Shamini Flint
Malaysia, 1969
A Curious Indian Cadaver
Inspector Singh Investigates #5
2012, EN
Inspector Singh is sick of sick leave, so when Mrs Singh suggests they attend a family wedding in Mumbai, he grudgingly agrees – hoping that the spicy Indian curries will make up for extended exposure to his wife’s relatives. Unfortunately, the beautiful bride-to-be disappears on the eve of her wedding – did she run away to avoid an arranged marriage, or is there something more sinister afoot? When a corpse is found, the fat inspector is soon dragged into a curious murder investigation with very firm instructions from Mrs Singh to exonerate her family. But as he uncovers layer upon layer of deceit, he knows it isn’t going to be that easy…
Prologue
31 October 1984.
In India, word of disaster spreads like head lice. Eyewitnesses and police officers whisper news to family, family members talk to friends and neighbours, they gossip with the servants, coolies, drivers and with the boys over a whisky at the cricket club. And not forgetting, of course, the cross-wired, long-distance, static-filled trunk calls to relatives. Soon, all is known, some of it true, some of it mistaken, some of it made up for effect – different accounts believed by different people. But the story has a life of its own. Eventually, careful versions of events appear on television and radio – but nobody trusts Doordarshan for the truth. Theirs is just one version, the official version, the one the government wants you to believe. Usually, it means that people believe the opposite. What is it that they say about India? If something is true in India, then the equal and opposite is true as well.
When Indira Gandhi was killed, we heard it first from the milkman. He was shouting and angry, spilling his milk out of the steel pots attached to his bicycle, waving his arms and threatening retribution against whoever had done it.
“Indira Amma is dead! Indira Amma has been killed!”
They called her that – Indira Amma – the Mother of India. Not the Sikhs, of course, but the rest, especially the Hindus and the Congress supporters.
“Was it the Moslems?” demanded the milkman of no one in particular although he’d gathered quite an audience of anxious housewives. They are troublemakers, he said. Nothing has changed since Partition. If they have spilled Nehru-Gandhi blood, theirs will flow like the great rivers of India, like the Ganges and the Brahmaputra.
Mata shushed the milkman and said it was all wild talk and nothing was known except that Indira was dead, and maybe even that wasn’t true. Certainly, no one knew who had killed her. Remember, she said, in that schoolteacher’s voice, people assumed that Moslems killed Mahatma Gandhi and it turned out to be a radical Hindu.
But in case there was to be trouble, Mata asked the cook to check the food stocks and told us that there was no need to go to school that day. It wasn’t safe. You see, when Indians get het up, crowds gather as quickly as flash floods during the rains, mobs form, shops are barricaded by terrified owners and traffic grinds to a standstill while a sea of people flows past, shouting and chanting and punching their fists in the air. If Indira Amma had been assassinated, said Mata, it was better to stay at home, stay away from crowds, stay out of trouble.
It was difficult for us kids to feel sorry about her death. Not when the death of a prime minister meant a holiday from school; from Mr. Arun with the cane and Mrs. Janaki with the ‘spot tests’ whenever she didn’t feel like teaching.
We first heard it was the Sikh bodyguards later that evening. Pita came home from work early. He walked in from the main road and he was dusty, pale and worried. Her own bodyguards had murdered the prime minister, he told us. Satwant Singh and Beant Singh were their names. One had been killed on the spot and the other was in custody.
Mata cried when she heard the news.
“But is it true?” she asked. “Perhaps there has been some mistake. You know as well as I do that there are always rumours…”
“I think not,” said father, shaking his head. “It is revenge for Amritsar. Some say she was shot sixteen times. A defenceless, elderly woman.” He clasped his hands together as if praying for deliverance. “A price will be paid for this.”
Pita was a middle-ranking civil servant in Delhi. He was a quiet man, small-sized, unlike the vast majority of Sikhs. His turban always looked too big for him, sitting on his head like a wild mushroom. He was a disappointment to Tara Baba, my grandfather, but I didn’t know why. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t ambitious. I heard Tara Baba ask him once, in an angry tone, whether he planned to spend the rest of his life stamping documents in triplicate in a musty office. Pita had smiled a little and said, “We value different things. I respect your choices. Why can’t you respect mine?”
Mata was adamant. “Gandhi should never have sent the army into the Golden Temple. Sikh hearts have turned to stone. And now see the result.”
“I’m not sure she had a choice,” replied Pita. “Temples are places of worship, not war. We should never have let separatists hole up in our gurdwaras.”
Pita always looked at both sides of an argument. It was one of his tricks that really annoyed me. I liked things to be certain; right and wrong, black and white. For Pita, everything was a point of view. Surely there were some truths that could not be turned on their head? Maybe the Prime Minister’s bodyguards shouldn’t have killed her. But Tara Baba said thousands of innocent Sikhs had died in Amritsar and the government was covering it up.
That night, no one felt like sleeping. I could hear Mata and Pita whispering together until a cotton-candy, pink dawn broke outside. I stood in the garden and took a deep breath. Early morning is the only time that the air in Delhi is crisp and fresh, like cold milk. And then Mata called me in.
