A Curious Indian Cadaver

by Shamini Flint

  “Have I won the lottery?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Singh.

  “Actually, to be very frank and honest, we are needing your help.”

  “What is it?” asked Singh, warily. He couldn’t think for a moment how he could be of assistance to the Indian police.

  If they were going to nag him to disclose Ashu’s pregnancy to Tara Singh they were wasting their breath.

  “We have some news which is not at all good.”

  Singh could almost hear Patel take a deep breath.

  He continued, “There’s a fellow from Canada – Jaswant Singh. A friend of Tanvir. At university with him in Toronto.”

  “He’s here now, at the funeral house.”

  “According to Canadian police, Jaswant Singh is also member of the Khalistan Liberation Front.”

  “And who the hell are they?”

  “Sikh separatists.”

  “Everyone needs a hobby,” said Singh.

  “Terrorists also.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Singh, flippancy erased from his voice. “That’s not good news.”

  “We are concerned that Jaswant Singh is here for nefarious purposes,” explained Patel.

  Singh almost smiled. Did people actually have ‘nefarious’ purposes any more? Perhaps in India.

  “Recently, KLF assassinated a few community leaders in Canada and Norway who were not at all sympathetic to their views,” continued the Indian. “Organisation only has a few hundred members but quite effective at planning attacks. Maybe Jaswant has some intentions here.”

  “Why don’t you arrest him and ask him?”

  “Better to see who his confederates are.”

  The penny dropped. “You suspect Tanvir?”

  “Not at all, not at all.” Patel sounded positively panic-stricken at the suggestion.

  Singh sucked on his cigarette as if he was mainlining oxygen. “I get it – you do suspect Tanvir but you’re afraid to get on the wrong side of Tara Singh if this turns out to be a storm in a teacup.”

  “Very powerful man,” said Patel by way of agreement. He added defensively, “Also, we want to know what they are planning…”

  That was actually credible. They might be able to pick Jaswant up and deport him to Canada to face whatever mild punishment was reserved for would-be terrorists but the reality was that they would be no further along in knowing whether he was in India with any actual scheme in mind and who his associates were. And it was the spider-web of fellow conspirators and the source of their finance that was of most interest to the authorities. Especially the latter. Without money, terrorists were just angry young men with an axe to grind. With money, the metaphorical axe became real and sharp and terrifying. He knew that very well – had learnt it the hard way – from his murder investigation in Bali after the bombings there.

  “You think they might be planning an assassination?” he asked. “Some Sikh leader?”

  “Or something bigger,” muttered Patel. “After Mumbai attacks, lot of chatter amongst Khalistani organisations – and rest as well.”

  Singh knew that chatter meant the electronic conversations picked up by intelligence surveillance. The agencies monitored volume and content and tried to deduce the intentions and targets of the terrorists with varying success. It didn’t surprise him that the Mumbai attacks had spawned copycats. If publicity was the lifeblood of terrorists, the week-long siege of the hotel had been a massive transfusion.

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “You are still looking into death of Ashu Kaur? This morning you went to see Kirpal Singh?”

  “Yes.” Impressive. They had their ears to the ground.

  “So you can still be helping us,” Patel continued.

  “How?”

  “By keeping an eye on Tanvir.”

  “I’m happy to keep an eye out for trouble,” agreed Singh, “as long as you’re not depending on me to foil some sort of terrorist attack.” He’d tried that once in his career – in Bali. It hadn’t been fun.

  “That is all we can ask, Inspector.”

  “I was with Tanvir and his friend earlier,” added Singh, gazing down at the lighted end of his cigarette, clamped between index and middle finger. “They seemed like good buddies…Tanvir suggested that they should go into business – a joint venture – together some time.”

  “No law against that.”

  “Depends on the business, I suppose.” He paused to consider the matter. “My advice – for what it’s worth. Put a tail on both of them.”

  “It shall be as you say,” agreed Patel and the inspector from Singapore didn’t doubt that his head was waggling from side to side in that strange affirmative action of the Indian.

