The Case of the Missing Servant

by Tarquin Hall

  Mrs. Kasliwal tutted impatiently. “Three hundred is fair.”

  “Four hundred and fifty?”

  “Three hundred and fifty. No advance.”

  Seema considered the offer for a moment and then, with a reluctant wobble of her head, assented.

  “Very good,” said Mrs. Kasliwal. “Sunday will be your day off and you can leave the house, but otherwise you must be here. I don’t want any sneaking out, and no visitors. Is this understood?”

  Seema nodded again.

  “Bablu will give you your duties. Any stealing and I will not hesitate to call the police. If, in three days, I am not satisfied, then you must leave.”

  Mrs. Kasliwal led Seema into the kitchen, where she instructed Bablu to put her to work immediately.

  It was a long, hard day. First Seema helped out in the kitchen chopping onions, kneading roti dough, picking out the grit from the moong daal and boiling milk to make paneer. Then she had to mop the hardwood floors in the corridors and the dining room. She was allowed thirty minutes for lunch, some subzi, which she ate on her own, crouched outside the kitchen. Afterward, she was sent to a nearby market to pick up three heavy bags of pulses, as well as a packet of cornflakes for Sahib’s breakfast. The rest of the early afternoon was spent doing laundry.

  As she worked, Seema was left with little opportunity to interact with her co-workers, let alone get to know them. Bablu said little and when he did speak, it was to curse. Mostly this was on account of Kamat, who was clumsy and forgetful and overcooked the chawal and poured fat down the drain. The driver, Sidhu, who had been working in the house for only a month, spent the morning in the driveway chatting on his mobile phone while wiping, waxing and polishing Mrs. Kasliwal’s red Tata Indica, which he treated as if it was the Koh-i-Noor. Sahib’s driver, Arjun, who had been hired to replace Munnalal, appeared at around twelve o’clock and, although there was no missing his reaction to the sight of Seema, he barely had enough time to eat his khana before returning to the office with his master’s tiffin.

  Seema found little opportunity to speak with any of the casual staff, either. The dishwasher girl who came for an hour to scrub all the pots and pans before continuing on to a number of other neighboring households was evidently intimidated by Bablu and kept her head down at the sink. The beautician who came to give Madam threading and maalish had airs and didn’t deign to say so much as a please or thank-you for a cup of tea. And as for the dalit toilet cleaner, who came from a rag pickers’ colony on the edge of Jaipur, she was a mute.

  The only person Seema managed to talk to properly was Jaya, the other young maidservant, who had been working in the house since early August.

  In the late afternoon, when Madam went out visiting friends, the two of them worked together sweeping and mopping the veranda. Given that Jaya was intensely shy and evidently unhappy, Seema broke the ice by telling her about some of her adventures. She talked about her days with a travelling theater troupe in Assam; the year she spent working as an ayah to a couple of Delhi socialites’ children; and her experiences as a Mumbai bar girl and how a crorepati businessman had fallen in love with her and proposed.

  These stories were all true, even though many of the mitigating circumstances surrounding them were adapted for the audience.

  Jaya liked listening to them and quickly took to her new friend. On a couple of occasions, she even had cause to smile.

  That evening, when all the day’s chores were done, Jaya led Seema to the servant quarters at the back of the compound.

  There were five rooms in all. The mali occupied the first (starting from the left); the next belonged to Kamat; the third was empty; the fourth, which had posters of the Virgin Mary and Hrithik Roshan on the wall, was vacant as well; and the last room belonged to Jaya.

  Jaya warned against staying in the fourth room because the door was warped and did not close properly. But Seema said she liked the idea of the two of them being neighbors. Besides, the door could be fixed.

  Together they cleaned the room, taking down the posters. And afterward, Seema took her idols from her bag. Having arranged them on the narrow windowsill of the front window, she lit an incense stick and said a prayer.

  The two maidservants spent the rest of the evening chatting some more and sharing a few dates. Seema related more stories about her adventurous past and, now and again, asked Jaya about the other servants.

