No, it must not be. It must not.
But how to avoid it? How?
Hours passed. Several times he was aware that his peon had come into the office, looked at him anxiously, and had gone out again. Twice the fellow had contrived to have some papers to put down in the desk tray at his elbow. But he scarcely saw him. A cup of tea had arrived on the desk, too, at some time. Had he paid the boy? He did not know.
At some point in the afternoon, he succeeded at last in stirring himself. He had, he forced himself to remember, until next morning before he had to decide. However much that decision, whichever way it went, was going to be only the first step on a path plunging and plunging downward.
In the compound outside his cabin he stood, heedless of the sun, and made himself think where it was he had got to the day before in his search for Mama Chiplunkar’s wretched hanger-on. At last he succeeded in bringing back to his consciousness what seemed a pale, dreamlike sequence of events, his activities of the day before. And, yes, the next place he had decided to go to was a drinking den, the Beauty Bar.
Then at once he found himself thinking again what did it matter whether his inquiries there led to the fellow or not? When success could only mean the beginning of disaster.
But he set off nevertheless. There seemed to be nothing else to do but to carry on with his duties. But halfway to the bar, which was tucked away deep inside a building in Nagandas Master Road crammed with the offices of dozens of little businesses, he stopped and stood where he was on the pavement, heedless of hurrying Bombayites brushing past. Was there, he had found himself wondering, anyone at all he could confide in about the dilemma that stared at him. Protima? From her he would get sympathy, all the sympathy he could possibly want. But what good would sympathy do? What he wanted was a way out. And there was no way out.
Nor could he possibly tell his secret to any one of his colleagues. That would be to put the weight and burden onto their shoulders also. Whether whoever he told advised him to defy Mama Chiplunkar or urged him to feed the crime kingpin with the tip-offs he was wanting made no difference. The only result would be that they, too, would be caught in the same iron trap as his own moment of decision lying underneath Dolly Daruwala’s shiny green-covered bed had eventually clamped on to him.
And that had been, he thought with tears springing to his eyes, by the smallest of chances only. If on the evening Mr. Mistry had unexpectedly given Ranchod leave so that the fellow would not know Burjor Pipewalla was visiting Marzban Apartments, if then Ranchod, that card player, had decided to go somewhere for a game … or if he had only happened to stay asleep curled up in the darkness of the stairs when Dr. Commissariat had gone clattering past … then none of this would have happened. Or, again, if he himself had not made that one small slip when he had first gone to report to Mr. Mistry and had announced himself stupidly as “Inspector Ghote,” then Ranchod would never have known who was the man he had seen coming down those dark stairs some minutes after Dr. Commissariat had woken him. Then he would have had nothing to exercise his petty piece of blackmail over. And in that case Mama Chiplunkar would never have learned the secret and seen how he could make use of it.
But no use blaming chance for always being on the wrong side, no use imagining what had never happened. The fact was that two terrible alternatives faced him, and he had to accept one or the other.
He had to defy Mama Chiplunkar and before long find himself dismissed in ignominy from the service that was the whole point and purpose of his working life, and with that see that truly good man Dr. Commissariat led like a common thief to the cells. Or he had to stick it out and every hour be ready to betray all he had believed in since the day he had joined service as a probationary subinspector.
For a moment the hopelessness of it all made him contemplate the only other way of escape open to him, escape altogether from a life that seemed to be nothing but his two impossible alternatives. But he knew he could not take that way. Some spark lay deep within him that he did not have the power to tread out. It was hardly the thought of how suicide would be failing Protima and, as bad or worse, somehow failing the promise that was young Ved, the hope lying in his wanting that talisman of the future, the home computer. That weighed with him, as did his feeling for his duty to the service. But what, he knew, made this final escape impossible was simply that nothing, not even Mama Chiplunkar’s unchallengeable arguments, could quite kill in him hope.
But what hope he had he could not in any way make out.
The secret that Ranchod had by chance acquired had been learned by Mama Chiplunkar, a man who knew its full worth. A man who, simply and without anything but the merest skin of pretense, was prepared to use it to make a deal. And there was nothing to be done.
He was caught. Caught. And tomorrow, early in the morning, he would have to pay one of the prices Mama Chiplunkar had demanded. Disgrace, or behavior meriting every disgrace he could heap upon himself.
He forced himself back to the present, stumped up to the Beauty Bar, saw that his quarry was not there.
So much the better. So much the worse.
THIRTEEN
Ghote’s scooter started at first try next morning. He cursed it.
He had felt obliged to leave home in particularly good time so as to be outside when Mama Chiplunkar appeared, as he had no doubt the business-blackmailer would. He had expected to be found, as he had been the day before, kicking and kicking at the scooter’s starting lever. But now he was left, standing beside the wretched machine, obliged to listen to it throbbing so noisily that whatever the two of them had to say would be in danger of being altogether drowned out.
