CHAPTER 1
THE WIDOWER’S LETTER
(POONA, FEBRUARY 1892)
I turned thirty in hospital, in a quiet, carbolic-scented ward, with little to read but newspapers. Recuperating from my injuries, a slow and tedious business, I’d developed an obsession with a recent story: all of India was shocked by the deaths of two young women who fell from the university clock tower in broad daylight.
The more I read about it, the more this matter puzzled me: two well-to-do young women plunged to their deaths in the heart of Bombay, a bustling city under the much-touted British law and order? Some called it suicide, but there seemed to be more to it. Most suicides die alone. These ladies hadn’t. Not exactly. Three men had just been tried for their murder. I wondered, what the hell happened?
Major Stephen Smith of the Fourteenth Light Cavalry Regiment entered the ward, empty but for me, ambling as one accustomed to horseback. Taking off his white pith helmet, he mopped his forehead. It was warm in Poona this February.
I said, “Hullo, Stephen.”
He paused, brightened and handed me a package tied in string. “Happy birthday, Jim. How d’you feel?”
The presents I’d received in my life I could count on one hand. Waving him to the bedside chair, I peeled the brown paper back and grinned at the book. Stephen had heard me talk often enough about my hero.
“The Sign of the Four—Sherlock Holmes!”
He nodded at the newspapers piled about my bed. “Interested in the case?”
“Mm. Seen this?” I tapped the Chronicle of India I’d scoured these past hours. “Trial of the Century, they called it. Blighters were acquitted.”
Outside, palm trees swished with a warm tropical gust. He sat, his khaki uniform stark in the whitewashed ward, smoothing a finger over his blond mustache. “Been in the news for weeks. Court returned a verdict of suicide.”
I scoffed, “Suicide, bollocks!”
Smith frowned. “Hm? Why ever not?”
“The details don’t line up. They didn’t fall from the clock tower at the same time but minutes apart. If they’d planned to die together, wouldn’t they have leapt from the clock tower together? And look here—the husband of one of the victims wrote to the editor.”
I folded the newspaper to the letter and handed it over. It read:
Sir, what you proposed in yesterday’s editorial is impossible. Neither my wife Bacha nor my sister Pilloo had any reason to commit suicide. They had simply everything to live for.
Were you to meet Bacha, you could not mistake her vibrant joie de vivre. She left each person she met with more than they had before. No sir, this was not a woman prone to melancholia, as you suggest, but an intensely dutiful and fun-loving beauty, kind in her attention to all she met, generous in her care of elders, and admired by many friends.
Sir, I beg you do not besmirch the memory of my dear wife and sister with foolish rumours. Their loss has taken the life from our family, the joy from our lives. Leave us in peace. They are gone but I remain,
sincerely,
Adi Framji (February 10th, 1892)
As Smith finished reading, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and got up. Or tried to, for the room did a dizzy whirl. I lurched, cursed, grabbed for the bed and missed.
Smith hollered, “Orderly!” and scrambled over.
They got me abed, but it was a struggle. I am not a small man.
“Take it slow, pal,” Smith said, his expression odd, as though I’d sprouted horns while he wasn’t looking.
“All right, all right,” I muttered to the orderly, a stocky Sikh in a grey turban and hospital uniform, who tended to fuss overmuch.
“Sahib has not been well, for many months,” the man assured me.
Bollocks. Had it been months? Only a few weeks, surely? I recalled feeling numb from cold, a fog of confusion, unfamiliar faces that came and went.…
“Dammit, Jim,” said Smith, wincing. “We’ve got to talk about the Frontier. The Afghans, Karachi.”
“Do we?” I asked. A drum began to pound in my head. I lay back and pressed the base of my palm to the aching pulse above my ear.
