Murder with Bengali Characteristics (6 page)

‘First, let’s go back to the station,’ said Big Chen hastily, trying not to imagine what the boss would do to him if Phoni-babu was unleashed on the local population. ‘Let the Inspector decide. If we need to, I’ll do the interrogating. You can help me in case I don’t translate properly.’

‘Translation never brings out the real flavour,’ said Phoni-babu.

As a lifelong member of the Calcutta Club, Ganguly took great pride in his tea skills. ‘Jasmine tea, or Darjeeling?’ he asked. He judged people by their choices. He would pour it out for them personally, and not a drop would splash.

‘How can we have anything but Darjeeling, sir?’ said Agarwal, who knew his methods. ‘Your Darjeeling tea is famous throughout the city. Mr Rungta had it once, and after that he was never satisfied with any other tea. Finally he switched to coffee.’

‘Red Label,’ mumbled Verma, but Agarwal quickly shut him up. Verma was from Delhi, where they mixed Darjeeling and Assam.

As executive assistant to Governor Wen, Ganguly was the de-facto ruler of over fifty million human beings. He bore his burden lightly. His table was bare, except for a fountain pen and a plaque that displayed a picture of Chairman Mao and the inscription ‘READ LESS. WORK MORE’. In his thirty years in the civil service, he had learnt to adapt to a wide variety of circumstances. His tailor had remained the same throughout.

‘Facing business problems, are we?’

‘Very big problems, Ganguly-uncle,’ said Agarwal, ‘only bold action by Governor-sahib can save us.’

Ganguly smiled regretfully. ‘If bold action is what you need, then Governor Wen may not be the right man.’

‘What are you saying, sir?’ said Agarwal. ‘He must be a high calibre person. These days Communist Party is so competitive, and he has risen to such a high position.’

‘Actually, he’s fallen to such a high position,’ said Ganguly. ‘This Wen fellow comes from army aristocracy. His father was the Very Excellent Marshal, who performed creditably in the war against Japan. He led the amphibious assault on Okinawa. Wen himself used to be Mayor of Chengdu. Unfortunately, a shopping mall built by his nephew collapsed, slaying six. The very next day he stepped on the foot of the Young Prince at an orgy. He was still wearing shoes.’

Verma was impressed. ‘Lot of action going on in China!’ he said. ‘Looking at them nobody can tell. I used to think they were decent people.’ Not that he was entirely surprised. He’d spent a few weekends in Macau. He had happy memories of the Golden Delight Sauna, with its free service bingo and sit down showers. But that was Macau. He had always assumed that Beijing was more civilized. ‘Their moral situation seems to have deteriorated.’

‘Unlimited power can do that to you,’ said Ganguly.

‘Is Governor-sahib suffering from some kind of personal problem?’ asked Agarwal. ‘He seemed very depressed. One or two times it looked like he would start crying.’

He had good reason to. The flow of tribute to Beijing had not been as expected. The province was running a deficit for the third year in a row. To make matters worse, Governor Wen’s economic advisors had been unable to agree on a figure for the deficit. They were busy pouring scorn on each other in a variety of public forums. The flood of investment from the Motherland had been unexpectedly delayed, as had the union with the local Maoists. The local Maoists had refused to lay down their arms, because they needed them to liberate the rest of India. They were cordial, but well-armed. Delegations of Chinese businessmen had conducted several fact-finding missions, and left very quickly. The only business booming was the arms business, where the Chinese lent money to the Maoists, and the Maoists bought weapons from the Chinese. Meanwhile, back in Calcutta, Propagandist Wang had spearheaded an ill-advised clampdown on the noodle-sellers of Gariahat, because they were an insult to Chinese culture, with their raw onions and their chunks of indigestible mutton, but the noodle-sellers had proved to be surprisingly resilient. Violence had escalated after the martyrdom of Bappa. A former mass leader had escaped from the mental institution. Efforts to apprehend her had so far proved futile. There were rumblings of discontent over the price of fish. The Kolkata Light Striders were near the bottom of the table, and East Bengal had once more been defeated by Dempo. The birth rate of Chinese immigrants was down, while the birth rate of Bengalis was up, because the Chinese were too depressed to have sex, and the Bengalis had nothing to watch on television, because of censorship. On top of everything else, their administration had been shamed administratively by the neighbouring Indians, thanks to their rapid rollout of the Smiley Drones, which kept the population under 24-hour surveillance, while broadcasting useful and uplifting slogans. Their techniques of governance were rusty, but their techniques for suppression were state-of-the-art. On the whole, there was no doubt that, despite specific instructions from Beijing, Governor Wen had been unable to move forward gloriously.