  Soon, she had learned that the mali was stoned all the time and always passed out in the evening. Bablu was gay, but pretended to be straight even though there wasn’t a Salman Khan movie he hadn’t seen. Kamat often drank and turned extremely aggressive and there was a rumor going around that he had raped a girl working in another house.

  At ten o’clock the two decided to turn in and Seema went back to her room.

  She heard Jaya close her door and turn the key in the lock and it was with some effort that she managed to do the same.

  An hour later, Seema was woken by the sound of a whistle. And then someone tried opening her door.

  She called out, “Who’s there?” But there was no reply and she heard footsteps running away.

  Cautiously, Seema got out of bed, went to the door, opened it and looked outside. It was pitch dark and there was no one in sight.

  In her right hand, she held the four-inch Nepali Khukuri knife that she always kept under her pillow at night.

  Ten

  There were fifteen phone lines running into the Khan Market offices of Most Private Investigators Ltd., only six of which were used, officially, by the company. The rest were for undercover operations.

  Each of these nine lines had its own dedicated handset, answering machine and a voice-activated tape recorder arranged on a long table in the “communications room” across the hallway from Puri’s office. In front of each phone lay a clipboard with notes detailing how the line was being used and precisely how it should be answered.

  These notes were for the benefit of Mrs. Chadha, whose job it was to answer the nine phones in a variety of voices.

  It was vital, but mostly uncomplicated work. Much of the time, all she had to do was pretend to be a receptionist or a phone operator and then connect the call to either Puri or one of his operatives.

  Recently, for example, lines one to four had been assigned to “Hindustan Pharmaceuticals” (as part of the investigation on behalf of the state of Bihar into the illicit sale of legally grown opium). Mrs. Chadha had been required to pick up all calls to those numbers with the words, “Hindustan Pharmaceuticals, your health is our business, how may I be of assistance?” before connecting them to Puri, a.k.a. Ranjan Roy, CEO.

  But at other times, Mrs. Chadha, who was a member of the South Extension Amateur Theatrical Society and a gifted impressionist and liked her job because she could spend most of the day knitting, had to play more complicated roles.

  During one of the latest matrimonial investigations, line seven had been dedicated to the “Hot and Lusty” escort service, and for that Mrs. Chadha had had to adopt a husky voice and arrange bookings for a certain Miss Nina.

  For the foreseeable future, line nine was allocated to a Chinese takeout called “Hasty Tasty” and for this Mrs. Chadha sounded harried and impatient and asked questions like, “How hot you want chili chicken?”

  To help make things sound authentic, the communications room was equipped with a multideck sound system. This had been set up by Flush and worked automatically. Whenever a call came though, the machine would start playing appropriate background noise.

  For Hindustan Pharmaceuticals the ambience was nothing special, just general office sounds: typing, murmuring, the distant ringing of other phones. Calls to the Hot and Lusty line triggered a Muzak version of the theme to Love Story. And when anyone rang Hasty Tasty, Mrs. Chadha found herself speaking over the clatter of pots and pans, gushes of steam and the cries of irate chefs.

  Usually Puri was able to give Mrs. Chadha a rough timing for when a call was expected.

  T
he same morning that Seema applied for work at Raj Kasliwal Bhavan in Jaipur, the detective told Mrs. Chadha to expect line six to ring at around nine o’clock.

  When the call came, it was closer to 9:30.

  Putting aside the sweater she was knitting for her youngest grandson, Mrs. Chadha answered the phone with a polite “Ji?”

  The woman on the other line asked for a certain Mrs. Kohli.

  “Yes, it is she,” she said in English, sticking to her own voice for once.

  The conversation that ensued panned out just as Puri had predicted. The caller, a well-spoken lady called Mrs. Kasliwal, divulged during a two-minute preamble that she had a large house in Jaipur, that her husband was a well-respected lawyer, and that her handsome son was studying in London.

  Eventually she came to the point. Had a servant girl called Seema worked for the Kohlis?

  “For three years or thereabouts,” answered Mrs. Chadha. “A most satisfactory worker she was.”

  “Might I ask why she was terminated?” asked Mrs. Kasliwal.

