Murder at the Happy Home for the Aged Read online

  ‘I will have only a small helping of salad. I wish I had not had that jalebi last night. I must learn to zip my mouth shut,’ muttered Maria as the taste of the sweet, hot jalebi drenched in syrup rose in her mouth. She hoped Francis would notice her new hairstyle. Joni, her friend who owned the only beauty parlour in Trionim, had said yesterday that it made her look much younger.

  ‘You don’t look a day over forty,’ said Joni.

  ‘What do you mean? I’m thirty-nine. I just turned thirty-nine six months ago.’ Maria was horrified.

  ‘I meant thirty-five,’ Joni had quickly said and sold her some new night cream that had just come in from Mumbai. It was very expensive but she claimed ‘all the famous movie stars use it’.

  Maria had put the cream on at night before she went to sleep and noticed that her skin did look much better in the morning. Francis would certainly notice. Maria looked out of the window at the flowering magnolia and pictured herself walking down the aisle of the church, with all of Trionim admiring her wedding dress. I will be quite slim by then, she thought as she picked up a piece of buttered toast. She immediately put it back down on the plate.

  Leela watched Maria eat and continued to clean the dining table. She knew Maria was desperately in love with Francis, who she didn’t consider a reliable sort of man. Francis worked in Dubai and only came to Goa for a few days a month to visit his old mother. He was very tall and good-looking, with brown eyes that were forever laughing. He was always flirting, flashing his white teeth like a leopard. Leela had seen him driving around with another girl in the village but she had not told Maria.

  Leela much preferred Bobby Menezes from the Menezes Spice Farm, who adored Maria but was ignored by her. Bobby would keep giving her herbs and spices as gifts, and Leela often hinted to him that he should bring Maria flowers but he never did. Bobby was very timid and shy, though they said at the farm that he was a very clever botanist and knew the names of all the plants in the garden. Leela had once heard him explain how the trees in the forest behind their house were very rare. ‘Goa is a land with many unusual trees. We should protect them,’ he had said, but Leela could see that Maria was not listening to him.

  Leela picked up the broom and came out into the veranda. There was no one about. Yuri the drunk painter must be sleeping; Cyrilo the happy gardener must be digging in the vegetable patch; Prema the witch must be praying; Rosie the beauty queen must be brushing her hair a hundred times and Deven the headmaster must be scolding the boys in the church school. Leela had given all five residents of the Happy Home nicknames (though she never said them out loud) but she called Maria ‘Miss Maria’. When she grew up she wanted to be as smart as Miss Maria and she also wanted to be a beautician. Ever since she had peered into the brand-new beauty parlour that Maria’s friend Joni had opened next to the tailor’s shop in Trionim, she knew that was what she wanted to do. She wanted to cut the hair on women’s heads, put rollers to curl their locks, polish their nails, and put magical stuff on their faces to make them more beautiful. She had not told anyone about her dream. They would just laugh at her, and in any case, no one would care to listen except perhaps Miss Maria. Leela began to hum softly as she swept the dead leaves away.

  Then she heard the scream. It sounded strange, as if the person was trying to scream for the first time ever.

  Maria heard it at the same time and came running out of the kitchen.

  ‘Who was that? Prema? Or was it Rosie? I hope she hasn’t had a fall. Leela, can you go and check?’ said Maria.

  ‘I think it came from outside, Miss. Someone screamed in the garden,’ said Leela, and they both rushed out. There was no one, and the green shadows of dawn still lingered in the dark corners of the garden as if reluctant to meet the sunlight. The breeze was making the leaves rustle and sing. Maria and Leela looked around, waiting by the door. A small boy was perched on the topmost branch of the old mango tree, his thin hand pointing towards the well located some distance away. He hid his face in the branches.

  Maria quickly walked towards the well. Leela stayed near the door. She knew something terrible was lurking inside it. Ever since she was a child she had always avoided going near the well. Once, long ago, she had peered into the green, moss-covered water and seen a dead parakeet, its green feathers almost the same colour as the moss surrounding the well. Its stiff eyelids were covered in black slime. She held her breath as she watched Maria lean over the stone wall encircling the well.

