POPPY’S BAR & RESTAURANT

Some hours later, when Chopra arrived at the restaurant after dropping Poppy back at their apartment complex, he found the place in its usual state of regimented chaos. The harrowing events of the afternoon had left him in need of a quiet hour or two with his own thoughts and so he had come to the restaurant just as he usually did at about this time each day.

The dining area, with its chequered tablecloths and glitzy chandeliers, was a cauldron of animated chatter and beguiling smells. He picked his way through the crammed tables, accepting greetings from regular patrons, many of whom were old police friends, but not stopping to converse.

Quickly, he made his way to the rear office of the establishment he had opened following his forced retirement from the police service earlier in the year.

Once inside his office, he flicked on the air-conditioner, only to hear it gurgle and wheeze to an untimely death.

Cursing, he picked up the phone and ordered a lime water and a dampened handkerchief from the kitchen.

He then slumped back in his padded chair and allowed his thoughts to return to the tumultuous events at the Prince of Wales Museum, going over the details Jha had let slip during his ham-fisted interrogation.

The robbery had been immaculate.

The thief or thieves had entered the Tata Gallery from the rear, blasting a hole through the unguarded, sealed door at the back of the gallery with a shaped explosive charge. Once inside, they had rendered the occupants of the gallery unconscious by using pressurised gas canisters. The thieves had then somehow broken through the reinforced glass of the display case housing the Crown of Queen Elizabeth, as well as shattering some of the surrounding cases. Puzzlingly, they had taken only the crown and, with this single prized possession, had fled the scene through the destroyed rear door. The door led to a passage that connected the Tata Gallery to the Jahangir Gallery in the east wing of the museum. The thieves, it was presumed, had taken the unguarded fire exit stairs, halfway along the passage, down to the ground floor… where they had promptly vanished into thin air.

Clearly, the ring of Force One guards stationed around the perimeter of the museum had not spotted anyone fleeing the scene. The instant that the glass display case had been shattered an alarm had gone off, placing each commando on red alert. Not even Houdini could have slipped through the net. The museum had been instantly locked down and every single person in the building had been rounded up and searched, as well as every corner of the museum premises.

Nothing.

The sound of a truck backfiring on the main road returned Chopra to the present.

He stood up and made his way through the restaurant’s kitchen to the compound at the rear.

The generous space was lit by a single yellow tubelight around which a cloud of midges roiled. The compound was walled in on three sides by crumbling brick walls topped by a confetti of multicoloured shards of bottle glass. A narrow alley ran from the compound back along the side of the restaurant and out on to Guru Rabindranath Tagore Road.

The noise of late-evening traffic drifted in, punctuated by the occasional blood-curdling scream as a pedestrian came too close to the passing vehicles.

Chopra walked to the rear of the space and lowered himself into the rattan armchair that he had installed under the tubelight. The light was suspended from a line strung between the compound’s single mango tree and a TV antenna on the roof of the restaurant. It swung gently in a sudden breeze that leavened the muggy December heat.

Beneath the mango tree, a grey shape stirred.

A flush of warmth moved through Chopra as Ganesha raised his trunk and gently ran the tip over his face. ‘How are you, boy?’ he murmured.

The moment lasted only an instant before the elephant turned away huffily and hunkered back down into the mudbath in which he had been wallowing.

Chopra knew that Ganesha was upset with him. It was just another sign of the young calf’s burgeoning personality.

When he had first been sent the baby elephant by his Uncle Bansi Chopra had not known what to do with the creature. What did he, a retired police officer, know about caring for an elephant? But gradually, as Ganesha had accompanied – and then actively helped – him in solving the murder of a local boy, he had come to realise that there was something mysterious and unique about the little creature. His uncle’s words, set down in the letter that had arrived with his strange gift, had come back to him then: ‘remember… this is no ordinary elephant’.

Once a sceptic, Chopra was now a believer.

There was something improbable about Ganesha, something quite beyond Chopra’s ability to slot him into the neat little boxes of rationality and logic that he had lived by his whole life. There were depths to the elephant that he had yet to fathom. And, of course, there was the mystery of the creature’s past, upon which he had singularly failed to shed any further light.

Ganesha: a riddle inside an enigma wrapped inside an elephant.

Often, when he looked into Ganesha’s gentle brown eyes, he would think he saw his Uncle Bansi staring back at him. The same mischievous uncle who had grown from a rascally boy into a white-bearded wandering sadhu, disappearing from their Maharashtrian village for years at a time only to return with tall tales of magical encounters in faraway lands that he would share with his callow nephew and credulous kinsmen.

Chopra knew that one day he would get to the bottom of the mystery, but for now he had barely enough time to count his blessings, as his wife took pains to regularly remind him. After all, not only had the restaurant got off to a flying start, so had the second venture that he had embarked upon following his retirement.

