The Taj Conspiracy (21 page)

‘But,’ Raghav interrupted, ‘that seemed to indicate the basement rooms, which, after Mehrunisa instructed me on the Taj labyrinth, we checked thoroughly and found nothing!’

Singh shook his head, took another long swig and drained his glass. ‘You got that wrong. The “andhera” was pointing at the changes in the calligraphy.’

‘Perhaps,’ Raghav nodded thoughtfully and took another sip of his drink.

‘Oye!’ Singh hollered and stretched a hand in his direction. ‘Why are you sipping rum like a lady at high tea? Bottoms up, man!’ With that he drained his glass again. Raghav followed dutifully.

As Singh wiped his mouth with the back of his hand Raghav refilled their glasses. It was past midnight and the dhaba was still buzzing. On several cots men were stretched out under blankets. In the distance fields stretched out, mist skimming the crop. R.P. Singh liked the open; it reminded him of his father. A decorated war hero, he had been an army officer whose non-family postings kept him away for long periods, but when he returned, he’d take his son trekking and hiking and Singh recalled many nights when they had slept in the open.... He shook his head and returned to the present.

‘But then why did Toor’s corpse vanish?’

‘To avoid a post-mortem,’ Raghav said, clearly enjoying his drink. He had removed his shoes and was sitting cross-legged on the cot now.

‘Who would take the corpse?’ Singh squinted in concentration. The rum was affecting him. ‘The murderer?’

‘Aurangzeb?’

‘I think this Aurangzeb is someone Mehrunisa knows as well,’ Singh said, and told Raghav about his visit to Professor Kaul’s house where he had witnessed the professor warn Mehrunisa about Aurangzeb.

Raghav whistled. ‘This gets interesting!’

‘Listen,’ R.P. Singh sat up. ‘Do you know why they assigned the case to me?

Despite several drinks, Raghav was sober enough to be unsure how to answer.

‘Go on,’ Singh urged, ‘speak your mind. Anything you say this evening will be forgiven.’

That was all the encouragement an inebriated Raghav needed. ‘Because, JCP Rana Pratap Singh, you are a son-of-a-gun, with a reputation for weeding out troublemakers.’

‘I am the official chutiya, you mean? Ha!’ R.P. Singh gave a loud snigger. ‘No. I am the jamadar, the cleaning man. I have gone down so many sewers I can think like the rats who live in those gutters!’

‘So what do you think of Aurangzeb?’

The two men were sitting on either ends of the narrow jute cot, their chests inclined towards each other, the depleted Old Monk bottle sitting between them. To a casual onlooker they would appear a pair of good-fornothing drunks.

R.P. Singh spoke softly. ‘This Aurangzeb has two faces, one he shows the world—Mehrunisa, for instance—and the other is hidden. So, he is a composite of his known face and his hidden face. What is hidden, is in the dark. Therefore, we need to search the dark....’

He tipped his glass, finished his drink and tossed the kulhar on the ground. It slammed into the clay ground with a pop.

‘What was designed as the complement of the Taj Mahal?’ R.P. Singh looked up at Raghav and watched the light slowly dawn in his eyes.

Raghav’s eyes widened as he recalled Mehrunisa’s tutorial. A bazaar and caravanserai originally formed an integral part of the Taj Mahal complex—it was now obliterated by the city quarter known as—‘Taj Ganj,’ he said.

Agra

T
he next morning SSP Raghav was up at the crack of dawn. His head was fuzzy from the previous night’s binge and lack of sleep, but it was nothing that a round of sit-ups and a cold shower would not fix. Two cups of tea and a breakfast of omelette-toast later, he was strolling in Taj Ganj as its residents awakened from sleep. Raghav had deliberately chosen the early hour for, as the day progressed, Taj Ganj became increasingly congested. He reached the streetlight under which he had seen the boys that night and looked around. A row of shuttered shops, a three-storey budget hotel—precariously perched on its narrow base, some cycle rickshaws parked for the night, the ubiquitous strays. Overhead electric cables crisscrossed the narrow street. He walked down, his keen eyes observing the pedestrian area for anything out of the ordinary.

