The Taj Conspiracy (5 page)

Kaul ruminated for a while before turning to Mehrunisa. ‘How do you think Toor died?’

‘I don’t know,’ she shook her head, ‘but he was badly beaten. The wrist was the only open wound I saw.’

‘Yes, the wrist.... Wouldn’t a man who has the strength and alertness to cut himself and then write with his blood, attempt to walk out and seek help? Toor knew the night guards were not too far off—why not try and reach them, instead of expending energy on some writing? And wouldn’t the murderer want to make sure Toor was dead before he left? If he had even some familiarity with the Taj, he would know that the supervisor could alert the night security.’

‘Well, perhaps the murderer thought Arun would be too weak to call anyone considering how much he was beaten. And perhaps he was; maybe he only had the strength to leave these clues.’

Kaul shook his head and said, ‘Then why not just write the murderer’s name?’

‘Because he was a stranger? He was wearing a mask that hid his face? He was ambushed and didn’t get to see his killer...’

There was a note of desperation in her voice that the professor didn’t miss. The strain of the past twenty-four hours and the lack of sleep were showing. Quietly, he suggested they wait for forensics to reveal the cause of death. ‘That should clarify a few things,’ he said.

After a few moments of silence, he continued, ‘You should go meet Raj Bhushan, thank him for the phone call to the Agra police and discuss what you saw with him. But wait for him to get better, though.’

‘Get better?’

‘He wasn’t in office yesterday when I called, and he wasn’t answering his cell phone, so I went over to his house and found him in bed, all covered up, hoarse voice.... A bad case of flu—all that travel, I think.’

Mehrunisa knew he was alluding to Raj Bhushan’s work on a UNESCO project on World Heritage Management, wherein contemporary Delhi, with its rich heritage and rapid urban growth, was a case study for conservation. That, coupled with his programme to upgrade the ASI, kept him travelling across the country and overseas—so much so that Mehrunisa had never met him.

‘I don’t think I’ve seen him like that before,’ said Professor Kaul, his face clouded with uncertainty, ‘he looked ... unusually unwell. Perhaps the news of the supervisor’s murder—’

Just then, the housekeeper, Mangat Ram, walked in and handed the telephone handset to Kaul. ‘Call from Agra, Sahib.’

Professor Kaul, his face registering mild anxiety, spoke into the phone. Mehrunisa could catch some indistinct voice, punctuated by static. As Kaul listened, the colour vanished from his face. He hung up and and cradled the handset in his lap, deep in thought.

‘Uncle. Kaul uncle,’ Mehrunisa urged softly, ‘who was that on the phone?’

Eventually he looked up, his eyes vacant until they fell on Mehrunisa. ‘You must be careful, my child.’

Mehrunisa watched, unsure. She slid her hands forward and found them now in her uncle’s firm grasp. The professor seemed to recover from his abulia. ‘It was SSP Raghav. The forensic tests cannot be performed. He wants to question you again.’

‘Why can’t the tests be done?’ Mehrunisa asked in a shrill voice.

‘Because they no longer have a body on which to conduct the tests. Arun Toor has disappeared from the hospital morgue.’

Agra

J
ara stood in the undergrowth bordering the Yamuna’s bank, opposite the Taj Mahal. Nothing much ever happened in these abandoned fields. The spot came to life occasionally as a vantage viewing point for visitors to the famous monument who did not want to pay for the entry ticket but were keen on photographs to flaunt back home. However, they never ventured too far into the thick undergrowth, which was just as well. Jara’s mind went over the events of the last several hours...

Through the day, mist had hung over the river, circling the Taj and winging its way over the gardens. Midday, the chill had driven people indoors for the warmth of a quilt, and late at night he did not expect to bump into anyone. At the morgue the lone guard, too cold to sit in watch over his dead charges, had deserted his metal chair, probably for the comfort of his little shed at the entrance gate.

Jara, a brown monkey cap shrouding his face, had slipped inside. Locating the corpse was no problem; he had specific directions, and the corpse was still in its distinctive pink kurta. The city of Agra was not exactly teeming with forensic experts, he was told, and a doctor was scheduled to examine the body only the next morning.

