The Case of the Missing Servant

Twenty-Two

The passenger manifest showed that whoever purchased Mary Murmu's train ticket on August 22 had opted for a seat in a non-air-conditioned three-tier carriage. The train from Jaipur to Ranchi had been a "local" and had stopped at every station along its 740-mile, 30-hour journey east across the subcontinent.

During his student days, Puri had always traveled in the cheapest trains and carriages out of financial necessity. He looked back on the experience with nostalgia. The hypnotic swaying of the train, the camaraderie between passengers, all of them poor, had been wonderful.

But he knew how unforgiving the conditions could be. And now, as he traveled in the comfort of a first-class carriage on a fast train (top speed 87 miles per hour) on the same route Mary had taken, he pictured her-weak, with nothing of her own to eat or drink, possibly fading in and out of consciousness-crammed into the corner of a bottom wooden bunk with the rough feet of the occupants on the bunk above dangling centimeters from her face.

Her carriage would have been heaving with laborers and rustics, who routinely clambered aboard slow-moving local trains between stations, occupying every inch of space. Mary would have been forced to share her bunk with up to six or seven other passengers. With no one to guard her place while she went to the toilet, she might well have found herself squeezed onto the floor.

When the train stopped during the day and the sun hammered down on the roof, it must have been like the inside of a tandoor oven. The circular metal fans bolted to the ceiling would have offered little respite. During the inordinate number of stops, there would have been no letup from the footfall of hawkers selling everything from biscuits and hot tea to safety pins and rat poison. Nor from the perpetual stench of "night soil," which, on all Indian trains, went straight down the toilet chutes onto the tracks.

Had someone taken pity on Mary and helped her? Perhaps a sympathetic mother who had given the poor girl some water and a little something to eat from her family's tiffin.

Had she had made it to Ranchi alive?

The odds were not good. And without Mary, or at least irrefutable evidence that she had not ended up dead and mutilated on the side of Jaipur's Ajmer Road, Puri was going to have an extremely hard time proving what had happened on the night of August 22. A train booking with her name on the roster would not be enough to prove Ajay Kasliwal's innocence.

The detective watched the striking Rajasthani landscape slip past his window. The sun was setting over an intricate patchwork of small fields-the dry, baked earth rutted with grooves made by ox-drawn plows in expectation of the monsoon rains.

His eyes followed the progress of a herd of black goats and a stick-wielding boy along a well-worn pathway that led to a clutch of simple homesteads. In front of one stood a big black water buffalo chewing slowly and deliberately. Nearby, on a charpoy, sat an old man with a brilliant white moustache and a bright red turban watching the train go by.

Puri reached Ranchi early the next morning. He had phoned ahead to arrange transportation and exited the station to find a driver who hailed from Jadugoda waiting for him.

Together they set off in a four-wheel-drive Toyota toward the mines.

"Sir, it's not a good idea to make this journey at night," the driver told Puri once they had left behind the economically depressed city, which embodied little of the new India. "Nowadays the roads are extremely dangerous."

"Why's that?" asked Puri.

"Naxals," replied the driver.

Much of Jharkhand, along with great swaths of eastern and central India-the "Red Corridor"-were controlled by Naxals, short for Naxalites, or Maoist guerrillas. Their cause was ostensibly a just one: to fight against oppressive landlords and functionaries of the state, who had tricked or forced hundreds of thousands of people off their land. But like so many proxy rebel movements around the world, they had become the scourge of the people they claimed to represent. Naxal comrades levied taxes on villagers, robbed them of their crops and indoctrinated their children.

They also killed hundreds of people each year.

"Just last week they murdered a truck driver who refused to pay their road tax," explained the driver. "They burned him inside his cab. Last night they murdered an MLA in Ranchi. They put a mine under his car and BOOM!"

Puri had read about the murder in that morning's paper. The MLA was the third to die in as many months. Little wonder the prime minister had recently called the Naxalites the single biggest internal security threat faced by India.

Puri asked the driver whether he thought the Maoist movement would continue to grow in popularity.

"Of course, sir," he said.

"Why?"

"Because now the poor can see what the rich have-expensive cars, expensive houses. So they feel cheated."

Yes, the genie has been let out of the bottle, Puri thought. God help us.

Despite all the potholes, which caused his head to jerk up and down and occasionally bounce off the window, Puri soon fell fast asleep.

He awoke when they were half an hour from Jadugoda town.

The landscape to his left was Martian: flat, rocky and arid. The only earthly features were the occasional thick, knotty trees-remnants of a great, primordial jungle, which had been cleared to grow monsoon-dependent rice. To the right rose hills with sharp escarpments. Here and there, the upholstery of patchy scrub was punctured by outcrops of rock and scarred by gullies made during heavy downpours.

