The Cambridge Curry Club (6 page)

Shyamal Chatterjee had always been of a serious bent of mind. As a boy, he had preferred books to the
company
of other children and adults; as a teenager, he profited from the hours spent at Durga Puja, Shivratri and Saraswati Puja learning logarithms instead of
flirtations
with his doe-eyed cousins. Like several young men of his time, he was sent to London to study law, a subject for which he had no interest but much aptitude. He spent his years and money wisely as a lodger with his landlady Rosie on Tottenham Court Road and
complained
about the biting winters before returning home carrying both the china teapot for his mother and his virginity intact.

Swarnakumari Mukhopadhyay had lived a sheltered and exemplary life in Calcutta as the youngest of four children. The family doctor had been convinced it would be a boy; her father concealed his
disappointment
over a fourth daughter, and Swarnakumari rewarded him with sweet renditions of ‘Rabindra Sangeet’ in gratitude. A product of Brahmo Girls School, she was shy and reticent; her sisters Devika, Menaka and Madhulika were the fiery rebels who
married
wealthy landowners and heirs to tea plantations. Swarnakumari liked needlework.

Her father consulted the senior Chatterjee in all his legal affairs and for advice in a wrangle over the
eviction
of tenants. Barely home from London, Shyamal Chatterjee was despatched with papers to the rambling Mukhopadhyay mansion. Swarnakumari’s father was
impressed by the manners of the earnest, neatly dressed young man who refused to share a glass with his host. Work and drink never mixed, he asserted firmly, also politely declining the sweets brought to him on a silver salver by Swarnakumari. Padding gracefully across the room, she sent him a shy glance, one that he
intercepted
and took back with the dusty legal files he carried that evening. Swarnakumari’s father needed no further persuasion; Shyamal Chatterjee’s honesty and humility would be suitably rewarded.

If Swarnakumari found Mr Chatterjee dull, she would have been incapable of expressing those
sentiments
as she settled into life in England. They moved to Cambridge, where he commenced employment with a reputed solicitor’s firm. He was always sensible, never spontaneous but always reliable, and Swarnakumari had few complaints after the renovation of the kitchen with its stainless steel double sink, the building of the
conservatory
and the landscaping of the garden.
Swarnakumari
had nevertheless received the news of her husband’s retirement with alarm and discovered her spiritual guide and mentor Guru Ma at the moment when Mr Chatterjee discovered mould in the bathroom. For Swarnakumari, Guru Ma was the equivalent of headphones.

Swarnakumari firmly believed that a prayer recited with increasing frequency became a living truth. Guru Ma’s little book of homilies for daily happiness was a clarion call to right action and non-action, resistance and endurance. Truth stood naked, but physical
intimacy
was no longer an option for Mr Chatterjee; his wife’s permission and participation had been
withdrawn
years earlier. Swarnakumari had taken a private
decision under the influence of cloudy sandalwood incense and pious prayer; he sensed a steely resolve in her that would not be easily challenged. Battling her resistance silently, he was annoyed that he had not been consulted on a matter of such importance. He could not be certain, but he suspected that Banerjee was in a similar situation of choicelessness. Women had their secrets, their eccentricities and unfathomable rituals, Banerjee had once intimated with an air of such
resignation
that Mr Chatterjee had clung gratefully to his words as evidence that he was not alone.

Swarnakumari had been an exemplary wife and mother, he thought; she had been content to settle in England, displaying a quiet support of his every
suggestion
. Conscious of her sheltered upbringing, Mr Chatterjee had ensured her protection from the evil influences of British society, endorsing her reluctance to venture out of the home.

Her desire to work in the charity shop was applauded by him as a noble, altruistic effort. The impulse
purchases
were another matter; he was somewhat unhappy with her gift of a grey Marks & Spencer cardigan from the charity shop. Englishmen appeared to be of an entirely different build, even if the size was S. It was difficult to ascertain whether it was the shoulders or the chest or the sleeves that were the problem, for no
full-length
mirrors were to be found in the Chatterjee household, a move initiated by Swarnakumari after she had read Guru Ma’s homily on vanity. A mirror
reflection
, decided Swarnakumari, was merely an illusion, not reality.

