The Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction Volume 2

by Various

Genres: Mystery Anthologies & Collections

Synopsis

A detective delves into a cold case; a ship that disappeared in the Bay of Bengal in the year 1913.

A man is bludgeoned to death in an apartment and a piece of paper with the word 'STOP!' is nailed to his forehead.

Six deaths under mysterious circumstances and the only common link is a box of arsenic-laced sweets.

A soldier's homecoming dredges up memories of a murder that took place a decade ago in the family.

And more...

The first-ever anthology of its kind, The Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction compiles more than 30 compelling whodunits spread across two volumes. Hybrid, self-reflexive and experimental forms of writing that blur the boundaries between genres, with supernatural mysteries, serial murders and at times absurd crimes jostling for the attention of both amateur and professional detectives in these stories.

Red herrings simmered in blood gravy, served up with family feuds, ancient curses, long-haired lady sleuths and many other typical subcontinental chutneys provide a rare feast for the avid reader of crime fiction!

Release date: February 5, 2024

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 432

Sample

INTRODUCTION

Tarun K. Saint

The second volume of The Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction focuses on police procedurals and historical mysteries, briefly introduced below. Interested readers may refer to the first volume for a more comprehensive introduction to the genre of detective fiction and its subgenres.

POLICE PROCEDURALS – THE PROFESSIONALS

In this section, we find police work performed by professional detectives, though not necessarily along the lines of the police procedurals of the Anglophone tradition. The moral and ethical quandaries faced here by the police officer protagonists require renewed scrutiny, even historical reinvestigation of the very basis for law and order mechanisms set up in colonial times. There is a probing of the grey zone resulting from the collapsing of the boundary between good and evil due to the pressures of a given historical moment, or the sociological distortions ushered in by the metamorphosis of societal and institutional frameworks set up in the past. Instead, these stories require a reconstruction of the very basis for justice, whether in terms of contemporary people’s resistance movements against power and oppression or through an excavation of memories of historical struggles for equality and freedom, as modes of fictive testimony.

Arunava Sinha’s translation of Rajarshi Das Bhowmik’s ‘Detective Kanaicharan and the Missing Ship’ brings in a dimension of postcolonial retrieval of erased memory as a century old ‘cold case’ is sought to be cracked by police investigators in contemporary Kolkata. The case requires delving into the history of revolutionary groups in colonial Bengal as well as deployment of forensic intelligence as an explanation is sought for the disappearance of a ship in the Bay of Bengal in the early twentieth century. In effect, writing back to the Empire, this story invokes sciences such as meteorology and climatology to excavate an untold history of resistance and insurrection in Bengal crushed by the colonial state and its police officers at the time, as well as tactics of evasion and subterfuge resorted to in response.

Vikram Chandra is a major voice in Indian Writing in English, and his collection Love and Longing in Bombay (1997) first introduced Sikh detective Sartaj Singh in the story ‘Kama’.1 Sartaj received an extended lease of life in Sacred Games (2006), the novel that followed, as well as the Netflix series in Hindi (2018/2019). While the novel encompasses a longer history, including the experiences of abduction of women and sexual violence in the Punjab during 1947, as a serious crime thriller with a nuclear terrorism–based plot, ‘Kama’ has a sharper focus, skillfully negotiating the intersection between crime and communal politics through Sartaj Singh’s exploration of the dark underbelly of Bombay during the 1980–90s.

Giti Chandra writes in varied genres including fantasy, science fiction and formal academic prose. Her story, ‘A Darkling Plain’ is a police procedural with a difference. The story sensitively addresses the dilemmas of the #MeToo era in the context of a contemporary campus setting in Delhi, with keen insight into the issues raised about marginalized identities, whether in terms of caste or gender.

Swati Kaushal’s ‘All that Glitters’ is set in Solan, Himachal Pradesh, early in the career of her character ASP Niki Marwah. A case of kidnapping of a wealthy jeweller’s daughter turns out to be more complicated than anticipated. A woman inspector at the heart of the investigation, facing institutional mistrust within the small-town police force, brings in intuition and psychological insights as she solves the puzzle in an unorthodox fashion.

Ajay Chowdhury is a writer of crime fiction based in London, and his detective Kamil Rahman is from Kolkata. In The Waiter, Kamil faced exile from the police force on account of institutional corruption, and later unexpectedly grappled with a murder case while serving as a waiter in London. ‘The Woman with the Snake Tattoo’ is set in Kolkata, a police procedural in which the murder of a jeweller precipitates an investigation in which Rahman’s wife plays a crucial role in solving the mystery.

Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay is a major voice in Bangla detective fiction. ‘When Goyenda met Daroga’ (‘Gayapatir Bipad’, trans. by Debaditya Mukhopadhyay) pits a daroga (an inspector, here Gayapatir) against a goyenda (amateur sleuth Baradacharan in this tale) in a comedic rivalry as the two seek to outwit the master thief Jhularam and his gang. We can sense echoes of tales by practitioners of the adventure story and tall tale like Premendra Mitra in the description of the dacoit’s exploits (there is a self-referential allusion to Mitra’s character Ghanada).2

Vish Dhamija’s ‘To be Continued…’ features his character ASP Rita Ferreira in an early case, with a Himachal Pradesh locale. The story outlines the origins of Rita’s career as an investigator facing many obstacles as a policewoman and officer in this provincial setting, not least among her colleagues, revisiting the ancient question of who will guard the guardians.

Salil Desai’s Inspector Saralkar has become an established presence on the scene of Indian detective fiction, with his quirks and eccentricities and unique investigative method located in the context of contemporary Pune. In ‘Sound Motive’ Inspector Tendulkar unravels the mystery of a brutal attack in an apartment complex, ultimately disclosing the underlying and simmering tensions that may surface in large urban conurbations.

Mahendra Jakhar writes film scripts as well as crime fiction. Jakhar’s ‘The Devil of Delhi’ is a police procedural featuring a lady sub-inspector named Phoolan Dagar on the track of the reason for an inexplicable suicide by a decorated police officer. The dark underworld of the capital is laid bare in this tale of overstressed police officers, rampant corruption and the spread of a new and addictive drug in Delhi’s bylanes.

Sharatchandra Sarkar’s ‘Bravo! What a Theft’, translated by scholar of Bengali detective fiction Shampa Roy, is a nineteenth century novella, an adaptation and indigenization of Arthur Conan Doyle’s story ‘The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet’.3 The story first appeared in one of the first magazines of detective fiction, Goyenda Kahini (Detective Stories) in 1895. This story, set in colonial Calcutta, features a police detective (rather than an amateur) named Haridas, and a lawyer (rather than a doctor) as sidekick and narrator, and the narrative points of view are more varied than in the source text. It follows the model of Doyle’s story as the mystery of the disappearance of a valuable necklace (instead of a coronet) from a banker’s home is investigated. As in much early detective fiction, including Bangla detective fiction, the restoration of order is eventually achieved by the detective despite red herrings and false accusations, albeit with more physical action and a hint of misogyny.

HISTORICAL MYSTERIES – EXCAVATING THE TANGLED PAST

Historical mysteries or crime fiction can, as Ray B. Browne has suggested, open windows to cultures not identical to our own, and which may yet suggest new insights as regards our way of life today.4 Authors of such novels and stories in India have consciously sought to retell the story of the past, with the vantage point of the historical detective figure allowing for new perspectives as regards hitherto lost aspects of social and cultural history. As we see here, the perspectives generated enable detection and historical reconstruction to converge, with some unusual takes on the inheritances from the colonial era and the continuing ramifications of power asymmetries until today, which these stories bear paradoxical witness to even in the retrospective telling of the tale.

UK-based Vaseem Khan’s ‘Ghosts of the Partition’ is an instance of fictive testimony to the residue of the historical trauma of the partition. Persis Wadia, the first woman appointed as a police inspector in independent India, was first introduced in Midnight at Malabar House (2020), a novel that takes up the spectral remainder of the partition in its counterfactual depiction of the setting up a Truth and Reconciliation–style Commission to deal with the violence during the Partition. In the novel, the murder of the Englishman heading the Commission sets Persis on a quest to unearth evidence of the unspeakable atrocities of the partition moment. Here, Persis Wadia tracks an obscure but significant episode of collective violence that occurred on the trains during this time that haunts the conscience of an Englishwoman, who is later found dead, an instance of the persistence of traumatic memory across time and the difficulty of bearing witness to extreme violence.

