I looked up at her husband for a long while, then turned back to her. “Yes, of course,” I said. “You were his maid.” I didn’t wait for that to sink in. “What did you think of Gobinda Babu?” I asked the husband. “Why would anyone want to murder him?”
“He had many enemies,” came the reply. The handyman looked me squarely in the face, eyes blinking occasionally behind the spectacles. “Many enemies. But he was a good man,” he added. “A good man. Very decent to us he has been. But he was a big man—a very big man. And big men have enemies.”
“Tell me,” I said to the woman, anxious to corroborate part of the houseboy’s narrative, “how did you both come to know of the murder?”
“The way the cook also did,” answered her husband. “Gopal, the houseboy, saw the body and screamed. At least he says he did—none of us heard him, but then we were downstairs in our rooms. Then he came rushing down wailing. He woke up the cook first, screaming. “The master’s been murdered. Murdered.” That’s all he said, he wasn’t coherent at all. My wife was shocked into hysterics, and I stayed with her while the cook called the police. Then you,” he indicated Sub-Inspector Jacob, “arrived and it was the cook who showed you the room. This is the first time both of us have even come up here today. My wife was inconsolable—she can’t stand the sight of blood. She even fainted once when I cut my hand,” he added conversationally. “She wouldn’t have dreamed of coming here with all that blood. I remember once. . . .”
“H’m,” I interrupted unkindly. “We haven’t the time for your little domestic details. I’m more interested in your account of the houseboy’s reaction to his discovery. He said ‘The master’s murdered, murdered’ didn’t he? You said he was incoherent—how incoherent was he?”
“That’s all he said,” replied the handyman. “He kept saying ‘the master’s murdered, murdered’ over and over again and sobbing. It took him quite a while to calm down. At first we couldn’t understand what had happened, but the word ‘murdered’ was enough—enough for my wife to go to pieces, poor girl, and for the cook to ring up the cops—sorry, I mean you gentlemen.”
“‘The master’s murdered, murdered,’” I mused. “That’s all? Over and over again? He didn’t give you any further details? Gruesome descriptions?”
“Oh, no, certainly not,” the handyman replied. “He wasn’t in a condition to do so.”
“Yes, of course,” I said, suddenly, incredibly, human. “I understand.”
When they left Sub-Inspector Jacob gave me a quizzical look. “And how does all that help?” he asked, with only the barest deference due my rank. “Seems to me we’re back where we started.”
“Does it really, Sub-Inspector?” I settled myself more comfortably in my chair. “Will you tell me why you say that?”
“Well, their stories have given you nothing to go on—no fresh clue, and no earthly reason why any of these people should have wanted to murder a man they’d worked with for long and appear to be fond of. Or do they?”
“Really, Sub-Inspector? You don’t think we’ve gained anything these last forty-five minutes? I’d beg to disagree. Let’s review the situation. A man’s murdered, someone’s stuck a knife in him about thirteen times, and because he’s a politician we immediately come to the conclusion it’s a political murder. Need it be? When someone dies of thirteen wounds, he’s either been killed by thirteen people, like some kind of latter-day Julius Caesar, or by someone who’s so bloody furious with him he can’t stop striking. And politically, Gobinda Sen was not the man to attract that kind of viciousness, at least not from what I know of his politics. But personally? That’s another matter. A bachelor, living alone, a scrupulously organized reticence surrounding his personal life—who’s to know whether some man hates his guts or not? I prefer to work on the suspicion that someone did—that this was what the French so often call a crime of passion, not a careful, premeditated murder. In which case it would have had to be perpetrated by someone inside the house.” I paused, looked around. Jacob was interested, not yet convinced, Ghosh was nodding his approbation—he knew the direction my thoughts were taking.
“The cook, the houseboy—obviously innocent. But the handyman: not so easily exonerated. Nothing I could place my finger on: certainly no motive. Till the woman provided me with one. The moment I asked her about Sen she committed the fatal error of overreacting to my not-too-subtle insinuation. It all fitted in: an illicit relationship, dramatic discovery by the husband, impassioned murder, and hasty cover-up: just the kind of thing cases are made of in the detective novels. But absolutely no proof, of course.
