Go West, Inspector Ghote

by H. R. F. Keating

  Yes, Nirmala Shahani.

  Could he leave his place here at Swami’s feet and get over to her? No. Not only would Swami plainly be aware if he moved so much as an inch, but every other eye in the hall would see him too, seated as he was so close to the centre of their beaming, mindless, logic-and-shoes-abandoned devotion.

  He would just have to wait till at last the discourse came to an end and then move quickly to get at the girl before any of her protectors realised what was happening.

  But would Swami, Swami who had seen across the whole width of the hall the thudding inside his head, know at once what he was doing and somehow prevent him? It would be possible. A true yogi would possess that much power.

  Yet was Swami a true yogi? Or was he simply a very cunning trickster? There were not only yogis back in India, there were clever conjurers too, the wandering magicians, the bhagats, who made their way from village to village, from town to town, from fair to fair mystifying all comers with their sleight-of-hand and their inherited knowledge of crowd psychology.

  There was their famous mango-tree trick that had deceived plenty of sceptical, scientifically-minded Westerners. The mango stone handed round to the audience and carefully examined. Its ceremonial planting in a small pot of earth. A cloth whisked across the surface and, behold, already the stone had sprouted. The cloth whisked again and there was a tiny plant. Another pass and another, and the plant was big enough to have a minute mango beginning to form on it.

  He had got to the bottom of that one himself once in his early days with the C.I.D. The time he had watched such a performance among a wide-eyed crowd of Bombayites on the dusty grass of the Azad Maidan, had waited till they had dispersed, leaving at the bhagat’s feet not a few silver-grey paise coins, and had then sprung his police identity on the fellow. Just a little bullying and there had been produced for him the mussel-shell that, already buried in the earth of the pot next to where the mango stone was to be planted, could at an adroit flick of a finger as the cloth was waved above it release the little bendy sprout it contained. And then, once a degree of belief had been created, there were the succeeding larger mango sprigs that were concealed in the folds of the fellow’s dhoti to be deftly inserted in the pot at the right moments.

  Yes, sheer cleverness could achieve things that would astonish almost anybody. After all, when he himself had come into the hall when everyone else was already seated it was more than likely that Swami had noted his arrival. And then a few minutes of careful observation while that Westerner on the other side of the platform was playing his sitar, and it might well have been possible to deduce from the lines on his forehead and round his eyes that he was suffering from a severe headache. Yes, that was possible. Quite possible.

  Suddenly then, just as he was trying to judge between the two explanations, from somewhere underneath Swami’s silken orange upper garment there came a wheezy, high-pitched sound. It was a little tune. Its title scratched at the back of Ghote’s mind. Yes. Surely. “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  The moment it had begun Swami had stopped speaking. His face in its frame of black-curling locks was lit by a broad smile. One or two people in the front of the audience began to titter with laughter and nudge each other. Swami held up his right arm so that the broad sleeve fell back. Round his wrist was a wide steel watch-strap, and from the watch the little wheezy tune was coming.

  “You see,” he said pointing with the finger of his other hand at the watch, “my little alarm, so kindly given to me by our friend, Mrs. Russell Walters. It tells me it is time for Swami to shut up. It tells me it is time for us to sing. Will you take your sitar and play Guru Nanak’s wonderful song ‘Oh, God Beautiful’ for us, Johnananda?”

  Johnananda. Johnananda, Ghote thought with a spurt of scorn. What a name. What a nonsensical mixture of West and East. That English John with coupled on the Ananda which many swamis added to their name to signify Bliss. It was like yoking up together a motorcycle and a bullock. No, anyone with a name like that was a fake. No doubt about that. And if this sitar-playing Johnananda was a fake, so surely was Swami.

  And that meant that Nirmala Shahani was being kept here by some trickery with the object of getting hold through her of as much as possible of the wealth of Shahani Enterprises.

  He looked across at the girl’s plump, vacant face. She had switched her attention from Swami to Johnananda sending a few preliminary silvery cascades of sound out into the hall from his sitar. Well, perhaps if she could switch from Swami to that fellow, then she could be induced to change her loyalties back to her father once again without too much difficulty.

  If only it was possible to get across there and start talking to her. But, plainly, there was no question still of doing that. No one in the audience had moved. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to wait till this meeting was over, let the girl get out of the hall and out of Swami’s sight and then catch up with her.

  He began measuring the distance between first the girl and the doors and then himself and the doors. If he waited till all the people between him and them had gone out, would his shoes still be where he had left them ready to slip into?

  The devotees had begun singing now, a waft of sound rising up to the pure white dome of the roof above.

  “O God beautiful, O God beautiful

  In the forest Thou art green

  In the mountain Thou art high

  In the river—”

  “You must sing also. Come, it is very easy. And the words are so beautiful. Sing. Sing.”

  Swami was leaning down over him, his eyes exuding benevolence.

  He felt a rush of fury. Yet it was somehow, too, slidingly easy to obey that sweet, intense voice.

  The song began again without pause and he found he had joined in.

  “In the mountain Thou art high

  In the river Thou art restless …”

  But he contrived to keep one corner of his mind concentrated on the girl Nirmala and on what he was going to do the moment he was free.