Nev March has firmly established her presence in the domain of historical mysteries with Murder in Old Bombay. ‘Arsenic and the Shepherd’ revisits the career of Jim Agnihotri, the Anglo-Indian detective, now part of the police force, as he recuperates from the injuries undergone in the novel. A case of poisoning leads the inspector down a trail of unexplained deaths linked by consumption of arsenic-laced mithai, to an unforeseen conclusion. The story raises important ethical questions about retribution and vigilante justice, also as regards the varying levels of commitment of officers in the colonial police force to investigative work at the time of the crime, in 1892. The critical significance of record keeping and forensic details is underlined here as a timeline is established by Agnihotri for the series of linked murders.

Anuradha Kumar has written several crime-based ‘literary’ novels, including It Takes a Murder (2012) and The Hottest Summer in Years (2021). Kumar’s ‘Sudden Appearances’ is set in Allahabad, in the historical moment of 1889, and features characters from ‘real’ history like the founder of the A.H. Wheeler & Co. railway bookstore chain Emile Moreau, Gagendranath Tagore and Rudyard Kipling, brought to life on the trail of an elusive ghost who can tell the real story that lies beneath a case of purported widow self-immolation.

Madhulika Liddle’s detective series set in Mughal India, beginning with The Englishman’s Cameo,5 established maverick amir Muzaffar Jang as an amateur sleuth to reckon with. ‘A Convenient Corpse’ is a tale about deception and masked identities, rivalry in trade and the pent-up passions that lurk beneath the surface of commercial transactions. Jang unravels these tangled threads, in part aided by the curiosity and intelligence of his wife Shireen, as they uncover the truth of a brutal slaying.

Arjun Gaind’s Maharaja series introduced us to Sikander Singh, the Maharaja of Rajpore, an enthusiastic criminologist and amateur detective in the time of colonial rule in India. Here, in ‘The Diva’s Last Bow’ the Maharaja undertakes to solve a mystery in London, where a violent death occurs after an opera performance which he attends. The context of colonial era London makes for an unusual place for the deployment of the investigative skills of the visitor from the princely state during the British Raj, implicitly entering into dialogue with the many whodunit narratives with a colonial setting that often resorted to stereotypes.

Shashi Warrier is a well-established figure in the realm of Indian fiction, honing his craft as the author of many successful novels and thrillers. In ‘Murder in the Monsoons’ he explores the terrain of historical memory, with a retired army sepoy as narrator, who returns to Madras Presidency shortly after the Second World War. The story captures the atmosphere of the countryside and rural tensions pertaining to power relations stemming from caste differences as the narrator tries to uncover the truth underlying a killing that has remained unsolved for many years. The distinction between law and justice becomes crucial to understanding the unsolved mystery the narrator has been haunted by since childhood.

Seasoned journalist and writer Avtar Singh’s novel Necropolis (2014) braided together elements from noir, fantasy and crime reportage in a sophisticated reflection on both the contemporary reality of Delhi and its ancient history. His story, ‘A Scandal in Punjab’ is set in Lahore in 1947. The title riffs on Conan Doyle’s ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, though this tale about the last days of the British Raj does not feature a detective like Holmes. Instead, the focus is on the ambiguous experiences of Bik, or Bikram Singh, a brown sahib, during a pig hunt organized in the twilight of the Raj. There is a partition-related subtext, and the class-based hypocrisy and racial arrogance of the departing sahibs is subtly debunked, even as the disappearance of a valuable watch threatens to upend the even keel of inter-racial relations and scandal rears its ugly head. The watch becomes a symbol of time corroded and lost in the years of colonial rule, impossible to retrieve despite the deductive skills of his partner Bella.

 

1 Vikram Chandra, ‘Kama’ in Love and Longing in Bombay: Stories, New Delhi: Penguin, 1997, 75–162, reprinted in this volume.

2 See Premendra Mitra, Mosquito and Other Stories, Gurugram: Penguin, 2004.

3 As Shampa Roy argues, ‘Initially, writers and publishers of such fictions felt they could only appease their readership – the English-educated, middle-class Bengali bhadralok, many of whom were fervent anglophiles and readers of Vidocq, Poe and Doyle – with writings that were “chhayabalamban”, a word that hints at a slippage between an exact reflection and adaptation of the Eurocentric models.’ In time, Bengali detective fiction acquired a voice of its own, resistant to colonial typologies. See Shampa Roy, ‘Coloniality and Decoloniality’ in Janice Allan, Jespar Gulddal, Stuart King and Andrew Pepper, eds The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, Oxon: Routledge, 2020, 120–28, esp. 125, 128.

4 Ray B. Browne, ‘Historical Crime and Detection’ in Charles P. Rzpeka and Lee Horsely, eds., A Companion to Crime Fiction, 222–32, esp. 222.

