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Synopsis
Bombay, 1950. James Whitby, sentenced to death for the murder of prominent lawyer and former Quit India activist Fareed Mazumdar, is less than two weeks from a date with the gallows. In a last-ditch attempt to save his son, Whitby's father forces a new investigation into the killing. The investigation leads Inspector Persis Wadia of the Bombay Police to the old colonial capital of Calcutta, where, with the help of Scotland Yard criminalist Archie Blackfinch, she uncovers a possible link to a second case, the brutal murder of an African-American G.I. during the Calcutta Killings of 1946. Are the cases connected? And if Whitby didn't murder Mazumdar, then who did?
Release date: August 10, 2023
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Print pages: 368
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Death of a Lesser God
Vaseem Khan
Author’s Note
Although this is a work of fiction, many of the ingredients have been culled from fact:
– The Direct Action Day riots (also known as the Calcutta Killings) took place in Calcutta on 16 August 1946. The brutality of the violence shocked the country and quickly spread to other regions. At least four thousand died: men, women, children. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were all culpable. Very few were ever brought to justice.
– On the morning of 16 August, just prior to the rioting, a large gathering did take place on the Maidan in Calcutta. A Muslim politician named Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy spoke to the crowd. Today Suhrawardy is remembered in different ways. In Pakistan, he is considered a founding father (he served as Prime Minister of Pakistan); in Bangladesh (formerly East Bengal), he is remembered as a mentor of Bangladesh’s founding leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman; and in India, he is a figure of controversy, with some suggesting he did not do enough to prevent the riots. Others disagree and say the riots were beyond anyone’s control.
– During World War Two, 150,000 American GIs did indeed arrive in Bengal, and 20,000 or so were black/African-American. They were largely segregated, as I have described.
– Gandhi and Kipling did indeed stay at the Great Eastern Hotel, also as described. The hotel still exists – though is now (officially, at least) known as the LaLiT Great Eastern Kolkata.
– The Jews of India have had a small yet storied history on the subcontinent. Few now remain, the population having gradually dwindled since the birth of Israel. However, those that remain strive to maintain the traditions of their culture and religion, and there are wonderful synagogues that may be visited around the country. The Cochin Jews were written about in Salman Rushdie’s award-winning novel The Moor’s Last Sigh.
– The Sundarbans is one of the most intriguing natural habitats in the world and the domain of the Bengal tiger. Bon Bibi is indeed a local goddess, and cyclones do indeed regularly strike the region, causing havoc. Organised criminals have been operating in the Sundarbans for decades, much in the manner that I describe.
– I am indebted to Amitav Ghosh’s wonderful book The Hungry Tide, which is set in the Sundarbans and helped me immensely in getting a lie of the land.
Chapter 1
Bombay, 1950 – James Whitby
They say that some crimes can never be forgiven.
I don’t believe that. If history has taught us anything, it’s that notions of right and wrong are a movable feast. Conquest by arms, infanticide, the burning of witches – through the ages, men have found ways to justify all manner of evil.
My name is James Whitby and I have been convicted of a crime I did not commit.
Arora came to see me today. He was dressed in his customary pale herringbone suit, with a tie so heinous it might have frightened Death away. Dark hair, slicked back, a trim moustache, and tortoiseshell spectacles. A neat little man with the grace and bearing of a pianist.
There was something different about him.
I couldn’t put my finger on it, at first, but then I got it. He was shrouded in the air of defeat, something I thought I’d never see.
He sat down beside me, set down his leather satchel, and pulled a pack of Woodbines from his pocket. Tapping out a cigarette, he lit one with a silver lighter embossed with the Statue of Liberty. He’d bought it in New York during a law symposium some years earlier.
He offered me the pack. I took out a cigarette and allowed him to light it for me.
We sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the smoke twist into slow-moving dragons in the air.
It was the day after the Supreme Court turned down my appeal.
There’s a certain irony to the fact that this man, regarded as one of the sharpest legal minds in the country, is also my sole remaining confidant. Friend would be too lavish a word. Arora is a force of nature and it’s damned difficult to befriend a hurricane.
In court, he’d proved his worth. I can’t fault him for losing. It was the case that was hopeless, not the lawyer.
There are times I look at him, this man whom I’ve come to admire, and think: is there a small corner of his heart that believes me to be guilty? He professes not to wish to know, or indeed to care. But no man is an island. No native can exist in the India of today and not feel some affinity for the political sentiments that have wracked this nation for nigh on half a century. In court, he urged the jury not to conflate the evils of empire with the crime that I was charged with. Did they heed him? I cannot believe that a coal of resentment does not burn in the heart of every Indian when faced with a man such as myself. I embody everything they came to hate. I am the ogre of their past; I am the giant with feet of clay.
During the trial, Arora made much of the fact that I too am Indian. Technically speaking. Born in Bombay, I have spent most of my life here, save for the three years I passed at Cambridge. I’ve walked the same streets as them; I’ve breathed the same air. But I will always be an outsider. Not because of the life of privilege into which I was born, but because of the colour of my skin.
Arora and I had laughed at that, the sort of hollow laugh men in the trenches share before the whistle blows.
‘I spoke with the governor’s office,’ he said, eventually. ‘He won’t receive me.’
I flicked ash on to the flagstones beneath my feet. He waited for my response but there was nothing left to say.
‘Is there anything I can get you?’ Light falling in from the barred window flashed from his spectacles.
‘I suppose a revolver would be out of the question?’
My macabre attempt at humour fell flat. He transferred the cigarette to his other hand, then placed his right hand on my forearm. An uncharacteristically intimate gesture. He did not offer me false hope. What would be the point?
