Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 9, September 2006

Death of a Mentor by Susan Oleksiw

Anita Ray scuffed along in her rubber sandals. The long shadow that overlapped hers kept a steady ten feet behind her until she came to the police substation, its door and windows still shuttered in the early morning light. Sunrise was sudden in South India and was only minutes away. Anita swung around. An old man jumped away from her, his hands grabbing the ends of his dirty lungi.

“Is it you, Panditji?” Anita threw back her shoulders and stuck her hands on her hips. Her camera bounced against her chest, her plans for an early morning shoot forgotten. “You have been following me since I left Hotel Delite a half hour ago. What are you up to? Didn’t you know it was me?”

“Of course I knew,” the old man said, shrugging. “But doubt is in my mind. Your aunt hates me. I am worrying she has turned you against me.”

“You are a foolish old man!” Anita grinned at him. “Come, let us find a place for coffee.” They walked until they came to a tea stall just opening up. “You must have a serious problem, Panditji, if you have come all this way to see me.”

“I am going to prison for murder! Murder, memsahib, murder!”

Anita could hardly believe her ears. Panditji had always been the most inoffensive of palm readers — he was so frail and brittle looking that a dissatisfied customer could just pick him up and snap him in two if he or she felt like it. “Murder? Really, Panditji, if the police meant to arrest you for murder, would they have let you travel all the way down here to see me?”

His stubbly chin trembled as he began to speak. “A man has died and it is because of me. You are the only one who can help.”

“Tell me what has happened.”

The tale was bizarre. Panditji and his wife lived in a tiny house in the hills with their daughter and her husband. Life was hard, but they were happy for the most part. At the time of the marriage, Panditji ignored the custom of his caste of handing over property to his daughter and, instead, held onto everything. After a while, the resentment grew.

“I am not a trusting old man,” he explained.

“If you had reservations about this son-in-law,” Anita said, “why did you let the marriage go forward?”

Panditji shrugged. “My daughter wants this — a love match — but I have seen his hand. He is a man who wants his freedom.”

“Go on,” Anita said.

The son-in-law began to complain that Panditji kept all the money everyone in the family earned, and that was the same as stealing from them. Then one day Panditji’s wife complained that pieces of her jewelry were missing. Panditji inspected the jewelry box and went straight to his son-in-law and accused him, but the boy insisted he had not stolen anything. Unable to bully him into a confession, Panditji sought out K.R.S. Elavan, a mantrakara, a magician known for his effective spells. Elavan came to the house, had every member of the household eat holy ashes, and then waited. No one confessed. He performed a second puja. Still nothing happened. “I had to send him away, and everyone in the village laughed at me, except my wife, who is still angry; she wants her jewelry back.” He snorted and lifted his dirty cotton shirt to better scratch at skin hanging off him like worn tree bark.

“Where does murder come into all this?”

“Late at night,” Panditji said, taking her question literally. “Everyone was angry then. My wife refused to make a meal, my daughter and her husband quarreled, and he went off to the arrack shop.”

“Have you grandchildren?” Anita asked

He shook his head. “Not a one.”

“Oh dear,” Anita said. “Well, go on with your story.”

“That night, when my son-in-law returned and went to spread out his mat to sleep in the corner with my daughter, I told him he would not get away with this. He said nothing, barely looking at me, like a drunken man.”

“Was he drunk?”

“I guess so. He often goes to the arrack shop in the evening, but my daughter, Reki, is so besotted with him she never complains. When he comes home late, she gives him a meal or a massage or a song. Not a word of reproach from her.”

“Is that what happened the night he died?”

He nodded. “She gave him a massage, and I went back to sleep.”

“Then what happened?”

“In the middle of the night I awoke to hear my daughter sobbing and wailing. I thought the spell had worked, but no, she was wailing over her husband’s dead body. The neighbors called the police when they heard all the noise.” He began to scratch his belly.

“You know, Auntie Meena, I think it is time I took a little vacation to some other parts of Kerala,” Anita said as she walked with her older relative toward the hotel. Her aunt had been negotiating with a taxi driver for a group of guests and was preoccupied with rupees per meter and the costs of petrol. “I’ll be gone for several days.”

“Several days?” Meena stopped by the steps leading into the hotel compound. “But—”

“Just think, Auntie. Three days without me offending the guests, or messing up your office, like last time.” Meena blanched at the memory of Anita relocating guests to other hotels so she could open up the annex to a group of stranded nuns.

“Is there any chance you’ll be getting a job?” This is what Anita’s family forever hoped for — a legitimate job, one that did not involve the Hindu-American woman wandering around the country with only a camera and no sign of respectable occupation.

