THE ELEPHANT CATCHER

Chef Lucknowwallah snored. Each stentorian exhalation gently lifted the damp handkerchief that he had placed over his face, and then just as gently set it down again. The dinnertime rush was over and the chef, having partaken of a simple meal of aloo matar – spicy potato and peas – was enjoying a period of quiet recuperation in the restaurant’s office before the late-night crowd began to filter in. The air was redolent with the odour of flue-cured Virginia tobacco, a thick cheroot of which he had smoked just before settling himself into Chopra’s chair, and which he ordered by the bushel direct from his friend Anmol Mazumdar’s plantation in faraway Andhra Pradesh. His doctor had forbidden him from smoking, but what did that old duffer know? The man couldn’t even boil an egg.

Lucknowwallah had had a trying few days.

Not only had he been forced to work overtime in order to prepare the spectacular Christmas dinner that they had just finished serving – an undertaking grossly undermined by Chopra’s mother-in-law, causing him more than the usual heartburn – but his sous-chef, young Romesh Goel, for whom he had high hopes, had managed to all but sever a finger whilst filleting a fresh pomfret for Lucknowwallah’s Goan seafood masala.

The boy seemed increasingly distracted these days.

The chef had a sneaking suspicion that this was because of Rosie Pinto, his other assistant chef. It had not escaped him how Rosie had been making goo-goo eyes at the pimply-faced young Romesh. Really, these youngsters must think he was blind!

The thought of the burgeoning romance had caused Lucknowwallah to dwell on his own wife, departed these past ten years. The late Mrs Lucknowwallah had been a fiery one, a Mangalorean princess he had swept along on his travels, beguiling her with his fried Goli bajji, against which her prickly persona had proved no defence. In choosing her Lucknowwallah had gone with his heart, refusing the arranged marriage his family had planned for him.

He had never regretted his choice.

His wife and he had fought every day of their marriage, but that was all part and parcel of the great love that they had shared. Thirty good years and two fine sons, married now and vanished abroad. And then he had watched, helplessly, as that invidious traitor cancer had eaten her away, diminishing, day by day, the person he had known and loved since his youth. But that was life. Why get worked up about what you could not control?

The door to the office slammed open, startling Lucknowwallah from his doze. The handkerchief fluttered to the floor as the chef blearily focused on the intruder. It was Rosie Pinto.

‘What the devil…?’

‘Sir! Please come quick! They are trying to steal Ganesha!’

Lucknowwallah burst onto the veranda at the rear of the restaurant just in time to see three coolies hauling Ganesha across the courtyard by a rope that they had dropped around his neck.

The three men were being bellowed at by a fat, dark-skinned man in a navy blue safari suit. Ganesha was resisting with all his might, digging in his heels. But, inexorably, he was being pulled towards the alley that led out onto the main road.

As Lucknowwallah watched, the supervisor leaned in and jabbed Ganesha in the flank with an electric cattle prod. Ganesha immediately let out a bellow of pain, his body convulsing and his hind legs spasming uncontrollably.

As his footing faltered, the men dragged him a further yard.

A curtain of red dropped over the chef’s eyes. With a bellow of his own, he charged into the fray, grabbing the supervisor by the lapels of his safari suit. The man’s eyes widened in fright and he dropped the cattle prod.

‘I am going to teach you a lesson you will never forget!’ roared Lucknowwallah, brandishing a fist.

‘Don’t hit me!’ yelped the man. ‘I am a government official! I am merely executing an order to take this elephant into detention. If you touch me you will surely go to prison!’

‘What the devil are you talking about?’ Lucknowwallah’s face had flushed and the unusual exertion was causing his heart to gallop wildly in his chest. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Romesh and Rosie on the veranda, expressions of horrified concern pasted on their faces.

The man scrabbled in his breast pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, which he held up to Lucknowwallah’s face. ‘My name is Kondvilkar. This elephant assaulted a boy. I must take him to the animal detention centre in Pune. By order of the Maharashtra Dangerous Animals Division.’

‘This is preposterous! Ganesha wouldn’t hurt a fly!’

‘That is not for me to say. He will be examined by experts. If God is willing it, he will be returned very soon.’

