The Case of the Missing Servant

Four

Puri woke the next morning to the sound of water dribbling into an empty bucket in the bathroom. This was his anomalous alarm, a signal that it was 6:30, the hour when Sector Four received its daily supply of water and each household filled up buckets, tanks and all manner of receptacles to carry them through the day.

Puri sat up and glanced over at the single bed next to his. It came as no surprise to find it empty. Hardly a day had gone by during the past twenty-six years when Rumpi had not risen at five. Even during the months when she was heavily pregnant with each of their three daughters, Puri's devoted wife had insisted on getting up at the crack of dawn to oversee the running of the house. No doubt she was downstairs now churning fresh butter for his double-roti. Or she was in the second bedroom rubbing mustard oil into her long, auburn hair.

The detective reached for the light switch, which, like the radio alarm and world clock, was fitted into the astonishingly shiny imitation-mahogany headboard. The side lamp did not come on, which prompted him to glance over at the electric mosquito repellent plugged into the far wall to see if its red light was glowing. It was off. Sector Four was experiencing more load shedding.

Muttering a curse, Puri reached for his flashlight, switched it on and slipped out of bed. His monogrammed slippers-"VP"-were lying next to each other on the floor where he had carefully positioned them the night before. He wriggled his feet inside their furry lining and reached for his silk dressing gown. His collection of fourteen Sandown caps were arranged on a shelf inside one of the fitted cupboards. He chose the tartan one, pulling it snug over his head. Then he surveyed himself in the mirror, gave the silk handkerchief protruding from the breast pocket of his dressing gown a tug and, pleased with what he saw, walked out into the hallway.

The beam of his flashlight fell on the marble floor, partially illuminating the large silver-plated Ganesh idol and the gilded legs of the hallway table, which supported a vase of plastic sunflowers. Puri walked to the top of the stairs, where the sound of giggling from the kitchen caused him to pause.

Listening intently, the detective was able to make out the voice of his new houseboy, Sweetu, who was in the kitchen joking around with Monica and Malika rather than attending to his morning duties. The detective couldn't quite make out what Sweetu was saying, so he crept over to the door of his private study. This was the one room of the house which no one, save Rumpi (who cleaned it every Friday), was allowed to enter. There were only two keys in existence: one hung on his key chain; the other was hidden in a secret compartment built into the shrine in the puja room.

Like his office, Puri's study was simply furnished. In one corner stood a fireproof safe containing his private papers, various important files, a selection of fake passports and IDs and his Last Will and Testament. The bottom half of the safe also contained 100,000 rupees in cash, some of his wife's gold and diamond jewelry (the rest she kept in a bank vault), and a loaded .32 IOF pistol-a copy of the .32 Colt Pistol made by the Indian Ordnance Factory.

Puri sat at his desk and pulled open one of the drawers. Inside lay a battery-operated receiver set to the frequency of the bug he had concealed in the kitchen. He switched it on, pushed the mono earpiece into his left ear, adjusted the volume and sat back in his chair to listen.

Rumpi frowned upon his practice of listening in on the servants, but Puri made it a policy to monitor all new recruits at home and at the office. He himself relied on servants as primary sources of intelligence and often planted his own operatives inside other people's households. As a man who fiercely guarded his privacy and had a number of dangerous enemies and unscrupulous competitors, he needed to be sure that his own staff were not spying on him or unwittingly passing on details about his private affairs to interested parties.

Furthermore, Puri was well aware of just how lazy servants could be. Village types like Sweetu were often under the illusion that city people did not work for a living, and saw no reason why they should behave any differently. Living in a modern house in comparative luxury could give them delusions of grandeur. The boy before Sweetu had had the audacity to seduce a part-time cleaner on Puri's bed. The detective had come home unannounced one afternoon when Rumpi was away visiting her sister and found them at it.

Puri spent ten minutes listening in on the conversation in the kitchen. The talk was mostly about the latest Shahrukh Khan film, a double-role. It all sounded harmless enough, as gossip went. But it was obvious that Sweetu was keeping the girls from their duties and shirking his own. The detective decided to put a stop to it and reprimand the boy. Switching off the receiver and locking the study door behind him, he walked to the top of the stairs.

"Sweetu!" he bellowed.

The sound of Sahib's voice brought the boy scuttling from the kitchen into the hallway below.

"Good morning, sir," he stammered, awkwardly,

"Why are you being idle?" demanded Puri in Hindi. "You are not employed to discuss Shah Rukh's double-roles!"

"Sir, I-"

"No argument. Where is my bed tea?"

"Sir, power cut-"

"Tell Malika to bring it to the roof. And," he added in English, "don't do chitter chatter!"

Puri headed upstairs, satisfied with the manner in which he had handled Sweetu. The boy was young, only fifteen, and an orphan. What he needed was discipline. But Puri was never one to abuse, exploit or treat his servants badly, as he had known so many other people to do. He believed in looking after the interests of all his employees, providing they were hardworking and loyal. In Sweetu's case, Puri had arranged for the boy to attend school two afternoons a week so that he would learn to read and write and acquire a skill. And in a few years' time, the detective would also help him find a suitable wife.

Had not Chanakya taught that it was the duty of the privileged to help the underprivileged?

