Tarquin Hall

by The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken

  “Is there anything wrong with that? The only way to clean up cricket is to legalize betting on the subcontinent.”

  “True. And match fixing hurts the legal betting business in Europe and elsewhere, no? Keeps the punters in Britain away from the betting shops if they believe the game has gone for a toss.”

  “There’s that as well,” conceded Scott. “But I’m not in this for the betting industry—and that goes for my fellow members as well. We just want to see the game cleaned up.”

  Puri filled their glasses for a third time. Scott watched him, waiting for a response.

  “I would be having certain terms,” said the detective. “Naturally a contract should be there—signed, sealed and delivered. But also—” He faltered. “Well, the thing is, sir, well, you see—”

  “You want a free rein, Vish—want to handle things your way.”

  “Exactly, sir. Not to say of course that your advice would not be invaluable—”

  Scott held up a hand. “I got it: no backseat driving,” he said. “Just provide me with updates now and again, some indication of how you’re getting along, and I’ll keep out of your hair. So do we have a deal?”

  Puri’s face showed marked relief. “Undoubtedly,” he said.

  They shook on it and Scott stood to leave. He was due to fly back to London in a few hours.

  “One other thing I wanted to mention,” he said. “In case you run into difficulties getting a visa to Pakistan, my colleagues and I will sort it out for you.”

  “Pakistan?” asked Puri, his voice suddenly weak.

  “I assume you’ll want to travel there, look into the Khans’ affairs.”

  Until now the thought of going to Pakistan had not even occurred to Puri. It was the one country in the world that he had vowed never to set foot in. He hated the place with every ounce of his body.

  “W-well, yes . . . I . . . naturally, why not?” he stuttered.

  “Good,” said Scott. “You can reach me on my BlackBerry night and day. The line’s scrambled.”

  Puri saw his client to the door and watched him climb into the waiting auto. He then exited out through a door in the back of the booth. The taxi he’d hired from Randy Singh at International Backside was still parked in the lane that ran behind the shops.

  On the front seat lay a fake beard, a chin net and an unraveled pink turban.

  Five

  Tubelight had been asked to track down all manner of unusual items in his time—everything from a runaway nautch girl to a eunuch’s disembodied head. When Mahatma Gandhi’s glasses were stolen from the National Gandhi Museum, it was Puri’s senior operative who traced them to the den of a so-called super-chor known as Ruby. Tubelight had also been instrumental in recovering his friend Hazrat Ali’s kidney after he was abducted and operated on by organ dealers.

  But locating a dead pye-dog? In the middle of Delhi?

  “You’d have better luck finding a virgin on G. B. Road, Boss,” he told Puri on the phone after the ATM meeting with Scott.

  There were tens of thousands of stray, flea-bitten mutts living on the streets of India’s capital, and every day, dozens succumbed to disease or were mowed down by the city’s angry traffic, Tubelight pointed out.

  “Few years back it would have been totally impossible,” replied Puri. “Now at least we’re in with a chance.”

  The detective was referring to the demise of Delhi’s traditional, eco-friendly, cost-free and thoroughly efficient canine cleanup service.

  Namely, its vultures.

  These magnificent birds, which had always been a feature of the capital—circling on the heat eddies in the skies overhead or perched up high in the branches of diseased trees—had been accidentally killed off in the past few years after feeding on the carcasses of cattle treated with a banned but still widely available veterinary drug.

  Dog disposal was now the detail of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi’s street cleaners, who were supposed to cart the carcasses off to landfills but often dumped them in more convenient locations like drains and ditches or “jungles,” as the wooded areas of Delhi were known.

  “I’ll get on it, Boss,” said Tubelight. “But what has this dog got to do with the case?”

  The canine in question was, of course, the one that had made such a scene at Kotla stadium yesterday afternoon.

  “I suspect the pooch died from the same poison that was used to kill Faheem Khan,” answered the detective. “We need it for postmortem. Find out if the grounds wallahs saw anything out of the ordinary—someone feeding it, perhaps? Could be they can identify the murderer.”

