The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra

by Vaseem Khan

  ‘Yes. Yours and mine.’

  ‘But… but… what about the… other woman?’

  ‘Poppy, for the last time, there is no other woman!’

  ‘So you haven’t been planning to leave me?’

  ‘Leave you?’ said Chopra. He seemed genuinely astonished. ‘Why in the world would I want to do that?’

  She looked down miserably. ‘You know why.’

  Chopra placed an arm around her shoulders. ‘God has been very good to me. He has given me you. I don’t need anything else.’

  Poppy looked into her husband’s eyes and knew that he was speaking the truth. She felt tears brimming from the corners of her eyes.

  In her heart she had known that the plan to adopt Kiran’s baby was an act of desperation. For it to succeed she would have had to lie to the most honest man she had ever known. The thought had festered inside her and thus, in one sense, it had been a relief that the plan had not come to fruition.

  Chopra’s words were now the perfect balm for her wounded heart.

  She was lifted by a sudden feeling of hope.

  ‘But then who is it that has been calling you? I thought it was… another woman.’

  ‘Shalini Sharma? She is a restaurant consultant I have been meeting. She has given me much valuable advice.’

  Poppy’s smile morphed into a frown. ‘A restaurant is a very stressful business. If you had told me about this I would never have allowed you to go ahead with it.’

  ‘Which is precisely why I had to keep it a secret from you,’ said Chopra. He watched the shadow on his wife’s face. ‘I will hire good people to help me run it. I will be like one of those big-shot restaurateurs, swanning in every now and again to taste the menu and move the chairs around.’

  Poppy was silent, then finally she giggled. ‘Very well, Mister Big shot. Just remember… I am the only chef in your life.’

  ‘You are much more than that, Poppy.’ Chopra turned and walked onto the porch. He stopped beneath the gable. Poppy noticed that a rope was dangling down from one end of the triangular pediment. Her eyes moved up, and saw that the rope was connected to the cloth draped over the restaurant’s nameboard. Chopra turned to her and grinned. With a theatrical flourish he tugged on the rope, pulling away the covering cloth and revealing the restaurant’s name:

  POPPY’S

  Policemen’s Bar and Restaurant

  EPILOGUE

  Rain thudded on the windows of Inspector Chopra’s bedroom once more.

  Mumbai was deluged. The prediction of Homi Contractor had been correct: the monsoons, now that they were here, were turning out to be the wettest in living memory. The city was in a constant state of alert at the prospect of repeated flooding. Where only a month before, everyone had deplored the drought-like heat, now everyone was complaining bitterly about the horrendous waterlogging.

  Chopra awoke, and sat bolt upright in bed. He was bathed in sweat. He could feel his heart hammering away in his chest. He had been dreaming, dreaming of his Uncle Bansi. The dream had been about something that he had forgotten, something about his uncle that had simply not occurred to him until now; a buried memory that had abruptly floated to the surface of his consciousness, like a weighted balloon released from its tether.

  It had been a sweltering day and Bansi had taken the eight-year-old Chopra to the mela that was held after each harvest in the nearby village of Ramnagar. Chopra had loved everything about the mela: the colour, the noise, the travelling troupe that came each year to entertain the crowds.

  Uncle Bansi had enjoyed the fair every bit as much as his nephew; many people had actually assumed that he was part of the entertainment, and he and Chopra had been continually stopped by those wishing to have their fortunes told.

  Towards the end of the day one of these well-wishers had repaid Bansi’s agreeable prognostication by handing him a treat. Bansi had shared it with Chopra. He had never forgotten the look of utter pleasure that had passed over his uncle’s face as he had consumed his half of the treat. ‘If I had known they tasted this good, I would have had one every single day!’ he had exclaimed.

  And as far as Chopra knew that is exactly what he had done. Every day that his uncle had remained in the village he had gone to Hari’s provisions store and purchased the same thing. How could he have forgotten? How could he have forgotten that his Uncle Bansi had adored Cadbury’s Dairy Milk?

