THE BUTCHER OF BENARES Read online

  Naga sadhus cover their bodies with nothing more than ashes, supposedly as a mark that they consider their bodies dead and already cremated. For this they use the ashes of open fires, where they burn tree-trunks, the roots facing the sky. The trident is the only real physical thing they possess. And the only things they wear are the beads of Rudraksha. They believe that wearing eleven thousand Rudrakhsa beads will help them attain the form of Lord Shiva.

  To Hawa Singh, they looked like ghosts. He noticed that they were led by a man much fairer than the rest, with long dreadlocks and a heavy beard.

  As they reached the Ganges, they all gave way to their leader to first step into the waters. He took the dip and chanted, ‘Om namo Narayana!’ At that, the entire crowd of sadhus jumped into the icy waters.

  The leader of the Naga sadhus raised his hand in the air and the chanting stopped. He folded his hands and took a dip inside the waters. He was followed by the hundreds of sadhus who all momentarily disappeared under the waters. Suddenly, the water went still. There was no sound. The ghostly sadhus seemed to have vanished.

  On top of the water, something came floating by, something that looked like a white shroud. Then it came closer and closer. Hawa Singh could smell it. The taste of death intensified on his tongue.

  The mass of bearded, long-haired sadhus reappeared above water, throwing out air from their lungs. It took a moment for them to register the floating body and they parted to surround the dead body of a beautiful woman.

  Hawa Singh saw that the young woman had long blonde hair, which fanned in the water around her head. She was wearing a flowing white dress, and there were bloodstains on the breast. Her lips were painted bloody red and her eyes were closed. She looked serene as if she had slept while her heart pumped out blood from inside her body. There was no sign of pain on her face.

  The body came closer and the Naga sadhus scrambled out of the water. Hawa Singh could see that the body was fair-skinned and looked like it had belonged to a European or American.

  Then he saw a wooden stake stabbed into her heart.

  ‘Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.’

  — Mark Twain

  CHAPTER 1

  The prospect of a bullet that could quickly put an end to the miseries of life holds allure to some. But those who wish to die in Benares have to wait. Death in the City of Moksha does not come that simply.

  Thousands come to Benares every year, looking for mukti, or release from the cycle of rebirth and death. Seventy-nine-year-old Fauja Singh had a similar pursuit in mind, when he asked his only son to accompany him to the holy city.

  They had taken a room at Mukti Bhawan, just a short walk from the river. This place is the preferred last destination—a final stopover—for elderly Hindus. Their hope is to end up on one of the hundreds of funeral pyres on the sacred Harishchandra Ghat, lit for cremation each day.

  Mukti Bhawan, or Salvation House, offers twelve bare rooms arranged around a courtyard in a hundred-year-old red-brick building with green shutters. While those who can afford to pay their electricity and food bills do so, the poorest families pay nothing.

  After checking in at the hostel, a guest has two weeks to die or else they are gently asked to leave. Between thirty and seventy people die here every month.

  It had already been five days since Hawa Singh brought in his father to the Bhawan. They had been given two blankets and bedsheets to sleep on the hard cement floor. The yellow paint on the walls was peeling and bore the marks of dampness and seepage. The cold was terrible.

  Fauja Singh munched on a hot oily kachori, saying, ‘I’m not going to eat their dead food. I’m not dead yet. I want to taste all the delicacies of Benares before I attain moksha. Do you hear me?’

  Hawa Singh, lost in his thoughts and waiting for a phone call, just nodded. He had made the call to the local police about discovering the body in the Ganges at Dashashwamedh Ghat. He knew the police procedure and that he could be called in any time to record his statement.

  ‘Tell me one thing. Once I achieve salvation, what will happen to my soul? Will it merge with God? Will I become part of God?’ asked Fauja Singh, popping a large gulaab jamun into his mouth.

  But Hawa Singh had never given thought to the concept of rebirth. For him the human body was like a non-rechargeable battery, one with a limited life. The battery finally loses its charge and dies. The End.

