Up in Flames Read online

  Maybe, Casey thought as he sat slumped in the garden waiting for Catt to return from the bar, the combination of a few beers followed by an early night would help shake loose the little niggle that seemed to have taken root in his brain. Besides, the interview with Chandra’s in-laws, Mr and Mrs Bansi was arranged for the next day and Casey had a feeling that he might need a good night’s sleep before he tackled those particular suspects.

  ‘By the way, said Catt, as he returned, handed Casey his pint and sat down opposite him in the pub’s garden, ‘have you got squatters?’

  ‘Squatters? What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s just that I passed your house earlier and saw this bedraggled old bloke coming out of your front door. I was about to challenge him, but then the radio went and I had to leave. Forgot about it till now.’

  Casey hadn’t confided his parental problems to Catt. Now he thought as quickly as his tired brain would allow and said, ‘Must have been my father. I’ve got my parents staying for a few days,’ he explained. ‘My father offered to do a bit of gardening while he’s here. No doubt he had on his disreputable old gardening clothes. Makes him look like a superannuated hippie.’

  Catt laughed. ‘That’s all right, then. Just as well I didn’t challenge him.’ Catt’s voice grew wistful. ‘Must be nice having your parents visiting. God knows where mine are. They could be dead for all I know.’

  ‘Have you never thought of trying to trace them?’ Casey asked, keen to get off the subject of his own parents.

  Catt shook his head. ‘What’s the point? They didn’t want me when I was a toddler so they’re unlikely to want me now.’ Abruptly, he changed the subject. ‘So, tell me about your parents. What do they do? Where do they live? I’m surprised you’ve never mentioned them.’

  Casey had never mentioned them for several very good reasons, one of which was that it seemed insensitive to talk about one’s parents with Tom. ‘They’ve got a smallholding,’ he said. ‘Miles away in The Fens.’

  ‘Must have been fun growing up there with animals and tractors and a barn to play in,’ said Tom, sounding even more wistful. ‘Sounds idyllic.’

  Casey gave a wry smile, but didn’t disabuse Tom of the notion that his childhood had been idyllic. Why disillusion him? Instead, he nodded at Catt’s nearly empty pint and said, ‘Fancy another?’ Keen to get off the subject of parents, Casey added, ‘I wanted to discuss how I’m going to handle tomorrow’s interview. You can think about it while I get the drinks in. One more won’t put us over the limit.’

  Later that evening, home early for once, Casey decided he would be wise to listen to his doubts about Gough and Linklater’s complicity in the Bansi deaths. If they proved well-founded he would need to consider other suspects so he might as well start now. It was probably time he learned something more about Asians and their culture, in any case, especially as the next day would bring the interview with Mr and Mrs Bansi, Chandra’s less than kind in-laws.

  So, after dinner that evening, Casey asked his mother for her experiences of India. Shazia Singh had reminded him of things he had mostly forgotten; if he had ever known them.

  Stretched out on a cushion, head in hands, in the flickering candlelight which his mother preferred, she looked young again. He noticed she still wore the little carving of the Hindu elephant god, Ganesh on a cord round her neck. It was his mother’s prized possession, having been given to her by a sadhu, one of India’s many wandering holy men.

  In popular Hinduism, Ganesh was, he recalled, an important god. As his mother had told him many times in an attempt to spark him to share her interest in Indian mysticism, as a policeman he should be grateful for any help received and Ganesh was supposed to be the remover of obstacles. He was prayed to by Hindus before any important event, whether it was getting married, moving house or taking examinations. The son of the great god, Shiva, Ganesh or Ganesha had had his head struck off by Shiva after Parvati, his mother, had asked her son to mount sentry outside her room and permit no one to enter. To the boy, his mother’s explicit instructions clearly included his father and after various failed attempts to gain entry to Parvati’s room, Shiva had finally struck the boy’s head off with his trident. At Parvati’s insistence, Shiva replaced the boy’s head with the head of the first living being he met, which happened to be an elephant.

  Casey could only be thankful that the fiercely-tusked carving had not pierced his flesh during his mother’s hug of greeting.

