Banquet on the Dead (15 page)

Hamid Pasha’s smile stayed on his face, but it seemed to Nagarajan the mirth that had been there a few minutes ago had gone out of it.

‘I stood there, thinking it over, wondering why Durga had gone to the well. But it’s a free house, sir. Anyone can go anywhere they want. I’d just an hour-and-a-half ago seen the old woman go up to the well on the same path. I wondered then, too, what was going on at the well.

‘Anyway, here I was, standing by the window, after Durga had disappeared from view, wondering what it could mean. I must have stayed standing there for five minutes or so, then I saw Gauri come down from the well, too.’

Nagarajan leant forward in his seat. ‘So you first saw your mother-in-law go to the well.’

‘Yes.’

‘And then, ninety minutes later, you saw Durga come
back
from the well, and then Gauri followed her. Is that right?’

‘Yes, but I did not see them go towards the well, so I don’t know when they went there.’

‘Yes,’ Hamid Pasha said. ‘Yes, rather unfortunate, that, is it not, miyan?’ To Kamala he said, ‘Do you know when Gauri’s sister is due to come here again from the village, memsaab, or indeed, if she is here now?’

Kamala looked confused. ‘Gauri does not have a sister,’ she said.

‘Oh, she does not? Then who is the lady that looks like Gauri that sometimes attends to work when Gauri is absent?’

‘Nobody attends to work on her behalf when she is absent. Are you sure you’re not mistaken, sir?’

‘Oh, but, memsaab, it was your husband that said so— that he has seen Gauri’s sister walk around the place, with her sari covering her head like so.’ He wound his arm around his head and bent it, demurely.

A quick smile appeared on Kamala’s face and disappeared again. ‘My husband does not know what he is talking about, sir. He does not take much of an interest in family matters anyway. Why, I’ve never seen him so much as speak to Gauri or even looking her in the eye. As for what he has seen, I am sure it was just Gauri walking around with her head covered. It gets hot in the afternoons here, and sometimes when she has to work in the sun, helping Ellayya to carry the sand and the concrete for a little bit of work here and there, she does wrap herself so.’

‘Oh, in that case I hope your husband was not seeing things when he mentioned a young man loitering around the gate and making eyes at Durga.’ Nagarajan saw Hamid Pasha’s eyes glance up quickly to gauge Kamala’s reaction.

‘Ha,’ she said, ‘he is surely not seeing things there. Everyone in the house has seen
those
things.’ Her face glowed suddenly, and Nagarajan saw that she was clearly enjoying herself. ‘She goes out to meet him too, though, God bless her, she has not yet had the audacity to invite him into the compound.’

‘Who is he, madam?’

‘Some old flame, no doubt,’ she said, sneering. ‘She was quite a beauty when she was in college, they tell me. She is not a bad looker even now, wouldn’t you say? Kotesh and she had a love marriage. Prameela was dead set against them for four years until the kid was born. She did not talk to either of them for all that time.’

‘Ah!’ Hamid Pasha said in admiration. ‘Madam, you are a mine of information.’

She flushed, but said, ‘Oh, it’s nothing. I just keep my eyes and ears open, that’s all. But yes, that boy has been loitering around for a few months now, and all of us wonder what Kotesh might be thinking of it all—if he knows.’

‘Do you think it is possible that he does not know?’

Kamala shrugged. ‘Who can tell? Kotesh has his own issues to worry about, I guess. He has this sickness that he tells us about—it has no name and no cure, apparently. And Karuna seems to have it as well, the way she is walking about with hands to her hips nowadays.’

Hamid Pasha gave her a quick, questioning look, but said nothing. Nagarajan looked at his watch and gestured to Hamid Pasha, who reluctantly got up and pushed his chair back.

‘Now that you have your evidence,’ she said, smiling, ‘I suppose you want to go and talk to the others’.

Hamid Pasha bowed and said, ‘It is impossible to hide anything from you, memsaab. But we are pressed for time. We will be back.’ He walked back the first three or four steps before turning around and striding to the front door. With a quick nod at Kamala, Nagarajan collected his cap and followed him.

When they were out of doors, Hamid Pasha stretched luxuriously and exclaimed, ‘Miyan! That one! You know, miyan, every family has one such character. Nothing ever happens without that one person knowing everything about it. No other member of this house can so much as breathe a puff of air without
her
getting to know about it. She would make a fine mistress of a house, that one. I wonder why the old lady did not see it.’

