The Feng Shui Detective

by Nury Vittachi

  ‘Ha. If you help me buy a sari, I will refuse you nothing,’ she replied. Then she blushed, wondering if what she had said was too flirtatious. She looked down and studied her hands.

  ‘Engineering is only free for two days and then they have some big assignments,’ Ravi said to his colleague. ‘Besides, I want to get this business over with and move on. Far East business is terrible. We need to give it a buck up.’

  The Sikh appeared unconvinced. ‘He died very young. I think if Mr Wong thinks that seeing Sooti’s wife would help tie up the loose ends, we should get him to see her.’

  The external relations manager slowly unwrapped a sweetmeat from its leaf wrapping and popped it into his mouth before replying: ‘Very well. I’m not stubborn. I could arrange to have her brought to my office and you could come and ask her questions. I wouldn’t mind asking her a few question myself.’

  ‘I want to be on her alone,’ said Wong.

  Ravi ’s eyebrows rose.

  Joyce quickly interpreted: ‘He means he wants like a one-on-one interview with her.’

  ‘I’m afraid that really is impossible,’ said Ravi. ‘This is India. A man cannot see a young widow alone. It is not seemly. No, it would have to be in my office.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Joyce. ‘I’ll go and see her by myself. Two women talking is okay, isn’t it? Ms Dev said it was near the old market. I wanna go down there anyway, do some shopping.’

  Ravi smiled. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘It’s not very far. You can take a company taxi or you can even wark.’

  Joyce nodded her head diagonally. ‘I’ll wark, I mean walk, thank you.’

  After lunch, Joyce took a long, lazy meander through the marketplace to the offices of Deshpande Handbag Manufactory Company, stopping regularly to take photographs. The midday heat made her dizzy and she stopped to buy a fresh king coconut from a street vendor. It was like drinking liquid energy. She found Delhi, like Hong Kong and Singapore, was a buzzy place, full of people hurrying and scurrying on their missions. Yet there was also something spiritual about it. People often had their hands together as if praying, and there were gods and shrines and holy pictures everywhere, sometimes interspersed with pictures of the Spice Girls and Elvis.

  The young woman initially had some difficulty entering the garment firm’s offices, but a phone call to Ravi helped sort out the problem-the Associated Foods executive had a cousin on the board of Deshpande’s. Access was quickly arranged.

  The handbag factory was noisy, dark and chaotic. Joyce McQuinnie soon found herself in a small room, loaned by a junior manager, talking to Mrs Kumari Sekhar, an attractive 29-year-old woman who looked too young to have children of eleven and twelve. The young Westerner was fascinated by the Indian woman’s large, dark-rimmed eyes and wondered whether it would be unprofessional to ask what sort of eyeliner she used.

  Better stick to business. Feeling very adult, she explained to the young mother that she was working for her late husband’s company’s Far Eastern shareholders, and just wanted to see if there was anything she wanted to talk about, anything to clear up.

  ‘You mean like returning of office properties?’ the woman asked in a strong Delhi accent. ‘He never took anything home, only paper clips, occasionally he would be having a pen with the company name, only like that. You can come and see in my home. There’s nut-thing.’

  ‘No, no, I am not like being the big nasty corporate big brother or anything, no way. We’re just like, really sorry he died and stuff. I just wanted to know if anything was wrong, whether he had any like, problems or anything?’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said the widow. She thought for a while, and then leaned forwards, not conspiratorially, but as an apparent gesture of trust. ‘Nut-thing. He had a bad cold one time last year, couldn’t shake it, and sometimes a bad stomach, but basically he was so healthy. Used to boast that he never went to a doctor. Never took a pill. No, he was healthy in body. When he started to go downhill, my brother-he’s a doctor-checked him out and just told Sooti to take more exercise, go to his bar a bit less. You know he liked to go out with his friends before coming home.’

  Joyce unwisely took a generous sip of the tumbler-full of unidentifiable yellow-pink liquid which had been placed in front of her. She grimaced and nearly spat it out when she found it was lukewarm milky tea containing at least three spoonfuls of sugar. She tried to turn her scowl into a smile.

