Breaking and Entering

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose you are right.’

  Ghote tried to suppress the twinge of pleasure he felt at having checked so decisively at least one thrust of his foreign friend’s inwards-borings.

  ‘There was even a time reported to the police,’ he said, ‘when Yeshwant went away empty-handed because the lady had had the good sense to lock away her new diamond necklace. She was only realizing a burglar had been there when she was finding a window in the high-up flat, which she had left just one inch open, was now open wide.’

  ‘But I suppose Yeshwant took something else. Some small and valuable antique he happened to see?’

  ‘No, he was taking nothing whatsoever. It seems this ghorpad will eat just only the finest jewels.’

  ‘Very good, very good.’

  The big Swede launched into another boisterous laugh, thumping the table flat-handed until their beer mugs jumped.

  Ghote regretted making his attempt at a joke.

  ‘You know,’ Axel Svensson said when at last his laughter had subsided, ‘I am beginning to be most interested in this daring Yeshwant of yours. Most interested indeed.’

  ‘Well, I suppose he is one criminal who is giving out more of interest than most. Yes, he is very, very daring. And also – What shall I say? – yes, quality-minded. Deputy Commissioner Kabir, who is very much a reader of English literature, when he was giving me my orders was calling him as a Raffles. You are knowing Raffles?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Your Mr Kabir is quite right. Raffles, the gentleman cracksman. As a boy I read those stories in translation. Raffles would steal only the rarest objects, and from the most rich. A discriminating criminal.’

  ‘So I am all the more wondering, if in the end we are nabbing this what you are calling discriminating criminal, what like he will turn out to be.’

  ‘And so am I wondering. So am I.’

  The Swede finished his beer with one lengthy swallow. He looked across the little round table at Ghote.

  ‘Ganesh,’ he said, on a suddenly lower, even plaintive, note. ‘Ganesh, my friend. Do you think …? Do you think that, possibly, possibly, I could accompany you in your investigation? The way we were doing when it was the case of the Perfect murder. We were good collaborators then, yes? I was even of some help to you. Wasn’t I?’

  Ghote realized now that all along he had half-feared such a request being made. But what he had not at all expected was the sad tone of supplication. He guessed what lay behind it. Axel Svensson, back in Sweden, had suddenly found himself a lonely man. His wife dead before her time. No children. Nobody, except a brother, he had said, different from himself in every way, as sometimes brothers could be.

  So an appeal was being made. A cry from a distance. The Swede wanted more than the brightness and cheerful noise of his remembered Bombay. Something to seize his interest, take him right away from unending gloomy thoughts.

  But that he could not, he must not, provide.

  ‘Mr Svensson,’ he said. ‘Axel. You must be knowing that it is impossible to allow a civilian, and a foreigner even, to take part in an official police investigation. Would this happen in Sweden? In UK? In America?’

  ‘No. No, I realize I have been asking too much. Only …’

  It was that infinitely human Only that finally did it.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Ghote heard himself say, ‘perhaps because of the help you were able to give me all those years ago, I will stretch one point. Yes, Axel, from time to time you may come with me as I am making my inquiries.’

  THREE

  Ghote had told Axel Svensson before he had left him that his from time to time proviso would mean he could not be accompanied to the Bombay Hospital to see the patient he had hoped to interview there when that roar of It is Mr Ghote? had burst in on him. He had, in fact, some hopes of learning from this Parsi lady, Mrs Marzban, something that might get him nearer daring and discriminating Yeshwant. The officer who had interviewed her earlier was likely to have learnt little from someone soon to be admitted to hospital. Perhaps, now that she was under good care, he would have better luck.

  But when he rang from home, after ascertaining that no new Yeshwant burglary had taken place overnight, he was told Mrs Marzban was in fact already on her way to the operating theatre.

  A check. But there was the next address in his notebook, an apartment in one of the toweringly tall blocks up on Malabar Hill called Landsend. And, since he had told Axel Svensson he would not call for him until midday, he thought, without much violence to his conscience, he could go to this substitute interview on his own. Not having a huge hovering foreigner at his elbow to be somehow explained away was altogether too tempting, whatever twinge of regret he felt about not taking the sad man out of his gloom.

