by Vaseem Khan
A TERRIBLE ACCIDENT
They drove along the banks of the Indriyani River, sun dappling the slow-moving water, bullocks wading in the shallows.
Fifteen minutes out from the village Chopra, guided by Sen, steered the Tata van over a narrow stone bridge.
On the far side, they stayed close to the river and then, ten minutes later, turned north along a rutted track that Chopra could see had once been an asphalted access road, now pitted and overrun by weeds.
The road curled behind a screen of trees, their crests flamed by the sun.
Beyond the trees, Chopra brought the van to a halt.
For facing him was an abandoned industrial complex, a collection of derelict buildings, steel unit structures and giant piping arrays. The plant had clearly fallen into ruin, racked by years of neglect, eaten away by rust and overrun by vegetation. A crimson, crackling heat seemed to radiate from the metallic structures.
The entire complex was surrounded by a rusted chain-link fence.
A large signboard stood beside the front gate—but the sign itself had been painted over in black.
Chopra’s intuition kicked in. “Fermi Engineering,” he said.
“Yes,” confirmed Sen. “This was Fermi Engineering. It was too costly to dismantle, so they just removed anything that could identify it.”
“Why?” said Chopra. “What happened here?”
For a moment, Sen didn’t answer. A crow cawed in the rustling silence. Clouds spun across the sky. “There is one more thing I must show you.”
They drove a further fifteen minutes along the river, a gentle breeze at their backs.
When they stopped again, it was at another derelict site.
This time, however, the ruins were of a village set by the riverbank. A fire appeared to have raged through the village; what remained of the dwellings—the remnants of brick walls—was blackened and burnt.
“Come,” said Sen.
He led the former policeman into the village.
With each step, Chopra felt the silence wind itself around his throat. There was a distinct texture to the air here, stagnant and motionless. Each breath felt as if he were choking on ashes. Dust devils spun over the parched earth; dry grass crackled underfoot. Time seemed to slow down, flow more slowly around them. He glanced up, saw a hawk floating on an air-pole, a stark sentinel framed against the sun’s glare.
The silence pricked the back of his neck and made him feel ill at ease. He had attended untold crime scenes in his time, and had heard colleagues talk of the numen of a place, a spiritual essence that was the residue of a ghastly crime.
If such a thing existed, then it pulsed brightly here.
Sen finally stopped in what might once have been the centre of the settlement.
“My sister was a truly good human being. She was the brightest in our family, in our whole village. She topped her school, and, in time, she went to Pune to become a doctor—it was what she had always wanted. When she qualified, it was one of the proudest days of my life. She could have done anything then, become a surgeon in a private hospital, become a wealthy woman. But she chose to return to us. She wanted to use her training to help those who couldn’t afford good medical care. She set up her practice back in Ramghar. Everyone loved her. She was a caring, considerate human being, and this translated into her work as a doctor.
“When the Fermi plant was established they hired her as an on-call medical professional. She would go to the plant regularly to give the employees check-ups. If they were ill they visited her at her clinic. That was how she met Roger Penzance and Jared Faulkner.” Sen paused, a strange expression on his features, at once sad and nostalgic. “Faulkner and my sister fell in love.
“For a while Penzance expressed his desire for her too, but she recognised him for what he was: a vain, arrogant, unpleasant man. Faulkner was different. I met him many times—he used to come to our home once he began courting Radhika—and I saw that he was honest in his intentions. Their relationship caused much gossip, but my sister was so well liked, and so indifferent to the rumour-mongering, that it had no effect on them.
“And then, one day, the gods, for their own amusement, decided to undo everything they had made.”
Chopra waited, watching Sen gather himself for whatever it was he was struggling to say. Painful memories that he had long suppressed.
“There was an accident. The plant specialised in chemical engineering. Its core products included pesticides, a new range to help increase the yield of India’s crops, in line with the government’s bold new five-year plan. Feeding the millions. The accident led to a cloud of methyl isocyanate gas being released, just before dawn, on the night of the fifteenth of May 1985. It drifted down to this village, the village of Shangarh. In the space of a few hours just over two hundred people were killed, fifty-nine families wiped out in the blink of an eye…” Sen paused. “Jared Faulkner was working late at the plant that night. He was killed in the accident.”
Chopra felt the revelation almost as a physical blow.
He had begun to suspect that something terrible lay behind the story of Fermi Engineering’s sudden closure, but this was beyond even his darkest imaginings.
Two hundred dead! Men, women, and children, decimated in an instant. And yet… he racked his memory. Why could he not recall reading anything about this? Even three decades on, he felt sure, he would have remembered.
Almost as if he had read his thoughts, Sen said: “There was a cover-up. Fermi Engineering’s Indian plant was a joint venture between an American firm and the Maharashtrian state government. The chief minister at the time had staked his personal reputation on the success of the enterprise. This was at a time when the Indian government had undertaken major economic reforms in the country in an attempt to woo foreign capital. They could not afford a PR disaster. And the death toll—in their terms—was insignificant. Two hundred unknown villagers? It was a price they were willing to pay.
