The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken

by Tarquin Hall

  Puri sat up, non-responsive to the repeated enquiries as to his well-being. He began to run a kind of all-systems check to make sure there was no serious damage and found that the pain in his shoulder had been caused by his fall to the pavement, a bruise rather than a wound. Relieved, yet still dazed, he sat there for a moment or two longer, brushing away pieces of shattered glass from his clothes, and then accepted the offer of an outstretched hand.

  It belonged to Handbrake.

  'Boss, are you OK?' he asked in Hindi as the detective got to his feet, still shedding bits of glass like a skyscraper in an earthquake.

  'It was that same bloody bastard on the motorbike - one from other day, the paan wallah assassin,' he said, suddenly remembering what had happened.

  'He got away, Boss. Sorry, too much traffic.'

  'Anyone else is wounded?'

  'No, Boss. Just a scrape or two.'

  'Thank the God,' murmured Puri in English.

  'And the car. The bullets hit the side, Boss.'

  'Don't tell me.'

  Handbrake pointed out the holes.

  'Bloody bastard,' cursed Puri. 'I'll get him if it's the last thing I do.'

  One of the jawans who 'patrolled' Khan Market approached, dispersing the crowd with the tact and sensitivity for which the Delhi police are famed.

  The detective suggested he might like to form a perimeter around the scene of the shooting before calling Inspector Singh and asking him to bring the ballistics boys over right away. Leaving Handbrake to guard the car, he returned upstairs to his office. He helped himself to a large Scotch and then opened the safe. Inside lay his .32 IOF revolver. This he loaded and slipped into one of the outside pockets of his safari suit.

  Puri was an hour late in picking up his wife from home, arriving in a taxi without the flowers he'd promised to buy. He didn't want to have to tell her about the attempt on his life - she had a way of getting upset when people tried to kill him - so he said the Ambassador had broken down.

  Thankfully, Rumpi let him off lightly and they spent the fifteen-minute journey to Lotus Gardens Phase Two reminiscing about their three daughters' mundans - how their second-eldest had cried and cried when her head had been shaved, and how Radhika, their youngest, had revelled in the attention and giggled uncontrollably as her locks had been shorn.

  'Such a silly little bachi,' smiled detective with a fond smile.

  The conversation set the tone for the afternoon. Puri and Rumpi entered their eldest daughter Lalita's apartment to find it heaving with members of both their families. Soon, the detective was able to put all thoughts of poison, match fixing, Antwerp and attempts on his life out of his mind - at least for an hour or so.

  'Getting so big, beta, haa?' said Puri as he held up his grandson, Rohit, and gave him a hug.

  The boy blew a loud raspberry.

  'And naughty, haa?' he guffawed.

  'Very naughty!' chorused everyone approvingly.

  Rumpi disappeared into the kitchen where large amounts of kheer and ladoos were being prepared, and Puri's son-in-law Arun brought him a cold drink.

  'All well, Papa-ji?' he asked, as formal as ever.

  'First class.'

  'You came from work?'

  'Direct from office.'

  'Heard there was some problem?'

  'Where you heard that?'

  'Mummy-ji said there had been some shooting?'

  How the hell did Mummy find out these things so quickly? 'Just a small misunderstanding, that is all,' he told his son-in-law.

  'Misunderstanding with a gunman?'

  'Correct.'

  Inevitably the conversation turned to cricket, with most of the men in the room gathered together discussing a recent controversial decision by an Australian umpire, which had almost certainly lost India an important international match.

  It took Mummy to put an end to it. 'Cricket talk is getting over,' she said. 'Come. Challo!'

  They all adjourned to the dining room where the family priest was sitting in the middle of the floor. After greeting the pandit and bending down to touch his feet, everyone found a spot on the Indian quilts that had been laid on the floor. Rohit, dressed in a smart kurta pajama, was brought forward by his mother.

  The priest recited some mantras, sprinkled drops of Ganga water over the boy's head, and then, with a pair of scissors, snipped away a few strands of his hair. A local barber, hired especially for the event, then took over. Using a straight razor blade, he began to shave the head clean, shearing Rohit's mop like wool from the body of a lamb. The child began to wail and everyone tried to appease him - 'No need to cry, baby'; 'Not long now, bacha' - but the tears kept dripping down on to the floor along with his baby locks.

  Puri found himself staring down at the hair, thinking back on the time when, as an adult, his head had been shaved. He'd been in his early twenties, stationed in southern India. While on leave, he visited the magnificent Vishnu temple at Tirupati.

  Like all pilgrims, he was required to get his head tonsured before entering the holy site. The shaving was carried out by one of the temple priests, a matter of a few minutes' work, his hair mixing with that of thousands of others carpeting the ground.

  Puri only came to know later that Tirupati, the richest temple in the world, sold approximately a ton of hair every day to the international cosmetics industry. In other words, his youthful locks had ended up as part of a wig. In the years since then, he'd derived a good deal of amusement from the thought that someone was walking around wearing his hair.

