The Case of the Love Commandos (7 page)

Puri checked his watch. It was almost eight. If Vishnu Mishra was coming, he would be here soon.

“Show me Ram’s house,” he said.

“It’s the one over there. The brick one.”

Shielding his eyes from the sun, Puri looked to where the chowkidar was pointing. The house stood at the bottom of the slope and was indeed built of brick, the only one of its kind in the Dalit section. There was another thing: the construction was new.

“Saab, it was made last month.”

“What does the father do?”

“Nothing. He sits around. She’s a midwife.”

Midwives were traditionally considered polluted and were invariably all Dalits. They earned a pittance.

“Then where did the money come from?” asked Puri.

“Ram sent it. He’s the only child.”

The detective noticed a satellite dish on the roof—an incongruous sight given the inherent impoverishment of this part of the village.

“They have a TV?” he asked.

“His father bought it.”

“With money sent by Ram?”

“Yes, saab.”

“When?”

“A few weeks back.”

“There’s electricity?”

“It comes and goes.”

Puri started toward the house. They passed a water pump, the only one in the Dalit section. It appeared to be broken. A well-trodden path ran down through the fields beyond the village to a river about a mile away. It explained why the chowkidar smelled of river water.

“Are Ram’s parents at home?” the detective asked as they approached the house.

“His father is there.”

“And the mother?”

The chowkidar didn’t answer.

“Where is she?” Puri demanded.

“She left, saab.”

“Left the village?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Last night. After dark.”

“And she hasn’t come back?”

The chowkidar shook his head, eyes cast down.

There was a sudden urgency to Puri’s step as he strode up to the front door of the house. This might well be a serious business after all. The boy’s life, the mother’s too, perhaps, was at stake. He found the door open and hanging off its hinges, a boot tread clearly visible across the grain.

Puri pushed his way inside. The room beyond was sparsely furnished, the floor bare concrete. A man sat snoring in a lone chair, his head resting on his chest. The TV in front of him had a cracked screen and a dent in its side, yet it still worked and was tuned to the Filmy channel. Bollywood’s Govinda was gyrating his hips in front of a Swiss Alpine landscape.

“Is this the father?” Puri asked the chowkidar, who’d entered the house behind him.

“That’s him, saab.”

There were a couple of empty plastic bottles lying discarded on the floor. Puri didn’t need to pick up and examine them to tell what they had contained. The whole place reeked of tharra.

His attention was drawn to the far wall of the room, which was plastered with posters, flyers and cutouts from newspapers all depicting Uttar Pradesh’s Chief Minister Baba Dhobi.

“For Ram’s parents, he is God,” explained the chowkidar, as he stood behind the detective. “When the party sends buses, she goes to his political rallies. Any opportunity to see him.”

“And you? You voted for him?”

“Of course. We all did. He gives us hope.”

Puri took a closer look at the collection on the wall. There was a photo mixed in. It showed a handsome young man in a T-shirt and jeans standing next to a village woman. They were posing in front of a statue of Baba Dhobi.

“That’s Ram and his mother, Kamlesh,” said the chowkidar. “They traveled to Lucknow last year.”

Puri took the photograph off the wall, slipped it inside his safari suit and went to rouse the father.

“Hey, you, wake up!” he bellowed, and gave the man a rough shake. “I want to talk to you!”

The man snorted a couple of times and opened his bloodshot eyes.

“Kya?” he said with a grimace.

“He’s with the police,” bawled the chowkidar in a belligerent tone that could not have been more different from the one in which he addressed Puri. “You’d better answer his questions!”

The detective could see now that the father had also been badly beaten in the past few days.

“Do you know where your son is?” he demanded.

His question was drowned out by the sound of “dishooms!”—the exaggerated fight-scene sound effects coming from the TV. Puri turned off the set and repeated his question.

“He was here but he left,” replied the father.

“Where did he go?”

“How should I know?”

“How does he make his money?”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Who beat you?”

“Some men. They were looking for Ram.”

“Who were they?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did you tell them?”

“What I told you.”

