The Spy Who Lost Her Head

By Jane De Suza

A hilarious read that capitalizes on the humorous potential of the Indian obsession with English 'I am Super Spy Gulabi. I am a belly from the village searching suitable man but finding only head. It is murder most fowl. But never fear, in the backside, I am ending with a blast.'   Gulabi from Gayab arrives in the city of dreams armed with fourteen suitcases but without her pet snake, ready to catch a husband before her lease runs out. A spunky young lass with an unusual grasp of English, she manages to capture the heart of everyone she meets. She does, however, have a way of 'forking' things up. She falls out of windows, attacks her landlord more than once and even sets the apartment on fire. When, to her horror, she finds herself in possession of a man's head, she does the only decent thing: she vows to find his killers. The trail leads us through danger and drunken poetry, big laughs and bigwigs. Now if only our brave belle can solve the dead-head riddle, without losing her own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Feb 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9789350299890

Jane De Suza

Jane De Suza is a leading humour writer and columnist. Her books, which have a habit of hitting bestseller charts, include the SuperZero series for kids, Happily Never After and The Spy who lost her Head. She is a management grad, storyteller, advertising Creative Director and now lives between India and Singapore, which is definitely uncool (being 1 degree North of the Equator).

Book preview

PART I

A rose by any other name would smell a rat

1

We seem to have lost our heroine.

She is not in the apartment in which we left her, waiting to make her debut. Not rummaging in the refrigerator. Not deep-breathing on the mat. Not even powdering her nose. Wherever could she be?

It is more than a tad embarrassing that Gulabi is absent from the beginning of her own macabre tale. How can a story unfold with a gaping hole where the main character should be? Especially a character like this one. She would not miss the beginning, her own introduction and the chance to deliver a laboriously prepared speech, extolling her own virtues, unless she were in the most unavoidable of circumstances, in which, we must conclude, she is now.

She is dangling out of a window on the seventh floor.

Windows in Mumbai high rises aren’t the stuff that macabre tales are made of. They are quite the opposite, in fact. They are morose and mundane. They filter the sunlight suspiciously and put up a half-hearted defence against pigeons and sky-walking thieves. Or they sport racks of dripping flowerpots and laundry flapping in the after-wind of local trains, waving to anyone who may be watching. Of course, no one in Mumbai has the time to watch through windows or at windows, or they might have seen Gulabi swinging out of one.

Gulabi’s high-rise swinging is not part of her huge array of talents nor is it part of her huger array of plans. It is not a circus trick or a film stunt. And it certainly isn’t her preferred mode of exercise. She is hanging onto life by her painted fingernails. Have you ever fallen out of a window and survived to tell the tale? No? Gulabi will tell you that you really must try harder. But this is her story, and yours can begin on another page, in another book, out of another window.

So Gulabi, fresh out of Gayab (as fresh as one can be after a dusty road trip and a humid train ride), was finally on a plane with her fourteen suitcases. One was left behind, since the airport authorities took unreasonable umbrage to her pet grass-snake. She insisted it was a pet and not poisonous, that it had bitten only three people, all of whom deserved it. She further tried to convince them that it was medicinal since it would cure her homesickness. However, with predictable callousness, they rejected her snake and charged her for her extra baggage before allowing her the privilege of boarding a bumpy flight with a seatbelt sign that was never turned off. But Gulabi was determined not to let anything at all burst her newly blown bubble. She spent the flight circling newspaper ads for houses on rent, and during the plane’s descent, she began her calls.

‘Hello, you have house for rent?’

‘Yes, who are you and what are you doing?’

‘My good name is Gulabi and I am now flying high in sky.’

‘I see. No house available, thank you.’

And onto the next: ‘Hello, you have available house?’

‘Available for what?’

‘For my activities in Mumbai.’

‘What are your planned activities?’

‘I am looking to catch suitable mans.’

‘Please look elsewhere. We are respectable people.’

Yet another attempt: ‘Hello, I am looking for available respectable house, please.’

‘We have a one-and-a-half bedroom house, and you need to share the half-bedroom with our son, but there is a curtain in the middle ...’

‘I am loving children. How old is your son?’

‘He is thirty-three.’

‘Thanking you. I am not available for your available house.’

The desperation cutting through her voice now: ‘Hello, I am looking for available respectable house with no sons or curtains. You are putting in ad?’

‘Yes. The house has one living room ...’

‘One living room? And in other rooms? The dead? Haha!’

Twenty-three calls later, Gulabi was no closer to finding a home. Each one, for the ficklest of reasons, made their available house unavailable. Flushed, desperate and cornered, she snapped her seatbelt open and attempted her twenty-fourth call, when she saw the stewardess rushing over, her lacquered nails flapping. ‘We are descending. Please fasten up.’

