Stroke of Death

by Shampa Roy

Genres: Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

The year is 1904 and there's a storm brewing on the horizon...

Nothing ever disturbs the quaint idyll of the village Rajapur. That is, until one day, a young widow is discovered bludgeoned to death, flies swarming over her corpse.

Called in to investigate, Bansidhar, the local daroga, is at his wits' end about this grisly murder, further complicated by the slain woman's ties to the most important household in the village - the Rajbari.

Inspector Dhananjoy Lahiri has just arrived at his friend Bansidhar's for a break from work, but he can't stop himself from being drawn to the gruesome case.

As the duo begins to dig deep into the victim's life and her relationships with the people she worked for, they discover that the Rajbari residents are hiding secrets of their own.

With the clock ticking, will the two of them be able to find the killer before tragedy strikes again?

Release date: September 20, 2024

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 272

Sample

Prologue

Rajapur, a village in (what will soon be) East Bengal

October 1904

Sarala Dasi’s corpse had lain undiscovered for more than twelve hours. And had it not been for some boys chancing upon it while playing truant from the village school, it would have probably remained unseen for much longer. Her body lay on its stomach, the smashed head twisted to one side. On the deserted path that connected the local zamindar’s estate, the Rajbari, with the rest of the village. Sarala, a cook and household help at the Rajbari, took that path once a week to walk back to the village. By the time her lifeless form was spotted, flies had already begun swarming all over it, playing a grotesque tune to accompany the stench of death. All else forgotten, the boys gaped with horror-filled fascination at the dead woman’s splayed limbs, the open wound at the back of her head, where blood and brain matter had coagulated, and the sightlessly staring milky eyes. Then one of them saw a fly crawl out of her eye, recoiled and threw up his last meal. A spell seemed to be broken, and all the boys screamed in unison and ran towards the village, clutching their dhotis, to raise an alarm.

When Daroga Bansidhar Gupta arrived on the scene, he fought hard to control his nausea as the acrid smell of blood, urine and rotting flesh assailed his nostrils. Every time something like this happened, he would chide himself and try to bolster his courage, but invariably, his knees would tremble and bile would tickle the back of his throat. Finally, when he could no longer go on pretending to assess the surroundings, without running the risk of being thought a coward by his junior officer, he dropped to his haunches with a sigh to get a better view of the dead woman’s face. ‘Bloody hell!’ he exclaimed as he flapped his hands to move the flies. ‘Isn’t this Sarala Dasi? Isn’t she a cook at the Rajbari? Why, who could have done this to the poor girl?’ Then the corpulent daroga stood with some effort, pulled at his robust moustache and thought plaintively, Lord, help me! How am I ever going to get to the bottom of this?



The evening just before having her head bashed, Sarala Dasi, in yet another instance of life’s cruel ironies, had felt her entire being swell with a rare sense of happiness. This despite the fact that the morning’s flurry of activities had left her feeling exhausted and tetchy. For kitchen hands like Sarala Dasi, the approaching Durga Puja celebrations meant monstrous amounts of work in the Rajbari kitchen. There was the incessant pounding, grinding, mashing, chopping and slicing of various kinds of spices, vegetables and fish. Then the scouring and scrubbing of heavy brass and copper utensils till every muscle hurt. Eyes and throat would burn with the thick smoke coming out of the large stoves. And all this accompanied by the head cook Kamini’s angry glare and oft-repeated warnings about the reprisals that would follow any mistakes in the kitchen. Sarala had to bite her lips to prevent a fitting rejoinder from flying out of her mouth. She often fantasized about killing the battleaxe! If there was a boti big enough to do the task, Sarala would have happily sliced the woman into pieces like the aubergine she was about to chop.