Earlier, discreet enquiries regarding the incendiary pamphlet had revealed that he had pre-empted the boys. At the police station they had rounded up the usual suspects, hooligans and petty thiefs, but the two boys he had sighted were not amongst them. Thereafter, Raghav, in plainclothes, had done a round of Taj Ganj but the punks remained elusive.

Taj Mahal-Taj Ganj, he thought, mulling over R.P. Singh’s hypothesis. He had to agree though: in this world, in the part of it that was India, beauty and beast co-existed, one never far from the other. The beautiful Taj Mahal, and attached to its side like a sore, the ugly Taj Ganj; the 5-star hotels and the budget hovels; the expensive marble souvenirs and their lowly craftsmen who went blind crafting them....

A buffalo grunted as he passed its stable and Raghav realised he had reached Sirhi Darwaza, the entrance gate to the Taj Mahal. Located close by was the wall the boys had clambered to get away. He walked up to it.

The street was now filling up with people engaging in their daily chores. However, his police uniform would ensure that they kept their distance. He glanced at his watch. He had a window of a half hour before patrons, animals, vehicles dispersed through Taj Ganj, rendering any further examination difficult.

The imposing carved wooden gate, decorated with iron knockers, stood under an arch beyond which lay the Taj Mahal’s Jilaukhana. The main bazaar street terminated at this point. It was some days since the incident and he was unlikely to find anything, but Raghav examined the ground as he traced his steps from the gate towards the low wall the boys had scaled.

A dog was idling by the wall and he shooed it away. The ground beside the wall was dusty, unlike the concrete of the bazaar street, and Raghav sifted through the soil with his shoe. The cap of a Pepsi bottle, scraps of paper, a twisted plastic rag, a—locket?

He bent down, retrieved the locket and wiped it on his trouser leg. It was two-sided, one face showing Shiva, the other a series of temples on a riverbank below which was written Bateshwar 101.

Raghav was vaguely aware of the town located around seventy kilometres from Agra—a Shiva pilgrimage centre, wasn’t it? The locket wasn’t much to go by, but the presence of Shiva on it had him hooked. He decided to drive down to Bateshwar for a recce.

Meanwhile, he would instruct a plainclothes policeman to scour Taj Ganj, then check the weedy Yamuna bank opposite the monument. Nothing would come of examining that undergrowth probably, but he didn’t want to come up short next time he faced CBI’s Singh.

Inside Brijwasi Sweet House & Restaurant in Sadar Bazaar, Inspector Bharadwaj sat in a private booth awaiting the arrival of steaming mutton handi and fresh naan. He was hoping to impress his guest, a man of considerable girth—the sort that came from wrestling in an akhara from an early age—and bulging biceps, all of which he put to good use as an Agra strongman. Which, in turn, had brought him several encounters with the law but no jail time. For a policeman to engage openly in public with a known goon was one way to ratchet up his own public standing—this, after all, was Uttar Pradesh, where a thug as the right-hand man of a politician was the norm. And this particular strongman had links that went all the way from the local BHP unit up to the top.

The next instant mutton handi was placed on the table and Inspector Bharadwaj was pleased to notice the strongman’s nostrils twitch. With upturned palms and an ingratiating smile he urged his guest to begin.

‘And you?’ the strongman grunted.

The inspector explained he was fasting, calling upon some obscure deity from the vast Hindu pantheon that desired Bharadwaj’s specific abstinence.

The strongman grunted again and started to tuck in—in his presence, folks usually fasted.

Inspector Bharadwaj was a newish recruit who had proved his credentials six months back when the strongman, who ran a successful rent-a-riot outfit, had orchestrated a spectacular rampage at the Taj Mahal on the occasion of the Urs celebration at the monument. Bharadwaj with his posse of CISF men had flailed helplessly while the vandals did their job. The CISF had the mandate of securing Taj Mahal, yet, as the proverb went,
ghar ka bhedi lanka dhaye
. With a mole within, even Ravan couldn’t keep his legendary Lanka safe.

That performance earned the inspector an entry onto the strongman’s list, and hard cash. However, the job Bharadwaj was entrusted with now was vastly bigger; executed correctly, it would catapult him up the state police hierarchy.

