by Monabi Mitra
What good would it have been to watch Shona across a room full of people, laughing and preening in a glamorous dress, while Bikram sat alone in a cloud of black gloom, a wintry smile on his face! Ignoring Shona and her pleas to stay back for the fireworks, he had gone stubbornly ahead on a six-hour journey feeling lonely and discontented.
‘So now you know about the murder. I expect you’ll be called in soon.’ Shona sounded bright and cheerful, as if refusing to bite the bait of a potential quarrel. ‘Where are you, by the way?’
‘At the Murshidabad Police Line, watching a couple of thousand poor boys fail a job interview. What are you doing?’
‘Shooting a love scene, but perhaps you don’t want to know,’ said Shona teasingly.
A rush of feeling came over Bikram. ‘Go right ahead,’ he said as evenly as he could and snapped the phone cover shut.
3
‘The greatest handicap of all . . . is the overwhelmingly indifferent, negative, attitude of the public, punctuated by spasms of short-lived, ineffectual indignation, that in no small degree nullify the effectiveness of police . . .’
Ashu Das, the officer holding Bikram’s charge while he was away, began the investigation the following morning in an inauspicious manner by almost running over a cat that flashed across his path. He was a sturdy man with a weather-beaten face and a florid moustache that masked an essentially timid and confused soul. He wore green, yellow and red stone rings on his fingers to propitiate the planets and turned to astrologers for help whenever he could.
So when the cat appeared, Ashu Das commanded the driver to stop the car—which the man did with a horrifying screech— and wait for someone else to cross the road before they did. Whilst they waited, Ashu Das fell silent, pondering over his own thoughts. This would be a good chance for him to prove himself and gain an edge over Bikram, who was too clever, too polished and too confident for his liking. Crime Branch was teeming with minnows like Ashu Das who hated Bikram for his flamboyance and guts, while Bikram himself, with his tight arrogance and unconventional ways, did nothing to dispel such feelings. Ashu Das turned the rings around his fingers and fantasized that he had solved the case by a stroke of good luck while an autorickshaw skidded crazily over the road and broke the feline spell.
In office, Ashu Das found the Broad Street murder details on his desk in two pink cardboard files. The first file had the details of the body and noted that Smt Monica Sarkar, businesswoman, forty, had informed police that on the 20th of October at 11.30 p.m. she had entered her house at 21, Broad Street, Calcutta, to find the dead body of her husband, Piloo Adhikary, fifty-five, lying in a bedroom of their house along with the corpses of two pet dogs named Brownie and Blackie.
Control Room and senior officers of the police station had been informed.
Officer-in-Charge Arun Biswas along with sub-inspector Subir Guha, Constable 15344 Asit Kumar Das and Constable 13648 Anoop Singh had visited the crime scene.
A sketch-map of the house had been prepared; a photographer who specialized in taking ‘dead body photographs’ had been called from a neighbourhood studio and he had taken snaps of the corpse, the room, the dead dogs and other miscellaneous things, including the bloodstained shoe print. Reports of the dead bodies were made in the presence of local witnesses; the human corpse had been sent for post-mortem accompanied by Asit Kumar Das. Dr Ashok Singhal of the Forensic Science Laboratory had also visited the scene of crime.
The seizure list included a knife found in the entrance passage and two ejected cartridges.
The physical evidence collected included clothing, blood samples, seminal fluid, scalp hair and nail scrapings from the deceased. Also collected were an empty vial, a hypodermic syringe and a white rope used as a tourniquet.
However, there were no injuries on the body to show signs of struggle or violence other than an injection mark near the wrist.
Biswas concluded that the death of Piloo Adhikary, fifty-five, was due to acute Xylazine toxicity/injection of drug per vein from person or persons unknown.
