Now Gurkhas are usually very neat and thorough killers. But this time someone had slipped up. This time one of the Gurkhas had been sloppy. And one of the guerillas at the table was not quite dead.
Unfortunately, it was this one who lay slumping half under the large wooden table as Singh reached over him for the bowl of olives. The half-dead Greek reached up, eased Singh's kukri from his sash, and slashed out with the deadly accuracy of a veterinarian gelding a stallion. Singh immediately clubbed him to death with his riflebutt, but by then it was too late. The damage was done. Singh was a eunuch forevermore.
It's a tributed to the Gurkha spirit that he didn't even faint. He tied a tourniquet himself and managed to drag himself back to his unit. Here an army doctor had no choice but to complete the amputation the Greek had started. A few weeks later Singh was given an honorable discharge and shipped back to Kathmandu.
"It was a difficult time for me," Singh remembered. "Again I was faced with a choice of futures. Only this one was more drastic. I would look at the women of the court, know I could never possess one, and consider the advisability of slitting my throat. I almost did, but in the end I found solace and tranquility through meditating in the temple, and decided to go on living. I wanted my life to have purpose, and so it was that I decided upon the priesthood."
Once made, this choice had carried him far. He was both bright and dedicated, and shortly after his novitiate he was given the honor of being appointed to serve in the temple of the Raj Guru himself. The Raj Guru is the high priest of Nepal and as all-powerful in the religious sphere as the Maharajadhiraj is in the government. Over the years Singh had moved up in the hierarchy of the temple until, a few years back, he'd achieved the status of being the Raj Guru's right-hand man.
It was just about this time that the thefts of temple art had started. As they grew more frequent, the Raj Guru complained more and more to the Maharajadhiraj that the government had to do something about it. Finally, when this last theft of the priceless jeweled phallus with the intrinsic desecration by castration of the jeweled idol had occurred, the Raj Guru had decided to act himself. He had assigned Singh to investigate the thefts, and above all to retrieve the four-foot phallus and restore it to its proper place on the body of the grieving god.
So Singh had investigated, and the more he'd investigated, the deeper he'd been drawn into the orbit – or was it a web? – of S.M.U.T. From the very first, his sleuthing had uncovered a geographical pattern indicating that the thievery was the work of a band of raiders operating across the Nepal border from the Gangtok passage of India. This Gangtok passage is a narrow strip of land separating Nepal from East Pakistan. Acting on this deduction, Singh took two courses of action. He prevailed upon the Maharajadhiraj to beef up the border guard facing the Gangtok passage, which effectively slowed the raids to a halt. And he disguised himself as a hill bandit and infiltrated the Gangtok area.
In this disguise, he had many adventures before he managed to trace down the gang responsible for the thefts. But once he had, the information he acquired only complicated the problem of retrieving the jeweled phallus. After stealing the temple art from Nepal, the gang had not only crossed back into India, but had kept going across the narrow Gangtok passage until they'd crossed the border of East Pakistan. It was here that they had a contact with an international fence who took the loot off their hands for a fragment of its actual value.
The complexities of tracing the idol further once Singh had established these facts stemmed from the delicate international relations between Nepal, India, and East Pakistan. Nepal is traditionally a country of determined isolationists. The mountains ringing it provide a natural geographic barrier to keep foreigners out. The attitude of the government is to maintain and strengthen this barrier. Thus the only part of Nepal which foreigners are allowed to visit is the Valley of Kathmandu. Officially, no outlander has ever set foot in any other part of Nepal. And, it's only since 1927 that even Kathmandu has been open to foreigners. At that time a narrow- gauge railway was built from the Indian border town of Raxaul to Kathmandu. Today special permission from the Maharajadhiraj himself is still required for the non-Nepalese to travel this railroad. And it is still the only means of transport into the country.
One of the reasons for this is that the Indians and the Nepalese still regard each other as natural enemies. This stems from the active role of the Gurkhas in maintaining British rule in India until the recent present. Another is the fact that Nepal still maintains cordial relations with Tibet, which it also borders, and the Indians consider Tibet a satellite of Red China and are fearful of Nepal being used as an invasion route by the Red Chinese.
Nor has Nepal particularly cordial relations with East Pakistan. There too the role of the Gurkhas in fighting for the British is still remembered bitterly. But East Pakistan is today far more concerned with its running quarrel with India to vent more than a historical dislike on Nepal. And the bitterness of this quarrel is such that there is no reciprocal extradition agreement between the two countries.
Thus Singh was faced with a gang of thieves which had shrewdly crossed two borders – the Nepal-India border, and the India-East Pakistan border – and involved three countries in their activities, three countries whose police refused to cooperate with each other. Realizing this, Singh gave up on the idea of trying to catch and prosecute the thieves. Instead, he decided to concentrate on the job of getting the priceless phallus back.
To do this, Singh went to East Pakistan and himself picked up the trail of the fence who had received the stolen works of art. The Raj Guru provided Singh with some minor sculptures to peddle to the fence. Passing himself off as a Gangtok hill bandit, Singh did this and then arranged to have the fence followed day and night. He led Singh back to India, clear across the country to New Delhi. Here an organization relieved the fence of his stolen goods. That organization was S.M.U.T.
Another year's work was involved before Singh was able to piece together the fantastic details of the S.M.U.T. operation. What it came to was this: the New Delhi chapter of S.M.U.T. was on the surface an organization pursuing two legitimate aims. One of these was a strong propaganda campaign against the birth-control program then being put into effect by the Indian government. No country in the world was suffering from the population explosion so much as India, but that didn't stop S.M.U.T. from actively opposing it on the grounds that it was a diabolical plan for the U.N. to take over India for the purpose of turning it into a colony of the U.S. which was supplying the bulk of the funds for the birth-control program as part of its imperialist plot to dominate India.
S.M.U.T.'s second public function in New Delhi was similar to its activities in the U.S. and other parts of the world. It was engaged in a crusade against pornography and pushing a drive to have all such objects, books, etc., confiscated and taken out of circulation. In India, where religion itself is interwoven with sex, there was much for S.M.U.T. to crusade against.
But Singh learned that these surface activities were also a smokescreen to obscure another activity of S.M.U.T. It was this activity which enabled S.M.U.T. to acquire the large sums of money needed to finance its operations around the world. It was this activity which lay behind the thefts of the jeweled phallus.
S.M.U.T. was the receiver of many priceless relics from temples all over Asia. All of these objects had one things in common. They were all erotic in one way or another.
Having acquired them at a fraction of their real value from bands of thieves dealing with fences in many parts of Asia, S.M.U.T.'s real profit lay in disposing of them. This was done under the table in cities all over the world. But the really nefarious thing was that after it was done, S.M.U.T. would blow the whistle on the buyers for possessing pornographic items, have the local police confiscate them, and then have a front man step in claiming to be the real owner. Since the buyer had come into illegal possession, he would be hard put to prove his claim. Usually the police were anxious to dispose of the case, and "proof of ownership" took them off the hook and saved them the trouble of prosecuting. The S.M.U.T. front man would promise to take the offending object out of the country, and this was usually enough to smooth things out all around. And he would take it out of the country – to some other part of the world where the whole process would be repeated.