When we first met, I asked him outright, ‘Can a white man expect justice in Nehru’s India?’ My question was born of anger; even then I’d felt aggrieved, resentful at the way I’d been treated. Railroaded, as the Americans might say. Indeed, there are moments when I feel like a man who’s collided head-on with a train.
He took his time to reply. ‘When I was a young man, my father sent me to London, to study law. I undertook my pupillage at Lincoln’s Inn. I was by no means the only Indian there, but we were a small group, largely ostracised by our white peers. It occurred to me then that it must be a natural thing to be treated as second-class citizens in another country. But to be relegated to the status of inferior in one’s own home . . .? That, I’m afraid, is something many Indians can neither forget nor forgive.’
Chapter 10
Fareed Mazumdar had lived on the first floor of an apartment tower in Fort.
Arriving at the complex, she first noted that it was gated, with a security guard out front. Leaning out of the jeep, she asked the man if he was the same guard who’d been on duty the day Mazumdar had been killed.
The scrawny fellow bounced up from his stool and launched into a passionate disquisition, part-defence, part-testimony, recounting how Mazumdar had arrived that day and driven down into the car park, and then, moments later, a wild-eyed James Whitby, smelling strongly of liquor, had turned up on foot, demanding egress. The guard, Ram Tilak, being a simple man, had not had the temerity to refuse the Englishman, something he would regret to his dying day.
Moments later, he’d heard a scream emanating from the car park.
He’d raced inside to find Whitby standing in a pool of blood, the body of Mazumdar at his feet. According to Tilak, the Englishman had been poised to launch an attack on the defenceless Mrs Mathur of apartment 102. Sizing up the scene, Tilak had leaped to her aid, frightening Whitby into making a run for it. Tilak had given chase, heroically apprehending the murderous villain, a fact he’d detailed with considerable relish in court.
Persis drove down into the basement-level car park, got out of the jeep, then spent a few minutes going over the crime scene.
The car park was expansive, with concrete columns dotted around the space at regular intervals, and populated by a stable of upmarket vehicles, a riot of glistening chrome, whitewall tyres, and snarling radiator grills.
There was nothing to mark where Mazumdar had fallen.
At the back of the car park, a narrow passageway, screened by a thin wall, led to the rear of the compound within which the apartment tower stood. A wall, approximately seven feet high, encircled the plot. She judged it to be little obstacle for an athletic and determined intruder. If Whitby had been telling the truth about seeing a figure fleeing the scene, then perhaps this was how the man had gotten in and out without having to negotiate the guard out front.
She took the stairs up to the first floor.
Lavinia Mathur was in her early fifties, a tall, severe-looking woman with short grey hair that fitted her head like an iron helmet. She wore square-framed spectacles and had a mole above her upper lip. She walked with a slight limp, wielding an elegant cane with an ivory handle in the shape of a bird.
‘I lost my husband just over a year ago,’ she said, leading the way into her apartment. ‘He died at our home in Jodhpur in Rajasthan, a heart attack. It’s why I moved to Bombay, to escape his memory. So it wasn’t that I hadn’t seen death before. But when I walked into that car park and saw Whitby leaning over Mazumdar, all that blood, it was simply too much. I’m not the sort of woman who normally screams, you understand.’
The apartment was spacious, with high Victorian ceilings, curtained bay windows, a gleaming parquet floor, and the sort of heavy, claw-footed furniture that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Palace of Versailles. A sideboard was littered with objets d’art including an ornamental silver spittoon and a replica of Gandhi’s three wise monkeys in brass.
A white Pomeranian yapped at them from the top of a grand piano, a dancing ball of fluff on legs. On the wall behind the piano, a lugubrious elderly gentleman dressed in a regal Rajasthani outfit and turban looked gloomily down on the scene, as if trapped inside the frame of his portrait.
‘Did you actually see Whitby striking Mazumdar?’
‘No. But it couldn’t have been more than a few moments after the stabbing that I walked in on him.’
‘Was he holding the knife when you saw him?’
She frowned. ‘All of this was in the testimony I gave at the trial.’
‘I’d like to hear it from you.’
She picked up the yapping dog, and sat down on the sofa with it, clasping it tightly to her bosom in a strangler’s grip, muffling its bark. ‘The scene is burned into my mind. I walked down to my car – well, it was my husband’s car, to be truthful. He used to call it his pride and joy. He was gifted it by the maharaja of Jodhpur – my husband worked for his administration. It was a running joke between us: you know, that he loved that car more than he loved me.’ Persis followed her gaze up to the desolate portrait of the former Mr Mathur and wondered briefly whether the man had actually been joking. ‘I stepped into the car park and there was Whitby, crouched over Mazumdar’s body. And yes, the knife was in his hand. I screamed instinctively, and his head snapped around. That’s when he dropped the knife.’
‘Did he say anything to you?’
‘No. He advanced towards me, but then the security guard, Tilak, arrived. Thank God that he did, otherwise there might have been two bodies in the car park that day.’
‘How well did you know Mazumdar?’
‘Not that well. He was a very private man. Kept himself to himself. I tried my best to be neighbourly, invited him to several social functions, but he would always excuse himself, citing work.’ She sounded miffed.
‘Did he ever speak about family or a female companion?’
‘Not to me.’
‘Did you ever see anyone visiting with him?’
‘Not that I can recall. Now that I think about it, the man was something of an enigma.’
Chapter 11
Fareed Mazumdar’s apartment had remained untouched since the day of his murder.
The authorities had searched it cursorily, discovered nothing of significance to the investigation, and, in due course, returned it to the building’s owner, a superstitious real estate magnate who’d decided not to place it back on the market until after the case had run its course, and enough time had elapsed for the spirit of his former tenant to find peace.
A key to the apartment, discovered on Mazumdar’s body, had ended up in the case evidence log.