Chopra had been a police officer for more than thirty years. For thirty years he had awoken, put on his khaki uniform, taken the police jeep to the nearby Sahar station and settled down behind his desk knowing that he was about to embark upon his allotted duty in life. For thirty years he had been a man with a purpose, one that was perfectly suited to both his disposition and his talents.

And then, one day, following a heart attack that had dropped on him out of a clear blue sky, a doctor had told him that he was the victim of a curse called ‘unstable angina’ and that the next time the attack might be fatal. To his despair Chopra had been forced to leave the police service and ordered to avoid stressful activity.

This had been easier said than done.

The murder that Chopra had subsequently solved had opened a can of worms in Mumbai, implicating senior politicians and policemen in a nationwide human trafficking operation. The scandal had done wonders for the new Baby Ganesh Detective Agency and they had been inundated with cases ever since.

And yet… the cases that now came his way were hardly the same as those he had tackled as head of the Sahar police station.

Take the past few months. Chopra had spent endless days trailing errant husbands and delinquent children. He had tracked down missing wills. Companies engaged his services to check up on the backgrounds of dubious employees; political parties paid him to uncover potential skeletons in the closets of election hopefuls. He was even approached by worried parents wishing to discreetly verify the bona fides – and assets – of aspiring sons-in-law.

It was all steady work.

Yet the truth was that such cases did not quicken the pulse the way a solid police investigation did. There was no sense of the greater good being achieved.

Chopra had always believed in the ideal of justice. He knew that sometimes justice was a malleable notion, particularly in India where money and power often tainted the application of due process. But this did not alter his view that the books of the cosmos could only be balanced when good and evil fought and good came out on top.

He shuffled around in the rattan chair, seeking a more comfortable position. His right hip hurt from where he had slumped onto the floor at the Prince of Wales Museum.

‘Come now, Ganesha, be reasonable,’ he said to the elephant. ‘I could hardly have taken you with me. They would never have let you into the exhibition.’

Ganesha snuffled noisily and hunched further away.

Chopra sighed. It was bad enough, he thought, to be burdened by a temperamental wife, but to also have to adjust to a temperamental one-year-old elephant was sufficient to try even the patience of a saint.

He decided that young Ganesha would be best left alone until he had overcome his fit of pique.

Pulling a sheaf of papers from the leather document folder that he had carried out into the compound with him, he excavated a calabash pipe from his pocket and set it into the corner of his mouth.

Chopra did not smoke. The calabash pipe was an affectation that he employed to promote clear thinking. He had long been a devoted fan of Sherlock Holmes – in particular the incarnation portrayed by Basil Rathbone in the 1940s – and the calabash pipe gave him an instant sense of stepping into the great detective’s shoes.

He settled his spectacles onto his nose and began to read.

Soon he was engrossed in his work. A mosquito hummed by his ear and he swatted it away without lifting his eyes. Smells and sounds drifted out from the restaurant kitchen: the nose-crinkling odour of frying onions and seared garlic; the chilli haze of innumerable exotic spices; the spit and sizzle from Chef Lucknowwallah’s giant copper pans; the growl of the clay tandoor.

He sneezed as a waft of ginger tickled his nose – he had always been fiercely allergic to the stuff.

The smells from the kitchen mingled with the undercurrent of elephant dung in the backyard. The odour was somewhat leavened by the sweet scent of ripe mango and jacaranda blossom floating in from the neighbouring Sahar International Cargo & Freight Company compound. The on-off breeze carried with it a raga from an old Bollywood movie playing on a nearby radio.

After a while Chopra realised that Ganesha had turned back to him and was watching him work. He peered at his young ward over his spectacles. ‘Something extraordinary happened today. There was a robbery at the museum. They stole the Koh-i-Noor. It is going to be a big scandal: mark my words.’

To his credit, Ganesha did indeed seem intent on his every word. Chopra reached out and patted him on his knobbly skull.

When Ganesha had first arrived he had been undernourished, quite the frailest elephant Chopra had ever laid eyes on. In his letter, Uncle Bansi had given no clue as to where Ganesha had been born or in what circumstances he had been sent to Mumbai and to Chopra.

It had taken a long time for him to earn the little elephant’s trust.

He was not by nature a sentimental man, but there was no doubt that the bond that had grown between them meant as much to him as any human relationship. In a way, Ganesha was now the child that he and Poppy had never been able to have. Poppy certainly treated their ward as if he were a member of the family, doting on him and spoiling him with treats such as the never-ending supply of bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate that Ganesha was addicted to.

There was something universally endearing about the elephant calf. Certainly he was much loved by Chopra’s friends and the staff at the restaurant, with the notable exception of Poppy’s bilious mother.

