The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook

by Nury Vittachi

  ‘Amazing colours,’ said Joyce, staring at the neon-vivid curries on the table. ‘Like, totally psychedelic.’

  She put a tiny portion of each one on her plate and tried to guess what they were. She particularly relished some soft lumps presented in a creamy, lemon-yellow sauce.

  ‘That is a humble potato.’ Sinha was filled with pride. ‘What a bland and uninteresting vegetable the potato is. No taste, no texture and no visual appeal. Yet curry a potato in the correct sauces and it becomes a succulent, delicious, melt-in-the-mouth treat which is perfect, pressed gently into basmati.’

  ‘Mm-mm. How’d you make it?’

  ‘Easy. You simply curry the potato with red onion, dhania powder, mango powder, garam masala, sugar, ginger, jira, dhania, tomatoes, chilli, curry leaves, fennel, all that sort of thing, and gently simmer it for a long time. It turns into what we call a white curry.’

  ‘But it’s yellow.’

  He was momentarily taken aback. ‘We mean white in a metaphorical sense. It has an extremely subtle taste. A white taste.’

  His eyes went out of focus again. ‘In all parts of India, the potato is revered. In Hindi—and also in Oriya and Punjabi, we call it aloo—that’s the name you’ll see on the menu at Indian restaurants around the world. In Malayalam and Tamil, they talk of urula kizangu. In Bengal, they celebrate the gal alu, while the people who speak Telungu talk of the alu gaddalu. The names have one root, but many rich associations. So many titles for one vegetable.’

  ‘And French fries. And chips. Those are names for potatoes.’

  ‘They are? I often wondered what they made those disgusting things out of. Poisonous, I believe.’ He pressed a lump of potato with his fingertips into the rice and expertly turned it into a little ball that he lifted to his lips. ‘Can you guess what the other dishes are?’

  ‘This one’s like lentil soup?’ Joyce offered.

  He nodded. ‘Sambar. We call it sambar.’

  ‘And this is okra?’

  ‘More commonly known here as bhindi or lady’s fingers.’

  Joyce correctly identified the chicken dish and a fish dish, but was baffled by a lumpy, dark brown meat which was rather too chewy for her taste.

  ‘Beef?’

  ‘Certainly not. This is India. Hindus cannot eat beef. Although many historians believe that the real reasons for the non-consumption of our bovine brothers and sisters were actually more practical than religious. In the fifth century, the number of cows in India was diminishing fast, and it was decreed that the value of a live cow, as an active year-after-year producer of ghee and so on, was far more than the value of a dead cow, as a short-term meal of beef.’

  ‘Is it lamb?’

  Sinha shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know, then. Is it something rare?’

  ‘Rare in Singaporean restaurants, yes.’

  ‘Crocodile? Tiger? Elephant?’

  He shook his head again.

  ‘I give up. It’s an unidentifiable meatal substance. Hippo? Rhino? Ostrich?’

  Sinha smiled. ‘You would call it goat. We call it mutton.’

  ‘I thought mutton came from sheep?’

  ‘In the West, I believe mutton does refer mainly to sheep. But in most of Asia, sheep and goats are considered brethren. In Chinese, I believe they say yeung for both. Correct?’

  They looked at Wong, but he sat glazed, out of the conversation. He had not made a move to touch any of the food Sinha had piled onto his plate. Indeed, he seemed reluctant to even look at it, as he sat half-turned, staring out of the window.

  The Indian astrologer gestured at the mutton. ‘Oh come on, try a little yeung, Wong. Or “unidentifiable meatal substance”, as Joyce calls it.’

  Sinha dipped his fingers into the lemon-water bowl, wiped them carefully with a serviette, and placed them under his chin. Joyce correctly surmised that he had paused to make another speech.

  ‘The question is often asked by visitors to India—often, I say, but in truth it is probably not asked as often as it should be, visitors being too likely to accept what they are told without even a modicum of intelligent curiosity these days— anyway, a question which should often be asked is this: why is it that a largely vegetarian country can produce such fine meat dishes?’

  She sat tight, knowing he would provide his own answer.