  Maria clenched her fists and forced herself to look in. A strange, putrid smell hit her face as if the water was full of dead, rotting things. At first she could not see anything except a dark hole and then, slowly, her eyes managed to focus. The water, dark and full of algae, seemed like a circle of oil with a few white feathers floating on its shimmering surface. There was nothing else. She looked up at the mango tree again and called out to the boy. But he seemed to have jumped over the wall and vanished. Maria was about to turn away when she saw the shoes under the tree. They were polished brown shoes with black laces. A pair of black socks lay discarded near them, looking like two dead rats.

  The shadows moved and something made her look up again. That was when she saw the body. It was hanging from the branch right above her head. For a moment she was too shocked to do anything. She opened her mouth to scream but her head began to spin, and she collapsed on the ground.

  Leela had seen the body too and she ran towards Maria screaming with terror. She tried to pick Maria up. ‘Miss Maria . . . open your eyes. Oh! God protect us from evil,’ she muttered. She forced herself not to look up but she knew the bloated face with its protruding tongue was watching them. The birds in the garden suddenly came alive and began to call as if they wanted to announce the tragic death to the world.

  * * *

  Inspector Chand yawned as he pushed his chair back and leaned his head back. There was a patch of oil on the wall and his head nestled right in the centre of it as if it had been measured out for him. He yawned again, snapped his fingers and looked out of the window. The green paddy fields shimmered quietly in the sunlight in front of his window and a few egrets hopped about. He had recently learnt that these long-legged white birds were called egrets. A young English boy he had briefly arrested last week had told him this as they sat waiting for his bail. The boy had been found smoking marijuana right outside the police station, blowing puffs of aromatic smoke into Constable Robert’s face, and Inspector Chand had had no choice but to arrest him. There were so many foreigners roaming about smoking ‘ganja’, wearing happy, calm expressions on their faces.

  They had informed the British consulate and the boy had been released after a few hours, but while he was around he had taught the inspector a number of new English words, many of them so rude that Inspector Chand had blushed on learning their meanings. He was not sure he would ever use them but it was good to be aware of their existence. He wished all his arrests could be so informative. Inspector Chand liked nothing better than to improve his English and learn new things about the world. He read all the time, mostly comic books he had borrowed from his nieces and nephews; there was not much for a policeman to do in Trionim.

  People obeyed rules, rarely fought, and nobody stole anything since everyone in the village knew everyone else. If you stole something you could never use it since the entire village would know at once. You would have to hide the stolen item forever, like those wealthy collectors who stole antiques from museums and kept them hidden in secret places. He had read about this in the newspaper just last week. Inspector Chand stared at the paddy fields and wished he had become a journalist. He was too smart to be only a policeman. He was thirty-five years old and there was not much hope for a promotion in this place.

  He had not even found a wife yet, though his mother had been looking for a long time. In fact, everyone in Trionim was looking for a wife for him, and several fathers had approached his mother. They had all been rejected quite rudely by her except those willing to pay a huge dowry. She lik
ed the ugly rich girls with ugly rich fathers while he liked the pretty ones with no financial scope. They could never agree, and now there were six new grey hairs on his head and two on his chest. Sometimes he woke up at night, panic-stricken, thinking, What if I never find a wife? He had liked one pretty girl with a BA degree but her father was only giving one lakh rupees in cash, which his mother rejected right away. He had tried several times to stand up to her and tell her that asking for dowry was illegal; she should remember that he was a police officer and his job was to uphold the law and not break it for his own gain. ‘You are a police officer; that is why I am asking for two lakh. If you had been a schoolteacher or a railway guard, I would have been happy with fifty thousand rupees. There is a fixed price for every profession and all fathers of marriageable girls know it.’

  ‘We are educated people, not ignorant villagers. And there is no dowry system in Goa. Only Hindus in the north take and give dowry, Ma,’ he had said.

  ‘It is a perfectly good system and many families have benefited from it for hundreds of years. My father was educated entirely by my mother’s dowry. We should embrace what is useful to us in our religion,’ she had announced firmly.

