Death at the Durbar

by Arjun Gaind

  “I am not. I am telling the truth. I swear it.”

  “Very well! If you insist on being difficult.” He shrugged. “Captain, he’s all yours.”

  “Wait!” Bahadur Rao let out a sigh. “I did know her, and try to help her, but you’re right, that is not why I went to see her.”

  “What was the real reason for your visit then?”

  “I had a message for her. I went to deliver it.”

  “Let me hazard a guess,” Sikander said, leaning forward. “This message, was it an invitation to work for you Nationalists?”

  The man’s eyes widened in shock. “You are a shaitan, a devil,” he hissed. Hurriedly, he made the sign of the evil eye, apparently to ward off Sikander.

  “Oh, do grow up. You are an educated man, Bahadur Rao. Do try and act like one.” Sikander wrinkled his brow. “I think I see the scheme now. You intended to use her to blackmail the English, didn’t you? What was the plot? Were you going to try and entrap the King? Make Zahra swear an affidavit that she was molested by him, that he forced himself on her. No, that doesn’t work. He would merely deny it, not without proof of some kind. Wait, I have it! You wanted to set it up so that you could take a photograph of them together, catch the King in flagrante delicto, so to speak. And for that, you needed Zahra to agree to seduce him. But she refused, didn’t she? She sent you packing.”

  Bahadur Rao shook his head, his voice hoarse. “You have it only half-right. Yes, we wanted her to help us ruin the Durbar by exposing the King. I had a press wallah all ready to interview her, an Irish journalist who is a sympathizer of our cause. He was all set to break the news that the King was consorting with courtesans and that the taxpayers were footing the bill, but unfortunately, I was unable to get to her in time.” He paused, before deciding that he might as well put all his cards on the table. “I managed to cajole my way to her tent, but when I got there, it turned out that she was entertaining someone else at the time.”

  “A gentleman?”

  Bahadur Rao nodded. “He was like you.”

  “What do you mean, a Sikh?”

  “No, not a Sikh. A Prince. I do not know which state, but he was definitely a royal.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “He had the same demeanor as you do, the exact manner.” Bahadur Rao’s mouth curled into a sneer. “Strutting around like you own everything, like everyone has been born solely to serve your ridiculous whims.”

  “You cur,” Charan Singh swore. “How dare you speak to the Maharaja with such insolence?” His hands curled into fists, and he looked ready to cuff Bahadur Rao again, but Sikander, who was not at all put out by the Nationalist’s hostility, forestalled his manservant with a wave.

  “Can you describe this man for me?”

  “He was very ordinary looking, quite short, dark, on the fat side. Also, he had a moustache.”

  “That could be any one of four dozen Indian monarchs,” Sikander said, struggling to hide his impatience. “Is there anything else you recall? Anything odd?”

  “Well,” Bahadur Rao said, frowning, “he was wearing rather a funny hat.” He sketched a shape in the air with his hands. “It was red and shaped like a cylinder. And it had a rope hanging from it, like a donkey’s tail.”

  Could he mean a fez, a tasseled cap, like the ones they wore in Turkey? That could be a viable clue, Sikander thought excitedly. It was rather a distinctive piece of headwear, and shouldn’t be too difficult to find.

  “You say Zahra was entertaining him? Do you mean romantically?”

  “No, not at all. On the contrary, they were arguing about something. Or at least he was, haranguing her as loudly as a fishwife.”

  “Did you happen to overhear what he was saying?”

  “No, I did not. He was very irate, though, whoever he was. And when I entered the room and interrupted him, he nearly bit my head off. I tried to explain I had a message for Zahra, but the man snapped at me like I was a third-rate chuprassy. He told me to make myself scarce, and when I tried to argue, he had two of his guards escort me away.”

  Bahadur Rao shook his head. “What choice did I have? I couldn’t hang about, not without looking suspicious, and I could not leave my message for someone else to deliver, given the sensitivity of the topic. As a result, I had no choice but to leave the camp, and go back to my master to explain that I had failed to carry out his orders.”

