The Case of the Missing Servant avpm-1

by Tarquin Hall

  Puri watched as an acrobatic young man clambered up the side of one carriage, scrambled along the roof and then attempted to swing himself inside over the heads of the competing passengers jammed into one of the doorways. But he was roughly pushed away and, like a rock fan at a concert, was passed backward aloft a sea of hands and dumped unceremoniously onto the platform. Unperturbed, he scrambled to his feet and clambered up the side of the train to try again.

  The detective continued along the platform where the calls of chai-and nimboo paani-wallahs competed with train tannoy announcements preceded by their characteristic organ chords. A knot of migrant workers, evidently waiting for a long-delayed train, lay sprawled over sheets of newspaper on the hard concrete platform, sleeping soundly.

  Near the first-class retiring room, he found the men he was looking for: three elderly station coolies who were sitting on their wooden baggage barrows taking a break from the grueling work of ferrying passengers' luggage on their heads.

  Like the other coolies Puri had just interviewed at the main entrance to the station, they wore bright red tunics with their concave brass ID plates tied to their biceps. Their arms and legs were thin and sinewy.

  Puri explained that he was looking for a missing girl called Mary who was said to have come to the station on the night of August 22. His description of the girl was cobbled together from the facts he'd gleaned about her during his investigation-together with a certain amount of deductive reasoning.

  "She is a tribal Christian from Jharkhand in her early twenties. She would have been extremely weak and probably had bandages wrapped around her wrists. I believe that if she boarded a train, its destination was probably Ranchi."

  The old men listened to the detective's description. One of them asked, "What was the date again?" Puri repeated it. No, he said after some discussion with his fellow coolies, they had not seen a girl who matched that description. "We would remember," he said.

  The detective made his way to the last platform. There he found a young coolie who was carrying three heavy-looking bags on his head for a family traveling on the Aravali Express to Mumbai.

  Puri walked alongside him as he made his way to one of the second-class A/C carriages.

  "Yes, sir, I remember her well," said the coolie after he had dropped off the bags for the family and Puri had described Mary to him. "She could hardly walk. She seemed sick. Yes, she had bandages around her wrists."

  "Did she board a train?" asked the detective.

  "A man put her on board the-" The coolie suddenly stopped talking. "Sir, I'm a poor man. Help me and I will help you," he said.

  Puri took out his wallet and handed the man one hundred rupees. This was as much as the coolie made in a day, but his composed expression did not change as he tucked the note into his pocket.

  "She boarded the Garib Niwas."

  "You saw her get on?"

  "Yes, sir, I helped her."

  "Did you speak to her?"

  "I asked her if she needed a doctor, but she did not answer me. She looked like she was in shock, just staring blankly, not even blinking."

  "What happened to the man she was with?"

  "He waited until the train departed. Then he left."

  "Describe him."

  Again the coolie pleaded poverty. Puri had to hand him another hundred rupees.

  "Middle aged, dark suit, white shirt, expensive shoes-well polished."

  Ever grateful for the observational powers of the common Indian man, the detective made a note of the coolie's name and went in search of the station manager's office.

  Twenty minutes later, he was back at the car, where Tubelight and Handbrake had been waiting for him.

  "There is one 'Mary Murmu' listed on the manifest for the Garib Niwas train to Ranchi on August twenty-second," he said. "Sounds like she was extremely weak."

  "What's our next move, Boss?" asked Tubelight.

  "You and Facecream keep a close eye on Bobby Kasliwal. He is up to his neck in this. I want him watched every moment of the day and night."

  "Think he murdered Munnalal?"

  "There's no doubt he was there on the scene."

  "And you, Boss?"

  "I'm going to Jharkhand tonight to locate Mary."

  "Jharkhand. Could take forever. Where will you look?"

  "The uranium mines of Jadugoda."

