Killers Are My Meat

by Stephen Marlowe

  “The holy man?” I asked.

  “Right. The Panch Kosi Sadhu. The Pilgrim Road Holy Man. He’s something of a celebrity, even among ascetics. You coming?”

  I nodded, and finished shaving while he waited. We went downstairs together and had a Continental breakfast served with tea instead of the usual coffee or cocoa. “I first got interested in the Panch Kosi Sadhu years ago,” Varley told me. “I once read a book about him. His name was Rajeshwar Mehta, but nobody’s called him that for twenty years. He’s just the Sadhu. Far as anyone knows, he hasn’t budged from his spot near a big old pipal tree on the Panch Kosi for twenty years. The funny part of it is, before that time he was active in politics as well as a fabulously wealthy member of an old Brahmin family. He gave all of it up for his pipal tree.”

  “What does he do out there?” I asked.

  “Contemplates. The contemplative life is the best life, according to yoga principle. It isn’t the only good life, but it’s the best.”

  “You sound interested.”

  “I am interested. I’ve wanted to come to India ever since I heard of the sadhu. Don’t you see, Drum, there’s a man who—well, like I did—had everything. Wealth, position, you know. And threw all of it over for the life of yoga contemplation. I want to meet him, Drum. I want to talk with him. I want to learn if he’s happy. I want to find out what he’s thinking.”

  “Twenty years in one position under a pipal tree, what the hell can he be thinking? His thoughts must be going around in circles.”

  He showed me his teeth in a supercilious smile. “You don’t get it. You don’t get it at all. A Hindu sadhu renounces the world not to get lost in a maze of introspection but to leave all desire behind and, through serene, impersonal contemplation, arrive at a vision of the life force of the universe, the Brahma.”

  I held up my hands as if to fend him off. “I’ll stick to sleuthing,” I said, but then a voice behind me informed us:

  “Well, I think it’s fascinating.”

  I turned my head. It was Marianne, looking crisp and perky-pretty in a pale rose sister of yesterday’s lavender dress.

  “Join you for coffee?” she asked.

  I grinned. “It’s tea. You’ve already joined us in spirit, haven’t you?”

  “Newshen’s prerogative. So this is why you’re in India!”

  I took refuge in a stage groan and said, “Marianne Wilder, this is Stewart Hoffman Varley, U.S. Observer to the Benares Conference. Mr. Varley, Marianne’s the Life reporter in these parts. I have a hunch there’ll be three of us in that party out to the Panch Kosi.”

  Marianne offered her hand, and Varley shook it. Marianne had a cup of tea with us, Varley signed for the check, and the three of us went outside together.

  The heat of the new day in Benares always hit you right between the eyes. It was a solid hot invisible wall with a dry wind blowing sand particles through it. Here in late May there was still almost a month to go before the rainy season got underway, so that meant every day was somewhat hotter and drier than the impossibly hot and dry day before. It didn’t seem to bother the pilgrims, though. There was no letup in the long, ragged files of the sick, the maimed and the leperous who trudged through the dusty streets to the ghats on the riverbank. For a car, they made the going as bad as bumper-to-bumper traffic.

  Varley had a car, courtesy of the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. It was a chauffeur-driven sedan. The driver was a quiet American boy named Meadows, who seemed more impressed with a Life reporter and a private eye than with the State Department’s representative in Benares. He navigated through the crowds with his horn and more gear-shifting than a truck going over the Continental Divide. Finally he found a comparatively uncrowded side street which took us out to the Pilgrim Road.

  This was the widest, best highway in the area. It circled the city of Benares on a thirty-six-mile course through flat, parched plains where oat grass waved in the hot wind and almond trees stood like gnarled, ancient sentries. Pretty soon we passed the University of Benares, where the Afro-Asian Conference would be held. It was a several-acre heap of ornate north-India buildings.

