by Tarquin Hall
Puri added as an aside in a less perfunctory tone: “Inspector, when I came across the unfortunate fellow, he was laughing.”
“Laughing?” echoed Singh.
“Naturally it crossed my mind maybe he was faking. Just as Dr. Jha did on Rajpath.”
“Hang on a minute, sir. Are you telling me Jha faked his own death?” interjected Singh, who was growing impatient with the inordinate details about the shooting.
Puri ignored his question and continued with his reconstruction, making his way out into the hallway to the foot of the stairs.
“Dr. Jha was upstairs. Upon hearing commotion and gunshots, he came to investigate. The murderer shot at him but missed. See the round here in the wall? Dr. Jha turned and retreated upstairs. But shot number four reached him in the back.”
Puri and Singh went up to the landing, where the Guru Buster had managed to crawl before breathing his last. A blanket had been placed over his body.
“Were these killings premeditated, sir?” asked Singh.
“Seems the murderer did not intend to kill Pandey. He had ample opportunity to do so the moment he entered the house. As for Dr. Jha, must be he came down and saw the murderer. Thus his fate was sealed.”
“Did you know Jha was alive – before he was killed?” asked Singh, radiating anxiety.
“I came to know this morning only during a game of cha-turanga at the Gym.”
“What does chaturanga have to do with it?”
“Point is it allowed me to make the connection. Suddenly I understood who it was exactly who knocked me for six. Until that moment, I had been fooled along with all and sundry to believe Dr. Jha was deceased. Thus I was unable to place his voice.”
“You mean it was Dr. Jha who knocked you out?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“But why?”
“Must be he imagined I was an intruder. It was an accident.”
“But what was he doing there?”
“Most probably putting some papers and affairs in order. His secretary, Ms. Ruchi, will tell me for sure. She was an accomplice, also.”
“So everything on Rajpath was – ”
“An illusion within another illusion. Sword, blood, everything was fake. The death, also.”
“But I saw the wound myself, sir! The medical officer certified Dr. Jha was dead!”
“Today I came to know the medical officer in question is one of Dr. Jha’s oldest friends. A committed rationalist, also. I traced him to his home this evening, only. He admitted to falsely issuing the death certificate. Seems the wound you saw was a fake one.”
“And the cremation?”
“Dr. Jha was atheist, so no one batted any eyelids when he was cremated using CNG. Seems a real human skeleton taken from Delhi University biology department played substitute for the body. Naturally it was wrapped in a shroud from head to toe so the face was not showing.”
“I can’t believe they got away with it,” said Singh, incredulous.
“Why not, Inspector? Just it was a question of taking advantage of our corrupt and incompetent system.”
“Still, sir, you would have thought – ”
“Don’t blame yourself, Inspector. Even Vish Puri had the wool pulled over, no?”
Singh seemed to take a certain comfort from this. “What about Pandey? Was he involved?” he asked.
“He and Dr. Jha were former colleagues. Twenty years plus they knew one another. Definitely they were in this thing together. But Professor-ji has some connection with Maharaj Swami, also. Seems he visited his ashram one month back only. Could be he was playing a double role.”
“So what was Jha’s game? Was it life insurance fraud? Was he trading in his wife for a new model?”
“Not at all, Inspector. Dr. Jha was misguided in some ways. Seems he had become obsessive, also. But he never broke a single law during his entire life.”
“Sir,” said Singh, drawing himself up tall, “half of Delhi was closed down thanks to him. He conspired with a medical officer to issue a fake death certificate. Who knows what other laws he broke.”
The inspector started to pace up and down. And then a thought suddenly occurred to him. “Of course! He was trying to frame Maharaj Swami!” he exclaimed. “The Godman had promised a miracle, so Jha gave us all one!”