  ‘He went out boozing and stuff lots?’

  ‘Oh no, I am not meaning he was a drunkard or anything like that. His father was a Muslim. Sooti used to be a teetotaller too. Then, maybe a year ago, he started to have one glass of wine or a Kingfisher with his meal. Maybe he would have two Kingfishers, or maybe three if it was a long evening. But still moderate. He was never drunk. Never in his life was he drunk.’

  ‘Did he stay out late very often?’

  ‘Never. Usually came home about 8.30 or nine, not late.’

  ‘Did he gamble?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Borrow money?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He sounds a cool dude.’

  ‘Kul-doot?’

  ‘I mean, like a good husband.’

  ‘He was. Very very good man.’

  ‘It must have been awful for you. Him being so young. How are you like, you know, getting on?’

  ‘Oh, it was a shock all right, but I am over it now. Nearly four months ago he died. We did the mourning properly.’

  ‘What about, er, money and stuff? You have two kids, right?’

  ‘Yes, certainly, the loss of income was a worry at first. But we saved a lot of money and Sooti had two life insurance policies. We do not need to worry. We have a house. My parents are still alive and live nearby.’

  ‘That’s really neat. The insurance companies have already paid up?’

  ‘One has paid, the other has agreed to shortly. Because he was so young…’ She paused, apparently rather uncomfortable about something.

  Joyce gave her a look which she hoped was a mixture of friendliness and concern.

  The widow continued: ‘I do not like to tell everyone this, but you are from his boss, who already knows this. Because Sooti was quite young, only forty-two, the pay-outs are actually quite large. We are very fortunate that he took such policies out. I do not really have to continue working. In fact I have handed in my resignation and am leaving at the end of the month.’

  ‘That was lucky,’ said Joyce.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The gods have been very kind.’

  ‘Yeah, cool. Like, er, did you take out this insurance a long time ago?’

  ‘Quite a long time. A year, maybe two years ago. Not me. I don’t know much about all that. Sooti handled it all, but left the policies in my father’s strongbox for me to get if anything happened to him.’

  ‘Great,’ said Joyce. ‘I’m really glad to hear that you and the kids will be okay. Do you mind if I just ask you a question about your eyeliner?’

  Late that afternoon, Ravi, who was clearly taking his role as genial host seriously, asked the visitors if they wanted to eat out or be entertained in some way. ‘Or would you like to go home? I understand you are staying at Mrs Daswani’s place in UP. I can arrange a car to take you back there. Any jet lag to sleep off?’

  Wong said: ‘We like to have dinner at a club. The club where Mr Sekhar used to go to after work.’

  Joyce added: ‘Yeah, you see we’re having some trouble visualising what went wrong in that room.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Ravi, waving to a small man with a large head. ‘Peon!’

  A noisy taxi ride in a tiny, cramped old car, grossly mis-named an Ambassador (anything less ambassadorial would be hard to imagine) took them first to Janpath, a main road in the centre of New Delhi. From there, they turned eastwards onto a road crowded with cars and bicycles, and drove over an old bridge into a more suburban area. ‘They really do use their horns instead of their brakes,’ commented Joyce, watching in horror as their vehicle simply push
ed carts, bicycles and pedestrians out of the way.

  After twenty minutes driving, they entered an area of high-class suburbs. The roads were still wide, but the press of population was much less. With its grand avenues and tree-lined streets, the young woman decided New Delhi was interestingly different from the old city, at the same time more stately but less charming.

  Then the roads suddenly became narrow and the houses less prepossessing. The small car took them to the Go Go Club, in a dingy, ramshackle street on the northern outskirts of New Delhi.

  Despite its name, the Go Go Club was a rather Spartan basement canteen. The inmates, clusters of middle-aged men energetically shovelling rice into their mouths, seemed content enough, judging by the loud and animated conversations in which they were engaged. They stopped talking for a minute to examine the foreign visitors, but the noise quickly returned to its former level.

  The magnolia paint on the walls was peeling slightly, but the orange-hued light fixtures gave the restaurant a warm appearance, and the smell of hot, spicy food was undeniably enticing, particularly for Wong, who had a taste for any food which bit back.

