The Tax Inspector

by Peter Carey

The rain was so bad that summer that the plastic-painted walls of the ashram developed water bubbles which ballooned like condoms. You had to puncture them with a pin and catch the water in a cup. The quilts which the devotees threw on top of the rusty-hinged wardrobes at four each morning became sticky with damp and sour with mildew. The walls of the staircase they flip-flopped down on their way to chant japa at the temple were marbled with pink mould, but Ghopal’s, the restaurant owned by I.S.K.O.N. (the International Society of Krishna Consciousness), was in a new building with a good damp course and all through that wet summer it stayed dry and cool. The devotees kept the tables and floors as clean as their dhotis.

  Govinda-dasa oversaw them. He had been a devotee since the early years when Prabhupada was still alive and nothing that had happened since his death had shaken him, not the corruption of the Australian guru whose name he would never pronounce, not the expulsion of Jayatirtha who was accused of taking drugs and sleeping with female devotees, not the murders at the temple in California. He was now forty-one. He had a sharp, intelligent face with dark, combative eyes and small, white, slightly crooked teeth. He said ‘deities’ not ‘deetes’. He was educated and ironic, a slight, olive-skinned man with a scholarly stoop.

  Govinda-dasa was not an easy man to work for. He was too often disappointed or irritated with the human material that was given him. He was kind and generous but these qualities lay like milk-skin on the surface of his impatience, wrinkling and shivering at the smallest disturbance. He could not believe that young men whose only concern in life was the service of Krishna could be so complacent.

  He found spots on tables which had seemed perfectly clean before his eyes had rested on them. He liked the Bhagavad Gita and The Science of Self-Realization to be placed on the table in a certain way which was at once casual and exact. He liked the glass jars on each table to hold nasturtiums and daises which the young brahmacharis had to go and beg from the women who cared for the temple decorations. They did not like the women having power over them.

  Govinda-dasa had such a passion for bleach that you could smell it still amid the ghee and cardamom and turmeric at ten o’clock on a busy night. He made it so strong that Vishnabarnu wore rubber gloves to stop the rash on his thick, farmer’s arms. Vishnabarnu did not mind the bleach. Being inside Ghopal’s was the opposite of Catchprice Motors – it was like being inside an egg. The Formica tables shone like pearly shells under neon light.

  It was Govinda-dasa who took Gran Catchprice’s call the night after the day when Benny got fired. He recognized the old woman’s voice. She was an attachment. All devotees vowed to shed attachments. He put his hand over the receiver and looked at Vishnabarnu, who was arranging sprouts and orange slices on a plate of dhal. There was, even in that simple activity, such kindness evident in his big square face. You really did gain something just from looking at him.

  He had such a big body, wide across the shoulders and chest, but his voice was high and raspy and his eyes lacked confidence. Now the phone call had produced a deep frown mark just to the right of his wide nose. He placed the dish of dhal and salad on the bench. He picked up a cloth and slowly wiped his big hands which were covered with nicks and cuts and stained yellow with turmeric. Then he picked up the plate and carried it to table no. 2.

  Then he came back to the call.

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t dissemble,’ said Govinda-dasa. There was no other devotee he could have used the word to, no one who would have understood it.

  Vishnabarnu picked up the towel and gazed at his stained hands. For a moment it seemed as if he might actually refuse the call, but then he looked up at Govinda-dasa, grinned self-consciously, and held out his hand for the receiver.

  ‘Hi-ya Gran,’ he said.

  The lightness of his tone was outrageous, as if he had never made a vow to anyone. Govinda-dasa’s nostrils pinched. He leaned against the counter, folding and unfolding the urgent order for table no. 7, straining to hear both sides of the conversation.

  Vish turned his back. His Grandma said: ‘Benny needs you here at home.’

  ‘Can’t do that, Gran.’

  ‘It’s not good,’ she said.

  In the privacy of the shadowed wall, Vish smiled and frowned at once. There had been so many ‘not good’ things that had happened to Vish and Benny. Their grandmother had never seemed to notice any of them before.

  ‘How is it not good?’

  ‘Can’t say right now,’ she said.

