Up in Flames (26 page)

             
‘That is why my husband moved Chandra and the baby to the flat. We didn’t think my mother-in-law even knew about the flat, but she could be sly, you see.’ She shot a reproachful glance at her husband. ‘I said we should have locked in her room so that I could get out, but my husband wouldn’t hear of his mother being subjected to such treatment. He told me it was my duty as his wife to look after her and my father-in-law and to keep Chandra safe from her obsession.’ 

             
Her voice broke. ‘But it was impossible to watch her every minute. The day it happened, I was alone in the house with little Kedar and my mother-in-law. Devdan had dropped my father-in-law at the temple and gone off somewhere and my daughter-in-law and the girls were shopping. Kedar was playing in the garden when he fell over. He gashed his arm badly. I couldn’t stop the bleeding. Kedar wouldn’t stop screaming. My mother-in-law was in our shrine room,  praying to the gods, oblivious to it all or so I believed. Usually she prays and chants for several hours at a time and I thought it was safe to slip out to take Kedar to our local chemist who is a man of much skill. The shrine room has never had a key, but even if it had and I used it, my husband would never forgive me if  he discovered I locked his mother in.

             
‘Obviously, it was impossible for me to take Kedar to the local Casualty Department - I didn’t dare leave my mother-in-law alone for the time that would take. Even so, I was gone no more than twenty, thirty minutes, but when I returned she was nowhere to be found.’

             
A sudden torrent of tears gushed from her eyes, streaking her cheeks with kohl. ‘I was frantic. What was I to do?’ she appealed to them. ‘I was alone in the house with Kedar and - and-’

             
‘You had no choice,’ Casey reassured her. He glanced at her husband. ‘We all appreciate that. Please go on.’

             
Mrs Khan took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘When she returned she had burns on her hands and scorch marks on her clothes. All she would say to me was that Chandra was happy now. Happy in Paradise with her husband. I couldn’t contact Rathi, so I rang Devdan on his mobile and he rushed over here.’

             
Her words revealed that he had been told another lie; so where had Dan Khan been when it was claimed he had been at home? Wherever, it was, as Casey glanced obliquely at the tight, unhappy face of Rani, Devdan’s wife, it was clear she had her suspicions as to where he had been.

             
‘Rathi had arrived in his High Street shop by the time Devdan got here. For some reason he was concerned that the call might be traced and thought it better to ring the shop from a public phone. He went out to do so and told his father what I thought his mother had done.’

             
Casey nodded. He had checked the phone records and they had shown that important phone call had been made from a public box. He had thought it odd at the time. Now he knew the reason for it. He turned back to Rathi Khan. ‘And that’s when you rushed from the shop?’

             
‘Yes. I ran first to the Chandra’s place, saw the flames shooting from Chandra’s flat and watched the firemen as they worked. I listened to the crowd outside, hoping desperately that she and the baby had been rescued in time. But according to the onlookers, the fire crews found both Chandra and Leela dead when they arrived.’ His voice broke as he added, ‘Both burned beyond recognition.’ He paused, gulped in several deep breaths, before he flatly  added, ‘I came back here then and we thought of what we should say. My mother was subdued by then. I knew I could shortly expect a visit from the police, so I set her to cleaning the brasses. I have found that giving her a simple practical task calms her mind, gives an element of normality. The rubber gloves also concealed her burned hands. Her face was only a little bit burned at the side and a shawl soon covered that.’

             
Casey nodded. No wonder, with painfully burned hands, her brass cleaning had  been so desultory. But a lifetime of doing her duty, her dharma, of pleasing her menfolk, had brought ready acceptance of a task that would cause her pain.

             
‘How did she get into Chandra’s flat? Your wife said you didn’t think she even knew about it.’

             
Mrs Khan broke in, ‘She must have taken the extra set of spare keys that my husband keeps in his desk. I noticed they were missing. We’re also missing a vacuum flask. And her favourite Krishna image is gone from the shrine room.’

             
Casey nodded and asked what colour was the flask.