  Even as he said those words, his eyes widened with dismay. Bahadur Rao let out a curse, biting his tongue when he realized that he had inadvertently revealed far too much information.

  Sikander’s heartbeat quickened. So here was the truth of it at last, he thought. Bahadur Rao was merely a catspaw. The real puppet-master was someone else altogether.

  “Your master, you say,” he said, quick to pounce on Bahadur Rao’s misstep. “Now that is an interesting development. Tell me, who is he? Who do you work for?”

  “I cannot.” His face stiffened, turning as obdurate as a Sphinx. “I have said all that I am willing to say.”

  “Have you now?” From the determined cast of his shoulders, Sikander could tell Bahadur Rao was deathly serious, that he had no intention of cooperating any further. “Very well, in that case, you may arrest him now, if you wish, Captain.”

  “With pleasure,” Campbell said. Leaning over, he clamped one hand on the Nationalist’s shoulder. “Come along, my friend. You have an appointment with the Assizes, and I wouldn’t want you to miss it.”

  “But,” Bahadur Rao recoiled, “you said you would let me go.”

  “Did I?” Sikander gave the man a pitiless glare. “I said if you cooperated with me fully, I would consider it, but you are the one who is refusing to divulge the identity of your master. Sorry, Bahadur Rao, but you have left me no choice in the matter.”

  He nodded at Campbell, who opened the car’s door, but Bahadur Rao moved with unexpected speed. Breaking loose, he turned on Sikander. His face was so red that for a moment, the Maharaja thought he intended to assault him, but instead, he pursed his lips and spat in his direction, a gobbet of phlegm that only narrowly missed him, splashing to the carpet between his boots.

  “You are not done with me, Sikander Singh,” he raved. “We will have our day. Very soon, the English will be forced to leave India, and when they go, you and your kind will be thrown off your thrones. Your ivory palaces will be pulled down, and your titles stripped from you. And we shall rise, we, the commoners, the nobodies. We will usurp all that you own. You will be a pauper then, a nothing, just you wait and see, Sikander Singh. I curse you, and your white masters who you serve so loyally, like a slave.”

  This tirade was just too much to take, enough to test even Sikander’s patience.

  “I am no man’s slave,” he thundered. Even before he knew it, he had surged forward, his hand bunching the man’s shirt, his face suffused with fury. But then, just as soon as it had crested, this wave of passion receded, leaving Sikander feeling dirty, like he had betrayed himself somehow by allowing himself to give in to such a base onslaught of emotion.

  “Just take him away.” He released Bahadur Rao, rubbing at his hands, as if he could not get them clean.

  Charan Singh obeyed, dragging the Nationalist bodily out of the car, but not before Bahadur Rao managed to get in a parting rejoinder.

  “You have chosen the wrong side,” he snarled. “Sooner or later, India will belong to us Indians, you can be sure of that.”

  His words stung at Sikander, as sharp as a razor. He stiffened, but it was not rage that gripped him this time around. It was realization. The wrong choice, Bahadur Rao had said. Sikander had heard those words before, that very phrase, repeated not twenty-four hours past.

  In a flash, he knew exactly who the man’s elusive master was. The Gaekwad of Baroda. That was who Bahadur Rao had to be working for.

  If that was indeed the case,
then it also meant he could not be the one who murdered Zahra.

  Why? Because Sayaji Rao would never resort to murder, especially not that of a woman.

  He was far too much of a gentleman for that.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  About a kilometer due west from the Royal encampment, very near the junction where the Kingsway intersected with the Princes Road, the English had razed several acres of farmland to create a vast open maidan. At the southern end, playing fields for hockey, football, and cricket had been demarcated, but the majority of the space was dedicated to the game of polo, of which the King was said to be an ardent devotee. Two full sized-greens had been laid out, with the stables and the paddocks adjoining the distant end, and the area between used to erect rows of stands for spectators, flanked by a handsome clubhouse done up in Tudor style and a row of matching pavilions.

  When the Rolls came to a stop outside the entrance to the clubhouse, it seemed a chukka was just drawing to a close. Sikander disembarked, strolling over to lean on one of the fenceposts that bordered the green. Shielding his eyes with one hand, he peered out at the players, trying to pick out his quarry.