Jara hated the smell of formaldehyde and the cold, slippery feel of the dead, but an order was an order, and he had never disobeyed one. A stiff, long, male human body was not the easiest thing to transport so he had brought his tools along. These were rather basic: a hammer and a saw, the teeth of which he had sharpened that morning.

A couple of determined blows to the knees saw the kneecaps break. That would enable him to fold the legs the way he wanted. Next, he struck at the shoulder blades, which proved tougher, taking several hard knocks before splintering. With pressure, he managed to fold the chest. The trickiest bit followed—sawing the body in two. Lifting the kurta, he chose the spot at the waist, keeping the navel as a benchmark. First, he tied down the corpse’s head and thighs with separate leather belts, fastening the straps under the narrow steel bed. The body was frozen— rigor mortis had set in—and he knew no blood would gush out. Yet he looked away as he took the saw to the waist.

The body was rock-hard and he realised with a jolt that it would require more strength and time than he had foreseen. He glanced at the clock in the morgue, its loud ticking the only sound to be heard above his breathing. Steadying himself, he resumed hacking, holding the blade at a forty-five degree angle to the taut flesh covering the bones. Since he was aiming for the spot between the rib cage and the pelvis, the one bone he had to cut through was the spine—his boss had illustrated it on a skeletal chart of the human anatomy. The one thing he was unprepared for was the vile odour. As he focused on the task, trying to keep the smell out of his mind if not nostrils, bile rose in him. The next instant a shower of vomit shot out of him, spraying the corpse, the floor, his shoes. When he was done, he looked around. In the room’s far corner was a sink. He removed his sweater and wiped the vomit from his shoes and the floor with it. The corpse, he let be. The smell would prove a useful bait. Next, he stuffed the sweater into the large black plastic bag he had carried with him.

The water at the sink was a trickle. He rinsed his mouth clean and washed his face. His hands shook, but the sight of the mauli, the spiritual Hindu thread in red and yellow, on his right wrist steadied him. Wasn’t that the instruction? Whenever he felt weak, he was to touch it—strength would surge within him.

Back at the corpse, he resumed sawing with manic energy. The human body is a precise piece, and just as he had been instructed, the body came apart at the navel, falling into two clean, saw-tooth-edged halves. He folded the two halves and shoved them into the capacious black bag.

Now, taking a quick look around and seeing no one, Jara dragged the black bag deeper into the mist-wrapped green cover until he reached a spot where the grass grew as tall as him. He shone a torch around, scrutinising the ground below. Yes, the grass at the peepul tree’s massive base lay flattened. Jara flung the bag towards it. Falling in a soft thud, the thin plastic rent to reveal the chopped body. The crisp winter air amplified the foul vapours of drying vomit and decaying flesh. He whistled, a low, long whistle that permeated the mist, and waited.

A couple of minutes later a faint rustling sounded. A brownish-green reticulated python came into view, its body writhing behind. It had grown to fifteen feet in the ten years that he had been raising it on a diet of dead meat. The python smelled the body. It was hungry, he knew. He had not fed it in weeks. And the python liked regular meals, he was used to it. He should know—he had trained it since it was a baby. He also knew the python would appreciate the gift that was ten times the size of his regular meal, a rabbit. It slid around the corpse now, opening its mouth wide until the upper and lower jaws were almost vertical, and made to swallow the meal in front of him.

The python would do a clean job, Jara knew. He had seen to the one thing that could have made it problematic for the snake: human shoulders can be too big for a python to swallow whole. Once he had seen a python that had attempted to swallow a young man. The pressure of the shoulders had ripped its stomach open.

In this instance the python would finish the job, the smashed shoulder blades ensuring a smooth passage into the snake’s belly. Thereafter it would disappear from view, satiated, and hide in the bush for weeks as it digested the cadaver.

Agra

S
SP Raghav was irate. The head of the Anti-Terror Squad had spent the past couple of hours questioning Mehrunisa Khosa once again in the murder of the supervisor of the Taj Mahal. Could the woman be a suspect? An accomplice? Or had she just been at the wrong place at the wrong time?

In any case, he had learnt nothing new. In the process, though, he had exhausted fifteen cups of unsweetened masala chai, half his daily quota of thirty, well before noon. That irked him. Raghav was a tea addict and the only way he had figured he could control his addiction was to ration it himself and eliminate the sugar—before a doctor mandated it.