Nagarajan muttered, ‘She probably wasn’t too keen to give up her hold over it. It’s always like that with women, isn’t it?’

Hamid Pasha frowned and shook his head emphatically. ‘Oh, no, miyan, I do not think Kauveramma was what you would call “an average woman”. If she put Kamala in her place, there must have been a good reason for it. I wonder what it was.’

‘The poisoning must have given her a hint.’

The older man chuckled. ‘Either way, there are not many people with whom you can talk for an hour and still think you’ve not even started a conversation. Yes, I am going to come back to this mem. There is still much I need to ask her.’ He stopped, then, and lapsed into a moment of thought. ‘There is this side to this whole thing, is there not, miyan, that the more you talk to people, the more you feel like asking them more and more questions?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Nagarajan dully. ‘I am hungry. Shall we go somewhere to eat?’

‘Hain? Yes, of course. Ashoka Hotel is nearby, is it not? Let us go there. Let us go there and let us have some of their excellent chicken manchurian, miyan. Have you had it before?’

Nagarajan shook his head.

‘No? Hai! Come! Let us have it. And let us talk while we are having it.’ He took the inspector by the arm and dragged him away to the stairs. As they began their descent he said, in a tone that had sobered down from just a few seconds before, ‘You know, miyan, people like this one— who see everything, hear everything,
smell
everything—they are generally very empty.’ He pointed to his head. ‘Up here. They are very good
collectors
of information, you know, but they often do not know what to do with it. In fact, maybe it is because they do not know what to collect and what not to collect that they collect
everything
.’ He turned his gaze from the balcony to the front door through which they had just come. ‘But that one—that one is
not
empty.’

‘And that,’ he added, ‘makes her dangerous’.

12

A
SHOKA
H
OTEL HAD COME UP
some sixty or so years ago—before Nagarajan had been born—on what was then the outskirts of Hanamkonda. It had then been a motley collection of umbrellas and plastic tables thrown together on a plot of land with a white banner standing at the entrance announcing the name. As the city grew bigger, and expanded towards Kazipet on the right and Warangal on the left, along the main road, Ashoka Hotel grew with it. At some time or the other a building was erected, and the old banner gave way to a metal board with the standard menu printed on it. Then, as Hanamkonda grew further and the main road underwent a makeover from dusty concrete to tar, Ashoka Hotel too decided to change, this time in a big way. The then owner of the hotel (no one remembered his name anymore) bought the site next door and built a movie theatre on it, at the same time getting rid of the old building and constructing a swanky new air-conditioned bar and restaurant. Ashoka Talkies and Ashoka Hotel, then, became new Hanamkonda’s hip landmarks. If the Big Sewer was the one thing of which Hanamkonda was secretly ashamed, Ashoka Hotel was something it could be openly proud of.

Inspector Nagarajan was not a big admirer of Ashoka Hotel or Ashoka Talkies. It was his opinion that the screen in the movie theatre was too dull to be watchable, and he found the lighting in the hotel too dim as well. He had occasionally come here at the behest of his family and tried desperately to like the place. But there was something about the whole ‘mood lighting’ that he simply did not get. He had once remarked to his wife that ‘mood lighting’ killed his mood.

He had thought of going to Shankar Café for lunch, and then Hamid bhai suggested this place. Now they were sitting at a dark corner table (though all tables here were dark, he thought wryly), and Hamid bhai was cleaning a plate of chicken manchurian. The Inspector’s vegetarian plate orders were yet to arrive. He cast a forlorn glance over his shoulder at the closed kitchen door and sighed.

‘You like to write things down, hain?’ Hamid Pasha was saying, licking his fingertips and pointing at Nagarajan’s notebook. ‘What did you write in it?’

Nagarajan palmed his book and opened it to a random page. He shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know if it helps or not, but I just write down whatever comes to mind; whatever I think is important at the time.’

‘What did you write in it today?’

‘Here’s an example: Raja is scared of Karuna.’

‘Hmm,’ said Hamid Pasha. ‘That is an interesting observation. What made you say that?’