“I’m going to visit Panditji’s family.” Anita was about to ask her aunt if she remembered the old man, but the look on Meena’s face answered that question.

“He took my palm and told me I have a seera mark! Me, a seera mark! Am I a nervous person, Anita? I ask you! I am never nervous! Never!” Meena began to chew her left pinkie. “You!” She caught sight of Panditji and picked up a pebble and threw it at him.

“It is fate,” the old man whined.

“Do you think you know more than my astrologer?” Meena leaned over to glare at him.

“I think I know far less,” he said. “He is wise enough not to get stones thrown at him.” Pebbles flew at his legs.

Panditji sat limp and silent on the long ride up to the hill village of Arayanakkam, no matter how Anita tried to engage him in conversation. She was fond of the old man, and eager to tell him about her recent investigations. Certainly, there were few enough she could talk to about her bad habits, as her aunt called them. Sometimes, when she began to wonder about an unexplained death, she found herself rubbing her thumb over the middle digit of her left index finger, the Devi sign that had convinced Panditji that she would find answers that eluded others.

Panditji’s house had fared no better than he had. The compound wall was streaked with dirt and grime from past monsoons, dead banana trees were piled up alongside one wall, the gate hung precariously on its hinges, and a dog sprawled in the noonday heat, too beaten down to growl or even lift its head.

“You can hear them from here,” Panditji said. Anita listened. Sure enough, she heard the wails of a young woman and the cries and voices of others, the clattering of pots and the general racket of a house in disarray. The old man showed no intention of entering. Anita dragged him inside.

The midday meal was an awkward affair. Anita and Panditji sat in the middle of a small eating room, banana leaves on the ground in front of them, while Chennamma, Panditji’s wife, and her daughter, Reki, and a maidservant came in and out with various dishes. Chennamma hovered in the doorway, alternately telling Reki to stop sniveling and telling Anita about the neighbors and how hard her life had become with an old man whose reputation for incisive palm-readings was failing. When the meal was at an end for everyone, Anita found Chennamma on the back veranda directing the maidservant in her duties.

“A useless girl, she is,” Chennamma said. “Like all the young ones. I teach her and beat her and still she gets it all wrong. What is an old woman to do?” The maidservant gave her a smug smile.

“Tell me about your jewelry,” Anita said, leading the woman away from the veranda.

“Heh? My jewelry? I was robbed. What more is there to know?”

“Gold bangles? Gold necklace? The usual things?”

“Exactly so. Nothing special, just some of my gold bangles. I have little left after all these years. Didn’t I pawn a bangle last year to put on a new roof? And now I have even less.”

Anita nodded. She could see Chennamma in line in a bank along with other women, young and old, watching their necklaces and bangles being weighed in return for house loans, school loans, car loans, and other purposes. Anita could usually pick out the women there to pawn jewelry; they were the best dressed among all the customers, as though their appearance could counteract the taint of the transaction. “Can you describe the pieces that were stolen?”

“The standard bangle from the goldsmith,” she said.

“So whoever has it can sell it or keep it, and you’ll never be able to recognize it,” Anita said.

“Yes, sadly so. Probably whoever it is has already sold it,” she said with a dramatic sigh.

“Tell me about your daughter and her marriage,” Anita said, switching topics. “Your son-in-law’s name was Moonu?”

“What is there to tell? He had a degree. If his family had money he could have gone on to college, but still, he had a degree from the district school.”

“What sort of job did he have?”

“He worked in a timber yard, in the office. Assistant to the second bookkeeper.” Chennamma was very proud of this title and repeated it twice for Anita’s benefit.

“That is a good job,” Anita said, watching the other woman preen. “And good pay too.”

Chennamma’s hands fell still, and she glanced over her shoulder. “Let us walk over here.” She led the way to the back of the yard, where no compound wall separated the family grounds from the tangled woods going up the hill.

“Your husband has told me there was dissension in the family,” Anita said.

“My son-in-law was a good man, he was. Moonu only wanted to have his home with my daughter, but he was not happy with how my husband treated him. Panditji went to Moonu’s employer and told him to give him the paycheck, not to Moonu. Panditji is a respected man in these parts,” she said, stopping to let that sink in. “So the yard owner said yes, he would do so. So every week Panditji goes to pick up the paycheck.”

“How did Moonu feel about this?” Anita asked.

Chennamma pulled a face. “The things they said to each other!”

“What about your daughter? Does she also have a job?”

“She sweeps at the doctor’s office, and there too Panditji collects her paycheck.” She sighed. “It is right that they contribute to the household. It was to be their house, not ours, but they did not like the way Panditji went about it.”

