The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes - Jamyang Norbu [43]
I shuddered to think of the day when I would have to return the cottage and its furnishings to that hard-faced Oswal Jain, who was the housing agent, for it was not only the table which would have to be accounted for but also the deep gash on the teak mantiepiece where Mr Holmes had transfixed all his unanswered correspondence with a Thibetan ghost dagger he had purchased from a curio dealer at the bazaar. The mantiepiece itself was always a mess, with a litter of pipes, tobacco-pouches, syringes, penknives, revolver cartridges, and other debris scattered over it.
But all this was nothing. One day the simple pahari manservant I had got for Mr Holmes came running into my apartment, yelling that there had been shooting and murder up at the cottage. With my heart beating furiously, I rushed up to the cottage, only to discover Mr Holmes hale and hearty, lounging in an armchair in a room filled with cordite-smoke. By his side was his hair-trigger and a box of cartridges, and the wall opposite him, to my horror, was adorned with a mystical OM, done in bullet holes.
But one thing I could not really object to was Mr Holmes's compulsive bibliophilism since I was thus inclined myself, although I never did have the means to indulge in it to the happy extent as he did. He bought books not by the niggardly volume, but in large piles and generous bundles, which were scattered higgledy- piggledy all over the cottage, much to the distress of the pahari servant. Indeed Mr Holmes and I never went for a walk around the Mall without finally ending up browsing at Wheeler's, or Higginbotham's Book Depot.
But Sherlock Holmes's favourite was the Antiquarian Bookshop belonging to Mr Lurgan. Stacks of strange and rare books, documents, maps and prints, covered with layers of grey dust, rested between all manner of strange merchandise. Turquoise necklaces, jade ornaments, trumpets of human thigh-bone and silver prayer wheels from Thibet, gilt figures of Buddhas and Boddhisattvas, devil masks and suits of Japanese armour, scores of lances, khanda and kuttar swords, Persian water jugs and dull copper incense burners, tarnished silver belts that knotted like raw-hide, hairpins of ivory and plasma, and a thousand other oddment were cased, piled or merely lying about the room, leaving a clear space only round the rickety deal table, where Lurgan worked.
He was an employee of our Department, of course, and extremely efficient at training chain-men and preparing them for great excursions into the unknown. He was very knowledgeable and an able linguist, speaking English, Hindustani, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, French and Russianfluently. We shared similar interests in strange religions, and native customs, though I must admit to not being altogether comfortable in his company. He had the disconcerting ability of being able to dilate the pupils of his eyes and closing them to a pin-prick, as if at will. He had strange mesmeric powers too, that I had on more than one occasion seen him use on people; and he was reputed to have dabbled in jadoo, magic! Lurgan was surely the most mysterious character ever employed by the Survey of India. He was very vague about his antecedents, claiming to be partly Hungarian, partly French and partly Persian, changing one or the other every now and then to suit his queer humours. Only Colonel Creighton knew Lurgan's real story; and the Colonel being the insufferably close-mouthed gentleman that he was, would probably carry that information with him to his grave.
Lurgan enjoyed Mr Holmes's company — though I had not told him who the Norwegian explorer really was — and between long bouts of speculation on nature, metaphysics, and the vagaries of the book-trade in Simla, served us small nutty biscuits and green china tea in exquisite egg-shell cups.
One evening when returning to Runnymeade Cottage from Lurgan's shop, Sherlock Holmes turned to me. 'Lurgan says you speak Thibetan.'
'I have some modest