Noon (11 page)

But they hadn’t quite. There was still that stale, sweet servant smell I had known all my life. In one of the rooms on the lower floor, a hired chauffeur lay on a single bed watching
television. Near him, on a bedside table, bringing to the room something of the feel of a motel, lay a used ashtray, car keys and money. Bright religious posters were Sellotaped to the walls.

He rose hurriedly when we came in and swung around to put his shoes on. Jat looked with dull amusement around the room, then addressing him, said, ‘Why did you do it?’

His name was Ashok; his father had come from Port bin Qasim in 1947; he was dark with spectacles, and frail. But this made him smile.

‘Sir, no,’ he said, acting up his servility, ‘where would I do it?’

Jat lost interest and went into another room containing washing machines and driers. He opened them with the feigned boredom of someone hoping for a surprise. Finding them empty, he went back
outside.

‘Namaste!’ rang out loudly. I stepped out and saw that Kalyan’s son, his palms brought together in greeting, had appeared at the top of the black metal staircase that was
attached to the building’s exterior. It was hard to meet his gaze. His innocence and enthusiasm, still reflecting gratitude for the green glass hospital and the red truck, was like a reminder
of the people we had been till a few hours ago, the people we had set out to be.

Jat eyed the boy with prurient interest. Only days before another small boy had helped incriminate his father in his mother’s murder. The TV channels had shown him in someone’s arms
being asked by an investigator, ‘Who hung up Mummy?’

‘Papa hung up Mummy,’ the toddler said easily, and many times.

Jat made for the stairs and I followed him, but he gestured to me to stay where I was.

A few minutes later he came back down. We were about to leave the small cemented triangle that made up the servants’ forecourt when suddenly it occurred to me that he had not shown me what
he had brought me out to see. Had he been waiting for me to ask? His eyes suddenly bright, Jat pointed to the green boundary wall in front of us. More specifically he pointed to an area near the
top of the eight-foot wall, which appeared to have been scuffed by the shoes of someone getting over.

‘Crossing has been made, Rehan saab,’ he announced.

And to complete his theory, he showed me the spot where the shards of glass that ran over the top of the wall had been removed, and where a roll of razor-wire, dislodged from its place, now hung
low like a slinky.

As we walked back to the house Jat noticed a gardener in the next door property. Ashirwad. A small squat sandstone building, with rounded marble minarets, giving it the aspect of an inflatable
castle. It was rarely occupied and rented out, we believed, for ‘functions’. Jat waved over the gardener and spoke to him in whispered tones, before rejoining me a few moments later in
the house.

A centimetre of melted ice lay over the thick orange of my gazpacho. I took a sip and marvelled at how much it tasted like the ones I had had in Spain. Robin looked at it with
keen interest.

‘Why do you drink this? Does it reduce cholesterol?’

‘No, it’s just refreshing.’

‘Is there garlic in it?’

‘Yes.’

‘What else?’

‘Cucumber, a pepper, tomatoes, olive oil . . .’

Then rising to lock the door, he said, as if our casualness was part of a new calloused exterior, ‘A lot of suspicion falling on him.’

‘Vinegar too, I think.’

Robin nodded politely and continued. ‘First he dusts the place at six, removing all the fingerprints. I mean you see that the laptops are missing and you start dusting? Then there’s
this business about the safe. Why should he notice it’s gone so quickly? Even before you tell him to look for it? And the open door? The security was patrolling the place, they say they went
around the house some six or seven times. They never saw the door open.’

‘You think he was acting alone?’

‘No chance. My suspicion falls on Santosh and . . .’

‘Why him?’

‘Rehan, he’s a very suspicious character. He has all sorts of strange connections in the area. He’s forever in and out of the house. And you know when the place was being built
some parts went missing.’

‘What kind of parts?’

‘A few door handles, some fittings, but they were the most expensive parts. Italian, I think. And everyone at that point suspected Santosh. But we didn’t make too much of it at the
time.’

I had seen Santosh often. He had curly hair and a round childlike face. He often handed me guavas when I walked outside, pointing to various corners of progress in an ornamental vegetable
garden.

‘And who else?’

‘Amit, for sure Amit.’

This was the former manager.

