THE BUTCHER OF BENARES Page 12

  Gaya Prasad took the Colt out from his own belt and handed it to the SSP. The senior policeman hefted it. ‘Thank God you didn’t fire it in the fog,’ he smiled. ‘It could have taken down a whole house,’ he remarked, before handing it over to Hawa Singh. ‘As an officer from out of state, you are not allowed to carry a weapon, and especially of this kind. Still, you may have it back. I know you’ll need it. Just get me the killer.’

  Hawa Singh took it and nodded at the SSP. ‘We only have three days to the 30th. We’ll need as many hands as we can use. There have to be policemen disguised as boatmen, pandits, vendors and beggars, whatever. Make sure all of them are armed. We are dealing with a madman who doesn’t hesitate to kill,’ he said grimly.

  The SSP looked at him with an air of reassurance. ‘Get some rest,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care of everything.’ With that, the SSP walked out of the hospital, followed by accompanying policemen.

  Ruby was left in the room with Hawa Singh. She shifted to sit on his bed, and the coarse coir-filled mattress stabbed her like pins.

  ‘This is a really bad bed,’ she said with a grin.

  ‘Welcome to Benares,’ Hawa Singh smiled back at her.

  She touched the bandages on his arm and chest tenderly. They didn’t speak for a few minutes. Finally, Ruby broke the silence. ‘You know I’m half-Pakistani. My mother was from Pakistan, while my father was from the US, California. They fell in love and got married. I was born soon after. But when I was seven, my mother suddenly left me, my father and the US to return to her village in Pakistan. Since then, I have never heard from her. Now, everyone nevertheless calls me a “Paki”.’

  Hawa Singh reached for her hand. He could sense a similar pain inside her that he had hidden inside his heart. It seemed to connect them.

  ‘There are times,’ she continued slowly, ‘when I dream about her holding my hand and walking on the beach beside our house. I remember her smiling playfully at me. Then, suddenly, she was gone.’

  Hawa Singh reconnected with his own nightmares, his memories and a heart that cried without tears. They had both learnt to hide their pain.

  Ruby leant her head on his chest. Hawa Singh flinched from the connection, and she moved away, startled. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said contritely.

  He smiled and brought her back close. She snuggled, gingerly this time, into his arms. In the comfort they brought each other, they forgot their nightmares and slept.

  It was late in the night that Hawa Singh woke up. Something hammered against his head.

  He remembered. He had seen that Russian knife earlier.

  It had been part of a collection.

  CHAPTER 16

  This was when spirits roamed the land. It was perfect for the Ghost. Hawa Singh, with his jacket ripped through in several places, leaped astride an Enfield motorcycle and rode it through the dark. The bike was popularly called the ‘Bullet’. He couldn’t stay away from one.

  The thumping beat of the bike matched his own heart’s. His stitches hurt, and a dull pain assailed his head. The wind was icy-cold, and ahead of him there was fog, only fog. By now he had learnt its ways. One had to be slow, and steady, but keep moving. You had to become part of it, become one with it. Be the fog, itself.

  He could hear dogs howling and a lone crow cawing in the dead of the night. It was said such animals could sense a spiritual presence. They had certainly sensed the Ghost.

  The Bullet slowly moved ahead. He was able to discern a palatial bungalow floating ahead of the fog. The white marble edifice seemed almost to merge with it. A few lights were on around the perimeter of the bungalow. There would definitely be dogs and guards.

  Hawa Singh left the bike at a distance away from the bungalow and quietly merged with the fog. He approached close to the walls of the bungalow. He had seen the guards, all armed with rifles, close to the gate, sitting around a bonfire. They all looked drunk.

  Any dogs in sight were chained. But no one dared to sneak into Suryadev Singh’s house. Ever. Hawa Singh was going to do it. Again.

  He realized that the wires running over the wall had high-voltage current running through them. They could fry an elephant. It was impossible to cut through them. He looked around and saw a crow sitting high atop one of the electric wires. It cawed, looking in his direction.