“Same thought came to me, also. But no, Inspector, I believe Dr. Jha’s motives were otherwise. He was getting old, no? And increasingly frustrated with how everything is going in India. Bitter, we might say. For years he’s been fighting Godmen. For what? Their popularity increases day by day. These middle-class types are hardly shunning religion. True, they love new cars and five-star holidays and all. But they are flocking to tele-yogis like Swami-ji in droves. Dr. Jha’s campaign had failed, quite frankly. So before facing retirement, he decided to take drastic action. He decided to stage his own death in the most dramatic way possible. His hope was to fool all and sundry into believing a miracle had really happened. That goddess Kali came down to earth and killed him.”
Singh was calmer now; he was listening to Puri’s explanation patiently.
“That much he achieved – in aces, actually,” continued the detective. “Right across India, length and breadth, people have been discussing little else these past days.”
“Where did his wife fit into all this?”
“Must be she was in on the plan from day one. Quite a performance she put on at the funeral.”
“So what was Dr. Jha’s plan? To jump out of a cake and surprise everyone?”
“Doubtful any cake would have been involved, Inspector,” answered Puri drily. “Most probably he’d have got on TV and explained how all it was done. Thus everyday people would have seen how they are ready to believe any and all nonsense.”
“But then someone stopped him,” cut in Singh. “Someone who knew he was alive.”
“Could be, Inspector. But we cannot discount the possibility the target was Professor Pandey and Dr. Jha happened to get killed also.”
A voice called from downstairs: “Inspector-ji? Star TV has reached!”
“Shit,” said Singh under his breath. “What am I meant to tell them?”
“If you will take one minute, Inspector, I have got one plan hiding up my sleeve.”
♦
The plan went like this:
“Inform Star TV and all Professor Pandey was murdered. Tell them his driver was shot, also.”
“His driver?”
“Dr. Jha had been posing as Professor Pandey’s driver these past days. That is, after shaving his beard and putting black dye in his hair. Even I failed to recognize him when I paid Professor-ji a visit. Must be they had a good laugh at my expense.”
Puri got back to the point.
“Tell them Professor Pandey’s driver was wounded. Mention he was rushed to St. Stephens and his chances are fifty-fifty. Then tomorrow the hospital should announce he is very much stable – expected to make a full recovery but not conscious. Just he should be placed in a private room. No guard. Remember he is a driver, only, an everyday person.”
“But… who is he?” asked Singh.
“One of my boys will play the part of Dr. Jha and we two will be present, also.”
“You’re expecting the killer to come?”
Puri nodded.
“But surely he’ll know that we know the driver is really Dr. Jha and suspect a trap.”
“That is a risk he will take, no, assuming Dr. Jha saw his killer.”
Singh smiled. “That’s ingenious, sir,” he said.
“Let us hope, Inspector,” replied Puri briskly.
His thoughts turned to Facecream. She had called him earlier in the day to say that Maharaj Swami had left the ashram, apparently for Delhi, and that she was planning to break into his private residence.
Perhaps she would be able to establish what the connection was between the Godman and Professor Pandey. It was the only piece of the puzzle that still didn’t fit.
∨ The Ca
se of the Man Who Died Laughing ∧
Nineteen
Facecream lay on her bedroll staring up at the ceiling fan – it was a good two hours after the lights had been switched off in the dormitory. The mantra in praise of Shiva, which she and her fellow devotees had spent most of the evening repeating over and over again, was playing back in her head.
“Om namah Shivaya. Om namah Shivaya. Om namah Shivaya…”
According to Maharaj Swami’s philosophy, repetition of such mantras would help awaken her spiritual life force, her Kundalini, as well as stimulate her chakras.
So far, though, all she had got out of the exercise was a splitting headache.
She tried to focus her mind on other things: her adopted eight-year-old son, Momo, who was being looked after by her ayah; her flat in Delhi, where the three of them lived together; the hungry street cats that perched on her wall and meowed and yowled until she fed them.
