Inspector Ghote Draws a Line

by H. R. F. Keating

  But only temporarily.

  “Judge. Sir Asif. Judge sahib, what—what are these memoirs?

  You are not writing your memoirs. Nothing at all has been said. You are not.”

  He was hardly asking the judge a question, even a blatantly impolite one. He was making an assertion. Declaring passionately that something was not happening.

  Sir Asif smiled at him, a quick curling smile under his oddly squashed-down nose.

  “But of course I am writing my memoirs, my dear fellow. I have been engaged upon the task for years. Are you sure that I have never chanced to mention them to you?”

  “Never,” said Mr. Dhebar. “Never, never, never.”

  His eyes gleamed in a fury of denial.

  “Ah well, if you say so, my dear chap. But it nevertheless remains that I have been steadily at work for, oh, a number of years. And what I have written will, I venture to think, be not without interest, even in these times when standards have been allowed so deplorably to degenerate.”

  And the old man turned and began to walk slowly away, silverheaded cane tapping out on the hard marble of the floor with a steady insolent beat.

  “If you will excuse me,” he murmured. “A little tiredness. The penalty of age. A short rest before tea time. You will find my daughter in the drawing room. I am sure you both know the way.”

  He disappeared into one of the four tall corridors leading off the hall.

  3

  Ghote and Mr. Dhebar were left staring at each other like two castaways unexpectedly coming face to face at the crest of some empty pin-point ocean island.

  For a few moments Ghote stood facing the heavy, short-statured figure of Mr. Dhebar, his mind still sliding this way and that on the wide expanse of doubt on which old Sir Asif had succeeded, in so few words, in setting him down.

  Then he pulled himself together.

  "Mr. Dhebar,” he said briskly, "shall we go?”

  Without waiting for an answer, since the newcomer appeared every bit as disoriented as he felt himself to be, he turned and set off.

  “Sir, excuse me.”

  Mr. Dhebar was standing stolidly just where he had been.

  “Yes?”

  “My dear sir, I am much afraid that for the drawing room you are taking altogether the wrong direction.”

  With abrupt deflation, he realised that, sure enough, the passage he had so confidently headed for—a large bluish patch of dried mildew on its wall reminded him of the frontier-bound outline of Bangladesh on a map, a vague two-legged, two-armed shape surmounted by a sort of waving cockscomb—was one which he had not gone down at all during his time in the big old house.

  “Oh yes, yes,” he stammered. “I am sorry. I arrived here only yesterday, you know.”

  “To assist with the memoirs?”

  Mr. Dhebar had rapidly pulled himself together. Gone completely was the evident confusion Sir Asif had implanted in him: in its place was as marked a determination. It made Ghote suddenly see him as a steam locomotive, fuelled perhaps by low-grade coal and capable of no great speed, but by no means easy to bring to a halt or to shunt off along a convenient sidetrack.

  He coughed.

  “Yes,” he said, allowing himself a little ambiguity, “I am here to assist Sir Asif in any way which he may require.”

  “With the memoirs?” Mr. Dhebar asked bluntly.

  “Er—yes. With the memoirs.”

  “I was not at all aware until just a few moments ago that Sir Asif was writing any such memoirs.”

  “Yes. Yes. Yes, I understand that. I believe it was a subject he did not much care to discuss.”

  “But now he is discussing,” Mr. Dhebar said implacably.

  “Yes. Yes, now he is discussing.”

  Again Ghote coughed, a long rattly sound. And then at last inspiration came.

  “The fact is,” he said, “that Sir Asif has now at last reached the point where he can see the end of his task. Now he knows that he has enough material to achieve publication and he feels in consequence that he can acknowledge the existence of the said memoirs. And that—that is why he has requested my assistance. Such as it is.”

  “Publication is certain then?” Mr. Dhebar asked.

  The question had been delivered in a way that did not admit of it receiving no answer. In a quick spurt of resolution he decided that attack was the only way to defend himself.

