Banquet on the Dead (28 page)

‘Answer number three,’ said Hamid Pasha. ‘Your grandmother was not killed after she reached the well. She was killed
before
it.’

Durga got to her feet. She said to the inspector, ‘Sir, this has gone on for long enough. I don’t see why we should give this man any more of our time. Nothing he has said so far makes sense.’

‘On the contrary, memsaab,’ Hamid Pasha said smoothly, ‘I think what I am saying now makes a lot of sense. No, no, I do not just
think
. I
know
it does, because it is the
truth
. Truth always makes sense.’

‘What truth are you talking of, sir?’ Durga demanded. ‘You say grandmother was killed before she got to the well, and yet no less than three of us have seen her walk to the well all by herself.’

‘Answer number four,’ Hamid Pasha said solemnly. ‘The woman you saw walking up the path to the well was not Kauveramma.’

Kamala started. Lakshman rubbed his hands together and examined his wet palms thoughtfully. Durga drew back and held the edge of her chair. None of them, though, said a word.

‘You saw a woman, an old woman, dressed like Kauveramma, walking like Kauveramma, who looked like Kauveramma, but you were all looking at the person from your first-floor windows; and her back was turned to you, was it not? Did any of you see her face?
Could
any of you see her face, from that distance, from that height?’

He smiled. ‘No, you could not. You saw someone who looked like Kauveramma, dressed like Kauveramma, and walked like Kauveramma, and you thought her to
be
Kauveramma; it was but natural. Tomorrow, if you see a bearded fellow in a topi limping off on the main road, will you not look out of your top-floor windows and say, “Ah, there goes Hamid Pasha?” You will, and the person—this person who walked up to the well in Kauveramma’s clothes—wanted it to happen.’ Suddenly, he turned to face Karuna Mayi and addressed her. ‘Is that not so, memsaab?’

The woman showed no emotion. A flicker of a smile appeared on her lips; it was more of a snarl. ‘Has anyone told you you are crazy?’ she said.

‘I may be, memsaab. But I will tell you right now: your game is up. You walked up to the well dressed like Kauveramma. You did not have to work hard on your appearance; it has been said more than once that the women of this house are all the same height and of a similar build—except Durga memsaab, of course, who is taller.’

Karuna Mayi sighed. ‘I was not even in the city at that time, sir. Surely to walk up to and down from the well, I would need to be in the city at least?’

Hamid Pasha waved that away. ‘You live mostly on your own in Hyderabad. I have confirmed that your daughter was away, visiting a friend out of town, as she often does. Therefore, nobody would have missed you if you came here in the morning. You do not have anyone in Hyderabad who will vouch that you spent the day there. Hain?’

Karuna shook her head. ‘It is not my fault that I am alone for the most part of my days.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Hamid Pasha murmured, ‘very convenient too, is it not? You were seen at five-thirty in the morning at the railway station here, memsaab, by the porter who then told Raja saab who then told us. You came here early in the morning, entered the house—if I am not wrong— at six.’

‘And no one in the house, of course, saw me.’

‘They did. Durga memsaab did. But you were in your disguise then too; this time you were disguised as Gauri. Memsaab saw you at the downstairs gate at six. And so did Raja when he peeped out of his front window; he saw you walk down the path from the front gate. And again, you were dressed as Gauri, you walked like Gauri, you
looked
like Gauri, so people who saw you from a distance thought you
were
Gauri.’

Karuna was about to say something, but Hamid Pasha stopped her. ‘Wait. Let me speak. Gauri is also the same height, of the same build, you see. When people talked of the ladies of the house, they only referred to the old lady, Karuna and Prameela. But what of Gauri? The thing about Gauri is that she is
dark-skinned
. All the others are fair-complexioned. So what did Karuna Mayi do? She coloured her arms and hands with a dye, and as soon as she entered the bathroom, she changed into the garb of Kauveramma, and it was when she was trying to wash the paint off her hands that Gauri—the real Gauri—walked in on her. Karuna was smart enough to tell her off for entering the bathroom and drive her away. After she went into Kauveramma’s room, Swami saab took her a bowl of water with which she washed her hands, and that is why the water was dark when it was brought out.’