  Inspector Chand shut his eyes and thought about Maria. Her beautiful, dusky cheeks, pouting mouth and soft eyes appeared before his eyes. If only she had been a Hindu girl she would have been perfect for both his mother and him. She was not rich but she did own a big house with a lot of land, and she was hard-working too. Her figure was so generous, unlike girls from the city who were as flat-chested as men. Her nose was a bit odd, upturned like a small boy’s, but that was a tiny blemish in a girl with a very pretty face and stunning figure. As if this was not enough, she was a really good cook and managed that Tip Top Cafe so well. But Maria was a Christian. His mother had said that she would hang herself from the ceiling fan if he ever married a girl who was not a Hindu and of the same caste as them. ‘My ghost will haunt you forever if you marry a Christian girl and take my grandchildren to church every Sunday,’ she warned, pointing to the fan whenever he tried to talk to her about Maria. He had never dared to tell Maria about his feelings but he was quite certain she would marry him. He was a policeman, after all, and she would get a very good pension when he died.

  The door of the police station creaked open hesitantly and Constable Robert peered in. If there had been a wrestling competition in Goa, Constable Robert would have won it hands down. He was six feet four inches tall, and his shoulders were so wide that he often had to enter rooms sideways. His hands were like a giant’s paws and his feet so large that special shoes had to be ordered for him from Mumbai. No other policeman in India had such huge feet. Constable Robert looked like an ancient, mythical giant who had been reborn in Goa but you could not find a more mild-mannered and soft-spoken man than him. It was fortunate that not many people knew about his timid nature because one look at him and the few unruly elements in Trionim fled at once.

  ‘Sir,’ squeaked Constable Robert in his shrill, girlish voice. God had given him a giant’s body but a woman’s voice.

  ‘Yes? What is it, Robert?’ asked Inspector Chand, trying to look busy though he had only been cleaning his fingernails with a paper knife. He always liked to give the impression of being a busy man whenever someone walked into his room. ‘Look busy, son, and people will respect you,’ his late father had often said to him while pacing up and down in front of the house with a preoccupied air.

  ‘A boy has come from the Happy Home to say a man has been found dead there,’ said Constable Robert breathlessly, twisting a lock of hair like a small, frightened boy. Both he and the inspector had a morbid fear of dead bodies, and fortunately not many had come their way in Trionim.

  ‘Which one has gone? They are all so old except for Miss Maria. I knew one of them would pop off soon. Just as well. There are too many of them for her to look after. Was it the drunken artist or old Cyrilo? He was a decent chap. Gave me a huge cabbage once. Tell me, which one?’ asked Inspector Chand, quite pleased to have a chance to visit the Happy Home and meet Maria again. He would call Eric the undertaker and ask him to take the body away.

  ‘Not any of them. The old people are all alive, sir. Some new dead person. Hanging from the tree,’ whispered Robert, looking out of the window anxiously.

  ‘Which tree?’ asked Inspector Chand, too shocked to say anything else.

  ‘Don’t know, sir. Maybe mango or banyan. The boy just wrote on a piece of paper “dead man hanging from tree” and ran away,’ muttered Constable Robert, keeping his head low so that it would not hit the ceiling fan and also to hide his eyes, twitching with fear, from Inspector Chand.

  ‘We should go and find out at once. Get the jeep out. I will ring up Eric and tell him to take the dead body to the morgue,’ said Inspector Chand, bile rising in his mouth as he uttered the words ‘dead body’.

  ‘But the Happy Home is so close, sir. Just behind the police station. We can cut across the rice fields,’ said Constable Robert, scratching his head.

  ‘Robert, get the jeep. It is always best for the police to arrive as quickly as they can. We are here to serve the people, remember. We don’t want to stroll down like tourists, do we?’ said Inspector Chand, hoping Maria would be there to see him arrive in a flurry of dust in his new police jeep like policemen in TV shows.

  It took them a long time to get to the Happy Home since the road circling the village had been dug up in various places and they had to turn around and take a longer route. When they finally arrived, there was a huge crowd outside and their jeep had to stop quite far away, much to Inspector Chand’s disappointment. He forced himself to walk calmly and prayed he would not throw up when he saw the body. He was certain Constable Robert would.

