‘Off on her own doing what?’
‘I guess all artists are like that,’ Koteshwar Rao said, not hearing what Hamid Pasha had said. ‘She was the only one in the family who took after my father. My father was an artist. And she used to paint too. I suppose my father spent some time with her before the rest of us were born.’ Again that faint, ironic smile, again that ruffling of hair.
‘Does she still paint?’
The doctor shook his head. ‘Not to my knowledge, no. We have drifted apart, sir, all of us. None of us knows any more what the rest of us are doing. That is understandable, isn’t it, with siblings—you never think you need to keep in touch with them, and suddenly you realise it has been a year since you last talked to each other.’
‘That is so, miyan. Regrettably so, but that is so,’ Hamid Pasha said, stroking his beard and nodding.
Koteshwar Rao’s voice acquired that dreamy tenor again, which told Nagarajan that he was once more recollecting the past. ‘She was a very irritating sister to have, sir. I remember being told almost every day that I should be more like her. She used to come first in school, she used to paint, she used to participate in her school’s theatre, she used to play the violin, she used to be an athlete, she had an interest in gymnastics...’
Hamid Pasha’s eyebrow rose appreciatively.
Koteshwar Rao saw that and nodded. ‘That is the reaction most people have when they hear of her. I don’t think she was very happy to have gotten married when she did. I think she wanted to study further—though I cannot be sure. We never really talked about that.’ He pursed his lips in thought. ‘We should have.’ Then he shook his head.
‘But you became a doctor,’ Hamid Pasha said. ‘You must have been a source of pride to your father too.’
‘Oh, yes, I was. I am the oldest son too, so there are some “privileges” that come with that, I suppose. And yes, as you said, I am the only one among us all who got a medical seat. My father once told me he would have killed himself if I had not qualified.’ He added hurriedly, ‘Not that he would have—but he said so.’
Hamid Pasha nodded. Nagarajan looked about them. They were nestled between bushes on three sides and the compound wall on the fourth. There was a brick wall that rose from the edge of the well to a height of about five feet. The day was cloudy, but the breeze was warm and dry. He felt as if the three of them were alone in a forest. This might be a place which was open to all eyes from the entrance, but once one reached it, there was complete seclusion and privacy. So maybe it was not a bad choice for a murder, provided that the murderer had a way to arrive at the well and leave it without being seen.
‘This is a very quiet place,’ said Koteshwar Rao, echoing Nagarajan’s thoughts. ‘People generally don’t come here unless they have a good enough reason. Swamannayya comes every now and then to dump some chlorine bags into the water. But unless we want to swim—and we haven’t swum here for at least two years now—we don’t come here.’
Hamid Pasha said, ‘But you are easily seen when going to it and coming from it, are you not?’
The doctor’s hand once again rose to his hair. ‘The path is visible, yes. But unless you are at the window at the time, you don’t see anyone. I mean, the windows that look out on this path, both upstairs and downstairs, are situated at the corners of the living rooms. You don’t go there unless by chance, or unless you want to look at the path. You know?’
Hamid Pasha exchanged a quick glance at Nagarajan, and their eyes gleamed for a quick fraction of a second. He nodded at the doctor. ‘So this is a good place for quiet reflection, hain?’
‘I come here every now and then, for just that. It’s a busy house, sir, and sometimes you just don’t get the peace you need. Wherever you turn you find people.’ This time the smile was good-natured, and there was genuine warmth in his eyes. ‘This is a good place for those awkward conversations too, I gather.’
‘Ah, my friend, what do you mean by that?’
‘Oh, nothing in particular. They say walls have ears. There are no walls here.’ He looked around. ‘In the house you cannot say anything that is private or confidential. You can rest assured that someone or the other is listening in on everything you say. But here—’
‘We have a wall here too,’ Hamid Pasha said, pointing at the brick barrier.