“Did Moonu threaten to do anything?”

Chennamma slapped her hands against her cheeks. “Oy, he accused Panditji of stealing his money! And my daughter! Her father is destroying her marriage, she says.”

Anita poked her head into the small room, but Reki, Panditji’s daughter and the new widow, was snoring softly. Although the family usually slept in the large front room, Reki had been allowed to set up a private room after her husband’s death, in part to keep her from startling the household with her sudden outbursts.

“Maybe later she will wake up and talk to you.”

Anita turned around at the sound of the maidservant’s voice. The woman was holding a shallow square basket of fresh vegetables just taken from the storeroom. “You are Poota, aren’t you? Have you worked here long?”

“I came as a little girl, when I was eight or nine. My mother lives in Tinnevelly, if she is still alive.”

“Don’t you know?”

Poota shrugged. “She sends me a card every year at Onam, and I send her one too. I don’t know from year to year, but I don’t care so much anymore.”

“Do you like working here?” Anita asked. Poota shrugged again. “Where do you sleep?”

“Outside the storeroom.” She nodded to a door standing ajar, where Anita could see a rolled mat leaning against the wall and a cloth bag hanging from a peg.

Anita wandered into the storeroom and looked over the items on the shelves; the pantry was well stocked, and reminded her of her grandmother’s storeroom when she was a little girl — full of bottles with strange-colored liquids and dried roots and other things.

“What’s this?” Anita asked.

“Chennamma’s chutney,” Poota said.

“And this?”

Poota peered at it. “Some of the oil mixture Reki uses for massage.”

“And this?” Anita pulled a bottle from the very far corner of the lowest shelf.

“Poison that is saved for animals that come in the dry season.” Poota studied her. “I think it is not enough to kill a person.”

Anita found the mantrakara tending a tapioca plot behind his small house. He moved bent over from plant to plant, and Anita followed along beside him, both silent, biding their time. All of a sudden he straightened up.

“I have heard about you. Panditji is very proud to know you, but,” he said, reaching out his arm to point at her, “you will not find a murderer here. The boy died because he was guilty! I know what I am saying. Guilty! The ashes never lie!” The speech was delivered with great passion and volume, but the mantrakara’s eyes told a different story. He was about Panditji’s age, but larger and far better fed, his round belly smooth from frequent oil baths.

“Aren’t the ashes supposed to make a guilty person confess?”

“Exactly what they do!”

“But Moonu didn’t confess; he died.”

The mantrakara waved away this objection and turned back to his tapioca plants. “The police have found nothing... nothing.”

“They’re not through looking,” Anita said. “Tell me exactly what you did and where you got the ashes.”

“The ashes are from the temple, from the supply they make every morning. I purchase what I need and take them.” The magician knelt over and scooped more dirt onto a mound.

“Did people know what you had purchased the ashes for?”

“I have many customers,” he said. “I don’t keep them secret but I don’t tell others either. I don’t know what they know.”

“Okay, so you have the ashes. Then what?”

“I go to Panditji’s house and prepare a puja. I recite the mantras for making a sinner confess. I recite the mantras over the family members, each one, and then I give them the ashes. I do this again.”

“Did you have any help there, at the house?”

“What sort of help would I want?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Did Panditji give you water for mixing the ashes? Did Reki help you mix the ashes? Did Chennamma offer you plates to use?”

He shook his head. “No one is helping me. I am giving the ashes with the mantras. No one is strong enough to confess.”

“Strong enough?”

“A preta can keep someone from confessing. It is well known. There must be a preta in the house making someone do evil.”

“Panditji has never mentioned any kind of ghost or spirit troubling his family,” Anita pointed out.

“Does he know everything?”

“He would know that,” Anita said.

“You know he is ruined. No one will come to him now. There is a murder in his house, and he cannot identify how it happened or who did it. Who will trust him now?”

During supper that evening Anita kept a close eye on the women cooking and serving the meal. She had not yet had a chance to speak with Reki, and Poota had grown sullen and moody, deflecting all of Anita’s questions about dinner on the night Moonu died.

The meal was modest — plain vadai soaked in yogurt along with some vegetables. As Anita sipped her chai later, she watched the other women cleaning up. Because the house was so small, the women were constantly bumping into each other while they worked, and no one could have added a poison to one person’s meal without others noticing. Anita took her cup and saucer into the kitchen and deposited them onto the stone counter. Outside the back door she could see a figure moving toward the house. It was Reki.

Anita waited for the young woman to return from the outside latrine. “I am so sorry about your husband’s death. You were only married two years, yes?”

