THE BUTCHER OF BENARES Page 16

  Hawa Singh took his father from one sadhu to the other, showing him their ash-covered faces. ‘Closely examine the eyes. See if anyone of them was the man I’m looking for,’ he instructed his father.

  Fauja went around, and then gave up. ‘I don’t think it was anyone of them,’ he told his son. ‘They all look big and strong. He was of medium height and lanky-looking.’

  ‘Why don’t you check with the Aghoris,’ suggested Baba Ramtirath. ‘They look very much like us.’

  Hawa Singh nodded.

  ‘But there’s one more thing,’ stipulated the sadhu. ‘I can’t keep all these other sadhus waiting here. They all want to go to Allahabad for their bath in the Sangam, the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati.’

  ‘We can’t let you leave, Baba Ramtirath,’ said Ruby decisively.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere,’ the head of the sadhus assured her. ‘My close circle of eleven disciples will remain with me, too, but the rest will leave.’

  The mention of the number eleven caught Hawa Singh’s ears. ‘What’s the significance of the number eleven?’ he asked.

  ‘It has a special place in Hinduism,’ replied Baba Ramtirath. ‘In systems such as astrology and basic numerology, eleven is considered to be a Master Number. Eleven can also represent sin, transgression and peril. Ten being the perfect number, eleven represents the exceeding of both. It is interesting to note that eleven, when broken down—one plus one is equal to two—comprises the two of duality. This Master Number is of the super-intellect or genius. Black and white are two colours of eleven, signifying truth, latent and active, hidden and revealed.’

  Hawa Singh looked at him dourly. There were no blacks and whites for him. Everything seemed hidden. His job was to reveal. He called Gaya Prasad over. ‘Make sure to get the fingerprints of all these sadhus before they leave Benares.’

  ‘It will be done, sir,’ the younger officer replied.

  ‘Baba Ramtirath, along with his eleven disciples, will stay here. Keep a close watch on them,’ further instructed Hawa Singh.

  The calm blue eyes looked like sparkling marbles studded on a cold face.

  *

  Hawa Singh took his father to meet Neelambar Nath and the Aghoris. They made their rounds once more, but Fauja Singh was certain that none of the sadhus there remotely resembled the man who had visited him.

  Hawa Singh told Gaya Prasad to get the fingerprints of all the Aghoris in Neelambar Nath’s group. He didn’t want to leave any stone unturned.

  Later, he sat with Ruby in her room enumerating the possibilities. It helped them clear their minds and come up with newer ideas about their investigation. Ruby Malik, trained though she was in the interrogation techniques of the FBI, found herself at a loss trying to comprehend who was lying and who was not. At the FBI they used truth serums, polygraph tests, chemical gases and other innovative techniques to extract the truth. She realized that men like Baba Ramtirath had a certain degree of control over their minds, and none of those techniques would decipher the truth.

  She had been taught that about half of all crime commited is under genetic control. Environmental factors such as parenting, poverty and discrimination account for the other half. In other words, nature and nurture are both important in developing the mind. However, the mind of a psychopath was totally different.

  She had observed the Aghoris and instantly known that they were not professional criminals or psychopaths. But they were men of faith—and faith could lead men to do strange things. For them anything was possible. They lived to uphold the name of God. In the deep recesses of their minds, they heard God’s voice—or that’s what they said—and acted upon it.

  The killer could well be acting on such a voice. He might believe that he was the messenger of God and fulfilling His will. It was like a task for them ordained by the divine will. Once the task was finished they would disappear. It would be almost impossible to track down such killers.

  ‘One thing is certain,’ Ruby told Hawa Singh. ‘This killer is not at all what we so far thought him to be. At times, I actually feel we are looking in the wrong direction altogether.’ Hawa Singh was quiet. Somewhere deep down he could feel a worry gnaw away at him.

  He knew that the killer was playing a nasty game with him, now hiding, then confronting him. He’d been sure that the killer was a local from Benares. And yet, he’d come right up to his father. And shown him his blue eyes.

