The Masala Murder: Reema Ray Mysteries Read online

  ‘Well, I don’t.’

  ‘Nor do any of us! But they must not know that!’

  ‘I don’t know that I want someone that weak.’

  ‘Uff!’ exclaimed Devika. ‘Even the strongest of men don’t mind some ego-stroking now and then. Or stroking of any kind, for that matter!’

  She laughed long at her own joke and I joined in, though I couldn’t say that I particularly liked Devika’s way of suggesting I got a man. But I couldn’t deny that there was a kernel of truth in her words. Not about the Jane stuff, though I dare not suggest she re-read the book. But about the men in my life. Were they only playing by rules I had unwittingly established?

  I very nearly lost myself for a moment. It wasn’t Neil I was thinking about; it was Amit. Even after a terrible break-up, the temptation to rose-tint the past was an ever-present threat. And after all we had shared, it was almost impossible to see past the peachy parts to the hard, unrelenting pit that can break a tooth if it takes you by surprise. Particularly when you are as drunk as a skunk.

  But there it was—rushing back at me through the haze of time and alcohol. His disparaging remarks about my alleged superhero complex, as he liked to call it. He never could quite understand the impulse behind my career choice. I felt a surge of anger that I hadn’t realized I still felt.

  Devika continued her lecture about compromise, and how the word shouldn’t be confused with subservience, a mistake, she said, often made by people of my generation. I listened without interrupting her, not even breaking in to tell her that she and I definitely belonged to the same generation.

  She stopped talking and the moment of silence was enough to prompt my tequila-addled brain to go off on a tangent of its own: there were things I should have said to Amit but I never had. Damn it, I hadn’t had the last word!

  An hour and another misguided margarita later, I crawled under the sheets in Devika’s guest room. But sleep was slow to come.

  four

  I woke up the next morning, too pickled still to be truly hungover. It was Sunday, I told myself, roll over and go back to sleep. I looked at my phone to check the time. 9.57 am. Yup, way too early.

  But within seconds of my head touching the pillow again, my eyes flew open. My phone. Last night. Amit.

  I groaned as I looked through my recent calls list. The last outgoing call was to Amit, at 1.35 am. Damn those tasty margaritas! I thought I had left my drunk-dialling days behind me!

  I tried to recover fragments of what had been said that were still floating around like the dregs of a bad dream. How I wished it were one. I replayed the bits that came most readily to the surface.

  ‘How dare you!’ I had begun unceremoniously.

  ‘Is that … Reema?’ Amit had asked, surprise loud and clear.

  ‘Who else would it be?’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Just a little drunk.’

  ‘Both pissed and pissed off. Winning combination.’

  ‘Save it, smartass.’

  ‘What can I do for you this evening?’

  ‘Why couldn’t you just leave me and my mistakes alone?’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘Your Nancy Drew? That was the best nickname you could come up with?’

  ‘I think you should get some sleep.’

  ‘I think we should talk.’

  ‘Do you miss me?’

  ‘Yes. No!’

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes. It’s good to hear from you, Reema. You should get drunk more often.’

  Oh no, no, no. Amit, silky smooth with words, had never been at the receiving end of such a sitter as this, and he hadn’t squandered the opportunity. How could I blurt out that nonsense about missing him! It wasn’t even true! Or was it?

  Either way, it was of no bleeding consequence anymore. Even if I could overcome the betrayal, he was now married, which I could never, ever forget, despite his call a few months back. He wanted to be friends again, he said. He missed me, he said. And like the softy I never knew I was, I had agreed to meet him for coffee. But it hadn’t gone well, the old anger, which I thought I had overcome, rising to the surface. He had called a couple of times after that, but I had evaded further efforts at meeting. Now, how he—or his wife—would interpret my midnight call was anyone’s guess.

  I swung my legs off the bed, took a deep breath and tested the air: miraculously no explosion took place inside my skull. I pushed sluggish feet into slippers and padded my way to the kitchen where I put on water for a cup of coffee as strong as I dared and raided the fridge for left over quesadillas. Nothing like grease to settle the stomach.

  As I heard the water bubbling through the percolator, my mind strayed back to last night. What had happened, exactly? And though I would have loved not to ask, why had it happened? Had I not moved past Amit, or had this all been Devika’s doing? Talk of ex-es and alcohol never mixed, even for the allegedly overcomposed Reema Ray.

  So much for that theory.

  Doomed relationship. Doomed career move. The two in my mind seemed inextricably linked. I had wanted to be a detective. Crime fighter extraordinaire. Equal parts Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, in a fetchingly female frame.

  A significant chunk of my parents’ life savings had all but gone down the drain when, in the third year of college in the US, I strayed from literature and started taking more and more crime-related courses. It started small with a class in crime fiction and, before I knew it, I had signed up for criminal psychology, photography, cybercrime, criminology and various aspects of forensic science. My parents had been amused more than alarmed till I returned home and advertised my intention of actually becoming a detective. Or investigator—a term I preferred for being a smidgen less smarmy.

  But before I could appear for the exams which I had hoped would be my route into a respectable position in the police, my father rang one of his oldest, dearest friends, Sharad Kumar. Uncle Kumar had had front-row seats to my growing-up years and also happened to be deputy commissioner of police in Calcutta.

