The Case of the Love Commandos (3 page)

Take that Bangalore trip four months ago, for example. It had coincided with an international conference on digital forensics and cyber crime. Since then, he hadn’t spent a single day at home.

A short break would do him a world of good. And the exercise—the family was due to make the pilgrimage to the
top of the Trikuta Mountain to visit the popular Vaishno Devi shrine—would be no bad thing, either.

Besides, Elizabeth Rani had made plans of her own. Tomorrow being Sunday, she’d be at home with her father. But she’d been promised Monday and Tuesday off as well and arranged to take her nephews to see a movie at Select Citywalk mall. She was also looking forward to doing some shopping in Lajpat Nagar, getting her eyebrows threaded and having tea with her childhood friend, Chintu.

How best to handle him?

It wasn’t in her nature to bully. And arguing would get her nowhere. Any attempt to appeal to his need for time off would simply be met with a weary riposte like “Man was not made to sit idle, Madam Rani.”

What was needed was a subtler approach. Sir, like most men, suffered from an acute fear of failure. If she could convince him that all would be well with the unsolved case, then she was in with a chance. A little massaging of his ego wouldn’t go amiss, either.

“Sir, you owe it to yourself to take some offs,” said Elizabeth Rani.

“And why is that exactly?”

“Such sacrifices you make of yourself every day, assisting people from all walks of life. No doubt everyone will understand if you are absent for a short while.”

“And what if some Tom, Dick or Harry has need of my services for some emergency or other? What then? Lives could be at stake.”

“That of course is possible, sir,” she conceded. “Such incidents can occur at any time without warning.”

“Crime knows no boundaries, nor distinguishes between night and day, Madam Rani.”

“But it is not only here in Delhi that people require your
valuable assistance. Who knows what might occur during the pilgrimage? What if it is your karma to be there on the pilgrimage?”

Puri despised astrology and all forms of stargazing, often describing it as a social evil that afflicted his fellow countrymen and women. Yet he was not altogether immune to superstitious thinking. Nor from perceiving himself as the sun around which the solar system orbited.

“Most true, Madam Rani, most true,” he intoned. “Who is to say what the God has in store for us, no?”

He went thoughtfully silent for a moment, then added, “Naturally, duty to family is there also. They will be looking for me to lead them on the pilgrimage.”

Elizabeth Rani reminded him that his senior operative, Tubelight, was also hard at work on the Jain Jewelry Heist case. He and his boys were trawling the underworld for any clues as to the whereabouts of the missing loot. “So it is hardly as if the case is lying idle,” she added.

Puri’s countenance began to brighten. “I suppose a few days cannot hurt,” he said. “It is a pilgrimage after all. Some blessings will be there. Perhaps the goddess will offer me some sort of guidance with regard to the case.”

“Some time away will help you see things in a fresh light, sir, I’m sure.”

“My thoughts precisely, Madam Rani.”

He picked up the file, put it inside the drawer of his desk and gulped down the second, still warm cup of chai. “To be perfectly honest and frank, I had already made up my mind to go,” he said in a confiding tone. “Just I was playing devil’s advocate, actually.”

He spent the next five minutes frantically packing his things and calling out reminders to his secretary to do this and that while he was away.

“Be sure to get Door Stop to polish the sign on the door each and every day.” “Ensure he doesn’t waste milk.” “Dusting of my personals is required, also.”

Elizabeth Rani noticed him slip his pistol into his bag along with a box of ammunition. This was unusual—Puri rarely carried—but then sir had received a tip-off recently that con man Bagga Singh, who’d sworn to “finish” Puri, was back in Delhi.

“I can be contacted night and day, round the clock, come rain or shine,” he said as he paused at the door. “Should any development be forthcoming regarding the robbery, I would want to know without delay.”

Elizabeth Rani watched Puri make his way down the stairs and disappear into Khan Market’s Middle Lane.

She closed the door, returned to her desk and relaxed back in her chair, relishing the silence. Although she was keen to get away as soon as possible and buy some Safeda mangoes in the market (it was nearly the end of the season and these would be the last she’d taste for the next ten months), she knew better. Sir would call en route to the station to remind her to attend to some of the tasks he’d already mentioned, and if the phone went unanswered he would have fresh doubts about leaving Delhi.