  “May I ask,” he said sharply, “what it is that you yourself do? Why is it that you are here in this house?”

  And it seemed that after all he had brought the ponderous locomotive to a stop. Mr. Dhebar stood and blinked.

  Then, after a second, he plunged his hand inside his stretched white kurta—close up Ghote could see that it was no longer in fact white but had gathered from the miles of red road dust a distinct pinkish tone—and brought out a very large visiting card, somewhat grimy at its fluted edges. He presented it with a weighty flourish.

  P. N. Dhebar, Editor-in-Chief, The Sputnik, A Journal of Opinion (Weekly Publication Assured)

  “Though on occasion,” The Sputnik editor added, “publication is fortnightly. Owing to the pressure of financial circumstances.”

  But Ghote was thinking: an editor, a journalist, a fellow with typewriters of all sorts all around him, never mind what is his motive, it is altogether possible that he has in his pocket, next to those visiting cards, another threatening note ready for delivery.

  “And Sir Asif is a contributor to The Sputnik?" he asked, making a sharp guess.

  “Yes, yes. My dear sir, you have come at once to the bottom of the matter. Some little time ago I realised that our district has the honour of having a person of such distinction residing within it. I entered into negotiation. Sir Asif contributes one pungent column per week, or in certain eventualities per fortnight.”

  Ghote processed this new information. For one thing, it explained Mr. Dhebars dismay at hearing about the fictitious memoirs: he must hope one day to secure for himself any reminiscences the judge might have. For another thing, the fellow’s very approach to the judge must mean that he could not be the famous missing conspirator. But there might yet be some other reason why he should want to threaten the old man’s life, and even, in twelve days’ time, to take it. Because if, as seemed probable, he visited here once a week, then he would at least have had ample opportunities to leave those threatening letters.

  Ghote pushed out something of a trick question.

  “I am surprised that, if Sir Asif is willing to write, many other journals all over India do not seek his services?”

  The editor of The Sputnik did not immediately reply. Various emotions could be seen coming and going in his sombre eyes. At last one of them triumphed.

  “I do not think many other papers would be altogether happy to print Sir Asif's opinions. The memory of the Madurai Conspiracy Case is not dead.”

  The truth, perhaps. Bitter though it might be to admit it.

  “Yes. Yes, I suppose that must be the case.”

  Mr. Dhebar looked at him mistrustfully.

  “Should we go to join the delightful Begum Roshan?” he said. “The drawing room is that way, my dear sir.”

  The big darkened room, where Begum Roshan and the other guests in the house were waiting until the hour for afternoon tea, looked, when Ghote entered it at Mr. Dhebar’s heels, as if it was a painting, so still and so silent were the three people in it. Or an old sepia-coloured photograph.

  High-backed, intricately carved armchairs stood in twos and threes in front of heavy wooden screens, all scrolls and convolutions, the velvet of their padded seats, which might once have been a deep red or as deep a blue, reduced by the sunlight of years to an indeterminate grey. Only the huge blue Persian carpet that covered most of the middle of the cool marble floor seemed, indeed, to have retained any colour. That, and on the grand piano standing, lid closed, in a far comer dozens of framed photographs glinting silver. And the only sound to be heard at this still dully hot hou
r was a faint sizzling from the tall windows where not long before a servant must have splashed a bucket of rose-scented water onto the split bamboo sticks of the chick blinds which kept the whole big room in blessed near darkness. That sweet rose-water smell struck the nostrils from the moment of entry.

  Yet the three people there—they did not seem to turn their heads at the sound of the opening door—were not quite statue still. Begum Roshan, tall, thin, wearing a sari of fine old silk, was in a state of continuous minute movement. The fine-boned hands resting on her lap flicked in tiny uncontrolled gestures, and her face, which the first time he had seen her he had thought of immediately as having been eaten away internally by some ever-acting acid so little flesh there was on it, jerked in almost imperceptible darts to left and right and right again.

