Preliminary note from Om Prakash’s collaborator, Dr Vatsan:
Those that have followed the exploits of the world’s foremost consulting detective will recall that it is on the website of The Wire that the chronicles of my illustrious friend and colleague, Om Prakash, first appeared. Known to an admiring public as ‘Chalak’ Om on account of his astuteness and acumen in disentangling mysteries, he has had an extended and distinguished career. What follows is one more in the long list of his cases that I have been privileged to record.
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As I believe I have had occasion to remark on an earlier occasion, Mr ‘Chalak’ Om of Bekar Street yielded to no-one in his esteem for his illustrious predecessor in the art and science of forensic deduction, Mr Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street. So closely did ‘Chalak’ Om model his methods and his career upon the methods and career of Sherlock Holmes that it must surely be beyond the bounds of coincidence that some of the cases unravelled by the former should so closely parallel ones that had been earlier investigated by the latter.
For, and simply as it happens, if there is a battered old tin dispatch-box in the vaults of Cox & Co. carrying Dr Watson’s account of Sherlock Holmes and The Creeping Man, so is there a battered old tin dispatch-box in the vaults of Kak’s & Co. carrying Dr Vatsan’s account of ‘Chalak’ Om and The Crawling Man. If Dr Watson’s account details the curious affair of Professor Presbury, then Dr Vatsan’s account details that of the not-too-distantly homonymous Professor Preyas Bahari. It is the notes pertaining to this latter case that I draw upon in seeking to present, in what follows, the singular events concerning the Professor, his wife, and his cat – bearing in mind, at all times, my friend’s injunction to preserve the utmost tact and discretion that would be called for in the telling of such a tale.
Upon one of those unpleasantly humid mornings of late August of the year 2024, ‘Chalak’ Om and I had just finished our breakfast (he before he had started it, and I after 16 of our landlady’s delicious dosas), when there was a peal upon the door of our barsati at B221, and Mrs Hardhan ushered in a very nervous and daunted-looking woman. She was, in my estimation, in her mid-forties, and despite the soothing and matronly ways which were Mrs Hardhan’s wont in her dealings with disturbed clients, it was clear that our visitor was in a distraught state of mind. Barely had she been invited by Om to seat herself than she burst out in a high-pitched voice: “Oh Mr Om, tell me, what must I do to prevent my husband from throwing his coffee cup at me again?”
“Do not distress yourself, madam,” said Om in his customary reassuring manner.
“Pray gather yourself together, and tell us, without omitting any detail small or large, what has led up to your decision to hurry out of your home to seek our urgent assistance. Tut, it is no great mental feat to deduce haste: the smudged mascara and lipstick tell their own story.”
And with that, Om lit one of his interminable Langar Chhap bidis, leant back on his seat, closed his eyes, and steepled his fingers as the smoke from his bidi swirled about his head.
“I apologise for my earlier outburst, Mr Om,” said our visitor in a calmer voice.
“I shall attempt to present my case as coherently as possible. You should know then that I am the unhappy wife of Preyas Bahari, Professor of Economics at the University—“.
“Pray forgive the interruption, Mrs Bahari. I find it helps me enormously to have some details about the individuals involved in a case. My eternal help in these matters is the good old Index! If you please, Vatsan – ah, thank you! What have we here? Babita the housewife who administered arsenic in her husband’s paratha; Babubhai the broker who crashed the Stock Exchange; and here – Bahari (Preyas), Professor of Economics, author of many articles on the Indian economy;…publications in Journal of Data Manipulation, Quarterly Review of Dodgy Statistics, Studies in Economics Spin; …, pieces in the popular press; …widely celebrated in official circles for demonstrating that poverty in India has been eliminated and for establishing, with what Martin Gardner would call economeritricious rigour, that India’s unemployment rate is actually negative! An ambitious man, would you say, madam?”
“Indeed yes, Mr Om,” said our client, flushing with pride.
“Aiming for the Nobel Prize – that sort of thing?”
“Oh no, Mr Om, not that sort of thing at all. Rather, he would like to move out of the stuffy trappings of academics and into a position of power in Government, whence he hopes, by dint of working hard to please his masters, to move up the bureaucratic ladder so that he can seek and find his place in a plum assignment with the International Minatory Fund or the World Bunkum where, I am given to understand – even if I cannot quite put a figure on it – that the pensions are, you know – ”
“Quite,” said ‘Chalak’ Om drily. “Pray continue.”
“You should know that my husband and I had slipped into the somewhat formulaic routine, at the daily breakfast table, of my asking him if the morning paper had anything of interest to offer, and his responding with a non-committal grunt. A few days ago, however, he reacted to my question by rubbing his palms together and displaying what I thought was a distinctly anticipatory gleam in his eye. He did not, of course, bother to elaborate, being a man of few words. But just a couple of days later, and in response to my routine question, he snarled and hurled his coffee-cup at me, which I succeeded in dodging in the nick of time so that it missed me but found instead his favourite framed portrait of the Economics Minister, now damaged by coffee stains and causing him to get into an even worse frame of mind. Is my husband going mad, Mr Om? What explains his throwing the coffee cup at me? Must I endure this every morning for the rest of my life?”
“Pray be precise as to detail: the dates, madam, the dates! On which day did the happy response occur, and on which day the angry one?”