‘I don’t know. I usually don’t. I feel something when I am talking to people, and if I don’t write it down I forget. There was something about him, wasn’t there, the way he was so keenly telling us that if anyone in the house would kill his mother, it was Karuna?’

‘You do not believe, then, that he truly believes that?’

‘He may, but I thought the insistent references to Karuna betrayed some fear he has of her. I am not sure what he is exactly scared of, though.’

‘Maybe he has some secrets that we have to uncover,’ Hamid Pasha said. ‘Everybody has secrets.’

‘I wonder what Prameela is hiding,’ said Nagarajan.

‘Do you think she is hiding something?’ Hamid Pasha asked. ‘Why so?’

‘Oh, you didn’t think she was a bit too eager to tell us things? When she first came into the room she was so subdued and then suddenly she started speaking and suddenly there was no stopping her.’ Nagarajan paused and stabbed at his notebook with a pen. ‘That sort of eagerness always makes me suspicious.’

Hamid Pasha smiled. ‘She might not be completely innocent, I agree. As Kamala told us, she might just be telling us what Karuna wants her to tell us.’

‘Oh, I would take what Kamala tells us with a pinch of salt too. I know you think she sees everything and hears everything, but she is one of the suspects too, you know.’

‘Of course, miyan. But everyone in the house is a suspect. Whom do we believe and whom do we mistrust?’

‘Aren’t we supposed to suspect everybody?’

Hamid Pasha took a toothpick and examined its tip for a second. Then he gingerly cleaned between his incisors with it, before letting it probe his backteeth. For a long time all Nagarajan heard was slurping and chomping. He turned around for another wistful glance at the kitchen.

Presently, Hamid Pasha said, ‘You are supposed to suspect everyone, miyan, yes. But we should also remember that our information comes from them. We cannot suspect
everything
that they tell us. We have to take at least a few things at face value.’

‘But you seem to be taking everything at face value.’

‘Not everything, but most things. You take things at face value until you see one thing contradicting another, one piece of detail flying in the face of another—until that happens, you just receive, and you arrange, and you wait... ‘

Another slurp, another chomp.

‘I am not sure that is going to work here.’

‘Also,’ Hamid Pasha added, as though Nagarajan had not spoken, ‘this is our first round. Murders usually take
two
rounds to solve, miyan. In the first round you listen, and you gather, and you wait... but in the
second
, you pounce. You know what to ask whom, you know what each person is trying to hide, so you bring that out. In the first round, they talk, but in the second round you
make
them talk.’

‘We haven’t even finished our first round of questioning,’ Nagarajan said sullenly.

‘So we haven’t, and yet we know quite a bit about the case, do we not? That will equip us well for what is to come.’

Nagarajan sighed and said, ‘What do we know?’

‘Why,’ said Hamid Pasha, ‘we now know much more about the affair than we did this morning, do we not? Let us first go by your notebook. You tell me, miyan, what did you think of Swami saab?’

‘His is probably the only story that checks out— provided the servant girl backs him out, and his is the simplest story of all. He just slept through the whole thing.’

‘Yes, but what do you think of him? What do you think of his
character
, if you know what I mean?’

Nagarajan looked down at his one-liner on Swami ‘saint-like in appearance. Saint-like by nature?’—and said, ‘He looks very serene in everything he does. By the clothes he wears or by the way he speaks, he doesn’t look like a material man. He seems to be quite collected in everything he does.’

Hamid Pasha nodded. ‘And yet he has fallen into trouble with the communist party in the backyard. What do you think is his relationship with his brothers?’

‘I think it is—functional. They don’t appear to be the best of friends, the three of them.’

‘No,’ Hamid Pasha agreed. ‘They do not.’

‘But there isn’t any bad blood between them, as far as I can tell. There is even some affection for each other—they refer to each other with respect, if not with love.’

‘Ah, you noticed that? Good!’

‘Yes, and it seemed like all three brothers loved their mother a lot. Their reactions all tie in with people who have gone into sudden shock at her death. If anything, only Prameela was the one with the most suspicious response.’

‘You mean her being “normal” about it all?’

Nagarajan nodded. ‘I know she has said she is used to death and everything, but it will be interesting to know how she reacted to all those deaths. You know?’

‘Good! Very good!’

‘And similarly with the lady Karuna Mayi too. Why does she hate them all so?’