  “Actually, my eldest son and his family returned from posting in Kathmandu and he brought back one ayah, so there is no need for the girl.”

  “But you had no complaints?” asked Mrs. Kasliwal, sounding as if she would need convincing.

  “Not at all,” said Mrs. Chadha. “One can say she’s a cut above the riffraff.”

  The conversation drifted on to other matters, with Mrs. Kasliwal dropping a few names and extending an invitation to tea the next time the Kohlis were in Jaipur.

  After she hung up, Mrs. Chadha logged the call on the appropriate clipboard and called Puri to tell him that the conversation had gone well. Then she got back to her knitting while she waited for the next scheduled call. A young, prospective groom was expected to call on line seven and ask for the services of Miss Nina.

  Puri did not expect to hear from Facecream for at least 24 hours. She had not carried a mobile phone with her so she would have to go to a pay phone out in the street to call him.

  Getting away from the house could prove difficult, but after working with the Nepali beauty on several dozen operations, the detective was in little doubt that she would find a way.

  At Puri’s request, Tubelight had sent two of his boys to Jaipur as well. Shashi and Zia had arrived in the Pink City yesterday and been tasked with trying to locate Kasliwal’s former driver, Munnalal, and locating the spot on the Ajmer Road where the unidentified woman had been dumped on August 22.

  Meanwhile, there was one other lead to follow: the stones Puri had found in Mary’s room. He had arranged to have them sent to Professor Rajesh Kumar at the geology department of Delhi University.

  “Perhaps Doctor-sahib can provide me with a clue to where they came from,” Puri told Elizabeth Rani, who was waiting in front of Boss’s desk as he placed the little stones, one by one, inside an envelope.

  “We must leave no stone unturned, isn’t it, Madam Rani?” said Puri, chuckling at his own pun. “It’s a long shot, no doubt, but then no clue is ever insignificant, no?”

  “Yes, sir,” she answered efficiently before returning to her desk to make the arrangements for the envelope to be dispatched to Professor Kumar’s office—Professor Kumar for whom, secretly, Elizabeth Rani had a soft spot.

  Puri, who likened himself to a spider at the center of a web with silky tendrils branching out all around him, eased back into his chair, confident that all the little secrets of the Kasliwal household would soon be his. There wasn’t another detective in India, private or otherwise, who could have handled it better. And (as Puri acknowledged, begrudgingly) there was only one to equal him.

  The young hotshots straight out of detective school (like that bloody Charlie, Harun what’s-his-name, who always wore a silk suit and gelled his hair so every goonda could spot him coming a mile off) certainly offered little in the way of competition. The problem with such Johnny-come-lately types was that they watched too much American television and imagined every case could be solved by turning up at a crime scene and using an ultraviolet light.

  Not that forensics didn’t have its place. As Puri had told a class of cadets at the Delhi headquarters of the Central Bureau of Investigation (the Indian equivalent of the FBI) during one of his recent lectures, Indians had been pioneers in the field.

  “In the fifteenth century, one Delhi court investigator, Bayram Khan, solved the most brutal murder of the Great Mughal’s courtesan by matching a hair he located floating in the baths where she was drowned by the eunuch Mahbub Alee Khan,” the detective had read from a speech that had been typed—and of which the English grammar had been greatly improved—by Elizabeth Rani. “Also let us not forget the Tamil alchemist, Bhogar, who led the way in substance testing. For example, he made extensive comparisons of tobacco ashes. This achievement came a full one and a half centuries before British detective Sherlock Holmes wrote a monograph on the same subject without so much as acknowledging the earlier work.”

  Puri had gone on to talk about the great Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose, who developed the fingerprint classification system and opened the first Fingerprint Bureau in Calcutta in 1897—although Sir Edward Richard Henry took the credit for their pioneering industry.

  “So, as we can see, forensics certainly has its uses,” he’d added. “But there is no substitute for good, old-fashioned intelligence gathering. The microscope cannot match the power of the human eye, we can say.”

  Naturally, in this field, India had also led the world.

