The first I knew about it was a constable knocking on my door with an electric torch in one hand and an enveloped chit in the other. It was gone midnight, but the chap had hardly woken me, seeing as I’d only just made it home myself. The evening had been long, hot and frustrating and I’d spent most of it in a squalid, pestilential corner of North Calcutta where the air stank of sewage and the families, when they had a room, lived six or seven to it, sleeping on rattan mats and subsisting off little more than rice and dal.
I’d gone there to meet a man called Uddam Singh, Uddam the Lion, which sounded impressive until you realised that a full tenth of the people in the country seemed to be called Singh. Uddam, from the dirt poor province of Bihar, had come penniless to Calcutta, and through nothing more than hard work and a penchant for slitting throats, had risen to become the kingpin of an underworld gang that controlled almost half the city’s trade in narcotics, prostitution and a few other illicit activities besides.
We’d met, aptly enough, in a street called Gola-katta Gullee, Cut-throat Alley, a foul-smelling passage of flophouses and hovels, where indolent dogs roamed in packs and itinerant cows grazed on the bounty of an open rubbish tip.
We were there to discuss the fate of Singh’s second son, Vinay. His elder boy, Abhay, had been murdered a fortnight earlier, and Suren and I had been called to the south of the city where we found him propped up in a lane near Kidderpore docks with the business end of a six-inch blade embedded in his oesophagus.
It was merely the latest in a series of rather unpleasant murders – all victims of, or, depending on your point of view, erstwhile participants in, a rather nasty territorial dispute which had broken out between two of the native gangs that vied for control of some of the city’s less wholesome business activities.
Normally we’d have left them to it, though Vice Division would keep an eye on things, of course. No one wanted the British or, God forbid, the foreign press picking up on such matters, but given our own stretched resources, we’d have been happy enough for the thugs to keep on merrily killing each other. The problem this time, however, was that the gangs in question hailed not just from different neighbourhoods, but also from different faiths, and we’d learned the hard way that where religion was involved, the deaths of a few goondahs could soon explode into the general mass slaughter of Hindu and Muslim.
The murder of Singh’s son seemed like an escalation. There’s honour among thugs, a gentleman’s agreement if you will, that close family of the kingpins on all sides were untouchable. Abhay’s murder might have been a terrible mistake, but my gut told me otherwise. There was no reason for him to be down in South Calcutta, so far from his father’s turf in the north. It felt to me like a set-up, and his father, it seemed, felt similarly. And now he was out for revenge.
And that’s where Suren and I came into the picture, or at least I did, because Suren had failed to show up. Normally I’d have carried on regardless and given the sergeant a talking-to later, but on this occasion, his presence was vital, seeing as he’d been the one who’d had the bright idea of arresting Vinay Singh in the first place.
Indeed, the whole plan had been Suren’s idea. He’d come up with it in an attempt to placate Lord Taggart who seemed rather put out by the warfare breaking out across his city.
‘What the hell’s behind the violence?’ he’d barked across the no man’s land of his desk, and of course Suren and I had no idea whatsoever. Maybe it was just a simple turf war; maybe it was the pending municipal elections; or maybe, like everyone else in 1923, the gangs had just gone a little mad. Whatever the cause, Taggart wanted it stopped, post-haste.
It was a week later, as we stood admiring the corpse of another dead sap, this time a Muslim hoodlum with one ear missing and his neck sliced clean, that Suren had had his brainwave.
‘We should bring in that fool, Vinay Singh.’
It took me a while to place the particular fool in question.
‘You know, Uddam Singh’s younger boy.’
The son was a chip off the old block, both in terms of his bullet-headed build and his proclivity for carving second smiles into people’s faces. What he lacked, though, was his father’s innate instinct for survival – which some called dumb luck – but which I put down to a form of primeval intelligence.
‘You think he’s involved?’
‘That’s not the point,’ said Suren. ‘The important thing is there’s nothing to say he isn’t.’
I wondered what had happened to the idealistic young idiot I’d taken under my wing almost five years earlier.
‘You want to stitch him up? Maybe we should get you a transfer to Vice? Or better still, Scotland Yard.’
He shook his head.
‘I’m not saying we charge him, we just threaten to. Rather, we threaten his father that we’re going to charge him.’
I began to see what he was driving at.
‘You want to arrest Vinay Singh and then tell his old man we’re going to ship his backside off to the Andamans, unless Singh pater calls a halt to this war with the Muslims?’
He grinned. ‘Why not?’
Why not? I could have told him that it was unethical to arrest an innocent man in order to put pressure on his family. I could have told him that no fair court in the land would convict him without evidence. And I could have told him that casting aside his principles to go down this road just once would make it harder to resist in the future. But of course I didn’t tell him any of that because there was no point. The truth was that the system of justice we administered in this country wasn’t particularly concerned with ethics, or with the innocence of a man if he were brown and his accusers were white, and as for the mortgaging of Suren’s immortal soul, well, I could hardly counsel against that, seeing as the deeds to mine had been sold, or at the very least mislaid, long ago.