  ‘The answer is this. In the period known as the Vedic times, which ran from three-and-a-half to about two-and-a-half thousand years ago, long before your Western spiritual man Jesus Christ was even born, our communities had a thriving and active religious life. The priestly castes energetically sacrificed animals to the gods, and then ate what was left over, so as not to waste it. So there were meat-eaters here for a long time. But then we saw the rise of Buddhism and Jainism —movements which were against any sort of violence to any sort of sentient being (movements which presaged your Western animal liberation groups by millennia). So then, in the fifth century BC, India became the largest vegetarian nation in the world—as it remains today. Because we ate only vegetables, we developed a wonderful range of sauces and creams to enliven them.’

  He pointed to a creamy, pale-brown dish. ‘But to me, it was the Muslim influence that turned an interesting vegetarian cuisine into the most varied and flavoursome in the world. Arabs visiting India cooked the barbecued meats from the Middle East in the rich sauces and gravies that were common in Indian food. The result was Mughlai cuisine. The final touch: To the cream and ghee of Indian food were added spices, cashews, raisins and almonds. We ended up with meat in rich gravies adorned with aromatic spices and nuts. It was enchantment on a plate. The British fell in love with Indian food and took their addiction back home and it spread round the world. Today, anywhere around the world, just the aroma of an Indian meal instantly fires up the most jaded appetite. It never fails.’

  A glance at the feng shui master suggested that this last point was not entirely accurate. Wong remained statue-still in front of his untouched plate, his eyes closed and his brow wrinkled with pain.

  The others moved on to dessert.

  Sinha remained in lecturing mode, although he ate at good speed as he spoke. ‘The entire concept of dessert, as you know, came from the Arabic world.’

  ‘It did?’ Joyce asked absently, her mouth full of kulfi.

  ‘Of course. Where do you think it came from?’

  ‘Dunno. Häagen-Dazs?’

  ‘The Arabs came to India and to China, and demonstrated their techniques of crushing almonds and rice, and then sweetening the resultant paste with sugar. Lastly, they added a touch of rose water for scent. The result was the first dessert.’

  Suddenly Joyce dropped her spoon onto her plate.

  ‘I’ve got it.’

  Wong, his attention caught by the clang of the teenager’s cutlery hitting the plate, looked up. ‘You got Delhi belly too?’

  ‘No. I know what killed that Jacob guy.’

  Sinha said: ‘We know what killed him. A bomb killed him.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Joyce. ‘But I know what the bomb was in. And I bet I know what job he did too.’

  Wong opened his eyes. ‘Tell.’

  ‘He was a spammer. Sitting there with all those computers. And servers. Getting killed by a tin of unidentifiable meat. Remember Subhash said that there were traces of meat?’

  The others looked blankly at her.

  ‘The munitions guy. They found traces of unidentifiable meat and a small tin. He was a spammer so someone killed him with a tin of Spam. With a bomb in it. Get it?’

  Sinha and Wong looked at each other for aid in comprehension, but found no help.

  Joyce raced off to the phone to call Inspector Muktul Gupta.

  ‘She appears to be suggesting some sort of cannibal act?’ asked Sinha.

  ‘Cannibal?’

  ‘He was a Spammer and was killed by a tin of Spammer meat, she said. Where do Spammers come from?’

  ‘Spam?’ mused Wong, his forehead wrinkled in thought. �
�Is a country in Europe. I think.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sinha. ‘Now I understand. We call them “Spaniards” here.’

  The curious thing about Mahadevan Jacob’s office was that it had good, powerful, natural feng shui, every trace of which had been emasculated by bad design. Had an expert in feng shui or a practitioner of Indian vaastu inspected the original location, he would have given it a thumbs-up. It was a light, bright, pleasant office, east-facing, comfortably proportioned, and had a good view of the Pallakiri main road and a small canal running to the east of the town.

  But the view had been removed and the light turned into a grey glow by cheap, plastic film coating all the windows. The office furniture, clearly obtained second-hand, was all mismatched in style, size and design. The wiring of the various computers had taken priority, as literally dozens of charred cables could be seen lying under the remnants of the desks, chairs and computer equipment.

