by Vaseem Khan
Soon he was engrossed in his work. A mosquito hummed by his ear and he swatted it away without lifting his eyes. Smells and sounds drifted out from the restaurant kitchen: the nose-crinkling odour of frying onions and seared garlic; the chilli haze of innumerable exotic spices; the spit and sizzle from Chef Lucknowwallah’s giant copper pans; the growl of the clay tandoor.
He sneezed as a waft of ginger tickled his nose – he had always been fiercely allergic to the stuff.
The smells from the kitchen mingled with the undercurrent of elephant dung in the backyard. The odour was somewhat leavened by the sweet scent of ripe mango and jacaranda blossom floating in from the neighbouring Sahar International Cargo & Freight Company compound. The on-off breeze carried with it a raga from an old Bollywood movie playing on a nearby radio.
After a while Chopra realised that Ganesha had turned back to him and was watching him work. He peered at his young ward over his spectacles. ‘Something extraordinary happened today. There was a robbery at the museum. They stole the Koh-i-Noor. It is going to be a big scandal: mark my words.’
To his credit, Ganesha did indeed seem intent on his every word. Chopra reached out and patted him on his knobbly skull.
When Ganesha had first arrived he had been undernourished, quite the frailest elephant Chopra had ever laid eyes on. In his letter, Uncle Bansi had given no clue as to where Ganesha had been born or in what circumstances he had been sent to Mumbai and to Chopra.
It had taken a long time for him to earn the little elephant’s trust.
He was not by nature a sentimental man, but there was no doubt that the bond that had grown between them meant as much to him as any human relationship. In a way, Ganesha was now the child that he and Poppy had never been able to have. Poppy certainly treated their ward as if he were a member of the family, doting on him and spoiling him with treats such as the never-ending supply of bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate that Ganesha was addicted to.
There was something universally endearing about the elephant calf. Certainly he was much loved by Chopra’s friends and the staff at the restaurant, with the notable exception of Poppy’s bilious mother.
He turned back to his papers. They comprised his handwritten notes on the various cases that he was currently working on as lead and only detective of the Baby Ganesh Agency. They all seemed so mundane in comparison to the theft of the Koh-i-Noor. Now there was a case! He felt a sudden pang of envy for the officer who would land that investigation. Envy, and sympathy, too. The whole world would be looking over the poor man’s shoulder.
The rear door leading from the kitchen swung open, its fly-screen cracking vigorously against the whitewashed clapboard wall.
Chopra watched as young Irfan emerged into the moonlit compound.
For a second the boy stood on the creaking veranda beneath the cantilevered porch roof. Below the veranda, bullfrogs chorused a late-evening dirge. The boy knelt down and lit a mosquito coil, the acrid smoke adding to the panoply of smells in the compound. Then he straightened and came trotting over the knobbly grass, the steel bucket in his hand clanking by his side.
Chopra turned as Ganesha lumbered to his feet. He couldn’t help but note the sudden sparkle in the young elephant’s eyes.
Ganesha greeted Irfan with an exuberant bugle.
Irfan set down the bucket and rubbed the elephant on the crown of his forehead and then tickled him behind his ears. A smile split the young boy’s features. Ganesha wrapped his trunk around the boy’s thigh and attempted to haul him off his feet. Irfan guffawed loudly.
Chopra watched the pair horsing around and felt happiness flower inside him. Ganesha and Irfan had become firm friends and he knew that this was good for both of them.
He recalled the day six months previously, just a week after he had opened the restaurant, when Irfan had walked into his office.
Chopra had been up to his neck in paperwork. Who knew that a business required such meticulous recordkeeping – an honest business, at any rate? He had looked up as the young boy, clearly a street urchin, peered at him from the far side of the desk. Irfan had seemed to him no different from a million other street children in the city of Mumbai. His only garments were a tattered vest and ancient shorts; his dark hair, streaked blond in places by constant exposure to the sun, was an unkempt mass; coloured strings – makeshift charm bracelets – were wrapped around his wrists; his hazel eyes were milky and his thin frame the product of years of malnutrition. And yet there was something about the boy, some indomitable sense of the human spirit, that shone through in his steadfast gaze and confident swagger.
