‘Yes,’ Kalyan answered, ‘we always prepare the study room and baba’s office at that time. Then we dust the rest of the house afterwards.’
I confirmed this was true and Kalyan continued. ‘When I entered the study, I noticed that the laptops
were missing. But thinking perhaps that baba was using them, I said to myself I’ll ask him when he comes down.’
‘Both? You thought I’d be using both the laptops, plus my third?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Kalyan replied, ‘so when you came down the first thing I did was to go up to your room and see if they were there. When they weren’t I came down and asked you
about it.’
‘And the safe? How did you know to look for it so quickly?’
Kalyan paled.
‘When you told me to search the house for anything else that was missing, I went up to madam’s room. I saw her cupboard doors were open and the safe gone.’
‘But you knew it was there?’
‘Yes,’ Kalyan answered after a pause, ‘we all did. The cupboard doors stayed open. We put her dry-cleaned saris in the cupboard. We dusted there. We all knew it was
there.’
‘Who’s we all?’ I asked.
‘Dheeraj,’ Kalyan began and then stalled. Dheeraj was the bearer and Kalyan’s brother-in-law; he had been on holiday since the middle of June.
‘Amit?’ Robin asked, introducing a new and dangerous element. He was the old manager, sacked recently under strained circumstances.
‘Yes,’ Kalyan replied.
‘And Santosh?’ Robin asked.
Santosh was one of the gardeners.
‘Yes, probably,’ Kalyan said again.
Robin looked up at me.
After a brief conference alone, we gave the security, Sati and Kalyan my mother’s warning: if they knew anything, they should speak now and there was still a chance of the matter being
settled privately. Once the police arrived, their investigation would take its course.
When they said they had no more to tell us, I said to Robin, in a voice loud enough for them all to hear, ‘Never mind. The cameras will reveal everything.’
Fighting the morning’s intrusion, I sought comfort in the chrysalis of my old routine. But within minutes, I sensed Robin’s slim figure hovering impatiently in a
dark corner of the basement study. He had, with Kalyan’s assistance, found the point of entry. He took me first to the front door to show me that it couldn’t be opened from the outside
without a key. He trailed a finger along its edge to further show that it had in no way been forced. Then he led me to the glass and gauze doors on the other side of the house, past the kitchen and
drawing room. Here, he pointed to the edge of the door’s black metal frame. There was a flaking silver abrasion, as if made by a screwdriver, and bright in the morning light, at exactly the
point where the handle met the frame; near it bits of black plastic were torn and hanging off.
‘He entered from here,’ Robin said. Sati and Kalyan had gathered around. Sati put his hand forward to touch the handle as if from wonder.
‘Don’t!’ I said, the thought occurring to me for the first time. ‘They’ll need to check it for fingerprints.’
‘He entered from here,’ Robin repeated, ‘took what he wanted and then left from the front door.’
Now Sati couldn’t control himself. He fingered the door handle with sensual pleasure. I slapped his hand away. Looking up at me, he said, ‘People have been touching it all
morning.’
‘Fine. But if your fingerprints are on it when the police arrive, you know where you’re going.’
He liked this and laughed.
‘They’re family men,’ Jasbir Singh Jat (ASI) said, ‘they wouldn’t have done it. Rehan saab,’ adding with aplomb, ‘ghar ka bhedi, Lanka
dhai!’ It was a reference to the grandest inside job of all time: Ravana’s brother, Vibhishana, helping Ram to destroy Lanka. And no sooner had he discovered that Kalyan was from
Uttarakhand, and not local, than he was sure he was our Vibhishana.
‘There’s no telling he’s even Indian; in many cases they turn out to be Nepali. By the time you figure out who it is, they’re back across the border.’ Then looking
at Kalyan, he said, ‘Son, you don’t eat the salt of a house and then betray the owner.’
‘No, sir,’ Kalyan said, beginning to tremble, the reference to salt perhaps especially close to his heart.
Jat smiled. ‘Then help us,’ he said.
‘Sir, you’re the police.’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean we pull answers out of thin air. We need your cooperation. Tell me, who did it?’
‘Sir . . .’
Jat laughed, and turning to me, said, ‘What was in the safe?’
‘Just some jewellery belonging to my mother.’
‘Money?’