5 Madhulika Liddle, The Englishman’s Cameo, Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2009.

DETECTIVE KANAICHARAN AND THE MISSING SHIP

Rajarshi Das Bhowmik, tr. Arunava Sinha

It had been quite a while since Kanaicharan Sircar, senior inspector in the Special Cell of the Detective Department, had been taken off duty. He had incurred the wrath of his bosses for several dubious activities. Taking his long experience and fame into account, he had not been transferred somewhere far away from Kolkata’s police headquarters in Lalbazar. In fact, he had been told to come to work every day. But no cases were being handed to him. Still, Kanaicharan knew that if something serious took place, it would take no time for his status to be shifted to on duty from off duty. So, he could be said to be savouring his fully paid holiday.

Every morning he had a bite to eat at home and then went to Lalbazar. He had a tiny cabin deep in the bowels of the building, with two doors and no windows. The corridor outside led to the offices of Criminal Records and of the Deputy Commissioner – Crime (DC – Crime). The cabin had two desks and chairs, one for Kanaicharan and one for Souvik Basu, a junior inspector who hadn’t served very long on the force. Souvik referred to Kanaicharan as his guru, paid for his cigarettes and coffee, and said that until the senior officer was brought back to active duty, he should have his lunch in Dacres Lane at Souvik’s expense. So Kanaicharan would enter his cabin at 10 in the morning, smoke a cigarette, open old case files and correctly identify the culprit after reading just a few pages.

Kanaicharan was quite fond of the registrar in the Criminal Records section. Every time he looked at the plump woman in round glasses with her sari pinned at the shoulder, he felt that had he been 31 or 32 instead of 58, and she, 27 or 28, there could have been an office romance. Now, on seeing him early in the morning, she smiled in a way that suggested she had been expecting him. ‘All these files of time-barred murder cases are so dull,’ Kanaicharan grumbled. ‘Can’t you give me something I can sink my teeth into, Didimoni? Something that can keep me going till the evening snacks at least?’

‘I’ve got something like that for you today,’ the woman Kanaicharan addressed as Didimoni said. ‘What they call an unsolved mystery.’

‘No such thing as an unsolved case in Lalbazar,’ Kanaicharan said despondently. ‘Just beat the shit out of them and everything’s solved. Oops, sorry, you didn’t mind that, did you?

Paying no attention, Didimoni said, ‘This isn’t a murder, it’s a lost ship. From the Bay of Bengal, no less. Right under the nose of the British Raj.’

‘Are you saying the Bay of Bengal turned into the Bermuda Triangle? Where’s the file?’

Passing Kanaicharan a pile of crumbling files, Didimoni said, ‘You’re just in time to read them, I have to send them to the Police Museum next month.’

When Kanaicharan entered with the dirty, yellowing files that were almost falling to pieces, Souvik jumped to his feet and put a packet of Navy Cut on his boss’s desk. Kanaicharan didn’t like talking when he read his case files, but his cigarettes had to be at hand. He would always tell Souvik: ‘Read the case files closely, they hold all the clues. Even the stupidest sub-inspector can come out on top if the case diary is written properly.’

Kanaicharan was absorbed in his files already, only reaching out mechanically for a cigarette periodically. He was frowning and rummaging through the papers. He was done with the case files and had opened a copy of the case proceedings. The hands of the clock were moving towards noon. But Kanaicharan hadn’t uttered a sound. On other days he only read the case files, abandoning each one after diagnosing that the suspects were beaten up to extract a confession. Racing though his own work, Souvik said, ‘Are we going to Dacres today?’

Surfacing from the depths of his thoughts, Kanaicharan smiled, ‘I haven’t briefed you yet, have I? I’ll tell you on the way there.’