Chopra reached into his pocket and removed a one-rupee coin. He held it out to the boy.
‘I did not come here for baksheesh, sir.’
Chopra looked surprised. ‘Then why did you come?’
‘To become a waiter.’
Chopra smiled. ‘You are too young to be a waiter.’
‘What age do you have to be to be a waiter?’
Chopra opened his mouth and realised that the question had no answer.
‘Well, how old are you?’
The boy shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But old enough to be a waiter.’
Another smile tugged at the corners of Chopra’s mouth. ‘Where do you live?’
The boy shrugged again. ‘Everywhere. Nowhere. Whole Mumbai is my home.’
He knew then that the boy was one of the nameless, faceless masses who lived on Mumbai’s overcrowded streets; beneath flyovers hurtling with traffic and in darkened alleyways smelling of human excrement; in shanty squats slapped together with discarded junk and inside the mouths of abandoned concrete sewage pipes.
‘Where are your parents?’
‘I have no parents.’
‘Who looks after you?’
The boy prodded his chest. ‘I look after me.’ Then he pointed at the ceiling. ‘And He, too.’
Chopra marvelled at the boy’s cheerful disposition. ‘What is your name?’
‘Irfan, sir.’
He examined the boy, his eyes travelling the length of his undernourished physique. He noted the bruises on the boy’s arms – reminiscent of the marks left behind when wooden lathis were beaten upon human skin – and the cigarette-burn scars forming a constellation of dark stars on his shoulders. He noted the crooked set of the boy’s left hand, a physical deformity of birth. ‘How can you be a waiter with one hand, Irfan?’ he said gently.
‘Sir, Gandhiji conquered the British only with his words. Why I cannot be a waiter with one hand?’
Chopra felt an unbidden lump steal into his throat. He wondered if someone had informed the boy of his fondness for Gandhi.
Inspector Ashwin Chopra (Retd) lived by Mohandas Gandhi’s words and the personal example of charity and human kindness he had set forth for his countrymen to follow. He suspected that if the great statesman had been in the room at that moment he would have had a few choice things to say to him… Why was he hesitating? If ever a child deserved the benefit of the doubt, then surely it was this indomitable youth standing before him.
He watched now as Irfan slid the bucket beneath Ganesha’s trunk. It contained Ganesha’s evening ration of milk. Chopra’s nostrils flared as he smelled the generous helping of coconut milk and ghee that Chef Lucknowwallah had added to the milk. The chef believed that Ganesha needed fattening up and had taken to lacing the milk with rich additives. The luxurious diet seemed to agree with Ganesha, who was filling out nicely.
‘Chopra Sir, I have something for you also.’ Irfan reached inside his garish pink waiter’s jacket – worn, as per Poppy’s instructions, above equally garish pink shorts – and handed over a sheaf of envelopes and string-tied manila folders.
Chopra felt his heart sink.
Less than a year in and his fledgling detective agency was busier than he could ever have imagined. He had always known that Mumbai was a hotbed of crime, but who knew that it was also a place of such familial intrigue? It seemed that everyone with a missing pet or e
rrant husband was beating a path to Chopra’s door. In the past months he had had to turn away case after case. There simply weren’t enough hours in the day.
It was fortunate, Chopra often thought, that young Irfan had turned out to have a razor-sharp mind and a near photographic memory. Although the boy was all but illiterate – a lack that Poppy was desperately trying to convince Irfan to remedy – he had become, through sheer necessity, Chopra’s de facto assistant. Irfan was now adept at managing the ever-increasing backlog of files, juggling irate customers who called demanding progress reports, and generally helping Chopra to stay on top of the spinning logs beneath his feet.
With a guilty conscience Chopra put the manila case folders to one side and instead focused on the envelopes.
Ever since he had placed an advert in the local paper he had been inundated with applicants. The fact that he had advertised for the position of ‘associate private investigator’, however, appeared to have completely escaped the vast majority of those who had written to him.
