It was Saturday night, and the sun had only just set. Orange streetlamps were just blinking to life one by one. In a little while, more vehicles would get on the roads. Summer had been unreasonably harsh that year – especially for a usually mild city like Bangalore – and it was only after nightfall that people dared to venture out.

So it was no surprise to Gangadhar and Swagata Das that their guests had not started arriving yet. Theirs was a small flat – real estate prices in Bangalore started from the stratosphere and rose further heavenward – and Swagata didn’t particularly like cleaning up, so she had made it quite plain that morning that they would be entertaining no more than two families.

Gangadhar sank his six-foot-two frame deeper into the easy-chair and closed his eyes. From inside the bedroom, Swagata called out. “I can’t believe you invited him too. I said only two families.”

Gangadhar said, keeping his voice deliberately calm, “He’s not a ‘family’. He’s a bachelor. You said two families.”

“Exactly, Shiv. He’s a bachelor. What will a bachelor do in a gathering of three families? What will he talk about?”

“He’s new to the city, Swagi. You know what it’s like when you don’t know anyone. If it hadn’t been for Aakash and Ashwati…” He let the sentence trail off. A year ago, when they had first moved into the third floor apartment in Temple Towers, it had been Aakash and Ashwati, their next-door neighbors, who’d invited them over and showed them the ropes.

Swagata didn’t say anything, and Gangadhar didn’t incite her further. It was best not to stoke a dying fire. He resumed enjoying the comfort of his easy-chair in prudent silence.

*

Aakash Jaitley smiled at the elderly man from the depths of Gangadhar’s easy chair and asked, “So, Mr. Khanna, what do you do?”

Mr. Adheer Khanna was a large man with a smile that looked a great deal like a grimace. His face was set in a perfect oval but for the double chin, which gave him a Santa-Claus like appearance. His cheeks were punctuated with uneven patches of two-day stubble, and his side-locks snaked down to just below his large, floppy ears. He wore a jaded brown T-shirt that looked on the verge of being torn down to pieces. The smattering of hair on his scalp was uncombed. His little eyes made quick, nervous movements as he talked. He was fifty-five.

“I am currently retired, so you might call me a gentleman of leisure,” he said, in a deliberate, choosy manner of speaking, clasping his huge hands together. “But you might find my wife disagrees with the ‘gentleman’ part.” He scratched the back of his head and looked sideways at his wife with a cheeky smile. His wife, a small, tender woman of around fifty, smiled and nodded from across the edge of the room where the ladies sat in a row. Mr. Khanna continued, “But when I was in a position to work, I was a lawyer.”

Swagata asked, her eyes widening, “Did you deal with murders?”

“Oh, no, Mrs. Das, I could never work with murders. I am very faint-hearted.” He chuckled at his wife. “No, fairly mundane stuff – like drawing up wills, for instance. You will be amazed how much money there is for that sort of…”

A soft, tentative knock on the door interrupted the man’s speech. A short, roly-poly man with big, square glasses stumbled into the room. When his eyes fell upon Gangadhar, he smiled, revealing spotty, yellow teeth. He placed a white plastic bowl in Swagata’s hands and said shyly, “I made some kheer.”

Gangadhar waved him to a chair in the corner. He said to everyone in the room, “Our guest list for the night is complete. This is my colleague, Suresh Velayudhan.”

Amid a chorus of slightly out-of-tune ‘Hi’s and ‘Hello’s, Velayudhan sat down in the corner chair.

Mr. Khanna, not to be deterred by the unforeseen interruption, picked up where he’d left. “As I was saying prior to Mr. Velayudhan arriving,” he said, “it is amazing how much money there is to be made out of such mundane things like making wills and settling property disputes. Besides, I liked it. There is not a little satisfaction in showing someone a clause in a written document to drive home your point and win an argument. Especially,” he concluded with a smile in his wife’s direction, “when the writer of the document is you.”

His wife smiled again and nodded. This time, Ashwati leaned a little in the lady’s general direction and asked her, “And what do you do, Mrs. Khanna?”

The lady first looked questioningly at her husband, as though surprised that she was asked a direct question. Upon getting an encouraging smile from him, she cleared her throat softly and said, “I’ve always been a social worker. I like working with children.” She lowered her head and looked up at her husband.