Persis now used that key to enter the apartment, Lavinia Mathur watching her nosily from the doorway of her own apartment at the far end of the corridor, her Pomeranian still clutched tightly to her chest, the poor creature turning blue in the face as its paws paddled ineffectually in the air.
The apartment was identical in layout to Mathur’s, but that was where the similarity ended. Whereas Mathur had stuffed her place with seemingly every conceit invented by the mind of man, Mazumdar’s home was bare, as Spartan as a monk’s cell. The whitewashed walls were devoid of paintings or portraiture; a few functional pieces of furniture graced the living room; and the bedrooms – of which there were two – were as characterless as motel rooms.
In the kitchen, the fridge and cupboards were all but empty, stocked with a handful of out-of-date items, including a Gruyère cheese hairier than the average Greek grandmother and a stick of salami so tough it could have been used as a cosh.
This was the apartment of a man who spent very little time at home. She’d seen prison cells with more personality.
In the master bedroom, she opened Mazumdar’s wardrobe to find several suits hanging in the darkness. Shoes, shirts, underclothes, a range of dark ties – all had been left undisturbed.
Her eye was caught by something sticking out over the lip of the uppermost shelf. She reached up and pulled it out.
A slim manila folder.
What was it doing here?
She walked to the bed, and sat down.
Inside the folder, she discovered several newspaper cuttings, together with a series of envelopes, addressed to Mazumdar at his home, postmarked with dates in the weeks before his death.
Collectively, the cuttings detailed a case from October 1946, the trial of a Calcutta gangster, Azizur Rahman, accused of murdering two people during the Calcutta Killings – an Indian woman named Rita Chatterjee and a black American soldier: Walter ‘Kip’ Rivers.
It became clear from the articles that the advocate who’d defended Rahman had been Mazumdar.
The case had stirred up controversy, with Rahman – a prominent local figure in the Calcutta Muslim community – accusing the authorities of manufacturing the case against him because of his Mohammedan beliefs.
Ultimately, Mazumdar had prevailed, proving his client’s innocence in court.
Picking up the envelopes, she guessed that someone had been mailing these to Mazumdar. But why?
There were four articles and five envelopes. What had been in the fifth envelope?
She made an intuitive leap.
Taking out her notebook, she lifted out the note with the Star of David. Folding it along crease lines prominent in the sheet, she discovered that it fit perfectly into the last envelope. There was no guarantee it had been mailed to Mazumdar in that envelope, but it seemed a safe bet that that had been the case.
Again, she asked herself: why?
What had the Star of David to do with the Rahman case? And why would someone send these cuttings to Mazumdar?
The fact that he’d been carrying the Star of David note in his pocket on the day that he’d died proved that the matter had been weighing on his mind.
A mystery, much like the man himself.
She wondered why the folder was still in the wardrobe. The answer came to her immediately. The police had searched the place as a matter of routine, but with no real expectation of discovering anything useful. With James Whitby already in custody, they’d dismissed any relevance of the folder – and its contents – to their investigation.
They had their man and that was all they needed.
Chapter 12
‘They’re trying to kill me.’
Her father’s voice was unusually subdued. At home, Sam’s natural tendency was to bellow, as if everyone he came into contact with was either an imbecile or a foreigner.
Persis had arrived back at the shop, helped Seema close up, shared a hasty supper with the girl, and then sent her off in a rickshaw.
After Seema had left, and unable to still her brain as it churned over the unfurling investigation into Fareed Mazumdar’s death, she’d poured herself a glass of sherry from her father’s cabinet, set Brahms’s Piano Sonata No. 3 on to the gramophone, and then settled on to the sofa to work through her case notes.
Akbar, her grey Persian, stirred beside her, uncharacteristically complaisant.
She suspected that the cat was missing Sam, though why he’d miss a surly old man who considered him a worthless rug on legs, she couldn’t begin to fathom. Her father seemed to have the perverse knack of eliciting warmth in those who came to know him, without appearing to reciprocate.
Before she’d managed to make much headway, the phone had rung.
Sam and her new stepmother, Meherzad, had driven from Shimla to Parwanoo, another of the hill stations that dotted the Himalayan foothills, out on the border between Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. Here they’d visited apple orchards, flower gardens, and spent time taking in the stunning valley scenery.
Not that you would have known it from the way Sam was complaining.
Her father appeared to find everything disagreeable, from the size of the fleas in his bed, to the food, to the coolies who pushed his wheelchair up and down the slopes of the hamlet. He claimed that one of them had tipped him over, to almost tumble to his death in the valley below.
Persis could almost sympathise with the porter.
‘Papa, it’s your honeymoon. Can’t you just enjoy it?’
She held the phone away from her ear as Sam launched into another tirade.
When he’d finished, she took a deep breath, and said, ‘This isn’t just about you. Have you considered what it must be like for Meherzad to spend her honeymoon with an old grouch?’
‘Grouch?’ Her father seemed mystified. ‘Who are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about you!’
A silence drifted down the phone.
‘Do you really think that’s how she sees me?’
‘If the shoe fits, Papa.’
They ended on that somewhat discordant note.
Afterwards, she’d picked up her glass and returned to the case, allowing the facts to settle in her mind, like sediment drifting to the riverbed.
Fareed Mazumdar: a nationalist Calcutta lawyer who’d moved to Bombay late in 1946, had been hired by the Indian government in 1949 to build a case against industrialist Charles Whitby for ordering the murder of one of his employees back in 1921.
Shortly afterwards, Whitby’s son, James Whitby, had visited Mazumdar’s office in an unsuccessful bid to convince him to drop the case. Hours later, Whitby had murdered Mazumdar.
At his trial Whitby denied murder, though admitted that he’d gone to Mazumdar’s home that evening to reargue his case. Whitby had been convicted of the killing and sentenced to death, a death that was now only ten days away.
