THE BUTCHER OF BENARES

by MAHENDRA JAKHAR

  Ruby voiced her thoughts out loud. ‘That’s another connection to astronomy,’ she said.

  ‘What did you do in Nalanda?’ asked Hawa Singh.

  ‘Sirji, I told him whatever I had mugged up as a tourist. He wanted to go deeper into the ruins and study them closely.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘That Nalanda was one of the world’s first residential universities from the fifth century AD to 1197 AD,’ Kanhaiya rattled off obligingly. In its heyday, it accommodated over 10,000 students and 2,000 teachers. The university was considered an architectural masterpiece, and was marked by a lofty wall and a magnificent gate. Nalanda had eight separate compounds and ten temples, along with many other meditation halls and classrooms. On the grounds were lakes and parks. The library was located in a nine-storeyed building where copies of texts were meticulously reproduced. The subjects taught at Nalanda University covered every field of learning, and it attracted pupils and scholars from Korea, Japan, China, Tibet, Indonesia, Persia and Turkey.’

  Kanhaiya took in a deep breath and continued, ‘The library of Nalanda, also known as Dharma Gunj (Mountain of Truth) was the most renowned repository of Hindu and Buddhist knowledge in the world at the time. Its collection was said to comprise hundreds of thousands of volumes, so extensive that it burned for approximately more than three months when set aflame by Turkish invaders. And almost 90 per cent of Nalanda still remains unexcavated.’

  Hawa Singh smiled with satisfaction at Ruby. Now, the man was talking. Ruby knew that when the mind recalls a memory, it’s not the original memory. In fact, the act of remembering is an act of creative re-imagination. The put-together memory doesn’t just have a few holes; it also has some entirely new bits pasted in.

  She looked closely at Kanhaiya and knew the man was not lying any more. He was not in a position to. The blade had done the trick.

  ‘So how long did you stay in Nalanda?’ asked Ruby.

  Gaya translated for Kanhaiya’s benefit.

  ‘We were there for the next three days, going up and down from Bodh Gaya. Brian wanted to get permission from the government officials to excavate the remaining site of Nalanda. He told them that his firm in London specialized in this kind of work. He was looking for a contract from the state government. He was refused.’

  ‘When did you return to Benares?’ asked Hawa Singh.

  ‘Sirji, we came back on 20 January. Brian had heard about the murder of the foreign woman and was afraid for his own life. He didn’t want to stay in a lodge or guesthouse. We had become good friends, so I invited him to stay with me in my room.’

  ‘Brian was staying with you?’ asked Ruby, surprised.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kanhaiya, shortly. ‘I took him all around Benares. He checked out temples and many ghats. He loved the markets. He seemed to be working on some project that he didn’t share with me. It was totally secret.’

  ‘And after what happened, you didn’t say a word of this to the police?’ said Hawa Singh.

  ‘I was scared that the police would arrest me for killing him. I swear by Mother Ganges and Vishnuji. I didn’t do it.’

  ‘What about Brian’s luggage and clothes? Have you sold them too?’ asked Hawa Singh.

  ‘Sir, I have everything confiscated, and have gone through each item,’ the sub-inspector reassured him. There are clothes, a camera, a few travel books, tickets, and a diary in which he wrote about his travel experiences. You can go through them all,’ said Gaya Prasad.

  Hawa Singh nodded thoughtfully and then asked, ‘By the way, did you manage to get prints from the knife?’

  ‘We got a set of prints and they don’t match with any in our records.’

  ‘One thing is clear,’ interposed Ruby. ‘That the killer has no past criminal records. He could be anyone here—a milkman, a guard at the king’s Fort, a policeman, a government official, postman or a delivery boy. The probabilities are infinite.’

  Kanhaiya, still crouching in the corner, whimpered, ‘Sirji, please can I go now?’

  ‘First, I want to ask you something,’ replied Hawa Singh. ‘Since you are a local guide, you must know everything about Benares. Do you know of a tunnel that runs under the Ganges right up to Ramnagar Fort?’

  ‘I can guarantee you, saab, there is no such tunnel. There’s nothing in this Benares that can escape the eyes of Kanhaiya.’

