Go West, Inspector Ghote. H. R. f. Keating
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orange garments was a little back door to the hut. If he could slip out through that he might be able to leave Fred Hoskins sitting in his monster car in—what was it he had said?—a back-up situation. With his piece, yes, his piece at the ready. To be free of that looming, noisy presence while making some quiet observations, what could be better?
The little door proved to be unlocked. Ghote stepped carefully out and began to make his way through the tall redwood trees up the hill, carefully keeping the bulk of the Visitors’ Centre between himself and Fred Hoskins’ car.
Soon after he had safely rejoined the dirt track he began to see through the trees the shapes of bright-coloured tents and the occasional wooden hut. He guessed that these were where the disciples of the ashram slept. Perhaps in one of them Nirmala Shahani would be found.
After a while the broad path, criss-crossed with tyre-tracks, divided, one branch continuing straight up the hill and the other, marked with a neat signpost saying ASHRAM, leading off to the right. A few yards distant from the fork a curious little structure caught his eye. It looked like a square metal cupboard standing all alone, half-hidden by the thick trunk of a soaring redwood. It was painted a bright blue and had some white lettering on it.
He wondered if it might be some sort of information kiosk, somewhere with pamphlets about the ashram and perhaps some bio-data on the Swami With No Name. He ought to have taken whatever was available at the Visitors’ Centre, but the prospect of slipping away and seeing the swami quietly for himself had made him forget. This might be his chance.
He went quickly through the trees towards the upright little metal box, and when he got near was able to see that the lettering on it spelt out JOHNNY ALL ALONE. What could that mean?
Cautiously he pulled open the door at the front.
A lavatory, western-style, confronted him, smelling abundantly of some artificial floweriness, very like that he had encountered in the men’s room at the airport. An American smell. The disappointment and surprise affected him with altogether disproportionate force. Abruptly he was aware how very far away he was from India. Poor, distant India where for the most part the open ground, though perhaps it should not do so, served the purpose of this bright blue box, so efficient, so functional and so private.
At a much slower pace he made his way along the path leading to the ashram’s Meditation Hall and the Swami With No Name.
He did not have far to go before he saw through the trees a circle of large log-built huts with, rising above them two odd and different buildings. One, on the farther side of the circle, was a big, pure white dome looking to his eyes a cross between a futuristic, solidly material structure reminiscent in a way of the spider-like control tower at Los Angeles airport and something airily light and flyaway like the intangible spiritual claims of an ashram.
But the second, nearer structure was perhaps even odder. At its base, he saw as he advanced, it was a log-cabin much like the Visitors’ Centre though somewhat larger, square in shape and apparently without windows. Above this base, however, there rose, twice as high, into the unbroken deep blue of the sky a tall spiral apparently made out of translucent orange plastic. What could such a place be?
He would have to find out later. The opportunity of observing the swami awaited him urgently now.
He went forward until he had reached the edge of the wide clearing in which the circle of buildings stood. There could be little doubt that the big white dome was the Meditation Hall and, squaring his shoulders, he set off towards it passing through the gap between the extraordinary orange-roofed building and a large plain one which, to judge by the faint odour of food coming from it, would be the ashram’s communal dining hall.
Against its wall, just as he emerged into the centre circle, a bicycle was propped in a state of half-repair, the tyre of its front wheel off and the soft rubber inner tube loosely dangling. It was a machine of much the same old standard pattern as the thousands he saw every day on the streets in Bombay, markedly different from the one or two low-slung, heavily-geared affairs he had noticed at the start of his trip out to the ashram. The sight of this old machine reversed in an instant the depression he had been plunged into by his encounter with the Johnny-All-Alone box. Here at last was something that did not work, and someone who, clearly, had lost heart half-way through trying to put it to rights.
Perhaps, here under the Californian sun, he was after all in a sort of India.
So he marched, careless now of his still thud-thudding head, straight across the centre circle over to the pure whiteness of the domed Meditation Hall. Its double doors, like those of the Visitors’ Centre, stood invitingly open. But this time he did not hesitate, mounted the two or three wooden steps confidently and entered.
He found himself in a lobby whose floor was covered with a huge variety of footwear, sandals, shoes, boots, runner’s shoes like the pair he had seen on the jogger and great clumsy rubber boots, all discarded in obedience to a stark notice on the wall saying ABANDON SHOES AND LOGIC ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.
But he was not going to abandon logic. Certainly not. He was going to enter and observe and quietly deduce. He was going to be what Dr. Hans Gross called in his mildew-stained masterwork Criminal Investigation, which he had not succeeded in snatching before his departure from his cabin at C.I.D. Headquarters, “a careful weigher of facts.”
His shoes, however, he would abandon. He did not want in any way to be conspicuous inside the hall.
He slipped them off—they were his better pair, worn in honour and fear of setting foot in America—put them where he could slide into them again quickly and easily and then turned to the inner pair of double doors leading into the hall itself.
Very quietly he pushed back one leaf and stepped inside.
The sight that met his eyes was as reassuring as the half-repaired bicycle had been. Under its white dome the building looked not all that unlike a temple in India. It was a good deal more filled with light, but the whole floor area was cluttered with worshippers, most of them sitting cross-legged. Many wore clothes, either orange in colour or white, that might have been seen in any temple, though here and there some unashamed Westerners were dressed in T-shirts. On the far wall in huge Devanagri script was the mystic word AUM together with paintings that plainly represented swamis of a past era, men who had never left their native India, copiously white-bearded sages whose eyes glowed with tender thoughts. And they were garlanded, too.
The air was heavy as well with the scent of agarbati, the drifting smoke from the little burning sticks visible here and there. And there was sitar music, rolling and tinkling out. Evidently the swami had yet to begin his discourse.
All the better.
He dropped into a sitting position on the floor by the doors.
The sitar-player, when he had located him at the left-hand front corner of the raised platform at the far side of the hall, gave him a new jab of uneasiness. Although dressed in the ochre garb of a holy man and although his playing gave every evidence of familiarity with his instrument, he was unmistakably a Westerner. His shaven head, all but a tuft at the back, was white-skinned and pale and his deep-set eyes were a piercingly bright blue.
The steady thudding of his headache obtruded itself again and he was once more aware of the weariness deep in every limb.
And then suddenly his eyes were caught by the man he had come to observe, and had a little dreaded seeing. The Swami With No Name. At the opposite side of the platform to the white sitar-player he had quietly risen to his feet. But, smooth and apparently unobtrusive though the movement had been, somehow it had at once attracted the gaze of every person down on the floor of the big domed building.
Perhaps, Ghote told himself sharply, this was simply because there had come the moment in a regular order of events when the swami’s discourse always began. So his hungry audience would have been expecting him to get to his feet. Perhaps no more than that was needed to explain the mass magnetic movement down on the floor. Or perhaps not.
The swami stood looking silently down on the sea of upturned faces. At the other side of the platform the sitar music faded away