  However, he set off on his motor-scooter hardly feeling ready to tackle the possibly difficult task ahead. His head was filled by a dull resentment. He knew he had in fact little to complain about. His breakfast puris had been as crisply puffed-up as Protima always made them. Some remnants of her quarrel with Ved over Swabhimaan and Lost in Space had been rumbling on, but those he could have dismissed as the sound of distant thunder. The trouble was the way he had been woken from his comforting end-of-night dozing dream.

  What had brought him back to the world was an unexpected caress from his wife. He did not usually resent such advances, and he had very soon responded. But all the same his happy state of half-awake dreaminess had been broken into. It had not been the time that such things should take place. His response, he acknowledged now, had lacked enthusiasm. Which must have been why those puris, however crisp, had not gone down as well as they usually did, and why he felt more than a little unfitted for the tactful interview he suspected lay ahead.

  But soon he found he was becoming cushioned from all that the outside world could throw at him by the pleasant vibration rising upwards from his feet, planked down on his machine’s ridged base. Despite the city’s as ever wildly erratic traffic all around him, he began at last to feel ready to tackle Mrs Latika Patel, wife of a Member of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly, a man who was, more to the point, son of a prominent minister. Care would be needed, and he felt now he was comfortable enough within himself to give it.

  There was little about the actual break-in, some weeks earlier, to take into account. It had been one of Yeshwant’s most audacious, and most successful. He had climbed the huge towering block, as usual in the darkest period of the night. He had eased back the flat’s open kitchen window, had evidently waited patiently till the cook, who had recollected being a little disturbed as she slept on the floor there, had gone back to sleep. And then he had silently crossed the narrow little room and entered the master bedroom. There, he had not at all interrupted the deeper slumbers of heavily pregnant Mrs Patel and her spouse and had simply picked up off the dressing table Mrs Patel’s latest acquisition.

  It was perhaps the richest haul he had yet had. According to the full description supplied by Pappubhai Chimanlal and Co., it was a necklace in the form of tiny linked gold monkeys from which hung in a diamond-studded setting an immense cushion-cut Sri Lankan sapphire. Mrs Patel, it appeared, had taken advantage of the last wedding she was likely to attend before she gave birth to display it. But, tired out that evening, she had failed to put her expensive acquisition into the safe behind the painting of a stallion, groomed and adorned for a procession, hanging opposite the marital bed. But the real mystery was how Yeshwant had got to know that the loot was there to be taken. If Mrs Patel, tactfully handled, could give a clue to that, an arrest would be that much nearer.

  The happy sphere of quiet Ghote had eventually grown round himself as he rode up Malabar Hill and along Dongersey Road was abruptly shattered, however, when he reached the tall block. A band of sex-changed hijras, engrainedly mannish despite the gaudy saris they flaunted, must have learnt that there had been a birth in one of the apartments in the building and had come to demand the tribute customarily given when a new human being came into the wo
rld.

  Mrs Patel, he thought with a tumble of dismay. Hadn’t she been about to have her baby? Or was it that she had already done so? Plainly, if she was being invaded now by this rabble of men-women, she would be in no mood to answer detailed questions. And invaded she would be. Eunuchs always claimed that when in far-off times Lord Rama, exiled to the forest, had ordered back ‘the men and the women’ who had wanted to follow him he failed to address those who were neither men nor women. So they had shared, at a distance, the god’s fourteen-year exile, and thus had gained special privileges. One of which was that of bestowing a blessing on a newborn child, and getting a reward for it.

  Why, oh why, did obstacles like this spring up whenever there seemed to be a hope of making progress? But nothing for it now but to wait and see if Mrs Patel really was the hijras’ target.

