the home of the British viceroy, but now the official residence of the president of India.
There had not been a hint of a breeze for days and the collective emissions of sixteen million souls hung heavily in the morning air. The dense haze created halos around the Victorian streetlamps and made keen edges of the headlights of passing vehicles. The rising sun was but a feeble glow in the sky. With visibility down to less than a hundred feet, the sandstone domes and chuttris of the Indian seats of power lay far off in the distance, shrouded from view.
On either side of the tarmac boulevard lay sandy paths and, on either side of these, wide lawns edged with trees. Dr. Jha made his way down the path on the left-hand side, having first smeared a dab of eucalyptus balm on his upper lip to disguise the nauseating pong emanating from the Yamuna River a mile and a half away.
Despite the hour, he was far from alone. Many of the other regulars who came to Rajpath every morning to exercise before the heat of the day made such activity unthinkable passed him along the way: the flabby, middle- aged couple in matching sun visors who did rigorous ‘brisk walking’ but never seemed to lose any weight; the tall, muscular Muslim army officer who always jogged the full length of Rajpath and back in a sweat-soaked T-shirt; the decrepit gentleman with the pained expression whose servant had to push him along in his wheelchair.
Dr. Jha, too, cut an instantly recognizable figure. He had a long, white beard and wore open-toed sandals and a dhoti. Anyone seeing him for the first time might have been forgiven for assuming that he was an ascetic. But the retired mathematician was the very antithesis of the ecclesiastic. The founder of the Delhi Institute for Rationalism and Education, or DIRE, he was known to millions of viewers who had watched him debunking and unmasking India’s God-men on national TV. They knew him as the ‘Guru Buster’.
This newfound celebrity was something Dr. Jha had neither sought nor welcomed. It had crept up on him over the past few years since the twenty-four-hour news channels had started reporting on so-called miracles as if they were newsworthy events, leaving him with no choice but to take to the airwaves and preach the gospel of reason and logic.
In doing so, he had lost his anonymity. Starstruck admirers were forever approaching him in public to shake his hand. And he was often hassled by ignorant people who, having seen him on TV demonstrating how simple ‘miracles’ were performed – like walking on red-hot coals or making holy ash pour from the hands – believed he had acquired the very powers he was trying to discredit. Only last week, for example, he had been asked to exorcise an evil spirit from a boy of five who was unable to speak. Subsequently, Dr. Jha had made some inquiries and learned that the boy had suffered from jaundice during infancy, was partially deaf and therefore unable to mimic sounds like normal children.
But here on Rajpath, where the early birds were drawn from the educated middle classes, Dr. Jha’s privacy was rarely invaded. It helped that his body language was reserved. He walked with arms held studiously behind his back and head stooped in contemplation.
On this particular morning, as his mind mulled over the death threat he had received the day before, his thoughts turned to his childhood and the first time he had set foot on Rajpath.
Suresh Jha had been seven at the time, still small enough to sit on his father’s shoulders. From that dizzying height, the view in all directions had been unforgettable: a vast ocean of people, their heads adorned with every kind of gear – pagris, Maharashtrian turbans, Gandhian topis – surging around the walls of the Secretariat and Parliament House.
The date: August 15, 1947, the day India gained its independence and, at the stroke of midnight, Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, made his famous ‘tryst with destiny’ speech.
“A moment comes which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new… when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance,” Pandit-ji had said. “We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again.”
Nehru’s enthusiasm, his belief that as a secular, socialist democracy India would modernize, build factories and power stations, schools and universities, clinics and hospitals – that it would retake its rightful place as a leader of the civilized world – had been infectious. The young Suresh Jha, brimming with optimism for the future, had been one of the first students to enter the newly formed Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. Later he’d helped design India’s first indigenous telecommunications network.
But during the 1970s and ‘80s, while China, South Korea and Taiwan pumped billions of dollars into research and development, Indian technology lagged far behind. Economically, the country fared no better. The so-called License Raj ensured that a small number of industrial families monopolized manufacturing. Corruption ate at the heart of the political system.
Now in his sixties, Dr. Jha felt bitterly disappointed by his country’s failures.
“While the middle-class elite grow richer and maintain an exceptionally high degree of tolerance for the inhuman levels of deprivation around them, India still languishes among some of the poorest countries in the world – on the Human Development Index just behind Equatorial Guinea and Solomon Islands,” he had written in the latest edition of
His campaign had made him countless enemies. Many a village fakir and traveling sadhu had sworn vengeance after the Guru Buster had unmasked them as frauds. Dr. Jha had been denounced as a ‘devil’ and a ‘monkey’ by the church and the mullahs. He had also provoked the ire of India’s Hindu right. But his most famous – and arguably most powerful – adversary was His Holiness Maharaj Swami.
“Swami-ji,” as everyone referred to him, had risen to prominence in the past three years. Revered as a living saint by more than thirty million followers and watched by millions more around the world on Channel OM, the saffron-robed Godman claimed miraculous powers. He often levitated, produced precious stones and valuable objects out of thin air and communed with an ancient rishi whose ghostly face thousands claimed to have seen materialize before their very eyes.
Dr. Jha had described him in the past as a ‘fraud’, a ‘crook’, ‘David Blaine in saffron robes’. On numerous occasions he had also challenged Swami-ji’s claim to be able to cure the sick of cancer, diabetes and HIV/AIDS.
And then a month ago, the two men had finally come face-to-face when, unbeknownst to one another, they had been invited onto the same live TV talk show for what the host had billed as a ‘showdown’.
Seizing the opportunity to rail against Maharaj Swami before an audience of millions, Dr. Jha had angrily denounced him as a ‘charlatan’ who was swindling the public.
“You should be prosecuted as a common criminal,” he’d said, adding: “If you can levitate, show us now!”
With his equable, beatific smile, Swami-ji had calmly explained that he only performed miracles when ‘there is a purpose and a need’ and that such feats were designed to ‘inspire humanity to understand its true potential’. He’d also added that he was not ‘a circus performer’.
“Scientists seek to undermine our belief in the divine,” the guru had continued, fingering his Rudraksha rosary. “The power of the intellect and modern technology is insignificant compared to the power of love that each and every one of us carries in our hearts. At times, people must be reminded of this – they must be shown something truly miraculous. This helps to renew their faith. Thus within the month, I will perform a spectacular miracle that will leave no one – not even atheists like my friend Dr. Jha here – in any doubt about my powers.”
The talk show host had pressed the Godman to explain the nature of the ‘supernatural occurrence’ he had predicted, but Maharaj Swami had refused to elaborate. He had promised, however, that Dr. Jha would ‘be left speechless’.
Then yesterday the death threat had been delivered.
WHENEVER THERE IS A WITHERING OF THE LAW AND AN UPRISING OF LAWLESSNESS ON ALL SIDES, THEN I MANIFEST MYSELF.
FOR THE SALVATION OF THE RIGHTEOUS AND THE DESTRUCTION OF SUCH AS DO EVIL, FOR THE FIRM ESTABLISHING OF THE LAW, I COME TO BIRTH, AGE AFTER AGE.
UNBELIEVER! TOMORROW YOU DIE!
The Hindi words had been made up of letters cut from a newspaper and pasted onto a piece of paper.
Terrified, Dr. Jha’s wife had called the police. They in turn had advised her husband to stay indoors. But the