The uranium mines lay deep beneath these hills. A barbed-wire fence encircled them. Large yellow Uranium Corporation of India signs warned trespassers to keep out.

Puri's vehicle was soon stuck behind a convoy of dump trucks. Each was carrying loads of ordinary-looking grey rock chips that, according to the driver, had been extracted from the mines and were being taken to the processing center a few miles away. There, the rock would be crushed, and after being put through a chemical process, the uranium extracted in the form of "Yellowcake."

"Sir, did you know our Yellowcake was used to make India's nuclear bomb?" said the driver, grinning with pride at his country's achievement and his native Jharkhand's contribution.

"Do you know anyone who works in the mines?" asked the detective.

"Sir, only tribal people do the manual labor underground," he replied.

There was a subtext to his answer: the driver was a caste Hindu and although he had grown up in the area, he did not mix with the tribals, or Adivasis, the indigenous aboriginals who traditionally dwelled in the jungle.

"I had a cousin who used to drive these trucks. He did the job for twelve years," said the driver cheerily. "But then he had to stop."

"What happened to him?" asked Puri.

"Sir, he got sick. The company doctors diagnosed him with TB and gave him some medicine. But he did not improve and then he died."

"What was his age?"

"Forty-two."

The driver fell silent for a moment and then, with a confused frown, said, "Sir, the antimining campaign-wallahs say the mines make people sick. They say people should not work there. But what else are people to do? There are no jobs. Driving a truck pays good money. If one or two people get sick, well…"

They were still stuck behind the dump trucks, unable to pass because of oncoming traffic.

A headwind had started blowing dust from uranium rocks in their direction. Some of it settled on the windscreen. Although the windows were rolled up, Puri automatic ally buried his mouth and nose in the crook of his arm.

The driver laughed when he noticed the detective's reaction.

"Sir, don't worry, you can't get sick from a little dust! See?" He rolled down his window and took a deep breath. "There's nothing wrong with me at all!"

Jadugoda was virtually indistinguishable from tens of thousands of other little roadside settlements to be found across the length and breadth of India, thought Puri as they stopped at the main intersection to ask for directions.

A collection of rickety wooden stalls stood along the sides of the road that led in and out of the town. There were several paan-bidi stands stocked with fresh lime leaves and foil pouches of tobacco, which hung like party streamers. There was a vegetable stand, a fruit stand with heaps of watermelons, and a butcher, whose hunks of meat hung on hooks smothered by flies.

A fishmonger sat cross-legged on a plastic tarpaulin on the ground scaling a fresh river fish using a big knife that he held expertly between his toes. Next to him crouched an old woman selling meswak sticks for cleaning teeth.

The scene would not have been complete without a big neem tree by the intersection, which provided welcome shade for the local dogs and loafers who spent their days watching people and vehicles coming and going.

There was, however, one unusual feature about the place. In the middle of the intersection stood a statue of three Adivasis armed with bows and arrows-a memorial to local heroes who fought, albeit with primitive weapons, against the British.

In Chanakya's day, too, the tribals had offered fierce resistance to the Maurya Empire, staging raids on passing caravans from their jungle fastness. But since the formation of the Indian republic, these people had been exploited and disenfranchised, Puri reflected sadly. To their misfortune, their ancestral lands lay atop some of the largest mineral deposits in the world, and in the past fifty years, most of these had been requisitioned for pitiful compensation. Hundreds of thousands of Adivasis had been made homeless and nowadays, all across India, scratched a living digging ditches, carrying bricks and cleaning toilets.

As they sat at the very bottom of the social scale, there was a good deal of prejudice against them.

"The tribal people are not so friendly," complained the driver as they pulled away from the dusty intersection. "And they drink too much!"

A couple of minutes later they passed a small township built in the 1960s by the Uranium Corporation of India to house its full-time employees and their families, nearly all of whom hailed from elsewhere in India. Within its spruce perimeter there was a school, a hospital, blocks of flats and green playing fields.

Beyond the township, the driver took a left down a rocky lane and pulled up outside an ordinary, one-story concrete building. Had it not been for the cross above the entrance, Puri would never have guessed it was the local church.

The detective got out of the Land Cruiser and knocked on the metal doors. They were soon opened by a middle-aged man who could easily have passed for an Australian Aboriginal. He was dressed in a shirt, jeans and a baseball cap, and around his neck hung a small gold crucifix. His eyelids blinked in slow motion, giving the impression that he was half asleep, and his mouth broadened into a wide, childlike grin.

"Good afternoon," he said, welcomingly, as if it had been some time since he'd had any company. His pronunciation mimicked the way English is spoken on "Teach Yourself" audiocassettes.

"Good afternoon, just I'm looking for the priest," said Puri.

"I'm Father Peter," replied the old man. "It's a pleasure to meet you."

