Four men were dead in the same office—their hearts gave up at the same time. They were Vuvuzula Sankatram Reddy, a bankrupt media magnate; his brother, Velveti Rompy Reddy; his son, BJ Reddy; and the media house’s human resources head, Sainath Rao.
‘Sainath was apparently found with his, er, how should I say this … his little fellow inside a tin of paayasam,’ said G.P. Shrivastava, director general (DG) of the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (SVP) National Police Academy.
‘Little fellow?’ Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Mona Ramteke asked. ‘Oh!’ she added hastily when she realized what the DG meant.
‘Yes.’
Mona’s stomach rumbled mildly in protest. She had been on her way to the canteen for lunch when she was intercepted by summons to the DG’s office. She now stood at attention in his office, facing a desk that was cluttered with police pennants.
DG Shrivastava, leaning back in his chair, peered at her through his bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows and his oversized tortoiseshell glasses. What he saw was a small and wiry woman with a boy’s haircut. Her complexion was a shade darker than wheatish. He scoffed. She is a Dalit, he thought, probably in the force through reservation.
‘Simultaneous fatal heart attacks,’ DG Shrivastava said. ‘Mrs Sharmila Rao, the chief minister’s daughter, wants you to look into it.’
‘Of course, sir,’ Mona said. ‘But why me?’
Mona was curious because this was Hyderabad, not Mumbai where she had spent most of her career. She was in the city for a six-week training, after which her recent promotion from inspector to ACP would be formalized. She knew little about Hyderabad and had never met the chief minister or his daughter. In fact, she knew barely anything about the state police and was yet to meet the city’s police commissioner.
‘How do I know?’ DG Shrivastava said, taking off his glasses. ‘The Reddys are an influential lot. Or were, I guess. Their newspaper, Deccan Testament, is a big deal here. Highest print run in the state and the families are influential. Their deaths will rattle the elite.’
‘Sir.’
‘You’re a high-profile investigator back home, but here, in Hyderabad, you are an outsider. That might count for something, for the powers that be at least. You are probably perfect for the job, whatever it might be. I’m sure I don’t need to know. It’s a complicated mess, but I am confident that you’ll figure it out as you go along.’
‘Understood, sir.’
‘You will not be officially associated with the investigation, but you will assist it. Or be an advisor, or a consultant, whatever you want to call it. A sub-inspector will assist you.’
‘Sir.’
‘You will report to the local ACP, Chittla Srinivas Kumar, who in turn reports to DCP Chittla Suresh Kumar. They’re brothers. Messy.’
‘Sir.’
‘Off you go now. No time for lunch. Try to get to the Deccan Testament office before the bodies are taken away for post-mortem examinations. Now.’
‘Sir.’
Mona saluted and departed, still wondering why Sharmila Rao, the chief minister’s daughter, had asked for her. Shouldn’t the minister himself make the request?
She left the DG’s office and was soon in the parking area, where she mounted her Royal Enfield and rode out of the lush campus. She turned on to the Hyderabad–Bengaluru highway and headed to Secunderabad, about forty minutes away depending on the traffic. Why hadn’t the request come from the chief minister’s son or his nephew, who are both important state ministers?
Perhaps it was because Sharmila Rao knew Srividya Suryawanshi, whose father was a powerful politician in Maharashtra. Sharmila and Srividya had both sat in the previous Parliament and were friends. Sharmila was now in the state assembly as a member of the legislative council. Srividya had probably advised her to rope Mona into the probe.
Mona focused on the unruly traffic as she passed Hussain Sagar Lake. The drivers here were worse than Mumbai or Pune, or even Aurangabad. It was complete chaos, as if all the crazy motorcyclists were on the road. She turned right at the Clock Tower and reached the opaque black gates of the Deccan Testament office. She honked her way past the frazzled watchmen and stopped at the two-wheeler parking area.
Mona took off her helmet and was immediately hit by an acrid smell emanating from a nearby drain. She quickly wore a mask that had become a permanent fixture thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A tall and strapping dark-skinned woman in a khaki uniform and peaked cap approached her. Her name tag read Pavani Reddy. She, too, wore a mask.
‘Jai Hind, ACP Ma’am. Welcome to Secunderabad,’ Sub-Inspector Pavani said, standing at attention and saluting.
‘Jai Hind, SI Pavani. Thank you, and at ease.’
Pavani leaned forward and whispered, ‘A lot of the sirs are annoyed with you for taking over the investigation, but they dare not say anything.’
‘Is that so?’ Mona asked.
