by Vaseem Khan
Chopra realised that McTavish was right. He had forgotten about the strange noise he had heard after the gas had enveloped him, a noise that had set his teeth on edge and made his palms itch. ‘Yes, you are correct. I did hear such a noise. Why? Is it significant?’
‘Could be. It’s a theory I’m working on.’
There was a short silence as the two men evaluated each other.
‘You know, Chopra, you’d make a better door than a windae, as my old da used to say,’ said McTavish eventually.
Chopra’s brow furrowed. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘It means I cannae see what’s inside your head, my friend.’ McTavish slurped at his can. ‘You ever hear of the Stone of Scone?’
Chopra shook his head.
‘It was used for centuries in the coronation of Scottish kings until the English made off with it back in the thirteenth century. For nearly seven hundred years they held on to the stone. But eventually they had to give it back. I think your Koh-i-Noor has found its way home. For what it’s worth, I dinnae think it will ever leave these shores again.’
THE RAREST PIGEON IN THE WORLD
Chopra drove back through the congested city, his mind carefully processing the wealth of new information he had discovered. He knew that once McTavish revealed his findings to Rao and Bomberton they would come to the same conclusion as he had. They would search for an inside man. It would not take them long to get the same list from the museum’s personnel department that Chopra had obtained.
Chopra knew that if Rao employed his usual methods, then sooner or later someone would confess, whether they did it or not. And that would either lead to the true criminals or else Rao would simply coerce a confession that implicated Garewal.
ACP Rao would stop at nothing to bring glory to himself.
And there was one other thing.
Chopra was convinced that he had seen Bulbul Kanodia in the Tata Gallery. What he did not yet know was how – or even if – Kanodia was connected to the robbery.
He had good reason for suspecting that this was the case, however.
Kanodia had been arrested by Chopra more than a decade ago. At the time he ran a small jewellery shop in the industrial zone known as SEEPZ near the Sahar station. Word had reached Chopra that Kanodia had graduated from gemstone merchant to small-time fence, with an expertise in stolen jewellery. He had immediately initiated an investigation.
The subsequent arrest and prosecution of Kanodia had sent him away for two years. Since then Chopra had heard nothing of the man. Kanodia was simply another of the many criminals that he had delivered onto the stuttering conveyor belt of Indian justice.
But now, now he needed to find out everything he could about Bulbul. He was certain that Rao and Bomberton would perform background checks on all those who had been in the gallery at the time of the robbery. This would bring Kanodia’s past to light. Chopra wanted to confront Kanodia before Rao got to him. He wanted to question him while he looked in the man’s eyes. He believed he would be able to tell whether or not Kanodia was lying. And he hoped he would learn whether Garewal was part of the plot.
But first he needed to fill in the missing years since he had last crossed paths with the jewel merchant. He needed Kanodia’s old case file and he needed information. And the best way to find that information was his old lieutenant Sub-Inspector Rangwalla.
The temperature outside the van had climbed into the early thirties. Chopra flicked on the air-conditioner, which hummed away in the background as the van slid smoothly along Barrister Nath Pai Road, swinging across from the eastern side of the city back towards its western flank.
He drove steadily through the midtown suburbs of Dadar and Matunga before whipping the sturdy Tata Venture over the Sion-Bandra Link Road and connecting with the Western Express Highway. The highway, with its many flyovers, took him back to Sahar, where he turned off onto the recently completed Sahar Elevated Road.
Chopra’s fingers drummed on the steering wheel as his thoughts lingered on the case.
Ganesha’s trunk reached over the front seats and dabbed at the van’s dashboard. The little elephant had become very fond of the radio. In particular he enjoyed listening to the newer music channels with their constant stream of Bollywood dance numbers. Chopra knew that this was his wife’s doing. Poppy was addicted to the Bombay talkies and had infected their young ward with her passion.
Chopra himself would look on in consternation as Ganesha became engrossed in the music, his eyes closing, ears flapping in time to the rhythm, and trunk tracing circles in the air as if he were conducting the raucous music like a pachyderm maestro.
Sometimes it would be all too much and Chopra would flick the radio back towards the news on All India Radio or, preferably, the cricket commentary. This rarely went down well with his young ward, who would turn around in the van, show Chopra his bottom, and enter into a protracted sulk.
They arrived at the Sahar police station just in time to see the much-abused blue police truck coughing and spluttering its way out from the station’s attached garage, a number of glum-looking constables sweating in the rear. Chopra briefly wondered where they were headed.
It had been a while since he had last visited the station. He was surprised to see that change had come to Shangri-La.
The tiles of the terracotta courtyard, bleached a pale pink beneath years of merciless sun, appeared to have been recently swept. The potted palm that had stood, sentry-like, for years by the saloon-style doors and had long ago contracted some sort of chronic fungus causing it to shed most of its leaves had been replaced by a verdant display of flowering plants. The flowers – yellow gulmohars, pink bougainvillea and bright red hibiscus – added a swathe of colour to the place and filled the air with a cloying sweetness.
A wild pig that had long frequented the courtyard on the promise of scraps from post-lunch tiffin boxes stood in the courtyard staring at the flowers in consternation, as if memorising details for the authorities later on.