  He took off his now tattered leather jacket and flung it at the wires. Nothing happened. He pulled it down with an available stick of wood and wrapped it in a bigger bundle of material—anything he could find around him. The jacket touched the wire. He slowly pushed it up and slid under it. He started to move to the other side of the wall, the crow keeping a constant eye on him. Crows liked the dead—or the dying.

  The Ghost had gotten in.

  The house inside appeared totally dark. The doors and windows were locked fast. The Ghost decided to first climb to the roof and then move in. He moved carefully from one window sill to the other, and from one drainpipe to the next. Until, finally, he was on the rooftop.

  The door to the stairs below was locked. He didn’t want to attract the guards. The dogs had been set free and were circling the house frantically, looking towards the roof. The guards disregarded their attention. No one could possibly get directly to Suryadev Singh’s rooftop.

  One of the guards consoled himself against the ominous barking of the dogs, chanting words from the Hanuman Chalisa, hoping they had merely sensed a harmless spirit circling the house. He was right, in his way.

  Hawa Singh traversed the rooftop terrace, hunting for a place that would let him in below. There was none. Spotting a large balcony, he decided to get down somehow to it, before planning his next step. He hung from the parapet of the roof, letting his entire height reduce the distance, and then let go. With a light thud, he was there.

  The dogs surged below, barking their throats off. Enormous searchlights were switched on to sweep the garden. Guards spread everywhere, their guns ready. Not that they could see much, in that fog.

  In the balcony just above, the windows were covered by a strong iron grille. They were locked from the inside and were probably unbreakable. Hawa Singh sought with his hands at the corners of the iron grille and realized that it was screwed into the wooden frame. He took out his Swiss knife and unscrewed it.

  Many householders had suffered from this mistake of simple carpentry. Hawa Singh removed the grille easily, and set it aside. There was a windowpane to tackle, next. He’d have to break the glass.

  Hawa Singh took out his leather jacket and again folded it into a bundle. He surveyed the glass pane, his blood still trickling down from his arm to his fingers.

  The dogs were still barking, and the lone crow cawing, when Hawa Singh placed the bundled leather jacket against the glass, and hit it with his elbow.

  He carefully pulled away the long shards of glass that emerged from the small explosion he’d caused. They had left a big-enough hole. He put his hand in and slid open the bolt. The Ghost skimmed smoothly inside the house.

  A lone dog barked, and barked. The guards searched, vainly, for an intruder in the dark. The crow blinked, still watching the figure moving inside the house.

  Hawa Singh could sense that there was no one home. The absence of people created a vacuum in a place, and the air felt stale. The furniture felt dead and the artworks hung like dead pieces on the walls. The presence of inmates made all the difference. The house breathed and felt like it was living. Everything came alive.

  Hawa Singh could feel the cold air creeping in through the cracked glass pane. With that, the fog, too, snaked in and drifted into the room like smoke. He focused his thoughts, trying to remember the exact place where he had last seen the knives.

  He swiftly and silently climbed up the stairs. Once he was in the corridor, he spotted the right door.

  Hawa Singh pulled down the sleeve of his leather jacket over his palm to cover any fingerprints and slowly applied pressure to the knob. The door opened; he stepped in, feeling the soft carpet under his feet.


  By then his eyes had adjusted well to the dark. He could see the Cross hanging on the wall. It was kind of silver, with some letters engraved on it. There were three doves drawn across the Cross.

  It was an Armenian Cross, with Armenian inscriptions on it—probably of sixth-century vintage. The three doves represented the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It was one of the only three such Armenian Crosses in the world. It was worth a few millions.

  He turned to view the guns on the walls. There was a huge painting hanging from the wall facing the door. He couldn’t make head or tail of it. There were geometrical patterns, and an eye, staring at him. He saw a name underneath, Picasso. Must be from Jharkhand, he thought.

  He bent closer to the remembered drawers and opened them. He saw the gleaming knives. It was obvious they belonged to different countries and different time periods. Expensive. Exclusive.

  He noticed one of the slots was empty. Now, he got it all clear in his head. This was the very slot where he saw that Russian blade that had sliced at him.

