It was then the detective had lost his temper: “Call her, yaar! Tell her to revert! No delay! Enough of this bloody nonsense!”
The detective regretted having raised his voice; it was his mother with whom he was furious. She’d been playing detective again. Worse, she’d withheld information vital to the case.
As soon as he reached Delhi, he’d confront her and demand to know what she knew about Faheem Khan’s past. Then he would get on with solving the case.
There could only be one detective in this family.
• • •
“I’ve met my match, Boss,” admitted Tubelight.
By now Puri was heading back down the GT Road toward Delhi, the silver sedan once again following behind.
“You lost the trail?” asked an incredulous Puri.
His operative took up the story again at the point where he had jumped on board the Pune Express.
In need of a new disguise in which to search the train and ascertain whether the diamond couriers were indeed on board, Tubelight had reverted to his old trade: thievery. He waited until the lights in the carriages were switched off and most of the passengers were asleep, and then went in search of new clothes. From beneath a berth where a sardarji lay snoring, he helped himself to a change of clothes and a freshly laundered turban.
Tubelight then entered the toilet a Muslim and walked out a Sikh.
“What did you do for a beard?” asked Puri in Hindi.
“Beard net,” replied the operative. “Cut a clump of hair off my head, stuffed it inside.”
He came across the angadia couriers in one of the front carriages in confirmed berths. Tubelight managed to find a spare seat a few rows behind them and kept watch through the night.
By the time the train pulled into Mumbai Central at 5:17 A.M., Flush and Chanel No. 5 had managed to reach the station by road, and Tubelight had called ahead for more help—four Mumbai boys with whom he’d worked in the past.
“You were seven in all?” asked Puri. He could count only a handful of occasions when he’d had cause to use such a large team.
“I tell you those old jackals were cunning,” said Tubelight. But not cunning enough. After a pursuit across Mumbai on the city’s busy local commuter trains, both couriers were followed successfully to their final destination: the city’s Diamond Bourse, the largest exchange in the world. There Desai’s blood diamonds were delivered to a firm called Shah and Partners.
“Couriers kept the packets well concealed. Even now I can’t tell you where exactly.”
Tubelight’s voice was thick with admiration as he continued. “These angadias carry nearly all the world’s diamonds back and forth, but without any security. Could have been more of them on the train for all I know.”
“An unparalleled parallel system, one might say,” said Puri.
“Only in India, Boss,” replied Tubelight with a certain pride.
• • •
Satya Pal Bhalla had left no fewer than eleven messages while Puri had been in Pakistan, demanding to know what progress had been made and threatening to find himself another detective.
The detective felt inclined to wash his hands of the whole affair. He might have been the best detective in all India, but he wasn’t a magician. A couple of Tubelight’s boys were making inquiries around the city about a six-foot-tall Punjabi barber with white blotches on his hands and a scooter with a license plate that ended in 288. For the time being there was nothing more to be done.
“Tell him I’m doing undercover work on the case,” he said. “There’s anything?”
“Another call from the chief’s office—demanding you explain your involvement in the case.”
Puri just chuckled. “Must be he’s getting nowhere with the case,” he said.
• • •
Puri reached Delhi at lunchtime, made a quick stop at his father-in-law’s house to drop off the copy of the Koran and then continued on to Punjabi Bagh, mentally preparing himself for battle.
Yet when he came face-to-face with the smiling, dimunitive figure of his mother, he could muster none of the anger he’d felt since yesterday’s encounter with Major General Aslam.
“Everything is quite all right, Chubby?” she asked. “Looking so tired, na. Come, sit. You should take chai vai. Then rest. Such big eye bags are there. Black and blue. Must be sore, na. I’ll bring some cucumber slice. And your favorite iron tonic, also.”
“No need, Mummy-ji. I’m fit and fine, believe me. Never better, actually . . .”