The chef’s mouth fell open, but he realised that he had run out of arguments.

‘Please, sir, could you let go of my shirt now?’

Lucknowwallah released Kondvilkar. The big man stepped back, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and patted his brow in relief.

‘I must inform Chopra,’ growled the chef.

‘You may inform who you wish,’ said Kondvilkar breathily. ‘But still the elephant must go with me.’

Lucknowwallah bent down and picked up the electric cattle prod. ‘This stays here.’

‘But that is government property!’

‘Then the government can come and get it.’

It took a further twenty minutes for the struggling coolies to haul Ganesha into the black truck Kondvilkar had brought with him.

As soon as the elephant calf had been manhandled aboard, Kondvilkar clanged the rear doors shut and leaned against them in relief. Ganesha immediately turned and charged the doors – but the truck had been reinforced for bigger and stronger beasts than him.

Lucknowwallah tried one more time to call Chopra. But the man was not answering.

The chef, surrounded by the restaurant’s staff, could only watch helplessly as the black truck roared away, the little elephant looking out at them through the mesh grill in forlorn unhappiness.

A white Hindustan Ambassador, long the favoured vehicle of government officials on the subcontinent, honked its way through the press of bodies crowded onto the Apollo Bunder plaza, before grinding to a halt in the shadow of the Gateway of India.

The rear door flew open and Detective Chief Inspector Maxwell Bomberton unfolded his enormous frame from the vehicle’s back seat.

A beggar, faster off the mark than his peers, bore down on the Ambassador with a hopeful air, but then recoiled as the hulking, red-faced foreigner turned towards him and pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his white tuxedo as if drawing a pistol.

‘Damn this infernal heat,’ muttered Bomberton, mopping his brow. ‘It’s Christmas Day. It’s not supposed to be hot.’

‘This is India. It is always hot.’

Bomberton turned to see Inspector Ashwin Chopra (Retd) nimbly navigating his way through the late-evening tourist crowd.

‘Nice outfit, Chopra,’ said Bomberton acidly. ‘Who are you supposed to be, exactly? Harry Houdini?’

Chopra looked down at his attire.

He was wearing a crisp white kurta pajama with a sleeveless black button-down waistcoat. His hair was hidden beneath a grey-furred astrakhan cap. Thick black-framed spectacles covered his eyes.

Chopra had put a great deal of effort into his appearance. In order to pursue the course of action he had chosen he would require a plausible disguise. It was a new kind of policing, one that he’d had to learn since becoming a private investigator. Although initially uncomfortable with the new methods he was forced to employ, he had vowed to himself that he would do whatever it took to pursue the cause of justice. And if that meant having to endure the ignominy of the occasional costume, then so be it. After all, hadn’t Basil Rathbone often disguised himself in the course of his investigations as Sherlock Holmes? Why, in The Spiderwoman, he had even dressed up – with the aid of a turban and a little lampblack – as a retired Sikh military officer named Rajni Singh in order to ensnare the eponymous femme fatale.

Chopra regarded the Englishman’s own efforts.

The white tuxedo with double-breasted waistcoat and scarlet cummerbund straining around Bomberton’s ample stomach. The red bow tie. The Sandown cap disguising the bald pate. The monocle.

‘Not bad,’ he conceded grudgingly, wondering where on earth Bomberton had obtained the outfit.

‘Remind me again, who am I supposed to be?’

‘Lord Cornwallis,’ declared Chopra as Bomberton tugged at his bow tie.

‘Lord? Are you trying to insult me? For my sins I am acquainted with more than a few peers of the realm, Chopra, and I can tell you that the only thing they are good for is eating large dinners in the House while they hum and haw about the price of fish. And this monkey suit is making me itch.’

Chopra checked his watch. ‘Let’s go. And remember, stay in character at all times.’

‘Aye, aye, skipper,’ muttered Bomberton, giving his colleague the evil eye.

Ganesha paced the rear of the truck, his trunk swishing angrily from side to side and his ears flapping in agitation. In the front of the truck Pramod Kondvilkar twisted his bulk to look through the iron bars partitioning the driver’s cabin from the rear.

