The PuppetMaster (11 page)

And always it passed without question or chatter.

An hour later we stood drenched, watching boats poling against the current. The sun had risen above the far bank. I took a pull from the Nalgene and offered it to him. He gulped down half the bottle and slapped my back. “Sweet session, Mate. Ya made me sweat like a Shivdas whore. Sorry I’ve got to flake out on ya so quick, but I’m on the eight fifteen to Delhi. ” He spun the green disc in front of me, and I tapped it back to him. We started jogging back towards my house, and he grinned and asked, “So, whot’s the difference ‘tween a moose and a Maine ‘ousewife?”

I knew this one from somewhere in the past, and before he could beat me to it, I blurted out, “Bout twenty pounds and a red flannel shirt, I reckon.” I’d answered in a respectable New England accent, which got him laughing.

“Well bugger me, Marty. I never took you for a fooking Mainer. Always figured yous a West Coast boy, a SoCal surfer type.”

It was the first time he’d pried even gently at my history, an innocent remark meant as an opener if I wished to take it. I didn’t, but still answered, “I grew up there. In San Diego, so you figured pretty well.”

He nodded. “So ‘ow’d you get into all this bloody Sanskrit shite?”

That surprised me a little. First, it was another probe. Second, it was an acknowledgment that he knew what I did all day long. It wasn’t as if it was a secret; everyone in the city seemed to know I was Devi's student, but it surprised me that he'd asked. As if reading my thoughts, he added, “A lot of folks say you’re one of the best, Mate. I think that’s the dog’s ollocks, you know, being able to read all them fookin’ words. I mean, it's soooo old.”

“I’ve been working at it for a long time, Mej. It’s like a huge set of word puzzles to me. History, law, politics, it’s all written in the mother tongue. And to be honest, I just like the sound of it.” I decided it was my turn to ask something. “So how’d you learn Hindi so well? I mean, it was like going from Latin to Italian for me after knowing the Sanskrit. How’d you learn it?”

He looked at his fingernails and answered quickly, “Me Mum taught me mostly. It was ‘er first language, not mine, so I sort of picked it up ‘ere and there. I figured I needed to improve on it when I got ‘ere, so I bought meself a teach yourself book last year.”

As we reached my gate he asked, “So whatcha working on now, Bro? Any juicy shite? They say that Kama Sutra can give you a right fine woody.” It sounded a little boring when I told him I was translating a play about a monarch with family problems, but he told me quickly that he wanted to hear more about it when he returned from Delhi. We set a time to meet in a few days, and then I watched as he bounced buoyantly down Sonapura Road towards the Asi River. Just before the bridge he turned and grinned back at me.

Eighteen

I pushed Ugly Bike through Devi’s gate with a cushy six-minute margin. My backpack contained my HP Pavilion laptop, the flash drive with our photographs, and the previous day’s notes scanned with my portable DocuPen scanner and saved on a file. I’d arrived early, hoping to chat with Sukshmi about her marriage predicament. Instead I found Soma.

She was squatting in the space behind the right side of the tool shed and the wall, and I could tell from the way her shoulders slumped forward and her hands shook that she was crying. I leaned Miss Ugly against the wall and squatted next to her in the dust. Her hands moved up to hide her face, but as I lowered myself with a groan from the morning’s exercise, her fingers spread into a childish vee. Between her dusty knuckles I saw a smear of black kohl and tears. One eye peeked at me.

Suspecting her mother-in-law as the cause, I asked, “So, Little Sister, is your Sas angry with you again? You mustn’t listen to her puffing, you know. She grumbles at you from jealousy because you are young and beautiful and she is a fat camel with foul breath.”

Soma sniffled wretchedly and mumbled through her fingers, “Oh Bhimaji, Sas always grumbles at me, but it no longer bothers me.”

“So what is causing all these tears to fall from those pretty eyes this morning?”

She drew in a choppy breath and in an uneven voice, whispered, “It is Sri Ralki. He…” She broke into a fresh round of sobbing.