  Ravi ordered, and the two visitors were quickly presented with a huge selection of dishes. There was no meat, because Ravi was a vegetarian, and the potato curry was a more fluo-rescent yellow than anything Joyce had eaten before. But the food was delicious. Joyce took tiny bites, and drank six glasses of water. While eating, they chatted with club manager Anish Butt about Mr Sekhar’s visits.

  Butt, a scrawny man of about seventy with a neck wrinkled like a turkey’s, champed his nearly toothless gums and spoke at length about The Deceased, whom he had known, he said, for at least twenty years.

  ‘Oh yes, indeed, The Deceased’s father used to come in here and Sooti came as a boy. Then he got the job with Associated and he came on his own steam. Three, four times a week, and then the last year he used to come almost every day, on his way back from work.’

  ‘Was there any change?’ asked Wong. ‘Did he drink more?’

  ‘When he was younger, he never drank. He was a Muslim, but not religious. Then he started drinking a little bit, but not a problem. Couple of Kingfishers, that’s all.’

  Joyce asked: ‘Did he come with the same people all the time?’

  ‘Mostly alone. Sometimes with Mr Kanagaratnum,’ he said, pointing at Ravi. ‘You become good friends, no?’

  ‘To some extent,’ said Ravi. ‘He was a difficult man to get to know. Not much of a talker. Once a week or so I would join him here. He never spoke of any health problems. I’m still stunned that he is dead.’

  The club manager went to tend to other customers, and the three diners spent the rest of the meal talking about the relationship between the Indian firm and the Far East ones, the standard corporate chit-chat of business travellers. Joyce gave Ravi a piece of paper on which was written the name of a cosmetics company. ‘Do you know where I could get stuff from this company? They make like, totally fab eyeliner.’

  Ravi was a great eater. He consumed everything that was left on the trays when Wong and McQuinnie were finished, polished off a fifth beer, patted his rice-belly and then took the young woman on a tour of the club’s facilities, which included a library and a gymnasium that was so under-used that several of the machines had never been plugged in.

  Wong told them that he would wait for them in the canteen.

  While he was putting on his suit-coat, he chatted briefly with the club’s oldest waiter, who had a walrus moustache that would have better suited a British major-general.

  ‘Please, what do you remember about Mr Sekhar’s visits?’

  ‘His favourite for years used to be aloo makhani and chicken korma,’ said the old man, his voice slightly muffled by the weight of hair on his upper lip and lack of teeth. ‘Lately he got this taste for vindaloos, double vindaloos and palis even. He quickly became hot-stuff king, and used to challenge the chef to make something too hot for him to eat.’

  ‘Did he eat alone? Or with friends?’

  ‘Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. Sometimes Mr Kanagaratnum, Mr Jagdish, Mr Govind, or someone else from the company. No one could eat the killer chilli like Mr Sekhar, though. Our food is quite hot.’

  ‘Is,’ Wong said. He had lost all sensation in his tongue, although he considered himself an experienced eater of spicy food. ‘He drink much beer?’

  ‘No. Always two Kingfishers, three on special occasions.’

  ‘Did he ever talk to you about any problem?’

  ‘Business was not so good. He used to sometimes come alone and bring business papers, all numbers, and he would do sums while he ate. Once I saw him by himself and he seemed to be crying into his bhaji. He never talked to me about his problems, though.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Wong as his companions returned.

  That night, Wong worked in his room at Rose House until midnight. He then slept until about five o’clock when he had to rise and go to the toilet rather urgently. He stayed in the bathroom for a long while. Fortunately, he did not feel particularly ill. He suspected that the food he had eaten had not been bad, but was eliciting complaints from his stomach because of its unfamiliarity.

  Dawn came slowly. Over an uneaten breakfast, Joyce was unusually silent, and was later induced to admit that she had had similar problems with her digestion.

  Their host, Mrs Daswani, laughed. ‘I’m sorry, but our bacteria here in India are quite unique. It always takes visitors a few days to get used to it. Some tourists swear by a slug of whisky every night. Kills all known germs. You’ll be fine in a few hours.’