  So green I was still embryonic, I walked into his large, intimidating office upon receiving my summons. Air-conditioned and spotless, utterly unlike the police station I walked through to get there. The stacks of dusty files that seemed to characterize the decor of the rest of the rooms and the stale, cigarette-smoke-infused air were noticeably absent. Instead, there was a computer and a phone on the desk, and a large, comfortable-looking chair behind it on which sat Uncle Kumar, dressed in similar spot-free white.

  ‘So you finally made it into my office,’ he began with a smile, the hair falling on his forehead making him look younger than his fifty-three years.

  I had begged him to bring me here for as long as I could remember, a request he had always responded to with a patient but firm shake of the head.

  ‘Quite an achievement.’

  ‘You never asked why I didn’t let you come before.’

  ‘I always figured it was because you were so busy. I have never been inside Baba’s office either.’

  ‘Your father is a chartered accountant. I assume he hadn’t taken you there for fear of boring you to death.’

  My mother certainly seemed to agree with this assessment. But I didn’t see where he was going.

  ‘Why do you want to become a detective?’ he asked.

  ‘To find the truth,’ I replied without hesitation. I was acutely aware of how naive I sounded, but it was the only answer that made sense to me. And was a little idealism a bad thing?

  ‘That simple?’

  ‘It is one of those things where the answer is rather obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘I am not sure I agree. There are numerous other possible motivations—catching criminals, preventing crime, holding people accountable for their actions.’

  ‘Doesn’t “truth” kind of cover all of that?’

  ‘I would hesitate before applying a word as weighty as “truth” interchangeably with anything. Yes, sometimes a detective’
s job is to discover the truth—though the whole truth is seldom required. At other times it is simply to uncover a series of events, which do not necessarily illustrate the true nature of things. Still more often, it is simply a matter of putting available facts together and seeing where they point. The truth—which implies a fuller knowledge of not only the proceedings but also the motivation that brought them about, of all parties—can only emerge, if it is to emerge at all, in a court, where the perspectives of defence and prosecution are held up to scrutiny. Accounts, you will find, tend to vary widely as to how close the criminal justice system ever comes to the “truth”.’

  ‘So how would you describe the job of a police detective?’ I had asked.

  ‘It is often a matter of merely upholding the law, and a discovery of how it was broken. Once again, truth and law are hardly the same thing. You may find yourself arresting a woman who killed her husband in a fit of rage, having endured decades of abuse at his hands. The law calls her a criminal. The truth of the matter is, however, quite different.’

  Yes, yes, I knew the drill. Hadn’t I lapped up all the crime and legal shows on TV I could find? What of it? ‘Uncle Kumar, I am aware of the ambiguities of the job. The kind of moral dilemmas you are talking about can apply to any number of possible professions, and I am prepared to face them.’

  He looked at me carefully and finally nodded his head slowly. ‘Then you are far wiser at twenty-two than I was. When I joined the police, I thought I was going to be the next James Bond. A dream fuelled by a certain disregard for reality. And a most definite ignorance of procedure.’

  ‘Procedure?’

  ‘Yes. Every soul-sapping bit of it.’

  ‘I am not sure I know what you mean.’

  ‘I knew there was still something I could teach you,’ said Uncle Kumar with a smile. ‘Why don’t you stick around the office and find out.’

  Uncle Kumar allowed me to come to the police station for a whole week, introducing me as an intern to his colleagues. As soon as he left the room, his men turned away with a sneer and resumed whatever it was they had been doing before the annoying interruption and its lingering subject.

  With Uncle Kumar himself spending very little time with me, and most of the others deciding to ignore my presence, I spent the next seven days as a fly on the wall of one of the busiest police stations in town. I was discreet, but I quickly came to realize that my intrusion would not have been felt anyhow. These men and women seemed used to ignoring people; they ignored people every day with a high level of expertise. Victims, complainants, idlers of all kinds who they seemed to think had nothing better to do than sit about in a police station, waiting for hours before being attended to. It worked well for me: I was at leisure to see all that I needed to. And if this was procedure, I wasn’t getting it.

  At the end of the week, Uncle Kumar sat me down in his office once again.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I don’t know what you expect me to say.’

  ‘Do you still want to be a police detective?’ he asked. ‘Because if you do, I am sure I can make it happen, even if the exam doesn’t go your way.’

  For a long moment, I said nothing. I had no idea how to ask him why all save a handful of his team seemed to spend most of their time doing apparently so little. The few times I saw them animated were when I spotted some amongst them counting cash—no doubt received illicitly. Some were a little more discreet about their extracurricular income, and I believed I had identified two or three who seemed to put their heads down and work and only work, though they seemed to be fairly low down in the pecking order.

  This had been my re-education, at my parents’ behest. It wasn’t kind, but perhaps it had been necessary.

  Uncle Kumar was prepared for my hesitation, anticipating perfectly its source. ‘You are wondering why. As did I when I first joined. I was one of the lucky few who entered through the IPS, guaranteeing me a certain growth path. I could choose to be a part of it or not—I had that option. And to join did not necessarily mean putting my hand out for a share of the pie. It could mean simply ignoring it.

