The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken (30 page)

Puri felt like putting his hands over his ears to blot out her voice.

'See, so many women got left behind, Chubby. Thousands and thousands in fact. That is after the Britishers chopped up India. So much violence and chaos and all was there. Total one thousand lakh women could not be traced. Hindu and Sikh girls held back in Pakistan. Many Muslim girls grabbed here in India, also. Each and every one of them got abducted. Most were converted and married by force and all. Thus Premna Auntie said it was our duty to save our poor mothers and sisters, and invited me to join.'

The detective had heard his mother talk of Premna Auntie in the past, an aunt on Mummy's maternal side. A former head teacher, she'd been a feisty, determined woman by all accounts.

'Mummy-ji, wait,' said Puri, holding up a hand. 'Allow me to understand one thing: you're telling me you reverted to Pakistan to rescue abducted women?'

'Hundreds of them, Chubby,' she said with a broad smile. 'I did volunteering, na. For Indian Recovery and Relief Operation. Premna Auntie said it was women's work. "Men cannot be relied upon. It is they who created such a mess in the first place," she said.'

The detective couldn't fathom what he was hearing.

'But why you kept it secret all these years, Mummy-ji?' he asked.

'We two agreed - that is, Premna Auntie and my good self - to keep it all hush hush. See, Chubby, people are always doing gossip and making utmost mischief, na. Had neighbours and all come to know I'd reverted to Pakistan, tongues would do so much of wagging. "That one's going round," and such. Then what? No marriage proposals would come.'

'Everyone must have wondered where you and Premna went off to, no?'

'Just we told them we were doing holiday in the hills, na. No one person offered objection. So much pain and anguish and all we'd suffered. Ma said rest was required. To forget all what I'd seen.'

Puri took this to be a reference to the murder of Mummy's brother, Anil. His next question was a few seconds in coming.

'Did Papa come to know - about your going to Pakistan, that is?' he asked.

'This was before marriage, na?'

'Yes but after did you tell him?'

Mummy shook her head. 'With marriage new life begins, na? After my shaadi, I packed away those times. My duty was to my husband - and my three boys, also. Past is past.'

'But it's never entirely forgotten, is it, Mummy-ji? It came back to haunt you when you met Kamran Khan at the durbar. You were totally thunderstruck, actually. He's his father's carbon copy.'

'Agreed,' said Mummy. 'But come, Chubby. Where's your appetite?' She picked up the plate of macaroons and offered it to him. 'It's your favourite, na?'

Puri took the plate and placed it back on the tray. 'Mummy-ji I want to know what all you know about Faheem Khan's past.'

'First thing is first, Chubby,' she replied. 'Must be Aslam found you and not the other way round. That means he told you something.'

'No more games, Mummy-ji,' replied Puri sternly. 'This is not some small matter like which servant stole the daal.'

The pallu of her sari had slipped forward. She pulled it back over her shoulder, her demeanour indignant. 'Why you shouldn't share what all Aslam told you first? It's my case after all,' she said.

'Your case, Mummy-ji! How exactly? I'm the detective, is it not!'

'Your voice is getting raised, na. Come. Take iron tonic. One spoon. Will make you calm.'

'I am very much calm!' he erupted.

The words penetrated into the next room where Bhuppi was watching TV. He put his head around the door. 'All OK, Chubby?'

Puri made a gesture as if to say 'as well as can be expected' and his brother gave a sympathetic nod before retreating.

'Mind telling me why all this is your case, exactly?' asked Puri. He was standing behind his chair now, hands gripping the top.

'It began in 1948, na. That is when she went missing.'

'Who?'

Mummy gave a tut. 'Saroya. Aslam didn't tell you?'

'He mentioned her but gave a different name, also.'

Mummy sat forward in her chair. Her face was alight with expectation. 'Tell me, Chubby.'

'You'll give me what I want, also?'

'It's my case, na. Since sixty years I've been waiting. It is only right and proper I be allowed to do conclusion.'

'Mummy-ji, how many times I've told you: detective work is for professionals, not mummies. Years of experience are required.'

'Case will not get solved without my know-how.'

The detective heaved a great sigh. 'Very well,' he said. 'Let us put our two heads together.'

He took out his notebook and read aloud the information Aslam had given him: 'Her name is Kiran Singh, daughter of Manjit Singh. Came from a village named Mandra. Aslam said you would remember it.'

Puri handed her the photograph Aslam had given him. Mummy gasped at the sight of it. 'So long I've been trying to picture her face, na,' she said. 'Yes, that is she. No doubt about it. Aslam said how long ago he found out her real name?'

'Some years, I believe. He wanted to pass on the information but didn't know where to find you.'

Mummy was still staring at the picture. A tear fell and splashed on to it. She quickly wiped it away with a napkin, embarrassed.

'Clumsy of me, na.'

'Please, Mummy, no need to apologise.' Puri's tone was soft, understanding now. 'So many memories and all.'

He held her by the hand. 'This Kiran Singh, known as Saroya, also - she is who exactly?' he asked.

Mummy wiped her face, still clutching the photograph.

'Faheem Khan's wife.'

TWENTY-TWO

MUMMY WENT UPSTAIRS to her room and returned with a small collection of tatty old notebooks: her diaries from 1948. She'd kept them hidden in a padlocked trunk all these years, something of an achievement in a busy Punjabi household in which personal space was an abstract concept.

'Here, Chubby,' she said, handing them to her son. 'You'll find what you want. All written down.'

'You're certain about this, Mummy-ji?' asked Puri. He had often seen his mother scribbling in her daily diary, but had never dared so much as peek inside. Their pages were the one place that had always been out of bounds, even to Papa.