“I have heard of your passion for detail, Mr Om,” said our client, “so that though I was in a hurry when I left my home, I remembered to pick up the newspapers of August 22 and August 24 when the two events occurred. Here are the papers.”
“Splendid, Mrs Bahari, splendid – I could not have asked for a more perfect client!” Om went through the proffered newspapers rapidly, and when he looked up again, no one but I, the one man who knew every variation of his mood and temper, could have sensed in him that excitement which comes from discovery, however suppressed its external manifestation.
Also read: The Return of ‘Chalak’ Om: The Adventure of the Media Vampire
“Today is the 25th, and the cup-throwing incident has occurred just once: yesterday. It seems to me that you are unduly worried about the possibility of its indefinite recurrence. But to get down to the reason for why it happened: I would like you to try and recall everything of even a slightly odd nature that might have occurred between the 22nd and the 24th of August.”
“I do not know if this is of any great significance, but I believe I should mention what occurred on the night of August 23rd or early morning of August 24th. Before I come to that, you should know that my husband is a generally sound sleeper, and often fails to awaken even when Chipku settles on his stomach in the middle of the night – oh, I should have explained, Mr Om: Chipku is our cat, who sleeps with us. A clingy, huggy, darling cat, who loves her food and can hardly be separated from it –”
“No doubt all of this is of the greatest general interest, madam, not to say of particular gratification for lovers of feline pets,” said Om with some asperity, “but may I request you to proceed with a focus on the principal and relevant aspects of your account?”
“I thought you wanted me to omit no detail however slight,” replied our visitor, with a touch of petulance. “But to resume: my husband, as I said, is a generally sound sleeper who scarcely gets out of bed during the course of the night, so you will conceive of my astonishment when, in response to a scuffling sound, I got up from my sleep, only to find that my husband was not in bed. When I switched on the flash of my mobile phone, I discovered him crouched by the foot of the desk at which he often works. When I asked to know what he was doing there, he replied peevishly that it was all my fault for keeping Chipku’s Miaow biscuits on the desk: he said that the packet containing the biscuits had listed over, scattering a lot of them on the floor, and that he had been gathering them up and returning them to the packet from which they had spilled out. I asked him to get back into bed, which he did, sullenly. I should have thought no more of this if it were not for his wholly uncharacteristic broken sleep and even more uncharacteristic concern for spilt biscuits in the middle of the night, taken together with the incident of the coffee cup on the following morning.”
“And where,” enquired Om, “was – er – Chipku when all of this was happening?”
“Why, in bed, between me and my husband, where she always sleeps.”
“That is most suggestive.”
“Are you drawing attention to some peculiar feature of the case, Om?” asked I.
“To the curious incident of the cat in the night-time.”
“But the cat did nothing in the night-time.”
“That,” remarked Om, “is the curious incident. I have been given to understand that the beast is a glutt – that is to say, something of an epicure. How is it that she failed to attack the biscuits the moment they spilt over on to the floor? There is no mystery: no biscuits ever spilt over. That was sheer bluff on the part of your husband, Mrs Bahari. Tell me, did you have occasion to examine the pajamas he slept in that night?”
“Yes, I did, before the pajamas went into the washing machine.”
“And were the pajamas scuffed and somewhat dirty at the knees?”
“Yes, Mr Om!”
“Ah! The ‘case’, such as it is, is solved.”
“Please tell me, Mr Om, that my cup-hurling husband is not a psychopath!”
‘That he certainly is not. But then again, he is something only a little less unsettling than a psychopath, to wit: a sycophant. Let me explain. If you had bothered to examine the newspapers of the 22nd and 24th of August before rushing over to consult me, you would not have failed to observe these two notices that your husband has circled in red. The first, appearing on the 22nd, announces a scheme for lateral entry into government involving the hiring of some 45 candidates under the auspices of the Union Public Service Commission. Hence the rubbing of the palms and the gleam in the eye at breakfast on the morning of the 22nd; with his record of spinning nice stories about the state of the economy, he thought a Joint Secretaryship – and everything else that that would entail – was a cinch. But after the Opposition’s objection to the scheme, and its swift withdrawal via a notice published in the newspapers on the 24th (here it is, circled by your husband), things changed drastically for him: hence the snarl and the hurled cup of coffee. On the night of the 23rd, what you found your husband doing – and this is testified to by the state of his pajamas at the knees – was crawling. He was practising what he intended to do for his bureaucratic and political masters, once he was appointed as Joint Secretary, up until the time he secured that prized job at the IMF or the World Bank. Madam, be assured that even if your husband should be in something of a bad mood for the next few days, he will overcome his disappointment in due course. After all, you cannot expect to keep a good sycophant down for ever. Sooner or later there should be other opportunities for inappropriate backdoor entries.”
With that, I saw a somewhat relieved, if also considerably chastened, Mrs Bahari to the door. As I turned around, ‘Chalak’ Om said: “Now that the case has been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, what say you, my dear Vatsan, to the prospect of lunch at the dhaba round the corner? They serve a mean baingan ka bharta there, and the price should suit us. That is surely no trivial consideration. For, despite whatever various Crawling Men may have to say about poverty and hunger and inflation and unemployment in the country today, for many of hoi polloi (which includes you and me), the wolf is never very far from the door!”
Athur Kannan Thayil is a Chennai-based economist who sometimes writes under the name of S. Subramanian.