The thought of hair and wigs recalled him to the moustache case. What if the thief intended to wear Gopal Ragi’s moustache himself, perhaps as part of a disguise?
A chilling possibility came to mind. The moustache, once fixed to the thief’s upper lip, could be used to strangle someone. Puri pictured the thief passing through tight security, getting close to, say, an unsuspecting dignitary who was under close guard, unraveling the tresses and . . .
He could think of another, less morbid possibility. And as the last of Rohit’s hair fell away and the barber crafted a little tuft at the back of his head, Puri made a mental list of professions where a big, bushy moustache was required as part of the job description.
In regiments like the Rajputana Rifles, President’s Bodyguard and Border Security Force, there was hardly a serving man to be found without facial hair. Those with the most outlandish of moustaches were always put on display during public ceremonies like the changing of the guard at Rashtrapati Bhavan or the Republic Day parade, for example.
In some parts of India, like central Madhya Pradesh, officers were given financial incentives for nurturing growth on their upper lip. Male actors appearing in theatrical performances of the Hindu epics, during Dussera, for example, were often well endowed in the facial hair department as well. Who else? Cadres of the martial Sikh Nihang order.
Puri could think of only one other profession: hotel doorman.
Many a five-star hotel employed Sikhs or Rajasthanis with dramatic moustaches to man their entrances. They wore colorful turbans and inauthentic uniforms—window dressing that bespoke romantic “Indiaaaah.”
Puri was brought back to the present by a loud cheer as the last of Rohit’s hair, deemed to be associated with his past life, dropped away.
The boy was still wailing as he was shown a reflection of himself in the mirror. The priest applied sandalwood to his forehead and blessed him. Envelopes of large rupee denominations (along with a traditional single rupee coin for luck) were laid before the child. And then everyone descended on the food.
Given the religious nature of the day, it was all vegetarian: gobi aloo, pooris, daal and malai kofta.
It was with a full stomach that Puri joined Rumpi and the rest of his family on the dance floor, where they strutted their stuff to the beat of Daler Mehndi.
Twenty-four
Puri was sleeping soundly on his office couch when the moustache thief entered through the window. Being a consummate professional and fancying himself something of an artiste, he’d come well prepared—razor, can of shaving foam, even a little block of alum to treat nicks and cuts.
He began by kneeling down next to his victim and tying a towel around his neck so as to catch any wayward hairs. He inspected the perfectly formed handlebar moustache, appraising it as a sculptor might a block of virgin stone. There came a squirt from the can as a little foam was extracted and applied to the detective’s upper lip. He opened a Sweeney Todd–style razor and inserted a new blade. The steel glinted in the moonlight as it hovered a few inches above the detective’s face. Then it began its descent. Slowly, as if in slow motion . . . closer. Puri felt the cold steel make contact with his skin.
With a cry, he sat up on the couch, his heart beating wildly.
He looked around him, convinced someone else was in the office with him, and, putting a hand up to his face, felt his upper lip. His moustache seemed intact. Just to make sure, he made his way into his “executive WC.” His reflection in the mirror revealed everything in its proper place. Not a hair missing. It had all been a terrible dream.
“Thank the God,” he muttered before washing his hands and splashing cold water on his face.
He emerged to find that the mess in his office—pizza boxes, takeaway containers from Colonel’s Kababz—was anything but imagined.
His operatives had all gathered at Most Private Investigators HQ late the night before to plan the surveillance of the two ICT cricketers. Both Kamran Khan and Vikas Patil, the Indian batsman suspected of match fixing, were due to play on opposing teams at Kotla the next day and would be staying at the Maharajah Hotel.
It had been decided that Flush would work with a sidekick known as Gordon and shadow Kamran Khan. Facecream, with Tubelight as backup, would handle Vikas Patil. In the meantime, Flush was also working on hacking the players’ e-mail accounts and getting across their mobile phone lines.
