by Vaseem Khan
After the peon had left, Sheriwal, still nonchalantly swinging her weapon around, said, “Where is Chopra?”
Rao’s eyes were mesmerised by the gun. “Gouripur Jail.”
“What is he doing there?”
“He is accused of a kidnapping.”
“Kidnapping!” exclaimed Poppy. “But that is preposterous! He is not the kidnapper.”
“He was caught red-handed.”
“Who caught him?”
Rao gulped. “I did.”
Sheriwal brought the gun to bear on him. Rao felt his bowels perform a complicated somersault.
“Get him out.”
“I cannot.”
“You put him there, you can get him out.”
“You don’t understand. I had to enlist certain parties to organise Chopra’s transfer to Gouripur. It was highly… irregular.”
“Then enlist those parties again.”
“It would do no good,” quavered Rao. “Chopra has made powerful enemies. Now that they have him where they want him, they will not release him.”
“You will have to convince them.”
“They won’t listen to me!” wailed Rao. “I am nothing!”
Sheriwal pointed the weapon at Rao’s head.
“I’m telling you I can’t do anything. It’s out of my hands!”
Sheriwal pulled the trigger. Rao gurgled as the chamber clicked empty.
She lowered the gun as he slumped back in his executive chair, bathed in a lather of perspiration.
“You will keep trying,” pronounced Sheriwal. “I will be back tomorrow, and the next day, and each day until Chopra is released. Do you understand?”
Rao nodded dumbly. The woman was a raving lunatic. Why the hell had they let her on to the force?
Sheriwal followed Poppy out of the office. “Your master needs a new pair of trousers,” she informed the peon. Then, turning to Poppy, she said, “Despite my threats this is going to take time. It has gone beyond my reach.”
Poppy was crestfallen. “How can this happen? What kind of country are we living in? My husband is the most honest man I know.”
“I believe you,” said Sheriwal. “Sadly, in our country honesty is like the scent of blood in shark-infested waters.” She glanced at her watch. “I have to go. Don’t lose heart, Mrs. Chopra. I am sure your husband will return. One way or the other,” she added under her breath as she strode away.
THE SECRET OF THE MYSTERIOUS PORTRAIT
The breakfast room was abuzz with conversation when Rangwalla arrived.
For a moment he hovered in the doorway, listening to the eunuchs as they laughed and quarrelled good-naturedly. He found himself dipping in and out of their talk, their concerns and hopes, their dreams and fears. In his short time with them he had learned a great deal about them. For instance, that they were absurdly fond of storytelling, engaging in competitions in the evenings as they ate dinner. “We are fabulists at heart,” Parvati would say pompously. “We like nothing better than to sit around a fire, regaling each other with the most wonderfully tall tales.”
But not everything they recounted was untrue. The day before Mamta had shared a story about how as a young woman she had gone to the temple to pray for an ailing friend. Here she had been prevented from entering by a gang of local youths, pelted with coconuts, and harried away. Rangwalla recalled, with a sense of shame, that he had seen something similar just a month earlier, ruffians harassing a pair of eunuchs who had tried to join the queue for a posh new multiplex cinema where he had taken his children. The ruffians had been aided and abetted by the security guards, who had chased the eunuchs away with lathi sticks. Rangwalla recalled now that those eunuchs had been dressed in their finest clothes, had come along, like any other visitor, to experience the new cinema and enjoy the movie. They had been chased away like dogs, and Rangwalla had done nothing to stop that from happening. Worse, his children had looked on as he had stood by, not sparing a second thought for the distressed eunuchs. Why should they, when their own father, a policeman, did not care?
This thought now filled him with self-recrimination.
Rangwalla finally understood what the eunuchs meant when they talked of their ultimate goal, that of being treated as any other citizens of their country, with the ability to have families and jobs, to visit a cinema or a shopping mall and not be stared at or abused.