  Who could it be? Suryadev Singh or Prashant? thought Hawa Singh. He closed the drawer and left the room, walking purposefully toward the sound-proof one. Who would want a sound-proof room in their house? And for what purpose?’ he continued to wonder.

  Well, it could be multi-purpose, he answered himself in his head. A room from which no sound escapes—no one hears anything, no one sees anything, nothing emerges from it. Deadly.

  How funny it is that our own thoughts become questions—and then go on to supply the answers.

  Hawa Singh relied on his brain—or what was left of it. This made him a part of an exclusive club. It was not scientists or top IT professionals who were cerebral. It was such policemen—and taxi drivers who were famous for knowing all the streets by heart—who had a larger-than-normal hippocampus. They were the ones who memorized more and more information daily, causing their brains to expand and grow.

  Nevertheless, Hawa Singh was still not comfortable with computers. He hesitated even to press a delete button, afraid he’d lose an entire file of information. He still preferred to use pen and paper. And he didn’t have an email account.

  ‘Why is everyone so obsessed with communication nowadays?’ he often asked his puzzled self. He had known people who got stressed because they hadn’t received mail recently, or whose photos on Facebook had not been ‘liked’. He’d much rather cut himself out of the picture. The fewer the people around him, the happier he’d be. He’d rather feel free to hug his private—very precious—memories to himself. He didn’t want to share them. Or seek people’s approval of them.

  He reached the heavy door of the sound-proof room. Again using his sleeve, he opened the door, and smelt stale air, faux leather, plastic, paint and spirits. An almost hospital smell.

  The room indicated a disordered mind. Someone who was fanatical about tidiness, order, sound levels, the kind of people and things he wanted around him. Basically, a mentally disordered person desperately seeking order in the house.

  Hawa Singh moved to the shelves displaying body parts pickled in alcohol. He looked at one grinning head with its eyes bulging out. A hand—sawed off at the wrist—with its fingers stretched out, trying to hold onto something, perhaps a last grip on life. An eye, gouged out with a knife, floating in yet another jar, like a playful marble.

  What makes people like B.P Singh and Suryadev keep these body parts as souvenirs, he asked himself again, sickened to the core. Do they really feel proud of their actions? Does all this give them a junkie’s high? Maybe, the high a cold-blooded killer gets from the kill, was of a different, even more compulsive kind. Perhaps, that is why he commits one murder after another, till he himself is killed.’

  Ruby had told him such habitual assassins began to regard themselves as artists, who created a world and space for themselves. They were the kings of their world, close to God Himself. They believed they held command over life—and therefore death—the continual pattern of the universe.

  ‘Rats. They are just like rats that come out of their holes and then scurry back to hide in. My role is to smoke them out and end their menace,’ Hawa Singh had told Ruby.

  He liked talking to her, discussing his life with her. He had told her about Kavita. She had told him all about her life. He felt so calm in her presence. They had held each other in each other’s arms, and slept together, but they hadn’t felt the need to take things to another level. He didn’t want to mar the purity of this relationship.

  So, was making love an impure act, something that was dirty? Or do I feel it would be cheating on Kavita? He tortured himself with self-doubt.

  Then he slapped his forehead. What the hell was happening to him? Why did all these thoughts keep coming back? Focus, man. Focus.

  He then looked at the jar that had held a human heart. He remembered clearly that the last time he’d been there, there was one heart in it. Now, there were two.

  Eva and the other victim had had their hearts wrenched out.

  He brought down some of the jars and placed them on a table. There would be no way to ascertain the human identity of the hearts, except by matching tissue. The jars were pretty heavy, filled to the brim with formalin. It wouldn’t be possible to move out swiftly, carrying them. And he could hardly pocket their contents.

  He removed the lids of the jars and bent close to them. The smell of alcohol and dead flesh penetrated his nostrils. He was overcome by nausea, close to puking, when he hurriedly opened a window and sucked in the fresh air.

