The Case of the Missing Servant

by Tarquin Hall

  Puri spent ten minutes listening in on the conversation in the kitchen. The talk was mostly about the latest Shahrukh Khan film, a double-role. It all sounded harmless enough, as gossip went. But it was obvious that Sweetu was keeping the girls from their duties and shirking his own. The detective decided to put a stop to it and reprimand the boy. Switching off the receiver and locking the study door behind him, he walked to the top of the stairs.

  “Sweetu!” he bellowed.

  The sound of Sahib’s voice brought the boy scuttling from the kitchen into the hallway below.

  “Good morning, sir,” he stammered, awkwardly,

  “Why are you being idle?” demanded Puri in Hindi. “You are not employed to discuss Shah Rukh’s double-roles!”

  “Sir, I—”

  “No argument. Where is my bed tea?”

  “Sir, power cut—”

  “Tell Malika to bring it to the roof. And,” he added in English, “don’t do chitter chatter!”

  Puri headed upstairs, satisfied with the manner in which he had handled Sweetu. The boy was young, only fifteen, and an orphan. What he needed was discipline. But Puri was never one to abuse, exploit or treat his servants badly, as he had known so many other people to do. He believed in looking after the interests of all his employees, providing they were hardworking and loyal. In Sweetu’s case, Puri had arranged for the boy to attend school two afternoons a week so that he would learn to read and write and acquire a skill. And in a few years’ time, the detective would also help him find a suitable wife.

  Had not Chanakya taught that it was the duty of the privileged to help the underprivileged?

  Puri climbed the stairs and stepped out onto the flat roof of the house. The sun was climbing into what should have been a clear, azure sky. But as was so often the case these days, a brown pall of dust and pollution blanketed Delhi, smothering the city like some Vedic plague.

  The family had hoped to escape the smog when they had moved to Gurgaon nine years earlier.

  When Puri had bought his plot of land, it had lain many miles from the southern outskirts of the capital. It had taken more than two years to build his and Rumpi’s dream house—a white, four-bedroom Spanish-style villa with orange-tiled awnings, which they’d furnished from top to bottom in Punjabi baroque.

  On the roof, Puri had established a garden of potted plants, tending to them every morning at dawn.

  In those days, the vistas in all directions had been breathtaking, the sun shimmering off mustard fields and casting long shadows over clutches of mud huts. Goatherds and their flocks wove along time-worn tracks that dissected the complex patchwork of land. Farmers drove oxen and wooden plows, kicking up dust in their wake. Barefoot women in bright reds and oranges walked from the hand pump to their homes, brimming brass pots balanced on their heads.

  Away from the drone of Delhi traffic and the roar of jets making their approach into Indira Gandhi International Airport, Puri had been greeted by peacock calls and the laughter of boys washing at the nearby village pump. When the wind was right, he had also been treated to the smell of chapatis cooking over dung fires and the scent of jasmine, wafting over the exterior wall.

  Little had Puri known that in building a new home in Gurgaon, he had become a trendsetter. His move from Punjabi Bagh coincided with the explosion of India’s service industries in the wake of the liberalization of the economy. In the late 1990s, Gurgaon became Delhi’s southern extension, and was made available for major “development.” First, a few reflective glass buildings appeared along the main road to Rajasthan. Then, one by one, the local farmers sold up, and their little fields disappeared under the tracks of bulldozers and dump trucks.

  In their place came Florida-style gated communities with names like Fantasy Island Estates. They boasted their own schools, medical facilities, shops, fitness centers and megamalls.

  Concrete superstructures shot up like great splinters of bone forced from the body of the earth. Built by armies of sinewy laborers who crawled like ants along frames of bamboo scaffolding, these were the apartment blocks for the 24/7 call center and software development workforce. LUXURY IS A PLACE CALLED PARADISE and DISCOVER A VENETIAN PALACE LIFESTYLE read the plethora of billboards that invited India’s newly affluent to share in the dream.

  All this was built on the backs of India’s “underprivileged classes,” who were working for slave wages. They had arrived in Gurgaon in their tens of thousands from across the country. But neither the local authorities nor the private contractors provided them with housing, so most had built shacks on the building sites alongside the machinery and brick factories. Before long, shantytowns of corrugated iron and open sewers spread across an undeveloped noman’s-land.

  The Puris now found themselves living between five hundred homes built on a grid of streets with names like A3; and a slum with a population of laborers and carrion that was growing exponentially. To the north, the view was marred by towering pylons and, beyond them, a row of biosphere-like office blocks bristling with satellite dishes.

  The smog, too, had caught up with them. The new four-lane highway to Delhi had encouraged more traffic, poisoning the air with diesel fumes. Legions of trucks stirred dust into the atmosphere.

  These days, the detective found himself struggling to keep his beloved plants clean. Each morning, he came up onto the roof armed with a spray gun and gave each of them a bath, and each morning he found them coated in a new deposit of grime.

  Puri had just got around to tending to his favorite ficus tree when Malika arrived with his bed tea and biscuits. She laid the tray on the garden table.

  “Namaste, sir,” she said shyly.

  “Good morning.”