  “What if the police are looking for the dog as well?”

  Puri guffawed. “Don’t do tension, yaar! The Chief could not tell his backside from a hole in the ground.”

  • • •

  Tubelight hung up and continued eating his lunch. Before him, laid out on the grass in a semicircle, sat the three round, stainless steel sections of his tiffin box. The first contained a few rotis, the second some aloo subzi, and the third cucumber raita seasoned with roasted cumin. The food had been prepared by his wife in the early hours of the morning, and he had carried the container with him in his auto rickshaw while fulfilling his first assignment of the day, namely picking up and dropping off Puri’s new client, the pink-faced Angrez police wallah.

  As he tore off a piece of the flat bread and scooped up a lump of potato with his right hand, he felt the sun’s rays break through the winter haze. He had almost forgotten what its warmth felt like; the cold had penetrated into the very marrow of his bones.

  His home, a small rented apartment in a typical, shoddily constructed building with no insulation, was like a fridge at this time of year (an oven for the other eight months). The two heaters he owned required electricity and with all the neighbors hooking onto the overhead lines illegally (the new scam was to draw electricity from overhead lines using TV antennas and step-up transformers), the colony’s junction boxes kept overloading and tripping.

  He closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun. The heat spread through him like an isotope, warming the blood in his veins. The other men and women—paint-splattered decorators, sweepers, a clutch of office workers—eating their lunch amidst beds of poppies and sweet peas, reacted in the same way, stretching and yawning as if emerging from hibernation.

  Tubelight finished his food, lit a bidi and lay back on the grass. For a few minutes, he almost forgot about the latest task he had been assigned by Boss—and the fact that he was in the middle of New Delhi’s Mathew Chowk roundabout at the junction of the Akbar Road and Tees January Marg. About fifty feet across and set with flower beds and neem trees, it was one of the few truly beautiful places in the city where anyone of any background was free to sit without fear of being moved on. Sometimes between jobs he even came here to take a nap, impervious to the honking traffic.

  But today he couldn’t afford that luxury, not if he was going to find the dead dog. Tugging on the last of his bidi, he sat up and packed his tiffin, stacking one container upon the other and locking it with the metal arm that held the whole thing together.

  Before returning to his auto rickshaw, which was parked next to his friend’s paan and cigarette stand on Tees January Marg, he picked up a marigold blossom lying on the grass and tucked it behind his ear.

  • • •

  Tubelight was barred from entering the Kotla stadium by the security guards on duty. He turned instead to the dhaba near the gate on Bahadur Shah Zafar Road, and there, he struck up a conversation with the owner.

  “Yes, I recognized that dog, bhai,” said the dhaba wallah, a large, greasy-faced man who was busy doing four things at once—taking orders from new customers, who all expected to be served simultaneously; frying baturas in a wok; counting change; and scratching his groin.

  “Sometimes I used to give it scraps,” he continued while garnishing a tobacco plate of channa with chopped chillis and coriander. “It was always friendly, but then it
went crazy.”

  “Any idea why?” asked Tubelight.

  “I didn’t say the dog was my best friend! How should I know?”

  “Did you see anyone else feeding it?”

  More customers arrived; more change was begrudgingly handed over from a container of grubby notes and coins; a big steel pot with a blackened underside was given a stir.

  Puri’s operative repeated his question and in reply got an irritated, “Haaa? Why the interest in some dog, bhai?”

  Tubelight produced a fake police ID. “I’m working undercover,” he said, flashing it conspiratorially. “We suspect terrorists of using dogs to spread disease.”

  The man looked unmoved, his apathy born of a lifetime spent on Delhi’s brutal streets.

  “Look, I was busy that day,” he answered. “There were big crowds. Think I can watch everything that goes on? There are lots of dogs hanging around. Why don’t you bother someone else? Like those two over there.” He gestured to two groundsmen crouched on the pavement eating their lunch. They were the ones who’d taken the dog off the cricket pitch.