‘Hello, I am fast and available, and desperate for your house for my respectable activities.’

‘I see. Well, I really don’t have the time now, but come over this afternoon around two-ish. I’ll show you the place during my lunch hour.’ A man’s voice hurriedly gave her directions to his house.

Fastened up indeed. And successfully. The stewardess should have been happy. Instead she waved her nails with an abandon that almost gouged out Gulabi’s kohl-smothered eyes.

‘Enough, enough. Fasten up. And stop talking please.’

‘Why I am not talking? You talking non-stop about sick bags and emergency evacuations, and whole plane listening to you silent. Why? Because silence is golden.’

To cut a long and winding story short, Gulabi finally found her way to the apartment.

A crusty old Bahadur sat at the gate, scrutinizing her and her many suitcases as they popped out of the airport taxi. Surely this was not the ‘lady’ the man on the seventh floor had phoned him about. The one who he said might move in. After many years in the city, the Bahadur was used to the sight of strange women hobnobbing with single men, but this bubble in blinding yellow stretched even his accustomed gaze. There really was no accounting for some people’s standards. Putting aside his misgivings, the Bahadur escorted her and her fourteen suitcases up to the seventh floor. He reluctantly let her in as he had been told to, waited in vain for a tip that never came, and then went back to his post a disgruntled man. Really, the standards of the city were abysmally low.

Gulabi, coincidentally, was undergoing the same mental turmoil. Her fourteen suitcases and sequined sandals parked inside the hallway, she sat primly on the spotless white sofa, waiting for the Voice’s lunch hour, while she surveyed her to-be accommodation. A tremor of concern flushed through her when she saw the dubious paintings of cherubically chubby, nonchalantly naked women that adorned the walls. Was she in a respectable house or were there curtains with sons sleeping behind them, a city trap for vulnerable village belles?

In the midst of her pondering, she heard a man’s low growl. ‘I will slut your throat, you slit!’ (Or possibly the other way around.)

It was a trap!

Her eyes did a slow swivel. There was no one there.

Suddenly a woman’s voice rang out, ‘No! Help me!’

The voices were coming through the window. Her curiosity piqued, Gulabi rushed to the window. Drawing the curtain, she peered out. She couldn’t see anyone. Was the house haunted?

‘Oh, help me, God!’ the woman screamed.

‘I am not God but I will help!’ Gulabi yelled back.

‘Leave me!’ the woman screamed again. ‘Help me!’

Why couldn’t the woman make up her mind? Gulabi would just have to make it up for her.

‘I am coming, sister!’ she shouted. Then thrusting her neck out, she continued, ‘But where am I to be coming, sister?’

Her voice: ‘Hurry, someone, or I will die!’

His: ‘Don’t move!’

Gulabi was finding their conflicting instructions dizzying, and leaning out of a seventh-floor window wasn’t helping. But never should such simple discomforts get in the way of saving a sister in such obvious (and loud) need.

On tiptoe now, she leaned further and further out of the window. She could hear the voices, but not see where this dastardly crime was unfolding. Leaning slightly more to the left, she bent over the windowsill when...

A door banged.

The surprise bowled her over. And out. Out of the seventh-floor window, where we now see her dangling like a lime on a string to misquote a line from poetry, though Gulabi is quite capable of writing her own.

2

Out of the window, seven floors above skull-smashing concrete, arms aching, head spinning - and no hope in sight. But let’s not sell our heroine short. All we do know about Gulabi so far tells us that she’s no quitter. She clutches on with one hand to the thick red drape of the window, wishing she’d eaten a little less of the airplane meal, which included five extra ketchup sachets. Precious seconds tick by, while the drape seems to groan under her weight. She dare not move more than she has to, since even an attempt to lurch upward may tear the fabric and send her spiralling down.

‘Help me!’ the wailing woman who started it all goes on.

‘No. Help me!’ Gulabi screams louder. Because she can now see the blue square in the next building, and the woman and the man throttling each other within it. The traitors who trapped her are in a television drama.

‘No. Someone help me first. She is only inside TV! I will die. She is not even being alive.’

Her pleas, like the woman’s, are met with silence.

Hope dims.

Pigeons cluck.

The TV couple disappear for a commercial break.

The drape, unaccustomed to the high tension, starts tearing apart with an ominous rip.

Gulabi hollers, as all brave stars of action films do in such situations: ‘Mummyji!’

And in response, a head appears in the seventh-floor window from which she has just exited. She almost lets go of the drape in her shock.

The face is equally shocked. It belongs to a man, who gasps, ‘What are you doing there?’

‘What are YOU doing there?’ she demands. ‘Are you going to trap me and kill me and rob my possessings?’

