The Elephant's Kiss

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

The holy city of Benares.

Sacred cows. Burning ghats. Pilgrims bathing in the river. Sometimes a corpse floats by. Lingams garlanded with flowers. In Mark Twain’s words - “a religious hive whose every cell is a temple, shrine or mosque.”

Home to three hundred and thirty million gods.

Putrid-smelling holy wells. Veiled women in palanquins. Scornful Brahmins with umbrellas. Wandering sadhus with tridents. Untouchables collecting dung. Monkeys stealing fruit. Sword jugglers. Incense shops. Funeral processions.

Naked men with dusty dreadlocks. Praying to orange-smeared time-eroded idols of Ganesh. Your arm is constantly grabbed by money-hungry priests.

Intricate stonework. Painted wooden doors. Narrow alleyways. Connected courtyards. Ladders to the roof. Great environment for thieves. Westerners especially will find all their money gone in seconds if they walk the streets without taking precautions.

White-gloved imperial policemen failing to maintain control. Ask them for help and they’ll snag a random boy, beat him until he returns a wallet he doesn’t have.

Outnumbered Catholic missionaries running tiny hospitals. In a state of panic. Trying and failing to challenge the enemy on his home turf. Christ reduced to just another minor deity - a face in the crowd.

Sister Mary of the Immaculate Conception House of Service wants your help.

A small, delicate woman. Often sick. A great performer of fragility. Utterly determined to cure the heathen Hindu of his errors and lead him back to the light of the Lord.

Father Jose Francis of Goa hasn’t been seen for a few months.

She’s worried he may have fallen victim to the Strangler. A serial killer. Plaguing Benares. Half a dozen holy men found dead in recent weeks.

A Ganesh devotee at the Chintamani Temple behind Scindia Ghat. A Buddhist monk at Sarnath - studying the vihara ruins, the Lion Capital of Ashoka and the city’s destruction at the hands of Muhammad of Ghor. A Jain Digambara ascetic, expert on the Mauryan emperor Samprati, found naked on the Parshvanath temple floor with his peacock-feather brush still in his hands.

An imam of the Alamgir Mosque. A baptised Khalsa Sikh preacher of the Singh Sabha movement. A monotheistic reformer of the Arya Samaj, trying to restore the infallible authority of the Vedas.

Bodies found in temples and back streets, eyes bugging out, skin covered with palm-sized leech-bite pockmarks. Choked out with impossible strength. Curiously blissful expressions. As if they saw something they liked in death.

Arthur Avalon has also disappeared. Retired Calcutta High Court Judge. Tantric scholar. Close associate of Annie Besant. Chief advisor to the Benares-based Theosophical Order of the Star in the East.

Sunanda Ray, reporter from the Statesman, is on the case. Knew the judge well. Hopes he’s still alive. The police have found no leads. Might get in trouble if another Englishman goes missing on their watch.

Francis and Avalon share a curtained room. A wrinkled old landlady, a widow, brings them meals. Keeps the windows covered. Bloated hand emerges from behind silk veils. Grabs the plate.

Elephantiasis. Flesh swollen unevenly. Teeth piercing their cheeks. Eyes lost in folds of mottled, leathery skin. Back sprouting humps - an ungainly lurch, getting faster as they build confidence with their new gait. Jaws extending into trunks - dry questing tubes tipped with pulsing lamprey mouths.

Street urchins have seen them crawling up the sides of buildings.

Snagging dogs. Lurking in the Ganges, where the sewer outflow meets the river. Pilgrims peering down the sacred wells, fed by underground springs, have seen hunched figures lurking at the bottom. Surprisingly quick. They seem to fear the light.

Francis was researching the ancient cult of Chaugnar Faugn - the elephant god, said to be a living incarnation of Time Itself. One day he paid a visit to the Palamu forts in the Jharkhand hills - said in ancient manuscripts to be where the emperor Ashoka built a private hell.

Came back changed. A Brother of the Elephant.

Strangled a dozen holy men - some itinerant sadhus, their bodies never found - before he met Avalon. Identified a kindred spirit. His bite infected Avalon with Chaugnar’s disease. When they’re not out killing they recline on sleeping mats together, eating bhang, having sex and talking about Philosophy. You might take Sanity damage from watching them fuck.