  Hawa Singh nodded, looking meaningfully at Ruby and Gaya Prasad. ‘Okay, I’ll let you go. From now on you will be working for the police. You will not leave Benares till I allow you to. And you’ll do exactly what I tell you to do.’

  Kanhaiya nervously nodded.

  ‘I need to know the names of each and every person whom Brian met in Benares. And I want it all quickly.’

  Kanhaiya nodded, his eyes filled with fear.

  ‘Now get up and leave.’

  Kanhaiya slowly got up. He stepped on his own puddle of urine. He cursed and walked out with a hand on his cheek. He could still feel the sharp metal. The image of the zig-zag cut on the head of his interrogator danced inside his head. The steely eyes had meant each and every word.

  Kanhaiya fled without another word.

  Ruby was flipping through Brian’s passport. She saw the visa stamp of India. She turned back to a page earlier and scrutinized the stamp on it as well. It was of the Vatican City.

  Ruby showed Hawa Singh the passport entry, adding, a little unnecessarily, ‘Look at this. Brian Johnson came to India from the Vatican City.’

  The Vatican. Benares. The two Holy Cities, thought Hawa Singh. What could be the real connection?

  Darkness now galloped in from all sides to conquer this one.

  Hawa Singh looked at his watch.

  It was 7.40 pm, 28 January.

  CHAPTER 19

  In the street illuminated by lights from many shops, he could see the pair of heavily shod feet walking ahead on the fractured broken road. The soles of the shoes were encrusted by mud and were close to worn out. The leather on the upper soles was intact, however, and looked good. He would have loved to skin the owner—as the leather must once have been.

  He didn’t concentrate on the female walking close to the man he was following with his telescopic sight. He focused, instead, on the long and obviously muscular legs of her companion. He could size up, from afar, the strong calves, flexible knee joints and the powerful thighs. A crooked smile appeared on his lips.

  He watched intently—he couldn’t afford to lose him. He moved his sights up and saw, again, the broadness of the policeman’s back. The leather jacket. The man loved leather. Skin. The watcher had sliced through that second skin into the man’s own, once. Oh, the thrill and lingering excitement of that experience!

  He now directed his vision to the nape of the man’s neck. That was a good spot—but not a great one, when you needed to kill with one shot. He moved the cross-hairs upwards to Hawa Singh’s head. Ah. Perfect!

  He was holding a SVD, a Snaiperskaya Vintovka Dragunova, a rifle popular with snipers. It had been designed in 1958 by the Soviet Union for sudden and secret assassinations. Only a few of the assassins remained in the Russia after the USSR had broken up and divided into many countries. The rifle used 7.62x54R ammunition and was equipped with a ten-round magazine. He had had the latest Russian telescopic sight fixed to the weapon to make it even more accurate in its aim and surer in its power to kill.

  He had a great love for all things Russian. He believed their products possessed a solidity others lacked. He thought of all those Russian trucks, tanks, jeeps, guns, binoculars, telescopes, their knives, their jackets, boots, caps and all. Everything looked so effective. Filled with life. And promising death.

  He could see Hawa Singh walking away into the fading light. Still, he told himself, he was sure he could easily hit his aim from this distance. Back in the USSR, snipers were chosen from personnel who did well in terms of rifle marksmanship. Those special ones were estimated to have a 50-per-cent probability of hitting a man-siz
ed target at a distance of 800 metres, 80 per cent at a distance of 500 metres and 90 per cent at a distance of 200 metres.

  He knew he was one of those skilled ones.

  His index finger curled tighter around the trigger, even though his knuckles were going tense and white in the cold. There was a slight wind, but that didn’t blow away the fog. Wait, his target may soon be lost in it—there was so little remaining light! The would-be assassin was perched on the rooftop of a building and could see him up to a distance of more than 300 metres. Which, he calculated backward, still meant a more-or-less 90-per-cent sure shot. He still had the cross-hairs fixed on the head.

  One soft squeeze on the trigger would blow it into smithereens. The target suddenly, and unaccountably, stopped. He was, unbelievably, turning around.

  What happened? Has he sensed me? he thought.