“They immediately put out a story of disease—a sudden, fatal outbreak had claimed the lives of an entire village. The chief minister sent in the troops. They sealed off the site and burned the bodies, and then burned the village. They claimed that this was the only way to ensure that the disease did not spread. It was a plausible cover story.
“Of course, it was impossible for something like that to be completely contained. Dissenting voices—friends and family of the villagers—were silenced, first with money and, later, for those who refused to be bribed, with threats. But some voices could not be silenced.
“My sister was one such voice.
“You see, one of the villagers had been out that night, when the gas cloud hit. He was down by the riverbank, relieving himself. He saw the goats tethered by the bank go into convulsions. The approaching gas began to choke him, and so he ran. He didn’t stop until he got to our village, and woke up my sister. She tended to him, but by then he too had begun to convulse.
“Moments later he was dead.
“By the time my sister got to Shangarh a military cordon had been set up around the village.
“When she returned it was to discover that the man’s body had been taken from our home. I was in the house that night. I saw the men who took him. Soldiers. Thugs. I tried to stop them, but it was useless. They had their orders.
“The days that followed were the hardest of Radhika’s life.
“The morning after the incident, she discovered that Jared Faulkner had died. We were told that his death had been an accident, that the details could only be released to his direct family, and that his body had been immediately cremated as per his wishes. We did not know at the time that Faulkner had no family, no one to hound Fermi for an explanation. No one aside from my sister. And, of course, her enquiries were met with a wall of silence.
“And then, later, came the revelation that the entire village of Shangarh had been wiped out. By disease, or so we were told.
“But my sister no more believed this than she believed th
at Faulkner had died in a simple accident. She had observed the young man’s symptoms as he lay dying in our home; she knew it was no disease that had killed him.
“And what the authorities didn’t know, couldn’t have known, was that my sister had already taken a blood sample from him before the soldiers arrived. Working on her hunch, she sent the vial to a clinic in Pune. When the results came back, she realised that everything we had been told was a lie.
“It was no disease that had wiped out two hundred men, women and children in Shangarh. It was a chemical agent, one that the clinic had identified, and which, my sister knew, could be tied to the Fermi plant.
“Radhika thought long and hard about what to do with this information. Going to the authorities was out of the question—it was evident that they had colluded in the cover-up. She considered approaching the media. But she knew that one vial of blood—belonging to an individual who was now ash—would not be evidence enough against the might of the government. And so she began to collect more information. She began to prepare files on all those who had perished in the disaster. She wanted to create a story for the media based on the lives that had been taken. The files are back at my home. I will give those to you too.”
In the sudden quiet following Sen’s revelation, it seemed to Chopra that the man had aged, his tall frame stooped and bent, as if the burden of his secret had hollowed him out from within, and now there was nothing left to hold him erect.
“Fermi Engineering found out what my sister was doing. They sent someone to talk sense into her. That someone was Roger Penzance.
“I was there when he came to our home, sat there in his suit, wiping his forehead with a cotton handkerchief. He told us how awful it was that his friend Faulkner had died, how sorry he was for my sister. He broached the subject of the disaster at Shangarh, calling it a matter of “some delicacy.” He made it clear that the authorities did not appreciate my sister’s attempts to investigate, her attempts to label it as anything other than the official account of an outbreak of disease. He threatened her, in his oblique manner.
“What Penzance didn’t know was that Jared Faulkner had predicted the disaster.
“In the months leading up to the accident he had told my sister that Penzance had begun to cut corners. He had signed orders to install cheaper components, to reduce safety protocols, all in a bid to cut down on operating costs. His bonuses were tied to certain budget targets, and he was willing to do whatever it took to meet those targets. He was reckless, and the result of his recklessness was the accident that killed both Faulkner and the villagers of Shangarh.
“My sister snapped. She accused Penzance of all manner of things, of being a murderer, of being the devil himself. She told him that she had everything she needed to bring him to justice, that she would shout it to the world, make certain that he ended up in prison for his crime.
“Penzance panicked. He warned my sister that any rashness on her part would go badly for her.” Sen paused. “Four hours later my sister was deliberately run off the road. She died in a fireball that consumed her vehicle. Her killers were never found.”
Chopra could almost reach out and touch the man’s grief, it was so palpable.
“I saw Penzance just once more,” continued Sen. “I went to his quarters, a guesthouse near the Fermi plant. I found a haunted man. He had been packing—I knew then that he was planning to flee. He was talking, to himself, couldn’t stop. About the chemical accident, about my sister. He didn’t admit it outright, but he seemed to think that those responsible for the cover-up were also behind my sister’s death. He seemed truly shaken by it. I think that was when I realised that he loved her. Or coveted her, at least. He’d never understood why she chose Faulkner over him. If he felt any guilt at all, it was over my sister’s death.
“He thought that her killers might come for him, to ensure that there were no loose ends left to reveal the truth. I don’t know what I expected to achieve by confronting him—whatever it was remained unsaid. You see, I didn’t have my sister’s courage. Her conviction. I had just had my first child. I couldn’t risk harm to my family. In the end, I said nothing. I merely listened to Penzance’s mumbled explanations, his veiled threats. And then I left.
