[Preliminary Note from Dr Vatsan:
These are records of some of the cases handled by my illustrious friend and colleague, the consulting detective Om Prakash, known to an admiring public as ‘Chalak’ Om on account of his astuteness and acumen in uncovering mysteries. Since he specialised in cases relating to fraud, bribery, corruption, chicanery and all manner of sharp practice, ministers and bureaucrats and the police were not always his best friends, though it is amazing how often they consulted him. This they did whenever they thought he might be of help in uncovering evidence that could fix their political or professional rivals.]
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On going through my notes for the twelve-month of the year March ’18- March ’19, I find instances of several cases of the greatest interest which challenged, and were eventually compelled to yield to, the formidable powers of reasoning and analytical acumen that were so signal a feature of the long and distinguished forensic career of my friend Mr ‘Chalak’ Om.
Here I find a reference to the Case of the Defamed Tycoon, and there a reference to the Case of the Entrance Examination; here a mention of the Adventure of the Fugitive Jewellers, and there an allusion to the Affair of the Politician’s Son; here an account of the Case of the Alert(ed) Absconders, and there a record of the Case of the Un-taxed Godman.
At a general level, all of these remarkable cases pointed to the abiding nutritional mystery of the expanding waistlines of a category of people who were rumoured neither to eat nor allow their friends to eat. It is not, however, of this set of cases that I now propose to write. Of an altogether different order of appeal from these enigmas of digestive anomaly was the bizarre and outré case of the Reappearance of the Dancing Men, which I trust will prove to be of some interest to the reading public.
Upon my return from my evening practice to our lodgings in b122 Bekar Street on a very cold January day of the year ’19, I found that a client was engaged in deep and earnest conversation with ‘Chalak’ Om. On Om’s insistence that I should join the consultation, it was revealed to me that our client was the Union Minister of Unlawful Activities.
He had come to seek Om’s advice on a sensitive case which was of concern to as many as 10 agencies that operated under his Ministry—the Brainpower Department, the Dope Regulation Bureau, the Coercion Directorate, the Central Bureau of Forthright Taxes, the Inspectorate of Revenue Brainpower, the Central Bureau of Snooping, the National Snooping Agency, the Closet Secretariat, the Inspectorate of Signal Brainpower, and the Delhi Department of Police.
These agencies, it may be recalled by keen followers of certain aspects of the government’s policy initiatives of the times, had been authorised to engage in activities relating to the interception, monitoring and decryption of any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource under the Information Technology Act of 2000.
Om, who had been attending to the minister’s deposition with rapt attention, opened his eyes briefly to say: “The Government Order in question, which empowers you to snoop on your citizens with impunity, should be a source of the greatest pleasure to you. You appear despondent, when you ought to be rubbing your palms in anticipation of the joys of administering the third degree to hundreds upon thousands of anti-national citizens.”
“Aye, Mr Om, there’s the rub o’ it,” said the statesman. (Not that the minister spoke like that, but we must preserve the atmosphere of a proper ‘Chalak’ Om story.) “We have reason to believe, you see, that one or more of the ten agencies I have mentioned has left behind footprints of an act of treason, which we wish you to investigate and identify.”
“Footprints, minister? A man’s or a woman’s?”
The minister’s voice sank to a hoarse, dramatic whisper, barely audible above the sound of the unseasonal winter rain falling with insistence upon the roof of the barsati: “They are the footprints, Mr Om, of a gigantic mole.”
Om knit his brows in impatience. “Minister, you speak in metaphorical riddles. Pray be so good as to state the nature of the problem as clearly and straightforwardly as you can.”
“Well, it is like this, Mr Om,” explained the Minister. “We have drawn up plans for snoo—er—intercepting the email messages of (as you put it) hundreds of thousands of people whom our agencies have identified as Urban Naxals. We have every reason to believe that there is a mole in the apple who has leaked this information to our target suspects.”
“And what evidence have you for this?”
“Mr Om, the only email or Facebook message that has been sent to their respective correspondents by our suspected Urban Naxals over the last twenty-four hours is this bizarre frieze of dancing men.” At this point, the minister fished out a computer printout from his pocket, which he handed over to Om, who shared it with me. Here is a reproduction of the singular set of hieroglyphs that Om held in his hand:
“This is obviously a sinister code intended to signal some dastardly message to the Enemy,” said the minister. “Can you decode it, Mr Om?”
“Well, well,” said Om, his eyes glinting and his body racked with paroxysms of internal mirth. “There is no great mystery here, minister. The Code of the Dancing Men was deciphered over a hundred years ago by my illustrious forbear Mr Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street. This should have been apparent to you and to the personnel of your 10 agencies of Snooping and Brainpower if only any of you had been acquainted with the singular case of ‘The Adventure of the Dancing Men’, as recorded by Dr Watson in The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Each of the dancing men, you would have realised, stands for a letter of the English alphabet.
“What you have in the cipher, then, are groups of letters making up words separated one from the other by a dancing man holding up a flag. In the message in front of you, you have two words: the first has four letters and the second three. It is only the last of the dancing men, drawn twice over, as you will see, that has not already been decoded by Mr Holmes.
“As for the remaining symbols, reading from right to left, they stand (as Mr Holmes’ decryption should show) for the letters ‘O’, ‘S’. ‘S’, ‘I’ and ‘P’. Your message, then, reads: PISS O_ _. I fancy we would be justified in assigning the letter ‘F’ to the last dancing man. Fully decoded, the message in front of you is the injunction to ‘PISS OFF.’”
“What can it mean, Mr Om? To whom is it addressed?” asked the minister.
“You supplied the answer yourself, minister. The message is addressed to the Enemy—and surely you recognise yourself and your agencies in the Enemy? As for what it means, tell me, sir: what would you say to somebody who opened your mail, and read your private correspondence, and poked their noses into your personal affairs, and then used these as a basis for punishing you simply because you disagreed with them?”
“Why,” said the Minister, “I suppose I should say something like ‘Piss Off’. Or something even stronger, but in similar vein.”
“Ah,” said Om, “having been tipped off by an Urban Naxal in one of your agencies, all the other targeted Urban Naxals have got together to let you and your Snooping Agencies know what they think of you—and is doing so, they have said precisely what you admit you yourself would have said if your respective positions had been reversed. Really, minister, I should learn something from this if I were you. After all: Vox Populi, Vox Dei. Would you not agree?
“And now, I shall be happy to pocket that cheque for Rs. 50 lakh which you had promised for the unravelling of the code of the dancing men. I am a poor man, and it is shocking how much inflation your official price data conceal.”
Athur Kannan Thayyil is an author who sometimes writes under the name of S. Subramanian.