“Then I started scenting a trail when the husband deliberately tried to attribute the murder to political opposition—’big men have enemies.’ In his anxiety to lead me onto the wrong track, he unfortunately talked too much. He spoke of his wife being unable to stand the sight of blood—yet from what the houseboy had told him how did he know there was any blood at all? Gobinda Sen had been ‘murdered’; he could have been strangled, asphyxiated, gassed, anything. Yet our friend the handyman knew there was blood. Which meant he’d done the killing.”
There was a stunned silence in the room.
“I can just imagine it,” I added, ever unable to resist the melodramatic. “Gobinda Sen comes home at night, expecting perhaps to find the maid waiting for him. Perhaps she is—but so is her husband. He is pushed onto the bed and stabbed with a cuckold’s fury. The terrified wife acquiesces in the fait accompli and helps cover it up. But neither performs the task too well.”
“And the window?” asked Sub-Inspector Jacob. “What about the window?”
“Ah, the window,” I smiled. “Ask the handyman to come in again.”
This time he was scared. You could see the fear in the rapid blinking of his eyes behind the heavy frame of his glasses. I stepped up to him, smiled pleasantly, and removed the spectacles from his nose. Then, quite deliberately, I flicked my index finger hard at the lens. The glass shattered and fell at his feet. A couple of fragments lay on my foot.
“Hey—what did you do that f. . . .” he began.
“To show you where you went wrong in breaking the windowpane,” I said harshly. “When I broke your lens from this side most of the glass fell near you. When our mysterious murderer broke the windowpane, ostensibly to get in, the broken glass equally mysteriously opted for the balcony instead of the bedroom carpet. Which means the murderer didn’t break it to get in. He was trying to be smart, trying to set up an interesting but misleading clue to disguise a murder that had been committed by someone who had no need to break any windows. You.”
“Oh my God,” he said as the handcuffs went on.
“You’ll have plenty of time to be devout in the Central Jail,” I remarked cheerfully. “Right now you’d better pray for a speedy trial. Come on, Ghosh.”
It was a few years later, when Jacob had become a deputy commissioner of police and I was still an inspector, that I let my resentments overcome my natural reticence late one evening at the Policemen’s Club. We’d been drinking together, me a few glasses too many, and what sparked it was something as innocent as Jacob reaching forward to sign my chit.
“Hey, let me . . . ,” I began, then checked myself. “What the hell,” I said. “On what you earn nowadays, why the hell shouldn’t you pick up the tab?”
Jacob looked embarrassed, but I went on, my speech slurring. “Look at the way they reward talent in this bloody force,” I said bitterly. “Take a man like me, knows his work, doesn’t lick any asses—so no promotion in eleven years. And you, Jacob—respectful, well-behaved, but you couldn’t spot a clue if it hit you in the face—and it’s I who’ve got to salute you.”
“Now that’s not quite fair,” he began, a little heatedly. I cut him short.
“Take the Gobinda Sen case, for instance,” I said. “Most celebrated murder in Calcutta for years, and I solve it in a morning, while you went around bleating you had no leads. What happens? Do I get so much as a thank you? No
sir—it’s you who get the promotion. Bloody hell.” I signaled sloppily for another drink.
Jacob banged his glass down, his face darkening. “All right, you poor sap,” he glowered. “You asked for it. So you think you’re the hero of the Gobinda Sen case, do you? Well, let me tell you something. The myopic hulk you’ve had put away in Central Jail didn’t do it.”
“What?” I looked at him in disbelief. “You must be mad. You testified in court that . . .”
“Sure I did. But that’s got nothing to do with anything.”
“But—his wife—I could have sworn . . .”
“Okay, so maybe she was warming Gobinda Sen’s bed for him. So what? Her husband was doing pretty well out of the arrangement, in any case. He wasn’t going to erupt in a burst of jealous rage after tolerating it for years.”
“But . . . the blood . . . how did he know about the blood?”