  Hawa Singh looked directly up towards the rooftop. To the man with the telescopic sights, it was like he was looking right into the watcher’s eyes.

  The finger on the trigger jammed. He gritted his teeth in frustration.

  He watched him turning away again, back in the old direction. Now was the time. He looked even more carefully through the telescopic sight.

  Hawa Singh had disappeared into the rolling fog.

  He lowered the rifle and smiled. These guns are for my collection alone, he consoled himself. I wouldn’t have killed you with this. It would have happened too easily. Too quickly.

  The Butcher watched the fog settling over the tree tops, surrounding the electric poles, round the street dogs, sadhus and beggars. It took various shapes. It circled the little boy shivering on the roadside and curled around a stray cat for warmth.

  He heard the sharp shriek of an eagle high up in the sky, and looked up. The eagle was hardly visible. At this distance the Russians would have accepted a reduction to a 40-per-cent probability of hitting such a target. He looked through his telescopic sight. The finger caressed the trigger.

  Squeeze it, he urged himself.

  For someone as special as him, surely it would be 100 per cent?

  They should have given me a different name, thought the Butcher.

  The ‘Artist of Benares’, perhaps?

  CHAPTER 20

  Hawa Singh glanced up at the wall clock. It read 10.30 pm. They had been waiting for more than one hour, fortifying themselves on masala tea at the lounge of Ramnagar Fort. Ruby was tense, as her immediate boss at the FBI had asked for a detailed report and her progress in the case. She knew she had not made much.

  She paced up and down the room in her thigh-length winter boots. Outside, it was icy-cold. The dark water of the Ganges appeared frozen in the moonlight. The Fort itself, uphill, looked eerie, like a haunted castle in a film. There was no sign—yet—of the Kashi Naresh, Abhay Narayan Singh.

  Ruby looked at the walls, hung with countless antique guns and weapons. There was something perverse about accumulating so many pieces of death and destruction, it seemed to her. Why would their ancestral collectors find any glory in killing or maiming?

  Hawa Singh sat quietly, sipping on his tea. It was his fifth cup. With every sip, he knew his personal clock was ticking.

  It was not till fifteen minutes later that he and Ruby were escorted by two armed guards into an area that looked like a workshop. Amazed, they saw there, nothing but clocks. The walls held big, small, hand-painted, wooden, metal and every other kind of timepiece conceivable. Many had pendulums swinging. There were clocks on tables and clocks hanging by hooks from the ceiling that measured from four to seven feet in height. The sound of their combined ticking was the only thing that could be heard in that ghostly silence.

  Ruby and Hawa felt suspended in time. They’d thought they were short of time, but here it seemed to be in abundance.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry to keep you waiting!’ said Abhay, as he emerged from behind the curtain of clocks.

  They shook hands. Hawa Singh noticed that the Kashi Naresh still wore gloves, and that his entire body remained covered, aside from his face. ‘Welcome. Although, I was working on some very intricate parts of a new clock and didn’t want to be disturbed,’ he said suavely.

  They walked to the operational area of this time warp. A large clock, with exposed parts, was hanging from a hook attached to the ceiling. It looked like a body cut open for surgery.

  Abhay was enjoying their look of wonder. ‘You must be curious about all these clocks,’ he smiled. ‘This is my passion. I make clocks. Most of these are handmade. I learnt the art of clock-manufacturing from our royal clockmaker, who designed the astrological clock you saw in Saraswati Bhawan.’

  ‘Well, there were some questions,’ said Hawa Singh, ‘so I thought I’d meet you here personally.’

  Abhay raised a finger. ‘Just a minute. I need to adjust something.’ He picked up a tiny instrument and slowly tightened a screw. Then he stood back and looked at the clock before him with almost paternal pride. ‘This is my masterpiece. This is going to become known as the best astrological and astronomical clock in our country.’