I inhaled sharply, that name typically having that effect upon me. Madru Ralki was a first inspector and assistant to the Varanasi Chief of Police. He was a fat weasel, and a purported spy for the Cabinet Minister Qereshy, which did not make him particularly popular within his own Hindu community. He denied being a turncoat, but not vehemently enough to convince me or anyone else. Unfortunately, he was also the first in a line of bureaucrats I had to speak with to renew my visa every six months. Those encounters were inevitably uncomfortable unions of oil and flame. In my slightly biased opinion, he was a pudgy bit of pomposity with far too much time and power at his disposal. His office reeked of beedees, the pungent eucalyptus cigarettes that he smoked incessantly. Always, by the time I had gotten the stamp for six more months of stay in Varanasi, I prayed that one of his little cigarettes would ignite the grease that coated his outstretched palm. What his business with Soma was, I couldn’t imagine.

“Madru Ralki? What does he have to do with you? You’ve committed no crime,” other than being a beautiful, young, outcaste.

She lowered her hands and wrapped them around folded knees. What I saw in her eyes sent a bolt of anger through me. Fear—coming from something Ralki had said. Or done.

“He just asked me some questions, Bhimaji. Just a few.”

“Questions? What questions? He has no business asking anything of you.”

She hesitated, confirming to me that he’d threatened her. That would have been his way--intimidation for silence. What he didn’t understand was that Soma was more like a sister to me, and I a brother to her, than true siblings. What she might withhold from someone else, she wouldn’t withhold from me. “First he asked me what I do for Master Devi all day, who I talk to, what my jobs are. He said they are searching for suspects in the bombings and all the people of Varanasi are being questioned. I told him I only talk to Master Devi, Mirabai, and my mother-in-law, because they are the ones who tell me what to do.” The simple truth of this statement stung me. There were few, besides me, who spoke to Soma. Why would Ralki be asking questions of a husbandless, second-hand sweeper girl?

“He asked you that, nothing else?”

Soma’s chin came to rest on her kneecaps. A long hesitation. “He asked me about you.”

I sucked in a lungful of hot dust and almost swore. Slowly I asked, “What did he ask about me, Little Pearl? Tell me the truth, every question. I will not let him harm you. I promise.”

She looked sideways at me, trust shimmering in her pupils. “He asked me what you study with Master Devi.”

“And you told him that I am a student of Sanskrit?”

“He knew that already. Everyone knows that, Bhimaji. He asked me what you are doing now.”

This time I did swear out loud. Even in English, the word ‘fuck’ brought a flash of smile to Soma’s lips. “Bhimaji swears.”

“Yes, I did swear, and it’s a bad swear because it’s no business of Ralki’s what I do at all, especially what I work on with Master Devi. If I thought it would do an ounce of good I would march into his smelly little office and tell him so.” The image of the ember-lit face staring at me the night before returned. Had it been Ralki? I hadn’t even considered who might have been watching me because it seemed inconsequential at the time. Now I wasn’t so sure.

Instantly the fear returned. “No, Bhimaji,” she pleaded. “Please, you must not do that. He would know that I have spoken to you and send for me again.” There was something in her voice—a quiver--that told me Ralki had gone beyond a mere warning. He had intimidated her with something else.

“Soma, tell me the truth. Did he do anything else? Did he hurt you?”

She stared solemnly at her toe rings and dug them into the dust. Lips trembled as she whispered, “No, Bhimaji, he did not hurt me.”

Inside the house I heard Devi’s voice grumble, “Where is our fine young Keeper of Notes and Photographs, eh? Late again.” Then a calm, but unintelligible, answer from C.G.

With a boiling that rose from deep inside, I asked again, “Did he hurt you?”

She replied in a reticent whisper, “He pushed his hand under my chola and squeezed me there. It did not hurt. But he . . . said that he would throw me into the streets with just my bangles to cover me if I spoke to anyone about it.”

I made a mental note to break at least nine of Ralki’s fingers for that grope of my little sister’s breast. Then I would sit back and watch him try to smoke one his fucking little beedees with just a thumb.