They went out to the busy Bowbazar Street. Two detectives amidst the human currents of Kolkata. Kanaicharan began his briefing in a low of voice. ‘Here’s the case in a nutshell. It’s 1913. The British are quaking at the revolutionary efforts of Bengalis. The Maniktala Bomb Case has been withdrawn. Aurobindo has been freed. The revolutionaries are relatively quiet in Kolkata (then Calcutta), but they’re rife in Dhaka. At this time a spy named Nripen Chattaraj is caught in Kolkata, from Lalbazar of all places. He is a junior employee in the fingerprint department, he has been trained by the pioneers of fingerprinting in Kolkata, Azizul Haq and Hemchandra Bose. But at heart he is a committed patriot, with a soft spot for revolutionaries. He has close friendships and regular communication with several members of the Anushilan Samiti. Even if he doesn’t take part in their efforts personally, he helps the revolutionaries indirectly. By virtue of working in Lalbazar, he is aware of what the police is up to. He begins to pass on vital information through coded letters. His direct communication with Barin Ghosh or Hem Kanungo stops when there are widespread arrests of revolutionaries, but Nripen finds a new way to evade police attention. His part-time maid is entrusted with the responsibility of delivering the coded letters. She is innocent, merely obeying her employer’s orders under the impression that these must be official documents since he works in the police department. But she has her own little side enterprise. A police officer visits her as a client and notices a letter written in code. She is arrested, and promptly discloses Nripen’s name as the sender, with the hope of being released at once. But this has the opposite effect. Decoding the letter reveals it is written to Amar Chattopadhyay, a member of the Anushilan Samiti. Nripen has conveyed the powerful police chief Godfrey Dinham’s daily routine in the letter. He is arrested. There is consternation among the senior officers at the discovery of a spy in the police headquarters. It doesn’t occupy more than half a column of space in the newspapers though.

‘In his defence, Nripen confesses to writing the letter but says he was trying to dissuade his revolutionary friends from their activities with the threat of police action. This claim does not hold in court. He has no Chittaranjan Das arguing for him after all. And to add insult to injury, the British present one of his cousins as informer. He confesses that he is part of Nripen’s spying activities. The judge exonerates him and sentences Nripen to imprisonment in the Andaman. The Cellular Jail in Andaman constantly sees the advent of members of the Anushilan Samiti. Nripen is probably relieved at not being sentenced to death.

‘A ship sails from Kidderpore, in September 1913, with Nripen on board. An English officer named Wilson and two Indian havildars named Ram Singh and Navin Kumar Hota are escorting him in handcuffs. The ship is named George the Saviour. News of its arrival in the Bay of Bengal reaches Kolkata Port a day and a half later. A week later a ship bound for Kolkata spots it on the sea. George sends a response with its hooter. This is the last anyone hears from the George. The ship goes missing after this. All reports say the sea has been calm. There is no evidence of a fire. It is clear the ship has not reached the Andaman. According to the Kolkata newspapers, there is no further news of Nripen after this.

‘The case goes to the Special Branch at Lalbazar. The Special Branch, as is usual, conducts a primary investigation and, unable to discover anything, says in the report that the George has sunk near the coast. They add that the ship which claimed to have spotted the George was mistaken, it had misidentified another ship, a Malaysian vessel bound for Singapore from Kolkata. The report says that the George did not even make it as far as the sea, sinking after a collision with a sandbar in the delta. The Special Branch officers are expecting the mast of the ship to become visible if the river changes its course. In the hundred years that have passed since then, the river has indeed changed its course many times, but the George has not been seen. This is the story. What conclusions can you draw?’

Souvik was about to put some egg from his egg chowmein into his mouth. While walking from Bowbazar to Dacres Lane, his appetite usually went from tea and toast to chowmein and biryani. After his long speech Kanaicharan concentrated on his fish cutlet, but he remained alert. Souvik said, ‘There are no witnesses, everyone is dead and gone. I’m assuming none of the passengers on board were ever seen again. So, our case will be built on possible scenarios: What could have taken place and what did not take place. Am I right?’

Sipping his tea, Kanaicharan closed his eyes and said, ‘And what are the things that could have taken place?’

‘Let’s take the first possibility. The ship sailed in September, just after the end of the monsoons. The sea should have been calm, but then it’s not just a neighbour’s garden, it’s a huge expanse, so there could have been a short-lived storm. Or a cyclone, or a tsunami. How many of these events across such a vast sea could the meteorology office have known about?’

‘Yes, they could have taken place. Scientists can check on weather events over a thousand years in the past these days with new-fangled equipment. We can check on this.’

‘The second possibility. Maybe the George didn’t even leave Kidderpore. And even if it did, how many were on board? Who were the passengers? This needs to be considered.’

‘Highly unlikely. The report says there were ten passengers besides the captain and crew. It seems rather small, and that’s always a matter of suspicion. But it’s going too far to imagine the ship wouldn’t even have left Kidderpore. The police would have been there, excise officers, maybe reporters and relatives. Could the ship really have escaped in full view of so many people? Any other possibilities?’

