoot, also protruded from beneath the sheet.

  “To be honest, I’m not a forensics man,” said Dr. Naqvi, who had a big booming voice and was strangely jovial given the morbid surroundings. “Whenever a body turns up and they suspect foul play, a Jallad first cuts open the body and removes the organs and then the cops ask me to take a look. Lucknow doesn’t have a coroner. In fact I don’t believe there’s one in the whole of Uttar Pradesh. No one would want the job. Imagine training for all those years to be a doctor just to spend your time in some stinking place like this.”

  He went on: “I’ve done quite a bit of reading, of course—Dr.Ludwig’s handbook has come in very handy. And I’ve learned a lot from watching American crime shows as well. House is wonderful, but I think Quincy remains my firm favorite. Sometimes I feel a bit like him—Quincy that is. You know—trying to figure out how someone like this poor lady ended up in such terrible circumstances.”

  Puri, who’d persuaded Dr. Naqvi to allow him to take a look at the body, dearly wished he would shut up. His conversation would have been tedious at the best of times and Puri didn’t have much time. He’d passed Inspector Gujar in the corridor outside the “morgue,” and if he was discovered illegally examining the body, the police wallah could make his life difficult. Besides, if there was one thing the detective was averse to (apart from flying, working with Mummy and having to deal with Mrs. Col. P. V. S. Gill, Retd., at the Gymkhana Club), it was spending time around dead bodies. There were four more lying uncovered on the floor, and the stink of formaldehyde and the sight of all the surgical instruments, which looked like they belonged in a Spanish inquisitor’s torture kit, was making him light-headed.

  Puri remained scrupulously punctilious in his manner, however. Naqvi was under no obligation to help him. And as a doctor he commanded respect.

  “You’re certain it was foul play, sir?” asked the detective, who was holding his handkerchief over his mouth.

  “I didn’t get you,” said Dr. Naqvi.

  Puri lowered the handkerchief slightly and repeated the question.

  “Oh, without doubt,” came the reply. “Any first-year medical student could tell you that. This unfortunate lady met with a frightful end. She was shot through the head. Would you like to see?”

  “W-well … I suppose,” stuttered Puri.

  Taking this as a yes, the doctor promptly pulled back the sheet to reveal her face. Puri grimaced to see the ashen skin, the color drained from it as assuredly as life had left the body. The eyes, glassy and vacuous, were fixed on a point far beyond the confines of the hospital theater. Yet somehow her mouth remained contorted in a silent, terrified scream, and her brow was fixed in a questioning frown that spoke less of terror than bewilderment.

  “The bullet entered here, through her left temple,” said Dr. Naqvi, pointing to the wound. “I found what seems to be powder residue, so the weapon must have been held very close.”

  “This was an execution,” said Puri, his mouth filling with an acidic taste brought on by nerves. He swallowed it back, wishing he’d brought a bottle of water, and asked the doctor if he could take a guess at what kind of weapon had been used.

  “As I indicated, I’m not trained in these matters. All I can tell you is the bullet exited down toward the back of the skull.” Dr. Naqvi pointed again. “See here.”

  It wasn’t so much a wound as a gaping hole, the hair around it caked with congealed blood.

  “By God, that poor woman,” mumbled Puri. He walked over to the window to take in some fresh air. “Thank you, Doctor, I think I’ve seen enough,” he said.

  Dr. Naqvi pulled the sheet back over Kamlesh’s face. He said, “She died instantly and not by drowning as the police assumed.”

  “That much is certain,” said Puri as he turned back into the room. “We can assume the killer was taller than she, also. Up to one and a half feet, in fact.”

  “That would make him around six foot.”

  “Six one by my calculation. And a lefty.”

  “Left-handed?” Dr. Naqvi considered Puri’s assertion for a moment and then concluded, “You’re right! He faced her, held the weapon up like so, and fired into her right temple. You see, it is like being Quincy!”

  Puri groaned silently. Who was this person the doctor kept mentioning? And why had he been named after a fruit?

  “You make an estimate time of death at all?” he asked.

  “Hard to say given that she’s been in the water. At a guess twelve hours, but don’t quote me on that.”

  “You came across anything else, sir?”

  “Such as?”

  “Physical abuse of any kind?”

  “None.”

  “You had a … well, thorough, um, look, is it?”

  “At the vaginal area?”

  “Yes … right … that.”

  “I saw no sign of bruising if that’s what you mean.”

  Puri took out his notebook and jotted down a couple of lines on a fresh page.

  “Any personal possessions and all?” he asked.

  “Some bangles, toe rings.”