Prior to his death, Fareed Mazumdar had received several envelopes containing press cuttings relating to a 1946 murder case in Calcutta, in which he’d defended a prominent Calcuttan charged with a double homicide. One of the envelopes had also contained a drawing of the Star of David.
She presumed that the drawing and cuttings had been sent to Mazumdar anonymously – certainly, there was no clue on the note, articles, or envelopes as to who had sent them.
How were they related to James Whitby’s case, if at all?
She was still mulling over the question when sleep found her an hour later.
Chapter 13
As one of the oldest law firms in the country, Dinshaw Mistry & Co. boasted offices in Bombay, Delhi, and Madras. Located on the ever-busy Colaba Causeway, the firm rented the top four floors of a building with a basalt sandstone façade and an enormous billboard crowning the roof emblazoned with the glowing face of the firm’s founding partner, Framji Dinshaw, a pioneer in the Indianisation of the country’s legal profession.
Dinshaw’s status as a patriot had been cemented back in 1934 when, at the age of seventy, he had been killed at the height of the independence struggle. A young postal worker had made his way into the central courtroom at the Bombay High Court where Dinshaw had been acting as defence counsel for a man accused of distributing revolutionary pamphlets; thirty minutes into the session, the postal worker had taken a grenade from his pocket, removed the firing pin, shouted an anti-British slogan, and then lobbed the missile at the bench, where the presiding judge, Justice Jonathan Harper, a staunch defender of the Raj, had spent the better part of the morning glowering at the accused.
Fortunately for Harper, the amateur insurrectionist’s aim had proved wayward; the grenade had caught the ceiling fan and ricocheted down on to the defence counsel bench. The resultant explosion had killed Dinshaw on the spot and severely wounded his junior, as well as effacing the moustaches of several august members of the public sat within the blast radius, a crime some considered more heinous than the old lawyer’s death.
Persis arrived at the firm’s offices at just after ten, parking the jeep out front.
Around her, the street shimmered with heat; the humidity was already high enough to drown fish. Worker ants stumbled along in a daze, faces glistening. The traffic on the busy thoroughfare was a typical Bombay morass, a conga of cars, trucks, rickshaws, buses, bicycles, handcarts, stray animals, and a river of careless pedestrians with as much regard for the rules of the road as a bull elephant in heat. The air held a bouquet that was practically Bombay’s trademark: a heady perfume of shit, urine, and sewage.
She made her way past a turbaned watchman, announced herself to the wilting ground-floor receptionist, climbed up to the offices of Dinshaw Mistry & Co, announced herself to a second receptionist, and was duly led to a meeting room and asked to wait.
A ceiling fan stirred the boiling air around the room; the windows had been left open, letting in more warm air and the cacophony of the street below. The room was plushly appointed, with oak panelling, a fresh coat of paint, a gleaming boardroom table, a royal blue carpet as thick as elephant grass, and a striking painting of a muscular Zarathustra posing heroically on a mountaintop.
Below the picture stood two pedestals on which roosted a pair of marble vultures. They reminded her of Hector and Achilles, the stone vultures that rested on a plinth above the façade of her father’s bookshop. Early customers of the shop had found the minatory avians somewhat disconcerting, until it had been explained to them that the birds were merely symbols of the Parsee faith.
Framji Dinshaw, like herself and Sam, had been a Zoroastrian.
The door opened behind her and a short white male entered. His dark hair was scraped back over a high forehead and his brown eyes were closely set. A scruffy moustache flowed over his upper lip, like algae washed up on a beach. A grey waistcoat enclosed a pinstriped shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows.
She had the impression of a great labour interrupted.
‘My name is Owain Price,’ he said, in an accent she’d rarely encountered, melodic, with the vowels drawn out almost to breaking point, like prisoners on an inquisitor’s rack.
The Welsh, she’d been led to understand, were a peculiar breed of Britisher – patriotic when the mood took them, neither quite at home with the shortcomings of empire, nor overly demonstrative against its excesses. To many Indians, they were kindred spirits, having made a holy animal of the common sheep, reminding them of their own reverence for cows.
‘I understand that you wish to speak with me?’
She introduced herself and quickly recounted the reason for her visit.
The young man – she guessed him to be in his mid to late twenties – frowned. ‘I’m afraid that I don’t see how I can help. Yes, I worked with Fareed, but I have nothing new to say on the subject of his murder.’
‘Nevertheless, I’d like to ask you a few questions.’
A protest began to form on his lips and then he seemed to change his mind. ‘Very well.’ He lowered himself gingerly into a chair like a man who’d recently been caned on the bottom. ‘What is it that you wish to know?’
‘How did you end up working for him?’
‘He advertised for the post of a junior. I applied and he hired me on the spot.’
‘This was back in late 1946?’
‘January 1947. He’d arrived a couple of months earlier from Calcutta to set up a practice here.’
‘Why did he leave Calcutta? I mean, by all accounts he was successful there.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know. I asked him, of course. He said that he simply needed a change of scenery.’
‘Did you believe him?’
‘I had no reason not to.’ He paused. ‘Of course, I began to suspect there was something more to it. He seemed never to want to talk about the place. Strange, given that he’d grown up in the city, and, as you say, made his name there.’
‘You worked closely with him?’
‘Yes, of course. I was his junior. We discussed cases and I would help prepare them.’
‘Did you advocate in court?’
His hesitation spoke volumes. ‘No. Fareed didn’t trust anyone else to present his arguments.’
‘I suppose that led to friction between you? Being held back, I mean.’
His eyes became flinty. ‘No. Fareed was an excellent lawyer and I learned a great deal from him.’
‘Victor Salazar tells me that you frequently argued. It’s his belief that Mazumdar was planning to dismiss you. My guess is that would have made it difficult for you to find another position. A young, inexperienced advocate, a white man, thrown out by a renowned Indian lawyer.’