‘No, just jewellery.’
‘Can I speak to mata ji?’
‘Sure,’ I said and walked over to the telephone. Above it, hung a garlanded picture of my recently dead grandmother in floral chiffon and pearls. On the sideboard, a framed
photograph of my mother’s marriage to Amit Sethia in Phuket some years before. And next to the telephone, a statue of Mahishasur Mardini. My eye was trailing the shaft of the trident being
plunged down the throat of a demon when my mother’s voice answered. I explained that Jat wanted to speak to her and handed the receiver to him.
In the minute or so that he spoke to her he grew animated. ‘Ghar ka bhedi, Lanka dhai,’ he repeated, adding also, ‘now that the snake has appeared, its path will become
clear.’
My fear that my mother would help to incriminate Kalyan turned out to be real. It was not that she wanted an innocent man to go to prison, but her mind was impatient with uncertainty and hurried
towards a solution. Also things might have seemed clearer to her from a distance. Whatever the cause, she not only turned suspicion toward Kalyan, she supplied Jat with a new theory: she believed
the safe had not been stolen the night before but days in advance, when there was no one home. The theft of the laptops, she felt, was only a cover. This way Kalyan would have a strong alibi: if he
was the thief, why carry out the theft on the one night I was home, and not on any of the nights when he was in sole charge of the house?
By the time Jat had put the phone down, and the forensics team arrived, his mind was inflamed with possibilities.
The team was made up of three. There was an older man in Bata chappals, loose blue trousers and an off-white shirt. He had a pockmarked face, a greying crew cut and bore a strong resemblance to
the actor Om Puri. There was another, middle-aged man, bellied and with a stout face, a thin moustache and a striped blue and yellow T-shirt. And there was a young man with thick bristly hair, deep
furrowed eyebrows and an intense constricted expression. It was this last member of the team who carried the forensic briefcase consisting of brushes, silver powders and magnifying glasses, each
with its place carved out in a thick bed of grey foam.
They went first to the glass and gauze door where it was believed the entry had been made. The youngest of the team stood outside in the heat, frangipani trees and a sandstone pavilion behind
him, brushing the glass door with silver dust. Finding only a greasy hodgepodge of prints, he moved inside. There he met with the same result except for a single print, slightly wet on the
edges.
‘This is usable,’ he said.
But Kalyan who, after bringing the forensics experts glasses of water stood around watching, confessed that it was his, made only seconds before.
Robin’s eyes fixed him in a cold stare. ‘Even after baba told Sati not to touch the door, you touched it.’
The team hurried inside to dust the table from which the laptops had been taken. The young forensics expert had barely covered one corner of the table when he looked up with dismay.
‘It’s been cleaned,’ he said, like a child about to cry.
‘No, no,’ I said, ‘there’s been no one cleaning this morning.’
‘It’s been cleaned,’ he said again, speaking not to me but to his colleagues.
‘Kalyan!’ Robin yelled.
While we waited for him to come in, the most senior in the team pressed his thumb onto the desk.
‘I’ll show you,’ he whispered to me, as if I was doubting the utility of their profession, ‘what a print looks like when it’s complete.’
Kalyan entered.
‘You’ve cleaned here,’ Robin said.
‘No, sir,’ Kalyan replied.
‘It’s been cleaned,’ the young expert said for the third time.
‘I just ran this . . .’ Kalyan rushed out of the room and returned with a rainbow-plumed duster. ‘I just ran this over it.’
‘So you cleaned it,’ Robin said, ‘you came in here, saw the laptops missing and the first thing that occurs to you is to dust the desk?’
‘No,’ Kalyan replied, beginning again on his involved account of how he had thought I had both laptops with me.
The forensics men were leaving the room when the elder beckoned to the youngest. ‘Dust here.’
The young man did as he was told and as if by magic the silvery and alluvial contours of a full print appeared.
‘This is usable!’ the young man said with delight and reached for a tape from his briefcase.
The other watched him with the paternal affection of a fairytale bear before breaking the sad news to him that the print was his.
‘Yours! You made it?’ the junior expert said with shock at this impropriety committed by a revered elder.
‘Yes,’ the senior expert consoled him, ‘but only to show . . .’ He broke off and pointed in my direction.