By late afternoon, Sarala had felt a headache chafing the back of her eyes and announced that she would return the next day after visiting her house in the village. Ignoring Kamini’s huff of annoyance, she had stalked out of the kitchen and then walked slowly to her favourite place on the estate, the little pond, the pukur. That was where she would often go to rest her aching limbs and calm her agitated mind. It also happened to be the beginning of her favourite time of the day. The time when the sun, just before fading gradually, proclaimed its presence in a dazzling display of colours. Ma had once told her that it had a special name – godhuli or the hour when the cows returned home, stirring up dust with their restless hooves – and little Sarala had smiled dreamily. Sitting on the banks of the pukur, she stretched out her legs and felt the water lapping against her feet. All around her, cicadas had begun their choric chirping. Frogs croaked at regular intervals, and tiny insects could be seen hovering right over the still surface of the pond water. Even the harsh cawing of the crows seemed to meld perfectly with the sweeter sounds of birds returning to their nests. It made her believe that life was full of possibilities. With a rapturous smile on her lips, Sarala leaned back on her hands, shut her eyes and inhaled the fragrance of the shiuli flowers that magically appeared at this time of the year to herald the arrival of the goddess. After a while, she placed her chin on her knee and thought about her precious secret, hugging it to herself.

Until now, there had been little in Sarala’s brief life to give her true happiness. Memories of her childhood made gall rise to her throat. Her parents had never made the slightest effort to hide their disappointment at having a daughter instead of the son they had always longed for. As they saw it, she was a hotobhagi, an accursed girl who had survived at birth by not allowing her male twin to breathe. All those years ago, while they had waited with bated breath for the midwife to revive their son, it was their wretched daughter’s lusty cries that filled their ears. And the cries had continued to rend the air for a long time, a loud and insistent echo of their own sense of devastation and loss.

Not surprisingly, therefore, soon after she turned eleven, they felt euphoric about being able to marry her off to a middle-aged man of the right sub-caste of brahmins. A grey-haired, hollow-cheeked Nobin Chandra, who was unabashedly besotted with his lissom mistress, a Boishnobi* called Haridasi. His wife he only saw as fit for endless cursing, pummelling, kicking and slapping. Thankfully, he did her a favour and died four years into their marriage. Sarala could still recall the day when the news of the accident and of his death arrived and flooded every pore and crevice of her tormented fifteen-year-old body and mind with relief.

With nothing but her tiny marital home to call her own, Sarala’s initial relief, however, had been quickly replaced with worries about finding a way to make ends meet. Her ma and baba all but abandoned her after offering injunctions about the life of a virtuous widow. Don’t even dream of eating fish, her mother had warned her through pinched lips. Sarala had nodded mutely while swallowing back the screams of frustration building up inside her. Why? She wanted to yell. What on earth does fish-eating have to do with a dead husband? I began eating fish long before I met him! So why, even in death, does this man have the right to take away everything that gives me pleasure in life? But she had kept quiet and watched her parents leave.

Strangely, help had come from a completely unexpected quarter. Out of the blue, her husband’s mistress, Haridasi Boishnobi, had paid her a visit one day, gauged her situation with large, intelligent eyes and then brought her the offer to work in the Rajbari kitchen.

That was how Sarala Dasi had landed up at Zamindar Ballabh Ray’s estate a year ago. A whole year ago! How time had flown! The first day that she had seen the imposing mansion with its seemingly endless grounds, it had left her feeling giddy with terror. Little by little, she got used to it. To the sheer scale of the place with its pond and gardens, its impossibly sturdy yet graceful pillars, maze-like corridors and courtyards, tall alabaster sculptures and latticed brickwork. To the people living in it. And then, just when she assumed that her arid life was going to centre around the endless drudgery in the Rajbari kitchen, something unexpected had happened. Something she didn’t think was written in the destiny of a hotobhagi.

With a smile, Sarala heaved herself up from the steps of the pukur. She could see someone walking towards her. A tide of jubilation rose inside her. Her life, Sarala felt confident, was on the brink of a great change.

Later, with the feeling of happiness still lingering, she walked towards the village, like she did every week. After every five days, she would return to her tiny house in the village. To clean it and then rest for a day before returning to the Rajbari. Walking on that desolate path usually made her jittery because of all the stories she had heard since childhood, of brohmodottyi, the demoniacal ghosts of brahmins, lurking in the trees and ready to pounce on unsuspecting travellers. But that evening, it felt as though she were treading air. The leaves she clutched in her hand made her feel invincible. She was loved, they told her, their rough edges rubbing against her palm. She had put a few in her mouth, but she wanted to feel the rest in her hand. She found herself humming a long-forgotten tune under her breath.