  The inspector slipped his phone back in his pocket and sat down heavily on the stairs. He dropped his cigarette butt and crushed it underfoot. This suspicion about Tanvir was an unexpected and unwelcome development. Was Patel’s story credible? It seemed unlikely that the scion of a wealthy Sikh family would be involved in any criminal activity. Perhaps he’d just been unlucky in his choice of friends while a student in Canada. It happened. Most of Singh’s cohorts were now senior figures in government or running gargantuan public companies manufacturing plastic gizmos in China. It showed that one could never be too careful.

  Even if it was true that this Jaswant Singh was a member of a fringe group prepared to use violent means to achieve their dubious ends, it was quite possible that he was merely using his friendship with Tanvir as cover for his own questionable activities. What better way to hide one’s true intentions than to visit an old college mate with an impeccable background? Singh remembered with a wrenching feeling in his gut what had happened to the son of Tara and the father of Tanvir – murdered by a mob after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. He knew all too well that it was from exactly such roots that terrorist shoots appeared.

  “What are you doing hiding here?”

  “You almost gave me a heart attack,” growled Singh, scowling at his wife who was peering at him in the half-darkness, secretly glad that he’d stubbed out his cigarette.

  She sniffed the air and grimaced. “Don’t tell me that you’re smoking?”

  “OK, I won’t,” said the inspector. “What do you want anyway? Can’t a man have a bit of peace and quiet?”

  “Here?”

  There was no credible riposte. It really was a stinking, dank stairwell.

  “We’re leaving,” she said. “Going to gurdwara and then the men to crematorium. Are you coming?”

  Singh was immediately and profoundly reminded that he was investigating a death. Patel’s call had been a sideshow. It was possible that there were terror plots afoot. But weren’t there always? Especially if you were the gullible sort who believed the government and the security services when they insisted that the citizenry was in constant danger and needed their steady guiding hand at the helm, ideally unconstrained by such considerations as human rights and due process. The inspector exhaled sharply and the sound echoed down the stairwell.

  “Do I have to come?”

  “No,” she said unexpectedly.

  Singh’s expression filled with suspicion. “Why not? You always say I have to come for everything!”

  “It’s a huge crowd – they won’t even notice that you’re not there.”

  “There’s always a huge crowd.”

  She stared at him, blinking myopically. It was a rare treat when his wife was lost for words but Singh was too perturbed to kick back and enjoy it.

  “Well?” he demanded.

  “Too many people with too many secrets. I think someone murdered that girl.”

  His shoulders slumped. “Me too,” he agreed.

  “Better if you spend your time looking for the killer – not attending funerals. Whoever it is must be punished.”

  “I thought you didn’t approve of my job.”

  “Different when it’s family.”

&n
bsp; “Most murder victims have families.”

  She nodded once. “So you better hurry up and find this killer instead of hiding here smoking cigarettes.”

  ♦

  Mahesh didn’t feel well. His heart was racing and his palms felt sweaty. He’d looked at himself in a piece of broken mirror earlier in the day and noticed that his lips and cheeks were flushed. And now, holding out his hands before him to gauge the tremors, he noticed that his fingertips were pink as well – as if he’d dipped them in a vat of paint. He stared down at his feet in the half-darkness, trying to decide if his toes, sticking out of his chappels, were a similar shade.

  “Mahesh, what are you doing? You look unwell.”

  The middle-aged woman, Janaki, had children enough of her own, eight at last count, but she was a kindly soul.

  “Not feeling so good,” he admitted. “Like the others…” His voice was a little slurred and the fear within him grew and spread and reached his shivering extremities.

  Janaki looked worried. “Doctor Amma asked me to look out for symptoms in my children. The pinkness especially. Do you have that?”

  In response, Mahesh held out his hands so she could see the pink sheen for herself in the light cast by a fluorescent tube.

  “What else?”

  “Hands and legs shaking.”

  He put a hand out to firm his stance against the nearest wall. The last thing he wanted to do was to keel over in all the filth.

  “Do you think it is the rats?” asked Janaki. “Or mosquitoes? So many years I have lived here, never seen anything like this.”

