The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken by Tarquin Hall

Author:Tarquin Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: India
ISBN: 9789085241522
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2011-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

Puri stood on the flat roof of his mock-Spanish villa looking down, in more ways than one, at the new home on plot number 23/B. It had been built over the past seven months, a constant source of hammering, banging, and voices raised over the sound of loud machinery, but was now, mercifully, finished. The owners had spent lakhs of rupees on the façade, a cross between the White House and the Taj Mahal with reflective silver windows and a portico large enough to support a helicopter pad. The building’s sides, however, were windowless and bare – just big, tall slabs of poured concrete. Given that the plots around were empty and there was no garden surrounding the property, it looked as if the house had been scooped up by a hurricane and randomly dropped by the side of the road.

The owner was a local Jat farmer who, by the looks of him, had spent most of his life in the baking sun dragging a wooden plough across mustard fields. That is until the local government, effectively working on behalf of a major property developer who wanted to build a mall or perhaps a new office block, had offered him several lakhs per acre for his ancestral land.

The fact that a Jat farmer could now live wherever he chose was progress of a sort, reflected Puri. Money now spoke louder than caste, at least in India’s ‘metros’. The new Indian suburbia was populated by people of different backgrounds, ethnicities and, to a lesser extent, religions.

Not that there was much of a sense of community. Few of Puri’s neighbours knew one another. And even if they did, they rarely interacted. The high walls and gates of their mansions and villas were hardly conducive to neighbourly chats.

Puri certainly had no plans to welcome the family into the colony. They were not his type. Despite the luxurious pile they had built for themselves, the family (great-grandparents, grandparents, parents and a big brood of children) spent their evenings sitting on a couple of charpais outside the front gates of their home. They drank rot-gut desi sharab, told raucous jokes, sang bawdy songs and picked lice out of each other’s hair.

“Delhi hillbillies,” Puri called them. Most definitely not his type at all.

He turned away from the edge of the roof and stepped into the small greenhouse where he kept his chilli plants during the winter. It was nice and humid inside, the perfect temperature, and his Naga Vipers were flourishing. Some of the fruit was already shiny and plump and he could hardly wait to pick them. The seeds had come from Cumbria in England, hardly chilli-growing country. However the friend who’d smuggled them into India on his behalf claimed they produced the hottest chillies in the world. An incredible 1,381,118 SHU!

The detective had yet to eat a chilli that was too hot for him; his taste buds were as anaesthetised as an Indian bureaucrat’s conscience. The fact that these were Angrezi chillies made the challenge all the more appealing.

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