Suddenly Ozzie’s control snapped. “Are you trying to tell me that some crazy, football-playing animal murdered my Tessie and this Uncle character has been an accessory to the fact all these years. I have half a mind to walk straight out and pull in this coach person for interrogation.”
“Don’t,” said Oscar, now sober and severe. “Judging by what I hear of your methods you will certainly kill him and, just as his players were loyal to him, Choo is loyal to his players. He won’t talk, whatever you do to him.”
“So what…?” D’Cruz began.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Oscar in tones I had never heard him use before. “I talk to Uncle Choo and set up a meeting between me, him, How Kum and the man who might have information about your sister’s death. When we are satisfied that the information is relevant and that the party is willing to speak…”
“When do I get into the act,” the policeman shouted. “When the blokes are wiping their dicks and the girls are pulling up their knickers?”
“All right, I’ll talk to Choo. Then the four of us, How Kum included, can meet. If your behaviour is exemplary throughout and, if we are quite sure that it is necessary, we will call in the man you have so much been wanting to meet.”
Ozzie looked terribly down in the mouth. I felt sorry for him. Not Ma however. In clearing the table, she removed his glass, which Oscar had recently replenished. She wanted Oscar to herself tonight, and she wanted him reasonably sober.
NOTHING HAPPENED ON Tuesday and Wednesday. The play was by no means over. This was merely the intermission. The curtain was down, but behind it I could hear the sounds of furniture being rearranged, backdrops changed. At Nats there were rumours of strange men visiting Symons and Loong. They were doubtless from the CPIB and sent by D’Cruz to stir things up and shuffle them about for the next bit of action. Vanita’s ghost, too, had taken time off and left me to myself, so the pieces in my head could be reassembled.
On Thursday morning, the phone on my desk rang. I knew that the intermission was over even before I picked it up.
It was Mohan.
“Are you free for dinner tonight?”
“Yes. Your father wants to see me?”
“No, no. I want to see you. There are certain matters for discussion between us. Matters that should not be allowed to stand and cool for too long.”
“What do you want to discuss, Mohan?”
There was a long silence. “I think that must wait till we are face to face.”
“Where shall we meet?”
“If it is to your liking, we can meet at Komala Villas in Serangoon Road.” He added, “In the air-conditioned dining chamber upstairs.”
I like the Indianness of Serangoon Road, the homely smell of garbage and spices, the contrapuntal beauty of women in saris and wizened men in dhotis strolling in narrow lanes. I got to the tiny restaurant and slipped up a narrow wooden staircase to the room where I was to meet Mohan. He was talking to a waiter when I arrived. It was early and we had the place to ourselves.
“The people working here are employed from India and are a tardy lot. I took the liberty of ordering for both of us so that the meal would not be unduly delayed. To ensure we are able to sample everything properly, I have ordered two full dinners.”
He indicated the two large banana leaves that had been placed on the table. I love eating with my fingers off banana leaves and grabbed every opportunity to do so, despite Ma considering it proof that the blood of the “Malayalee scoundrel” ran strong in my veins.
“I am not a vegetarian,” said Mohan, shovelling a mouthful of rice and pickle into his mouth, “and do not believe that being so is essential to Hinduism.” He swallowed what was in his mouth and began fashioning another ball of rice. “However, the cuisine here is excellent and one must, in this world, seize all opportunity for pleasurable experience. That is the true message of Hinduism.”
“I must say that I thought the Hindus believed in denying the body in much the same way as Christians do.”
“That is the kind of rubbish that the missionaries spread to make our beliefs seem not unlike their own.” He laughed merrily. “Take sex, for instance. There are the glorious carvings in our temples which talk to us of beauty of copulation, the delights of the conjunction between flesh and flesh which is the only experience in this life which can, even in the tiniest of ways, resemble the ecstasy of union with the Infinite. Sexual congress has a Divine purpose, yet there are some among us who insist on chastity and continence being all important to those aspiring towards the Godhead. Krishna, the most sacred of our avatars…”
“I’m sorry, Mohan, but I am really quite ignorant about Hinduism. I’m afraid you will have to explain quite a few of the terms you use.”
“That, my dear How Kum, will increase the pleasure of dining with you. It will also introduce the matter I want to discuss.
“To return to the avatars. Avatars are reincarnations of the God Vishnu. There are three basic Hindu Gods. First there is Brahma, the primary consciousness. Then we can consider Shiva. Shiva is the creator and destroyer, for creation and destruction are the same process. The last God I mention, though he is by no means the least in importance, is, of course, Vishnu the preserver.” He swept up the food on his leaf with his palm, before going on. “It is not difficult to see that these so-called gods are in fact primary natural forces. Hinduism, to my way of thinking, is an elegant form of theoretical physics.”
“Sorry I let my ignorance disturb your train of thought, but you were saying something about sexual attitudes.” Vanita had told me that Mohan’s interpretation of the Hindu sexual code had scandalised her father even more than her own behaviour. I wanted to hear more about this family disagreement.