  He saw, too, that Swami had moved away after issuing his invitation, or command, to him to join in. He had gone to the middle of the platform where on a broad orange sheet a tiger skin had been laid. Seated on this, with back upright as a pole and bare feet protruding from his silken garments, he was adding a powerful sweet voice to the ocean-swell coming from below.

  “In the forest Thou art green, In the mountain …”

  Again and again the words came round. On the platform Swami sang as if he was on some pinnacle of blind happiness. Down below his disciples sang back, as bemused, as faraway.

  Were they never going to stop, Ghote thought as his lips, too, mindlessly repeated the simple words. Were they going to sit there lost in their singing till they all fell down from exhaustion? Did they never get anything done here? How would the world work if everybody was like this?

  He shut his mouth with a snap.

  And, as if that had been a signal, behind him on the platform Swami’s high, sweet voice also abruptly ceased. And down below the chanting voices swiftly petered out into silence.

  Arre, was the man going to subject him to a public rebuke for not going on and on with that song?

  But no.

  “Good, good,” came that sweet voice from the tiger skin. “That was very good. And later perhaps we will sing again. Or we will have a hum. But now you have things that you want to ask Swami. When he talks sometimes he forgets to make everything quite, quite simple. So now you can ask me questions. Any question you like.”

  Would this be the time to move so as to be ready to pounce on Nirmala Shahani as soon as she had taken herself out of Swami’s influence? But no one in the audience got up from the floor and Ghote resigned himself to a longer wait.

  “Swamiji,” an American girl’s voice piped up from somewhere near the front of the circular floor. “Swamiji, have you ever brought a person back to life when they were dead?”

  Swami gave a little coy chuckle.

  “Oh
, such questions she asks. But I will tell you the true answer. No. No, I have not restored any dead person to life. Yet.”

  A murmur of wonder at the feat-to-come rippled through the seated devotees. Then a tall young man got to his feet from where he had been seated in the first row, not on any clever little stool or squabby cushion Ghote noted, but on the floor itself. He had a long, lean face, fixed and intent as if it were carved.

  “Swamiji,” he said, his voice harsh with anxiety, “I have this problem. I’ve got to get rid of the greed I feel within. I really want this. And I’ve meditated for it, and, well, I guess I’ve done everything you’ve ever told us to do. But it’s still there, Swamiji, the greed. I can feel it like a little hard lump inside of me. So what do I do next, Swamiji? Please, what do I do?”

  From a snicker of unease that seemed to zigzag through at least some parts of Swami’s audience Ghote deduced that the young man’s earnest questioning had found an echo in some at least of the orange-clad disciples.

  He turned his head to watch Swami as he answered. How would he deal with something that, however humbly expressed, was in fact a challenge?

  Swami smiled.

  It was a smile yet fuller, yet sweeter, than any he had bestowed on them before. Then with the plump forefinger of his extended, palm-up left hand he made a little beckoning gesture, so insignificant that he might have been doing no more than nudge towards himself some unimportant little object.

  But the lanky, long-faced questioner moved towards the platform and on to it as if he was being drawn there by a smooth nylon rope reeled in by a steadily thrumming electric motor.

  There was a hushed silence throughout the whole white-domed hall as he came to a halt just in front of Swami’s tiger skin.

  “You must kneel,” Swami said, still smiling and smiling.

  The tall young man thumped down on to his knees. His long, intent face was little more than a foot away from Swami’s lusciously-locked, full-smiling one.

  For a full minute, though it seemed to Ghote much longer, Swami looked deep into the lean, young face in front of him. From where he was sitting Ghote had only an oblique view of Swami’s eyes, but even so he distinctly felt that they possessed a hypnotic pull.

  Then at last Swami spoke, his voice low and honeyed but clear to hear in the tense silence.

  “Why didn’t you come before?”

  The young man’s Adam’s apple rose and fell in his thin, almost child-like neck.

  “I—I guess I thought it wouldn’t be right to—to trouble you, Swamiji.”

  “No,” said that low, clear voice. “That was not the reason. It was pride. Too much pride. A heart full of pride.”

  The kneeling young man bent his head.

  And suddenly, Ghote saw on Swami’s gentle face there had appeared a look of anger. Of formidable anger.

  “Why don’t you become a human being?” the voice, honey no longer, stormed at the young man. “Why not? Why do you go on like this? Stop it. Stop. Throw it away. Be human. Be a human being.”

  The words were commands. And criticism. Unsparing criticism.

  Ghote, new to it all, felt their sting almost as if they had been directed at himself.

  What are they feeling down there, the others, he thought. The ones who have been here for weeks or months. They must be dominated. Held as slaves.

  And from this man with all this power he had to wrest Nirmala Shahani.

  His mouth went dry.

  The young American on the platform was trying to give Swami an answer. But whatever justification of himself he was attempting to produce emerged only as a mumble.

  Swami cut into the confused syllables like a blade.

  “Why?” he stormed. “Why? Why? Why? I ask: Why haven’t you made yourself a human being?”

  “I can’t.”

  The cry was tugged from the boy as if it had been wrenched from his inner flesh.