Mr. Khanna blinked at her and nodded. He sighed and said, “You must understand, we’ve never had any children ourselves.”

“Oh,” Ashwati said, looking both of them in turn. “I am sorry.”

“No, no, that’s okay,” Mrs. Khanna said, her voice rising a touch but never once reaching the booming level of her husband’s. “I hardly ever feel the loss anyway. I work so much with kids that sometimes it’s a relief not having any of our own.” She twisted the tip of her salwar-kameez and smiled.

Swagata broke the short silence that descended on the room. She said, “Do you work with – children with special abilities, Mrs. Khanna?”

Mrs. Khanna looked at her levelly and said, “You mean mentally retarded kids?”

Swagata opened her mouth in shock, but Adheer Khanna interrupted smoothly. “There is a queer stigma with referring to under-developed kids, Mrs. Das, but thankfully, that exists only for people working outside the field. People who regularly work with such children freely refer to them as mentally retarded. After all, there is nothing wrong with the word, ‘retarded’.” After pausing for a while for one of his smiles, he said, “So to answer your question, yes, she does.”

Aakash pushed his jet black hair back, thinking. “Yes, now that you mention it, you’re right. ‘Retarded’ just means ‘slowed down’. There is nothing wrong with being ‘slowed down’. But somehow, when someone says ‘retarded’, it sounds wrong, doesn’t it?”

Gangadhar said, “That’s because of the way the word is normally used, I guess. It’s commonly used to abuse someone who is slow and ineffectual. So someone with poor social skills might be called a social retard.” He stopped and shrugged. “It probably evolved from the original, but now it’s taken a meaning of its own.”

Mr. Khanna nodded vigorously. “No doubt. No doubt.”

Swagata raised her voice and gave it a distinct emphasis. “On my part, I prefer a different word, Mrs. Khanna. Something like – like – ‘challenged’.”

Ashwati leaned back, folded her arms, and considered her freshly painted toenails. “But is ‘challenged’ the right word? I mean, it might seem like a challenge to us, but to them, I am sure life is just normal?” She looked around the room from person to person, and her eyes finally came to rest on Mrs. Khanna.

So it was she that answered, “You’re right Mrs. Jaitley. People who’re born with disabilities usually suffer a lot less than we think.” Then, she hesitated as if she had something else to say, and looked to her husband for help.

Mr. Khanna rose to the occasion. “While it is true in a sense, Mrs. Jaitley, that mentally retarded kids might look upon themselves as perfectly normal, it is also true that over the course of their lives, they do come into contact with people whom we consider ‘normal’. People like you and me. And even with their diminished sense of perspective, I am sure they become aware, sometimes painfully, of how ‘different’ they really are.” His hands moved continuously as he talked, drawing patterns in the air.

Aakash shrugged lightly. “Besides, some of these mentally ‘challenged’ kids go on to be very successful in life, don’t they?”

Gangadhar said, “Yes, of course. We saw a movie just last night about a dyslexic child who is a gifted artist.” He turned to Mrs. Khanna and asked her, “Is that even possible, Mrs. Khanna? Is it possible for a mentally retarded child to be an artistic genius?”

Mrs. Khanna sighed. “I’m afraid that’s more of an exception than the norm, Mr. Das. In my experience, I’ve only seen a couple or so kids who’ve displayed higher than average artistic ability.”

Ashwati said resolutely, “But just because they’re different from us doesn’t mean we should consider ourselves superior to them. It doesn’t mean we should call them ‘retarded’.” She looked around the room. “Does it?”

Swagata nodded emphatically. “I agree. Why, they say even parents like their mentally retarded children more than their ‘normal’ children.”

Everyone nodded at that for a while, and Mr. Khanna eased himself into the vacuum created by the silence. He said, “I’ve just remembered something I’d been involved with a long time ago, and the reason I remember it now, I think, is because it contains elements of what both of you said.” He pointed one of his hands at his wife and the other at Swagata. “It was about a person who gave his considerable wealth to his son who was ‘normal’ while leaving almost nothing to the mentally ‘challenged’ son.”

Aakash sat forward. “A retarded genius?”