‘One last one. All the people on board were killed so that Nripen could be freed, after which the ship was diverted to Malay or Pondicherry. Is this entirely implausible?’

‘Quite implausible. Ships were not planes, they ran on steam. Which needed deckhands and officers. Where would they have come from?’

Souvik objected mildly.

‘What if Nripen’s revolutionary associates murdered the crew and passengers? Meanwhile a foreign ship arrived, with extra deckhands on board, whose services were used to push the George into the jungles of the Sundarbans.’

Rinsing his hands using the water in his glass, Kanaicharan said, ‘The story’s grown legs and is climbing a tree, pull it back to earth. These were British waters my boy. Not even a fly could move about in the Bay of Bengal without their permission. So many people travelling on a ship would mean records being kept by the port authorities.’

‘So, is the first phone call going to be to the Port Trust when we get back to the office?’

Grinning from ear to ear, Kanaicharan said, ‘The first phone call will be to the Meteorological Bureau, not the Port Trust. And you will make it, don’t forget I’m still off duty.’

The walk back from Dacres Lane to Lalbazar usually helped Kanaicharan digest his lunch. Having smoked a cigarette, he leafed through the case file again and then closed his eyes to think. Nripen was a widower and had no children. His wife had died after going down with dum-dum fever soon after the wedding. Nripen’s only close relative was his mother. There was no record of what had happened to her after he was sentenced. The case diary included a list of things confiscated, the arrest warrant and an account of Nripen’s interrogation. It was all very dull, since no one had been murdered. When interrogated, Nripen had said he had never even been to Maniktala, where the Anushilan Samiti was located, leave alone Dhaka. The detectives hadn’t found any clues. So, the entire case stood on the confiscated letters, and the testimony of the maid and the cousin. The police brought a number of false witnesses to the court proceedings. The experienced judges needed no time to pick holes in their statements. What they said was given no importance in the verdict. The maid, whose name was Ganga, said in court she had delivered letters several times to the addresses her employer had asked her to. She had no idea who they were meant for. Nripen never denied sending the letters. In court, his answer to the public prosecutor was that he had appealed to his misguided friends for the sake of justice, the penal code and the British administration to refrain from their armed struggle. Kanaicharan tried to read some of the letters in the file on the now time-barred case. They were indeed written in code, and notes from the expert who had deciphered them had been added. Nripen proved to have been extremely canny – the way he had worded his letters was ambiguous. In one of the letters, he had written: ‘Be careful of Godfrey Dinham. I appeal to you on the basis of the penal code, Amar, he will not spare you. If you’re in Chitpur Lane in the morning that’s where he’ll arrest you.’ Nripen had cleverly revealed Dinham’s route while pretending to warn Amar Chattopadhyay.

Interrupting Kanaicharan’s afternoon nap, Souvik said, ‘I just got off the phone with the meteorology office. September is cyclone season. Suchayan Babu from the office said the cyclones arrive after the monsoon. There were some low-pressure areas over the Bay of Bengal in September 1913, but no storm.’

‘So, they used to forecast the weather from the Alipur office even back then?’ Kanaicharan asked with a trace of disdain.

‘Suchayan Babu said they have weather reports for all of India from 1850 onwards. But the surveys of maritime weather began much later. The British started it after surmising that a great war was on its way. The first World War. Honestly, sometimes I wonder what we would have done if the British hadn’t come. We wouldn’t even have known there’d been a cyclone.’

‘Your Suchayan will be arrested one of these days for wrong weather forecasts. This year the monsoon report came twelve days after the arrival of the monsoon. The DC wanted to know whether the Meteorological Bureau would supply blankets for flood relief.’ Kanaicharan lit another cigarette, laughing.

Souvik left to attend the daily crime conference. ‘I’ve sent some questions to the Port Trust,’ he said before leaving, ‘let’s see when they answer.’

Kanaicharan went back to his ruminations about the court proceedings against Nripen. He could have been exonerated, but his cousin’s testimony proved vital. An enemy in disguise. But then this was a familiar tactic for the British, who had used it to break the Anushilan Samiti. One of the police officers would threaten everyone, and another one would cultivate a chosen few to turn approver. Youngsters, all of them inspired by Barin Ghosh and others to free the country, and now facing police cases. Meanwhile their families were starving. Pushed into a corner by the good cop, bad cop act, it was easiest to turn approver, not be found guilty, and go back home safe and sound. All they had to do was to spill the beans on the activities of one of the senior- or middle-level leaders of the