The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook (23 page)

The pain that had been a constant presence in the
feng shui
master’s face for the past two days vanished. He appeared to grow younger.

Wong looked at the house and turned to Sinha. ‘The
ming
t’ang,
’ he breathed.

The taller man echoed him. ‘The
ming t’ang.
’

The
feng shui
master slowly shook his head in wonder. ‘Waah. Nearly perfect, no?’

Sinha nodded. ‘Yes. Damn near.’

‘The house. The hill.’

‘The other hill.’

‘The
ch’i.
’

‘The
prana.
’

Joyce stood open-mouthed and speechless as Wong and Sinha spontaneously started skipping through the tall grass, which was speckled with shoulder-high poppy plants and wild sorghum. They looked like infants, dancing with excitement at the discovery of a new playground.

‘
What
are they doing?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. They’re your friends,’ said Subhash. ‘Do they often do this?’

‘I’ve never seen them do anything like this before. There must have been something in their tea.’

‘What does
ming t’ang
mean?’

‘It means bright hall. One of the signs of a place with perfect
feng shui
is that it has a low, open area in front of it where good spirits gather. It’s very significant.’

‘I get the feeling they like this place.’

Joyce agreed. ‘They spend all their lives looking for places with perfect
feng shui.
They seem to have found one.’

‘Come.’ Subhash beckoned to her to sit on a large, pebble-shaped rock nearby. ‘Tell me about this
feng shui
stuff. What does it mean?’

Joyce used finger and thumb to wipe the sweat from her upper lip. She sat next to Subhash and looked over at the two grown men gambolling through the glade with their arms in the air.

‘It’s like this. Deep in your brain is a picture of
home.
’

‘Your own home?’

‘No. It’s in the bit of your mind they call like the instinctive memory? You heard of that?’

‘Yes. We sometimes call it the race memory. Part of our brain that holds things that evolved over centuries and millennia. From when human beings lived in caves and so on.’

‘Yeah. That’s it. Well, Wong believes that there’s a picture there of the perfect home. It’s a small place. It’s surrounded by greenery—’cause, that was the only colour in those days, they hadn’t invented Dulux and stuff. It had running water nearby. It was built into the side of a hill.’

‘Why?’

‘So the sabre-toothed tigers or mammoths or whatever couldn’t get you.’

‘Got it.’

‘Well,
feng shui
helps us to like re-create that scene. That’s why green is a relaxing colour. That’s why you feel better with a mountain behind you and water in front. Et cetera, et cetera.
Feng shui
turns your home into a replica of that dream home deep, deep in your head, sort of thing.’

‘Interesting. We have the same idea. We call it
vaastu.
’

‘Yeah, same thing.’

Wong and Sinha, having skipped the length of the glade several times, stopped in the middle and stared at the house.

The geography of the scene before them was simple, but breathtaking. The small home appeared to be embraced by two hills. To the east and slightly behind the house was a steep, rocky hill with a small grove of amaltas at its foot. The high branches of the trees were draped in clusters of bright yellow blossoms that looked like gold grapes.

To the west was a smaller hill—really little more than a cluster of igneous boulders. The rocks were phaneritic, their surface peppered with tiny bright crystals. They stretched behind the small home, reaching out to the lower parts of the hill opposite. In front of the rock formation was a single old-growth gul mohur tree carrying a vivid mass of scarlet blossoms.

The two hills, their fingers touching behind the house, formed a perfect Dragon and Tiger embrace, protecting the house and encompassing it with the best fortune imaginable. Further behind the house were tall trees and, beyond, a much larger mountain.

Wong picked out the elements that made the location so magical. ‘Green dragon one side, white tiger other side. At back is black turtle.
Ming t’ang
in front. Truly here is heaven.’

‘It is really quite remarkable,’ Sinha agreed. ‘All you need is a red bird at the front, and it would be perfect.’

Wong pointed at the shrubs in front of the house, where several birds could be seen—and one of them was a scarlet minivet, a startlingly bright crimson Indian bird with a jet-black head and cloak.

