Ghote looked back at him in the dim light, wooden-faced. “Excuse my joke,” Mr. Dhebar said hastily. “Excuse my joke, in rather poor taste I fear.”
Ghote felt yet more ill at ease. The editor’s suggestion had not sounded like a joke. He tried, not very successfully, to bring a smile up onto his lips.
“Well, well,” Mr. Dhebar said with forced briskness, “come up to my humble chamber, my dear chap. Not palatial. Not palatial at all. But such as it is you are welcome to it. And you should get to bed right away. The morrow will be upon us with stealthy foot all too soon. Yes, all too soon.”
He followed the editor’s bulky figure up the stairs and into the room which appeared to form the whole of the top part of the house. Evidently, from the charpoy in one corner, it was where Mr. Dhebar spent his bachelor nights. But the bed was put into complete insignificance by mounds and heaps everywhere of newspapers and magazines, fresh at the top, yellowed and ancient at the bottom. There was the Times of India, going back it seemed almost to British days. There were piles of the Statesman from Calcutta and the Hindu from Madras, both every bit as aged. There were the coloured covers of the Illustrated Weekly, dozens and dozens and dozens of them. There was Bombay’s Blitz, gaudy red headlines long faded to an undemanding pink.
Beyond these, the room was almost unfurnished. Except that under the single uncovered light bulb there was a little rickety table with a typewriter on it.
A typewriter. He looked at it with all the passion of a small boy contemplating a piled tray of sweetmeats at a meethaiwallah’s stall. He longed simply to advance upon it, slip in a sheet of paper, type with all the rapidity that two battering fingers were capable of tiiequickbrownfoxjumpedoverthelazydog, and then hide that useful piece of evidence somewhere on his person ready for comparison with the next note that Sir Asif Ibrahim might receive, however difficult that would be to get hold of.
But with Mr. Dhebar solemnly regarding him there was nothing to be done.
Perhaps if the fellow went out for a moment . . . but he did not.
“Kindly avail yourself of my humble resting place,” he said instead. “I shall continue to work if the light does not disturb you. Consulting my files. My amassed files.”
He laid a benedictory hand on the top of the tallest Times of India pile and then sat himself down cross-legged on the floor beside it, evidently ready to extract from its layers whatever piece of the long-recorded past particularly interested him at this moment..
Stretching himself cautiously on the charpoy on the other side of the room, he discovered that it needed the attentions of a carpenter yet more urgently than he had thought. It did not just sag, it sagged unevenly. Its only taut rope bit into his hip like an instrument of torture.
“Yes,” Mr. Dhebar continued, “these files, I am accustomed to say, are my true friends. My only counsellors. It is from them that I learn all that has happened in the past of our wretched country from its first day as a nation. It is from their wise aid that I draw every lesson necessary for the future. The light does not worry you?”
For a fleeting second Ghote was tempted to answer as if it was not a small practical question but a large moral one. And to answer deflatingly. But he owed the editor some politeness.
“No, no. Please keep it on. I would not like to prevent you from continuing your valuable work.”
“Well, yes, it is true that it is here, toiling often like this deep into the night, that I make my little discoveries. Sometimes even my not so little discoveries.”
No, this was carrying self-esteem too far. Ghote closed his eyes.
“It was here, for instance,” the remorseless plummy voice continued, “that I hit upon the facts that made me aware, poignantly aware, shall I say, of our friend Begum Roshan’s sad situation.”
He opened his eyes.
Was that squat figure on the floor beside his pile of old newspapers, his head level with Ghote’s on the charpoy, going to add to that remark? Or was it intended to stand by itself as some sort of test? A way of finding out if he too was aware of the sad situation? Was in Begum Roshan’s confidence?
To prompt the fellow? Or to leave a silence?
He left a silence. And eventually Mr. Dhebar gave a heavy sigh.
“Yes, there it all was in my filed copies of the Hindu. There for any person able to read between the lines”
Another long melancholy sigh.
