Jadugoda was virtually indistinguishable from tens of thousands of other little roadside settlements to be found across the length and breadth of India, thought Puri as they stopped at the main intersection to ask for directions.
A collection of rickety wooden stalls stood along the sides of the road that led in and out of the town. There were several paan-bidi stands stocked with fresh lime leaves and foil pouches of tobacco, which hung like party streamers. There was a vegetable stand, a fruit stand with heaps of watermelons, and a butcher, whose hunks of meat hung on hooks smothered by flies.
A fishmonger sat cross-legged on a plastic tarpaulin on the ground scaling a fresh river fish using a big knife that he held expertly between his toes. Next to him crouched an old woman selling meswak sticks for cleaning teeth.
The scene would not have been complete without a big neem tree by the intersection, which provided welcome shade for the local dogs and loafers who spent their days watching people and vehicles coming and going.
There was, however, one unusual feature about the place. In the middle of the intersection stood a statue of three Adivasis armed with bows and arrows-a memorial to local heroes who fought, albeit with primitive weapons, against the British.
In Chanakya's day, too, the tribals had offered fierce resistance to the Maurya Empire, staging raids on passing caravans from their jungle fastness. But since the formation of the Indian republic, these people had been exploited and disenfranchised, Puri reflected sadly. To their misfortune, their ancestral lands lay atop some of the largest mineral deposits in the world, and in the past fifty years, most of these had been requisitioned for pitiful compensation. Hundreds of thousands of Adivasis had been made homeless and nowadays, all across India, scratched a living digging ditches, carrying bricks and cleaning toilets.
As they sat at the very bottom of the social scale, there was a good deal of prejudice against them.
'The tribal people are not so friendly,' complained the driver as they pulled away from the dusty intersection. 'And they drink too much!'
A couple of minutes later they passed a small township built in the 1960s by the Uranium Corporation of India to house its full-time employees and their families, nearly all of whom hailed from elsewhere in India. Within its spruce perimeter there was a school, a hospital, blocks of flats and green playing fields.
Beyond the township, the driver took a left down a rocky lane and pulled up outside an ordinary, one-story concrete building. Had it not been for the cross above the entrance, Puri would never have guessed it was the local church.
The detective got out of the Land Cruiser and knocked on the metal doors. They were soon opened by a middle-aged man who could easily have passed for an Australian Aboriginal. He was dressed in a shirt, jeans and a baseball cap, and around his neck hung a small gold crucifix. His eyelids blinked in slow motion, giving the impression that he was half asleep, and his mouth broadened into a wide, childlike grin.
'Good afternoon,' he said, welcomingly, as if it had been some time since he'd had any company. His pronunciation mimicked the way English is spoken on 'Teach Yourself' audiocassettes.
'Good afternoon, just I'm looking for the priest,' said Puri.
'I'm Father Peter,' replied the old man. 'It's a pleasure to meet you.'
'Father, my name is Jonathan Abraham. I run a charity based in Delhi that offers assistance to Adivasi Christian families,' lied the detective.
The business card he handed the priest named him as 'Country Director' of the nongovernment organization that he often used as a cover: 'South Asians in Need'-SAIN. The card listed two Delhi numbers-both of which, if dialed, would be answered by an extremely helpful lady by the name of Mrs. Kaur, who would offer to send out an information pack about the charity.
The priest studied the card and his eyelids blinked in slow motion again.
'Ooh!' he said like an excited child. 'Are you from Delhi?'
'Yes, Father, my office is there.'
Father Peter grinned again. He had a dazzling set of white, perfectly straight teeth, which might have belonged to an American high school student. 'Then you are the answer to my prayers!' he said, inviting the detective inside.
Puri had reasoned that if he went around asking people in the local Christian Adivasi community about Mary's whereabouts, they would react with suspicion and he would be stonewalled. Furthermore, he didn't want Mary- assuming she was still alive-coming to know that an outsider was looking for her.
Ideally, he wanted to engineer a situation in which she would feel comfortable divulging the truth about what had happened to her in Jaipur. To do so, he would need to gain her trust.
Fortunately, the cover of a Christian was an easy one to pull off. Puri had attended a Delhi convent school as a young boy and the nuns had drummed the Lord's Prayer into him. The other sacraments of the Nazarene guru were also easily observed. (Pretending to be, say, a Muslim presented considerably more pitfalls. Mastering the Islamic prayers alone took hours and hours of practice.)
Christian priests, too, were easier to handle than the representatives of other faiths. They were generally nowhere near as greedy as Hindu pundits, who always had their hands out.
The only thing Father Peter really wanted was a new cross for his church. The existing one, which was made of wood, was being eaten by termites. 'Now it is 'holy' in more ways than one,' he joked as they drove back into town.
Over lunch-Puri took him to the dhaba on the main road, which was the only place to eat in Jadugoda-the detective promised to send him a new one from Delhi.
By the time they had finished their meal and sat cleaning out the bits of mutton gristle from the gaps in their teeth with toothpicks, he had learned that there were only forty families in the Jadugoda area who had converted to Christianity (far greater numbers were to be found around Ranchi). The rest still clung to their animist religion.
Of those forty families, seven or eight bore the tribal name Murmu.
Puri told Father Peter that he wanted to visit their homes because the Government of India's Ministry of Development had identified the Murmus as the poorest and he wanted to assess their needs.
The priest accepted this explanation without question and offered to act as the detective's guide.
To reach the first house, they drove back to the main junction in the center of the town and turned left along the narrow road. It passed through the hills, which were cordoned with high fences. More yellow 'No Trespassing' signs appeared and the driver explained that the uranium processing center was off behind the line of trees on their left.
'See the pipe coming out of the jungle? That carries the waste from the plant-a sludge of toxic chemicals and crushed rock,' chimed in Father Peter.
Puri followed the path of the pipe with his eyes. It traveled under the road, crossed the narrow valley and climbed up the side of an enormous, 150-foot-high man-made dam that had been constructed across the mouth of the adjacent valley.
'The waste is dumped there, is it?' he asked.
'Behind the dam lies what they call the 'tailing pond,'' said Father Peter. 'No one is allowed there. But when I was a boy, we used to go up the hill and throw stones into the mud.' He grinned impishly at the memory of his childhood escapade. 'It's very thick. Sometimes when it is very hot, the surface is hard and cows stray across it and get sucked down.'
Their destination was a hamlet that lay in the shadow of the dam.
By now, it was early afternoon and the sun was at its hottest. The little sandy lanes that ran between the mud and straw compounds were empty save for a few chickens.
Father Peter knocked on the first door and an Adivasi man with coal black skin, wearing a sarong and a baseball cap, answered. He was obviously delighted to see the priest and after a good deal more grinning and pleasantries, the detective was invited inside.
A large well-swept courtyard lay at the center of the house. On one side, rows of cowpats were drying in the sun; on the other grew a banana tree, holding up a direct-to-home satellite receiver dish.
Their host arranged a couple of chairs in the shade provided by the overhanging thatch roof and soon his daughter served them glasses of cold water and a packet of cream-filled biscuits.
