Ghote advanced carefully, keeping under the shade of the ragged palms at the top of the grey beach. A big bird with long trailing legs and widespread white wings suddenly rose up in front of him and lazily ascended into the pale blue sky.
He felt out of place. His shoes were thick with mud and his legs dragged.
He looked at the little village with its scatter of beached boats again. Beyond it the shore curved to form a wide creek. In the distance he could see an immense, low railway viaduct cutting across the soft, muddy landscape. He wished he was on a train there, heading steadily and directly back to the city.
But ahead of him lay his only hope of gaining enough time to break the dilemma of whether Krishna Chatterjee or Amrit Singh had been the one to open with a protective piece of cloth the jar of arsenic trioxide in the dispensary hut and tip out some of the contents. If he could only get enough here to hold the Sikh on that major smuggling charge, he would have bought himself just so much extra time. And then he would press and press until at last something cracked and down went one side of the balance once and for all.
He saw now the value of the terse instruction ‘Hut nearest sea’ on Mr Chatterjee’s precious index card. In all the collection of huts, each constructed in almost exactly the same way out of mud bricks slimed over with a greenish growth and precariously roofed with palm leaves, one stood out by being built a good ten yards nearer the wide expanse of the sea than any of the others. And, sure enough, just outside it stood two figures corresponding to two of Tarzan’s family, a small wiry man of about fifty and his sturdy young son. They were methodically at work repairing a net hanging between a pair of tall bamboo poles. From time to time the young man straightened his back and turned to gaze out to sea. Once he caught hold of his father by the elbow and pointed to the far horizon where a small smudge of dark smoke showed a distant steamship heading south for Bombay Harbour.
The old man looked at the smoke impassively, glanced up at the sun as if to tell the time and went purposefully back to his net-mending. Ghote wondered whether the Paramour was inside the hut. The old man must have hidden qualities, he thought, to have acquired a mistress when his own appearance and demeanour were so unpromising.
He looked round at the rest of the village, noting everywhere the signs of poverty. A youngish woman emerged from one of the huts and came over towards the old fisherman. Ghote looked at her closely. Would she be the Paramour? She wore her sari tucked up hard between her legs in the fisherwomen’s fashion so that it showed every outline of her whipcord body. She walked with a decided sway. Ghote found his thoughts beginning to wander.
The woman said nothing to the two men at their net but went through the gap in the tumbledown little fence surrounding the hut, stooped and entered. The inspector wondered whether the time had not come to approach.
Suddenly from inside the thin-walled hut there came a deep burst of laughter. The young woman came hurriedly out clutching a borrowed wooden bowl and an instant later another woman followed her. She was enormous. A great round, shiny face presided over a pyramid of contented chins, which in turn capped a huge wobbling torso culminating in a vast rounded belly and huge shaking hips. And it was immediately apparent from the comfortable way she looked about her that it was she who was the mistress of all she surveyed, the Paramour.
She went over to Tarzan’s brother and said something which evidently she found colossally amusing. She jabbed the young man in the ribs to emphasize the humour of the situation. His ribs were well-covered: they needed to be.
At last she decided that her joke had been well and truly dealt with. Still chuckling subterraneously she turned back towards the hut. Ghote broke from cover and approached.
They watched him coming with frank stares. He stopped and asked if they had a young son who had run off to Bombay.
‘Oh, that boy, that boy,’ said the Paramour, lifting her great pudgy arms in a gesture of despair. ‘What has he done now? There is a devil in him. I know that. A devil, a real devil.’
She clapped her thickly fat hands to her massive sides and snorted with laughter.
‘Well,’ Ghote said, ‘I will not hide from you that he is causing us a lot of worry. I have come from Bombay to see if I can find the cause.’
The Paramour was still laughing at intervals.
‘Oh, the cause is easy enough to know,’ she said. ‘It is that devil in him. I tell you when first I came to this man –’
She halted herself, waddled heavily over to Tarzan’s father and slapped him tremendously on the back. The little wiry fisherman took no notice at all, simply making use of the interruption in his twisting and tying of the threads of his big hanging net to glance once again at the position of the sun in the sky and then at the little lapping waves of the sea as they advanced slowly up the muddy beach.
‘When I first came to this man,’ the Paramour went on, ‘I took that boy to my heart. Everything of the best I gave him. Milk he had to drink, meat to eat. Never once did I beat him. And you know what he did?’
She swung round on Ghote.
‘He tried to run off.’
Ghote looked serious. But seriousness was foreign to the Paramour. Abruptly she burst into new guffaws of laughter.
‘To run away he tried,’ she shouted. ‘And his brother I had to send after him to bring him back, holding his ear.’