‘Do you know,’ Robin continued, ‘before he left he threatened madam?’

‘How?’

‘The security is changed every six months, not the agency, the guards; it’s part of their routine. Amit suddenly tells madam not to change the guards. She explains to him that they
have to be changed cyclically and you know what he says to her? “Don’t change them because otherwise there might be a robbery.” She said to him, “Amit, are you threatening
me?” ’

‘What did he say?’

‘What’s he going to say, “No, no, madam, nothing like that.” My fear, Rehan,’ he said, giving me a chill, ‘is that they’re all involved.’

‘Where’s Kalyan now?’ I asked.

‘He’s taking a round with the policeman.’

Seconds later Jat appeared in the study. His eyes danced; he was in a state of high excitement.

‘Come with me,’ he said with a broad grin, ‘I want to show you something.’

I rose, my gazpacho still in my hand.

‘You can finish that,’ he said.

Jat timed the climax of his explanation with our arrival at the servants’ quarters. ‘When we were there earlier,’ he said, ‘you saw footprints in only one place,
right?’

I thought back to the green wall. I remembered it scuffed in two places.

‘But both on the same wall, no?’

‘Yes, the same wall.’

‘Well, now look,’ Jat said, as we entered the shade of the servants’ forecourt.

He pointed at the adjacent wall. It was nearly four feet higher than the other wall, and its glass and barbed wire were in place. But five feet from the ground, about as high as the average man
could kick, were a set of fresh and dusty footprints.

‘It was your cook who showed them to me,’ Jat said.

‘What do they mean?’

‘Bas, that someone heard us discussing them and marked the wall after we left, obviously wanting to give the impression that these marks are everywhere; that they don’t mean
anything?’

Hearing this explanation, I felt for the first time that I could see in miniature the thinking that had gone into the bigger plan. At every step circumstances had been prepared to draw us away
from our most obvious conclusions: the theft of the laptops, to distract from the safe, the main prize of the robbery; the date of the robbery to throw us off our most likely suspect: if it was
him, why would he choose the one night I was home and why the night his family arrives; the point of entry presented as the forced side door of glass and gauze; if it was Kalyan, he would have used
the front door; he had the key; and now, the method growing cruder, the alternative footprints on the much higher wall, and in no way suggesting a place where it could have been scaled. The plan
was designed to protect the most obvious suspect by suggesting a course the most obvious suspect would not have needed to take. But now, its motivations revealed, this double deception began to
work against its author, implicating the most obvious man.

We shrank from the white heat. Entering the house, I handed Kalyan my empty glass of gazpacho. He stood nervously by the kitchen door. Robin and I spoke briefly in private,
then we called him into my mother’s study. The courage I had found hard to muster earlier came easily now. Jat sat on a single chair in one corner of the room.

‘This is your last opportunity,’ I said, matter-of-factly, ‘even now it’s not too late to confess. But let me be clear, there’s a lot of suspicion falling on
you.’

‘I know, sir. But I know what’s true. I have no guilt on my part.’

‘Kalyan, try and understand that we can’t turn a blind eye to this. Someone came in here last night and walked out with over a lakh’s worth of stuff. They walked past my
bedroom. If, by chance, I’d woken up they would have killed me. You have to know something.’

‘Sir, there are more than ten people who work here, it could have been any one of them.’

‘That is not so many. There are fifteen million in the city. To find one man there, on the outside, would have been difficult. To find one in ten is not so difficult. And the police have
their methods.’

Kalyan flashed a glance at Jat who looked directly ahead.

‘You do concede that it’s an inside job, don’t you?’ I continued.

‘Yes.’

‘So whom do you suspect?’

‘Sir, I don’t want to put any false accusations on anyone. I feel so bad that this has happened. As much as this is your house,
it is my house too. Madam has done so much for me. She saved my son’s arm, she sent him to school, she’s given me so many opportunities . . .’

‘Kalyan, be careful,’ Robin, seated on a bamboo stool, intervened. And building a case for his guilt out of what I knew to be nothing, he said, ‘Right now, in the eyes of the
police, you are not only a suspect, you are guilty of destroying evidence. First you dust the desk from where the robberies occurred, then your fingerprint appears on the glass after baba has told
you explicitly not to touch anything . . .’