It seemed to him strange that he had never considered them in this light before. If he had ever thought of them at all it had been as simply another of the many factions that made Mumbai such a melting pot of intrigue and anarchy. He had known Anarkali for years, but only as a somewhat intimidating presence who occasionally frequented the station, one of many eyes and ears that he cultivated on the streets of the city. He had never dwelled upon what lay beneath her swarthy exterior.
He slipped into a chair beside Mamta, who was crunching loudly on a piece of toast smeared with mango pickle. The big eunuch eyed Rangwalla’s careworn features. “You look like you’ve just entertained a team of kabaddi wrestlers.”
The others guffawed loudly, as Rangwalla scowled. “I didn’t sleep well.”
“If I danced and sang like you, sister, I wouldn’t sleep at all,” said Rupa icily.
“Oh, leave her alone,” said Parvati good-naturedly. “She just needs a little training, that’s all. Why don’t you show her a few steps?”
“Hah!” said Rupa. “Do you think one can fashion the Taj Mahal from a pile of dung? No offence, sister.”
“None taken,” muttered Rangwalla, brushing away a persistent fly from his plate.
“What is troubling you, dear?” asked Parvati. She suddenly belched and covered her mouth. “So sorry! This food seems to disagree with me.”
“Are you sure?” said Mamta. “The way you’ve been eating, I assumed you were getting on like a house on fire.”
Parvati patted her belly. “Well, I wouldn’t want to offend our host. But you are right. If I keep eating like this my clients won’t want me when I return.”
“They don’t want you now,” sniped Rupa.
“I am a tree whose fruit is always ripe,” responded Parvati, smiling broadly.
“Talking of our host,” said Mamta. “Am I the only one who finds those peacocks’ eyes everywhere unsettling? I think our host is watching us quite closely—from behind the walls.”
A momentary silence fell on them as they looked around at the carved wainscoting and peacocks’ tails mural.
“I saw something last night,” said Rangwalla, putting down his spoon. “A woman, singing. I followed her but she disappeared.”
“What do you mean ‘she disappeared?’” said Rupa.
“Did anyone else hear her?” asked Rangwalla, ignoring Rupa.
“I’m afraid I slept like a baby,” said Parvati. “All that singing and dancing was very taxing.”
“I listen to music when I sleep,” declared Rupa. “And if this woman’s singing was anything like yours, sister, I’m very glad I couldn’t hear her.”
“I heard nothing,” declared Mamta. “But I’m a heavy sleeper.”
“You’re heavy full stop,” muttered Rupa. She turned to her left. “What about you, Kavita? Did you hear anything?”
Rangwalla focused his attention on the youngest eunuch. Kavita seemed withdrawn. The day before, she had complied with the requests to sing and dance—and indeed had excelled at both—but had done so as if distracted. He wondered if she, too, was succumbing to the unsettling atmosphere that lay over the haveli. Rangwalla found himself beginning to worry for the girl. And then he began to worry that he kept thinking of her as a girl, rather than a eunuch. The lines were beginning to blur for the former sub-inspector and this too made him deeply uncomfortable.
“No,” said Kavita. “I heard nothing.”
At that moment Premchand materialised in the room.
The munshi’s appearance was, as ever, immaculate. His white kurta and dhoti gleamed, his Nehru jacket was faultless, and hi
s black pillbox hat formed the perfect apex to the fine figure he cut. A fresh tilak had been applied to his forehead, as if he had just returned from the temple.
“Why don’t we ask him?” said Mamta, rising to her feet. She folded her arms and fixed the munshi with a stern look. “We want some answers.”
“I have already told you: the Master is not paying for the privilege of answering your questions.”
“It’s not the Master we want to know about. Sister Sonali here saw something strange last night. A woman wandering around the haveli. Singing.”
Premchand’s face was an impenetrable mask. “Impossible,” he said eventually. “There are no women in the haveli.”
“Does the Master have a wife?” asked Parvati.
“The Master is not married.”
“You, then?”
“Certainly not! I would not dream of soiling myself with a woman.”
“Is that so?” said Mamta, narrowing her eyes.
“I am a Brahmin and a brahmacharya. I have taken a vow of celibacy.”
