Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker

by H. R. F. Keating

  The press of the crowd had brought them to within a yard of the newspaper seller Ghote had noticed. He forced his hand into his trouser pocket, pulled out a coin and bought a paper. It was hard to do anything with it in the press but he saw sprawled right across the front page a huge photograph of Lal Dass, the would-be water-walker, and a thick black headline with the words “Excitement Mounts” on it. He crumpled the paper up in a sudden fit of rage.

  Ahead of them now he saw the tall stone gates of the temple with in front the wide square of the tank across which the demonstration was to take place. The still surface of its greenish water was glinting like a mirror in the sun. Directly in front of the tall temple gates with their elaborate carvings of gods and scenes from the epics, the whitewash on them shown up in its successive layers by the glare of the sun, stood one section of the crowd. Already densely packed, they would be among the poorer spectators: a long wait in even the heat of April in their situation was going to be no mean feat of endurance.

  The better-off spectators had rows of chairs and an odd assortment of benches arranged in a rough square on the near side of the tank and in smaller enclosures on either side. A number of awnings of different coloured stripes, some running one way some the other, supported on bamboo poles provided a certain amount of shade.

  The Rajah pulled a couple of bright pink oblongs of paper from an inside pocket and looked at them.

  “Yes,” he said. “We ought to try and make our way along there to the left. We’re at the side, so we ought to see the fun all right.”

  Ghote wanted to say that it was not a matter of fun. But he had no time for talking. Making sure that they got to their 200-rupee seats before anything happened was now a full-time job. Everybody else had already been struck by the same panicky thoughts.

  He set his face towards the entrance way between two rope barriers that the Rajah had pointed to and set off to forge his way there.

  Suddenly a voice called his name, distinctly and very loudly from some little distance away. He turned in the direction of the sound.

  It was Sgt. Desai. Never, Ghote thought furiously, had he seen someone look so happy. A look of radiant bliss was sprawled over the wretched man’s face like a rosy sunrise.

  “I am taking bets on how far across he gets, Inspector,” he called. “Already I have fifteen rupees I am holding.”

  Ghote turned away and pretended not to have heard. No doubt the idiot was betting that this Lal Dass would get right to the far side: he would be handing back every anna of those fifteen rupees and much more besides before very long.

  The rope barrier was near now. Behind it there was less of a crush. People who could afford 200-rupee tickets did not feel it necessary to arrive as early as those hoping somehow to obtain a free view of something.

  At the barrier two huge toughs armed with wooden clubs inspected their tickets and let them through. The Rajah threaded his way along the rows of still half-empty benches. Their seats were right at the front with only a low wooden fence separating them from the area round the tank itself. Already other members of the party were there: Homi Currimbhoy in a spotless white suit with a red and yellow striped tie and a wide-brimmed straw hat was sitting in animated conversation with Jack Cooper, boilingly redfaced, sweating, crumple-suited, but with blue eyes still dancing.

  Ghote began to feel that this journey was not going to be such a waste of time after all. He would have a few quiet words with Mr. Cooper, and find out just how much he knew, or pretended not to know, about Sir Rustomjee’s laboratory. And then a sudden mention of the zoo . . .

  But this was a hope that was destined to be deferred.

  “Now, let me see, my dear chap,” the Rajah said to him. “Do you know everyone here?”

  He looked at his guests.

  “Mr. Currimbhoy, of course, you met last night. And Mr. Cooper I believe you know. But do you know Ram here?”

  Ghote indicated cautiously that he did not. It was hardly likely that he would know any of the Rajah’s smart friends, and the man who so far had been referred to simply by the common name of Ram looked very much the sort of person he would never have encountered in the ordinary way. He was dressed decidedly in the western style, with a smartly cut cream-coloured silky-looking suit, a white shirt with a razor-stiff collar and a narrow straight tie in broad horizontal bands of colour. Added to this, his face was rendered almost entirely anonymous by a pair of dark glasses in a heavy white frame.