There was no telephone at home so we didn’t know that mobs had rampaged through Trilokpuri in West Delhi, attacking Sikh households and businesses. The leaders said that Sikhs had been celebrating the assassination, that we had handed out sweets to the neighbours and gurdwaras all over the country were lit up as if it was Diwali. But none of it was true. Not in our area anyway. Some of the neighbours came to ask my father’s advice because he was a civil servant and they thought he might know what was going on. Where are the police? they asked him. Is the army to be deployed? Pita said that the soldiers would arrive soon to keep the peace and things would return to normal. It was best to just stay indoors and lock up tight and wait for the curfew to be announced.
“Should we remove our turbans, cut our hair?” suggested a broad-shouldered bear of a man, staring at his feet and not meeting the eyes of the others. “Just temporary, you understand?”
“It is part of our Sikh identity handed down by the gurus,” insisted one of the neighbours. “I will not take it off at the first sign of trouble!”
Pita raised a hand and touched his turban with thin fingers as if faintly surprised that he was encumbered with one too.
Later, I noticed that father had changed his dark turban to one of pure ivory. I knew from funerals that white was a sign of mourning. What was he mourning? I wondered. Indira? Sikhs? The future?
“Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge!” We heard the chants later that day just down the road from our Sikh colony in West Delhi. We shall avenge blood with blood. The sun was so intense overhead that it was like standing too close to the stove when mother was flipping chapattis.
I was badly scared by then. I could see that Mata was stealing glances at us children from time to time. Pita’s face had hollowed and his pepper beard looked like poison ivy climbing up his cheeks.
A thin figure ran up to our front gate – and to my surprise, I recognised the milkman. He had a can of paint and he marked our front gate with a gr
eat red splash. It looked like blood, streaked against the gate, splattered on the walls, dripping onto the pavement.
“What is he doing?” I asked.
“Marking the Sikh homes,” answered Pita quietly. I don’t think he really meant for me to hear that. He was just speaking his thoughts aloud. I suddenly realised how easy it was to identify Sikhs because of the dastaar, our turban. No wonder that burly fellow had wanted to take his off. Mind you, it wouldn’t have helped. The milkman would know every Sikh household in the colony – hadn’t he been delivering our milk for years?
“The police, the army. Where are they?” asked Mata, her voice a whisper, barely louder than the chants that were getting closer.
“There is no one.”
The mob reached our gate. They were screaming for us to come out, hungry hands rattling the gates. We cowered indoors like mice. Finally, one of them lit a huge kerosene torch and held it high so that the air around his head shimmered and I feared him as if he was a spirit creature come up from the bowels of hell to torment us.
“Come out now or we will burn the house down and all the Sikh traitors within it.”
My father shouted, “There are women and children here. I beg you to leave us.”
“You come out and we will consider sparing the rest,” hollered a large, well-fed man. He looked like one of those dignitaries who always sat in a front row armchair at cricket matches.
“That is Anil Gupta – from the Congress party,” said Pita and his tone was cracked and parched like a patch of earth without rain. I was too young to understand but later I realised that it meant that the violence against Sikhs had been instigated by powerful figures. It explained why there was no sign of the police or military. We were on our own.
“Come out now,” screamed one of the others and there were howls and jeers from the rest.
Pita walked to the door. “I have to go,” he said, “or we will all be killed.”
“Naa,” whispered Mata.
“You try and escape out of the back door,” he insisted.
I was sobbing now. Why was there no way to show despair except through the same tears which I used when Mata would not buy me sweetmeats from a street vendor?
Pita put his hand on my head. “You will be the man of the house when I am gone, son. Take care of your mother and siblings.” He smiled a little. “Especially little Ashu.”
I turned to look at my young sister. She was in Mata’s arms, wide-eyed but not crying. Not really understanding what was going on.
Pita walked out to the gate.
“Come, bhai. Come and tell us why you killed our Mother!”
I recognised the mocking tone of a school bully who’d cornered the bookworm behind the toilets. Father kept walking, his pace never faltering. I would never have guessed that he had that kind of courage. He was such a quiet, gentle man, unable to raise his voice in anger even when I played truant from school. He reached the front gate, unlocked it, opened it a crack and stepped through. Later, when I revisited the scene in my head as I did through most of my childhood, I realised that he was trying to shift the focus from the house, from us.
A mob is more than the sum of individuals. It is more like a single creature with many arms and legs, hydra-headed but working with one idea. This creature grabbed Pita with its many hands and tied his own behind his back. The many mouths jeered and spat. Suddenly, it produced a tyre and put it around my father’s neck. The man with the torch held the burning end to the tyre and it caught fire. Pita writhed and screamed. I was about to run to him when Mata grabbed my arm and then wrapped her arms around my skinny struggling frame.
“Tanvir, naa. We must leave him. Come now.”
I hesitated and she screeched at me, “You heard what your father said. You are the man of the house now!”
Ashu began to cry. She didn’t like it when Mata was upset.
I turned around to have one last look. Pita had fallen to the ground. They were kicking him as he lay. His head and turban were on fire, like a human torch.
“Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge!” We shall avenge blood with blood.
