She said, “Did you know Mrs Darling?”
“Oh, poor Elizabeth. We were so devastated. She was like a second mother to me – well, a first mother actually. I had some problems back home with my mother and her fourth husband.”
“She was happy here, was she?”
“Oh, yes. She’s been coming here every spring for quite a few years. She and the Swami were very close… in a spiritual sense, I mean. He’s been in deep retreat ever since it happened. You’re about the first person he’s agreed to see since then. Come along, I’ll take you to him.”
Swami Bhatti was a small man with a large white beard, wrapped in an orange shawl and with a matching orange bindi on his forehead. He was sitting in the full lotus position on a plain cotton mat, and gestured to Christine to sit facing him. His eyes gleamed at her through large rimless spectacles, which reflected the flames of candles set up around the room.
“Christine,” he said, in a voice so soft that she had to lean forward to hear his words. “You have set out on a great spiritual journey. You feel like a traveller without a map, a sailor without a rudder, a bird without a sense of direction.”
“Yes.”
“You grieve for your mother.”
“Yes.”
“You are deeply troubled by your loss.”
‘Yes.”
“You seek closure.”
Christine hesitated. She wished he hadn’t used that word.
“Here we can help you to find closure, and to put this behind you, so that you can move forward in your spiritual journey.”
The Swami closed his eyes and a deep murmuring sound filled the room. It took Christine a moment to realize that it was coming from him. It stopped and he opened his eyes again.
“Often there are impediments to closure – a feeling of guilt, for example.”
“Oh, yes!” Christine nodded vigorously.
“Property, for example. Things that the dead beloved left behind.”
“My mother left me her house.”
“Exactly. It weighs upon you, like a debt, it fills you with guilt.”
The guru blinked and gave a little cough, as if he were getting ahead of himself. “But we can speak of that later. For now it is enough to recognize your need for forgetfulness and closure, so that you can begin again your spiritual journey, here, with us.”
He was interrupted by a sudden commotion outside in the courtyard. A woman – Mrs Yanamandra perhaps – was shrieking and then a man shouted, “Where is that thieving bastard!”
The door of the meditation room in which Christine and the guru were sitting crashed open and Mrs Darling’s son stood there, a furious expression on his face. “Ah, there you are!” He glared at Swami Bhatti, who was scrambling to his feet in alarm. “Come here, you little scumbag. I’m going to wring your bloody neck!”
Christine watched in alarm as Jeremy Darling charged into the room. The candle flames flickered and the Swami stumbled back against the wall as the furious interloper lurched forward, hands bunched into fists, and then several young men, some in dhotis and some in jeans, came running in and grappled him, falling to the floor in a struggling heap.
Mrs Yanamandra appeared, wild-eyed. “Swami! Are you hurt?”
Swami Bhatti had pulled himself together. He took on the dignified stoop of a martyr. “I am perfectly fine, thank you, Dorothy. This poor man is sadly deluded.”
“Yes, yes.” Mrs Yanamandra pulled out a mobile phone from beneath her sari and called the police. On the floor the bodies had stopped struggling. The young men got to their feet, hauling Darling upright. “What shall we do with him, Dorothy?”
“Lock him in the store room,” she snapped. She turned to Christine. “Come with me.”
As she waited in the office, Christine thought back over her meeting with Swami Bhatti. There had been the disconcerting mention of property just before Jeremy Darling had appeared, but the guru’s words before that had also made Christine feel uneasy. All that talk of closure – he seemed to want to numb her feelings about the death of her mother and cover them up. But she didn’t want forgetfulness. She was angry at its unfairness and she wanted to hang on to her anger and fight against those awful memories, not blank them out.
“Christine!”
She looked up and saw Sub-Inspector Gupta in the doorway.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” She described what had happened.
“So you heard Darling make threats against Swami Bhatti’s life?”
She nodded reluctantly. “He was very angry. He said the Swami was a thief.”
“That’s absolute rubbish,” Mrs Yanamandra said, coming out of her office. “The man’s a menace. You must arrest him for attempted murder.”
“Where is he now?”
“We have locked him up in a store room. I’ll show you.”
Sub-Inspector Gupta followed her out to the corridor, where two uniformed policemen with rifles were waiting, and they set off to make the arrest. A little later they were back, the sub-inspector giving orders to the other two, who ran out into the street.
“He broke through the tiled roof of the store room and climbed down into the alley behind the ashram,’” Gupta said, getting out his phone. “He’ll be miles away by now.”
When he finished his call to headquarters, Christine said that she felt sorry for Jeremy Darling. In a way they were both the same, seeking answers to the death of a mother, both angry at the unfairness of it. And although Mr Darling’s anger at Swami Bhatti might be financial in nature, that may just be a mask for his deeper feelings of loss.
Sub-Inspector Gupta looked at her with a smile. “You try to see the best in people, Christine, although in this case I think Mr Darling’s motives are straightforward. His mother’s legacy consisted almost entirely of her house, in an expensive part of Sydney Harbour, worth many millions of dollars. She left it to Swami Bhatti to establish an ashram there, to further his work.”
A house, Christine thought – another parallel.
“So long as Mr Darling is free, we shall have to post a guard here to protect the Swami.”
“And meanwhile Mrs Darling’s killer is on the loose.”
“That’s true. My superiors who have taken over the case are not making much progress. The autopsy has shown that she was stabbed by a long, narrow blade, but we have no record of such a weapon, no terrorist group has claimed responsibility, and we still have no eyewitnesses coming forward, even though she was surrounded by dozens of people when she was killed. It is a baffling case. If only I could solve it, I could make a considerable name for myself.”
Christine remembered the impression that Mrs Darling had made on her when they had met so briefly before her death. “It would be nice to think that some good might come of it,” she said.
Christine returned to the Dubashi Guesthouse feeling disappointed by her visit to the Atmapriksa Ashram. Perhaps she hadn’t given Swami Bhatti a fair trial, she thought, but his words had not resonated with her.
Mr Dubashi called out to her when she stepped inside. “You do not look uplifted by your meeting with the guru, Christine.”
She told him what had happened, and he nodded smugly. “You confirm my suspicions. He is all right for gullible tourists who want to pay a lot of dollars for a mild taste of Indian mysticism, but not for a serious pilgrim like yourself.”
“What should I do, then?”
“If you ask me, fate has brought the answer right here to your side. Here, under this very roof, is a true student of the mysteries of life and death.”
“Mr Nemichandra?”
“Exactly, a Jain monk. If anyone can help you it is surely he. And do you know, Christine, it may help us in another matter if you talk to him.”
“How is that?”
“Jain monks and nuns live by the five mahavratas, the five ‘great vows’, which are non-violence, truthfulness, honesty, asceticism and celibacy. Of these, the first, ahimsa, non-violence, is the most important, and if there is a clash it takes precedence over all the others. So, what if telling the truth would cause someone to suffer violence? A Jain would then have to remain silent, and I am wondering if this, rather than the knock on his head, is what is preventing Mr Nemichandra telling us who he saw kill Mrs Darling, for the Indian Penal Code prescribes death as the penalty for murder.”