The Taj Conspiracy

by Someshwar, Manreet Sodhi

  The body was rock-hard and he realised with a jolt that it would require more strength and time than he had foreseen. He glanced at the clock in the morgue, its loud ticking the only sound to be heard above his breathing. Steadying himself, he resumed hacking, holding the blade at a forty-five degree angle to the taut flesh covering the bones. Since he was aiming for the spot between the rib cage and the pelvis, the one bone he had to cut through was the spine—his boss had illustrated it on a skeletal chart of the human anatomy. The one thing he was unprepared for was the vile odour. As he focused on the task, trying to keep the smell out of his mind if not nostrils, bile rose in him. The next instant a shower of vomit shot out of him, spraying the corpse, the floor, his shoes. When he was done, he looked around. In the room’s far corner was a sink. He removed his sweater and wiped the vomit from his shoes and the floor with it. The corpse, he let be. The smell would prove a useful bait. Next, he stuffed the sweater into the large black plastic bag he had carried with him.

  The water at the sink was a trickle. He rinsed his mouth clean and washed his face. His hands shook, but the sight of the mauli, the spiritual Hindu thread in red and yellow, on his right wrist steadied him. Wasn’t that the instruction? Whenever he felt weak, he was to touch it—strength would surge within him.

  Back at the corpse, he resumed sawing with manic energy. The human body is a precise piece, and just as he had been instructed, the body came apart at the navel, falling into two clean, saw-tooth-edged halves. He folded the two halves and shoved them into the capacious black bag.

  Now, taking a quick look around and seeing no one, Jara dragged the black bag deeper into the mist-wrapped green cover until he reached a spot where the grass grew as tall as him. He shone a torch around, scrutinising the ground below. Yes, the grass at the peepul tree’s massive base lay flattened. Jara flung the bag towards it. Falling in a soft thud, the thin plastic rent to reveal the chopped body. The crisp winter air amplified the foul vapours of drying vomit and decaying flesh. He whistled, a low, long whistle that permeated the mist, and waited.

  A couple of minutes later a faint rustling sounded. A brownish-green reticulated python came into view, its body writhing behind. It had grown to fifteen feet in the ten years that he had been raising it on a diet of dead meat. The python smelled the body. It was hungry, he knew. He had not fed it in weeks. And the python liked regular meals, he was used to it. He should know—he had trained it since it was a baby. He also knew the python would appreciate the gift that was ten times the size of his regular meal, a rabbit. It slid around the corpse now, opening its mouth wide until the upper and lower jaws were almost vertical, and made to swallow the meal in front of him.

  The python would do a clean job, Jara knew. He had seen to the one thing that could have made it problematic for the snake: human shoulders can be too big for a python to swallow whole. Once he had seen a python that had attempted to swallow a young man. The pressure of the shoulders had ripped its stomach open.

  In this instance the python would finish the job, the smashed shoulder blades ensuring a smooth passage into the snake’s belly. Thereafter it would disappear from view, satiated, and hide in the bush for weeks as it digested the cadaver.

  Agra

  S

  SP Raghav was irate. The head of the Anti-Terror Squad had spent the past couple of hours questioning Mehrunisa Khosa once again in the murder of the supervisor of the Taj Mahal. Could the woman be a suspect? An accomplice? Or had she just been at the wrong place at the wrong time?

  In any case, he had learnt nothing new. In the process, though, he had exhausted fifteen cups of unsweetened masala chai, half his daily quota of thirty, well before noon. That irked him. Raghav was a tea addict and the only way he had figured he could control his addiction was to ration it himself and eliminate the sugar—before a doctor mandated it.

  Earlier, the crime scene examination had not revealed her fingerprints on anything incriminatory, no weapon had been discovered except for the pen knife; in fact, the corpse itself had disappeared! And the woman appeared as perplexed by the entire sequence of events as he. He had shown her the broken celadon plate that had been discovered in a dustbin in the supervisor’s room—she could shed no light on that either. In any case, one of the attendants at the monument had earlier shrugged and said, the discovery of such brica-brac was not unusual in the complex’s extensive gardens. To add to Raghav’s woes, Mehrunisa’s credentials were impeccable: both the ASI director-general and that eminent historian Kaul had vouched for her. Except for the fact that she had been found at the crime scene, there was nothing really to tie her to the crime.

