The Case of the Unknown Snake.
1.
Padmasena had accepted to do the killing for Ananthabatta!
She had known Suresena for the last few years. She was not sure when she met him first. But she remembered Suresena not only because of his youth but also because of the comments he made about her!
He is a great lover, she thought. What was it that he said last time when he came visiting her? Ha, she recollected. She was wearing only a simple leaf and bark dress when he visited her last time. He had said, ”Lotus is beautiful even if it blooms in the murk. The dark shades on the moon does not reduce its lustre. So are you, even in this dark bark and green leaf!”
He said that in Sanskrit quoting from Kalidasa!
She laughed, “Do I look like Shakuntala to you? And are you going to ditch me too?”
He replied: “Can the day be far away when the sun has decided to rise? Can the flood be stopped by the piercing arrows of your eyes?” He sang it!
Today was the day he promised to visit her again when he left her last time, almost three months back. In a way, she looked forward to his visit, for he showered gold coins on her, didn’t he?
As the daughter of a courtesan, she had also become one and had mastered the nuances of Kathak and of Kamasutra. Many times, as a favoured courtesan and as someone who is privy to personal information of her clients, was a part of the large Magadhan spy network. She had no feelings for her clients. Never ‘loved’ them as some of the other courtesans did; Or unlike Shakuntala who fell into a perennial love! That much for Meghadoot!
This time, she had a job. Ananthabatta had given her the job of killing a man. She was surprised when he said the name of Suresena.
Suresena was a dark and not-so tall man! A little plump but all the same pretty desirable. He was not a Brahmin. Neither was he a Kshatriya. She was not sure what were his origins or where he came from. It is possible, she thought, that he is a revolutionary. He was bold, was he not?
Maybe, he did not obey the rules of Ujjain. That could be the reason why Ananthabatta wanted this man killed. But killing is an extreme punishment. She naturally, asked him why he wants that man killed. All that Ananthabatta would say was, this man is against our King!
Once again, she took that little horn like thorn from its leather pouch. A small pouch made out of goat skin. Ananthabatta had laid the thorn in it and showed her how it appeared. He had told her never to touch the sharp edge. It was lined with highly venomous poison, he had said. It was the same poison that a Cobra uses to strike a man dead.
of space between them. The whole needle was hardly longer than the thorn from a Jujube tree. The tips were sharp, and it might just feel like the bite of an ant. At the broad end, the needle was covered with a piece of animal tissue. All that she had to do was put both the thorns into his body and press the animal tissue. That would send the poison in the tank of the needle to flow into the person’s body, through the two prongs in the thorn! It simulated the bite of a snake.
When someone sees the wound, it would appear like that of a snake bite! Anantha, she thought, is very ingenious!
Anantha had said that the person will die in less than one muhurtha (approximately one muhurtha is one hour).
Just then, she heard someone pushing the door open. Her clients do not take her permission to visit her! She hurriedly placed the thorn in its pouch, and the pouch near her bedside.
“Padma!” she could hear the sexy voice of Suresena. “Where dwells my sweet eyeball? The eyeball that can pierce every Ujjaini heart”.
‘I should have him first. He is a great lover!’, she thought, ‘before sending him to the doors of Yama’.
She went to the courtyard and embraced him. Her soft touch sent him into rapture. He lifted her and carried her into the inner rooms.
2.
Supratik, the Chief of Police and Internal Security at Ujjain, walked rapidly up to the riverside, just as the body was being fished out. The officer supervising the operation turned around and saluted his commander immediately.
The body was not too bloated. It was blue as if rigor mortis had set in before it was thrown into the water! There were no strangle marks. No mark of any wound. Water from the Kshipra River was still dripping from the body. Being the fifth day of the second month of the monsoon, Shravana, the river was flowing full to its brim. But the water flowed unusually calm and placid, as if hiding the mystery behind the death that ended in its waters.
Supratik asked the officer near him, “Could you identify who this is?”
“Ji, we could! He carried a pouch on his body. He was obviously a learned man but not a Brahmin. There was no sacred thread on him!”
The pouch was twisted in his garment and was tied to his hip. The manuscript in the pouch said that he was from Kotlingala, the Satavahana capital. He was well versed in Sanskrit was clear from the fact that he had quotes written in the manuscript from Aryabhatta and Varahamihra’s mathematical treatises. There were many trigonometrical markings on it; along with some mathematical calculations. It looks like he was interested in astronomy!
