The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing

Ten

National Highway 58, which ran for 334 miles northeast of Delhi, had been under construction for nearly a decade. The few sections that had been completed between Ghaziabad and the holy city of Haridwar offered three smooth lanes in both directions. Drivers reaching one of these stretches experienced instant elation, as if they had entered a vehicular promised land where there were no tedious, terrestrial speed limits.

But the euphoria was short-lived. After just a few miles, each tarmac tract ended abruptly in a rugged tear – the destructive influence of corruption and ineptitude, and not, as it perhaps appeared, an act of God. Even the most robust of vehicles had to brake suddenly and inch down sharp inclines into a purgatory of rutted, potholed tracks.

Windows were hastily rolled up as tires stirred clouds of fine white dust. Through this choking pall, drivers and passengers passed laborers with bleached faces breaking piles of rocks with chisels and crude hammers. Rows of concrete supports for half-complete flyovers appeared suddenly, giant and potentially lethal obstacles. Rusty construction equipment stood idle like tanks abandoned by a fleeing army.

That Puri was able to sleep soundly through all this – head back, mouth agape, snoring loudly – was thanks to an inherited but yet-to-be-identified Punjabi gene that endowed him with the power to snooze through almost anything. But it helped that he was exhausted from his encounter yesterday with the cricket bat in Dr. Jha’s office followed by a long day of interviews.

It had been almost eleven o’clock by the time he reached the Mount Kailash Hotel, a seedy ‘businessman’s lodge’ off Connaught Place, where he had spent an hour.

Room 312 had been registered to ‘Miss Neena’, who had an understanding with the discreet manager.

‘Miss Neena’ was but one of the lovely young woman’s aliases. Indeed, she used so many that even Puri, who had been making use of her services for nearly five years, sometimes lost track of who she was pretending to be at any given time.

Had she ever told him her real name? he sometimes wondered.

What he knew of her past was certainly sketchy, pieced together from scraps of information.

Originally from Kathmandu, she had run away from home as a teenager to join the Maoist rebels, undergone combat training in a camp in the mountains and taken part in numerous guerrilla operations against the Nepali state. During one of them, she had witnessed or experienced something terrible. Disillusioned with the cause, she had fled and escaped to India.

For the next few years, she had rambled across northern India. She spent a year with a traveling theater troupe in Assam and worked as a bar girl in Mumbai and an ayah for a wealthy Delhi family. In between, there had been a marriage that ended disastrously.

Puri had also noted the following characteristics about her: she didn’t trust the opposite sex; considered alcohol nothing short of evil; was a night owl; could handle herself in a fight better than most men.

There was a distinct possibility that she had a child (a couple of times on the phone he had heard crying in the background). But Puri had never visited her home or pried into her private life.

Indeed, despite her secretive nature, their relationship was based on mutual trust. They had met in Mumbai during the Case of the Deaf Dabawallah when Puri had saved her life. Subsequently, she had moved to Delhi to work for him as an undercover operative.

Given her talent for blending into almost any situation and ‘putting on so many of faces’, he had dubbed her Facecream.

Now he was asking her to take on a task that would stretch even her considerable resources: to infiltrate the Abode of Eternal Love, Maharaj Swami’s ashram north of Haridwar.

Last night, in the Mount Kailash Hotel, she had listened attentively to Puri’s briefing.

“Frankly speaking, thus far, nothing has come to light linking Swami-ji directly with the murder,” he’d told her. “But I am in possession of Dr. Jha’s file on ‘His Holiness’ and grounds for investigation are there – no doubt about it at all. Dr. Jha spoke to three of Swami-ji’s ex-associates – naturally it was off record – and seems our Godman is very much active in money laundering for politicians. This Abode of Eternal Love is also Abode of Washing Machines, we might say. Black money goes in and comes out white.

“Through Right to Information Act,” Puri had continued, “Dr. Jha was endeavoring to prove Swami-ji’s corrupt practices. Thus, he had petitioned for financial statements of numerous ashram bank accounts in India and Switzerland to be made public. Thus Dr. Jha had become a thorn in Swami-ji’s side.”

“Dr. Jha had political enemies,” Facecream had pointed out. “It could have been one of them who killed him.”

“Bullets delivered to the backs of heads are more their style, no?”

Puri had also briefed Facecream on what Manish the Magnificent had told him about Maharaj Swami’s secret past and about his being an obsessive hoarder of personal memorabilia. He left the file with her to study.

