The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown

by Vaseem Khan

  It was at this time that the curse became widely known.

  Discovered in an ancient and enigmatic Sanskrit document the curse stated: ‘He who owns this diamond will own the world, but will also know all its misfortunes. Only God, or a woman, may wear it with impunity.’

  Over the coming centuries the curse had proved alarmingly accurate in its dire prediction.

  Babur’s son, Humayun, was the first to be eclipsed by the diamond’s black shadow. His short-lived empire was overrun by the Pashtun general Sher Khan. A broken man, Humayun would later die in a freak fall from the stone steps of his court library. Sher Khan himself perished soon after when a cannon packed with gunpowder exploded during the siege of Kalinjar Fort in Uttar Pradesh.

  Next came Humayun’s grandson, Shah Jahan, the visionary behind the Taj Mahal, who installed the Koh-i-Noor in his magnificent Peacock Throne, and paid the price for tempting fate when he was subsequently imprisoned by his own son Aurangzeb. Legend had it that in order to torment his father Aurangzeb had the Koh-i-Noor set outside the window of his cell so that he could see the Taj only by looking at its reflection in the great stone.

  In 1739 Nadir Shah, the Shah of Iran, sacked Agra and Delhi and carried off the Peacock Throne to Persia, not realising the ill fortune he was bringing upon himself. He was assassinated shortly thereafter.

  The Koh-i-Noor subsequently passed through a number of hands before ending up in the treasury of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, ruling prince of the Punjab.

  In 1839, following Singh’s death, the British claimed the Punjab for the Empire, and the Koh-i-Noor was surrendered – through the machinations of the British East India Company – to Queen Victoria. Transported to England in 1850, it was duly presented to Her Majesty as a tribute from her ‘loyal’ subjects on the subcontinent. A line of female queens had safeguarded the great jewel ever since.

  In this way the prophecy was said to have been fulfilled.

  Irfan’s face kept intruding into Chopra’s thoughts. To divert himself, Chopra picked up his notebook, pushed his spectacles on to his nose, stuck his calabash pipe into his mouth, and tried to organise his thoughts about the case. His pen scritched across the paper as a moth, circling the light fixture above, threw dancing shadows over the page:

  Robbery planned months ago once location of exhibit known.

  Motive = theft/recovery of Koh-i-Noor.

  Fake security guard inserted into museum. ‘Prakash Yadav’. Yadav left behind gas canisters and (possibly) plastic explosive. Canisters in statue. But where was explosive? If not hidden in advance then how did thieves bring it in?

  Chopra paused and realised that the whole question of the plastic explosive was something that had been bothering him, like a piece of grit in his eye. He placed himself back in the gallery now, looking through the ragged hole in the sealed rear doors and out into the corridor connecting the Tata and Jahangir galleries. The hole had been blown into the Tata Gallery, so the thieves had to have come in from the corridor. That was the assumption. But sometimes assumptions were the very worst thing for an investigation… And suddenly he had it, the thing that had been bothering him. He had seen a technician vacuuming up debris in the corridor. McTavish had said this was probably debris from the blowback of the explosion. But Chopra felt that something was wrong with this explanation. He was no explosives expert, but it didn’t sit right. An idea was circling his brain that he just couldn’t latch on to.

  Eventually he gave up and continued with his list.

  Yadav false identity. High quality forgeries = expensive! Yadav missing, possibly dead.

  How did the thieves break into display case?

  Did they temporarily hide crown in museum? If so, where?

  How did they get crown out of museum?

  Who is the mastermind? Bulbul Kanodia? How involved is the Chauhan gang? What was Bulbul doing in the museum? Why did he need to be there?

  Chopra stared at the paper for a long time. He recalled Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Homes in Terror by Night in which a fictional diamond – the ‘Star of Rhodesia’ – was stolen. The culprit had eventually been identified as an old friend of Dr Watson.

  He looked at his list again and wrote:

  Can I trust Garewal?

  He gazed at the paper, then underlined the final point. Twice.

  INSPECTOR CHOPRA PERFORMS THE HIGH WIRE ACT

  ‘Poppy Madam! What are you doing here?’