Puri had reasoned that the same individual behind the killings of Full Moon, the Mumbai bookie, and possibly Faheem Khan as well had now gained control of the match-fixing ring. It stood to reason, therefore, that this individual would now contact Kamran Khan and Vikas Patil and provide them with instructions for the forthcoming match. With any luck Most Private Investigators would be able to trace the messages to their source.
The attempt on his life had convinced Puri that Aga was no longer in charge. Had he wanted the detective dead, then surely he would have got the job done in Pakistan. This meant that Brigadier General Aslam had been telling the truth about the Americans grabbing him.
Someone else—an Indian living on Indian soil—had taken control of the illegal gambling business.
• • •
With the entire Most Private Investigators team engaged on the Khan case, Handbrake was assigned the task of visiting all the five-star hotels in Delhi to inquire if any moustachioed doormen had been hired in the last couple of days or if there were any job vacancies for which candidates were being sought.
Handbrake took the Ambassador, setting off at around ten; Puri meanwhile called for one of Randy Singh’s taxis. His destination was the National Archives, where he wanted to check up on Mummy.
It wasn’t that he didn’t trust his mother. She’d made him a promise they would work as a team and could be counted on to share any information that came into her possession. There was every possibility, however, that she’d take her sweet time in doing so. Mummy had this tendency of interpreting things in her own particular way. She might decide that cooperating actually meant doing her own thing, at least temporarily, on the grounds that it was best for both of them. The fact that her phone had been switched off all morning didn’t bode well for their partnership.
The taxi dropped him outside the National Archives at the intersection of Janpath and Rajpath, a stone’s throw from India Gate, the heart of British New Delhi. He made his way along the front of the long colonial building with its grand red and brown sandstone façade and imperial columns, once emblematic of the empire and suppression, but now much cherished in a city of architectural mediocrity.
Puri applied for a pass in the main reading room, where scholars were bent over Mughal parchments and rare Sanskrit manuscripts written on animal skin. From there a helpful librarian led him deep into the vaults. They passed through stacks groaning with great wedges of paper the color of aged cheese and dusty box files bound in string.
There wasn’t a computer in sight, just the odd microfiche machine and blackboards with lists of categories and classifications chalked upon them—“Foreign Deptt. Select (Secret) Committee 1756”; “Persian Dispatches. 1716–1881”; “Deptt. of Ceded and Conquered Provinces 1803.”
Puri found Mummy sitting at a table surrounded by thick ledgers and piles of yellowing forms. Despite the daunting amount of paperwork, she was decidedly upbeat. “Chubby, some progress is there!” she announced after explaining that her phone was out of range. “See here.”
She’d been searching through the records pertaining to ration cards allocated to refugees in Delhi in 1947 and found a certain Manjit Singh listed.
“Manjit Singh was Saroya—sorry, Kiran Singh’s father, na,” she reminded him.
“Yes, Mummy-ji,” said Puri patiently.
“See, his native place is mentioned—Mandra. Here, also, it states he stayed in Purana Qila.”
Purana Qila, the walled ruins of the sixteenth-century citadel of the Mughal emperor Humayun, had become a refugee camp in 1947, housing thousands of the five million
Sikhs and Hindus who arrived from West Pakistan.
“A forwarding address is listed there?” asked Puri.
“Unfortunately not. But all families got land, na. Thus Singh’s address should be somewhere in here.”
She indicated the stack of seven or eight old box files lying next to her. They were all marked “Gadgil Assurance Scheme.”
“I’ll give you a hand, Mummy-ji.” Puri pulled up a chair. “Shouldn’t take too long, na,” he added.
“This is only part of an iceberg, Chubby. Rest is over there.”
Dozens more box files sat on the shelves. “They’re arranged in alphabetical order, is it?” asked the detective.
“Don’t do joking, Chubby. It’s all topsy and turvy. Nothing in the right order, na.”
