THE BUTCHER OF BENARES Page 3

  This was the time when ghosts or vampires ventured out. This was also Hawa Singh’s favourite time for conducting investigations. This was the time when most people were deep in sleep, but for Hawa Singh it was just the start of day. It was not surprising that they called him the Ghost.

  He had repeatedly requested Neeraj Thakur that he be allowed to go through Eva’s hotel room. But the SSP had denied him permission, saying, ‘We have already searched the place and collected all the evidence. Now the room is sealed, and only with the permission of the court can it be re-opened for further examination.’

  Finally, the Ghost had decided to knock on the door himself.

  According to the police reports, Eva Marie Cassidy had been staying at Yogi Palace in Karthik Gali, close to Dashashwamedh Ghat. Hawa Singh waded through the thick fog as the street dogs barked and howled at him. He was smoking a bidi for warmth. He disliked cigarettes because of the filters, and the chemicals they put in the tobacco. This was perfect. Nothing came between the tobacco, the drag and the smoke.

  He felt the icy-cold body of his constant companion, a Colt .45 that he kept tucked in at his back. He preferred this to the service pistol policemen were issued. He had snatched it from a Russian arms dealer in Paharganj. Since then it had become his weapon of choice and had stood right by him in many encounters.

  It was called the peacemaker, a fire-arm forbidden even in America. Hawa Singh preferred to use cross-filed bullets that could singly kill an elephant. If you shoot it at a man from a distance of five metres, the bullet makes a wound as big as a dinner plate. Hawa Singh kept the trigger filed to make it quick and more sensitive. He could have taken down six Clint Eastwoods in a matter of five seconds with his Colt. It made him dirtier than Dirty Harry.

  Through the fog he could see a bulb shining above a signboard. As he stepped closer he saw it was a board painted in yellow, with hand-written black letters: ‘Yogi Palace, The Best And The Cheapest. All Are Invited.’

  Hawa Singh took his hands out from the pockets of his leather jacket and felt the chill running into his veins. His heavy stubble worked as a light cover for his face but his crew-cut left his scalp cold. The bullet inside was slowly absorbing the cold and, soon, his vision could turn foggy.

  The main door was a glass one and there was no one outside. The Ghost sneaked in and saw a man snoring at the reception desk. He looked at the rate card: ‘Dormitory—Rs 150’, ‘Double Bedroom—Rs 500’, ‘Single Room—Rs 650’, ‘Private Room—Rs 800’ and ‘Ganges View Room—Rs 1000.

  ‘Not bad at all. This is the true haven for all backpackers in Benares,’ thought Hawa Singh.

  The Yogi Palace was more of a cheap lodge and nothing of a palace. Still, the clean rooms and cheap accommodation, and the proximity to the Ganges attracted a lot of foreigners.

  Totally uncaring of disturbing anyone, he climbed up the creaky stairs, his heavy boots clomping. He knew that Eva had taken up a single room on the first floor. There had to be something there that the local police had missed.

  As he walked up to the room, he saw that the room was sealed with a big lock on the door, wrapped in a white cloth and bearing the insignia of the Uttar Pradesh Police. Any attempt to break in would destroy the seal. Hawa Singh knew that the window inside the room, which overlooked the street, would be sealed too.

  Hawa Singh had entered many such sealed rooms. He took out his Swiss knife and unscrewed the entire bolt. It was a fake Swiss knife that he had bought for a Rs 100 or so from Karol Bagh Market in Delhi. He was fascinated by the multi-tool device and always kept it by him.

  There was another wire that was wound around the two handles of the door, also sealed. He unscrewed the two handles—and the Ghost ‘walked’ in through ‘sealed’ doors.

  Hawa Singh had been a policeman for fifteen years. During that time several of his colleagues had been killed in the line of fire. It had hit him hard every time it happened and he was painfully aware of how dangerous his work was. But the risk itself, the fear and the nervousness involved in it, had kept him alive. The fear bestowed on him the spirit to stay alive, to win against all odds. If there was no fear, heroes wouldn’t be heroes.

