The Solitude of Emperors (31 page)

13

Seven Steps to a Tragedy

1. The storm I had been hoping for never materialized. It did rain all the next day but it was nothing more than a gentle easing down of moisture that barely wet the leaves. By nightfall the rain had stopped and the mist rolled in. If it stayed misty it would be helpful, but I remembered Noah telling me it was rare for the mist to last more than a couple of days, especially at the Tower of God where strong winds blew all year around. I wandered aimlessly around the house, reading the last chapter of Mr Sorabjee’s book every so often until it was imprinted on my mind. I tried the phone regularly, but it remained stubbornly dead.

The taxi that had been hired before the phone went down arrived on time the following day, and I was at the bottom of the hill on which the cemetery was located by seven thirty, the time we had arranged to meet, but there was no sign of Noah. I didn’t think it was wise for the car to attempt the deeply rutted road, so I instructed the driver to wait and set off on foot. It was still very dark, there was no sign of the sun, and I wished I had brought a torch with me. I hoped there were no snakes around, and then I remembered that they didn’t like the cold. As I made my way up the hill, I was filled with foreboding about the next day as I thought about Rajan, the young boy growing up in this bleak environment. Had he already been dreaming of the violence he would wreak upon the world, or had that come later, a straightforward reaction to the injustice that had been meted out to him? And was he really a killer? I had charged him with murder during my interview and he hadn’t denied it, but did that automatically make him guilty? I knew that even if he was involved in some way with the riots it was probably true that he hadn’t killed anyone himself, merely orchestrated it. How evil did that make him?

~

2. When I got to the cemetery I could hardly see my way to the gate because the mist pooled thickly, streaming between the trees and the great bulk of the church. None of the dogs was around, but where was Noah? Now that I knew he didn’t live in the parsonage I wondered what he did in inclement weather. On one of my visits I had seen a disused gatehouse with part of the roof and a wall missing—perhaps I would find him there. I moved forward cautiously, calling out his name. There was no response but I spotted a weak glow in the direction of the peepul tree and decided to investigate that first.

I came out of the mist into the flickering light cast by a small fire and stopped short, arrested by what I saw. Noah squatted beside a patch of freshly turned earth, dressed only in a T-shirt and jeans despite the cold and the wet. His T-shirt was bloody. Next to him was the great bulk of Godless. At my approach the dog cocked its eyebrows at me but made no other movement or sound. His eyes shut, the headphones of a Walkman clamped to his ears and a lit joint in his hand, Noah seemed totally at ease. He took a long pull at the joint, slowly released the smoke, then suddenly began to sing loudly. The composition of the macabre scene altered in that instant.

I began backing slowly out of the light under the watchful gaze of Godless, my mind empty of everything but the thought that I should get out of the cemetery immediately. I was finally seeing Noah for what he was, a man who could commit murder. I had no idea who his victim was, but I wasn’t waiting around to find out.

Godless’s barking crashed into the space vacated by the tuneless melody of his master, Noah opened his eyes, lazily surveyed the scene, and said, ‘Sorry, Vijay, had some business to take care of. We’re in no hurry, right?’

His voice was relaxed. Wordlessly, I gestured at his bloody clothes, the rusty shovel that lay at his feet. He looked at me uncomprehendingly for a moment, then took the headphones off and said, ‘I found one of Godless’s bitches near the bridge a couple of hours ago—some lorry driver had run her over. Thought I’d give her a decent burial. Not one of his regulars, I’ve seen her around occasionally, but what the hell?’

I wondered what he had been doing wandering around in the early hours of the morning, but my relief at his explanation was so great I brushed the thought aside. It was a minor detail, perhaps Godless had led him to the corpse. I edged back into the light.

‘Do you know the Tibetans believe dying people enter something they call a bardo state just before they pass on? That’s when their
Book of the Dead
is read out to them, to prepare them for their journey,’ Noah said. ‘Poor bitch, all she’s going to get is Roger Daltrey singing ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ and her unfaithful paramour standing watch. And the bugger had to be bribed with bones to stay…’ The big dog seemed to know Noah was talking about him, and his tail thumped on the ground.

