Death in the East Read online

  With the gamcha tied around my waist, I made it back to the dormitory in time to see the door open and my dorm-mates stumble in. They seemed a motley collection. What little conversation there was between them ceased at the sight of me standing there, naked from the waist up and dripping like a haddock caught in the rain. I gave them a cursory nod and dripped more water onto the stone floor. The man first through the door – a short dark-haired chap, not much more than a boy – gave me a pained half-smile of acknowledgement before collapsing onto his cot.

  None seemed much in the mood for conversation. The last to enter, a middle-aged man with a thick, reddish, bespectacled face and greying hair, walked over and sat down on the bunk across from mine. Around his neck hung a thin chain and a small golden Star of David.

  ‘You should put on some clothes, friend.’ His accent was unmistakably German. He nodded towards the cabinet beside my bed. ‘You don’t want to catch a cold. Trust me, the last thing you need is to be heaving your guts out all week while also coughing up your lungs.’ He let out a gruff laugh and proffered a hand. ‘Adler. Jacob Adler.’

  ‘Wyndham,’ I said, shaking his hand, ‘Sam Wyndham.’ I took his advice, leaned over and retrieved the monastic vestments and began putting them on.

  ‘English.’ He nodded matter-of-factly. ‘You are in good company.’ He gestured to the bunks nearest the door. ‘Cooper and Green, they also are English. But your first name, this is short for Samuel, no? You are Jewish?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m not anything,’ I said as I buttoned the rough shirt, ‘at least not anything that a rabbi or a vicar might recognise as one of his flock.’ I slipped my feet into the sandals and sat down on the edge of my cot. ‘I fear whatever deity might be up there, he’s long since washed his hands of me.’

  Adler nodded sagely. ‘And yet here you are, in a monastery, looking for help from men of God to rid you of your affliction.’

  ‘Believe me,’ I said, ‘I’d much rather be seeking a cure in an Alpine health spa run by Viennese psychoanalysts, but I can’t afford the cost of the voyage let alone their hourly rate, so I’m stuck with Assam, Hindu monks and a week’s worth of vomiting.’

  The Jew laughed.

  ‘And you?’ I continued. ‘What’s your excuse for coming here? I’d have thought Austria was closer to home for you than Assam.’

  ‘You’re correct about that,’ he said, ‘if not about the efficacy of Viennese men of science. I am here because the monastery of Devraha Swami was recommended by an old friend who was once treated here.’

  ‘What’s your poison?’ I asked.

  His brow creased. ‘Poison?’

  ‘Your affliction of choice. Opium? Heroin? You don’t strike me as an alcoholic.’

  His face lightened.

  ‘Ah, I take your meaning. My “poison”, I’m afraid, is internal,’ he said, pressing the fingers of one hand to his chest. ‘I have a tumour which my doctor tells me is cancerous.’

  ‘And is the treatment doing any good?’

  He gave a world-weary shrug. ‘Eh, who knows? They give me the herbal tonic. I drink the herbal tonic. They give me more tonic. I drink more tonic. And then I go to the latrines and I spritz the whole lot down the drain.’

  ‘You’re not on the vomiting regime?’

  ‘If I am,’ he chuckled, ‘it isn’t working.’

  Adler lay back on his cot. ‘Now, Mr Wyndham, with your permission, I might take a rest before dinner. The exertions leave me weak.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, and turned to survey the other inmates. None of them had taken much of an interest in me, or, it seemed, in anything else. They lay silently on their bunks, exhaustion etched on their faces, reminding me of a group of sailors I’d once seen pulled from the North Sea after their ship had been torpedoed from under them. Suddenly, a shiver passed through me. A black wave of fear of what lay ahead.

  I distracted myself by focusing on the others and trying to deduce who was who. I was a detective, after all, and deduction was something I was supposed to be good at. So far I knew that Adler was German, and that the two nearest the door were Englishmen. Brother Shankar had mentioned that the others were French, Belgian and American.