  “Doctor Amma said that it was something new – not the usual things. She was researching this disease. I was helping her.”

  “And no cure,” said Janaki worriedly, sparing a quick glance for her sleeping children, a mass of tangled limbs, within her hut.

  “No idea what is causing it,” he explained as if he was the adult and she the child. It was what Doctor Amma had told him. That it was difficult to find a cure, fashion a solution, because she had no idea what the ailment was.

  “Has anyone got better?”

  Mahesh’s eyes were wide clear pools with dark centres of worry. “Not yet. So far it is getting worse for everyone who has this pink disease.”

  Mahesh knew better than the rest how widespread the illness was and how serious the symptoms of some of the early sufferers. That was because he’d been Doctor Amma’s eyes and legs, going from hut to hut asking for information, checking the progress of those who were already ill to see if they were responding to any treatments, watching and recording in his head the deterioration in their conditions so that he could report back to the woman in the white coat. She would write down his findings, make notes of the date and time and name of the patient, and keep it all in the thick file. The file that the fat Sardarji had taken.

  “Can I catch this thing from the sick ones?” he’d asked Ashu once.

  “No sign of any common vector,” she had said and then laughed and ruffled his hair at his mystified expression. “The sick ones haven’t been in contact with each other, nor worked the same sites. I don’t think it is passed from person to person.”

  “That’s good, Doctor Amma. I wouldn’t want to fall ill. Otherwise, how will I marry you when I’m older?”

  Mahesh wondered if it was possible that she’d been wrong and he’d caught this illness helping her. Well, if that was the case, he clenched his jaw to convince himself that he meant it; it would have been worth it.

  “We have to stop the degeneration before it becomes irreversible,” she had said to him and he’d nodded wisely. He’d no idea what she was talking about, of course, but it sounded like she was on top of things.

  Unfortunately, Doctor Amma was not in a position to help him. What was he going to do? He didn’t know and had to fight back tears. He couldn’t go back to his village. His father would have no patience for a sickly creature. His mother couldn’t protect him. The thought of his mother filled him with something close to panic. How was he to build a better life for her if he was unwell? He remembered the Sardarji who had daintily picked his way across the slum to the free clinic and been mesmerised by Doctor Amma’s medical file. Maybe he would find out what was wrong in time to offer Mahesh some hope of salvation.

  Mahesh made up his mind. If there was no cure – well, he knew what to do before he completely lost control of his arms and legs. It was a solution that no one could take away from him however poor and ill he was. It was his one personal freedom.

  ♦

  Sameer Khan was alone in the building except for the couple of security guards asleep at their post near the main entrance. He let himself into the laboratory using his cardkey and debated switching on a light. He decided against it – he didn’t want to attract unnecessary attention. There were blinds on the window but he knew that the light would still be visible on the outside, thin strips indicating the presence of a nocturnal visitor. He already had a glib explanation for his presence on the tip of his tongue: unfinished work, deadlines, staying on the good side of the American boss. Most of his colleagues considered it a mark of status to have a non-Indian boss so they would appreciate his brown-nosing. Sameer’s full lips twisted with derision. He didn’t share their sycophantic views. He judged people as individuals. So he thought that Tyler Junior was a buffoon and he’d fallen in love with a Sikh girl.

  A low hum in the room sounded like a swarm of sleepy mosquitoes. Probably, the air conditioning or the computers on stand-by, he surmised. He walked quickly to the nearest desktop, pulled up a chair and typed in his password, a tedious combination of letters and numbers. Many of his colleagues wrote down their passwords and taped it to their desks. The irony of a security arrangement that required more of the human brain than was practical. Sameer soon accessed the company database. He opened the files on the chemical compounds used at the plant and his shadowy, fine-print covered reflection showed his dismay. There were hundreds of items within the database. It would take him days – or nights – to get through it and he didn’t have that kind of time. The situation was urgent. He’d been shown a newborn that morning with hands and feet gnarled and useless. It was the first time the disease had spread from mother to child through the womb. Prior to that, from Ashu’s careful study, there had been no nexus between individuals except for the fact that they all lived in that particular slum next door to this particular factory.