  “Some two thousand and three hundred years ago, Mr. James Bond’s ancestors were living in caves,” he’d said. “In those dark, distant days, there was no Miss Moneypenny, no Mr. Q, and the only gadgets were flints to strike together to make fire.”

  This point had got a gratifying laugh from his audience.

  “But in India at this time, we were having the great Maurya Empire,” the detective had continued. “The founder of our greatest dynasty was, of course, the political genius Chanakya. It was he who established what we can call the art of espionage. He was, in fact, the world’s first spymaster, establishing a network of male and female secret agents. These satris, as they were thus known, operated throughout the empire and its neighboring kingdoms.”

  Puri had not needed to remind the cadets that it was Chanakya who had written the world’s first great treatise on statecraft, the Arthashastra, an extraordinarily practical guide to running and nurturing a fair and progressive society—one that India’s modern rulers, and indeed the world’s, would have done well to study. But he had drawn their attention to the section on running a secret service and read an excerpt:

  “‘Secret agents shall be recruited from orphans. They shall be trained in the following techniques: interpretation of signs and marks, palmistry and similar techniques of interpreting body marks, magic and illusions, the duties of the ashramas, the stages of life, and the science of omens and augury. Alternatively, they can be trained in physiology and sociology, the art of men and society.’”

  Chanakya, Puri explained, had recommended numerous disguises to be adopted while conducting clandestine operations.

  “Brothel keepers, storytellers, acrobats, cooks, shampooers, reciters of puranas, cowherds, monks, elephant handlers, thieves, snake catchers and even gods, to name just a few,” he said. “For agents planning to infiltrate a city, Chanakya suggested adopting the cover of a trader; those working on the frontiers should pose as herdsmen. When a secret agent needed to infiltrate a private household, he urged the use of—and I quote—“hunchbacks, dwarfs, eunuchs, women skilled in various arts and dumb persons.’”

  Nowadays of course, dwarfs were no longer easy to recruit since many of them had found work in Bollywood. The wealthy classes were no longer inclined to hire hunchbacks as servants. Disguising yourself as a nun was no longer a guaranteed way of gaining access to the home of a high official. And, ever since one-rupee shampoo sachets had become available at paan stalls, shampooing had ceased to
be a viable profession.

  But the Arthashastra remained the basis of Puri’s modus operandi. The section on the recruitment, training and use of assassins aside, the treatise remained as instructive today as it had proven to the rulers of the great Maurya Empire.

  In all that time, human character had changed little.

  “Nowadays,” he’d concluded, “a man can fly from one end of the planet to another in a few hours only. Achievements in science are at a maximum. But still, there is more mischief going on than ever before, especially in overpopulated cities like Delhi.”

  Puri believed this was because the world was still passing through Kali Yuga, the Age of Kali, a time of debauchery and moral breakdown.

  “More and more, people’s moral compass is turning 180 degrees. So you must be vigilant. Remember what Krishna told Arjuna at the battle of Kurukshetra. ‘The discharge of one’s moral duty supersedes all other pursuits, whether spiritual or material.’”

  Eleven

  With Facecream now inside the Kasliwal household, Puri decided to turn to Brigadier Kapoor’s case.

  He spent a few hours on the phone checking into the prospective groom’s background and soon learned that Mahinder Gupta was to be found at the Golden Greens Golf Course most evenings.

  The club was in NOIDA, the North Okhla Industrial Development Area to the east of Delhi, which, despite its clumsy acronym, had become one of the most elegant addresses for Delhi’s wealthy, image-conscious elite. To reach it, Handbrake took the road that passed the magnificent Humayun’s Tomb and frenetic Bhogal market with everything from toilets and bamboo ladders to cotton mattresses for sale on the sidewalks.

  At around seven o’clock the Ambassador passed east on the toll bridge that spanned the Yamuna River.

  Handbrake had recently overheard Puri bemoaning the fate of the holy river to someone. Apparently, he and his friends had swum in its waters when they were young. On summer weekends, they had crossed by ferry to buy watermelons from the farmers on the other bank. But now, as the terrible stink that filled the inside of the car attested, the Yamuna was a giant sewer—three billion liters of raw waste went into it each year.