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  No book can be published without the help, advice and good wishes of a great number of people. In this lean age for the first-time author I am forever indebted to my agent Euan Thorneycroft at A.M. Heath and to my editor Ruth Tross at Mulholland. Their confidence is the reason you have just finished reading this novel.

  I am grateful too to all those who helped incrementally improve upon the original manuscript. Thomas Abraham and Poulomi Chatterjee at Hachette India; Amber Burlinson, copy-editor, and Zoë Carroll, eagle-eyed proofreader. To this I add Euan whose insightful first comments helped me to tighten up the sense of place in the novel and to round out the characters. A special thank you to Ruth whose constant enthusiasm, relentless attention to plot detail, and gentle manner of persuasion elevated many aspects of this work. Who says editors have to be tyrannical?

  I would also like to thank Ruth’s team at Mulholland: Naomi Berwin in marketing, Kerry Hood in publicity, Laura Del Vescovo in production, and Ruth’s assistant Sharan Matharu. Similar thanks go to Euan’s assistant Pippa McCarthy.

  Another special thank you to Anna Woodbine who designed and illustrated the novel’s cover, perfectly bringing together the colour and exuberance of India with the beating heart of the novel: one man and his elephant.

  My brother-in-law Ashwin Chopra deserves an honourable mention for permitting me to borrow his name. His integrity is as unimpeachable as Inspector Chopra’s.

  Lastly, I’d like to thank those who have helped me in researching this work. My wife Nirupama Khan, my great friends from Mumbai, and my colleague at UCL and former Indian police officer Dr Jyoti Belur. A mention too for Terry Brewer who first took me to the subcontinent and in a very real sense placed my feet on the long road to publication.

  MEET THE AUTHOR

  Photo Credit: Nirupama Khan

  Vaseem Khan first saw an elephant lumbering down the middle of the road in 1997 when he arrived in India to work as a management consultant. It was the most unusual thing he had ever encountered and served as the inspiration for the Baby Ganesh Agency series.

  He returned to the UK in 2006 and now works at University College London for the Department of Security and Crime Science where he is astonished on a daily basis by the way modern science is being employed to tackle crime. Elephants are third on his list of passions, first and second being great literature and cricket, not always in that order.

  introducing

  If you enjoyed

  THE UNEXPECTED INHERITANCE OF INSPECTOR CHOPRA,

  don’t miss the next Baby Ganesh Agency Investigation

  THE PERPLEXING THEFT OF THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN

  by Vaseem Khan

  A TRIP TO THE MUSEUM

  ‘Arise, Sir Chopra.’

  As the gleaming blade touched gently down upon his shoulder Inspector Ashwin Chopra (Retd) found himself overcome by a jumble of conflicting emotions. Pride, undoubtedly, at this supreme moment in his life. But with pride came a boundless sense of humility. That he, the son of a schoolmaster from a poor village in the state of Maharashtra, India, could be thus honoured seemed altogether improbable.

  After all, what had he really achieved?

  He was an honest man who had worn the uniform of the Brihanmumbai Police with an unblemished record for over thirty years–before a traitorous heart had forced him into early retirement–and in the India of today that was something to be proud of indeed. And yet was integrity enough of a virtue to warrant such accolade?

  Surely there were more deserving candidates?

  What about his old friend Assistant Comm
issioner of Police Ajit Shinde who even now was fighting Naxalite bandits in far-off Gadchiroli and had already lost the tip of his right ear to a sniper’s bullet? Or Inspector Gopi Moolchand who had lost a great deal more when he had selflessly dived into Vihar Lake on the outskirts of Mumbai to rescue a stricken drunk and been attacked by not one but three opportunistic crocodiles?

  Chopra was overcome by a sudden overwhelming sense of pathos, as if this singular occasion marked a peak in his life from which there could now only be a perilous and unwelcome descent.

  He stumbled to his feet from the knighting stool and cast around at the circle of gathered luminaries in search of Poppy. He saw that his wife, radiant in a powder-pink silk sari, was engaged in conversation with a haughty-looking white woman, a peer of the realm whose name Chopra could not recall. Standing in the lee of the old dowager was his old sub-inspector, Rangwalla, fingering the collar of his ill-fitting suit… and next to Rangwalla, Ganesha, the baby elephant that Chopra’s mysterious uncle Bansi had sent to him seven months previously with the intriguing missive stating that ‘this is no ordinary elephant’…

  He frowned. How did Ganesha get here? Or, for that matter, Rangwalla?… And did they really allow elephants inside Buckingham Palace?