  Above the phone was an image of a half man, half lion – Krishna’s fourth incarnation, Lord Nara Sinha – ripping the guts from a man in his lap.

  Vish humped his body around the phone. ‘I’m needed here,’ he said.

  ‘This is your home,’ she said. ‘You’re needed here too.’

  Vish looked at Govinda-dasa. Then he turned back to the wall and rested his forehead against it. When you were a brahmachari, living in an ashram, it was hard to imagine that Catchprice Motors still existed. It was hard to remember the currents of anger and fear which made life normal there.

  He tried to think what could be so bad that Granny Catchprice would actually notice. Probably something not very bad at all. ‘O.K.,’ he said at last. ‘Put him on.’

  ‘He can’t talk,’ she said. ‘He’s lost his voice. They fired him from Spare Parts.’

  The inside world of the temple was calm and beautiful. It had marble floors and eggshell calm. When they said you knew God through chanting his name, they were not being poetic.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a long silence on the phone while Vishnabarnu felt the cool dry wall against his cheek.

  ‘I’m not talking to my father, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘You don’t have to talk to your father.’

  Vish shut his eyes and sighed. ‘I’ll try for the 9.35,’ he said at last. ‘I’m going to have to borrow some money.’

  He turned to see that Govinda-dasa was holding out ten dollars between thumb and double-jointed finger.

  ‘Table 7 is in a hurry,’ Vish said.

  ‘Is this how you serve Krishna?’ Govida-dasa asked, pushing the money at Vishnabarnu like it was a lump of carrion.

  One sharp tooth rested on his lower lip and he looked straight into Vish’s eyes until Vish had to look down.

  ‘You have no reason to feel superior to Janardan,’ Govinda-dasa said.

  Vishnabarnu respected Govinda-dasa more than anyone else except his guru, but now he felt impatient and disrespectful. He was shocked to recognize his feelings.

  ‘If Janardan puts on a wig and smokes grass and talks about sex-pleasure, he’s no more wedded to Maya than you are.’

  ‘I know, Govinda-dasa.’

  ‘But you don’t know, or you wouldn’t act like this. What is the greatest fear of any intelligent human being?’

  Vishnabarnu closed his eyes. ‘To spend their life as a lower animal.’ He had fifteen minutes to make the train. ‘Govinda-dasa, I have to go.’

  ‘Will your attachment to your family bring you closer to God?’

  This meant that you did not move closer to God by associating with Bad Karma. You associated with God by abandoning attachments, by chanting his name, by eating prasadum. Through good association you became a better person and took on His qualities of Compassion, Cleanliness, Austerity and Truthfulness.

  Vish removed the damp note from between Govinda-dasa’s fingers.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He looked briefly into Govinda-dasa’s blazing eyes and then walked out on to the landing and down the stairs towards the street.

  In the dark shelter of the doorway he paused. He looked out through the rain at the traffic and the hooker in the red bunny suit standing in the white light of the BMW showroom across the street. He looked back up the white-walled stairway towards the restaurant. He looked out into the dark-bright street. He did not want to go to Catchprice Motors. He did not want to go
through this silent anger with his father or walk back into that spongy mess of bad things that was his childhood.

  He took the four steps down on to the street and chanted God’s name once each step. And then he ran. He pounded through the rain-puddled streets – Darlinghurst Road, Oxford Street, Taylor Square – splashing his robes. He ran strongly, but without grace. His shaven head rolled from side to side and he bunched his forearms up near his broad chest like parcels he didn’t want to get wet. He came down the dark part of the hill at Campbell Street and emerged on to the bright stage of Elizabeth Street like a bundle of rags and legs. His braided pigtail of remaining hair, his Sikha, glistened with drops of rain like sequins.

  He ran against the Don’t Walk sign: a mess of yellow illuminated by three sets of headlights. At the ticket counter he slipped and fell. He grazed his knees.

  He burst into the carriage on the 9.35. His heart was banging in his ears. His breath worked his throat like a rat-tail file.

