The Case of the Love Commandos (8 page)

The Dughals were slow to disembark and the reason for the holdup soon became obvious. Mrs. Dughal was so large that she required two porters to carry her down onto the platform. She then had to be hefted into a wheelchair, her lower frame wobbling like blancmange.

“That is she—the one who was doing shouting,” Mummy told her daughter-in-law, who’d joined her on the platform.

“She doesn’t look like a very happy person, does she?” observed Rumpi.

They watched as Inspector Malhotra interviewed Pranap Dughal, who listened and smiled, and made an amiable gesture that suggested he had nothing to hide. He then reached into his back pocket for his wallet. As he took it out, half the contents spilled onto the platform. Cards, bank notes and receipts scattered in all directions.

“Such a pagal!” scolded Mrs. Dughal. “Why don’t you watch what you’re doing! I’m always telling you not to keep your wallet there!”

Her husband looked embarrassed and flustered as the porters scrambled around after his personal effects and returned them to him.

Once he’d found his ID, he handed it to the inspector the wrong way up.

“He doesn’t look like he’d make a very competent pickpocket to me,” said Rumpi. “Think maybe we’ve got the wrong man?”

“Definitely not,” replied her mother-in-law. “Just he’s doing acting.”

It was at this point that Chetan came running down the platform. “Aunty-ji, Mummy-ji! Look! I found it!” he shouted.

Rumpi and Mummy shot him an irritated look and told him to “chup!”

“No, no, you don’t understand. Here, here, see!” Chetan was in a state of breathless excitement. “It … it … was on the floor … under the table. Between the … the berths.”

He handed Puri’s wallet to Rumpi.

The outburst caught Inspector Malhotra’s attention and he approached. “Is this Puri sahib’s?” he asked with a frown.

Rumpi checked the contents and confirmed that it was indeed her husband’s property.

“Looks like we owe you an apology, Inspector,” she said. “I’m so sorry to have wasted your time.”

But Mummy wasn’t convinced.

“No, no, something is not right, na,” she interjected. “Definitely the wallet was not there! Just it has been planted by this fellow in the wee hours. Inspector, I tell you this Dughal is guilty as charged.”

“Now, Mummy, that’s enough,” said Rumpi. “We’ve got Chubby’s wallet back, buss.”

Inspector Malhotra cleared his throat. “If there’s nothing more, madam, I’ve my duty to attend to,” he told Rumpi in a polite but firm tone. “With your permission I’ll take my leaves.”

He went and handed Pranap Dughal back his ID and wasted not a second in making for the station exit.

Rumpi placed a hand on her mother-in-law’s arm and gripped it tenderly. “Come, Mummy-ji, we should get a move on,” she said. “Jagdish Uncle’s come to pick us up.”

But her mother-in-law didn’t budge. “He’s a cunning one,” she said. “Must be he came to know he looted the wallet belonging to a certain jasoos. No doubt, he was already regretting his mistake, na. Then thanks to Chetan my face becomes known to him. Thus he does two and two and checks the chart. There he finds my good name—that
is Puri, also. What to do? Return the wallet, that is what. Thus he slips it under the curtain in dead of night.”

“But, Mummy-ji, you told me you were up all night—keeping ‘vigil,’ as you put it.”

“Correct. In case he fled the train.”

“So don’t you think you would have noticed a man that size coming through our carriage?”

“He’s got a compliss.”

“An
accomplice
? Now, Mummy, I’ve heard enough. I’m going to call Chubby, tell him the good news, then let’s just forget the whole thing. Come. Everyone’s waiting.”

Mummy had been watching the Dughals over Rumpi’s shoulder. The porters had struggled to get their bags—they looked uncommonly heavy—up onto their heads and were now heading for the exit. Pranap Dughal was pushing his wife’s wheelchair and she in turn was berating him.

“How could you let that police wallah harass you without a protest? You should have given him a piece of your mind! Who is
he
to ask to see your ID? What are you, a man or a mouse?”

Mummy looked for Weasel Face, but there was no sign of him. He must have left the train from a door on the other side, unseen, she decided, and reluctantly she went with Rumpi to join the rest of the family in the station car park.

Her mood was not improved by their teasing—“Better bring your magnifying glass next time, Mummy-ji,” joked Chetan. And when Rumpi gave her a gentle reproach—“You have to admit, you got a bit carried away”—she bristled.