  “Which one is Jey Singh?” Campbell inquired, coming up behind him.

  “Over there, the man on the white Arabian, wearing blue and red.”

  “I have heard some rather sinister things about him,” the Captain said with a shiver. “Is is true that he is a pederast?”

  Sikander replied with a grimace. “The princes of Alwar are complicated.”

  Located at the border of Rajputana, Alwar was roughly the size of Montenegro. It had been founded by a Kachawwa Rajput named Partap Singh Prabhakar, a soldier of fortune who had conquered the ancient Kingdom of Mewat. Compared to its neighbor, Jaipur, it was a relatively minor principality, entitled to only fifteen guns. However, it was very wealthy, due mainly to the famed slate and sandstone mines located at the fringes of the Aravalis. However, in recent times Alwar had become most notorious for the unbridled eccentricity of the ruling family, who had long enjoyed a reputation for being somewhat unhinged.

  Jey Singh’s grandfather, Sheodan Singh, the first of the clan to be anointed Maharaja, had been as erratic as a tornado, so unpredictable that the British had pushed him aside and taken over management of Alwar’s affairs. When he had died, ironically, of brain fever, with no legitimate heirs, an adopted son, Mangal Singh, had been placed on the throne. Unfortunately, he had turned out to be an alcoholic, another victim of the Alwar curse.

  If rumor was to be believed, this infirmity of character had been passed on to his son, Jey Singh, the current bearer of the title. There were half a hundred stories about his peculiarities: that he had built himself an Italian villa and then refused to live in it because a black cat had walked past its entrance; that he loved practical jokes so much that he had once had one of his ministers arrested and sentenced him to death, only for it to turn out that he had ordered the crossbeam sawed through so that it would snap precisely when the man was hanged from the gallows. It was rumored he bought three new automobiles every year and had his old cars buried in unmarked graves after full state funerals, and that when his guru had died, rather than cremating his corpse, he had it pickled. There were darker stories as well, that once he had doused a polo pony with kerosene and set it aflame merely because it had bucked him, that he used the babies of villagers as bait on tiger hunts, and that he was a sadist and a pederast and a sodomite who enjoyed having his concubines seduce young British officers so that he could then coerce them into sexual liaisons, threatening them with scandal if they refused.

  Of course, looking at him, it was difficult to detect even a trace of insanity. Sikander was reminded of the story of Jekyll and Hyde. It was as if two people inhabited the same body, one urbane and calm, the other savage and animalistic. On the face of it, Jey Singh was handsome, a man of unsurpassed wit and elegance, gifted with the silver tongue of a Cicero. As far as the English were concerned, he was a thorough gentleman, not to mention that he was widely considered the best polo seat and rifle shot in India. But those who knew him personally understood that this was a carefully cultivated façade. Jey Singh wore sanity like a mask. Beneath it, he was deeply deranged.

  Which Jey Singh was he about to encounter? Sikander wondered. The affable version, or the lunatic? It was that very thought which remained uppermost in his mind as he preceded Campbell into the pavilion. Inside, it was like something straight out of Kipling. No effort or expense had been spared to perfectly recreate a planter’s clubhouse, right down to the rattan furniture and the bamboo bar in the corner, not to mention the preponderance of potted palms spread around the room, giving the place a vaguely jungle air.

  “Come, let us get a drink,” he said, allowing a white-jacketed khidmutgar to usher them over to a cane-and-glass table, flanked by a pair of wicker armchairs.

  “We shall have a bottle of Pol Roger.” Sikander settled into the chair facing the entrance, leaving the other vacant for Campbell.

  “We haven’t time for this, sir,” Campbell insisted, looking rather out of sorts.

  “Patience, Captain! Here comes our suspect now.”

  He swiveled his neck toward the door, where Jey Singh had just made a triumphant ingress, accompanied by the usual crowd of hangers-on. He was a striking man, almost as tall as Bhupinder, so slender he seemed almost effeminate, and very dark, with sunken, inscrutable eyes and a perpetual smirk that gave him the air of a Rupert of Hentzau.

