knobs on the control panel, waited a couple of seconds and then pressed a red button. The oven trembled as the gas inside ignited.
The temperature gauge rose abruptly and settled on red.
A moment later, when Puri looked for the man with the video camera, he was gone.
Five
Puri hurried home to greet his second daughter, Jaiya, who was driving from Agra with her husband.
Jaiya’s baby, Puri’s third grandchild, was due in eight weeks. As tradition demanded, she was returning to her parents’ house, where she would remain until the infant was at least a month old.
Over the past few weeks, frenetic preparations had been under way for Jaiya’s arrival, and every evening Puri had arrived home to learn that his bank balance had taken another hit. Rumpi, who could usually be relied upon to be frugal, had called in the decorators to paint the largest of the three guest rooms. The adjacent bathroom had also been retiled in matching pink. An imported coil-spring Slumber mattress (14,000 rupees!) had been procured, along with an unusually large cot, numerous sets of sheets and pillowcases printed with motifs of elephants and penguins, and countless baby outfits. A strange, boomerang-shaped pillow had also been bought at one of the exorbitant shops in the Great Mall of India – “A Mall for All.”
The detective, who kept a close watch on everything that transpired inside his house, sometimes even bugging the servants, had also discovered a large stash of imported disposable nappies hidden away in the servants’ quarters.
This had prompted him to object to the exorbitant sums being spent.
“Why you’re buying so much of everything? How many outfits this child will need? You think paisa can be plucked from trees in the jungle, my dear?”
Rumpi had said nothing to this. Emboldened, Puri had continued with his protest: “No need for all these imported products. Made in India is just as good, if not better. We were all fitted with cloth nappies and our bottoms never suffered.”
At that, his wife scowled, telling him that he was the one who needed nappies.
“Why exactly, my dear?” an incensed, bemused Puri had asked.
“Because of so much of verbal diarrhea!” she’d snapped.
The next day, the detective had opened his lunch tiffin to find it packed with celery sticks. The day after that plain bean sprouts. And so on…
To make amends, he had bought Rumpi a new mixie, something he had been putting off for months (the old one was only nine years old, after all). The model he had purchased was one of the best on the market, made in China, as almost everything was these days. According to that bloody bastard of a salesman who had refused to give a discount, “It slices and dices in a thrice.”
There had been a marked improvement in the quality of Puri’s lunches after that. But the frivolous spending had not abated.
The latest purchase, which Puri found propped against the wall in the corridor when he reached home at seven o’clock, was a plastic tub shaped like a whale. The attached price tag was for 3,500 rupees.
“By God,” muttered Puri, “it is practically a swimming pool!”
“What was that you said, husband?” asked Rumpi as she emerged from the kitchen to greet him.
“Nothing at all, my dear,” he said with a smile, refraining from pointing out that he and his brothers had all been bathed in a steel bucket and it had done them no harm. “Just I was admiring this beautiful tub. The child is going to learn swimming, is it?”
“Nothing of the sort, Chubby,” Rumpi said brusquely. “And I don’t want to hear about how you were washed in some balti of yours.”
“Yes, my dear. Nikhee must be getting close, is it?” Nikhee, Little One, was Jaiya’s nickname.
“She called twenty minutes back. A truck turned turtle on the road. She won’t reach here for another hour at least.”
Rumpi brought Puri up to date with the rest of the affairs of the house: all the food apart from the kadi, which Malika had burnt, was ready; the geyser in the downstairs washroom wasn’t working again; the diyas needed filling with oil.
“Now don’t just stand around, Chubby. Make yourself useful. Our son-in-law will be arriving soon!”
Rumpi returned to the kitchen.
“Yes, my dear,” murmured Puri as he took off his shoes and slipped on his monogrammed VP slippers.
He mounted the stairs. Halfway up, he stopped and suddenly bawled at the top of his lungs, “Sweetu!”
The houseboy came running out of the kitchen.
“Sir?” he asked, standing to attention in the hallway with an alertness that pleased his employer.
“Sweetu, what is five times six – tell me?” Puri asked him in Hindi.
“Five times six, sahib?” He murmured to himself nervously and then declared: “Thirty… sahib?”
“Very good. You’ve done your homework?”
Puri had enrolled Sweetu, who had been working in the house for over a year now, in afternoon maths classes. Next year, the orphan boy would begin an apprenticeship as a mechanic; when he was old enough, the detective would also find him a wife. This was the sort of help all well-off Indians should have been providing to those less fortunate than themselves, in the detective’s opinion. It was their dharma, their duty, if only they knew it.
“All done, sahib,” replied Sweetu.
“Very good. Go help madam.”
Puri went upstairs, had a cold bucket wash, changed into a freshly pressed kurta pyjama, splashed on some Sexy Men aftershave, and donned a cloth flat cap.
A few minutes later, he was standing up on the roof, a generous tumbler of Royal Challenge whisky in hand. He watered his prized chili plants and then stood for a few minutes looking out over the lights dotted across the landscape twinkling in the polluted night air.
When Puri had moved to Gurgaon some sixteen years ago, it had still been a flyspeck of a village. He had built his house, a mock Spanish villa with an orange tiled roof and matching awnings, on land surrounded for miles by mustard and sugarcane fields. But there had been no escaping the city. In the past decade, it had expanded at a dizzying rate. Gurgaon, a part of the NCR, the National Capital Region – now the largest human agglomeration on the planet with a population fast approaching 17 million people – had been quickly transformed into a land of housing estates, monster shopping complexes and shiny glass office blocks that seemed to grow overnight as if they came from magic beans. Were the cranes that loomed over the concrete superstructures giant watering cans?
In the cracks and shadows of this newfangled, corporate world, on plots of yet-to-be-developed land, tens of thousands of migrant workers were living in makeshift shelters without toilets or running water. Rickety stands selling chai, tarra and one-rupee shampoo sachets had rooted along the sides of the roads, as tenacious as Japanese bindweed. Barbers and earwax cleaners were to be found plying their trade between yet-to-be-laid concrete sewage pipes.
As he gazed out, Puri’s thoughts turned to his guru. In his great work of 300 BC,
Chanakya would have ridiculed the Nehru dynasty’s protectionist policies and applauded India’s recent economic rebirth, Puri reflected. But the slums and poverty, the inequality and rampant abuse of natural resources – all this would have appalled him. More than two millennia ago, he had stressed the necessity of honest and just governance. And yet today, a handful of politicians aside, India was ruled by a bunch of bloody goondas.
Sometimes, Puri wondered if the best thing might not be a revolution. But he doubted that would ever happen. The majority of Indians were farmers, not fighters. War had always been the preserve of the Kshatriya caste, and nowadays most of them were traders, businessmen and software engineers. Some even worked as
