Ritual by Uttaran Das Gupta

Author:Uttaran Das Gupta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

TWENTY-ONE

The sound of machine gun fire on Little Russel Street seemed incongruous to Tim Taylor. It came in two short bursts, the second round lasting marginally longer than the first. He could not immediately figure out its source and started looking around.

How do I know all this? Well, some of it is from police records on that day. The rest is informed deduction. There might be a few subtle differences, but this how it all probably happened.

This was the fashionable part of town, where it would be more common to hear the strains of jazz or cabaret wafting out, along with the smell of soy sauce and spring onions, from an air-conditioned Chinese restaurant on a sultry afternoon like this. As the names of the roads – Theatre Road, Camac Street, Rowdon Street, Lawdon Street, Wood Street – suggested, these were all parts of the old colonial city, constructed mostly in the nineteenth or the early twentieth century. Tim was not unfamiliar with the area, having walked through its streets for hours on lonely evenings when he was a newcomer to the city. He knew that in 1964, the municipal authorities had renamed Theatre Road as Shakespeare Sarani to commemorate the birth centenary of the Bard. Tim knew that if you took a right at Wood Street, you would reach Saturday Club, which was established in 1878 by British civilians and army men as an exclusively white institution but was now run by Indians. The longevity of some of these institutions often surprised him. Take for instance the Calcutta Nursing Home: it was established by one Miss Brown in 1918, was taken over by a Bengali army doctor in 1926, and continues as a medical establishment even today. Another example was the Waqf Estate of Shahjad Begum at 33 Theatre Road – a property always owned by Muslims. On the day of the Vasant Sena procession, the police had thrown a protective ring around it. About half a dozen constables, armed with bamboo sticks, were strolling in front of it. The senior ones were sitting on a few wooden chairs placed outside the iron gates of the estate and listening to cricket commentary on a portable transistor. Most Vasant Sena members passed by without even glancing at the property.

Tim stopped to take a few pictures. He knew these were good ones and he could sell them easily to the Auckland Star. The meteoric rise of Hindu fanaticism in India had started attracting the attention of the international press. Perhaps, once this case was sorted, he could plan a trip to Ayodhya.

The voice of Yogi Premananda suddenly filled the afternoon air:

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