by Khan, Vaseem
‘You don’t seem overly upset by his death.’
Lal stiffened. Tact had never been her strongest suit. Aunt Nussie was constantly at pains to admonish her for her forthright manner. A lady, she had impressed upon her, must be demure, charming, gracious, and light of foot. Persis had rarely found herself praised for any of these qualities.
‘He was not just my employer, Inspector. Sir James was also my friend. We first met years ago, at University College London. My parents had sent me abroad for the furtherance of my studies. Herriot was a trustee of the college. He gave that year’s Disraeli Lecture, a vivid dissection of the state of affairs in India – he’d already spent the best part of a decade here. He was one of the few Englishmen at the time who believed in Indian Home Rule and was courageous enough to say so publicly. It is one of the reasons we asked him to stay on after Partition.’ He sighed. ‘I saw death in abundance during the war, Inspector. I cannot say that it has inured me to it, but I have a certain stomach for these things. I grieve for James in my own way.’
Her last act of the night was to arrange for the body to be taken to the morgue.
She waited for the ambulance to arrive and looked on as they lifted Herriot’s pallid corpse on to a stretcher, threw a white sheet over it, then carried him downstairs and out into the night like pygmies bearing an expired chieftain to the mountain.
As she drove home, just an hour before dawn, a single thought reverberated in her mind. Why, out of all the police departments in the city, had Lal chosen to call Malabar House? After all, even if those in power would never openly acknowledge it, they knew that they were outsiders, brought together precisely because they had been deemed unfit for any assignment of worth.
The thought followed her into a fitful sleep.
Chapter 3
1 January 1950
Barely three hours later, Persis awoke to find Akbar in bed beside her, regarding her nonchalantly with the dazzling green eyes that had first won her heart. He leaned his face towards hers, clearly intent on physical intimacy. She grimaced and raised a hand to ward him off. ‘I don’t think so.’
Offended, he flashed her a cold look, turned his back on her, and snuggled into the soft down of the mattress.
She sat up, stretched, then left the overfed grey tomcat to his sulk as she headed to the bathroom.
The coal heater was out again. The shower, bracingly cold, left her with goose bumps dotting her arms. After dressing quickly in her khaki uniform, she bundled her long black hair into its habitual workaday bun, tucked her peaked cap under her arm, checked her revolver before slipping it back into its holster, and headed for the living room.
She discovered Aunt Nussie bustling about the kitchen area. ‘Sit down, dear,’ she sang. ‘Almost ready!’
Her father, Sam Wadia, did not bother to look up. He was absorbed in a game of chess with his regular sparring partner, Dr Shaukat Aziz, a kidney specialist of some renown.
‘You’ve got to go easier on the whisky,’ Aziz was saying. ‘If you’re not careful, your liver will blow up like a balloon.’
‘Great,’ said Sam, plucking up a rook and advancing it belligerently across the board. ‘That means there’ll be space for more whisky.’
‘You’re wasting your time, Uncle Aziz,’ she said, leaning down and giving her father an affectionate peck on the cheek. ‘Happy New Year.’
‘How many times have I told you not to call me uncle? I am in the prime of my life. A flâneur, a man about town.’
Aunt Nussie set a pair of steaming plates on the table. Spiced kedgeree. Saliva flooded Persis’s mouth. When had she last eaten?
‘You didn’t have to, Aunt Nussie.’
‘What better way to start the new year than a home-cooked breakfast for my only niece?’
‘We have a home-cooked breakfast every morning,’ muttered Sam. ‘Because Krishna cooks it. At home.’
As long as Persis had been aware of it, an unspoken animosity had hovered between her father and her mother’s younger sister. It was only after her mother’s death that she had discovered the reason why.
Aunt Nussie – and her mother – came from a wealthy Parsee family, the only daughters of Zubin Poonawalla, a shipping magnate who had doted on his girls. Sam Wadia, though also a Parsee, came from earthier stock. His father had run a bookshop, Wadia’s Book Emporium, and had made a decent living from it, but had never been a man of any great wealth or influence. Sam himself had studied law before the independence struggle had hijacked his fledgling career. Along with thousands of young men in the country he had thrown himself wholeheartedly into the fight, inspired by the likes of Nehru and Gandhi, but also by his own sense of disillusionment.
Persis had often marvelled at how quickly the British had fallen from their pedestal. For centuries those at the upper levels of Indian society had striven for closeness with their overseers, in the hope that this would allow them to retain some semblance of mastery over their lives. They had shut their eyes to the injustice, the abuse, the cruelties meted out to those at the base of the pyramid. But once the national mood tilted from protest to outright revolution it was only a matter of time. Sam Wadia was just one of millions of educated Indians who had found the scales dashed from their eyes. For Sam Wadia had once admired the British, had held them up as the epitome of all that Indians might aspire to. It had only come to him later in life that this admiration was the result of a sense of self-loathing planted within him by three hundred years of colonial rule.
‘Let me look at you,’ said Nussie. She reached out and placed her hands either side of the young policewoman’s face, a gesture Persis had hated even as a child. ‘As lovely as your mother,’ she sighed.