Ashu Das leaned back in his chair and considered the possibilities presented to him. It could be one of the neighbours, of course, especially since the dogs had been looked upon as a nuisance in the neighbourhood as the thana had told him, but it would require a thoroughly crime-savvy neighbour to sashay in with a specialized drug and cut the man down. The injection indicated someone with medical knowledge.
Ashu Das went to the second file and its pages of details that included the scene-of-crime sketch, done with stick figures and artistic-looking splotches and two heroically drawn dog portraits with the tails down and the legs splayed. The post-mortem report stated that the stomach and the small and large intestines were empty. He frowned and read through Monica Sarkar’s statements at the house and later at the thana and decided that he didn’t like her at all. A woman who ran a beauty parlour and did social work for stray dogs on the side sounded, in an obscure way, villainous. What social work? With dogs, too! The stresses that had accumulated in his life seemed to push him inexorably towards a loathing for this weird woman and her dead husband who lived with stray dogs. He would begin by working on her.
* * *
A scruffy-looking maid opened a window beside the main door and said, ‘There’s no one at home so you can stop hanging around here. Go away because the dogs are really restless this morning.’
Ashu Das, momentarily discomfited, recovered his presence of mind before she could slam the pane shut and said, ‘I’m the police.’ He added importantly, ‘Crime Branch.’
The maid was ugly and insolent.
‘Prove it.’
‘Can’t you see my car outside?’
Two maids, three idlers and a man with a bundle on his head had already gathered around it. So had Chotu’s probationer, a fourteen-year-old lout newly recruited from Bihar, who gaped annoyingly at the security guard and the driver.
‘I’ll have to see,’ said the maid and shut the window carefully.
Ashu Das spent an agonizing minute of intense dismay under the scrutiny of the assembly outside. He was sure they were laughing at him. What would Bikram have done now? If only the large television van parked outside would take a snap of him and flash it on the evening news, as Bikram’s often was! How impressed his mother-in-law would be! He took out his phone and pretended to answer a fake call at the same time as he stepped back and looked at the house. A typical middle-class house. Long passage leading to the main door with an adjacent window. Doors and windows firmly shut. The passage snaked round on the left to the back of the house. Should he take a peek? The door flew open and the maid said roughly, ‘Come in.’
She led him into a room with a three-unit sofa set and jerked her head at one sofa, asking him to sit.
There was a clearly recognizable animal smell in the house. Were the dogs loose?
He heard footsteps and the lady of the house came in. She was wearing a blue kaftan and Dr Scholl’s slippers. Her hair was plaited and Ashu Das could see streaks of red henna near her temples.
Ashu Das introduced himself and stated that the case had been taken over by the Crime Branch. The woman nodded, and to his astonishment, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her kaftan pocket and proceeded to light up. Ashu Das stared as though she had slipped out of her clothes. This middle-aged harridan would actually smoke during a police interrogation! Ashu Das thought only svelte, size-zero girls did such things, especially if they had been picked up from a busted sex racket. Moreover she seemed fully in control of herself, in spite of having sat at a police station for more than ten hours over the last forty-eight hours. His skin prickled and his palms felt clammy.
He began quickly, ‘When was the last time you saw your husband alive?’
‘Three-thirty,’ answered Monika Sarkar in a slow drawl. Her voice was husky, hoarse—as if she had an infected pharynx.
‘And where were you after that?’
‘At a friend’s house in Salt Lake.’
‘When had you planned this visit?’
‘Three days ago on the invitation of my friend.’
‘I’ve got the name here . . . Mrs Leena Mukherjee at CC block, Salt Lake. She was having a puja at her house.’
The woman said, ‘Yes. Some of us had gone to help with the preparations. It was more than just a puja. It was, in fact, a gathering of friends. Later we were to have firecrackers and things like that.’
Ashu Das nodded. Monica Sarkar’s alibi had been well checked, which was all that the thana had really done before handing over the files to him. It would clearly distance itself from the case as much as possible.
‘Did you eat there?’
‘What?’
‘I asked where you had dinner, if at all, or whether you were on a fast.’