‘I thought you’d killed somebody,’ I said.

‘Not the first time I’ve felt like it, but hey I’ve become a pacifist in my old age, da.’

‘We should get going, Noah,’ I said, trying to get the day back on track.

‘OK, give me a moment. Get lost, Godless, your vigil is over,’ he said, batting the dog on the rump. The dog trotted off and Noah said to me, ‘Do you like The Who?’

When I admitted I didn’t know their music he said enthusiastically, ‘Bloody great music to listen to when the mist rolls in. Or the Doors. It makes your melancholy so fucking deep, especially if you’re smoking first-rate dope, that you come close to touching the void. One of these days I’ll want to experience it so much that I’ll get carried away and jump—falling, falling, falling into eternity… Wouldn’t that be a great way to go?’

‘You don’t really mean that, do you?’

‘Course not. It takes great courage or great despair or the great stupidity of youth to be able to kill oneself, and I don’t have any of those… but look, I know you want to get going, so I’ll stop blathering and go get changed.’

He walked off into the mist, and I sat down beside the fire, surrounded by the shadowed faces on the tombstones looking down on me like an attentive audience, all sorts of thoughts teeming in my head. I had brought the last chapter of Mr Sorabjee’s book with me to pass on to Noah, hoping that he would be struck by what my mentor had to say. But would that do the trick with someone like him?

Noah returned, having swapped his bloody T-shirt for his favourite Jimi Hendrix one. He asked me whether we had an appointment to see the Collector, and I admitted that we hadn’t; I had been told just to turn up and take my chances. It was the sort of small-town behaviour I should have been anticipating. He shrugged and said, ‘No hurry then,’ and sat down beside me, lit the stove and put the kettle on. When the tea was made, we both sat in silence for a while watching the play of the fire on the mist. What a strange man he was, I thought, a man who would carry a stray dog for miles to give it a farewell, yet a man without faith.

As if reading my thoughts, he said to me, ‘You must think I’m pretty weird, huh, hanging out in the cemetery and all?’

‘Well, I have wondered…’

‘Listen, da, you’ll be gone in a couple of days, and I doubt we’ll ever see each other again, but you’re an OK guy, Vijay, so I’m going to tell you something nobody knows about me. Just keep it to yourself is all I ask. As you know, my mother died when I was ten, and I’ve told you that screwed me up pretty badly, made me junk religion and all, but what I didn’t tell you was that for many months I’d come and hang around in this cemetery, every opportunity I got. She’s buried here and I would tend her grave, put fresh flowers on it, that kind of stuff. I would also talk to her as though she were still around, tell her my problems. She was always in my head, so it was easy to do. I read later that this is quite a common reaction when you lose a parent, especially when you’re very young, but I didn’t grow out of it. I kept coming back to the cemetery for as long as I lived here and gradually got used to hanging out with the dead—not just my mother, others too, they seemed to fit quite naturally into my scene. Later, I got friendly with some Todas, they’re the original inhabitants of the Nilgiris, and they believe their dead make their home in a place just like ours until they are reborn. It’s right here in the mountains and there’s a constant criss-crossing of spirits and living people between their respective worlds so it all made a strange kind of sense. Anyhow, as I became more and more reclusive, it was convenient to chat to the people who were buried here—it was less taxing than having to deal with the living. It’s not that crazy when you think about it, most religious traditions believe the dead hang around for a bit before they move on to the next life. Even scientists agree that we are basically recycled from people and things that existed centuries ago, and until that happens everything that has passed on decomposes into a sort of free-floating state, so who is to say that the dead don’t exist here as naturally as you or I…’

There didn’t seem a whole lot to say to this latest revelation. I must be getting used to him, I thought, because I didn’t even find it particularly crazy. Perhaps if I managed to persuade him to become more involved in the business of the shrine, he could enlist the services of the ‘unrecycled’ dead to scare Rajan off.

