The Five Fakirs of Faizabad

by P. B. Kerr

  Moo smiled back at him. “Were they?”

  “No,” said Nimrod. “Hated the place. But I rather liked the puma.”

  “Oh.”

  “These mendicant fakirs often joined fraternities, or unions of fakirs, upon which they would be given a new name after the ten great fakirs of Tirthankar. These ten great fakirs were Puri, Parvata, Sagara, Vana, Aranya, Keviin, Tirtha, Asrama, Swaraswati, and Bharati. That is why I believe these three men you arrested, Moo, are mendicant or fake fakirs. And that is why I believe a quaesitor would have no effect on them. Because they will certainly have trained their bodies to withstand a certain amount of physical discomfort. Nevertheless, I should like to see them.”

  “They’re being held on HMS Archer,” said Moo. “That’s the Tollesbury Marsh Prison Ship. In Essex.”

  She opened her bag and took out her cell phone. “I’ll arrange it now,” she said, and went out into the hallway to make the call.

  “And then I suppose we’ll be going to India,” said Philippa.

  “What on earth makes you say that?” said Nimrod.

  “The title of your book. Bengal. That’s in India, isn’t it?”

  “Used to be,” said Nimrod. “You’re right. Only these days it’s called Bangladesh.” Nimrod shook his head. “But it doesn’t follow that we’ll be going there at all, Philippa. It all depends on where the animadverto conducting the world’s luck has been trapped or waylaid.”

  “Waylaid?” said Philippa.

  “Interfered with,” said Nimrod. “It’s the only possible explanation why the tuchemeters are giving false readings. For some reason the animadverto’s gotten stuck somewhere.”

  “Is that possible?” asked Philippa. “That someone could interfere with an animadverto?”

  “Interfering with this particular animadverto is not something I can see any djinn, good or bad, bothering to do,” said Nimrod. “I can see no possible advantage to any djinn in doing it. And only a mundane who was a skilled djinnfinder would ever attempt such a dangerous thing. It’s a well-rewarded but precarious profession. The last djinnfinder I met, a woman called Montana Retch, is now a cat. Your cat, I believe.”

  “Yes, I’d forgotten about her,” said Philippa. “Although to be quite correct that cat is a him. But how do you know the other tuchemeters are giving false readings, too?”

  “Stands to reason,” said Nimrod. “Otherwise I should have heard from Creemy, in Cairo, and Faustina, in Berlin. Blessed be her name. No, I shall only know precisely where we’re going after we have first had a closer look at these three fakirs.”

  Moo came back into the drawing room. “It’s all arranged. Only we shall have to leave now if there’s any chance of me getting to Ascot in time to see my horse running.”

  “In which case I had better do the driving,” said Nimrod. “The Tollesbury Marshes, you say?”

  CHAPTER 7

  THE PRISON HULK

  It used to be that any djinn in a hurry would travel by his or her own personal whirlwind, but global warming had affected the world’s weather to such an extent that it was no longer safe for a djinn with a conscience to whip up a whirlwind for fear of creating a more violent and uncontrollable tornado or typhoon. As a result, good djinn were now obliged to travel like ordinary mundanes: by plane, train, or automobile. Naturally, these same, self-imposed restrictions did not apply to bad djinn, which partly accounts for the greater number of hurricanes that now affect the world, especially the southern United States and the Caribbean.

  With Moo and Philippa in the back, Nimrod drove his own Rolls-Royce at great speed through London. Most traffic moves in central London at just ten miles per hour — which, as any fool knows, is the same speed as a running chicken. But Philippa’s uncle seemed to know the least used, quickest roads, not to mention every shortcut and rat-run, and a car journey from Kensington to a place well beyond the east end of London, which any normal Londoner might have expected to take at least an hour, took Nimrod less than twenty minutes. In that twenty minutes it seemed to Philippa that they didn’t just leave west London behind, but the good weather also, so that by the time they reached their destination, the sun had quite disappeared behind a grimy net curtain of gray clouds.