  Maria had warned Leela not to say anything to the other residents but they already knew because Rosie had seen the body from her window. Cyrilo, who was working in the back garden, had rushed over at once. He told Prema not to go outside but she was already running towards the gate, screaming her head off: ‘Evil . . . evil has struck us!’

  Many more people from the village had gathered and begun wailing as if they had known the dead man. ‘Who is it? Do you know him?’ asked Maria. ‘No, no one we know. A stranger, but it’s so sad,’ sobbed a woman whom Maria had never seen before. The noise woke Yuri and he came out half-dressed, his eyes swollen and red. ‘Looks like a close relative of the corpse,’ hissed Prema. ‘Deven is missing all the fun. Serves him right,’ she said, and pushed her way through the crowd.

  Rosie watched from the other end of the garden; she did not like crowds. She could see the dead man’s legs dangling from the branches but could not see his face. Just as well. It will not be a pretty sight. If he had to kill himself, why not walk into the sea? Much cleaner and better for himself and those who’ll have to clean up after him. The sea would have just taken him into her arms and not a trace, not a finger or a toe, would ever be found again. The sharks would see to that. Hanging from a tree was such a stupid way to die. Trust a man to make a nuisance of himself even after death. People were so selfish; fortunately, both her husbands had died quietly in their sleep. She had organized beautiful funerals for them with music and flowers.

  Rosie tried to peer through the shrubs. She saw Inspector Chand strutting about, pointing his baton at the tree. Now, if he were a good Christian boy, Maria could have married him. He is not as good-looking as Francis or as clever as Bobby from the spice farm but he is a police officer and a man who wears a uniform is always the best suitor. Both of Rosie’s husbands had been civilians but she had always made sure they wore smart blazers with an emblem stamped on the pockets as well as a tie.

  ‘Look, they are bringing the body down,’ whispered Leela as a cry went up. The crowd moved forward and fell back as the body hit the ground. ‘Move back, move back!’ cried Constable Robert, waving a stick about as his giant figure pushed through the crowd. For a brief moment there was a silence so deep that Leela could hear the cicad
as chattering. Suddenly someone yelled. ‘Oh my god! Look!’

  ‘He is . . . it is a woman!’

  ‘The dead man is a woman!’

  CHAPTER TWO

  GOA, VERDANT GREEN, fragrant and gold, rose from the sea when an arrow was shot from a high mountain peak by Lord Parashurama, the sixth avatar of Vishnu, when he was looking for land on which to build a sacred space for meditation. He stood on the highest peak, his eyes searching for the perfect spot, and then swiftly sent forth an arrow that landed on the sea. Obeying Parashurama’s command the sea moved back dutifully and offered a beautiful stretch of land studded with pearls and conches and with sand as pure as gold dust. Thus, Goa came into being.

  Geologists have concluded that Goa rose up from the seabed as a result of violent tectonic activity around 10,000 BCE. But it is easier to believe that a heavenly being was responsible for creating Goa, adorning it with endless golden beaches fringed with coconut palms, wide rivers and several natural harbours glowing like half-moons as they kiss the blue-grey waters of the Arabian Sea. The Mauryans included Goa in their empire and so did many other kingdoms down the ages. The rulers of Vizianagaram used Goa as a safe landing place for the priceless horses that Arab traders brought by ship. Many fierce battles were fought over Goa through the centuries and it changed hands constantly. There was an abundance of fish in the rivers, the soil was rich and fertile, and paddy grew effortlessly. There were coconut trees all around. What more could they want?

  The Portuguese arrived in 1510 and Afonso de Albuquerque laid siege around Goa, finally defeating the sultan of Bijapur and claiming the land for Christ and his country. By the end of the sixteenth century, Goa became famous as ‘Golden Goa’ or the ‘Lisbon of the East’. Grand churches and beautiful mansions were built along the Mandovi river, and elegant boats carried equally elegantly dressed men and women. The cashew, guava, chickoo, aubergines, tomatoes and chillies they brought with them became a part of Goan life. Each year, ships carried away precious cargo of pepper and other spices, and fabulous stories about the magical land of Golden Goa spread all over Europe.