Noon (12 page)

Vijay Singh did a brisk inspection of the property. He was followed by a young handsome constable whose beauty was marred, as if part of the grotesque quality of the day, by a dense patch of
warts, maybe fifty, at the exact point where the jaw met the neck.

After his cursory inspection, Vijay Singh confirmed that the theft was an inside job. ‘The man knew exactly where he was going. An outside man wouldn’t have had the balls to do this.
One of your own men is eating from your hand while driving a knife into you.’

‘Do you see many thefts like this?’ I asked.

We stood outside the front door. In the cobbled area beyond, Singh’s white Gypsy, full of women police officers in khaki salwar kurtas, waited.

‘Yes, but never in a farmhouse. This is the first in a farmhouse.’

‘Really, how come?’

‘Because they’re normally very well guarded. A farmhouse,’ he said, evoking their reputation as places of vice and luxury, ‘is like your temple. It should be completely
private. Even the police shouldn’t be allowed in. You never know what might be happening in a farmhouse.’

I nodded, vaguely registering the suggestiveness of his tone.

He misunderstood my expression and it brought a smile of complicity to his face.

‘You need to
revive
your security, Rehan saab,’ he said, climbing into his Gypsy, ‘you need to
revive
your security. Someone from within is giving you the
knife.’

With this, he drove away, leaving Surinder Sharma to begin the first of the drawing-room trials. Once he had gone, Sharma become emboldened.

‘Are you a Kashmiri, sir?’ he asked with overfamiliarity, introducing some new regional prejudice into the mix, even though I, for being English-speaking and privileged, was in an
important sense, as with the law, above these caste-, region- and faith-based judgements.

‘No, Punjabi. Why?’

‘Just from your dress,’ he smiled, pointing at my white salwar kameez.

‘It’s worn in Punjab too,’ I said firmly.

We sat down in the drawing room. Robin handed me a file containing the identification documents of the staff at Steeple Hall. No sooner had I started flipping through it than I felt an
unexpected pang. It came from being made aware of human details – like Dheeraj’s birth date, 1st of June, 1983, so twenty-two a few weeks ago; Narender the electrician’s
birthplace in the hill town of Almora, which I had visited as a child; and Santosh’s residence, described as ‘at Needou the Untouchable’s, behind the petrol pump’ –
which one, even after a lifetime of employing people in India, never discovered about them. Servants didn’t have birthdays or zodiac signs; their age and the places they had lived and grown
up in didn’t matter. But now, shown these documents for the first time, I thought I could see in Dheeraj’s passport picture the excitement of its purpose, the anticipation of life in
the big city; I was struck by the grand Hindu names from the epics, like that of Kalyan’s mother, Draupadi Devi, still alive in temple-going India, but forgotten and degraded in Farmhouse
Delhi; and perhaps most alarmingly of all, Time, with its special ravages on servants: Kalyan, whose age I might have put at thirty-five, was, in fact, born in 1978, just five years before me.

In Jat’s hands these documents revealed a variety of regional and caste-related knowledge, which acted like evidence itself. He took the sheets and separated them into two suspect camps,
the Garhwal camp from the hills of Uttarakhand, which included Kalyan, Dheeraj and Narender, and the Delhi/Bihar camp which,
led by Santosh, included the rest.

Kalyan was the first in.

Robin and I sat on one sofa, the police on two straight-backed armchairs with a table and vase containing tuberoses between them. Sharma led the inquiry.

Taking in his entire figure at once, Sharma said, ‘Kalyan, why are your legs shaking?’

Kalyan looked down at them as if they were somebody else’s legs. ‘No, sir, they’re not.’

Sharma reached forward and fingered the fabric of Kalyan’s pale-blue trousers.

‘Never mind,’ he said after a pause, and smiled. ‘I thought they were. I might have been mistaken. How long have you been working here?’

‘It must be three and a half years, sir.’

‘Three and a half years. What do you earn?’

‘Four and a half thousand.’

‘Four half thousand, but you wanted more?’

It took a moment for Kalyan to gauge his meaning.

‘No, no . . .’ he sputtered.

Sharma and Jat smiled at each other. They had a surprise for him. Sharma fingered the cuff of his rolled-up shirt while Jat spoke.

‘You told us you knew no one in the area?’ Jat said.

‘I don’t,’ Kalyan replied and gulped noisily.

‘But what about Dinesh?’

Kalyan’s face lost all colour.

Speaking among themselves, one of the policemen said to the other, ‘Have you searched his quarters?’