  He collapsed in his seat opposite a man in shorts and a woman in a tight red dress. They did not see him. The man’s hairy leg was between the woman’s resisting knees and he was kissing her while he massaged her big backside.

  Vish was coming home.

  3

  Granny Catchprice had her tastes formed up on the Dorrigo Plateau of Central New South Wales – she liked plenty of fat on her lamb chops and she liked them cut thick, two inches was not too much for her. She liked them cooked black on the outside and pink inside and when she grilled them in her narrow galley up above the car yard the fat spurted and flared and ignited in long liquid spills which left a sooty spoor on the glossy walls of her kitchen and a fatty smell which impregnated the bride dolls in the display case and the flock velvet upholstery on the chairs in the room where Vish sat opposite his expressionless brother. He knew whatever had gone wrong with Benny was his fault. This was something which was always understood between them – that Vish had abandoned his little brother too easily.

  It was eleven o’clock on Sunday night and the griller was cold and the chop fat lay thick and white as candle wax in the bottom of the grill pan in the kitchen sink. Granny Catchprice was on her knees, her head deep in the kitchen cupboard, trying to find the implements for making cocktails. She was busying herself, just as she had busied herself through Cacka’s emphysema. Then she had run ahead of her feelings with brooms and dusters. Now she was going to make her grandson’s aerated brandy crusters but first she had to find the Semak Vitamiser in among the pressure cooker and the automatic egg poacher and all the aluminium saucepans she had cast aside when Benny told her that aluminium drove you crazy in old age.

  People were used to thinking of Granny Catchprice as a tall woman although she was no more than five foot six and now, kneeling on the kitchen floor in a blue Crimplene pant suit which emphasized the slimness of her shoulders and the losses of mastectomy, she looked small and frail, too frail to be kneeling on a hard floor. The bright neon light revealed the eggshell scalp beneath her grey hair. Her lower lip protruded in her concentration and she frowned into the darkness of the cupboard.

  ‘Drat,’ she said. She pulled saucepans from the cupboard and dropped them on to the torn vinyl floor in order to make her search less complicated. She forgot Vish did not drink alcohol and he was too engrossed in his fearful diagnosis of his brother’s condition to pay any attention to what she was doing.

  The word Schizophrenia had come into his mind when he looked into Benny’s ulcerated mouth and now he was wondering how he could find out what Schizophrenia really was. A saucepan clattered. His grandmother’s red setter yelped and skittered across the slippery kitchen floor.

  Benny winked at him.

  Vish narrowed his eyes.

  Benny pursed his lips mischievously and looked over his high bony shoulder towards the kitchen, then back at his older brother.

  ‘Bah-bah-bah,’ he said. ‘Bah-Barbara-ann.’

  Vish did not normally even think profanity. But when this quoted line from their father’s favourite song told him that Benny’s lost voice, his curved spine, his dead eyes, his whole emotional collapse had been an act, he thought fuck. He felt angry enough to break something, but as he watched his grinning brother take a pack of Marlboros from the rolled-up sleeve of his T-shirt, all he actually did was squinch up his eyes a little.

  Benny lit a cigarette and placed the pack carefully in front of him on the table. He rolled his T-shirt up high to where you could see the first mark life had made on him – a pale ghost of a scar like a blue-ringed smallpox vaccination. He leaned back and, having checked his Grandma again, put his long legs and combat boots on the table and tilted back on the chair.

  ‘No, seriously …’ he said.

  ‘Seriously!’

  For a moment it looked as if Benny was going to mimic his brother’s outraged squeak, but then he seemed to change his mind. ‘No, seriously,’ he said, ‘I’ve got something great for you.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘An opportunity,’ said Benny.

  Vish was breathing through his nose and shaking his head very slowly. He brought his hands up on the table and rubbed at the cuts on his knuckles. ‘Do you know what it takes for me to come out here? Do you know what it costs me?’ His eyes were so squinched up they were almost shut, with the result that his face appeared simultaneously puzzled and fatigued.

  ‘I got fired from my own business,’ Benny reminded him. ‘I need you more than ever in my life. Isn’t that enough of a reason to come?’