  ‘He must have been wearing coloured contact lenses,’ Hawa Singh mumbled to Ruby.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, he loves to taunt us. Enjoys misleading us.’

  “What if he really has blue eyes? It would be easy to close in on him,’ said Ruby.

  ‘That’s exactly what he wanted to do. Point us in the wrong direction.’

  Meanwhile, the hands on an unseen clock raced around to complete their lap.

  7 pm. 29 January.

  CHAPTER 24

  It was 10.30 pm by the time the policemen took their posts at the hundred ghats and many temples. All the vagabonds were removed from the sites. A curious journalist from a local Hindi newspaper tried to question the SSP on the sudden police bandobast. The SSP told him that it was just a police exercise in security measures.

  However, the SSP was nervous. What if those reporters added two and two and came up with five?

  ‘You cannot help it,’ Hawa Singh told him. ‘Those people always write what they want to. Let them create stories. We have other things to do.’

  Hawa Singh went with Ruby to the Dashashwamedh Ghat. For him, this was the key location. The first body was found here and the second victim was found inside Vishwanath temple—also close to this ghat. Somehow, he knew that the killer would strike in the vicinity.

  Each of the police personnel was equipped with a wireless radio, to communicate with the rest in an emergency. Every half hour Hawa Singh would himself take reports from coded teams. No names on the wireless.

  ‘It is possible that the killer listens to all our communication on the same radio frequency,’ Hawa Singh had told the SSP.

  For this Hawa Singh advised total silence on the wireless. Apart from him no one else would speak—unless they had the target in sight, or needed back-up. None of the usual police chatter over the frequency.

  Ruby shivered on the steps of the ghat. The darkness was impenetrable. The only sounds were of waves lapping at the steps below and street dogs howling in the night. The sight of their breath condensing in front of their faces frightened the policemen. It could be their last.

  The SSP had given Ruby a Beretta, which she had placed in the inside pocket of her jacket. It was a semi-automatic M 1923 model, a standard service pistol for the Italian Army from 1923 up to 1945. The pistol had a 4-inch barrel with a 7-shot detachable magazine. It had grooves for a shoulder holster machined into the bottom of the grip frame. It was one of those pistols the police had seized from some arms dealers.

  Ruby was more used to the big M 9 pistol, a standard issue for the US Army, with its nine-inch barrel. The M 1923 looked too small to her. Still, it was something.

  They were not wearing gloves as that would make it difficult to draw their guns and shoot. The cold had frozen their fingers—Ruby had to keep rubbing her hands to warm them.

  At 11 pm Hawa Singh made a check with all the posts, using the code assigned to each. It was all clear so far. Their hour had not come. They were not even sure when the killer would strike—the pattern only suggested that he would kill before dawn.

  Hawa Singh’s chest and arm felt better with the tapes Ruby had placed on them. But for the first time—in a long, long time—he was terrified. The darkness was more than darkness. The fog looked thicker than snow.

  He walked close to Ruby as they strode up and down the ghat. He nodded once or twice at her, intimating that things were under control. In the darkness, he tried to peer into her eyes. They reminded him of Kavita’s. He felt for, and caressed, her cheek. There wa
s a certain unspoken assurance in that gesture. That he was there. That he’d take care of her. What else did a girl need?

  The clock hands completed their lap. It was midnight. And another step took them into a fresh new day.

  30 January.

  The day of the dead.

  *

  He stood on high ground, surveying the little he could see of the scene below him. Dear friends. He had earlier watched Hawa Singh and that FBI girl on the ghat. And also several other armed policemen. Benares that night had turned into a fortress. He liked this Hawa Singh. The man was a fighter.

  He smiled, thinking, ‘Friends, can you stop me any more than you can stop the darkness or the fog? I appear and disappear just like them, at my will.’

  They had no idea who he was. He could have been one of those many reporters who daily queue outside the SSP office for juicy stories. Or he could be one of the policemen himself.

  He wanted to laugh. As those foolish policemen tried to hunt him down, they forgot the basic tenets of Vedic astrology. How many more signs did they want? Should he shout down to them? ‘Look, here I am!’ An expert astrologer can never go wrong. If the chart indicates death, even God will have to back off.