  They appeared to have arrived not much before himself, and seemed to have only just begun dancing and singing to the lively beat of the tabla which one of them was playing, long flexible fingers swiftly moving on the little drum’s twin surfaces. Their aim at present was partly to attract passers-by and partly to induce the new mother – would it be Mrs Patel, or not? – to come out to receive eventually the blessing May the little one live long. And their leader, he noticed now, was really a beautiful creature. He was wearing a sari as boldly striking as those of his companions but, a pure lemon yellow, much more attractive. He even looked not unlike oval-faced Shabana Azmi, the film star. His eyes made to appear enormous by a skilful application of black kohl. A flashing red nose-jewel setting off the purity of his skin. Long silver earrings drawing attention to two neat, close-to-the-head ears. Vivid red outlining elegantly shaped lips.

  Ghote felt a tremor of disturbance. The hijras’ dancing presence was forcibly upsetting all his customary feelings about the opposite sex.

  He debated for a moment whether he should leave at once. He could come back at a better time.

  But, no. He would not be made to run away by such a coarse band invading not only the home of this new mother but, worse, the quietude of his own mind.

  He was glad, a few minutes later, that he had stood his ground. The new mother came out at last into the building’s forecourt, carrying her baby. Her young husband, looking a little sheepish, accompanied her. And it was clear they had come from one of the ground-floor apartments. So not Mrs Latika Patel.

  Ghote knew he ought now to enter the building, find a lift, go up to the eighteenth floor and its double apartment, 18 C/D. But he allowed himself to stay where he was for a little longer, still half in thrall to this invasion of his mind by the hijra in the lemon-yellow sari.

  Now that the mother of the newborn child had arrived, the next stage of the ceremony began. Swiftly under the lemon sari the dancing hijra had stuffed a bundle of clothes, and in an instant, no bad actor, he had become a heavily pregnant woman. ‘May my little one have a rich family,’ he sang repetitively in a voice that, deep though it was, was by no means harsh. Next he added a note of comic vulgarity, first hugging his enormous belly with ‘The British gave it to me,’ then repeatedly singing variations on ‘I lost my nose-ring under his bed’ and ‘He has stung me like a scorpion.’ Then, lapsing into his pregnancy role, he went on to ‘Oh, I am wanting something sour’ and ‘Oh, I am wanting sweet things.’

  At last he collapsed into the lap of one of his fellow men-women, one dressed in a vilely vivid wide green skirt with a choli in shiny black and silver stripes above it. There he went through the motions of giving birth, with many a groan and moan of pain. Until at last he rose, the bundle under his sari adroitly transformed into a hardly visible baby in his arms. He went across to where, in the surrounding semicircle of applauding onlookers, the new mother sat, half-smiling. Cunningly loosing the clothes bundle, he appeared to bestow on the real mother the real baby already in her lap.

  A hand to bless her. An embrace for the uneasily grinning new father, not without its share of sexuality. Hastily from his shirt pocket the father took the stapled wad of small denomination notes he had put there in advance. And the invasion was over.

  Quickly Ghote slipped past the still-delighted crowd, ran up the steps of the building, found the liftman he had hoped for, shot upwards.

  He found Mrs Latika Patel, when a servant had ushered him in, sitting plumply comfortable in one of the huge brocaded armchairs in the big, coolly air-conditioned drawing room, its tables laden with pieces of fashionable tribal art, its walls dotted with gold-framed mirrors, its floor richly silk-carpeted. She had a baby in her arms – to judge by the tiny pink dress, several weeks old – and was looking still almost as much a new mother as her neighbour down in the forecourt.

  ‘Madam,’ he began sharply, when he realized he was getting little of Mrs Patel’s attention. ‘Madam, I very much regret it has become necessary to ask further questions about the theft from this apartment one month past. Police has, I am sorry to tell, failed so far to obtain any information leading to the arrest of this criminal they are calling by the name of Yeshwant.’

  Mrs Patel at last glanced up from cooing at her little daughter.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘A terrible, terrible shame.’

  Ghote felt a little disconcerted. But he rallied to the defence of Crime Branch.

