by Vaseem Khan
Chopra looked down on the sea of faces before him.
He felt absurdly self-conscious.
He transferred his gaze to Kanodia’s bungalow, painted in shades of powder yellow and white. A cantilevered awning extended from the back of the house, beneath which trestle tables had been laid out, crammed with food for the luncheon scheduled for after the circus show. Standing to one side of the tables, partially obscured by a water fountain, was the largest birthday cake Chopra had ever seen, a ten-foot-tall, six-tiered confection in white chocolate. The base of the cake rested on a platform fitted with castors. The intention, he assumed, was to wheel it out later for a gala cake-cutting as the grand finale to the birthday party.
At that moment a paunchy man in a gleaming white jodhpuri suit emerged from the bungalow. Affixed to his arm was a fat woman in a shimmering blue sari. They were trailed by a hefty young girl in a frilly pink dress.
An energetic round of applause burst out as Kanodia and family took their places on a leather sofa placed before the stage.
Chopra felt himself flush once again as Kanodia’s gaze ran over the gathered troupe. He felt sure Bulbul would recognise him. But the former jewel fence lingered on the tall clown for only a second, and then looked away.
‘Gentleladies and gentlemen,’ Tiger Singh began, ‘welcome, one and all, to the Grand Trunk Circus!’
As they returned to the waiting rickshaw, Rangwalla turned to Poppy. ‘My instincts suggest that he is telling the truth. Chopra Sir also felt that this is most likely the work of an insider, not the St Francis school.’
Poppy looked genuinely alarmed at the possibility. ‘Oh, Abbas, do you really think it could have been one of my boys? But they look like such angels.’
Rangwalla bit down on his tongue.
He wanted to tell her that the reality of the world was that all the devils he had ever encountered had, at one time, been doted upon by their mothers as their ‘little angels’. But Poppy had a unique way of looking at things; she tended to believe the best of people. Rangwalla had no wish to puncture her balloon of optimism with the needle of his own cynicism.
‘Do you have anyone else that you suspect?’ he asked instead. ‘At St Xavier, I mean. Have any of the students been acting suspiciously over the past couple of days? Going out of the way to make themselves heard? In my experience, children make very poor criminals. They need others to know how clever they have been.’
Poppy considered this, before shaking her head. ‘I cannot think of anyone in particular.’
‘Anything else out of the ordinary? Anything at all? Sometimes it is the smallest thing…’
Poppy bit her lip as she considered this. ‘I cannot think of anything—’ She stopped, her brow crimping into a frown.
‘What is it?’
‘Well, there is one thing… but it has nothing to do with the theft.’
‘Please tell me.’
‘It’s Mr Banarjee, the school secretary. The morning after the theft he took a turn. He has not been in to work since.’ Poppy hesitated. ‘Well, the thing is… Mr Banarjee has not had a day off in the past forty years.’
‘I am not riding that thing,’ hissed Chopra.
‘You do not have to ride it,’ Bhiku the dwarf hissed back. ‘The whole point is that you do not know how to ride it.’
Chopra was awash with terror.
The circus performance had proceeded well. The flame-thrower and the sword-swallower had been a hit. Then Piyush, Master of Pythons, had strolled around the audience with an enormous serpent entwined around his shoulders, encouraging the tremulous nabobs to pat the creature. Ruma, the contortionist, had curled herself into a ball and allowed herself to be rolled around the stage before being locked up inside a tiny box, from which Tiger Singh had made her vanish.
Now it was time for the clown show… and Chopra was suffering from an acute case of stage fright.
‘What is the matter?’ whispered Tiger Singh, who had come over to investigate the delay.
‘First he is too tall to be a dwarf, now he does not know how not to ride a unicycle!’
Bhiku glared daggers at Chopra.
‘Come now, Chopra,’ said Tiger Singh encouragingly. ‘There is literally nothing to it.’ He patted the reluctant clown on the shoulder and walked away.
Beneath the white make-up Chopra’s face was burning with embarrassment as he picked up the unicycle and placed one foot on the pedals. He looked around and saw that even Kanodia was watching him intently.