  He spread his hands out to the welcome night. ‘Ah, my Benares, they don’t know anything! They don’t want to know anything. The Ganges knows, but she can’t speak out. Blood will flow, like her. Blood that will cleanse everything.’

  He looked at the Cross in his hands. ‘First, they crucified you and then they started worshipping you. What kind of God are you? You couldn’t even defend yourself. So how can you defend the one that your Cross is going to kill? O Lord, protect the ones who are going to die!’ He nearly laughed out loud.

  He removed the blue contact lenses from his eyes. The deep black eyes now matched the darkness.

  CHAPTER 25

  It was a narrow confined space and he thrashed around it in a frenzy. He had scrambled up and down it on all fours, but it was walled in on all sides. He had been in many such spaces before, but he’d always managed to find his way out. Odd. He had to escape! He desperately wanted to meet his family. Surely they were out there, somewhere?

  But even his limited faculties told him he had no options. He smashed his body again against the solid mass surrounding him. There was one thing his scrambled brain registered: he would never succeed like this.

  If people could only see him now, he would have become a source of humour. Videos of him would have been shared on the social networking sites. Live humour today, after all, was derived from the misfortune of others. Compassion, love and romance were mocked at and pushed to the confines of cinema.

  He felt broken and defeated, and a terrible sadness engulfed him. Soon the struggle would be over. It was becoming difficult to breathe. The darkness danced around him and was closing in on him. He clawed at the walls, his fingers torn and bleeding.

  And then he realized he did indeed have a last option. He would chew through the wall with his own sharp teeth. He was a rat. He could find his way out of anywhere.

  Rats have excellent memories. Once they learnt a path—even through copper and aluminium—they never forget it. He started biting on the cold wall. Surprisingly, it started to flake off easily. He chewed at a fragment of it. It tasted a lot like flesh—only a little different. If he went on biting, tearing and cutting, he’d make a big enough hole to get out.

  Rats love being in a group of their own species, eating, playing and sleeping curled up inside each other. When rats don’t have company they feel lonely and desperately anxious. A group of rats is often called a ‘mischief’.

  *

  It was around 5 am on 30 January that the police control room got the call. Hawa Singh along with a sizeable force had been patrolling the entire night and everything seemed to be under control until the icy dawn. The Butcher had kept his word.

  Hawa Singh was in one of the numerous streets checking with the policemen blocking the narrow alleyways when he got the message on wireless. He drove through the deserted vegetable market in Rajendra Prasad Ghat, next to the Dashashwamedh. He stopped at an old building, the Man Mandir, erected by Maharaja Man Singh of Amber in around 1600. They jumped from the police jeep and ran up the stone steps to its terrace.

  It was on this terrace that Maharaja Savai Jai Singh II, the then Maharaja of Jaipur, had constructed an observatory. It was popularly called the Jantar-Mantar—much like similarly called observatories in Delhi and Jaipur. Jai Singh had been a great admirer of science and technology, but his reigning passion had been astronomy.

  Hawa Singh reached the head of the stairs and immediately saw the body lying there. The sight froze all those who followed in his wake. Despite all the precautions they had taken, the Butcher had had his way after all.

  They moved closer and saw the Cross sticking out from the chest of the corpse. Ruby pulled on her latex gloves before touching the body. The policemen switched on their heavy torches. It was the body of a male, smeared with ashes.

  Ruby made a closer examination. ‘There is a deep cavity in the upper left of the torso,’ she informed the rest. ‘It’s clear that the heart has been removed.’

  Hawa Singh turned away, looking at the Ganges flowing peacefully below. ‘The killer didn’t break his pattern,’ he said heavily. ‘We failed to look into the pattern. We forgot that astrology and astronomy went together. He still operated close to the Dashaswamedh Ghat, but we ignored such an important site right next to it.’ Hawa Singh kicked at a wall with frustration.