  From Adler I’d learned that the two Englishmen were called Cooper and Green, though I didn’t know which was which. The one nearest the door was a tall, pale, skeletal man with fair hair and a nose that might have fallen off the face of Julius Caesar. The other was shorter and darker, with the tanned, leathery skin that spoke of a lifetime spent exiled in the tropics. If I had to choose, I’d have guessed Cooper to be the walking cadaver and Green as the one with the face like a saddle.

  I moved on to the three foreigners in the remaining bunks: an American, a Frenchman and a Belgian. That sounded like the start of a promising joke, but none of them looked like they might find it funny. In the absence of gen on any of them, I decided to fall back on the natural intuition of the Englishman in regard to foreigners. Or to put it another way, I’d rely on deep prejudices, honed over generations.

  The bed next to Green was occupied by the young boy who’d been first through the door and who seemed to have passed into some sort of stupor as soon as his head hit the thin pillow of wadded cotton on his cot. I decided that he must be the Belgian, equating his shortness of stature with the smallness of the country.

  The man across the aisle from him was cut from a different cloth, or by the look of him, dynamited out of a quarry. He was well over six foot and sported a shock of flame-red hair that put me in mind of that legendary Irish giant, Finn MacCool, who, in true Celtic fashion, and with his Caledonian counterpart, Benandonner, decided to build a bridge between their countries, just so that they could have a fight. This, I determined, must be the American, probably a descendant of Scotch or Irish immigrants, or both.

  That left the man in the bed opposite Adler. He looked in worse shape than all the others. Beads of sweat glistened on his pale brow and his body shivered uncontrollably as it cried out for whatever drug of which it had suddenly been robbed. The flesh on his arms was yellow and dimpled, and every so often, he let out what sounded like a muffled plea. I should have felt some sympathy for him, but I felt nothing. Instead, all I could do was consider myself in his position. The man was about my height, and build, with the same dirty blond hair. It was as though I was looking at a vision of myself twenty-four or forty-eight hours hence. Or maybe less. Maybe two. Maybe three.

  The fact is, opium robs you of empathy, and most other noble emotions besides. The only thing that matters is getting the next hit of O, and the visceral suffering of others becomes nothing more than a curiosity, playing out in front of you like a film in a picture house. I should have felt sympathy. Instead I listened to his moans to see if I could tell if they were in French.

  FOUR

  The gong for dinner had sounded an hour later. Now I was seated, along with Adler and three of the others, at one of a dozen wooden benches in the monastery’s mess hall, staring at a bowl of coarse brown rice and a thin yellowish soup of lentils. The food was bland, lacking both taste and smell, which was miraculous given this was India, but maybe it was purposely this way. After all, the last thing a recovering addict needed after an evening’s vomiting was his senses assailed by a curry.

  Across from me sat the man mountain I’d correctly guessed was the American. His name was Fitzgerald and he hailed from the city of New York. It occurred to me that if more of his fellow citizens were built like him, it could explain the city’s need for so many skyscrapers. Beside him sat the diminutive young man I’d deduced was Belgian. It turned out he was actually French, and named Lavalle, but the barrier of language and possibly a natural desire to keep his circumstances to himself meant he did little in the way of talking.

  To my left sat the German, Adler, and to my right, the pale Englishman I’d determined, rightly as it turned out, to be Cooper. Green and the other member of our dormitory, a man named Le Corbeau who was the Belgian, both seemed
caught in the throes of withdrawal and hadn’t the strength or the stomach for food. Around us, and after allowing for an appropriate cordon sanitaire of a few spaces, sat Indians and assorted orientals, all in groups of their own kinsmen.

  There must have been thirty or so people in the dining hall: all men and all eating the same food served by a group of monks who wandered from table to table dolling out the rice and dal from large metal pots. The hum of conversation around us was muted, at least by Indian standards, with tired faces concentrating on their plates and once more reinforcing the feeling that I’d stumbled into some labour camp.

