Last Victim of the Monsoon Express

by Vaseem Khan

Genres: Cozy Mystery; Mystery

Synopsis

A new novella in the charming Baby Ganesh Agency series.

In a symbolic journey of reconciliation, the Monsoon Express is travelling between hostile neighbours India and Pakistan. The passenger list includes politicians, celebrities, former Mumbai policeman Inspector Chopra and his baby elephant ward, Ganesha.

Then a senior diplomat is found murdered in his cabin. Accusations fly, tensions rise and an international incident seems certain. But is the murder political — or personal?

Tasked to investigate, Chopra has just hours before the train reaches its destination and the news goes public. He must unmask the killer quickly if he's to stop the last journey of the Monsoon Express going entirely off the rails....

Release date: June 13, 2019

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 80

Sample

The Monsoon Express



The death, when it came, happened late at night, a silent affair – certainly no one heard anything at the time – yet one that detonated so loudly in the cold light of day it almost brought two nations to the brink of war. Inspector Ashwin Chopra (Retd) would later reflect that in many ways this particular death had been travelling towards its victim for years, much like the train within which it took place. Perhaps, no matter how far a man might run from his past, destiny always found a way to catch up.

Of course, it was only for the most tenuous of reasons that Chopra found himself aboard the train at all.

Like most of his fellow countrymen – and those of neighbouring Pakistan – he had followed the developing story of the Monsoon Express for over a year, never believing that the rhetoric would subside long enough for anyone to actually do anything about it. It was a genuine shock when his old friend Dr Homi Contractor, noted cardiovascular surgeon and pathologist, called to invite him aboard.

‘They need an on-call doctor,’ Homi had said. ‘I was the natural choice.’ Homi’s modesty, Chopra had long ago learned, was a rare and shy creature, unlike the man himself. ‘They asked me if I wanted to bring anyone along and so I thought of you. What could be more perfect for a circus like this than a grown man who wanders about with an elephant in tow?’

Chopra gritted his teeth. His friend meant nothing by it, of course, but sometimes . . .

Just over a year ago he had arrived home – an apartment tower in the suburb of Andheri in Mumbai – to discover a one-year-old elephant on his doorstep. The animal had been sent to him by his long-vanished uncle for reasons he had yet to fathom, with the simple instruction that he care for it, no small request of a man who lived on the fifteenth floor.

Chopra had, that same day, retired from the Mumbai police force. Three decades of diligent service had been brought to an abrupt end by a bout of unstable angina. The sudden derailing of the life that he had known had left him disoriented, a man flapping around in a sea of confusion. Perhaps this was why, the very next day, he had made the fateful decision to pursue a case that was not only no longer his responsibility, but one his seniors had expressly forbidden him to investigate. His subsequent unmasking of a major criminal enterprise in the city had spurred him on to establish his own detective agency, for the one thing that hadn’t changed following his retirement was his commitment to the cause of justice.

During this initial investigation he had discovered that his young elephant ward was remarkable in ways that he had not at first understood. A flurry of further cases had only enhanced his appreciation of the creature. Not that the elephant was, in any sense, his partner in the agency. But he had fallen into the habit of taking his new companion around with him; Ganesha needed the exercise and his presence gave Chopra a sense of reassurance he would have been hard put to express in words.

Ganesha’s arrival had also gained the fledgling detective agency a certain degree of fame. Even in India the notion of a former policeman navigating the city with an elephant by his side had fired the imagination. Chopra had ignored it all, quietly getting on with things, beholden only to his own sense of mission. For he knew that modern India was a country of such vast inequalities that the notion of justice itself had become malleable, often at the mercy of those who had wealth, power and influence.

All aboard



The Monsoon Express was scheduled to depart late in the afternoon from Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus – still stubbornly referred to by most locals as Victoria Terminus or VT Station – a Gothic colonial-era building that commanded status as a world heritage site. VT station was also one of the busiest train stations in the world.

Chopra battled his way through the hordes of his fellow citizens scrambling in a dozen different directions, a mad dance of Brownian motion, towards the station’s outermost platform. Along the way, he found himself accosted by beggars, eunuchs, bootboys, dragomen, runaways, pickpockets and sellers of everything from coconut water to windscreen wipers.