The team rushed out of the room and went to the last station where prints could potentially be found. But within seconds of dusting the cupboard that contained the safe, they said in one voice
‘nothing’. The middle-aged expert, pointing to a sliced sliver of clear lines, added, ‘Half a print here, but it’s cut off. Unusable.’
After their run through the house the team cooled off in the drawing room. Their failure had made them resentful. They needled Jat: ‘So do you have any suspects?’
‘The police can’t pull off miracles,’ he said gloomily, ‘we need cooperation. No one’s going to come out and say, “Sir, we stole the things, take us
in.” Never mind. We’ll give some people the third degree, then we’ll get answers.’
The senior forensics expert nodded in agreement, looking over at me. ‘If you don’t put pressure, how will the juice come out?’
‘Yes,’ Jat stressed, ‘without fire, how will the food cook?’
But even as I listened to the men, speaking, as it were, in code, like television policemen, I did not grasp their full meaning. Their clichés created an illusion of procedure. They
seemed like complete people, acting out a rehearsed role, and their conversation was so fluent that it allowed no point of entry. It was, as with the customs of an unfamiliar society, just to be
observed. And so it was only when they began to look expectantly in my direction that I realized, in a sudden metamorphosis from spectator to participant, what they were asking of me, and how
extraordinary their demand was. Extraordinary, for it, too, could be executed as a role, played out unthinkingly.
The policemen wanted me to select two or three of the ten or so men who worked at Steeple Hall for a thrashing, for what they referred to, using a dysphemism, as the ‘third
degree’.
Now, before my innocence should become my biggest crime, I should say that I, of course, knew that all of this existed, not only in India, but elsewhere. So what was it that surprised me? Not
the police’s methods. No. It was that I had inadvertently become complicit in their violence. That a crime had been committed, that there was no question of my being a suspect and that the
rights of ten independent adult men had been slipped into my hands to handle as I saw fit. And for what was about to happen, no extra-legal measures were needed; everything would occur within the
limits of the system. One did not have to go outside the law to stray: one could stray irrecoverably within the sphere of its enforcement.
Unwanted powers had become mine, and my options were few: I could choose not to act and risk the police losing interest in the case; I could abdicate responsibility and let someone less
squeamish than myself – my stepfather or Robin for instance – make the decision; or I could stop fooling myself about where I lived, and instead of clinging to an idea of myself formed
abroad, accept the realities of the place I was from. A line from a book about India flashed through my mind: ‘. . . a determination, touched with fear, to remain what I was.’
I excused myself from the drawing room and went to call my mother.
She said, when I told her what the police had asked of me, ‘I’ve already said no rough stuff. But they have to do their investigation. Why don’t you try speaking to Kalyan
yourself? He’s a weak sort of guy. He’ll confess without having to be taken to the police station. Just tell him, “Listen, Ma says that even now if you confess . .
.” ’
‘Yes, yes, OK.’
I put the phone down and yelled for Kalyan. He appeared in the doorway of the study. His expression, though grave, seemed to be struggling to retain its normality, as if it was just another day,
and I wanted, perhaps, a cold coffee. I noticed for the first time how slim and long his fingers were, like a pianist’s. I tried, by fixing my gaze on his figure, to focus my thoughts. Then I
lost my nerve.
‘Can I have a gazpacho?’ I said at last.
He looked confusedly at me.
‘You know the soup I taught you to make yesterday. Put some in a glass and give it to me. If it’s not cold, add an ice cube or two.’
I could make out Jat in the doorway. He stood close behind Kalyan, almost pressing up to him, smiling. Kalyan kept his cool in the face of this playground intimidation, then turned around and
went back into the kitchen, passing under Jat’s arm, which was propped against the door frame. Jat said he wanted to show me something outside.
We stepped into the blaze. It forced me back for a pair of sunglasses. Through their lenses the light became like the brownish yellow light of a photograph from the 1970s. The flowers of the
frangipani and the pink of the sandstone pavilion acquired the gentle tones of a seaside resort.
Jat led me to the corner of the property where the servants’ quarters were. They sat at an angle, facing away from the house. ‘And they’re as nice,’ my mother liked to
say, ‘as Rehan’s college suite, with a drawing room and Bombay Dyeing sheets. They will learn to live like human beings if it’s the last thing I do.’