Preliminary Note from his 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 had a long and distinguished career, which he however brought to a premature end, on these grounds: “What we have these days are not mysteries, but scandals—which we have now grown too blasé to be even shocked by. I would rather retire from my chosen vocation, return to my village, and devote the rest of my life to the cultivation of mooli.” This, in fact, is what he did. But at the end of the 2024 General Elections, sensing a glimmer of hope on the horizon, he decided to emerge from his retirement. The Return of ‘Chalak’ Om is heralded by two hitherto unpublished accounts from the canon. The first appears today, the second will follow tomorrow.
§
“Ah, Vatsan, this is positively an embarrassment of riches,” said my friend ‘Chalak’ Om, rubbing the palms of his hands together with undisguised pleasure and anticipation. “I have been lamenting the absence of any problem upon which to apply those skills of ratiocination for which I might have acquired some little reputation (notwithstanding your own substantial efforts in your accounts, my dear Vatsan, at sensationalising the trivial and dramatising the insignificant in favour of underlining those sturdy virtues of logic and method which alone matter in the successful conduct of the Science of Deduction), but I am happy now to announce that I can look forward to not one, not two, but three cases in quick succession! My first client should be here any moment now. No, no, I insist, Vatsan—I need you by my side, my dear fellow, to perform your customary invaluable role of a reflector, if not radiator, of light.”
Thus began upon a cold winter morn of November of the year `24, in the modest living room of our modest barsati at b221 Bekar Street, the extraordinary affair of three seemingly unconnected incidents of men who vanished suddenly, inexplicably and utterly, in a manner paralleled only by the baffling case, which I have recorded elsewhere, of Mr Jamshed Bilimoria who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world. But I anticipate, and get ahead of my story.
In telling the story in sequence, I shall skip over the minutiae of the three cases, as they were presented, one following the other. In all three cases our clients were the wives of men who had disappeared without notice two days earlier, at, as it turned out, virtually the same time (between two and three of the afternoon) when the respective wives were away from home, shopping. One of the three men was a young career diplomat who had just begun his professional life in the government’s Tax Department as a member of the Central Revenue Service. The second person was a professor of Economics at a well-known research institution. The third was a junior lecturer in English at a local college. The only other salient feature of the cases is that, this being a ‘Chalak’ Om story, each of the wives on arrival fainted dead away upon our (third-hand) Pepperfry rug, and had to be revived with a specific I always have ready to hand, namely, a stiff shot of Old Monk rum.
While my friend ‘Chalak’ Om heard out the cases in phlegmatic silence, his naturally inscrutable face rendered almost invisible by the clouds of smoke that emanated from the interminable sequence of Langar Chhaap bidis he smoked, I was myself quite affected by the distress of the three ladies, and not least when the English lecturer’s wife (a very pretty young woman as I believe I am well qualified to judge as a keen connoisseur in such matters) said brokenly: “You must find him for me, Mr Om! He is so dear to me! Oh, and he had such simple, childish pleasures in life! Such as setting crossword puzzles for The Bindu Financeline newspaper—!”
Om got up from his chair as if abruptly expelled by a great force. “Really, Madam?” he enquired, in a voice suddenly sharp and raised. He stooped and held the shoulders of the young woman in his hands, as, his eyes boring into hers, he said: “That could be an invaluable clue to a resolution of this mystery! Why was I not made aware of this at the outset? No, no, do not be alarmed! It is better late than never, I suppose! I do not wish to disappoint you with what may turn out to be false hope, but I do believe that what you have said presents us with features of the most distinctly compelling interest. It may yet hold the key to this pretty puzzle.” With that, he virtually bundled our bewildered young client out of our front door (but not before she had turned her head in my direction to throw me a pretty little glance of appeal which I trust I was equal to the chivalrous task of responding to with a look, of my own, of comfort and reassurance).
“Quick, Vatsan, the back page of The Bindu Financeline of November 18th, if you please! Pray be so kind as to read out the clues of the crossword puzzle, one by one.”
“Very well, Om. Here we are. 1 Across: ‘What we need badly, but do not have (6,3)’—”
“Stop! That will do! You need go no further, Vatsan! What is it that is immediately suggested, in a finance and economics newspaper, by an allusion to something that ‘we need badly, but do not have’, a phrase in two words of six and three letters respectively—especially after it was formally abolished in the Union Budget of 2016-17? It should be apparent to the meanest intellect that the solution is—”
“‘Wealth Tax’,” I yelled, in the excitement of discovery.
“Quite, Vatsan,” said Om. “You have most obligingly verified my conjecture. If I am not vastly mistaken, ‘wealth tax’ must be a common thread running through all three cases of disappearance. Let us see if we can establish the connection. The headlines, please, of the January 18th issue of Financeline. Here we are! ‘Economics Minister Throws Tantrum’. Surely, that is not news? The Economics Minister throws at least one tantrum each day, and sometimes eight. But what was it about on this occasion? Here we are! A young Revenue Service officer in the Tax Department—there’s our man!—has ‘leaked’ an internal report he has been working on, which recommends a wealth tax and an inheritance tax on the ultra-rich to finance a part of the Government’s occasional expenditure on alleviating poverty. There’s the link with Client Number One. And Client Number Two, the Economics Professor? Quick, Vatsan! Shall we press the good old Index to the rescue? Thank you! What have we here? If it is an Economics professor, one can safely infer it must be a Bengali, and possessed, further, of a double-barrelled name—though the second inference, as it turns out, is true only to a first order of approximation. For what does the Index reveal?—ho! hum! Ballu the strangler of infamous memory, Banwarilal the poisoner,—aha! here it is: Professor Amartya Basu-Dutta-Chaudhuri-Khasnobis! Quick! Quick! His list of publications! And there is the final piece of the puzzle! His last publication, which has appeared in the latest issue of The Annals of Economic Squiggles, is titled: ‘Why India Must Implement a Wealth Tax: Evidence from a Tobit Model with Auto-Correlated Errors in One-Period Lagged Categorical Variables Corrected for Endogeneity by Sequential Instrumentation’. The case is complete! I know now exactly where the three missing men are!”
“My dear Om! Where? And how—?”
“Tut, man. It is simplicity itself. The men can be found at Janakpuri, Delhi 110058. One moment, while I verify something from one of my numerous contacts in the legal world.” Om busied himself on the phone, and eventually replaced the receiver with a look of satisfaction on his face. “Just as I imagined, Vatsan. That Janakpuri location I mentioned is the address of the Tihar Jail Complex. Our three friends have been incarcerated on charges of misguiding the public, spreading enmity against the ultra-rich, creating public disharmony, double-guessing the Economics Ministry, sedition, participating in an international conspiracy to reveal the government in a bad light, disturbing the peace, sabotaging the economy, preventing growth, spreading canards about inequality, getting above themselves, growing too big for their boots, thinking no end of themselves,—the list goes on and on, but no doubt you get the general idea.”
“All this for recommending a tax on wealth and inheritance?”
“Precisely. I suppose we must content ourselves with Henry David Thoreau’s thought, that ‘under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.’ Well, well. It remains for us now to bring the matter to the attention of the unfortunate fellows’ wives, who no doubt will seek legal assistance to try and get their husbands off on bail. Let us hope for the best. By the way, and since you are not rich, leave alone ultra-rich, I trust, my dear fellow, that you have remembered to file your income-tax returns?”
The author is a lapsed academic who sometimes writes under the name of S. Subramanian.