‘Yes, yes, I even spoke to his wife.’

‘Haan, so tell us, Kalyan?’ Sharma said, picking up where Jat had left off. ‘When did your friendship with Dinesh begin?’

Kalyan, recovering himself, said, ‘He’s just a guy I sometimes meet. There’s no friendship.’

‘But he’s also from Pauri Garhwal, isn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ Kalyan replied.

Unable to contain myself, I said, ‘From the same village?’

‘No, no,’ Kalyan replied, looking at me, ‘not the same village. I met him here for the first time.’

‘How far away?’ Sharma said, cautioning me to be quiet.

‘Fifteen kilometres or so.’

‘So not too far,’ Sharma stressed. He had, after fingering Kalyan’s shirt, worked his way into the pockets of his trousers. He now removed from them, a mobile phone, a packet
of chewing tobacco and a soft black leather wallet, which fell open to reveal a picture of his son in the red truck my mother had given him. The probing cruelty with which these personal articles
were revealed was, as with the details of his life, at once humanizing and degrading.

Sharma’s hands now worked their way up Kalyan’s shirt, one finger digging into a small hole on the front.

‘How did you get this?’ Sharma said.

‘Tore it on the wall?’ Jat pressed.

Kalyan, seeming almost to laugh from nerves, said, ‘No, sir. It’s been there for ever.’

‘What about these creases on your shirt? Were these the same clothes you were wearing when you discovered the laptops?’

The two questions had been positioned in such a way that Kalyan had to pick his way out of their implications.

‘I’m wearing what I was wearing last night,’ he said at last.

‘I see,’ Sharma said, ‘and were you wearing your trousers up to your nipples?’

‘Sorry?’

‘How did you get these bloody creases, you fool?’ Jat barked.

Sharma gestured for calm with the gentle fanning of his folder.

‘Kalyan, do you drink?’

Kalyan paused, and seeming to make a calculation, said, ‘Sir, yes. Why lie? I do.’

‘Beer or spirits?’

‘Both.’

‘Cards?’

‘No.’

‘Do you drink alone or with someone?’

‘Alone.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘How much?’

‘Three or four times a week?’

This surprised me; I didn’t think of him as a drinking man. And without forming any considered judgement, the police’s morality made an impression on me.

‘Did you drink the night of the theft?’

Now there was a notable silence and an audible gulp. ‘Yes,’ Kalyan replied.

‘What? Whisky?’

‘No, sir, rum.’

‘Why rum?’ Sharma asked with genuine interest.

‘It’s cheaper, sir, and readily available at the BSF canteen.’

The BSF was the Border Security Force; they had a base opposite our house.

‘So, Kalyan,’ Sharma said, ‘you drank in front of your family.’

‘No, not in front of them. I put the peg into a steel glass and downed it with my dinner.’

‘Downed it with your dinner,’ Sharma repeated, blandly adding, ‘and came back to take the safe. Bastard.’

It was clear from their method of parroting insignificant details, the deliberate changes in the tone and their studied mixture of boredom and cruelty that they had had training. But they were
finished with Kalyan. This was a preliminary investigation, just a way to flush out conflicting stories and spread panic among the confederates.

Sati was in next. He was calm and aloof throughout. He stood in the middle of the room, his large paunch on display and his prominent lips half-open as if in contempt. He recounted with ease the
previous night’s closing up. If the police became too familiar, now enquiring into his drinking habits, now asking how he fitted the safe into his night bag, he would pause and look at them
with adult disdain. ‘It’s not him,’ Sharma said at last. And it wasn’t; I was embarrassed for him even to be questioned; he’d been with us eight years. But before
walking out, he left us with a detail. His night bag was full because on the way to work he had bought mangoes for his son. When he was leaving at night it occurred to him that perhaps
Kalyan’s children would want a few. He took three or four out, put them in a cloth with ice and both the men walked over to the quarter where Kalyan’s family had just arrived, after
their ten-hour bus journey from the hills. And it was these details completing the picture of Kalyan’s evening, of rum in a steel glass and children eating mangoes, the light and noise of a
television in the background, that made it impossible for me to think of him as the thief.

But everyone had their details. Santosh, standing before us in a tight striped T-shirt and flared jeans, had his.

‘Where do you live?’

‘At Needou the Untouchable’s.’

‘The Untouchable!’ Jat said. ‘We can’t write that. Just write Needou.’

‘How long have you been with madam?’