  ‘What the hell has happened to you? Here I’m talking about my death and you are fiddling with your cell phone. You policemen will never understand spirituality. I’m telling you, you are never going to attain moksha.’

  Hawa Singh looked up at his father and shouted with gritted teeth, ‘I don’t want moksha and I don’t want to see God! I have seen enough deaths to understand there is no God.’

  ‘Oh, so you think you can defy death with your guns?’ the old man shot back. ‘It was God who saved you with that bullet still stuck in your head. There will come a time when you will want to die, but death will not come. Dying a good death is as important as living a good life. Death is the ultimate bliss.’

  ‘Enough!’ warned his son. ‘I don’t want to hear another of your lectures on death and salvation. I have enough problems on my mind.’

  ‘You have nothing but a bullet in your head. Fool! Come, I’ll make you a big one.’

  Fauja Singh took a bottle of rum out from his rucksack with a naughty smile, ‘This is going to perk you up big time.’

  He poured rum into two steel tumblers with his big hands. There was a time when these very hands had punched the wind out of top international boxers. Fauja Singh had won two consecutive gold medals in the heavyweight category at the Asian Games during the ’60s. On his third outing, he was disqualified on technical points.

  The infuriated Fauja Singh proceeded to punch one of the judges of the tournament. That one punch threw Fauja Singh’s life out of gear. He was barred from the Indian Boxing Association and was banned from competing in any sporting event. Those were times when, in India, people didn’t even respect the sport of boxing. One of the greatest champs of Indian sparring was plucked out and thrown into anonymity.

  From then on, Fauja Singh did odd jobs to take care of his family. Finally, he settled in his village, near the Delhi border, in Haryana, to work on the fields. His wife died early due to tuberculosis and he single-handedly raised their only child, Hawa Singh.

  Hawa Singh had inherited all the qualities of his father—a short temper, the tall and wide frame, the big hands and the strength of a boxer. Only a strong man would survive a bullet in his head. Fauja wanted him to take up a secure government job and Hawa Singh ended up in Delhi Police.

  He was the most ferocious of his force, the most daring, and had the most number of problems with his seniors, although that did not prevent him from acquiring a long list of commendations. They had not been able to throw him out. They needed him to face the bullets. The war never stopped for Hawa Singh.

  Fauja Singh had developed a serious heart problem and the doctors gave up on him. The champion who once weighed ninety kilograms was reduced to a body weight of fifty-five. The bones protruded under his skin, giving him the look of a skeleton covered with a thin layer of tissue.

  In Benares, Fauja decided that he wouldn’t complain or cry. He would instead make the most of his last days. So he indulged in all the delicious food and drink he could avail of.

  ‘Soon, I’m going to be with God so I don’t need these priests—or any doctors—to teach me anything. I am going to be on a one-to-one with the Almighty Himself.’

  Little did the sellers of moksha know that soon this father-son duo would make Benares cry for salvation.

  Fauja handed the steel tumbler of rum to Hawa Singh. Father and son looked at each other and brought the glasses together, saying, ‘Cheers!’

  ‘Cheers to your life and cheers to my death,’ said Fauja Singh smilingly.
r />   With that, they did a bottoms-up. The dark rum caused a pleasant burn, bringing warmth and a heady determination to go on with whatever life they had lived as they pleased.

  Finally, the cell phone rang.

  *

  Hawa Singh walked through the narrow lanes of the old city. These galis, or lanes, are a maze. He walked hurriedly, cutting through a group of students dressed in saffron, going to their Sanskrit lessons, and vendors selling artefacts and sweetmeats on the sides of the lanes. There were kids flying kites on the tops of their houses, girls learning Kathak in a courtyard. The sounds of the shehnai and flute emanated from some corners, along with the fragrance of incense and flowers that mixed with the stink rising from the open drains and garbage strewn around.

  The sound of temple bells never seemed to stop in Benares. They were a constant reminder that you were in a holy city. Hawa Singh saw many people who had come from all parts of the globe in search of peace, spirituality or to gain wisdom. He could never understand it. For him Benares was just a city that stank.