  There was a piece of her ‘wailing’ music playing softly in the background. With the candlelight and the burning sandalwood joss sticks his mother favoured delicately perfuming his living room, if he half-closed his eyes and fixed them on a particular part of his prized scripophily collection - a framed old share certificate of the India General Navigation and Railway Company with its river boat and onion-domed building in the background - they might almost be back in India. To complete his memories of that time, his father was stretched out on the floor with his head in his mother’s lap, snoring softly.

  Invited to talk about her favourite subject, his mother smiled. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Anything. Everything.’

  She gave a low chuckle. ‘Silly Willy. I can’t tell you everything. No one knows that. India is a country of many mysteries, much spirituality, great kindness and great cruelty, too. Many different peoples, languages, religions, history. The contrasts are like way out.’

  Smarting a little under his mother’s ‘Silly Willy’ tag, he said shortly, ‘I know that much.’ He had been there, after all. ‘I meant tell me something more specific. For instance, someone was telling me about widows today. What an awful time they have of it. Is it true?’

  She nodded. ‘I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I expect so. We were there in ‘87 when another case of widow-burning hit the headlines. Young woman, not even out of her teens. Only been married a matter of months. There was speculation that she hadn’t climbed on the pyre willingly.’

  Casey hunched forward encouragingly as his mother paused as if she had trouble recalling the past through the haze of drugs she had consumed in between. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Give me a chance, Willow.’ His mother sat up and eased another cushion under her legs where the weight of her husband’s head pressed her into the floor. Her expression turned sombre. And as she spoke, it was evident her memories of that time were very clear. ‘We’d been bumming around Rajasthan for a couple of weeks and hey - it was so in your face. All the local papers were full of this young woman’s suttee. The English language rags followed suit. They raged about it for weeks as though such happenings were unheard of. But we got talking to another traveller - one who’d put down roots - and he told us that widow and bride burning caused regular uproar, although bride burning was frequently disguised as kitchen accidents and the widows were apparently always willing. Sounds barbaric, I know, but suttee or sati has a long history in the state. You’ve got to remember the centuries of violence and upheaval that brought it about. This guy - Seth, his name was - told us that the practise of sati went back at least to the times of the Moghul invasions when the infamous Chittor mass satis in Rajasthan occurred. The – ’

  ‘Hold on,’ Casey interrupted. ‘Tell me about the Chittor thing.’

  ‘According to Seth, Rajputs had a code of chivalry and honour, something similar to the code of chivalry followed by our medieval knights. When they were invaded, even when they were massively out-numbered, rather than doing the sensible thing and retreating to fight another day, their code of honour demanded they don saffron robes and ride out to meet death on the battlefield. Meanwhile, so that they wouldn’t be dishonoured in the usual fashion by the invading army, this same code demanded that their women and children commit Jauhar - mass suicide - on huge funeral pyres. A relatively quick death by fire was considered to be the better option than the dishonour and inevitable death following multiple rape. Among Rajputs, honour was always more important than death.’

  Hi
s father stirred in his sleep, grunted and turned over. ‘So what numbers are we talking about here?’ Casey asked.

  ‘Patience, Willow. Let me tell you in my own way. Where was I? Oh yes. Mass suicide happened three times in Chittorgarh’s long history, the last one was sometime in the sixteenth century. During the previous invasion, when the fort was again besieged,

  Seth told us that around 13,000 Rajput women and 32,000 warriors died after the declaration of jauhar.’

  Casey let out a long, low whistle at this, muttered ‘Jesus’.

  ‘As with so many traditions, sati clung on, particularly among the illiterate peasants.’

  Casey sat back as he tried to imagine the scene at one of these jauhars. Fortunately, his mind was unable or unwilling to compose the horrific pictures necessary.