On the journey along Highway 58 this morning, she had been reading through the information Dr. Jha had acquired about the death in April at the ashram of twenty-six-year-old devotee Manika Gill. There were press cuttings, copies of police reports, ‘witness’ statements and affidavits from the girl’s family. Dr. Jha’s notes and transcripts of interviews he had conducted with some of her friends and the local farmer who had found the body lying facedown in the river were also included.

Facecream was able to glean the following:

Prior to coming to the ashram, Manika, whose father was a wealthy jeweler, had been a ‘rebellious type’. During her late teens and early twenties, she had ‘entered into’ a number of casual sexual relationships. At twenty-five, she had found herself pregnant. At her father’s insistence, she had ‘gone in for’ an abortion. Naturally this was hushed up; apart from her parents, only her best friend, Neetu Chandra, had known about it.

Soon after, Mr. and Mrs. Gill, who were both devotees of Maharaj Swami, had escorted their disgraced daughter to the Abode of Eternal Love and implored their guru to give her ‘direction’. Manika had found the place ‘tedious and boring’ at first but then had undergone a ‘spiritual awakening’. According to several different sources, she had seen a vision during a special darshan conducted by the Godman.

Neetu Chandra said Manika ‘wasn’t the same person’ after that. All she talked about was Maharaj Swami. The two drifted apart. Seven months passed. Then on the night she died, at around eight o’clock in the evening, Neetu received a distressing call from her friend.

“She wasn’t making much sense. Just babbling about how she hadn’t slept in days and she’d been having these terrible nightmares. I told her to get the hell out of that bloody freak show, but she said she couldn’t trust anyone. She said she’d told her parents but they didn’t believe her. Told them what? I asked. She didn’t answer. She sounded afraid, just broke down in tears. I told her to stay put and I’d drive up to fetch her.”

Neetu Chandra had set off from Delhi early the next morning. By the time she arrived, Manika had been discovered drowned in the Ganges. The police had quickly concluded that she had gone for a swim near the ashram at eleven o’clock at night.

Mr. and Mrs. Gill maintained that their daughter had drowned by accident. But according to Manika’s friends, she couldn’t swim and was scared of the water.

No suicide note was discovered.

Handbrake, at the wheel of the Mercedes four-wheel drive Puri had hired in order to make the right impression at Maharaj Swami’s ashram, turned off Highway 58 south of Haridwar. The single-lane road passed through waterlogged, emerald-green paddy fields fed by the mountain meltwater of the Ganges. Here and there, farmers stood in mud up to their ankles tending to their crops, and zebu, humped oxen, dragged wooden plows through the rich, oozing mire.

The holy city of Haridwar, where drops of the elixir of immortality are believed to have been spilled by the celestial bird Garuda, announced itself with a line of budget hotels with names like Disney Inn. The idyllic rice fields gave way to the all-too-familiar detritus of dusty dhabas, vegetable carts and car-repair shops with oil-stained forecourts.

Skirting to the east of the old city, the Mercedes crossed over the fast-running cobalt waters of the Ganges. A giant statue of Shiva, his neck garlanded with a spitting cobra, towered over the road. Behind the deity lay the Har ki Pauri steps, where millions come every year to bathe and cleanse their sins, and behind them the white domes and peaked rooftops of temples, shrines and ashrams. Farther on, they passed three sadhus walking barefoot away from the city into the hills. With their matted dreadlocks, loincloths and tridents, they resembled cavemen out hunting woolly mammoths.

“Would you mind if we reviewed our cover story? I’m getting a little forgetful in my old age.”

The voice belonged to Mrs. Duggal, who did the occasional freelance assignment for Most Private Investigators since her retirement from the Indian Secret Service. Puri had asked her to pose as his wife for the day and she was sitting next to Facecream.

“Most certainly we can,” agreed the detective. He repeated the details again: the Garodia family’s home address in Singapore, the name of the school Queenie had been expelled from, the names of her paternal grandparents and so on.

Mrs. Duggal, who was expected to do a good deal of crying during their visit to the ashram, tested the menthol stick she kept in her handbag for such situations. Rubbing it beneath her nostrils quickly brought on tears.

“Most convincing,” said Puri approvingly.

Mrs. Duggal patted her face dry with her handkerchief. “It is always a pleasure to work with someone as talented as yourself, Mr. Puri. I would never recognize you in all that getup,” she said.

“So kind of you,” replied the detective. “Actually, disguises have always been my speciality. Once I take on a role, Vish Puri is put aside and I become the character. Sometimes I don’t even recognize myself. So engrossed I become.”