Chopra stepped through the saloon doors.
As always he felt a hoop of nostalgia tightening around his chest as he recalled the twenty-odd years he had spent as the in-charge of this little outpost. And an outpost was how he had always pictured it, a little island of integrity in the great sea of wickedness that Mumbai often seemed to have become.
Chopra knew that he had been a bit of a stickler, but he believed that discipline was something to be embraced, not feared. With seniority came responsibility. A police station was a reflection of the man in charge. A bad officer, a venal officer, an incompetent officer infected the men below him. They took their cue from the man at the top. Chopra had always ensured that his men had an excellent example to follow.
He stopped and looked around. Something was different. The place was gleaming. The walls had been newly whitewashed and the ancient floor tiles polished to a reluctant shine. The blades of the ceiling fans had been wiped down and the thousands of dead flies in the barred window wells had been swept away. Each of the four battered old desks in the station reception had been repaired, repainted and tidied up. Not a sheet of paper was out of place. The gallery of withered posters of long-dead criminals had been stripped from the walls to be replaced with improving epistles such as ‘DO NOT SPIT IN THE OFFICE. SPITTING IS A CRIME’ and ‘CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS’ and ‘WE ARE HERE TO HELP PEOPLE, NOT SHOOT PEOPLE. UNLESS WE HAVE TO.’
Chopra was confronted with a bustling activity that he was unused to seeing in the post-lunch hour, when most of his officers tended to descend into a state of semi-consciousness.
‘Chopra Sir!’
He turned to see young Constable Surat bearing down on him, a wide smile splitting his homely features.
Chopra corrected himself.
Surat was no longer a constable. He had recently been promoted to the rank of sub-inspector – in part thanks to Chopra’s human trafficking investigation, during which poor Surat had been wounded by one of the villains.
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It was still disconcerting for Chopra to see Surat out of his shorts and in his new, neatly pressed khaki uniform with full trousers and peaked cap. The trousers were somewhat strained around the young man’s midriff: the new sub-inspector was overweight, impressionable, and had idolised Chopra during his tenure as the station head.
‘Surat, how are you?’
‘Very fine, sir!’
Chopra had given up trying to convince his former constable that he needn’t call him ‘sir’ any more. ‘Surat, what is going on? What’s happened to the place?’
‘Operation Clean-Up, sir.’
‘Operation Clean-Up? Whatever do you mean?’
‘Orders of the new station in-charge, sir.’
Ah. Chopra understood.
Following his retirement earlier in the year, he had been replaced by a fellow officer from the service. Unfortunately, the new incumbent had not proven to be the man Chopra was and had been rounded up as part of the human trafficking ring investigation. Unlike Chopra’s nemesis, ACP Suresh Rao, Inspector Suryavansh had had no influential connections to deliver him from the inquisitors of the CBI and had never returned to the station.
Seven months later it seemed the higher-ups had finally got round to installing a permanent replacement.
‘Is the new man here? I may as well meet him.’
Surat grinned queasily. ‘Not exactly, sir.’
‘Well, either he is here or he is not. Which is it, Surat?’
The young policeman reddened.
‘I think what the sub-inspector is trying to tell you is that “he” is not a “he”.’
Chopra turned.
A tall, broad-shouldered woman in the khaki dress uniform of a police inspector was walking towards him. The woman had a dusky, round face with soulful brown eyes. Her thick black hair was pulled back beneath her peaked cap. A mole sat high on her right cheek, just below a deep scar that looked to Chopra as if it had been inflicted by a knife.
He flushed.
During his long career in the service he could scarcely recall coming into contact with a female inspector. Although the Brihanmumbai Police was changing, female police officers of any meaningful rank were still a rarity. Chopra had long considered this to be a lost opportunity.
‘Chopra, isn’t it?’
Realising that he must look foolish just standing there, gaping, Chopra coughed to cover his embarrassment. ‘Yes,’ he said, then, ‘Ah, you seem to have had a spring clean.’
‘Correct. I thought the place could use a little freshening up. Works wonders for morale, I have found.’ The woman’s voice had a lilting quality to it. A voice used to authority. ‘How may we help you, Inspector?’
‘I am no longer an inspector.’
‘Correct.’
Chopra wondered if the woman was making some sort of statement. He found himself colouring again.
‘I, ah, I just came in to see Surat here.’
‘A social visit, was it?’
Chopra’s collar felt suddenly hot. ‘Yes. I, er, wanted to see how he was getting on in his new role.’
‘He is doing fine. He will make a good inspector one day.’
Surat swelled with pride.
‘Is that all?’
‘Well, I… I also thought I’d wish Rangwalla well while I was here.’
‘Rangwalla is not here.’
‘Ah. He is out on an investigation, is he?’
‘Sub-Inspector Rangwalla has been sacked from the service. He is no longer a police officer.’
Chopra gaped at the woman. ‘What? When did this happen? Why?’
‘I am afraid I am not at liberty to discuss these matters. They are police business.’
Chopra bristled. He realised that the woman was quietly putting him in his place. He realised too that his ability to come and go at the station was going to be severely curtailed, particularly if Rangwalla was no longer around.