His cheeks burned. ‘Salazar’s never liked me. He’s had a chip on his shoulder since the day Fareed hired me.’
‘Why?’
‘Why do you think? I was never Indian enough for him.’
She shifted in her seat. ‘. . .
Although this is a work of fiction, many of the ingredients have been culled from fact:
– The Direct Action Day riots (also known as the Calcutta Killings) took place in Calcutta on 16 August 1946. The brutality of the violence shocked the country and quickly spread to other regions. At least four thousand died: men, women, children. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were all culpable. Very few were ever brought to justice.
– On the morning of 16 August, just prior to the rioting, a large gathering did take place on the Maidan in Calcutta. A Muslim politician named Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy spoke to the crowd. Today Suhrawardy is remembered in different ways. In Pakistan, he is considered a founding father (he served as Prime Minister of Pakistan); in Bangladesh (formerly East Bengal), he is remembered as a mentor of Bangladesh’s founding leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman; and in India, he is a figure of controversy, with some suggesting he did not do enough to prevent the riots. Others disagree and say the riots were beyond anyone’s control.
– During World War Two, 150,000 American GIs did indeed arrive in Bengal, and 20,000 or so were black/African-American. They were largely segregated, as I have described.
– Gandhi and Kipling did indeed stay at the Great Eastern Hotel, also as described. The hotel still exists – though is now (officially, at least) known as the LaLiT Great Eastern Kolkata.
– The Jews of India have had a small yet storied history on the subcontinent. Few now remain, the population having gradually dwindled since the birth of Israel. However, those that remain strive to maintain the traditions of their culture and religion, and there are wonderful synagogues that may be visited around the country. The Cochin Jews were written about in Salman Rushdie’s award-winning novel The Moor’s Last Sigh.
– The Sundarbans is one of the most intriguing natural habitats in the world and the domain of the Bengal tiger. Bon Bibi is indeed a local goddess, and cyclones do indeed regularly strike the region, causing havoc. Organised criminals have been operating in the Sundarbans for decades, much in the manner that I describe.
– I am indebted to Amitav Ghosh’s wonderful book The Hungry Tide, which is set in the Sundarbans and helped me immensely in getting a lie of the land.
Chapter 1
Bombay, 1950 – James Whitby
They say that some crimes can never be forgiven.
I don’t believe that. If history has taught us anything, it’s that notions of right and wrong are a movable feast. Conquest by arms, infanticide, the burning of witches – through the ages, men have found ways to justify all manner of evil.
My name is James Whitby and I have been convicted of a crime I did not commit.
Arora came to see me today. He was dressed in his customary pale herringbone suit, with a tie so heinous it might have frightened Death away. Dark hair, slicked back, a trim moustache, and tortoiseshell spectacles. A neat little man with the grace and bearing of a pianist.
There was something different about him.
I couldn’t put my finger on it, at first, but then I got it. He was shrouded in the air of defeat, something I thought I’d never see.
He sat down beside me, set down his leather satchel, and pulled a pack of Woodbines from his pocket. Tapping out a cigarette, he lit one with a silver lighter embossed with the Statue of Liberty. He’d bought it in New York during a law symposium some years earlier.
He offered me the pack. I took out a cigarette and allowed him to light it for me.
We sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the smoke twist into slow-moving dragons in the air.
It was the day after the Supreme Court turned down my appeal.
There’s a certain irony to the fact that this man, regarded as one of the sharpest legal minds in the country, is also my sole remaining confidant. Friend would be too lavish a word. Arora is a force of nature and it’s damned difficult to befriend a hurricane.
In court, he’d proved his worth. I can’t fault him for losing. It was the case that was hopeless, not the lawyer.
There are times I look at him, this man whom I’ve come to admire, and think: is there a small corner of his heart that believes me to be guilty? He professes not to wish to know, or indeed to care. But no man is an island. No native can exist in the India of today and not feel some affinity for the political sentiments that have wracked this nation for nigh on half a century. In court, he urged the jury not to conflate the evils of empire with the crime that I was charged with. Did they heed him? I cannot believe that a coal of resentment does not burn in the heart of every Indian when faced with a man such as myself. I embody everything they came to hate. I am the ogre of their past; I am the giant with feet of clay.
During the trial, Arora made much of the fact that I too am Indian. Technically speaking. Born in Bombay, I have spent most of my life here, save for the three years I passed at Cambridge. I’ve walked the same streets as them; I’ve breathed the same air. But I will always be an outsider. Not because of the life of privilege into which I was born, but because of the colour of my skin.
Arora and I had laughed at that, the sort of hollow laugh men in the trenches share before the whistle blows.
‘I spoke with the governor’s office,’ he said, eventually. ‘He won’t receive me.’
I flicked ash on to the flagstones beneath my feet. He waited for my response but there was nothing left to say.
‘Is there anything I can get you?’ Light falling in from the barred window flashed from his spectacles.
‘I suppose a revolver would be out of the question?’
My macabre attempt at humour fell flat. He transferred the cigarette to his other hand, then placed his right hand on my forearm. An uncharacteristically intimate gesture. He did not offer me false hope. What would be the point?
When we first met, I asked him outright, ‘Can a white man expect justice in Nehru’s India?’ My question was born of anger; even then I’d felt aggrieved, resentful at the way I’d been treated. Railroaded, as the Americans might say. Indeed, there are moments when I feel like a man who’s collided head-on with a train.
He took his time to reply. ‘When I was a young man, my father sent me to London, to study law. I undertook my pupillage at Lincoln’s Inn. I was by no means the only Indian there, but we were a small group, largely ostracised by our white peers. It occurred to me then that it must be a natural thing to be treated as second-class citizens in another country. But to be relegated to the status of inferior in one’s own home . . .? That, I’m afraid, is something many Indians can neither forget nor forgive.’
