by Vaseem Khan
A cloud of shame arose inside him. He felt the ghost of Gandhi hovering on his shoulder, rebuking him: ‘There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience.’
There and then he promised himself that he would track the boy down, no matter what it took. He would ensure that Irfan was in good hands. And, if not, well then he would move heaven and earth to return the boy to where he belonged – a safe and loving environment.
Rosie watched her boss disappear into the restaurant, then set down the bucket. ‘Well, young man, how about some lovely coconut milk? I have put some Dairy Milk chocolate in it today.’
Ganesha swivelled his head towards the assistant chef, then looked down at the bucket. Then he turned his back on them both, collapsed onto his knees and closed his eyes, his ears folded flat against his head in the profoundest sorrow.
SEARCHING FOR IRFAN
The next afternoon, Poppy once again arrived at Rangwalla’s flat with the glint of purpose in her eye. This time she was armed with a renewed sense of optimism.
A long conversation with her husband the previous evening had revealed that he had finally come around to her way of thinking, that he too had been having serious misgivings about the manner of Irfan’s exit from their lives. Chopra was now firmly behind the notion that they must find Irfan and assure themselves of his wellbeing. He had even spoken with Rangwalla, who had sent all his old informants out scouring the city for the boy.
Now, as a bleary-eyed Rangwalla materialised from his bedroom, Poppy felt a bright band of hope around her heart.
‘I have been up all night, hounding my people,’ Rangwalla explained, somewhat embarrassed at the fact that he had only just arisen from his slumber. ‘I have an address.’
‘Then what are we waiting for?’ said Poppy.
The ragpickers’ slum was a notoriously difficult place to navigate.
Having negotiated their way through a Byzantine maze of narrow, open-sewered alleyways, Rangwalla and Poppy emerged into a tiny courtyard around which a ragtag assortment of shanty homes had been haphazardly thrown together as if by a storm. In the courtyard a single spigot provided water for the locality. A line of women bearing clay pots chattered by the tap.
A naked infant squatted to play with a dead cockroach while his mother filled her pot. Leaning in the doorway of one of the dwellings a milky-eyed old man chewed on a neem stick as he watched the water-gatherers.
The ragpickers of Mumbai were a community unto themselves, low down even in the pecking order of the city’s poorest classes. The majority were children from the rural economy who had gravitated to Mumbai in search of a better life. They spent their days trawling through the waste generated by a human termite mound of twenty million, rooting for plastic, metal, glass, anything that might fetch a few rupees at one of the city’s many unscrupulous scrap dealers.
The ragpickers lived a hard life of constant exposure to the dangers of untreated waste – noxious gases, medical cast-offs, hazardous chemicals. To claim a few grams of copper they scarred their lungs making bonfires of discarded electrical goods. They worked barefoot and without gloves. Often they earned barely enough for a day’s meal. Some called them parasites. But the city’s civic authorities understood that without these ‘parasites’ Mumbai would become a cesspool, drowning beneath the weight of its own accumulated rubbish.
Rangwalla moved towards the old man and spoke to him. The man gesticulated with his neem stick to a dwelling on the far side of the courtyard.
As he walked over to the bricolage home Rangwalla checked his watch. It was already 5 p.m. He had to be at St Xavier’s in precisely one hour to put into motion the plan that he had hatched yesterday with Principal Lobo, the plan that would entice Raj Wadia and his gang out into the open.
It had been a busy few days for the former sub-inspector. If truth be told, he was still coming to terms with the sudden upturn in his fortunes.
Once again he felt a surge of gratitude towards Chopra for delivering him from the hell that he been in since being sacked from the police service. Now he was intent on repaying the confidence his senior officer had shown in him, starting by cracking the case of the missing bust.
He had spent the best part of the previous evening sourcing the information and materials he needed for his plan to entrap Wadia. It had taken longer than he’d anticipated to convince Lobo of the necessity of his machinations – the old principal was not enamoured of what he insisted on calling ‘this new-fangled hoodoo’. The technicians Rangwalla had found worked late into the evening in Banarjee’s office, beneath the principal’s brooding gaze as he prowled the flagstones with his hands clasped behind his back, jowly face gummed into an expression of furious impatience. ‘I should just thrash it out of them,’ he kept muttering.