  “Oi, you two! What happened to that dog? The one that went crazy?” the dhaba wallah shouted.

  “We dumped it over there,” one of them replied.

  He indicated a ditch next to some big sewer pipes waiting to be laid. Tubelight went and investigated but there was no trace of the dog.

  “The Kala Bandar must have eaten it,” concluded the other groundsman.

  The Kala Bandar, literally “monkey man,” was a kind of Indian Bigfoot who was said to prowl the streets of Delhi. Dozens of people claimed to have been attacked by him; many more witnesses had described his nocturnal activities: bounding down streets, jumping ten feet over cars, scaling walls. The police were taking the issue seriously and had issued a likeness, plastering wanted posters onto walls and lampposts across the city. They showed a creature covered in black hair with razor-sharp claws and a monkey face. His only apparel was a motorcycle helmet.

  “He doesn’t eat dogs,” bawled the dhaba wallah. “So you shouldn’t worry!”

  “Chippkali ke jhaant ke paseene!” swore the groundsman. Sweat of a lizard’s pubic hair!

  The dhaba wallah’s helper, who was about ten years old and was standing on a stool pouring small glasses of chai the color of mud, spoke up. “I just remembered something!” he announced.

  “The name of your father?” quipped the dhaba wallah.

  “No, bhai! Two men came and took that dog away!” he said. “They wore masks and gloves. There was something written on the side of their Tempo.”

  “You’re talking about that dog?” chimed in one of the stadium security guards, overhearing the conversation.

  “You saw the men who took it?” asked Tubelight.

  “Maybe. Who wants to know?”

  The fake police ID was produced again, but the security guard said he still couldn’t quite remember the details. It took a fifty-rupee note to refresh his memory.

  “They were from rabies control,” he said.

  • • •

  Tubelight drove as fast as his auto rickshaw could travel (top speed thirty-one miles per hour) north to Timarpur Marg. But he was too late. A blood sample had been taken from the dog, and according to the chowkidar on the gate, the usual ragpicker charged with disposing of animal carcasses had taken it away. He’d done so on a bicycle cart a couple of hours ago.

  “What’s the ragpicker’s name?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Where does he come from?”

  “Get lost.”

  It was then that Tubelight noticed an oily trail leading out of the gate and down the road. The route taken by the ragpicker’s cart? He decided to follow it. A mile on, he found himself in front of a concrete Dumpster where cows grazed on a mound of garbage. Here, another ragpicker confirmed that he was on the right track and pointed him in the direction of the Bhalswa jhuggi.

  Tubelight continued north, past dense, suffocating townships of bare concrete blocks. And soon, above the otherwise flat terrain, he spotted the mountain. The air turned foul, a toxic stench catching in the back of his throat, as the massif loomed larger. He could make out a road cut into its side, a dump truck heading toward the flattop summit. A black cloud of birds wheeled overhead like a portent of doom. There were figures picking their way along the escarpment—women, the reds and pinks of their saris bright against a crumbling, unstable terrain the gray of nuclear ash.

  The English word for the place was “landfill” but this was a misnomer, Tubelight reflected as he turned off the highway onto a rough track. An open “drain,” or sewer, with garbage-strewn banks led to a tangle of tumbledown shacks blackened by dirt and pollution. He stopped to ask a kabari wallah if a ragpicker with a dead dog had passed that way. By a miracle the man knew his name: Raju. Finding this Raju, however, didn’t prove easy. The area’s geography was defined, indeed as most of Delhi is by the majority of its inhabitants, by landmarks and narratives.

  “Turn down the lane where the old blind man sits,” Tubelight was told.

  When he came across the blind man (who fortunately was where he was supposed to be), a woman hanging wet clothes on a barbed-wire fence pointed in the direction of a communications tower jutting up above the tin roofs. “Beneath that you will see the place where the men have been digging these past days and where another died when he fell off his ladder.”