  Tollesbury Marshes was a bleak, featureless place, a mixture of flat, waterlogged land, scattered lakes, and an empty sky that seemed to come out of a horizon of water. Philippa thought it was a grim, discouraging area, like something out of a bad dream. And then she saw it. Enveloped by a heavy mist, and marooned on a large spit of rat-infested mud like a beached whale, was the gray hull of an old warship — a destroyer from the Second World War. All of the guns and turrets from the deck had been removed, and there was just the rusting hull and nothing else. The name of the ship HMS Archer was just visible on the bow next to a sign that read HM PRISON ARCHER. Philippa felt sad just looking at the old hulk.

  “Prisoners are held in cells belowdecks,” explained Moo as they walked up a long gangway toward a reception area where the prison governor, Mr. Weston, was already waiting to greet them.

  “What a horrible place to keep human beings,” remarked Philippa.

  “How else should a prison look?” inquired Moo. “People are put in these ships because they murder and because they rob and do all sorts of bad things, and because none of them ever gave a second thought to other human beings or their welfare as you do, child.”

  “It’s still a horrible place,” Philippa said defiantly.

  “Rest assured, little lady,” said Mr. Weston. “We’ve come a long way since Charles Dickens and Abel Magwitch. Our prisoners are well fed and allowed to bring one or two comforts from home. Although I don’t think anyone has ever thought of comfort in quite the same way as these three fellows.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Philippa.

  “You’ll see.” Mr. Weston chuckled and, lighting a candle — for the government was on one of its periodic energy-saving drives — he led the way down several flights of iron stairs into the gloomy, creaking bowels of the old ship where it seemed that several hundred men were imprisoned or awaiting trial.

  Being in the ship was already making Philippa feel claustrophobic, which is a phobia that afflicts a great many djinn. She didn’t like the smell, either. The ship smelled worse than the locker room in a boys’ school — which was about the worst thing she could think of.

  “Cabbage,” she muttered. “Cigarettes, bleach, perspiration, French fries, and despair.” Identifying each constituent part of the collective stink of the ship helped to keep her mind off her increasing claustrophobia. “Unwashed socks, cheap burgers, carbolic soap, and mildew.”

  Moo seemed to agree with Philippa’s analysis because, along the way, she produced some perfume from her handbag and sprayed herself liberally.

  On the bottommost level, Mr. Weston lit another candle, found a key on the wall opposite a gray steel door on which were chalked the words FAKIRS: THREE OF, and opened the door carefully.

  Straightaway, Philippa was struck by a strong smell of castor oil and camphor that emanated from the cell. It was a curious smell but it made a pleasant change from the smell of the rest of the prison ship.

  The three fakirs, Messrs. Puri, Parvata, and Sagara, were all housed in one large cell for four prisoners. They were tall, thin men, wearing loincloths — although one of the men seemed a head shorter than the others on account of the fact that he was standing on his head, which was completely buried in a fire bucket full of sand. The other two had long, straggling beards. One of these men was lying upon a bed of nails; the other was balanced cross-legged on top of a long bamboo pole that seemed to be without any sort of a platform or seat.

  Philippa marveled that the three men seemed so comfortable, although it was a little hard to tell with the man whose head was buried in a bucket of sand.

  “Doesn’t it hurt?” she asked the man lying on the bed of nails. She pressed a finger on one of the nail points and found it was hard and sharp.
/>   “Of course it hurts,” he said.

  “Then what’s the trick?”

  “The trick is really not minding that it hurts,” he said.

  “The answer of a true fakir,” said Nimrod. “My compliments to you, sir.”

  The man lying on the bed of nails bowed his head, acknowledging Nimrod’s courtesy.

  “But I’m puzzled,” continued the djinn. “Why would a true fakir try to sabotage Britain’s rail network? Why would true fakirs allow innocent people to burn their feet, or perhaps worse, when walking through fire?”

  “To bring about the answers,” said the man.

  “The answers to what?” asked Nimrod.

  “What else but the questions?” said the man sitting on the end of the pole.

  “What questions?” said Nimrod.

  “If we knew the questions,” said the man on the pole, “we should have little need of the answers.”

  “But without the questions,” said the man on the bed of nails, “the answers would make no sense.”

