One sees strange characters often in streets, bazaars or in courts, hospitals, police stations and in church, mosque or temple. One remembers a tall thin man with a leering look, wearing a black shirt over narrow pyjamas who stood out as more unusual than any in faded butler shoes with weird rings on his fingers. One saw him at namaz in the local mosque and at Christmas midnight mass he was seen standing right at the and of the church nave with those who had come in late or were reluctant to sit down in the pews. Wearing a serge coat over his trademark shirt, he received holy communion last of all. Incidentally, not everyone gets it unless he is a bonafide Christian (a Catholic in this case) as priests can easily detect an imposter. One kept track of the man and found that he lived alone in the butchers’ Qasabpura Mohalla and was very fond of one particular boy whom he fondled and tried to lure in other ways too while chewing a paan indolently. But the 10-year-old sensed something wrong and avoided him as best he could.
The man whom nobody seemed to address by name, disappeared after some years. Who was he – a spy, CID man or just a queer character without any ostensible means of livelihood? There was another person in white full-sleeved shirt and black trousers, with salt and pepper hair combed back, who also had an air of mystery about him. Someone commented that he was a Freemason who attended the Lodges in Janpath and Qudsia Garden. Addressed as Jagan Uncle by some, he seldom spoke and was never seen with his wife and children. A nosy parker brought word that he had been a Grandmaster in the old Madras Lodge and later settled down in Delhi. Whenever one met Jagan Uncle one felt a chill down the spine, especially after the late Fr Monthu, whispered one evening that the man must have been taking part in secret rituals at midnight in which the Eucharist was desecrated and sometimes a nail driven through it.
When one asked a Freemason friend about it, he pooh-poohed the priest’s assertion as a fanciful allegation. “There is nothing of the sort done at what actually is a fraternal, philanthropic organization which borrows some rituals from the Old Testament of the Bible and does no jadoo-tona ,” thundered the offended friend. However Fr Monthu did also claim that one day he caught a woman who after receiving the sacrament quietly wrapped it in her shawl. He followed her out of the church and asked her if she was a Roman Catholic. The woman nodded. “Then why did you not consume the Eucharist”? he enquired. The woman said that she wanted to give it to someone seriously ill at home who couldn’t come to church. “But if you had told me about it I would have gone and given her the sacrament myself”, said Fr Monthu. Since the woman had no answer to that, the priest literally forced her to swallow the Host at the church porch and warned her not to do repeat her sacrilegious action. By the way, there are no women Freemasons here.
One wonders if the man with the black shirt also used to do what the woman had done but with greater caution. Was he a Mason or member of some satanic club or a magician who tried to misuse the sacred Host? He posed as a Christian in church, a namazi in the mosque, a Shiva bhakt in the Shivalaya and a Panth devotee at the gurdwara. He was spotted at the Parsi temple in Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg too. And, wonder of wonders, he sometime played a role in the Daryaganj Durga Puja and also occasionally acted in the Ramlila. One Id-uz-Zuha he definitely visited a house in Ballimaran to slaughter a sacrificial goat and took the skin after pocketing the fee. “Who the hell was he?” One asked the old sacristan Francis. “I only know”, replied Francis, “that his name was Sultan and he sometimes appended Masih and Singh to it”. Sultan was allegedly discharged as an orderly for sexually assaulting the young son and daughter of an officer and jailed for seven years under Section 377 of Tajirat-e-Hind (IPC), after which he worked in a Freemason Lodge until he was turned out as a fraud. Thereafter his earnings came from satta gambling as he had the knack of predicting the New York Cotton Market’s opening and closing ( khulta-bandh ) futures quotations, disclosed Bacchu Bhai, an ex-Kurk-Amin (bailiff). Both he and Francis are long dead and probably Sultan too but one hasn’t met a “har fun maula” man like him again. The bluff and bluster surrounding him refused to end even after it was confirmed years later that he had been an O.S.D., extraordinary and plenipotentiary, of the World War days!
