The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star

by Vaseem Khan

  Chopra had seen many such “void patterns” at crime scenes, and had learned never to ignore the message they conveyed.

  He took out his phone and dialled Greta Rodrigues, Vicky Verma’s PA.

  “Greta, I want you to think carefully back to the day of the kidnapping. Place yourself in the room below the stage. There is an alcove to the right of the trapdoor. There was something inside the alcove. Something large. What was it?”

  A silence drifted down the line.

  “You said that when Vicky dropped into the room he had to change costumes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where were those costumes kept?”

  “In a chest, of course… Oh, yes!” she exclaimed. “You are right! That was where Vicky’s costume chest was. The porters had brought it in earlier. It was a large wooden one, with brass fittings, very expensive.”

  “Was it still there after Vicky went missing? Think carefully now.”

  He could picture Greta biting her lip, and then she answered, hesitantly this time, “No. I don’t think it was. At least, I don’t remember it. I simply assumed the porters had collected it.”

  Chopra turned to Saigal. “I must question the staff. Someone must have seen something.”

  Chopra spent the next two hours individually quizzing everyone who had been on duty the night of Vicky’s disappearance.

  It took him until the seventh interviewee to make a breakthrough.

  A guard named Madhav Holkar claimed that he had been coming out of a toilet in a backstage corridor—a corridor that led out to the delivery car park—when he had seen a man in a porter’s uniform wheeling a large chest. The man had been tall, copper-skinned, wearing an Islamic prayer cap, and sporting a thin red beard, the kind that Hajjis wore—those returned from Mecca. The man smelled strongly of ittar—the alcohol-free perfume some Muslims favoured. Holkar had never seen the man before but had had no reason to stop him. Porters were constantly coming and going.

  Chopra pulled out his notebook. Greta Rodrigues had seen a porter matching this description on the night of the disappearance.

  “Do you have CCTV in the delivery car park?” he asked Saigal.

  “Yes. We have a camera covering the rear door into the stadium.”

  “I need to review the footage of the night Vicky disappeared.”

  Half an hour later Chopra found what he was looking for: the red-bearded man wheeling out his loaded hand truck into the car park. Unfortunately, the CCTV didn’t cover the car park itself so Chopra couldn’t see the vehicle that he’d loaded the chest into.

  Next Chopra went back through the footage until he found the kidnapper making his entry into the stadium, wheeling an empty hand truck. The timestamp on the video said 21:42. At that time Vicky had been onstage, fifteen minutes away from his abduction.

  Chopra cycled between the two images of the man entering the stadium and leaving, trying to memorise his appearance. Something began to nag at him, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Something about the doorframe…

  “Do you log in the deliveries?” he asked Saigal, eventually.

  “Of course.”

  In the car park he discovered that a veteran security guard named Pancholi had been on duty that evening. Pancholi was a large man with an unshaven chin and a pugnacious manner. He chewed betel nut incessantly and spat it in all directions. A tide of red stains lapped against his guard hut.

  He immediately became defensive when he realised why Chopra was there. At first he refused to hand over his logbook. When Saigal ordered him to do so, he flung it over with bad grace.

  Chopra ran a finger down the entries for that evening, trying to find a name that might match the description of the mysterious porter. There were quite a number of comings and goings that night, as might be expected for a major event. But none of the names felt right. He did not suppose that the kidnapper would have been foolish enough to give his real name but, in Chopra’s experience, criminals lacked imagination when selecting aliases—they rarely moved far from the familiar.

  “Do you note down every single visitor?”

  Pancholi blinked, then spat another mouthful of betel nut on the ground. It splashed near Ganesha’s foot, who shuffled hurriedly back. “Every single one.”

  Chopra turned to Pancholi’s partner in the car park, a thin man who looked barely out of his teens. His uniform hung off him and his Adam’s apple bobbed nervously.

  “Do you note every single visitor?” Chopra repeated.

