Murder with Bengali Characteristics (3 page)

‘What’s up, boss?’

‘We’re investigating a former member of the Politburo,’ said Li.

‘What?’ said Sexy Chen. He went semi-transparent with fear, flickered in and out, and disappeared. Moments later, he burst into the room, in person. He must have been somewhere nearby.

‘Don’t do it, boss!’ he said. ‘It’s suicide! Remember what the principal at the Beijing Police Academy said. Solve the case gloriously, but be careful where big people are involved.’ Sexy Chen planned to betray Inspector Li at some point in order to further his career. He seemed like the disloyal type, and if there was one thing Sexy Chen could not stand, it was disloyalty. But not just yet. The timing had to be right, and he had no desire to go down with him.

‘A man is dead,’ said Li. ‘He was a decent man, I think. You’re going to help us find out who killed him.’

‘Who’s the Politburo member?’ asked Sexy Chen, sticking to the point.

‘I should have said
former
Politburo member. His name is Bijli Bose. He ran Bengal for years, before the war, before they invited us in. He’s been a loyal supporter of the Motherland. It’s just that for a long time no one knew which Motherland.’

‘A darkie?’ Sexy Chen relaxed slightly. That made things easier, but he would remain vigilant.

‘I talked to him briefly. Seemed like a tough nut,’ said Li. ‘Find out more about him. Now tell me about the Maoists. There’s a local camp nearby. What have they been up to lately?’

Sexy Chen relaxed further. The boss wanted to gossip. His loyalty was suspect, but he had his good points. He was quite human with his subordinates.

‘The liberated zone closest to the Protectorate is Junglemahal. They’ve been ruling it for years now. The boys over there are supremely chilled. They’re focusing more on theatre and floriculture. Discipline has been going to hell. Some of them have come back from the Patna front. Others are local recruits who just want to stay home. They’re not as interested in revolution as they used to be. Violence is way down. They haven’t executed too many class enemies lately, although this could be because there are none left.’

Would Barin Mondol classify as a class enemy, Li wondered. Technically, he worked for the government, but in a low-level clerical position in the Fisheries Department. He would have to go there. He would also have to visit some of these supremely chilled Maoists. They were very different from the Maoists back home, who were busy identifying revisionists and waiting for popular sentiment and circumstances to align. Meanwhile, they were raising funds by selling Mao memorabilia.

‘Big Chen is finding out about the other victims. You find out more about the thugs. They’re a secret society. Go check with Crazy Wu. He’s good with secrets.’

‘Please, boss, not Crazy Wu,’ begged Sexy Chen. ‘His skin is covered in creepy-crawlies. The last time I met him, he and his duplicate spent most of their time cracking jokes about me.’

Crazy Wu was their Information Officer. He never came out of the basement. His primary job was to prevent the public from getting too much information. He helped suppress reports, comments, paintings, photographs, memes, graphic novels, music, films, books, art installations, theatre, interpretative dance performances, mime and any other form of self-expression which contained the wrong type of thinking. He was a member of the Happy Cow Army, a hacker collective, which had once roamed proud and free. Now they were government employees. They created software that hunted disloyalty across networks and devices, ensuring that even the original files were destroyed. Nowadays, when a book was banned, it disappeared forever. Because Crazy Wu spent so much time making knowledge disappear, no one knew more than him. Li had figured this out long ago. Crazy Wu was unpredictable, but for some reason he approved of Li.

Inspector Li looked down at his phone. It was Gao Yu. In the old days, he had often ignored her calls, because he was busy. Now that it was too late, he never made that mistake. ‘Just go,’ he said, as he dismissed Sexy Chen. Gao Yu appeared on his screen. It had to be a screen. There was no way he could afford long-distance holo. Her eyes were just as alive as he remembered. She seemed to have grown fairer, but her nose was still crooked. Her pimp had punched her in the face. She had knifed him in the groin. Her police record had made her out to be a one-woman crime spree. He remembered well. That was the second time they had brought her in.

‘What did you do with my red shoes?’ she demanded. He braced himself. He knew that expression. It meant trouble.

Li tried hard to remember. ‘I sent everything back in a box,’ he said. ‘You didn’t have much.’