“That’s a shame,” said Rupa sarcastically. “I could have shown you a thing or two.”
“The woman was singing an old love song,” said Rangwalla.
“Love songs are dangerous,” remarked Parvati. “Why don’t you sing us a few bars, dear?”
“Heaven help us!” muttered Rupa.
Rangwalla realised that he had talked himself into a corner. But he had begun this; he could not back out now. He cleared his throat and began to sing.
“Stop!” said Premchand. A look of alarm had leapt onto his placid features.
“Didn’t I warn you?” said Rupa. “That voice could send the dead running for cover.”
“Do you recognise the song?” asked Mamta, her eyes focused on Premchand. “Does it mean something to you?”
“It—it is a song from the Master’s childhood.” The munshi seemed shaken.
“Could Rangwalla’s mystery woman have been the Master’s mother, then?” asked Parvati.
Premchand shook his head. “No. The Mistress—Thakurani Jaya Rathore—has been dead for many years.”
“What did she look like? This Mistress?” asked Rangwalla, thinking suddenly of the mysterious portrait he had discovered the night before.
“What does that matter?” said Premchand sharply.
Rangwalla hesitated, then said, “Follow me.”
He led the eunuchs and the protesting munshi upstairs, and through the maze of corridors along which he had pursued the mysterious woman the previous night. Arriving in the alcove at last, he paused below the covered painting. Then he swept aside the curtain.
The eunuchs shrank back.
“By Shiva, she is hideous,” exclaimed Rupa.
“Let us not be uncharitable,” said Parvati. “She has a certain charm. In the right light.”
“Yes,” said Rupa. “Pitch black would be best.”
“There’s something evil about her,” declared Mamta, echoing Rangwalla’s own thoughts.
“It’s the eyes. They follow you around,” said Rupa with a shiver.
Rangwalla glanced at Premchand. The old martinet seemed transfixed. “Is this the Master’s mother?” Rangwalla asked.
Finally, Premchand revived. “Yes,” he answered.
“What about the Master’s father?” asked Mamta.
“The old Thakur? He died when the Master was young. The Mistress raised him herself.”
“She ran this estate on her own?” asked Rangwalla, intrigued. Widows in rural India held little status, even the widow of a landowner. The tides of prejudice and precedent would have been set against her from the very beginning.
“She was a formidable person.” The munshi strode forward and covered the painting. “We have a busy schedule.”
“But what about the woman?” persisted Mamta.
“There was no woman. Your colleague is mistaken.”
“No,” said Rangwalla. “I know what I saw. I know what I heard.”
“Perhaps it was a ghost,” said Kavita quietly.
“A ghost?” shivered Rupa. ‘Do you really think so?
“Nonsense,” said Premchand dismissively.
“There was a ghost in my village once,” mused Parvati. “He used to put coconut oil in people’s hair and massage their scalps.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” said Rupa.
“Their scalps were no longer attached to their skulls.”
Rupa shrieked dramatically. “I want to go home,” she wailed.
“You cannot go home,” said Premchand firmly. “You have made an agreement. You will honour it.” He turned and walked away.
“There’s something not right about that man,” muttered Rupa, as the munshi disappeared around a corner.
“There’s something not right about all of this, sister,” said Parvati. “There are old secrets here and they are beginning to smell. But… he is right. We have made an agreement. Come, let us see what surprises the Master has in store for us today.”
THE GREAT ESCAPE
The covered wagon juddered along the rural road as it meandered towards a row of low-slung hills. Beyond the hills, the sky was illuminated by the blood orange of a late-afternoon sun. Ahead, the winding path crested a shallow ridge. And below the ridge lay the sandstone quarry, the quarry in which, Poppy Chopra knew, her husband was toiling under God-only-knew what duress, surrounded by human ghouls.
Since returning from the meeting with ACP Rao, Poppy had alternated between fits of despair, terror, and rage. Not only had her husband been arrested, laid low by powerful forces whose influence she could only guess at, but to top it all off he had been whisked away to a prison renowned for its brutality and excess.
