Banquet on the Dead

by Sharath Komarraju

  ‘Still, a riskier option than doing her away in a quiet place.’

  ‘Definitely. But if we grant that it is not as risky as we first thought it was, we have to also grant that the murderer is someone who knows the house intimately and the individual habits of the family too. Because both Kamala and Durga have confirmed that it was their siesta time and they usually were not up then.’

  Nagarajan nodded.

  ‘That much we know already. We know that if Kauveramma was murdered—and it seems very likely now—then it had to be one of the people in the house that had committed the crime; either of the family, or the servants. So far, we are on fairly firm ground, then, hain? We have acknowledged that we need to answer the question of “why at the well”, but also grant that for people intimately versed in the ins and outs of the house, it may not have posed too big a risk to kill the old lady at the well. Okay?’

  Nagarajan nodded again, only half-listening to the older man. The fried potatoes that accompanied his basmati rice were cooked just right, and the chef in Nagarajan (who surfaced every now and then when his wife went home to her mother’s place) approved. All he felt towards that waiter now was benevolence, and in the far reaches of his mind he even considered the possibility of leaving him a tip. So Ashoka Hotel was not that bad after all; he made a mental note of the dish. He should remember to order this the next time he got dragged here. He had to memorise the numeral placed alongside the dish on the menu too, just in case they changed the name of the dish or something— these people were always doing that...

  ‘Miyan!’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Miyan, the food is very tasty, hain?’

  ‘Yes, very,’ Inspector Nagarajan eventually responded, shame-faced. If he had a weakness, and he admitted to it freely, it was good food. But work was work. So he nodded primly and said, ‘Yes, solid ground so far, Hamid bhai. Keep going.’

  Hamid Pasha swallowed a gulp of water and began again: ‘Now, let us look at it from Kauveramma’s side for a little while. She is scared of water, we are told. In fact, she is so scared that she has confessed to her grandson that she gets the chills even when she is taking a shower and has to wash her hair. Now what possible thing would lure such a woman to the well? It has got to be a very strong reason, has it not?’

  Pointing his spoon at Hamid Pasha and chewing his food, Nagarajan said, ‘Also, this might be the reason the killer wanted to kill her there—because she is so afraid of water.’

  ‘Ah, you mean it is an act of hatred to kill her in the way she most fears?’

  ‘It is possible, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but I wonder... anyway, we know the killer lured the old lady out to the well, but we need to find out how.’

  ‘Or indeed,’ said Nagarajan, ‘if one person lured her out and another person, who had always wanted to kill her, saw his chance and took it.’

  ‘Ah, miyan, you read too many detective novels.’

  ‘A few,’ Nagarajan admitted.

  ‘I do not think this is a crime that was committed on the spur of the moment, miyan. I think it had been planned—oh, yes, I see planning here: immaculate planning, and someone with an innate sense of timing.’ Hamid Pasha’s voice took on a cold, distant tone. His eyes hardened. ‘And of course, someone with nerves of steel. For it is no easy matter, miyan, to trust yourself to do this sort of thing without being seen; without being caught.’

  ‘Maybe he was seen,’ Nagarajan ventured. ‘We just don’t know who by.’

  ‘Ah.’ Hamid Pasha waved his idea away. ‘That is no good. Now, let us focus again. Let us now talk about the two people who are vital to this case and yet who are out of place in it—Nagesh and Ashok. Remember, miyan, that I said something in this whole mess is out of place, is all wrong. It is these guys. They do not fit!’

  Nagarajan frowned. ‘I thought they were the only people in the story that are not suspects—who are pure witnesses.’

  ‘Oh, I agree with all that, miyan! But let me ask you this—we just established that the person who has killed Kauveramma ought to be someone intimately in the know about things happening at Kauvery Bhavan. Hain?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Then why did this Mister-or-Ms Know-it-all choose to kill the woman on the very day there were—not one, two!—witnesses to the event? They would know that the people working near the compound wall could hear them, so why did they simply not choose the day after or the day before? This was not a spur-of-the- moment murder, remember—the murderer planned it. But why on that day of all days?’