  The story had obviously made a deep and lasting impression on his mother for her to recall it so vividly and with such ease. How the uneducated clung to well-worn ways, even when the need for them had long passed. Casey remembered his Great-Grandmother, his mother’s Gran. A countrywoman, born and bred in the East Anglian Fens, she had religiously followed the practises she had learnt in her youth - of force-feeding Casey senna to give him ‘a good clearout’; of smothering his chest in goose-grease whenever he had a sniffle, covering it with brown paper and then applying an iron; of wringing the necks of chickens without a qualm. Substitute women for chickens and fire for neck-wringing and it was easy to see that the way things had always been done could so easily continue without anyone questioning them. There were enough examples in British history of men riding out valiantly towards almost certain death; The Charge of the Light Brigade, going over the top in the First World War were just two. With his interest in history which had sparked the start of his scripophily collection, Casey was aware that in Britain’s past death had been cheap, much as it was in present-day India and other parts of the globe regarded as third-world. Change was a thing that happened slowly, as leaders such as the Shah of Iran and Rajev Ghandi had learned to their cost.

  He gestured for his mother to continue and she resumed her story. ‘For Rajputs, the death of a widow on her husband’s pyre was regarded as the equal in courage to that of a Rajput warrior dying on the battlefield. It’s like a glory thing. Hey, these guys have got temples dedicated to sati all over the state. There’s bread in it. In some places the entire economy is dependant on visitors to the local temple spending their dosh. Widows might be outcasts, but once they’re burned they become deities. You should see some of the temples. Seth took us to one at Kotri, the Sati Savitri temple which was built in memory of a woman named Savitri who was immolated on her husband’s pyre.’ She frowned. ‘On 1 April 1973, if I remember rightly.’

  ‘Bit extreme for an April Fool jape.’

  ‘There’s nothing funny about a fundamentalist Hindu guy caught up in some religious rite. There was a kind of altar at this temple. It had a woman’s figure with a triangular brass head and a ghagra, an image of Durga, a female deity, astride a lion.’ She frowned. ‘Let’s see if I can remember this right - it’s been a long time. The dead woman apparently acquires the Shakti - the energy or life-force, I suppose, of Durga, who enters her and becomes the Sati Mata; a new, powerful goddess embodied in the two-eyed trishul. The two-eyed trishul represents the,’ she shrugged faintly, ‘metamorphosis, I suppose, of the woman Savitri into the goddess sati mata Savitri Devi.’

  ‘Not much consolation in becoming a goddess when you’re reduced to ashes.’

  ‘That’s what I said, but some of the Indian women I spoke to told me that Rajput females are amongst the most subjugated in the country. Few get any schooling. Once you become a widow there your life’s over. Widows bring such bad karma that the general drift I got from the women was that it was better for them to be a dead goddess than a living outcast. Many thought climbing on the fire would win out every time over a lingering living death. Strange country. Fascinating, too. You should go there.’ She smiled. ‘Might loosen you up’

  Funny, thought Casey, but his mother seemed to have forgotten that he had been to India, much as she and his father had forgotten about him for days at a time when, as a child he had accompanied them on the hippie trail. Probably, all the drugs she had taken down the years had damaged her memory. Or maybe it had always been selective. And if she forgot he was there she could also forget how she and his father had left him to fend for himself.

  ‘The contrasts are like way out,’ she went on when he didn’t speak. ‘Barbaric practises like widow and bride burning on the one hand and a terrific growth in the hi-tech industry on the other.’

  Casey nodded. He had read in the paper only the other day that lots of British firms subcontracted IT work to India. Not only were they world class in the field their computer nerds were also far cheaper than England’s.

  As his mother said, a strange, fascinating land, vast and sprawling, full of contrasts such as modern hi-tech alongside barbaric medieval ritual.

  And as he went to bed later that night, Casey’s only hope was that his doubts about Gough and Linklater’s guilt were unfounded. Because if they weren’t, he would have to start investigating the Khan and Bansi families’ possible complicity in Chandra and Leela’s deaths. And after what his mother had told him, he wasn’t sure he had the stomach for the further delving into India’s culture that such an investigation would require.

  Chapter Ten

  Mr and Mrs Sanjit and Roop Bansi lived in a three-bedroomed semi on the outskirts of King’s Langley. The house would have been spacious but for all the clutter. Casey wondered whether their home was used as an extension to their business storeroom, as all sorts of Indian artefacts and materials seemed to be stacked around the house. He recognised several pitaras, traditional carved wooden chests dotted around the room. The chests had small doors in front which, as he remembered from Indian folklore, were designed to deter thieves from stealing too many items from the chest at any one time. These were no doubt considered good enough for the export market, but as he recalled, they were far inferior to the magnificent examples of wood artistry he had seen in some of the palaces in India.