  He was always happy to see Malika, who had been with the family for six years. She was a bright, cheerful, hardworking girl, despite having an alcoholic husband, a tyrant of a mother-in-law and two children to care for.

  “How are you doing?” asked Malika, who was keen to try out her English, which she picked up from watching American soap operas on Star TV.

  “I am very well, thank you,” said Puri. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” she answered, but started giggling, blushed and then fled downstairs.

  The detective smiled to himself and drank some of his tea before returning to the job at hand. He finished bathing his ficus and then made his way over to the roof’s east side, where, on the ledge, he was growing six prized chili plants. He had nurtured each of them from seed (they had been sent to him by a friend in Assam and came from one of the hottest chilis Puri had ever tasted) and was pleased to see that after many weeks of tender care and watering, they were bearing fruit.

  He sprayed the leaves of the first plant and was lovingly wiping them clean when, suddenly, the flowerpot shattered into pieces. A split second later, a bullet whizzed by Puri’s ear and punctured the water tank on the platform behind him.

  With some difficulty, given his bulk, he managed to prostrate himself on the roof. A third bullet smashed into another of his chili plants, showering him with broken pottery and earth. The detective heard a fourth and fifth round hit the side of the house as he remained flat on his front, conscious of the pounding in his chest and the shortness of his breath.

  A sixth bullet whizzed overhead, puncturing the tank for a second time. Water began to stream out, soaking Puri’s silk dressing gown.

  He decided to crawl over to the stairwell. If he could get down to his study and retrieve his pistol from the safe, then he could go after the shooter. It crossed his mind that he would need to put on some shoes as well; his monogrammed slippers would get ruined if he had to give chase through the slums.

  But as he reached the door, it suddenly flew open, knocking him squarely on the head. Puri’s vision doubled for a moment, and then went solidly black.

  Five

  Puri came around to find Rumpi kneeling by his side, holding some smelling salts under his nose. Nearby, Malika and Monica stood looking down at him with con
cerned expressions. In the doorway of the stairwell hovered an anxious Sweetu, wringing his hands.

  “Sir, sir, sir, so sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to, sir! I heard shots, sir, so I came running and then…I didn’t know you were there, sir! Sir, please don’t die…”

  Puri’s head was spinning and he felt nauseous. It took what seemed like several minutes until he could focus his thoughts and then he whispered to Rumpi, “For God’s sake, tell the boy to shut up and go away.”

  Rumpi complied, assuring Sweetu that “sir” was going to be fine and that he should get back to work.

  After seeking further reassurance that his life was still worth living, the houseboy did as he was told and returned downstairs.

  The girls soon followed him to the kitchen, leaving Rumpi to apply an ice pack to the bump on Puri’s forehead.

  “Thank heavens you’re all right, Chubby,” she said tenderly.” “I thought you’d been shot.”

  “Had I not reacted with lightning reflexes and thrown myself on the ground, most certainly I’d be lying here permanently,” he said. “Just I was crawling over to the door when that…that fool burst in. Otherwise I would have caught the shooter. Undoubtedly!”

  “Oh please, Chubby, it wasn’t the boy’s fault,” chided Rumpi gently. “He was only trying to help. Now tell me how you’re feeling.”

  “Much better, thank you, my dear. A nice cup of chai and I’ll be right as rain.”

  Slowly, the detective pushed himself up into a sitting position, taking the ice pack from Rumpi and holding it on his forehead.

  “Tell me, anyone see the shooter?” he asked.

  “I don’t believe so,” answered Rumpi. “I was in the toilet and the others were downstairs. I heard the shots and the next thing I knew Sweetu was shouting you’d been shot and we all came running.”

  “You called the police, is it?”

  “I’ve tried several times, Chubby. But I keep getting a message: ‘This number does not exist.’ You want I should try again?”

  “Yes please, my dear. An official report should be made. Most probably the cops have been negligible in paying the phone bill. Last I heard, they were some years behind, so the lines were cut off. If you can’t get through, send that Sweetu to the station. Tell him to say that some goonda tried putting Vish Puri in the cremation ground, but very much failed in his duty.”

  The police—an officer and four constables—arrived an hour later. After stomping around on the roof, they concluded that the would-be killer had positioned himself in the vacant plot behind the house.

  Their search of the area yielded nothing of value and, predictably, they turned their full attention on the servants.

  “Nine times out of ten, it’s the help,” the officer told Puri.

  The questions put to Monica, Malika and Sweetu were accusatory and misleading, and after all three had answered them in turn and professed their innocence, the policeman told Puri he strongly suspected an “inside job.” Sweetu was his “chief suspect.”

  “You think he’s dangerous, is it?” asked Puri, playing along.

  “I’d like to take him down to the station and get the truth out of him,” replied the officer.

  The detective pretended to give this suggestion some thought and then said, “Actually, I’d prefer to keep him here. That way I can keep an eye on him and he’ll lead me to the hit man.”

  Puri showed the cops to the door and, after watching them drive away and pausing for a moment to contemplate their crass stupidity, headed up onto the roof.

  A careful inspection of the holes in the water tank and the pits made by the two bullets that had impacted on the exterior wall indicated that the hit man had positioned himself on top of the half-constructed building that stood a few feet to the east of the Puris’ home.