  Rangwalla gaped at the apparition of his employer’s wife nonchalantly seated on the threadbare sofa of his living room sharing a cup of tea with his wife. Judging from their cosy demeanour and somewhat startled expressions, the two women appeared to have been embroiled in the depths of conspiracy.

  Rangwalla had just emerged from the shower, dressed in a vest and towel. Droplets from his still-damp beard plopped onto the worn granite tiles of the floor.

  Poppy placed her teacup onto the scarred surface of the coffee table. ‘We have work to do, Abbas. I want to make an early start.’

  Rangwalla blushed.

  There were very few people in the world who used his first name. Not even his wife called him Abbas, preferring to use the universal ‘ho, ji!’ or the demure ‘janaab’ when she wished to wheedle something from him. Then again, Poppy had always treated him like a younger brother, though he suspected that they were of a not too dissimilar age.

  Rangwalla pinched himself to check that he was not dreaming, then briskly rubbed his forearm as his eyes began to water. ‘Work?’ he echoed eventually.

  ‘Yes,’ said Poppy firmly as she rose to her feet and smoothed out her sari. ‘And if we are to proceed you had better put on some clothes.’

  In the rickshaw, Poppy explained. ‘My husband appears to be preoccupied with this Koh-i-Noor business. However, we have a paying client who is waiting for results – and who just happens to be my employer.’

  ‘You are referring to the missing bust case.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rangwalla scratched his beard in an unconscious gesture of discomfort. ‘I must confess, madam, that I have not had much time to devote to this investigation.’

  ‘Well, it is high time that you made time, Abbas,’ said Poppy, primly. ‘You are now an associate private detective of the agency. It is time to do some detecting.’

  The rickshaw struck a pothole in the road. The driver swore as he skidded into the adjacent lane, earning a torrent of horned abuse from the red BEST bus behind them, which swerved wildly on its exhausted axle-springs and sent a ripple of chaos back along the swarming traffic. Howls of rage permeated the fog of pollution that had sunk to the level of the road.

  Poppy, who lived in perpetual fear of death-by-road-accident – ever since Chopra had almost killed them both on his infernal Bullet not long after their wedding – waxed wrathfully upon the unfortunate rickshaw driver, haranguing him for a good few minutes.

  Rangwalla glanced at her from the corner of his eye. Finally, he decided that he must lance the boil, even if it meant attracting her ire.

  ‘Madam, perhaps you would like to tell me what is bothering you?’

  Poppy swivelled in the plastic-coated rick seat to fix him with an angry glare. He braced himself for an explosion… but then she turned away.

  He saw her biting her lip. Eventually, she spoke. ‘You are right, Abbas, something is bothering me.’

  Ah, thought Rangwalla, now we will get to what this is really all about.

  ‘Yesterday a strange man walked into the restaurant. He claimed to be Irfan’s father. He took Irfan with him… You know who Irfan is, don’t you?’

  ‘Chopra Sir explained everything.’

  Poppy sniffed. ‘Well, did he explain why he simply let that man walk off with a helpless little boy?’

  Rangwalla, sensing that he was treading on dangerous ground, thought a moment before replying.

  Over the long years that he had known Chopra, he had always found his senior officer’s wife a somewhat intimidating presence. She w
as a force of nature, of that there was little doubt. But he also knew her to be a well-intentioned woman, with a heart large enough for the city-monster that was Mumbai.

  He knew, too, that Poppy and Chopra’s childlessness was a delicate matter. ‘Madam, what is this about?’

  ‘I wish to locate Irfan. I wish to assure myself that he is well.’

  Now Rangwalla understood why Poppy had really come to his home. He imagined the poor woman had barely slept since the boy had been taken from the restaurant.

  ‘Chopra Sir mentioned that the boy’s father had left an address.’

  ‘Yes. I went there this morning. No one has heard of him there.’

  Rangwalla fell momentarily silent. He considered his next words carefully, not wishing to reignite Poppy’s wrath. ‘Well, I suppose it could simply be that he did not wish to be harassed.’

  ‘I do not want to harass him,’ sniffed Poppy indignantly. ‘I simply want to make sure that Irfan is being properly looked after.’