  In which case, the focus shifted to the mysterious Aurangzeb who had visited the supervisor. Was he another terror export from the Western neighbour?

  SSP Raghav had been given charge of ATS only recently. This new outfit was to be modelled on the ATS Mumbai—the first to be formed in the country in 2003 in response to the increasing incidents of terror. SSP Raghav’s initial area was what the ASI called ‘Agra Circle’. The objective was to monitor the safety of an area dotted with three World Heritage Sites.

  His first case, he rued, and he had been unlucky enough for it to involve a murder, that too in the Taj! If there was one monument that could define India—like the Eiffel Tower did Paris and the Statue of Liberty did the US —it was the Taj Mahal.

  It was rather inconvenient that the supervisor had popped it right inside the mausoleum. The Taj had had to be closed to visitors for a full day. The abrupt closure had caused such a furore amongst tourists who had arrived— many foreigners having booked in advance, for winter was peak season—that he had been summoned by his boss, the deputy inspector general, to offer an explanation! And then to top it all, the dead supervisor had managed to vanish from the morgue. The guard on duty swore he had seen no one arrive in the night. Having been in the police department for two decades now, Raghav deduced that was entirely feasible, the guard likely sleeping on duty. That knowledge, though, didn’t help him, for the body had vanished leaving no trace behind. Except, yes, some dried vomit on the concrete floor close to the raised steel bed on which the body had lain. So now there were further additions to his existing list of questions regarding the murder.

  Who had murdered Arun Toor?

  How?

  Why?

  Was it personal enmity? or

  Was it linked to his role as the Taj supervisor?

  Who had taken the body of Arun Toor?

  Why was the body taken?

  Where was it taken?

  SSP Raghav had a hunch as to why the body had been taken. It was due for a post-mortem. The forensic examination would have revealed the cause of death. Since the body had disappeared, perhaps the murderer did not want the real cause of death to be identified.

  Again he returned to the mysterious Aurangzeb who might have been the last person to see Arun Toor alive. And the one to have murdered him. Yet, no one at the monument had heard his name with regard to anything, nor could the security confirm that such a man had visited the supervisor that evening.

  How exactly, Raghav scratched his luxuriant moustache, had this Aurangzeb entered the office unnoticed, and where had he vamoosed?

  SSP Raghav acknowledged to himself his casual use of that word: vamoose. In his job of chasing criminals and interacting with low-lifes, he liked to be reminded of his English (Honours) graduate degree. It recalled gentler times and distinguished him from his peers who could not construct one sentence in English that was not mangled. His command of the language had impressed the DIG who often roped him in to prepare presentations. As head of ATS, Raghav’s career trajectory had only one way to go—up. With fundamentalist Muslims and rabid Western superpowers, terror was a growth industry. He wished he had a larger force to command though; with two constables reporting to him, how much terror could they handle?

  The clearing of a throat brought SSP Raghav back to the present. Mehrunisa was sitting upright, her hands c
lasped together, her brow puckered.

  SSP Raghav bristled at the quietly confident demeanour—the woman was involved in a murder case, yet he could not help feeling that she was reproaching him for keeping her waiting. He bolted upright and briskly gathered his police cap.

  ‘We shall visit the crime scene,’ he cocked a brow at Mehrunisa, ‘to reawaken any dead memories.’

  Agra

  ‘W

  hat do you make of the clues your friend left behind?’ SSP Raghav asked Mehrunisa as they walked the concrete pathway to the mausoleum. Being a Friday, the monument was still closed to general visitors, entry permitted to Muslim worshippers alone. But it was past the time for prayers at the mosque and the monument stood silent.

  Mehrunisa disliked the policeman’s tone that pitched her simultaneously as Arun’s accomplice and adversary. She shrugged, her mouth a straight line. ‘Does that mean you’ve ruled out the possibility that it could be the murderer’s doing?’

  ‘The murderer was a violent man who beat the supervisor black and blue. He doesn’t strike me as the type who’d hang around sketching clues for us.’