‘Oh, that. It used to be much bigger than that until two years ago—about eight feet tall. We used to dive into the well off it. I taught Uday to jump off it too. I was going to teach him to dive off it and they got it chopped down to half its size.’
‘Ah, do you know why, miyan?’
Koteshwar Rao shrugged. ‘I suppose it was for the best. If children climbed it and fell and hurt themselves—it’s a much safer world these days, is it not, sir?’
Hamid Pasha said solemnly, looking down at the steps leading down to the well, ‘Not for everyone, hain?’
Koteshwar Rao’s face darkened too. ‘I suppose not,’ he said.
Again silence settled over them. Nagarajan could not help but think that Hamid Pasha sometimes deliberately ignored the time-honoured technique of avoiding conversation-killers during interrogation. You wanted the suspect to talk as much as possible; the more he talked, the more it was likely he would give you something to go on. Killing the conversation only made the suspect uneasy, and you had to redouble your efforts to tease him into the talkative comfort zone again.
But this time Koteshwar Rao took up the tack himself. ‘My grandmother was the only one on my side of the family who supported my marriage. “You go and marry anyone you want to, Kotesh,” she told me. I told her my to-be-wife was a Reddy and that my mother was against an out-of-caste marriage, but she told me not to listen to anyone. “If the girl is nice, does it matter what caste she is from, boy?” she said. And she gave me a bundle of fifty-rupee notes. “Keep these—fifty-thousand rupees,” she said.’ Again the kind smile opened up his face, and the eyes glistened with moisture. ‘I gave it right back to her, and I told her a bundle of fifties was five thousand rupees, not fifty-thousand.’
Nagarajan heard the choke in the man’s voice, and his attempts to clear it. The breeze died down, and a stillness fell over the place. The bushes and the grass seemed as reluctant to move as the brick wall. Koteshwar Rao’s shoulders slumped, and though he was not a tall man, he looked like he had shrunk in size from just a few moments ago.
‘She was ahead of her time,’ he said. ‘She never learnt to read or write, but she had that which all the members of the next generation lacked—yes, including my mother. She had common-sense. And quite a lot of it.’
‘You do not seem to like living in this house very much,’ Hamid Pasha said. ‘And you have not always lived here, have you?’
‘No, sir. We have a house in Reddy Colony. We came here only because my grandmother asked me to come. I was to be her doctor and look after her. I ended up being a doctor to their whole family, of course.’ He grinned disarmingly. ‘My wife did not like us coming here.’
‘Ah, is that so?’
‘Not because she did not like my grandmother. She did—she probably liked her more than I did, in fact. But my grandmother was a rich woman, sir, and people here like to talk. There were some who said I came here only out of hope that some gold will spill my way, if you know what I mean.’
‘Has it?’ Hamid Pasha asked immediately.
The ironical smile made a reappearance. ‘It has, yes, but my grandmother and I have agreed that it was not charity; it was payment for my ten years of service—professional service—to her and her sons.’
‘Achha. But I am sure people do not see it that way.’
‘No, they don’t. Just the other day a friend of mine came to my house, and we were sitting on the balcony. He looked out at the building where the communist party lives, and he said to me, ‘What have you got to fear? All this is yours.’ That night I told Durga that we had to make preparations to move out.’
‘Was your grandmother happy with your decis
ion to move away?’
Koteshwar Rao sighed. ‘No. For that matter none of them was. It would mean that I would not be here on call to attend to them. And my grandmother was always— afraid, I think. She was a pit paranoid when it came to health matters.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Yes, food always tasted or smelled funny to her. This was food she had made herself. She always made her own food, till almost the very end.’
‘Is she that sort of person? Did she get paranoid in that way about other things too?’
‘Oh, no, sir, as I told you she was a very balanced woman. She had a perfectly sound head.’
Hamid Pasha asked, choosing his words carefully, ‘Maybe, then, her paranoia over food became more severe after the poisoning incident?’
Nagarajan saw lines reappear on Koteshwar Rao’s face. It did not appear to sit with him very well that they had already come to know about the poisoning. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I did not know you knew about it.’