  Hawa Singh and Ruby tensed at something he’d said, but he continued implacably. ‘I have designed it after the Prague Astronomical Clock, in the capital of the Czech Republic. That had been installed in 1410, making it the third-oldest astronomical clock in the world. I offered to buy it but the Czech authorities refused. So I decided to make one myself.’ He paused to stroke the clock face. ‘Look at this. Just like the one in Prague, this one is also composed of three main components: the astronomical dial, representing the positions of the Sun and Moon in the sky and displaying various astronomical details. The calendar dial, the one with the medallions, represents the months, and the many sculptures show the time. The background to the astronomical dial represents the standing Earth and sky, and around those are the four main moving components: the zodiacal ring, an outer rotating ring, an icon representing the Sun, and an icon representing the Moon.’

  Abhay paused to smile proudly again, and then went on. ‘The blue circle directly in the centre represents the Earth and the upper blue is the portion of the sky which is above the horizon. The golden Roman numbers at the outer edge of the blue circle are the timescale of a normal twenty-four-hour day and indicate time. Isn’t it wonderful?’ Abhay said excitedly.

  ‘That’s really fantastic. But we were wondering, can we talk now?’ Ruby cut him off.

  ‘So you were not impressed,’ laughed Abhay. ‘Okay, shoot.’

  ‘Last time we met,’ said Hawa Singh, relieved to be able to speak his mind at last, ‘you didn’t tell us about your brother’.

  ‘Well, you never asked.’

  ‘I did mention the Sparrow but you refused to acknowledge it,’ said Hawa Singh a little sharply.

  Abhay sighed heavily. ‘The royal family has broken all ties with Manvendra. He has turned worse than an animal.’

  Ruby tried to gauge the extent of his fear. ‘Did he ever attack you?’ she asked, her head to one side.

  Abhay stared back at her, long and hard. ‘He chewed off my finger,’ he said finally.

  ‘It’s hard to believe that a man would do that to another man,’ said Ruby.

  ‘Could we see that hand, please?’ Hawa Singh asked.

  Abhay was quiet. His eyes twitched. There was a hint of nervousness that he tried to hide. He turned away, looking at the clock. Hawa Singh and Ruby stood there waiting.

  Abhay brushed imaginary dust off the clock. Then he turned back to them. Quietly, he removed his glove.

  His entire hand was covered by scabs, where the skin had folded thickly. One of the fingers was missing. It was a horrible sight.

  ‘You can see for yourself. The other hand also has a curse on it,’ said Abhay, removing the glove off it. It, too, was covered with scabs and ghastly boils.

  ‘Curse?’ asked Hawa Singh.

  ‘I was cursed with this disease. I went from the US to the best doctors in Europe. They told me I had a rare skin disease that cannot be treated
. In fact they don’t even have a name for it. It has started to spread all over my body.’

  Hawa Singh and Ruby were quiet. Ruby felt the bile rise in her throat, and longed to spit it out.

  Abhay put on his gloves again saying, ‘Imagine, I can’t touch anything, without my gloves on. Even in the dark, women can feel my diseased skin, and don’t want to touch it. Even prostitutes have refused to come to the Fort. And day after day, I have to look at people with normal, healthy skin. It fills me with hatred.’

  They were all silent. The sound of ticking filled the space between them. ‘I’m a creator,’ said Abhay, with a sudden revival of his earlier mood. ‘I create time. Isn’t this clock a marvel? I am working on it so it will also calculate the exact time of the day from sunrise and sunset. I have used the calculations of Vedic mathematics.’

  ‘It shows your genius,’observed Ruby.

  Abhay looked at her and smiled bitterly. ‘Really? But still you won’t sleep with me.’

  Then he laughed out loud. ‘I am just whiling away my time on all this. The simplest of pleasures have been taken away from me. Some holy men have told me that it is all karma catching up with me. I have to pay the debt for whatever I did in my previous lives. Pay off the debt. My foot!’ cried out Abhay.

  His eyes filled suddenly with tears, and he turned around to hide them. The kings of Benares never cried.

  Ruby took a deep breath. ‘Did this man ever come to meet you?’ she asked, showing Abhay the picture of Brian Johnson displayed on her touch screen phone. The tiny gadget was a sophisticated one. Hawa Singh had once tried to use it but his thick fingers kept pressing all the wrong keys and slipping away.

  ‘Why do you show me pictures of a white person? Man or woman, they do something to me. To my skin,’ said Abhay.