The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra Read online

  ‘My name is Inspector Chopra,’ said Chopra, showing him the copy of the panchnama. ‘I wish you to take me to where the body of the dead boy was discovered two days ago.’

  De Souza readily agreed to help. He had nothing else to do anyway, having been recently relieved of his position at the local abattoir where he had worked for ten years. ‘You are in plain clothes?’ he asked. ‘Like CID?’

  Chopra did not answer.

  They walked along the Marol Pipeline Road, passing the vegetable market and the Mother Mary Convent School. A painting of a blue-eyed, blond Jesus looked down from the convent wall onto the passing traffic with an expression of benign suffering. Two nuns in blue habits conversed by the convent gate. ‘Good afternoon, Sisters,’ said De Souza, crossing himself.

  They passed a man frying banana chips by the side of the road. De Souza insisted on stopping to purchase some. ‘Ragu, this is Inspector Chopra, a very good friend of mine. We are currently working on a very important case together. Do you remember that dead body we found the day before yesterday?’

  Ragu’s eyes rounded with interest as he swirled the frying chips around in the re-used cooking oil of the blackened pan. The pan rested above a butane cylinder housed inside a handcart. ‘The boy who drowned in the shit?’

  ‘Yes. Very bad business.’

  An emaciated beggar stopped by to scratch himself and stare longingly at the chips. De Souza barked at the man who, in the way of Mumbai’s beggars, simply ignored him. The beggar edged closer. ‘Boss, give me some chips. I haven’t eaten in three days.’

  Ragu raised his ladle threateningly. ‘Get out of here. Can’t you see I am serving the inspector sahib?’

  ‘The inspector sahib looks as if he has eaten too much already,’ said the beggar.

  Chopra suppressed a smile. Most beggars in the city were meek, beaten-down specimens, cowed by the relentless assaults of abject poverty. This man seemed to have decided that he would not play the role assigned to him by fate.

  Chopra bought the beggar a twist of chips. De Souza stared at him. In Mumbai beggars were so plentiful that they were practically a sub-population in their own right. Feeding a beggar was considered an act of foolhardiness usually committed only by addle-brained tourists.

  After a few minutes they walked out of the Village, and into the wasteland beyond.

  Amidst a tangle of foliage, they came into the area where the pipeline–a mile-long concrete sewage pipe–ended. The ground was damp with seepage. Chopra’s nose twitched at the extraordinarily bad smell in the air. Human excrement, he realised.

  ‘Over here,’ said De Souza, leading Chopra around a mound of dumped rubbish to where a shallow pool of water had collected. A number of pigs rooting around in the waste looked up from their foraging to eye Chopra with interest.

  He looked around, picked up a nearby stick, then bent down to push it into the pool of stagnant water. Mosquitoes lifted from the surface and buzzed around his face.

  He removed the stick and looked at the watermark. ‘Six, seven inches,’ he muttered. It would be extremely difficult for a man, even a very drunk one, to drown in six inches of water.

  ‘Who discovered the body?’

  ‘I myself,’ said De Souza importantly.

  ‘What were you doing here?’

  ‘My lavatory is not working at home.’

  ‘Do many people use this place?’

  De Souza shrugged. What was ‘many’ in Mumbai?

  ‘And you say you found an empty whisky bottle by the body?’

  ‘Nearly empty,’ said De Souza. ‘Black Label.’

  ‘That is very expensive whisky.’

  ‘Yes,’ grinned De Souza. ‘Imported.’

  How did a poor boy afford such an expensive bottle of liquor? thought Chopra. ‘Did you see anything else… out of the ordinary?’

  ‘What do you mean “out of the ordinary”?’

  Chopra did not know what he meant, but there was a feeling growing inside him that was familiar. It was a feeling that came to him whenever he was working a case and he knew, without being able to put his finger on it, that something was not right.

  ‘Hutt!’ barked De Souza suddenly as one of the pigs snuffled at his sandal and was rewarded with a stout kick. The pig wandered off, squealing indignantly.