‘Since childhood,’ Santosh replied.

This was blatantly untrue.

‘You’ve been with her since childhood?’ the police asked, and looked over at me.

I shook my head.

‘Not with her,’ Santosh replied, ‘but on the property. I was born here and worked for the previous owners.’

‘Ah!’ Jat said. ‘You mean to say you were given as part of the dowry.’

Everyone chortled.

Jat, suddenly serious, said, ‘How’s that girl you’ve been fucking? You know the one I saw you with.’

Santosh looked at him with a puzzled smile, dimples appearing in his cheeks. He tried shrugging off the question as if it were the lewd joke of a friend.

‘Sir, what girl? I’ve just got married.’

Robin confirmed that this was true. He had been married only the month before. And this to me, as with the description of Kalyan with his family the previous night, was like proof of his
innocence. But the police were unmoved.

‘So? When’s that ever stopped anyone?’ Jat said. ‘And your friend,’ he added now somewhat lamely, ‘didn’t I see you with him on the day there was a fire
in Bijwasan?’

Santosh, now bolder, smiled with open disregard at Jat.

The police ran through their standard morality test: Drink? Beer, and that too very occasionally. Cards? Never. Parties? Never. Hookers? Sir, I’m newly married.

‘And do you know Dinesh?’

‘Only from the times when he would come to see Kalyan?’

‘Oh. You were present on these occasions?’

‘I was not present. I just knew about them.’

‘How did you know about them without being present?’

‘Just. You know, sir. One finds out. From the guards and people like that?’

Robin: ‘Why were the guards telling you if Kalyan had guests or not?’

Sharma fanned his folder at Robin to say ‘allow me’.

‘And when was the most recent of these occasions?’

‘Just a few months ago. It was a party to celebrate Dheeraj’s wedding.’

‘A party? Was there alcohol?’

‘Yes, there was.’

‘Beer or spirits?’

‘Both.’

‘Girls?’

‘No, sir.’

‘And were you present? Or did you know about it from the guards?’

‘I just came in and out.’

‘Had a glass of beer perhaps?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Are you listening, Mr Rehan, to what happens in your house when you’re not here.’

I was not only listening; I was full of indignation. But at what exactly? That a few grown men had had a celebration in their quarters that involved alcohol? Where was the harm in that? What had
they done that I wouldn’t do myself? Once more, I came up against my undeclared expectations of servitude, which was really an expectation of a kind of subdued humanity. Just as servants
didn’t have birthdays, so I was now surprised they had parties. Not surprised; offended.

Santosh was sent out and another gardener came in. He was small and very dark with a bird-like frame. His eyes were wide with alarm and sunken, his hair thick and springy. He wore his dirty
beige shirt out and removed his smoothly worn Bata slippers before stepping onto the carpet. His feet were hard and calloused.

‘What are your duties?’ Surinder Sharma asked.

‘I am one of the gardeners.’

‘Do you ever come inside the house?’

‘Yes, to water the plants.’

‘Do you go to all the rooms in the house?’

‘Yes,’ the gardener replied.

‘And how many are there?’ Surinder Sharma asked cryptically.

‘This, I don’t know,’ the man replied, as if already being asked to consider an impropriety.

‘You go to all the rooms in the house, but you don’t know how many there are? Very strange. What is in the rooms?’

‘Sir, I just water the plants. I don’t know.’

‘Yes, but you have eyes, don’t you? If I come into this room, for instance, I can see that there are sofas, some tables, a few silver frames. I don’t need anybody to tell
me.’

The gardener made no reply. But I could tell he was not lying. His way of looking was not like Sharma’s. I had seen him at his work. He went from station to station with his pale-brown
pipe in coils around his shoulder. I believed him when he said he saw nothing else, that he hadn’t even considered how many rooms there were in the house. His business was the plants and he
went about it blindly; it was all he knew. And this was another shade of the crime: it was like a crime of looking, of seeing more than one’s position permitted. I could see also that what I
had thought was morality in the police’s questioning was not in fact morality. They were trying to establish, though perhaps unaware of it, the audacity of the suspect’s way of looking:
what he was capable of seeing, and by extension, of coveting. And they were right to ask about gambling, alcohol and women. Because though these things were not all, they gave an indication of what
a man had seen in his life and the values he had given up to see them. The police wanted to know what temptations each man had succumbed to, and the desires that still lay buried in him. Then, by
divining the secrets of this heart that had dared to desire beyond its station, they would ferret out the thief that resided in it.