  Twenty-Two

  The passenger manifest showed that whoever purchased Mary Murmu's train ticket on August 22 had opted for a seat in a non-air-conditioned three-tier carriage. The train from Jaipur to Ranchi had been a "local" and had stopped at every station along its 740-mile, 30-hour journey east across the subcontinent.

  During his student days, Puri had always traveled in the cheapest trains and carriages out of financial necessity. He looked back on the experience with nostalgia. The hypnotic swaying of the train, the camaraderie between passengers, all of them poor, had been wonderful.

  But he knew how unforgiving the conditions could be. And now, as he traveled in the comfort of a first-class carriage on a fast train (top speed 87 miles per hour) on the same route Mary had taken, he pictured her-weak, with nothing of her own to eat or drink, possibly fading in and out of consciousness-crammed into the corner of a bottom wooden bunk with the rough feet of the occupants on the bunk above dangling centimeters from her face.

  Her carriage would have been heaving with laborers and rustics, who routinely clambered aboard slow-moving local trains between stations, occupying every inch of space. Mary would have been forced to share her bunk with up to six or seven other passengers. With no one to guard her place while she went to the toilet, she might well have found herself squeezed onto the floor.

  When the train stopped during the day and the sun hammered down on the roof, it must have been like the inside of a tandoor oven. The circular metal fans bolted to the ceiling would have offered little respite. During the inordinate number of stops, there would have been no letup from the footfall of hawkers selling everything from biscuits and hot tea to safety pins and rat poison. Nor from the perpetual stench of "night soil," which, on all Indian trains, went straight down the toilet chutes onto the tracks.

  Had someone taken pity on Mary and helped her? Perhaps a sympathetic mother who had given the poor girl some water and a little something to eat from her family's tiffin.

  Had she had made it to Ranchi alive?

  The odds were not good. And without Mary, or at least irrefutable evidence that she had not ended up dead and mutilated on the side of Jaipur's Ajmer Road, Puri was going to have an extremely hard time proving what had happened on the night of August 22. A train booking with her name on the roster would not be enough to prove Ajay Kasliwal's innocence.

  The detective watched the striking Rajasthani landscape slip past his window. The sun was setting over an intricate patchwork of small fields-the dry, baked earth rutted with grooves made by ox-drawn plows in expectation of the monsoon rains.

  His eyes followed the progress of a herd of black goats and a stick-wielding boy along a well-worn pathway that led to a clutch of simple homesteads. In front of one stood a big black water buffalo chewing slowly and deliberately. Nearby, on a charpoy, sat an old man with a brilliant white moustache and a bright red turban watching the train go by.

  Puri reached Ranchi early the next morning. He had phoned ahead to arrange transportation and exited the station to find a driver who hailed from Jadugoda waiting for him.

  Together they set off in a four-wheel-drive Toyota toward the mines.

  "Sir, it's not a good idea to make this journey at night," the driver told Puri once they had left behind the economically depressed city, which embodied little of the new India. "Nowadays the roads are extremely dangerous."

  "Why's that?" asked Puri.

  "Naxals," replied the driver.

  Much of Jharkhand, along with great swaths of eastern and central India-the "Red Corridor"-were controlled by Naxals, short for Naxalites, or Maoist guerrillas. Their c
ause was ostensibly a just one: to fight against oppressive landlords and functionaries of the state, who had tricked or forced hundreds of thousands of people off their land. But like so many proxy rebel movements around the world, they had become the scourge of the people they claimed to represent. Naxal comrades levied taxes on villagers, robbed them of their crops and indoctrinated their children.

  They also killed hundreds of people each year.

  "Just last week they murdered a truck driver who refused to pay their road tax," explained the driver. "They burned him inside his cab. Last night they murdered an MLA in Ranchi. They put a mine under his car and BOOM!"

  Puri had read about the murder in that morning's paper. The MLA was the third to die in as many months. Little wonder the prime minister had recently called the Naxalites the single biggest internal security threat faced by India.

  Puri asked the driver whether he thought the Maoist movement would continue to grow in popularity.

  "Of course, sir," he said.