‘You know how hard I worked to save money for those shoes from what you gave me every month?’

Li remembered. She had been a good wife, for a while.

‘I didn’t think you would need them,’ he said gently. ‘Your new man could buy you a whole shoe factory, if he wanted. You could have an Italian cobbler living in your dressing room. Why would you need old shoes?’

Gao Yu was waving something. It looked like a weapon. ‘Look at this! Look! You couldn’t keep them properly? Was it so much trouble? The heel is broken. I used to love these shoes.’ She was working herself up. He could see it. He did what he always did.

‘Send me a picture,’ he said. ‘I’ll save up and buy you new ones. I have to rush, pretty. I have to go back to a village near the jungle, and then I have to meet a politician. He could be involved in a murder.’

Gao Yu hung up on him.

It was a village of thatched roofs and naked children. Nothing much had changed in hundreds of years. Li’s car was the most modern object within a fifty-mile radius. Village boys had gathered round it, peering inside, running their hands all over, whispering to each other. The car put up with it for a while, before letting off a blast on its siren. The boys scattered. The car called after them. ‘Juveniles! Remember to study the Six New Thought Processes! And always wash your hands before meals!’

The old lady sat on her porch, a stainless steel plate on her lap, picking stones out of a pile of rice. She threw them at her goat who ignored them. She bared her toothless gums at Li. ‘All these teeth were taken from me by ration shop rice,’ she said. ‘However much you try, you can never get them all.’

‘It’s the same everywhere,’ said Li.

‘Barin-babu never mixed with us much,’ she said, ‘even though we lived next door. He did come to my husband’s funeral, though. He ate very little.’

‘Too high class?’ asked Li.

‘What class will a Mondol have? Nothing like that. In the morning he would do his puja, bathe-shathe, go off to office. He was a small-time gorment babu. Not even smart enough to make money. Came back in the evening, read his books, ate dinner, slept. He was always reading books. Very big scholar he was. One of my nephews was like that, always reading. Bhodai, go and have your bath, I would say. Just coming, he would say, two more pages. He never amounted to much. Neither did Barin-babu. What was the point of so much reading? Barin-babu lived in a raw hut, just like me. These are all useless pursuits. Look at Geju. He doesn’t know ABCD, but his house is like the Taj Mahal. He has his own cinema hall, and his maid is automatic. Spoilt girls come for parties to his house.’

‘What about his students? Do you remember any of them?’

‘I think one of them was Fatima’s husband-sister’s son, but I’m not sure. Five-six of them there were, age would be twelve-thirteen. He was chewing their heads, I can tell you. What’s the point in teaching village boys? What good can come of it? Will they become magistrates? And even if they do, what comes or goes for us? Moyna’s auntie-mother-in-law in Narayanpur, she became a magistrate. Now her son lives in America. People say he has a helicopter. What good did it do the village?’

Li noticed his car hovering near Barin Mondol’s hut. It was in stealth mode. It had retractable tentacles, with which it could apprehend suspects, provided they weren’t too agile. It must have spotted something suspicious. Li let it be. It could well be a cow. Its ability to distinguish between humans and animals was limited.

‘So you’ve known him for many years,’ he said.

‘All my life. He was a few years older than me. His father was a railway guard. Used to beat his wife. Barin spent his whole life in the village. Only his college he did in Calcutta. He came back very modern. I thought he would marry a modern girl, but he never married. He was a communist. I don’t know what else he learnt in college, but communism he learnt very well. Everything was party, party, party with him. Party was his father, Party was his mother, Party was his children. All of us will be free, he would tell me, just you wait. In those days he was very active. In the beginning, Party did some good things. But after that, it became all goondas, like that Geju.’

‘I thought you liked Geju,’ said Li.

‘Who else is there to like? He’s the only person. Whatever has to be done, he has to do. We had thought the Party ruling means everyone in the village will prosper, but actually they had a quota. It was one person per village, approved by the Party. Mostly they are the goonda-badmaash type. Whatever kind of number-two business in the locality, that person will do. Seeing all this, Barin became depressed. Only during election time, Geju and the other boys would come, saying, come, come, Barin-da, you are well respected, come and ask for votes. The Party requires your service. Barin would go. After elections, they forgot about him, until next time. This was their system. In this way, the Party ruled. In Bengal, we prefer polite people. Seeing polite people in front, people were reassured. After some years, the goondas decided, now the public knows us well, there is no need to hide. Naturally by then we knew them, because they were taking money from all of us. From that time onwards, they fought elections on their own. Polite people became unimportant. The Party never called Barin again.’