* * *
In the days that followed, my doctor came by, adding a host of cautions as medicos will. He seemed both pleased and doubtful at my progress. No longer a young man, I lay in bed considering my future and found it bleak. I had no family, just old Father Thomas at the Mission orphanage, who’d raised me. My friends from the Company were buried in the red dust of Karachi. Of the old company, only Smith, Colonel Sutton and I were left.
There was little profit in dwelling on it. Instead I returned again and again to the puzzle of the women’s deaths. Could I piece together the dire events of that sunlit October day? The story was starting to fade from the front pages, giving way to news of railway expansion across the Indian subcontinent. Yet that heartfelt letter haunted me: They are gone but I remain, the young husband had written. His words cut into me, the sharp burn of his grief. I knew something of his pain, for my brothers-in-arms were gone, yet I remained.
A week later I took medical discharge. Most of my army wages had gone toward my care and I had forty rupees to my name. I needed a job.
Well, perhaps I could write for the papers. Thinking of that snippet, the letter to the editor tucked in my billfold, I decided to call on the editor of the Chronicle.
CHAPTER 2
THE INTERVIEW
Four weeks had passed since young Mr. Adi Framji’s letter had burned through my fog in army hospital. Having persuaded the editor of the Chronicle of my seriousness, I rode a tonga through red gulmohur trees and stately houses to plead my case to the reclusive Mr. Framji. At the entrance to a great white house on Malabar Hill, a turbaned gateman disappeared through an ornate door with my calling card: Captain James Agnihotri, The Chronicle of India, Bombay.
Now standing atop a sweep of stairs outside Framji Mansion, I hoped to meet the man whose words would not leave me: They are gone but I remain.
Filled with trepidation, I breathed in the crisp morning air. Bougainvillea danced in the breeze beside fluted pillars, and scattered pink petals over smooth marble. The blooms’ wasted beauty struck a poignant note, echoing the tragic loss a few months past. Adi Framji’s wife and sister had fallen to their deaths from the university clock tower. Had the two women committed suicide, or were they murdered? The trial had failed to resolve the question for lack of evidence. Since young Mr. Framji had never spoken with the press, an interview could be the making of my new career. Hat in hand, I waited.
I’d either be told that Mr. Framji, student of law, son of a Parsee landowner and now the bereaved widower, was “not at home” or I’d be granted the interview I requested last week. He had not replied to my note. I might have waited, but I was eager to establish myself as a journalist.
As I fingered the brim of my hat, the man returned, saying, “Adi Sahib will see you.”
I entered a marble foyer, and followed him to a morning room where light filtered through the greenery.
“Hello. I’m Adi.”
A thin, pale young man stood beside a wide desk, one hand splayed on the dark wood. Here was no invalid, I saw. He approached with a confident step. His immaculate white shirt and crisp collar framed lean features. A wide, bony forehead rose above narrow nose and clean-shaven jaw. He studied me through wire-rimmed glasses, gaze sharp but not unkind.
He saw a tall fellow with the arms and shoulders of a boxer and short-cropped hair that would not lie flat over one ear. The pale English complexion from my unknown father had weathered during my years on the Frontier. His eyes flickered over my military mustache and plain attire without inflection, yet I felt measured in some undefinable way.
“Jim, sir.” I stepped forward to shake hands. “My condolences on your loss.”
“Thank you. Military?” His grip was firm, his palm dry and smooth.
“Fourteenth Light Dragoons, until recently. Stationed in Burma and the Northwest Frontier.”
“Cavalry. And now a journalist,” he said.
I attempted a smile. “Joined the Chronicle two weeks ago.”
Why the urge to explain my journalistic inexperience? We’d just met, but his pale, almost waxen pallor drew my attention. After the grueling trial and uproar in the press, he had reason to dislike, if not despise, newsmen, yet he’d admitted me. Why?
Waving me to the settee, he took a chair beside it. Behind him, heavy bookshelves lined the wall—thick tomes, dark spines aligned, not ornamental, but substantial. Legal books, I supposed.
I expected the usual pleasantries: weather, how long in Bombay and so on, before I could broach the interview.