  ‘But why wouldn’t Arun write the murderer’s name, if he had a chance?’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t know his real name. How many people do you know who are called Aurangzeb? Maybe a terrorist was on a recce of the monument, maybe the recce went wrong...’ he muttered. ‘So, what do the clues mean?’

  ‘They mean as much to me as they do to you.’

  ‘The eye on the forehead implies a calamity, because—?’ Raghav paused with a questioning look at Mehrunisa.

  ‘Because the eye sketched on the forehead was open. Shiva’s third eye is usually closed; its opening means destruction, a calamity.’

  ‘Okay,’ Raghav said. ‘The slashed wrist?’

  ‘I keep returning to it,’ Mehrunisa said thoughtfully, ‘and what is significant is that Arun chose the right hand. Why? The right hand is regarded as the pure hand, the hand used to eat, to make a religious offerings, etcetera. Maybe, then, cutting off the right hand, notionally, would be a desecration? A desecration of something considered pure?’

  The SSP had been listening with narrowed eyes. ‘So the clue is implying that something will desecrate the Taj Mahal?’

  As they entered the mausoleum, the two constables took guard outside. Lord Curzon’s lamp cast its yellow light over the cenotaphs. SSP Raghav flashed his torch at the lamp and said, ‘That, I guess, is the chirag.’ His loud voice echoed in the vaulted dome, compounded by the still air that had lain undisturbed overnight. He was referring to the proverb Arun, presumably, had scrawled on the floor: Chirag tale andhera.

  Now the SSP swivelled the torchlight towards the cenotaphs: ‘That, we can assume, is the darkness beneath the lamp.’

  ‘If you take it literally,’ Mehrunisa said.

  SSP Raghav narrowed his eyes. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Well, the proverb is generally understood to mean that something is awry where it should not be.’

  Abruptly, the SSP barked, ‘How much Indian blood is in you?’

  ‘Half,’ Mehrunisa said. ‘My father is Indian.’

  ‘Mother?’

  ‘Persian.’

  The SSP regarded her darkly as he pondered this revelation.

  ‘What do you think is awry with the Taj Mahal?’ He pointed his torch at the cenotaphs. When Mehrunisa looked puzzled, he added, ‘If the supervisor hinted something was wrong, he was obviously alluding to this place, right? So, what is out of place here?’

  ‘How would I know?’ Mehrunisa shrugged her shoulders in helplessness. Yet, even as she said that something struck her: the SSP’s usage of ‘out of place here’. The one thing that was out of place was the second cenotaph, Shah Jahan’s. At the end of his reign, the emperor was imprisoned by his son Aurangzeb and placed under house arrest in Agra Fort where he spent the rest of his life contemplating the Taj Mahal from a window. On his death, Aurangzeb—out of pity, remorse, or piety— ultimately united Shah Jahan with his beloved Mumtaz by placing his tomb adjacent to his wife’s. However, that charitable act forever spoiled the mausoleum’s famed symmetry.

  Mehrunisa opened the low gate and let herself into the octagonal chamber. The SSP followed, handing her his torch, the weak light of a winter day proving insufficient.

  Mehrunisa first shone the torch on Shah Jahan’s cenotaph, to the west of Mumtaz’s. Bigger than his wife’s, it reflected the same elements: a larger casket on an elevated base decorated with splendid lapidary and handsome calligraphy. Her eyes skimmed over the cenotaph, the sheer beauty of it once again entrancing her. On the casket’s lid was a sculpture of a small pen box, a traditional Mughal funerary icon for a man’s casket. On Mumtaz’s cenotaph a writing tablet was similarly sculpted, the traditional icon for a woman.

  As a teenager, in the summer months of tutorship under Professor Kaul, Mehrunisa had burnished her knowledge of the Taj Mahal. It had started off as plain curiosity. However, her evident enthusiasm for the task and organised approach had prompted Kaul to take her on as an assistant as he had embarked on an ambitious project: the first full documentation of the Taj Mahal. The result was his authoritative work titled, The Taj.

  ‘Well?’ the SSP prodded.

  ‘Nothing here.’

  ‘Perhaps the other one?’ SSP Raghav indicated Mumtaz’s cenotaph.

  ‘The one out of symmetry is Shah Jahan’s.’

