‘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.
21
IN THE DYING LIGHT of the day, in front of Hanamkonda Police Station, by a black Rajdoot, Inspector Nagarajan and Hamid Pasha shook hands.
‘The net is cast for tomorrow,’ said the Inspector.
‘Good, miyan. Good. Are you going to stay true to the bargain you offered the brothers? That you would let them go if they led you to the peddlars?’
‘I have not yet decided. But thank you—once again.’
Hamid Pasha beamed. ‘No, miyan, thank you. Life becomes so monotonous without these things. It is regrettable that they happen, of course, but sometimes, when they do, a small part of you is thankful. The mind
goes numb when one does nothing but chop vegetables for one’s begum all day, miyan.’
Nagarajan said, ‘What is going to happen with the doctor and his wife?’
‘Oh, nothing. I had a small conversation with them before we left. I think they will be just fine. They will be getting out of the house soon, which is the best thing that can happen to them, I think. There is a little bit of hurt, I think, especially on the doctor’s part, because his wife did not trust him enough to tell him what was going on, but that is quite common, is it not, miyan? Women never tell us what is going on.’
‘And the servants?’
‘Oh, the servants will stay as long as there is someone at the house. Even if you did take Venkataramana and Raja into custody, there would always be someone at the house to serve the new inhabitants, hain? Even if you arrested all the men in the house, I suppose the women would still stay on.’
Nagarajan nodded. Then he said, ‘Listen, if I came across this afternoon as a little too sure of myself—’
‘Oh, miyan, none of that between us. I think we were both solving different problems right from the start. For me, Venkataramana’s fields and his property held no interest whatsoever, whereas for you that took up all your time. I gave more importance to the small details while you followed up, in your usual diligent fashion, on the big ones. You took care of all the surrounding mysteries, which made my path very clear. So do not underestimate your value, miyan. You are invaluable, masha Allah.’
‘It has been a long day for you, Hamid bhai. Shall I drop you to your place?’
‘Oh, no, miyan,’ said Hamid Pasha. ‘I will take an auto. I do not want you to be sucked alive by the mosquitoes that devour us at home. As for me, I am used to it now. They seem to me almost like love-bites, you know.’
‘Are you sure you’ll manage?’
Hamid Pasha stepped aside and signalled to an auto, waving his other arm back at the Inspector. After a little haggling he got into the vehicle. Nagarajan followed him and placed a fifty-rupee note in the auto-driver’s hands. He removed his cap and leant so he could see the old man better.
‘Goodbye, Hamid bhai. Until next time.’
‘Khuda hafeez, miyan. And next time, make sure you do not come to me as a messenger of death. Hain?’
Nagarajan took a step back, and the auto whirled around to join the traffic. Soon it disappeared, heading towards Chowrastha. Nagarajan stood there looking after it for a while, then turned and walked back into his station.
Banquet on the Dead Page 23