  “No mobile phone was discovered on her person?”

  “Not that I’m aware.”

  “And she was totally, um, without clothes and all when she came to you, is it?”

  “She was wearing a sari. It’s over there.” Dr. Naqvi indicated the material draped over a chair.

  “Mind if I take a look?”

  “Help yourself.”

  The doctor went to wash his hands in a washbasin in the far corner of the theater and, while rigorously lathering his hands, sang to himself. “What to do with the drunken sailor?�
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  Puri tried his best to ignore him while giving the sari his full attention. Despite having been in the water, it looked relatively new. There was another thing: the cotton was of a high quality—far better than a Dalit village woman would wear while going around her everyday chores or traveling to, say, the local market.

  What had prompted Kamlesh to don her best before heading out of the village just before dusk?

  He stepped back to the table and took a close look at her hands. The left offered nothing of interest. However, on the top of the right, he discovered a symbol—a smiley face. It had been stamped onto the skin with indelible ink—the kind of stamp punched onto the hands of customers at, say, a fairground or water ride as proof of payment.

  Puri took out his mobile phone, managed to locate the camera icon and clicked a picture of the symbol. Dr. Naqvi didn’t notice.

  Inspector Gujar was standing on the front steps of the hospital briefing a rabble of reporters on his arrest of Vishnu Mishra. Puri stopped to listen to the police wallah outlining his case. Kamlesh Sunder’s body had been found less than a mile from Mishra’s ancestral village, the police wallah explained. Vishnu Mishra’s daughter, Tulsi, had eloped yesterday with Kamlesh Sunder’s son, Ram, in Agra. Therefore Vishnu Mishra’s motive was clear. He had abducted the woman from her home, killed her and dumped the body in the canal.

  “The evidence is undeniable,” he added as the reporters let rip with a barrage of questions.

  Where are the couple—Ram and Tulsi—asked one.

  “Both of these individuals are missing,” said Inspector Gujar. “We appeal to anyone with information about their whereabouts to come forward.”

  Could sir confirm that Tulsi Mishra was sprung from Agra University?

  “It’s my understanding that an FIR was filed subsequently by her father yesterday evening,” the inspector answered.

  Puri tarried a little longer and then went in search of his car. He was getting hunger pains and considered stopping en route to the canal to get something to eat, but decided against it. The sooner he reached the spot where the body had been discovered, the better. Already, the scene would be “getting stale.”

  The emptiness of his stomach was not the only discomfort Puri felt during the hour-long drive. There were a number of points about the case niggling at him—“brain itches,” he called them.

  Number one, how was it that young Inspector Gujar had acted so quickly? It was not like the Uttar Pradesh police, or any Indian force for that matter, to be so efficient. Kamlesh’s body had been discovered at dawn this morning and within a few hours there’d been an arrest. What’s more, the suspect was a powerful man—not the kind of individual a lowly inspector simply picked up on a whim. Obviously, someone high up had given the order.

  Second, Inspector Gujar had stated outside the hospital that he believed Vishnu Mishra had abducted Kamlesh from her village. But according to the village chowkidar, she’d left at dusk, when Mishra was still in Agra. Also, if he had indeed killed her, why return to the village this morning?

  The questions kept coming. What had been buried behind the house? Where had Kamlesh got that smiley stamp on her hand? Where had Ram, supposedly an impoverished student, found the money to pay for the construction of a brick house, a TV and a mobile phone?

  Puri listed all these points in his notebook, a process that helped declutter his mind and put everything into a certain order. Then he sat back, looking out the window.

  The image of the mother’s face kept appearing in his mind’s eye. There was something in that terrible, contorted expression—something that held the key to understanding who it was who’d murdered her.

  The exact spot where the body was discovered hadn’t been marked, let alone cordoned off by the police. Puri had to stop to ask directions from a group of local boys diving off a lock into the muddy waters of the canal. Dripping wet and as dark as dates, they crowded around the car, each more eager than the last to answer his questions.

  “Yes, yes, we can show you!” they all chorused. “We’re the ones who found her!”

  They all set off at a trot north along the grassy verge, motioning for the driver to follow. After roughly a mile, they stopped. “Here! Here!”

  A branch lay in the water. The body had caught against it, they explained.

  “Here?” Puri’s face showed marked confusion as he stood outside the car looking left to right and back again.

  It made no sense. Vishnu Mishra’s village was downstream—about another mile and on the far bank, according to the driver. He would hardly have dumped the body in the water upstream.