Mummy disappeared into the kitchen, to emerge a few minutes later bearing a tray groaning with cups of chai, a plate of macaroons, a plate of cucumber slices and a bottle of the iron tonic that she had fed him every day throughout his childhood and teenage years. The sight of it made him feel instantly nauseous.
“That Radhika didn’t come today—can you imagine?” she complained as the detective cleared space on the dining table. Radhika was the maid. “Some nonsense about ingrowing toenails. Such an idle one, I tell you. Always taking offs. Just she’s doing chitchat and ignoring her duties—”
“Mummy-ji, I’ve been in Pakistan these past days,” Puri interrupted, adding, pointedly, “Rawalpindi.”
She was in the middle of pouring the tea. For a second, the pot in which she had boiled the leaves, milk, sugar and cardamom hovered motionless above the tray.
“Oh,” she said. “That explains it, na.”
“Explains what, exactly?”
“Those eye bags, Chubby. Tension is there, na.” Mummy sighed. “Not to worry. Some iron tonic will do the trick.”
“I met an old friend of yours,” Puri continued. He gauged his mother’s reaction as he said, “Khalid Muhammad Aslam.”
Mummy finished pouring the tea and sat down, folding her hands in her lap. Her smile was full of tenderness as she asked, “He’s well, na?”
So it was true.
“Very much fine, Mummy-ji,” replied Puri, who thought it better not to mention how her so-called friend had arranged for him to be abducted at gunpoint. “Aslam is retired, Mummy-ji, but being a former major general, he is one fellow who keeps his fingers firmly on the pulse.”
“Major general, you say? In those days, he was captain, na. So dedicated to his duty he was. A proper gentleman all round.”
A terrible thought suddenly struck Puri, something he could never have dreamed of considering before. Had she been in love with Aslam? Was this the reason why she had kept her time in Pakistan a secret all these years?
“Must be you’re wondering why I never told you, na? About that time,” asked his mother, who had a canny way of knowing what he was thinking.
Puri didn’t answer; he braced himself for the truth.
“In those days it was not done,” continued Mummy. “Things I got up to, na? Not for young girls. Such different times.”
Puri felt like putting his hands over his ears to blot out her voice.
“See, so many women got left behind, Chubby. Thousands and thousands in fact. That is after the Britishers chopped up India. So much violence and chaos and all was there. Total one thousand lakh women could not be traced. Hindu and Sikh girls held back in Pakistan. Many Muslim girls grabbed here in India, also. Each and every one of them got abducted. Most were converted and married by force and all. Thus Premna Auntie said it was our duty to save our poor mothers and sisters, and invited me to join.”
The detective had heard his mother talk of Premna Auntie in the past, an aunt on Mummy’s maternal side. She’d been a former head teacher and a feisty, determined woman by all accounts.
“Mummy-ji, wait,” said Puri, holding up a hand. “Allow me to understand one thing: you’re telling me you reverted to Pakistan to rescue abducted women?”
“Hundreds of them, Chubby,” she said with a broad smile. “I did volunteering, na. For Indian Recovery and Relief Operation. Premna Auntie said it was women’s work. ‘Men cannot be relied upon. It is they who created such a mess in the first place
,’ she said.”
The detective couldn’t fathom what he was hearing.
“But why you kept it secret all these years, Mummy-ji?” he asked.
“We two agreed—that is, Premna Auntie and my good self—to keep it all hush-hush. See, Chubby, people are always doing gossip and making utmost mischief, na. Had neighbors and all come to know I’d reverted to Pakistan, tongues would do so much of wagging. ‘That one’s going round,’ and such. Then what? No marriage proposals would come.”
“Everyone must have wondered where you and Premna went off to, no?”
“Just we told them we were doing holiday in the hills, na. No one person offered objection. So much pain and anguish and all we’d suffered. Ma said rest was required. To forget all what I’d seen.”
Puri took this to be a reference to the murder of Mummy’s brother, Anil. His next question was a few seconds in coming.
“Did Papa come to know—about your going to Pakistan, that is?” he asked.
“This was before marriage, na?”
“Yes, but after did you tell him?”