  The Rajah smiled with a sudden flash of fine white teeth, and Ghote experienced an equally sudden interior qualm.

  “Well you ought to know Ram,” the Rajah said. “You and he are in the same line of business. Ram was recently appointed P.R.O. to your Minister.”

  Ghote looked at the aggressively self-confident whiteframed sunglassed figure in front of him.

  “You are Mr. Ram Kamdar?” he asked.

  “And you’re Ganesh Ghote,” Ram Kamdar replied. “Bunny told me he’d bring you along by hook or by crook, and I see he got you.”

  Ghote felt a fierce flush of shame.

  “I am not neglecting the case of the dead flamingoes,” he said in a flurry of excuse. “Indeed, I am actively at work as of this present moment. I have reason to believe a similar practical joke is about to be attempted on this present occasion.”

  “Yes, Bunny told me about that idea of his,” Ram Kamdar replied. “That’s why I came along too. My duty, you might say. And a P.R.O. is never off-duty, old man. Never.”

  He jerked his head forward in what Ghote took to be, with the white-framed sunglasses intervening, a look of shrewd keenness.

  Ghote manfully swallowed the bitter pill of realisation that life is always unfair. He faced Ram Kamdar.

  “I will not say the matter is totally concluded,” he admitted. “But I have made a certain amount of progress. I have widened the field of inquiry.”

  “Yes,” Ram Kamdar said, cheerfully taking command of the conversation. “Bunny and I were running over the situation last night, trying to establish a few guide-lines, you know. And we certainly came to the conclusion that what had to be done was to correct any tendency to minimisation. It’s obviously a major operation you’re up against.”

  “Yes,” Ghote said cautiously.

  The unexpected confrontation did not seem to be as unpleasant as he had expected. But you could never tell.

  Ram Kamdar rubbed his hands together briskly.

  “Yes,” he said, “I think it’s a fair bet the whole business is becoming distinctly religion-orientated. Look at the chappie now.”

  He turned the two white-framed oblongs of his sunglasses in the direction of the far side of the glassy smooth tank in front of them. Ghote, relieved, looked in the same direction.

  Sitting there cross-legged on a small raised platform spread with a roughly-patterned piece of cotton material was Lal Dass. It was easy to recognise him from his numerous photographs in the papers, a somewhat plump man of about fifty, entirely naked except for a clean white loincloth and the thin black sacred thread across one shoulder and his chest. He was gazing placidly at the scene in front of him, apparently oblivious of the crowds, the nearby busily conferring European television team, the shouts of the hawkers of cool drinks, newspapers, garlands and kum-kum powder and the general hullabaloo as those who considered themselves latecomers fought to get to their places.

  Ghote craned forward to look at the hathayogi. Not so much because he was particularly interested in the figure at the centre of what he had always known would be a noisy and elaborate fiasco, but because he was extremely anxious not to get involved in any further conversation with Ram Kamdar, that living representative of the Minister. He abandoned now all ideas of dealing with Jack Cooper: discussing any aspects of the case in front of a man who might report his every word direct to the top was unthinkable.

  So he peered and peered at the plump cross-legged figure on the far side of the tank. One thing looked plain enough : the fellow was hardly th
e person responsible for all the publicity. He was much too quiet for that. No doubt he had been got hold of by some sharp operators who intended to make a good thing out of what was no doubt a perfectly genuine attempt to perform a really extraordinary feat.

  Ghote looked at the tank. It stretched for about fifteen yards between him and the hathayogi and was perhaps three yards wide, a green-black, still, unbroken stretch of water. Could anyone ever possibly simply get up and walk across it, as if it was glass? Some strange things certainly did happen sometimes.

  Time passed. The others were talking among themselves, and all the seats around them had now filled up with excited people. It was like some sort of monster party, with old friends and acquaintances greeting each other across the intervening heads and a great deal of laughter and pleasantries. But Ghote succeeded in relegating it all to a distant chatter. The Rajah, luckily, was too absorbed in being greeted by people he knew, who all seemed anxious to remind him of their existence, to do any more about playing at being a detective and he was mercifully left alone.