Chapter 10
Fareed Mazumdar had lived on the first floor of an apartment tower in Fort.
Arriving at the complex, she first noted that it was gated, with a security guard out front. Leaning out of the jeep, she asked the man if he was the same guard who’d been on duty the day Mazumdar had been killed.
The scrawny fellow bounced up from his stool and launched into a passionate disquisition, part-defence, part-testimony, recounting how Mazumdar had arrived that day and driven down into the car park, and then, moments later, a wild-eyed James Whitby, smelling strongly of liquor, had turned up on foot, demanding egress. The guard, Ram Tilak, being a simple man, had not had the temerity to refuse the Englishman, something he would regret to his dying day.
Moments later, he’d heard a scream emanating from the car park.
He’d raced inside to find Whitby standing in a pool of blood, the body of Mazumdar at his feet. According to Tilak, the Englishman had been poised to launch an attack on the defenceless Mrs Mathur of apartment 102. Sizing up the scene, Tilak had leaped to her aid, frightening Whitby into making a run for it. Tilak had given chase, heroically apprehending the murderous villain, a fact he’d detailed with considerable relish in court.
Persis drove down into the basement-level car park, got out of the jeep, then spent a few minutes going over the crime scene.
The car park was expansive, with concrete columns dotted around the space at regular intervals, and populated by a stable of upmarket vehicles, a riot of glistening chrome, whitewall tyres, and snarling radiator grills.
There was nothing to mark where Mazumdar had fallen.
At the back of the car park, a narrow passageway, screened by a thin wall, led to the rear of the compound within which the apartment tower stood. A wall, approximately seven feet high, encircled the plot. She judged it to be little obstacle for an athletic and determined intruder. If Whitby had been telling the truth about seeing a figure fleeing the scene, then perhaps this was how the man had gotten in and out without having to negotiate the guard out front.
She took the stairs up to the first floor.
Lavinia Mathur was in her early fifties, a tall, severe-looking woman with short grey hair that fitted her head like an iron helmet. She wore square-framed spectacles and had a mole above her upper lip. She walked with a slight limp, wielding an elegant cane with an ivory handle in the shape of a bird.
‘I lost my husband just over a year ago,’ she said, leading the way into her apartment. ‘He died at our home in Jodhpur in Rajasthan, a heart attack. It’s why I moved to Bombay, to escape his memory. So it wasn’t that I hadn’t seen death before. But when I walked into that car park and saw Whitby leaning over Mazumdar, all that blood, it was simply too much. I’m not the sort of woman who normally screams, you understand.’
The apartment was spacious, with high Victorian ceilings, curtained bay windows, a gleaming parquet floor, and the sort of heavy, claw-footed furniture that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Palace of Versailles. A sideboard was littered with objets d’art including an ornamental silver spittoon and a replica of Gandhi’s three wise monkeys in brass.
A white Pomeranian yapped at them from the top of a grand piano, a dancing ball of fluff on legs. On the wall behind the piano, a lugubrious elderly gentleman dressed in a regal Rajasthani outfit and turban looked gloomily down on the scene, as if trapped inside the frame of his portrait.
‘Did you actually see Whitby striking Mazumdar?’
‘No. But it couldn’t have been more than a few moments after the stabbing that I walked in on him.’
‘Was he holding the knife when you saw him?’
She frowned. ‘All of this was in the testimony I gave at the trial.’
‘I’d like to hear it from you.’
She picked up the yapping dog, and sat down on the sofa with it, clasping it tightly to her bosom in a strangler’s grip, muffling its bark. ‘The scene is burned into my mind. I walked down to my car – well, it was my husband’s car, to be truthful. He used to call it his pride and joy. He was gifted it by the maharaja of Jodhpur – my husband worked for his administration. It was a running joke between us: you know, that he loved that car more than he loved me.’ Persis followed her gaze up to the desolate portrait of the former Mr Mathur and wondered briefly whether the man had actually been joking. ‘I stepped into the car park and there was Whitby, crouched over Mazumdar’s body. And yes, the knife was in his hand. I screamed instinctively, and his head snapped around. That’s when he dropped the knife.’
‘Did he say anything to you?’
‘No. He advanced towards me, but then the security guard, Tilak, arrived. Thank God that he did, otherwise there might have been two bodies in the car park that day.’
‘How well did you know Mazumdar?’
‘Not that well. He was a very private man. Kept himself to himself. I tried my best to be neighbourly, invited him to several social functions, but he would always excuse himself, citing work.’ She sounded miffed.
‘Did he ever speak about family or a female companion?’
‘Not to me.’
‘Did you ever see anyone visiting with him?’
‘Not that I can recall. Now that I think about it, the man was something of an enigma.’
Chapter 11
Fareed Mazumdar’s apartment had remained untouched since the day of his murder.
The authorities had searched it cursorily, discovered nothing of significance to the investigation, and, in due course, returned it to the building’s owner, a superstitious real estate magnate who’d decided not to place it back on the market until after the case had run its course, and enough time had elapsed for the spirit of his former tenant to find peace.
A key to the apartment, discovered on Mazumdar’s body, had ended up in the case evidence log.
Persis now used that key to enter the apartment, Lavinia Mathur watching her nosily from the doorway of her own apartment at the far end of the corridor, her Pomeranian still clutched tightly to her chest, the poor creature turning blue in the face as its paws paddled ineffectually in the air.
The apartment was identical in layout to Mathur’s, but that was where the similarity ended. Whereas Mathur had stuffed her place with seemingly every conceit invented by the mind of man, Mazumdar’s home was bare, as Spartan as a monk’s cell. The whitewashed walls were devoid of paintings or portraiture; a few functional pieces of furniture graced the living room; and the bedrooms – of which there were two – were as characterless as motel rooms.
