The Bloody Tongue

An adventure for Calcutta PCs, working for the Great Detective Chatterjee.

Nail bombs outside the Writers’ Building. Midnight raid on a police station - armoury robbed, two petty thieves released. Body of a Special Branch detective found at the Nimtala burning ghat - stuffed in a jute sack, burnt alive.

You are quietly approached by Calcutta mayor J. M. Sengupta. People on the street are saying this new wave of terrorism is going a bit too far. Everyone knows the Swaraj Party, of which he is the chief, has ties to the Jugantar, the underground anti-British revolutionary association.

He needs you to find out who is actually behind the bombings and get them to stop.

A wrestling club in Burrabazar.

Oiled men in loincloths in a courtyard, throwing each other, practicing with spears. Presided over by Rajesh, a colossal Bihari ox-cart driver whose daily exercise involves lifting a small calf over his head.

One of the police station raiders was shot in the leg by a frightened desk clerk, and left behind to die.

Teenager from a village near Dacca - not thought by his friends to be very political. Known to be a regular at the wrestling club. Came to Calcutta to make his fortune. Unemployed. The club gave him something to do all day.

George Halliday, chief of Special Branch, colonel with a monocle and braying equine laugh, handles the investigation. Convinced the Swaraj Party is behind the wave of bombings. Sees this as his chance to round up the independence activists. Pack them off to jail in Mandalay where they belong.

Questioned Rajesh personally. Then told his detectives to leave the club alone.

The murdered detective’s name was Vinod Banerjee.

Last seen in the Chore Hat thieves’ market in Bowbazar, where second-hand clothes dealers will sell you the same pair of shoes three times. Old books. Battered kettles. Stolen shirts. Victorian debris. A haunt of thieves - keep your hand physically on your wallet at all times while walking through the market or it’ll disappear.

Vinod was talking to a fence.

Yasir. A genial old Kashmiri. Skullcap and long spidery fingers. Right hand permanently damaged by the dog of a British colonel whose house he’d broken into. Trains child pickpockets using a belled coat.

Pretends to be a tailor. Feeds stray cats. Gossips with other old guys. Sits all day long behind a cloth-heaped table, sipping pink chai from a clay cup. A small boy brews it for him on a portable stove.

He gave Vinod the password to Bloody Tongue House. He’ll deny it if asked.

Bloody Tongue House.

A dark smoky nightclub hidden beneath a cigarette and paan shop in the Bowbazar alleys. Down a long flight of stairs. The walls painted with nude women and Vedic warriors, insulting pornographic caricatures of local dignitaries, many-headed demons fighting sacred kings. The ceiling drips.

A gigantic Kali statue up against one wall, tongue protruding, wearing a necklace of real human heads. Sometimes she vomits blood. Clotted gutters lead to a pit in the centre of the room, blocked by an iron grating, which can be removed. Tables surround it. Patrons recline on sticky pillows, listening to musicians with sitars.

Jewel-bedecked goondas with extravagant moustaches. Dancing. Singing. Playing dice. Harassing dancing girls. Smoking opium and black lotus powder, which makes you feel like a god of destruction and gives you weird dream powers while you’re on it. Your flesh turns to smoke. Sometimes you can bilocate.

You’ll find Rajesh here. Drinking with his friends.

Babu Chasmawala, the famous prison breaker, who’s escaped from every jail on the subcontinent. Dawood, the rogue shikari, arranger of hunts for jaded Englishmen who want to pursue the most dangerous game. Amrit, the crooked lawyer, briber of witnesses and poisoner of reputations, who could get Jack the Ripper off on a technicality.

A storeroom full of guns and homemade bombs behind the bar. For use in terrorist attacks.

Vinod wanted to find out who owned the place. His partner Hussain got a phone call from him, babbling about “the mother of serpents”, a few days before his charred and tortured corpse was discovered by a startled tourist at the Nimtala ghat.

The Bloody Tongue is owned by Keshram Poddar.

