The Black Orphan by S. Hussain Zaidi

Author:S. Hussain Zaidi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Published: 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

15

A police jeep picked up Ajay from the airport. They sped off towards Colaba, where Moshe used to live in a nondescript house in the bylanes. It was a fair distance away from Chabad House, which served as the outreach centre for the Jews in Mumbai and had been one of the targets of the 26/11 attacks.

By the time Ajay arrived, Pratap had cordoned off the area. Barricades had been put up. There was considerable police presence on the streets. The constable parked the car near the bylane where Moshe lived and Ajay disembarked from the vehicle. He acknowledged the salutes from the other policemen as he walked towards the building.

A fleet of cars was parked on both sides of the road. Shop owners around the complex had downed their shutters for the day. Ajay could understand their predicament. ‘Police ka lafda nahi chahiye (we want no trouble with the cops)’ was the most common refrain of civilians everywhere. Ajay climbed up the wooden stairs and squatted under the police tape to enter Moshe’s house. One of the junior policemen brought over a pair of non-porous gloves and Ajay slipped them onto his hands.

Pratap was dictating his observations to a constable, who was making notes in a red diary. The living room was filled with cops. The body was not visible to Ajay yet. He found it ironic that people turned into bodies after their death. Their names were written in police records, but their identities were reduced to statistics and euphemisms.

‘Where is it?’ Ajay asked.

Pratap led him to a corridor that went to the other rooms. To kill an Israeli operative was not an easy task. A foreign-made pistol was lying a few feet away from his body, which was sprawled in the middle of the corridor.

Moshe’s gold-plated spectacles were still on. The lens had cracked when he had fallen to the floor.

‘Who reported it to the police?’ Ajay asked.

‘The Israeli Embassy asked us to check in on him,’ Pratap said. ‘His wife had called them up.’

‘Where is his wife?’

‘In Haifa,’ Pratap said. ‘She’d left for Israel only four days ago. The two were on a video call in the bedroom when Moshe told her that perhaps someone was at the door. He disconnected and never called back. He didn’t answer her subsequent calls for hours either. Troubled by the sudden events, she alerted her embassy.’

‘Did the murderer make a forced entry?’

‘Yes,’ Pratap said. ‘She picked the door lock.’

‘She?’ Ajay said. ‘Interesting.’

‘There’s CCTV footage captured by the store on the opposite side of the road. A woman with a limp made her way into the apartment around the time the murder happened.’

‘Do you have an ID on the suspect?’

‘No,’ Pratap said. ‘She was wearing a burqa.’

The gears suddenly started turning in Ajay’s head. A group of women in burqas had been also spotted in the CCTV footage recovered from the site of Chandrashekhar’s murder. Plus, there was the warning from Moshe himself about a module of women being active in Mumbai.

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