  The dogs kept on barking. The crows got louder. He was left with one last option. He took out his Swiss knife, made fine cuts in both hearts and took out portions of tissue, placing them in a plastic zip-lock pouch that he always carried on him. Adding a little alcohol from the jars, he zipped them shut.

  He would have to slip out the same way he had come in. The dogs now sounded like they had been unleashed. He looked at the still-open jar with the floating hand. Its smell attracted the dogs, who came running into the room towards it.

  Hawa Singh used that distraction to escape into the fog, bound over the wall and under the wires. The guards heard only a thumping sound in the distance. A crow flew into the dark sky. The Ghost was gone.

  CHAPTER 17

  28 January.

  The shards of sunlight came cascading down through the fat clouds, overcoming their gloom. It was a bright morning, as if God Himself was bestowing a blessing on Benares. The pilgrims took exhilarated dips in the Ganges while, behind them the temple bells rang joyously and sweet incense wafted through the air. The sounds of ghungroos, tabla and music emanated from the houses lining the streets as dance students practised Kathak. The sweetshops displayed freshly made laddus, jalebis, and kachoris. It was a heady mix in the city. Benares, the beautiful.

  Hawa Singh and Ruby Malik stood in the warm sunlight, staring at the large board that read ‘Sparrow’s Research and Analysis Wing for Mental Health’. A few sparrows flitted in the nearby trees. They could easily represent the fleeting moods that gave wings to the imagination of the patients within. Those had been categorized as ‘abnormal’ people.

  It was a red-and-white brick building. The structure looked very European; the board said the building had been designed by Ted Johnson, a British architect. There were many windows in the front, opening out on the large open space where Hawa Singh and Ruby stood. A few eyes seemed to be examining them secretly. And not just those of the sparrows.

  They moved to a gravel path, which crunched under their feet. Hawa Singh loved that sound. The circuitous path led them to a long corridor with white pillars on both sides. The floor was squeaky clean. The walls looked freshly painted. The air was fresh. They saw a woman scrubbing the already clean steps going up.

  Hawa Singh was wearing his trademark jacket over a t-shirt and a fresh pair of jeans. Finally. Ruby had bought him a new shirt, a pair of jeans and a few t-shirts. He never wore shirts. The stitches on his chest and arm had dried and now pulled a
t his skin, uncomfortable and itchy. He made a determined effort to forget them. Forgetting was bliss.

  Ruby smiled at the woman cleaning the stairs, who stared at her. Hawa Singh pointed out the signage on a board: ‘Chief Medical Officer, First Floor’. They walked up the stairs.

  The woman mumbled to no one in particular. ‘They have come to take him away. But they will all die. It’s written in their horoscopes.’

  They reached the first floor and walked through the next corridor looking for another signboard. There was no staff member around. At the far end of the corridor there was a man staring out at a tree, smiling. ‘The blue sparrow will come today, and then I’ll be free,’ he repeated over and over again to himself. ‘I’ll be free.’

  Ruby pointed out a room with a nameplate outside that read ‘CMO, Sudha Krishnamurthy’. They knocked on the door. A woman dressed in a white saree answered it and stood regarding them quizzically.

  ‘We are from the police and would like to meet the CMO. It’s very important,’ said Hawa Singh.

  The woman looked at Ruby with a questioning eyebrow. ‘She, too, is with the police,’ said Hawa Singh

  The woman nodded. ‘The CMO is busy at a morning meeting. You’ll have to wait for a while,’ she said, and shut the door.

  Hawa Singh and Ruby were left standing where they were. They exchanged glances and shrugged.

  Hawa Singh turned away from the door, adjusted the Colt in his waistband and tried to plan his next move. He had handed over the specimen samples from the two hearts to the medics. He was told that they didn’t have the expertise and equipment to analyze the tissues, so the specimens would have to be sent to Delhi. It would take a week or ten days for the reports to back come to them.

  His thoughts were racing to find ways to trap the killer. Somehow, he felt he had slipped so far. There was something that was just not fitting into the larger picture. There were only questions. He needed more answers. He hoped the Sparrow would provide them all.