From the anthology: A journalist at a workshop for new crime-fiction writers is accused of murder

Nestled within a cloud-mattress, under a silken razai, I woke to a room in darkness. What had punctured the warm bubble of my sleep?

Loud thumping.

Wake up, WAKE UP! screeched a voice at the door. THE COOK’S BEEN MURDERED!

“Wha—?” I croaked, my voice froggy with sleep. I must have heard wrong. To leave the delicious warmth of my bed was an intolerable torture. Nevertheless, I pulled on my fleece-lined dressing gown, thrust my feet into fake-fur slippers and stumbled to the door.

Broad daylight. Chunks of snow hurtling down out of a grey sky. Madhvi Dhillon, her hair wild and uncombed, a bright pink parka over her lace nightie, was screaming, “The COOK! MURDERED! Come to the COMMON ROOM!” She sped away, continuing to scream, “Oh my GOD, oh my GOD!”

I threw on some clothes and hurried to the main building. The central structure was built onto a steep slope. The main entrance to the building was on the top floor. It led onto a mezzanine with a glorious two-storey viewing window through which Nanda Devi and all her fellow peaks could be seen in all their glory. Today, of course, there was only fog and snow.

A curving wooden stairway led down to the spacious and cosy Common Room, ringed with bookshelves. I took the path that skirted the cliff, entering directly into this lower space, warm and brightly lit.

The Bokhara was roaring and the electric samovar of tea was steaming on the counter that separated the Common Room from the cafeteria. Madhvi was there, still wearing her parka and negligee. So were Sugar Kara, Harsha Lalwani and Zinnia Batlibhoy – all fully dressed. They were all four huddled together on the huge scuffed-leather sofa that defined one corner of the room. They were each hunched over the mugs in their hands, looking miserable.

Our hosts, Manoj and Chetna – Mango and Chutney, as they were fondly known – weren’t present. They’d told us they’d be away for one night midway during the retreat. They assured us that their excellent cook, Peter, was perfectly good at managing on his own.

But he was gone, according to Madhvi. And so was Leena Rodrigues, the glamorous supermodel writer, who was the star of the group.

I took my seat in the spherical armchair opposite the sofa and waited only a couple of minutes before saying, “Look—”

“Shut up,” hissed Sugar at once. She had bushy black hair and gold rings pierced through her eyebrows. She wrote steamy adult crime fiction in which there was never any suspense. The victims were always men, and the murderers were always women for whom intercourse was a bloodsport. “You slept through the whole thing!”

“Rubbish!” snorted Harsha, not looking at me. “How could she? She must have done it! After all, her room is closest to the you-know-what—” she trailed away.

“No, what?” I asked, feeling stupid. The accusation was too ridiculous to be worth even denying.

“Scene of the crime!” Harsha exclaimed. She was wearing a bright blue phiran, woollen salwar and thick-soled boots. She was the oldest in the group, with the largest number of novels under her belt. Fifteen to be exact. All highly popular, all involving the same diminutive female detective, who worked as an ayah for a middle-class Delhi family by day, while solving crimes for the police at night. She claimed that her books were responsible for making the word ayah socially respectable again. “Naturally, Miss Purity Patel, hack reporter for the Evening News, denies all knowledge of the situation!”

My name, of course, is Purini, not Purity. But they had slapped the nickname on me when we all met, four days ago.

Madhvi – Mads, for short – said to me as if reciting the multiplication tables, “The cook’s been murdered. Leena’s gone missing. Our host is stranded in Almora by the snowstorm. And … and—” She made a gesture of helplessness with her hands, “we’re just sitting ducks!”

This made no sense to me. “Sitting ducks to whom?”

Zinnia turned on me like a smooth, shiny snake, her grey eyes flashing and black ringlets shaking. “—to you, of course, you twit! Can’t you recognise the most classic pattern in all of cri-fi?” She made a disgusted sound, “—keh!” and turned her head away. She was, it has to be noted, extremely lovely, even at seven in the morning in the midst of a blizzard, with a murderer possibly on the loose.

Sugar said, imitating Mads’s sing-song voice, “—a group of people … stranded together … in a remote location … with a dead body in their midst!” She lifted her mug. “Cheers!”

Excerpted with permission from ‘Leopard’s Leap’ by Manjula Padmanabhan in The Hachette Book of Indian Crime Fiction: Twenty-first Century Crime Fiction in English, edited by Tarun K Saint, Hachette India.