  Chopra turned back to the supreme monarch.

  He looked down at The Queen and realised, for the first time, that she bore an uncanny resemblance to his mother-in-law, the widow Poornima Devi, right down to the black eyepatch and the expression of intense dislike that Poppy’s mother had reserved for him ever since she had first set eyes on him all those years ago.

  The royal monarch’s mouth opened into a yawning black hole… BAAAAAARRRRRRPPPPP!

  Chopra jerked out of his daydream and looked around wildly. He realised that he was still sitting in the gridlocked traffic around Horniman Circle in south Mumbai.

  The violent chorus around him testified to the increasing sense of desperation of his fellow motorists. A quick glance in the wing mirror informed him that the bright red sports Mercedes that had been bumper-to-bumper behind him was now attempting to ooze past by climbing onto the concrete verge of the Horniman Circle Gardens that lay at the centre of the roundabout.

  As the Mercedes pulled alongside, the young man behind the wheel barped his horn again. ‘Excuse me, Gandhiji, you are not driving a tractor! This is Mumbai, my friend!’ Loud foreign music blared from the vehicle and a chorus of laughter spilled forth from the youth’s companions seated in the rear.

  Chopra reddened.

  He had half a mind to climb out of the van and give the obnoxious youth a piece of his mind. But then he noticed that a grey-furred macaque was watching him intently from the branches of an ancient banyan tree growing on the edge of the Gardens and he recalled the recent reports in the Times of India about the Horniman macaque attacks.

  The gardens, once a favoured haunt of Mumbai’s wealthy Parsee community, had recently been colonised by a troupe of bonnet macaques, displaced from their ancient mangrove home by the city’s relentless urbanisation. The macaques had caused a stir by viciously assaulting a passing MLA–Member of the Legislative Assembly–much to the delight of the MLA’s fellow Mumbaikers. The Member in question was embroiled in a bribery scandal and had three criminal cases lodged against him in the High Court. Far from disqualifying a man from running for office, it seemed to Chopra that a criminal record was almost a requirement for most political aspirants in his country.

  ‘We’re going to be late.’

  Chopra glanced at his wife, Archana, known to all as Poppy. Chopra loved his wife dearly, but at this precise instant he was struggling to recall why.

  It had been upon Poppy’s insistence that they were here now, on their way to the Grand Exhibition of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom at the Prince of Wales Museum in Fort. Chopra had known that traffic at this hour would be horrendous, but Poppy had been hounding him for days, ever since the exhibition had arrived in Mumbai two weeks ago, a full ten days before Her Majesty, The Queen made her historic visit to the city.

  It was the first time that The Queen had ever visited Mumbai, the first time in two decades that she had set foot on Indian soil. The newspapers had been full of little else.

  Poppy, like most in the city, had quickly succumbed to the ‘royal malaria’ as it had been dubbed. Chopra, however, had remained aloof.

  As a closet Anglophile he was secretly delighted that The Queen had chosen to visit Mumbai. But Chopra was a sober and rational man. From his father–the late Shree Premkumar Chopra–he had inherited both an admiration for the British and the progress they had brought to the subcontinent, and a healthy perspective for all that the Raj had taken from Indians. He did not see the need to gush just because Her Majesty had come calling.

  Naturally, Poppy did not agree.

  All her friends had already been to see the exhibit, she had complained. They talked of nothing else.

  Chopra’s eventual surrender was inevitable. He had rarely refused his wife in the twenty-four years of their marriage. Poppy was a force of nature, flighty, romantic and a devil when aroused. It was far easier to acquiesce to her occasional whims than to act the curmudgeon. And besides, he knew, instinctively, that in the perennial war between the sexes it behooved a husband to surrender the occasional battle. The trick was to pick the right battles to lose.

  He glanced again at his wife.