This was not so far from the truth.
Persis had seen the photographs; she knew that she closely resembled the tragic beauty who had captured Sam’s heart. Jet-black hair, deep brown eyes, full lips and an aquiline nose. There had been times when she had felt the weight of that pulchritude, most notably in the police training college. It seemed that half her time had been spent batting away unwanted advances. It was not that she was immune to romantic longings. It was simply that these were not the desires that commanded her. Sam had not raised her to dream of marrying the first big-chinned wonder who came a-courting. He had encouraged in her a freedom of spirit and thought, of ambition, and for this alone she would love him fiercely until the day he died.
Which, if he didn’t watch his drinking, would be a day not long in the coming.
She plucked up his glass, walked to the sink and poured it away.
‘Are you mad!’ howled her father. ‘Have you any idea how much that cost?’
‘Whisky for breakfast, Papa? Really?’ The Bombay Prohibition Act that had come into force the previous year had hardly slowed him down – medical chits granting permission to purchase liquor for health reasons were easy enough to obtain. Even the licensed bars and clubs were forced to use bootleggers to keep the taps flowing.
‘The poor girl’s only looking out for you,’ offered Aziz.
Sam gave his friend a filthy look. ‘And what time did you get up today?’
‘Me? Up at the crack of dawn, as usual.’
‘Really? What time did your hangover get up?’
‘I’m not the one with a face like a depressed German clown.’
As they glared at one another, Aunt Nussie asked her about the evening before. ‘You missed a wonderful party. I mean, really dear, who works on New Year’s Eve?’
‘Anyone with half a sense of duty,’ muttered Sam.
‘What use will duty be when she’s an old unmarried maid?’
Her mother’s younger sister was the other reason Persis had agreed to stand the graveyard shift on New Year’s Eve. It was the only way to avoid attending a soirée at Aunt Nussie’s home, where, no doubt, she had planned yet another elaborate scheme aimed at thrusting her melon-headed son in Persis’s direction. It was not just that Darius Khambatta was her cousin (cousin-marryi
ng within the Parsee community had long been an acceptable practice, responsible, in her private opinion, for their slow waltz to extinction.) It was rather that the sight of a drooling Darius in polished brogues, an ill-fitting three-piece suit, and sporting the expression of a man who looked as if he were about to lay a large egg through a very small hole was enough to put her off marriage for good.
Persis sometimes wondered whether her decision to join the force had been motivated by her desire to prove something to those around her. Following her schooling, it was expected that she would throw herself headlong into the business of marriage and procreation. But in the dead of night her own desires had risen up like smoke to enfold her.
She chose the police force precisely because it seemed a fit for her own sense of morality, a desire to even up the scales in a country where those with wealth and influence could literally get away with murder. In some ways, she was attempting to measure up to the mother she had barely known but whose spectre hovered constantly at her shoulder. By all accounts, Sanaz Wadia had been a woman of great conviction.
As she ate, she found herself sharing the outline of the investigation that lay before her. She reasoned that news of the murder would soon hit the papers; secrecy was pointless. The murder of a million Indians might pass with barely a raised eyebrow in the halls of power, but the death of an Englishman would raise a hue and cry to rouse the gods.
The irony of the situation was not lost on her.
At the beginning of the new decade, the British may have quit India in name, but many remained in the country. More than sixty thousand, at the last estimate. Some had stayed on to live out their remaining days amid the ashes of empire; others had businesses to run or wind down, while others – like Archie Blackfinch – had been tasked to help India find its feet. It was one thing taking the reins of a country as large and unwieldy as the new republic, quite another coming to grips with the monumental task of running her.
Sam’s face darkened. He set down his fork and pushed his plate away.
‘An Englishman,’ he said woodenly. Daylight from the bay window behind him splashed from his bald dome. His greying moustache crinkled as his mouth bent into a grimace. ‘You would dishonour your mother by investigating the murder of a Britisher?’
‘The British didn’t kill my mother,’ she countered. ‘She should never have been at that rally.’
As soon as the words escaped her mouth she wished she could take them back.
Sam stiffened, a faint tremor of shock passing through him. Without another word, he wheeled his chair around and headed towards his bedroom, the chair’s right wheel squeaking in the sudden silence.
As the door closed on him, Aunt Nussie spoke up. ‘You shouldn’t have said that, Persis.’
Persis refrained from pointing out that her aunt had made the same point on numerous occasions. She wondered what had possessed her to upset her father. Perhaps it was because she had spent part of the night fretting over his reaction to her involvement in the case. Sam might have forgiven the British for many things, but what he could never forgive them for was the death of his wife.
The door to the apartment opened behind them and Krishna, her father’s driver and manservant, bundled into the room.
A sixty-year-old south Indian with a potbelly and skin as dark as onyx, Krishna had served the Wadias for the best part of two decades; in some ways, he had been a nanny to Persis. A father of six – all tucked away in a village in the Keralan backwaters, together with his wife, to whom he dutifully posted money orders every month – he was the most inept driver Persis knew. But Sam would never dream of getting rid of him. The two men had shared much, soldier and general.