The two of them started to walk towards the home at the centre of the picture: a small structure with a gently sloping roof. A row of pink cassia trees stood behind it, a profusion of rose-white blooms visible over the house’s green tiles. In pride of place at the heart of the area behind the house was a tree that Wong did not recognise. It stood taller than the cassias, with solid branches carrying orange and scarlet clusters of flowers.

In front of the house were several low shrubs, decorating a winding path to the front door. On the right of the stone track were several hari champa bushes, their leaves dark green at ground level, rising to bright lemon green for the newest buds. Even from this distance the apple-fragrance of the bushes could be detected. On the other side of the track was a line of yellow oleander shrubs, known in India as the trumpet flower bush. They were growing wild, with some sprigs standing higher than Dilip Sinha. ‘I love the trumpet flowers,’ the Indian astrologer said. ‘Poisonous to man but very popular with the gods—we use them for decorating temples.’

‘That tree is what?’ asked Wong, pointing to one beyond the house.

‘That’s an asoka, a sacred tree for Hindus. It exhales perfume at nights during April and May every year. It is associated with love and chastity. Remember the story of how Sita, the wife of Rama, is abducted by Ravana? Well, she escapes and finds refuge in a grove of asokas.’

‘Very beautiful,’ said the
feng shui
master.

‘It is. Gautama Buddha was born under one of those.’

As they approached the house, the thick grove of trees behind it appeared to grow taller. ‘In
feng shui
, trees north behind house very favourable. Lots of leaves, lots of prosperity.’

Sinha agreed. ‘Works for me too. In
vaastu,
the north direction is associated with the god Kubera, Lord of Wealth. We associate it with the planet Mercury and Indians place their vaults and money boxes in the north, in the belief that this means they will always have something to put into them.’

Wong took great draughts of air into his chest. ‘Feel much better. Feel hungry for first time.’

‘I can tell you why,’ Sinha said. ‘See that?’ He pointed to a creeper gently climbing a trellis on the green-dragon side of the house. It had dark leaves, interspersed with thick bunches of flowers of pale violet. ‘We call that the garlic creeper,’ he said. ‘No relation to the garlic you use in cooking, but it has the aroma of cooking. Rather a neat trick by the gods.’

As they reached the house, they noticed how simple it was. The walls of Mag-Auntie’s home were off-white plaster and the roof was made of terracotta tiles. There was a shiny satellite dish, draped by a creeper, barely visible behind a chimney stack. The windows were small and square. There was no doorbell.

‘Auntie,’ Subhash called. ‘Auntie.’

No reply.

After politely waiting for a minute, he opened the door and all four of them looked in.

The small room was dark, but a little sunlight came from the windows, and there was some artificial illumination from a computer screen to the east.

‘Ah, you have come for me. Finally.’

A small but stocky woman, who appeared to be in her late sixties, turned from the computer game she was playing. ‘I apologise—these online games—so addictive, you know.’ On the screen behind her, a war scenario was displayed.

She looked at Subhash. ‘Do you know
Epsilon Grand Killer
Breakout 3
?’

‘I play it every day.’

She smiled at him.

He slid into her chair and took over the game.

Before stepping out of the cottage to join the others, she turned to him. ‘If I come back and I’m dead, you’re dead.’

He nodded without taking his eyes off the screen. Joyce slid into the chair next to him and put her arm across the back of his seat.

The old woman walked out into the glade that had had Wong and Sinha in ecstasy. She was a bulky woman in a shapeless top over a coloured ghaghra. There were a dozen bangles on each wrist. Her black hair was heavily streaked with steel grey.

‘I knew you would come for me,’ she said.

‘Your home is almost perfect,’ Wong said. ‘
Feng shui
very good. Very good.’

‘It
is,
isn’t it? This spot was chosen for me by a great master.’

‘He is a great master. His name is?’

‘His name is Mistry and he lives north of here. His home is far, far better, even than this. In
vaastu
terms, it is perfection.’

Wong was amazed. ‘I must meet him.’

Mag-Auntie offered to supply him with Mistry’s address.

As they reached the edge of the glade, Wong realised that their conversation had entirely the wrong tone. He shouldn’t be humbly expressing awe and admiration for Mag-Auntie’s home—he should be firmly grilling her to see if she had committed the crime they were investigating.