  ‘So you say,’ he acknowledged, ‘but in popular wisdom, it is the man who gets the central place. Here, rather unconventionally, it is the woman. Since we are examining the asymmetry of things, we should look at the other one too.’

  Mehrunisa shrugged—the SSP was spouting folk wisdom, so it was no use pointing out to him that the tomb owed its existence to the memory of a woman—and turned her attention to Mumtaz’s cenotaph, placed at the chamber’s centre.

  On a rectangular marble base, about 1.5 metres by 2.5 metres, was the oblong marble casket. Once again, the base and casket were inlaid as though embroidered with golden, silver and multicoloured metal threads of zardosi, an ancient Persian art form successfully transplanted to India. With a sigh Mehrunisa thought of her current project on Indo-Persian linkages. Her godfather was hopeful she would be able to create a book out of it; Mehrunisa’s goal though was more personal. Arun had been so helpful with the project—now, he was dead and she was embroiled in the investigation of his murder....

  She returned to her examination. The base was decorated with registers of interlacing hanging flowers, the top and sides inscribed with Quranic verses. The common theme of the verses, Mehrunisa knew from her earlier study, was to comfort the soul of Mumtaz with the prospect of paradise. The programme began at the north (head) end. At the south (foot) end, in the lowest element of the plinth was the epitaph: The illumined grave of Arjumand Banu Begum, entitled Mumtaz Mahal, who died in the year 1040 (AD 1631). Satisfied, Mehrunisa returned the torch to the SSP when something niggled at her. Surely not! She grabbed the torch back.

  The geometric floor patterns and the floral screen motifs threw shadows on the cenotaphs. Mehrunisa’s gaze cut through those as she scrutinised the lettering in the epitaph. She was fluent in both the languages used: the Quranic verses in Arabic and the epitaph in Persian, the official language of the Mughal Empire. Besides, the flowing lines of the calligraphy had become all too familiar to her over past visits.

  Something was horribly wrong...

  SSP Raghav heard Mehrunisa’s slight gasp. ‘What is it?’ he asked urgently. ‘What do you see?’

  Mehrunisa raised her left hand, a request for silence, and continued to peer at the marble. A minute back when she had read the inscription on the south side she had failed to notice the change. She shut her eyes, blinked several times, then focused on the inscription, even as memory raced ahead: The illumined grave of Arjumand Banu Begum, entitled Mumtaz Mahal, who died in the year 1040.

  Except, that was what it should say...

  S
he knew the script by heart. Mumtaz’s epitaph was styled in naskh—as opposed to the sulus script used for Shah Jahan’s epitaph. Naskh was a simpler script than sulus, which was regarded as the mother of the cursive styles of writing. It was the predominant calligraphic style for epigraphs in the seventeenth century. The Quranic verses, however, on the top and sides of the cenotaph were written in sulus.

  She bent closer, willing the discrepancy to vanish. No. Crouching a half-foot from the cenotaph she fingered the calligraphy, something she strictly abstained from usually, and shone the torch on her finger. It was white dust.

  ‘What!’ the SSP growled. ‘What is so fascinating?’

  Mehrunisa heard the curt rebuke but her mind was in turbulence. There was no mistake. Glancing at him she said slowly. ‘The epitaph, it has been ... altered.’

  ‘Altered? You mean tampered with? In what way?’

  Mehrunisa’s tongue peeped out to touch her upper lip as she collected her thoughts. ‘The inscription here,’ she pointed at the area of scrutiny, ‘says, Marqad Masnooee Arjumand Banu Begum Mukhatib bah Mumtaz Mahal Tanifiyat ferr sanh 1040 Hijri.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said the SSP thrusting his right hand forward. ‘You mean to say you can read all this?’ His hand swivelled in circles over the cenotaphs. ‘I have been told there are parts in Arabic and parts in Farsi, Persian that is.’ He scrutinised her, his left eyebrow quizzically aloft.

  It was a question she was used to; people were surprised that she could speak Arabic and Persian. To their minds, the two were probably as different as Swahili and French—the answer, therefore, confounded them further. ‘I do—read and speak both languages,’ she said in a firm-gentle voice. ‘Anyway, the Persian script uses all the letters of the Arabic script, plus four.’