~

3. We finally got to Ooty at half past one. The mist had thinned by the time we set out, but our progress was slow because visibility was still poor, especially on the hairpin bends where we couldn’t see more than a foot ahead of us. To make matters worse, our taxi broke down just short of town, and we wasted over an hour while the driver sorted out the problem.

I was disappointed by Ooty. Charing Cross, the main intersection, was chaotic and dirty, and it set the tone for the rest of the place. The mist erased much of the grime and the squalor, but the town bore scant resemblance to the enchantment promised in the tourist brochures.

The Collector’s office was an old colonial building set on an elevation above the town. Groups of men loitered in the compound, the usual crowd of supplicants, hangers-on and minor functionaries that could be found around virtually every seat of government or bureaucracy in the country. We had formulated a rough and ready plan of action in the car—I would reprise my role as a
Times of India
reporter who was holidaying in the Nilgiris and had decided on the spur of the moment to write a story about the controversy surrounding the Tower of God.

At reception we were told that the Collector was out touring the district but was expected back at around 3.30 in the afternoon. Noah was all for leaving but I insisted we stay. More than ever it seemed important to me to meet this powerful official, if only to impress on him the urgency of the situation; and if he heard it from a
Times of India
reporter perhaps he would have no option but to take it seriously. After we had waited for an hour in a crowded room that stank of unwashed bodies and wet wool, I suggested we have a coffee and return closer to the hour the Collector was expected. We stopped at a roadside restaurant, and then wandered through the misty streets before returning to the Collectorate. This time we were told the Collector wasn’t expected back at all that day, but when I began waving my journalistic credentials around I was told I could meet the ranking bureaucrat in the building.

After another half an hour of waiting in a small antechamber on hard folding chairs, I was summoned to an office which the electric tube-lights did little to brighten. A portable heater in which a single heating filament glowed was the only source of warmth. My interview with the official, whose precise rank I never found out, was brief. I asked him whether I could get a message to his superior about the trouble that was expected in Meham, but it was obvious within minutes that he didn’t share my concern. He said that the Meham police station had already informed them about the demonstration and had made arrangements to ensure that everything went off peacefully. He said he would tell the Collector about my visit but beyond that wasn’t prepared to do anything. I left the office feeling dispirited and, collecting Noah from the waiting room, made my way out of the building. To my annoyance, he was whistling.

As we walked towards the taxi, I noticed a small knot of men bearing hand-lettered placards and shouting slogans protesting against a lockout of tea estate workers at an estate in Kotagiri. That might work, I thought, but when I suggested to Noah that we should think of organizing our own demonstration to counter Rajan’s, he wasn’t enthusiastic. When I pointed out that there had been a peace march the last time the shrine was besieged, he said, ‘We’ll never get permission from the authorities. And there’s not a whole lot you can do to stop Rajan from inside a prison cell in Meham.’

‘There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot I’m doing outside,’ I said. ‘Who would we have to go and see?’

‘The Collector maybe, but as this is a local matter the inspector in charge of Meham police station could probably give permission.’

‘Let’s bring it up when we see him then,’ I said.

‘I think you’re just wasting your time,’ he replied.

‘I’d like to try anyway.’

~

4. On the way back to Meham, I asked the driver to make a detour to the Tower of God. Noah argued that we couldn’t climb up to the shrine as well as get to the police station on time, but I brushed his objections aside. I had no clear plan in mind, all I wanted to do was check to see that everything was all right. When we got to the Tower, we could barely see it for the clouds but, to my dismay, the white shroud was beginning to disperse. It was very windy, and at this rate the approach to the shrine would be clear by nightfall. I asked Noah what he thought the chances were for bad weather the next day, and he shrugged and said it was always possible there would be rain.

As we weren’t going to make the climb, there was still enough time for tea before we went to the police station. It was dark and gloomy in the tea stall, so we went back to the road and drank our tea sitting on the parapet. It seemed a good opportunity to give Noah the chapter from Mr Sorabjee’s manuscript. We had only one more stop to make, and if I was going to convince him to accompany me to the shrine the next day—which was as far as I had got with my plan to stop Rajan—then I would need to do it this evening. I collected the chapter from the taxi and gave it to him.