Now he would have to be prompted. Now he wanted to be.
“And you were able to read between those lines, Mr. Dhebar?”
“Ah, yes. Yes, I was. The poor woman. The poor, poor woman. First, the announcement of her forthcoming marriage. And the name of the bridegroom-elect not a Muslim one. All too easy to imagine, in those days, some thirty years ago, what had gone on behind the scenes before that announcement was printed. What was still going on when it was printed.”
“Yes,” he answered, attempting to infuse an equal weightiness into the word.
To get hold of the rest of this he would cross and cross again the line that divided proper interest from gross flattery.
He shifted a little on the wretched charpoy and managed to transfer the pressure to a different part of his hip.
And, besides, what the fellow had said was true enough. Thirty years ago divisions between the religious communities were very much sharper than they were today, and they were not so easily crossed even now. So before a Muslim girls marriage to someone outside her community would have been publicly announced there would indeed have been trouble behind the scenes.
“Yes,” Ghote repeated, with a sigh in his turn. “And you said first an announcement of a forthcoming marriage. But Begum Roshan has never married. So there was another announcement?”
“Yes, yes. There was. The marriage arranged between Mr. So-and-so—I have forgotten the name now, but I can always find it again in my files if you wish . . .”
“No, no. Kindly do not trouble yourself.”
“No? Well, he was a young lawyer from a well-known South Indian family, married long since to another lady, from his own community, of course. And dead now also. But there was the second announcement: ‘The marriage will not now take place.’”
“And it would have been soon after that that Begum Roshan came to live here, in this remote locality?”
“Yes. Yes, soon after. I have understood that from her. There is, you know, a certain sympathy between us. An unexpressed sympathy.”
“Yes.”
Unexpressed indeed, he reflected. Begum Roshan had not seemed to have much time for the visiting editor.
But he had learnt from the fellow something worth knowing. Another hard fact. Something else requiring adjustments to his picture of life in the old quiet house.
Firmly he shut his eyes again. But Mr. Dhebar apparently failed to notice.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, things today are not as they were. Today there would not be such objection to a marriage across the religious line. Not at all, not at all.”
But Ghote ignored the solemn reflections.
Not so long before, as he had been making his way through the dark streets, he had wondered to himself why on earth Begum Roshan should have waited till now to leave death threats for her father. And here, unexpectedly, he had been given an answer. Thirty years ago it would have been, beyond doubt, Sir Asif who had been in the end responsible for preventing her marriage. And that would have been at much the same time as he had been pronouncing those death sentences on the Madurai Conspirators. Another death then, perhaps, added to them. A death of the heart. Yes, it made a sort of sense for Begum Roshan to choose to link the Madurai Case to her own long nurtured revenge.
If she had. Because there was no proof of any of it. No proof at all. The evidence he had, such as it was, told just as much against the Saint or against the Naxalite. Or, come to that, against Mr. Dhebar here.
The figures and the faces loomed up one by one and in curious combinations in his mind’s eye. The Saint, sitting
cross-legged, his smile embedded in his white beard. Mr. Dhebar, approaching the old house on his motor scooter through the still heat of the sun-battered afternoon like a little buzzing insect determined to bore its way through any obstacle. Begum Roshan, twisting and twisting at the edge of her sari, taking up defensive positions and abandoning one after the other. The American priest with his tangled eyebrows and necktie loosely knotted, talking interminably about “conventional morality,” “the capitalist media,” “armed struggle,” and “the oppressor class.” The Saint and the American. The American and Mr. Dhebar. Mr. Dhebar and Begum Roshan. Begum Roshan and Mr. Dhebar.
And, though he had been sure he would not sleep on his abominably uncomfortable charpoy, with the light still burning and Mr. Dhebar cross-legged beside his high-piled Times of India, those whirling and conjoined figures suddenly brought sleep to him.