  Nagarajan made to say something, but Hamid Pasha hushed him. ‘And also,’ he said, waving an arm theatrically, ‘another thing that is all wrong about the two accounts are that they did not hear anything apart from the splash’.

  ‘But they heard the woman scream.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Hamid Pasha impatiently. ‘The scream and the splash. Nothing before that or after.’

  Nagarajan allowed a little bit of irritation to creep into his voice. ‘I don’t know what you expected them to hear, Hamid bhai.’

  ‘Well, miyan, I do not expect the old lady to have walked to the well, and silently got toppled into it, without so much as a protest. Remember we postulated that it was hatred that made the killer push her into the well. If that was the case you would expect the killer to let her know that she was dying, and that she was dying at his hands. So some exchange of words should have been there. Hain?’

  ‘I don’t know, Hamid bhai. Maybe there was some exchange of words, who knows?’

  ‘But your men did not report it, hain?’

  ‘I did not question) them specifically on this point.’

  Hamid Pasha’s face contorted—whether in perplexity or in frustration, Nagarajan could not tell. ‘Fine,’ the old man said, visibly controlling himself. ‘So if we have not asked them so far, we will when we meet them next. But if they have not reported anything outside of the scream and the splash, it means they have not heard anything. Hain?’

  ‘Yes, probably not,’ Nagarajan said.

  ‘That is strange. It does not fit, that. It—it—sticks out, you know. Just like the lady’s hands.’

  ‘Which lady’s?’

  Hamid Pasha threw a look of shocked admonishment at Nagarajan. ‘Karuna Mayi’s, miyan. I drew your attention to them when we first met!’

  ‘I—yes, but I did not get what you were hinting at.’

  ‘Well,’ said Hamid Pasha, very slowly and very deliberately, and Nagarajan could tell he was angry. ‘Here is a woman who is supposedly so weak and so crippled with her “illness” that she only does the bare minimum of her chores. And yet her hands are heavily calloused. And so pale, miyan. So pale! Did you not notice her palms?’

  Nagarajan paused and shook his head.

  ‘What did you think I was secretly pointing at her hands for? Because I thought they were beautiful?’

  After another pause, Nagarajan shrugged.

  ‘These are the things that you have to keep a lookout for, miyan, in the first round. Things that should be one way but are not—in fact, they are quite the other way— you know what I am saying, yes?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘And of course, you saw how fit the lady was.’ He looked up at Nagarajan’s blank expression and shook his head sadly. ‘Being healthy is one thing, miyan, being fit is quite another! You saw the lady’s arms, how well-formed they were? You saw her legs, her hips, her body? If it were not for her disease, she would be a very fit woman, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘A disease, as it turns out,’ said Nagarajan, ‘that no doctor can find and no medicine can cure’.

  Hamid Pasha’s eyes twinkled. ‘Quite so. And the doctor suffers from this same disease. It will be interesting, would it not, to find out more about it?’

  Nagarajan signalled to the waiter to clear the plates. He looked around once more and decided that Ashoka Hotel was definitely not as bad a place as he had thought an hour back. A full stomach usually pu
ts things in perspective, he thought. Maybe he would come here again with his wife and have some of those excellent fried potatoes.

  Hamid Pasha said abruptly, ‘There is another thing that bothers me, miyan.’

  Nagarajan eyed him and placed a toothpick in his mouth. He opened the bill wallet, raised a customary brow at the price, and placed a thousand-rupee note in it.

  ‘It is the question of the servant girl’s sister,’ Hamid Pasha said. ‘The husband says the servant girl has a sister; the wife says she doesn’t. The wife thinks the husband is too pre-occupied with his affairs to notice that it was just the servant girl with the border of her sari covering her head. The husband says it is a different girl. Which one is it?’

  ‘I’m more inclined to go with the wife. Venkataramana does not look to me like someone who would notice anything—let alone domestic affairs.’

  Hamid Pasha nodded. ‘And yet—yes, it is yet another of those things. And there is that young man who was loitering about the gate.’