  Our group was little different, though out of the five of us, surprisingly, it was the Englishman, Cooper, who was the most talkative. Maybe it was our shared nationality that prompted his repartee. More likely was the fact that he’d almost completed his regimen and, now clean, was leaving us the next day.

  ‘Back to Bombay,’ he said, swallowing a mouthful of rice, ‘and not a day too soon. It’ll still be the best part of a week before I get there, of course.’ He scraped his spoon along his metal plate and shovelled another load into his mouth. He seemed to be particularly hungry, which made me think that maybe he’d been starved close to death before his arrival here, or that his cure had led him to lose half his body weight. Either way, he was making up for it now.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.

  ‘Three weeks I think, though at times it’s felt longer. Like eternity in purgatory.’

  That brought a derogatory chuckle from the American, Fitzgerald.

  ‘Don’t worry, Wyndham,’ he said. ‘The cure takes less than half that time. A week to ten days normally. Any longer than that and it’s liable to kill you.’

  ‘The rest of the time,’ interjected Cooper, ‘is recuperation. You can either stay here or with some friendly soul in Jatinga. The monks like farming you out so that the beds are freed up, but they keep you close by so that they can keep an eye on you.’

  ‘They’re keen to ensure there’s no backsliding,’ added Fitzgerald. ‘That we truly are clean. Of course, Adler here’s a special case. He’s been here longer than any of us.’

  I turned to the German.

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  Adler ruminated, then swallowed. ‘Who knows? One loses track of time.’

  The conversation jerked and stuttered, with no one, save for Cooper, much in the mood for it. For minutes it died completely, then spluttered back to life, sparked by a stray question or comment. Then there would be a burst of chatter: opinions given in staccato before all too quickly the silence descended once more.

  It seemed impolite to ask what vices the others were in for, and honestly it didn’t matter. Other than Adler, it was clear we were all addicts of one sort or another, and, as in wartime, that spawned the natural camaraderie of disparate men whom fate had thrown together in difficult circumstances. Indeed the notion of a group of international strangers, all huddled up together in a monastery in the middle of nowhere, might have even struck some as being rather poetic. But only if you overlooked the vomiting, of course.

  A Hindu might have told you that our fates had been written long ago: in the stars the moment each of us was born; that we had always been destined to meet here and now in the hills of Assam; that we’d been predestined to become addicts, to fall to the lowest ebb, and to wind up here.

  But that was nonsense.

  They say the human mind seeks to make sense out of chaos. How much easier it was to simply ascribe these things to the fates or the gods than to face the truth: that the universe was a callous, capricious place, where bad things happened to good people because there was no good reason why they shouldn’t.

  One by one my comrades finished and headed back towards the dormitory. Soon, only Cooper and I remained. Having undergone the cure, he was now effusive, and buoyed by the prospect of leaving in the morning, was more than happy to hang around the refectory. I was in no hurry to get back either. I knew from bitter experience that the night ahead would be long and arduous, and I was quite prepared to delay matters for as long as possible. For me, opium and nightfall were inextricably intertwined. Night was when I smoked – and when I didn’t, it was at night that the cravings were at their worst. Already my hands were shaking and my skin beginning to burn. And as the night went on, things would only get worse. To date, I’d experienced the agony of withdrawal in the seclusion of my own rooms, or, on one occasion, locked in a cell under a military base – which was just as solitary. If my anguish had had one saving grace, it was that my pain had been private, my screams secret and unwitnessed. Tonight, though, my cries would be all too public, and that unnerved me, both as a policeman and as an Englishman.

  I could have done with a cigarette, but I’d assumed, wrongly as it happened, that it was banned at the monastery. To take my mind off things, I struck up conversation once more.

  ‘Tell me about the cure.’

  Cooper’s demeanour changed. He shook his head and looked away. ‘It’s hell. Or as close to it as you’re likely to find in this life. But seven days in hell is better than a lifetime enslaved to opium. Think of it as penance: the price to be paid for the sin of addiction and the misdeeds you’ve done in furtherance of it.’

