The Five Dollar Smile: And Other Stories by Shashi Tharoor
I wanted to say something to his parents. Sujeet wasn’t afraid; he wasn’t afraid of the things you are afraid of. But I didn’t, because I couldn’t; and because I knew that if he had stayed afraid, had not dared, had not chosen to defy every convention the world had thrust upon him, he might have been alive.
And then I thought of Mira. Mira, the girl he screwed and I wished I could; Mira, the General’s daughter, sultry, exciting, unattainable Mira. Mira, of the dark eyes and the painted, carefully-shaped eyebrows, of the hip-hugging pants and sleeveless shirts that somehow never reached her waist and gave me so many tantalizing views of the small of her back; what would this do to Mira? Mira who was so much in love with the one guy who didn’t give a damn about her, Mira who defied society with a toss of her head and bedded the grandson of a cobbler, Mira who let him hump her regularly in the little room next to mine in the dormitory while I sat on my side of the wall and tried to read—what would Mira do?
I’d have to be the one to tell her. To say that Sujeet wasn’t going to be at the back gate of her dorm the next day. To inform her about the funeral.
The funeral. The funeral will be held this evening at 4:00 p.m. at Haldi Ghat, the college announced. I didn’t want to go. How could I go there and see a friend I’d been talking, laughing, joking, smoking with for the last three years being burned to ashes? At four o’clock we should have been in the café together, not at some crematorium with one of us dead. It just didn’t make any sense.
The only funeral I’d ever attended was my grandfather’s. They’d called me from school after my last exam and told me in hushed tones that it had happened at last, and I had to rush home. The Sikh driver from the office was there, and instead of his usual indifference, he picked me up very tenderly and put me by his side on the front seat of the car. When I got home there was a crowd of people, mostly subordinates who’d envied him and competitors who’d hated his guts, standing around in the living room looking suitably grieved. And there was mother in the bedroom trying to console grandma, who was weeping bitter tears into the end of her sari, wailing so loudly it was embarrassing, while my father, his face set, sat completely still by grandfather’s bed, as if still maintaining the vigil the family had kept for the last eight weeks. And I, the only one who’d really ever loved grand-father, the only one he’d always got along with and whose company he could bear, I wasn’t allowed in to pay my last respects because the sight of death was considered too much for my eleven-year-old sensibilities.
But I saw him at the funeral, lying on his bier, triumphant in death as in life. He had had plenty of time to meet his end, to make his will and issue his last instructions before handing over the firm to my father. He was over seventy and had lived a full life, and his final illness, when it came, had not ravaged him. Even in death his face bore the look of arrogant self-confidence it had always done; no crease of pain marred those perfect, haughty, aristocratic features. It was a fitting way to go, and I had the sense of participating in a moving, but not sad, family ritual as I stood behind my father and he held my fingers tightly in one hand while he lit the pyre with the other.
That was what death and funerals should be about. Not this.
“Ram, you son-of-a-bitch,” Sujeet had said once. “I know what a lot of you guys thought about me when I first got into this elite little college of yours. One more chamar on an affirmative action program, right? Wouldn’t even have got in if the government hadn’t obliged the college to reserve a couple of seats for the Scheduled Castes. Well, I don’t give a shit what those turds think, or you too, for that matter. It’s my right, my right and that of my people, because you bastards have got to pay for centuries of bloody discrimination. And I’m going to enjoy that right, Ram, and I’m not going to be apologetic about it. I’m going to enjoy everything this bloody college has to offer, the library, the theater, the rich buggers’ motorbikes, the booze and the parties—and I’m going to enjoy the girls. And then I’m going to go right on to the bloody Indian bloody Administrative Service, and I’m going to get a posting to my family’s home district. No Foreign Service for me, my friend, no fobbing off the untouchable with offers of New York or Paris, no sir. I’m going to be District Magistrate in Chhoti Haveli and I’m going to get every bloody Jat and Thakur in the area to kiss my arse. You just watch me, Ram my friend. You just watch me.” And he had taken another drag, and he had turned smiling to me and said, “And you know what? At the end of the whole bloody thing, when I’m finally dead and gone, bloody Brahmins are going to come to my funeral.”