Puri rolled his eyes and gave an exasperated sigh. This was a waste of time. What brain cells this simpleton had ever possessed had been destroyed by seventy-proof moonshine and Govinda movies. He went to look around the rest of the house and found two bedrooms, a basic kitchen equipped with a sigri and a few pots and pans, and a bathroom devoid of plumbing.

There were, however, a couple of items of interest: a newly opened mobile phone box and, plugged into an electrical socket, a charger with a cord that had recently been uncoiled.

Pushing open the back door in the kitchen, he found himself in a small, walled enclosure. To one side there was a hole in the ground about a foot deep. Next to it lay a pile of freshly dug earth.

Retracing his steps into the kitchen, Puri found what appeared to have been retrieved from the hole: a stainless steel box with traces of dirt inside.

He carried the box into the main room. What had it contained? he demanded from the father.

“Kya?”

“Who dug the hole in the ground?”

“Kya?”

The detective finally lost his temper and shouted, “Does your wife have a phone?”

It was the chowkidar who answered. “Yes, saab, she has one. Ram gave it to her,” he said.

“About a month back, no doubt?”

“Yes, saab.”

“Do you know the number?”

The man giggled again, as if this was the silliest thing he’d ever been asked. “No, saab.”

Puri left the house and walked back to the car. It would take a less direct approach to find out what had happened here—and for that he would use Facecream.

“Which way did the mother go—when she left last night?” Puri asked, pausing by the open door of the hatchback.

“Through the village to the main road, saab,” the chowkidar answered.

“Was she carrying anything?”

“Just a plastic bag.”

“Did anyone pass her on the way?”

“Saab, it is possible,” he said, his hands pressed together again. “But it was dark and the night belongs to the owl and the jackal.”

Puri was making his way back to the highway from the village when he spotted a plume of dust rising above the narrow lane ahead. A black Range Rover soon came into focus, traveling at high speed. In little more time than it took him to mumble to himself, “I don’t like the look of this, actually,” the vehicle closed the distance between them and came to a grinding halt.

With the way effectively blocked, Puri’s driver had no choice but to stop as well, although he did so in rather less dramatic fashion. He then made his displeasure known by pressing down on his horn, which emitted a sound like a duck quack, and gesturing through the windscreen as one might to a lowly rickshaw wallah.

His railing ceased abruptly, however, when through the haze of fine sand stirred up by the Range Rover’s tires, a large goon wielding a shotgun stepped out of the vehicle.

The driver’s exact words were: “Mar gaye!” (“We’re dead!”)

Puri, too, was taken aback by the size of the man and the sheer thickness of his jaw. But he wound down his window nonetheless and was perfectly friendly.

“Beautiful morning, no?” he said.

The goon’s skin was red and blistered around his eyes and nose. This was Naga, the thug Facecream had described.

“Come,” he grunted, the shotgun held across his chest.

Puri smiled up at him. “Direct and to the point, haan? Well, how I can refuse when you put it in such a gracious manner?”

He exited the car and Naga motioned him toward the Range Rover. A back window slid down, revealing an unshaven man in a white collarless shirt and a silk half-sleeve jacket.

Vishnu Mishra wasn’t someone who would have possessed a great sense of humor at the best of times, Puri observed, and right now he looked like he was ready to take on the whole world.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” he asked, his voice dispassionate.

“Sir, with due respect and all, my mummy-ji told me not to speak with strangers,” said Puri, conscious that Naga was now standing directly behind him.

“That was bad advice,” said Mishra. “Some strangers won’t take no for an answer.”

“I’m not in the habit of providing information of a professional nature to any and all persons,” answered the detective.

Mishra said nothing to this. He simply gestured to Naga, who promptly grabbed Puri by the shoulder, twisted him round and drove the butt of his rifle into his stomach.

The detective’s ample padding absorbed a good deal of the blow, but he felt the wind go out of him and bent double.

The goon gave him a moment and then straightened him up by the arms. “Aaan-saar!” he bawled.

It took a moment for Puri to catch his breath. “I’m Inspector Lal Krishna, Delhi Crime Branch,” he wheezed.

Mishra looked him up and down. “What’s a Delhi cop
doing out here?” he said, doubtful. “And why are you being driven in a hire car with Agra plates?”

