Tarquin Hall - The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing

Two of the senior disciples carried a brazier filled with wood onto the stage and placed it to the left of the guru’s throne. This caused a ripple of anticipation to course through the congregation.

“But throughout human history, saints and avatars have been sent to guide humanity, to reveal the infiniteness of the universe. This is done through the use of miracles. Here today I propose to reveal to you one such miracle. I propose to communicate across time and space with one of the seven rishis – Bharadwaja. It was he who came to me and revealed the ultimate Truth – who showed me the true power of God’s love.”

“We are truly blessed,” the excited ad man whispered to Puri. “Swami-ji summons Bharadwaja rarely, usually only for special guests. They say the last time was for the prime minister. After, a date for the election was set!”

The lights in the hall were dimmed and Maharaj Swami commanded absolute silence. The hall went deathly still.

Pressing his fingertips to his forehead and temples, he closed his eyes and began to utter incomprehensible incantations. He reached out with his right hand and pointed to the brazier. With a click of his fingers, the wood burst into flames. Everyone, including Puri, gasped.

Maharaj Swami approached the burning brazier. He pushed his hands together and held them tight, muttering something under his breath. When he unclasped them again, they were full of red powder. This he threw onto the flames, causing them to leap higher.

A dense smoke began to curl upward and then, as if it had a mind of its own, made an abrupt left turn and proceeded horizontally into the middle of the stage. There it started to circle, creating a vortex. And at its center a bright white light appeared.

Maharaj Swami closed his eyes again and moved his hands back and forth over the brazier.

The white light slowly formed into a man’s ghostly head.

Puri could make out his facial features – the creases on the forehead, the crumpled nose, the sagging jowls, the ancient eyelids.

He felt a tingle run up his spine as some of his fellow visitors cried out: “He’s here!” “Bharadwaja has come!”

The rishi opened his eyes and yawned, as if he had been woken from a long, peaceful sleep.

“Who dares disturb me?” spoke a deep, gravelly voice that boomed down from above.

“It is I,” answered Maharaj Swami, who by now had retaken his throne.

A smile crept across the lined face. “And what is it you seek?”

“All-knowing one, I seek nothing for myself. I ask that you give guidance to my children as they strive toward the divine!”

“Not all can be helped,” spoke the rishi. “Those who resist, who refuse to abandon preconceived notions, they will remain trapped forever in an endless cycle of birth and rebirth.”

A timid devotee was invited up onstage and prostrated himself before the apparition. In a halting voice, he asked the rishi a question about an event in one of his past lives. He, like the six others who followed him, received answers that seemed to shock and surprise them.

All the while Puri sat, as he had done on the roof while Ak-bar the Great had levitated, trying to figure out the method behind the illusion.

There was no projector being used; the face was three-dimensional. It was not a hologram, either. Of that he was certain.

Was it possible there was a man onstage wearing a black outfit to camouflage his body? As if in reply to his question, the door at the side of the hall opened, casting a beam of light across the stage, revealing nothing beneath the rishi’s floating head.

The detective and Mrs. Duggal exchanged a furtive, perplexed look.

It was then that Puri noticed Facecream staring blankly at the stage. She looked transfixed, as if she had been hypnotized, and there were tears running down her face.

He reached out and touched her hand. At first she didn’t respond. He tried again. Facecream turned and stared at him and then, looking back at the stage, started to laugh.

Puri was unsure what to do. Was there something wrong? Was she improvising?

He decided to play along, keeping a careful eye on her.

A few minutes passed and she began to look more herself. But then she suddenly stood up and, with arms stretched wide, declared in a loud voice: “I have seen the truth and it is beautiful!”

Many of those sitting around her started to applaud. And then Facecream fainted, collapsing into the lap of the person behind her.

“According to my dear late husband, intelligence is number one key to doing solving of cases. But two kinds of intelligence there are, na? Information and IQ, also. For proper detection both are required.”

“Yes, Mummy-ji,” said Rumpi wearily. “But in this case, we don’t seem to have any intelligence at all – intelligence of the first sort, I mean.”

It was Thursday afternoon, twenty-four hours after the kitty party robbery. Puri was in Haridwar and his wife and mother were sitting in the back of Mummy’s car outside the Central Forensic Science Laboratory on Lodhi Road, South Delhi.

They had spent the past couple of hours inside the CFSL building, where the son of one of Mummy’s oldest friends worked as a laboratory technician. Through a combination of charm and sheer obstinacy, she had persuaded him to lift the fingerprints from the items in her handbag and run them through the national database. The computer had not found a match. But as the young man had sheepishly admitted, such random checks rarely bore results.

“Fingerprinting comes into play when we find a murder weapon and need to match prints to a suspect,” he’d explained. “Most investigating officers don’t bother collecting forensic evidence. They rely on confessions from suspects for convictions.”

When Mummy had asked him to run a DNA test on her fingernail cutting, he’d responded: “Auntie-ji, I think you’ve been watching too much of CSI on Star TV, isn’t it?”

Mummy had not understood what he’d meant by this; she never had time to watch television, what with all her duties as a mother and grandmother (she still lived with her eldest son, Bhupinder, and his wife and four children) and her numerous weekly social engagements and charity work – not to mention the occasional bit of sleuthing.

But she had not been put off by this setback.

“Look at bright side,” Mummy told her daughter-in-law as they discussed their next move in the back of the car. “Fingerprints will come in useful once we’ve got hold of those goondas. Now it’s time for B Plan.”

Rumpi could not remember what B Plan was. Nor if there was a C or D Plan, for that matter. She was finding that detective work did not come naturally to her. It required a suspicious mind, and she was still struggling to come to terms with the idea that one of her friends had betrayed the trust upon which all kitty parties were based.

“You’re sure it couldn’t have been one of the ladies’ husbands?” asked Puri’s wife.

“You tell Chubby about your kitty, is it?” asked Mummy.

“Of course not!”

“My point exactly, na? No Indian wife is sharing such information with her husband of all people. Her private savings and jewelry worth remain top secret at all times.”

“I suppose you’re right, Mummy-ji.”

Rumpi was still not entirely convinced that the matter wasn’t best left to the professionals. But Jaiya had gone off for the day visiting friends, so she had decided to keep her mother-in-law company – if for no other reason than to make sure she didn’t get into trouble.

She had specified one condition, however. Mummy was never to tell Puri that they had worked together.

“You know how he feels about mummies doing investigations. God only knows what he’d say about wives!”