Fiction: A political rally ends in tragedy when detective Persis Wadia kills a lone gunman

They found the body curled up on a cracked shelf of black rock lapped at by the warm waters of the Arabian Sea, down by the tip of the Malabar Hill peninsular.

Parking the jeep on a dirt track leading from the main road, they made their way over the rocks to the corpse. The sun floated high overhead, in a sky of electric blue. Light made an ever-shifting tracery of prisms on the water’s surface.

A crowd had gathered, though not of the human variety.

The smell of death had its own bouquet and to a certain cross section of Bombay’s population the noxious odour of a burned body was akin to the aromas emanating from the five-star kitchens of the Taj Mahal Hotel. A gang of rooting pigs had turned up, accompanied by a pack of stray dogs, a brace of langurs, a flock of gulls, ravens and crows, and a goodly contingent of Bombay’s ubiquitous rat population. They were being kept at bay by a wizened homunculus in a uniform so big it made him look like an overgrown child. Handlebar moustaches hung to his pigeon chest.

Persis watched the cut-price Zorro fence at the slavering menagerie with a bamboo lathi.

Birla exchanged words with the man...

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