Not that he knew what he himself was going to say. He had spent the night dozing and waking, turning and tossing, thankful only that Protima seemed to be sleeping particularly well. She had the knack of asking the very questions he most wished not to answer. The evening before, too, he had taken pains to keep away from her, telephoning briefly from headquarters to say a case was keeping him. But not all his heart-searchings of the night, and his equally tense mental arguments at his desk in the evening as he had made efforts to deal with his paperwork, had got him any nearer to finding an answer to give the brown-sugar kingpin.
The fact of the matter was, he knew, that there was no answer.
But now in the quiet of the early morning—here and there along the road people were still lying on the pavement asleep—he saw Mama Chiplunkar’s black Ambassador turn the corner. In a moment it drew up, some hundred yards from where he was standing beside his still rhythmically shaking machine. Mama Chiplunkar got out, gave some order to his driver, and advanced down the road.
What was he going to say to him? He knew no more now than when he had watched him go the morning before, and had then unexpectedly kicked his scooter into instant life.
“Good morning, Inspector. Tell me, you are in better mood today? You are ready to do business-business, yes?”
Ghote muttered a yes. What else can I say, he thought.
“Good, good. So you are agreeing?”
Now is the moment I must do it: the fearful signal flashed up in Ghote’s mind. No more of shilly-shally. It is now or never. Some answer I must give. Now. Now, it is either “Go to hell,” or it is “Very well, Chiplunkar sahib, you are giving me no alternative.”
“Very well, Chiplunkar sahib, you are giving me no alternative.”
He felt as if it had not been himself who had pronounced the words, and pronounce them loudly he had over the explosive throbbing of his scooter. But said they had been, if by some other-Ghote standing there in his clean gray cotton trousers and the red-and-blue-checked shirt Protima had ironed for him the evening before. The words had been said. The choice had been made.
“And now you will shake, Inspector?”
For a moment Ghote was almost prepared to submit to this last act of humiliation. He felt he had already lost so much. He might as well lose whatever remaining shreds of pride he had left in the profession
he had wanted to be part of from his earliest boyhood and had taken in from the day he had first reported for duty at police training school.
But then some tiny warning instinct buzzed in his head. He glanced back toward Mama Chiplunkar’s car. Yes, it looked as though the driver might well be watching whatever it was his boss was doing. There would be a witness to this agreement between a police inspector and a crime kingpin. And he was now someone who had to guard against any one of his secret actions being observed by any witness whatsoever.
“No,” he said. “No handshakes. I have agreed. That must be enough.”
“As you are liking, Inspector, as you are liking. Just only so long as you are giving me good warnings when I am needing same. Remember, I am looking to you to be always finding out what is happening against me. And, ek dum, when you are finding you must let me know.”
He gave a quick look this way and that along the road.
“Now,” he went on, “I am going to give you one telephone number. It is secret-secret. So soon as you have anything to tell, ring at once 4520775. If I am not there, someone I am altogether trusting would be. Night and day also. So ring. I will say that number once again. It is 4520775. Now, you have by-hearted it?”
“Yes,” Ghote said. “It is 4520775. I would not forget.”
He felt somehow as if that string of figures, which already he knew he would not be able to force from his mind, however little he wished to have it there, was a stamped seal. A seal set on his treachery.
This was the day when he had to put together the papers for Shiv Chand’s appearance at the Court of Sessions on the charge under Section 383 of the Indian Penal Code, extortion. He congratulated himself dully that the task had come when it had. If he was in his seat all day, working through statements, checking and rechecking, making sure his two panches—the old Parsi, Mr. Framrose, and the timid young municipal building inspector—were ready, then he was altogether unlikely to catch any gossip about the operation against Mama Chiplunkar. He would have nothing he ought, if he was to keep his bargain, to pass on.
But he knew that this was a respite only, and the shortest of respites. Next day he would in the ordinary course of events be spending less time behind the closed bat-wing doors that kept out any of his colleagues without some particular need to see him. Then he would have to force himself to go about taking the active steps on Mama Chiplunkar’s behalf that the gang kingpin would expect of him. If he failed to warn him of some planned raid and he was caught in it, the first thing he would do would be to take revenge on a blackmail victim who had defied him. He would produce from wherever it was he was keeping Ranchod captive this witness that a Crime Branch officer had let a murderer go free. Giving Vigilance Branch that name would be a powerful counter in his efforts to get himself out of trouble.
The Shiv Chand paperwork, however, was not so absorbing that from time to time he found he was ceasing to pay it attention. Instead his mind kept going back and back to that first early-morning meeting with Mama Chiplunkar. Should he have acted differently then? Should he simply have come out at once on the spot with the Duke Wellington answer?
Was it even now too late? Could he not go to the Assistant Commissioner at this moment and tell him exactly what Mama Chiplunkar had attempted to do? There would be no need to say that, for some few hours, he actually had cowed down to the man’s blackmail. If that came out later, he could deny it to one hundred percent. It would be his word only against that of a known criminal.
But, no, going to the Assistant Commissioner would mean telling him exactly what Mama Chiplunkar knew that he had used to blackmail him. And that would betray Dr. Commissariat.