  He stepped inside the room. It was neat and tidy. There was a single bed carefully made up, with a bedsheet tucked in and a blue bedcover over it. A wooden table with a reading lamp on it stood by the bed, along with a foldable, rusted aluminium chair. A simple wardrobe stood opposite the bed, close to the attached bathroom. The walls were painted a light blue, adorned by framed pictures of Lord Shiva and the ghats of Benares.

  The floor was of cheap imitation marble, and Hawa Singh could make out hundreds of footprints left there, courtesy the local police. They must have swarmed in like a herd of hippos to take charge and had ruined all possible prints.

  Hawa Singh stepped closer to the study table and saw there were a few books piled on top—a travel guide on India, a book telling the history of Benares, another about many Hindu gods and goddesses, and underneath them all, a book on Vedic astrology.

  He could make out another pile of oily prints on the books. The policemen must have flipped through the books in the hope of finding a love letter or some nude pictures of the white girl. However, they had left the books lying there, deeming them the useless things that foreigners seem to find fascinating.

  Politicians say the police profession calls for the highest intelligence and exceptional mental, physical and moral qualities. Hawa Singh knew differently.

  Many high-profile and sensitive cases had been botched by untrained policemen who merely trampled over the scene of a crime. They brought in another pack of apes, the journos, to show them around the place for photo opportunities. By the time the forensics arrived, everything was a mess. Then, when the local police failed, the Central Bureau of Investigation—the CBI—was called in. By that time, they had nothing to go on.

  He looked under the bed, under the mattress, but found nothing. He opened the cupboard and met with a strong waft of some feminine fragrance. The local police seemed to have taken away all the young woman’s possessions. He opened one of the drawers and saw a few beads of Rudraksha—another pet purchase of foreign tourists in Benares.

  He looked at the bathroom door. It was made of plastic, to cut the cost of a more expensive wooden one. Inside the bathroom were a few leftover bottles of shampoo, bath gel, sunscreen lotion, a tube of toothpaste and a few twigs of neem, something used by locals to clean their teeth.

  The dustbin contained old newspapers that had once wrapped oily samosas or kachoris. The policemen must have brought these with them.

  On the plastic door, there was a picture of Hanuman ripping his chest apart to show Lord Ram and Sita residing in his heart. The celibate Hanuman clearly had to watch nude guests during their ablutions in the bathroom day after day.

  There was nothing that yielded a clue. Hawa Singh looked for signs of blood but there were none.

  The question that rose to mind, was, ‘Was she killed inside the room and then dumped in the Ganges? Or was she killed somewhere else?’

  He found some traces of ash in a corner of the bathroom. It looked like cigarette ash. He touched it with a finger and smelled it. A familiar smell. Then he tasted it. It was weed.

  In all, it seemed Eva had been quite adventurous. She had wanted to soak in the local flavour, grew interested in the myriad colours of Hinduism and tried all the stuff associated with its mystic side.

  Hawa Singh turned and stood at the bathroom door looking inside the room thinking, ‘There has to be something here.’

  He was not a married man, but from his limited experience of the opposite sex, he knew that all women loved to collect things. They have their own memorabilia. It could be gifts received from their first boyfriend, the wrappers of chocolate bars, birthday cards, pictures, a diary or a scrapbook.

  He had already gone through the pictures in Eva’s digital camera that lay with the local police. It contained all the usual touristy pictures o
f temples, ghats, boats in the river, burning pyres, the narrow lanes, shops and dishevelled sadhus. However, they had not yet found her cell phone.

  The police had informed the Vatican Observatory on the mail id they found on her ID badge. Her body would be sent to her family in the US. The Vatican had made a special request to the Indian government to look into the murder and had also requested the American investigative agency, the FBI, to help with the Indian investigation.

  The FBI had chosen one of their young and highly trained agents, Ruby Malik, to be sent to Benares to work with the police and apprehend the killer.

  Hawa Singh had no idea about all this. For him, it was more about fighting the darker forces and keeping himself alive. The more he worked, analyzed and investigated, the more his brain kept up with him. The moment he slackened, the bullet started to pinch.