No doubt he would also need another pep talk to assure him that Armageddon wouldn’t happen in his absence.

The phone rang five minutes later.

Elizabeth Rani was surprised to hear Facecream’s voice on the line. “How is Goa?” she asked her.

At the mention of the word “emergency,” her heart sank. “He’s on his way to the station. You’ll reach him on his portable,” she said before hanging up.

So much for the nice quiet break.

Clouds the shade of smudged charcoal rolled over Delhi like some biblical portent. A torrid wind spitting sand began to buffet the trees and stirred a maelstrom of loose leaves, twigs and plastic bags. The light took on an ethereal quality, the greens of the city’s flora rendered psychedelic in their intensity. In Connaught Place, that paradigm of whitewashed British imperial architecture, tourists and locals alike ran for cover. Even the ubiquitous touts selling carved wooden cobras and Rajasthani puppets abandoned their pitches and took shelter between the colonnades.

The traffic thinned and bicyclists, motorcyclists and auto rickshaw drivers joined the beggars and migrant workers beneath one of the city’s numerous overbridges. Dozens of black kites, giant wings stretched wide, wheeled and cried overhead. And then the first drops of rain fell—big, angry dollops that banged down on the roofs of cars and left long streaks on red sandstone facades.

Puri had always relished these summer squalls. As a child, when they’d rolled in from Rajasthan (as they generally did in the weeks preceding the arrival of the monsoon), he would run up onto the flat roof of his father’s house in Punjabi
Bagh. Despite the threat of lightning and strong, unpredictable gusts, he’d put his face up to the sky, relishing the sensation of cool droplets splashing down upon his flushed skin. Not even Mummy’s chiding would persuade him to come down until the storm had passed and the air was thick with the strangely intoxicating smell of steaming concrete.

This evening, however, he had no wish to get wet. He was wearing his favorite black Sandown cap and a new safari suit, a gray one made by his tailor, Grover of Khan Market. Besides, it was unseemly for gentlemen of his maturity and reputation to run around in storms. Such behavior was allowed only on Holi and when participating in a wedding baarat. Furthermore, the Jammu Express would be pulling out of the station in less than twenty minutes, and with the electricity knocked out by the storm and the traffic lights on the blink, the gridlock on the approach to the station was threatening to delay him still further.

Not even satellite imaging could have made sense of how the jam had formed. A vehicular stew, it bubbled with angry drivers honking and gesticulating at one another, the two-finger twist synchronized with a jerk of the head by far the tamest expression of their frustration. Puri watched, helpless, as the rain came down in earnest and gusts drove litter across the street. Everything was dripping wet now: the backpacker hotels and crowded eateries with their forlorn facades and cockeyed signs; the fruit-and-vegetable wallah’s barrows on the half-dug-up pavements; the omnipresent crows perched on the sagging overhead wires. Only the beggar children seemed to be enjoying the downpour, broad grins of brilliant white teeth beaming from tawny faces as they danced in the puddles.

Handbrake, Puri’s driver, inched the Ambassador forward and, with only ten minutes to go, finally turned into New
Delhi Railway Station. Passengers were hurrying from their vehicles and dashing zigzag between waterlogged potholes toward the terminal building. Parking touts were gesticulating wildly like gauchos herding cows. Coolies in red tunics and soggy turbans peered through steamed-up car windows touting for work.

“Which train, saab?” “How many pieces?”

An elderly coolie, whose bare, sinewy legs showed between the folds of his dhoti, hoisted Puri’s bag onto his head and set off for the terminal. The detective struggled to keep up with him—umbrella held at forty-five degrees against the wind, eyes fixed on the backs of the man’s callused heels, which squelched rhythmically in his rubber chappals.

They’d covered about a third of the distance when disaster struck: a gust plucked away the umbrella as easily as a balloon from a child and sent it rolling across the car park. Puri had the presence of mind to clasp one hand to the top of his head, thereby saving his cap, but in so doing, he forgot to watch where he was treading. Looking down, he found his right leg knee-deep in muddy water.