“Krishna was a sexual enthusiast and, if legend be true, a sexual athlete. He recommended that both men and women have four relationships going on concurrently. This would ensure, as must be pretty evident, that relationships were not ruined by boredom. Further, he advised men to make sure that women had five or six orgasms to their one. This would keep the male-female bond a loving one.
“Then the missionaries got into the picture and corrupted us with their nonsense.” He sniffed several times. “All this rubbish of having one God, one king, one spouse, one orgasm, one sexual position.”
“Your sister agreed with your views?”
“What Vani believed was a mystery even to herself.”
“She didn’t believe in a sexual morality…the traditional kind, I mean?”
“I don’t know for sure but I hope not. How can a simple animal pleasure be noble or base. It is how we use these acts that gives them the values that we attribute to the acts themselves.” He waved to a waiter for more rice. “Can there be any ethical principal involved in my having more rice. Would I be a morally superior being if I chose to deprive myself and left this table only half satisfied? As the Epicureans put it, dum vivimus vivamus, ‘while we live let us enjoy life’. That is what dharma is about. The celebration of life in all its forms, not its mourning in rituals and sacrifices.”
“What then is a moral action?”
He shrugged. “To think one capable of answering that question is to be stupidly arrogant. We attempt to be one with the forces of nature by understanding them. We do this by keeping ourselves unattached to too many manmade values. Through non-attachment comes enlightenment, from enlightenment a feeling of oneness with the universe. This feeling of being one with everything that exists is all we are capable of achieving.”
“And what does one have to do before one arrives at this enviable state?”
“One struggles for detachment, one pursues knowledge, one fights against maya, the illusory component in life, and prevents it from dulling one’s perceptions. One refuses to be involved in the petty things, the squabbles, the entanglements that make up the lives of most people.” He mopped up the remains of his food and folded the leaf along the spine to indicate to the waiter that he had finished. “We are, you an
d I, no more than a shudder of electrons; a tiny disturbance in the ether.” He picked up the bill. “Let’s walk as we talk.”
Mohan led me away from the crowds and into the back streets lined by old-fashioned shop-houses. Families sat in their front rooms. It was early evening, the time for eating, watching television, lying around and scratching each other’s backs. I slowed down each time we passed one of them. I felt the warmth from within reach out and touch me, understood the smiles which invited me to join them. They were strangers but I was attached to them. Mohan’s philosophy did not allow for this kind of thing. He was unmoved by everyday things; unwarmed by the common and ordinary that binds us together. More than that: he was not merely oblivious of everyday goings-on, he went to great pains to distance himself from them. These thoughts crossed my mind, at first idly, then with increasing purpose. It began to dawn on me that the man walking beside me was the killer. Killers have to be distanced from people, from those they kill.
When I was a little boy, I first noticed toad’s eggs. Females laid them in gutters and monsoon drains during the rainy season. The eggs are bound to each other by a gum and, thereby, a continuous sheet is formed which could not be swept away by the rains. I have always felt that the gum protects the egg, keeps it in touch with its fellows and makes it less lonely in a frightening world.
We too have a gum no less protective and no less strong because it is invisible. We call it attachment. It glues us together, protects us not merely from the world outside but from each other, for it makes us see the death of others and their pain as identical to our own.
By not being attached, Mohan had broken loose of this gum. He had made himself free to follow what he called “the dictates of dharma”, which, as far as I could tell, were the liberty to do what he saw was the right thing for himself. I was not interested in whether or not his understanding of Hinduism was true or false. All I was concerned with was how it affected the workings of my life.
I knew I was not deciding it was moonrise simply because I saw a red ball perched on the edge of the world. Thinking back, I realised that I was seeing, if ever so slowly, the ball move up and out of the sea. Tiny incidents began to come together.
Early on, D’Cruz had emphasised that the killer had to be physically strong to have driven a knife through the chests of Lip Bin and Esther. Podgy and effeminate he may look, but I had realised how strong Mohan was when he held the mayurasana position for several minutes, supporting the weight of his entire body with one hand. There were other things, more incriminating, more like evidence. Mohan mentioning that he knew where Vanita and I spent our nights though I was sure she had not told him this; Sundram complaining about his son wandering about all night and him actually leaving the house with me on the evening of the lesbians’ murder.
I didn’t hate Mohan. In fact I felt a melancholy warmth for this man who had distanced himself from other men and sought to free himself from the pain and passion that made life worthwhile. He claimed to love his sister but his was not a philosophy that allowed for the sticky attachment that love entailed. Perhaps, in killing her, he had proved to himself how detached he really was.
Mohan interrupted my thoughts. “That scoundrel, Kishore, is persuading father to go sanyasin hoping that this will give him the family fortune without him having to wait for father to die.”
“What’s sanyasin?”
“When a man reaches the final stage of his life, when he does not need the solace of a woman, nor finds pleasure in the acquisition of wealth, when all his worldly obligations are fulfilled, he sets out to find himself. He has by this time no needs, not even the need to find himself.” He laughed, enjoying the paradox. “Yes. That is in fact the case. The first step in finding oneself is losing self-awareness. I do not see father as having reached this stage, do you?”