  The thought of hair and wigs recalled him to the moustache case. What if the thief intended to wear Gopal Ragi's moustache himself, perhaps as part of a disguise?

  A chilling possibility came to mind. The moustache, once fixed to the thief's upper lip, could be used to strangle someone. Puri pictured the thief passing through tight security, getting close to, say, an unsuspecting dignitary who was under close guard, unravelling the tresses and . . .

  He could think of another, less morbid possibility. And as the last of Rohit's hair fell away and the barber crafted a little tuft at the back of his head, Puri made a mental list of professions where a big, bushy moustache was required as part of the job description.

  In regiments like the Rajputana Rifles, President's Bodyguard and Border Security Force, there was hardly a serving man to be found without facial hair. Those with the most outlandish of moustaches were always put on display during public ceremonies like the changing of the guard at Rashtrapati Bhavan or the Republic Day parade for example.

  In some parts of India, like central Madhya Pradesh, officers were given financial incentives for nurturing growth on their upper lip. Male actors appearing in theatrical performances of the Hindu epics, during Dussera for example, were often well endowed in the facial hair department as well. Who else? Cadres of the martial Sikh Nihang order.

  Puri could think of only one other profession: hotel doorman.

  Many a five-star hotel employed Sikhs or Rajasthanis with dramatic moustaches to man their entrances. They wore colourful turbans and inauthentic uniforms - window dressing that bespoke romantic 'Indiaaaah'.

  Puri was brought back to the present by a loud cheer as the last of Rohit's hair, deemed to be associated with his past life, dropped away.

  The boy was still wailing as he was shown a reflection of himself in the mirror. The priest applied sandalwood to his forehead and blessed him. Envelopes of large rupee denominations (along with a traditional single rupee coin for luck) were laid before the child. And then everyone descended on the food.

  Given the religious nature of the day, it was all vegetarian: gobi aloo, pooris, daal and malai kofta.

  It was with a full stomach that Puri joined Rumpi and the rest of his family on the dance floor, where they strutted their stuff to the beat of Daler Mehndi.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  PURI WAS SLEEPING soundly on his office couch when the moustache thief entered through the window. Being a consummate professional
and fancying himself as something of an artiste, he'd come well prepared - razor, can of shaving foam, even a little block of alum to treat nicks and cuts.

  He began by kneeling down next to his victim and tying a towel around his neck so as to catch any wayward hairs. He inspected the perfectly formed handlebar moustache, appraising it as a sculptor might a block of virgin stone. There came a squirt from the can as a little foam was extracted and applied to the detective's upper lip. He opened a Sweeney-Todd-style razor and inserted a new blade. The steel glinted in the moonlight as it hovered a few inches above the detective's face. Then it began its descent. Slowly, as if in slow motion . . . closer. Puri felt the cold steel make contact with his skin.

  With a cry, he sat up on the couch, his heart beating wildly.

  He looked around him, convinced someone else was in the office with him, and putting a hand up to his face, felt his upper lip. His moustache seemed intact. Just to make sure, he made his way into his 'Executive WC'. His reflection in the mirror revealed everything in its proper place. Not a hair missing. It had all been a terrible dream.

  'Thank the God,' he muttered before washing his hands and splashing cold water on his face.

  He emerged to find that the mess in his office - pizza boxes, takeaway containers from Colonel's Kababz - was anything but imagined.

  His operatives had all gathered at Most Private Investigators HQ late last night to plan the surveillance of the two ICT cricketers. Both Kamran Khan and Vikas Patil, the Indian batsman suspected of match fixing, were due to play on opposing teams at Kotla the next day and would be staying at the Maharajah Hotel.

  It had been decided that Flush would work with a sidekick known as Gordon and shadow Kamran Khan. Facecream, with Tubelight as backup, would handle Vikas Patil. In the meantime, Flush was also working on hacking the players' email accounts and getting across their mobile phone lines.

  Puri had reasoned that the same individual behind the killings of Full Moon, the Mumbai bookie and possibly Faheem Khan as well had now gained control of the match-fixing ring. It stood to reason, therefore, that this individual would now contact Kamran Khan and Vikas Patil and provide them with instructions for the forthcoming match. With any luck Most Private Investigators would be able to trace the messages to their source.

  The attempt on his life had convinced Puri that Aga was no longer in charge. Had he wanted the detective dead then surely he would have got the job done in Pakistan. This meant that Brigadier General Aslam had been telling the truth about the Americans grabbing him.

  Someone else - an Indian living on Indian soil - had taken control of the illegal gambling business.

  With the entire Most Private Investigators team engaged on the Khan case, Handbrake was assigned the task of visiting all the five-star hotels in Delhi to enquire if any mustachioed doormen had been hired in the last couple of days or if there were any job vacancies for which candidates were being sought.

  Handbrake took the Ambassador, setting off at around ten; Puri meanwhile called for one of Randy Singh's taxis. His destination was the National Archives, where he wanted to check up on Mummy.