“Something like that,” Mr. Khanna said. “I will have to tell you the story from beginning to end. It has stuck remarkably well in my memory, I might add, because it’s a queer little incident. Usually my memory is very fallible.” He looked at his wife and they shared a smile.

Gangadhar raised an eye-brow. “Something that puzzles you?”

Mr. Khanna shook his head first, and then he shrugged. “Well,” he said, “yes, a puzzle of sorts.”

Everyone waited in expectant silence.

But before Mr. Adheer Khanna could speak further, Swagata stood up and said, “Dinner’s ready. Why don’t we continue this afterwards, over dessert?”

*

“It was one of my earliest cases as a private practitioner,” Mr. Khanna said, twirling a toothpick expertly between his lips. “My client was an elderly man whose name I cannot divulge to you – in fact, I cannot state any of the real names. I assure you it doesn’t affect the details of the incident in any way.

“My client came to me with a very straightforward request. He knew he was about to die very soon, and he wanted me to draw up his will for him. He had two sons, he told me, and his initial thought had been to leave two-thirds of his wealth to his elder son, who was an Autism victim.

“But over the course of their lives, it so happened that the elder son did rather well for himself – so much so that, in fact, at the time of the old man coming to me, the younger one was very much the slouch, living with his father and trying unsuccessfully to come to grips with the family business.”

Aakash finished his kheer and said, “What was the family business?”

“They have an agarbathi manufacturing plant,” Mr. Khanna said. “The lad was a complete failure at school, which is not surprising given the financial affluence into which he happened to be born, but he also turned out to be absolutely clueless in matters of business.

“On the other hand, the older son was doing well, which placed the old man in a very difficult dilemma.”

Aakash interrupted the speaker once again. “I am sorry, Mr. Khanna, but how did it happen that the kid was doing well in life in spite of being an Autism victim?”

Mr. Khanna showed no signs of being irritated at being interrupted. He said, “The kid was spotted as being a special talent at art when he was five, and from then on, his father employed the best teachers he could find to teach him. Though his work was often criticized as lacking imagination – not surprising for someone with reduced cognitive abilities – his technique was apparently considered peerless in the state.” He removed the toothpick from his mouth and examined its tip. “According to his father, at least.”

He put the toothpick back in his mouth. “Anyway, my client’s dilemma was this: he had always loved his older son more than his younger, and he had always assumed he would leave more of his property to his first-born. But now, the younger needed the wealth more. What is he to do? Divide the wealth up, like he originally planned, giving the older son the lion’s share? Or be the dutiful father and give his younger son the majority because of the circumstances?”

Gangadhar frowned. “Couldn’t he have divided his wealth equally between his sons?”

Mr. Khanna smiled widely. “I asked him the same question, and the answer was a very firm no. The old man was very particular about keeping his residential property and his business assets separate. As it happens, his business accounts for roughly seventy percent of his wealth, and he intended to keep it unscathed.”

Gangadhar said, “So it had to be divided up in a seventy-thirty proportion.”

“Unfortunately so,” Mr. Khanna said. “So when he asked me the question, I told him that it was his money so he could break it down as he wished, but I suggested that each of his sons should be sent a draft copy of the will before it was finalized so that both sons could give their thoughts on the matter.

“My client agreed, and I proceeded to write up a draft of the will as he wanted it – with the younger son getting the business and the older getting the houses. It was my client’s notion that his first-born, being autistic, would have a need for a more settled inheritance, whereas his younger son, being normal, would hopefully be intelligent enough to at least keep the business going as it was, even if he never expands it.

“Once I finished the draft, I delivered it to my client’s house personally and, while I was there, had an opportunity to meet the younger son. I handed over the will to him, summarized its contents, and asked him if he had any comments or objections. He had none – I could tell as much by his barely concealed joy.

“For the younger son, it was a little more complicated. You see, he lived in Delhi with his secretary and hardly ever came here to Bangalore. So I mailed a copy of the will to him and called him to ask him his opinion.

“A strong male voice answered the phone, and I told him I wanted to speak to – let’s say Shyam. The person answered that whatever Shyam needed to know, I could tell him, and that he would see to it Shyam will be informed accordingly.”

Mr. Khanna took a little breather. He said, “You should know I generally disapprove of secretaries; even more so when they convince themselves that they need to know everything in their employer’s life. So I told him quite firmly that I could only talk to Shyam and no one else, because it’s a very personal matter.