‘Things have not been going well for him,’ admitted Ganguly. None of this was new. He had served under many rulers. Eventually, all of them reached a steady-state equilibrium of apathy and depression. He’d been helping matters along. Whenever the Governor seemed lucid, he put more pills in his coffee. He preferred his masters foggy. They interfered less.

Agarwal was aware of this. Agarwal was aware of everything. ‘Sir, if you could reduce his medicine-shedicine, that also would be helpful. He’s becoming very hazy.’

‘I’m sorry?’ said Ganguly, raising one eyebrow.

Agarwal was impressed. You had to admire the man. Because Verma was an outsider, his lips were sealed. Such judgement. They didn’t manufacture officers like him any more. Thanks to jiggery-pokery with the admission procedure, nowadays it was all somebody’s nephew and somebody’s grandson. Most of them were very low quality people. All they wanted was flats, premium SUVs, and American passports for their children. The Chinese ruling classes were very similar. It was true what his guru-ji said. They were all becoming one. Ganguly was different. He was old school. It was not his job to provide answers. He provided guidelines.

‘Sir, is there anything you can suggest, sir?’ asked Agarwal.

Ganguly sipped his tea thoughtfully. ‘I find it helps if one gets to the root of the problem,’ he said. ‘I fear there may be a deeper malaise at work here. The thing to do is to study the psychology of the individual.’

‘And who could do this better than you, sir?’ said Agarwal. ‘Seeing how you are supporting him on a daily basis.’

Ganguly inclined his head graciously. ‘The fundamental problem facing the Governor is an absence of adequate concubines. I am unable to help, as this is not covered by service rules. Despite strenuous efforts on his own part, he is yet to find someone who can meet his exacting standards. Conditions here have demoralized him to the point of paralysis. His morale is plummeting. He needs the kind of solace that can only be found in the arms of an extremely good woman.’

Agarwal made a quick note on his phone. Concubines. Yet another commodity in short supply. He liked keeping track of shortages. Shortages meant money. Shortages to him were like sausages to a bloodhound. Onions. Baby food. Spectrum. Coal. Ammunition for the army. Rare Scottish whiskies. Antibiotics. Mosquito coils. Mustard oil. Textbooks for children. Mountain Breeze Oxygen. Red Pagoda cigarettes. The latest novel by the novelist Shankar, who was stored on a pen drive by Ananda Publishers. On the face of it, Agarwal was a mining magnate, and a steel baron, and a real estate colossus, and a retail giant, and a movie maven, and a financial wizard, and a provider of business process solutions, but what he really did was deal in shortages. Wherever supply was limited, Agarwal entered the supply chain.

‘I believe you will find him much more amenable to your requests if you can satisfy him in this regard,’ said Ganguly. ‘In short, you need to put lead in his pencil.’

Verma was disappointed. He had thought things in Calcutta would be far more refined and cultured. Sunita was always on at him to get more cultured. He had imagined that subtle strategies and elegant sleights of hand would be involved. But this was just pimping. He did it in Delhi all the time. How was Calcutta any different? It was just the same, except that they took more time to get to the point.

‘Can you give any kind of guideline?’ asked Agarwal.

‘Well, I imagine a trip to Eden Gardens should stand you in good stead,’ said Ganguly. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I have pending files to attend to.’

‘What does he mean?’ whispered Verma, as they left the room. Between his accent and his vocabulary, Verma had only understood around one word in three. The man was like a cross between Shakespeare and Montek Singh Ahluwalia. His head was hurting.

‘He means we have to go to Eden Gardens,’ said Agarwal.

The living room was surprisingly modest, with the usual display case on one side. Instead of cheap holiday bric-a-brac and Happy Meal toys, it was full of foundation stones, souvenirs of the many projects that Bijli Bose had inaugurated. Each one was labelled neatly. Against the opposite wall was a bookcase, where the complete works of Marx rubbed shoulders with the complete works of Rabindranath Tagore. Neither appeared to have been opened much.