The strident ringing of Mr. Dhebar’s old alarm clock woke him as suddenly.
He opened his eyes wide. The editor was standing over him, a sombre expression on his large pear face.
“What—what is it?” he asked him, prey to inexplicable fears.
“It is time for you to set forth,” Mr. Dhebar replied. “Time to set forth if you are to get back to the house as early as you wish.”
“Oh yes,” he answered, rationality reasserting its precarious hold. “Yes. Thank you.”
He heaved himself off the charpoy. His left hip felt cripplingly stiff where the cord had cut into it. Following the editor sleepily, he went down the steep flight of stairs and out to the bathroom at the back. By the time he had finished, Mr. Dhebar had taken his tan suitcase, strapped it onto the back of the scooter, and wheeled the machine out into the street.
Ghote went out into the cool pre-dawn dark and joined him.
“Turn right at the top, my dear fellow, and then keep straight on. Straight on, straight on, till you see the house on the far side of the river.”
Ghote muttered a few words of thanks, took the handle bars of the scooter, and pushed it up the length of the street, unwilling to wake Mr. Dhebar’s neighbours by starting up the engine. Then, at the top, he put a leg over the saddle, switched on the headlight, and kicked the machine into life.
And he was off, buzzing through the darkness, heading once again for that time-smothered house and the tin shed in its gardens from which he was to attempt to save Sir Asif Ibrahim from his own obstinacy.
But he refused to let thoughts of the difficulty of his task depress him. The air was delicious on his face and body, puffing out his shirt behind him, sending his necktie flicking like a whip, making him cool as he had not felt since he had first arrived. The road was clear in front, a straight ribbon, and he was making progress. He must be.
The eastern sky had just begun to lighten when he whirred past the village and came to the river. He cut off the engine and pushed it rapidly as he could across the stony river bed, half afraid that some servant in the big house, Raman perhaps, might be up and about and would see him from an upper window, or that the watchman had for once broken with the routine Begum Roshan had told him about and had stayed in the gardens till now.
But all seemed silent and still. Almost an hour before the milkman with his cow and its muzzled calf would make his appearance.
He mounted the far slope of the river and made his way, stealthily as he could, through the gardens to the long tin shed under the tamarind tree. Heaving the scooter back onto its stand, he tried the shed door. No padlock, thank goodness. But the broad corrugated iron door shuddered appallingly as he began to pull it wide. He stopped, took a new hold, lifted it half an inch from the ground, and tried again.
And managed it in silence.
He wheeled the scooter into the thick, oil-smelling darkness and found, to his delight, that there was room to push it right to the far end, past the bulky shape of the generator engine, past a great block of aged batteries and round behind the long fuel tank itself, made out more by feel than sight at this dark end of the long shed. But with luck it should be safe here. There ought to be no need for Raman, when he came in the evening to start the engine, to penetrate as far as this. Very probably he would be able to stay here himself while the orderly carried out his task.
He went back and carefully closed the door and then, stopping only to slip a pair of comfortable chappals out of his case and put shoes and socks back into it, he settled down on the beaten earth floor close by the hidden machine.
When it was day he might perhaps by peering through some nail hole in the corrugated iron sheets of the shed be able to catch a glimpse of one of the inhabitants of the house walking in the gardens before it grew too hot. Perhaps from them he could get some idea of what was going on, hear a snatch of talk possibly, or see Begum Roshan and be able to attract her attention. Otherwise it was a matter of patiently waiting.
Half-dozing, he was aware vaguely of the swiftly increasing daylight outside. Then at last he heard the bleating of the milkman’s calf and a little later the sound of women from the village singing down by the river where they had begun to wash clothes.
Then, quite suddenly, he heard Raman coming towards him. The fellow was singing as well, lightheartedly and loudly singing the same South Indian boatman’s song he had heard him humming the evening before coming back from taking Sikander his evening food.