Hamid Pasha shrugged and said airily, ‘You know how it is, miyan. One hears things.’
Koteshwar Rao pushed his hair back. ‘It was arsenic,’ he said, and paused. ‘I think it was around six or seven months ago. Ammamma complained about the buttermilk. She said it smelled funny. She insisted on getting it tested, so I did, just to keep her happy. I found traces of arsenic in it.’ He inclined his head to one side. ‘Funny thing is, arsenic is odourless.’
‘And there was not enough to kill her, was there?’
‘No. Not enough to kill, but there was more of it than I would be comfortable with. We don’t get so much arsenic in groundwater around these parts.’
Hamid Pasha nodded. ‘Do you know who made the buttermilk for her? Did she make it herself?’
‘No, buttermilk comes from upstairs every night. Venkataram Mamayya has a few buffaloes up at Puthoor, so he gets milk from there. And his wife used to make the buttermilk for my grandmother.’
‘Ah, indeed. But this must have been a long tradition? Something that must have been going on for years?’
‘Yes,’ said Koteshwar Rao. ‘Who knows how long she has been poisoning it for? We only detected it recently.’
‘Ah, so there is no doubt in your mind then, that she was the one who poisoned it?’
‘We-ll, I did not confront her directly, but I sent her a message through Venkataram Mamayya, and there was a big row in their house that night. All of us could hear it. I told you—the walls are not very thick.’
Hamid Pasha nodded.
‘And we monitored the buttermilk from then on for a while. There was no arsenic in it from then on. I—I did not tell anyone other than Venkataram Mamayya about this, of course. It will only make people more nervous than they should be.’
‘What do you mean by that, miyan? It was not serious, then, this poisoning?’
Koteshwar Rao sighed, and he appeared uncertain as to how to string his words together. ‘Well, sir, the amount of poison in the milk was too little to cause any harm, you understand. Maybe over a period of time— maybe if the same dosage had been maintained for two more years or so; maybe then we would have started seeing symptoms. But as it was, it was quite harmless, you could say.’
‘But if it is so harmless, why would she even bother with the poison?’
‘I do not know. And since it stopped, I thought it would be best—in the interests of the family—to ignore the matter. Maybe I shouldn’t have.’
‘Did your grandmother stop complaining about the milk after that?’
The doctor grinned, and when he grinned he looked very much the young thirty-year-old he was. There was something boyish about the lopsided curl of the lips and the sudden switching on of the eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘So I still had to carry out tests on samples every now and then and assure her that everything was fine.’
‘Ah, so it was not the poison that she smelled.’
‘I told you—arsenic has no smell. It is all psychological, sir. The relationship between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law have been—let’s say they have been “cold”.’
‘But if that is the case, why did she not reject the buttermilk altogether?’
‘Ah, but that would mean openly acknowledging the bitterness. It had to be thinly disguised, you see.’ A remnant of the grin still played on his lips. ‘And I don’t think it would have done her conscience any good to throw away the stuff. And maybe in her mind she knew that it was all psychological. Maybe that’s why she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away.’
Hamid Pasha nodded seriously. ‘Yes, a woman of common-sense, as you say.’
‘But a woman all the same,’ the doctor said. Something buzzed, and his hand went to his waist and unbuttoned a little black leather cover. He brought out a pager and had a quick look at it before replacing it. ‘I have stayed here too long. My patients are waiting for me at the clinic, and I still haven’t even had lunch.’ He turned back to the well. ‘But this place is like that...’ Then he turned around and straightened himself. ‘I should get going now. If you have any further questions for me, you can get hold of me at night. Or you can pop down to the clinic if it is urgent.’
With that he nodded at each of then in turn and walked away, along the path.
As soon as he was gone, Hamid Pasha sprang into action just like he had in the morning in the old lady’s room, and threw a command in the Inspector’s direction: ‘Look!’ He bent at the knees, staring at the ground where the big depression was, and taking slow, steady steps along the edge of the well and then back again, murmuring to himself all the time. Every now and then he looked at Nagarajan and said, ‘Look!’