He turned back to his papers. They comprised his handwritten notes on the various cases that he was currently working on as lead and only detective of the Baby Ganesh Agency. They all seemed so mundane in comparison to the theft of the Koh-i-Noor. Now there was a case! He felt a sudden pang of envy for the officer who would land that investigation. Envy, and sympathy, too. The whole world would be looking over the poor man’s shoulder.

The rear door leading from the kitchen swung open, its fly-screen cracking vigorously against the whitewashed clapboard wall.

Chopra watched as young Irfan emerged into the moonlit compound.

For a second the boy stood on the creaking veranda beneath the cantilevered porch roof. Below the veranda, bullfrogs chorused a late-evening dirge. The boy knelt down and lit a mosquito coil, the acrid smoke adding to the panoply of smells in the compound. Then he straightened and came trotting over the knobbly grass, the steel bucket in his hand clanking by his side.

Chopra turned as Ganesha lumbered to his feet. He couldn’t help but note the sudden sparkle in the young elephant’s eyes.

Ganesha greeted Irfan with an exuberant bugle.

Irfan set down the bucket and rubbed the elephant on the crown of his forehead and then tickled him behind his ears. A smile split the young boy’s features. Ganesha wrapped his trunk around the boy’s thigh and attempted to haul him off his feet. Irfan guffawed loudly.

Chopra watched the pair horsing around and felt happiness flower inside him. Ganesha and Irfan had become firm friends and he knew that this was good for both of them.

He recalled the day six months previously, just a week after he had opened the restaurant, when Irfan had walked into his office.

Chopra had been up to his neck in paperwork. Who knew that a business required such meticulous recordkeeping – an honest business, at any rate? He had looked up as the young boy, clearly a street urchin, peered at him from the far side of the desk. Irfan had seemed to him no different from a million other street children in the city of Mumbai. His only garments were a tattered vest and ancient shorts; his dark hair, streaked blond in places by constant exposure to the sun, was an unkempt mass; coloured strings – makeshift charm bracelets – were wrapped around his wrists; his hazel eyes were milky and his thin frame the product of years of malnutrition. And yet there was something about the boy, some indomitable sense of the human spirit, that shone through in his steadfast gaze and confident swagger.

Chopra reached into his pocket and removed a one-rupee coin. He held it out to the boy.

‘I did not come here for baksheesh, sir.’

Chopra looked surprised. ‘Then why did you come?’

‘To become a waiter.’

Chopra smiled. ‘You are too young to be a waiter.’

‘What age do you have to be to be a waiter?’

Chopra opened his mouth and realised that the question had no answer.

‘Well, how old are you?’

The boy shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But old enough to be a waiter.’

Another smile tugged at the corners of Chopra’s mouth. ‘Where do you live?’

The boy shrugged again. ‘Everywhere. Nowhere. Whole Mumbai is my home.’

He knew then that the boy was one of the nameless, faceless masses who lived on Mumbai’s overcrowded streets; beneath flyovers hurtling with traffic and in darkened alleyways smelling of human excrement; in shanty squats slapped together with discarded junk and inside the mouths of abandoned concrete sewage pipes.

‘Where are your parents?’

‘I have no parents.’

‘Who looks after you?’

The boy prodded his chest. ‘I look after me.’ Then he pointed at the ceiling. ‘And He, too.’

Chopra marvelled at the boy’s cheerful disposition. ‘What is your name?’

‘Irfan, sir.’

He examined the boy, his eyes travelling the length of his undernourished physique. He noted the bruises on the boy’s arms – reminiscent of the marks left behind when wooden lathis were beaten upon human skin – and the cigarette-burn scars forming a constellation of dark stars on his shoulders. He noted the crooked set of the boy’s left hand, a physical deformity of birth. ‘How can you be a waiter with one hand, Irfan?’ he said gently.

‘Sir, Gandhiji conquered the British only with his words. Why I cannot be a waiter with one hand?’

Chopra felt an unbidden lump steal into his throat. He wondered if someone had informed the boy of his fondness for Gandhi.

Inspector Ashwin Chopra (Retd) lived by Mohandas Gandhi’s words and the personal example of charity and human kindness he had set forth for his countrymen to follow. He suspected that if the great statesman had been in the room at that moment he would have had a few choice things to say to him… Why was he hesitating? If ever a child deserved the benefit of the doubt, then surely it was this indomitable youth standing before him.

He watched now as Irfan slid the bucket beneath Ganesha’s trunk. It contained Ganesha’s evening ration of milk. Chopra’s nostrils flared as he smelled the generous helping of coconut milk and ghee that Chef Lucknowwallah had added to the milk. The chef believed that Ganesha needed fattening up and had taken to lacing the milk with rich additives. The luxurious diet seemed to agree with Ganesha, who was filling out nicely.