‘You kill the Spaniard?’ Wong asked sternly.

‘Spanner,’ Sinha interpreted.

‘If you are referring to the Spam King, Mahadevan Jacob, yes, I killed him.’

Both Wong and Sinha could not help but be surprised at her easy admission of guilt. Taken aback, neither of them knew how to proceed. So they continued strolling, reaching the bamboo grove at the far end of the clearing.

‘I killed him—and so did everyone else in Pallakiri, judging by the number of confessions that the police have received,’ Mag-Auntie continued. ‘I believe it was one hundred and fifty last night—one hundred and fifty-one if you count my admission just now. Unfortunately I am not on the list. I missed the deadline to be registered among the murderers. Mukta-Gupta is at this very moment trying to find a Hyderabadi judge who will legalise his impromptu bit of law making.’

‘How do you know this?’ Wong asked.

‘I lurk in Internet chatrooms. When I’m not playing online games. You find out things surprisingly quickly.’

The three walked slowly along the side of the creek.

‘Please explain me. What is a Spaniard? Joyce try to explain, but I find it hard to hear her.’

The old woman nodded. ‘Hard for people of our generation. Quite simple. A spammer is the worst sort of human detritus. A spammer is a murderer of hopes and dreams. A spammer is a conman and a thief and a piece of turd from one of the dogs of hell.’

‘Ah. So you don’t like spammer,’ Wong said, without irony.

She thought for a moment before replying. ‘Let me tell you a true story, Mr Wong.’

But after that promising introduction, she lapsed into silence. They walked on almost to the edge of a small lagoon at the edge of the glade. She stopped at the edge of the water and began to talk.

‘A woman, let’s call her Mukta-Leika, earns a few rupees a day. She comes to my shop. She gives a third of her money to me, so she can log on to the Internet to get news of her daughter Amarjit, who is working as a waitress in Telegu. Every day, she and Amarjit swap a few words. It keeps each of them alive in each other’s hearts. Oh yes, they could write letters and send photographs, but this daily conversation is a magical thing for them both. It continues like this for many weeks.’

Mag-Auntie’s expression darkened. ‘But then one day an evil man in the Internet business sells a bunch of email addresses from my ISP to someone else. They sell it to someone else. They sell it to someone else. Each address is worth a tiny sum of money, so small you can hardly measure. Then one day Mukta-Leika comes to log on. She finds that instead of her daily message from her daughter, her email inbox is filled with rubbish. Pictures of sexual acts, abhorrent to us all. Advertisements from people selling items she will never need and could never afford, not if she saved everything she earned for the rest of her life. She tries to stop the flow, but it only increases. Abuse and trickery and lies. So she asks me for help. Of course, I help her. I teach her how to delete the spam emails and find her daughter’s letter. But the next day the problem is worse—and it gets worse each succeeding day. Soon, there is so much junk email in her box that her daughter’s email cannot even arrive. She spends her full time downloading, but her time is up, and her daughter’s letter still isn’t there. I give her an extra ten minutes free, but still the junk is coming. There are two hundred pieces of spam, some with HTML, some with pictures, even with video. Even if I gave her a whole hour and bankrupt myself, she cannot cope with searching through the lists of porn and rubbish to find the letter. She gives up. The messages cannot be received. Mukta-Leika is broken-hearted.’

Mag-Auntie turned a hard face to Wong. ‘This is true story. It happens every day in my café. There are many, many Mukta-Leikas, with many Amarjits and Rajeshes and Nitishes and other children to contact. It happens in every village in India—and India has a lot of villages. Connections are made between mothers and children, grandparents and offspring, men and women—people with just a few paise to spare. But the spammers arrive and the system can no longer work for them.’

Wong nodded his head. ‘Maybe I understand.’

‘If this happened to people you know, do you think it would be moral to get rid of the man who caused all the trouble?’

‘Maybe yes. Maybe I would murder him myself.’

‘In which case I have beaten you to it.’

He bowed his head in acknowledgement. ‘Good idea,’ he said.