  When he saw him, unbidden, a memory sprang to Sikander’s mind, the recollection of a sunny afternoon, many years long past, when he had chanced upon a young boy sitting in a secluded corner of the school dormitory, laughing uproariously even though he was all by himself.

  “What are you doing?” he had asked curiously.

  “They die so easily,” the child, who had been none other than Jey Singh had replied, holding up his hands, which had been filled with the corpses of butterflies. “Do you think they feel any pain when I pull off their wings?”

  A chill ran down his spine now, a tremor of dread, and Sikander took a deep breath before raising his arm.

  “Jey Singh!” he shouted. “Over here!”

  Alwar’s neck swiveled toward him, studying him with a quizzical, almost hostile frown, before recognition dawned. His mouth broke into a faint smile. Altering his direction, he sauntered to their table.

  “Is that Sikander Singh, as I live and breathe? What an unexpected surprise! Since when did you take an interest in polo? I thought all you cared for was mystery stories!”

  “Actually, I came to see you.”

  “Did you now?” He whistled to the waiter who approached him warily, dragging up a well-upholstered chair.

  “You, boy, bring me oysters, two dozen of them, and make it quick.”

  It was obvious his erratic reputation had preceded him, judging by the speed with which the khidmutgar hurried away to fulfill this command. Languorously, Jey Singh sat down, crossing one leg over the other and casting an appreciative glance at the boy’s retreating backside before turning his attention to Campbell, eyeing him carefully, an examination so discomfortingly lascivious that it was almost an assault.

  “Well, aren’t you going to introduce me to your handsome friend?”

  “This is Captain Campbell of the Coldstream Guards.”

  “Is he now? Tell me, Captain, have you even considered leaving the Army and entering private service? We at Alwar are always on the lookout for a few good men.” He tittered, amused by this unexpected double-entendre. “With posture quite as admirable as yours and those wonderful eyes, you should be a Colonel, at the very least.”

  The Captain blushed a deep scarlet. Luckily, that was when the waiter came to his rescue, returning with the requested oysters and champagne. Losing interest in Campbell entirely, Jey Singh attacked the platter with immense gusto, cracking open the shells and
shoveling their slippery innards into his mouth greedily. Sikander sat in silence, watching him, trying to keep his gorge from rising.

  “I adore oysters,” Jey Singh said, grinning. “They are wonderful for a man’s virility.” Tendrils of pink meat hung from his teeth, and he smacked his lips which were slick with ichor at Campbell. “Do try one,” he offered the plate to Sikander, who refused with a scowl.

  “I think I will stick to the champagne, thank you,” he said, helping himself to a generous measure of Pol Roger.

  “Aren’t you going to pour me a glass?” Jey Singh said. Sikander obliged, and Alwar paused from his molluscian genocide long enough to take a delicate taste.

  “That is bloody awful,” he pulled a face, and let out another, even more shrill whistle, which brought the waiter scurrying back. Jey Singh fixed him with a glower and then, without warning, flung his glass squarely at the man’s face. Luckily, his aim was off, and it missed its intended target, bouncing off the waiter’s chest and falling to the floor, but not before his tunic was quite inundated.

  “How dare you serve us warm champagne?” he squealed. “Go fetch a properly chilled bottle immediately.”

  Squirming with embarrassment, Sikander shifted in his seat, aware that the entire pavilion had fallen silent, every eye now fixed squarely upon them. Jey Singh, on the other hand, indifferent to the fact that he was making a spectacle of himself, returned instead to his oysters as if nothing at all had happened.

  Oblivious to Sikander’s discomfort, Jey Singh said, “How long has it been since we last met. Ten years, is it?”

  Sikander’s spirits rose, seeing his opportunity. “Twelve, I believe. The last time was in Bikaner. We were both guests of Ganga Singh for the grouse season. Don’t you remember?”

  “I don’t, I am sorry to say.”

  “Are you sure? Jagatjit arranged for us to watch a nautch girl perform, don’t you recall, a bewitching creature named Wazeeran? In fact, if my memory serves correctly, you were very taken with her, weren’t you?”