Chopra did not believe in prayer, but for once he wished that there was a god he could pray to, preferably the kind who deigned to listen once in a while. He took a deep breath and put his other foot on the other pedal whilst simultaneously flinging out his arms to steady himself. For a second he teetered like a gyroscope, and then his feet began to pump the pedals and he began to circle around the stage…
A wave of delight arose inside him, obliterating all other thoughts.
‘I’m doing it!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m doing it!’
He saw Bhiku’s face flash past. The mask of clown paint was twisted into an evil grimace. ‘Yes,’ said the dwarf, ‘but this is not funny, is it?’ He stuck out a stick with a boxing glove on the end and jabbed Chopra in the back.
‘Hey!’
Chopra’s arms flailed as he lost control. A cry of anguish escaped him as the unicycle arced out over the edge of the stage…
He landed in a heap on the grass, the unicycle on top of him, its solitary wheel still spinning forlornly in the air. A round of laughter added insult to his injury until he realised that everyone believed his denouement to be part of the act.
He untangled himself and stood up, gathering together the remaining shreds of his dignity.
‘Oh, Papa, the poor clown is bleeding!’
Chopra raised a hand and discovered that Kanodia’s daughter was correct.
Blood was flowing from his nose.
At the same instant he saw that fate had provided him with the opening he had been looking for.
‘Is there a bathroom I can use?’
For a second Kanodia stared suspiciously at him. Chopra immediately realised his mistake. The make-up disguised his features but there was no way to disguise his voice.
‘Follow me, sir,’ said a helpful waiter. ‘I will show you.’
He felt certain that Kanodia’s eyes were boring into his back as he limped stiffly away.
Mr Banarjee lived in an old colony in JB Nagar, a neighbouring enclave of Sahar. Banarjee’s flat was on the fifth floor of a run-down apartment building. A hand-scrawled OUT OF ORDER sign had been jammed into the accordion-style shutters that fronted the lift, forcing Poppy and Rangwalla to trudge up the betel-stained stairs.
Arriving on the fifth floor, they knocked on the door to flat 501 – residence of one AUROBINDO BANARJEE – to which an elaborate cross had been nailed, the workmanship of the cross leaving much to be desired.
To Rangwalla the splayed Christ seemed cross-eyed and listless.
The door swung back to reveal an elderly and obese cleaning woman holding a broom. Once they had explained their presence, she led them grumpily to the apartment’s narrow balcony where Banarjee was slumped in a rattan armchair clad in a white shirt and shorts, distractedly thumbing through a book of psalms.
The old man arose with a start as they approached. His eyes swam behind bottle-bottom spectacles, and a sudden gust blew up the few hairs that he had scraped across his bald pate.
A strange shadow passed over his face as he stood there. Rangwalla recognised it immediately.
Guilt.
‘Mr Banarjee,’ he said, ‘I am Rangwalla. I am a detective from—’
‘Detective!’ Banarjee ejaculated, interrupting Rangwalla. ‘Oh, Mother Mary help me!’ His knees buckled and he fell back into his rattan seat.
‘Mr Banarjee, are you all right?’ asked Poppy, leaning over her stricken colleague in concern.
‘Forty years! Forty years in the
service of our Lord and Saviour and now I am to break rocks in jail!’
The poor man seemed ready to faint.
‘Mr Banarjee,’ Rangwalla said sternly, ‘kindly pull yourself together.’
They watched as the veteran administrator gradually calmed himself.
‘Now, please explain yourself.’
Banarjee would not meet their eyes, preferring to stare at his sandals, the book of psalms clasped tightly in his hands. Eventually he spoke, in the tone of one confessing a mortal sin. ‘I have lost this year’s examination papers.’
Rangwalla gaped at him. ‘What do you mean, lost?’
‘The papers for the January exams were sent to us one week ago. As school secretary I am responsible for them. I locked them away inside the new safe that we had purchased just for this purpose. A safe that I had recommended. And then, two days ago, I discovered that the papers had been stolen.’