Through cigarette smoke, the woman looked at him suspiciously and answered, ‘I hadn’t thought about that. We would have eaten at her house.’
‘But the puja for the goddess usually winds up very late. Assuming that you made the preparations for the puja, why didn’t you wait for it to end? Why were you back here at eleven-thirty? There was no meal ready here.’
He must have hit upon something. Monica Sarkar sat very still, smoking and thinking, furiously, added Ashu Das to himself. Aha!
But before he could savour his triumph, the woman said, ‘Next question.’
‘You haven’t answered this one.’
‘Did you say you were from Crime Branch?’
‘You still haven’t answered my question.’
‘Why Crime Branch?’ murmured the woman to herself.
She finished her cigarette and looked straight into his eyes. ‘I wouldn’t have eaten anything at all that night. To shed some weight.’
He knew she was lying but did not see how he could bust her lie. In desperation, he continued blusteringly, ‘Where did your husband work?’
‘He had his own business.’
‘He was also a film producer, right?’
‘He sunk some of his money in things like that, yes. The movies did very badly.’
‘How long ago was this?’
‘About two years, I think.’
‘And what did he do before that?’
‘I just told you, he had a business of his own.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Trade.’
‘Why hadn’t you changed your surname after marriage?’
‘Because I’m a modern woman.’
They were barking questions and answers at each other as if they were dogs themselves. Ashu Das had the cynical feeling again, that she was keeping her answers monosyllabic to prevent an outflow of information and that he was onto something here. Monica Sarkar’s mouth looked set in a hard line and she stared back evenly at him, too self-possessed for his liking. Ashu Das liked tearful, nervous and flustered female witnesses to break down. This one seemed to be made of steel.
‘Where are the papers of this trading business of his?’
‘In the locker of the Godrej almirah in his bedroom. I can get them for you.’ She sounded almost bored, and again, Ashu Das frowned. Any papers available in the house should have been taken away by the police on the night of the murder. What had the officer-in-charge and his men been doing?
‘Bring the papers, I’m waiting.’
Monica Sarkar yawned, stretched like a plump cat and strolled across the room to the inner door. Now that he looked at her closely, he spied what looked like dog hair on her kaftan. And heard dog whines in the distance. And someone banging pots and clanging pans in the kitchen, and the hiss of a pressure cooker. A smell of boiling meat filled the house and wafted towards him. Ashu Das almost threw up at this combined onslaught of dog pee, shit and boiling bones.
A sheaf of papers was thrust under his nose. There were letterheads and bills, orders, official-looking agreements on stamp paper, receipts and bank statements. Ashu Das riffled through the pages as quickly as he could but found nothing incriminating. The dead man seemed to have simply dealt in supplying crockery to various small stores. There were catalogues of flasks and ovenproof tableware and thick tumblers made of lead crystal from Korea. Could a man have made such enormous amounts of money selling pots and pans that he was able to branch off into movie production? The letterheads said Laser Dealers, General Order Supplier, Specialist in Crockery and Other Such Merchandise.
Ashu Das slipped the papers into the diary he was carrying.
‘Where’s my receipt?’ asked Monica suspiciously.
‘You will get a copy of the seizure list,’ said Ashu Das in an irritated tone, and changed track.
‘Did your husband mention any guest for that evening?’
‘No.’
‘What about relatives? Don’t you have anyone with you now?’
Monica Sarkar shrugged her shoulders.
‘We liked to keep to ourselves. Whatever relatives we had were frightened off by our dogs. Our friends kept us company, really.’
‘Did your husband mention any threats to his life?’
‘Not to me! You’ll have to check the diary that he hunched over and scribbled in secretly. As for threats, the only ones I know of were from the neighbours on the left when they met at a grocery shop. They threatened that they would call the police or go to court or slit Piloo’s throat if we didn’t give up our dogs. Why don’t you arrest the neighbours?’
