The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown

Poppy paced the floor of their bedroom, wielding her hairbrush in one hand and her night cream in the other. Her obvious agitation sent ripples of protest through the fabric of her cotton nightgown.

‘Irfan confirmed his story. The boy agreed to go with him. I couldn’t stop him.’

‘He is a child!’ Poppy wailed. ‘He was afraid. You should have asked for some proof, a birth certificate or… or… something! Anything!’

‘Have you any idea how many children are born in the slums without birth certificates each year?’

Poppy turned to her husband, anguish in her eyes. ‘But how can he just go like that?’

Chopra, seated on the bed in his shorts and T-shirt, knew that this was the question to which there was no easy answer.

How could he explain to Poppy how hard he had tried to convince Irfan not to go, to at least wait a day while Chopra investigated the matter? How could he explain the feeling of helplessness that had overcome him as he had watched Irfan walk out of the door with a stranger?

Irfan had arrived of his own accord and was now leaving by his own wish. The boy had repeatedly confirmed that Lodi was his father and that he was going with him willingly. Beyond that Chopra had not been able to ascertain anything, no matter how hard he tried.

The situation had left him deeply upset, not least because of how vested he himself had become in the boy’s welfare.

Chopra had done everything he could for Irfan since he had entered their lives. Indeed, he did not think he could have offered Irfan more had the boy lived in his own home, had he signed documents to lay a legal claim to the child.

Chopra believed in destiny. He believed that human beings possessed the ability to change minor eddies within the great river of their fates, but not the course of that river. If he were to attempt to alter Irfan’s life entirely – for instance, by enrolling him into the sort of fancy school that Poppy kept insisting the boy needed – he believed that he might upset some sort of cosmic accounting and nothing good would come of it. If Irfan himself wished to attend school, then certainly he would arrange it. But he would not force his and Poppy’s own belief systems on the boy. He was confident that with just a little guidance Irfan would make something of himself one day.

His brow darkened as he privately admitted that he had seen himself as that guiding hand. A father figure to the boy. Not one to smother, but a reassuring presence who would always be there, patiently waiting for whenever he was needed… But now, now that harmless dream had been shattered.

He left his distraught wife and retreated to the relative safety of his office, where he settled into his armchair and switched on the television.

A late-night debate show was arguing over the ‘legitimacy’ of the theft of the Koh-i-Noor. The crowd was divided. Many felt it was an act of justifiable revanchism; others that it was a crime no matter which way you looked at it.

Chopra found himself unable to focus on the discussion. He wondered where Irfan was now. Back in the slums? Back with a man who he strongly suspected was responsible for the cigarette burns on Irfan’s body, though the boy had denied it when he had taken him to his office at the restaurant and questioned him privately.

Fate. Karma. And nothing in between except the Brownian motion of human lives moving along their random paths, bouncing between moments of joy and those of trial and tribulation with only the illusion that they had control over what they were doing.

He picked up the remote and changed the channel. On WD-TV a reporter lurked outside the apartment complex in which Shekhar Garewal lived. ‘Is this the home of the mastermind behind the theft of the Koh-i-Noor?’ he asked in a sombre baritone.

The complex was in a relatively affluent sector of Bandra. Chopra wondered which floor Garewal lived on. He wondered how his wife and children were coping with their father’s sudden notoriety. He imagined that they were besieged, that they had turned off the phone, drawn the curtains and no longer dared to venture out into the city.

The scene shifted to live footage of the exterior of Lilavati Hospital, where the Queen had spent a night before flying back to the UK. News reports confirmed that she was still ill, despondent and upset by the loss of the Koh-i-Noor.

In spite of the Queen’s absence the crowd outside the hospital had swelled. Hundreds of lit diyas glowed amongst the well-wishers. In the centre of the crowd a temporary shrine had been set up, with a blown-up photograph of Her Majesty set inside a wooden mango crate and perched on a hastily erected stand. Garlands of jasmine flowers were strung around the photograph and sticks of incense poked from the slats in the crate. A line of devotees edged up to the stand, brought their palms together in respectful greeting and offered up a prayer for the Queen.