Instead, young Mr. Framji asked, “Why did you leave the army, Captain?”
He seemed wary, shuttered somehow, the very quiet of his chamber a rebuke. Of course he’d want to ascertain my credentials. Very well.
“Sir, twelve years was enough.” Fifteen, if I counted the years I served officers as a groom for their horses.
“So why join the Chronicle?”
This was my cue to introduce my purpose. “I’d done some writing, so I asked the editor Mr. Byram for a job. You had my note last week, requesting an interview?”
He put up a hand as if to say “not yet” and asked, “Who are you, Captain Agnihotri?”
“A soldier, sir.” I noticed his keen attention and said, “I’d like to investigate this, ah, matter.”
How might I share my interest, no, fascination without sounding ghoulish or insensitive? It was all I thought about these days, for I would not dwell on Karachi.
I’d seen death at Maiwand. Dying friends and dead Afghans. On the road to Khandahar … and Karachi. Each time is different, but to me the pain was the same. An ache twists inside when a friend’s eyes plead, pleading that gives way to realization, that final contortion as the body fights to hold a soul already breaking free, tearing its way out.
Soldiers trade in death. We give and receive. And we ache. But a pair of young women at the opening of life’s adventure? It made no sense. Young Mr. Framji’s letter said, Sir, what you proposed in yesterday’s editorial is impossible. Neither my wife Bacha nor my sister Pilloo had any reason to commit suicide. They had simply everything to live for.
He watched me, the plane of his forehead catching the morning light. Such intensity in his look!
I said, “Sir, I read about the case. Some of the details … puzzle me.”
“Go on.”
I struggled to explain without offending. “Have you perchance read The Sign of Four by Conan Doyle? His methods interest me. The use of deduction, observation.”
Light reflecting off spectacles hid the young man’s eyes.
“The singular, or unusual features of a crime … can help explain it. That could be useful in a case like this,” I said.
“You want to investigate my wife’s death? So why join the Chronicle?” When he moved I saw his piercing gaze belied his calm voice.
I explained. “Sir, the Chronicle focused on the individuals—the ladies and the accused. I suggested a new approach. Piece together a more complete picture. The sub-editor said there was no story left, but I don’t agree. There’s more to this matter.”
Adi Framji did not speak. I scarcely breathed. Now he would toss me out on my ear. His aristocratic face would stiffen into a polite mask. That’s how he’d faced a chaos of reporters at Bombay High Court during the short, inconclusive trial.
“Yes, I wrote to the Chronicle,” he said at last.
I said, “You wrote that it could not be suicide. Perhaps I can discover what happened.”
My words held more confidence than they should, for as yet I had seen no evidence.
His eyes flickered. “How?”
“Examine the evidence methodically, put it together. I’m not sure what I’ll find, but I think it can be done.”
“You’d like to be … Sherlock Holmes,” Adi said.
So, he was conversant with Conan Doyle’s work. It did not surprise me.
“To use his methods, sir,” I hurried to explain. “To investigate what the police … might have missed.”
He frowned. “You decided you’d had enough of the army? After reading about the trial, and seeing my letter?”
“I’d had enough before that. Your letter caught my attention.”
“Hm. You’re Anglo-Indian?”
“Yes.” My parentage was obvious in my coloring and size. Most Indians are smaller.
“Agnihotri is an Indian name. Your father was Indian?”
So here it was, the fact that dogged my footsteps. “No, sir. Agnihotri is my mother’s name. I never knew my father.”
I was a bastard. My English father had not stayed long enough to give me his name.
“I see.” Adi’s face bore no judgement. That was unusual.
I had “grown up army,” running errands for soldiers. When I was tall enough, I enlisted and was sent straight to the Northern Frontier. He’d not want to hear about that. Instead I spoke about a case I’d investigated in Madras, involving an officer and the death of a washerman.
Copyright © 2020 by Nawaz Merchant
