The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown

There are few cities in the world where an elephant can move along a busy thoroughfare and attract little or no attention.

As Ganesha trotted down the narrow street, shopkeepers sitting cross-legged behind the counters of their hole-in-the-wall shops barely glanced up from their wares, old men smoking beedis did not look around from their games of shatranj and carrom, chattering housewives carrying earthenware jugs under their arms did not miss a beat in their bellicose conversations as they swayed past.

Occasionally, children, inherently more curious than the adults with whom they share the world, would jog beside the little elephant. The more intrepid ones attempted to scale Ganesha’s flanks.

It is a well-known fact that many animals possess senses that humans have yet to fully understand. For instance, salmon somehow find their way back through thousands of miles of ocean to the exact pond in which they were born in order to breed and die. Silverback grizzly bears can smell a carcass from almost twenty miles away. Millions of monarch butterflies fly to the same grove of trees in Mexico each year, in spite of the fact that each generation only lives for a few months. The mechanics of how this information is passed down is still not clear.

It has recently been discovered that elephants are able to sense infrasounds – sounds below the level of human hearing – through their feet. This is why elephants are usually the first to sense impending earthquakes or storms, which send silent tremors through the ground. By virtue of their amazing trunks, elephants also possess a truly extraordinary sense of smell.

Had the residents of the Sunder Nagar slum been paying attention they would have noticed that the young elephant passing through their midst occasionally stopped to lift its trunk and sniff at the night air before continuing on its journey.

Ganesha was on a mission. Having escaped the clutches of the nefarious Kondvilkar he now found himself loose in the city. It had been a long time since he had been outside his courtyard at the restaurant without Chopra by his side. At first he had been afraid, but gradually his panic had subsided.

He had just survived a traumatic experience. He wanted nothing more than the company of the people he trusted most in the world, Chopra and Poppy. But his beloved guardians had been very busy of late, and he did not know when they would return to the restaurant.

Ganesha was feeling confused and upset. He was in sore need of his friend, a friend who had recently vanished with no word of explanation. Chopra did not seem to have the answer to this mystery.

The great river of smells parted into individual scents; it was like a magnificent symphony splitting into its constituent notes, each one a sparkling mote twisting in the air.

Ganesha sought the note that was unique to Irfan. It was incredibly faint, but he could sense it.

Eventually, the slum began to peter out. Ganesha walked until he began to hear the noise of passing traffic. He had reached the Jogeshwari-Vikhroli Link Road, the JVLR. For a moment he paused, watching the wall of honking, clanking, hooting vehicles roaring by in glorious Technicolor. A truck shuddered past, belching a cloud of fumes from its exhaust. A hurled beer bottle shattered next to Ganesha’s foot, startling him and eliciting a soft bugle of fright.

The little elephant flapped his ears determinedly, put his head down, and bundled across the road and into the darkness beyond, an area known as Ganesh Nagar, a barren wilderness dotted with the occasional cluster of slum dwellings or a low-end industrial complex. There were rumours that wild leopards roamed the area; that snakes and scorpions were a constant threat; and that outlaws patrolled in gangs robbing with impunity those who ventured in. Only the most foolhardy and desperate would actually try to live here.

But in a city as crowded as Mumbai there would always be some who were just desperate enough.

Ganesha eventually entered a slum that had recently sprung up within the concrete remains of an abandoned industrial complex. Free-standing structures devoid of windows and doors and without running water or electricity served as homes to the truly forsaken. This was not a functioning slum of poor families such as the shanty city known as Dharavi. This was the sort of slum to which the dregs of Mumbai society gravitated, the gutter into which the very worst and most unfortunate were eventually swept. Here were the drunks, the drug addicts, the mentally impaired, the thieves and murderers who had escaped the not-so-long arm of the law. Just as the bright face of the moon has a side permanently shadowed in darkness, so did places like this slum exist in a city that shone brighter than any other on the subcontinent.

Ganesha walked through the strangely quiescent streets, his trunk wrinkling at the unfamiliar scents of opium and hashish, his ears flapping as groans of pain and disillusionment were carried to him on the breeze, his frightened gaze alighting on human beings collapsed into vacant doorways and around open fires, suffering in mute agony, eyes hollowed out with confusion as if they had landed in some nether hell with no rhyme or reason for their presence there.

Beyond the furthest reaches of the slum Ganesha stared up at a looming concrete superstructure set apart like an architectural leper.

Once upon a time this skeletal structure had possibly dreamed of being a magnificent modern edifice, a leviathan of steel, concrete and glass. But that grand vision had barely got beyond the architect’s drawing board. The reality had stopped at these naked walls of grey, weather-ravaged cinderblock, walls with gaping hollows where windows, doors and even whole wall sections should have been. Rusted steel rebar poked out of crumbling columns like the ribs of desert-dried skeletons.

A wind howled through the uppermost floors, which were open to the elements. A fire flickered on the top floor.

Inside, he stopped and looked around. Between the mouldering twelve-foot-high walls, rusted I-beams and broken sections of concrete pipe were haphazardly strewn. Rubble and fallen masonry made little pyramids in darkened corners.

Ganesha sniffed the air again. Then, following his nose, he turned and walked up a flight of shallow concrete steps to the floor above.

He continued until he had reached the third floor. Here he paused and surveyed the scene.

More grey columns rose up around him, holding up a temporary roof fashioned from corroded sheets of corrugated iron.

The fire that he had seen from the ground was constrained inside a pit of bricks, the edges of the pit lined with the stumps of charred logs. The fire flickered in a cross-breeze that cut across the floor, which was open to the elements on all sides. Motes of red ash danced in the wind.

A sudden blur of movement jerked Ganesha’s head around. He was just in time to see the shape of a small boy in ragged shorts and vest sprint through an open doorway into darkness.

He paused in the open doorway. Then he unfurled his trunk and sniffed. He could not see into the dark, but he could sense that a room lay ahead of him, one of the few intact rooms in the whole edifice. He sensed that Irfan had been there not long ago.

For a moment he stood in the gloom, allowing his eyes to adjust. And then he saw the rope, dangling down from a ragged hole in the far corner of the room’s crumbling ceiling. The rope was still swaying.

Ganesha realised that the boy had shimmied up the rope and disappeared, but why?

THE SLUM AT THE END OF THE WORLD