The PuppetMaster Read Online Free PDF

the door handle. Grasping the back of the driver’s seat, I said, “This is not fair to keep me guessing like this, Master. What is going on?”
    “I will explain more when we arrive, my boy, and there you may see for yourself, but” He rubbed his hands together. “C.G. and I believe we may have uncovered a small addendum to the Atharva Veda.”
    Now, for the average person this might not generate a great deal of exhilaration. For most, the question might arise: What the hell is an addendum to the Atharva Veda? And even more likely, why should I care? Like a botanist presenting a new species of orchid from a Central American hillside, or an astronomer announcing that an asteroid is actually a small moon, the typical person wouldn't flush with a great deal of excitement. But for a linguist? For those of us who lived our lives for such discoveries? We would salivate like Pavlov's dogs.
    Sanskrit has deep roots and more branches than an acre of trees, and though no longer a living language, it is still a powerful tool for historians, philologists, anthropologists, even physicians. As the elder sister to Greek and Latin, it has many times more researchable text than those two combined. Any new finding would mean instant notoriety for the discoverers, even if only as a footnote in some arcane publication. It would be akin to discovering an additional chapter of Ulysses’ return to Ithaca, an authentic piece left innocently behind in an old footlocker.
    As we moved towards the outskirts of the city and the gardens of Sarnath where Buddha spoke his first sermons, the words of my housekeeper, not the Gautama, drifted back to me. ‘It is not the journey, but what you will find on your journey that will be of danger to you.’ It was then that the reality hit me. At the end of this unbelievably bumpy ride I was going to enter a cave. Suddenly my mouth contained less water than the Punjabi Desert.

     
    Five
    Dust. Like a vast convection oven the scorching breeze blew fine powder in layers about our rickshaw. Peering vertically through a tear in the fabric I saw shimmering blue, to the sides only muted orange. It settled into the leaves of the trees, the curves of corrugated roofs, and all the banana stalks that hung like carcasses along the way. The creases of our skin were lined with sweat . . . and dust.
    There were two reasons the city was on a knife’s edge that July—lack of rain and the gnawing fear of another bombing. The bombings had brought dread to those who entered crowded places, especially on the rail lines; the drought had them questioning the sanity of the gods. Rice fields had dried up, cattle had succumbed to thirst, and it seemed as if the entire province was being scorched into oblivion. People drifted like zombies, stared at the sky and shook their heads. When will the rains return? Then they looked at each other guardedly and asked, ‘when will another bombing happen?’
    I did my best to ignore it, lived alone, invested in a good ceiling fan, and drank lots of bottled water.
    Forty minutes later our driver veered off the highway onto a secondary road of crushed rock, the change immediately taxing his skills. He snapped the handles to and fro in a futile attempt to slalom through the debris, then began tapping the gas and brakes to avoid obstacles and still maintain velocity. All of this had the affect of tossing us around like marbles in the back. I gripped a roof strut and peered through the windshield. Ahead, perhaps three kilometers distance, a high fence rose out of the flatness; chain link and circlets of razor wire stretched ominously across the horizon.
    We had been motoring for two nearly hours, and I decided we had to be nearing our destination. I hoped so. The thought of uncoiling my body and stretching my wretched joints returned. My knee smacked sharply against the metal frame reminding me that we weren’t there yet, and that seventy-five inches of body length was at least ten more than