He pointed to Gauri. ‘Gauri saw the dark water and made the association with blood. And while Karuna Mayi was inside Kauveramma’s room, she started to groan and moan like the old lady did, and the fact that Kauveramma was suffering from a cold meant that any difference in the voice that would otherwise be noticed would now just be attributed to a sore throat.

‘She stayed in the room until lunchtime, and at twelve-thirty she carried out the last bit of her plan. She hid the clothes she’d worn to impersonate Gauri in the folds of her sari and set off for the well. She dressed as Kauveramma would, but she forgot to put on Kauveramma’s glasses— because Karuna’s eyesight is perfect, you see. That was a fatal mistake, but understandable, when you think of how much she must have had on her mind.

‘So she got out of the house via the back door and walked around to the front, because Gauri was sleeping by Swami saab’s room and she would not have liked to wake her up. She walked up the path and towards the well, hoping somebody would see her from the top-floor windows. But even if nobody did, it would not matter. She went to the well, and by means of the crowbar, dropped the stone into the water, and the same time screamed Swami’s name. Once again, consider the genius of the choice; Swami saab was the only other person in the whole house that had an alibi, so she chose to scream out his name.

‘Then she immediately went behind the wall and changed into Gauri’s costume. Now this took her a good half and hour to forty-five minutes because of the colour she had to apply on herself; and just as she was about to go, she saw Durga and Gauri come to the well to talk. What they talked about and what Karuna memsaab overheard is not relevant to the issue, but as the two walked away, Karuna memsaab saw her opportunity and walked off herself, not more than five minutes later.

‘But here she was walking
towards
the house, so she had to cover her face. So with the ends of her sari, she covered her head and her face. That is why Kamala memsaab said Gauri came back from the well at two, but Lakshman said she did that five minutes after two. Lakshman also remembered that “Gauri” had her sari veiling her face, but Kamala did not say so. In fact, Kamala said that she had never seen Gauri with her sari about her head.

‘Once Karuna memsaab got off the path her task was relatively simple. She walked up to the side-gate and opened it—she must have had a key made for the lock. But as luck would have it, Ellayya came out at the same time and called out to her, thinking she was Gauri. Once she was outside, Nagesh saw her walk away from Ellayya. But that was just one of those things—in a complex plan, something or the other had to go wrong. But Karuna managed to walk away undetected, only to “arrive from Hyderabad” later in the evening, after the dust had settled.’ Karuna laughed and shook her head. ‘You
are
crazy.’

Hamid Pasha smiled in return.

Inspector Nagarajan said, ‘But are you not missing something in your version of what happened?’

‘Yes,’ added Lakshman, ‘like—the most important detail of how Grandmother’s body came to be in the well?’

Hamid Pasha’s smile broadened. ‘Yes, miyan. I have only described to you one part of the plot; the part about what
appeared
to have happened to the old lady. Now I will tell you what
actually
happened to her. Remember that she did not die of drowning. Everyone thought that she had died due to cardiac arrest brought on by the terror of falling into the well. But who could
exactly
tell what caused the cardiac arrest? Hain?’

He looked at Swami, whose face, Nagarajan noticed suddenly, had withered in the last hour. He gave Hamid Pasha a fleeting, impassive glance and then looked away.

‘Anything can cause a cardiac arrest, can it not?’ Hamid Pasha said, his voice rising. ‘Even if you were to choke someone, taking care not to leave any marks on the victim, death would come, and the heart would stop eventually beating. It is only
because
everybody thought that Kauveramma fell into the well, and
because
no water was found in the lungs, that the doctor passed the verdict of cardiac arrest. What if she had been killed in the house— right here in her room—that morning?’

Nagarajan felt a commotion build up among the people in the room. Prameela, Kamala and Durga shifted in their seats. The men moved about, fidgeting and murmuring. He cleared his throat loudly to bring silence back into the room, and took a step closer to Swami.
Just in case
, he thought.

‘She had a cold the night before,’ said Hamid Pasha, striding towards where Swami sat, hands wound behind his back. ‘She was heard complaining about the chlorine bags which did not have to be there. This is a big house, after all, miyan. Why did the chlorine bags have to be put in that room specifically?

‘I think she was drugged that night. Any easily available drug could have been used. Chloroform would have worked as well as anything else. The smell of the chlorine would have kept most other smells unrecognisable. If the people in the house had noticed something suspicious in the air, it could have been explained away as chlorine.

