Peter Carey: The Tax Inspector

When she sat with her back to the dolls on Sunday night she had to face her youngest grandson. She would have preferred not to see how his spine was curved over and how his animated eyes had gone quite dead. He was not bright, had never been bright, could still not spell ‘vehicle’ or ‘chassis’ but he had a shining will she had always thought was like her own. She did not necessarily like him, but he was like a stringy weed that could get slashed and trampled on and only come back stronger because of it. Of all the things she had ever expected of him, this was the last – that he should allow himself to be destroyed.

She gave him a big white-dentured smile. ‘Well,’ she told him. ‘The worst accidents happen at sea.’

He did not seem to hear her.

She looked across at his brother for support. She had dragged that one out here all the way from the Hare Krishna temple in Kings Cross but now he was here she could see that he was more frightened by his brother’s collapse than she was. His name was Johnny but now he was a Hare Krishna he would not answer to it. He was Vishnabarnu – Vish – he looked at her and gave a little shrug. He had his grandfather’s big knobbly chin and wide nose, and when he shrugged he squinched up his eyes just like Cacka used to do and she thought he would be no use to anyone.

He had the same neck as his grandfather as well, and those sloping strong shoulders and the huge calves which knotted and unknotted when he walked. He would be no real use, but she liked to have him near her and she had to stop herself reaching out to touch his saffron kurta with her nicotine-stained fingers. He was so clean – she could smell washed cotton, soap, shaving cream.

‘It’s not worth being upset about,’ Vish was telling Benny. ‘It’s a dream. Think of it as a dream.’

Benny looked at Vish and blinked. It was the first thing to actually engage his attention.

‘That’s right,’ Vish said, speaking in the way you coax a baby’s arms into its sleeves, or a nervous horse into its bridle. ‘That’s right.’

Benny opened his mouth wide – ah.

Vish leaned across the table on his elbows, squinting and frowning. He peered right into the darkness of Benny’s open mouth. Then he turned to his grandmother who was in her big chair with her back to the dolls’ case.

‘Gran,’ he said. ‘I think you’re wanted in the kitchen.’

She went meekly. It was not characteristic of her.

2

The rain was so bad that summer that the plastic-painted walls of the ashram developed water bubbles which ballooned like condoms. You had to puncture them with a pin and catch the water in a cup. The quilts which the devotees threw on top of the rusty-hinged wardrobes at four each morning became sticky with damp and sour with mildew. The walls of the staircase they flip-flopped down on their way to chant japa at the temple were marbled with pink mould, but Ghopal’s, the restaurant owned by I.S.K.O.N. (the International Society of Krishna Consciousness), was in a new building with a good damp course and all through that wet summer it stayed dry and cool. The devotees kept the tables and floors as clean as their dhotis.

Govinda-dasa oversaw them. He had been a devotee since the early years when Prabhupada was still alive and nothing that had happened since his death had shaken him, not the corruption of the Australian guru whose name he would never pronounce, not the expulsion of Jayatirtha who was accused of taking drugs and sleeping with female devotees, not the murders at the temple in California. He was now forty-one. He had a sharp, intelligent face with dark, combative eyes and small, white, slightly crooked teeth. He said ‘deities’ not ‘deetes’. He was educated and ironic, a slight, olive-skinned man with a scholarly stoop.

Govinda-dasa was not an easy man to work for. He was too often disappointed or irritated with the human material that was given him. He was kind and generous but these qualities lay like milk-skin on the surface of his impatience, wrinkling and shivering at the smallest disturbance. He could not believe that young men whose only concern in life was the service of Krishna could be so complacent.

He found spots on tables which had seemed perfectly clean before his eyes had rested on them. He liked the Bhagavad Gita and The Science of Self-Realization to be placed on the table in a certain way which was at once casual and exact. He liked the glass jars on each table to hold nasturtiums and daises which the young brahmacharis had to go and beg from the women who cared for the temple decorations. They did not like the women having power over them.

Govinda-dasa had such a passion for bleach that you could smell it still amid the ghee and cardamom and turmeric at ten o’clock on a busy night. He made it so strong that Vishnabarnu wore rubber gloves to stop the rash on his thick, farmer’s arms. Vishnabarnu did not mind the bleach. Being inside Ghopal’s was the opposite of Catchprice Motors – it was like being inside an egg. The Formica tables shone like pearly shells under neon light.

It was Govinda-dasa who took Gran Catchprice’s call the night after the day when Benny got fired. He recognized the old woman’s voice. She was an attachment . All devotees vowed to shed attachments. He put his hand over the receiver and looked at Vishnabarnu, who was arranging sprouts and orange slices on a plate of dhal. There was, even in that simple activity, such kindness evident in his big square face. You really did gain something just from looking at him.

He had such a big body, wide across the shoulders and chest, but his voice was high and raspy and his eyes lacked confidence. Now the phone call had produced a deep frown mark just to the right of his wide nose. He placed the dish of dhal and salad on the bench. He picked up a cloth and slowly wiped his big hands which were covered with nicks and cuts and stained yellow with turmeric. Then he picked up the plate and carried it to table no. 2.

Then he came back to the call.

‘Who is it?’ he asked.

‘Don’t dissemble,’ said Govinda-dasa. There was no other devotee he could have used the word to, no one who would have understood it.

Vishnabarnu picked up the towel and gazed at his stained hands. For a moment it seemed as if he might actually refuse the call, but then he looked up at Govinda-dasa, grinned self-consciously, and held out his hand for the receiver.

‘Hi-ya Gran,’ he said.

The lightness of his tone was outrageous, as if he had never made a vow to anyone. Govinda-dasa’s nostrils pinched. He leaned against the counter, folding and unfolding the urgent order for table no. 7, straining to hear both sides of the conversation.

Vish turned his back. His Grandma said: ‘Benny needs you here at home.’

‘Can’t do that, Gran.’

‘It’s not good,’ she said.

In the privacy of the shadowed wall, Vish smiled and frowned at once. There had been so many ‘not good’ things that had happened to Vish and Benny. Their grandmother had never seemed to notice any of them before.

‘How is it not good?’

‘Can’t say right now,’ she said.

Above the phone was an image of a half man, half lion – Krishna’s fourth incarnation, Lord Nara Sinha – ripping the guts from a man in his lap.

Vish humped his body around the phone. ‘I’m needed here,’ he said.

‘This is your home,’ she said. ‘You’re needed here too.’

Vish looked at Govinda-dasa. Then he turned back to the wall and rested his forehead against it. When you were a brahmachari , living in an ashram, it was hard to imagine that Catchprice Motors still existed. It was hard to remember the currents of anger and fear which made life normal there.