The Inspector Walter Darriteau Murder Mysteries - Books 1-4 David Carter (autobiographies to read txt) 📖

their Hindu neighbours, and as a boy, Wazir played cricket with them on the public field behind the Christian hospital.

Wazir delighted his parents. He was a capable boy, eager to learn, keen to better himself, and would cram in three part-time jobs, aside from his school work, that he completed under pain of the punishment the disappointment his parents would portray, when and if, he failed them.

When he was fourteen, his father arranged for him to take an apprenticeship in his uncle’s locksmith’s shop in Calicut. Wazir needed to rise at six every morning to enable him to walk barefoot the ten miles to work. As in everything he did, he worked hard, pleased his master, who modestly increased his tiny pay packet, as Wazir slowly learnt everything there was to know about making, dismantling, and servicing locks, of every size and shape.

Most of the locks came from England, and usually the best ones at that, MADE IN ENGLAND, they had stamped proudly on the reverse, or the underside, and Wazir would occasionally imagine what that great land might be like.

When he was twenty he disappointed his parents.

He became involved in politics, and everyone knew that politics brought trouble, and being a good Muslim, he certainly wasn’t a follower of the mad Mahatma Ghandi. Like so many other young men he wanted a lot more than that. He wanted direct action, and he wanted it now. He wanted change. He wanted recognition. He wanted independence, and he wanted power. The whole country was going through a period of enormous turmoil.

The British were sidetracked with their own silly wars against Japan and Germany, little wonder that magnificent India was low on their list of priorities. Wazir Khan and his friends sensed their moment approaching.

Yet when it finally came, after so much longing, the twenty-something Wazir felt crushing disappointment. True, the country was heading for the yearned for independence, but not as one united country, but as three: India, West Pakistan, and East Pakistan.

Muslims were encouraged to pack up and move to one of the Pakistans. Wazir’s parents were too old and too frail to contemplate such a hazardous journey. Both Pakistans were some 1400 miles from their southern Indian home, and none of the family wanted to leave Kerala, the place of their birthright, the place of their ancestors, stretching back for as long as anyone could remember, or trace.

The Khan family stayed put, avoiding the mass migration of some twenty million people, both ways across the borders, avoiding the inevitable slaughterings and destruction that followed, violence and mayhem that would eventually account for the lives of a million human beings.

Soon afterwards, one day when Wazir was at work, an out of control Hindu mob attacked and burnt the Khan family home to the ground. Both of his frail parents died in the inferno, embraced together in the corner of their home, clutching metal photograph frames to their chests, the glass and the pictures long gone, the frames bent and buckled and ruined in the ashes.

It was only by luck that Wazir’s wife, Nadirah, and their young son Ahmed, had escaped. They were attending the Christian hospital where the nuns were concerned about a cut to Ahmed’s foot, an injury that had been caused by an out of control mule stamping on the child. When he heard the news Wazir was understandably distraught, and angry.

He gave up his job in Calicut, and drew his paltry life savings from the bank, and retrieved the ancient ceremonial sword, the same family heirloom of a weapon that had been handed down from father to son for more than four hundred years. Sensing the upheaval, Wazir had wisely buried it in a shallow grave at the back of the house, and during his noon meal break at the locksmiths, when no one else was watching, he had taken the opportunity to secret it into the centre of a large hollowed out cricket bat.

He worried that rioting street gangs would steal it if they so much as set eyes upon it. The crazy hooligans had taken his parents; they had destroyed his home, but they would not set their filthy hands on the family’s ancient artefact. Aside from his savings, and what remained of his family, it was the only thing of value he possessed.

The family treasure with the mythical past was now sound asleep inside the largest cricket bat that Wazir could find. He’d halved the bat from top to bottom, hollowed it out, and once the sword was in place, had stuck it together as meticulously as he did the locks on which he worked all day long, the deadly tip running up into the bat handle, the be-jewelled ivory sword handle safe and sound within the base of the blade of the bat. The cracks where the two halves joined were barely visible, and the moment he applied a fresh coat of varnish and a smudge of Kerala mud, they disappeared.

Wazir decided that he would indeed move what remained of his family, but not to either of the Pakistans for that seemed so far away. Two days later they began the much shorter four hundred mile journey to Colombo in Ceylon.

It took them five days, some by mule, some on foot, then a short distance on an old single-decker bus that was stoned by angry Hindus, then two hundred miles on the cranking and clunking British built railway, and finally a sea crossing on an overloaded ferry, that heaved and yowled in protest at the weight it was expected to carry across the stormy Gulf of Mannar.

Wazir, Nadirah, and Ahmed safely arrived in Colombo, found a small and inexpensive guesthouse down by the docks where resting seamen often stayed. The Khan family would reside there for three days, as Wazir sought accommodation and work. He wasn’t alone. Thousands of displaced persons had had the same idea, for Colombo was thought to be a safe haven. Wazir trudged the docks seeking inspiration, and it