'Hard for me, what with my eyes,' she answered. 'You go ahead. Just I'll take rest. Some tiredness is there.'

Puri stood as she left the room and headed upstairs.

'I'll be here only,' he called after her, staring down at the cover of the first notebook, marked in English in faded ink: 'February 1948'.

With a sense of guilt, as if he was trespassing, the detective turned back the cover.

Mummy had written in the Perso-Arabic script, which Puri had studied at the Military Intelligence Training School in Pune. But he was rusty and could only make sense of certain sentences by saying the words out loud.

The first entry was for February 8. It described the journey back to Pakistan, retracing the route Mummy and her family had taken in the opposite direction when they had fled to newly independent India only a few months earlier.

At Wazirabad, she had wept bitterly, reliving the scenes of men being dragged from the refugee train and vanishing beneath a ferment of bloody fists and weapons.

Reached Pindi at seven in the evening. As we decamped from the train I fainted - memory of those eleven terrifying hours when we were stuck in the station with a handful of jittery British soldiers holding back the mob too much to bear. Premna Auntie comforted me. But I felt embarrassed. God knows she has suffered more than me. Husband, son, father all gone.

Here Mummy reflected on how surreal it was being back in Rawalpindi, the city where she had grown up. This new country called Pakistan was her watan, her homeland, and yet she would never live there again.

At times she vented her anger: 'Strangers are living in Papa's house,' she'd written.

Who are they? They have no right to be there! What have they done with our possessions? P said we should go and see. I can't. Not strong enough. Keep searching in the crowd, looking for the boys who came that night. I can picture every one of their faces.

She was referring to her brother's murderers, Puri concluded, and he read on:

How could people do such things? Slaughter their neighbours like cattle? Drive one another from their homes? P says there is only one explanation for such madness: Lord Shiva has danced the rudra tandava. But no one has time to mourn. Everyone has started to put the past behind them - here and in India also. In this alone, in their common denial, are the people of our two countries now united.

Puri reached the entry for February 21, 1948, where Mummy described her and Premna Auntie's modus operandi:

Dressed as poor Muslim peasants wearing tatty coloured salwar kameez, frilled dupattas, ta'wiz. Went barefoot and carried cloth bundles containing a few possessions on our heads. Had to hone our rural Punjabi accents.

Every day they would set off at dawn for villages in the Punjab hinterland, searching for abducted Hindu and Sikh girls and women being held against their will. When they received confirmation of one being held in a certain location, Mummy and Premna Auntie were bound to pass on the information to the local authorities. The governments of India and Pakistan had signed a pact to allow rescue teams to work in each other's countries and facilitate the search and release of the missing women. But the police often proved corrupt or uncooperative.

'Some officers have abducted women themselves or bought them from others as wives,' wrote Mummy.

On February 23, however, a certain Captain Aslam of the Pakistan army had been seconded to help them.

That morning he waited with his men on the Grand Trunk Road while Mummy and Premna Auntie set off to investigate a rumour that a young woman was being held in the village of Bajal.

While Puri read on, Mummy slept - and dreamed.

She was young Koomi Pabla again, nineteen years of age, walking with dear Premna Auntie . . .

It's dawn and the farmers working in the fields watch their approach. The fine layer of dust that coats the two women from head to toe, diligently acquired during a long, arduous walk along a rough track that leads to the village from the Grand Trunk Road, completes the picture of desperate refugees escaping the ongoing violence in the contested state of Jammu and Kashmir.

The only facet of their disguise that's not been improvised is the pain, anguish and sheer exhaustion that shows in their features. The memories of bloodshed and violence, the murder of loved ones, of being brutally uprooted from their homes in August of the previous year - all this is as fresh in their minds as it is for millions of others now living on either side of the new border.

'Amma! A-salaam-alai-kum,' calls out Premna, spotting a local, middle-aged woman returning from the fields through the early-morning mist. 'Help us! Barely any food has touched our lips in days!'

'Wa-lai-kum-a-salaam!' the local woman greets them. Koomi judges her to be no older than forty despite the shock of pure white hair peeking from beneath her headscarf.

'Where are you coming from?' the woman says.

Premna answers, 'Jammu! My daughter and I have been walking for days. My husband is no more! And the kafirs drove us from our homes! May Shaitan stone them!'

Premna is weeping now, tears streaming down her face, her hands held up in supplication. 'What are we to do?' she implores the stranger. 'Amma! We have lost everything! May Allah protect us!'

The local woman approaches them with pitying eyes and asks, 'But, sisters, where are you going?'

'To Rawalpindi! Word has reached us that my brother is there in a camp. Tell us: how far is it?'

'Two days.'

Koomi's eyes widen and then she, too, begins to cry. 'But Mother has not the strength in her,' she sobs. 'We were robbed on the road and have nothing left - only a few pots and no food to put in them.'

The local woman, whose name is Homaira, places a comforting arm around Koomi and says, 'Please don't cry, child. Come. You will have food and drink and you can take rest.'

She leads the women through the village, where the charred hulks of houses, scenes of unimaginable crimes that will go unpunished for ever, bear testament to the slaughter and pillaging that has accompanied the brutal division of India by the British and the creation of Pakistan. They pass a boarded-up well, a tomb for many of the village's Hindu and Sikh girls, who took their own lives rather than be seized by a Muslim mob. Further on lies a Muslim graveyard with freshly dug plots - more victims of the frenzy of killings that swept through cities, towns and villages where previously those of different faiths had lived side by side for generations.