  It wasn't that he didn't trust his mother. She'd made him a promise they would work as a team and could be counted on to share any information that came into her possession. There was every possibility, however, that she'd take her sweet time in doing so. Mummy had this tendency of interpreting things in her own particular way. She might decide that co-operating actually meant doing her own thing, at least temporarily, on the grounds that it was best for both of them. The fact that her phone had been switched off all morning didn't bode well for their partnership.

  The taxi dropped him outside the National Archives at the intersection of Janpath and Rajpath, a stone's throw from India Gate, the heart of British New Delhi. He made his way along the front of the long colonial building with its grand red and brown sandstone facade and imperial columns, once emblematic of the Empire and suppression, but now much cherished in a city of architectural mediocrity.

  Puri applied for a pass in the main reading room, where scholars were bent over Mughal parchments and rare Sanskrit manuscripts written on animal skin. From there a helpful librarian led him deep into the vaults. They passed through stacks groaning with great wedges of paper the colour of aged cheese and dusty box files bound in string. There wasn't a computer in sight, just the odd microfiche machine and blackboards with lists of categor-ies and classifications chalked upon them - 'Foreign Deptt. Select (Secret) Committee 1756'; 'Persian Dispatches 1716-1881'; 'Deptt. of Ceded and Conquered Provinces 1803.'

  Puri found Mummy sitting at a table surrounded by thick ledgers and piles of yellowing forms. Despite the daunting amount of paperwork, she was decidedly upbeat. 'Chubby, some progress is there!' she announced after explaining that her phone was out of range. 'See here.'

  She'd been searching through the records pertaining to ration cards allocated to refugees in Delhi in 1947 and found a certain Manjit Singh listed.

  'Manjit Singh was Saroya - sorry, Kiran Singh's father, na,' she reminded him.

  'Yes, Mummy-ji,' said Puri, patiently.

  'See, his native place is mentioned - Mandra. Here, also, it states he stayed in Purana Qila.'

  Purana Qila, the walled ruins of the sixteenth-century citadel of the Mughal Emperor Humayun, had become a refugee camp in 1947, housing thousands of the five million Sikhs and Hindus who arrived from West Pakistan.

  'A forwarding address is listed there?' asked Puri.

  'Unfortunately not. But all families got land, na. Thus Singh's address should be somewhere in here.'

  She indicated the stack of seven or eight old box files lying next to her. They were all marked 'Gadgil Assurance Scheme'.

  'I'll give you a hand, Mummy-ji.' Puri pulled up a chair. 'Shouldn't take too long, no,' he added.

  'This is only part of an iceberg, Chubby. Rest is over there.'

  Dozens more box files sat on the shelves. 'They're arranged in alphabetical order, is it?' asked the detective.

  'Don't do joking, Chubby. It's all topsy and turvy. Nothing in the right order.'

  'But this will take for ever, Mummy-ji,' he said, suddenly struck by the vastness of the task. The files, after all, contained paperwork pertaining to the allocation of land to some three million people.

  'Do positivity, Chubby. Today I'm feeling very much lucky.'

  At four o'clock Puri returned to ground level to check his messages and learned that James Scott had called from London. His enquiries into Patel and Patel, the company in Antwerp, had proven fruitful.

  'They've been under investigation here in the UK,' he said when the detective called him back. 'As it happens, I know the officer in charge. Peter Kemp. Good man.'

  Puri took 'good man' to mean that the colleague had been willing to share what he knew, albeit in confidence and most probably over a couple of pints of warm bitter.

  'Seems the firm's been making regular payments to an account in Liechtenstein,' continued the ex Scotland Yard man. 'The account's owned by an Indian national. I can't give you a name; Peter doesn't have it himself. The authorities there won't release the details. Liechtenstein's a tax haven, as I'm sure you know. Very secretive. But he says the Government of India has the details.'

  'How exactly?'

  'Apparently your Finance Ministry petitioned the Liechtensteinians, or whatever you call them, for all accounts held by Indian citizens, citing tax evasion and money laundering.'

  'When was that exactly?'

  'Three years ago, Puri. All the details were handed over to New Delhi as part of a secret deal. Thirty or forty accounts in all, some allegedly containing hundreds of millions of dollars.'

  Typical, thought the detective: the ruling party finds vast quantities of black money stashed away, knows exactly who's done the stashing and doesn't do a thing about it. Except perhaps use the information to elicit funding for their next election campaign.

  'Most helpful of you, sir. I'll r
evert,' said the detective.

  He wrote a quick note to Mummy, explaining that he had to return to the office, and left it at the front desk. He didn't expect to hear from her today. Nor tomorrow. Nor the day after that.

  There were still dozens of files to search through - possibly more lurking yet undiscovered in the bowels of the National Archives.

  By seven-thirty, with only half an hour remaining before closing time, Mummy had begun to wonder if perhaps her search might take many more days, perhaps even weeks. She sat back in her chair, rubbing her eyes: they had begun to sting after ten hours in the archives. She was hungry as well, having gone without her lunch. Time to call it a day.