  On top of the chests were piled bolts of fabric; mirrored Rajasthani embroidery, hand-worked Salma saris. Another pile contained crewel-worked Toran wall and door hangings. In the corner was a teetering pile of beautifully detailed Jali carvings.

  Every wall was covered in pictures of a young man in his early twenties, whom Casey took to be the dead son, Magan. The pictures portrayed a good-looking, self-confident young man, verging on the podgy; the only-son-syndrome mentioned by Angela Neerey clearly evident in the well-fed cheeks and self-satisfied expression.

  The quantity of photos of him indicated that the son now ranked amongst the Indian gods in his mother’s eyes, statues of which cluttered every flat surface not already occupied, and which had apparently spread out from the corner shrine. Casey remembered several of them; Ganesh, of course, the popular elephant god, his mother’s particular favourite, Krishna, with his crown of peacock feathers, Brahma, Vishtu and Shiva the Trimurti.

  On the sofa, looking like a particularly well-fed Bhudda, sat Mrs Bansi with her husband squashed into a tiny corner beside her. Hard not to be reminded of Jack Spratt and his wife, was Casey’s thought. Mr Bansi was as thin as a beanpole, with a cadaverous face and desiccated looking skin, a bundle of twigs only held together by his clothing. She appeared as wide as she was high, with pendulous jowls that wobbled in tandem with the loose skin under her upper arms. She reminded Casey of the first - and only - children’s party he had attended at the age of five when he had seen a jelly for the first time - his hippie mother not being given to the provision of puddings - and had been so fascinated by the wondrous wobbling propensity of the jelly that his attempts to make it wobble still further had caused it to wobble to the floor. He had never forgotten it or the swift slap his friend’s harassed mother had administered; the injustice still rankled.

  There seeme
d no danger of the jelly woman collapsing to her carpet. Mrs Bansi looked as firmly set on the bright orange-floral settee as Queen Victoria had on her throne. Her voice was shrill and easily overpowered her husband’s low tones. She certainly seemed the more dominant personality.

  Casey was thankful the couple both spoke English; he had half-expected them to plead ignorance of the language in order to avoid his questioning. Perhaps they might have, but presumably they had realised that the presence of the uniformed Shazia Singh precluded such a stratagem.

  Casey began by asking about their dead son and offering his condolences.

  This set Mrs Bansi off. ‘My beautiful boy. What a loss to a mother. And to lose such a one because of a randi.’ Beside him, he heard WPC Asian’s swift indrawn breath. But before Casey could glance at her, Mrs Bansi had clasped her be-ringed hands to her mighty bosom with such force that every bit of her began to wobble alarmingly; almost he expected bits of her to shoot off in all directions and go splat on the carpet. ‘Such a good boy.’ Wobble. ‘Such a hard worker.’ Wobble. ‘How could you know what a loss my son is to me?’ Wobble. ‘Who will now look after me in my dotage?’ Wobble, wobble.

  Casey dragged his gaze from the human jelly to glance at the jelly’s husband. Squashed into a tiny corner of the two-seater settee he had scarcely uttered a word. At any moment Casey expected him to vanish altogether, his dry kindling body crushed to dust by the exuberant exertions of his wife. She had made no mention of her husband’s loss or of Chandra’s. Her words indicated that she did indeed blame Chandra for her son’s death, however unjustly. Grief such as Mrs Bansi’s didn’t allow for mercy or even fairness

  Such grief and outraged passion in a mind as strong-seeming as Roop Bansi’s could be a dangerous combination, particularly as ThomCatt, with a speed and initiative that Casey had come to expect, had somehow managed to uncover the information that Chandra would, indeed, have received a healthy inheritance from her late husband. A share of the business had been given to the son as a wedding gift, and, as his widow, Chandra would have inherited under the intestacy laws, always presuming that her youthful husband had made no will.