  And it was at once answered. By a slap. A ringing slap delivered with the full force of Swami’s right arm on to the side of the boy’s face. By a slap and then another. And another, and another. The sound of them cracked into the still air under the wide white dome of the hall. The first had brought from the seated devotees a tiny, suppressed gasp of dismay. But each one after was received in silence.

  It is the silence, Ghote thought, of abject acceptance. Of the whipped dog.

  Yet, he wondered, are there just possibly one or two minds out there that do not accept all this? The girl in the grubby white pullover with that fixed frown on her muddy-complexioned face? That other girl, the radiantly healthy tennis player?

  But if either of them was protesting at this scene, she was doing so inwardly. There was not a murmur anywhere in the whole of the big hall.

  “Go now,” Swami said to the boy at last. “Go, and do not come back to me until you are ready for me to see you.”

  The kneeling boy turned his body away and actually crawled to the side of the platform before getting to his feet and circling the wide hall with his face held the whole time looking at the pure white wall beside him until at last he slipped out through the double doors.

  “But nobody is sitting near Swami.”

  That voice was all honey again. Coy honey.

  “Come. Come up and sit by Swami. Swami likes to have his friends near him. Come. Come up. Mrs. Russell Walters, you must come and sit close to Swami.”

  Ghote saw the fat woman with the rings push herself up from her meditation stool that ingeniously gave her the appearance of sitting on the floor. Of course, he thought, she is the one who gave Swami that very expensive watch.

  He watched her go wobblingly up the steps to the platform and then, with a giggle that struck him as being altogether unseemly, stoop and touch Swami’s feet before she settled down on to the floor within a few inches of his tiger skin. Half a dozen other disciples who apparently knew they were equally privileged had followed her on to the platform, touched Swami’s feet in their turn and had placed themselves at varying distances from him. The last of them, coming forward only after a short gap, was the tennis-player girl. After she had stooped, rather more quickly than the others, to touch Swami’s bare toes she positioned herself almost directly behind him, pulled a secretary’s note-pad out of a leather bag she had slung on her shoulder and propped it open on her knee as she sat cross-legged.

  So close to the fellow, Ghote thought. So close, and yet not totally under his influence. Perhaps here was something …

  “Swamiji,” Mrs. Russell Walters said in a voice that must have been too quiet to reach the body of the disciples still seated on the floor of the hall but which Ghote, straining a little, could make out quite clearly. “Swamiji, have you been thinking about what I asked you last week?”

  Swami made a brushing-away gesture with his two plump hands.

  “No, no, no, no,” he said. “You must not be mentioning such things, Mrs. Russell Walters.”

  “Oh, but I must. I am. Swamiji, have you made up your mind which one it is to be?”

  Swami gave her a beaming smile, such as a doting uncle might give to a two-year-old.

  “You know Swami cannot make up his mind,” he said. “You know he doesn’t understand anything about such things.”

  Mrs. Russell Walters returned his smile with a little nod of determination that sent her several chins wobbling this way and that.

  “Well, if your mind’s not made up,” she said, “mine is. I’m going to go right ahead and get you what I think is best myself.”

  Ghote felt a little spurt of elation.

  So she was going to get something more for Swami, this wealthy woman who had already given him a wristwatch that any film star in Bombay would be proud to show off. Here was proof, if anything was, that the fellow was on the make here in money-oozing California.

  He inclined his head at a slightly changed angle so as to be sure of catching every next word of the conversation up on the platform.

  “Oh, Mrs. Russell Walters,
Mrs. Russell Walters, you are a very naughty lady. You are spoiling poor Swami.”

  “Yes, and I mean to go right on doing just that. Now, am I going to have to do the choosing, or will you tell me?”

  “But how should I know which is best? My head is always so full of fine thoughts. It is thinking of flowers and of the path to God, not of motor cars only.”

  Motor cars. So Mrs. Russell Walters was going to give Swami a car. And—he had said it himself—whichever one was the best. The best out of all those huge, wide, splendid, gleaming machines they had walked past in the car-park at the airport. The best of them. This was certainly not how a real yogi should behave.

  And abruptly Ghote realised that his feelings about the fellow were being shared. By the tennis-player girl with the note-pad on her knee. On her face that, as she had stooped to touch Swami’s feet, had worn a bursting-with-health, white-teethed, oral-hygiene-programme smile there was now a look of dismay. Of deep dismay, that she was fighting to keep back.

  As soon as he could he must have a quiet word with that girl.

  It was as he made this resolution that he became aware that he had seen something else as well. Swami’s toes. While the fellow had been telling Mrs. Russell Walters that his head was full of fine thoughts instead of thoughts about cars his toes had suddenly tightly curled up.

  Curled-up toes were a sign that, in his everyday work among Bombay’s criminals, he had long ago learned to look out for. It was one of the tricks of his trade. As often as not when someone was telling a lie their feet betrayed them. The toes curled up. So, like all his colleagues, he had learnt always to place himself where he could see a suspect’s bare or sandalled feet.

  So, yes, beyond doubt Swami was no more than—

  From the back of the hall there came a single loud crash, heart-thumpingly sudden in the atmosphere of quiet devotion.