Negotiating the security protocol that had been laid on for the journey, he found himself on the platform proper, herding Ganesha along to the far end of the train. Here he met with a steward, sweating in a heavy formal uniform complete with gold piping and a pillbox hat. In the blistering April heat the man appeared on the verge of passing out. He looked at Ganesha, then back at Chopra. ‘That is an elephant.’

‘Yes,’ said Chopra. What else was there to say? It was not as if you could mistake an elephant for anything else.

The man consulted a clipboard.

‘There is no elephant on my list. Sir.’

‘There must be some mistake. This has all been cleared.’

‘There is no elephant on my list,’ repeated the man.

‘Is there a problem here?’

Chopra turned to see a tall, late-middle-aged white man, dressed impeccably in a cream linen suit.

The porter straightened his shoulders and pulled in his gut. ‘Yes, sir. The problem is that that is an elephant.’ He pointed his clipboard accusingly at Ganesha, who merely flicked away a curious fly with his trunk.

‘Remarkably observant of you,’ said the newcomer, in a crisp English accent. ‘I still don’t see the issue.’

‘There is no elephant on my list, sir.’

The Englishman turned to Chopra. ‘Now you wouldn’t be trying to smuggle an elephant on board, would you, old chap?’

Chopra bristled but then realised the man was smiling.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You have caught me. That was precisely my intention.’

‘Excellent. Better to make a clean breast of it and promise never to do it again.’ He stuck out a hand. ‘James Fairbrother. British liaison to the delegation. You must be Chopra.’

‘Yes,’ said Chopra. ‘And this is Ganesha.’

‘Remarkable creatures, elephants,’ said Fairbrother. He extended a hand in Ganesha’s direction. The calf wrapped his trunk around it and shook. Fairbrother addressed the porter: ‘Please make sure our little friend is taken care of.’

The man appeared ready to protest, but then nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

Chopra waited long enough to ensure that Ganesha was settled comfortably in the goods car, then headed towards the passenger carriages at the front of the train, together with Fairbrother. The platform was filling up with the handful of delegates fortunate enough to have been invited on the momentous journey. A heaving mass of press, held at bay by a cordon of security staff, snapped photographs and lobbed a never-ending barrage of questions into the fray. One or two had been allowed beyond the cordon to interview the passengers.

For the first time, Chopra got a close look at the train aboard which he was scheduled to spend the next two days.

He knew the story, of course; by now it had been replayed so often in the media that even beggars in the street could repeat it in their sleep.

Before the cataclysmic sundering of Partition, the Monsoon Express had charted a course between Calcutta in the far east of then-undivided India, all the way to Quetta in the west. In late 1947, as Muslims were forced to flee India to the newly created Pakistan, the train had found itself caught up in the national outburst of sectarian rage that had seen it stopped, literally in its tracks, and set ablaze. Thousands of passengers had died in their seats in the worst religious violence the country had ever seen. Nor had it been a solitary case. Many trains, flowing to and from both sides of the border, had become victims of the madness; tit-for-tat killings that remained an indelible stain on the souls of both nations seventy years later.

‘She’s a thing of beauty, isn’t she?’ remarked Fairbrother as they made their way through the press of bodies.

Chopra could only nod. He had quickly discovered that Fairbrother was one of the chief architects of the mission. A senior diplomat at the United Nations, for the past three years he and an American colleague had worked behind the scenes to convince the Indian and Pakistani governments to move towards détente. The two countries had been at loggerheads for years, ever since a spate of terrorist bombings in India led to accusations that Pakistan’s military intelligence had covertly encouraged the killers – a claim vigorously denied by the Pak government. Things had deteriorated to the point that the two nations had suspended cricketing relations; in other parts of the world this might have been tantamount to declaring war.

Fairbrother, whose grandfather had served as a railway engineer on the subcontinent, had proposed recovering the burned hulk of the Monsoon Express, restoring it to its former glory, and running the train between the two countries in a symbolic journey aimed at bringing this ‘Cold War’ to an end. After much horse-trading in the senior echelons of both governments the plan had been greenlit.

It had taken over two years to get the Monsoon Express up and running.

But the results were worth it.

There was something uniquely appealing about a train such as this, Chopra felt, eyeing the new maroon-and-mustard paintwork gleaming in the tropical sun. A sense of romance and revived grandeur, an echo of something once thought lost salvaged from the ravages of time and history. The train’s very existence, after all that it had se. . .