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A subinspector, a junior officer, came out of an office where at least three typewriters were resounding, and this young, officious policeman spoke aggressively to Dr. Daruwalla … something to the effect that “spoiling” the Doberman puppy would make it untrainable for police business, something about not treating a future attack dog as a pet. Whenever anyone spoke Hindi this abruptly to the doctor, Farrokh felt frozen by his lack of fluency in the language.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Daruwalla said in English.
“No, don’t you be sorry!” someone suddenly shouted. It was Deputy Commissioner Patel; he’d popped out of his office onto the balcony, where he stood clutching Farrokh’s written statement in his hands. “Go on—play with the puppy all you want to!” the deputy commissioner shouted.
The junior policeman realized his error and quickly apologized to Dr. Daruwalla. “I’m sorry, saar,” he said. But before the subinspector could slip back into his office and the safe din of the typewriters, he was barked at by Detective Patel, too.
“You should be sorry—speaking to my witness!” the deputy commissioner yelled.
So I am a “witness,” Farrokh realized. He’d made a small fortune satirizing the police; now he knew he was in utter ignorance of even a matter as trivial as the pecking order among policemen.
“Go on—play with the puppy!” Patel repeated to the doctor, and so Farrokh once more turned his attention to the Doberman. Since the little dog had just dropped a surprisingly large turd on the newspaper floor of its cage, Dr. Daruwalla’s attention was momentarily attracted to the turd. That was when he saw that the newspaper was today’s edition of The Times of India, and that the Doberman’s turd had fallen on the review of Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence. It was a bad review, of such a hostile nature that its surliness seemed enhanced by the smell of dog shit.
The turd prevented all but a partial reading of the review, which was just as well; Farrokh was angered enough. There was even a gratuitous swipe taken at Dhar’s perceived weight problem. The reviewer asserted that Inspector Dhar sported too protrusive a beer belly to justify the film studio’s claim that Dhar was the Charles Bronson of Bombay.
By the nearby flutter of pages, Dr. Daruwalla realized that the deputy commissioner had finished reading the doctor’s statement. The detective also stood close enough to the puppy’s cage to observe what Farrokh had been reading; Detective Patel was the one who had put the newspaper there.
“I’m afraid it’s not a very good review,” the deputy commissioner observed.
“They never are,” Farrokh said. He followed Patel back to his office. Dr. Daruwalla could feel that the detective wasn’t altogether pleased by the doctor’s written report.
“Sit down,” Detective Patel said, but when the doctor moved to the chair he’d sat in before, the detective caught his arm and steered him around the desk. “No, no—you sit where I usually sit!” And so Farrokh seated himself in the deputy commissioner’s chair. It was higher than the doctor’s previous seat; the photographs of the murdered prostitutes were easier to see, or else harder to ignore. The doctor remembered the day at Chowpatty Beach when little John D. had been so frightened by the festival mob, by all the elephant heads being carried into the sea. “They’re drowning the elephants!” the child had cried. “Now the elephants will be angry!”
In his written statement, Farrokh had said that he believed the hateful phone calls about his father’s assassination had been from Rahul; after all, it was the voice of a woman trying to sound like a man, and this might suit whatever voice Rahul had ended up with. Twenty years ago, Rahul’s voice had been a work-in-progress; it had been sexually undecided. But although Detective Patel found this speculation interesting, the detective was disturbed by Dr. Daruwalla’s conclusion: that Rahul had been old Lowji’s assassin. This was too imaginative—it was too big a leap. This was the kind of conjecture that marred the doctor’s written report and made it, in the deputy commissioner’s opinion, “amateurish.”
“Your father was blown up by professionals,” D.C.P. Patel informed Farrokh. “I was still an inspector at the Colaba Station—only the duty officer. The Tardeo Police Station answered that call. I wasn’t allowed at the scene of the crime, and then the investigation was turned over to the government. But I know for a fact that Lowji Daruwalla was exploded by a team. For a while, I heard that they thought the head mali might have been involved.”
“The Duckworth Club gardener?” cried Dr. Daruwalla; he’d always disliked the head mali, without knowing why.
“There was a different head mali then … you will remember,” the detective said.
“Oh,” Farrokh said. He was feeling more and more amateurish by the minute.
“Anyway, Rahul is possibly the one making the phone calls—that’s as good a guess as any,” Patel said. “But he’s no car-bomb expert.”
The doctor sat dismally still, looking at the photographic history of the murdered women. “But why would Rahul hate me—or Dhar?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.
“That is the question you don’t answer, or even ask, in your written statement,” said D.C.P. Patel. “Why, indeed?”
Thus were both men left with this unanswered question—Dr. Daruwalla as he took, a taxi uptown to meet Martin Mills, and Detective Patel as he reclaimed his desk chair. There the deputy commissioner once more faced the winking elephants on the slack bellies of the brutalized women.
No Motive
The deputy commissioner reflected that the mystery of Rahul’s hatred was probably unsolvable. There would be no end to the conjecture on this subject, which would remain unsatisfactorily answered, probably forever. The matter of what motivated Rahul’s hatred would remain
incomplete. What was truly implausible in all the Inspector Dhar films was that all the murderers’ motives were plainly established; the reasons for this or that hatred, which would lead to this or that violence, were always clear. Detective Patel regretted that Rahul Rai wasn’t in a movie.
In addition to Dr. Daruwalla’s written statement, the detective had secured a letter from the doctor, for it hadn’t escaped Patel’s attention that Dr. Daruwalla was guest chairman of the Membership Committee at the Duckworth Club. On behalf of Deputy Commissioner Patel, the Duckworth Club was requested to release the names of its new members—“new” as of the last 20 years. The deputy commissioner sent a subinspector to the club with the letter of requisition; the subinspector was instructed not to leave the Duckworth Club without the list of names. Detective Patel doubted that he would need to peruse the names of all 6,000 members; with any luck, a recent membership to a relative of the late Promila Rai would be easy to spot. It was hard for the deputy commissioner to contain himself while he waited for the subinspector to bring him the list.
At his desk, Detective Patel sat among the dust motes that danced in the movement of the ceiling fan, which was silent not because it was truly noiseless, but because the constant orchestra of the secretaries’ typewriters concealed the fan’s faint whirs and ticks. At first, the deputy commissioner had been enthusiastic about the information he’d received from Dr. Daruwalla. The detective had never been this close to Rahul; now he thought it was inevitable that the killer would be apprehended—an arrest seemed imminent. Yet Detective Patel couldn’t bring himself to share his enthusiasm with his wife; he would hate to see her disappointed if there remained something inconclusive. There was always something inconclusive, the detective knew.
“But why would Rahul hate me—or Dhar?” Dr. Daruwalla had asked. To the deputy commissioner, this question had been a typical inanity from the creator of Inspector Dhar; even so, the detective—the real detective—had encouraged the doctor to keep asking himself that same inane question.
Detective Patel had lived with the photographs for too long; that little elephant with its cocky tusk and its mischievous eyes had gotten to him, not to mention those murdered women with their unresponsive stomachs. There would never be a satisfactory motive for such hatred, the deputy commissioner believed. Rahul’s real crime was that he didn’t have sufficient justification for his actions. Something about Rahul would remain uncaptured; the horror about murders like his was that they were never sufficiently motivated. And so it seemed to Detective Patel that his wife was destined to be disappointed; he wouldn’t call her because he didn’t want to get her hopes up. As he might have guessed, Nancy called him.
“No, sweetie,” the detective said.
From the adjacent office, the sound of typing ceased; then, from the next office, the typing also stopped—and so on, all along the balcony.