             
‘It was red.’

             
The flask discarded amongst the rubbish bags in the alley to the rear of Chandra’s flat had been red. It had reeked of petrol and there had still been some petrol in the bottom. They had had no luck in tracing it to its source as it was at least ten years old, made in their thousands and sold up and down the country.

             
‘Do you know what she told me when she returned?’ Mrs Khan’s haunted eyes met Casey’s. ‘In her demented state she was so pleased with what she had done that she wanted me to share her joy. She told me she had insisted that Chandra chant to Lord Krishna before her immolation. And Chandra, no doubt desperate to give the drugs you told us she had fed the baby time to work, was forced to join in this macabre ritual as she waited to die. I can hear her voice all the time in my head. Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna, till I think I shall go mad.’

             
‘Your daughter was a very courageous young woman, Mrs Khan,’ was all the consolation he could offer her. ‘Try to force your mind to concentrate on that. She died bravely, with honour. It is something to be proud of.’

             
Casey glanced at Rathi Khan in the heavy silence that had fallen. Perhaps he read reproach in Casey’s glance, for Casey had no chance to say anything before Rathi Khan launched into a torrent of speech.

             
‘What was I to do, Inspector? Remember this was my mother we’re talking about. She had Alzheimer’s. She wasn’t responsible for her actions any more than Chandra’s little daughter would have been. When Magan, Chandra’s husband, died she began to say to Chandra that she must become sati. At first Chandra laughed about it. We all did. But then my mother began collecting chunks of wood and coconut hair and built a pyre in the back garden. Suddenly it wasn’t so funny. She took Chandra’s bridal sari and hid it so that it would be ready for the day, she said. She sounded so sane, so matter of fact that it was frightening.

             
‘By this time we were all terrified of what she would do, so I got the tenants out of the flat and moved Chandra and the baby in. As my wife told you, we didn’t think my mother even knew about the flat, but she still had her lucid moments and must have taken in more than I thought. I certainly never imagined she would be able to get herself over

there on her own.’ Head in hands, he added brokenly, ‘I thought Chandra would be safe there. I thought what I did, everything I did, was for the best. I didn’t know what else to do. My brother in India refused to have her back. He couldn’t bear the stigma. He had never been her favourite son.’ He gazed plaintively at Casey and asked, ‘What happens now? I suppose we’ll be charged as some sort of accessory?’

              Casey hesitated. Personally, he thought the family had suffered enough. ‘As to charges, I’ll need to discuss that with my superintendent, but I think I can safely say he’s likely to take a lenient view. But it would at least stop all the hot-heads from trying to stir up trouble if you’ll all come down to the station and make statements. Get everything out in the open.’

             
Rathi Khan nodded. ‘We’ll come. Of course we’ll come. We would not like all these sad deaths in our family to be the cause of any further tragedy.’

             
Evidently believing that the day’s revelations released him from his vow of silence, Catt remarked, ‘I’m surprised you didn’t try to arrange to get your mother back to India, safely secreted in some out of the way village where we’d never trace her.’

             
‘I was trying to, with my brother’s help. But he wasn’t being very co-operative. I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to talk him round. What with the shock of Chandra and Leela’s deaths and at the hands of my own mother. Then my father’s stroke...’ Rathi Khan raised his gaze to Casey’s. ‘You may not believe this, Inspector, but I loved my daughter. She was the apple of my eye. But I loved my mother, also. Always, I have tried to be a dutiful son. Chandra and Leela were dead — my mother was still alive. Naturally, I had to protect her.’ He sighed. ‘I believed the marriage I arranged for Chandra would be a good one, with a man I knew already adored her. Many women —’ briefly his gaze rested on his plain, sad-eyed and neglected daughter-in-law where she sat alone in the corner of the room — ‘would be thankful for such a loving husband. I knew Roop Bansi, Chandra’s mother-in-law, could be difficult, but I was sure that in a few short years Chandra’s husband would be persuaded to move away from his parents’ home and find a place of their own. He was ambitious and had far more drive than his father. He had the modern ideas, too, just like my son. And like my son, Chandra and Kamala he had been born and brought up here. More English than the English - isn’t that what you say?’ He essayed a tiny smile that quickly faded. ‘Things are changing in our community. The old ways are giving way to the new. It is right that they should. But for Chandra things didn’t happen quickly enough.’ His shoulders sagged and all at once his face took on the furrows and contours of a much older man. Faintly, he added, ‘I am not such a fool as to make the same mistakes with my second daughter.’