They came. Most of the college dorm was there at Haldi Ghat. So was I. I stood there with Mira sobbing softly into my shoulder and stared glassy-eyed at the funeral pyre while I patted her silky head in sympathy. His parents wept openly, and the little knot of Harijan scholars stood in a solemn circle away from the rest. The priests talked among themselves, and chanted, and pulled out the tins of vanaspati. As they poured it into the crackling fire the flames leaped higher, enveloping the body in its shroud under the wood. And the smoke that was Sujeet rose towards the sky.
1973
The Political Murder
As a policeman I make it a point to steer clear of politicians. Being a servant of the state has its advantages, but then silver linings do have their clouds and a cop’s special cloud is his local politician. One of my erstwhile colleagues posted in a rural tehsil once complained ruefully over a pint of beer in the Policemen’s Club that whenever the resident MLA’s foot wasn’t in his mouth it was usually treading on the inspector’s corns. Being based in the city has its compensations but hasn’t endeared me any more to the denizens of our democracy. In the force one of the first things you learn is to mind your own business. As far as politicians went I was only too happy to observe the rule.
Till Gobinda Sen got himself murdered.
Gobinda Sen was a member of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly and had a house in Calcutta though he was elected from some mofussil district or the other. As with many MLAs of his type he shuttled back and forth between his city home and his rural constituency. This year he was back in the capital for the budget session. I don’t much care for the political news, but I couldn’t help noticing how frequently his name appeared in the newspaper reports of the legislators’ discussions on the budget proposals. Gobinda Babu, as he was known, was an influential and strong-willed politician, a man widely respected on both the Treasury and the Opposition benches. And, on the morning something jammed the silencer of my scooter and I reported five minutes late for work at the HQ, he was dead.
The boss wasn’t amused. In moments of deep emotion his vocabulary ranges from late Victorian to early Zane Grey.
“Nayar, you misbegotten son-of-a-bee,” he said cordially when I apologetically answered his summons, “you’re supposed to be on duty, not taking a promenade down the Strand to meet a dilatory sweetheart. Gobinda Sen’s been murdered this morning and the DIG’s having kittens. A jeep’s leaving in about thirty seconds for his Alipur bungalow, and you’re supposed to be on it. Now haul your a out of this o before I kick you in the p.”
One thing they teach you in the force is politeness, manners, refinement. I saluted, smiled an off-duty grin, and left.
Gobinda Sen’s one-storied bungalow was a little way off the road and was approached by a longish drive which wound its way through an unusually well-maintained garden. The place was surrounded by a ten-foot wall opening out in two gates, each with a durwan, the IN gate possessing in addition a sentry box, where visitors stated name, occupation, and purpose of visit. In our case, of course, there was no need for the formalities. The news wasn’t supposed to have broken but the place was already teeming with people and cars that looked as if they belonged to people who were important or thought they should be. The gates were shut to keep them out, but the durwans were plainly having a tough time. A preliminary police team had already arrived when the murder was first discovered earlier in the morning, and three of them had stayed
As soon as we drove in through the gate, ignoring the shouted questions of the crowd outside, the short, harried-looking sub-inspector in charge waddled up to me. “Inspector Nayar,” he said, his hand in salutation touching a perspiring brow, “I’m Sub-Inspector Jacob. The body’s upstairs. Nothing’s been touched, everything’s been left for your team. Shall we climb the stairs?” He glanced briefly at me for confirmation, knowing that none was necessary, and turned to the staircase. Havildar Ghosh, my right-hand man, parked the jeep and joined us. Followed by our squad of experts, we climbed up to the MLA’s bedroom.