“Not at all, Chubby was looted for sure,” said Mummy with crossed arms. “He himself told you, na.”

Indeed, Puri, although delighted to hear that his wallet had been retrieved, was adamant that he’d been pickpocketed.

“There is no way I dropped it,” he insisted when Rumpi called him while the bags were being loaded onto the roof of Jagdish Uncle’s car. “Definitely it was taken by that bloody bastard.”

“Well, I don’t know what to say,” said Rumpi. “I’ve got your wallet. Just tell me what you want me to do with it … Wait, your mother’s trying to say something.”

She handed the handset to Mummy.

“Hello? Chubby? Listen,” she said. “Definitely this concerned person, name of Pranap Dughal, got hold of your wallet. What is that?”

Mummy held the handset away from her ear for a moment. She rejoined the conversation with “Yes, I came to know. I was the one to get that snap on my portable. Do checking of police files. He’s a charge-sheeter, no doubt.”

She listened to him for a few seconds and then let out a loud tut. “Just I’m trying to be of assistance, Chubby. Making so much of effort on your behalf. Thanks to me your wallet got returned. But fine. Have it your way.”

She disconnected the line and handed the phone back to Rumpi.

They both sat in silence, brooding, until they reached Jagdish Uncle’s haveli.

After Puri’s run-in with Vishnu Mishra, Facecream spent a couple of hours in a small town five kilometers from Ram’s village where there was a hole-in-the-wall establishment that offered long-distance calling, prepaid mobile charging and photocopying. Internet access was also available, subject to electricity, with seven partitioned booths equipped with PCs. All but one was occupied by young men surfing social media sites and ogling busty snaps of Bollywood starlets.

Facecream’s searches were mundane by comparison. On
the official website of the state government of Uttar Pradesh, she found details about the Govind village school. The current teacher, who was charged with the education of some fifty-two children between the ages of four and eleven, was a certain Mr. P. Joshi. After accessing the Most Private Investigators online database of Indian logos, she then forged all the official paperwork she required. With half a potato, her trusty switchblade, a red ink pad and a laminating machine, she also fashioned herself an ID.

An hour later, after buying some dour cotton suits, a pair of bookish glasses, and a few notebooks and pens, she arrived at the school in the guise of Miss Padma Jaiteley, an assistant teacher from Lucknow.

An elderly Muslim caretaker wearing a prayer cap sat in a metal chair behind the gates. There was not a gram of fat on him, his sun-baked skin stretched taut over his bones and joints.

“I’m looking for Mr. Joshi,” Facecream explained, brandishing a letter for him from the Uttar Pradesh state Education Ministry, which appointed her as his deputy. But the caretaker, whose name was Atif, said he wasn’t there.

“He went for a family wedding.”

“When?” asked Facecream.

“Oooh, long time. A month at least.”

She spotted some children playing hopscotch in the shade of a banyan tree. There were roughly twenty in all.

“Where are the rest of the students?” she asked.

“Working in the fields, mostly. Some go to a new private school. It’s a few miles up the road.”

Atif took her bag and led the way across the compound. The children greeted her enthusiastically and followed her as she inspected the school buildings.

The only classroom was dusty and littered with insect carcasses.
It contained a few old desks, some metal chairs that were all bent out of shape, a couple of rusting almirahs and a pile of textbooks missing half their pages. A dog was asleep in one corner.

The “kitchen” was a room with an open hearth and a metal bucket for washing dishes. There, the cook, a miserable-looking local woman, was preparing a heap of spotty potatoes. Watery daal containing a minimum of onion and garlic was boiling in a large aluminum pot.

“The pradhan provides us with the worst-quality rations,” complained Atif, referring to the village headman. “It’s barely enough for each child.”

“What does he do with the rest? Sell it?” asked Facecream.

“In the local market.”

She stepped outside into the sunlight and stood for a while watching the children who’d returned to their play. She’d been wondering why they still came to school despite the absence of their teacher. Now she understood: they hailed from the poorest families and their parents didn’t want them to miss out on the pitiful, adulterated gruel cooking in the kitchen.