Puri admired his disguise in his makeup mirror: stick-on henna-dyed moustache, eyebrows and wig – all a lurid orange-red – and a hawkish nose.

Mrs. Duggal and Facecream exchanged a playful glance.

The Abode of Eternal Love was spread over a vast estate in the foothills of the Himalayas. Had it not been for the bronze statues of the Hindu saints along the driveway and the comings and goings of the devotees dressed in white kurtas and sarongs, it might have passed for an American university campus. Manicured lawns dotted with shade trees and benches snuggled between new, utilitarian buildings. White picket signs pointed visitors in the right direction:

DARSHAN HALL; ANANDA RESIDENCE; ABODE OF KNOWLEDGE;

ATM. The well-tended flower beds around the edges of the car park were decorated with bark chips.

The main reception, with its sliding automatic doors, split air-conditioning units and computerized registration system, also contradicted all preconceived notions of modernity being at odds with spirituality.

Maharaj Swami, according to the stacks of free literature available to visitors, had attained samadhi after meditating naked in a cave high up in the Himalayas for seven years. His devotees could achieve the same while living in well-appointed dormitories, eating freshly prepared vegetarian food, attending pranayama yoga sessions in the marble-floored gazebo, listening to Swami-ji’s daily discourses and following a pancha karma detox system.

For those with ‘health issues’, the Abode of Health, a multimillion-dollar two-hundred-bed hospital, also offered treatments for every conceivable condition, including cancer and AIDS. An Ayurvedic cure was also offered for homosexuality, which Maharaj Swami considered a ‘sickness and disease’.

While waiting in line at the front desk, the Garodia family – of Marwari stock and currently visiting from Singapore, where Lakshmi Garodia ran a multi-crore textile business – found themselves in good, middle-class company. Behind them stood a young couple from Delhi working in IT who had come to spend three days at the ashram.

“We’re looking for something more to life beyond work and shopping and more work, like higher thought or something, you know,” said the husband, who had paid almost a thousand dollars for the Fast Track to Yourself package.

“Lakshmi Garodia up from Singapore only,” announced Puri in a sonorous tone to the young lady devotee behind the desk when it was his turn.

He placed a Garodia Enterprises business card on the counter. It listed a Singapore office address, a website and a number that Flush, Puri’s computer and electronics whiz, had rerouted to the Communications Room inside the Most Private Investigators offices.

“I called one day back only to enroll my daughter, Queenie,” said Puri. “We were invited to attend darshan at four o’clock.”

“Yes, Mr. Garodia, we’ve been expecting you,” the devotee said with a seraphic smile. She stood and pressed the palms of her delicate hands together in a namaste.

Puri reciprocated, as did Mrs. Duggal, aka Mrs. Garodia.

“That is your daughter?” asked the devotee.

Facecream was standing on the other side of reception with her back against the wall, listening to her iPod. It was turned up full volume. A thudding beat leaked from her headphones. She was mouthing the lyrics while looking suitably oblivious.

“Yes, that’s Queenie,” said Mrs. Duggal with a sigh.

The devotee regarded the young woman in the tight jeans and high heels with a curious, whimsical smile.

“Whaaat are you staring at?” squealed Facecream, pretending to have suddenly noticed the three of them staring at her. “Think I’m some kind of freak or something? Just leave me alone – o-kaaayl”

“That is the total limit!” shouted Puri. He stormed across reception and snatched the iPod out of her hands.

“God, Pa, what the hell’s your problem anyway?”

Everyone else in reception turned and stared.

“How dare you, young madam! Think we’ve brought you here for nothing, huh?”

“No one asked me if I wanted to come. I hate this place. India’s filthy and it smells. I mean, have you seen all the crap in the streets or what? Men just piss on the walls wherever. There are freaks with no arms begging at like every traffic light. India’s a total nightmare and I hate it!”

“India is your mother country!” roared Puri. “You are here to learn about your heritage and culture, only! Think MTV can teach you anything, huh? Think you can just laze about all your life and go to so many of parties?”

Mrs. Duggal joined in: “Please, beta, try to behave. Your papa has your best interests at heart. He’s paying so much of money for you to stay here and get help. Why don’t you put away the chewing gum and come and introduce yourself?”

“Nooo waaay, Ma. This is all bullshit. You’re not getting me doing any yoga or stoopid crap like that. I want to go home!”

Mrs. Duggal burst into tears. “I knew we should never have gone to live in Singapore!” she wailed, addressing the devotee receptionist. “I blame myself. Had Queenie been brought up in the proper way, she’d have learned to appreciate her culture.” Mrs. Duggal let out a couple of loud sobs. “Instead, she goes to… to nigh… nightclubs and… and dan… dances with b… b…” Mrs. Duggal took a gasp of air before wailing, “Boyyyyyyys!”