  ‘He is the boy’s father. There is not much that we can do, even if we do find him.’

  ‘Let me worry about that when the time comes.’

  Rangwalla gave in.

  Poppy was a woman on a mission, as single-minded as a tigress protecting her cubs. Heaven help anyone who got in her way. ‘As you wish, madam. I will make some calls. Perhaps we can pick up the trail.’

  Poppy nodded firmly. ‘Good. In the meantime, let us see about this missing bust business.’

  ‘He is too tall to be a dwarf.’

  The dwarf glared at Chopra with accusing eyes.

  Chopra felt his face turning hot beneath the make-up. He looked once again in the full-length mirror.

  A six-foot-tall clown in oversized shoes, baggy dungarees and curly ginger wig stared back at him, smiling crazily. The smile was fixed, painted onto the bone-white face in a garish smear of red. A broad-brimmed top hat jammed the wig securely to the clown’s skull.

  Inspector Chopra (Retd) had never felt so ludicrous in all his life.

  What the hell am I doing? he thought.

  A soft trumpeting behind him alerted him to the presence of his young ward. He looked around to see Ganesha staring up at him with an expression of happy innocence.

  ‘I do not know what you are smiling at,’ he muttered. ‘You do not look much better yourself.’

  Ganesha turned to admire himself in the mirror.

  The elephant calf wore a richly coloured caparison across his back, with a Keralan-style nettipattam headdress tied over his forehead. The nettipattam stretched all the way down to the top of his trunk and was painted gold and edged with a rainbow of coloured pom-poms. White cheek spots had been painted on either side of his face, and coloured garlands and brass bells had been tied around his tail.

  Unlike Chopra the little elephant was delighted with his new look. Like any child he was enormously proud of his new outfit and wished to show it off.

  Realising that Chopra was not an appreciative audience, he turned away, swished his ringing tail at the glowering clown, and wandered off to examine the strange smells of the circus ring.

  ‘There is nothing we can do about his height,’ sighed Tiger Singh, passing a critical eye over Chopra.

  ‘But he does not even know our act!’ protested the dwarf, whose name, Chopra had learned, was Bhiku.

  Bhiku was the acknowledged leader of the clown troupe at the Grand Trunk Circus, though he himself claimed that he was only ‘first among equals – as long as the other equals do what I tell them’.

  Circus dwarves, Chopra was discovering, were a notoriously factious bunch.

  ‘What is there to know?’ he said grimly. ‘You fall down. You throw pies at each other.’

  The dwarf glared at him. ‘Oh, so you think it is easy, do you, Mister Bigshot? Have you ever fallen off a bicycle in a humorous way? Have you ever been hit in the private parts with a broom handle whilst balancing on a beach ball? Let me tell you, clowning is a serious business.’

  Chopra raised his hands in surrender. ‘Look, all you have to do is get me inside Kanodia’s bungalow. After that, I’m on my own.’

  A bear sidled up to Chopra and then stood on its hind legs and folded its paws across its chest. ‘Well, if you ask me, you look like a very fine clown.’

  He gaped at the bear. ‘But you’re a man!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘We can no longer afford to keep a real bear,’ Tiger Singh explained wearily. ‘A man in a bear suit is the next best thing. Children expect a bear. What to do?’

  The St Francis Catholic School for Boys might have been a carbon copy of St Xavier. As Rangwalla and Poppy walked across the school’s grounds a game of soccer was in progress. Two sets of young boys in coloured outfits were racing around the grass whilst an elderly gentleman refereed. The elderly gentleman, a stick-thin figure in a blazing white T-shirt, white shorts, tennis socks and sneakers, continually blew on a shrill whistle that bounced around his neck.

  Rangwalla stopped as a pair of Franciscan brothers in white cassocks swished by. ‘Excuse me, can you tell us where we might find Principal D’Souza?’

  One of the two men pointed back the way they had come. ‘You have just passed by him.’

  The referee jogged to a halt before them. Up close he was even thinner than he had seemed at first glance, with a long, scrawny neck in which an Adam’s apple rode up and down like an elevator.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ asked Principal Angelo D’Souza crossly. His hawkish face was pinched into an expression of annoyance at having been called away from his football match.