"Father, my name is Jonathan Abraham. I run a charity based in Delhi that offers assistance to Adivasi Christian families," lied the detective.

The business card he handed the priest named him as "Country Director" of the nongovernment organization that he often used as a cover: "South Asians in Need"-SAIN. The card listed two Delhi numbers-both of which, if dialed, would be answered by an extremely helpful lady by the name of Mrs. Kaur, who would offer to send out an information pack about the charity.

The priest studied the card and his eyelids blinked in slow motion again.

"Ooh!" he said like an excited child. "Are you from Delhi?"

"Yes, Father, my office is there."

Father Peter grinned again. He had a dazzling set of white, perfectly straight teeth, which might have belonged to an American high school student. "Then you are the answer to my prayers!" he said, inviting the detective inside.

Puri had reasoned that if he went around asking people in the local Christian Adivasi community about Mary's whereabouts, they would react with suspicion and he would be stonewalled. Furthermore, he didn't want Mary-assuming she was still alive-coming to know that an outsider was looking for her.

Ideally, he wanted to engineer a situation in which she would feel comfortable divulging the truth about what had happened to her in Jaipur. To do so, he would need to gain her trust.

Fortunately, the cover of a Christian was an easy one to pull off. Puri had attended a Delhi convent school as a young boy and the nuns had drummed the Lord's Prayer into him. The other sacraments of the Nazarene guru were also easily observed. (Pretending to be, say, a Muslim presented considerably more pitfalls. Mastering the Islamic prayers alone took hours and hours of practice.)

Christian priests, too, were easier to handle than the representatives of other faiths. They were generally nowhere near as greedy as Hindu pundits, who always had their hands out.

The only thing Father Peter really wanted was a new cross for his church. The existing one, which was made of wood, was being eaten by termites. "Now it is 'holy' in more ways than one," he joked as they drove back into town.

Over lunch-Puri took him to the dhaba on the main road, which was the only place to eat in Jadugoda-the detective promised to send him a new one from Delhi.

By the time they had finished their meal and sat cleaning out the bits of mutton gristle from the gaps in their teeth with toothpicks, he had learned that there were only forty families in the Jadugoda area who had converted to Christianity (far greater numbers were to be found around Ranchi). The rest still clung to their animist religion.

Of those forty families, seven or eight bore the tribal name Murmu.

Puri told Father Peter that he wanted to visit their homes because the Government of India's Ministry of Development had identified the Murmus as the poorest and he wanted to assess their needs.

The priest accepted this explanation without question and offered to act as the detective's guide.

To reach the first house, they drove back to the main junction in the center of the town and turned left along the narrow road. It passed through the hills, which were cordoned with high fences. More yellow "No Trespassing" signs appeared and the driver explained that the uranium processing center was off behind the line of trees on their left.

"See the pipe coming out of the jungle? That carries the waste from the plant-a sludge of toxic chemicals and crushed rock," chimed in Father Peter.

Puri followed the path of the pipe with his eyes. It traveled under the road, crossed the narrow valley and climbed up the side of an enormous, 150-foot-high man-made dam that had been constructed across the mouth of the adjacent valley.

"The waste is dumped there, is it?" he asked.

"Behind the dam lies what they call the 'tailing pond,'" said Father Peter. "No one is allowed there. But when I was a boy, we used to go up the hill and throw stones into the mud." He grinned impishly at the memory of his childhood escapade. "It's very thick. Sometimes when it is very hot, the surface is hard and cows stray across it and get sucked down."

Their destination was a hamlet that lay in the shadow of the dam.

By now, it was early afternoon and the sun was at its hottest. The little sandy lanes that ran between the mud and straw compounds were empty save for a few chickens.

Father Peter knocked on the first door and an Adivasi man with coal black skin, wearing a sarong and a baseball cap, answered. He was obviously delighted to see the priest and after a good deal more grinning and pleasantries, the detective was invited inside.

A large well-swept courtyard lay at the center of the house. On one side, rows of cowpats were drying in the sun; on the other grew a banana tree, holding up a direct-to-home satellite receiver dish.

Their host arranged a couple of chairs in the shade provided by the overhanging thatch roof and soon his daughter served them glasses of cold water and a packet of cream-filled biscuits.

The daughter was too young to be Mary and Puri quickly established that she had no sisters. But he went through the motions of taking out his notebook and inquiring about the family's financial circumstances.

The couple had had two other children, both boys. The elder was working down in the mines, where he loaded rocks onto a conveyor belt all day without any protective gloves or breathing apparatus; the other son had been born physically and mentally handicapped and died at the age of seven.

"What problems did they face?" Puri asked them.