Just then, a slight noise made her stop. What was that? A trapped bird fluttering its wings? The sinister presence in the trees that she had heard about? Or just her mind playing tricks on her? She needed to walk faster, not stop and wonder. And that’s when the blow seemed to come from nowhere and put paid to all of Sarala Dasi’s dreams. She felt as though her head was exploding into a thousand fragments as she pitched to the ground. Then, just before drawing her last ragged breath, Sarala glimpsed a face peering down at her. A set of familiar eyes was watching her die with an unwavering expression. That was no ghost! She knew the owner of that face. But why? was her baffled thought before darkness descended and Sarala’s mind lost its ability to make sense of anything forever.

 

* A Boishnob or Boishnobi refers to practitioners of Vaishnavism in Bengal. Associated with the worship of Radha and Krishna, Vaishnavism was hugely popular in the nineteenth century amongst prominent Hindu houses as well as amongst men and women of non-dominant castes.

1

An Inspector Arrives

When Inspector Dhananjoy Lahiri of the Detective Department of Calcutta Police alighted from the train that had brought him from the bustling city, where he lived and worked, to the quiet village of Rajapur, nothing could be further from his mind than a homicide investigation. It was at his boss Mr Smithson’s behest that he had had to plan this holiday, and his boss had made it quite clear that his instructions were not to be taken lightly. The superintendent of Calcutta Police had noticed the growing shadows under the young detective’s eyes – legacies of sleepless nights – and the slight tremor in his hands. He knew they were signs of the hidden toll that battling the forces of darkness was taking on his best and favourite recruit. Without further ado, he insisted that Dhananjoy take a month-long break during Durga Puja. The idea had filled the young detective with feelings of bewilderment. A break? How on earth was he going to live without what Smithson had termed ‘the relentless pressures of working as a detective in this wretched city’? What was he supposed to do if he could not puzzle over enigmatic clues, pursue intractable leads or go off on wild goose chases? But Smithson had been firm. He needed to get away from it all for a while. Dhananjoy had had no choice but to rack his brains for a place to visit. And that’s when Rajapur had sprung to mind.

Rajapur! The village where he had spent his childhood. The village he had not visited in over fifteen years, despite all the promises he had made to his childhood friend Bansi, now Daroga Bansidhar Gupta of Rajapur Thana. Bansi had even stopped writing to him for a while when Dhananjoy could not make it to his wedding. At long last, it seemed to Dhananjoy, the time had come to make good on all those promises. Revisiting Rajapur after more than a decade, he hoped, would provide the much-needed panacea for his ills. Crime-solving would have to be set aside for a while.

And yet, one of the first things he heard as he got off the train in the evening and scoured the small platform to see if Bansidhar had come to meet him was the word ‘murder’. The rural railway station was utterly different from the one at Howrah from where he had started his journey. That had been a swirling mass of passengers, porters, food and magazine sellers and beggars. A maelstrom of sights, sounds and smells that left one’s senses reeling. Here, besides him and a skeletal stray dog searching for scraps of food, there were just two men on the near-deserted platform. They were talking in agitated voices, and there was no doubt that the one word he heard being used repeatedly was ‘murder’. Feeling Dhananjoy’s eyes upon them, the men stopped and turned around to cast curious glances in his direction. One of them then walked up to him and asked whether he needed any help. Strangers were a novelty in Rajapur, and the gentleman who asked the question stared intently at the newcomer.

