The Spiritualist's Dilemma

Maya's First Case

A Lunatic woman kills 3 inmates in Emilia Asylum for calling her fat.

Maya kept the newspaper upon the table, reread the asylum address, the time and date of the incident, and closed her eyes, trying to fit the article in her head. She classified the information as 'miscellaneous accidents' and tried to club it with three other pieces of news that she had read today. One was the death of a beggar who had been trampled by a rogue Elephant who had escaped from Liberty Circus. The other was the collapse of an under-construction building in Flea Market which had caused the death of four laborers and a schoolboy and the last was the fire at a cigarette factory in Anthill. In these types of incidents, the actual events were far less important than the details. Maya did not care who killed the 3 patients in the mental asylum or who was the beggar squashed to death. It was good information, though, to know that there was a Lunatic Asylum for women in Emilia and that if ever a child was kidnapped from the convent school on Prison Road nearby, it might well be a work of a grieving lunatic mother who had escaped from the asylum. It was a far-fetched proposition but in Cardim she could not discount any possibility. Stranger things were known to happen in the metropolis.

It was Sunday morning and Maya sat in her weekend office – The Bombay Detective Agency, leaning back in her chair, her legs propped up on the small table at the reception area of the office. It was still very early and apart from a sweeper boy who moved around the large hall whistling cheerfully, a broom in hand, there was no one in the premises. It was a perfect moment to consume the first of her seven daily newspapers.

Maya turned the Daily Harbor to the 4th page, bracing herself against the barrage of violence which she knew lay waiting for her there. The Daily Harbor devoted the 4th and the 5th pages to report petty crimes in Cardim (Wife murders husband and mixes his blood in her broth; Man buries stepdaughter alive; Deranged lover sets woman's house on fire; A thief dressed as Mayor burgles a Jewelry shop in North bank.) Ever since she had started studying newspapers to feed the information to her mind, Maya had found these two pages the most challenging. She struggled to discern the important from the worthless, the wheat from the chaff and meat from the bone. It was paramount to do so. Mr. Henry Camleman had explained it beautifully in his "Handbook for the aspiring Detective" - the brain is not a sea but a tumbler, it fills quickly and you cannot pour anymore till you take out what is already inside. To shovel all the news inside her head was a foolish proposition, but to ignore the important bits was also imprudent. Maya read the first article on the page but found the words floating past her head, making no sense. She finished the item without getting a clue what it was about. It felt like she had already filled her glass, at least the quota of it reserved for the day. It seemed impossible to feed any more information to her brain without threatening its integrity. But the young woman exhaled deeply and repeated the article under her breath attempting to learn it like the children learned the alphabet. The sweeper boy heard her muttering and eyed her doubtfully. If she was to become a successful detective Maya had to consume information like fire consumes wood (that was also a piece of advice she had found in Mr. Camleman's book). A detective, Camleman had written, needs to possess four indispensable qualities – the power of observation, a knack of sound logical deduction, inexorable perseverance, and a sizeable bank of knowledge. Maya liked to think she had an ample amount of the third quality, enough of the first two but was lacking severely in the last. If she hoped to become a detective (or at least an official detective), she had to enhance her vault of facts considerably. Reading, Mr. Camleman had mentioned, was the only cure to the deficiency.

Maya had paid great heed to his words and immediately gotten a membership of the Emilia Public Library. She hadn't been an avid reader all her childhood and it took a lot of effort to go through books, especially the ones suggested by Mr. Camleman. Most were about criminal psychology. Voluminous leather-bound books on the functioning of the criminal mind, its motivations, and fears. She read about serial killers, rapists, occult murderers as well as compulsive thieves and dangerous psychopaths (Maya shuddered to note the similarities she shared with some of the studied specimens – an inability to conform to social norms, utter disregard for morality and a queer restlessness at passing life of monotony). Some texts were about the judicial system – criminal laws as well as laws about inheritance and property. There were books to be read about poisons and potions. Which chemical made the pupils dilate against which one made the throat blue and the limbs rigid. Maya had found the study of human anatomy the most demanding. She had never felt too interested in the human body (as evident from her own lack of personal grooming) but Mr. Camleman was particularly stringent in this respect. Without a sound knowledge of the human constitution, a person can only be a reporter of a physical crime never a detective. She was compelled to pore through expansive research papers of autopsies published by some of the renowned anatomists of Cardim.