“But this will take forever, Mummy-ji,” he said, suddenly struck by the vastness of the task. The files, after all, contained paperwork pertaining to the allocation of land to some three million people.
“Do positivity, Chubby. Today I’m feeling very much lucky.”
• • •
At four o’clock Puri returned to the ground level to check his messages and learned that James Scott had called from London. His inquiries into Patel and Patel, the company in Antwerp, had proven fruitful.
“They’ve been under investigation here in the UK,” he said when the detective called him back. “As it happens I know the officer in charge. Peter Kemp. Good man.”
Puri took “good man” to mean that the colleague had been willing to share what he knew, albeit in confidence and most probably over a couple of pints of warm bitter.
“Seems the firm’s been making regular payments to an account in Liechtenstein,” continued the ex–Scotland Yard man. “The account’s owned by an Indian national. I can’t give you a name; Peter doesn’t have it himself. The authorities there won’t release the details. Liechtenstein’s a tax haven, as I’m sure you know. Very secretive. But he says the government of India has the details.”
“How exactly?”
“Apparently your Finance Ministry petitioned the Liechtensteinians, or whatever you call them, for all accounts held by Indian citizens, citing tax evasion and money laundering.”
“When was that exactly?”
“Three years ago, Puri. All the details were handed over to New Delhi as part of a secret deal. Thirty or forty accounts in all, some allegedly containing hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Typical, thought the detective: the ruling party finds vast quantities of black money stashed away, knows exactly who’s done the stashing and doesn’t do a thing about it. Except perhaps use the information to elicit funding for their next election campaign.
“Most helpful of you, sir. I’ll revert,” said the detective.
He wrote a quick note to Mummy, explaining that he had to return to the office, and left it at the front desk. He didn’t expect to hear from her today. Nor tomorrow. Nor the day after that.
There were still dozens of files to search through—possibly more lurking yet undiscovered in the bowels of the National Archives.
• • •
By seven thirty, with only half an hour remaining before closing time, Mummy had begun to wonder if perhaps her search might take many more days, perhaps even weeks. She sat back in her chair, rubbing her eyes: after ten hours in the archives, they had begun to sting. She was hungry as well, having gone without her lunch. Time to call it a day.
Her friend Preeti passed by, reminding her that the archives would be closing in thirty minutes and that tomorrow was Maha Shivaratri, one of the biggest Hindu festivals of the year.
“Day after is an off as well,” she added. “We’re getting VVIP visit. That Maharani of Alwar is coming. She’s donating all her family’s private papers.”
“She’ll be present all the day?”
“One hour maximum, but the DG uses any excuse to take a holiday.”
Mummy decided to make the best of the remaining half hour and reached for yet another box file.
She was indeed very much lucky: Manjit Singh’s land records lay at the bottom.
“Here it is, na!” she cried out, although by then there was no one else there to share her discovery.
The plot Manjit had been given was in the Karol Bagh area of West Delhi. She made a note of the number—“T-5361, Block 7A”—and hurriedly gathered up her things.
Upstairs, Puri’s note was waiting for her at the front desk. She slipped it into her pocket and then called her driver, Majnu.
“Pick me up right away, na.”
He started to whine about having to work late.
“Chup!” she interrupted. “All day you’re sitting idle, na! No duty is there. Now come! Hurry! No discussion.”
She disconnected the call and scrolled down the list of numbers on her phone until she came to “Chubby Portable.” Her finger moved towards the dial button, but then she had second thoughts. Being a busy and successful private investigator, he’d probably been called away on important business, she reasoned. Surely, then, it made sense for her to go and search for the plot alone. Manjit Singh or his family might not be living there any longer, in which case Chubby would waste valuable time in coming to Karol Bagh.
Of course if she found that the Singhs were indeed still living at the same address, well, then, naturally, she would call him. Right away. Without fail.
Yes, that made perfect sense. This must be what Chubby meant by teamwork.