  Beyond it every two hundred yards along the mango-lined Panch Kosi were Hindu shrines for the pilgrims who, in trucks, oxcarts and on foot did their sacred circumambulation of the holy city. They wore rags. They moved slowly, in small clots. Most of their faces had been burned dark by the fierce sun. Most of them were skinny to the point of emaciation, and wore no shoes. You heard the shuffling of their feet. You heard a steady hum which you supposed was talking or groaning or praying or all three. It was an oddly frightening sound, like the pounding of a down-east surf to someone who has never heard the ocean. It made you think: drop a match, any kind of match. Light a spark in this mob, brother, and duck.…

  The Panch Kosi Holy Man’s pipal tree stood three miles beyond the university. As Meadows slowed the car I saw Varley light a cigarette and immediately put it out, then breathe deeply through his mouth as if he’d just come up from under water. He saw me watching him and tried on his usual grin, but it slipped off his gaunt, grave face almost immediately. I don’t think Marianne was aware of his tension; she was staring out the window and scribbling notes in a steno pad furiously.

  We got out of the car. Meadows lit a cigarette and waited. We had parked at the edge of the Panch Kosi about seventy-five yards from where the grotesquely twisted limbs of the pipal tree were silhouetted against a sky of brass. The tree stood on a little sandy hummock with stunted hill bamboo growing in patches around it. There was a crowd of perhaps two hundred people up there on the hill, keeping their distance respectfully from a masonry platform which had been built around the sacred fig tree. On this platform stood the holy man.

  Actually, there were two figures on the platform. As we drew closer, I saw them clearly. One of the figures was a girl. She wore a white cotton garment which the hot wind pressed against her body as she stretched her arms up toward the sadhu’s face. In her hands she held a bowl of brass and a spoon. She was feeding the sadhu.

  He was an elongated ascetic figure like something out of a painting by El Greco. He was very tall. He wore a saffron rag around his loins. He was absolutely motionless, not even moving his jaws although he seemed to be eating the food the girl spooned into his slack, thin-lipped mouth. He stood with his arms high over his head, perfectly still, the extended fingertips inches from a branch of the pipal tree. He had long white hair. His skin was burned almost black by continuous exposure to sun and wind. It stretched like parched leather over his protruding bones. His large, wide-spaced eyes stared over the heads of the crowd, on over the Panch Kosi with its dust and its pilgrims, over the sheen of Ganges water you could see from the hummock and out to something you could not see, something which the Panch Kosi Holy Man had been seeking for twenty years, something beyond the sight of men, beyond the world and beyond time. Tears hung on the lower lids of his eyes. They were suspended there, as he was suspended. I never saw them fall. I never even saw him blink.

  Stewart Varley walked to him as in a dream. I stood back in the crowd with Marianne. There were angry mutterings. Then there was no sound at all except the faint noise of the spoon against the brass bowl the girl held and the distant hum from the Panch Kosi.

  Varley went to the very edge of the masonry platform. He gazed raptly at the sadhu a long while without speaking. His back was to us. When he finally spoke, his voice held awe and surprise and wonder, as if he had found something which until this moment he had feared did not exist. “Holy sadhu,” he said, “I have come halfway around the world to see you. Where I live I have wealth and position, as once you had. But I seek the wisdom which lies beyond the wealth and the desire of man—if such wisdom exists. Will you speak with me, holy sadhu? Will you tell me of it?”

  Marianne was writing in her steno pad. I took the pad away from her, tore off the last page and told her before the look of bewilderment on her face could turn to anger, “You can’t use that, and you know it.
The guy’s sick. He’s hypnotized himself. Or maybe he isn’t sick. Maybe we’re the poor saps who can’t understand. But at least it makes a little sense to us because we’re here. You won’t laugh at Varley when we go back to Benares, will you?”

  “No. No, of course not. What kind of a person do you think I am?”

  “No matter how you write it, your readers would laugh at him. Or they’d feel sorry for him, and that’s worse. No matter how you write it. Don’t you see?”

  “Is that why you came to India, to protect Varley from himself? Or from the press?”