  Ghote greeted in turn each of the others with a formal pressed-hands namasker. Words, he felt, would be somehow too jarring.

  The American, he saw, had put on once again the stringy black necktie he had worn the evening before. And, as before, it was pulled down a good two inches from the collar of his boldly checked shirt. He was sitting, too, in a pose of extreme casualness, the calf of one leg resting on the thigh of the other. Only the black eyebrows above the hollow eyes in his pale face were locked in a fierce tangle that indicated some inner tension.

  Could this man, so blatantly unconventional, so radical in all his opinions, really be a priest? Or had Sir Asifs calling him that been only another devious way of putting confusion into his unwelcome visitor.

  But at least in response to that bowed namasker the American did speak.

  “Hi,” he said softly, breaking the dampened silence of the big room.

  The response of the Saint, Anand Baba, was however more disconcerting. He said not a word, made not a sound. Instead, sitting with crossed legs up on the velvet seat of his tall carved chair, he released from the flowing mass of his wide white beard a smile, one that beamed and radiated and lingered and warmed. Warmed through and through.

  It was like nothing else than being struck full in the face by a wave of feeling that was almost physical in its impact.

  Ghote stood there and received it.

  “Today is one of Babaji’s days of silence,” Begum Roshan said, after what seemed minutes.

  Ghote absorbed the fact. Days of silence. Of course, many holy men underwent periods of refraining from speech, and it was no surprise that Anand Baba should from time to time erect round himself a wall against the babble of the world. But such a practice could make life distinctly awkward for an investigator pursuing his duties.

  He watched Mr. Dhebar approach the saffron-clad figure and offer a deep reverence.

  “It is indeed an honour to have Anand Baba come to this poor corner of our country.”

  The Saints smile visibly decreased.

  “I think,” Begum Roshan said, “that Babaji would tell us that it is to the poor comers of our country that he comes especially.”

  Mr. Dhebar gave her a look of gratitude.

  “Begum Roshan is as always perfectly right,” he said. “Right in everything that she is good enough to take into her consideration.”

  He sighed.

  “Right even,” he added, “to conceal from my humble self that her father was in process of writing his memoirs.”

  Begum Roshan gave a sharp little laugh.

  “My dear Mr. Dhebar,” she said. “I was the last to know about that, I assure you. My father consults me about nothing. Nothing. If you wish to know about those memoirs, you must ask Dr. Ghote, whom they have sent from Bombay University.”

  Ghote felt in quick succession a fire of rage against the deputy commissioner for having gone so ridiculously beyond common sense in inventing his cover story and a chill of anticipation at what answers he might be asked to provide in order to back the story up. The editor of The Sputnik, for all that he plainly came so far below the distinguished Sir Asif in the social scale, was nevertheless clearly a person with an understanding of the world of books, writing, and scholarship. How would he fare at his hands?

  But he was spared any further interrogation. The mention of the memoirs had stirred Father Adam. The indolent leg lying across its fellow came thumping to the floor.

  “Memoirs?” he said. “Is Sir Asif going to write his memoirs? And I suppose the book will sell like hot cakes, just because people will think its going to let out a few secrets. But all the time it’ll be nothing but a rallying cry for the oppressor class, just when this country was beginning to free itself of that sort of massive manipulation.”

  Begum Roshan, with a quick sideways dart of her head as if to see whether the very walls of the room had not crumbled at such heresy, ventured a murmur of contradiction.

  It merely set the priest off as if it had been a hair trigger releasing some long kept-down force.

  “I know I’m a guest in this house, and please don’t think I’m ungrateful. But a man has a duty to the truth ”

  And for something like ten minutes more Father Adam did his duty to his truth. It seemed to Ghote that what he repeated of Sir Asif's views was more or less accurate, at least to go by what the old man had said at the dinner table the night before. Yet he could not help feeling that to blow those opinions up into the tremendous crimes that the priest seemed to think they were—the word “fascist” came up several times, and the phrases “capitalist conspiracy” and “elitist monopoly of the media”—was exceeding the bounds of ordinary debate, let alone of polite conversation.