The technicians, unsure who the old man was referring to, were suitably unnerved.
Rangwalla rapped on the shanty home’s rickety balsawood door. Seconds later, the door swung back to reveal a short, emaciated woman in a dull brown shalwar kameez staring out at them with a blank look. Behind her he could see milk boiling in a steel pot on a kerosene stove resting on the floor. A second woman was busily sweeping the tiny one-room dwelling with a rush broom.
She stopped as Rangwalla peered in at her, then came to the door to stand by the first woman.
‘My name is Rangwalla,’ said Rangwalla. ‘I am looking for Mukhthar Lodi.’
‘Why are you looking for him?’ asked the woman with the broom. Her eyes were fish-like and her lips taut with distaste.
‘You knew Mukhthar?’
‘What do you mean “knew”? Is he dead?’
‘No.’
‘Shame,’ said the woman.
‘Do not say that, Nazia,’ admonished the woman who had opened the door. ‘Would you take my husband from me?’
‘Husband!’ pouted Nazia. ‘Hah! He is an animal!’
‘Do not call him that!’
‘What else do you call a man who beats and terrorises his wife?’ She turned to Rangwalla. ‘That animal even put cigarettes out on her. He did—’ Her eyes flickered to Poppy. ‘He did many bad things. But will my sister hear a word said against him?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Allah save us from martyrs.’ She turned back to her sister. ‘Shabnam, you are a fool.’
‘He is still my husband,’ muttered Shabnam stubbornly.
‘Then Irfan is your son?’ said Poppy quietly.
Shabnam stared at her, before shaking her head. ‘No. I am Mukhthar’s second wife. Irfan is not my child.’
‘Ask her what happened to the first wife,’ Nazia prompted belligerently.
‘It is just a rumour.’
‘Yes, the sort of rumour that gets up and applies hot candlewax to your breasts when you are asleep.’ She leaned forward and said, in a conspiratorial voice, ‘He burned her alive. Whoosh! Claimed it was an accident, but we all know the truth. I have heard of Hindu women committing sati by jumping on their husband’s funeral pyres, but he made a sati out of her in advance.’
‘Ugly lies!’ snapped Shabnam, hot tears springing to her eyes. ‘You are just jealous because you are an old maid.’
‘Yes, I am jealous of your husband. A murderer, a liar and a thief. Wah wah, sister, what a prize specimen you have caught!’
‘Where can we find him?’ Rangwalla said, interrupting the quarrelling sisters.
‘Why do you want to find him?’ asked Shabnam, her expression suddenly wary.
‘We are looking for Irfan,’ explained Poppy.
‘Why?’
‘He ran away from your husband. He came to live with me. Then your husband found him and took him. I want to make sure he is well.’
‘Hah!’ snorted Nazia. ‘If he is with Mukhthar then he will not be well, that is for sure. That man is the devil himself. Do you know he makes them all steal? The boys. And if they don’t get him what he wants, he beats them – heavens above how he beats them!’
‘You are exaggerating, Na
zia,’ scowled Shabnam.
‘Oh, am I?’ said Nazia. She grabbed her sister roughly by the arm and spun her around. ‘Is this an exaggeration?’ She pointed at a jagged knife scar running across the back of the woman’s neck. ‘This was his idea of an anniversary gift.’
‘It was an accident,’ whispered Shabnam, shaking off her sister. But her voice was miserable.
‘Please tell us where we can find him,’ pleaded Poppy. She reached into her purse, removed a one-hundred-rupee note and held it out to the women.
Nazia bristled. ‘Just because we are poor, madam, it does not mean that we have no shame. Keep your money. If Mukhthar has Irfan then it is not a good thing. We do not know where he is but we wish you Allah’s blessings in finding him. And if you do find Mukhthar… kill him!’
She led her stricken sister away, closing the door behind them.
Poppy was crestfallen, and Rangwalla sensed her anguish. ‘I will keep searching,’ he promised. ‘I will find him.’