The news item returned Chopra’s thoughts to the ‘dark and bloody history of the Koh-i-Noor’ that had been related by the tourist guide Atul Kochar, describing how the great diamond had ended up in the Queen’s possession, having fallen through the centuries trailing misfortune in its wake…

The first historically verifiable record of the Koh-i-Noor came from the memoirs of Mohammed Babur, descendant of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, and founder of the Mughal Empire. Babur claimed the diamond had been gifted to him by the Pashtun sultan Ibrahim Lodi, though the truth was far bloodier. Lodi had fallen to Babur’s invading army and the Koh-i-Noor had been part of the plunder claimed by the new ruler of the subcontinent.

Discovered in an ancient and enigmatic Sanskrit document the curse stated: ‘He who owns this diamond will own the world, but will also know all its misfortunes. Only God, or a woman, may wear it with impunity.’

Over the coming centuries the curse had proved alarmingly accurate in its dire prediction.

Babur’s son, Humayun, was the first to be eclipsed by the diamond’s black shadow. His short-lived empire was overrun by the Pashtun general Sher Khan. A broken man, Humayun would later die in a freak fall from the stone steps of his court library. Sher Khan himself perished soon after when a cannon packed with gunpowder exploded during the siege of Kalinjar Fort in Uttar Pradesh.

Next came Humayun’s grandson, Shah Jahan, the visionary behind the Taj Mahal, who installed the Koh-i-Noor in his magnificent Peacock Throne, and paid the price for tempting fate when he was subsequently imprisoned by his own son Aurangzeb. Legend had it that in order to torment his father Aurangzeb had the Koh-i-Noor set outside the window of his cell so that he could see the Taj only by looking at its reflection in the great stone.

In 1739 Nadir Shah, the Shah of Iran, sacked Agra and Delhi and carried off the Peacock Throne to Persia, not realising the ill fortune he was bringing upon himself. He was assassinated shortly thereafter.

The Koh-i-Noor subsequently passed through a number of hands before ending up in the treasury of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, ruling prince of the Punjab.

In 1839, following Singh’s death, the British claimed the Punjab for the Empire, and the Koh-i-Noor was surrendered – through the machinations of the British East India Company – to Queen Victoria. Transported to England in 1850, it was duly presented to Her Majesty as a tribute from her ‘loyal’ subjects on the subcontinent. A line of female queens had safeguarded the great jewel ever since.

Irfan’s face kept intruding into Chopra’s thoughts. To divert himself, Chopra picked up his notebook, pushed his spectacles on to his nose, stuck his calabash pipe into his mouth, and tried to organise his thoughts about the case. His pen scritched across the paper as a moth, circling the light fixture above, threw dancing shadows over the page:

Chopra paused and realised that the whole question of the plastic explosive was something that had been bothering him, like a piece of grit in his eye. He placed himself back in the gallery now, looking through the ragged hole in the sealed rear doors and out into the corridor connecting the Tata and Jahangir galleries. The hole had been blown into the Tata Gallery, so the thieves had to have come in from the corridor. That was the assumption. But sometimes assumptions were the very worst thing for an investigation… And suddenly he had it, the thing that had been bothering him. He had seen a technician vacuuming up debris in the corridor. McTavish had said this was probably debris from the blowback of the explosion. But Chopra felt that something was wrong with this explanation. He was no explosives expert, but it didn’t sit right. An idea was circling his brain that he just couldn’t latch on to.

Yadav false identity. High quality forgeries = expensive! Yadav missing, possibly dead.

Who is the mastermind? Bulbul Kanodia? How involved is the Chauhan gang? What was Bulbul doing in the museum? Why did he need to be there?

Chopra stared at the paper for a long time. He recalled Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Homes in Terror by Night in which a fictional diamond – the ‘Star of Rhodesia’ – was stolen. The culprit had eventually been identified as an old friend of Dr Watson.

A SLEEPLESS NIGHT FOR POPPY AND CHOPRA