  ‘Shame, yes,’ he said. ‘But kindly remember that an investigation of this sort is not at all an easy matter. When the thefts—’

  ‘No, no. The shame of it is my losing my sapphire. Already my guru is telling me I should be wearing some new one, or my ill-luck under Saturn will go on and on. But how can I be finding time to go to Pappubhai Chimanlal and Co. when I must be nursing my little Amrita? But then Guruji is saying this is not yet the time when I can finally emerge from the cloud Saturn has shadowed me with. My seven years of bad fortune are not quite over yet.’

  Ghote had no particular belief in astrological predictions. But he felt he should at least keep the baby-struck mother talking.

  ‘Seven years?’ he said. ‘So what it was, madam, that caused you to come under such a curse?’

  ‘Who shall say, Inspector? Who shall say? Perhaps it was just that I was conceived on a moonless night. But I have at last conceived a child of my own, and under a full moon. So we may yet live a happy life.’

  ‘Madam, I am hoping so,’ Ghote brought himself to say. ‘I am seeing your problem. Nevertheless, it is a vital matter for us in the police to obtain even the smallest indication concerning the identity of said Yeshwant.’

  But Mrs Patel, back again to smiling down at her baby and crooning away, had plainly re-entered the cosy world she had been inhabiting when he had come in. He waited for a long minute, and then tried again.

  ‘Madam, can you recall any circumstance of the robbery that was seeming peculiar when you were discovering same?’

  No response.

  ‘Madam? Madam?’

  ‘Yes, Inspector? Something you were asking?’

  ‘Yes, madam, yes. I was asking were any of circumstances peculiar?’

  He thought, once more, that she was not going to reply. But after a lengthy pause she did manage to raise her head from contemplating the baby.

  ‘Peculiar? Well, you see, when I was married … It was a semi-arranged marriage, you understand, and— And for various reasons it had to take place at short notice, my husband’s relations going back to Europe, America, a question of the auspicious date. Many reasons.’

  She dipped her head back down to her baby. Ghote thought he had lost her again. But she looked up almost at once and went on.

  ‘So there was no time for obtaining all the jewelleries there should have been. But, when at last after six years I became pregnant, of course the first thing was to buy some good pieces in case my baby was a girl and would need a proper dowry. After so many years childless, now I am having my sweet little girl I must buy many more jewelleries. When it is coming to her wedding I must have as many jewels to give in dowry as her status is requiring.’

  Now a
t last I have got her attention, Ghote thought, and what is she telling? Some nonsenses only about buying more and more jewellery. These rich women. Not that she is worse than most of Yeshwant’s victims I have already interviewed. Almost without exception they seemed to regard police inquiries as one irritating nuisance. With each day that has passed since they have been robbed the sting of it appears to have lessened. Insurance was there, they seemed to be feeling. Why am I, they say, to be wasting my time answering each and every question this policewalla is liking to put?

  And Mrs Patel was prattling on.

  ‘We were very lucky before my sweet Amrita was born that Pappubhai Chimanlal and Co. had just made a necklace that would fit well with the very good sapphire they had. They are saying they will be able to make another just like it now, but only if we are giving them time to find a sapphire equally as good.’

  And, with that, the excessively devoted mother turned back to her little Amrita. Eyes for nothing else.

  Inwardly cursing her, Ghote found himself wondering how it was that, married for six years, the Patels had only just achieved parenthood. Some women’s problem? Or, perhaps, the semi-arranged marriage, a negotiation where the girl could say, No, had been instead a fully arranged one, a contract between two families that left no room for the bride’s rejection? In such cases it was sometimes long before successful sexual adjustment was arrived at, so it was no great surprise that the little girl was getting so much attention. It was good, in fact, to see a wealthy mother not passing a baby over to an ayah at the first possible opportunity.

  But this was no time for such speculation. If only just one of his questions would get a proper answer. And then, too, he would like to be given permission to examine the kitchen where climbing Yeshwant had entered, and he would like to see the master bedroom and the exact place that Mrs Patel’s sapphire necklace had been left.