             
He stood up. ‘Please give us a few minutes and we will come to the station and make those statements.’

             
Casey and Catt waited in the hallway while the family gathered themselves and their grief together. ‘Terrible business,’ a subdued Catt muttered as they waited. ‘Not only his mother, daughter and her child gone up in smoke, but I imagine his reputation, too.’ 

             
‘Maybe we’ll all be pleasantly surprised,’ said Casey. ‘Sometimes tragedy brings out the best in people. We’ll just have to wait and see. But at least the super and the rest of the PC brass will have to accept the outcome. Maybe now they’ll stop their eternal handwringing and apologising and start realising that not everything white is bad and everything black or brown good.’

             
Catt snorted. ‘I wouldn’t bet on it. Last I heard from one of my Asian snouts was that the not-so-super has arranged to don saffron robes and join in procession with the Hare Krishna lot down the High Street.’ Catt shook his head in disbelief. ‘Why, for God’s sake, can’t he be what he is - white, middle-class and Christian, instead of always aping the rituals of other faiths? To my mind, a man who won’t stand up for his own beliefs or people is unlikely to be a reliable defender of anyone else’s either. Not a very healthy thing in a senior police officer.’

             
Casey could find nothing to add to that. Shortly after, they formed their own procession, as one, two, three cars, followed one another in almost funereal mode, to the police station.

             
And as the family signed their statements, Casey could only hope it put an end to all the hatred. At least till the next time.             

‘Do any of us know who we are?’ asked Catt much later. The Khan family had long since left and he and Casey were about to leave for home themselves. ‘Did Chandra? Caught between two worlds as she was how could she ever find the time to discover her true self?’

             
Making the first — and Casey hoped —the last reference to the other evening when Catt had turned up at his home, Catt added with the sharp insight Casey had come to recognise, ‘Do you? Whose whole lifestyle it seems to me - apart from what I presume was a lapse the other evening - has been deliberately chosen in reaction against your parents’ way of life.’

             
Catt’s words prompted Casey into an evaluation of himself as he climbed in to his car and drove home.

             
Was he whatever he was merely in reaction against his parents’ lifestyle? Rather than because it was what he wanted to be? Casey felt Catt might have a point, to an extent at least. But unlike poor, beautiful, tragic Chandra and her child, he had a chance to do something about it. He had a chance to metamorphose into the true him. Whatever that was. But maybe it was time he found out what it might be.

             
Maybe it was time he tried doing some of the things he should have done in his youth, might have done in his youth but for his parents continuing to do them in his stead. Wasn’t that meant to be the whole point of youth? To discover who, what, you were? Like Chandra Bansi he had missed out on all that. Chandra had tried to accommodate her family’s demands, while he had been too busy being the responsible parent when he should have been the child to ever really have a youth. Maybe, if he now, belatedly, went through the rituals of the young, he would come out the other side a more rounded individual.

             
Official communication with the Indian authorities had revealed that Rathi Khan’s mother’s mental health had been failing for some time before she travelled to England. Presumably, the culture shock upon her arrival in modern Britain had exacerbated the disease’s extent. Her son had told them that, until her marriage at the age of thirteen, his mother had lived all of her life in one village - Sikar. Like all Indian brides, on marriage, she had moved to her in-laws’ home village. As a child she had witnessed widows committing —or being forced — to commit sati. Didn’t they say that the memories and experiences of youth were the ones most vividly retained as one grew older and the grasp on reality is dimmed?