  Chopra began to walk around the pool of water in ever-widening concentric circles, his eyes carefully scanning the ground. After a few circuits, he knelt down behind the rotting stump of a tree. The ground was drier here, but there was just enough moisture to reveal the imprint of a pair of tyres. His fingers traced the embedded single track. A motorcycle had parked here.

  Who would bring a motorcycle here?

  Chopra tried to judge the depth of the imprint. His years as a sub-inspector, when he had been directly involved with the day-to-day business of investigation, told him that there had been two people on the bike, one of them heavyset. Could the boy have been on the bike?

  He stood up. There was another mystery here, which no one seemed to have considered. What had the boy been doing here? He was a local of Marol; why did he need to use this place as a latrine? Was there an epidemic of broken lavatories in the area? Chopra filed this under the ‘unlikely’ heading.

  He considered other scenarios that might have brought the boy here.

  Perhaps he had been with a friend? Had they been drinking and suddenly needed to go? Had the boy suggested they use this spot, perhaps not wishing to enter his own home in an inebriated state with a drunken friend in tow? And then what? An accidental drowning, Rangwalla had said. But if his friend was drowning, wouldn’t the other party have helped? Or was he too drunk himself? But if he was so drunk how did he drive his bike away? And why hadn’t he called an ambulance or the police?

  Too much conjecture, thought Chopra. Too many unanswerable questions.

  HOMI AT THE HOSPITAL

  From the Village, Chopra took another rick, this time to the Sahar hospital.

  Once there, he plunged his way through the heaving corridors, which always reminded him of the sort of semi-ordered chaos one saw in a riot, and down to the basement level where he found his old friend Homi Contractor, MBBS.

  Homi Contractor was the senior police medical examiner stationed at the hospital. In between his duties as a leading heart surgeon, Homi also served in various other capacities in the city of Mumbai. As a scion of the famous Contractor dynasty–whose innumerable philanthropic acts had led to a bronzed statue of Homi’s grandfather, Captain Rattanbhai Framji Contractor, being erected in the hospital’s recovery garden–Homi had been a shoo-in for the much-coveted position of Chair of the College of Cardiac Physicians and Surgeons of Mumbai, a post that he now ruled with a tyrannical fist.

  Outside work Homi was equally industrious, a devoted and domineering father of four, foremost member of the board of the Parsee Cyclists Club–the renowned bastion of Mumbai’s oldest cricketing traditions–and a rabidly outspoken critic of the Nehru dynasty.

  Chopra had always wondered how his old friend found the time to conduct autopsies for the three police stations under ACP Suresh Rao’s command.

  Chopra himself had known Homi for more than twenty-five years. He was a grimly cheerful man, with a macabre sense of humour that he often employed whilst elbow-deep inside the internal organs of a corpse.

  ‘You owe me ten bucks, Chopra,’ he said gruffly as Chopra walked into his office.

  Not for the first time Chopra thought that Homi’s thick belly did not sit well with his thin, pale hangdog face. The effect was as if he had stuffed a pillow under his white lab coat. Homi’s bulbous nose sat beneath a cap of greying frizzy hair and his grizzled eyebrows were reminiscent of the vultures that ate the Parsee dead in the Towers of Silence on Malabar Hill.

  Homi had bet Chopra that Sachin Tendulkar would not complete his century. Sachin had been run out on ninety-nine that very morning. Homi was the only man in India who would dare bet against Sachin. ‘And how’s the whole
retirement business going?’ he added.

  They exchanged pleasantries, and then Chopra got to the point. ‘You had a body come in from my station, a young man found in Marol, possible drowning.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Santosh. Santosh Achrekar.’

  ‘Achrekar, Achrekar… Yes, I know the one. He’s down in the morgue. The accidental drowning case. I believe Rohit completed the examination just an hour ago.’ Rohit was Homi’s youthful assistant. He was a newly qualified examiner, and was usually given the straightforward cases, together with a generous lashing from Homi’s acid tongue.

  ‘Have you conducted an autopsy?’

  ‘Autopsy? What for? The station sheet requested no autopsy.’

  ‘I’m requesting.’

  Homi looked thoughtfully at Chopra’s face. ‘What’s this about, old friend?’

  ‘A hunch.’