‘Your master should have paid me,’ he said morosely. ‘Then all this trouble would not be necessary.’ He shook his head. ‘Always there is one! Why to give everyone a black name by trying to be honest? Who does he think he is? Raja Harishchandra?’

The driver nodded in agreement, then yanked the wheel viciously to the left, skidding the truck around a corner and almost knocking over a handcart piled high with rods of sugar cane.

‘Now I will have to do something I do not like,’ continued Kondvilkar. ‘It is not my fault, you understand. There is simply no room for an elephant in our caging facilities.’ He shook his head again. ‘I know you cannot understand a word I am saying but it is only fair to tell you that you are going to meet your maker. I have a pit of quicklime prepared for troublesome creatures such as you. Do not worry, you will not be alone. There are plenty of others down there. Mad bulls, stubborn camels, worn-out mules, retired circus bears and, of course, elephants. Plenty of elephants.’

The driver sniggered and glanced back at Ganesha via his mirror. The little elephant had stopped pacing the rear of the truck and was standing stock-still, his attention focused on Kondvilkar.

‘It is almost as if he is listening,’ said the driver.

‘Oh, he is listening, that is for sure,’ opined Kondvilkar. ‘But he is not understanding. None of them do. Not until the last second when the ground suddenly gives way beneath them, and they realise that they have fallen into the pit of their doom. Such a shame, really. But the state only gives me a small amount to house these creatures. If I were to actually spend it on cages what would I keep for myself? I must eat too, yes?’

‘We must all eat,’ nodded the driver philosophically.

Kondvilkar shuffled and reached into his back pocket to dig out a battered tin tray. He plucked a pinch of snuff from the tray and inserted it violently into his nose. Then he snorted deeply, tilted his head back and closed his eyes. ‘Ahhh!’

The driver glanced at his boss, then turned his eyes back to the road.

They had moved out of the crowded Sahar area and were now passing through Mahakali Caves. This was a poor enclave – the slums of the suburbs were only a little way down the road.

The driver, whose name was Namdev, knew the way to the quicklime pit. He had been there many times. It was located in a half-finished building in an area of abandoned construction. There were many such ruins blighting the city, the sad remnants of the dreams of avaricious developers who had overreached themselves or failed to placate the planning authorities with the requisite bribes.

A garland of sweet lime and chilli swung from the mirror, a good luck charm. Namdev’s fingers tapped out a tune from the latest Bollywood blockbuster on the steering wheel.

Behind the humming driver a coiled grey shape snaked between the iron bars sectioning off the rear cabin. With a sudden dart Ganesha wrapped his trunk around the driver’s scrawny throat and yanked back as hard as he could.

The effect was electrifying.

Namdev yelped in alarm, his hands flying from the steering wheel to his throat, his legs flailing wildly. His foot caught the accelerator and the truck bucked forward, swerving across the road. Pedestrians and animals dived for cover. A limbless beggar on a wheeled tray suddenly sprouted legs and ran for his life. A pair of tethered goats bleated in terror, snapped their ropes, and hurdled a handcart loaded with rolls of cotton. A macaque gnawing on a rotten mango by the side of the road threw the bruised fruit at the onrushing vehicle and shot up a lime tree, howling with rage.

The truck hurtled through a pyramid of straw baskets and a waist-high mound of rotting vegetation, then ploughed headlong over a concrete drainage pipe, careening into a series of rolls until it struck a solitary brick wall, the only remnant of an ancient dwelling.

Finally, it skidded to a drawn-out halt, upside down, sparks flying, its undercarriage covered in bricks from the demolished wall.

For a long instant there was only a creaking silence, then a crow, rudely dislodged from the rubbish mound, fluttered onto the truck’s exhaust pipe and began to peck furiously at the rear right tyre.

A few moments later the rear doors of the truck, now hanging loose from their moorings, swung open and the tip of a trunk emerged.

Ganesha stood for a moment, trembling on unsteady legs and blinking in the glow of the evening streetlamps. Then he shook his head violently from side to side as if to clear it.

Finally, somewhat recovered from his ordeal, he proceeded to move down the road at a brisk trot.

Behind him a chorus of groans emanated from the driver’s cabin of the upturned truck where Kondvilkar and Namdev were gracelessly arranged in a tangle of bruised and battered limbs.