And then, after scanning Dhananjoy’s face for some time, he exclaimed in a loud voice as though he had just won the lottery, ‘As I live and breathe, it’s Dhananjoy, is it not? Pandit moshai’s son? Arre, no wonder you seem so familiar! You look so much like your father, Dhirendra Lahiri. Our Pandit moshai. Tall and lean like him. Same eyes as him! I remember the hair as well!’ Chortling gleefully, he pointed at Dhananjoy’s abundance of wavy hair, which had always defied the ministrations of a comb. ‘I was a few years senior to you in school, but we were all taught maths by Lahiri Pandit. And who can forget those lessons and the canings that accompanied any mistakes? I had heard that you were going to pay us a visit. You have come to visit your old friend Bansi, right? Our Daroga Bansidhar? By the way, I’m Ahir. Ahir Bhattacharya. I’m the station master here. Welcome, welcome back to Rajapur.’ Dhananjoy had nearly forgotten that in a village, secret threads of communication bound every household. In a place like this, it would be nigh on impossible for a stranger to slip in unnoticed. Everyone knew everyone else, and if a stranger was spotted, the locals felt entitled to know every little detail about him and probably also that of his forefathers. Once Dhananjoy confirmed that Ahir was right in his conjectures, he found his hand seized and pumped with great enthusiasm.

The other gentleman had been standing at a distance and picking his teeth, his eyes trained on the duo. When Ahir waved to him, he joined them and was introduced as Ahir babu’s cousin from a neighbouring village. After some initial pleasantries, they both looked at Dhananjoy with keen interest and asked, ‘Now that you are here, Dhananjoy babu, are you going to help our Bansidhar in his investigations?’

In response, Dhananjoy could only look at them blankly and ask, ‘What murder? What investigation?’

Taken aback by his genuinely perplexed expression, the two men exchanged glances and then launched excitedly into a lengthy description of the murder that the entire village was abuzz with. The body, it seems, had been found that very morning. A woman’s body at that! A cook at the Rajbari. Their garbled account of the incident was rounded off by Ahir babu’s cousin’s ominous proclamation about the Rajbari estate. It sounded like something he said often and with relish. Shaking his head, he asserted after spitting out a few bits of betel leaf, ‘The Rajbari is accursed, I tell you, Dhananjoy babu. Not a year passes without some incident that leaves everyone reeling with shock.’

‘But, Ajay, that’s not necessarily a bad thing for us, is it?’ the station master countered with a cackle. ‘Where would we get all our fodder for gossip and speculation if it were to become a quiet, uneventful place? Fodder we can chew on for months and months? We would probably all die of boredom, don’t you think?’

After a while, sensing Dhananjoy’s growing restlessness, Ahir said, ‘You must be tired after your journey, Dhananjoy babu. Look at us, jabbering away. But Bansi isn’t here yet. Maybe there’s something holding him up. I have a suggestion. Why don’t I ask my assistant, Panna, to accompany you to the daroga’s house? It’s not that far.’

Several minutes later, as he walked to Bansi’s house accompanied by a dour-faced Panna, who had clearly not appreciated being hauled away from whatever he was doing and sent off to chaperone a strange man from the city, Dhananjoy wondered what could possibly have prevented his friend from coming to the station. Was it because of the case that Ahir and his cousin were talking about? Or could it be that Bansi’s wife, Saroja, didn’t share her husband’s enthusiasm about having a random stranger rattling about their house? What if she was a strict follower of the purdah, and resented the very thought of having to welcome a man who wasn’t actually a relative? In the city, he had begun to see a few ladies running the gauntlet of mockery and censure, and emerging out of the veil. Some, he had heard, entertained their husband’s friends at home. A few bold ones had even started travelling on the train with their husbands or crossing the seas with them. He truly admired them. But how could he possibly expect the same behaviour from a young woman who had never stepped out of Rajapur? How thoughtless of him not to consider these things till now. Had he unwittingly ignited a domestic spat in his friend’s house? Is that what had prevented Bansi from coming to the station? Preoccupied with his misgivings, Dhananjoy started a little when Panna pulled up short in front of a house and shouted, ‘O Bansi dada, look who’s come here all the way from Calcutta to see you.’