“Barely two years.” She dropped her arms to her sides and stared sullenly at the floor, her face a mask of distress. “Not long enough.”

“And no children?”

She shook her head.

“Your father told me what a devoted wife you were,” Anita said, hoping for some reaction.

“I did everything a wife is to do.” She spoke with a dullness that Anita attributed to the shock of her husband’s death; but then, all of a sudden, she became animated. “Did I not tend to his pain? Did I not tell him stories and jokes when he was bored? Did I not make his favorite foods? Did I not come to him without calling?”

A breeze rustled the bushes near the compound wall, and the night grew cooler. “Were you happy living here? The two of you?”

“Where else would we live?”

“He was happy with his job?”

“It was a good job,” she said, leaning back against the counter. “Enough for us, the two of us.”

“It is how he died that confuses me most,” Anita said. “I don’t understand what happened. Tell me how it went.”

Reki crossed her arms over her waist, her worn, red-bordered white sari reflecting the moonlight, her eyes suspicious and dark. She pulled the end of the sari around her shoulders against the evening chill and let her gaze drift around the room. Panditji and her mother had settled on the front veranda and were engaged in one of their many bickerings; Poota was nowhere in sight.

“The mantrakara performed his puja, but no one was guilty of stealing someone else’s jewelry,” she said with a sneer, “so he had to leave. He was disgraced.”

“What happened after that?” Anita was taken with her defiance; it was so different from her histrionic display of sorrow earlier in the day.

“We had our supper — lentils and puris, very simple. And then we are sleeping. At midnight my husband whispers to me that he is unwell. And then he is dead.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes, madame detective, just like that!” She burst into tears and ran from the room.

The Ganesh Timber Works lay along a main road leading down to Trivandrum, next to a long, one-story building housing a number of new shops. Anita strolled up the hard-packed dirt road to the small, whitewashed office. It was early, and although workers were preparing to move huge tree trunks into the sawmill area, the office was closed. She kicked at a pile of wood chips and the air was filled with the fragrance of freshly cut wood.

“You are looking for someone?” A stocky man in a white shirt and white lungi greeted her from among the timber. “Office is not opening until ten o’clock.” Anita explained her business. He shook his head and scurried around the logs. “A terrible thing, yes, terrible.”

“What sort of employee was he?”

“The ordinary sort. Reliable, steady, eager to advance, but not too bright. Young but able.”

“Good enough,” Anita said. “Did he ever say he had trouble at home?”

The man stifled a laugh. “We should all have such trouble at home.”

“Meaning what?”

“Such a devoted wife he had. She came here a few times, just to bring him a meal or a sweater when it was cold, or to clean his office or help where she could.”

“I’ve heard she was devoted,” Anita said. He went on laughing. “Why is that so funny?”

“You are Panditji’s friend who is part American? I have a cousin in Chikagoo and he tells me the expressions of your people.”

“Such as?”

“Closing the barn door after the horse has run away.” He seemed to think this was hilarious and slapped his leg while he laughed.

“It’s an old expression, yes,” Anita replied.

“But you live in skyscrapers! You have no horses.” Suddenly he grew serious. “But that was Reki, I am thinking. She is closing the barn door but the horse is escaping.”

“That’s quite an accusation, if I’m understanding you correctly,” she said.

“There is a reason she has no child,” the man said in a near whisper. “His seed was worn out.” And he went on chuckling.

The man let Anita wander around the timber yard for more than an hour while he went about readying the office to open. Other employees drifted in, and after a few words of explanation, gave her a humorous welcoming smile and went about their duties. At the end of her visit, Anita had a very good idea of how the sawmill machinery worked and was maintained, how the logs were transported and managed, and how the finished wood was shipped out. It had never occurred to her before how a chair got to be a chair, but now she knew.

The village street was just waking up to the busyness of the day when Anita left the timber yard. A bus careened past her and lumbered around a corner, spitting dust along the road. A sari vendor spread stacks of saris across the covered floor of his small shop sitting high up on its plinth; from there he could chat with villagers passing by, calling the women to admire his wares. The bank manager lolled in the doorway, trying to stay cool until the power returned and started up the ceiling fan. He ushered Anita in and she pulled out her ATM card. Already bored, he was ready for a chat, and Anita was glad to accept a cup of tea and visit.

“We are looking and looking for you,” Reki said when Anita returned to the house. “We are thinking you have gone out without your breakfast. My father was very worried. Come!” She led the way to the eating room. Anita followed without comment and settled down to a late breakfast. She was too preoccupied with her morning discoveries to notice much around her. She could feel answers forming in her mind — her stomach had that tightness that always preceded the perception of truth, and with it, the confidence that she was right.