  I looked at Varley. He stood as still as the sadhu, waiting for an answer. I thought of the job Priscilla Varley had given me. I thought of Gil Sprayregan and his wife. I couldn’t really answer Marianne’s question; I wished to hell I could. Protecting Varley wasn’t enough. Finding out why the Sprayregans had to die would help, but that wasn’t enough either. Did I expect to make Ambedkar pay for what he’d done? Nero Wolf and His Seven-League Boots, I thought. Ambedkar? Hell, it wasn’t only Ambedkar. It was Sumitra Mojindar, too, and her hopped-up chauffeur. I’d need those seven-league boots, all right. And I’d need the Royal Mounted Police and every Irish cop in Boston and the Bengal Lancers.

  I snapped out of it without answering Marianne’s question. By then she wasn’t waiting for my answer anyway. Her attention was riveted on the sadhu’s masonry platform, where things were happening.

  The sadhu hadn’t moved. He showed no sign of having heard Varley. The girl had finished feeding him and was watching Varley now. She was very young, no more than sixteen or seventeen, and quite pretty.

  Varley said, “Answer me. You’ve got to answer me. I know you speak English. I know who you are. You’re Rajeshwar Mehta and you probably speak English better than I do.”

  The sadhu remained a statue against the brassy sky.

  “Please,” Varley pleaded. “Someone must have told you. Someone must have showed you the way.”

  Maybe he hadn’t realized it, but he was shouting. The crowd around the pipal tree was edging toward him. A big bald man with the white crescent of Siva on his forehead shook his fist and yelled something in Hindi. A woman jabbered.

  Someone nudged me from behind. I whirled, ready for a fight, but it was Meadows. “I think we’d better pull out of here,” he said. Then he whispered, “What’s the matter with him, anyway?”

  “Take Miss Wilder back to the car,” I told him. “Wait for us. With the motor running.”

  Marianne gave me an exasperated look. “If you think I—” she began.

  “Take her back by force if you have to,” I told Meadows. Then I went forward through the crowd.

  Varley had reached up to touch the sadhu’s leg. There was no expression whatever on the girl’s face, but she had swung around to look down at Varley from the platform. The big fellow with the Siva crescent had come up behind Varley. He held a walking stick in his hand. He raised it over his head.

  I grabbed his arm. His biceps was like a plank of wood. He pivoted and we looked at each other. He shouted something at me in Hindi. His face was dark red. He was so mad, saliva flew from his lips.

  I said, “Try using that stick and I’ll break it across your back.”

  I don’t know whether he understood me or not. Plenty’ of Indians can speak English. He shouted something back at me. There was a chorus of similar shouts from the crowd. Then, suddenly, they were stilled as if someone had cut off the sound track.

  The girl on the platform had put her small foot against Varley’s chest. And the sadhu had moved.

  One of his arms came down, the gnarled hand resting on the girl’s shoulder. She cried out, dropping the brass bowl. She fell on her knees before the sadhu, but his hand remained where it was, still gripping an invisible shoulder.

  The whole crowd had fallen to its knees, and a wailing sound rose over the hummock like a ground swell. Clots of other pilgrims, robes streaming behind them, came running toward the hill of the Panch Kosi Sadhu to prostrate themselves before the miracle of his movement.

  I looked up at the sadhu and thought I saw a twinkle in his eyes. I touched Varley’s arm. He jerked around, his eyes badly out of focus. Using the sadhu as a point of concentration, he’d hypnotized himself. He swayed toward me. I shook his arm and all at once he came out of it. His face was bathed in sweat.

  “We’re getting out of here,” I said.

  He came with me docilely.

  Marianne was standing outside the embassy car with the door opened. Meadows sat behind the wheel, ready to roll. After Varley climbed into the car, Marianne told me: “Someone in a jeep’s watching us.”

  I didn’t think it meant much. Everybody was watching us. Marianne got into the car and I looked around. There was a jeep parked about thirty feet behind us on the edge of the Panch Kosi. Its lone occupant wore white dhotis and a shirt. At first I didn’t recognize him. The only time I’d seen him before he’d been wearing jodhpurs.

  He was Sumitra Mojindar’s chauffeur, Rukmini.

  “Okay,” I told Meadows.

  We drove away. Rukmini didn’t follow us. Marianne sat staring out the rear window of the car until a curve in the Panch Kosi hid the holy man from view.