‘Well, in that case, perhaps I will take my leave.’
The woman nodded, her eyes not leaving his face.
Chopra smiled at Surat, who looked as if he had been stricken to the floor by a bolt of lightning. His moon-shaped face swung from Chopra to his new boss and back again.
‘Well, Surat, carry on the good work. I know you will make us all proud.’
Surat slapped his heels together and snapped out a brisk salute. ‘Yes, sir!’
‘You don’t have to call me “sir”, Surat. As the inspector has pointed out, I am no longer a police officer.’
Surat maintained his salute, conflicting emotions squirming over his bovine features.
Chopra turned away.
‘Chopra?’
He turned back.
‘You didn’t ask my name.’
He stared at the woman. ‘What is your name, Inspector?’
‘Malini Sheriwal. Inspector Malini Sheriwal.’
As he drove away from the station Chopra realised that he had heard the name before. Malini Sheriwal… The memory swam tantalisingly just beneath the surface of his mind, but he couldn’t quite grasp it.
Rangwalla and his family lived in a two-bedroomed apartment on the seventh floor of a nine-storey tower in Marol optimistically named Little Heaven. The tower was one of a number that had been built on land released following the demolition of a sprawling shanty town some years previously.
Chopra remembered the fuss when the bulldozers had moved in.
As head of one of the local police stations he had been told to send in his men to help evict the slum dwellers and prevent violence. Each time he thought about that day he felt a knot of shame twisting inside him. He had known well enough that the slum dwellers had nowhere else to go, but the high court order was inviolable. In a city bursting at the seams space was always at a premium and the ones that suffered were always those lowest on the totem pole. As an officer of the law he had been forced to uphold the high court’s edict.
But as he had overseen the sundering of those poor slum dwellers from the little patch of earth they had called home for years, he had become infected with their rage, a rage aimed at the faceless men of power who, with a careless flick of the pen, signed away the lives of those they had never met and did not care to meet.
And he understood too that some of that hatred was reserved for people like him, the enforcers of those invisible vultures.
Chopra had rarely felt uncertain of his calling, but on that day, as he had stood behind slum children huddled together in a daze as they watched their homes being bulldozed into rubble, he had felt himself grow hot with his own helplessness.
Now, as he ascended the stairs of the building that had risen from the ashes of the slum, he realised that in all the years he and Rangwalla had worked together he had never once set foot inside his deputy’s home. He noticed how worn down the building looked, even though it was barely two years old. He could not help but compare it to the meticulously well-maintained tower in which he lived. Once again, he felt perturbed by the stark reality of economics in the city of Mumbai.
The young woman who opened the door to flat 303 was wearing a red headscarf and traditional shalwar kameez. She was young, perhaps fifteen, and was chewing gum with a ferocious pounding of her jaws. She stared at him with insolent eyes.
‘Yes?’
‘I am here to see Rangwalla.’
‘Abbu is not here.’
Abbu? Chopra stared at the girl. ‘Rangwalla is your father?’
‘Correct. I don’t go around calling any old person “Abbu”. You must be a detective.’ The girl’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.
‘My name is Chopra.’
The girl stopped chewing. ‘Chopra? Inspector Chopra? Abbu’s old boss?’
‘Yes.’
Her face changed instantly. ‘Then you’re the one responsible for what has happened to him! To all of us! I hope you are happy now, Mister Bigshot police inspector! I hope your big belly is full!’
Chopra was astounded. The girl seethed with fur
y.
‘Because of you we are living like beggars! Because of you we will be evicted from our home! Because of you I have had to leave my school! You have ruined us!’
‘Sumaira!’
The door opened wider. A middle-aged woman, also in a headscarf, pushed the girl away from the door. ‘Go on. Get back to your studies.’
‘What am I studying for?’ the girl shouted. ‘Because of him I can’t go to school any more.’
‘Is this how we have brought you up? To be rude to your elders? Is this what your school is teaching you? Do you think your abbu would be proud of you now?’
The girl glared at her mother, then stormed away.
The woman turned to Chopra. ‘I am sorry. She is very emotional. It is a difficult time for her.’
‘What has happened?’
‘It does not matter. It is not your problem.’
‘Please tell me.’
She hesitated. ‘Since my husband lost his job we have found things difficult. Word reached our daughter’s school. The fees for next term were already overdue. Five thousand rupees. They decided we would not be in a position to pay and so they asked us to make alternative arrangements for Sumaira. It is a very good school. Competition is fierce and they wished to allocate the place to someone else.’
Chopra was aghast. ‘But… why didn’t Rangwalla say anything?’
‘My husband is a proud man. He has looked after us very well.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He is on the roof. I will send someone to fetch him.’
‘No. I will go to him.’
The roof of the apartment tower was a flat concrete deck bordered by a low retaining wall, ornately latticed and painted the colour of sandstone. The bleached concrete reflected the harsh sun beating down from above and would have been impossible to walk across in bare feet, even for a yogi.
In the southeast corner of the terrace was a sprawling, cage-like structure, slapped together from old bits of wood and chicken-wire, which Chopra realised was a dovecote.