Twenty-five
Majnu, who had to be reminded no less than three times not to slouch behind the wheel, took the Upper Ridge Road, crossing the Delhi Ridge, a part of the ancient Aravalli Range and now a reserved forest. It was dark and where the road turned and undulated the headlights of the little Indica swept across rocky terrain thick with kair shrubs and babul trees. This was how most of the landscape surrounding Old and New Delhi had looked when Mummy arrived in the capital in 1947. In the winter, the banks of the Yamuna were carpeted pink with flocks of flamingos. Leopards sometimes strayed into the city. And it was not uncommon to find your path blocked by a king cobra. Once Mummy had even come across an enormous python with a head as big as a man’s shoe, basking in the sun out in the garden.
She remembered Karol Bagh very differently as well: tents pitched on plots, their boundaries marked with lines of stones; the odd one-story brick structure painted in whitewash; and chickens clucking about on dusty roads. In the summer, the residents slept outside under a canopy of stars undimmed by smog. The cries of jackals sounded in the distance. At dawn, the call to prayer from Shah Jahan’s Jamma Masjid reached them over the ramparts of the walled city.
Change had come gradually, sneaking up on Mummy street by street, building by building. Most of the kothis were replaced by three, four, even five-story blocks. Gardens vanished beneath swathes of concrete. If you saw a cow these days it was wandering through traffic, chewing on a plastic bag.
As a member of the Punjabi Bagh Association, Mummy had always done what she could to help preserve public spaces and keep the colony clean. She was the first to criticize the lack of planning and the corruption of the local authorities. “Moral fiber is totally lacking, na,” she often said of Delhi’s elected representatives. Yet in her heart, Mummy was a city person, and the lack of aesthetics didn’t bother her all that much. She thrived on the tamasha, on being in the middle of a crowd in the busy, vibrant markets. The smell of aloo tikki frying in hot oil, the sight of dyers pulling cotton saris out of great vats of steaming liquid and twisting them dry, the haunting sound of kirtan spilling out from the gurdwara—all these things made her feel alive. Why Chubby had moved to Gurgaon was something she would never understand. The place had a manufactured quality about it—a kind of albino India. Mummy couldn’t bear the idea of ending her days in such a place.
“Punjabi by birth, Punjabi by nature,” she often said with pride. “We are bighearted people, na?”
This was something Majnu, who was not Punjabi, would have done w
ell to learn from, Mummy reflected as she watched him turn into West Extension Area, his face still long and sullen.
“What address, madam?” he asked with no enthusiasm.
“I told you, na! You’re getting deafness or what? Block 7A. Straight, then left.”
She soon discovered that the plots allocated under the Gadgil Assurance Scheme no longer corresponded with today’s house numbers. Mummy told Majnu to park—“Don’t sit idle, na! Do window washing!”—and then went and asked around the neighborhood.
She knew more than a few locals and it took only half an hour to find the right address.
A square, three-story block with narrow windows filled the plot. A nameplate on the door of the ground-floor apartment bore Manjit Singh’s name.
Mummy paused, a voice in her head reminding her that she should call Chubby and bring him up to date with her progress. At that moment, however, the door opened and an elderly man appeared. He looked frail, the bags under his eyes sagging like deflated balloons hanging from a light fitting the morning after a party.
“You’re looking for someone, madam?” he asked in Punjabi.
“I’m searching for Shri Manjit Singh,” explained Mummy.
“He died two years back,” the man answered with a fatalistic air.
“I’m sorry to hear that. My condolences.”
“He was ninety-eight.” The man paused. “Why are you looking for him?”
“I needed some information. Are you his son?”
“That’s right: Hardeep Singh is my name.”
“I want to speak with you.”
“I was going for a walk. I always try to take a walk at this time.” He looked over her shoulder with a certain longing. The busy street held the promise of escape from domesticity.
“It’s very important.”
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