“In the years since not a day has gone by without me reliving that encounter. I should have done something then, I should have exposed Penzance and Fermi when I had the chance. But I didn’t, and that is a regret that will live with me till the day I die.
“I have kept my sister’s files. In her lockbox, you will also find a written statement. She knew that her life may have been in danger so she took the precaution of setting down everything she knew, or suspected. I should have given it to the authorities years ago, but I had no wish to raise old ghosts. I am a coward, and that is my shame. But now, you have come, and I pass the burden to you. Do with it as you will.”
On the way back to Sen’s home, Chopra reflected on how guilt affected people in different ways. Some it warped, damaging them beyond repair. For others, like Penzance/Burbank, guilt was a nebulous thing. Burbank had clearly felt a lifelong guilt over the death of Radhika Sen, a woman he may have loved. It explained why he had held on to those photographs. And yet, at the same time, the death of two hundred villagers had not appeared to weigh heavily on his conscience. There was no real way to reconcile this, except to acknowledge that human beings were more complex than most people assumed. In spite of the engineer Ravinder Shastri’s belief, even men like Hollis Burbank were not black-and-white caricatures.
Back at Sen’s, Chopra watched the old man remove manila files from a steel cupboard, setting them down on his narrow bed. There were fifty-nine files in all, one for each family. “She spent months putting these together. It wasn’t easy. A lot of the information she took from her own medical records. You see, she was the doctor for Shangarh as well as our own village. It’s the reason she took it so personally. She knew every one of those people; they were her wards, her extended family.” He paused in the doorway. “My sister was my hero, Chopra. I only wish that I could have been half the man she was.”
Chopra sat on the edge of the bed and began to go through the files.
Most had very little in them. The names of the family members, birth certificates, sheets from their medical records. Some contained photographs, and these were the most poignant of all.
His eyes lingered on the faces, the expressions of simple innocence. No idea of what awaited them around the corner.
He went through each file, not knowing what he could learn, other than the reaffirmation of the gossamer fragility of human lif—
He froze.
The file he had picked up lay open on his lap. The name hadn’t registered at first, though it was unusual enough. It was the photograph inside, the family’s only child. A twenty-year-old son.
Chopra realised, with a sense of shock, that he knew this man. He knew that face.
And in that instant, he understood that he had found someone with the means, motive and opportunity to murder Hollis Burbank.
Someone who had, hitherto, not even entered into his suspicions.
Chopra shoved the remaining files into a bag, picked up the lockbox and, with a promise to keep Sen updated, raced for his van.
He had to get back to Mumbai as soon as possible.
“We can’t really afford this suite, but at a wedding like this, appearances are everything.” Big Mother sighed and wheeled her chair away from the mullioned window overlooking the sea.
She stopped glumly in front of Poppy.
Ganesha trotted forward and ran his trunk over the chair’s wheels. The little elephant was inordinately fascinated by the contraption.
“So Anjali had a uniform tailored for herself, a uniform worn by the staff here at the hotel? What does it mean?”
“One of two things,” replied Poppy. “Either the uniform was simply to ensure that Anjali could walk out of the hotel in disguise with no danger of being recognised…”
> “Or?”
“Or, she is still here.”
Big Mother nodded glumly, as if she had expected this. “It makes no sense. Why would she engineer an escape, only to stay here?”
“I’m not sure,” admitted Poppy. “As you said earlier, Anjali is conflicted. She wants to do the right thing by her family, and yet she feels it may not be the right thing for her. And so, perhaps, she wishes to stay close by, to keep an eye on what is happening. Personally, I think she is judging the reaction of Gautam’s family… and her own.”
“And based on our reaction she will either return or…?”
Poppy shrugged. “I do not know, Big Mother. Only Anjali can answer that.”
Huma Dixit, standing beside Irfan, spoke up. “She always used to say to me how ridiculous being a royal in modern India was. Nawabs and princes, maharanis and princesses, with their silly airs, their feuds, their jaded pageantry. Stripped of wealth and land, the noble families are just puffed-up goldfish in a bowl. At least, that’s what Anjali thought.”
Anger flashed in Big Mother’s eyes. She seemed about to retort, but then thought better of it. She sighed. “My granddaughter always was bright. Yes, it’s true that we royals have been revealed as having feet of clay. But there is still a role for us, even in this modern India of yours. The future may not belong to us, but the past most assuredly does. Love us or loathe us, the royal dynasties of India have shaped this country’s heritage. We connect what you are today to what you once were. And that has to mean something or what is the point of anything?” She rested a hand on the head of the inquisitive elephant calf before her. Ganesha responded with a soft bugle. “What must we do next?”
“I have an idea,” said Poppy. “Please come with me. We need to see a man who values the past as much as you do.”
WHEN GUEST IS NOT GOD
“Dashputra is an unusual name,” said Chopra. “Unusual enough to make me take a second look.”