  The boy, whose name was Khedekar, gulped, and looked at Pancholi.

  “Answer the question!” roared Saigal suddenly.

  “No, sir!” blurted Khedekar. “Sometimes, Pancholi Sir just waves them through.”

  “And why would he do that?” said Saigal menacingly.

  “Sir, because we were watching the cricket.”

  Chopra grimaced. Quickly, he described the red-bearded man. “Do either of you remember this man? Do you remember him leaving? The vehicle he was in?”

  “No.” Pancholi glared at Chopra. Khedekar hung his head.

  Chopra turned away. So… an unknown delivery man had entered the stadium and later left with Vicky Verma’s costume chest.

  He was beginning to understand.

  The kidnappers had kept things simple. A single kidnapper posing as a porter had snuck into the stadium, taking advantage of the chaos on concert night. He had entered the dressing room beneath the stage at about the time Vicky had dropped down to change costumes. He had overpowered the actor, striking him on the head with—presumably—a blunt object as Vicky bent over his costume chest, and then bundled him into that same chest, which he had then calmly wheeled out of the stadium.

  In order for this plan to work the kidnappers would have needed a combination of good fortune, a criminally lackadaisical approach to security around Vicky—but there was nothing unusual about that in India—and access to critical information, such as the exact time that Vicky was due to descend from the stage. He wondered what would have happened if Greta Rodrigues had not gone to use the washroom. Presumably she would have been incapacitated as well, possibly even kidnapped along with Vicky. Chopra did not doubt that the kidnapper had come prepared for such an eventuality.

  A fleeting shadow passed across his features as he considered the possibility that Greta was involved. After all, she had access to the very information that such a plan required to succeed. And it was indeed convenient that she had chosen to step away at the exact time that the kidnapping had taken place… Was Greta Rodrigues the inside woman?

  Chopra had no evidence to back up such a suspicion, but he felt this was an avenue he would need to investigate further. Then again, Greta’s description of the red-bearded stranger she had seen that evening had now been corroborated by an independent witness, and by CCTV footage. If she had been involved in the crime, why would she have told Chopra about him?

  Chopra reached into his pocket and took out the broken chain bracelet Ganesha had discovered in the alcove.

  He thought he understood what had happened.

  The costume chest had been inside the alcove. The kidnapper had been wearing the bracelet. When he had tried to move the chest he had scraped the bracelet against the wall, breaking the clasp. In the urgency of the kidnapping he had failed to notice that it had fallen from his wrist.

  Chopra allowed himself a grim smile.

  This was the vital clue, the breakthrough that he needed.

  RANGWALLA DRESSES FOR THE OCCASION

  Sub-Inspector Rangwalla (Retd) had been in many hairy scrapes during his time on the force. He had crawled, in turgid horror, through Mumbai’s infernal sewers in pursuit of criminals; he had confronted a rampant leopard terrorising a hall full of pensioners from the Old is Gold Society, and concluded that he would rather tackle a herd of wild cats singlehandedly than ever again be harangued by the doyennes of that hallowed institution; he had been present at innumerable violent encounters with thugs and gangsters,
surviving only by his steadfast commitment to the cause of his own self-preservation… yet he could not recall an occasion that had left him more petrified than this moment.

  As he examined his reflection in the full-length mirror inside a tiny dressing room in the Red Fort, he couldn’t help but think that he had fallen through a crack in reality, into some otherworldly realm where his worst nightmare had come to pass.

  From the mirror a grisly apparition stared back at him.

  He was dressed in a magnificent purple sari with a tasselled hem. A wig gave him a luxurious plaited pigtail that fell all the way to his waist. Bright lipstick adorned his lips, while earrings and a nose ring decorated his face. Kohl rimmed his eyes. But the icing on this heinous cake, the crowning insult to the Rangwalla ego, was his beard.

  Or rather the absence of it.

  As hirsute as many of the city’s eunuchs were, a full-fledged beard would not have gone with the disguise Rangwalla had reluctantly adopted.