“Even from his first words to me it was apparent Shyam was not a ‘normal’ person, as it were. He came to the phone and said, ‘Hello? Mister Khanna?’ with a very heavy lisp on the ‘s’. It was obvious I was speaking to an autism patient. His speech was halting throughout, and he kept repeating the same things over and over again. He also had a tendency to wander in his speech, so that I had to ask the same questions repeatedly to make sure I was getting the right answer.

“I asked him if he got the will and he said yes. I asked him if he found any issues in it that he needed discussion with me or his father, and he said no. But he said, ‘I send you letter. Take it – from Papa.’ He didn’t speak much, you understand; just yes or no, mostly.

“I promised him I would read the letter, and just before I hung up, I asked him again if he had anything about the will that he wanted to tell me. He waited for a while (there was a lot of waiting and repeating in that conversation) and said, ‘It’s long. Make it – l-l-light’.”

Mr. Khanna shrugged and said, “At the time I was fresh out of college, and I had grandiose notions of being a good writer. I tended to use to a lot of compound sentences when simple ones would do, and complex words when simple words would do. I’m still not completely cured of the disease, as I am sure you can tell by the way I speak.” He smiled once self-deprecatingly across the room.

“So I told the kid that I will make the will shorter, and when he started repeating his sentence for the fourth time, I’d begun to run out of patience, so I cut him short and hung up with a hasty goodbye. It is not an easy job speaking to an autism patient on the phone, let me assure you. It was a full twenty minute call and that was the gist of the conversation. You could imagine how much haggling there was with me trying to understand him and vice versa.

“I mentioned this to my client’s younger son, and even he recommended that I should lighten up the language a little. Reading it, he said, gave him a headache. After all, it’s simple stuff, and there was no need to use such complex words and sentences? He also told me he would keep a look out for his brother’s letter and forward it on to me once it arrives. He explained to me that his brother preferred to communicate through the written form because in a letter, he could take his time and arrange his thoughts carefully while in a conversation, he cannot because of his condition.

“The boy impressed me quite a bit at the time. He didn’t have to respect me – I was not much older than him then, you see – but he still treated me and his father with the most respect. The way he talked about his brother, he clearly admired him and looked up to him. He might have been unlucky at business, but he didn’t seem to me to be a particularly bad lad.

“Anyway, I sat down to revise the will and cut out all the ‘hard’ parts out of it. Half-way through the editing process, a type-written letter arrived from my client’s house. It was originally from Delhi, and it said the will was fine, and all it needed was a little bit of simplification that an autistic could understand it better. It was a very short note, and it didn’t contain anything that we didn’t talk about on the phone. The older son didn’t mind his brother getting a bigger share of his father’s wealth, and my heart warmed for them both.

“The shortening process took a little bit longer than I expected, because of two reasons: one was that I had other clients to take care of and other projects to work on, and because this was just a cosmetic change, I didn’t give it much thought. Two, the old man’s credits were a little complicated, so I had to make sure none of the detail was lost in the simplification. Due to these two reasons, it was only until four months later that I finished the second draft.”

Mr. Khanna folded his hands. “By that time, however, my client’s health had deteriorated, and he died just as I finished the final draft.”

He bowed his head in silence for a second and then continued, “Once again, I made two copies of the final will, dropped one off with the grief-stricken boy, and the other, I mailed to the older son in Delhi, not expecting to hear from them ever again.”

Swagata smiled. “So, a happy story.”

Mr. Khanna smiled back at her. “Not quite. That very evening I got a call from Shyam, and it was plain from his voice that he was very agitated. ‘The will’s still long,’ he kept saying again and again. I had to tell him that that’s the shortest I could make it with all the details accurate, and if there were things that he didn’t understand in the simplified version, his secretary could explain it to him.

“That seemed to make him angrier still, and he went off on a tangent – as autistics are wont to do – and started babbling incoherently about random things for a while. I couldn’t understand even a word of what he was saying. Then suddenly, pulling himself together, he said, ‘Ram killed Baba’ – let’s say Ram’s the name of the younger brother.