With a curse, he hurried to the station building and took cover. His mishap had engendered a collective whoop from the crowd sheltering beneath the overhang. Many of them were still smiling as he brushed away the muck from his trouser leg. Puri could barely mask his displeasure at being considered a figure of fun. After being reunited with his umbrella, which was brought to him by a helpful parking attendant, he strode purposefully into the ticketing hall, water seeping from the sides of his shoe.

The security check beyond proved as haphazard as ever. The metal detector beeped constantly as departing passengers coursed through it unchallenged. The jawan manning the X-ray machine yawned. When the image of the detective’s
bag appeared on his screen, the impression of his .302 IOF pistol went unnoticed.

Puri, who had a license to carry the firearm, felt tempted to give the idiot a piece of his mind. Sloppy security had helped facilitate the success of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack, after all. But he hurried on, deciding instead to report the incident upon his return to Delhi.

Finding the station’s only escalator broken—BY ORDER OF THE STATION MANAGER according to an official notice—gave him something further to grumble about. But once he’d climbed the steep steps up to the iron bridge that spanned the platforms, spied the roofs of the trains below and heard the lowing of the horns, his pulse began to quicken. Puri was still caught up with the romance of train travel. No other means of transport came close. With a car you simply got inside, told the driver where to go and sat back, a passive observer. Buses were even worse. But with trains there was ritual and expectation: pick up a couple of magazines from the A. H. Wheeler’s bookstand; find your carriage; claim your berth; watch the stragglers hurrying to get on board; listen to the final whistle as the bogie shuddered forward.

There was no substitute for the tamasha of being amongst the jostling crowds of passengers in the stations, either. In New Delhi they were drawn from every corner of the country. While crossing the bridge, he found himself amongst Sikhs, Rajasthanis, Maharashtrians, Tamils and Tibetan monks. He passed a family of Gujarati villagers, who’d evidently disembarked from the Varanasi train and were carrying plastic containers of holy Ganga water. Behind them appeared a group of Baul minstrels, easily identifiable in their patched cloaks, their instrument cases tucked under their arms. All the while over the PA system came announcements about the departures of trains bound for some of the furthest destinations
in the country—Jaisalmer in the Thar Desert; Darjeeling in the foothills of the Himalayas; Thiruvananthapuram, a three-thousand-kilometer journey to India’s southern tip.

If there was anything that provided Indians with a sense of living in one nation, it was the railways, he reflected. The Britishers had at least bequeathed that.

“Carriage number, sir-ji?” asked the coolie.

He’d been waiting at the bottom of the stairs on Platform 11 for his customer to catch up with him. Despite the heavy bag balanced on his head, he wasn’t the one sweating profusely.

“S3 number,” panted the detective. “Second-class AC.”

The Jammu Express was preparing to depart. Along the platform, relatives stood waving off their loved ones. The coolie wove his way between heaps of cargo and the odd fortune-telling–cum–weighing machine, and reached the carriage with a few minutes to spare.

Inside, passengers were settling down for the journey. Bags were being stored under bunks, the sore feet of elderly aunties were being attended to by dutiful daughters-in-law, packs of cards were being shuffled in preparation for games of teen patti, and sections of stainless steel tiffins containing home-cooked food were being separated and laid out on newspaper like mini buffets.

The detective brazenly pushed his way down the aisle between the bunks until he found his family members, who numbered six in total.

“Chubby, so wet you are, na!” exclaimed his mother. “What all you’ve been playing at?”

Rumpi, too, reacted with little sympathy. “What have you done to your new suit?” she asked. “Such a state!”

He looked down at the offending trouser leg. A small pool of water had started to form around his shoe.

“It is raining, my dear,” he stated.

“Well, main thing is you made it just in time,” said Rumpi. “Come. The train’s leaving any moment. Your berth is that one.”

She pointed to the one across from hers. It was occupied by his nephew Chetan, who was fifteen, grossly overweight and an irritating busybody.

“Hi, Uncle!” He grinned, his mouth full of chocolate.

Puri greeted him warily, never altogether comfortable with the young man’s overly familiar tone, and felt suddenly thankful that he wasn’t going with them.

“Actually, my dear, something most urgent has come up,” he said.