  ‘Oh, that’s quite easy to guess. What Kamala said is quite likely, I’d say.’

  ‘And if it is true, it opens up another line of thought, nahin? Maybe the old lady saw the young lady carry on with this young man, and maybe she even threatened her with—consequences, shall we say. Who knows where that conversation could have led?’

  The waiter came back with the change, placed the wallet on the edge of the table, and stood a few feet away, and Nagarajan could see his one eye fixed on him. Nagarajan made a quick percentage calculation and left him a suitable tip.

  ‘Ah,’ said Hamid Pasha, and slammed his hands on the table. ‘I am frustrated, my friend. Frustrated with so many directions, with so many possibilities, and there are too many stories to keep track of—ah, I hope there is some respite from this, but it is only going to get worse, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nagarajan. ‘We have not yet talked to everyone in the family. Who would you like to meet next?’ He slid out of the chair to his feet and reached for the bowl of peppermint. Hamid Pasha had already popped a handful into his mouth.

  ‘None from the family,’ he said, chewing noisily. ‘I want to meet the servants.’

  13

  WHEN THEY OPENED THE gate and went in, walking by the path up to the fork in it, with one branch leading to the well and one to the house, Hamid Pasha stopped and looked up at the windows facing them. There were ground-floor windows too, Nagarajan noticed, in exactly the same places as the upper floor, but one of the windows was in Raja’s room and the other was in the big living room. Raja hadn’t been home, so it was unlikely anyone would have been behind that window that day to look upon the path. About anyone behind the other window, they did not know.

  They were walking towards the right side of the building which led to the servant’s quarters—in the old house—but Hamid Pasha stopped abruptly and took Nagarajan by the elbow. ‘Come, miyan, someone is at the well.’

  They hurried back up the path and took the way to the well. They crossed the bushes and came upon the clearing to see Koteshwar Rao standing by the edge of the well, looking down into its waters. For a second it seemed to Nagarajan the man was about to jump in, but then he recalled this was a family of swimmers.

  At least the men, he corrected himself.

  The doctor gave no sign of having seen them arrive, neither looking back nor saying anything. For a minute or two they stood behind him, not knowing what to say. Just when Nagarajan was about to lose patience and say something, Koteshwar Rao spoke.

  ‘We used to come here as kids,’ he said. ‘We used to live near Vijaya Talkies, and it is only a short run here—or at least it seemed like a short run back then, when we were young.’

  Nagarajan heard these words and thought they suited a man of fifty, not one of thirty, which was what Koteshwar Rao was. He suddenly realised that he had always thought of Koteshwar Rao as elderly. He had a son aged seven, but he had married early, when he was in his final year of college. But it was the hair. By the time Nagarajan had first met Koteshwar Rao, the latter’s hair had already greyed. Now, in his head of neatly combed, thick hair, one would have to hunt to find a single strand of black hair.

  Maybe it was that, yes, and words such as these, talking about running around and swimming and playing in the old days.

  ‘In summers we used to swim. All of us—Lakshman, Praveen, Krishna, Ram, Swamannayya—he taught us all to swim, right here, in this well. I taught my son to swim in this well too.’ He looked down at the depression on the ground to his left, where the grass was flattened and muddied, as though a big weight had been recently removed. ‘I used to come running from there,’ he looked back along the path, ‘and jump over the roller here and dive into the well’. He looked up at Hamid Pasha with a faint smile. ‘Into the ring provided by a scooter tire.’ After Hamid Pasha’s incredulous look he said, ‘I used to be thinner then.’

  Mild consternation appeared on his face. ‘I don’t know where the diving stone went. I have never known what it was used for, though, but it was always there, somehow. It has always been right here.’ He looked around again, desperate, Nagarajan thought, to cling onto some remnant of a dead past.

  Hamid Pasha limped forward and placed a hand on the doctor’s shoulder.

  ‘You must think I am sentimental, coming here and reminiscing like this. But I have happy memories of this place. I am so glad that it was not me who found her, sir. Even now when I look down at the water I feel like I see her, just as Praveen described it to me, floating face down, with her arms spread out wide, her hair fanning around her head, and I feel dizzy. Just before, when you were standing behind me, I felt I would topple over and fall.’