“He didn’t know about the blood, Nayar. All he said was that he and his wife hadn’t gone up to the room because she was inconsolable. Then he probably realized what that implied, so he covered up by adding that crap about the blood—on the basis of the mess he was seeing around him while talking to you. But you’re so smart, of course, that you read even more into his statement than he intended to conceal.”
“But who—what—I don’t understand.” I stuttered lamely.
“That’s exactly your problem, Nayar,” Jacob said softly. “You don’t understand. You think you do, but you don’t really. And that’s why we needed you that day. We needed someone with your capacity for self-deception.”
“We—who’s we?”
“Guess, Nayar, just guess,” Jacob replied. “Maybe you should start paying a little more attention to politics instead of playing Sherlock Holmes all the time. Then maybe you’ll become deputy commissioner one day.”
1975
The Other Man
I know your name almost as well as my own. Arvind. Sometimes she cries it out at night when she is with me on my bed. Arvind. How I have grown to hate that name.
I know what you look like. I see you in my nightmares, in the other half of my mind when I think of her. I see you in her eyes when she speaks of you, and you are a wall between us I cannot surmount. If we pass each other on the street one day I know I will spot you. You will look like a man who feels he ought to be recognized.
I know how wonderful you are. What a heart of gold God has blessed you with. How you smile, how your teeth flash in the sun and your eyes twinkle as you toss your hair back from your forehead and walk towards her. She tells me of you sometimes, and when she speaks she looks indescribably beautiful, head partially bowed, eyes far away, lips moving quietly in remembrance, and I yearn to touch that loose curling strand of hair that falls on her cheek, but know I cannot reach her. And despite her beauty she is frightening then, lost to me, as I sit there next to her and see how distant you can make her. She sits wrapped in a tender, impenetrable cocoon of remembered love. And I am afraid.
I am afraid when I hold her hand and fear yours was not as sweaty. I am afraid when I turn to her in love and call her by a name she has heard more often from your lips. I am afraid when I disrobe before her and wonder whether you were stronger, taller, better-built than I am. I am afraid when she holds my face in her soft hands and looks into my eyes, for I do not know what she sees there, myself or the ghost of your memory. And I cringe when sometimes in the dark, that great leveler, she shudders beneath my touch and cries your name. Alone with her, I fear the night.
And I fear you. I fear you not as a remnant of a past that was beautiful and personal and very, very happy, a past I cannot deny her because it is a part of her life, of what she is to me. But I fear you instead as a looming, threatening shadow that might one day emerge from her past into my present, emerge to shatter the little world I have created for myself and her. For I know and she knows and we both acknowledge that you have a prior claim on her that I can never supersede. You are the first man she gave herself to. And she was yours till you left her.
Till you left her. Left her for the attractions of an alien land where there was money and pride and that intangible thing you termed satisfaction. Left her with a ring and a promise you would return to redeem the pledge it represented. And she let you go, accepting your departure as unavoidable, refusing to be tempted into hoping for your return. Because she loved you.
But she waited. That was the tragedy of it all, she waited. For what, she did not know. But she waited, and while I came to love her and seek her for myself, she would not give herself to me. She was yours, and in her waiting she remained yours.
Then, little by little, she succumbed. Succumbed to a woman’s need to be wanted and loved and cared for. But she never let me forget, with each iota of her resistance that gave way, that she was not mine. And as I tried to place the shroud of my affections over her, to cover her with a love that would shut out the pressures of external things, I realized the shattering truth. The truth that while her body, her time, her nominal existence, might be given to me, her mind and heart were still waiting. For you.
I did not know how long she would wait. How long she could wait. But then she herself did not know what she was waiting for. As time passed I began to hope that its passage would slowly eradicate, if not the memory, the need to sustain it. Loving her, I slowly learned not to expect anything in return, or even from myself. All along I was gentle and loving and patient. And all broken up inside.
Then you wrote. Telling her you were alive and doing well and you still cared. Or thought you cared. And presuming with the easy confidence of long possession that she was still yours, that she had not changed. I remember her face the day she got your letter. With your casual, effortless words you touched a chord in her I had never been able to feel. Quietly, that evening, soundlessly giving vent to a pain I knew she felt deeper inside than I had ever seen, she wept. And she cried for you in my arms.
