for a seat in a non-air-conditioned three-tier carriage. The train from Jaipur to Ranchi had been a 'local' and had stopped at every station along its 740-mile, 30-hour journey east across the subcontinent.
During his student days, Puri had always traveled in the cheapest trains and carriages out of financial necessity. He looked back on the experience with nostalgia. The hypnotic swaying of the train, the camaraderie between passengers, all of them poor, had been wonderful.
But he knew how unforgiving the conditions could be. And now, as he traveled in the comfort of a first-class carriage on a fast train (top speed 87 miles per hour) on the same route Mary had taken, he pictured her-weak, with nothing of her own to eat or drink, possibly fading in and out of consciousness-crammed into the corner of a bottom wooden bunk with the rough feet of the occupants on the bunk above dangling centimeters from her face.
Her carriage would have been heaving with laborers and rustics, who routinely clambered aboard slow- moving local trains between stations, occupying every inch of space. Mary would have been forced to share her bunk with up to six or seven other passengers. With no one to guard her place while she went to the toilet, she might well have found herself squeezed onto the floor.
When the train stopped during the day and the sun hammered down on the roof, it must have been like the inside of a tandoor oven. The circular metal fans bolted to the ceiling would have offered little respite. During the inordinate number of stops, there would have been no letup from the footfall of hawkers selling everything from biscuits and hot tea to safety pins and rat poison. Nor from the perpetual stench of 'night soil,' which, on all Indian trains, went straight down the toilet chutes onto the tracks.
Had someone taken pity on Mary and helped her? Perhaps a sympathetic mother who had given the poor girl some water and a little something to eat from her family's tiffin.
Had she had made it to Ranchi alive?
The odds were not good. And without Mary, or at least irrefutable evidence that she had not ended up dead and mutilated on the side of Jaipur's Ajmer Road, Puri was going to have an extremely hard time proving what had happened on the night of August 22. A train booking with her name on the roster would not be enough to prove Ajay Kasliwal's innocence.
The detective watched the striking Rajasthani landscape slip past his window. The sun was setting over an intricate patchwork of small fields-the dry, baked earth rutted with grooves made by ox-drawn plows in expectation of the monsoon rains.
His eyes followed the progress of a herd of black goats and a stick-wielding boy along a well-worn pathway that led to a clutch of simple homesteads. In front of one stood a big black water buffalo chewing slowly and deliberately. Nearby, on a charpoy, sat an old man with a brilliant white moustache and a bright red turban watching the train go by.
Puri reached Ranchi early the next morning. He had phoned ahead to arrange transportation and exited the station to find a driver who hailed from Jadugoda waiting for him.
Together they set off in a four-wheel-drive Toyota toward the mines.
'Sir, it's not a good idea to make this journey at night,' the driver told Puri once they had left behind the economically depressed city, which embodied little of the new India. 'Nowadays the roads are extremely dangerous.'
'Why's that?' asked Puri.
'Naxals,' replied the driver.
Much of Jharkhand, along with great swaths of eastern and central India-the 'Red Corridor'-were controlled by Naxals, short for Naxalites, or Maoist guerrillas. Their cause was ostensibly a just one: to fight against oppressive landlords and functionaries of the state, who had tricked or forced hundreds of thousands of people off their land. But like so many proxy rebel movements around the world, they had become the scourge of the people they claimed to represent. Naxal comrades levied taxes on villagers, robbed them of their crops and indoctrinated their children.
They also killed hundreds of people each year.
'Just last week they murdered a truck driver who refused to pay their road tax,' explained the driver. 'They burned him inside his cab. Last night they murdered an MLA in Ranchi. They put a mine under his car and BOOM!'
Puri had read about the murder in that morning's paper. The MLA was the third to die in as many months. Little wonder the prime minister had recently called the Naxalites the single biggest internal security threat faced by India.
Puri asked the driver whether he thought the Maoist movement would continue to grow in popularity.
'Of course, sir,' he said.
'Why?'
'Because now the poor can see what the rich have-expensive cars, expensive houses. So they feel cheated.'
Yes, the genie has been let out of the bottle, Puri thought. God help us.
Despite all the potholes, which caused his head to jerk up and down and occasionally bounce off the window, Puri soon fell fast asleep.
He awoke when they were half an hour from Jadugoda town.
The landscape to his left was Martian: flat, rocky and arid. The only earthly features were the occasional thick, knotty trees-remnants of a great, primordial jungle, which had been cleared to grow monsoon-dependent rice. To the right rose hills with sharp escarpments. Here and there, the upholstery of patchy scrub was punctured by outcrops of rock and scarred by gullies made during heavy downpours.
The uranium mines lay deep beneath these hills. A barbed-wire fence encircled them. Large yellow Uranium Corporation of India signs warned trespassers to keep out.
Puri's vehicle was soon stuck behind a convoy of dump trucks. Each was carrying loads of ordinary-looking grey rock chips that, according to the driver, had been extracted from the mines and were being taken to the processing center a few miles away. There, the rock would be crushed, and after being put through a chemical process, the uranium extracted in the form of 'Yellowcake.'
'Sir, did you know our Yellowcake was used to make India's nuclear bomb?' said the driver, grinning with pride at his country's achievement and his native Jharkhand's contribution.
'Do you know anyone who works in the mines?' asked the detective.
'Sir, only tribal people do the manual labor underground,' he replied.
There was a subtext to his answer: the driver was a caste Hindu and although he had grown up in the area, he did not mix with the tribals, or Adivasis, the indigenous aboriginals who traditionally dwelled in the jungle.
'I had a cousin who used to drive these trucks. He did the job for twelve years,' said the driver cheerily. 'But then he had to stop.'
'What happened to him?' asked Puri.
'Sir, he got sick. The company doctors diagnosed him with TB and gave him some medicine. But he did not improve and then he died.'
'What was his age?'
'Forty-two.'
The driver fell silent for a moment and then, with a confused frown, said, 'Sir, the antimining campaign- wallahs say the mines make people sick. They say people should not work there. But what else are people to do? There are no jobs. Driving a truck pays good money. If one or two people get sick, well…'
They were still stuck behind the dump trucks, unable to pass because of oncoming traffic.
A headwind had started blowing dust from uranium rocks in their direction. Some of it settled on the windscreen. Although the windows were rolled up, Puri automatic ally buried his mouth and nose in the crook of his arm.
The driver laughed when he noticed the detective's reaction.
'Sir, don't worry, you can't get sick from a little dust! See?' He rolled down his window and took a deep breath. 'There's nothing wrong with me at all!'