He knew that in a city of twenty million, finding gainful employment was no trivial matter. And yet he was continually taken aback by the singular unsuitability of the mountain of applications that he had been forced to read each evening since placing the advert. He wondered if there was something inside the human psyche that convinced people that the role of private investigator was one that anyone could turn their hand to – like writing. They said that there was a novel waiting inside everyone. Perhaps there was a private detective hiding inside everyone too, he thought cynically. After all, snooping on one’s neighbours was possibly the oldest hobby in the world.
Chopra believed that people were intrinsically different. They had different talents, dispositions and motivations. Sometimes it took a long time for a person to find out exactly what they were good at. Chance, upbringing, education, all these played a part. But there was also such a thing as karma. Fate. Destiny. Some people were simply born to play certain roles in the great story of life. And others… well, he had always believed that you couldn’t fit a crooked peg into an honest hole, no matter how hard you tried.
‘Sir, Mrs Roy called again today,’ Irfan announced. ‘She said, “If Chopra does not call me today I will have him arrested for fraud. Then I will have him castrated”,’ he added helpfully.
Chopra sighed.
Mrs Roy was the wife of the president of the local Rotary Club, a severe and uncompromising woman. Chopra had unwisely accepted a retainer from the old harridan to investigate the possibility that her husband had returned to his old drinking habits, which she had hoped that thirty years of marriage had cured him of. But he had simply not had the time to follow the old sot around. And now his wife was on the warpath.
‘What did you tell her?’ asked Chopra wearily.
Irfan grinned. ‘Do not worry, sir. I told her you were working very hard on her case. I told her that you followed Mr Roy today and that you suspect she is correct.’
Chopra gaped at the boy. ‘But that is not true!’
Irfan shrugged. ‘What is truth?’ he said philosophically. ‘This is Mumbai, sir. Truth comes in many disguises. Why don’t you call her and tell her you will follow Mr Roy again tomorrow? And then you will give her a final report. That can be the true truth, yes?’
Chopra tried to suppress a smile. The boy had initiative, he’d give him that. Still… ‘Irfan, the next time you wish to give a client advice, please check with me first.’
Irfan looked crestfallen. ‘Did I make a mistake, sir?’
Chopra reached out and tousled Irfan’s hair. ‘No. You merely learned something. Namely, that the client is not always right.’
Chopra watched the smile return to Irfan’s face and found a warmth suffusing him. Just as Ganesha had grown close to Irfan, he had grown closer to the boy too, though he would not have been able to express his feelings in the obvious way that his young ward did.
He knew that he had made the right decision by taking him on. Poppy, ever the big-hearted advocate of social change, had applauded his action, though others had not been so easy to convince. Poppy’s horrified mother Poornima had warned them against taking in a ‘slum dog’, a child ‘with no name or address’. ‘He has probably been lying and thieving since before he could walk,’ she had muttered.
‘His name is Irfan,’ Chopra had said sternly. ‘And whatever he was or was not before today is irrelevant. This is his home now.’
To accommodate Irfan he had purchased a charpoy and installed it on the veranda at the rear of the restaurant. This was where Irfan now slept, though it had taken a while for the boy to adjust to his new arrangements. Early on Chopra had discovered that Irfan often slept beneath the charpoy instead of on it. ‘It is too soft, sir,’ Irfan had explained. It had stung him to realise that this child had spent so much of his short life sleeping on the street that even a rope charpoy was too ‘soft’.
Chopra hauled himself to his feet. ‘Come, let’s go and see what Chef has prepared for supper, shall we? The mice are wearing a hole in my stomach.’
ARTHUR ROAD JAIL
The next morning Chopra awoke to find that he had the apartment to himself.
It was a rare luxury.
Chopra lived with Poppy and his mother-in-law on the fifteenth floor of Poomalai Apartments, one of three identical towers that made up the Air Force Colony complex in the bustling Mumbai suburb of Sahar. The apartment was spacious and well ventilated. During the hot post-monsoon months they would leave the windows open, permitting a welcome breeze to cool the place down.
