entered a vehicular promised land where there were no tedious, terrestrial speed limits.
But the euphoria was short-lived. After just a few miles, each tarmac tract ended abruptly in a rugged tear – the destructive influence of corruption and ineptitude, and not, as it perhaps appeared, an act of God. Even the most robust of vehicles had to brake suddenly and inch down sharp inclines into a purgatory of rutted, potholed tracks.
Windows were hastily rolled up as tires stirred clouds of fine white dust. Through this choking pall, drivers and passengers passed laborers with bleached faces breaking piles of rocks with chisels and crude hammers. Rows of concrete supports for half-complete flyovers appeared suddenly, giant and potentially lethal obstacles. Rusty construction equipment stood idle like tanks abandoned by a fleeing army.
That Puri was able to sleep soundly through all this – head back, mouth agape, snoring loudly – was thanks to an inherited but yet-to-be-identified Punjabi gene that endowed him with the power to snooze through almost anything. But it helped that he was exhausted from his encounter yesterday with the cricket bat in Dr. Jha’s office followed by a long day of interviews.
It had been almost eleven o’clock by the time he reached the Mount Kailash Hotel, a seedy ‘businessman’s lodge’ off Connaught Place, where he had spent an hour.
Room 312 had been registered to ‘Miss Neena’, who had an understanding with the discreet manager.
‘Miss Neena’ was but one of the lovely young woman’s aliases. Indeed, she used so many that even Puri, who had been making use of her services for nearly five years, sometimes lost track of who she was pretending to be at any given time.
Had she ever told him her real name? he sometimes wondered.
What he knew of her past was certainly sketchy, pieced together from scraps of information.
Originally from Kathmandu, she had run away from home as a teenager to join the Maoist rebels, undergone combat training in a camp in the mountains and taken part in numerous guerrilla operations against the Nepali state. During one of them, she had witnessed or experienced something terrible. Disillusioned with the cause, she had fled and escaped to India.
For the next few years, she had rambled across northern India. She spent a year with a traveling theater troupe in Assam and worked as a bar girl in Mumbai and an ayah for a wealthy Delhi family. In between, there had been a marriage that ended disastrously.
Puri had also noted the following characteristics about her: she didn’t trust the opposite sex; considered alcohol nothing short of evil; was a night owl; could handle herself in a fight better than most men.
There was a distinct possibility that she had a child (a couple of times on the phone he had heard crying in the background). But Puri had never visited her home or pried into her private life.
Indeed, despite her secretive nature, their relationship was based on mutual trust. They had met in Mumbai during the Case of the Deaf Dabawallah when Puri had saved her life. Subsequently, she had moved to Delhi to work for him as an undercover operative.
Given her talent for blending into almost any situation and ‘putting on so many of faces’, he had dubbed her Facecream.
Now he was asking her to take on a task that would stretch even her considerable resources: to infiltrate the Abode of Eternal Love, Maharaj Swami’s ashram north of Haridwar.
Last night, in the Mount Kailash Hotel, she had listened attentively to Puri’s briefing.
“Frankly speaking, thus far, nothing has come to light linking Swami-ji directly with the murder,” he’d told her. “But I am in possession of Dr. Jha’s file on ‘His Holiness’ and grounds for investigation are there – no doubt about it at all. Dr. Jha spoke to three of Swami-ji’s ex-associates – naturally it was off record – and seems our Godman is very much active in money laundering for politicians. This Abode of Eternal Love is also Abode of Washing Machines, we might say. Black money goes in and comes out white.
“Through Right to Information Act,” Puri had continued, “Dr. Jha was endeavoring to prove Swami-ji’s corrupt practices. Thus, he had petitioned for financial statements of numerous ashram bank accounts in India and Switzerland to be made public. Thus Dr. Jha had become a thorn in Swami-ji’s side.”
“Dr. Jha had political enemies,” Facecream had pointed out. “It could have been one of them who killed him.”
“Bullets delivered to the backs of heads are more their style, no?”
