Tarquin Hall - The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing

Puri found it hard to picture the bespectacled, oh-so-respectable Brahmin scaling the wall and shooting down men in cold blood.

On the other hand, when it came to fanatics and psychopaths, there was no telling.

Puri reached for his mobile; called Tubelight, who was just reaching the hospital; and asked him to assign Shashi and Zia to tail Sharma.

“Tell them to get hold his garbage, also. Let’s see what all he is into,” instructed the detective.

Puri’s sister had phoned twice this morning, but he had ignored her calls. He was dreading having to hear more about Bagga-ji’s latest mess. But when she called him again at three o’clock, he felt compelled to answer.

“Chubby, thank God!”

Preeti was at home in Ludhiana. She sounded panicked.

“You’ve got to help me. He’s planning to put up the house against a loan of one crore with some lowborn moneylender!”

“What is that bugger up to exactly?”

“He won’t tell me, Chubby. He’s so blinded by the profit he says is to be made. But a crore! And the high interest to pay! It can be our ruin.”

Puri sighed. There was nothing for it; he could not stand by and watch his sister lose everything.

“What is his current location exactly?”

“He’s up in Delhi.”

“I’ll talk to him,” the detective promised.

“Sir-ji! Kaha-hain?”

“Haa! Mr. Sherluck! Kidd-an?”

“Very fine, sir-ji! I want to see you. Something urgent.”

“Fine, fine, fine, fine.”

“Sir-ji, where are you? Hello? Hello?”

“Haa!” Bagga Uncle was somewhere noisy – a background din of laughter and raised voices.

“Sir-ji?”

“Haa!”

“You’ve been drinking or what?”

“Haa!”

The detective felt like he was about to explode but managed to contain his fury. He said in sharp, staccato Punjabi: “Baaga-ji, tell me where you are!”

“Mr. Sherluck? Hello? You’re asking me?”

“Of course I’m asking you!” He refrained from adding: “Saala!”

“I’m at the adda. What do you want?”

“Adda’ translated as ‘joint.” Puri knew the place: Bagga-ji’s favorite haunt in Delhi, a carrom-board and illegal-drinking den in Punjabi Bagh.

“I’ll be reaching in forty minutes.”

“Fine, fine, fine, fine.”

Puri had mixed feelings about Punjabi Bagh. It was the neighborhood where he had grown up, and every street, every corner, held a memory for him.

Returning there, as he did from time to time to visit near or dear, always stirred strong feelings of nostalgia – especially for Papa-ji, who had built his house in the Moti Nagar subsection in the early 1960 s. But nowadays the detective found the old neighborhood a stifling place. Although he always told everyone he had moved to Gurgaon to escape the noise and pollution, the truth was that he had also sought to distance himself from Punjabi Bagh’s boisterous inhabitants.

He was, after all, India’s Most Private Investigator. And when everyone was constantly coming in and out of your house at all hours, asking for favors and the odd loan of a thousand rupees for some uncle’s heart medicine, it was impossible to keep your affairs confidential and not become embroiled in everyone else’s problems.

Punjabi Bagh was not an especially noteworthy address, either. Not for a member of the Gymkhana Club and the son-in-law of a retired army colonel with a penchant for oxford shoes. Gurgaon fitted the bill better – although, admittedly, for the son of a local police officer there was no competing with the old elite.

The constant gridlock had been another reason for leaving. Some bloody Charlie was forever stopping his Tempo in the middle of one of the narrow streets and off-loading a consignment of live chickens, thereby turning the entire neighborhood into a solid, honking traffic jam.

Today was no different. But instead of live chickens, it was rusty barrels with skull-and-crossbones stickers plastered all over them.

The fact that they were being carried into someone’s house by a gang of laborers who looked as if they had tuberculosis did not strike Puri as odd. Suspicious, perhaps, but by Punjabi Bagh standards, definitely not odd.

The detective decided to abandon the car and told Handbrake to park as close as he could to Bagga-ji’s adda.

“I’ll give you ‘missed call’ when I’m in position, Boss,” said the driver in a combination of Hindi and English.

Feeling the heat rush at him like the thermal radiation of a forest fire, Puri stepped out of the Ambassador, narrowly avoiding a cowpat underfoot.

He kept to the shady side of the street, making his way along a busy pavement where children played hopscotch and carpenters sawed, sanded and hammered made-to-measure mango-wood furniture for one of the residents of the kothis. A door-to-door salesman of mops, brooms and dusters passed down the middle of the street on a bicycle bristling with his wares. It looked like a kind of punk porcupine. “Jharu, ponche! Saste! Brooms, mops, cheap!”

Puri turned the next corner, looking up at all the brightly colored laundry hanging overhead and the paper kites up in the hazy sky, and almost ran straight into an old school chum whom everyone knew as Mintoo.

“Oi! Chubby! Kisteran?”

They chatted for a couple of minutes and then Puri made his excuses and hurried on. Farther down the street, he met Billa, a former next-door neighbor who owned a shop selling galvanized-steel buckets in Jawala Heri. Master-ji, the local tailor, waved and called out greetings from his shop, which had once been four times the size, but thanks to family property disputes was now little more than a cubicle. And inevitably, Bhartia Auntie (who had bad hips and walked with her feet splayed like a circus clown) appeared and reminded him, as she always did, how, at the age of six, he had burned his lip eating some of her homemade gulab jamuns.

“You couldn’t wait and just shoved it in your mouth!” she cackled, pinching his cheek. “Greedy little bacha!”

Bagga-ji’s adda was housed in the basement of a doctor’s private clinic, Dr. Darshan being the owner and a regular himself.

The entrance was down the side of the building behind a door with a notice on it that read CLINIC IN SESSION.

In the poorly lit room beyond, through a haze of cigarette smoke, Puri counted nine tables with carrom boards. Around each sat four men with chalky fingers.

The sight of the boards and the sound of the strikers hitting the pucks and ricocheting off the buffers immediately aroused in Puri a desire to join in. As a teenager, he had been a carrom fanatic; to the detriment of his homework, he had played for hours on end. But it was rare that he got in a game these days, chess and bridge being more the Gymkhana’s speed.

Indeed, when he located Bagga-ji at one of the boards in the middle of the room – “Mr. Sherluck, what you’re doing here?” – and one of the players offered to give up his seat, Puri could not resist.

“I’m drinking Aristocrat.” Bagga-ji grinned. “Aristocrat’ came out ‘aa-rist-row-krAAt.”

“Instant relief! You want?”

“Most certainly, sir-ji!” declared Puri. “How often I get to drink with my favorite brother-in-law, huh?”

Bagga Uncle was too drunk to be suspicious of the detective’s disingenuous chumminess and poured him a large glass from the bottle he had under the table. Then he called to the eleven-year-old boy who fetched packets of cigarettes and fresh paan from the stand across the road and plates of murg saharabi tikka and ‘chutney sandwitch’ from the local restaurant.

“Oi! Soda bottle laow!”

The black and white pucks and the red queen were arranged in the middle of the lacquered board. One of the other two players at the table flicked the puck with his index finger, sending it crashing into the pack. A black shot into one of the corner pockets.