by Tarquin Hall
Puri playfully slapped Rinku on the shoulder before making his escape.
On his way home, the detective considered how best to proceed in the Brigadier Kapoor case.
Mahinder Gupta struck Puri as somewhat dull—one of a new breed of young Indian men who spent their childhoods with their heads buried in books and their adult lives working fourteen-hour days in front of computer terminals. Such types were generally squeaky clean. The Americans had a word for them: “geeks.”
Being a geek was not a crime. But there was something amiss.
Why would a successful, obviously fit and active BPO executive agree to marry a female four years his senior?
To find out, Puri would have to dig deeper.
First thing tomorrow morning, he would get his team of forensic accountants looking into Gupta’s financial affairs. At the same time, he’d assign Flush to find out what the prospective groom was up to outside office hours and see what the servants knew.
Twelve
Puri did not reach home until ten o’clock, an hour later than usual.
The honk of the car’s horn outside the main gate marked the start of his nightly domestic routine.
The family’s two Labradors, Don and Junior, started barking, and, a moment later, the little metal hatch in the right-hand gate slid open. The grizzled face of the night-watchman, Bahadur, appeared, squinting in the bright glare of the headlights.
Bahadur was the most conscientious night watchman Puri had ever come across—he actually stayed awake all night. But his arthritis was getting worse and it took him an age to open first the left gate, then the right, a process that Handbrake watched restively, grinding the gears in anticipation.
Finally, the driver pulled inside, stopped in front of the house and then jumped out quickly to open the back door. As Boss stepped onto the driveway, Handbrake handed him his tiffin.
The dogs strained on their ropes, wagged their tails and whined pathetically. Puri petted them, told Handbrake (who was renting a room nearby) to be ready at nine sharp and then greeted Bahadur.
The old man, who was wearing a stocking cap with earflaps and a rough wool shawl wrapped around his neck and shoulders, was standing at attention with his back to the closed gates. He held his arms rigid at his sides.
“Ay bhai, is your heater working?” asked Puri, who had recently installed an electric heater in the sentry box in anticipation of the cold, damp smog that would soon descend upon Delhi.
“Haan-ji! Haan-ji!” called out Bahadur, saluting Puri.
“You’ve seen anything suspicious?”
“Nothing!”
“Very good, very good!”
Puri entered the house, swapped his shoes for his monogrammed slippers and poked his head into the living room. Rumpi was curled up on the couch in a nightie with her long hair down around her shoulders. She was engrossed in watching Kaun Banega Crorepati, India’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but turned off the TV, greeted her husband and brought him up to date with what was going on in the house.
There were no visitors or guests, she told her husband. Radhika, their youngest daughter, who was studying in Pune, had called earlier. Malika had gone home to her children, alcoholic husband and impossible mother-in-law. And Monica and Sweetu had gone to bed in their respective quarters.
“Where’s Mummy?” asked Puri, perching on the arm of the armchair nearest the door.
“She went out a few hours ago. I haven’t heard from her.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“She mumbled something about visiting some auntie.”
“Mumbled? Mummy doesn’t do mumbling. I asked you to keep an eye on her, isn’t it?”
“Oh please, Chubby, I’m not one of your spies. I can’t be expected to keep track of her all the time. She comes and goes as she pleases. What am I supposed to do? Lock her in the pantry?”
Puri frowned, hanging his head reflectively. His attention was drawn to the stain on the white carpet in the living room made by some prune juice Sweetu had carelessly spilled recently. It reminded him that he needed to have another word with that boy.
“I’m sorry, my dear, you’re right of course,” he conceded. “Keeping up to date on Mummy is not your responsibility. I’ll try calling her myself. First I’m going upstairs to wash my face.” This was code for: “I’m hungry and I’d like to eat in ten minutes.”
After he’d freshened up and changed into a white kurta pajama and a cloth Sandown cap, Puri went up onto the roof to check on his chilies. The plants that had been caught in the cross fire appeared to be making a full recovery.
The detective was little closer to finding out who had shot at him. His sources inside Tihar jail had heard nothing about a new contract on his life. Tubelight’s boys had not been able to find any witnesses to the shooting, either.
All the evidence pointed to the shooter being an amateur, an everyday person, who would have passed unnoticed in the street.
There was only one lead and it was tentative at best: Swami Nag had apparently returned to Delhi, but his whereabouts remained unknown.
Puri picked a chili to have with his dinner and made his way downstairs. Rumpi was busy in the kitchen chopping onions and tomatoes for the bhindi. When the ingredients were ready, she added them to the already frying pods and stirred. Next, she started cooking the rotis on a round tava, expertly holding them over a naked flame so they puffed up with hot air like balloons and became nice and soft.
A plate had already been placed on the kitchen table and Puri sat down in front of it. Presently, Rumpi served him some kadi chawal, bhindi and a couple of rotis. He helped himself to the plate of sliced tomato, cucumber and red onion, over which a little chat masala had been sprinkled, and then cast around the table for some salt.
“No salt, Chubby, it’s bad for your heart,” said Rumpi without turning around from the cooker.
Puri smiled to himself. Was he really that predictable?