Puri had also briefed Facecream on what Manish the Magnificent had told him about Maharaj Swami’s secret past and about his being an obsessive hoarder of personal memorabilia. He left the file with her to study.
On the journey along Highway 58 this morning, she had been reading through the information Dr. Jha had acquired about the death in April at the ashram of twenty-six-year-old devotee Manika Gill. There were press cuttings, copies of police reports, ‘witness’ statements and affidavits from the girl’s family. Dr. Jha’s notes and transcripts of interviews he had conducted with some of her friends and the local farmer who had found the body lying facedown in the river were also included.
Facecream was able to glean the following:
Prior to coming to the ashram, Manika, whose father was a wealthy jeweler, had been a ‘rebellious type’. During her late teens and early twenties, she had ‘entered into’ a number of casual sexual relationships. At twenty- five, she had found herself pregnant. At her father’s insistence, she had ‘gone in for’ an abortion. Naturally this was hushed up; apart from her parents, only her best friend, Neetu Chandra, had known about it.
Soon after, Mr. and Mrs. Gill, who were both devotees of Maharaj Swami, had escorted their disgraced daughter to the Abode of Eternal Love and implored their guru to give her ‘direction’. Manika had found the place ‘tedious and boring’ at first but then had undergone a ‘spiritual awakening’. According to several different sources, she had seen a vision during a special darshan conducted by the Godman.
Neetu Chandra said Manika ‘wasn’t the same person’ after that. All she talked about was Maharaj Swami. The two drifted apart. Seven months passed. Then on the night she died, at around eight o’clock in the evening, Neetu received a distressing call from her friend.
“She wasn’t making much sense. Just babbling about how she hadn’t slept in days and she’d been having these terrible nightmares. I told her to get the hell out of that bloody freak show, but she said she couldn’t trust anyone. She said she’d told her parents but they didn’t believe her. Told them what? I asked. She didn’t answer. She sounded afraid, just broke down in tears. I told her to stay put and I’d drive up to fetch her.”
Neetu Chandra had set off from Delhi early the next morning. By the time she arrived, Manika had been discovered drowned in the Ganges. The police had quickly concluded that she had gone for a swim near the ashram at eleven o’clock at night.
Mr. and Mrs. Gill maintained that their daughter had drowned by accident. But according to Manika’s friends, she couldn’t swim and was scared of the water.
No suicide note was discovered.
Handbrake, at the wheel of the Mercedes four-wheel drive Puri had hired in order to make the right impression at Maharaj Swami’s ashram, turned off Highway 58 south of Haridwar. The single-lane road passed through waterlogged, emerald-green paddy fields fed by the mountain meltwater of the Ganges. Here and there, farmers stood in mud up to their ankles tending to their crops, and zebu, humped oxen, dragged wooden plows through the rich, oozing mire.
The holy city of Haridwar, where drops of the elixir of immortality are believed to have been spilled by the celestial bird Garuda, announced itself with a line of budget hotels with names like Disney Inn. The idyllic rice fields gave way to the all-too-familiar detritus of dusty dhabas, vegetable carts and car-repair shops with oil-stained forecourts.
Skirting to the east of the old city, the Mercedes crossed over the fast-running cobalt waters of the Ganges. A giant statue of Shiva, his neck garlanded with a spitting cobra, towered over the road. Behind the deity lay the Har ki Pauri steps, where millions come every year to bathe and cleanse their sins, and behind them the white domes and peaked rooftops of temples, shrines and ashrams. Farther on, they passed three sadhus walking barefoot away from the city into the hills. With their matted dreadlocks, loincloths and tridents, they resembled cavemen out hunting woolly mammoths.
“Would you mind if we reviewed our cover story? I’m getting a little forgetful in my old age.”
The voice belonged to Mrs. Duggal, who did the occasional freelance assignment for Most Private Investigators since her retirement from the Indian Secret Service. Puri had asked her to pose as his wife for the day