‘Why not indeed,’ I said.
And that is what we proceeded to do. Suren arrested the bastard soon after, dragging him screaming from his bed and his woman, and out into the streets with enough brouhaha to ensure his old man would know about it by the time young Vinay had managed to get his trousers on. And then we’d waited, a good twenty-four hours, leaving Vinay to sweat in a cell and his father to stew, wondering what we were doing to his boy.
We’d finally contacted him, sent him a message through one of the young street lads he used to ferry drugs, and set up the meeting in Gola-katta Gullee. Suren and I would explain to Singh the elder that the best way to end this rather unfortunate situation would be for him to draw a line under his little war with the Muslims, and then we might see our way clear to letting his son out of the clink with his looks and his teeth intact.
It was all going swimmingly until Suren failed to show.
‘Where the hell is he, this Banerjee fucker?’
Uddam Singh, his face pockmarked like a pineapple and prickled with sweat, picked at his teeth with a wooden splinter. He wasn’t the sort to appreciate delays, even when caused by members of the Imperial Police Force, though that was possibly because he had a fair number of them on his payroll.
‘He’ll be here,’ I’d said, but after twenty minutes, that assurance had started to ring hollow.
Singh had registered his disapproval with a nod of his head which had summoned a couple of thugs who pinned me to a wall while he took a blade to my throat.
‘You are playing games with me, Wyndham sahib? You think I won’t kill a gora officer?’
I’d felt steel caress my jugular, and while I could have done with a shave, Singh’s record hardly marked him out as the most diligent of barbers.
‘You do and you’ll never see your son alive again.’
The old man had relented, which was decent of him, and pulled the blade back half an inch. That was the thing about Indians. Their children were their weakness. All of them, even the homicidal crime bosses it seemed, doted on their offspring like mother hens fussing over their chicks. Rumour had it that fathers even went as far as to embrace their offspring, which, from a British point of view, was frankly rather alarming.
‘Two hours,’ Singh had said. ‘Get him here, or there will be trouble.’
I’d straightened my shirt, cursed Suren under my breath and set off to look for him.
An hour of searching from Lal Bazar to Cosipore threw up precious little, and in the end I’d headed back to the digs we shared in Premchand Boral Street, in the hope that the boy had either returned home or at least left me a note there. Alas, he’d done neither and I found myself pouring a whisky and walking out onto the balcony in the hope that a drink might provide, if not inspiration, then at least some insight. Sadly neither was forthcoming, so I cursed Suren, then I cursed Uddam Singh, and finally, I cursed Mr Gandhi.
That might have sounded harsh, but the way I figured it, the Mahatma had a lot to answer for. This vision of India, peace-loving and tolerant, which he’d sold and which millions had bought into, had in the space of months, turned to dust, hatred and communal bloodshed.
In the gentlemen’s clubs, cricket grounds and other bastions of British power, men crowed that he’d lost his nerve. Others opined that the natives were always bound to fail in the face of British resolve. What was certain was that after a year of his general strike and the supreme sacrifice from his followers, the Mahatma, in a puff of holy smoke, had called the whole thing off and disappeared back to his ashram to feed his goats. He claimed it was in penance at the deaths of some twenty-odd policemen at the hands of a pro-independence mob in some flyblown village somewhere in the United Provinces, but to many it felt like a surrender. The Mahatma went on a fast for his part in stirring passions that had led to such violence, and the viceroy and the men at Government House applauded his decision, waited a few weeks, then promptly arrested him on charges of sedition and packed him off to prison for a nice six-year stretch.
Since then, and without Gandhi to hold things together, the independence movement had collapsed into a morass of infighting and mutual recrimination. It hadn’t been helped by the calling of elections – not national elections – we weren’t that stupid – but elections to municipal councils – elections which were now only weeks away.
The prospect of those elections had split the Congress Party and begun to reopen the wounds which Indians had always inflicted upon themselves. The pressures which had simmered beneath the surface: the tensions between Hindus and Muslims; between upper and lower castes; between landowners and peasants – all now bubbled to the fore, and we of course were quick to exploit them. After all, you didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Not if you were British.
The press began to paint the Congress as the party of the Hindus, and Muslims began deserting it in droves. Then came the religious riots, in towns and cities up and down the country. We, for our part, gave it a name: communalism, which was a nice, polite term for the indiscriminate butchery of people who happened to worship a different god.
As for Calcutta, if there was trouble to be had, you could bet your last rupee that the city’s denizens would be among the first to get involved, taking up arms even against neighbours whom they’d lived beside for generations. The violence between the Hindu and Muslim gangs felt like a precursor to something bigger, and unless we put Uddam Singh back in his box, things could soon spiral.
And so it was that I was standing on the balcony, nursing a whisky sometime after midnight, when the constable cycled up, came to my door and passed me a note informing me that Suren had been arrested on a charge of murder.