In the kitchen, the fridge and cupboards were all but empty, stocked with a handful of out-of-date items, including a Gruyère cheese hairier than the average Greek grandmother and a stick of salami so tough it could have been used as a cosh.
This was the apartment of a man who spent very little time at home. She’d seen prison cells with more personality.
In the master bedroom, she opened Mazumdar’s wardrobe to find several suits hanging in the darkness. Shoes, shirts, underclothes, a range of dark ties – all had been left undisturbed.
Her eye was caught by something sticking out over the lip of the uppermost shelf. She reached up and pulled it out.
A slim manila folder.
What was it doing here?
She walked to the bed, and sat down.
Inside the folder, she discovered several newspaper cuttings, together with a series of envelopes, addressed to Mazumdar at his home, postmarked with dates in the weeks before his death.
Collectively, the cuttings detailed a case from October 1946, the trial of a Calcutta gangster, Azizur Rahman, accused of murdering two people during the Calcutta Killings – an Indian woman named Rita Chatterjee and a black American soldier: Walter ‘Kip’ Rivers.
It became clear from the articles that the advocate who’d defended Rahman had been Mazumdar.
The case had stirred up controversy, with Rahman – a prominent local figure in the Calcutta Muslim community – accusing the authorities of manufacturing the case against him because of his Mohammedan beliefs.
Ultimately, Mazumdar had prevailed, proving his client’s innocence in court.
Picking up the envelopes, she guessed that someone had been mailing these to Mazumdar. But why?
There were four articles and five envelopes. What had been in the fifth envelope?
She made an intuitive leap.
Taking out her notebook, she lifted out the note with the Star of David. Folding it along crease lines prominent in the sheet, she discovered that it fit perfectly into the last envelope. There was no guarantee it had been mailed to Mazumdar in that envelope, but it seemed a safe bet that that had been the case.
Again, she asked herself: why?
What had the Star of David to do with the Rahman case? And why would someone send these cuttings to Mazumdar?
The fact that he’d been carrying the Star of David note in his pocket on the day that he’d died proved that the matter had been weighing on his mind.
A mystery, much like the man himself.
She wondered why the folder was still in the wardrobe. The answer came to her immediately. The police had searched the place as a matter of routine, but with no real expectation of discovering anything useful. With James Whitby already in custody, they’d dismissed any relevance of the folder – and its contents – to their investigation.
They had their man and that was all they needed.
Chapter 12
‘They’re trying to kill me.’
Her father’s voice was unusually subdued. At home, Sam’s natural tendency was to bellow, as if everyone he came into contact with was either an imbecile or a foreigner.
Persis had arrived back at the shop, helped Seema close up, shared a hasty supper with the girl, and then sent her off in a rickshaw.
After Seema had left, and unable to still her brain as it churned over the unfurling investigation into Fareed Mazumdar’s death, she’d poured herself a glass of sherry from her father’s cabinet, set Brahms’s Piano Sonata No. 3 on to the gramophone, and then settled on to the sofa to work through her case notes.
Akbar, her grey Persian, stirred beside her, uncharacteristically complaisant.
She suspected that the cat was missing Sam, though why he’d miss a surly old man who considered him a worthless rug on legs, she couldn’t begin to fathom. Her father seemed to have the perverse knack of eliciting warmth in those who came to know him, without appearing to reciprocate.
Before she’d managed to make much headway, the phone had rung.
Sam and her new stepmother, Meherzad, had driven from Shimla to Parwanoo, another of the hill stations that dotted the Himalayan foothills, out on the border between Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. Here they’d visited apple orchards, flower gardens, and spent time taking in the stunning valley scenery.
Not that you would have known it from the way Sam was complaining.
Her father appeared to find everything disagreeable, from the size of the fleas in his bed, to the food, to the coolies who pushed his wheelchair up and down the slopes of the hamlet. He claimed that one of them had tipped him over, to almost tumble to his death in the valley below.
Persis could almost sympathise with the porter.
‘Papa, it’s your honeymoon. Can’t you just enjoy it?’
She held the phone away from her ear as Sam launched into another tirade.
When he’d finished, she took a deep breath, and said, ‘This isn’t just about you. Have you considered what it must be like for Meherzad to spend her honeymoon with an old grouch?’
‘Grouch?’ Her father seemed mystified. ‘Who are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about you!’
A silence drifted down the phone.
‘Do you really think that’s how she sees me?’
‘If the shoe fits, Papa.’
They ended on that somewhat discordant note.
Afterwards, she’d picked up her glass and returned to the case, allowing the facts to settle in her mind, like sediment drifting to the riverbed.
Fareed Mazumdar: a nationalist Calcutta lawyer who’d moved to Bombay late in 1946, had been hired by the Indian government in 1949 to build a case against industrialist Charles Whitby for ordering the murder of one of his employees back in 1921.
Shortly afterwards, Whitby’s son, James Whitby, had visited Mazumdar’s office in an unsuccessful bid to convince him to drop the case. Hours later, Whitby had murdered Mazumdar.
At his trial Whitby denied murder, though admitted that he’d gone to Mazumdar’s home that evening to reargue his case. Whitby had been convicted of the killing and sentenced to death, a death that was now only ten days away.
Prior to his death, Fareed Mazumdar had received several envelopes containing press cuttings relating to a 1946 murder case in Calcutta, in which he’d defended a prominent Calcuttan charged with a double homicide. One of the envelopes had also contained a drawing of the Star of David.
She presumed that the drawing and cuttings had been sent to Mazumdar anonymously – certainly, there was no clue on the note, articles, or envelopes as to who had sent them.
