The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown Read Online Free Page A

were depths to the elephant that he had yet to fathom. And, of course, there was the mystery of the creature’s past, upon which he had singularly failed to shed any further light.
    Ganesha: a riddle inside an enigma wrapped inside an elephant.
    Often, when he looked into Ganesha’s gentle brown eyes, he would think he saw his Uncle Bansi staring back at him. The same mischievous uncle who had grown from a rascally boy into a white-bearded wandering sadhu, disappearing from their Maharashtrian village for years at a time only to return with tall tales of magical encounters in faraway lands that he would share with his callow nephew and credulous kinsmen.
    Chopra knew that one day he would get to the bottom of the mystery, but for now he had barely enough time to count his blessings, as his wife took pains to regularly remind him. After all, not only had the restaurant got off to a flying start, so had the second venture that he had embarked upon following his retirement.
    Chopra had been a police officer for more than thirty years. For thirty years he had awoken, put on his khaki uniform, taken the police jeep to the nearby Sahar station and settled down behind his desk knowing that he was about to embark upon his allotted duty in life. For thirty years he had been a man with a purpose, one that was perfectly suited to both his disposition and his talents.
    And then, one day, following a heart attack that had dropped on him out of a clear blue sky, a doctor had told him that he was the victim of a curse called ‘unstable angina’ and that the next time the attack might be fatal. To his despair Chopra had been forced to leave the police service and ordered to avoid stressful activity.
    This had been easier said than done.
    The murder that Chopra had subsequently solved had opened a can of worms in Mumbai, implicating senior politicians and policemen in a nationwide human trafficking operation. The scandal had done wonders for the new Baby Ganesh Detective Agency and they had been inundated with cases ever since.
    And yet… the cases that now came his way were hardly the same as those he had tackled as head of the Sahar police station.
    Take the past few months. Chopra had spent endless days trailing errant husbands and delinquent children. He had tracked down missing wills. Companies engaged his services to check up on the backgrounds of dubious employees; political parties paid him to uncover potential skeletons in the closets of election hopefuls. He was even approached by worried parents wishing to discreetly verify the bona fides – and assets – of aspiring sons-in-law.
    It was all steady work.
    Yet the truth was that such cases did not quicken the pulse the way a solid police investigation did. There was no sense of the greater good being achieved.
    Chopra had always believed in the ideal of justice. He knew that sometimes justice was a malleable notion, particularly in India where money and power often tainted the application of due process. But this did not alter his view that the books of the cosmos could only be balanced when good and evil fought and good came out on top.
    He shuffled around in the rattan chair, seeking a more comfortable position. His right hip hurt from where he had slumped onto the floor at the Prince of Wales Museum.
    â€˜Come now, Ganesha, be reasonable,’ he said to the elephant. ‘I could hardly have taken you with me. They would never have let you into the exhibition.’
    Ganesha snuffled noisily and hunched further away.
    Chopra sighed. It was bad enough, he thought, to be burdened by a temperamental wife, but to also have to adjust to a temperamental one-year-old elephant was sufficient to try even the patience of a saint.
    He decided that young Ganesha would be best left alone until he had overcome his fit of pique.
    Pulling a sheaf of papers from the leather document folder that he had carried out into the compound with him, he excavated a calabash