The father made a face as if he did not know where to begin. Usually, he said, his words translated for the detective by Father Peter, he worked alongside his son in the mines. But he had been feeling weak for the past few months and had not been able to work. Because of this the family's income had been halved. Like seven hundred million other Indians who were yet to see the benefits of the country's economic growth, they were surviving on less than two dollars a day. To make matters worse, the water in their well had been poisoned by the chemicals from the tailing pond.

"They can no longer drink it," explained Father Peter, almost jovially. "But they still use it for washing."

"Have you thought about moving? It is dangerous to be here, no?" Puri asked them.

"This is the only land we have left," said the father. "The jungle is mostly gone and we have nowhere else to go."

Puri made a show of writing down more details and, before heading off to meet the next family, gave the father a thousand rupees. He also tried to impress upon him that it was hazardous to use the water from the well. But the man shrugged, resigned to his lot.

It was not until the following afternoon, when the detective and Father Peter arrived at the eighth and final home on the list, that Puri's search came to an end.

The house, which was much smaller than the others they had visited, stood next to a sal tree. In its shade a teenage girl and a young woman squatted playing a checkerslike game called Bagha-Chall, or Tigers and Goats. The board was a grid drawn in the sand; for game pieces they were using twenty-four little pebbles. In shape and color, they were indistinguishable from the ones Puri had found on the windowsill of the servant quarters in Raj Kasliwal Bhavan.

"Hello, Mary, God bless you," said Father Peter in Santhal, the local language, greeting them both with a big, friendly smile.

"Hello, Father." Mary, who was wearing an unusually large number of bangles on her wrists, beamed.

She stood up, brushing away the hair from her eyes with her left hand, and a few of the bangles slid down her arm toward her elbow, revealing a scar on her wrist.

"Is your father at home?" asked Father Peter.

"He's inside, sleeping," she said.

"Well, go and wake him, child. This gentleman has come all the way from Delhi and would like to speak with him."

Mary shot Puri a suspicious look.

"What does he want?" she asked.

"He's here to help us."

"How?"

"Now, don't ask so many questions, my child. Run along and bring your father," said the priest.

Puri watched Mary walk over to the house. She was an attractive young woman, slim, with dark brown eyes and long black hair tied in a ponytail. Her features, dusky and distinctly Adivasi, were strikingly similar to those of the murder victim dumped on Jaipur's Ajmer Road. "That poor girl has suffered a lot," the priest told Puri when she was out of earshot.

"What happened to her?"

"I hate to think. She won't tell anyone, not even her mother. Like so many of our young women, she went to the city to find work. When she came back a few months later, she could hardly walk. It's taken her weeks to recover, God protect her."

"How did she get here?"

"The Lord was watching over her. She collapsed at Ranchi station, but a member of our community took her to a hospital."

Soon, Puri was sitting on a mat on the floor inside the house with Mary's father, Jacob, asking questions about the family's circumstances. Mary sat in the doorway listening to their conversation and sifting through a pot of lentils. All the while she watched Puri suspiciously.

Like most of the men Puri had interviewed in the past 24 hours, Jacob worked in the mines, which provided just enough money to feed the family. But he was getting old and complained that he had no son to help him. Last year, after the family's rice crop failed, he had sent his eldest daughter to the city to work. For a while, she sent money home.

"But she became sick and returned," said Jacob. "Now I'm afraid my health will give out and we will all starve."

Puri made a note of this and then explained to Jacob that he ran a charity willing to provide the family with assistance. He made a show of taking out a calculator and punching in some figures and then announced that because they had no sons, they were eligible for an immediate payment of four thousand rupees. This was more than Jacob made in a month, and the sight of so much cash left him speechless. He took the wad from Puri with tears in his eyes and said to Father Peter, "It is a miracle!"

Puri accepted the family's invitation to stay for dinner and, before the sun went down, managed to snap a surreptitious picture of Mary with his mobile phone.

After dark, by the light of a paraffin lantern, they sat eating a simple meal of fish, rice and daal. The food, which was prepared by Mary and her mother, was delicious. Throughout the meal, Puri complimented the cooking and ate seconds and thirds.

Afterward, as he, Jacob, Father Peter and the driver, who had joined them, shared the priest's pipe, he made his host an offer:

"I would very much like to give your daughter a job working in my house in Delhi," he said. "The salary would be four thousand rupees a month and she would stay in the servant quarters."

Mary looked horrified by this suggestion. "No, Father, I won't go!" she protested immediately.

Puri ignored her protest, adding, "Of course, I can understand why you would be concerned about her safety. You are welcome to bring her there yourself. I will provide the train tickets and we can all travel together. Perhaps Father Peter would like to come as well and we can find him a new cross for his church?"

The detective knew it was too good an offer for Jacob to turn down. It was the answer to all his prayers.

Sure enough, despite Mary's misgivings, her father soon agreed to Puri's terms. They would leave for Delhi the next day.