  Homi shook his grizzled head. ‘And who is Homi Contractor, a mere mortal, to question the hunches of the great Inspector Chopra?’

  ‘Former Inspector Chopra.’ He hesitated. ‘You don’t have to do it. I would understand.’

  ‘Don’t be such a nincompoop. Give me a day. I’ll have some results for you tomorrow. The only thing is if I have to send samples to Ranbaxy for analysis, they will charge me. Without a station request, that will leave a hole in the paperwork.’

  ‘I would prefer that the station does not know about this for now.’

  ‘The fees will still have to be paid.’

  ‘I will pay.’

  Homi pulled at his cheeks, an old habit of his. For a moment he looked as if he were going to say something, but then he simply nodded. ‘OK. OK. Call me tomorrow. Now, tell me–do you still have time from your busy schedule to go to Wankhede next month for the One Day International with Pakistan?’

  ‘Homi,’ said Chopra, smiling, ‘time is the one thing I do have now.’

  As Chopra walked out of the hospital his thoughts lingered on the parting expression he had seen on Homi’s face. He could practically read his friend’s thoughts. Would this be how it was when Homi himself retired? Like Chopra he was a man devoted to his work. Would he find himself back at the hospital, without his white lab coat, sniffing around the next incumbent of his position, making a nuisance of himself while the juniors laughed at him behind his back?

  No, that was not fair, Chopra thought. He was certain that no one had ever laughed at either Homi or himself. He did not think they would start now.

  HOW INSPECTOR CHOPRA MET POPPY

  When Chopra arrived home, he discovered that the children had ignored his interdiction. The little elephant was still slumped despondently beside the pole to which he had been chained. A garland of lotus flowers had been tied around his tail. Someone had jammed a paper crown onto his knobbly skull; Chopra could see that it was meant to resemble the filigreed gold crown that usually adorned idols of Lord Ganesh. On a silver platter by the elephant’s still-uneaten food was a pyramid of coconuts.

  ‘Bahadur!’ called Chopra crossly. ‘I thought I told you the children were not to interfere with the elephant.’

  ‘Not children, sir!’ quavered Bahadur. ‘Poppy Madam.’

  Chopra felt a surge of irritation. Trust Poppy to turn the poor creature into an object of devotion! And then it occurred to him that it would be a far harder task for Mrs Subramanium to eject a god from the complex than a mere elephant. Poppy had always had a way of being cleverer than he suspected; many times he’d thought he had the better of his wife only to find that she had somehow confounded his intentions.

  He shook his head ruefully. Twenty-four years they had been married now. Who would have thought that? Certainly not he, on the day that he had first seen her.

  He had been twenty-seven then, already an assistant inspector, returning to his village after a gap of almost three years. As he had been walking past the river, the very river beside which he had been caught as a youth spying on frolicking maidens, he had passed her coming the other way. She had been in the company of her sister, who Chopra recognised as the eldest daughter of Dinkar Bhonsle, sarpanch of the village council.

  He had stopped to say hello, and had noted how the beautiful girl had pretended not to be interested in him, even though he was at his dashing best with his hair freshly oiled, his moustache waxed, and wearing his newly pressed khaki uniform. Her sister–a married matron with three children and an eye for a good catch–had been far more impressed, and had insisted that he come to their home for dinner one evening whilst he was in the village.

  He had not gone.

  Instead, after making enquiries with his family, he had sent his father to arrange for the girl to be married to him. He had discovered that her name was Archana, that she was eighteen, that she was called Poppy by her friends because of her habit of constantly snacking on raw poppy seeds, and that she had passed her elementary school certificate at the second attempt. In fact, like all the children of the village, Chopra’s own father had been her tutor.

  Shree Premkumar Chopra had graduated from the University of Mumbai in 1947, just a few months before the traumatic upheavals of Partition. Having worked for a number of years in the big city, he had eventually decided to return home and take over the little village school in which he himself had received his junior education. Since then he had been known as Masterji, a term of great affection and respect.

  Thus, when Masterji requested the hand of his good friend Dinkar Bhonsle’s youngest daughter for marriage to his youngest son, a handsome young police officer living in Bombay city with a monthly income of no less than eleven hundred rupees, there was no question of a refusal. The two old friends were overjoyed to be united as family.