“Chasing a con man. His name is Ram Sunder.”

“A con man? What are you talking about?”

“He plays on girls’ sympathies, gets them to agree to marry him, then absconds with all their valuables and such. We’ve been tracking him for some months.”

Mishra studied Puri’s expression as intently as a portrait painter, weighing up his story, then said, simply, “Search him.”

The goon promptly pushed Puri up against the Range Rover, patted him down and went through his pockets. He found a few clear plastic bags, one of which contained some pasty residue from a samosa, a mobile phone, and a forgotten, oily receipt from Dosa Heaven.

“ID?” demanded the goon.

“It’s in the dickie,” said Puri with impatience.

Naga gave him a shove and the detective staggered back toward the hatchback. His heart was beating furiously. Had his wallet not been stolen, he’d have used his Inspector Lal Krishna, Delhi Crime Branch, fake ID. His only option now was to get ahold of his pistol. Otherwise he had no doubt that Mishra would order his goon to beat the truth out of him.

With shaking hands, he opened the trunk and unzipped his bag.

“My wallet’s in here somewhere,” he said as he felt amongst his clothes for the metal of the pistol.

He found it near the bottom and gently wrapped his finger around the trigger.

“Jaldi!” bawled Naga.

“Moment, yaar,” insisted the detective. “It is in here somewhere.”

Slowly, he took his pistol out of the bag and pushed the toe of his right shoe down into the sandy surface of the lane. His plan was to kick some dirt into the goon’s face and then draw on him. If he had to shoot, he’d aim for the legs.

Puri took a deep breath to calm his nerves. On the count of three. One, two …

On three, as if by a miracle, Puri heard sirens in the distance. He looked over the roof of his car and, to his relief, spotted a police jeep racing toward them.

“The cavalry,” he said with a smile.

Naga cursed, ordered Puri to stay put and hurried back to the Range Rover. The police jeep pulled up moments later and disgorged an inspector and four jawans.

Mishra couldn’t have looked less concerned. He greeted the officer with an irritated “What is it, bhai?”

The police wallah, whose nametag read GUJAR, was nervous. “Sir, I’ve been ordered to place you under arrest,” he half-apologized.

“For what?”

“Murder, sir. Ram Sunder’s mother was found in the canal close to your ancestral village two hours back. At the hospital she was declared ‘brought dead.’ ”

Mishra made a face like a customer in a restaurant who’s discovered his food is cold. “Who gave the order for my arrest?” he asked.

“Sir, I’ve been told to bring you to the station, where you’ll be charged under section 302,” said Gujar.

Mishra waved his hand as if to brush away a fly.

“Go have your khana,” he said. “Tell them I wasn’t at home.”

For a moment, the Inspector looked as if he might indeed back off. His expression betrayed the agony of indecision. But he stood firm and unclipped his service revolver.
The jawans, too, readied their rifles and trained them on Naga.

“Sir, I respectfully request that you alight from your vehicle,” said Gujar.

“Sure you know what you’re doing, Superman?”

“Sir, I’ve my orders.”

Mishra opened the door to his Range Rover and stepped out. He maintained a commanding presence even as he was cuffed.

“Careful what you start, bhai,” he said as he squared up to the inspector. “Once you have dirtied your hands, only death will remove the stain.”

He shook off the jawans’ grip on his arms and walked, slowly, to the waiting jeep. Naga and Mishra’s driver were taken into custody as well, and they were all driven back along the lane toward the highway.

Puri, whom Gujar had noticed but ignored, followed behind.

One thousand kilometers to the northwest, another police wallah was preparing to question a suspect. Inspector Malhotra, the Jammu deputy chief of police, stood on the platform as the Delhi overnight train pulled into its final destination three hours late. He was soon approached by Mummy, who was the first passenger to disembark.

“Pranap Dughal is the suspect’s name,” she informed him. “It is written there on the chart.”

“Very good, madam,” said Malhotra. “But understand, at most I can check his identity. If there are any irregularities, then only I will be able to take action.”

“Irregularities” could be construed as almost anything in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, where the security forces had special powers to fight the ongoing insurgency. Mummy
therefore took succor from his statement and waited at the back of the platform to watch what happened.