She sang herself one of her favorite Hindi songs, “Paani Paani Re.” But nothing worked. The mantra kept cutting back into her thought processes like a traffic update on FM radio. “Om namah Shivaya.”
Aaaagh! No wonder so many of the devotees wore eerie, passive-aggressive grins, she thought.
♦
At three in the morning, Facecream crawled out from under her mosquito net and, chappals in hand, tiptoed silently from the dormitory.
The corridor beyond was dark and empty. Facecream made her way to the stairs and crept down to the ground floor. Upon reaching the bottom and hearing footsteps approaching, she ducked under the stairwell. One of Maha-raj Swami’s senior devotees shuffled past, clicking his bead necklace between his fingers, and exited through the front door of the residence hall.
Puri’s operative stepped out from her hiding place and made for the emergency side door, which was propped open and, like all such doors in India, never alarmed.
It was cooler outside. A light breeze played in the topmost branches of the Himalayan maple next to the building. Crouched beneath it, Facecream took several deep breaths to calm her nerves and surveyed the surrounding terrain.
The wide lawn in front of the tree ended at the edge of the driveway, which was lined with lollipop streetlights and statues of Hindu saints. To her left lay the car park and, far beyond, the main gate, where nighttime chowkidars were sitting around playing cards. Above the din of chirping crickets could be heard snippets of conversation and laughter.
Off to the right stood the main reception building and behind this the darshan hall and Maharaj Swami’s residence, where there were only a couple of lights on.
Facecream spent ten minutes under the maple tree making sure that the coast was clear. Then she made her way to the darshan hall, keeping to the shadows and meandering between plinths, benches and trees. She reached a side door that was warped and didn’t close properly and slipped inside the building.
Although the lights were all off and no moonlight filtered in through the stained glass windows, there were still enough candles burning under the effigies for her to see her way up onto the stage.
There, she had to switch on Flush’s pocket-size flashlight in order to search for the trapdoor behind Maharaj Swami’s silver throne she was sure must be there. Facecream soon came across its outline but in the process bumped her head into something hard – a large pane of thin glass about ten feet across and at least twenty feet high suspended on ultrathin wires from the ceiling. Hanging at an angle of forty-five degrees over the trapdoor, it touched the stage at its base.
Puri’s operative felt her way behind the glass and discovered a second, smaller trapdoor. This one had a latch.
It lifted easily to reveal a set of concrete stairs.
At the bottom, Facecream found herself standing at the beginning of a passage.
On one side stood a door.
The room beyond was roughly ten feet square and twenty feet high. Its ceiling was the underside of the larger of the two trapdoors. Now she could see that it was designed to open downward on quiet rubber-lined tracks. A switch on the wall operated a mechanical pulley system like those used on automatic garage doors.
In the middle of the room stood a plinth with a light projector on top of it. The front of the projector was raised up on a block. It was pointing at a wooden platform built against the wall at the back of the room. The platform stood about six feet off the ground and could be reached by a ladder.
On the wall opposite the platform hung a large silvered mirror positioned at an angle of forty-five degrees.
There were only two pieces of furniture in the room: a chair and a dressing table. In a drawer of the latter, she found a rubber mask. Its face was that of a wizened old man with a thick, bulbous nose and pronounced frontal lobes.
Facecream recognized it instantly: it was the rishi oracle.
She spent a few minutes trying to make sense of how the illusion worked and thought she understood. An actor wearing the mask stood on the platform and the light projector was switched on. His brightly lit profile appeared in the silvered mirror and was reflected up to the pane of glass on the stage through the trapdoors, which opened on demand. Somehow – science was not her strong point – this created a ghostlike image. The smoke was an extra touch to make the illusion all the more spectacular.
The room also contained a hydraulic lift, which, according to the instructions on the control panel, could be raised to a height of twenty-five feet. Facecream wondered if perhaps this was the secret behind Maharaj Swami’s levi-tation.