  Rangwalla was instantly intimidated by the old Franciscan. He was reminded of his own school days, which, admittedly, had not lasted very long. He had spent more time playing cricket in the playground and chalking lewd images onto his slate than he had studying. A voice reached out to him from the dim mists of the past: ‘Rangwalla! Pay attention, boy! Do you think Gandhi could have defeated the British if he had spent all his time in school sketching images of nude milkmaids?’

  He coughed to clear his throat. ‘Ah, we are here to enquire about the bust of Father Albino Gonsalves that was stolen from St Xavier three nights ago. Sir.’

  ‘Bust? Bust? You interrupt my game to ask me about Lobo’s silly statue. Why, man?’

  Rangwalla glanced at Poppy. ‘Er, Principal Lobo thinks… What I mean to say is… he believes that…’

  ‘Well, spit it out, man, spit it out. Haven’t got all day.’

  ‘Well, it’s just that… St Francis and St Xavier are old rivals…’ Rangwalla’s voice tailed off.

  D’Souza’s eyes narrowed. ‘That damned Lobo is accusing me?’ His face swelled with rage. He jabbed Rangwalla in the chest. ‘Now you listen to me, you blue-footed booby. I had nothing to do with Lobo’s damned bust. He who lives in a glass house should not be throwing stones. He’s always had it in for me. Even when we were in seminary together, he always had to throw his weight around. Well, you can go back and tell him that Brother D’Souza isn’t warming his toilet seat for him any more!’

  Rangwalla frowned. ‘Sir?’

  But D’Souza had already turned on his heel.

  Bulbul Kanodia’s Bandstand bungalow was fronted by ornate gates, the ironwork sculpted into a classical image from Hindu mythology – Lord Hanuman, the monkey-headed god, chasing the sun which, as a child, he had believed to be a ripe mango.

  The largest guard hitched up his black trousers beneath the pregnant swell of his stomach, unleashed a mouthful of scarlet betel fluid onto the sizzling tarmac, then tipped back his cap and stood with his hands on his hips staring, slack-jawed, at the surreal sight of the circus troupe gathered in the middle of the dusty road.

  The troupe, in turn, stared up at the lavish three-storey, purpose-built, colonial-style bungalow that Bulbul Kanodia called home.

  The bungalow was located on the same stretch of real estate as the homes of some of Bollywood’s biggest stars – on the promenade, where, on sultry summer
evenings, Mumbai’s mega-rich stood on their breezy balconies drinking imported Colombian coffee and watching the sun set on the Arabian Sea. For this and other reasons the Bandstand was a popular venue for walkers and gawpers.

  At the end of the kilometre-long promenade lay the Bandra Fort, built by the Portuguese in 1640 as a watchtower. Now it was employed by late-night lovers to canoodle – safely hidden from the eyes of disapproving elders – and by scores of roosting pigeons.

  Chopra quelled the sudden feeling of nervousness pooling in his belly as the guards talked animatedly with Tiger Singh. Pedestrians swirled around them, a few pausing in their headlong dash along the promenade to cast curious glances at the motley crew.

  Chopra knew that what he was doing might be classed as borderline criminal. He was, effectively, entering a man’s home under false pretences, with the intention of conducting an illegal search. Had he still been a police officer this alone would have been grounds for instant dismissal… He took a deep breath and willed himself to calm.

  Perhaps this was the essential difference between a police officer and a private detective.

  One was bound by the law, whilst the other merely used the law as a guide.

  As Chopra was quickly learning, the second way was sometimes the only way to get things done.

  Eventually the guards led the troupe inside the compound, herding them through an alley that ran alongside the bungalow and out into a lavish garden. The garden had been set up with white marquees and strategically placed hors d’oeuvres tables, manned by staff in crisp, white waiters’ outfits. A selection of well-heeled Mumbaikers trolled between the tables, sipping from champagne flutes. They all turned as the circus troupe was led through the garden to a specially built stage at the rear of the expansive lawn. A round of polite applause trailed the costumed performers as they clambered onto the stage. The audience, chattering good-naturedly, settled into rows of plastic chairs set out in front of the stage.