  For a Hare Krishna the answer was no. Vish did not have the stamina to explain that again, nor did he want to hear what the ‘opportunity’ was.

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  Benny leaned across the dining-table to pat him on his shaven head. ‘I wanted my brother … he’s here. I needed a cocktail … she’s making it. Relax … calm down. You going to have a brandy cruster? A little Sense Grat-if-ication? Put a wig on.’

  Benny’s eyes were like their father’s – the same store-house of energy. Humour and malice lay twisted together in the black centre of the pupil. ‘Put on your wig,’ he said. ‘God won’t see you if you have a wig on.’

  ‘Don’t be ignorant.’

  ‘Fuck yourself,’ Benny hissed.

  Vish had a hold of his younger brother’s grimy little wrist before Benny knew what was happening. Benny was a sparrow. He had light, fine bones like chicken wings. He yelped, but he was not being held hard enough to really hurt him.

  ‘Please let me go,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have called me that. You know you shouldn’t call me that.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have said what you said.’

  ‘About the wig?’

  Vish tightened his grip.

  ‘Let me go,’ Benny said. He bowed his head until the burning end of his cigarette was half an inch from Vish’s hand. He never could stand being held down. His chin quivered. The cigarette shook. ‘Let me go or I’ll burn your fucking hand.’

  ‘I came here to see you,’ Vish said, but he let go.

  ‘Oh sure,’ Benny said. ‘You thought I’d flipped out, right?’

  ‘I was worried about you.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Benny. ‘You’ve been worrying about me for years. Thanks. Your worry has really helped my life a lot.’

  ‘You want me here or not, Ben? Just say.’

  Benny was messing with the butts in the yellow glass ashtray, pulling the skin off the cigarette and shredding the filter. ‘I’m not joining the Krishnas,’ he said. ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Listen Ben, you give this up, I’ll give up the temple. I’ll get a straight job. We’ll get a place together. We’ll get jobs.’

  ‘Get it into your head,’ Benny said. ‘We don’t need to get jobs. We’ve got jobs. We’ve got our own business. This is what you’ve got to understand.’

  ‘They fired you.’

  ‘They think they fired me.’ Benny had these eyes. When he smiled like this, the eyes looked scary –
they danced, they dared you, they did not trust you. The eyes pushed you away and made you enemy. ‘They can’t fire me,’ he said.

  ‘Cathy fired you. That’s why I’m here. She fired you and you went down in a heap.’

  Benny took out a fresh Marlboro and lit it. ‘The situation keeps changing,’ he said.

  Vish groaned.

  ‘No, look,’ Benny said. ‘Think about it. This is the best thing that could have happened.’

  ‘Then why am I here? Why did I get this call from Gran?’

  ‘Just listen to me. Think about what I’m saying. Cathy fired me, but she’s a dead duck. She’s got an unemployed carpenter for a drummer and a lead guitarist with a fucked-up marriage and they’ve actually got a record on the Country charts. They’re charting! Nothing’s going to stop these guys going on the road. This is it for them. What I’m saying is, they’re entitled – it’s their name too and if she wants to keep it, she’ll have to leave the business and go on the road with them. She fired me but she doesn’t count.’

  ‘Benny, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Then listen to me. She always thought she was Big Mack, right? She thought the Mack was hers because McPherson is her name, but Mickey Wright got a lawyer and the lawyer says the name is for the whole band. She’s got to go on tour with them or they’ll go and tour without her. She’s got to go. She’s out of here. She doesn’t count. You leave the Krishnas, fine,’ Benny said. ‘But you stay here with me. We can run this show together. I can go through the details for you any time you like.’

  ‘Did you work this out before Gran phoned me?’

  ‘They feed you at the temple,’ Benny said. ‘I know – you’ve got no worries, well you’ve got no worries here. I’ll guarantee a living. Don’t shake your fucking head at me. You can make two hundred grand a year in this dump, really. You can walk on fucking water if you want. We can set this town on fire.’

  The dog came and pushed his nose up between Benny’s legs. Benny kicked him away and he went back to the kitchen, slipping and scratching across the floor to where Gran Catchprice was hunched over her defective Semak Vitamiser.