  “Truly,” said Nimrod.

  “And when there are no questions left,” said the man on the pole, “this itself is the answer. Is it not so, great djinn?”

  “Do you know who I am?” asked Nimrod.

  “Of course, great djinn,” said the man on the bed of nails. “You give off a certain chi, or energy.”

  “Who are you working for?” asked Nimrod.

  “Not who,” said the man on the pole. “What.”

  “You won’t get any sense out of this fellow,” Moo told Nimrod.

  “Very well,” Nimrod said patiently. “What?”

  “Did we not already tell you? To bring about the answers.”

  “If you know what I am, then you must know I could make you tell me,” said Nimrod. “With a quaesitor. In case you don’t know what that is, it’s a djinn binding that’s designed to find out the things you find most unpleasant and then make them appear in your mouth.”

  “As you can see,” said the fakir on the bed of nails, “we do not fear that which others find uncomfortable and unpleasant. Least of all that which appears in our mouths.”

  “Indeed, we welcome it,” said the man on the pole. “We live on an unusual diet.”

  At this point, the fakir standing on his head, which was buried in the bucket of sand, lowered his bare legs carefully until he was kneeling on the floor, at which point he lifted his head out of the sand and exhaled loudly as if he hadn’t taken a breath in a long while. His hair and beard appeared to be even longer and filthier than those of his two companions.

  “Which is now demonstrated, thus.” And so saying, the fakir lifted his stomach into his rib cage and regurgitated a large cockroach, which appeared to be very much alive, and placed it, almost reverently, at Nimrod’s feet. The cockroach hissed angrily — it was the hissing kind — and wriggled assertively.

  Philippa was horror-struck. In her time she’d seen some very horrible things, but at that moment this seemed like the worst.

  “Really,” exclaimed Moo with distaste, and went out of the cell. “What a revolting person.”

  But there was more to come.

  The fakir lying on the bed of nails opened his mouth very wide and put his filthy forefinger and thumb deep into his mouth, from which he then withdrew a living mouse by its tail. The smiling fakir held the wriggling mouse a few inches off the ground for a moment and then let it go.

  The fakir on the bamboo pole wobbled his head and grinned. The grin turned into a wide-open mouth — rather wider than seemed possible, even in a dentist’s chair — and, with an obscene flourish of fingers, he began to pull inch after inch of a snake from somewhere inside his throat. When there were as many as three or four feet of the reptile in his hands — it was a harmless grass snake — the fakir dropped it onto the floor, where it promptly swallowed the mouse (the grass snake is only harmless to humans and djinn).

  “I’ve heard of the old woman who swallowed a fly,” exclaimed Philippa. “But this is ridiculous.”

  “Gentlemen,” said Nimrod. “Light my lamp, but it’s been fascinating. And I begin to see why the British in India suppressed rascals, knaves, and vagabonds such as yourselves. For how else am I to describe men who make an intolerable nuisance of themselves such as you do? I tell you honestly that you will soon come before an English judge and you will do much better if you wear clothes. The English system of justice is more forgiving of a man who wears trousers than a half-naked man who feels he can do better with his head in a bucket full of sand. In spite of that I shall make it my business to see that you are given proper legal representation and that you are treated fairly. Good day.”

  They retreated into the corridor and Mr. Weston locked the door behind him. Then they went back upstairs and outside, where Philippa took a very welcome breath of fresh air. Right on cue, the sun appeared from behind the net curtain of clouds and warmed her face like a blazing fire. Djinn love heat, and Philippa was no exception.

  “It’s good to be out of there,” she said, feeling suddenly euphoric.

  “Isn’t it?” agreed Nimrod.

  “Well?” Moo asked him. “What did you make of them?”

  “No doubt about it,” said Nimrod. “They were mendicant fakirs, all right. Or at least as near as there exists to the mendicant fakirs in this degraded day and age. Did you notice that peculiar smell as Mr. Weston opened the cell door? Oils of cajeput, chaulmoogra, origanum, terebinth, and unguent of althea? Not to mention camphor. All of which mixed together is better known as the recipe for Indian balm, which for many years has been manufactured in England. It helps to keep them warm in the absence of very much clothing.”