One of Calcutta’s wealthiest investors. Got his start working as an agent for the Mitsui zaibatsu, selling Golden Bat cigarettes. Made his first fortune by adulterating ghee with pig fat. Owns a string of jute mills, a taxi service, a Javanese sugar plantation.

Respected member of the Marwari business community. Lives in a Ballygunge mansion. Buys his wife Chanel and sends the kids to St. Paul’s boarding school in Darjeeling. Big donor to Gandhi - funds the Charkha Sangh, which encourages Indians to spin their own cloth, and the Hindi literacy movement active in the south.

Imports Rangoon opium. Black lotus powder. Cocaine shipped from Peru by way of Japan. Pays sea captains to stash drugs in the coal stores of tramp steamers and deliver them to overgrown temples, in the jungles along the Hooghly riverbanks, downstream of Calcutta. Custom officers bribed or intimidated by grim Rajasthani enforcers.

Poddar’s mistress Devi owns a Sonagachi playhouse. Moliere and Shakespeare done with minimal rehearsal to a raucous, sweating crowd. Actresses with painted faces. Incompletely remembered soliloquies drowned out by the shouts of paan salesmen and fat merchants fighting over seats.

Assignations in sweltering dressing-rooms. Stained with make-up. Crammed with bits of broken scenery.

Hidden cameras behind the mirrors. A fat blackmail file underneath the manager’s desk. Halliday is in there, doing something obscene with a pair of skinny Delhi showgirls while a parrot watches. Poddar has a copy of the picture in an Imperial Bank of India safety deposit box.

His plan is to use Special Branch to eliminate all opposition to his control of the Calcutta underworld.

Crack down on the Chinese tongs and the rival goonda networks who sell drugs on his turf. Jail Sengupta and set up his own candidate as mayor. The Raj suits him just fine. Next he’ll have someone throw a bomb into a young white woman’s rickshaw, and Halliday will have a free hand to round up all the dissidents he wants.

A ruined temple in the Sundarbans.

On the banks of the Shibsa River. An impenetrable labyrinth of channels and mangroves, patrolled by a handful of brave fishermen in tiny wooden boats. Masks on the backs of their heads. Tigers won’t pounce if they think you’re watching them.

One elderly sadhu guards the temple. Vrindavan. A renegade aghori necromancer. Wild staring eyes, dreadlocks, beard. Spends most of his time killing.

Wrestles crocodiles, tortures monkeys, drags dolphins out of the river and beats them to death with his bare hands. Crouches in a chamber full of skulls, rocking back and forth, muttering to himself. Incredibly tough and strong. Muscles like a nest of snakes under his ash-smeared parchment skin.

Has cowed a full-grown Bengal tiger into being his slave. Now it does his bidding. Kills anyone but Poddar who approaches the ruins. Last victim was a British tiger-hunting party who followed a trail of pawprints through the mud, and assumed legends of a haunted temple were just silly native superstition.

Inside the overgrown temple - an altar to the snake god Manasa, the Mother of Serpents, the Conqueror of Poisons. A swampy pool, connected to the river, lit only by sunbeams that pierce the root-cracked ceiling. Something stirs in the muddy water. You want it to be a dolphin but it’s not.

Thousands of years ago, in Vedic times, an alien queen was dissected by a mi-go assault force in near-earth orbit. Her pieces came crashing down on India. Temples were built around them. Things grew from them.

Swamp naga. Sundarban serpent kings.

Poddar sacrifices people to them about once a month. Tying them up and throwing them into the water, still alive, to be torn apart by the thrashing, scaly, needle-fanged, tentacular creatures of the swamp.

Kidnap victims. Underlings who have failed him. Mutilated bodies found by peasants, along riverbanks, weeks later. Faces gone. Circular holes bored in flesh. Bloated black with poison - cannot be recognised.

The naga have taught Poddar illusion magic, and the art of breathing underwater, which he hasn’t found useful so far. They promise they’ll make him a god, or at least a king, if he can feed them every day.