‘They’re afraid the chief minister’s family will send them on a long deputation to the Indo-Tibetan Border Police.’
What else is new, Mona mused.
ACP Mona and SI Pavani climbed the steps to enter a four-storeyed, old-world, off-white building. They passed a defunct Linotype machine on display behind a glass screen, as if was in a museum, and crossed the foyer. To their left was the entrance to the Classifieds department, where she detected barely any activity. They marched straight to the reception where a lady sat with her head wrapped in a black dupatta, leaving just her sparkling eyes visible. She stood up and gaily sang, ‘Good morning, ma’am.’ A watchman sprayed sanitiser on Mona’s hands, but when he tried to scan her temperature she clicked her tongue sharply, making him step back towards the wall.
Pavani handed Mona a pair of surgical gloves as they entered, turned left and walked past a narrow staircase and an old lift towards a row of glass cabins behind a wall of glazed glass bricks. The office felt strange. The usual hustle-bustle was missing—it was eerily silent. Perhaps it was because of the pandemic-induced low attendance, but even then the unearthly silence dominated the cream walls and the grey linoleum.
They spotted half a dozen staffers crowding around the last cabin. ‘Hey, move aside,’ Pavani said, using her baton to part the herd so that the two of them could walk through.
Inside, a forensic team was at work. A woman examined the body of a roughly fifty-year-old man sitting on his chair, his chin resting on his immobile chest, his perfectly oiled and combed grey hair shining in the cabin’s bright ceiling lights, his grey safari top uncreased. He was surprisingly fair-skinned and looked like he had lived a privileged life.
The black frame of his glasses was gleaming over his unblinking, startled bug eyes. Though his face was at an angle, it was apparent that he wore a light-blue triple-layered surgical mask. As ACP Mona and SI Pavani stepped closer, they saw that behind his desk his pants and underwear were pulled down to his thighs. His shrivelled penis was submerged in a tin of pinkish rice pudding.
‘What happened?’ Mona asked, pulling on gloves though she had no intention of touching anything.
The lead forensic expert addressed them in Telugu until Pavani uttered the magic phrase: ‘English, please.’
‘ACP Ma’am,’ said SI Padmaja Rao, saluting, ‘the victim was masturbating into a tin of paayasam. It was procured from a sacred place of pilgrimage in Kerala.’
‘Blasphemous,’ Pavani said.
‘No wonder his eyes are wide open,’ Mona remarked. ‘Must have realized that Lord Shiva had a—’
‘ACP Ma’am, no one masturbates to death,’ Pavani noted.
‘Not unless he had a bag over his head or a belt around his neck to induce autoerotic asphyxiation,’ SI Padmaja said. ‘To heighten his orgasm.’
‘Get to the point,’ Mona said. ‘Cause of death?’
‘Ma’am, prima facie evidence shows that it is coronary failure,’ she said. ‘The post-mortem will surely confirm it.’
‘Surely? So, no murder? Natural death? Let’s see the other bodies. Were they also found like this?’
‘No, ACP Ma’am.’
Mona followed Pavani through the same gawking crowd, a couple of whom Pavani whacked with her baton for good measure. ‘Why aren’t you idiots wearing masks?’ she asked. The crowd evaporated.
They stepped into the lift and Pavani pressed the button for level three. ‘Ma’am,’ she said to Mona, ‘third floor is finance and administration. First floor is marketing and circulation. Second floor is editorial.’
‘And the ground floor is for masturbating savarnas.’
Pavani giggled.
The lift opened to a warren of cubicles and workstations. Pavani, however, turned left and walked through a deeply tinted glass double door into a quiet corridor where a constable guarded a heavy wooden door not far down on the right. He clicked his heels to attention as the police officers entered the room.
Behind a well-appointed desk, in front of a bookshelf that occupied the entire wall but was itself filled with fluffy reading, a light-skinned man in his early thirties sat in a swivel chair, his chin immobile on his chest and a fly exploring his woolly hair. He wore a pale green dress shirt and steel grey slacks. There was no mask. Drool had left a trail from the left corner of his slightly agape mouth down to his chin. A forensic team was brushing the tabletop for fingerprints.
Mona lifted the victim’s weak chin with a forefinger. His eyes did not look back at her, or anywhere at all.
‘Ma’am, his nostrils look raw,’ Pavani said. ‘Do you think he snorted cocaine early in the morning?’
‘The toxicology report will tell us, no doubt,’ Mona answered.
‘It would account for the coronary failure, ma’am,’ Pavani said. ‘But that’s not all.’
‘Of course. Show me.’