  As he stared forlornly at his dark, pockmarked cheeks, he felt strangely denuded.

  He wondered, once again, if he was mad.

  The door opened behind him.

  “Hmm,” said Anarkali, folding her arms and running her eyes up and down his costumed height. “Truly, Rangwalla, you are a rare flower from the Ganges delta.”

  “I suppose you think this is funny?” muttered Rangwalla.

  Anarkali smiled. “This was your idea, not mine. Come now, the Queen is waiting.”

  In the Queen of Mysore’s chamber Rangwalla waited as she regarded him at length.

  “Well,” said the Queen finally, “I am glad you are not one of my girls. I don’t think I’d get a handful of mung lentils for your services.”

  Rangwalla glowered as the Queen bubbled away on her hookah, a slow smile splitting her coarse features. “The other girls will not know who you are. We cannot take the risk that they will give the game away.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you?” said the Queen, her eyes narrowing. “You have not lived this life. You have no idea what we must endure. But perhaps you will learn. They say that the path to true wisdom lies through a field of broken glass, Rangwalla. If so, you have a very large field ahead of you.”

  A knock on the door interrupted them. A breathless eunuch entered. “The limousine is here, Maharani Bibi!”

  A group of eunuchs had gathered around the vehicle, talking animatedly and teasing the driver, a short potbellied man in a white uniform and peaked cap. They bombarded him with questions that he resolutely shrugged aside.

  Then the door to the Red Fort swung back and the four ornately dressed eunuchs selected by the Queen to attend the mysterious summons sauntered out to catcalls and good-natured hoots of derision.

  The eunuchs exchanged lewd jokes with their friends before disappearing one by one into the cavernous interior of the limousine.

  Rangwalla felt a push in the back. “Go on,” Anarkali hissed in his ear.

  The former policeman’s feet were encased in lead. A clammy sweat had broken out on his forehead. What the hell was he doing?

  “The Queen is watching,” said Anarkali, her voice dropping several octaves.

  Dragging his feet Rangwalla made his way to the vehicle.

  Just before he ducked inside he took one last look at the world of common sense and reality that he was leaving. Then he slipped into the limousine, and the driver slammed the door shut behind him.

  MIRA ROAD MYSTERY

  The locality of Naya Nagar in Mira Road lay some fifteen kilometres north of Chopra’s own home in Andheri East, a satellite suburb of the ever-growing metropolis, bounded on one side by the Sanjay Gandhi National Park and on the other by the relatively unpopulated Uttan coastal district.

  An enclave of largely Muslim residents, Naya Nagar enjoyed a boisterous reputation, one that Chopra had yet to experience first hand. He had never come to this particular part of the city, and it took a while for him to find his bearings.

  He finally located Ghazalbhai Jewellers on a short street named Pathli Gully.

  The road was exceedingly narrow—indeed, as Chopra slid his van to a halt he could see a bullock-cart owner and a rickshaw-van driver engaged in a heated argument over right of way. The argument had been going on for some time, judging from the way local residents had pulled up chairs and were sipping glasses of tea as they commented on the merits of each combatant’s position.

  Chopra abandoned his van, extricated Ganesha from the rear, and set off on foot.

  He paused at a barber’s shop to ask directions. The shop was besieged, not by customers but by locals watching the cricket on the shop’s tiny television set. Every time India’s premier batsman Sachin Tendulkar hit another four everyone would cheer, and the barber, holding a strop razor, would swing his head around. His client, with a froth of shaving foam around his chin, would also swing about, risking slashing his own throat.

  Ghazalbhai Jewellers was at the very end of the street.