  "Why?"

  "Because now the poor can see what the rich have-expensive cars, expensive houses. So they feel cheated."

  Yes, the genie has been let out of the bottle, Puri thought. God help us.

  Despite all the potholes, which caused his head to jerk up and down and occasionally bounce off the window, Puri soon fell fast asleep.

  He awoke when they were half an hour from Jadugoda town.

  The landscape to his left was Martian: flat, rocky and arid. The only earthly features were the occasional thick, knotty trees-remnants of a great, primordial jungle, which had been cleared to grow monsoon-dependent rice. To the right rose hills with sharp escarpments. Here and there, the upholstery of patchy scrub was punctured by outcrops of rock and scarred by gullies made during heavy downpours.

  The uranium mines lay deep beneath these hills. A barbed-wire fence encircled them. Large yellow Uranium Corporation of India signs warned trespassers to keep out.

  Puri's vehicle was soon stuck behind a convoy of dump trucks. Each was carrying loads of ordinary-looking grey rock chips that, according to the driver, had been extracted from the mines and were being taken to the processing center a few miles away. There, the rock would be crushed, and after being put through a chemical process, the uranium extracted in the form of "Yellowcake."

  "Sir, did you know our Yellowcake was used to make India's nuclear bomb?" said the driver, grinning with pride at his country's achievement and his native Jharkhand's contribution.

  "Do you know anyone who works in the mines?" asked the detective.

  "Sir, only tribal people do the manual labor underground," he replied.

  There was a subtext to his answer: the driver was a caste Hindu and although he had grown up in the area, he did not mix with the tribals, or Adivasis, the indigenous aboriginals who traditionally dwelled in the jungle.

  "I had a cousin who used to drive these trucks. He did the job for twelve years," said the driver cheerily. "But then he had to stop."

  "What happened to him?" asked Puri.

  "Sir, he got sick. The company doctors diagnosed him with TB and gave him some medicine. But he did not improve and then he died."

  "What was his age?"

  "Forty-two."

  The driver fell silent for a moment and then, with a confused frown, said, "Sir, the antimining campaign-wallahs say the mines make people sick. They say people should not work there. But what else are people to do? There are no jobs. Driving a truck pays good money. If one or two people get sick, well…"

  They were still stuck behind the dump trucks, unable to pass because of oncoming traffic.

  A headwind had started blowing dust from uranium rocks in their direction. Some of it settled on the windscreen. Although the windows were rolled up, Puri automatic ally buried his mouth and nose in the crook of his arm.

  The driver laughed when he noticed the detective's reaction.

  "Sir, don't worry, you can't get sick from a little dust! See?" He rolled down his window and took a deep breath. "There's nothing wrong with me at all!"

  Jadugoda was virtually indistinguishable from tens of thousands of other little roadside settlements to be found across the length and breadth of India, thought Puri as they stopped at the main intersection to ask for directions.

  A collection of rickety wooden stalls stood along the sides of the road that led in and out of the town. There were several paan-bidi stands stocked with fresh lime leaves and foil pouches of tobacco, which hung like party streamers. There was a vegetable stand, a fruit stand with heaps of watermelons, and a butcher, whose hunks of meat hung on hooks smothered by flies.

  A fishmonger sat cross-legged on a plastic tarpaulin on the ground scaling a fresh river fish using a big knife that he held expertly between his toes. Next to him crouched an old woman selling meswak sticks for cleaning teeth.

  The scene would not have been complete without a big neem tree by the intersection, which provided welcome shade for the local dogs and loafers who spent their days watching people and vehicles coming and going.

  There was, however, one unusual feature about the place. In the middle of the intersection stood a statue of three Adivasis armed with bows and arrows-a memorial to local heroes who fought, albeit with primitive weapons, against the British.