‘Two days ago? You mean they were taken on the same night as the theft of the bust?’
Banarjee nodded miserably.
Rangwalla considered the old man’s revelation.
From the balcony he heard the sounds of late-afternoon traffic passing five storeys below, the buzzing of rickshaws, the ringing of bicycles, the shouts of two women embroiled in an argument. It seemed to him that they had stumbled across an important turning point in the investigation. The shape of things was emerging from the fog of mystery. ‘Mr Banarjee, please get dressed. We are going to the school.’
Bulbul Kanodia’s office was located on the second floor of his lavish bungalow.
Chopra slipped out of the bathroom into which he had been deposited following his tumble and quietly climbed the marbled staircase to the second floor, his tread as light as a cat burglar’s.
The upper floors were deserted. Everyone was preoccupied with the birthday party.
Kanodia’s office was unlocked. Chopra entered and looked around.
The room, like everything else in the grand residence, was opulently furnished. In the manner of many rich men Bulbul Kanodia had allowed himself the vanity of a grand bookcase, extending across one entire wall, stuffed with volumes that he would never read. In Kanodia’s case, Chopra wasn’t sure the man could read. The remaining walls were covered in stylised paintings of Indian rural scenes that must have been purchased at inordinate expense from one of Mumbai’s burgeoning art galleries. No doubt they were by noted Indian artists. The floor was polished granite and gleamed under the artfully placed spotlights. An enormous television, flanked by towering speakers, took pride of place before an imported Italian sofa.
Chopra hurried to the expansive teak desk in the centre of the room and began to riffle through the drawers.
Kanodia kept very little in them. He discovered a clutch of useless papers, a selection of jeweller’s loupes, and a well-thumbed library of gemstone catalogues.
In the bottom drawer he found a slim volume entitled The Koh-i-Noor Diamond: A Jeweller’s Guide. It was an old edition, written by an American jeweller who claimed to have examined the Koh-i-Noor in the late sixties at the invitation of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. It rehashed the history of the Koh-i-Noor and then went into meticulous technical detail about the diamond itself. The detail – elucidating on the cut and characteristics of the stone – meant nothing to Chopra.
The volume in itself didn’t prove anything – after all, Kanodia was a jeweller. But Chopra felt that old tingle he got when he was on the right scent.
He finished with the desk and moved to a rosewood Regency writing bureau beside the room’s French windows, which opened on to a narrow balcony.
On top of the bureau lay a number of exquisite fountain pens and pads of scented notepaper stamped with the logo of Kanodia’s Paramathma jewellery brand.
Quickly, he searched inside it.
Tucked into one of the tiered letter compartments he discovered an ornate envelope, covered in gold leaf, but bearing no name. Chopra slid out a single card. His eyes scanned it:
Chopra was astounded. His instincts were telling him that he had found the very thing he had been looking for – evidence of Kanodia’s involvement in the theft of the Koh-i-Noor diamond. After all, what else could this ‘long-lost national treasure’ be?
But what did the BBC have to do with this? Surely the British Broadcasting Corporation was not involved?
No. He cast the preposterous thought aside. This had nothing to do with the BBC. The BBC mentioned in the card was something else entirely.
A noise sounded in the corridor outside.
Chopra looked around wildly, his heart thundering in his chest. If he were discovered here, it would be a disaster. He would be unmasked in front of Kanodia. He could not afford to alert him to the fact that he had discovered this vital clue.
There was nowhere to hide inside the office… nowhere inside…
He flung open the French windows and walked out onto the balcony, pushing the doors shut behind him.
The balcony overlooked the alley that ran by the side of the house. There was no way down, yet if he stayed on the balcony he would be seen by anyone who entered the office.
Before second thoughts could deter him, he clambered onto the balcony railing and from there onto a narrow, decorative ledge that ran along the bungalow’s exterior wall and disappeared around the edge of the house.
With his back to the wall, arms spread-eagled, he slowly inched his way along the ledge. Sweat poured from his brow, washing his clown make-up into his eyes.
Finally, he made it to the edge and turned the corner.