  A slavish follower of fashion, Poppy had styled her long, dark hair into a beehive, which seemed to be all the rage following the release of a new Bollywood movie set in the Sixties. Her fair cheeks glowed with rouge and her slender figure was encased in a bottle-green silk sari with gold-flecked trim.

  Chopra himself was dressed, at Poppy’s insistence, in his best–and only–suit, a dark affair that his wife complained made him look like an undertaker. But he had not seen the need to purchase a new suit for a simple visit to the museum. The suit had served him well for the past fifteen years; it would serve him well for a few more.

  As a concession to his wife he had made an effort with the rest of his appearance. His thick black hair–greying at the temples–was neatly combed and his brisk moustache was immaculately groomed. His deep brown eyes sat above a Roman nose. Nothing could be done about the frown lines, however, that had recently taken up residence on his walnut-brown forehead.

  Supressing a sigh, Chopra looked back out at the Circle where a hapless constable was attempting to herd the gridlocked panorama of cars, trucks, motorbikes, bicycles, rickshaws, handcarts, pedestrians and stray animals.

  If there is a hell, he thought, then it cannot be worse than this.

  The queue at the ticket window stretched around the stylish new stainless-steel-plated Visitors’ Centre. For once the usually riotous mob was being kept in check by the presence of the severe-looking commandoes patrolling the grounds. A line of these commandoes was stationed all the way around the museum adding an air of intrigue to the picturesque formal gardens in which the museum sat.

  Chopra knew that the commandoes, in their black military fatigues, were from the elite Force One Unit, a special anti-terrorist squad that had been set up amidst a blaze of publicity following the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. What the newspapers didn’t know–but which Chopra had heard on the police grapevine–was that the Chief Minister, having achieved his self-aggrandising news splash, had subsequently slashed the unit’s funding. The savings had disappeared into that strange place where percentages vanished on the subcontinent. The handful of commandoes to survive the cull now spent their days sitting in their Goregaon HQ idly polishing the M4 assault rifles they were wielding so impressively today.

  As the queue inched forward he took the opportunity to once again admire the recently renamed museum. It was now called the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya after the warrior-king, Shivaji, founder of the Maratha Empire. But to Chopra it would always be the Prince of Wales Museum. As he looked up once again at its three-storied façade, clad in kurla st
one and topped by its Mughal dome, he felt a gladness knocking on his heart. This feeling overcame him each time he thought of the treasure trove of ancient relics housed inside those enigmatic walls, going back as far as the Indus Valley civilisation, which scholars now claimed might be the oldest of them all.

  He had been coming here for nearly three decades, ever since he had first arrived in the megalopolis as a freshly minted constable from his native village in the Maharashtrian interior, a bright-eyed seventeen-year-old with Bombay dreams in his eyes. Since then he had learned a great many lessons, the most painful of which was that all that glittered was not necessarily gold.

  The relentless pace of change in the big city often dismayed him. The constant striving for the future, as if the past was a yoke that had to be cast off and trampled into the dust of history. He had found the museum to be a refuge from this headlong rush into the unknown, a balm for the affliction of nostalgia from which he suffered.

  Chopra considered himself a historian, a guardian of the legacy of ancient India, one of a dwindling number. He knew that his country was now intoxicated by progress and the prospect of becoming a superpower. But for Chopra there was still much to be gleaned from the traditions of a culture that had persisted for more than seven thousand years. Modernity was not everything. Technology was not the answer to all problems.

  They purchased their tickets and then waited patiently as they were both frisked, Poppy by a female officer inside the Visitors’ Centre. They were asked to deposit their phones and cameras–which were not permitted inside the exhibition–before being herded towards the museum’s main entrance where they queued up to pass through a metal scanner. Ahead of Chopra a woman refused to give up her gold wedding necklace. The guards inspected it and allowed her to keep it. A tall, broad-shouldered Sikh man set off the scanner and pointed to the thick steel bracelet on his wrist, a core article of his faith. Again the guards permitted him to pass. Another man argued to be allowed to take in his asthma inhaler. The guards examined the object, turning it this way and that in their calloused hands, then exchanged mystified glances. Eventually, they shrugged and handed it back.