Cyril Birch, the Benares Opium Agent, an employee of the British government, and an addict himself, meets quietly with Avalon and Francis once a week.

The Brothers of the Elephant extract soma, the fluid of wisdom, from the heads of holy men. Store it in a throat sac. Regurgitate it into bottles.

Cyril uses it to make “blue opium”. A special product. Creates instant but fleeting epiphany - addicts will do anything to feel God’s presence once more. Production has substantially increased in recent weeks. Police drag in ragged amateur burglars, begging for more wisdom, weeping in their cells.

Cyril’s in charge of the opium factory in Ghazipur.

Downriver from Benares. Constructed by the British East India Company to serve the China trade. Now owned by the Ghazipur Scientific Society, a front for the Chaugnar Faugn cult. Most of its product bought by Government, for ostensibly medical purposes - morphine for the army. Inspectors easily bribed.

Cavernous godowns by the river. Shelves up to the ceiling stacked with balls of opium in every possible grade. Coolies with clay bowls of raw poppy latex on their heads, grown by licensed farmers on the Ganges’ fertile eastern plains. First it’s tested for purity in the Examining Hall - then mixed to ensure consistency, packed into cakes, left to dry for weeks and shipped off to Calcutta.

Factory manager Syed Sehar - a respected Ghazipur doctor and lover of all things European - leads the workers in midnight orgies on the warehouse floor. Sikh policemen stand guard. It’s an opium factory - security is high.

Syed keeps in his office a number of obscene photographs. A few vials of soma. An idol of Chaugnar that could be mistaken for Ganesh. Teeth in the trunk.

A small book called The Elephant, published by Sir Charles Wilkins in 1788. Now out of print. Wilkins strangled in London around 1836. Reproduces a Sanskrit inscription found in the Barabar Caves. Explains how the secrets of Samothrace mystery cultists were passed down to Chandragupta Maurya by Alexander the Great. Locates Ashoka’s Hell, where Chaugnar’s physical incarnation can be found. Tells you how to kill it.

Describes a set of ideas that will envenom the human spirit. Study them for long enough and anything that eats your soul will choke.

The Chota Nagpur plateau in Jharkhand. Dry forested leopard-haunted hills. Vultures. Nilgai antelope. Aggressive wild gaur. Sloth bears. Dholes.

The elephants here seem strangely knowing and will try to hurt you if they think they can get away with it. The hill tribes are expert hunters, skeptical of outsiders, and speak of elephants with mixed fear and contempt.

The Palamu Fort. Overgrown. Crumbling. A single red-jacketed British soldier, a devotee of Chaugnar, holed up in the north tower. Tommy. Driven mad by fear and isolation. Seventy years old. Wants you to go away.

Underneath - Ashoka’s Hell.

A torture chamber that looks like a palace. Flower gardens. Steam baths. Dancing boys and maidens hung with silk and jewels. Mandalas of seven-coloured sand under floors of glass.

Designed by Mayasura, the demonic architect, who occupies an office on the lowest floor where he plans endless refinements to the agony. Girika the Cruel, the chief executioner, will greet you at reception and show you to your room.

Next morning he’ll lead you to the pain pit.

Very strong. Served by naga and pot-bellied dwarves with huge moustaches. Spends the next eight hours hammering stakes through your limbs and submerging you in cauldrons full of boiling excrement. Then releases you, for the apsara nymphs to adorn with potent unguents and massage back to health.

Eight hours bliss, eight hours torture, every day until you die. Some people last for years. The worst elements among the hill tribes guard the fort and capture travellers to send down to him.

Below the Hell is Patala. The Hindu Hollow Earth.

Chaugnar Faugn lairs down here. Squatting at the end of a vast steaming cavern. Red eyes gleaming in the darkness. Toothed trunk ceaselessly questing among his slavish priests.

He’ll eat the soul of anybody Girika presents to him. The executioner chooses only those pilgrims who he thinks are worthy of the Elephant’s Kiss.