  I gave Varley a cigarette. This wasn’t the time to tell him if he pulled a stunt like that again he could forget all about being the United States Observer at the Benares Conference. His hands were shaking violently. “I’m going to be all right,” he said. “I’m going to be all right now.”

  11.

  IN THE AFTEROON I borrowed Marianne’s car and drove out to the University of Benares on the Panch Kosi Pilgrim Road. Marianne surprised me by not asking to come along, then I realized she wanted to get her journalistic claws into Varley without interference. I couldn’t blame her, but I hoped she would use some discretion on what she cabled back to the States as copy.

  The chokidar at the University told me that some of the delegates to the conference had already moved into the settlement of masonry bungalows provided for them, but when I asked him if the Mojindars had arrived he told me, “That, sahib, I do not know.” For a watchman, he was armed to the teeth. He wore a holstered automatic and carried a rifle slung over his shoulder and a brassbound lathi club. I could almost feel his eyes boring into my back as I made my way on foot to the slate-roofed cluster of houses.

  A trio of Oriental kids was playing in the first street I came to. One of them wore a shirt as protection against the fierce sun, the other two were naked. “Mojindar?” I asked them. “India sahib?”

  The one in the shirt giggled. One of the others looked scared. The third, who was about six years old, said in English as good as mine, “The house of Sir Gaganvihari Mojindar is the fourth on the left, this street.”

  I thanked them and tried it.

  Sumitra Mojindar came to the door herself. She had changed her sari for white shorts and halter. A sheen of sweat glistened on her face and flat, bare midriff. A tendril of hair hung down in front of her face, and she brushed at it.

  Then she recognized me. If I expected cart-wheels, I was disappointed. Sumitra Mojindar still had her composure. For a split second I saw white all around her incredible amber eyes, and that was all.

  “Mr. Drum, isn’t it?” she said. “You must forgive my appearance, but a sari was not made to do housework in, and it seems we arrived before the domestic staff.”

  “You didn’t arrive before Rukmini.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something? As a matter of fact, Rukmini and Ambedkar arrived even before we did, but they’re being released from their domestic duties during the conference.”

  “That right? Reward?”

  “Mr. Drum, I find your inclination to smirk at the things I say most annoying.”

  “Then why don’t you call the chokidar?”

  She was a girl who maintained her composure no matter what, but she was a girl who didn’t like to be badgered. The two traits fought it out for a moment, her fists clenching and h
er eyes darkening. Then she said: “Come in, please, Mr. Drum. I don’t think this costume I’m wearing would appeal to some of the neighbors.”

  I couldn’t resist one more dig, because if I was going to get through Sumitra Mojindar’s composure at all that seemed the way. “I’ll bet the First Secretary isn’t exactly wild about it either.”

  She slammed the door behind me harder than necessary, and I followed her into a pleasant, rattan-furnished living room. Then she wheeled suddenly and said, “I am a Malabar woman, Mr. Drum. Unlike the rest of the women of my country, we Malabar women were never considered an inferior species of animal. Does that answer your question about the First Secretary? Or anything else?” She paused. I didn’t say anything. She went on: “As for Ambedkar and Rukmini, they have been released from work because by Indian standards the pay they receive in Washington has made them wealthy men, so they would consider it degrading to perform the same functions here. Was there anything else?”

  She didn’t ask me to sit down. The room seemed in pretty good shape. She’d left a broom leaning against one wall.

  I said, “And Ayyangar?”

  Her eyes narrowed. She almost pouted. “He was a sick man. His heart. He was so excited about returning home. He was born in Benares, you see. He died in his sleep our last night in Washington.”

  “Wasn’t that convenient.”

  She picked up the broom. I thought she was going to hit me with it, but she bent her shapely torso to the task and began sweeping the rattan rug. She swept right up to my shoes and looked up at my face from three inches away. Her voice was soft and controlled, but it was sitting on mayhem, holding it down. “Stop insinuating. If you want something, say it.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “Just tell the First Secretary I’m here.”

  She hadn’t expected that. She carefully returned the broom to where it was doing guard duty against the wall. She wore flat sandals and they whispered back across the rattan. “Do you have a cigarette?” she said.