Queenie had to be bribed with a promise of some new Ugg boots before agreeing to accompany her parents to the dar-shan hall, where Maharaj Swami was due to address ‘his children’.

Inside, chandeliers sprouted from dark pink lotus flowers, and wax effigies of the gods peered out from rows of glass cases along the walls. An enormous marble fountain spouting blue-tinted water stood in the middle of the auditorium floor, and at the far end was a stage.

Hundreds of devotees sitting cross-legged on mats were singing devotional songs accompanied by musicians on santoor, bansuri and tabla. Hundreds more were chanting Maharaj Swami’s ninety-nine names. Bells rang out. Handheld cymbals clashed. Clouds of incense wafted over the congregation. The Godman’s senior male disciples, recognizable by their off-white sarongs, silk stoles and intense, self-important miens, lit candles and distributed baskets of flower petals to be cast in front of their lord’s feet.

The Garodia family took off their shoes outside the elaborately carved wooden doors and were served cups of papaya juice. Then they were escorted to the front of the hall, where all the other guests and visitors were seated on padded yoga mats. Puri estimated they numbered about three hundred; by the looks of them, they were mostly drawn from India’s new middle class.

The man sitting next to him was in his thirties, an advertising executive from Mumbai. Like the detective, he was overweight and unable to manage the lotus position, so he sat with his short, chubby legs sticking out in front of him.

“I’ve been watching Swami-ji on Channel OM and I’m hoping he’ll help me with my tension and high blood pressure,” he told Puri. “Nothing else has worked till date.”

The detective had watched Channel OM a few times; Rumpi sometimes had it on in the sitting room. Maharaj Swami’s broadcasts offered a bit of everything: Vedic wisdom, Ayurvedic health advice, yoga, meditation and Deepak Chopra-style self-help guidance on how to deal with issues associated with the challenges of modern-day life – in other words, stress, wayward children and extramarital affairs. A new brand of Hinduism was sweeping India. It was highly ritualistic and steeped in the kind of pseudoscience that helped the new middle classes reconcile their use of modern science and technology with their belief, as one social commentator had put it recently, “in supernatural powers supposedly embodied in idols, divine men and women, stars and planets, rivers, trees and sacred animals.” Most significantly, it also condoned materialism. “The Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Sutras have been turned into self-help manuals for making money and achieving success,” the same commentator had written.

It was not Puri’s cup of chai, nor that of most of his generation. Theirs was a more contemplative, philosophical Hinduism that frowned on ostentation. Besides, he hated all the appeals for donations and the slick marketing. Borrowing from the techniques used by American TV evangelists, Swami-ji sold his books, CDs and DVDs in the same cloying manner as soap powder.

“It’s like ‘new, improved Hinduism for the reaching of spots others can’t’,” the detective had commented to his wife recently.

Lakshmi Garodia, though, was an ardent fan of the Godman.

“One can feel his presence and power through the TV, actually,” he said. “I understand he’s healed so many of people.”

“So many!” agreed the advertising executive breathlessly. “You know, my cousin lives in Hong Kong and was dying of cancer. He was on the verge of death. Then Maharaj Swami came to him. He walked right through the wall of his hospital room and laid his hands on my cousin’s head. He said he could literally feel the cancer being destroyed. That day only my cousin left hospital!”

A chorus of trumpets announced the arrival of Maharaj Swami. He entered through the garlanded archway at the back of the hall and then proceeded along a path that led through rows of fawning, adoring disciples, many of whom reached out to touch his feet. The guru stopped now and again to lay his hands on bowed heads. And with a seraphic smile, he sprinkled vibhuti over the congregation, the holy ash materializing in his hands.

Puri and the other visitors remained seated on the floor as the Godman approached. With hands pressed together, they grinned at him like eager children pleading for his blessings. A chosen few received reassuring, almost pitying, pats on the head.

“Swami-ji! Swami-ji!” called out the advertising executive with tears running down his cheeks. “Bless me, Swami-ji!”

The devotional singing, chanting, bell ringing and cymbal clashing reached fever pitch as Maharaj Swami walked up onto the stage, where temple priests greeted him with flaming brass diyas.