Inspector Bharadwaj watched the strongman gorge, swallowed the saliva in his mouth, patted his shiny forehead that was enlarged because of frontal baldness, and waited for his guest to divulge the next step in the plot.

Delhi-Jaipur highway

‘A
re you keen on an intellectual exercise? Some mental aerobics?’ Raj Bhushan popped a fresh mint into his mouth as he glanced at her.

‘Why not?’ Mehrunisa said, her eyes scanning the barren tract that bordered NH8, the national highway connecting Delhi to Jaipur. They were being driven in Raj Bhushan’s official car, having left at dawn for the five-hour trip. ‘It’ll help pass the time.’

Raj Bhushan cocked his head. ‘You remember the pamphlet that SSP Raghav found? I’d like to debate some controversial points it raised, especially with regard to the design elements of the Taj Mahal.’

‘Why would you want to do that?’

‘A healthy spirit of enquiry?’ Raj Bhushan chuckled. ‘Why does Shiva’s trident rest atop the central dome of the Taj Mahal?’

Mehrunisa’s eyes widened in disbelief as she examined her interrogator with frank curiosity. He was, as the cricketing term went, batting on the front foot.

‘You know it’s nothing of the sort! The pinnacle consists of a crowning element formed of lotus leaves—’

‘Another standard Hindu symbol: the lotus! Vishnu is always depicted standing on a lotus. Goddess Saraswati sits on a lotus.’

Aria fritta! Mehrunisa said to herself silently. Clearly, although the ASI director-general was friendly with Professor Kaul, the two men had decidedly different approaches to their work. While Raj Bhushan believed in questioning history which sometimes necessitated being equivocal on historical matters, Professor Kaul was rigorous with the truth.
Rubbish
, he would have exclaimed on hearing the counter-argument just made by Raj Bhushan. His life’s work had been built around the Taj Mahal; a small fraction of it dealt with speculation concerning the Hindu origin of the mausoleum, which in his mind, was the preserve of idle gossipers and greedy guides.

At its heart, the Taj Mahal was a syncretic creation. That the product of a mating between two vastly different beliefs and cultures had wrought a thing of such luminosity rankled the fundamentalists who’d rather see it as a mongrel. A mongrel was a stain on the purebred—it had to be stripped of its individual features until each element could be assigned its proper ancestry. The lotus flower was Hindu: how dare a Mughal emperor use it in his monument? The pot with overflowing flowers was definitely a Hindu kalasha, and damn the Mughals with their vision of paradise as a place filled with flowers! An old anger stirred within Mehrunisa and flashed briefly in her grey-green eyes before years of self-discipline asserted itself. She angled her chin at Raj Bhushan: if the Taj Mahal required an advocate, this Indo-Persian mongrel would fit the bill just fine.

‘So, you’re unaware,’ she said in a mocking tone, ‘that the lotus flower had become a standard motif of Islamic Indian architecture by the time of Shah Jahan? The Qutab Minar in Delhi, begun in 1193, is an excellent example of early Indo-Islamic style.’

Raj Bhushan smirked. ‘Because twenty-seven temples were destroyed to construct the Qutab complex!’

‘Shifting from architecture to political history, are we?’

‘The two are linked, my dear.’

‘Sure, but that isn’t the point of this discussion. The point is that the Qutab Minar evolved out of an Islamic conception and a Hindu execution. Qutab-Din-Aibak built the first mosque in India, the Quwwat-ul-Islam within the Qutab complex. Because he was in a hurry, he did not wish to send for engineers to Iran—where arches and domes were well developed. Instead, he ordered the local Hindu architects to follow their trabeate system of horizontal beams. Partly due to the use of material from Hindu temples, and partly due to the work of Hindu craftsmen, the Qutab Minar is what it is.’

‘Well said. But returning to the Taj, what about the shape of the finial atop the main dome? Which is a pot with overflowing plants, an ancient Hindu symbol of prosperity and wellbeing? What the Hindus call a kalasha?’

‘Who’s sounding like a conspiracy theorist now!’

Mehrunisa had propped her sunglasses atop her head since the sun was still not strong. Now she wished she was wearing them—she could do with a rose-tinted view of both the landscape and the ASI director-general. She forced herself to speak evenly, but her grey-green eyes registered scorn at the foolish query.