He sounded a little like an old-school Maoist, thought Li, as opposed to the neo-Maoists, who had websites. You could still see them in Beijing parks on Sundays, waving flags and singing from the Little Red Book. Gao Yu used to point at them and laugh. ‘Losers! As if anyone’s going to follow people dressed like that! China needs fashion, baby!’

‘Did he still have links with the Party?’

‘Who knows?’ said the old lady. ‘We hardly talked towards the end. But one thing I will say, he was a decent man, a polite person. Not like all those small people. Nowadays, wherever you look, the country is covered in small people.’ She turned her head and spat on the ground.

‘What was he doing with the boys?’

‘He always worked for the country. It’s just that as he got older, the work became smaller. Towards the end, he thought about education a lot. In the evening, he would teach some poor boys. English-finglish he was teaching them. Of course, nowadays you can put the language straight in the brain, with some type of injection, I’ve heard. Just the way you must have learnt Bengali. But you still have to practice. Your Bengali is quite sweet, for a chinkie.’

Li ducked his head to acknowledge the compliment. He tried speaking it whenever he could. Most of his colleagues never bothered, so when they did, they sounded like circus freaks. Reading was even harder. No software was able to translate
Ananda Bazar Patrika
, a popular local newspaper, in which the language was high-flown and literary, and the descriptions of meals very detailed.

An alarm went off in his hat. He whipped it off and clutched his head. He wished he could control the volume. It was the car. It had hovered back into view, clutching a little boy in its tentacles. The boy was struggling silently, arms and legs waving in the air. He had a narrow, angry face, streaked with tears. ‘Suspect apprehended!’ said the car. ‘Suspect apprehended!’

‘Excuse me, mother,’ said Li, and walked over to his vehicle, which was waiting patiently, the struggling boy firmly in its grip. ‘Where did you find him?’ he asked.

‘Suspect was trying to enter scene of the crime,’ said the car. ‘Appears to be a human juvenile. Suspect is unarmed. His pockets contain sixty-two rupees and an A-card. Should I interrogate suspect? Please, Inspector Li? No one ever lets me interrogate suspects. I practise a lot when you park me.’

Inspector Li put the car on mute. ‘Let the boy go,’ he said. The tentacles relaxed. The suspect collapsed to the ground. He stood up and wiped his eyes angrily with the back of his hand. He looked about twelve, but it was hard to be sure. Most boys here were small for their age. It was basic nutrition. With every generation, the Chinese were becoming bigger and the Indians smaller.

‘You were his student, weren’t you?’ said Li.

The boy nodded silently. He was used to keeping secrets. Li smiled at him. ‘Would you like to come for a ride in my car?’ he asked.

‘Can we fly?’ asked the boy, his face lighting up. ‘I’ve never been in the sky.’

It was tight. He had enough fuel to fly for six minutes. Fuel had been in short supply ever since the Saudis had run out in ’33. Nowadays, they spent most of their time with their camels.

‘Why not?’ said Li.

‘Can you stop him from talking, though?’ asked the boy. ‘He talks too much, and he’s stupid. I hate it when stupid people talk too much.’

‘I’ll shut him off if it gets too bad,’ said Li, ‘but he’s got a right to talk if he wants to, doesn’t he?’

The boy looked at the car thoughtfully. He remembered his teacher.

‘I suppose he does,’ he said.

‘Sir, this is for you, sir,’ said Agarwal, placing the sandalwood Ganesha before him. It would look quite nice on top of the small teakwood bookcase just behind the Governor. There was a small Chinese flag on his table, next to the black-and-red flag of the Bengal Protectorate—a silhouette of the Poet Rabindranath with his hand on the head of a tiger. It was the only flag in the world featuring a beard. On the rich wood-panelled wall behind the table hung portraits of Chairman Mao and Mahatma Gandhi. They were looking in different directions.