‘She was drugged that night, and early next morning Karuna took her place in her room. I do not think the lady came out at all that morning. When Karuna went in she started groaning, pretending to be Kauveramma, and Swami saab went in and out of the room. It is significant that nobody but Swami saab entered Kauveramma’s room that morning. No, not even Gauri.

‘I do not know for sure
when
the deed was done. I would guess that it happened closer to ten-thirty in the morning, just before Swami saab went in to “get the chlorine bags”. While the people outside heard Kauveramma admonishing Swami saab about the smell, inside the room the real Kauveramma was being quietly put to sleep. It is quite easy to kill somebody who is drugged, is it not, miyan? They do not struggle. They do not cry out for help. None of the usual drama.

‘After that the story is quite simple. He put his mother’s body into one of the empty chlorine sacks—they are forty-kilo sacks, remember?—and carried her out to the well. He carried each sack down the flight of stairs and emptied them into the water. At the same time he also let the old lady’s corpse out on the water. He may have even immersed her for a while so that it gave the impression that she had fallen in.’

He took another halting step towards Swami and folded his arms across his chest. ‘And then he came back and went into his room, complaining of a headache. In an hour, he knew, the second part of the drama would start, with Karuna playing the lead.’

Karuna stood up, her fists curled into balls by her side. Nagarajan saw for the first time that, despite her expansive posture, she was really quite a short woman, not much taller than Prameela was, or—he thought with a start— Kauveramma had been. ‘This,’ she said in a low, ominous voice, shaking in fury, ‘is the most fantastic bit of drivel that I have ever heard in my life’.

Hamid Pasha held up his hand. ‘Madam, please! Hamid Pasha never makes a case without checking up on his facts. Yesterday I paid a little visit to the Kalanjali school of arts and dance, miyan,’ he said, and his eyes met Swami’s, before they returned to Karuna’s. ‘The lady there told me that you borrowed two costumes from them on the day before Kauveramma was killed, and that they were returned four days later, after you went back to Hyderabad.

‘I have them with me, but a description of the two costumes will be enough, I think. A light orange sari, a white blouse, a grey, untidy wig: that was the first one. The second was a purple terylene sari of the kind Gauri generally wears, a yellow blouse, and yes, she also took a bottle of deep-brown body paint—which, apparently, is used by actors in certain roles that demand a dark skin.’

‘You’re lying,’ Karuna said from between her teeth.

‘And I also compared the wig I got from the lady at Kalanjali with the tuft of hair I found behind the brick wall at the well.’ Hamid Pasha dropped his voice to a murmur and said to Swami, ‘I am no expert on hair, miyan, but even I could see the hair came from the wig.’ He turned around to face Karuna Mayi. ‘So maybe
you
could tell us, memsaab, how hair from a wig in a Hyderabad acting school came to make an appearance here, behind your well,
right on the day your grandmother died
. Maybe you could, hain?’

Karuna’s nostrils flared, like they had when she caught Inspector Nagarajan and Hamid Pasha in Kauveramma’s room the previous day. Nagarajan felt a tiny frisson of fear at the look of the woman’s smooth features contorted in anger. ‘This is not evidence. You can prove nothing!’ she said.

‘Stop it, Karuna.’ Swami’s voice, soft, low and assured, made itself heard. There was an incredible amount of fatigue behind that sentence, Nagarajan thought, as he reached into his pocket and closed his fingers around a pair of handcuffs.

‘Stop it,’ Swami said again. ‘It is all over.’ He looked up at Hamid Pasha. ‘It was morphine, sir, not chloroform.’

‘Swamannayya! He is bluffing! He does not have anything on us!’

Hamid Pasha held Swami’s stare and nodded.

Swami waved Karuna away dismissively. ‘Everything else was basically as you said. I was not convinced this would work. I was more inclined to doing things the old-fashioned way, without drama.’

‘It would have been easier to catch you then,’ said Hamid Pasha, signalling to Nagarajan to move forward.

Swami nodded and shrugged. He looked up at the advancing Inspector and held out his hands. From the other end of the room Karuna opened her mouth and let loose a volley of such vile abuses at the old man that the women in the room gasped. Hamid Pasha merely looked over his shoulder, waited for the torrent to stop, and then clapped his hands. A couple of female constables entered the room and made their way towards Karuna.