“My dear,” he said, trying to sound charming rather than patronizing but not proving entirely successful, “a little salt never did anyone any harm. It is hardly poison, after all. Besides, you’ve already cut down on the amount you’re using, and we don’t even have butter on our rotis any more.”
“Dr. Mohan has ruled out butter and said you have to cut down on salt. This is your life we’re talking about. You want to leave me a widow so I have to shave my head and live in a cell in Varanasi and chant mantras all day long?”
“Now, my dear, I think you’re being a little overdramatic. You know full well that well-to-do middle-class widows don’t have to sing mantras for a living. Besides, are we going to allow Doctor-ji to ruin every last little pleasure? Should we go through life living in fear?”
Rumpi ignored him and carried on preparing the rotis.
“All I require is a one small pinch to have with my chili,” he continued. “Is that really going to kill me?”
Rumpi sighed irritably and relented.
“You’re impossible, Chubby,” she said, spooning out a little salt from one of the sections of her dabba and putting it on the side of his plate.
“Yes, I know,” he replied playfully. “But more important, now I am also happy!”
He bit off the end of the chili, dipped it in the salt and took another bite.
For most people this would have been equivalent to touching molten lead with the tip of their tongue. The Naga Morich chili is one of the hottest in the world, two to three times as potent as the strongest jalapeño. But Puri had built up an immunity to them, so he needed hotter and hotter chilies to eat. The only way to ensure a ready supply was to propagate them himself. He had turned into a capsicum junkie and occasional dealer.
“So how is my Radhika?” asked the detective, who ate with his hands, as did the rest of the family when at home. This was a convention he prided himself on; Indians were supposed to eat that way. Somehow a meal never seemed as satisfying with cutlery. Feeling the food betwee
n your fingers was an altogether more intimate experience.
“Very fine,” answered Rumpi, who made sure her husband had everything he needed before taking her place next to him and serving herself a little kadi chawal. “She found a good deal on one of those low-cost airlines so as to come home for Diwali. It’s OK with you, or should she take the train?”
More family news followed during the meal. Their second grandchild, four-month-old Rohit, the son of their eldest daughter, Lalita, had recovered from his cold. Jagdish Uncle, one of Puri’s father’s four surviving brothers, had returned home from the hospital after having his gall bladder removed. And Rumpi’s parents were returning from their vacation “cottage” in Manali.
Next, she brought Puri up to date on local Gurgaon news. There had been a six-hour power cut that morning (it had been blamed on fog). An angry mob of residents had stormed the offices of the electricity company, dragged the director out and given him “a good thrashing.” Eventually, the police had intervened using lathis and roughed up a lot of people, including many women.
Finally, Rumpi broached the delicate subject of a vacation; she wanted to go to Goa.
“Dr. Mohan said you need a break. You never stop working these days, Chubby,” she said.
“I’m quite all right, my dear. Fit as a fiddle, in fact.”
“You’re not all right at all. All this stress is taking its toll. You’re looking very tired these days.”
“Really, you’re worrying over nothing. Now what about dessert? There’s something nice?”
“Apple,” she replied curtly.
After Puri had finished eating, he washed the residue of kadi chawal from his hands in the sink, ladled out a glass of cool water from the clay pot that sat nearby and gulped it down.
Afterward in the sitting room, he turned on his recording of Yanni Live at the Acropolis, relaxed into his favorite armchair and dialed Mummy’s number.
She answered on the sixth ring, but there was a lot of static on the line.
“Mummy-ji, where are you?” he asked her.
“Chubby? So much interference in there, na? You’re in an auto or what?”
“I’m very much at home,” he said.
“You’ve not yet reached home! So late it is? You’ve had your khana outside, is it?”
“I’m at home, Mummy!” he bawled. “Where are you?”
The static suddenly grew worse.
“Chubby, your mobile device is giving poor quality of connection. Listen, na, I’m at Minni Auntie’s house. I’ll be back late. Just I need rest. Some tiredness is there.”
She let out a loud yawn.
“This line is very bad, Mummy-ji! I’ll call you back!”
“Hello, Chubby? My phone is getting low on battery and no charger is here. Take rest. I’ll be back later, na—”
The line went dead.
Puri regarded the screen suspiciously.
“Who is Minni Auntie?” he shouted to Rumpi, who was still in the kitchen.
“Who?”
“Minni Auntie. Mummy said she’s at her house.”
“Might be one of her friends. She has so many, I can’t keep track.”
Rumpi came to the door of the sitting room, wiping her hands on a tea towel.
“Who are you calling now?” she asked Puri.
“Mummy’s driver.”
He held the phone to his ear. It rang and rang, but there was no response and he hung up.
“She’s out there looking into the shooting—I know it,” he said wearily.
Rumpi made a face. “Oh, Chubby, I’m sure she’s just trying to help,” she said.
“It’s not her place. She’s a schoolteacher, not a detective. She should leave it to the professionals. I’m making my own inquiries about the shooting and will get to the bottom of it.”
“If you ask me, I think Mummy’s a natural detective,” said Rumpi. “If you weren’t being so stubborn and proud, you might give her a chance. I’m sure she could be very helpful to you. It doesn’t sound like you’ve got any clues of your own.”