  Wong and McQuinnie spent most of their second day in Andhra Pradesh painstakingly tracing each cable to its destination. Many of them went to a switching box in a locked cabinet to the left of the front door of Unit C. But there were a number of thick wires that appeared to be out of place. Particularly confusing was a bundle that simply disappeared into a tiny hole in the wall between Data Storage Systems Ltd and Lakshmi Sachdev’s office next door.

  ‘Maybe this is ghost,’ Wong said.

  Meanwhile, Inspector Muktul Gupta had immediately followed up Joyce’s suggestion that the victim was a specialist in junk email killed by a booby-trapped tin of Spam—and it led him to a host of answers that neatly filled several gaps in his knowledge. Given a lead by police, local reporters had managed to ferret out more of the facts. By the third morning of their visit, the results were evident in the write-ups in the local papers.

  MURDER VICTIM MAHADEVAN JACOB WAS THE SPAM KING OF HYDERABAD, the Deccan Chronicle reported that day. He had sent out millions of items of junk email over the past year. He had clogged up the email accounts of unimaginable numbers of people with unwelcome exhortations to buy software, purchase lawnmowers, improve their sex lives, embark on new diets, put their savings into investment plans and so on.

  And he had done a lot of it using other people’s equipment. The I.P. addresses he had been using were eventually traced to their real origins. Yes, many came from the third floor of the Bodwali Building in the town of Pallakiri, as the police had confirmed from the I.P.-trace. But only one of them came from the offices of Data Storage Solutions. The others came from the servers of the other tenants of that floor: Sachdev Imported Fineries Ltd and Bharat Golden Investments Co. Ltd.

  Mahadevan Jacob had quietly hacked into the computers of everyone he knew who had an Internet connection of reasonable bandwidth (and a penetrable firewall) and employed them, without their knowledge, to help him send out literally millions of junk email items.

  By lunchtime that day, technicians from the Internet service providers had visited the building, and the ghost had been exorcised—or so Sinha said.

  ‘Not exorcised,’ Joyce corrected him. ‘Deleted.’

  The Hyderabad job had been quick and easy. A report was filed with the police and the task was complete. A final meeting was held in the management office of the Bodwali Building. The representative of owner Nawal Kishore was an elderly man named Sharrifudin Azam. ‘T’ank you,’ the old man said, bowing.

  Inspector Muktul Gupta was also grateful. ‘Yes, many, many thanks,’ he said. ‘You have been most helpful.’

  There was a knock at the door.

  It opened from the outside before anyone could reach it and a small, wizened man with sun-roasted skin wandered in. He had a wide grin revealing several gaps in his teeth, and he wore a baseball cap with the slogan I have a big brian.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, cheerfully, tilting his head to one side. ‘Are you crack investigation team being mentioned in Chronicle, investigating death of late Mr Mahadevan Jacob, deceased former Spam King of Hyderabad?’

  ‘He is boss,’ said Wong, pointing to the police officer.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ Inspector Gupta said, thrusting out his chest.

  ‘I am Himanshu Mukherjee. I was merely wanting to express my very-very great delight at how all this turned out.’

  The officer gave a short bow. ‘Our investigation is proceeding at good speed. Thank you.’

  A thought occurred to him. ‘Are you a journalist?’ He pronounced it jarnalist. ‘Are you looking for official statement? Because if so, I cannot be giving you one. Contact with press is all centralised these days. But I can give you the number of our press off —’

  ‘No, I’m not press,’ Mr Mukherjee said. ‘I am not a jarnalist. I am murderer. I killed Mahadevan Jacob. I sent him tin of meat with bomb in it. Spam. Mentioned in paper.’

  Joyce gasped. A confession—live, at the scene of the crime. And they were right there, witnessing it.

  ‘Cool,’ she said. ‘Does that like so neatly wrap it up or what?’ She theatrically clapped the dust off her hands.

  A junior police officer poked his head around the door. ‘Inspector, can I have a word?’

  ‘Just a minute, Nitish,’ Gupta said. ‘Important business is happening here.’