‘No, but by the looks of it, you’re doing your best to kill yourself He holds out a hand to her.

Gulabi looks at his hand suspiciously. ‘Don’t touch me!’

The man says, ‘Well then, could you be decent enough to go kill yourself from someone else’s window?’

The drape rips further.

‘Save me!’ the woman on the TV begins to scream again, her commercial break over.

‘No, forgetting her and saving me!’ Gulabi demands, her competitive streak rising, her inhibitions flung to the winds.

‘Okay, okay,’ the man concedes. But the man, being a man and unfamiliar with household linen, pulls at the drape and it rips even more, so that it now hangs by a shred of rather expensive damask.

‘No! No! I will die! Hold me! Grab me!’ Gulabi pleads, now in absolute desperation.

The man looks startled. ‘Please don’t shout. Everyone can hear you!’

Gulabi, of course, is dying to disagree. No one has heard her. She could fall to her death with no one to hear or help her. That’s the big city for you.

She kicks in panic while a new man pops his head out of the sixth-floor window to roar, ‘Go swing in your own window. You are scaring my cat!’

Before she can deliver a cutting reply, or fall into his window or onto his cat, the Man on Top grabs her hand. And with a heave (his) and a hai (hers), she comes back in the way she went out through the window. She falls right into his arms, rather romantically, she thinks, but he reacts violently, sprawling across the marble floor on his back, while she lies triumphantly on top of him. Then she sees the inappropriateness of their position and shrieks, ‘Don’t touch me! Who you think I am?’

‘I’d really like to know. If you’d be so kind as to get off me.’

Scrambling onto her elbows, she regards him. A tall man dressed in a black suit. A crow with brown cow eyes. Nicely proportioned, though definitely squashed now, being the sole supporter of Gulabi’s weight. Under the melting gaze of the cow eyes, Gulabi begins to blush.

‘Is there an explanation for this? Because I’d really like to hear it.’ He slides out from beneath her with an attempt at dignity.

Oh, her manners!

She gushes, ‘Yes, most surely. I am going to save slut from being slit.’

He goggles at her for a moment, and then gathers himself with visible effort. ‘Really? Why don’t we start from the beginning? Who are you?’

‘We will start? What we will start? Oh finely, I will start first. My good name is Gulabi. I am waiting for available man,’ she whispers in a voice most coy.

‘I am the man with the available room,’ he corrects her. ‘But how many of you were intending to live here?’ He looks worriedly at her fourteen suitcases.

‘Only I alonely.’ She looks at him again from under her eyelashes, in the time-and-Hindi-film-proven technique of turning men into malleable jelly. ‘But not living with you. I am respectful and honourful. Also, I am of marriageful age, and I am ...’

‘Yes, yes, pleased to meet you.’ His mouth twitches, valiantly attempting to hold back his smile ‘So,’ he says, ‘in this apartment, I have that one bedroom at the end, which I hardly use; I’m out most of the time. But in the other bedroom,’ he points to another door, ‘is my tenant, Tanya. And that door leads to the vacant room, if you’d like to see it.’

She stares at his lips moving in and out, to the left, to the right, forward march - she has never seen a man like this in Gayab. He looks like the men in films and talks like the men on TV. She decides she will live in this house, even if her room is a cupboard. This may well be the suitable man she is fated to marry, met on her very first day in the city. He has literally fallen into her lap - or vice versa. What a sign from the stars. The early bird has worms, as they say in Queen’s English. She’s not sure why.

‘I am not wanting to see room. I am taking it.’ Then a discordant thought strikes her. ‘But why you not living here most time? You must live here most time. I am expert cook and will cook for you. But first, you being a Bemba?’

‘A what?’

‘You know. You being engineer?’

‘Well, yes, as it happens, I did my engineering from

‘Yes. Pass. And you being MBA?’

‘Yes, but how on earth would you know that?’

‘Pass again?’

‘Of course I’ve passed. But how does this affect ...?’

She winks. ‘Your pass is my future! You will see!’

‘I see.’ Quite unable to see, he waves in the general direction of the vacant room. ‘Well, if the rent suits you, please make yourself at home.’

‘Thanking you muchly! I am making my home in your home. And I am cook tonight. My brinjal fry is your brinjal fry. You like? You come home fastly.’

‘You, what? I, what?’ The Bemba’s eyebrows shoot up. He blinks, turns and attempts to rush out, and trips over her multiple suitcases. This time it is she who holds out her hand to steady him. ‘You save my life, now I save your life. We will save life whole life!’

‘You what? We what?’ As he scrambles down the staircase, she shouts after his retreating form, ‘See you tonight, Bemba. Remembering - brinjal fry!’