“I was shocked to hear that at first, but it made sense on reflection. People with mental disorders do tend to overreact to grief and they’re very quick to place blame on others for their misfortunes. I had no doubt in my mind that it was his grief that was turning him against his brother. Why? Had he not sent me a letter approving the will just a few months ago?

“I tried to reason with him, but his voice grew louder and more incoherent with each passing sentence. After a few minutes’ of yelling back and forth and getting nowhere with him – he kept repeating that Ram killed his father – I finally hung up in sheer despair. It was just getting pointless, really.

“I wondered whether I should tell Ram what Shyam had said on the phone, but for some reason, I decided not to. I waited for another letter or phone call from Shyam on the matter; but none came. After a month, I called him, but it was answered by someone who’d recently bought the place. And no, they didn’t know where the previous owner lived.”

Mr. Khanna sighed and shook his head. “No one’s ever heard from him after that.”

Ashwati was the first to speak. “Did you ask Ram about his brother?”

“I did,” Mr. Khanna said. “But he was as clueless as I was. He travelled down to Delhi in the hope of finding him, but he had no luck.”

Gangadhar thought for a while and then said, “The point of contention here is obviously Shyam accusing Ram of murder. Did you see any evidence supporting that accusation?”

“Well, I didn’t investigate the matter closely, but I did talk to the doctor, and he didn’t seem to have found anything amiss. The old man had been suffering from a weak heart for a long time, and for all intents and purposes, his death was almost expected.”

Aakash scratched his eyebrow with his forefinger and frowned. “There is also the matter of the simplification of the will. How much did you cut it down by, Mr. Khanna? Did you, say, halve it in size?”

Mr. Khanna said, “More than that. The final draft was, I daresay, only about a third of what the original was. And I couldn’t shrink it down further without compromising the information contained in it.”

Aakash said, “And he still didn’t understand it?”

Mr. Khanna shook his head.

Swagata, who had been listening with wide-eyed attention all this time, said, “What about the secretary? I wonder why Shyam didn’t make use of his secretary’s services if he needed his help.”

Gangadhar said, “He must have. Remember, he never said he couldn’t understand what was in the will. He did understand, but he felt it was a bit too wordy. I’m sure he must have taken his secretary’s help to understand it.”

“Then why did he want it to be shortened?”

Gangadhar shrugged. “Maybe he wanted to be able to read it for himself; maybe he was preparing for a future without his secretary. You know how sensitive about dependence mentally challenged people can get.”

Swagata raised her hand half-way to say something, but she let it drop.

Ashwati leaned forward to the edge of the sofa. “This is all okay, but why did he run away? He agreed to the will in all its essentials, and then at the end of it all, took off without telling anyone. Did he even take his share of the property?”

Mr. Khanna shrugged. “Not to my knowledge.”

Aakash said, “Maybe he was afraid of his younger brother. He thought Ram killed his father. Maybe he was scared he would kill him too?”

“But why would he think that?” Mr. Khanna said.

“I don’t know, but if he truly believed that his brother was a danger to his life, he would flee even without caring about the property, wouldn’t he? That would explain his running away.”

Everyone in the room fell silent. Gangadhar said slowly, “You mentioned Shyam had a lisp, didn’t you?”

“Yes, a very pronounced one.”

“And the manner of speech was befitting an autistic?”

Mr. Khanna considered that for a while. Then he said, “Yes, I would say yes. To be sure, I hadn’t worked with autistics before that, but in light of my later experiences, it is very much how an autistic speaks.”

Gangadhar pursed his lips. “You don’t sound very sure of that.”

Mr. Khanna said, “Well, you see, I started working with mentally challenged people a while after this happened, and I only have my memory to rely on to answer your question correctly.” He paused. “And well, my memory is not the best.”

“The reason I am asking you this, Mr. Khanna,” said Gangadhar, “is because it just struck me that you’ve never seen this Shyam.”

Mr. Khanna raised his eyebrows and said, “Yes, you’re right.”

“You’ve just heard him over the phone, and you’ve received a letter from him, but that’s it. You’ve never seen him in person.”

Mr. Khanna said, “I’ve seen photos.”

“That’s fine. I am not contesting whether there did exist an autistic elder brother or not. There must have been one, but I am wondering if it’s possible that it was Ram all along that you were talking to.”

Mr. Khanna looked jolted all of a sudden. “Ram?”