  It had been Ashu’s suggestion, ill-received at the time, to research each substance used at the factory for possible poisoning side effects that matched the symptoms shown by residents of the slum. He intended, belatedly, to do as she had asked. For her. And for the slum dwellers whose plight was now his own.

  Sameer began, for lack of any better ideas, alphabetically. ‘Ammonia’ was used in the manufacture of cleaning agents. He read with interest the toxicology reports on various websites and concluded that the common symptoms from exposure, irritation to the respiratory tract and eyes, didn’t match. So much for that. He was soon immersed in his work, blinking rapidly from time to time to lubricate tired eyes, methodically going through the lists and products. After a few hours, he’d only just completed the ‘A’s and wasn’t sure whether he’d missed something. Sameer straightened up in his chair, feeling the sharp bursts of pain as his spine elongated. He pulled back his shoulders as far as they would go – the pain was almost refreshing – and stood up. He needed a break. Maybe a short walk would clear his head.

  Sameer sauntered over to the window, parted the blinds a crack and was surprised to see a large sedan pull up at the front gate. He watched with interest as the guards raised the barriers and saluted smartly. He recognised the silver four-wheel drive. It belonged to Tyler Junior, and he was very curious to know what he was doing at the plant so late in the evening. No one had ever accused the American of being a workaholic. He was usually the last one in and the first one out, counting down the days until his retirement. The car drew up under the porch.
>
  Sameer decided to back a hunch and hurried down the corridor towards Tyler’s office, a spacious room with all the modern accoutrements and a museum-quality collection of Moghul-era miniature art on the walls. The entrance was usually guarded by the ubiquitous Mrs. Bannerjee but she was long gone, hurrying home to cook dinner for her husband and children and regale them with the latest gossip from the office. He tried the door and was pleased to discover it was unlocked. Sameer walked around the desk, ears attuned for the slightest sound. There was nothing on the work surface except a computer and a photo in a heavy silver frame of Tyler, his spouse, who looked like a Stepford wife, and two overweight teenage children. Sameer, thinking quickly, feeling reckless as the adrenaline surged through his body, ducked behind the leather couch in the corner. He was far from invisible to the observant but he would have wagered a large sum – if it hadn’t been against his religion to do so – that Tyler Junior was not expecting company.

  ♦

  The inspector sat on the hotel bed, his back propped up against a pile of feather pillows and his feet bare. Papers were strewn across the bed so that at first glance it looked as if a hurricane had blown through the room and dispersed the contents despite the tubby paperweight in the middle.

  Mrs. Singh had not come back from the expedition to the gurdwara, although, looking at the time, he suspected the cremation was over by now. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Indians took the instructions literally.

  Singh returned to his reading material, a glossy brochure that folded like a particularly annoying map, for the products of Bharat Chemicals. There were shiny pictures of a ribbon-cutting ceremony featuring a younger smiling Tara Singh, some gleaming steel tubes and men and women in white coats staring intently at colourful liquids in test tubes. A flowchart explained that the employee structure ‘combined the best elements of East and West’ – surly American management and cheap Indian labour, concluded Singh.

  Products included various compounds with incomprehensible chemical names as well as some more ordinary sounding stuff like ‘paint’ and ‘face-whitening cream’. The latter product had been behind the factory’s improved finances, remembered Singh. It appeared that the sub-continental attachment to ‘fair’ skin had survived the nation’s so-called modernisation and advancement into the nuclear age. The classifieds in the newspapers gleefully informed potential suitors that the available brides were ‘fair’. Occasionally, they were apologetic – the girl was on the dark side – but insisted to would-be husbands that her other outstanding attributes would make up for this blight. Posters along the street had ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of various celebrities, speech bubbles informing passers-by that they owed their glittering movie careers to a lightening of skin tone rather than any acting talent. Having accidentally watched ten minutes of a head-waggling, hip-shaking, breast-jiggling extravaganza on television, the inspector wasn’t surprised that thespian qualities were not at a premium. It was disheartening, however, to think that it was skin colour that was of paramount importance instead.