Gouripur Jail.
Last waystation on the road to hell.
How could God have allowed this to happen to a man like her husband? The most honest person she had ever known, a man whose goodness had illuminated each and every day of their union.
She had paced the office at the restaurant, her mother watching from the sofa. “Wearing a hole in the floor isn’t going to help anyone,” observed Poornima Devi.
“Then what do you propose I do?” snapped Poppy.
“Call the Chief Minister,” advised Poornima primly. “That’s what I would do.”
“And what makes you think the Chief Minister will listen to me?”
“Well, if you ask me, your husband has brought this on himself. Who asked him to go meddling in other people’s business? I told you no good would come of it.”
“Oh, Mother!” wailed Poppy. She stormed from the office, and walked out through the kitchen to the rear courtyard.
She found Ganesha hunkered under his mango tree, staring forlornly into the mud between his feet. The little elephant remained thoroughly disheartened.
On the veranda, Irfan was being tutored by Usha Umrigar. Both sat cross-legged on the polished planks, Irfan with a rectangular black slate on his lap, his malformed left hand hooked under it. As Poppy watched, Irfan crunched his brow and pressed a piece of chalk to the slate. Then he lifted the slate to Usha.
The old woman raised an eyebrow. Irfan coloured. He kept forgetting that the woman was blind.
“I’m sure it is fine,” said Usha. “Now kindly recite what you have written.”
Irfan broke into a toothy beam of satisfaction, and then he began to read from his slate.
The scene brought a lump to Poppy’s throat.
If there was a living example of her husband’s generosity and good nature then it was Irfan. How many others would have taken in an urchin from Mumbai’s unforgiving streets, given him a job, and invited him into their life? The fact that Irfan chose to live at the restaurant rather than at their home was neither here nor there. The boy wished to be close to his best friend, little Ganesha, and Chopra had respected his wish.
Poppy knew that her husband sometimes thought of her as overwrought, even flighty.
Perhaps, at times, she
was.
But she lived by her emotions and she saw nothing wrong in this. Every couple needed a balance. Chopra was her balance, and she his.
“Why don’t you tell me what’s troubling you, dear?”
Poppy turned to see Chef Lucknowwallah leaning against the wooden fence that bounded the courtyard. He had just strolled in from the street via the alley that ran out onto the bustling Guru Rabindranath Tagore Road. Her nose crinkled as a fragrant cloud wafted from the thick cheroot sticking out of his mouth.
Poppy examined the chef’s avuncular features, his rosy cheeks, his gleaming pate, partially hidden beneath the cricket umpire’s cap that he wore to disguise his encroaching baldness.
She had grown fond of the man.
Lucknowwallah was excitable, temperamental, and inordinately precious about his kitchen; in many ways he was similar in disposition to herself. And yet he was also an intelligent and generous man, a happy widower who had travelled widely, with a store of worldly wisdom that was available to anyone who asked for it.
Quickly, she explained the situation.
Lucknowwallah’s face creased with alarm. He drew deeply on his cheroot, then threw it to the ground, crushing it beneath his heel. “It seems to me you have only two choices,” he said. “One: butt your head against our monolithic bureaucracy to try and secure Chopra’s release, or, two: do something about it yourself.”
“What can I possibly do?” said Poppy miserably.
“That I don’t know. But I would be happy to sit with you and throw some ideas around. Chopra is a good man. I like to think that we have become friends. And Azeem Lucknowwallah never leaves his friends in the lurch.”
Poppy gave a watery smile. “I could use all the help I can get.”
The wagon bounced out of another pothole, jerking Poppy back to the present.
“Hyah!” cried Lucknowwallah, wrestling with the reins.
The chef, seated on the wagon’s box seat beside Poppy, planted his feet on the buckboard, lifted his crop, and tapped the plodding bullock across its expansive behind. The beast responded by snorting breathily, lifting its tail, and relieving itself. A cloud of pungent steam washed back over him. He cursed loudly, and smothered his nose with his hand.