Mummy shook her head. “With marriage new life begins, na? After my shaadi, I packed away those times. My duty was to my husband—and my three boys, also. Past is past.”
“But it’s never entirely forgotten, is it, Mummy-ji? It came back to haunt you when you met Kamran Khan at the Durbar. You were totally thunderstruck, actually. He’s his father’s carbon copy.”
“Agreed,” said Mummy. “But come, Chubby. Where’s your appetite?” She picked up the plate of macaroons and offered it to him. “It’s your favorite, na?”
Puri took the plate and placed it back on the tray. “Mummy-ji, I want to know what all you know about Faheem Khan’s past.”
“First thing is first, Chubby,” she replied. “Must be Aslam found you and not the other way round. That means he told you something.”
“No more games, Mummy-ji,” replied Puri sternly. “This is not some small matter like which servant stole the daal.”
The pallu of her sari had slipped forward. She pulled it back over her shoulder, her demeanor indignant. “Why you shouldn’t share what all Aslam told you first? It’s my case, after all,” she said.
“Your case, Mummy-ji! How exactly? I’m the detective, is it not!”
“Your voice is getting raised, na. Come. Take iron tonic. One spoon. Will make you calm.”
“I am very much calm!” he erupted.
The words penetrated into the next room, where Bhuppi was watching TV. He put his head around the door. “All OK, Chubby?”
Puri made a gesture as if to say “as well as can be expected” and his brother gave a sympathetic nod before retreating.
“Mind telling me why all this is your case, exactly?” asked Puri. He was standing behind his chair now, hands gripping the top.
“It began in 1948, na. That is when she went missing.”
“Who?”
Mummy gave a tut. “Saroya. Aslam didn’t tell you?”
“He mentioned her but gave a different name, also.”
Mummy sat forward in her chair. Her face was alight with expectation. “Tell me, Chubby.”
“You’ll give me what I want, also?”
“It’s my case, na. Since sixty years I’ve been waiting. It is only right and proper I be allowed to do conclusion.”
“Mummy-ji, how many times I’ve told you: detective work is for professionals, not mummies. Years of experience are required.”
“Case will not get solved without my know-how.”
The detective heaved a great sigh. “Very well,” he said. “Let us put our two heads together.”
He took out his notebook and read aloud the information Aslam had given him: “Her name is Kiran Singh, daughter of Manjit Singh. Came from a village named Mandra. Aslam said you would remember it.”
Puri handed her the photograph Aslam had given him. Mummy gasped at the sight of it. “So long I’ve been trying to picture her face, na,” she said. “Yes, that is she. No doubt about it. Aslam said how long ago he found out her real name?”
“Some years, I believe. He wanted to pass on the information but didn’t know where to find you.”
Mummy was still staring at the picture. A tear fell and splashed onto it. She quickly wiped it away with a napkin, embarrassed.
“Clumsy of me, na.”
“Please, Mummy, no need to apologize.” Puri’s tone was soft, understanding now. “So many memories and all.”
He held her by the hand. “This Kiran Singh, known as Saroya, also—she is who exactly?” he asked.
Mummy wiped her face, still clutching the photograph.
“Faheem Khan’s wife.”
Twenty-two
Mummy went upstairs to her room and returned with a small collection of tatty old notebooks: her diaries from 1948. She’d kept them hidden in a padlocked trunk all these years, something of an achievement in a busy Punjabi household in which personal space was an abstract concept.
“Here, Chubby,” she said, handing them to her son. “You’ll find what you want. All written down.”
“You’re certain about this, Mummy-ji?” asked Puri. He had often seen his mother scribbling in her daily diary but had never dared so much as peek inside. Their pages were the one place that had always been out of bounds, even to Papa.
“Hard for me, what with my eyes,” she answered. “You go ahead. Just I’ll take rest. Some tiredness is there.”
Puri stood as she left the room and headed upstairs.
“I’ll be here only,” he called after her, staring down at the cover of the first notebook, marked in English in faded ink: “February 1948.”