  Ruby continued with her examination. ‘Just like in the others,’ she told the men around her, ‘there are no marks of any struggle. The body is naked. The man looks strong, heavy and tall, approximately six feet and three inches. It would be difficult for anyone to kill such a strong man without a fight.’

  Hawa Singh came closer. He noticed what seemed like movement under the body. Everyone’s eyes glued themselves to the phenomenon. The gap in the body widened, and two beady eyes, followed by a small, furry body with a tail, emerged, looking inquisitively at the men pointing beams of light at it. The rat, fattened with blood and tissue, had fought its way out. It left a big hole in the stomach.

  While the men stood there, paralysed with shock, Hawa Singh and Ruby wondered the same thing: ‘Had the killer planned to put that rat in a hole under the body, knowing it would gorge on it and gouge its way out? Had he wanted to make the sight more gruesome than it already was?’

  They turned the body over with some effort, heavy and grown stiff already. There were no more signs on it except for the opening in the back that the rat had made to escape. But there was a hole in the cement in which the rat had been trapped for a while. Hawa Singh crouched and played a torch on it. There was the expected blood and tissue around the cement hole.

  And just next to it, the faint lines of a horoscope chart.

  A note for the next kill.

  Hawa Singh turned around and shouted, ‘Get Pandit Vishnu Shastri here, right now.’

  Sub-inspector Gaya Prasad ran down the steps, sensing the urgency. This was not the time for questions, arguments and discussions.

  The old, by-now-familiar pain shot through Hawa Singh’s head. He knew he might black out at any moment. He sat down to rest against the wall, holding his head in his hands, as if it was not a part of his body, and yet connected agonizingly to it.

  Seeing him crumple, Ruby rushed to him and handed him two aspirins from his pocket, forcing him to gulp them down without water.

  ‘You sit here till your head feels better,’ she said, briskly taking charge. ‘I’ll keep up with the investigation.’ Hawa Singh tried to nod, but his head threatened to explode with that small movement.

  Ruby, the interrogator, took over. She looked around and asked, ‘Okay, first tell me, who made the call to the police?’

  One of the police officers pushed forward a dark-skinned, heavy-built, altogether tough-looking man, ‘Madam, this is the Dom Raja, Sanjeet
Choudhary. He made the call.’

  Ruby walked up to the Dom Raja and looked directly into his eyes. She was looking for that slight flicker of the eyelids, the nervousness, the quivering of lips, and the hesitation in speech that indicated a liar.

  ‘Madam,’ Sanjeet Choudhary spoke with some fear, ‘I received a call on my cell phone about an unidentified body lying here in Jantar-Mantar. The caller told me to collect the body before sunrise. So I hurried right up here and saw this. I knew it was the work of that Butcher. I have read about it in the newspapers. I didn’t touch anything and made the call to the police.’

  ‘Good,’ said Ruby, approvingly.

  ‘What do you Doms do?’ Hawa Singh couldn’t resist calling out, despite the pain.

  ‘We are a community who are the cremators of the dead,’ he replied with pride, ‘and the keepers of the sacred fire in cremation grounds, which is never allowed to die down.’

  Even more proudly, he added, ‘We are the descendants of Kalu Dom, who worked as a cremation undertaker during the regime of Raja Harishchandra.’

  ‘What time did you get the call?’ Ruby resumed her questions.

  Sanjeet Choudhary took out a cheap cell phone and checked the log for received calls, saying, ‘It was 2.45 am.’

  ‘But you made the call to the police only after 4.30 am. What took you so long?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘Madam, every day we get such calls and the pyres keep burning all through the night. I was supervising a cremation and could leave only after 4 am.’

  ‘Trace the number from which the call was made,’ Ruby told the still silent policemen.

  Hawa Singh asked to be shown the Dom Raja’s cell phone. He checked the number and said, ‘This seems to be a public phone. We would never trace the killer from this. Still, try and follow up.’

  They sat there discussing the many possibilities of the killer’s leads. One of the policemen brought up some tea. Anything hot was welcome in that weather. Hawa Singh took out his flask and sipped on the whisky. The pain was slowly subsiding. He felt better.