They did not need any more bone china cups, saucers, plates and bowls, egg slicers, rattan magazine
racks, vases, recycled pencils or lampshades from the shop, thought Mr Chatterjee. The small television set she acquired for the bedroom had, however, been
useful
, and after Swarnakumari fell asleep he turned down the volume and watched until late into the night. His dreams were lurid, and, feeling revulsion and distaste, he wrote letters of complaint to the television watchdog protesting against explicit programme content.

Swarnakumari was garrulous every Thursday
evening
as she recounted the day’s events, described the customers and the arrival of new items. Mrs
Wellington-Smythe
was a fine, aristocratic woman, with a strong sense of authority and command, decided Mr Chatterjee. He mentioned her name several times in conversation on his walks with Banerjee, who in turn narrated Heinz’s stories of barbecues in the San Ramon backyard and a trip with Madhumita to Yellowstone National Park in their black BMW five series car.
Banerjee
had somehow formed the impression that
Swarnakumari
and Mrs Wellington-Smythe were good friends.

Mr Chatterjee had noticed an increasing yearning in Swarnakumari for India, for Kolkata and for her
relatives
, but he deliberately refrained from comment. He was of the view that the past should remain the past. There was no future in the past, and as for the tense, it was present perfect. At an early age, Mr Chatterjee had learned the wisdom of the haiku he had read:
When sitting sit/When standing stand/Above all, don’t wobble.

Mr Chatterjee never wobbled, although the breasts of the woman in No. 32 opposite the quiet square did. He had noticed them and their owner from the moment she had moved into the house with the blue door on 24 June 1997. She lived alone with two cats that were
entirely house-trained and remained indoors. Two days after her arrival at Newton Square one of the cats had leaped out of the window and was seen wandering
disoriented
and distraught over the lawn like a
blindfolded
inmate released at midnight from a high-security prison. By a happy coincidence, Mr Chatterjee was tweaking the net curtains at the time. Despite a strong aversion to cats, he gallantly gave chase. Rachel Chesterton explained that she had lived in a London flat and was obliged to relocate after her divorce. She expressed her gratitude with an offer of tea, patting his arm gently with rose-pink nails to propel him into her kitchen. He had stared in wonder at the wooden flooring, the cosy bright curtains and the cheerful furniture of an IKEA world.

Rachel was lonely; she had recovered from skin cancer three years ago, but it was her divorce that was her undoing. Her chronic alcoholism led to a court decision awarding custody of the child to the father. She found Cambridge provincial and dull, as dull as her little Indian neighbour, who looked at her with
inscrutable
eyes and transparent thoughts. Conscious of the proprieties, he had declined further offers of tea,
choosing
instead to chat on the street. If he passed her in the company of Banerjee, he merely nodded briskly from afar.

On his Neighbourhood Watch rounds one winter’s evening he saw a twisted bicycle abandoned near Rachel’s house. He knocked on her door, noticed it was unlatched and waited. He knocked and rang again before gingerly calling out her name. He found her crying on a sofa in the living room, wearing only a dressing-gown, an empty bottle of vodka by her side.
Between sobs she told him that her ex-husband had moved the courts to prevent her visits to her child on the grounds that they were disruptive.

Absorbing the impact of her words, Mr Chatterjee found the sight of her gown open to the waist even more disturbing, as she leaned across and rested her head on his shoulder. He patted her reassuringly, but suddenly felt warm, naked skin instead, as the gown fell away. She began to kiss him with urgent, desperate passion. Then a furry living snowball scratched his arm and landed with lightning speed on Rachel’s bosom. The sight of her ballooning breasts swinging under the weight of a clinging cat clawing them in jealousy was one that Mr Chatterjee never managed to erase. He fled, remembering to shut the front door firmly behind him, and on reaching home rang the local police station about the twisted bicycle. He was a good Neighbourhood Watch Co-ordinator.

Rachel Chesterton had moved home shortly after the incident, carrying no recollection of her last encounter with Mr Chatterjee, a detail sadly unknown to him. For years thereafter, Mr Chatterjee had suppressed a thought couched in rhyme that gnawed at his insides: what would he have done, with the dress undone, had the cat not won? Searching for the answer, he drove solitary in the silent winter dusk down Lime Kiln Road to gaze at the city of spires below. The branches of the bare trees were wagging, censorious fingers in the sky and the frost on his neat patio garden was the ice in his heart.