  Hamid Pasha said softly, ‘Come, my boy.’ And that manner of addressing him did not seem strange at all to Nagarajan, though he would never be able to bring himself to call Koteshwar Rao that. Yet that was all he was compared to Hamid Pasha and himself. He was young enough to be their son. Suddenly, Nagarajan felt old, and he sighed.

  ‘My sister died in this well too,’ said the doctor. ‘I had another sister. Her name was Kiran Mayi. She—she died of fright more than anything else.’ He had taken a step back from the well, but now he peered out at it, like he wanted to see the calm green water again. ‘Swamannayya had told her that our well had snakes—harmless, small snakes, sir. She wanted to swim with us, play in the well with us—she was young, you see. Karuna was already sixteen by then, but Kiran was twelve, our age, almost.’

  He stopped and stared. Lines appeared and changed shape on his smooth features, as emotions surfaced and faded away. Nagarajan could not tell exactly what was going through his mind, but he was recalling events long past, that much was clear. Hamid Pasha said into the silence, ‘Tell us, my boy, how did she die?’

  ‘She was bitten,’ he said, running a hand through his hair. ‘We had seen snakes in the well all the time, sir, and we hoped that one of them would come and bite us. We knew they were non-poisonous, of course. But we were never bitten. She was. And for all her bravado, she went into a fit that day. It was a small, harmless wound—just a flat jaw-mark and a couple of punctures, you know. Requiring nothing more painful than two injections. Swamannayya brought her out of the water, and she had an attack right there. They rushed her to a hospital. Got her out of it that evening, but then she ran a temperature for a few days, had another fit—all psychological, the doctor said—and she slipped away.’

  ‘Hai Allah,’ Hamid Pasha murmured.

  ‘Karuna never forgave Swamannayya for it,’ said Koteshwar Rao quietly, ‘and I don’t think she forgave my grandmother either. She always maintained that they should never have let Kiran take to the water that day. But who can foresee these things, sir?’

  Hamid Pasha asked, ‘And from then on your sister would always be cold towards your uncle and grandmother?’

  Koteshwar Rao nodded. ‘You have to remember she was a young girl as well, just sixteen. In many ways she was the most impressionable of
us all, I would say. Maybe it affected her more than it did all of us—maybe because she remembers more of it than all of us. I—I just remember what my mother tells, and things have come back to me after I have grown older. With Karuna it was not so.’

  ‘I heard your son also had a little—brush—with drowning when he was learning to swim?’

  ‘Who told you about that?’ Koteshwar Rao asked hotly. Then in a mellower voice he said, ‘Don’t misunderstand me, sir, but it is an exaggeration to say that my son had a brush with drowning when I was by his side all the time. We’d just strapped him to an empty barrel and thrown him into the water, but there was a hole in it, and I just dived in and brought him back up. Nothing really happened.’

  ‘And yet people remembered the incident.’ Hamid Pasha paused tactfully. ‘Maybe there was some debate on how the hole—or holes—happened to be there?’

  Pursing his lips, the doctor shook his head. ‘Conspiracy theories abound everywhere. I don’t believe anything without evidence. I would like to ask who would want to kill my son, and even if they did, would they do so in so clumsy a fashion?’

  ‘You are right,’ said Hamid Pasha. ‘It is probably just a theory.’

  ‘It is,’ said Koteshwar Rao. And a hint of stubbornness crept into his voice as he said, ‘We have happy memories of this place. Happy!’

  ‘Miyan,’ Hamid Pasha said slowly, ‘what is Swami saab’s feeling towards Karuna Mayi?’

  Koteshwar Rao sighed, and Nagarajan got the impression of a man who’d been asked to decipher and explain the meaning of existence. ‘Karuna is not an easy person to get along with, sir,’ he said. ‘And I don’t mean just now. She has always been aloof, even as a child. She was never close to any of us—not to my father nor my mother. She was off on her own most of the time.’