Inspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes
Page 22
‘Ah, it is what happened when at last electricity was coming. One day there arrived into the village a jeep with on it the words Ele Dept and inside a burra sahib with one sola topee on his head. Of course, we boys were not then knowing what all this was. But we soon learnt. The sahib was there to take measurements for digging the ditch for the cable that was to bring us this marvel electricity.’
The excitement had kept the village buzzing for weeks. Debate had raged. Some had prophesied dire effects from breathing air mixed with mysterious electricity. Others had seen a glorious new world when everything at night would be seen as plainly as in the full sun. Fears and jokes. The great sport of the evening at the chaikhana was telling the proprietor he would no longer be able in the all-revealing light to make his tea with too little milk. And Ghote’s father had given his pupils special lessons on electricity, the new wonder.
‘But I am afraid the utmost result of those was that we boys thereafter went round the village the whole time shouting two English words, “Light coming, light coming”.’
‘So,’ said Ved, ‘when it was coming what was happening?’
‘Oh, but you cannot imagine what the coming itself was meaning to us. It gave us entertainment all the day, from when we were let out of school till when we were driven by the darkness to go to bed.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Protima put in. ‘In those days no boys were allowed to stay up till late-late listening to radio and watching television.’
‘No. But nevertheless we had plenty to amuse us,’ Ghote said.
There had been the arrival of the truck bearing a huge drum of silvery cable, ‘and we boys went rushing to see it, like one flock of sparrows only, elbowing and pushing to get a better view, though there was nothing to stop us seeing all we wanted by standing still only. And then there was the Engineer sahib, taking pleasure to push us back. And we boys – I was one of the most daring even – taking pleasure also to get as near to the truck as we could. And the orders shouted as the big-big drum was rolled to the ground, and the opposing orders, shouted more loudly. Oh, it was one hundred per cent tremendous.’
Then there had been the weeks of the digging of the ditch and opportunities for jumping down into it. And there had been following round the Engineer sahib as he superintended the work, treading almost on his heels and imitating his stomach-outthrust walk. And there was the raising of the poles on which the new lamps were to be placed, with even the women enrolled to help heave on the ropes that hoisted them. And there had been more hours of keen-eyed, mystified watching while the wiringwalla connected up the big main fuse-box placed in the safety of the chavadi where the village headman had his one-room office. And finally there had come the ceremonious departure of the three unneeded old iron lamp-posts which each evening the village lamplighter had climbed up to with his ladder and his guarded flame. They had been carried away ‘with much of singing, like a funeral procession only’.
‘Yes, but—’
‘No, no. I am coming presently to what I was wanting to tell.’
Eventually all the work had been completed. In the schoolmaster’s house and others of the better-off light fittings had been installed, switches placed with care, bulbs fitted. ‘Then it was my delight to stand and switch. On, off. On, off. On, off. It must have been altogether very, very annoying to each and every person in the house. So in the end I was forbidden absolutely to touch any switch whatsoever. When it was the time in the evening for light it was to be my father only who would click the switch.’
‘I know, you did it once, Dada? You were beaten also?’
‘Oh, that would not be too much of a story, if it was just only that.’
No, the excitement of ‘Light coming’ had not ended with the coming of the light itself. Something as important in the history of the village could not go by without proper and due recognition. ‘Our MLA was to come to perform opening ceremony.’
‘Ved, you are knowing what is MLA?’ Protima asked.
‘Oh, everybody is knowing that. Member, Legislative Assembly. Member, Legislative Assembly.’
So at last the great day had come. Or rather the great evening because, although the village had had and used the electric light for five or six weeks, it could not truly be there without being switched on officially. And this, of couse, could be done only when there was darkness to be, at the throw of a switch, triumphantly banished. ‘May this light, symbol of progress, progress for the village, and progress also for our free and independent India …’ the great man had intoned, standing garlanded in front of the whole assembled village.
‘Or, if I am to be altogether accurate, the whole assembled village with one only exception. Myself. I do not know to this day what it was that had come over me. But I was not sitting cross-legged on the ground with the other children at the front of the rows of attentive listeners to the great sahib. Where I was? I was inside the chavadi, near that big fuse-box. And no sooner had MLA sahib thrown the switch that, officially, was bringing light to our benighted village than I myself and no other pulled out the fuse, as I had seen the wiringwalla do when he was testing.’
‘And after, Dadaji?’ Ved finally asked, awe in his voice, almost shock.
It was a reaction echoed in Protima’s expression, if not aloud.
‘After? After there was very much of confusion. More even than I had in my most wild dream expected.’
‘And after that? You were beaten-beaten?’
Ghote smiled.
‘No, my son. I was not. For the one and simple reason that from that day to this no one has ever known who played that abominable prank.’
It was then that he saw in his son’s eyes, as he had hoped to see, light coming.
1988