‘Chopra Sir, I have something for you also.’ Irfan reached inside his garish pink waiter’s jacket – worn, as per Poppy’s instructions, above equally garish pink shorts – and handed over a sheaf of envelopes and string-tied manila folders.

Chopra felt his heart sink.

Less than a year in and his fledgling detective agency was busier than he could ever have imagined. He had always known that Mumbai was a hotbed of crime, but who knew that it was also a place of such familial intrigue? It seemed that everyone with a missing pet or errant husband was beating a path to Chopra’s door. In the past months he had had to turn away case after case. There simply weren’t enough hours in the day.

It was fortunate, Chopra often thought, that young Irfan had turned out to have a razor-sharp mind and a near photographic memory. Although the boy was all but illiterate – a lack that Poppy was desperately trying to convince Irfan to remedy – he had become, through sheer necessity, Chopra’s de facto assistant. Irfan was now adept at managing the ever-increasing backlog of files, juggling irate customers who called demanding progress reports, and generally helping Chopra to stay on top of the spinning logs beneath his feet.

With a guilty conscience Chopra put the manila case folders to one side and instead focused on the envelopes.

Ever since he had placed an advert in the local paper he had been inundated with applicants. The fact that he had advertised for the position of ‘associate private investigator’, however, appeared to have completely escaped the vast majority of those who had written to him.

He knew that in a city of twenty million, finding gainful employment was no trivial matter. And yet he was continually taken aback by the singular unsuitability of the mountain of applications that he had been forced to read each evening since placing the advert. He wondered if there was something inside the human psyche that convinced people that the role of private investigator was one that anyone could turn their hand to – like writing. They said that there was a novel waiting inside everyone. Perhaps there was a private detective hiding inside everyone too, he thought cynically. After all, snooping on one’s neighbours was possibly the oldest hobby in the world.

Chopra believed that people were intrinsically different. They had different talents, dispositions and motivations. Sometimes it took a long time for a person to find out exactly what they were good at. Chance, upbringing, education, all these played a part. But there was also such a thing as karma. Fate. Destiny. Some people were simply born to play certain roles in the great story of life. And others… well, he had always believed that you couldn’t fit a crooked peg into an honest hole, no matter how hard you tried.

‘Sir, Mrs Roy called again today,’ Irfan announced. ‘She said, “If Chopra does not call me today I will have him arrested for fraud. Then I will have him castrated”,’ he added helpfully.

Chopra sighed.

Mrs Roy was the wife of the president of the local Rotary Club, a severe and uncompromising woman. Chopra had unwisely accepted a retainer from the old harridan to investigate the possibility that her husband had returned to his old drinking habits, which she had hoped that thirty years of marriage had cured him of. But he had simply not had the time to follow the old sot around. And now his wife was on the warpath.

‘What did you tell her?’ asked Chopra wearily.

Irfan grinned. ‘Do not worry, sir. I told her you were working very hard on her case. I told her that you followed Mr Roy today and that you suspect she is correct.’

Chopra gaped at the boy. ‘But that is not true!’

Irfan shrugged. ‘What is truth?’ he said philosophically. ‘This is Mumbai, sir. Truth comes in many disguises. Why don’t you call her and tell her you will follow Mr Roy again tomorrow? And then you will give her a final report. That can be the true truth, yes?’

Chopra tried to suppress a smile. The boy had initiative, he’d give him that. Still… ‘Irfan, the next time you wish to give a client advice, please check with me first.’

Irfan looked crestfallen. ‘Did I make a mistake, sir?’

Chopra reached out and tousled Irfan’s hair. ‘No. You merely learned something. Namely, that the client is not always right.’

Chopra watched the smile return to Irfan’s face and found a warmth suffusing him. Just as Ganesha had grown close to Irfan, he had grown closer to the boy too, though he would not have been able to express his feelings in the obvious way that his young ward did.

He knew that he had made the right decision by taking him on. Poppy, ever the big-hearted advocate of social change, had applauded his action, though others had not been so easy to convince. Poppy’s horrified mother Poornima had warned them against taking in a ‘slum dog’, a child ‘with no name or address’. ‘He has probably been lying and thieving since before he could walk,’ she had muttered.

‘His name is Irfan,’ Chopra had said sternly. ‘And whatever he was or was not before today is irrelevant. This is his home now.’

To accommodate Irfan he had purchased a charpoy and installed it on the veranda at the rear of the restaurant. This was where Irfan now slept, though it had taken a while for the boy to adjust to his new arrangements. Early on Chopra had discovered that Irfan often slept beneath the charpoy instead of on it. ‘It is too soft, sir,’ Irfan had explained. It had stung him to realise that this child had spent so much of his short life sleeping on the street that even a rope charpoy was too ‘soft’.

Chopra hauled himself to his feet. ‘Come, let’s go and see what Chef has prepared for supper, shall we? The mice are wearing a hole in my stomach.’