  This was the second time he had been inside a jewellery store in the past few weeks but the contrast could not be greater. The last occasion had been an emporium catering to the rich, a palace of glitz and glitter. This time he was in the type of hole-in-the-wall store found in every mercantile quarter in the country, a family-owned business run by craftsmen who had forgotten more about the art of jewellery making than any of the chain-store tycoons had ever known. In India, families became connected to their jeweller over generations. The jeweller was there for every major occasion: births, celebrations, marriages, even death. Jewellery was passed from mother to daughter, from father to son. Each piece had its own story to tell, and the jeweller sat at the very centre of this vast web of familial intrigue, a magnet for gossip and news.

  In the store an old man with a white beard and a prayer cap was peering down at a glittering necklace on a velvet swatch spread over the counter. He looked up as Chopra entered, peering at him myopically through a loupe wedged into his right eye. Beside the man a youth in an astrakhan cap was staring raptly at a young girl trying on a succession of gold bracelets. The girl’s mother, a leathery dragon, glared at the boy. “Put your eyes back in your head,” she snapped. “Just because you were friends in school doesn’t mean you can get fresh with my daughter.”

  The boy coloured.

  “Mother,” said the girl, also blushing.

  Her mother grabbed her by the arm and dragged her away. “Come on! I don’t want that goonda ogling us.”

  Us? Chopra doubted that the boy had been ogling the mother.

  “But what about the bracelet?” protested the boy.

  “Hah, I wouldn’t buy a bracelet from you if it was the last one on earth.”

  “But she is still wearing it!” he cried desperately.

  The woman appeared not to hear. She stormed from the shop, leaving the boy to look pleadingly at his father.

  “Don’t worry, son,” said the old man mildly. “When she calms down she will be back. She is one of my oldest customers.” He turned back to Chopra. “How may I help you, sir?”

  Chopra reached into his pocket and brought forth the bracelet. “Did you make this?”

  The old man took the piece and examined it through his loupe. “Why, yes,” he said. “I made this for Aaliya, Aaliya Ghazi, old Mansoor’s daughter. I believe she had it commissioned for her cousin. He recently arrived in the city, to offer support following the death of her mother.”

  “Aaliya’s mother is dead?”

  “Yes. She passed away six months ago. She was a good woman.”

  “What is this cousin’s name?”

  “I think she said his name was Ali, if I remember rightly.” He scratched his chin. “Frankly, it was all a little puzzling. I’ve known that girl since she was an infant. She’s never mentioned a cousin before. She told me that this Ali left the city when she was a child—before she and her mother moved into this area, together with that deadbeat father of hers—and has only now returne
d. He is the closest thing to a brother she has, hence the inscription.”

  Chopra felt his pulse quicken. “Where can I find this Ali?”

  The jeweller stared at Chopra. “How did you come by this? And what is your interest in Aaliya?”

  Chopra hesitated, then decided to tell something akin to the truth. “My name is Inspector Chopra, and I am following up a lead in a recent crime, the details of which I cannot reveal.”

  “Aaliya involved in a crime?” The old man laughed, and handed the bracelet back. “That girl has the sweetest disposition of anyone I’ve ever known. The day she’s implicated in a crime is the day I’ll lie down in my own grave. Of course, I’ve never met this Ali, so I cannot vouch for him. Aaliya lives close by. Why don’t you talk to her?”

  Chopra noted the address, and thanked the man.

  The house was small, at the far end of a badly lit lane of similar homes, with thin plank-board walls, tin roofs, worm-eaten window frames, and plywood doors gnarled by sun and monsoon rain. A kerosene lantern lit the sagging porch. On the porch a broken water pot squatted beside a much-abused bicycle. A lizard scuttled away as Chopra approached.

  “Hullo!” he shouted, announcing his presence.

  Nothing.

  He poked the door, and discovered that it was unlocked.

  Chopra stepped inside, into a cramped living room set up with a small TV, a kitchen area, and a single battered sofa upon which a large man was splayed, his big belly rising up and down as snores emanated from his robust frame. A hairy-knuckled hand dangled on the floor. Beside it a bottle of unlabelled liquor rolled around, pushed back and forth by a trio of squabbling mice.