  Eventually he found the ragpicker’s shack, built against the exterior wall of a crematorium. Tubelight saw him crouched amidst a pile of gutted computers. His wife sat nearby, baby cradled in one arm, stirring a big metal basin sloshing with a soup of nitric acid and circuit boards. A teenage son panned for bits of copper, gold and lead.

  “I sold it,” said Raju when asked about the dog.

  For a small fee, he agreed to take Tubelight to the buyer and led the way deeper into the jhuggi. They passed more ragpickers bundling and weighing recyclable refuse—cardboard, newspapers, tin cans, bags of plastic bottle caps—until they reached a compound surrounded by a brick wall. The smell was different here: the stench of death hung in the air, and for the first time, Puri’s operative felt the urge to retch.

  Stepping into the compound, Tubelight spotted a couple of men lowering a bloated dog carcass into an oil drum of boiling liquid. Another dog lay nearby, equally bloated. Raju the ragpicker recognized it as the one he’d brought from Rabies Control.

  Fifty rupees, a little more than the price the animal’s bones would fetch from the agro-fertilizer industry, gave Tubelight possession of the dog, and ten more went to procure a large piece of dirty plastic sheeting to wrap it in.

  Once the stinking carcass had been loaded into the back of the auto, Tubelight handed Raju thirty rupees. He took the payment without a word and set off back through the slum.

  Not once had the ragpicker queried why someone would want the animal. Everything had a value in Delhi. Even a dead dog.

  Six

  While Tubelight was ingratiating himself with the dhaba wallah and the coolies outside Kotla stadium, Puri returned to the Delhi Durbar Hotel. He found the banquet hall cordoned off and three jawans guarding the main doors. That is to say they were sitting around, drinking tea and talking idly amongst themselves—three vocations at which jawans the length and breadth of India could justifiably claim to excel.

  Through the banquet hall’s open doors, the detective could see two forensics officers in white jumpsuits examining the round dining table where Faheem Khan had met his fate. He dearly wanted to slip inside and find out if they had come across a delivery device for the poison. Getting past the jawans would not present too much difficulty. But doing so would risk his involvement in the case becoming known.

  Besides, the detective had other means. Half an hour ago, he’d spoken to his friend and occasional collaborator Inspector Jagat Prakash Singh, who’d agreed to meet him in the evening and let him know what the official investigation had discovered. Assuming, of
course, that the Chief had discovered anything aside from his own shadow.

  For now, Puri would settle for a copy of last night’s dinner seating plan and went in search of the resourceful young waiter who’d sprung him from the Mattu table last night. Gunny was his name, and the detective found him in the Sea of Tranquillity, the hotel’s Thai restaurant.

  “What can I do for, sir, this time?” he asked in a conspiratorial manner, making it clear that he was willing to be of assistance in any way he could.

  “I’m not here to eat,” said Puri, who sat down at one of the tables nonetheless. “Some information is required.”

  He went on to explain what he needed.

  “Not a problem, sir,” was Gunny’s response. “I’ve one copy of the seating plan in my locker. It’s got Sanjay Sala’s autograph on the back. So it is worth one thousand at least.”

  “Understood.”

  Gunny eyed his manager, who was standing over by the entrance to the restaurant.

  “Sir, it would be best if you ordered something. Perhaps a drink.”

  “Bring one bottle water—room temperature.”

  Gunny returned with a bottle of mineral water and presented it as if it were a fine bottle of wine. The detective gave a connoisseur’s nod and the waiter poured him a glass. He also slipped the seating plan onto the table before heading off to attend to some other customers.

  Puri took out his notebook and began to write down the guests’ names, adding the odd annotation of his own.

  Left of Faheem Khan clockwise:

  Satish Bhatia—“Call Center King”

  Jasmeet Bhatia—elderly mother of Satish Bhatia

  Sandeep Talwar—politician, president of the Indian Cricket Board, crook

  Mrs. Harnam Talwar—elderly wife of above

  Nilesh Jani—ICT chairman

  Mrs. “Mini” Jani—page-three type, twentysomething

  Neetika Sahini—“public relations” power broker

  J. K. Shrivastav—PM’s cabinet secretary