“I really don’t know.”
“You must see, How Kum, that father is more concerned with preserving identity than losing it. He even believes in the egotistical Christian rubbish about the preservation of the personality after death. That’s not the frame of mind in which one goes sanyasin.”
“What sort of mood should one be in?”
“A truly holy man has no thought for the future. His entire consciousness is committed to the present.” He stopped walking and put a restraining hand on my shoulder. “Listen to this lovely Sanskrit hymn.” He began crooning. His voice was more high-pitched than his sister’s but the cadences of the song were identical to the bajans that Vanita sang.
Look to this day for it is life;
the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all
the realities and truths of existence:
The joy of growth,
The splendour of action,
the glory of power.
For yesterday is but a memory
and tomorrow only a vision.
“You can see, How Kum, that Hinduism asks nothing but that we glory in the actions that confront us, looking neither backwards into what prompted them nor forwards into what we can gain from them.”
“That must make life very difficult to live.”
“In one sense it is impossible for life to be lived in this way. Yet if you contemplate the proposition a little, it is the only way in which life can or is actually lived.”
“So you make no plans for the future?”
“I plan but only to enjoy the pleasure of planning, detaching myself, as much as I can, from the end-point of my plans. The vedas teach that we are entitled to the labour but not to the fruits thereof.”
“What then is the point of any action?”
“The point of doing anything is to enjoy doing it in the knowledge that we are doomed to action. Our lives are laid out in our karma. We act, not because we choose to, but because of events enacted long, long ago in our history.”
“And we are not in control over what we do?”
“What we see as choice is simply a recognition of imperatives whose origins are deep and untraceable.”
I realised that Mohan was telling me in Hindu jargon what Quincy said in sociological mumbo-jumbo. By Mohan’s book, it was karma that made us bad. By Quincy’s, it was perverse genes. In both, choice and its twin, responsibility, had been removed. I began to understand why I felt no hatred for this man who had killed the woman I loved. It is difficult to hate someone who is debarred from hating himself.
Mohan continued the exposition. “Once the fact of karma is grasped, things become simple. We act as situations demand and see ourselves as blameless.”
“Are there many people who believe like you?”
“Not enough, but a group is being formed, a resurgent force, that will bring our religion in line with thinking in the modern world.”
As illustrated in the thinking of people like Quincy Sio, I thought but said, “Perhaps you could introduce me to this group some time.”
“No sooner said than done, my dear How Kum. We meet on Thursdays and I had invited you to dinner in the hope that you might meet the group.” He added apologetically, “There are only three stalwarts at the moment, for wisdom is the least infectious of human conditions. But we will grow, given time, and,” he paused and looked into my face, “sufficient funds.”
I knew that Mohan was our killer and the philosophy he expounded made me more certain of this. Now he was telling me what he needed Sundram’s money for.
We came to an old-fashioned drinking house in which several elderly men sat swilling arak. An incredibly thin man dressed in a pair of black shorts appeared to be the landlord. At a table beside him sat two young Indians.
“Ashok and Tilak,” said Mohan, introducing them. They shook my hand but greeted Mohan with a namaste in true Hindu fashion. “I have been familiarising How Kum with our views,” said Mohan, as we sat down.
The three Indians spoke a mixture of Hindustani and English. Mohan, from time to time, stopped the conversation to tell me what was going on. From their discussion it was clear t
hat they looked on themselves as leaders of the Hindu renaissance. They had contacts with like minds in India and frequently referred to a group called the Araya Samaj, which had aims similar to their own, though Mohan and his friends were confident that their own ideas were in advance of those put out by the Indian organisation. Much of their talk centred around the problem of getting funds to begin activities in Singapore. Two well-known Indian businessmen had reneged on their promise of a donation. Their lawyers had advised them that Mohan’s group constituted a secret society, the support of which was illegal.
“Secret,” said Mohan who had begun to speak in an authoritarian voice, “perhaps, but not exclusive. We would accept anybody into our fold as long as he was prepared to abide by our rules.”
“Would you accept someone who was a criminal?” I asked.
“Let me quote you some lines from the Bhagavad Gita, that great discourse between Krishna and Arjuna:
He who shall say, ‘Lo! I have slain a man.’
He who shall think ‘Lo! I am slain.’
These both know naught!
Life cannot slay.
Life is not slain.
“I choose the exact lines that refer to killing, because your mind still dwells on the murder of my sister, does it not, How Kum?”
“Would you be prepared to accept a murderer into your group?” I pressed.
“The slayer and the slain are the same,” said Mohan, nodding sagely. “We are only agents and cannot seek to judge.”
I stood up and took my leave. In the course of the evening, Mohan had shown me that he had motive, means, and opportunity for the murders. What was more, he had a philosophy which provided automatic absolution. I would let D’Cruz work on the details of evidence. I had forgotten that many sub-plots remained unresolved. I did not realise then that these were as important to the course of my life as the main theme.
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