Obviously, he was a mathematician and well read. Supratik looked him over. The body was turning into blue. There were traces of froth in his mouth, showing that the man had gurgled out saliva before death embraced him. Looked like he had been bitten by a snake! May be, a water snake. Or he was bit by a cobra and fell into the water! Either way, he ended his life possibly due to a snake bite and not because of swallowing water, thought Supratik.
“How was this person spotted? Who spotted?”
The officer at the river front pointed out to a boatman who was standing by and said,” That is him, sir! Shall I call him?”
“Yes, let us see whether he tells the same story again, to me! Cross check and let me know if he changes the story”.
“Ji” Said the officer.
The boatman was summoned. He was wearing a cloth over his loins tied to hip tightly. He could do any work without worrying about his cloth falling off. He could not be more than eighteen years old. He had no clothing to cover the upper half of his body!
“Tell me, young man! What happened? How did you kill him?”
“Oh, sir! What did you say? I kill a man? With my hands? I do not even kill an ant, my Lord! I have told the whole story to the officer here. If you want I will tell you how I saw this man. No, this body!
I did my evening prayers at my Lord, Mahakaleshwar’s temple. I sat there for a long time when suddenly I realised it has gotten too dark and I came out of the temple. Walked from the shores of the Rudra Prayag lake to this river, here. I had my boat tied to the shore and normally, nobody asks me for a ride in the thick of the night.
So I was alone when I started punting across the river. Though there was lots of water, it was calm and flowed steadily. With my punting pole, I propelled my boat towards the opposite shore. When I was almost midstream, suddenly my pole hit something and stuck to it. I tried to extricate it, but it was not coming off. I tried to lift the pole. I could sense that something big underneath was also coming out with the pole!
I was surprised and wondered, what fish could be doing this? It looked like my pole was getting entangled in something. I lifted the pole out with great effort. I was surprised to see that my punting pole was caught in the cloth of this body! What a shock to me! I took him quickly into the boat to see if he was dead or alive. He was dead as a log, already!
I came to the shore hurriedly. I ran from there to the place of the police officer and complained to him. This is the real story, my Lord!” he said.
From the look in the police officer’s eyes, Supratik could see that the story told to him was the same one told to the police officer. Supratik thought, he had very little reason to doubt him. A killer would not have come to the police outpost. Instead, he would have thrown the body into the running water and gone to his home!
The Chief of Police thought for a moment and then said, “Let us take him to our doctor for an autopsy. That will give us much better idea as to how this person died. In the meantime, see if anyone had seen anything related to this. Check with the boat men! Check with the riverside dwellers”.
He was wondering, how the body went to the middle of the river. Someone should have dropped him! Or he was on a boat, fell into the river and was bitten by a water snake. He had his doubts!
3.
The body was covered with one single long cloth. It covered multiple times his private parts. And the final end of the cloth was thrown over the left shoulder. The other end made a knot at the hip and that knot tied a parchment to the hip.
The body was laid on top of a bench made of bricks and lime mortar. Eyes were closed. Body was mildly blue. It had not been in the water for too long. Therefore, it had not bloated much. No, it was not bloated at all! That means, it was seen quickly and brought to the shore.
Dhanvantri, the Ayurveda Doctor of the court of Vikramaditya, stared at the body for a long time.
His dispensary was closer to the Mahakaleshwar temple, on the banks of Rudra Sagar lake, farther east from the river.
He sat by the body and started looking at the body from close quarters. Every life is important in this world. How did this man die? His inquisitiveness had been triggered by the look of the body. Every death teaches the learner in him with the myriad ways of nature. This time, what is he going to learn?
As he slowly looked over the body, he removed parts of the clothing and started observing every piece of dead man’s body. He could see that the blue of the body was lighter in the shoulders while the blue was darker closer to the thighs. He tried to find out the reason behind it and he could quickly spot that the epicentre of the blue was somewhere in the legs.
The broad symptoms were similar to a snake bite. He thought this could be a case of snake bite when the person was walking along the shores of the river. May be, he fell into the river immediately after the snake bite.
Ah, here it is! He could spot the two sharp marks of the snake bite. Blood has frozen around the sharp markings of the bite but the body was one dark blue at the place of bite due to the intensity of the poison.