‘Robin, sir, I was trying to avoid touching the handle. If I was the one who did it why would I choose this day of all days when baba is here? I’ve had the house to myself for the
past fifteen days. And why the day when my family arrives?’

Robin and I looked at each other. To hear this rationale come so easily to Kalyan did more to damn him than anything we had said. The man who played stupid was not so stupid as not to have
thought of an alibi. And quite a sophisticated alibi at that: one that included a moral component – would any man endanger his family? – while functioning on an inverted
surely-not-the-butler logic. Already Jat was an ardent subscriber to my mother’s theory that
the safe had been taken on a different day. Now he intervened. Opening the soft grey file on his lap, and beckoning Kalyan over, he pointed to the first exposed sheet. Even from a distance I could
see that it said in English ‘Arrest Order’.

‘You know what this is?’

Kalyan looked genuinely blank.

‘Oh you want to see it in Hindi. Wait, bachchu, I’ll show you.’ He flipped through the file, nearly dropping the papers between his legs, then opened to a page, which had
English and Hindi. ‘It’s not good to be a namak haram,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you what we do in the station to men who eat the salt of a house and then betray its
owner.’ Looking at Robin and me, Jat said, ‘Now leave us alone, please.’

We went out of the room.

Already polluted by the morning’s emotions, my happy ideas of a summer in India ruined, my routine broken into, I felt myself a rougher man than I knew. To be morally superior in India was
to feel physically weak and insecure. And, as though revisited by that childhood longing for security, I ached to feel strong, to shed any naivety that might still remain. I wanted the servants
quickly to know how ruthless I could be.

The door opened. Kalyan appeared with red eyes, and with voice trembling, said, ‘They’re taking me away.’

The pity that arose in me turned to anger.

‘No one’s taking you away,’ I yelled hatefully at Kalyan, pushing him inside the study, ‘but you have to cooperate. You have to tell us what happened or we can’t
help you. Such a big robbery has happened under your nose. And you have nothing to say. What would you do if you were in my position? Pretend it didn’t happen and carry on? Kalyan, you better
think fast what happened or no one will be able to help you. Think of your children.’

I couldn’t gauge his reaction; unused to handling these heightened emotions, I couldn’t see past my own nerves and anger. Jat stepped in, sending Kalyan out of the room and gently
closing the door behind him. I sank into the leather chair in front of the desk from where the laptops had gone missing. Their loss seemed so insignificant in the face of the situation that had
arisen.

‘Be calm, be calm,’ Jat advised with a smile, ‘nothing comes of force. Even in our investigations if you hit too hard too early, the suspect toughens. Then there is no way in.
Play him sweet now. Tell him that you have prevented me from taking him away. Abuse us if you have to. Everyone does. Then you watch. Nothing works better on guilt than a dose of kindness
administered at the right moment.’

I opened the door and the face Kalyan saw through the fingerprinted glass of the kitchen pane was a smiling one. I pushed open the swing door, and putting a cupped hand to Kalyan’s cheek,
said, ‘I won’t let anyone take you anywhere. You are our old, loyal servant. You’ll stay right here. This theft will only be resolved with your help. Now hurry up, put lunch on
the table.’ And as I said these words, a new and soothing coolness flowed into me. I felt my transformation had begun.

That afternoon, the police, sensing a more substantial crime had been committed, sent men of high rank and caste. Leading the new command was Vijay Singh, the inspector at
Chawalla police station. He was a tall well-built man in his late forties with hawkish eyes, a long face and a brief bristly moustache. Though he spoke mainly in Hindi, he would have occasional and
fluent effusions in English centred on a single, admired word, such as ‘systematic’ or ‘revive’. His rank was written into his uniform: it was pale beige, of a far better
material than Jat’s, and it struck an attractive harmony with the blue of his braided shoulder cord and the red and blue of the police badge. He was accompanied by Sub-Inspector Surinder
Sharma, a stout older man with hennaed hair, who had large protruding teeth that fixed his mouth in a permanent grimace. Around these men, his superiors, Jat shrank. Once imposing, he now became
the station clown, sly and cruel, his humour bawdy.