They climbed the stairs to the top floor. To the left of the lift were two forbidding and intricately carved teak doors that a constable opened for them. As they stepped inside, Mona felt as if she was stepping on to the set of a Telugu blockbuster involving celestial battles and scantily clad fair damsels. The walls were covered with such opulent paintings and ornate wood carvings. The long corridor had three doors—the one on the left was a double glass door that led to a conference room; further to the right was a narrow teak door that was slightly ajar; and straight ahead, at the end of the corridor, was another imposing carved teak door.
‘Ma’am, end of the corridor first.’
‘First?’
The teak door led them into a vast wood-panelled room divided into two sections—the one closer was like Aladdin’s cave, full of old cameras, books and framed photos, all of which featured a man with a walrus moustache and dyed long black hair slicked back, posing mostly with politicians. The unchanging expression on his fair-skinned face was midway between superciliousness and ennui.
The second section of the room, partitioned by a shelf of objets d’art, was dominated by a desk almost as large as one that might be used by the authoritarian head. The supercilious walrus sat behind it, his prickly chin resting on his chest. He wore a purple dress shirt and his white trousers were still on, but the face mask was nowhere to be seen. Behind him was a tinted window that muffled the sounds of invisible traffic, and to his sides were display shelves of generic idols and dubious trophies. The day’s newspaper was on the desk in front of him.
Mona went around the desk to lift his chin and examine his face. He bore an uncanny resemblance to someone she had seen before.
‘Mahishasura,’ Pavani said.
Yes, that was it! Mahishasura was a demon speared in the heart by Goddess Durga at every puja pandal Mona had visited in her childhood. The victim’s eyes had the same look of surrender.
‘Heart failure?’ Mona asked.
Pavani nodded.
From the victim’s chair, Mona looked across the room towards a narrow hall? that held up a large-screen TV. Deeper into the room were bookshelves. On the back wall was the victim’s photo. A forensic team was wiping down the frame.
‘And the last dead body?’
Pavani nodded and turned to lead her out.
They went back out into the corridor and through the teak door. This room was similar to the third-floor room that they had visited, but with subdued lighting from the false ceiling. A man in an azure dress shirt and thick, spiky greying hair sat behind the desk, dead like the others. Mona lifted his maskless and lifeless face by the chin and nearly dropped it after seeing the venal look frozen on it.
‘He looks like he was plotting someone’s murder.’
‘Or plotting to rob someone.’
Mona gently placed the victim’s head back on his chest.
‘Can you tell me who each of these dead men are?’
‘Ma’am,’ Pavani said, drawing a deep breath, ‘the first one, on the ground floor, was the HR manager, Vaniti Sainath Vulvapuram Rao, fifty-three years old. Mr Sai, for short. The other three were from the Reddy family that used to own this newspaper.’
‘Used to? What were they doing here then?’
‘Ma’am, it’s a complex legal story whose details I’ve not totally grasped.’
‘We’ll figure it out soon enough. Tell me about these family members.’
‘The patriarch, the one in the largest room, is Vuvuzula Sankatram Reddy, sixty years old. This is his brother, Velveti Rompy Reddy, fifty-eight years old. On the floor below is Sankatram’s only son, Babloo Jubilee Reddy, or BJ Reddy, thirty-three years old.’
Mona paused. ‘No more men left in the family?’
‘Sankatram has a wife and a married daughter in Delhi. Rompy has a daughter, but no grandchildren. BJ is childless.’
‘And they no longer own this newspaper?’
‘Yet they are rich … their wealth is secretly stashed abroad,’ Pavani said. ‘How strange that they all had heart attacks and died, along with the HR manager, on the same day.’
‘Four people in the same office don’t die of simultaneous heart attacks by coincidence. There is no such thing. It has to be planned. It has to be murder.’
‘Whoever did it must be devious.’
‘No doubt.’
‘How will we ever find out who it is?’
Mona’s phone buzzed just then. She looked at the screen, but it was not a number she recognized. Truecaller was of no help either. She declined it, but before she could return her phone to the pocket, it buzzed again.
‘Yes?’
‘This is Sharmila Rao, MLC.’
Right. The chief minister’s daughter, and the reason she was here right now. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Mona said.
‘How does it look?’
‘It’s a …’ Mona looked at Pavani. ‘It’s a puzzle, ma’am.’
‘A puzzle?’
‘At the moment, ma’am.’ Mona paused for further instructions.
‘Well, whatever you do, and whatever you find, I merely ask one thing of you.’
‘Yes, ma’am?’
‘Let me know before you tell my brother.’