  Over the other side of the tank the hathayogi seemed to be in a rather similar situation. There too there was a great deal of excitement, with people running up with messages and conferring and having heated exchanges of various sorts and at the still centre of it all one person who seemed quite oblivious of what was going on. Even when dignitaries from the centre, most expensive seats were led up to him he seemed scarcely to notice their existance, giving only occasionally a mild quiet inward-looking smile. And he betrayed no more interest when they were led away again to examine the tank itself, poking at the surface of the water with great earnestness and much public-display nodding of heads.

  And then, well after the advertised time of the event, things at last began to happen.

  The various dignitaries began returning to their seats from their inspection of the tank—one had even plunged his umbrella deep down into it and part of his forearm, regardless of any possible damage to either. From the crowd, which now stretched so far into the distance that those at its edge could not possibly see anything of the proceedings, there came a concerted shift forwards and a low unison murmur. Lal Dass, smiling serenely and taking no notice of the deferentially whispering men on either side of him, stood up. For half a minute perhaps he remained upright looking placidly at the water of the tank as it in its turn regained the placidity it had possessed before the experimenters had got at it.

  A complete hush fell on the crowd, from the elect in the 500-rupee seats to the poorest of the poor seeing nothing at all in the distance. Slowly Lal Dass began to walk down the steps towards the water.

  Ghote found he could not take his eyes off him. He knew at the back of his mind that he ought to be darting discreet glances all round at a peak of alertness for any signs of possible sabotage. But the gentle serenity of the yogi held him transfixed. He felt through and through that he was going to see a quite extraordinary feat: he was going to see a man, a heavy-looking man, solid and well-fleshed, walk airily over the still surface of the tank in front of him.

  Lal Dass reached the side of the tank. Again he stood for a long half-minute, looking, not so much at the mirror flat surface, as into some far, far distance of the mind.

  And at last the moment came. Calmly, wonderfully confident, Lai Dass stepped boldly forward.

  And toppled straight under the thick green water.

  CHAPTER VII

  The same silence that had held the huge crowd watching Lal Dass suspended in one single hush as the hathayogi had taken his stand at the edge of the tank in front of the big temple continued for a few awe-struck instants after his disappearance under the greeny-black water. And then like a gathering whirlwind a single enormous communal squeak of indignation wound its way up from every side, from every outraged throat.

  And Ghote realised that the joker had played his biggest joke of them all. He had expected that in some way Lal Dass was to be hoaxed: instead all that huge crowd, from the ones that had paid five hundred rupees for the privilege to those that had endured for two or three long hours the heat of the sun, had been the joker’s victims.

  And now they were all voicing their feelings, explaining them away nineteen to the dozen, pointing out to each other in a wild clamour of jabbering how utterly everybody else had been tricked by the whole fantastic business, gesturing, shouting, cursing. Ghote remained silent, thinking.

  And all at once he realised the most astonishing fact of all: Lal Dass was still there, still under the water. He had taken that step, toppled incongruously forward into the green-black water, but then he had not splashed upwards walrus-like to the surface. He was still under. It was just possible to make out in the murky depths the vague white area of his muslin loincloth.

  Ghote jumped to his feet and scrambled over the low wooden barrier in front of him. No one seemed to be paying the least attention to the yogi. Even his attendants were busy explaining away to each other with the rest of the huge concourse. Nobody had eyes for the tank at all.

  Ghote ran round its stone-edged sides till he reached the place where Lal Dass had stepped in. He crouched quickly at the edge of the water and peered downwards.

  Yes, the yogi was there. Tranquil and unmoving, in a gently curled-up position, the faint ripples of his fall into the water still stirring very lightly the floating ends of his loincloth.

  Ghote took a quick breath and dived head-first in beside him.