“I’ll fill you in on some of the details briefly,” Jacob said as we ascended the steps. “Gobinda Sen came back late last night from an after-dinner meeting—a political one, something about what’s on in the Vidhan Sabha nowadays. The durwan opened the gate for him after midnight. He let himself into his house—the household was asleep. Not that there’s very many of them—Gobinda Babu was a bachelor, lived alone, just a cook and a houseboy and a handyman, whose wife also functions as a sort of maid. They all sleep downstairs; there are no servants’ quarters as such but then there’s enough space in the house for a bachelor—most of the rooms are guest rooms. Anyway, the houseboy usually wakes him up every morning with his bed-tea. Today he knocked as usual at 7:30. He has standing instructions to wake up Gobinda Babu at 7:30 whatever hour of the previous night he goes to sleep. There was no reply, but this wasn’t surprising; most people who are regularly woken up develop a tendency to oversleep till they are. So he turned the handle—and found this.”
We’d reached the bedroom already, and Jacob casually, almost routinely, pushed open the door. I’ve seen plenty of cadavers in my time, but I haven’t ceased being sickened by what one human being can do to another. Gobinda Sen lay on his bed, dhoti in disarray, soaked in blood. There was a knife sticking out of him, but at first glance it was obvious that the wound it was embedded in was not the only one that had caused his death. Holes gaped in his kurta and the exposed portions of his body, holes covered and ringed by russet-red circlets of congealed blood. He had been dead some time.
The doctor from our squad didn’t take long to examine the body. “He’s been dead almost ten hours,” he said.
“I didn’t need you to tell me that,” I retorted. “He hadn’t changed out of his dhoti-kurta—must have been killed soon after his return. Fingerprints?”
The fingerprint man, who had looked carefully at the knife, shook his head. I wasn’t surprised. People who use knives aren’t stupid enough to do so without taking some kind of precaution.
“Eyes open,” added the doctor. “Wasn’t killed suddenly or while sleeping. Evidence of struggle—or at least he seems to have thrashed about a bit.”
“Thanks again,” I rejoined ungratefully. “The bedclothes are messed up enough anyway—even I could deduce someone had either an orgy or a struggle on the bed. Leave the poor chap alone,” I added. “Ghosh, cover him up.”
I stepped past the bed to the window. The pane was shattered, glass lay in fragments all over the balcony, and little slivers were embedded on the bedroom carpet beneath it. The point of entry. Perhaps.
“Check for footprints,” I barked. But I didn’t expect too much. There would be none on the carpet; a careful assassin needn’t have left any on the balcony either. I wasn’t too surprised when the eventual answer came like a development in a darkroom: negative.
I looked out the window. A drainpipe, almost perfectly positioned for a murderer, ran down the wall to the garden. Apart from a few bushes and a solitary neem tree, nothing stood between the house and the road but the surrounding ten-foot wall, which could easily be scaled via the tree. The bedroom window overlooked the other portion of the house: it was not visible from either gate, and at night the streetlights were unlikely to reach and illuminate it. I turned back in disgust.
“What a setup,” I growled at no one in particular. “Out here he was about as safe as the swimmers in Jaws.”
I looked around the room; Ghosh and two of the others had already beaten me to it. “I checked as well,” interposed Sub-Inspector Jacob, “without disturbing anything, of course. There’s nothing of any interest.” He waved me to a chair and sank on one himself, looking very tired and very unhappy. “What a case,” he lamented loudly. “I don’t envy you a moment of it. Anyone could have killed him—the opportunity was scarcely lacking. And the motive—a man like this, a politician of standing and influence, helpful to many people, dangerous to others: it must have been so easy to make enemies. But you’ve got to do something impressive because the man—was—an MLA.”
He mopped his brow. “So you have to find, in a metropolis of eight million, the man or men who jumped over a wall, broke a window, killed a politician, and shoved off—leaving no clues except for an eight-anna knife bought from a roadside vendor on Dharamtolla.” He sighed expressively. “What a case,” he repeated.