  The only source of comfort was the marijuana freely available in various forms. One could smoke it, eat it or drink it mixed with milk, tea or lassi. Hawa Singh preferred to eat the small laddus, the form in which they were sold from government-owned stalls. They were not perceived as a drug but as the prasad of Lord Shiva who was said to have founded this ancient city, once called Kashi.

  The little balls of bhang, along with country-made liquor, had become his constant companions on the dark highway called life.

  Hawa Singh came out onto the main road and took a rickshaw to the office of the city’s senior superintendent of police. To prepare himself for such official meetings, he preferred marijuana over alcohol, as it didn’t smell and eased the pain in his head.

  Sitting on the rickshaw, he looked around at the riot of colours in the market. The tourists, along with daily-wage workers, crowded around the shops selling hot samosas, kachoris dipped in potato-and-peas curry, golden jalebis filled with sugar syrup and hot milk laden with dry fruits.

  A sharp, stinging pain took over his head as the images of the floating body returned to him. Then he saw the Naga sadhus gasping for air as they came out from their dip in the waters. The naked, ash-smeared Shiva worshippers, the self-claimed authorities on the Hindu way of life, were known for their austere living and quickly aroused temper. They were possessive of their lot, and would go to any lengths to protect and guard what they considered sacred.

  Hawa Singh spotted the old dilapidated building which housed the SSP’s office. Some fresh paint had been applied in a vain attempt to hide the many cracks and peeling plaster. A few saffron-clad sadhus were on the road outside, with a group of young and restless foreigners tailing them—in search of God.

  The crime rate in Benares had never made it to the headlines, in spite of the attacks by fanatic Hindu organizations on film crews and young romancing couples, cases of thefts, missing persons—most of whom were elderly people abandoned by their families on the many ghats, some sporadic murders—but nothing that commanded the attention of the world outside Benares.

  The long corridors of the SSP’s office were guarded by lazy policemen. The warm sun on a cold day had made them drowsy. Hawa Singh walked past them with a stride that spoke of confidence gained by diving headlong into many battles. This office had nothing to do with those, stinking as they did of inactive bureaucratic stench. He hated the air here.

  The SSP’s office was at the end of the corridor. Hawa Singh saw the big nameplate stuck on the door: ‘Neeraj Thakur, SSP, Benares district’. He was the man who controlled the entire police force there—a veritable army.

  A thought crossed Hawa Singh’s mind. ‘What would happen if the entire police force went on strike? Will the animal instinct tempt people to prowl the streets looking for prey, or have we become civilized enough to take charge of our affairs? Maybe the fear created by the police keeps us grounded and civilized. You can domesticate animals, keep them as pets, but you need to keep them on leash so they do not to cross the line.’

  He shrugged off his thoughts and, before the guard at the door could stop him, Hawa Singh entered the office. Right ahead on the wall was the huge emblem of the Uttar Pradesh Police and underneath it sat the top boss of Benares Police.

  Neeraj Thakur, forty-seven years old, looked like the foodie he was—round. He was dressed in finery, his immaculate uniform adorned with the Ashoka emblem and several stars and medallions. The wall on each side of the office was covered with the statistics of solved cases. In front of Neeraj Thakur sat his coterie of junior officers, munching on hot samosas and slurping sugary tea.

  Hawa Singh walked up to desk and said, ‘I was asked to come and meet you here. I’m Hawa Singh, senior inspector, Delhi crime branch.’

  The SSP and others looked up at him, astonished.

  ‘Well, if you want to finish your breakfast, please carry on. I’ll come back later.’

  The SSP laughed. ‘Hawa Singh, this is Benares. Wherever we meet to talk, first we eat. I have heard a lot about you, and finally, we get to meet.’

  The SSP and Hawa Singh shook hands. The SSP looked at the officers. ‘This man looks like a boxer or a wrestler,’ he said. ‘Look at his massive hands.’ Turning to his visitor, he added, ‘Just don’t break mine!’

  ‘No, sir, I’m just a policeman. It’s my father who was a boxer.’

  ‘See, didn’t I tell you? Tell me, is it really true that the size of one’s palm is equal to the size of one’s dick?’ laughed the SSP.