Stroking the back of Soma’s hand, I said, “He will need to go through a very large, very strong, ferenghi to do that, Little One. You go now and wash that pretty face. Mirabai will be asking for you. And Soma?”

“Yes, Master Bhim.”

“It is probably best that you do not talk to anyone about this.”

With the smile that always made me forget my aches, she sniffled and rose gracefully from the dust. “Just to you, Bhimaji,” she answered.

Nineteen

I wasn’t that late. Three minutes by my Casio, six by Master’s Timex. Later than ever before, but being the Keeper of Notes and Photographs provided legitimate excuses.

“Good Morning, Punditjis. I pray that you are both feeling very well this morning.” I entered the parlor with a broad smile and purposeful stride. “And I assume you are wondering why I am a few minutes late.” Before Master could even inhale, I went on. “Yesterday I found the perfect program for us. It has allowed me to rework all of our notes into Devanagari on the computer. And now it all typed and safeguarded onto this.” I held up the memory stick for emphasis. “I finished just before I left this morning, and now . . . we are ready for our second day of research.” That was my first fib. I had scanned the notes the previous afternoon. The second was that I had been using the optical character recognition program for three months.

While Devi made disapproving clucks and scowls at the innocuous, but technical, flash drive, C.G. coughed a soggy burst of phlegm into a handkerchief and said, “Do not be concerned over a few seconds of tardiness, Bhim. You have done well. A good OCR program with Hindi script? Which one? It must be Letter Box East. My students tell me that has the best Asian fonts.”

C.G.’s praise of the gadget rustled Devi’s feathers. He grumbled impatiently, “If the two of you have finished with your pleasantries, I believe it would be good to actually look at some of that fonze and continue the work from yesterday.” And being linguists, that is precisely what we did.

Before Mirabai arrived with our first mugs of chai, we knew the text was something not only old, but far more compelling than we could have imagined.

It took C.G.’s translation of the first seven lines of the second photo. Borrowing my pencil, he scribbled and asked, “What does this sound like to you?

‘When the man’s self thins the like a reeds in a summer sun;

And his waters pour out like a swollen stream,

And none replenished will slake his thirst;

When his water is sweet as the juice of the cane,

And yields a fragrance as sweet.

Then the man’s self lightens and pales like the moon,

And in the dawn the self thereupon dies.’

Devi and I looked at each other, puzzled, while C.G. tossed me the notepad. “Make something up, my boy, anything that comes to mind. One young mango is better than two old melons.” He grinned at that.

I thought out loud, “Well . . . sounds like a high fever, perspiration, something to do with cane juice. Whatever that means.”

Devi added absentmindedly, “Precisely so, precisely so. You see, C.G., I told you it was a shastram. It is definitely one of the old Ayurvedic treatments.” After a moment of silence, we began looking at the screen like schoolboys over new set of puzzles.

A cure of some sort. But for what?

C.G. and I then spent an hour organizing it into sequenced thumbnails--snapshots we could look at six at a time and expand with double-clicks. I labeled each by lines: 1-12—Benediction/Salutation. 13-41—Description of Symptoms. As I typed the words sweating, emaciation, and slow death, I wondered. Cholera? Yellow fever? Were those the symptoms?

We moved on, and the next fourteen brought us to the beginning of third photograph and elaborate instructions for cremation of the corpse. These, I assumed, were necessary when the cure hadn’t worked. I kept going until my fingers felt like they had run a marathon.

Lunch arrived--trays of chapattis, rice, dal, and bowls of condiments. I saved the file to the flash drive, so excited I didn’t want the session to end, even for one of Mirabai’s feasts.

We dined cross-legged on the floor and I listened silently as the boys talked in short, giddy exchanges.

“It is one of the cures, Devi. That is certain.”

“Indeed, C.G.. All the earmarks. Tomorrow we will encounter some of the old plants. Do you not agree?”

Chandragupta wheezed, “Most certainly, Devi. Herbs and mixtures. That is always the way, a lot of damned flowers and pastes that we linguists know nothing about. Probably need to find a pharmacist from four thousand years ago.”