Venturing farther down the damp and musty passage with her flashlight’s feeble beam catching glimpses of the odd rat, she soon came to an intersection. The passage to the left, she guessed, led to the Abode of Tranquility; the one to the right, back to the residence hall. Facecream took neither of these, pressing on through puddles of water, until about a hundred yards farther on, she reached another set of stairs.
These led up to yet another door.
Switching off her flashlight, she pushed it open an inch and peeked through the gap. The room beyond was dark, but she recognized the desk with the computer on top of it by the window and realized with glee that she had found her way into Maharaj Swami’s private audience chamber.
The door was a secret one disguised amongst the bookshelves.
She opened it a little wider so that she could get a better look.
The Venetian blinds were drawn and the only source of light was coming from beneath the main door to the room, which was on her right.
Suddenly she heard male voices and footsteps beyond in the echoey entrance hall and stepped back, pulling the secret door almost shut.
For several minutes she waited, not daring to venture into the room. Finally the voices faded and the light was switched off.
Silence.
Facecream slipped off one of her chappals and lodged it between the door and the wall. Risking her flashlight again, she stole across the room to Maharaj Swami’s desk. Following Flush’s instructions, she turned on the computer and, by holding down the escape key, ensured that it booted up in DOS.
She drew the om pendant from around her neck and pulled it apart to reveal the USB data key inside. This she inserted into one of the computer’s ports, typed the word ‘copy’ and pressed the return key.
The process took only a few minutes. Then she retrieved the key, put it back around her neck and switched off the machine.
Opening the metal door that she had spotted during her private audience with Swami-ji did not prove as easy. The two warded locks were both different, and she had to make subtle alterations to two different skeleton keys in order to get them open.
Finally, however, the second of the locks let out a satisfying click.
Fully fireproofed, windowless and meticulously organized, the room beyond was a veritable Aladdin’s cave – not of jewels and coins but of information.
Manish the Magnificent had been right. Maharaj Swami – Aman in his former incarnation – was an obsessive hoarder.
Stacked on the shelves along both walls were boxes and silver metal trunks. The room was an archive of memorabilia collected from an early age.
It read like an autobiography.
All the props the young Aman had used in his teens and early twenties as a traveling street magician were there – dusty old wicker baskets, aluminum swords and a bed of nails. There were bottles of chemicals, some with still legible labels: “Potassium Permanganate’, ‘Glycerine’, ‘Yellow Phosphorous.” And Facecream came across photographs taken of him performing for tourists in front of the Taj Mahal when he was no more than seventeen – skinny, pencil-thin moustache, suit two sizes too small.
Aman had evidently traveled the length and breadth of India. And then, at the age of twenty-seven, he had left the country. In one box marked ‘USA’, she discovered souvenir postcards, ticket stubs, brochures and a crude diary detailing his travels. Far from sitting in a cave attaining nirvana as he claimed to have done, Maharaj Swami had traveled to Las Vegas, where he had won nearly nine thousand dollars on blackjack and watched David Copperfield perform!
“To Aman with love, David,” read the dedication scrawled in marker pen on a glossy headshot of Mr. Copperfield. Attached was the pink flamingo drink stirrer that had dressed the Long Island iced tea he had drunk at Caesars Palace after the show.
From America, Aman had traveled across Europe, Russia and the Far East, seeking out the world’s greatest magicians and working for some of them as an understudy.
Finally, at the age of thirty-four, he had returned to India and dedicated two years to mastering yoga. It was during this period that he had come to meet the man in the black sherwani. His name, according to Aman’s diary from this period, was Vivek Swaroop, and he was a graduate of Harvard Business School. At the time of their first meeting, he had been working for another internationally successful guru in Pune, marketing his books and health products and running his ashram, which catered to Western, spirituality-seeking tourists.
Aman and Swaroop had teamed up, and a year later, Ma-haraj Swami had emerged from his long years of isolation high up in the Himalayas to establish the Abode of Eternal Love in Haridwar.