Tarquin Hall - The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing

“Let’s hope, Boss.”

“But he said he is willing to talk to me, is it?”

“I told him you wanted to see some magic and were willing to pay. The rest is up to you.”

Puri knocked on the door. A young boy answered, looked the detective up and down and motioned him inside. They crossed a small, drab room and stepped out into a courtyard. From there, they mounted a flight of concrete stairs that curled around the outside of the house like a python.

Akbar the Great, descendant of courtly magicians, was sitting on a charpoy on the roof. His eyes were those of an anxious man, one who had lived his life by his wits and expected trouble around every corner. Still, he greeted his visitor with a respectful salaam and his right hand placed over his heart.

“Please forgive the conditions in which we must welcome such an honored guest,” he said in a lyrical Urdu rarely heard in Delhi these days. Akbar the Great’s wrinkled face was surmounted by an impeccably clean topi. His white beard reached his chest. “Once we entertained Mughal emperors. Babur, Humayan, Aurangzeb – all loved our magic. In those bygone days, they rewarded us with precious stones – rubies from Badakhshan, diamonds from Golkonda. But now we are reduced to performing on the streets for a few rupees, constantly harassed and beaten by the police. Earlier today we were outside the Red Fort and they chased us away and hit us with their lathis.”

“There is no need to apologize on my account, Baba,” said the detective, who knew only too well that India’s Muslims, the largest minority in the world, were amongst its most marginalized. He sat down on a chair facing the magician. “It is an honor to meet you. I am told that you are the greatest magician in all of India.”

Akbar the Great acknowledged this praise with an assuming nod.

“I’m known from one part of India to the next!” he declared with a flourish of his worn hands. “There is not a village or town where I have not performed. Ask anyone and they will have heard of Akbar the Great – he who can pull thorns from his tongue, swallow steel balls whole and bring the dead back to life!” His patter sounded well rehearsed; he delivered it as he might to an audience on the street. “But nowadays people are not interested in magic. They all want to stay at home and watch TV, an invention of the evil one, Shaitan!”

The boy who had answered the front door, one of Akbar the Great’s great-grandsons as it turned out, served tea in chipped cups as the Muslim call to prayer sounded over the slum. Beyond the roof’s precipitous edge lay the jutting, irregular rooftops of Shadipur – homemade TV aerials, laundry lines and plastic water tanks superimposed against the setting sun.

“I was told you have come to see me perform,” said Akbar the Great, as they began to sip their tea. “My fee is five hundred rupees.”

“Forgive me, Baba, but I did not come here to see your show,” said Puri.

“Oh?”

“I am seeking information. And for this I am willing to pay one thousand.” Puri took the money from his wallet.

“What kind of information?” Akbar the Great sounded suspicious, but his eyes were fixed on the crisp hundred-rupee notes in the detective’s hand.

“Baba, I need your guidance. I am investigating the murder of Dr. Jha, the Guru Buster. You must have heard that he was killed yesterday morning on Rajpath. I believe the so-called Kali apparition was nothing of the kind. It was an illusion. I would like to understand how the levitation in particular was achieved.”

Akbar surveyed him with a deep frown.

“You’re a policeman?”

“No, Baba. I am Vish Puri, the private investigator.”

“You’re working for someone?”

“Only for myself. The victim was a friend of mine.”

Akbar the Great thought for a while, stroking his long beard, and then said something in a strange language to his great-grandson. With a nod, the boy stepped forward, held out a hand for the money and took it. Then the magician said: “How it was done is irrelevant. Perhaps it was real jadoo! Perhaps it was only a trick. Who knows? It’s what people believe that is the important thing.”

“What do you mean by real magic?”

“Genuine miracles performed by those with genuine supernatural powers, of course.”

“You believe such things are possible?”

“The Holy Koran is full of examples. So are the Bible and Ramayan. Water can be turned to wine. Many things happen in this life that cannot be explained.”

“Do you have these powers, Baba?” asked Puri.

The old man smiled for the first time. It was a kindly, avuncular smile, the detective thought to himself.

“Alas, I’m only a humble magician,” he said. “I do simple tricks and entertain people. But what the audience believes… well, that’s another matter. When I bring a chicken back to life – as I often do – they ask me how it is done. If I tell them it is a magic trick, a sleight of hand achieved by distraction, they get very angry and accuse me of hiding something from them! To appease them I have to say that I get my powers by sleeping at the cremation ground. Then they’re satisfied and stop accusing me of being a fraud!” The magician smiled indulgently. “You see,” he added, “people need to believe in these things. They want to be fooled, but they do not want to be made fools of!”

A thought suddenly occurred to him.

“I will perform a simple trick for you,” he said. “It’s not part of my normal routine, so I don’t mind explaining how it’s done. It might help you understand how easily people’s eyes are deceived.”

Soon Akbar the Great was lying on the roof’s solid concrete surface. The boy, who was regularly chopped to pieces on the streets of Delhi only to be miraculously reassembled again, announced in a loud, confident voice: “Make obeisance to the feet of Indra, whose name is one with magic, and to the feet of Shambara, whose glory was firmly established in illusions!”

Puri watched with rapt attention.

“During his travels across the length and breadth of India, my great-grandfather Akbar the Great has collected many magical objects. Rings, cloaks that can turn you invisible, a bottle that houses a terrible djinn – heaven forbid that it should ever escape!”

The boy held up a dirty blanket.

“It was high up in the Himalayas that he was given this from a man with three eyes! Now, it may look like an ordinary blanket to you. But anyone lying beneath it will float off the ground and up into the air!”

He draped the blanket over his grandfather.

“I will now make Akbar the Great, greatest magician in all of India, float up above the roof!” he declared – and as an aside, he added with the cheeky humor characteristic of Indian street jadoo wallahs: “Let us hope Baba did not have too large a lunch or he will be too heavy!”

The boy closed his eyes, held his hands over his greatgrandfather’s body, moved them around as if he was divining for water and spoke the magic words, “Yantru-mantra-jaala-jaala-tantru!”

Nothing happened for ten seconds. He repeated his incantation. And then Akbar the Great’s body began to shudder and rise upward.

The magician floated to a height of roughly three feet and remained there, suspended in midair.

For the life of him, Puri could not see how the trick was done. There were no wires connected to the blanket; no one was holding Akbar the Great up; no box had been slipped under him; there was no trapdoor. “You’ve got some kind of lifting device under there?” he asked after the magician had gently floated back down to earth.

“The jasoos is clueless!” cackled Akbar the Great with delight. “Where are your powers of detection now, sahib?”