  In Chanakya's day, too, the tribals had offered fierce resistance to the Maurya Empire, staging raids on passing caravans from their jungle fastness. But since the formation of the Indian republic, these people had been exploited and disenfranchised, Puri reflected sadly. To their misfortune, their ancestral lands lay atop some of the largest mineral deposits in the world, and in the past fifty years, most of these had been requisitioned for pitiful compensation. Hundreds of thousands of Adivasis had been made homeless and nowadays, all across India, scratched a living digging ditches, carrying bricks and cleaning toilets.

  As they sat at the very bottom of the social scale, there was a good deal of prejudice against them.

  "The tribal people are not so friendly," complained the driver as they pulled away from the dusty intersection. "And they drink too much!"

  A couple of minutes later they passed a small township built in the 1960s by the Uranium Corporation of India to house its full-time employees and their families, nearly all of whom hailed from elsewhere in India. Within its spruce perimeter there was a school, a hospital, blocks of flats and green playing fields.

  Beyond the township, the driver took a left down a rocky lane and pulled up outside an ordinary, one-story concrete building. Had it not been for the cross above the entrance, Puri would never have guessed it was the local church.

  The detective got out of the Land Cruiser and knocked on the metal doors. They were soon opened by a middle-aged man who could easily have passed for an Australian Aboriginal. He was dressed in a shirt, jeans and a baseball cap, and around his neck hung a small gold crucifix. His eyelids blinked in slow motion, giving the impression that he was half asleep, and his mouth broadened into a wide, childlike grin.

  "Good afternoon," he said, welcomingly, as if it had been some time since he'd had any company. His pronunciation mimicked the way English is spoken on "Teach Yourself" audiocassettes.

  "Good afternoon, just I'm looking for the priest," said Puri.

  "I'm Father Peter," replied the old man. "It's a pleasure to meet you."

  "Father, my name is Jonathan Abraham. I run a charity based in Delhi that offers assistance to Adivasi Christian families," lied the detective.

  The business card he handed the priest named him as "Country Director" of the nongovernment organization that he often used as a cover: "South Asians in Need"-SAIN. The card listed two Delhi numbers-both of which, if dialed, would be answered by an extremely helpful lady by the name of Mrs. Kaur, who would offer to send out an information pack about the charity.

  The priest studied the card and his eyelids blinked in slow motion again.

  "Ooh!" he said like an excited child. "Are you from Delhi?"<
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  "Yes, Father, my office is there."

  Father Peter grinned again. He had a dazzling set of white, perfectly straight teeth, which might have belonged to an American high school student. "Then you are the answer to my prayers!" he said, inviting the detective inside.

  Puri had reasoned that if he went around asking people in the local Christian Adivasi community about Mary's whereabouts, they would react with suspicion and he would be stonewalled. Furthermore, he didn't want Mary-assuming she was still alive-coming to know that an outsider was looking for her.

  Ideally, he wanted to engineer a situation in which she would feel comfortable divulging the truth about what had happened to her in Jaipur. To do so, he would need to gain her trust.

  Fortunately, the cover of a Christian was an easy one to pull off. Puri had attended a Delhi convent school as a young boy and the nuns had drummed the Lord's Prayer into him. The other sacraments of the Nazarene guru were also easily observed. (Pretending to be, say, a Muslim presented considerably more pitfalls. Mastering the Islamic prayers alone took hours and hours of practice.)

  Christian priests, too, were easier to handle than the representatives of other faiths. They were generally nowhere near as greedy as Hindu pundits, who always had their hands out.

  The only thing Father Peter really wanted was a new cross for his church. The existing one, which was made of wood, was being eaten by termites. "Now it is 'holy' in more ways than one," he joked as they drove back into town.

  Over lunch-Puri took him to the dhaba on the main road, which was the only place to eat in Jadugoda-the detective promised to send him a new one from Delhi.

  By the time they had finished their meal and sat cleaning out the bits of mutton gristle from the gaps in their teeth with toothpicks, he had learned that there were only forty families in the Jadugoda area who had converted to Christianity (far greater numbers were to be found around Ranchi). The rest still clung to their animist religion.