But then there was something special about this snake bite, he thought. He has seen many cobra bites. And every one of them, would taper in the direction of the bite. But this bite seemed rather straight! As if someone has pushed a needle inside the body! What! Two small needles at the same time. If that is the case, then it is not accidental death, it is murder! They have tried to make it appear like a snake bite. An ordinary person would have thought it was snake bite. But can you cheat Dhanvantri?
Poison had the impact of the Cobra bite. He went through his records and notes and then called the police chief to his discussion room which was adjacent to the room where the body laid. He explained to him his thoughts.
Supratik was all attention. The moment he had a doubt that this could be a murder, he was stunned and silent. He did not want to have blood on his hand. After sharing the thoughts, both returned back to the body to inspect it again and see if they had missed anything. Supratik thought, it tallied with his observation. How can a bitten man travel all the way to the centre of the river to fall into it? Does not sound logical.
Now some of the disciples of the doctor had removed all the clothing from the dead man. While one of them was going through the parchments in more detail, two others were inspecting the body in detail. When Dhanvantri returned to the body, one of them exclaimed, “Sir, I see traces of dried up semen as if it was his last act before he died!”
The disciple who was going through the parchment looked up and said, “Sir, this man is a mathematician and his name is Suresena. I am sure many of our mathematicians will know him”.
Supratik checked the facts and came out of Dhanvantri’s dispensary to order one of his soldiers to go over to the city and check if any of the courtesans hosted Suresena on that day! While he ordered another one to go and check whether there was any meeting on astronomy or mathematics that happened or is going to happen shortly.
He asked the doctor to preserve the body for some time while he completed his investigation and could identify the reason behind the killing. ‘Who could this unknown Snake be,’ he thought.
4.
It took hardly three muhurthas for Supratik to solve the case! He congratulated himself and later, his team for solving it so swiftly. He had of course, good words for the doctor who excelled in autopsy too!
The case came for hearing at the Royal Court and Supratik gave a detailed explanation of the case.
The man, Suresena had come from Kotlingala, the Satavahana capital. He is a learned man and a well-known mathematician there. He had visited Ujjain multiple times and had participated in mathematical and astronomy satsangs that were conducted in Ujjain regularly.
He had participated in a satsang held by Varahamihra a day before his death. He had listened to Varahamihra’s earth centric proposal of astronomy and questioned it in the satsang. He showed the discrepancy in the movement of moon and the planets and also showed Varahamihra that they do not match with the theory of earth centricity. Instead he said, if sun is assumed to be the centre, then the calculations seemed to tally!
Though Varahamihra himself was open to criticism some of his disciples and staunch followers of Varahamihra could not tolerate questioning of their Guru. They shouted Suresena down, even in the meeting, calling him ‘man from the illiterates’ and ‘man from the dark’, referring to his dark skin and his origin. Of course, Varahamihra scolded them and brought them under control. He told the meeting that what Suresena is asking, may or may not be correct. But he has every right to ask and that is the very idea of the satsang. Varahamihra upheld the grand traditions of the satsang. During the course of the satsang, his disciples had no way of stopping the comments from Suresena.
Though the disciples were brought under control by their guru at the Satsang, they were upset with Suresena and did not want the existence of someone who dared to question their guru. If they were to allow the rise of one person from outside Ujjain, then many will come about! Plus, they did not want anyone to question what they believed in. That is, the earth is the centre of the Universe and all planets, stars and the sun went about it.
So, they decided to get rid of him! Anantha, one of Varahamihra’s disciples, used the services of a courtesan whom Suresena frequented whenever he visited Ujjain. She plunged the needles into his thighs when he was tired and sleeping.
Immediately after his death, they took Suresena under the cover of darkness in the early hours of the evening and threw him in the middle of the river. They have engaged one of the boatmen to carry the body.
Proof of every happening was presented by the Police Chief in the royal court.
Ananthabhatta was the prime accused and the lovely lady, Padmasena was an accomplice. Though the murder was done by Padmasena, she was only doing what was told to her, he said. Both the accused admitted their crime and stood guilty.
Vikramaditya asked the court what the right punishment for these people would be.
After listening to the various readings of earlier judgments and Manu’s treatise on such cases, the King ordered as follows.
While commending the quick work done by Supratik, he said, this court orders that Ananthabhatta be killed the same way he killed Suresena. His accomplice shall spend ten years in prison and repent her unbecoming work.
So ended the Case of Unknown Snake in the court of Vikramaditya!
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