He turned to her and wheezed, ‘There is a man downstairs. He wishes to see you, madam.’
She took the stairs down into the shop, entering it from the rear.
It was the smell that always took her. The unmistakable musk of books, old and new. Arrayed on sagging shelves, piled on trestle tables, built up into drifts eight feet high, to form a haphazard maze that only hardened bibliophiles dared to tread. Over the years, Persis had attempted to impose a semblance of order on the chaos, only to be thwarted by the impracticality of the task. Her father tolerated her efforts with a supercilious expression, knowing full well that no sane person could hope to prevail against the shop’s rampant disarray.
‘But how can you ever find anything?’ she would wail.
Sam would grin and tap the side of his forehead. ‘It’s all in here, daughter of mine.’
The Wadia Book Emporium, tucked away in a corner of Nariman Point at the southern tip of Bombay, flanked on one side by a liquor store and on the other by a cloth merchant, had managed to maintain a loyal clientele throughout the war years. Indeed, though Sam’s father, Dastoor Wadia, had openly declared himself for the British at the beginning of the Quit India movement, such was his and the shop’s popularity that it had had little effect on the business. It was only later, when the struggle gravitated beyond rhetoric to bloodshed, that father and son were faced with a choice: continue to side with a despotic occupier whose increasingly desperate attempts to maintain the status quo had resulted in shocking acts of cruelty; or join their fellow countrymen.
It had been time to face the truth.
And so the Wadias had thrown in their lot with the revolutionaries. Dastoor became a member of the underground movement, printing and distributing revolutionary propaganda in the shop, holding clandestine meetings with agitators, and, in general, making up for lost time.
Persis retained few memories of her grandfather and none at all of her grandmother – one thing that Sam and his father had shared was the early passing of their wives. Dastoor himself had died one stormy monsoon night, shortly after Persis’s eleventh birthday, felled by a heart attack. They found him the next morning, slumped in the battered sofa he kept at the rear of the shop, a copy of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil still clutched in his grasp. In his latter years, the old bawa had taken to wandering down into the shop on restless nights, finding some sense of solace there from the troubles of the time and his own fading health.
It was a habit Persis shared.
As a girl, she had imagined that the books talked to each other in the dark. Papery whispers that gave her comfort through a troubled childhood. The shop became her refuge. Sitting between the shelves, unfashionable reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, she gulped in knowledge. In a very real sense the bookshop had shaped the woman she had become. If she was a police officer today, it was because she had imbibed stories of real-life heroines: aviator Amelia Earhart; Swiss explorer Isabelle Eberhardt, who’d moved to Algeria and dressed as a man to fit in with the locals; British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. Indian heroines too: the Rani of Jhansi who’d rebelled against the British; Keladi Chennamma, the ‘Pepper Queen’ of Karnataka, who’d repelled the Mughal armies of Aurangzeb. These were the women who had inspired her; these were her companions throughout her awkward teenage years.
She had few real friends. Her prickly personality, her refusal to conform, had marked her out as a troublemaker. The other girls at her Anglo school had ostracised her; she had become the focus of their petty cruelties. One day they had rounded on her, teasing her mercilessly until she hurled insults back at them. They held her down and cut off her plaits. The next day, her father’s war-cry ringing in her ears, she had returned to the school and ambushed the ringleader, beating the girl black and blue. And so it had continued, until they learned to keep their distance. She had grown to understand loneliness. As with all things, individualism came at a price.
It was a price she was willing to pay.
At the front of the shop she discovered a neatly dressed Indian. She recognised him from Herriot’s home: the manservant who had opened the door to her.
‘Madam.’ He handed her an envelope. ‘From Lal Sahib.’
She took the envelope and tore it open.
Lal’s handwriting was as immac
ulate as the man himself; it spiralled over the creamy bond paper in flawless loops.
Inspector Wadia,
Allow me to thank you for your sterling efforts last night. Most impressive. It is my hope that you will continue to head up the investigation into Sir James’s death. I have conveyed the same to the commissioner this morning. As per your request please find below a summary of Sir James’s recent engagements. I shall be at your disposal. Please do not hesitate to prevail upon me.
Yours faithfully,
Madan Lal
No honorific, she noted. Perhaps the man wasn’t quite the stiff she had thought.
Her gaze moved down to the list of Herriot’s recent appointments – Lal had been thorough and had covered the past three months – picking out those she thought might be worth following up. There were a number of instances where Herriot had travelled out of the city, but the destinations were not mentioned.
Two recent encounters stood out.
On the morning of his death he had met a Robert Campbell at the Bombay Gymkhana – the only scheduled meeting for that day. Two days prior to his death, on 29 December, he had met an Adi Shankar. The name stood out because Persis recalled that Herriot had kept a newspaper cutting in his desk of Adi Shankar launching a nightclub in the city. Shankar and Campbell were among those who had left Laburnum House without being interviewed.