With his black beard and moustache parting to reveal a row of perfect white teeth (according to the literature Puri had read in the entrance hall, they were kept in perfect condition by Abode of Eternal Love-branded neem dental sticks), he sat down on a large silver throne. Suspended by wires behind him was a circle of blinking fairy lights that formed a halo. He held up his left hand to silence the congregation. A hush fell over the hall, and his deep, orotund voice sounded over the speakers.

“My children,” he said in Hindi, “today we will consider the word ‘I’, which refers to the ego born out of an attachment to the body…”

For thirty minutes, Puri listened attentively to Maharaj Swami’s discourse, impressed by his oratory skills. Mrs. Duggal, too, appeared captivated. Facecream looked a little off color, but the detective thought nothing of it.

When he was finished giving his sermon, the Godman stood again and walked to the front of the stage.

“None of you here are yet capable of comprehending my reality,” he explained. “Although I appear as flesh and blood, I exist in multiple dimensions. Time has no meaning for me. Past, present, future are but one.”

Two of the senior disciples carried a brazier filled with wood onto the stage and placed it to the left of the guru’s throne. This caused a ripple of anticipation to course through the congregation.

“But throughout human history, saints and avatars have been sent to guide humanity, to reveal the infiniteness of the universe. This is done through the use of miracles. Here today I propose to reveal to you one such miracle. I propose to communicate across time and space with one of the seven rishis – Bharadwaja. It was he who came to me and revealed the ultimate Truth – who showed me the true power of God’s love.”

“We are truly blessed,” the excited ad man whispered to Puri. “Swami-ji summons Bharadwaja rarely, usually only for special guests. They say the last time was for the prime minister. After, a date for the election was set!”

The lights in the hall were dimmed and Maharaj Swami commanded absolute silence. The hall went deathly still.

Pressing his fingertips to his forehead and temples, he closed his eyes and began to utter incomprehensible incantations. He reached out with his right hand and pointed to the brazier. With a click of his fingers, the wood burst into flames. Everyone, including Puri, gasped.

Maharaj Swami approached the burning brazier. He pushed his hands together and held them tight, muttering something under his breath. When he unclasped them again, they were full of red powder. This he threw onto the flames, causing them to leap higher.

A dense smoke began to curl upward and then, as if it had a mind of its own, made an abrupt left turn and proceeded horizontally into the middle of the stage. There it started to circle, creating a vortex. And at its center a bright white light appeared.

Maharaj Swami closed his eyes again and moved his hands back and forth over the brazier.

The white light slowly formed into a man’s ghostly head.

Puri could make out his facial features – the creases on the forehead, the crumpled nose, the sagging jowls, the ancient eyelids.

He felt a tingle run up his spine as some of his fellow visitors cried out: “He’s here!” “Bharadwaja has come!”

The rishi opened his eyes and yawned, as if he had been woken from a long, peaceful sleep.

“Who dares disturb me?” spoke a deep, gravelly voice that boomed down from above.

“It is I,” answered Maharaj Swami, who by now had retaken his throne.

A smile crept across the lined face. “And what is it you seek?”

“All-knowing one, I seek nothing for myself. I ask that you give guidance to my children as they strive toward the divine!”

“Not all can be helped,” spoke the rishi. “Those who resist, who refuse to abandon preconceived notions, they will remain trapped forever in an endless cycle of birth and rebirth.”

A timid devotee was invited up onstage and prostrated himself before the apparition. In a halting voice, he asked the rishi a question about an event in one of his past lives. He, like the six others who followed him, received answers that seemed to shock and surprise them.

All the while Puri sat, as he had done on the roof while Ak-bar the Great had levitated, trying to figure out the method behind the illusion.

There was no projector being used; the face was three-dimensional. It was not a hologram, either. Of that he was certain.

Was it possible there was a man onstage wearing a black outfit to camouflage his body? As if in reply to his question, the door at the side of the hall opened, casting a beam of light across the stage, revealing nothing beneath the rishi’s floating head.

The detective and Mrs. Duggal exchanged a furtive, perplexed look.

It was then that Puri noticed Facecream staring blankly at the stage. She looked transfixed, as if she had been hypnotized, and there were tears running down her face.

He reached out and touched her hand. At first she didn’t respond. He tried again. Facecream turned and stared at him and then, looking back at the stage, started to laugh.

Puri was unsure what to do. Was there something wrong? Was she improvising?

He decided to play along, keeping a careful eye on her.

A few minutes passed and she began to look more herself. But then she suddenly stood up and, with arms stretched wide, declared in a loud voice: “I have seen the truth and it is beautiful!”

Many of those sitting around her started to applaud. And then Facecream fainted, collapsing into the lap of the person behind her.