Bijli Bose was sitting in a richly upholstered leather armchair, perfectly still, his dhoti draped gracefully, his kurta spotless white, glass of Scotch near his elbow. He had no idea how much longer he had, so he conserved his energy for the times when he really needed it. So far, this had not proved to be one of those times. He was on the verge of pretending to be in a coma, a technique which worked well with unwanted visitors. He found most policemen deadly boring, which is why he had ignored law and order when he had ruled Bengal for all those years. Gentlemen did not deal with the police. He also preferred the proletariat to sort things out by themselves. It was the only way they could evolve. He sat staring into space, mouth slightly open, eyes slightly glazed, in the hope that the man would get up and go away. Most people gave up after a while. Inspector Li waited patiently.

‘Barin Mondol was a loyal party worker,’ said Bijli Bose, eventually.

‘What did you talk about on the night he was murdered?’ asked Li.

There was a faint flicker of interest in Bijli Bose’s eyes. ‘Sometimes we talked about old times,’ he said. ‘He would call, not me. I gave him a phone so that we could stay in touch. It was a gift. He helped build the Party in Jhargram. He guided youth in the proper direction. Ideologically he was very sound. He remained committed to the cause of global workers till the very end. But over time, it became necessary to engage with the more active elements of the proletariat, in order to suppress those who were unwilling to be uplifted. This was not his forte. He was more of a purist.’

‘Was he an angry purist?’ asked Li. He’d met some of those. They were unpredictable. Sometimes they stoned embassies. Sometimes they chased sluts. Usually they ended up doing hard labour.

‘A sad one,’ said Bijli Bose. ‘He believed he could change the world through better thought processes, but sometimes this is not enough. He was an impractical idealist. Our history is full of them. From Ramakrishna to Bappi Lahiri, they have caused many problems. He reminded me a little of Charu, although Charu was completely insane. If you have access to Leader Gloogle, you should look him up. He was a big fan of China, was Charu. I was in jail with him around the time of the first war with China in 1962. We used to talk a lot. He would do most of the talking. He wanted our party to become part of the Chinese Communist Party, and to welcome the Chinese Army as liberators of the masses. I told him we should stick to discussing football and films, since in the area of politics, he was unable to talk any sense. Later on he founded the Maoists, who are now your loyal allies. Although the fact that they are refusing to come out of the jungle should be a matter of concern.’

‘How about you, sir? What do you believe?’

‘How are my beliefs relevant to your investigation?’

‘I try to understand how each suspect thinks,’ said Li.

Sexy Chen froze with horror. Distracted by his reflection in the display case, he had been adjusting his hair and pouting, but now he was fully alert. The cheering teenage girls faded into the background. He flashed a friendly grin at Bijli Bose to show that he was not part of this. He clutched Li’s elbow. ‘Next time they’ll post you to North Korea!’ he hissed.

The look Bijli Bose gave Li was imperious. ‘You think I’m a suspect?’

‘He talks to you on the phone. Three hours later he’s dead.’ said Li. ‘You’re a suspect. You told me what Barin Mondol believed in, and your friend Charu. What about you?’

‘I believe in the upliftment of global workers, as I have always done,’ said Bijli Bose, calmly sipping his Scotch. ‘Besides, do I look physically capable of committing this crime?’

‘Crime is never personal in India,’ said Li. ‘Things like alibis and fingerprints and murder weapons play no role. You have people to do it for you. In China, we put poison in our roommate’s water jug, or stab our ex-wives with kitchen knives, or try to run them over with our fancy cars. It’s a more intimate thing. Chairman Mao taught us the virtue of using our own hands. In India, you hire someone. If he gets caught, you take care of the family. Around here, if someone’s murdered, there’s only one question that needs to be answered: Who wants him dead?’

‘I’m only here as an observer, sir,’ said Sexy Chen, appalled. ‘I can assure you that I will go back and file a report against Comrade Li, whose behaviour towards a senior Politburo member like yourself is anti-people, anti-harmony and in direct violation of the Six Excellent Ways. He used to be a good officer, but he’s been backsliding recently. Overall, his attitude is poor. We of the Public Security Bureau take a very dim view of such individuals. I will recommend to my superiors that the Harmony Doctors make the necessary adjustments.’