He crouched in abrupt tension. What if Begum Roshan was wrong about the fellow’s routine? What if every morning he looked into the shed to see if the generator was all right? What if he even carried out a thorough inspection of the whole oily-smelling building?
It was not beyond the bounds of possibility.
He imagined the orderly coming along the winding path from the house. He would be carrying the same large tray he had taken through the moonlit darkness. Under its white cloth on banana-leaf plates now would be whatever food Sikander was given in the mornings. Fewer leaves, probably, than the three of last night. And Raman would be wearing his neat white jacket, meeting the standard Sir Asif had set more than thirty years before when he had taken the fellow on. “False in omnibus,” and believing it all this time. What a changeless world they both lived in.
But would that world change suddenly and totally in just eleven days from now?
The boat song was getting louder in the morning air. The fellow must be happy. Was he always happy at the start of each day? Happy until he encountered the first of Sir Asif’s rages, and then happy again within minutes? Evidently the fellow did not regard having to look after the madman underneath the old fort as a burden. Perhaps on most mornings he was able to greet him cheerfully, and have a friendly chat. Perhaps it was only on rare days that he would be confronted by the raging maniac Ghote himself had seen in the darkness.
And now the sound of Raman’s singing was only yards away. Was it going to pass the shed door?
In the gloom, pierced now that the sun had risen by thin beams of light coming through nail holes and slits in the walls, he began to count in his head. If he could get up to twenty that was bound to mean the orderly was safely past.
One, two, three . . .
He must be right outside.
Keep counting, keep counting.
. . . eight, nine, ten, eleven.
Was the sound fading? Just a little? Impossible to tell. Count.
. . . seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.
Yes. Twenty. And he had gone past. No doubt about it. And stupid to have got into a panic like that. Yes, it was possible in theory that he would have come in and made his way right to the back here. But it was not really something that was likely to happen.
He must make himself be sensible. He straightened his legs on the hard earth floor.
How long would Raman be today down in the bat-smelling darkness under the fort? In what state would he find the captive? Raging and shaking at the bars? Or talking about “memboralising” the King Emperor?
The sounds of day outside went lazily on. The village women’s voices in the dis
tance, birds twittering, the tiny noises of innumerable insects.
Then suddenly, totally unexpected in the tranquillity, there came a wild screaming human bellow.
He jumped to his feet.
It sounded for all the world like Sikander, like the howl of rage that had greeted him under the fort. But how could it seem to come from so near? From outside?
Then, thumping hard on the sun-baked earth, came the noise of running feet. And a low moaning, the moan of someone running in fear.
Raman. It must be Raman.
A moment later, horribly loud in the air now, there was another wild bellow. There could be no doubt any longer. Sikander had escaped, and was out in the garden, in pursuit of Raman.
What to do?
Only one thing possible.
He dodged through the gloom, past the fuel tank, past the bank of batteries, past the generator, and wrenched open the door. At once he saw, in the bright morning light, what the situation was. Raman was pelting towards the house, hair streaming in the wind. And bounding after him, at a yet greater pace, was the wildly bearded form of Sikander, arms outstretched, huge hands already clutching for a throat.
Without pause for thought, Ghote set out after them.
But—he knew it even as he started—he was going to be too late. He was still fifteen or twenty yards distant when Sikander caught up with the orderly. With a yet louder yell of triumphant fury he seized him by the neck and actually plucked him up off the ground. He raised the body high above him and then crashed forward with it onto the hard ground.
Ghote leapt forward in a long dive, feeling himself jar against the wild man’s back as if he had flung himself onto a rock, found he had managed to dig both forearms in across Sikander’s neck, and, thrusting his knees into the ground on either side, began to heave upwards with all the force he could put into back and legs.
For what seemed an impossibly long time—for what must have been a full minute—he thought he was not going to budge the mad giant by an inch. Sikander had his teeth fastened into the flesh of Raman’s shoulder, deep into his prey.
Inspector Ghote Draws a Line Page 11