He disappeared behind the brick wall, and Nagarajan too started looking in the front, amid the grass, in the mud, by the stones and around the old crowbar that lay next to them. He did not know what he was looking for, just like Hamid Pasha didn’t either, he imagined, but he willed himself on to look.
About ten minutes later Hamid Pasha emerged from behind the wall. He held between his fingers a tuft of grey-black hair. He held it up to Nagarajan and said, ‘Touch-me-not plants, hain? They always hook on to something.’ He slid his hand into his pocket. Kicking the stones in his path with his good leg he stalked out towards the main gate, signalling to Nagarajan to follow. ‘Come, we are done here.’
14
A BROKEN TILED ROOF, termite-ridden walls, a rickety wooden door with a rusty lock hanging by the bolt, and a film of dust everywhere one looked—’old house’ really lived up to its name. This was the house in which Kakaji had been born, and in those days all of what was now called ‘Kakaji Colony’ was farming land. The Big Boom had not yet happened; either way, Kakaji’s father had been a farmer with minimal education. He would never have taken up the project that Kakaji had made his own after he returned from the city, armed with a Bachelor of Commerce degree. He proposed to his father that half of his farming land ought to be converted into ‘real estate’, a term that his father was unfamiliar with, and was therefore leary of.
He told his son that theirs was a family of farmers and that Kakaji (he was probably not called Kakaji back then) should become a farmer too. All this talk of ‘real estate’, he said, was a sure way of wasting good, food-bearing land. And when you wasted land, he told his son, you wasted money.
But the old man did not live long, and the first thing Kakaji did upon claiming his inheritance was to go ahead with his plan. Half his land he still tilled, but the other half, especially the outer sections which were more or less barren anyway, he converted into business property. He made friends at the required places in the registration office and at the police station—both were quite receptive to his proposed ‘gifts’—and within half a decade he was more landlord than farmer.
When he began his accountancy practice he found it so profitable that he found no need to continue cultivation— the rewards one got out of it did not seem to him to warrant the effort one had to put in—so he repeated his conversion process on the remaining ha
lf of the property and sold the first half to the highest bidders. When an official from the postal service came to visit the area he dined at Kakaji’s place, stayed the night, and left the next morning assuring him that he would do his best to make sure the landlord’s name became immortal.
Thus was born Kakaji colony.
Kakaji breathed his last when his three sons and one daughter were no more than children, but he left his widow with more than enough to spare. If Kauveramma had been a naïve woman, perhaps Kakaji’s wealth would have dwindled at the incessant clawing of the vultures that had gathered, but the woman took to the situation, after a suitable period of mourning, with remarkable equanimity. She was said to have told a friend at the time that if she could manage a household, she could equally manage an estate. The difference was only in dimension, not in nature.
It was around that time that Kauveramma decreed that a house should be erected—a big house, enough to house her whole family—and when it was finished, it was named Kauvery Bhavan. The old house in which the family had stayed before naturally became the servants’ quarters.
Now, Kauvery Bhavan itself was showing signs of age, and the ‘old house’ was literally on the verge of caving in. Nagarajan thought the time was perhaps ripe for another house to be constructed on the grounds, though with Kauveramma gone he was unable to think of anyone among the current lot who would have the foresight or planning required to even start—let alone manage and finish—the project.
From inside they heard the sound of muffled breathing interspersed by an occasional snore. Nagarajan guessed it must be siesta time, so he stepped forward and tapped the bolt against the door a couple of times.
They heard movement inside, and presently the door opened. Two large eyes peered at them from round lenses set in fat, reddish-brown spectacle-frames. When Ellayya recognised them he muttered a hurried greeting at both and opened the door fully. ‘Come in, babus,’ he said. ‘Come in, please.’
Banquet on the Dead Page 14