3

Her room is a cupboard.

Even the most well-heeled migrants in this city (sequined heels, no less) sooner, rather than later, learn to adjust to their cupboards. They shift a little, they crouch lower, they realign objectives, stuff their egos into their pockets, cut their dreams to size ...

She will have to stand the bed on its head. That is the only way Gulabi will fit into this room. She can sleep standing. Unless, of course, she sleeps in the Bemba’s bed. Ha! But one step at a time. Either she or her fourteen suitcases will fit into this minuscule room. She pushes some under her bed and some into the bathroom which is the size of an armchair. Some go into the living room, one on top of each other, to hide the painting of a woman who looks sorrowfully into a stream, possibly because all her clothes have floated away in its swirling waters. She is now covered by VIP suitcases, and should be suitably grateful. On top of another woman, whose assets hang like the fruit of the tree she reaches out for, Gulabi hangs the picture of her beloved Sister Ancy.

Happy with her efforts, she turns to the all-important hook in the hooking of the suitable fish: brinjal fry. And not much later, we behold her in the kitchen, this splendid example of young womanhood, spluttering her brinjals in a well of oil, freshly bathed, oiled and powdered.

Over the cacophony of the spluttering oil and her strident singing, she hears, nevertheless, the sound of the door opening. The Bemba has returned. She attempts to strike a pose between sensuous siren and homely housewife without falling into the oil and waits for his gasp of pleasant surprise as he enters to the tempting smell of fresh, home-cooked ...

‘Oh fork! What is that smell?’

That is not a gasp of pleasant surprise. That is not even the Bemba. That is a woman’s voice. A thief? A suitcase stealer? Another slit? Another TV?

Gulabi picks up a knife and strides out of the kitchen.

It is a woman as thin as a cricket wicket, with close-cropped hair standing like stiff egg-whites from her head and three long earrings clutching one ear so that her egg-white head looks like it is toppling off to one side. She is dressed in a skirt short enough to make a baby’s bib.

‘Who the fork are you?’ asks the creature. She looks at the knife in Gulabi’s hand, and without waiting for an answer, turns to pick up a vase of flowers and begins a run in the general direction of Gulabi and the kitchen.

So she is thinking I am a fork? Then she is not dangerous, just not very smart, deduces Gulabi. Gulabi is her school’s martial arts star, but this particular threat doesn’t require such finesse. All she needs to do is step aside, while the vase-flinging apparition goes flying into the kitchen. And when she falls on the floor, Gulabi sits on top of her. (She seems to be doing this a lot since the people in this apartment insist on transacting from the floor.) She says, with the knife held to her prey’s throat, ‘Please to meet you. My good name is Gulabi, not Fork.’ She does not look pleased. Nor does the apparition. ‘And what is your good name?’

‘Tanya. Get off me!’

‘Oh, please to meet you. You are Tanya the Tenant and I am Gulabi in the Cupboard.’

‘Which cupboard? Why have you been hiding in cupboards, and why are you burning down my house and trying to slice off my tonsils?’

‘We are start again, okay?’ Always one to admit her mistakes, Gulabi jumps up, holds out her hand and helps the creature sit up. ‘I am making brinjal fry for my Bemba. You want?’

‘Who is your Bemba? How many people are hiding in the cupboards?’

‘Only I and my Bemba is owning this house, and I am renting the cupboard.’

‘Your Bemba ... oh, I see. You’re the new tenant! I am pleased to meet you, I think.’

Gulabi bares all her teeth in what she hopes is a forgiving smile. ‘I am cooking most time for my Bemba. I will cook for you also. You are looking all skin and bone. You are having any infectious disease?’

‘No. I try hard to look like this ... but wait. Your Bemba owns this house. Are you his new wife?’

‘Not yet.’ Gulabi winks, and then a downright depressing thought strikes her. ‘Oh, no. You are his old wife? Or his lover? I am such a tin-cover! I am not understand big city ways.’ She sits again on the kitchen floor and holds her head in her hands.

‘I am always jumping over gun!’

Tanya melts. How can you resist a damsel in such evident distress? Especially if she’s jumping guns. Oh, you can? Well, Tanya, despite her vase-flinging bravado, is quite a sop when it comes down to it. Besides, this is her new flatmate, and she needs to live with her in harmony for the foreseeable future. She tries hard to put her new flatmate at ease. ‘No, no, no. I am not his wife. I would not be his wife if he were the last man on the last island of ... I am totally not his wife. You can have him all to yourself Tanya looks desperately at the downcast Gulabi, and ups the ante. ‘And he loves brinjals. We all love brinjals. I’ve been wanting to eat brinjals for ever so long. Please don’t cry

Tanya picks up a sliver of brinjal that has