  Both the visitors slumped silently in the car as they were driven to the centre of town. They were back at the Associated Food and Beverages Delhi Manufactory Old Building at 9.30 a.m., and Ravi led them to the Far East department, which they knew they would never have re-found without him. The internal engineering department’s team was standing at attention, waiting for the plans. The two visitors spent the next hour giving detailed instructions to the foreman and his staff.

  Wong and McQuinnie then moved to a spare office, near Kanagaratnum’s. The young woman grabbed a phone and started dialling. ‘My uncle’s a journalist,’ she said. ‘I worked in his office for a summer job last year. I’m going to do a bit of what he calls “working the phones”.’

  She spent the next half-hour on the phone, being transferred from person to person, until she found what she was looking for: an expert in pathology and poisons at a medical school attached to the university. She had a theory she wanted to check out.

  Not for the first time, Wong marvelled at the ability of a Western female to command Asian males to do her bidding. Without any indication of her authority other than her bossy phone manner, Joyce soon had the man obediently answering a lengthy list of questions, which she shouted down the phone, since the line was poor.

  ‘Dr Prasad, are there poisons which are like, really really slow-working and which would like, not be detected in an autopsy?’

  Wong picked up the extension handset to listen to the man’s answer. ‘That is a very hard question, since it all depends on your understanding of what a poison is,’ said the voice on a crackly line. ‘The word usually conjures up images of strychnine, or arsenic, or some forms of mercury perhaps. These quickly and obviously do great damage. But consider alcohol. This is also a lethal poison, but taken in small quantities over a long time, it is not lethal, and some doctors-I am not among them-say it may even do some good. If you drank a bottle of detergent, it would make you very sick. Yet every night, we all consume tiny amounts of detergent left as residue on the cups and plates we use. You see, Ms McQuinnine, almost anything can be a poison if you take an inappropriate quantity of it over an inappropriate period, you see what I am saying?’

  ‘Yeah. I see. It’s McQuinnie, not McQuinnine. But is there any… I mean, like, is there a poison that you could use, and doctors doing an autopsy would just be like, “Oh, it’s natural causes or a heart attack�
�?’

  ‘There are many substances which can be introduced at low levels and could eventually lead to death. Most, I am glad to say, are detectable, particularly if the autopsy is done promptly, not more than a couple of days after death.’

  ‘Okay, thanks Dr Presshard.’

  ‘Prasad. It’s Prasad.’

  During the lunch break, Wong and McQuinnie ate with Mardiyah Dev (at least, Ms Dev ate, while the two visitors pushed food around their plates and took tiny sips of bottled water). The Malaysian woman added little that she had not already told them the previous day. She said she believed Sooti Sekhar’s autopsy had been performed promptly, the morning following his death late one afternoon. ‘There were no suspicious circumstances,’ she said.

  The assignment seemed to be over, the geomancer thought. The rooms had been done, and Sooti Sekhar had been confirmed by all routes of inquiry as a victim of death by natural causes. But Joyce’s doggedness had inspired him. Perhaps it would be worth making one final call. They should speak to the man who did the autopsy, he decided.

  That afternoon, Wong phoned Dr Ran, brother-in-law of the dead man. The geomancer also had to shout into the phone. ‘Hello? Is it Dr Ran? What? Yes? I am Mr Wong from East Trade Industries. I am working today at Associated Food and Beverages. No, no, I am not selling anything. I am a feng shui master. I want to ask you about Mr Sekhar. What? No, I do not want to come to your surgery. Sick? I am not sick. What? You ask what? Who is sicker? No, not sicker. I am not saying sicker. I am saying Sekhar. Your brother-in-law is sicker. I mean Sekhar. Yes, yes, I know he is dead.’

  Joyce gently picked up the extension. She waved to him to signify that she would do the talking.

  ‘Hi, Dr Ran, this is Jo McQuinnie, I’m like Mr Wong’s assistant. We are doing like a report at Associated on the death of your brother-in-law, and just, er, want to double-check a few things, if you’ve got a couple of minutes.’

  ‘Very well.’ The voice was low and measured.