  “But do you have any idea of what they’re up to?” asked Moo.

  “Only that you were right,” said Nimrod. “That they are indeed religious scoundrels, part of a fraternity that is governed by laws of an uncommon or secret nature and that is bent on bringing about some change in the amount of luck that exists in the world. The question is, why? What do they hope to achieve? If only Mr. Rakshasas were alive. He might already have an answer. His knowledge of the sannyasi fakirs was second to none.”

  “I do miss that man,” confessed Moo.

  Nimrod nodded silently. “Rest assured, dear lady,” he told her, “I shall find an answer to those questions. But first I must think awhile inside my lamp. Which I happen to have in the glove box of my car.”

  “In a glove box?” Moo’s tone was one of disbelief. “Isn’t that a little cramped?”

  “The interior of a djinn’s lamp exists outside time and space. I suggest you drive my car to Ascot, dear lady, and by the time the Gold Cup race is over I hope to have some sort of answer as to our next course of action.”

  CHAPTER 8

  A SMALL PROBLEM

  John sat in his uncle’s house, awaiting his return from wherever it was he’d gone and rehearsing his story with Groanin and the Jinx. The grandfather clock in the hall ticked ominously, as if measuring out the seconds and the minutes before John was obliged to face the music about exactly what had happened in Bumby.

  He could see that Philippa was back from Italy — her bag was by the stairs — and John was glad that at least he would have her there to support him. That was the good thing about having a cleverer twin sister. Sometimes she was able to come to his aid when he was having a little trouble explaining himself.

  “This is a nice house,” said Zagreus. “The person who lives here must be very rich.”

  “Did you ever hear of a poor djinn?” said John. “No,” said the Jinx. “I suppose not.”

  John glanced at Groanin uncomfortably. “What am I going to tell my uncle?” he asked.

  “The truth is always best,” said the Jinx.

  “Is it?” John looked doubtful. “I don’t know about that. Sometimes my mother asks me what I think of something she’s wearing and I don’t want to hurt her feelings by telling her I think she looks weird, and so I say, ‘Mom, you look gr
eat.’ And that’s a lie. Plus, there are the times when you go to someone’s house and they’ve cooked dinner and they say, ‘I hope you like fish cakes,’ and you have to pretend you love them, which is also a lie. Or if someone had a really horrible disfiguring injury and they said, ‘You’re looking at my scar,’ or whatever and, of course, you say, ‘I didn’t even notice that you had a scar,’ so as not to make them feel bad. Sometimes I think that lies oil the wheels of life’s skateboard, you know? Because if you told the truth all the time, you’d have no friends.”

  John didn’t usually talk so much, but he was feeling nervous.

  “It’s what you intend that makes the difference, I guess,” said John. “If you tell a lie with a good intent, that makes it okay in my book.”

  “Clearly that won’t apply here,” said the Jinx. “I mean, there’s no way of telling this other than the way it happened. And I still think it wasn’t your fault.”

  “What wasn’t your fault?” said an Englishman’s voice.

  John spun around.

  Nimrod was standing in the doorway. John had been talking so much he hadn’t heard his uncle come in through the front door. Immediately behind him were Philippa and an old lady wearing a silly hat and carrying a gold trophy in her hands. Nimrod pointed at the Jinx.

  “Why is there a white monkey in my drawing room? And where is Groanin?”

  John felt a sort of prickly sensation and a hideous feeling of guilt, together with a shortness of breath and sudden perspiration.

  “Er, this is Zagreus,” he said. “And he’s not a monkey. Or at least, not completely. He’s a Jinx. He used be something or someone else. And then he died, which happens, yeah? And when he died, he got himself reincarnated as an ape. Almost. Because the reincarnation didn’t work, see? At least not completely. That’s what a Jinx is, okay? Someone that doesn’t make a proper reincarnation. He’s a sort of missing link between his old life and his new incarnation, which is supposed to be an ape. Which is why he’s white and sometimes invisible and why he can still talk. Which is not something that apes are supposed to be able to do. Obviously.”