The Case of the Love Commandos by Tarquin Hall Page A

hides, a few women milking the cows, three or four kids playing cricket with a tennis ball. One by one, they all stopped what they were doing and hurried indoors. By the time the hatchback came to a stop and Puri got out, there wasn’t a single person in sight.
    The detective considered knocking on one of the doors and explaining the purpose of his visit, but decided instead to go and sit in the shade of the only tree and wait for someone to come to him.
    Gandhi, he reflected, had seen village life as essential to the survival of Indian society. “If the village perishes, India will perish too,” he wrote. His romantic notions of the rural ideal were shared by many an Indian even today. As a younger man, Puri had shared them as well. But experience had changed this perception. The former Dalit leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s assertion that the village was “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism” had proven closer to the truth in the sixty or so years since independence. Sitting there, Puri thanked his lucky stars that he had born and brought up in a city, even if he often bemoaned the negative sides of urban living and the creeping Westernization of the nation’s youth.
    Ten minutes passed. And then a man approached. Like the other Dalits, his clothes were old and dirty and he was clearly malnourished. His face and body bore signs of anadditional indignity: he’d been badly beaten within the past few days and his cheeks and forehead were bruised. Had Puri not known better, he might have attributed the stranger’s cautious, subservient demeanor to the violence he’d endured and not a natural timidity born of a lifetime of repression.
    “Saab, I am the government-appointed village chowkidar and it is my duty to ask you your business here,” he explained in Hindi, hands pressed together in a namaste.
    Puri improvised. “I’ve come to make a full report about the incident,” he said without elaborating.
    “You’re with the police, saab?” asked the chowkidar.
    “From Delhi.” He was certain that mention of the far-off capital would be enough to establish his authority. Taking out his notepad and pen, he added, “Tell me what happened to you.”
    The chowkidar eyed the items with apprehension. “Which incident, saab?”
    “You’ve been beaten.”
    A coy smile spread across the man’s face. “It’s nothing, saab,” he said with a shake of his hand. “A misunderstanding.”
    “With whom?”
    A schoolboy giggle spilled out of him. “What’s done is done. No complaint.”
    “Were the men who did this to you looking for Ram Sunder?”
    The chowkidar pressed his hands together again, this time in supplication. “Please, saab. I’m a humble man. I don’t want trouble.”
    “Then tell me this: when was the last time you saw Ram?”
    “Just three or four days back, saab. Since then we’ve not seen him. Believe me! If he were here, I would tell you willingly. Why should we suffer for him?”
    Puri gave a nod. “How long did he stay?”
    “A few hours. He came late at night. By morning he’d gone.”
    “Has anyone else come today looking for him?”
    “No, saab.”
    “Last night?”
    “No one.”
    Puri checked his watch. It was almost eight. If Vishnu Mishra was coming, he would be here soon.
    “Show me Ram’s house,” he said.
    “It’s the one over there. The brick one.”
    Shielding his eyes from the sun, Puri looked to where the chowkidar was pointing. The house stood at the bottom of the slope and was indeed built of brick, the only one of its kind in the Dalit section. There was another thing: the construction was new.
    “Saab, it was made last month.”
    “What does the father do?”
    “Nothing. He sits around. She’s a midwife.”
    Midwives were traditionally considered polluted and were invariably all Dalits. They earned a pittance.
    “Then where did the money come from?” asked Puri.
    “Ram sent it. He’s the only child.”
    The detective