Over the years, Mr Chatterjee slowly convinced
himself
that he was not to blame, that her breasts were, in fact, thorny, wrinkled pineapples that should have
stayed on the stem, and that encounters of this nature were as much an occupational hazard for a
Neighbourhood
Watch Co-ordinator as for the engineer called out to inspect a gas leak.

Mr Chatterjee had recorded a private image of
English
life in the neighbourhood with his customary powers of observation; the women who gave their
husbands
a peck on the cheek before the car backed out of the driveway; those who never came out; the men who regularly cut the lawn and washed the cars and trimmed the hedges; the women who put out winter pansies in garden centre terracotta containers and planted aconite, snowdrops, anemones, grape hyacinth, tulips and daffodils along the path to the front door; the children who greeted the neighbours and those who stayed up late; those who had cats and those who had dogs; those who left Dairy Crest milk bottles outside their door and those who were disabled; those who left the black bins out too long and those who took them in early; those who recycled and those who did not; those who swept up the autumn leaves and weeded the flowerbeds; those who read the broadsheets and those who read the tabloids; those who bought DIY furniture and those who entertained; those who had attic
conversions
and those who had conservatories – and those who led happy lives.

Mr Chatterjee believed that the years devoted to the study of law and human nature had sharpened his
faculties
, and it was thus evident to him that Mary and David were a cultured elderly couple and ideal
neighbours
for the adjoining side of his semi-detached house. Even the dull, muffled sound on the stairs stopped after some years; David moved downstairs once he
contracted
Parkinson’s disease. Mary was devoted and uncomplaining; she wheeled him out into the sun, a blanket over his knees, to cheerfully water the petunias. She began to suffer from migraine, a condition that made it difficult to tend to an ailing husband. Their two sons, who lived locally, made infrequent visits. Mr Chatterjee pursed his lips at their lack of filial devotion, while Swarnakumari wordlessly added Mary’s Tesco and Sainsbury’s shopping lists to her own. Soon David no longer left the house, and the sons no longer visited.

Returning from an afternoon in the Central Library, Mr Chatterjee was met by an excited Banerjee outside the lane. The neighbour, David, was dead. That was not all, said Banerjee, falling into step with Mr Chatterjee as he began to walk towards his home; it was murder.

Mr Chatterjee paused.
Murder
. The word
reverberated
in his head, growing louder until it was a horn blasting over the treetops and chimneys in the quiet square, flew over the Cherry Hinton Park, past the swans and over the railway and onto the speeding track, returning over the fields of Grantchester and along the ripples of the River Cam to the police car parked
outside
the house on Newton Square.

Arriving at his home, he noticed that an over-zealous police officer had extended the cordon to include the Chatterjee entrance, erroneously giving the impression of multiple crimes. Mr Chatterjee stared up at the house next door in disbelief as Banerjee narrated the succession of events. He felt betrayed. Had he not been reading the pages of the
Telegraph
at the library, he would have been at home;
he
, as Neighbourhood Watch Co-ordinator, would have been the one the police would have approached for assistance.

Perhaps it was still not too late. Striding up to the officer in the police car, he introduced himself,
declaring
himself ready for a lengthy interview on the
neighbourhood
and its inhabitants, but the officer merely had instructions to stay outside the house for a further hour. He knew nothing other than that there had been a murder, that the elderly lady had been taken away and that she was unharmed.

Mr Chatterjee walked up past the front lawn to his home along with Banerjee. Swarnakumari had little to add; she had been praying in her room, unaware of the commotion outside, and Mallika was away in London for the day. Mr Chatterjee sat still and small on his favourite leather armchair. He was afraid, and
wondered
whether he should write a note to the
neighbours
, but lacked the words. The motive for murder had to be burglary; the cold-blooded assassin had
evidently
noticed a helpless invalid and an elderly lady who stayed indoors and rarely received visitors. The man would have stood behind the privet hedge to observe the house at close quarters; indeed, he was
lurking
in the neighbourhood, waiting to strike again, and this time the target could be the Chatterjee household.