  But he was only half listening. Because with every word he saw the case for this surprising American after all being the one writing the threatening notes becoming stronger and stronger. True, when the Madurai Conspiracy Trial had taken place the fellow in all probability had not even been bom. And, true again, apparently he had been in India only for a year or two at the most. But he was showing himself to be just the sort of person who needed only to have heard at second or third hand of the circumstances of that affair to have fastened on it as a symptom of all that he felt to be wrong in the world.

  So were those notes intended to frighten old Sir Asif into some sort of a public recantation, timed for the exact thirtieth anniversary of the trial? It surely could be.

  But, if it was, the American had chosen an opponent altogether too tough for him. His own twenty-four hours’ acquaintance with Sir Asif had made that clear. If ever a man was hardened in his convictions, it was the old judge. If ever anyone would cheerfully accept death rather than compromise by a word on what he felt to be right, it was Sir Asif.

  Perhaps, indeed, the old man had long ago guessed who the author of the anonymous threats was. And it was for that reason that he was treating him with such contempt.

  But motive was what the hard-to-believe-in priest certainly had. Did he too have the means? Did he have a typewriter?

  As soon as the tirade slackened a little, Ghote pounced.

  “Father Adam, I am most inter—”

  “Now, please. Enough of the ‘Father.’ You’ve got to treat me on totally equal terms. It’s Mort. Mort Adam. And what am I to call you?”

  For half an instant he wanted to reply, shredding to pieces in a wild outbreak of truthfulness the whole ridiculous pretence he had been saddled with, “You should call me Inspector, Inspector Ghote.” Then he and the American would truly be on equal terms. But he swallowed hard.

  “Ganesh. My name is Ganesh.”

  “Fine, Ganesh. So what was it you wanted to ask?”

  Evidently some challenge was expected. Something to be crushed with a few more references to “social justice” and “the class war.”

  “Well, Mort, I was going to ask only if you are in any way a writer yourself. You appear to have such fine opinions that I think you must at times put them onto paper.”

  The priest looked down for a moment at his feet. He was wearing not the socks and shoes which Ghote himself had felt to be correct in this house but a pair of sandals, and much scuffed s
andals they were too.

  “Well, I guess you’re right, Ganesh,” he said at last. “Back in the States I have contributed to a few periodicals.”

  A brief wry smile appeared on his pale eyebrow-locked face.

  “I guess my writing was the reason I was sent to India,” he added.

  So had he brought a typewriter with him? But before that question could be approached Mr. Dhebar lurched with massive misunderstanding into the conversation.

  “Ah, then, Father, you are an authority on Indian affairs? I had not realised. Now, would you be prepared to contribute to The Sputnik?" He held up a pudgy warning finger. “But I must tell you, however, that we are unable to pay any grossly inflated American rates. And also that the editor reserves the right to withhold publication in the event of any opinions expressed crossing, in his judgement, the fine line between controversy and defamation.”

  “Or any opinions that might upset the censor?” Father Adam said challengingly.

  Mr. Dhebar drew himself up.

  “The Sputnik has defied all censorship from its very beginnings,” he said.

  “By carefully avoiding all real offence.”

  It was the judge.

  Damn it, Ghote thought at once. He must once again have walked all the way along the passage to this room keeping his stick clear of the floor.

  Well, he had certainly caught Mr. Dhebar on the wrong foot.

  The heavy-set editor was gobbling like a jungle turkey trying equally to defend The Sputnik and to defer to the judge.

  Sir Asif in the end helped him out.

  “But, my dear Dhebar,” he said, “in the time since you have done me the honour of printing my few reflections on the state of present-day society we have changed all that, have we not?”

  “Oh yes, Judge sahib,” the editor said, perking up instantly. “Every week we defy them. Oh yes, indeed.”

  The judge smiled. Slightly.

  “Or we would defy them if anyone ever read The Sputnik," he said.