A sense of hopelessness, of defeat in the face of insurmountable corruption, swept over her. The village headman skimming the children’s only meal was but one of thousands doing the same across the country. The whole system was as rotten as that heap of potatoes. Little wonder that the Mao-inspired Naxalite movement was gaining ground across huge swaths of the country. But violence wasn’t the answer. She’d learned her lesson the hard way as a young idealistic teenager when she’d joined the Maoists in Nepal in their fight against the state. Change could only come from the grassroots, from people producing their own legitimate leaders and then holding them accountable. For that to happen,
there needed to be universal education. The words of Rabindranath Tagore came to mind. Even for those at the extremes of poverty, he’d once written, “there can be no question of blind revolution.” By far preferable was a “steady and purposeful education.”

The thought reassured her, and she walked over to the banyan tree to address the children. Class would begin tomorrow, she announced, and asked that they spread the word through the village.

Between then and now, she would stock up on chalk and slate tablets. That was all that was needed in terms of equipment, Facecream reflected, remembering the example of biochemist Hargobind Khorana, who had received his early schooling from village teachers under a tree and went on to win a Nobel Prize.

She also resolved to do something about the food situation. A visit to the pradhan was on the cards.

But there was no forgetting why she had come to Govind in the first place, of course.

Ram’s mother had been found dead in a canal a mile from Vishnu Mishra’s ancestral home, Puri had informed her. Facecream’s priority was to find out what had possessed Mrs. Sunder to leave the village on foot last night and to retrace the unfortunate woman’s final earthly steps.

The body lay on a table in a crude surgical theater that doubled as an autopsy examination room. A Lucknow Government Hospital bedsheet was draped over it. Where the crisp cotton had come into contact with the skin, damp stains had formed.

That the deceased was a woman was immediately obvious to Puri. A shock of long hair, leaves and bits of twig caught in its gray tresses, hung over one end of the table. A petite hand, wan after hours lying in muddy canal water, and a set of pigeon toes, deformed by a lifetime of walking barefoot, also protruded from beneath the sheet.

“To be honest, I’m not a forensics man,” said Dr. Naqvi, who had a big booming voice and was strangely jovial given the morbid surroundings. “Whenever a body turns up and they suspect foul play, a Jallad first cuts open the body and removes the organs and then the cops ask me to take a look. Lucknow doesn’t have a coroner. In fact I don’t believe there’s one in the whole of Uttar Pradesh. No one would want the job. Imagine training for all those years to be a doctor just to spend your time in some stinking place like this.”

He went on: “I’ve done quite a bit of reading, of course—Dr.
Ludwig’s handbook has come in very handy. And I’ve learned a lot from watching American crime shows as well.
House
is wonderful, but I think
Quincy
remains my firm favorite. Sometimes I feel a bit like him—Quincy that is. You know—trying to figure out how someone like this poor lady ended up in such terrible circumstances.”

Puri, who’d persuaded Dr. Naqvi to allow him to take a look at the body, dearly wished he would shut up. His conversation would have been tedious at the best of times and Puri didn’t have much time. He’d passed Inspector Gujar in the corridor outside the “morgue,” and if he was discovered illegally examining the body, the police wallah could make his life difficult. Besides, if there was one thing the detective was averse to (apart from flying, working with Mummy and having to deal with Mrs. Col. P. V. S. Gill, Retd., at the Gymkhana Club), it was spending time around dead bodies. There were four more lying uncovered on the floor, and the stink of formaldehyde and the sight of all the surgical instruments, which looked like they belonged in a Spanish inquisitor’s torture kit, was making him light-headed.

Puri remained scrupulously punctilious in his manner, however. Naqvi was under no obligation to help him. And as a doctor he commanded respect.

“You’re certain it was foul play, sir?” asked the detective, who was holding his handkerchief over his mouth.

“I didn’t get you,” said Dr. Naqvi.

Puri lowered the handkerchief slightly and repeated the question.

“Oh, without doubt,” came the reply. “Any first-year medical student could tell you that. This unfortunate lady met with a frightful end. She was shot through the head. Would you like to see?”

“W-well … I suppose,” stuttered Puri.

Taking this as a yes, the doctor promptly pulled back the sheet to reveal her face. Puri grimaced to see the ashen skin, the color drained from it as assuredly as life had left the body. The eyes, glassy and vacuous, were fixed on a point far beyond the confines of the hospital theater. Yet somehow her mouth remained contorted in a silent, terrified scream, and her brow was fixed in a questioning frown that spoke less of terror than bewilderment.