‘How, Abbas?’ said Poppy miserably. ‘Even his own wife does not know where he is. And the city is so big! How do we find one little boy in a haystack of twenty million?’ Tears lurked at the corners of her eyes.
‘Perhaps we must trust in God,’ suggested Rangwalla. He waited, then said, gently, ‘We must go to the school. Lobo will be expecting us for this evening’s assembly.’
Principal Augustus Lobo, veteran of innumerable Christmases in the city of Mumbai, reflected that in all his years he had rarely presided over a Christmas Eve Vespers such as this. Over those long years he had come to believe himself inured to the manifold pranks and mischiefs of his young wards, but recent events had convinced him that the world had indeed changed, and not for the better. He had always looked upon himself as a shepherd, tending his flock through their treacherous formative years to a profitable manhood from which both they and society might benefit.
But now he saw a blight taking hold of his young wards, the blight of modernity, where the pursuit of personal gain at any cost was all-serving, all-conquering.
He looked down now upon his gathered congregation with a stern expression. ‘Students of St Xavier, it is with a heavy heart that I stand before you today. At a time usually reserved for veneration of our Saviour, I am forced instead to discuss a most unsavoury matter.’ Lobo’s gnarled fingers whitened around the edges of the lectern. ‘Three nights ago something of great value was stolen from the office of the school secretary. I will not divulge the exact nature of the stolen goods, but the perpetrators of this deed know that of which I refer.’ He punctuated this statement by thumping the lectern, startling Brother Machado who had been looking on nervously from the wings. ‘I speak now to those villains, those goondas!… Your efforts have been in vain! I have this very day received a revised set of the stolen items, prepared in advance against this very contingency. These new items will now take precedence over those that were stolen. In short, sirs, the originals are now worthless.’ Lobo washed his petrified audience with a glare of intense disapprobation. ‘I have placed the new items in the exact same place from which the originals were taken. I dare the thieves to try and take them again.’ Another grimace. ‘If you have a shred of decency, sirs, you will hand yourselves over to me. Did you think you could hoodwink old Lobo? Hah! I have been besting the likes of you since before your fathers were born.’
At the rear of the assembly hall Poppy leaned in towards Rangwalla. ‘Do you think it will work?’ she whispered.
‘I do not know,’ replied Rangwalla. ‘But if Wadia is as arrogant as I think he is, he will not be able to resist the challenge.’
‘And if he takes the bait, you will catch him red-handed?’
‘No,’ said Rangwalla. ‘If he takes the bait I will not need to. He will be caught but it will not be red-handed.’
LEOPOLD CAFÉ
On those rare occasions that Chopra ventured to the south Mumbai district of Colaba he usually made a point of looking in on his old friend and batchmate Inspector Girish Poolchand.
Poolchand, a shiftless sot who had scraped his way through police training school with Chopra all those years ago, had subsequently secured a plum posting in the Colaba station to which he had clung with a limpet-like tenacity for over two decades.
Chopra had long since given up trying to convert Poolchand to the ranks of the assiduous.
Poolchand was one of many in the service who swam with the prevailing currents, waiting only to be washed up on the beach of retirement nirvana with a full pension and no further responsibilities in life save the consumption of cheap whisky and the recounting of ever-taller tales from his disingenuously remembered police years.
Whenever they met, the two men would pat each other on the back and ask after each other’s families, before swiftly repairing to the renowned Leopold Café where Poolchand was a fixture in the notorious upstairs bar. Here he would partake daily of a liquid lunch safely hidden from the inconvenient eyes of those dining below – which often included his seniors at the station – behind a wall of smoked glass.
Today, however, Chopra sat alone in the bustling restaurant.
For the first time in years he had not called upon his old sparring partner. His business today was a matter for himself and the party he had persuaded – with considerable effort – to meet him here.
As a wheezing ceiling fan swirled lazily above him, Chopra found a low-wattage anxiety oozing around his colon. He was not one to second-guess himself, but the coming encounter unnerved him. His only consolation was that the meeting would take place on familiar ground. After all, didn’t they say that choosing the terrain was half the battle?