She did not reply to your letter. And yet with that nongesture she seemed only to grow even more remote from me, remote and beautiful and so much more in need of the love I was so willing to give her. I loved her then in a strange, new kind of way, as one loves a finely-tuned sentence in a book that one wishes one could write but knows one can’t. It was easier than to be reconciled to her inaccessibility. For perhaps that was what made her what she was, a Mona Lisa. And I could never reach her smile.
Every time I touched her it was a commitment, a commitment not to possess. And when your second letter came, and she did not reply to that one too, I knew in a strange way that it only reaffirmed the terms of my commitment. You did not write again. And if you had, perhaps she still would not reply. But she is still waiting.
And that is why I still fear you. For as long as you remain away and tell her you love her from the other end of a postage stamp I know I can still preserve my tenuous hold on the reality of her life. But I am afraid that you may not. I am afraid that one day you will step out of the murky, half-light of remembered importance and enter the harsher glare of tomorrow’s sun. And then I do not know what will happen to me.
But perhaps you will not. Perhaps she will go on waiting for that something within her to break or bloom. Perhaps one day it will, and it will not be you effecting the change but I and my relationship with her. Yes, I too will wait and hope. For I know that there is one thing in her you will never understand. That the ring she wears on her second finger is not yours but mine. That the surname she bears today is not the one you wrote on the airmail envelope you addressed to her but the one I signed on our marriage register. That she chose at all to marry me when she was still yours. For there is one thing I know that you will never learn and that the world will never tell you. That six months after she became my wife, she bore me your son.
1974
Auntie Rita
Having an affair with your aunt is fraught with a lot of serious complications. At least that’s what Arjun discovered when he went down to Calcutta to spend his autumn ho
lidays with Auntie Rita and realized that he loved her.
As realizations go, it was a pretty significant one in his life, and as realizations don’t go, this one stayed in the innermost recesses of his mind and grew. Actually it hadn’t quite dawned on him slowly, in the manner of most pansophisms. He had always had a lurking suspicion he was in love with somebody, and the day before his departure for Calcutta his rejection by the fat-arsed, bosomy nymphet who lived downstairs confirmed that she couldn’t possibly have been the queen of his heart. Which left only Auntie Rita in his brief roster of attractive members of the opposite sex.
Not that his love for her was the result of any logical or even consciously biological process. In fact it had only been on that second evening on the terrace that he had come to realize it was she his heart thirsted after.
Why? Arjun often asked himself the question, so often that he began to sound like a child who had forgotten the last letter of the alphabet. Why? Why? Each time Arjun found himself stumped for a reply. What was it in her that really attracted him? That astonishing freshness of face in a thirty-two-year-old given to a generosity around the hips and waistline that came from fourteen years of indolent housewifery and no children; that provocative, even slightly promiscuous tilt of her face as she talked, despite the overwhelming respectability of marriage and aunthood; the even greater eloquence of her elegantly kaajaled eyes that gazed into his, frankly admiring his cherubic good looks though she’d first seen him as a runny-nosed three-year-old when she’d married his uncle; which of all these caused fluttering fingers to clutch at his heart and his femur and fibula to turn into gelatine, Arjun did not know. All of them, perhaps—and yet, at the same time, maybe none of them. . . .
“What’s a man without an ego?” she’d said unblushingly to him that evening on the terrace, as the lengthening shadows closed in on them and the rooftops of Calcutta retaliated with intermittent yellow spots of electric lighting, and she looked straight into a face that had not yet learned to dissemble its feelings. Perhaps that was where Rita really scored, in her sense of time and place and appropriateness and her vital grasp of what exactly to say that would have the most telling effect. Maybe her psychology lectures at Women’s Christian College years ago had been of some use after all; or maybe it was simply an inherent gift, some kind of an acquired art that made her a mistress of the business of capturing seventeen-year-old hearts by appealing to the postpubescent vanity that pulses in them.
The Five Dollar Smile: And Other Stories Page 13