  He looked at the bed and thought, ‘Women are not the ones to keep things under or inside their mattresses. But they do keep stuff close to or under their pillows.’

  There was nothing. Maybe it had been cleared by the local police.

  The cupboard.

  Hawa Singh thought, ‘The cupboard is usually the place where everything is piled by women. They prefer to have diaries with locks, notepads and stick-on notes, along with an army of markers and stickers. This is their temple. They keep it covered and won’t allow their husbands, boyfriends and even mothers to look inside. It is their world.’

  Hawa Singh maintained that one look at the contents of a cupboard told you about the kind of person using it—organized, structured or just plain messy.

  He went to the wardrobe again. He opened it but there was still nothing. There were sheets of newspapers lining the shelves. He removed the paper but there was nothing underneath it.

  He moved his fingers along the line of shelves, hoping against hope to find something stuck there. Nothing.

  He opened the drawers. Empty.

  The shoe box. Dust.

  Hawa Singh bent closer to look at the dust. It was red sand. There was hardly any sand of this colour in and around the Ganges.

  ‘Where did this come from?’ he mused.

  As he bent to look into the shoe box, he raised his eyes to one of the open drawers. Inside it, he could see another box. One feature you would find in most Indian almirahs. They’re used to keep jewellery and other precious items.

  Hawa Singh put in his hand and felt something. It was a small pocket diary. He flipped through it and saw some telephone numbers written on a page. There was a name underneath them. He tore out the page and pocketed it.

  There was something else. Bigger.

  It was a framed picture of Baba Ramtirath, the leader of the Naga sadhus. He wore a soft smile, his deep blue eyes twinkling behind his rimless glasses.

  At the bottom of the photograph, he had signed: ‘For Eva, with lots of love, Baba Ramtirath’.

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘The idea of the existence of some religion called Hinduism was created by Western imperialists out of a desire to describe the world according to the system of their own values. It is impossible to estimate the ancient world from the point of view of the modern one. Hinduism is a way of life, not a religion. It was there even before Judaism, Christianity and Islam came into being. It is the true way to the supreme goal—realizing God. And we Naga babas are an ancient and wild order of naked yogis whom I call the “Hell’s Angels” of Indian spirituality,’ intoned Baba Ramtirath, the head of the Naga sadhus, while talking to a group of media persons.

  Baba Ramtirath was unlike other Naga sadhus. He had deep-set blue eyes and fair skin. A flowing peppered beard completed the resemblance to Tolstoy. He was actually an American, born and brought up in California. It was during the ’70s when, as an eighteen-year-old young man, he wandered to India and met with the Naga sadhus.

  He was struck by their way of life, and became a disciple of a Naga baba, a master shaman sadhu from Rajasthan. As foretold by an astrological prophecy, he soon found himself the first foreigner to become an initiate of the Juna Akhara, the oldest and largest grouping of Naga babas, with more than 200,000 members.

  At the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar, in 2010, Baba was honoured with a permanent seat in the Juna Akhara Council and given the title Antahrashtriya Mandal ka Shri Mahant (World Circle Guide).

  But the spiritual path wasn’t quite what the young Ramtirath had expected. He was accused of using his tantric powers to murder his own guru. That accusation remained a riddle to be solved. His life was full of accounts of magic, miracles, ghosts, and austerities. He was a mystic who bore the true heart of India.

  He had led more than five thousand Naga sadhus for a bath in the Ganges on the sacred day of Makar Sankranti. The entire ritual was disrupted by the body of a murdered woman that floated in between them. Taking it as a sign from the universe that the dark forces were gathering together their powers, Baba Ramtirath had organized a huge Shiva puja to protect the holy city of Benares.

  Hundreds of naked Naga sadhus covered in ash, squatted, smoking chillums filled with marijuana. The media people had left and Baba Ramtirath was giving directions to prepare for the big puja.

  Hawa Singh, dressed in his usual leather jacket, leather boots and an old pair of faded jeans, walked up to meet Shri Mahant Baba Ramtirath.