As he looked around at the evening rush, he reflected, not for the first time, that Leopold’s – once a rutputty eat-and-go joint – was now a bona fide Mumbai institution.
Located in the bustling heart of Colaba, the café – one hundred and forty-one years old and counting – was one of the few places in the city where foreigners and locals of all ranks, faiths and backgrounds regularly congregated. In the past Leopold’s had enjoyed a dubious reputation. For many years it had operated as a sort of ‘free zone’, profitably ignored by the authorities, a den of genteel iniquity where all manner of shady characters conducted their business, and where tourists and Mumbaikers alike came to purchase drugs or organise illicit liaisons. And this in spite of the café’s indiscreet location directly opposite the Colaba police station.
Recently, however, things had changed.
Ever since the terror attacks that claimed one hundred and sixty-four lives in Mumbai, Leopold’s had become something of a beacon, a symbol of the city’s indomitable spirit. The restaurant had been one of the first places attacked by the gunmen – ten people had died in the café itself – but the owners, uncowed, had reopened for business within days, sending a message to all those who thought terror could dampen the exuberance of the subcontinent’s greatest city.
As Chopra looked around the bustling restaurant he noted, once again, the bullet holes in the mirrored walls, left there as a mark of respect by the café’s owners for those who had fallen. The bullet holes were a reminder to all who dined at Leopold’s of how ephemeral life could be.
‘All right, Chopra, what the devil is this all about?’
Chopra turned to find Detective Chief Inspector Maxwell Bomberton looming over him. Bomberton looked hot and bothered.
‘And a good day to you too, DCI Bomberton.’
Bomberton did not seem overly impressed by the fact that it was Christmas Eve in the city of Mumbai. There was a distinct absence of Yuletide spirit emanating from his robust frame. ‘Well, man, don’t just sit there, spit it out!’
Chopra stiffened. ‘Garewal had nothing to do with the theft of the crown,’ he said woodenly.
Bomberton glared at him, then collapsed into the seat opposite. A ceiling fan ruffled the few remaining wisps of hair on his prominent pink dome, which appeared to have been recently sunburnt.
Around
them the din of the evening crowd rose and fell in a dozen languages. Food smells wafted from the kitchen as red-clad waiters buzzed between the cheap tables, where menus were trapped beneath squares of ancient, pockmarked glass. An attempt had been made to add a modicum of Christmas cheer to the proceedings – tinsel had been wrapped around the ceiling fans and a Christmas tree lurked behind the juice bar. Thankfully, the owners had drawn the line at hiring a pseudo-Santa to harangue the customers.
Chopra had considered his present course of action carefully.
The card that he had found at Bulbul Kanodia’s home had convinced him that at 11 p.m. the next day the ‘long-lost national treasure’ would be present at ‘The King’s Ransom’. It had not taken him long to discover that this was not, in the strictest sense, a place.
The King’s Ransom was a boat.
A yacht, in fact, that belonged to one of the richest men in the country, industrialist Mohan Kartik.
This fact had bemused Chopra at first. Surely Mohan Kartik – billionaire entrepreneur and business advisor to the Indian government – could not be involved in the theft of the Koh-i-Noor diamond? And then his mood had darkened as he reflected that greed knew no boundaries and avarice was a law unto itself. There was no rule that said a billionaire could not covet something as priceless as the Koh-i-Noor. Only time would tell how dirty Mohan Kartik’s hands were in this affair.
Earlier in the day Chopra had taken the time to visit another old acquaintance, Kishore Dubey, an investigative journalist at the Mid Day, Mumbai’s daily tabloid. Dubey had all the latest celebrity gossip at his fingertips and the nose of a bloodhound. For many years he had worked for a provincial paper in the Andheri suburbs. As a consequence he had been useful to Chopra, on occasion, when he had needed the help of the local papers.
Now Dubey took the time to piece together a profile of Mohan Kartik for him. Inevitably, the former policeman had had to hold at bay his old friend’s insatiable curiosity. It was too early to even hint at what he was up to, but Dubey was a veteran newsman and not about to let Chopra off without extorting a promise that if anything came of whatever it was that he was investigating, Dubey would get the exclusive.