Gangadhar said, “Yes, is it possible that it was Ram who answered your call and put on a lisp and a fake autistic speech pattern and pretended to be okay with the will, knowing that his real older brother, wherever he might have been, would not accede to giving up a major portion of the estate?”

Mr. Khanna said, “It’s not very probable –”

“To make his plan more elaborate and to avoid rousing your suspicions in this direction, he asked you to make a revision of the will even though there was no need for it. Because, as Swagata had mentioned, he’d already agreed to the contents of the will. Of what practical use would be a revision?”

Mr. Khanna frowned and chewed the inside of his lower lip thoughtfully. “I suppose it could be possible. But – but that leaves further questions. Where did the older brother go then?”

Gangadhar said, “I don’t know. The older brother could have been anywhere at the time. You only had Ram’s word for where his brother was. He could have been lying.”

Mr. Khanna shook his head. “It was not Ram who gave me Shyam’s contact details. It was his father.”

Gangadhar smiled sheepishly and looked at Swagata. She shrugged in return. Aakash and Ashwati also traded confused glances. Mrs. Khanna’s face looked on impassively at her husband’s, who was staring into the distance.

At last, Aakash let out a long, tired sigh and said, “Well, I guess we just don’t know with some things.”

Then, the people in the room heard an unfamiliar voice for the first time. It had a thin, screechy edge to it, and if Suresh Velayudhan were not sitting there, it could easily have been thought to have belonged to a woman.

Velayudhan adjusted his glasses nervously and said, “Shiv, there might be a simpler solution to this than Ram impersonating his brother.” His nostrils twitched and his eyes blinked rapidly.

Gangadhar smiled. “Go ahead, Velu.”

Velayudhan turned his head to face Mr. Khanna. “You remember the phone conversations you had with Shyam. Have you missed out anything of importance?”

Mr. Khanna thought for a moment and said, “No, not that I can think of.”

Velayudhan adjusted his huge square-shaped glasses again. “You said you had to repeat most of your conversation. In that repetition, was there anything fresh that came up that you might have forgotten?”

Mr. Khanna smiled thinly. “If I had forgotten, Mr. Velayudhan, I would not remember that I forgot, would I?”

Velayudhan didn’t answer that directly. “Okay,” he said, grinning stupidly. “Then I will assume you remember the phone conversations accurately. Now, you said Shyam had a lisp.”

Mr. Khanna said wearily. “Yes, he did have a lisp – a very strong one.”

“Not surprising for an autistic,” Velayudhan said. “But some lisps can be hidden.”

Gangadhar said, “What do you mean, Velu?”

Velayudhan scratched his head and frowned, as though he was framing his sentences in his head. He said at length, “Look, there are different types of lisps. The most common lisp is a mispronunciation of the ‘s’ syllable. Like so.” He said the word, ‘mister’, wedging his tongue between his teeth while pronouncing the ‘s’.

Mr. Khanna nodded. “Yes, that’s what I meant. I could see he had a lisp straight away, when he said ‘Mister Khanna’.”

“Right,” said Velayudhan. “This is a very pronounced lisp. It’s impossible to miss it. But in some lisps, the speaker substitutes some syllables in the place of other syllables, and sometimes they can be missed. Especially if the syllable they substitute gives the word a different meaning.”

Everyone looked at him blankly, so he continued, “Tell me Mr. Khanna, you said Shyam told you that the will was long and that he wanted you to make it light. Was those his very words?”

“Yes.”

“Is it possible then, that he might have been saying that the will was wrong and that he wanted you to make it right?”

“Oh?” Mr. Khanna said skeptically. “Oh, I – I don’t know.”

Velayudhan shrugged. “If we accept it as a hypothesis, his actions fall into a pattern. They become more explainable. He asked Mr. Khanna to pick up his letter – a letter in which, presumably, he detailed all the reasons why he thought the will was wrong.”

Ashwati said, “But the letter didn’t contain anything. It was just a reaffirmation to make the will shorter.”

“Well, the letter Mr. Khanna got didn’t contain anything. By that time, you see, Mr. Khanna had confided in Ram the details of his conversation with Shyam. And the letter first came to the estate and then got forwarded to Mr. Khanna.”