One
Mrs. Singh had recently stumbled upon the Internet. This was a source of enormous aggravation to her husband, Inspector Singh of the Singapore Police Force. Especially as he was still on medical leave from his job as Singapore’s most successful and least appreciated murder cop. The inspector felt quite well enough to return to work after his mishap in Cambodia but his bosses were adamant that he adhere to the letter of his medical leave certificate and not return a day, an hour or even a minute too soon. This supposed concern for his health was a thin disguise. Superintendent Chen had merely seized a golden opportunity to keep him out of the way for a while. Singh had to admit that there was a certain irony in his desperate desire to return to the office. Usually, when ensconsed behind his big and pathologically orderly desk, his foremost desire was to slip out for a long lunch, ideally accompanied by a cold beer and followed by an afternoon nap.
“Eighty per cent of doctors in the United States are of Indian origin,” snapped Mrs. Singh, looking up from the computer for a moment to ensure that he was paying attention.
“That can’t possibly be right,” protested Singh.
“It says so right here,” said his wife, pointing a bony finger at the screen and basking in the blue light like an acolyte before a high priest.
“Not everything you read on the Internet is true,” muttered Singh, addressing his remark to the skinny back in the flamboyant pink caftan.
A slight stiffening of the muscles along her spine and an aggressive jabbing of the ‘Page Down’ key indicated her resistance to this notion but she did not deign to respond.
Mrs. Singh didn’t have a modicum of cynicism when it came to the Internet. She’d been brought up to believe that the print news was always accurate and not even the suspicious lack of bad news in the Singapore papers had taught her caution. She had now transferred this blind faith to the musings of various self-proclaimed pundits on the Web. And her current all-encompassing favourite subject was India.
Perhaps, mused Singh, still contemplating his wife’s back, it was a reaction to the Singapore government’s constant lauding of China’s economic success, industrial might and abundance of culture. Non-Chinese Singaporeans like his wife were forced to look elsewhere for inspiration or accept this Chinese hegemony. And India, the ‘world’s largest democracy’ (as Mrs. Singh had informed him complacently, and slightly more accurately than usual, over breakfast), was the natural choice.
Singh sighed and wondered if he dared sneak out for a smoke. His various doctors had been adamant that he needed to give up cigarettes, at least during his recuperation. Singh had agreed, his sudden brush with mortality having made him more cooperative than normal. But he was fast discovering that the flesh was indeed weaker than the spirit. And while he would have happily succumbed to the temptation to light up, Mrs. Singh, as his guardian – more like prison warden – was keeping a close eye on him. Except, of course, when she was immersed in her absorption of propaganda.
Singh, realising quickly that one person’s obsession was another’s opportunity, heaved himself out of his chair, trying not to gasp for air like a stranded fish. He was barefoot, his pristine white sneakers sitting neatly by the front door as if inviting him to wander further afield than his living room. It was a new pair. The previous pair had not survived his Cambodian adventure. The inspector knew he had a packet of cigarettes hidden on top of the spare bedroom wardrobe but he would need a stool to reach it. He was not much taller than Mrs. Singh and his turban, although it appended useful inches to his stature, did not add reach to his arms. He was just clambering onto a chair with that degree of care shared by invalids and the overweight, when an impatient tut-tut-ting by the door informed him that he’d been caught red-handed.
His wife’s expression was not cordial. “Can’t you even just for once follow the doctor’s advice?”
“I
’m trying,” said Singh, despising the plaintive note in his voice. “But…I’m so fed up that they won’t let me go back to work.”
“I suppose you’re worried about all the killers escaping while you’re resting at home?”
He ignored the snide tone and answered the substance. “Yes, I am. My colleagues will just ‘round up the usual suspects’ and throw them in jail.”
“I’m sure they must have done something – the police only lock up the criminals.”
Singh wondered whether to discuss the presumption of innocence with his wife and decided that he didn’t have the energy. Women like her, conservative and narrow-minded, were quite willing to believe that someone arrested for pilfering was congenitally pre-disposed to commit more serious crimes, eventually and naturally culminating in murder. In her view, fixating on the evidence for an individual crime was just pedantic. Mind you, Singh had met high court judges with the same attitude. He wondered for a moment why his wife had such faith in the police force in the abstract and so little confidence in his role in it.
“Actually, the problem is that you have nothing to do.”
Singh was forced to concede that she had a point. He wasn’t really filled with righteous anger over uncaught killers and unsolved crimes. He had just watched his fill of cricket – who would have thought such a thing was possible? – on television. Plus, he missed aggravating the higher echelons of the police force.
“And you’re getting fat,” she continued. “Fatter,” she amended, running a critical eye over his rotund form.
Why didn’t she just laminate a list of his flaws and hand it to him at pre-arranged times during the day? “What do you expect when I’m home for three meals a day and you serve so much food?” It wasn’t fair to blame his wife, an excellent cook, for his own lack of self-discipline when it came to her culinary offerings but he was in no mood to be reasonable.
“You don’t have to eat everything – you wipe up the last drop of curry with your naan. I’m surprised you don’t lick the plate!”
A Curious Indian Cadaver Page 1