Free The Case of the Love Commandos by Tarquin Hall Page A

long-distance calling, prepaid mobile charging and photocopying. Internet access was also available, subject to electricity, with seven partitioned booths equipped with PCs. All but one was occupied by young men surfing social media sites and ogling busty snaps of Bollywood starlets.
    Facecream’s searches were mundane by comparison. Onthe official website of the state government of Uttar Pradesh, she found details about the Govind village school. The current teacher, who was charged with the education of some fifty-two children between the ages of four and eleven, was a certain Mr. P. Joshi. After accessing the Most Private Investigators online database of Indian logos, she then forged all the official paperwork she required. With half a potato, her trusty switchblade, a red ink pad and a laminating machine, she also fashioned herself an ID.
    An hour later, after buying some dour cotton suits, a pair of bookish glasses, and a few notebooks and pens, she arrived at the school in the guise of Miss Padma Jaiteley, an assistant teacher from Lucknow.
    An elderly Muslim caretaker wearing a prayer cap sat in a metal chair behind the gates. There was not a gram of fat on him, his sun-baked skin stretched taut over his bones and joints.
    “I’m looking for Mr. Joshi,” Facecream explained, brandishing a letter for him from the Uttar Pradesh state Education Ministry, which appointed her as his deputy. But the caretaker, whose name was Atif, said he wasn’t there.
    “He went for a family wedding.”
    “When?” asked Facecream.
    “Oooh, long time. A month at least.”
    She spotted some children playing hopscotch in the shade of a banyan tree. There were roughly twenty in all.
    “Where are the rest of the students?” she asked.
    “Working in the fields, mostly. Some go to a new private school. It’s a few miles up the road.”
    Atif took her bag and led the way across the compound. The children greeted her enthusiastically and followed her as she inspected the school buildings.
    The only classroom was dusty and littered with insect carcasses.It contained a few old desks, some metal chairs that were all bent out of shape, a couple of rusting almirahs and a pile of textbooks missing half their pages. A dog was asleep in one corner.
    The “kitchen” was a room with an open hearth and a metal bucket for washing dishes. There, the cook, a miserable-looking local woman, was preparing a heap of spotty potatoes. Watery daal containing a minimum of onion and garlic was boiling in a large aluminum pot.
    “The pradhan provides us with the worst-quality rations,” complained Atif, referring to the village headman. “It’s barely enough for each child.”
    “What does he do with the rest? Sell it?” asked Facecream.
    “In the local market.”
    She stepped outside into the sunlight and stood for a while watching the children who’d returned to their play. She’d been wondering why they still came to school despite the absence of their teacher. Now she understood: they hailed from the poorest families and their parents didn’t want them to miss out on the pitiful, adulterated gruel cooking in the kitchen.
    A sense of hopelessness, of defeat in the face of insurmountable corruption, swept over her. The village headman skimming the children’s only meal was but one of thousands doing the same across the country. The whole system was as rotten as that heap of potatoes. Little wonder that the Mao-inspired Naxalite movement was gaining ground across huge swaths of the country. But violence wasn’t the answer. She’d learned her lesson the hard way as a young idealistic teenager when she’d joined the Maoists in Nepal in their fight against the state. Change could only come from the grassroots, from people producing their own legitimate leaders and then holding them accountable. For that to happen,there needed to be universal education. The words of Rabindranath Tagore came to mind. Even for those at the extremes of poverty,