  Five minutes later, the detective was standing on the spot, behind a half-built wall, from where his assailant had shot at him.

  There, on the ground, amid some broken bits of brick and lumps of dried concrete, he found six empty slugs and a few cigarette butts. These he scooped up one by one, wrapping them carefully in his handkerchief, and then returned to ground level.

  From a number of boot impressions left in the earth, which matched those visible in the dust on the top of the building, he determined that the hit man had entered the site through an open back gate and could easily have come and gone without anyone seeing him.

  Puri spent a fruitless hour asking the neighbors and their servants if they had seen anything unusual that morning and then returned home.

  Once seated on the big blue leather couch in the sitting room, he wrote down everything he knew so far.

  Hit man waiting 15 mins. at least.

  Hit man expecting subject.

  Hit man uses country-made weapon.

  Hit man is man—size nine boots.

  Next, Puri turned to his Most Usual Suspects file, which he’d retrieved from the safe in his study.

  It contained up-to-date information on all the individuals with a strong motive for having him murdered and whom he judged to be a grave threat. In the event of his untimely death, Rumpi was under instruction to take the file to his rival, Hari Kumar. Despite their differences, he and Hari had an understanding that they would not allow each other’s murder to go unsolved.

  The Most Usual Suspects file contained details of four individuals. A fifth name, that of a serial killer known as Lucky, had recently been removed after he had been awarded the death sentence.

  “Not so lucky after all.” Puri chuckled to himself as he looked over the other names. In no particular order, they were:

  Jacques “Hannibal” Boyé, the French serial killer, serving a life sentence in Tihar jail for murdering and eating seven Canadian backpackers.

  Krishna Rai, the opposition MLA from Bihar, whose son Puri had helped convict for murdering a bar girl.

  Ratan Patel, the head of India Info Inc., serving six years for insider trading.

  Swami Nag, the swindler, confidence man and murderer.

  Without doubt, this last individual posed the greatest threat. There was a note on his page that read “absconding, whereabouts unknown.” Before going into hiding, the Swami had sworn to kill Puri himself “by any and all means.”

  The detective decided to call his usual sources within the criminal underworld to find out about Swami Nag’s whereabouts and whether any of the other three had put out a contract on his life recently. He would also ask Tubelight to make some inquiries; no one else had better informants.

  Beyond that, there was not much more Puri could do.

  There were hundreds of hit men for hire in Delhi; nearly all of them were ordinary, everyday people desperate to do anything to provide their families with their next meal. Their fingerprints were not on record; their weapons of choice were often “country-made” pistols and rifles, which were impossible to trace. Puri closed the Most Usual Suspects file, put it on the couch next to him and opened another dossier containing details of the attempts that had been made on his life.

  Today’s incident brought the tally to twelve.

  On six occasions, his enemies had tried shooting him; twice, they’d attempted poison (once using a samosa laced with arsenic); and during the Case of the Pundit with Twelve Toes, a hired thug had tried to force Puri’s car over the edge of a hairpin bend on the road to Gulmarg.

  The most ingenious attempt had been orchestrated by a cunning murderer (a naturalist by profession) working in Assam’s Kaziranga Park, who had secretly sprayed Puri’s clothes with a pheromone that attracted one-horned rhinos.

  The closest anyone had come (not including the three rhinos, who could move surprisingly quickly) had been a criminal hijra who had pushed a pile of bricks off the top of a building into an alley in Varanasi where Puri had been walking.

  Hardly a day went by when Puri didn’t relate one of these stories to someone. Prospective clients, journalists, visiting children doing school projects and Scotland Yard dete
ctives had all heard one or more.

  “Danger is my ally,” he would tell eager listeners.

  Fostering an image of fearlessness was vital to his reputation as a detective. But Puri was not lax about his own security. His Ambassador was a customized model fitted with bulletproof glass and a reinforced steel undercarriage. He kept two Labradors in the garden and employed an alert chowkidar armed with a shotgun. And he varied the route he took home.

  Puri was also careful to appease the gods, visiting the temple at least once a week and observing all the major festivals.

  If all that failed to protect him…well, the detective had not stared death in the face without being somewhat fatalistic. As he was fond of saying, “We’re all one breath from this life to the next, only.”

  A couple of hours after the shooting, with the bump on his forehead no longer throbbing, Puri decided he was well enough to drive to Jaipur.

  Rumpi had other ideas.

  “Chubby, you must rest,” she insisted in Punjabi, the language the two usually spoke with each other, returning from the kitchen with some tea for him.

  “I’m making you some khichri and later I’ll rub mustard oil on your head.”

  Obediently, the detective sat on the couch again. He knew when it was prudent to do as he was told. Besides, spending the day at home would not be all bad. He could repot his chili plants, watch some cricket and, in the evening, visit the temple.

  Rumpi returned to the kitchen and Puri switched on the TV, surfing through the inordinate number of satellite channels until he found one showing the India vs. West Indies match in Hyderabad. It was the second test—the Indian batsmen having collapsed in the first—and the tourists were nearly eighty-two for one, with Lara two runs short of a half-century.