  ‘Quick interruption only,’ the young officer said. ‘Also important.’

  Gupta looked sternly at the youthful sergeant. ‘The man in front of me, Mr —’

  ‘Himanshu Mukherjee,’ said the confessor.

  ‘Thank you. Mr Mukherjee has just confessed to the murder of Mahadevan Jacob. I will be needing to take a statement, as you can imagine.’

  The officer at the door nodded. ‘Yes, sir. There’s a woman at the front desk, sir. She has also confessed to murder of Mahadevan Jacob. There may be bit of a row about who actually did it.’

  Wong and McQuinnie were talking in a taxi on the way back to the hotel to collect their bags. The air-conditioner in the vehicle was not working, the car was stuck in a rush-hour gridlock, and they felt trapped in an inferno.

  Wong had wanted to get away as quickly as possible, worried that unpaid extra work might be coming their way. ‘So they have two confessions. Not our problem. Their problem. They are police. They can deal with it. We cannot. This is not feng shui work. This is police work. We go now.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Joyce did not want to argue with Wong. Yet she was dying to find out who had actually done it. Especially since the person at the desk was a young woman—only in her twenties. Was there another story there? Perhaps the murder had been some sort of love triangle? Perhaps the woman and the man had done it together? Still, their plane left that evening. No doubt Gupta could be persuaded to keep them informed about what happened. After all, a senior police officer from Hyderabad must have basic email skills.

  Then she remembered that Sinha had once told her that legal cases in India often dragged on for years or decades, so perhaps they wouldn’t find out the conclusion of the case for a long time, if ever. It was all rather unsatisfying, but what could they do? There was nothing for it, but to head home.

  The car eventually arrived at the driveway of the hotel. ‘Yeah, I’m ready,’ Joyce said. ‘Let’s go. Maybe I’ll just make a phone call or two while you’re packing.’ She had Subhash’s phone number in a notebook in her bag and remembered how his big, soulful dark-rimmed eyes had stared into hers.

  Three-quarters of an hour later, McQuinnie was standing in a queue in the lobby of the Roomy Inn. Subhash Reddy was standing next to her, keeping her company in her final hours in India. They were laughing together at nothing in particular.

  Dilip Kenneth Sinha marched into the hotel.

  ‘Hi, DK,’ said Joyce. ‘You packed?’

  ‘I am not,’ the elegant astrologer said. ‘The investigation has taken a somewhat unexpected turn. I need to speak to Wong.’

  She called to her employer. ‘CF! You’d better come here.’

  Wong, who lay on a couch rubbing his stomach, not having eaten anything but a sin
gle bowl of plain rice in two days, looked up unhappily.

  The young woman turned to Sinha. ‘He doesn’t look too good. Maybe we’d better go to him.’

  The three of them abandoned their place in the checkout queue and sat down on the lobby sofas opposite the feng shui master.

  ‘So who was it?’ Joyce asked Sinha. ‘The weird toothy guy? Or the girl?’

  ‘Who knows?’ the Indian said. ‘It may have been one of them. Or it may have been someone else. While I was standing there with Gupta, six more people confessed to the murder.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard correctly. Six more people have confessed to the murder. And as I was leaving the station, there were more people heading up the stairs. I suspect the number will have grown by now.’

  Wong opened his eyes. He said: ‘So now are eight people who say they put bomb in tin of Spaniard meat?’

  ‘At least.’

  ‘Weird,’ Joyce said. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It means that we are not getting on the plane,’ Sinha said.

  Inspector Muktul Gupta was thrilled to see them back. ‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘This has never, never happened to me before. I am really most needful of your help in a very-very bad way.’

  Joyce was about to make some quip about too many murderers spoiling the broth, but she looked back at the long queue of people lining up to be interviewed and decided that it might not be funny.

  ‘How many so far?’ asked Sinha.

  ‘We took statements from the first thirteen who confessed to the murder. Then, to speed things up a bit, we photocopied a murder confession and got people to sign it. About twenty-eight have signed that version. Judging by the queue out there, we’ve got another thirty to thirty-five to go.’

  ‘How many will that make altogether?’