  ‘I don’t mean this as an excuse, far from it. But the people whom you see lining their pockets here so brazenly are often the same ordinary people who had to shell out a significant amount of cash for their current positions. They did so knowing full well that once they got where they wanted to be, they would recoup their investment, with interest, through similar means.’

  ‘It’s a vicious cycle?’ I asked at last.

  ‘As vicious as it gets.’

  ‘One that can’t be broken?’

  Uncle Kumar considered this for a moment. ‘I would prefer not to be so cynical. But I don’t think it can be broken from the inside.’

  Cynical, I felt like shouting, no, that wasn’t cynical at all.

  ‘And what about the people who come to the police for help, the victims?’

  He looked away, staring through the window out onto one of the most bustling thoroughfares of the city. That was his jurisdiction. There walked the people who should hold him and his men accountable. And though I knew Uncle Kumar was personally beyond reproach, shouldn’t the buck in his police station stop with him?

  Uncle Kumar took his time replying. ‘I won’t deny that there are victims who fall through the cracks. But it is also incorrect to assume that just because some of our officers are corrupt that they don’t also do their jobs as best they can. Quite often, the money they take in bribes is used to investigate cases.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Would I joke about something so shameful? That our official budgets don’t allow for proper investigations to be carried out? Our men often do their best, within the constraints imposed by men and machinery.’

  In other words, the system.

  I thought of the people I had seen come and go through the department over the previous week. Men and women waiting for hours, helpless, only to be turned away. Officers actively dissuading them from filing complaints. And others, those who arrived in the biggest cars and had called ahead through a ‘source’, being ushered into empty rooms for discreet, dedicated action.

  ‘Reema, if I didn’t see the problems, I wouldn’t have gone through this exercise with you. I know how it looks to an outsider. I know that much of what you see with your fresh eyes is true. But there are those of us who are constitutionally able to see past the institutional decay and those of us who are not. You need to decide which category you fit into.’

  I left Uncle Kumar’s office with the stars snuffed out of my eyes. I was angry: at what I had seen, at my father for calling in his friend to ensure that I had seen it, at myself for having been so easy to disillusion.

  I didn’t think I’d make it as a cop. But a twenty-two-year-old doesn’t have the fight kicked out of her so easily. I had already thought through my Plan B. In fact, at one point, Plan B had been my Plan A.

  ‘A detective agency!’ my mother almost screamed the next day at lunch. Her anger quickly found its usual target. ‘You had to stop her from becoming a police officer, didn’t you?’ she yelled at my father across the table. As long as I could remember, that table had never been wide enough for the anger to miss its mark, on either side. If I had thought their divorce five years ago would have been a hindrance, I had been wrong. They still had me in common,

  after all.

  ‘I didn’t know she’d come up with this insane scheme instead!’ my father bellowed back.

  ‘Hey, I am still in the room, people!’

  They both looked at me, their anger turning into exasperation. ‘Reema—’ they began.

  I quickly interrupted. ‘I understand you are concerned and that you both think I am a lunatic. But I have been trained for this. I think I can do this. Can’t you trust me enough to let me try?’

  I spent the next half hour convincing them that I (in all probability) would not be running around chasing gangsters; that it made the most sense of all the alternatives as all I needed w
as an office, a computer and an Internet connection; that I had learnt self-defence and even knew how to fire a gun rather well. The last point caused them to cry out in unison, my father saying that he would not give me a single rupee if I bought a gun.

  ‘Baba, I don’t need your money. I have enough to get started. And to feed myself. But no, I will not be buying a gun,’ I told him coldly.

  At least, not till I could afford one, I added mentally.

  I left the room in something of a huff. If I hadn’t been so annoyed, I might have actually been happy that my parents were finally agreeing on something.

  Two weeks later, tiny office rented, computer and desk acquired, name concocted (Steele Securities—I had wanted to invoke a sense of strength as well as an early idol, Remington Steele) and signboard put up, I was considerably less huffy. I was ready to provide all manner of security solutions—private investigation, installation of surveillance equipment, digital security. But no one seemed to want them. I soon began to feel that perhaps inventing my own tall, dark, mysterious, Pierce Brosnan-like associate might swing fortune in my favour. Just as quickly, I assured myself that the clients would come soon enough, no falsehoods needed.

  The only weapon required in my arsenal proved to be a healthy dose of self-deception.

  The first person to knock on my door was my father, just before my first idle month was through. I couldn’t face him, not when I knew the landlord would come for his money the next day and my bank balance was taunting me in a most unrelenting manner. I could scrape through only a couple more months without work, or help.

  ‘Hi, Baba,’ I said, trying to project cheer.

  ‘Reema, I’ve brought someone to see you,’ he said with a smile. I could see a lady standing behind him, about his age, wearing a worried expression. My first thought was that this was the girlfriend. I had done my best to beat down my territorial instinct with reason: this was good, maybe he’d drink less, maybe he’d argue less, maybe he’d even be happy. Hadn’t I told him many times that this was precisely what he needed?