Now he was above the garden. He could see the stage, and the audience with their backs to him. On the stage the Brain of Bangalore was hypnotising a short man in a bad toupee into believing that he was a langur. On cue the man dropped to his haunches and began to nibble at an imaginary mango clasped in one hand whilst scratching his behind with the other. The crowd guffawed.
Chopra had no doubt that if anyone chose this moment to look around, he would be spotted. A clown clinging grimly to a wall two storeys above the ground was not a sight you saw every day, even in Mumbai.
He looked around wildly. What the hell did he do now?
‘There! See for yourselves.’
Banarjee stepped aside and waved a hand at the wall. Rangwalla and Poppy were standing in the secretary’s office at St Xavier. The office was sparse, a single meticulously kept steel desk surrounded on all sides by a sea of metal filing cabinets. On top of the cabinets were worn ring binders with yearly dates on the spines. Rangwalla could read dates marching all the way back to 1952.
Behind the desk, on the whitewashed wall, there had been a large painting of Father Albino Gonsalves, the school’s founding father, staring down at them with an expression of beatific idiocy. Banarjee had unhooked the painting and laid it to one side.
Behind it was a wall safe, but one more complicated than any Rangwalla had ever encountered. The front of the safe had no dials or turning wheels or even a keypad. All that Rangwalla could see was a black, rectangular LCD screen and a narrow socket like the ports on a computer.
‘It is a very modern safe,’ explained Banarjee. ‘Completely computerised. One must attach this device,’ he held up something that looked like a mobile phone, ‘and then one must input the correct nine-digit code.’
They watched as the old secretary plugged the device into the port on the front of the safe. Instantly the display flashed with red letters: ‘PLEASE ENTER CODE’.
Banarjee pushed his spectacles further up his nose and then punched in the code on the portable device’s keypad. There was a sequence of beeps and the door to the safe swung open.
Rangwalla and Poppy peered in.
‘There are papers in here,’ observed Rangwalla.
‘Yes. They are historical papers and rare volumes from the school’s early years.’
‘So the thieves took only the examination papers?’
‘Yes,’ said Banarjee wretchedly.
&nbs
p; Poppy considered this. ‘Why can’t we just request the Examination Board to send us new papers?’ she said eventually. ‘I mean, with new questions?’
‘My dear Poppy, do you understand what a laborious process it is preparing and vetting these papers? It takes months of work on the part of the Examination Board. It is too late to change the papers.’
‘But then, if someone has stolen the papers, they will be able to cheat.’
‘Precisely!’ Banarjee seemed ready to collapse into despair once again. ‘Not to mention the scandal that will engulf the school once it becomes known that we – that I – have inadvertently aided that cheating. We are not like those schools in Bihar where cheating is openly encouraged. Our motto is honestas et fides – “honesty and faith”. We will be ruined. And the Holy Father’s visit… ruined!’
There was a clattering outside the office and then Principal Augustus Lobo burst in. ‘What the devil is going on?’ he barked. ‘Banarjee? What are you doing here? I thought you were down with suspected dengue fever? Is this some sort of miraculous recovery?’
Rangwalla looked at the wretched Banarjee wringing his hands in terror.
Poppy spoke up. ‘Sir, there is something you should know.’
Quickly, she explained the situation. Lobo’s face expanded like a bullfrog during mating season. Rangwalla waited for the explosion, but then the principal shook his head in a gesture of sadness. ‘Banarjee, how long have we worked together? Why didn’t you just come to me?’
Banarjee hung his head. ‘I was ashamed.’
‘“A friend loveth at all times and a brother is born for adversity”,’ intoned Lobo. ‘Take heart from the words of Solomon, Banarjee.’ The principal turned to Rangwalla. ‘It cannot be coincidence that the bust went missing on the same night as the examination papers.’
‘No, sir,’ agreed Rangwalla. ‘I believe that the bust was stolen to deflect attention from the theft of the examination papers. I believe the thieves – knowing of your animosity towards the St Francis school – thought they could misdirect any investigation. At the very least they aimed to muddy the waters.’