  The water was deliciously cool and from underneath seemed wonderfully green instead of black and murky. Peering through its translucent depths as his feet found a slimy bottom he located Lal Dass. The heavy yogi’s forehead was just touching the greened-over stone slabs of the tank’s bottom, and the rest of his body appeared to be floating above the head. Ghote put his arms under the naked smooth flesh in a scooping gesture and levered himself upwards from the bottom.

  To his infinite relief the yogi moved. He had feared somehow that the body would mysteriously resist all his efforts. But slowly and heavily it came to the surface and Ghote came with it. He found he could just touch the slime of the tank bottom with the toes of his shoes and still have the top of his face out of the water with his head thrown back.

  “Help!” he called. “Help, somebody, help.”

  He had to call several more times, but at last Lal Dass’s attendants realised his predicament. Some of them came to the tank edge and shouted instructions, which Ghote was unable to hear as his ears were just below the surface of the murky water. Others turned to tell people around what was happening. Eventually two of them knelt at the side of the tank and with tentative pawing gestures urged the big smooth body of their master towards them.

  Ghote, his feet slipping and sliding, pushed. And in the end he got near enough to the edge to get a shoulder under the inanimate form of the yogi and heave. Now a few more people joined in, catching hold of an arm or a foot and pulling, some in one direction, some in another. Between them all they got Lai Dass laid out beside the tank, a big mound of golden flesh, smooth and unresistant.

  It was Ghote, dripping and clammy, who after he had struggled out of the tank himself, put his ear to the yogi’s chest and pronounced that the heart was beating.

  “My dear chap,” a voice said in his ear, “you really oughtn’t to be plunging into the water and so on, you know.”

  His clothes clinging, wet and stiff, to his body, he swung round to face the Rajah of Bhedwar.

  “He would have drowned,” he said crossly.

  “Oh, not really, old man. And in the meantime, you know, we’ve work to do. Now we’ve got the initiative, we mustn’t let it go.”

  Ghote felt no better for realising that this had a large element of truth in it. Someone had succeeded somehow in convincing Lal Dass that he was going to be able to walk on water. That was plain. And at the moment of his discomfiture the hathayogi was most likely to give them some idea of who it was. Only . . .

  He looked down at LaL Dass. His heart might be bea
ting, but it was plain that it would be some while before he was doing any talking.

  “It’s quite plain to me what must have happened,” Bunny Baindur said.

  Ghote realised miserably that it was far from clear to him. He took the top of his jacket between a finger and thumb of each hand and tried to lift it clear of his back so that it would begin to dry off.

  “Yes,” the Rajah said. “I dare say you read in the paper: the poor old fellow had already taken a few steps on water, here on this tank in the early hours of one morning. So someone must have done something to the water to make it possible.”

  Ghote wrenched his mind away from the clamminess round his waist, which he could think of no way of dealing with in public. He concentrated on the problem the Rajah had propounded. An idea came to him.

  “Perhaps if a heavy sheet of glass had been put just below the surface?” he said.

  And immediately he was overwhelmed with a sense of how ridiculous the suggestion had been.

  “But no. No,” he stammered. “It would not be possible. It must be some other way. Air. Perhaps it was with air. Somehow.”

  “No,” the Rajah said thoughtfully. “I have a feeling you’re on to something, old boy. A big sheet of glass, plate glass, just below the surface. It would do it, you know. Come on.”

  He swung round and started off through the thinning crowd at a great rate. Ghote followed him, without having any clear notion what he was doing.

  “It’s just possible the glass will still be somewhere about,” the Rajah said. “Our chap might be trying to get rid of it at this moment.”

  Ghote broke into a jog-trot. He found with satisfaction that it caused his clothes to billow out away from his body. But it was with much less satisfaction that he registered that once again the Rajah was being the detective while he himself simply tagged along behind.

  They made for the back part of the temple where there was a huddle of huts where the vendors at the various stalls round the building lived.