He discovered a note from Poppy on the glass coffee table that sat before the hideous new leather sofa that she had recently installed, though Chopra had seen nothing wrong with the previous one. It had lasted twenty years and he was certain that it had another decade in it, but Poppy was not to be swayed.
The apartment was being transformed on a daily basis. Sometimes a beleaguered Chopra would wake up and think he had somehow ended up in someone else’s home. Poppy had been an early victim of the mall mania that had swept the country. It seemed to him that his wife intended to shoehorn into their home every item of kitsch being recommended by those so-called doyennes of good taste that now held sway over the lives of ordinary Indians just as astrologers and snake-oil swamis had once done.
He read the note. Have gone to work. Your idlis are in the microwaved oven. Make sure you take your pills. Poppy.
He frowned.
Ever since Poppy had started her new job she had been a whirlwind of activity.
In all their years of marriage Poppy had never had a real job, substituting for gainful employment a never-ending catalogue of social causes and personal crusades instead, many of her own making. Chopra was used to finding his wife at home in the mornings and when he returned from work in the evenings. Her presence had long been a constant in his life, as was her attentiveness to his needs.
He found that he was, inexplicably, put out by the sudden wife-shaped hole in his life.
His brow darkened as he dwelt momentarily on the individual he blamed for this state of affairs – Sunita Shetty, middle-aged former beauty queen, whose show Modern Indian Woman had taken the nation’s housewives by storm. The Modern Indian Woman, Ms Shetty regularly informed her audience, was mother, wife and worker. She was honest, able, hard-working and the very vision of chaste beauty. She was both traditional and modern, custodian of India’s ancient family values and an icon of fashion and good taste. She was pure, virtuous and effortlessly alluring. A veritable superwoman.
Chopra pottered into the kitchen alcove and recovered his breakfast – steamed idlis with masala sambar – before sitting down in front of the TV.
The sensational robbery at the Prince of Wales Museum dominated the news channels. ‘Bungling Bombay Cops’ screamed one well-known commentator. ‘Koh-i-Noor diamond stolen from under the noses of Mumbai’s finest!’ roared another tagline.
A clip showed Force One commander Deodar Jha outside the
Prince of Wales Museum being hotly pursued by barking newsmen as he retreated to the sanctuary of an armoured truck. Another clip showed a grim-faced Commissioner of Police arriving at the museum in the company of the Chief Minister of Maharashtra. In Delhi the Prime Minister of India appeared on television promising swift action and appealing to the thieves to show a sense of patriotic decency and return the crown forthwith. The leader of the principal opposition party took the opportunity to suggest that the Prime Minister’s face had been irredeemably blackened by the incident.
Many channels focused on the plaza outside Mumbai’s Lilavati Hospital where a large crowd had gathered. A number of women in the crowd beat their breasts and wailed hysterically. ‘She is like our mother,’ blubbed one woman, wiping snot from her face with the tip of her sari.
It appeared that the Queen, devastated by news of the theft, had taken ill during the night and had been admitted to the hospital. Her Majesty was due to be flown home the next morning on an RAF jet.
Conspiracy theories were rife.
Fingers were being pointed at the various Indian nationalist organisations that had made such a fuss about the Koh-i-Noor diamond in the first place. A self-satisfied spokesman for India First stated that although his outfit was innocent of the crime he nevertheless fully applauded the act as no more than natural justice demanded. ‘How can it be theft if you take back what was stolen from you in the first place?’ he opined smugly.
Many commentators warned that the theft would strain Anglo – Indian relations.
A terse statement from the British Prime Minister had already been interpreted as laying the blame for the theft on the complacent security arrangements employed for the protection of the Crown Jewels. Chopra knew that it was only a few letters from ‘complacency’ to ‘complicity’.
There was little doubt that the theft had put many important noses out of joint.
The stakes could not be higher.
The phone rang.
For a moment Chopra fumbled with the shiny new cordless handset his wife had purchased just days earlier and which had so many buttons on it he was thoroughly confused about how to operate the damned thing. When he did manage to answer, he was surprised to hear a voice that he had not heard in many years.