  Come to think of it, Mishra wouldn’t have put the body in the canal at all, Puri reflected. He’d grown up in the area, knew the territory, could have dumped Kamlesh in any number of canyons for the jackals.

  Mishra was innocent for sure. Someone was trying to frame him. But what had prompted the murderer to put the body in the canal upstream rather than simply dumping it on Mishra’s land?

  Light, perhaps? Dawn had broken by the time he, and perhaps his associates, reached the area? Fearing he’d be spotted in Mishra’s territory, he decided to off-load the body into the water in the hope that it would be carried downstream.

  That meant the body had been dropped into the canal at some point between here, where it had been spotted by the boys, and the lock.

  Before making his way back up the road, however, he examined the immediate vicinity. It had indeed been badly trampled. No doubt the police were as culpable in its desecration as the general public. He could make out numerous boot treads in the soggy embankment. The sandy shingle on the side of the road was scored with multiple tire tracks.

  Had Inspector Gujar come across any clues or evidence, the existence of which he was keeping to himself? Puri thought it most unlikely. Such young, inexperienced bucks couldn’t help blurting out everything in front of the cameras. By now any major discoveries, like a murder weapon, would have been all over the news.

  Puri set off back along the canal with the gang of boys in tow, on the lookout for shoe or boot impressions on the grassy verge and trampled reeds on the bank sloping down to the canal. But he found nothing, concluding that the body had been dropped into the water from the lock itself.

  Something else didn’t add up. How had the boys notified the police? There wasn’t a public phone for miles.

  Puri went to the car and retrieved a packet of toffees from his bag.

  “Who likes sweets?” he asked.

  “Me!”

  Grubby hands were soon tearing away the wrappings and shoving toffees into open mouths.

  “So which of you found the body?” he asked.

  Four hands went up.

  “You said it was six o’clock this morning?”

  “That’s right, Uncle,” answered the eldest of the four as he chomped on his toffee.

  “How did you know what time it was?”

  “We just knew, Uncle.”

  “So what did you do when you found the body?”

  “We called the police.”

  “From where?”

  “On a phone, Uncle.” The boy shifted his weight from one leg to the other and tried his best to look bored.

  “Which phone did you use?” he asked.

  Some of the other boys exchanged nervous furtive glances. But the eldest tried to brazen it out. “The shop.”

  “Where?”

  “In the village.”

  “Achcha. So the owner will have a record of your call.”

  The boy gave a shrug. “His equipment doesn’t work that well.”

  Puri shared out the remaining sweets. The children took them a little less eagerly than before, now weary of their benefactor.

  “You know there’s a reward being offered for the dead woman’s mobile phone,” he said. “One thousand rupees.”

  “One thousand!” blurted out one of the youngest.

  “On the other hand, if the police came to know someone
had hidden the phone from them, who knows what they might do?” continued the detective. “Removing evidence from a crime scene is an offense. They throw people, small boys included, into prison for that.”

  He took one of Facecream’s one-thousand-rupee notes from his pocket. The boys eyed it as if it were a precious gemstone.

  “You won’t tell the police wallah?” said the eldest.

  “Kassam se, no,” replied Puri.

  The phone was quickly retrieved from where it was hidden on the canal bank, the exchange was made and the eldest boy inspected the note, holding it up to the light to make sure it wasn’t a fake. Then with a frown and a quick upward motion of his head, he asked, “Uncle-ji! Aapke paas change nahi hai kya?” (“What, you don’t have any change, Uncle?”)

  There was still some battery power left in the phone and Puri checked the call log. Kamlesh had received a call from the same number every morning at ten o’clock for at least the past couple of weeks. But there was no record of a call yesterday.

  The outgoing log showed that between ten thirty A.M. and around seven P.M. last night, Kamlesh had tried calling the number herself some sixty or more times.

  He called Facecream. She confirmed that the number was indeed Ram’s.

  “Thus the following can be concluded,” Puri told his operative, who had gone to the nearest market to buy supplies for the school. “Ram bought his mother the phone and programmed his number into it. Being illiterate and all, she did not add any further names or numbers. The sole purpose of this device was for mother and son to remain in contact.”

  “But then he failed to call her yesterday,” said Facecream.

  “And his mother got frantic. Over and over she tried his number. The maximum number of attempts is listed there in the log, actually.”

  “And fearing the worst, she left the village.”

  “That is after digging up something from a metal box buried behind the house.”

  Somewhere, some time later that evening, her hand was stamped with a smiley face, Puri went on to explain. And then she was murdered—brutally and efficiently by a six-foot-tall lefty who’d proceeded to dump her body in the canal.