“I have wasted your time,” Panditji said, coming into the room. “You must go home. I will call for a car. Do not fret,” he said holding up a hand when she tried to speak. “I shall pay.”

“With what?” Anita said. “Your wife’s bangles?” She heard the gasp from the kitchen doorway.

“What are you saying?” Chennamma stood transfixed. “You know where my bangles are?”

“Your husband knows.” Anita waited for Panditji to deny the accusation, but of course he couldn’t. She looked down at her banana leaf, at the iddlies and special chutney that reminded her of the many times she had enjoyed breakfast with Panditji when she was a child. “Tell us, Panditji,” Anita said in a gentler tone.

“Yes, Papa, tell us.” Reki stood behind her mother. “You have the bangles yet you accused my husband. All your accusations and anger drove him away. Why?”

“You don’t know the truth,” Panditji said to Anita. “You only think you do.”

“I know enough.” Anita rose, folded up the banana leaf, and passed it to Poota. Anita waited until the servant had left the room, knowing even so that the other woman would listen at the door. “You stole the bangles for the obvious reasons. The bank manager told me you brought bangles in to pawn,” Anita said. “Just before Chennamma also brought in two bangles to pawn.”

“You stole my bangles?” Chennamma clasped her hands over her mouth and swayed.

“You have been pawning bangles without telling me?” Panditji said in surprise.

“Both of you looked at Chennamma’s pile of bangles and knew that there should have been more, but neither one of you told the other that you had pawned bangles secretly,” Anita said.

“But you accused Moonu!” Reki said, coming forward. “You almost throttled him.”

“If Moonu didn’t steal the bangles, why did he die after the mantrakara’s puja? What killed him?” Chennamma asked in a whisper.

“Not what. Who,” Anita said. She looked behind Chennamma, to Reki. Both parents followed her gaze.

“How can it be?” Chennamma grabbed her daughter and crushed her to her bosom. But Reki pushed her away.

“Is it true, child?” her father asked.

“You know it is,” she said. “You were right about him, Papa.”

Panditji sighed. “I predicted that he would complain of feeling suffocated,” he explained to Anita. “He had the mark of Kambu on his left hand, the little mark by the fingernail on his little finger; sure enough, he complained that he had no freedom, no home of his own. I told him he and Reki would have this house and my land as soon as Chennamma and I were old, but it was not enough. Not for him.”

“So when Chennamma found her bangles missing, you assumed it was Moonu getting ready to run away,” Anita said.

“I couldn’t get the mark of Kambu out of my head,” Panditji said.

“But you were right!” Reki said. “He meant to leave me! He had other women!” She burst into deep, painful sobs.

“And so you killed him,” Anita said. “I found the massage oil, Reki, and I have been to the timber yard and seen the small cans of carbon tetrachloride. It is used for degreasing equipment at the yard,” Anita explained to Panditji. “Mix it in with massage oil in high concentrations and anyone would succumb to coma and death. Did you get him drunk first?”

Reki looked frantically from her father to her mother.

“We can test the massage oil in the pantry, Reki, and on the body,” Anita said.

“He was always drinking,” Reki said. “He liked to sneak out when he thought no one would notice. Off to the arrack shop and his other women and then skulking back home. Did he not see how I cared for him?”

“The police will be here soon,” Anita told Panditji. “And they will not take you instead of your daughter.” Panditji slumped to the ground.

The tears streamed down Chennamma’s face as she stumbled after her daughter and the constable. Poota tried to bring her back to the house. When that failed, she stood with her on the path gently holding her while the old woman stared at the empty road where her daughter had been driven away. Panditji sat on the veranda, crying softly.

“You will have to tell her,” Anita said. “You both have many debts.” She wanted to lay her hand on his shoulder and say, Don’t worry, everything will work out. But that would be a lie. Things were going to get much worse. She took a deep breath and let her gaze wander over the compound and little house. Here she had learned to listen to her own instincts, to judge people for herself. Sitting beside Panditji as he read palms and analyzed his customers’ characters, she had discerned his gift and found her own. Here she had learned to be astute, wily, silent, compassionate. And here she would learn one more lesson.

“The bank will take it all, won’t they?” he said.

She nodded.

“It will not matter. My wife and I are the last of our family. I knew it would come to an end when no child was born at the end of their first year of marriage. I think Reki knew too. We will begin our wanderings, the end of our life.”

“I think this will be good-bye for us too,” Anita said, wishing it weren’t so.