How were they related to James Whitby’s case, if at all?
She was still mulling over the question when sleep found her an hour later.
Chapter 13
As one of the oldest law firms in the country, Dinshaw Mistry & Co. boasted offices in Bombay, Delhi, and Madras. Located on the ever-busy Colaba Causeway, the firm rented the top four floors of a building with a basalt sandstone façade and an enormous billboard crowning the roof emblazoned with the glowing face of the firm’s founding partner, Framji Dinshaw, a pioneer in the Indianisation of the country’s legal profession.
Dinshaw’s status as a patriot had been cemented back in 1934 when, at the age of seventy, he had been killed at the height of the independence struggle. A young postal worker had made his way into the central courtroom at the Bombay High Court where Dinshaw had been acting as defence counsel for a man accused of distributing revolutionary pamphlets; thirty minutes into the session, the postal worker had taken a grenade from his pocket, removed the firing pin, shouted an anti-British slogan, and then lobbed the missile at the bench, where the presiding judge, Justice Jonathan Harper, a staunch defender of the Raj, had spent the better part of the morning glowering at the accused.
Fortunately for Harper, the amateur insurrectionist’s aim had proved wayward; the grenade had caught the ceiling fan and ricocheted down on to the defence counsel bench. The resultant explosion had killed Dinshaw on the spot and severely wounded his junior, as well as effacing the moustaches of several august members of the public sat within the blast radius, a crime some considered more heinous than the old lawyer’s death.
Persis arrived at the firm’s offices at just after ten, parking the jeep out front.
Around her, the street shimmered with heat; the humidity was already high enough to drown fish. Worker ants stumbled along in a daze, faces glistening. The traffic on the busy thoroughfare was a typical Bombay morass, a conga of cars, trucks, rickshaws, buses, bicycles, handcarts, stray animals, and a river of careless pedestrians with as much regard for the rules of the road as a bull elephant in heat. The air held a bouquet that was practically Bombay’s trademark: a heady perfume of shit, urine, and sewage.
She made her way past a turbaned watchman, announced herself to the wilting ground-floor receptionist, climbed up to the offices of Dinshaw Mistry & Co, announced herself to a second receptionist, and was duly led to a meeting room and asked to wait.
A ceiling fan stirred the boiling air around the room; the windows had been left open, letting in more warm air and the cacophony of the street below. The room was plushly appointed, with oak panelling, a fresh coat of paint, a gleaming boardroom table, a royal blue carpet as thick as elephant grass, and a striking painting of a muscular Zarathustra posing heroically on a mountaintop.
Below the picture stood two pedestals on which roosted a pair of marble vultures. They reminded her of Hector and Achilles, the stone vultures that rested on a plinth above the façade of her father’s bookshop. Early customers of the shop had found the minatory avians somewhat disconcerting, until it had been explained to them that the birds were merely symbols of the Parsee faith.
Framji Dinshaw, like herself and Sam, had been a Zoroastrian.
The door opened behind her and a short white male entered. His dark hair was scraped back over a high forehead and his brown eyes were closely set. A scruffy moustache flowed over his upper lip, like algae washed up on a beach. A grey waistcoat enclosed a pinstriped shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows.
She had the impression of a great labour interrupted.
‘My name is Owain Price,’ he said, in an accent she’d rarely encountered, melodic, with the vowels drawn out almost to breaking point, like prisoners on an inquisitor’s rack.
The Welsh, she’d been led to understand, were a peculiar breed of Britisher – patriotic when the mood took them, neither quite at home with the shortcomings of empire, nor overly demonstrative against its excesses. To many Indians, they were kindred spirits, having made a holy animal of the common sheep, reminding them of their own reverence for cows.
‘I understand that you wish to speak with me?’
She introduced herself and quickly recounted the reason for her visit.
The young man – she guessed him to be in his mid to late twenties – frowned. ‘I’m afraid that I don’t see how I can help. Yes, I worked with Fareed, but I have nothing new to say on the subject of his murder.’
‘Nevertheless, I’d like to ask you a few questions.’
A protest began to form on his lips and then he seemed to change his mind. ‘Very well.’ He lowered himself gingerly into a chair like a man who’d recently been caned on the bottom. ‘What is it that you wish to know?’
‘How did you end up working for him?’
‘He advertised for the post of a junior. I applied and he hired me on the spot.’
‘This was back in late 1946?’
‘January 1947. He’d arrived a couple of months earlier from Calcutta to set up a practice here.’
‘Why did he leave Calcutta? I mean, by all accounts he was successful there.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know. I asked him, of course. He said that he simply needed a change of scenery.’
‘Did you believe him?’
‘I had no reason not to.’ He paused. ‘Of course, I began to suspect there was something more to it. He seemed never to want to talk about the place. Strange, given that he’d grown up in the city, and, as you say, made his name there.’
‘You worked closely with him?’
‘Yes, of course. I was his junior. We discussed cases and I would help prepare them.’
‘Did you advocate in court?’
His hesitation spoke volumes. ‘No. Fareed didn’t trust anyone else to present his arguments.’
‘I suppose that led to friction between you? Being held back, I mean.’
His eyes became flinty. ‘No. Fareed was an excellent lawyer and I learned a great deal from him.’
‘Victor Salazar tells me that you frequently argued. It’s his belief that Mazumdar was planning to dismiss you. My guess is that would have made it difficult for you to find another position. A young, inexperienced advocate, a white man, thrown out by a renowned Indian lawyer.’
His cheeks burned. ‘Salazar’s never liked me. He’s had a chip on his shoulder since the day Fareed hired me.’
‘Why?’
‘Why do you think? I was never Indian enough for him.’
She shifted in her seat. ‘. . .
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Death of a Lesser God
Vaseem Khan
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