The Tax Inspector Read Free Page A

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.
    He tried to think what could be so bad that Granny Catchprice would actually notice. Probably something not very bad at all. ‘O.K.,’ he said at last. ‘Put him on.’
    ‘He can’t talk,’ she said. ‘He’s lost his voice. They fired him from Spare Parts.’
    The inside world of the temple was calm and beautiful. It had marble floors and eggshell calm. When they said you knew God through chanting his