Swagata asked, “So did the younger son destroy the original letter and write a letter of his own?”

Velayudhan said, “It’s definitely possible. From what you told us, Mr. Khanna, the letter was typewritten, and there was no signature at the bottom. Right?”

A glazed look came over Mr. Khanna’s eyes. He murmured, “Right.”

“So Shyam thinks his letter has reached Mr. Khanna and rests assured that he is investigating the matter, whereas Mr. Khanna is merely simplifying the will’s contents without changing any of the details. And he does this for four months – until the old man dies, in fact. Then, Shyam suddenly gets a copy of the will and to his amazement, he finds out (either by himself or with the help of his secretary) the will is essentially the same. That is when he realizes, for the first time, that someone has tampered with his letter.”

Ashwati said, “And he suspects his brother.”

Velayudhan nodded, and his voice became a touch louder. “He suspects his brother destroyed the letter, and he also suspects his brother of murdering their father. And once the thought occurs to him that his brother might kill him, it is enough to make him flee. As you probably will agree, Mrs. Khanna, instincts are more primal in mentally challenged people. Their capacity to reason, while slow to begin with, is particularly susceptible to instincts – like in this case, fear.”

“And worse,” Velayudhan continued, “he realizes he has foolishly told Mr. Khanna of his suspicions. What if he tells Ram? So, without telling anybody of his whereabouts, he vanishes, leaving his wealth behind. To his mind, I suspect, being alive would have been the most important thing.”

Aakash said, “That’s why he said the will was long the second time, too.”

Velayudhan nodded, and his eyes shone from behind his glasses. “Yes, because it was still wrong.”

“Incredible,” Mr. Khanna said. “Incredible.”

Velayudhan shrugged. “But what the letter contained, there is no way for us to be able to say. But we can make a guess – maybe Ram was putting pressure on his father to give him the major share of the property and maybe Shyam got wind of it, somehow. Maybe he wrote to Mr. Khanna about it, asking him to make sure that their father was not under duress when he signed the will.” He stopped for a second and shrugged again. “I don’t know.”

Gangadhar said, “Do you think Ram murdered his father?”

“He didn’t have to. He’d already arranged it such that the will – the copy he favored – was going to be signed. And I am sure he was aware that his father didn’t have too long to live. Why did he have to kill his father and run the risk of getting caught? He could just as easily sit back and let nature run its course. I think that’s what he did.”

Aakash nodded, smiling. “Yes, yes, it makes sense. But Shyam was suspicious of his brother because of his fear for him and because of what he knew he did to his letter.”

Mr. Khanna shook his head. “I can’t believe how I missed this!”

Velayudhan said, “It’s not your fault, Mr. Khanna. In your phone conversation with Shyam, there were no other words with a strong ‘r’ syllable that might have guided you into identifying the man’s lisp for it. The only two places where the lisp appeared happened to be places where the meaning of the words got completely changed.”

Mr. Khanna said, “It makes sense now why he repeated himself so many times that day. He was telling me the will was wrong and I was assuring him that I will shorten it so that he could understand. What a fool I have been!” He slapped his forehead.

Velayudhan said soothingly, “There, there, Mr. Khanna. We still don’t know if it’s true. It’s simply a theory. For all we know, Shiv might be right. There might have been only one brother.”

“No, no, Mr. Velayudhan, I am sure you’re right. I am so sure. Oh, it’s all so simple!”

Velayudhan opened his mouth to say something, but chose to stay silent.

“Wait a minute,” Ashwati’s melodious voice filled the room. “In his phone call, Shyam said, ‘Ram killed Baba’. If he had a lisp on the ‘r’, he would have said ‘lam’, wouldn’t he? But he didn’t.”

Velayudhan smiled. “Mrs. Jaitley, Mr. Khanna has not been using real names in his story, as I am sure you will remember. But it’s a good point that you raise, so to settle the matter further, I will ask him one final question.” He turned to Mr. Khanna and asked him, “The younger son’s name didn’t have a strong ‘r’ syllable, did it, Mr. Khanna?”

Mr. Khanna answered eloquently enough, with a quiet shake of the head, and his eyes stayed fixed on the seated figure of Suresh Velayudhan, who proceeded to noisily lick the last drops of kheer off his bowl.