Puri bristled at this last remark.
“My dear, if you want your child to learn his six times table, you go to Mummy,” he said brusquely. “If you want a mystery solved, you come to Vish Puri.”
As her son had rightfully surmised, Mummy was not at Minni Auntie’s (although such a lady did exist; she was one of the better bridge players among the nice group of women who played in Vasant Kunj); she was on a stakeout.
Her little Maruti Zen was parked across the street from the Sector 31 Gurgaon police station, five minutes from Puri’s home.
With her was her driver, Majnu, and Kishan, the servant boy, whom she’d persuaded to come with her. She’d also brought along a thermos of tea, a Tupperware container packed with homemade vegetarian samosas and of course her handbag, which, among other things, contained her battery-operated face fan.
This had come in extremely useful when her son had called earlier. By holding it up to her phone, she had created what sounded like interference on the line, which helped her avoid having to give away her location. This was an old trick she’d learned from her husband, who had occasionally used his electric razor to the same effect.
During forty-nine years of marriage, she’d picked up a number of other useful skills for a detective and a good deal of knowledge as well.
Take red boots, for example.
Mummy knew that they were part of a senior police officer’s dress uniform and were supposed to be worn only during parades. Occasionally cops were known to wear them for their day-to-day work when their other boots went for repairs.
If the shooter was indeed an officer—who else would wear such footwear?—then the most logical place to start looking for him was the local “cop shop.”
Of all the stations in Gurgaon, the one in Sector 31 had one of the worst reputations. Stories abounded about police-wallahs arresting residents of the bastis and forcing them to cook and clean for them; of beatings, rapes—even murders.
“We might be here for hours,” moaned Majnu, who was always whining. They had been outside the station for an hour already and he was annoyed at having to work late.
“We have no other choice,” Mummy told him. “Everyone else is being negligent in this matter. Some action is required.”
At around 10:40, a man in plain clothes emerged from the station. Kishan recognized him as the person he’d seen leaving the scene of the shooting.
“Madam, please don’t tell anyone it was me who told you! The cops will kill me!” he said when he realized that the shooter was a police-wallah.
“Your secret is safe,” Mummy reassured Kishan, giving him a couple of hundred rupees for his trouble. “Now go home and we’ll take it from here.”
The servant boy did not have to be told twice. He hurriedly exited the car and rushed off into the darkness.
On the other side of the road, Red Boots got into an unmarked car, started the ignition and pulled into the road, heading west.
Mummy and Majnu followed behind. But the driver kept getting too close and she had to scold him more than once.
“There’s a brain in that skull or just thin air or what?”
Twenty minutes later, they found themselves pulling up outside a fancy five-star Gurgaon hotel.
Red Boots left his car with the valet and went inside.
“I’m going to follow him. You stay out here in the car park,” Mummy told Majnu.
“Yes, madam,” sighed the driver, who was by now in a sulk.
Puri’s mother passed through the hotel doors—they were opened by a tall Sikh doorman with the kind of thick beard and moustache that appealed to tourists—into the plush lobby. Red Boots had turned left, past the bellboy’s desk and the lifts. Mummy saw him disappear inside a Chinese restaurant, Drums of Heaven.
Outside the entrance, she stopped for a moment and looked down at what she was wearing in alarm; her ordinary chikan kurta and churidaar pajamas were hard
ly appropriate for such a fancy place.
“But what to do?” she said to herself, continuing her pursuit.
Beyond a kitsch dragon and pagoda, Mummy was greeted by an elegant hostess, who looked Tibetan. Would Madam like a smoking or nonsmoking table?
“Actually I’m meeting one friend, only,” replied Mummy. “Almost certainly she’s arrived. Just I’ll take a look. So kind of you.”
The hostess escorted Mummy to the back of the restaurant, where Red Boots was sitting with a fat-throated man in a white linen suit. They were both smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky.
Behind them there was a vacant table for two; Mummy made a beeline for it, sitting directly behind her mark.
“Must be my friend has yet to arrive,” she told the Tibetan lady. “Her driver’s always getting confusion.”
The hostess placed a menu on the table and went back to her podium.
Mummy pretended to peruse the dim sum section while trying to eavesdrop on Red Boots’s conversation with Fat Throat, gradually inching her chair backward as close as she dared.
The Muzak and the general murmur from the other tables drowned out most of their words. So Mummy asked the waiter to turn off the music—“Such a headache is there”—and, after turning up her hearing aid to full volume, she was able to grasp a few clear sentences.
“You’d better not fail again. Get him out of the way or the deal won’t go through,” Fat Throat was saying in Hindi.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of him,” replied Red Boots.
“That’s what you said before and you missed.”
“I told you I’ll get it done and I’ll get—”
Just then Mummy felt a searing pain in her head.
The waiter had returned and asked to take her order. The effect was like having a screaming megaphone put up to her ear.
“Madam, are you all right?” asked the waiter.
Again his words boomed through her head and Mummy flinched in pain, managing to turn her hearing aid down to normal before he could ask anything else.