Earlier, the crime scene examination had not revealed her fingerprints on anything incriminatory, no weapon had been discovered except for the pen knife; in fact, the corpse itself had disappeared! And the woman appeared as perplexed by the entire sequence of events as he. He had shown her the broken celadon plate that had been discovered in a dustbin in the supervisor’s room—she could shed no light on that either. In any case, one of the attendants at the monument had earlier shrugged and said, the discovery of such brica-brac was not unusual in the complex’s extensive gardens. To add to Raghav’s woes, Mehrunisa’s credentials were impeccable: both the ASI director-general and that eminent historian Kaul had vouched for her. Except for the fact that she had been found at the crime scene, there was nothing really to tie her to the crime.

In which case, the focus shifted to the mysterious Aurangzeb who had visited the supervisor. Was he another terror export from the Western neighbour?

SSP Raghav had been given charge of ATS only recently. This new outfit was to be modelled on the ATS Mumbai—the first to be formed in the country in 2003 in response to the increasing incidents of terror. SSP Raghav’s initial area was what the ASI called ‘Agra Circle’. The objective was to monitor the safety of an area dotted with three World Heritage Sites.

His first case, he rued, and he had been unlucky enough for it to involve a murder, that too in the Taj! If there was one monument that could define India—like the Eiffel Tower did Paris and the Statue of Liberty did the US —it was the Taj Mahal.

It was rather inconvenient that the supervisor had popped it right inside the mausoleum. The Taj had had to be closed to visitors for a full day. The abrupt closure had caused such a furore amongst tourists who had arrived— many foreigners having booked in advance, for winter was peak season—that he had been summoned by his boss, the deputy inspector general, to offer an explanation! And then to top it all, the dead supervisor had managed to vanish from the morgue. The guard on duty swore he had seen no one arrive in the night. Having been in the police department for two decades now, Raghav deduced that was entirely feasible, the guard likely sleeping on duty. That knowledge, though, didn’t help him, for the body had vanished leaving no trace behind. Except, yes, some dried vomit on the concrete floor close to the raised steel bed on which the body had lain. So now there were further additions to his existing list of questions regarding the murder.

Who had murdered Arun Toor?

How?

Why?

Was it personal enmity? or

Was it linked to his role as the Taj supervisor?

Who had taken the body of Arun Toor?

Why was the body taken?

Where was it taken?

SSP Raghav had a hunch as to why the body had been taken. It was due for a post-mortem. The forensic examination would have revealed the cause of death. Since the body had disappeared, perhaps the murderer did not want the real cause of death to be identified.

Again he returned to the mysterious Aurangzeb who might have been the last person to see Arun Toor alive. And the one to have murdered him. Yet, no one at the monument had heard his name with regard to anything, nor could the security confirm that such a man had visited the supervisor that evening.

How exactly, Raghav scratched his luxuriant moustache, had this Aurangzeb entered the office unnoticed, and where had he vamoosed?

SSP Raghav acknowledged to himself his casual use of that word: vamoose. In his job of chasing criminals and interacting with low-lifes, he liked to be reminded of his English (Honours) graduate degree. It recalled gentler times and distinguished him from his peers who could not construct one sentence in English that was not mangled. His command of the language had impressed the DIG who often roped him in to prepare presentations. As head of ATS, Raghav’s career trajectory had only one way to go—up. With fundamentalist Muslims and rabid Western superpowers, terror was a growth industry. He wished he had a larger force to command though; with two constables reporting to him, how much terror could they handle?

The clearing of a throat brought SSP Raghav back to the present. Mehrunisa was sitting upright, her hands clasped together, her brow puckered.

SSP Raghav bristled at the quietly confident demeanour—the woman was involved in a murder case, yet he could not help feeling that she was reproaching him for keeping her waiting. He bolted upright and briskly gathered his police cap.

‘We shall visit the crime scene,’ he cocked a brow at Mehrunisa, ‘to reawaken any dead memories.’

Agra

‘W
hat do you make of the clues your
friend
left behind?’ SSP Raghav asked Mehrunisa as they walked the concrete pathway to the mausoleum. Being a Friday, the monument was still closed to general visitors, entry permitted to Muslim worshippers alone. But it was past the time for prayers at the mosque and the monument stood silent.