“I don’t know,” I said, slowly, playing with the embroidery on the armrest of my chair. Talking to people about a case once I’m on it often helps me to marshal my thoughts, clear my mind of the tangled webs of unsorted facts that impinge when one is faced with so much so suddenly under such pressure. Havildar Ghosh, who’d worked with me as long as I’d been on the force, understood this and stood respectfully by listening. “To my mind there are a few disturbing aspects to this case. Which doesn’t mean I agree or disagree entirely with what you’ve said; you’re right, this is going to be a tough nut to crack precisely because it’s so open. But I’m not happy about a few things. I can understand the durwan at the gate not hearing the breaking of the windowpane—there’s the distance, and then durwans do sleep, for God’s sake, it isn’t a crime. But how is it that with all these people sleeping downstairs no one heard the murdered man’s cries? He must have cried—he couldn’t not have; if he’d died with the first stroke, the subsequent ones wouldn’t have been needed. Yes, yes, I know the objections you’ll raise: the air-conditioning was on, the door was shut, the people were in all probability asleep. But I can accept one person not hearing, two even, but four? Surely at least one of them might have been a light sleeper? Oh, of course these are just suspicions, born out of my basically very suspicious nature—I don’t know, perhaps I’m just wasting my time. But let me talk to these people.”
The houseboy, obviously very upset, eyes still red with crying, was the first to come in. “Houseboy” was an anomalous term for him; he must have been at least sixty, an old and trusted retainer who’d worked with Gobinda Babu for over a decade, ever since he had become an MLA. He confirmed Jacob’s earlier version of his story, only it was more pathetic to see him, broken and old, weeping every time he thought of his master, punctuating his narrative with wails of how good a man Gobinda Babu was and how could anybody have murdered him. It was all very sad, and I felt a strong surge of sympathy flow through me, but only for a moment. One can’t afford to be a sympathetic policeman, not if one has a murder on one’s hands. In a terrible pun I’ve ever since been ashamed of, I’d once observed that a policeman had to be a copper, but the aesthetics of humor apart, I was grateful for that reserve of copperlike hardness as I turned to question the old man.
“What were you doing when the master came in last night?” “I . . . I . . . was . . . asleep.” The words came out in a racking sob, as if the man wished he had been awake so that he could have been of some use. “I sleep in the little room downstairs in the corner.”
“You heard nothing?”
“I am an old man. I heard nothing.”
I dismissed him with a caution that I might need him later.
There was little I could ask the cook. He too had been asleep, he too had heard nothing. But he didn’t break down and weep, like the houseboy; he was calmer, quieter. He had been, as I would say in my report, in the employ of the deceased for the past five years.
“Tell me—what do you think of your master? Would anyone want to murder
“He was a good man,” the cook said simply. “I do not know about his political foes, but I do know that he never hurt another person if he could help it. He was sincere, honest, well-liked. In this world such people are not necessarily safe.”
“No,” I said, looking him full in the face. “Such people are not necessarily safe.” I stared at him for a full moment and he returned my look quietly, unflinchingly. “You may go now,” I said. “But don’t leave the house. You will have to come to the police station to record your statement.”
The handyman came in with his wife, the maid. The woman was obviously shaken; she seemed terrified out of her wits and her eyes, too, were red and swollen. I let her sit while her tall, broad, oddly bespectacled husband stood, and went over the by-now-familiar ground. They too had been asleep, they too had heard nothing. But they at least had the excuse that they had been together.
“You’re terribly upset,” I remarked kindly to the woman.
She seemed startled, “No—of course not. I mean yes, of course, how can I not be upset when a murder has been committed in this very house.” She looked over her shoulder to where Gobinda Babu still lay, covered now with a spotless white sheet, and there was a look in her eyes that bordered on fear.
“Of course,” I said slowly. Then, after a pause—”Were you very close to him?”
“What do you mean?” Her voice was shaking. “I was his maid.”