With a sense of guilt, as if he were trespassing, the detective turned back the cover.
Mummy had written in the Perso-Arabic script, which Puri had studied at the Military Intelligence Training School in Pune. But he was rusty and could make sense of certain sentences only by saying the words out loud.
The first entry was for February 8. It described the journey back to Pakistan, retracing the route Mummy and her family had taken in the opposite direction when they had fled to newly independent India only a few months earlier.
At Wazirabad, she had wept bitterly, reliving the scenes of men being dragged from the refugee train and vanishing beneath a ferment of bloody fists and weapons.
“Reached Pindi at seven in the evening. As we decamped from the train I fainted—memory of those eleven terrifying hours when we were stuck in the station with a handful of jittery British soldiers holding back the mob too much to bear. Premna Auntie comforted me. But I felt embarrassed. God knows she has suffered more than me. Husband, son, father all gone. ”
Here Mummy reflected on how surreal it was being back in Rawalpindi, the city where she had grown up. This new country called Pakistan was her watan, her homeland, and yet she would never live there again.
At times she vented her anger: “Strangers are living in Papa’s house,” she’d written. “Who are they? They have no right to be there! What have they done with our possessions? P said we should go and see. Can’t. Not strong enough. Keep searching in the crowd, looking for the boys who came that night. I can picture every one of their faces.”
She was referring to her brother’s murderers, Puri concluded, and he read on.
“How could people do such things? Slaughter their neighbors like cattle? Drive one another from their homes? P says there is only one explanation for such madness: Lord Shiva has danced the rudra tandava. No one has time to mourn. Everyone has started to put the past behind them—here and in India also. In this alone, in their common denial, are the people of our two countries now united.”
Puri reached the entry for February 21, 1948, where Mummy described her and Premna Auntie’s modus operandi.
“Dressed as poor Muslim peasants wearing tatty colored salwar kameez, frilled dupattas, ta’wiz. Went barefoot and carried cloth bundles containing a few possessions on our heads. Ha
d to hone our rural Punjabi accents.”
Every day they would set off at dawn for villages in the Punjab hinterland, searching for abducted Hindu and Sikh girls and women being held against their will. When they received confirmation of one being held in a certain location, Mummy and Premna Auntie were bound to pass on the information to the local authorities. The governments of India and Pakistan had signed a pact to allow rescue teams to work in each other’s countries and facilitate the search and release of the missing women. But the police often proved corrupt or uncooperative.
“Some officers have abducted women themselves or bought them from others as wives,” wrote Mummy.
On February 23, however, a certain Captain Aslam of the Pakistan Army had been seconded to help them.
That morning he waited with his men on the Grand Trunk Road while Mummy and Premna Auntie set off to investigate a rumor that a young woman was being held in the village of Bajal.
• • •
While Puri read on, Mummy slept—and dreamed.
She was young Koomi Pabla again, nineteen years of age, walking with dear Premna Auntie . . .
• • •
It’s dawn and the farmers working in the fields watch their approach. The fine layer of dust that coats the two women from head to toe, diligently acquired during a long, arduous walk along a rough track that leads to the village from the Grand Trunk Road, completes the picture of desperate refugees escaping the ongoing violence in the contested state of Jammu and Kashmir.
The only facet of their disguise that’s not been improvised is the pain, anguish and sheer exhaustion that shows in their features. The memories of bloodshed and violence, of the murder of loved ones, of being brutally uprooted from their homes in August of the previous year—all this is as fresh in their minds as it is for millions of others now living on either side of the new border.
“Amma! A-salaam-alai-kum,” calls out Premna, spotting a local, middle-aged woman returning from the fields through the early-morning mist. “Help us! Barely any food has touched our lips in days!”
“Wa-lai-kum-a-salaam!” the local woman greets them. Koomi judges her to be no older than forty despite the shock of pure white hair peeking from beneath her head scarf. “Where are you coming from?” the woman says.
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