Puri climbed the stairs and stepped out onto the flat roof of the house. The sun was climbing into what should have been a clear, azure sky. But as was so often the case these days, a brown pall of dust and pollution blanketed Delhi, smothering the city like some Vedic plague.

The family had hoped to escape the smog when they had moved to Gurgaon nine years earlier.

When Puri had bought his plot of land, it had lain many miles from the southern outskirts of the capital. It had taken more than two years to build his and Rumpi's dream house-a white, four-bedroom Spanish-style villa with orange-tiled awnings, which they'd furnished from top to bottom in Punjabi baroque.

On the roof, Puri had established a garden of potted plants, tending to them every morning at dawn.

In those days, the vistas in all directions had been breathtaking, the sun shimmering off mustard fields and casting long shadows over clutches of mud huts. Goatherds and their flocks wove along time-worn tracks that dissected the complex patchwork of land. Farmers drove oxen and wooden plows, kicking up dust in their wake. Barefoot women in bright reds and oranges walked from the hand pump to their homes, brimming brass pots balanced on their heads.

Away from the drone of Delhi traffic and the roar of jets making their approach into Indira Gandhi International Airport, Puri had been greeted by peacock calls and the laughter of boys washing at the nearby village pump. When the wind was right, he had also been treated to the smell of chapatis cooking over dung fires and the scent of jasmine, wafting over the exterior wall.

Little had Puri known that in building a new home in Gurgaon, he had become a trendsetter. His move from Punjabi Bagh coincided with the explosion of India's service industries in the wake of the liberalization of the economy. In the late 1990s, Gurgaon became Delhi's southern extension, and was made available for major "development." First, a few reflective glass buildings appeared along the main road to Rajasthan. Then, one by one, the local farmers sold up, and their little fields disappeared under the tracks of bulldozers and dump trucks.

In their place came Florida-style gated communities with names like Fantasy Island Estates. They boasted their own schools, medical facilities, shops, fitness centers and megamalls.

Concrete superstructures shot up like great splinters of bone forced from the body of the earth. Built by armies of sinewy laborers who crawled like ants along frames of bamboo scaffolding, these were the apartment blocks for the 24/7 call center and software development workforce. LUXURY IS A PLACE CALLED PARADISE and DISCOVER A VENETIAN PALACE LIFESTYLE read the plethora of billboards that invited India's newly affluent to share in the dream.

All this was built on the backs of India's "underprivileged classes," who were working for slave wages. They had arrived in Gurgaon in their tens of thousands from across the country. But neither the local authorities nor the private contractors provided them with housing, so most had built shacks on the building sites alongside the machinery and brick factories. Before long, shantytowns of corrugated iron and open sewers spread across an undeveloped noman's-land.

The Puris now found themselves living between five hundred homes built on a grid of streets with names like A3; and a slum with a population of laborers and carrion that was growing exponentially. To the north, the view was marred by towering pylons and, beyond them, a row of biosphere-like office blocks bristling with satellite dishes.

The smog, too, had caught up with them. The new four-lane highway to Delhi had encouraged more traffic, poisoning the air with diesel fumes. Legions of trucks stirred dust into the atmosphere.

These days, the detective found himself struggling to keep his beloved plants clean. Each morning, he came up onto the roof armed with a spray gun and gave each of them a bath, and each morning he found them coated in a new deposit of grime.

Puri had just got around to tending to his favorite ficus tree when Malika arrived with his bed tea and biscuits. She laid the tray on the garden table.

"Namaste, sir," she said shyly.

"Good morning."

He was always happy to see Malika, who had been with the family for six years. She was a bright, cheerful, hardworking girl, despite having an alcoholic husband, a tyrant of a mother-in-law and two children to care for.

"How are you doing?" asked Malika, who was keen to try out her English, which she picked up from watching American soap operas on Star TV.

"I am very well, thank you," said Puri. "How are you?"

"Fine," she answered, but started giggling, blushed and then fled downstairs.

The detective smiled to himself and drank some of his tea before returning to the job at hand. He finished bathing his ficus and then made his way over to the roof's east side, where, on the ledge, he was growing six prized chili plants. He had nurtured each of them from seed (they had been sent to him by a friend in Assam and came from one of the hottest chilis Puri had ever tasted) and was pleased to see that after many weeks of tender care and watering, they were bearing fruit.

He sprayed the leaves of the first plant and was lovingly wiping them clean when, suddenly, the flowerpot shattered into pieces. A split second later, a bullet whizzed by Puri's ear and punctured the water tank on the platform behind him.

With some difficulty, given his bulk, he managed to prostrate himself on the roof. A third bullet smashed into another of his chili plants, showering him with broken pottery and earth. The detective heard a fourth and fifth round hit the side of the house as he remained flat on his front, conscious of the pounding in his chest and the shortness of his breath.

A sixth bullet whizzed overhead, puncturing the tank for a second time. Water began to stream out, soaking Puri's silk dressing gown.

He decided to crawl over to the stairwell. If he could get down to his study and retrieve his pistol from the safe, then he could go after the shooter. It crossed his mind that he would need to put on some shoes as well; his monogrammed slippers would get ruined if he had to give chase through the slums.

But as he reached the door, it suddenly flew open, knocking him squarely on the head. Puri's vision doubled for a moment, and then went solidly black.