  As he moved ahead, he was stopped by Naga sadhus holding tridents. He could see that there was an organized structure to the mass of sadhus. They sat in circles, one within the other, making a kind of a barrier around their leader. It was not easy to break through this as these Nagas were jealously loyal, ruthless, and could kill with their bare hands.

  Hawa Singh cleared his throat and shouted, ‘Police! I need to talk to your leader.’

  The sadhus looked at him and one of them went to inform the Mahant. Through the mass of sadhus, Hawa Singh could only see two blue eyes peering from behind the thick, round rimless spectacles. Then the eyes settled on him.

  For the past two days, Hawa Singh had been running from the SSP office to the government hospital to get the autopsy report. However, they didn’t have an expert to conduct the post-mortem and they had to wait for one to come from Allahabad.

  The local police and the SSP office had been of no help to Hawa Singh. On the other hand, his father, Fauja Singh, was constantly on his case as the old man wanted Hawa’s constant company in his last days.

  Hawa Singh himself had gone to the government hospital to study Eva’s body. She was lying on the steel platform, almost melding with the cold white metal. He saw that she was of medium height, five feet, six inches. She had brown hair with streaks of blonde. She must have dyed it.

  Her face was not exactly beautiful but she had good features, with a shapely nose and thin lips. The eyes were grey, below very thin eyebrows. There was something about death that changed the face of a living person into cold marble. With her body having been in water, the skin had become paler. Yet, she had not bloated a lot.

  It was clear that she had not been in water for long before her body was discovered.

  One question haunted him. Did the killer walk past him carrying her when he lay passed out on the ghat? Was it possible that the killer threw her in the water right before Hawa Singh’s sleeping eyes?

  The killer may have stepped over his prostrate form, a thought that would add to his nightmares.

  He had gone back to the ghat to look for clues. There were no signs. It came as a consolation that the killer may have been on the opposite bank of the river, and that he never came up to the ghat itself.

  Hawa Singh had checked the young woman’s hands for any signs of struggle or wounds. The fingers were long and artistic. She definitely was not used to any manual work.

  The thing that shocked him was the gaping hole in her chest. The medic conducting the autopsy confirmed that Eva’s heart was wrenched out while she was still alive. The wooden stake had been stabbed in later, after her death, into the very place where her heart had been.

  Howeve
r, there were no signs of sexual violence or even struggle on her body. Hawa Singh specifically checked her wrists, her feet and the neck area to ascertain whether she had been tied up before the entire ritual of killing began.

  Apart from that, a few pieces of paper had been found in her stomach. They contained blurred drawings with some chants pertaining to Hindu astrology. Nothing could be made of that.

  This connection of an astronomer with astrology confounded Hawa Singh.

  He tried to gather as much information about the Vatican Observatory from the Net. He found that the Vatican Observatory is one of the oldest astronomical research institutions in the world. Originally based in the Roman College of Rome, it now has headquarters and a laboratory at the summer residence of the Pope in Castel Gandolfo, Italy.

  The Vatican Observatory Research Group operates the 1.8m Alice P. Lennon Telescope with its Thomas J. Bannan Astrophysics Facility, known together as the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT) funded by the Vatican and directly under the Pope.

  However, nothing seemed to fit for Hawa Singh. A research scientist working with the Vatican studying the vast galaxies, the presence of Hindu astrological drawings, Baba Ramtirath’s signed picture, the removal of Eva’s heart, and then her being dumped into the Ganges impaled by a Holy Cross. Hawa Singh decided to meet directly with Baba Ramtirath.

  He was trying to break through the ring surrounding him when, suddenly, two massive hands started to frisk him. A strongly built sadhu pulled out his Colt and looked at it with a smile. Then he threw it down to the others sitting in a circle. They passed it around, examining it with amazement. The Naga sadhu who had frisked Hawa Singh pushed him ahead.

  Hawa Singh could feel the raw power in that gentle push. The Naga sadhus were a tough lot. Even when they went high up into the snow-covered mountains of the Himalayas, they stayed there for months on end in the same condition—unclothed, and persevering with the same austerities.