“Haa!”
“You’ve been drinking or what?”
“Haa!”
The detective felt like he was about to explode but managed to contain his fury. He said in sharp, staccato Punjabi: “Baaga-ji, tell me where you are!”
“Mr. Sherluck? Hello? You’re asking me?”
“Of course I’m asking you!” He refrained from adding: “Saala!”
“I’m at the adda. What do you want?”
“Adda’ translated as ‘joint.” Puri knew the place: Bagga-ji’s favorite haunt in Delhi, a carrom-board and illegal-drinking den in Punjabi Bagh.
“I’ll be reaching in forty minutes.”
“Fine, fine, fine, fine.”
Puri had mixed feelings about Punjabi Bagh. It was the neighborhood where he had grown up, and every street, every corner, held a memory for him.
Returning there, as he did from time to time to visit near or dear, always stirred strong feelings of nostalgia – especially for Papa-ji, who had built his house in the Moti Nagar subsection in the early 1960s. But nowadays the detective found the old neighborhood a stifling place. Although he always told everyone he had moved to Gurgaon to escape the noise and pollution, the truth was that he had also sought to distance himself from Punjabi Bagh’s boisterous inhabitants.
He was, after all, India’s Most Private Investigator. And when everyone was constantly coming in and out of your house at all hours, asking for favors and the odd loan of a thousand rupees for some uncle’s heart medicine, it was impossible to keep your affairs confidential and not become embroiled in everyone else’s problems.
Punjabi Bagh was not an especially noteworthy address, either. Not for a member of the Gymkhana Club and the son-in-law of a retired army colonel with a penchant for oxford shoes. Gurgaon fitted the bill better – although, admittedly, for the son of a local police officer there was no competing with the old elite.
The constant gridlock had been another reason for leaving. Some bloody Charlie was forever stopping his Tempo in the middle of one of the narrow streets and off-loading a consignment of live chickens, thereby turning the entire neighborhood into a solid, honking traffic jam.
Today was no different. But instead of live chickens, it was rusty barrels with skull-and-crossbones stickers plastered all over them.
The fact that they were being carried into someone’s house by a gang of laborers who looked as if they had tuberculosis did not strike Puri as odd. Suspicious, perhaps, but by Punjabi Bagh standards, definitely not odd.
The detective decided to abandon the car and told Handbrake to park as close as he could to Bagga-ji’s adda.
“I’ll give you ‘missed call’ when I’m in position, Boss,” said the driver in a combination of Hindi and English.
Feeling the heat rush at him like the thermal radiation of a forest fire, Puri stepped out of the Ambassador, narrowly avoiding a cowpat underfoot.
He kept to the shady side of the street, making his way along a busy pavement where children played hopscotch and carpenters sawed, sanded and hammered made-to-measure mango-wood furniture for one of the residents of the kothis. A door-to-door salesman of mops, brooms and dusters passed down the middle of the street on a bicycle bristling with his wares. It looked like a kind of punk porcupine. “Jharu, ponche! Saste! Brooms, mops, cheap!”
Puri turned the next corner, looking up at all the brightly colored laundry hanging overhead and the paper kites up in the hazy sky, and almost ran straight into an old school chum whom everyone knew as Mintoo.
“Oi! Chubby! Kisteran?”
They chatted for a couple of minutes and then Puri made his excuses and hurried on. Farther down the street, he met Billa, a former next-door neighbor who owned a shop selling galvanized-steel buckets in Jawala Heri. Master-ji, the local tailor, waved and called out greetings from his shop, which had once been four times the size, but thanks to family property disputes was now little more than a cubicle. And inevitably, Bhartia Auntie (who had bad hips and walked with her feet splayed like a circus clown) appeared and reminded him, as she always did, how, at the age of six, he had burned his lip eating some of her homemade gulab jamuns.
“You couldn’t wait and just shoved it in your mouth!” she cackled, pinching his cheek. “Greedy little bacha!”
Bagga-ji’s adda was housed in the basement of a doctor’s private clinic, Dr. Darshan being the owner and a regular himself.
The entrance was down the side of the building behind a door with a notice on it that read CLINIC IN SESSION.
In the poorly lit room beyond, through a haze of cigarette smoke, Puri counted nine tables with carrom boards. Around each sat four men with chalky fingers.
The sight of the boards and the sound of the strikers hitting the pucks and ricocheting off the buffers immediately aroused in Puri a desire to join in. As a teenager, he had been a carrom fanatic; to the detriment of his homework, he had played for hours on end. But it was rare that he got in a game these days, chess and bridge being more the Gymkhana’s speed.
Indeed, when he located Bagga-ji at one of the boards in the middle of the room – “Mr. Sherluck, what you’re doing here?” – and one of the players offered to give up his seat, Puri could not resist.
“I’m drinking Aristocrat.” Bagga-ji grinned. “Aristocrat’ came out ‘aa-rist-row-krAAt.”
“Instant relief! You want?”
“Most certainly, sir-ji!” declared Puri. “How often I get to drink with my favorite brother-in-law, huh?”
Bagga Uncle was too drunk to be suspicious of the detective’s disingenuous chumminess and poured him a large glass from the bottle he had under the table. Then he called to the eleven-year-old boy who fetched packets of cigarettes and fresh paan from the stand across the road and plates of murg saharabi tikka and ‘chutney sandwitch’ from the local restaurant.
“Oi! Soda bottle laow!”
The black and white pucks and the red queen were arranged in the middle of the lacquered board. One of the other two players at the table flicked the puck with his index finger, sending it crashing into the pack. A black shot into one of the corner pockets.
When it came to Bagga’s turn, he potted five pucks in a row; if there was one skill the man possessed, it was as a car-rom player.
“You’ve still got it, sir-ji!” said Puri in Punjabi as he took his turn and, being out of practice, only managed to pot a single white.
Bagga Uncle showed Puri his index finger.
“This is one in a billion!” he declared.
“Just like you, Bagga-ji!” bawled one of the opponents to roars of laughter.
The banter, drinking and play went on. And after Bagga had won the game and declared himself ‘vorld champion!’ the detective told him there was something he wished to discuss.
“Not for others’ ears,” he said.
They went and sat to one side of the room against a wall that was decorated with red-brick wallpaper.
By now Bagga’s eyes were bloodshot and he looked like he might pass out.
“Sir-ji, I’ve been thinking,” said Puri.
“Haa?”
“Sir-ji, I’m talking to you.”
“Haa.”
“This business proposition of yours sounds like a sure thing.”
“Huh?”
“You said a construction company wants to build a mall on your land. It sounds like a very good thing!”
“Oh yes, that! Well, it is!” declared Bagga Uncle, finally cottoning on. “Chubby, I will soon be the richest man in all Punjab! People will treat me with respect!”