No, he had been faced with two alternatives, each as appalling as the other. And, for better or worse, he had chosen the one that he had.
He hardly, even now, knew why he had made that choice. Perhaps, he thought, putting out a feeble, waving tentacle toward some shadow of a steady rock, it had been the alternative that gave out some hope. At least it meant that disaster would not strike at once. Perhaps something would somehow … While, if he had done what he had truly wanted to do and said, “Be publishing and be damned,” then already today perhaps Arjun Singh or someone else from Vigilance would be barging through his door demanding answers.
He came at last to the end of the day. All the papers necessary for Shiv Chand’s trial were ready to the last dotted i, the last crossed t.
And, he reflected, I have done the work damn well. No one would be finding one mistake—when they come to take over from an officer suspended in disgrace, suspended if not for having allowed a murderer to go scot-free then for having given information to a known criminal.
He left headquarters almost like a fugitive. He cursed and cursed at his scooter when, once again, it failed to start at first kick. And when he did get it to go, he rode toward the gate with guilty looks left and right all the way in case some colleague newly allocated a task in the operation against Chiplunkar should stop him wanting to chat.
But at least, he thought, as at last he shot out of the gate with the machine spluttering and jerking beneath him, at least I have resisted taking the bribe of a new scooter. And if Mama Chiplunkar had offered again after I had agreed to his stinking plan, then I would have given him the selfsame answer as before. At least there is that.
But one day’s grace was only one day’s grace, and it was with that thought swirling darkly in his mind that he arrived home. For a moment, standing with his hand raised to tap the outer latch, he actually peered into the dark corner where Ranchod had been accustomed to stand on his regular monthly visits. How good it would be if the man was there again, slobbering and squinting, hand held out demanding. Just only to have to pay him his hundred rupees and be done with it. That regular transaction had truly seemed almost a pleasure. It had been a visible sign that he was continuing to do what he had undertaken to at that moment when he had deliberately stayed hidden under Dolly Daruwala’s bed with her murderer not two feet away from him. It had been the confirmation of his decision to protect a truly good man. A man of positive good, even with that good taking the form of killing a fellow human being. That human being had, indisputably, been a vermin, pest, and snake. The good man had done what was right, never mind the sections and subsections of the Indian Penal Code.
Yes, there had been a sort of comfort in being blackmailed by Ranchod.
But there was no pleasure at all in being under the thumb of business-business Mama Chiplunkar.
With an effort of will that brought a film of sweat to his forehead he tapped at his own door, behind which lay the reality of having to keep stone-buried within himself the dilemma his protecting Dr. Commissariat had now created for him.
But no amount of willed effort could help him, once inside, to behave with anything of his customary ease. He could bring himself to do no more than give the tersest of answers to anything Protima or Ved said. And when he realized that Protima had judged his state so well that she was refraining, if with difficulty, from asking him the reason, it served only to make him more rebelliously determined to sit in silence.
But eventually it was borne in on him that Ved was hovering around instead of quietly getting on with his studies. For some time, however, his black depression prevented him recalling Ved’s stratagem with the newspaper cutting. Then he remembered. So, the boy must know now it had been successful. Or successful at least to the extent of the existence of a secondhand home computer being drawn to his own attention.
What had he said in response when Protima had made him look at the cutting? He could not remember. All that business seemed to have taken place in some far distant time, in another world. But he had certainly not agreed outright to getting the computer. Yet neither—so his groping mind told him—had he come out with a total refusal.
He must have said something that would have given Protima reason to believe he was capable of being won around. And she would have passed on the news. Probably she had been tell
ing it to the boy at just the time Mama Chiplunkar had made that first approach. There must be, too, he gradually got himself around to thinking, a certain urgency about the matter. At any moment, really, some other bright boy from anywhere in Bombay might have persuaded a father to get together the money to buy at such a bargain price this key to a golden future.
And plainly, now he looked at Ved, the boy was filled with anxiety. He wanted an answer. A decision to buy or not to, which he himself should have made well before this, meant everything to him.
So would it not be best just to lift up his head now and say he could reply to the advertisement and that, somehow, the money would be there?
But he could not do it. He knew that he ought to. Or that he ought to bring himself to say that the sum required was really too much to find. But bowed beneath the weight that Mama Chiplunkar had placed crushingly on him, he lacked the will.
For one viciously ironic instant he even said to himself that he would only have to ring that number, 4520775—no, he had not been able to get it out of his head—and demand as an extra for his services the three thousand rupees the home computer cost and he would get it. But the moment passed almost before it had arrived. No, he would never take one paisa from that man.
But that did not mean that he was not utterly under his thumb.
Yet thicker billows of depression rolled through him.
He was deprived even of the energy to push himself up from his chair and pretend he needed an early night. So he sat on, silent and glowering, till first Protima sent a plainly disconsolate Ved off to bed, and then she herself said that if he was going to go on sitting she at least was tired out and was not going to wait. And still he stayed slumped where he was, and it was well past midnight before at last he found enough strength of mind to stagger to his feet and take himself off.
The Iciest Sin Page 15