And then, to Dhananjoy’s immense relief, a young woman, her head covered with the end of her sari, walked out into the courtyard to greet him with a broad, welcoming smile and said, ‘Thakurpo, your friend has told me so much about you. He misses you a lot. Why did you take so long to come and meet us?’ And with that, she proved all his worries to be unfounded. The mystery of Bansi’s absence at the railway station was also soon solved. Daroga Bansidhar, it seemed, had gorged on luchi and halwa in the afternoon and, not surprisingly, by the evening, had been prostrated by a terrible pain in his stomach.

With a glint of amusement, Saroja said, ‘Ever since your letter arrived, he has been on pins and needles with excitement. Running around and preparing for your visit. But then, there was the murder scene he had to visit in the morning, and when he returned, he just couldn’t stop eating.’ She continued with a heavy sigh, ‘You know, Thakurpo, some people sink their worries in drink. Your friend drowns his in food.’



Upon seeing his old friend after fifteen years, all that Bansidhar could muster was a wan smile and a half-hearted embrace before going back to clutching his rather substantial stomach and importuning his dead parents to come and rescue him from the pain. He was sprawled on a takhtaposh, moaning, ‘Baba go, Ma go,’ and vowing from time to time that he would never touch another luchi again in his life.

Dhananjoy was sat next to him in a chair, with his arms folded and a small playful smile on his lips. Glaring at him, Bansidhar bleated, ‘Is the hoity-toity inspector from Calcutta amused at my suffering? Is it not enough that he has deigned to visit his oldest and closest friend after fifteen long years? Must he then add insult to injury by cackling shamelessly at my pain?’

Trying in vain to control his laughter, Dhananjoy comforted his offended friend. ‘Oh, no, no, not at all. I’m very sympathetic, Bansi. After all, it’s not every day that one gets to hear of such Herculean feats! Sixteen luchis, Saroja boudi informs me! You are a true marvel, my oldest and dearest friend! So what if there’s a bit of stomach ache? Think of it as a small sacrifice at the altar of the great luchi!’

Bansi continued glowering at his friend. ‘Is it my fault that your boudi makes luchis only once in a blue moon? Of course I end up overeating. You know about my weakness for the wretched things.’

Somehow, Bansi managed to look both angry and woebegone. Dhananjoy burst out laughing as he sat watching his childhood friend. ‘Yes, Bansi, I know about your weakness for food. That’s something I have not forgotten in all these years. But I can also understand why Saroja boudi makes luchis only once in a while.’

Saroja peeped into the room upon hearing her name and then said in an emboldened voice, ‘Yes, Thakurpo, please tell your friend that his gluttony will be the end of him someday. I have given up trying to knock sense into his head. Can you see that belly of his? People laugh behind his back and say that the chor-dakat of Rajapur sleep peacefully because they know Daroga Bansidhar will never be able to chase them with that huge paunch.’

Bansidhar grimaced as a fresh wave of pain hit him and then huffed like a fractious child. ‘Must you also start? Aren’t I being punished enough as it is? O Ma, go! Go away now. Let me talk to my friend. His Highness has come to visit me after fifteen long years. Leave us in peace, will you?’

Saroja bristled. ‘Who’s talking to you? Can’t I have something to say to my Thakurpo? But since I’m here, let me tell you, Daroga babu, you are going to get thin gruel for the next two days. Don’t even think of protesting. I’ll start adding an extra day of gruel for every word of protest that comes out of your mouth. Everything else that I make in the kitchen will be for Thakurpo. He could do with a bit of fattening up. I don’t think he gets the time to eat in Calcutta.’ And with that, Saroja flounced out of the room.

Sitting near Bansidhar, Dhananjoy felt a little dazed by the fact that he was seeing him after more than a decade. His puny childhood friend had gained a fair bit of weight in the intervening years. But he could still catch glimpses of the round-faced boy he had left behind. All those years ago when most of the other boys of the village pathshala would give Dhananjoy a wide berth or trouble him for being the fearful Lahiri Pandit’s son, Bansi, for some reason, had decided to stick by the tall, thin boy’s side. He felt protective towards the earnest boy who was slightly younger than him. They had become inseparable – manikjor as they were called by the people of the village – and remained so til. . .