Tarquin Hall - The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing

“Nothing of the sort, Chubby,” Rumpi said brusquely. “And I don’t want to hear about how you were washed in some balti of yours.”

“Yes, my dear. Nikhee must be getting close, is it?” Nikhee, Little One, was Jaiya’s nickname.

“She called twenty minutes back. A truck turned turtle on the road. She won’t reach here for another hour at least.”

Rumpi brought Puri up to date with the rest of the affairs of the house: all the food apart from the kadi, which Malika had burnt, was ready; the geyser in the downstairs washroom wasn’t working again; the diyas needed filling with oil.

“Now don’t just stand around, Chubby. Make yourself useful. Our son-in-law will be arriving soon!”

Rumpi returned to the kitchen.

“Yes, my dear,” murmured Puri as he took off his shoes and slipped on his monogrammed VP slippers.

He mounted the stairs. Halfway up, he stopped and suddenly bawled at the top of his lungs, “Sweetu!”

The houseboy came running out of the kitchen.

“Sir?” he asked, standing to attention in the hallway with an alertness that pleased his employer.

“Sweetu, what is five times six – tell me?” Puri asked him in Hindi.

“Five times six, sahib?” He murmured to himself nervously and then declared: “Thirty… sahib?”

“Very good. You’ve done your homework?”

Puri had enrolled Sweetu, who had been working in the house for over a year now, in afternoon maths classes. Next year, the orphan boy would begin an apprenticeship as a mechanic; when he was old enough, the detective would also find him a wife. This was the sort of help all well-off Indians should have been providing to those less fortunate than themselves, in the detective’s opinion. It was their dharma, their duty, if only they knew it.

“All done, sahib,” replied Sweetu.

“Very good. Go help madam.”

Puri went upstairs, had a cold bucket wash, changed into a freshly pressed kurta pyjama, splashed on some Sexy Men aftershave, and donned a cloth flat cap.

A few minutes later, he was standing up on the roof, a generous tumbler of Royal Challenge whisky in hand. He watered his prized chili plants and then stood for a few minutes looking out over the lights dotted across the landscape twinkling in the polluted night air.

When Puri had moved to Gurgaon some sixteen years ago, it had still been a flyspeck of a village. He had built his house, a mock Spanish villa with an orange tiled roof and matching awnings, on land surrounded for miles by mustard and sugarcane fields. But there had been no escaping the city. In the past decade, it had expanded at a dizzying rate. Gurgaon, a part of the NCR, the National Capital Region – now the largest human agglomeration on the planet with a population fast approaching 17 million people – had been quickly transformed into a land of housing estates, monster shopping complexes and shiny glass office blocks that seemed to grow overnight as if they came from magic beans. Were the cranes that loomed over the concrete superstructures giant watering cans?

In the cracks and shadows of this newfangled, corporate world, on plots of yet-to-be-developed land, tens of thousands of migrant workers were living in makeshift shelters without toilets or running water. Rickety stands selling chai, tarra and one-rupee shampoo sachets had rooted along the sides of the roads, as tenacious as Japanese bindweed. Barbers and earwax cleaners were to be found plying their trade between yet-to-be-laid concrete sewage pipes.

As he gazed out, Puri’s thoughts turned to his guru. In his great work of 300 BC, The Arthashastra , literally The Science of Material Gain , Chanakya had emphasized the importance of wealth creation. Perhaps the world’s first economist, not to mention a political genius, he was also an ardent capitalist.

Chanakya would have ridiculed the Nehru dynasty’s protectionist policies and applauded India’s recent economic rebirth, Puri reflected. But the slums and poverty, the inequality and rampant abuse of natural resources – all this would have appalled him. More than two millennia ago, he had stressed the necessity of honest and just governance. And yet today, a handful of politicians aside, India was ruled by a bunch of bloody goondas.

Sometimes, Puri wondered if the best thing might not be a revolution. But he doubted that would ever happen. The majority of Indians were farmers, not fighters. War had always been the preserve of the Kshatriya caste, and nowadays most of them were traders, businessmen and software engineers. Some even worked as private investigators.

A honk at the gate brought Puri to the front door with an expectant grin on his face.

His face fell when a red Indica with a crumpled bumper, a bashed-in fender and a Punjab number plate entered. It belonged to his sister’s husband, Bagga-ji, who lived in Ludhiana.

“Don’t tell me,” the detective moaned to Rumpi, who was standing next to him on the porch. By now she had changed into a light chiffon sari, which had been part of her wedding trousseau, and rubbed sindoor into the parting of her hair.

“Chubby, stop it. Be nice. They’ve got some good news.”

“They’re getting divorced, is it?”

“Now that’s enough. Be a good host and don’t get into any more arguments with him.”

Bagga-ji pulled up and stepped out of the car. Everything about him screamed cheapness, from his polyester shirt to the big gaps in his blackened teeth.

“Namaste-ji!” he cried, sounding as if he had cotton wool in his mouth. “How are you, Mr. Sherluck?”

Puri groaned inwardly. He hated people comparing him to Sherlock Holmes. Bagga-ji’s thick Punjabi pronunciation made it all the more irritating.

“Hello, sir-ji!” said the detective, pronouncing ‘sir’ ‘saar’. “Good journey?”

“Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine,” replied his brother-in-law.

The detective’s older sister, Preeti, alighted from the other side of the Indica. Of all the minor but nonetheless enfeebling ailments from which this large, quiet woman suffered, the most serious was acute Bagga-itis.

“Chubby, you’ve lost some weight, is it?” she asked as they greeted one another with a loose, sideways hug.

This was said with concern rather than admiration.

“Not that I’m aware,” said Puri, observing his belly, which spilled over his belt.

Bagga-ji had already gone inside the house.

Five minutes later, when Puri, Preeti and Rumpi reached the sitting room, he was sprawled on the floor. On the carpet in front of him lay a large glass of Royal Challenge and a collage of irregularly shaped pieces of paper with names and phone numbers in spidery writing. The backs of cigarette packets, old cinema tickets, strips torn from old envelopes – these served as Bagga-ji’s phone directory and lived, for the most part, as a big lump stuffed into the pocket of his half-sleeve shirts.

“Sorry, ji. Long-distance. Five minutes only. Don’t mind, huh?” he said, holding the receiver of the home phone to his ear.

“Please, sir-ji,” replied Puri. “Make yourself at home. You’d like a cushion? A foot rub?”

The detective’s sarcasm was lost on his brother-in-law.

“Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine!”

The detective still found it hard to believe that his sister had married such a prize Charlie. But Preeti had never attracted many suitors thanks to her weight and bad skin. She’d been twenty-seven by the time Jaideep Bagga had come along in his secondhand three-piece suit.

“Good for nothing much, na,” had been Mummy’s appraisal after meeting him for the first time.

But Papa and Bagga-ji’s father had got along and Mummy had been overruled.

The family astrologer had sealed Preeti’s fate. Jaideep Bagga was a perfect match. Never mind that the young man had only displayed an aptitude for playing carrom board and eating large quantities of laddus.