  Over the years, Chopra had wondered how his life would have turned out if he hadn’t been walking by the river at the precise moment that Poppy and her sister had wandered past. No doubt he would have left the village without meeting her, and, by the time he returned, she would have been married off elsewhere.

  He could not imagine his life these past decades without Poppy. He had married for love; this was true, though he would certainly not admit it. He had feared, because of her beauty, and the fact that she was somewhat younger than him, that she might not appreciate a husband with the simple qualities he had to offer, namely, honesty, integrity, thoughtfulness. And when he had discovered that his wife was a fanciful, often flighty romantic, he had feared that perhaps what she had really wished for was a dashing hero like the stars of the Bollywood masala movies she enjoyed so much, an Amitabh Bachchan perhaps, or a handsome Vinod Khanna. But Poppy had proved to be a devoted wife and, in spite of their troubles, they had enjoyed each other’s company all these long years.

  This thought reminded Chopra of Shalini Sharma, and he felt a sudden pain flower inside his chest.

  Chopra had suspected that, following his retirement, he would need something new to inspire him, and this was why he had purchased the run-down old bungalow on Guru Rabindranath Tagore Road. This was why he had employed an architect and a contractor to work on the plot. This was why he was meeting the delectable Miss Shalini Sharma once a fortnight at the Sun-n-Sand Hotel in Juhu. He felt terribly guilty about the whole affair; it made him feel sick to think what would happen if Poppy discovered his secret before he was ready to break the news to her.

  ‘Subhan’Allah, Chopra Miah, subhan’Allah!’

  Chopra turned to find Feroz Lucknowwallah bearing down on him, with his good friend Vikram ‘Vicky’ Malhotra in tow.

  Feroz and Vicky shared an apartment on the fifteenth floor, making them Chopra’s neighbours. Feroz, a lanky beanpole with a goatee and a mop of unruly black hair, was a poet, an aficionado of the Urdu language and devotee of the famous ghazal maestro Mirza Ghalib. He was also a celebrated drunk. Vicky Malhotra, handsome in a debonair way with clean-shaven cheeks and an up-to-the-minute lacquered haircut, was an actor who had a small part in a major serial while he waited for his big break in Bollywood.
/>   Feroz and Vicky were constantly falling foul of Mrs Subramanium’s rule book; their raucous parties, which would sometimes go on till the early hours and usually involved Feroz and his friends engaging in drunken poetry competitions whilst Vicky played the tabla as accompaniment, had annoyed Chopra on occasion. But Poppy was very protective of the two young men, insisting that their ‘artistic temperaments’ be allowed to flourish. They added colour to the building, that much he could agree.

  ‘What a great idea, Chopra Miah!’ continued Feroz enthusiastically. ‘An elephant in the courtyard! The ghazals are already rushing to my head, I swear absolutely.’

  ‘He looks totally depressed, yaar,’ said Vicky. He laughed as if this were the funniest thing in the world.

  Chopra knelt down beside the little elephant and removed the paper crown. How long could an elephant go without eating? he thought.

  And right there was the problem, whole and soul. He didn’t know. He knew nothing about elephants. There had been none in his village. The only ones he had seen were in Mumbai. He remembered there had been one on Juhu Beach for many years giving rides to children until that was made illegal. And Byculla Zoo had a pair, male and female. And you saw one now and again wandering down the crowded roads of Mumbai, a mahout on its back, shifting loads around the city. But that was becoming rarer and rarer… How could Uncle Bansi do this to him?

  The more Chopra thought about it, the more he wondered why his uncle had picked him for this thankless task. Why not his elder brother Jayesh, who, in line with the ancient rules of primogeniture, had stayed in the village to take over their ancestral acreage? Jayesh was a man of the soil; he had bullocks, he had cows; he would know what to do with an elephant. At the very least he would have no problem housing the poor creature, and certainly no Mrs Subramanium to deal with.

  The thought of the old battleaxe sharpening her claws gave Chopra heartburn, and he decided to retire to his apartment for a well-earned rest.