  I thought of the lies I’d told because of the O; the friends I’d lost and the woman I’d hurt. Given the context, seven days in hell seemed a good deal.

  ‘When was your last hit?’ he asked.

  ‘Four days ago.’

  He turned and stared. ‘You’re doing pretty well to have survived this long. At my worst, I couldn’t get through twenty-four hours without a pipe.’

  ‘I’ve been surviving on kerdū pulp. But I’ve run out now.’

  ‘Kerdū pulp?’

  ‘A gourd,’ I said, ‘recommended by a quack I found back in Calcutta. It quells the cravings. At least temporarily.’

  ‘The monks have something similar. A sort of herbal tea that helps take the edge off.’ He pointed to a large steel pot at the far end of the room where a couple of the native inmates were ladling a liquid into enamel mugs. ‘They keep a constant supply brewing. I suggest you have a few cupfuls now, and don’t be afraid to come back during the night if the need takes you.’

  It seemed like good advice, and I was close to uttering a heartfelt hallelujah. Instead I rose from my place, and without seeming to rush, walked over to the cauldron simmering in the corner. A few orientals congregated around it watched me approach, then moved off to a safe distance. Two others, Indians who were waiting their turn to fill their mugs, stepped back to let me partake first. Even here among drug addicts, it seemed the racial pyramid of empire still held firm.

  From a table, I picked up a chipped blue enamel cup, and with the ladle that hung from one of the pot’s handles, clumsily spooned in a measure of the watery brown liquid. I held the cup to my lips, drank, and immediately felt like retching the whole mouthful out. It tasted like trench water, with a hint of barbed wire to give it a kick as it went down. Nevertheless I steeled myself and knocked back the whole cupful, then refilled and repeated the process.

  With the cup filled a third time, I walked back to the bench where Cooper sat waiting.

  A wry smile played on his lips. ‘So, what do you think?’

  ‘It’s not quite a single malt.’

  ‘That much is true.’

  ‘I’m hoping it’s an acquired taste.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope you won’t need to acquire it for too long.’

  As I sat back down, Cooper began to set out a typical day’s treatment.

  ‘Reveille is at 5 a.m. No need to set an alarm clock, you’ll know it’s time to rise because they keep banging that bloody great gong in the courtyard. No need to get up either if you can’t, or just don’t want to. The gong just calls the monks for their morning prayers, though many of us get up anyway and partake of the daily chores. Got to keep the ashram ship-shape.’ He smiled sardonically. ‘There’s more pr
ayers at six, then an hour of physical jerks. The monks call it joge – it’s mainly exercises in stretching and funny breathing, and again it’s optional, but Brother Shankar says it helps relax the body and soul. You will, however, want to be up by eight. That’s when breakfast is served.’

  ‘Brother Shankar,’ I said. ‘What do you make of him?’

  Cooper scratched at an earlobe. ‘He’s an eccentric bird all right. I’ve never heard of an Englishman converting to the religion of the Hindus before, but …’ he paused, ‘after the last month, who am I to judge?’

  He continued listing the daily itinerary. Most of the time seemed to alternate between idling away hours in the dormitory – recuperation he called it – and the opportunity for meditation or light work for those who felt up to it. Either side of lunch, there was a session in the steam room. ‘Mandatory,’ he explained. ‘Something to do with sweating the poisons out of one’s body.’

  So far, it sounded more like a holiday than the hell Cooper had attested to, and I told him as much.

  He gave a short laugh. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I’m coming to that.

  ‘It’s around teatime when the fun and games really kick off. That’s when we all assemble in the courtyard for the cure. Now I can only tell you what others have told me, which is that it’s a concoction of certain special herbs and leaves with medicinal properties that grow in the hills around here. They say the recipe was created in the mists of time by Devraha Swami himself, when he was a young initiate. The story goes that as a young itinerant monk he came across a man, feverish from opium withdrawal. The man thought he was about to die, and he asked the monk to pray for his soul.