barricaded from the inside. A big swastika had been painted in red on the doorstep to ward off evil.
“Go away! I don’t want to talk to anyone!” Gupta shouted from behind the door after Puri rang the bell three times.
“But it is Vish Puri this side. I’m looking into – ”
“I don’t care who you are!” interrupted the lawyer. “Those media persons have been banging on my door all day. All I want is to be left alone! I’ve got nothing to say to anyone!”
It took the detective a good ten minutes to persuade Gupta to come to the front window.
Even then he refused to put on the lights or fully pull back the curtains. He stood a couple feet from the window, his face barely visible.
“None of us is safe!” he exclaimed. Puri caught a glimpse of his wild, tormented eyes. “
“Most unlikely,” replied the detective soothingly. “What you saw was someone pretending to be the goddess, only.”
“How do you know? You weren’t there. I tell you that was no human being! It was the goddess herself. I looked into her eyes! She breathed fire!”
“All a trick of some sort,” said Puri.
His words were wasted; Gupta could not be persuaded. And yet the advocate retained his legal faculties and, despite his ranting, provided the detective with a remarkably intelligible account of the murder: how he had been unable to stop himself laughing and felt transfixed by ‘an invisible force’. He remembered the caws of the crows, the barks of the dogs and the mysterious mist. Kali had ‘materialized out of thin air’ and floated above the ground.
“She was absolutely hideous! Her arms writhing, the skulls around her neck clunking together. I can’t get that noise out of my head. And her voice, Mr. Puri! Her voice! Like… like the screams of murdered children!”
Gupta came closer to the window and looked left and right down the street.
“What about a severed head? You saw that, also?” asked Puri.
“Yes! Yes! It was dripping with blood!”
“You recognized his face – this gentleman who had been apparently deprived of his body, that is?”
Gupta faltered. “I… I didn’t see it clearly,” he admitted.
“There was no blood found at the scene apart from that belonging to Dr. Jha,” Puri pointed out.
Sharma grew agitated again. “I’m telling you what I saw.”
The detective asked about the sword.
Gupta said he had seen it driven through the Guru Buster’s chest. But what had become of it he could not say.
“I covered my eyes. After that I can’t remember much.”
“When were you able to move your feet?”
“Immediately after she disappeared.”
“And it is my understanding you had a headache, is it?”
“Yes, and it won’t go away, Mr. Puri! It will never go away!” He gripped his hair with his hands. “Just like her voice! It’s like she’s here now, calling my name!”
Mr. Ved Karat lived in New Rajendra Nagar. A political speechwriter for the Congress Party, he was also at home trying to recover from the ordeal of the day before. He too was badly shaken. In his case, though, it was the shock of witnessing the murder that had affected him. The goddess herself had not scared him.
“In fact I found her quite magnificent to look at,” he said, sitting in his living room still wearing his pajamas and dressing gown. In one hand he held a glass of fresh nimboo pani, to which he had added a pinch of black salt. “She had an extraordinary aura about her, an emanation of raw power. In a way it was awe-inspiring.”
Karat, too, had been unable to stop himself laughing and his feet had gone ‘leaden’. He described the mysterious mist and the severed head and a ‘blinding flash’ before Kali appeared, ‘levitating high above the earth and breathing fire’. The speechwriter had also witnessed Dr. Jha’s death and seen the sword sticking out of the poor man’s chest after Kali had ‘miraculously disappeared’.
When Puri explained that it was yet to be found, he seemed surprised.
“Someone took it?”
“Murder weapons are often getting removed from the scene. Most probably some unscrupulous fellow took possession of it.”
Karat went on to explain what had happened next: how he had stopped laughing the moment Dr. Jha was killed; how he had rushed to his aid.
“There was so much blood. I felt his pulse, but he was already gone.”
“After you had any headache?”
“I felt nauseous, but no, no headache,” said Karat.
“When were you able to move your feet?”
The speechwriter had to think for a moment before answering. “I believe it was soon after she vanished,” he said.
Puri reached the residence of Professor R.K. Pandey, the Laughing Club instructor and organizer, late in the afternoon. A detached four-bedroom house in West Shalimar Bagh, it was surrounded by a seven-foot wall.
“Very nice to meet you!” Pandey greeted the detective at the front door with a warm, welcoming smile. “Are those rubber soles you’re wearing? There’s a chance of an electric shock, you see.”
Puri looked down at his shoes with a quizzical expression. “They are made of natural rubber. From Kerala, I believe.”
“Excellent! Then do come in.”
Puri followed him through the front door and inside the house, which smelt of pipe tobacco. A collection of old computers, TVs, vacuum cleaners, electric razors, calculators and tangles of wires cluttered the place. Circuit boards, soldering irons and current testers lay on a workbench positioned against the far wall. In the center of the room stood an old washing machine that had been gutted of its innards; it looked like a robot that had suffered a nervous breakdown.
“I’m building a rudimentary thermoelectric generator,” explained Pandey as he knelt next to his creation, tightening a wing nut with a spanner.
“Pardon?” asked Puri.
“It converts heat into electricity. This one creates cold air from hot! Does the job much cheaper than solar power. Think of the potential here in India. This one’s for my class, to show my students. Bright young minds!”
“It’s dangerous?” asked Puri with a frown, hovering by the door.
“You can never be too careful, can you? Not when you’re dealing with electricity. That’s why I asked about your shoes. Rubber provides insulation. Look at mine!” He lifted his right foot in the air to show Puri his boots. “See?”
“Very good, sir,” said Puri, stepping tentatively into the room.
“Are you here about Dr. Jha’s death?” said Pandey, beaming. He sounded positively excited by the prospect.
“I’m doing my own investigation,” explained the detective, puzzled by the man’s exuberant mood. “His murder should not and must not go unsolved.”
Pandey looked up from what he was doing. “Good for you,” he said, smiling. “And you’re of the opinion nothing paranormal occurred?”
“At the present time, I am concerned with your opinion, only,” he answered.
“I’d be happy to tell you what I saw,” said Pandey with an ironic smile. He stood up, put the spanner on his workbench and picked up his pipe. “Frankly, it’s baffling,” he continued, emptying the bowl of the pipe into a dustbin and then filling it with fresh tobacco. “As an electrical engineer, I deal in data, verifiable results – in proof. But what happened yesterday… well, I can’t explain it. Whatever that thing was – goddess, deity, apparition – it levitated three feet off the ground. That is not within the capabilities of mortal man.”
“Must be a trick of some sort,” suggested the detective.
“An illusion?” Pandey shook his head as he lit his pipe and the smoke wafted up over his face and hair. “I saw no wires, no stilts, no platform.”