  The gang of police officers cackled. Hawa Singh hated such jokes at times of crisis. He could clearly see that none of them was capable of handling a sensitive case, nor had they ever stepped out of the confines of these walls.

  ‘Well, sir, can we get down to work?’ he asked the senior officer. ‘It seems you wish to take down my statement, as it was I who had discovered the body and made the call to the police.’

  The SSP got up and walked around Hawa Singh. He placed his hand on his shoulder, in an attempt at propitiating him. ‘It is a very serious case,’ he conceded. ‘A foreigner has been found murdered. The report has gone to Delhi as we had to inform to the embassy.’

  ‘Have you been able to identify her?’ asked Hawa Singh.

  The SSP’s tone suddenly changed to one of anger. ‘What do you think we have been doing here? She is a US citizen and was murdered with that wooden stake. The body has been sent for autopsy and we should get the report by this evening.’

  ‘So, sir, what do you want from me?’

  ‘Well, the Home Minister knows about your presence in Benares and he has specifically asked you to help us in this case. Maybe they want to hang you soon.’

  ‘It’s your territory, and I came here only to accompany my father, who wished to die here.’

  ‘Now, it’s your neck in the noose. I don’t want you to step out of line, get in our way, or hamper our investigation in any way. Everyone comes here for mukti and I hope you get yours. Understood?’

  Hawa Singh nodded in affirmation.

  Neeraj Thakur sat back in his chair and looked at Hawa Singh. ‘So how do you wish to start?’

  A faint smile crossed his lips, as Hawa Singh thought, ‘So, they have not even started yet.’

  ‘Well, sir,’ he put the question to the SSP, ‘How did you figure out that she was a US citizen?’

  One of the junior police officers spoke up, ‘We found the receipt of her hotel bill in her pocket. We searched the room and found the passport. It’s that straight and simple.’

  Hawa Singh knew that these idiots had ransacked the entire room. It would be difficult to find any more clues there.

  ‘Did you find anything else on the body?’ asked Hawa Singh.

  The SSP pushed a large brown paper envelope across the high wooden desk towards Hawa Singh, saying, ‘Everything that we found on the body is here. You can check it for yourself.’

  Hawa Singh was aghast that thes
e guys hadn’t taken any precaution to avoid tampering with the evidence. He looked at the SSP and nodded. Then, very carefully, he removed and laid down the items from inside the envelope.

  First to come out was a long chain with the Holy Cross dangling from it. It looked like it was made of steel but could have been platinum or white gold. The next object Hawa Singh placed on the table was an ID card with a clip to wear it around a belt or on a jacket pocket. It was clear that the woman preferred to wear Western clothes.

  Hawa Singh looked at the ID card and read out, ‘Eva Marie Cassidy, age 31 years, research scientist working with the Vatican Observatory Research Group.’

  Then he saw the seal of His Holiness, the Pope.

  Hawa Singh failed to find the connection between the Vatican and one of the oldest Hindu cities in the world, Benares. He fumbled and asked, ‘Where is that wooden stake?’

  The SSP took out a sealed plastic bag from a drawer and placed it on his desk. At least they had taken care not to smudge the fingerprints.

  In the early hours of dawn, when Hawa Singh first saw the body, he had not been able to fully see the shape and contours of the wooden stake. To him, it looked like another dagger. Now, he saw it up close.

  He saw that it had a pointed end and that the wood was polished, probably teak. It was approximately an inch-and-a-half thick and twelve inches long. Deadly. Dangerous. It had achieved its purpose.

  He tried to figure out why anyone would use a wooden stake to kill. Why not simply use a knife or a dagger?

  It was then that he saw the hilt. It was in the form of a cross.

  The Holy Cross.

  CHAPTER 2

  It was 3 am, and a thick layer of fog shrouded off this part of the Earth from its satellites. Below it, the inhabitants of Benares could hardly make out the numerous stars in the vast sky. Their very breath condensed into vapour and mixed with the fog. The Ganges looked like it was boiling, as the foggy smoke rose from its waters.