I would if I could, thought Ashu Das miserably, and wrap up this case. Aloud he said, ‘How would they have got in? Did they have a key?’
‘The main troublemaker is a she. Mrs Kuttan. Go and get her instead of annoying me. I’ve already told all I know at the police station that night.’
‘The knife that was found in the passage outside, you identified it as yours from the kitchen. At what time did you see it last?’
At the mention of the knife the woman frowned and shook her head, then shivered and looked down at her hands on her lap. She looked up and Ashu Das saw what looked like tears quivering in her eyes.
‘Why do that to Blackie?’ she whispered breathlessly. ‘He was just an innocent darling.’
Had Bikram been here he would have waited for this subtle shift in mood from the matter-of-fact to the emotional to continue further. But Ashu Das blundered magnificently on.
‘Do you have reason to suspect that your husband wasn’t as innocent as the dogs were?’
Even as he said it he realized that he had phrased it inelegantly. It was meant to be a dry, acerbic statement, but it came out sounding monstrous. Monica Sarkar’s eyes blazed in anger.
‘What do you mean? You call my poor, dead, murdered husband a dog and then say he had secrets? What are you?’
‘I . . . I meant nothing . . . the neighbours say that your husband often went out late at night and returned almost at dawn, and that there were loud parties here, and the synthesizer playing at full volume . . . a riotous lifestyle. With all those dogs. You have to explain all this to me.’
‘There is nothing to explain. We had friends over and played music. Is that a crime? Don’t you see that some people from the neighbourhood wanted us so badly out of the way that they are spreading slander and lies all around? Go and talk to Murari Koyal, if you want the truth.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘That’s for you to find out,’ she answered stubbornly.
‘I will have to take you into custody if you continue to talk like that and hamper the investigation.’
‘Do, please. At least there will be some other policeman there. Enough now, that’s enough! I’m tired and sick and frightened and all you do is bully me. Besides, my husband’s dead and I’m in mourning. I’ve barely finished performing the last rites and here you are pounding away at me as if I’m on the dock.’ Monica Sarkar then threw Ashu Das a malevolent look and said, ‘You’re harassing me. Produce me in court and I’ll inform the judge of your offensive behaviour.’ Her voice had dipped low and become hard.
Suddenly she began sobbing dryly
and flung herself down on the sofa. The lighter slipped out from her pocket and clattered to the floor. The maid came in and glared at Ashu Das before going over to Monica Sarkar and patting her on her back. ‘There, there, you must lie down,’ she said and poured her a glass of water.
There were excited whines and shrieks from the inner rooms and Ashu Das’s hair stood on end.
The complainant was turning hostile and his dignity was in shreds.
Ashu Das fled.
When he began with the neighbours he was astounded by their hostility. The officer-in-charge had thoughtfully sketched a map of the locality and appended it with a few words of wisdom.
To the north of the PO is a boundary wall, drain and front road with electric lamp post.
To the south is a passage and the house of Gopal Saha.
On the eastern side is the dwelling of one Tapas Dhar.
On the western side is the dwelling of Mary Kuttan, tenant of Navin Sharma.
Ashu Das chose to take on Mary Kuttan first and immediately regretted his decision. She was a thin, elderly woman with fierce eyes and a daunting air of severity, and took three minutes to check his credentials. When she finally let him in, it was to a sitting room that smelled of coconut oil and vanilla. Ashu Das sat down on a hard chair that faced a wall on which hung a picture of Jesus Christ with a hole in his heart, looking pitifully at a corner of the ceiling, and felt a similar wretchedness suffuse his whole being.
‘Did you hear any noise on the night of the murder?’
‘Could anyone hear anything, with all those rockets and conch shells and bells?’ she retorted sourly.
He sighed and asked another question, ‘When did you go to sleep?’
‘At eleven o’clock, as a good Christian should, after cleaning the kitchen and locking the front door.’
‘What were you doing till then?’