The thought convulsed her. Her massive sides shook like jelly, her enormous thighs wobbled, her immense bosom heaved in and out.
The brother turned from the net-mending to confirm her story.
‘Yes,’ he said with laboured earnestness, ‘he ran away from a good home. Of course, I had to bring him back.’
He stood thinking for a little.
‘I held his ear very hard,’ he said.
This was a new and delightful matter of amusement to the Paramour. She positively stamped on the loose, greyish sand under her feet in an ecstasy of mirth.
Her little spouse turned and looked at her without moving a muscle of his face. Then he glanced once more at the thin scummy line of the advancing tide and from that to the long curving black craft that lay pulled up on the beach in front of their hut.
‘But later the boy ran off again?’ Ghote asked.
‘Oh, he ran off,’ said the Paramour, grinning hard. ‘This time he had reason. After being good to him had been so badly repaid, I started to beat him.’
She looked down at her massive forearm.
‘I beat good,’ she said.
She began to titter again.
Unexpectedly Tarzan’s father left the half-mended net and came up to Ghote.
‘You go,’ he said.
Ghote looked at him. His face was so unmoving that he could hardly believe he had spoken the two abrupt words.
He did not repeat them, but the jerk he gave to his head was eloquent enough.
‘Soon I will have to be off,’ Ghote said easily. ‘But first I must learn some more about this boy. Did he have friends in the village, for instance?’
The fisherman turned away and went over to his son. He muttered something that Ghote could not catch and both of them looked out to sea with shaded eyes.
Ghote turned to the Paramour.
‘What about the friends?’ he said.
She shrugged her huge, well-padded shoulders.
‘It is easy to have friends,’ she said. ‘You make a joke. They laugh. You laugh. You have friends.’
She gave Ghote a hearty slap on his back and burst into a fountain of deep chuckles.
Ghote forced a smile to his lips.
‘Does the boy ever come home nowadays?’ he asked.
Before the massive Paramour had time to reply, the fisherman again came up to Ghote. This time he pointed in a totally unmistakable way.
‘Go. Now.’
Ghote nodded and smiled.
‘In a minute. In a minute I go. But first it is most important for me to know whether the boy ever comes back here. You know, that is a very impo
rtant sign to us. Whether the runaway still feels a liking for his old home at times.’
The fisherman turned to the Paramour.
‘Tell,’ he said, and jerked his head towards the lean black shape of his boat.
The Paramour raised her two hands in the air.
‘He is going fishing again today,’ she said. ‘Oh, ho, the poor man. Twice in one day sometimes he has to go out on that terrible sea to support his family. And the day after tomorrow is Holi. He will not go to sea on such a holiday, so there is a day lost. And we need money to buy the things for the feast. That is why he must go out today again. The poor man, the poor man.’
She cascaded into a shower of deep, guttural giggling.
‘Ah, it is a hard life,’ Ghote said.
‘Oh, hard, hard, very hard. Before daylight they go out and now they must go again. The catch this morning was so poor, so poor.’
She turned a happy smiling face towards the vast spread of the ocean.
Out of politeness, Ghote looked too. And then something distinctly odd caught his eye. The whole beach in front of the little village was littered, he saw, with dozens of tiny fish. Here and there a big seagull would fly up from the sea, sweep gently down and pick one up in its beak. But it was obvious that the birds, bobbing contentedly on the little chopping waves, had had their fill that day. And the litter of fry round Tarzan’s father’s boat was every bit as noticeable as elsewhere. He had had no poor catch that morning. That was certain.
‘Perhaps,’ Ghote said, ‘you could tell me the names of the boy’s friends in the village here. Often, you know, a boy will tell his friends more than he will tell anyone else.’
He slipped a notebook from his pocket, turned over the pages, perched on a post in the tumbledown fence and sat looking up expectantly.
The fisherman gave his son one short glance of baffled fury and then resumed his habitually dour expression.
The boy came heavily up to Ghote.
‘It is not right to come asking questions of poor people,’ he announced.
Ghote looked up at him.
‘But this is in the interests of your brother,’ he said. ‘Do you not want to help? I think you could tell me a great deal of what I want to know.’
‘He ran away,’ the young man said. ‘He left his good home. He ought to be put in prison.’
He turned on his heel.
His father glanced at him and then looked over at the boat. They went down to it across the soft, unwetted sand of the higher shore and began making sure they had everything needed to put to sea. Ghote turned to the Paramour again.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘there is no hurry. You think about that boy. Think who used to play with him on the shore. And then one by one tell me the names as they come into your mind.’
She grinned and shook her head.
‘Oh, I have better things to do,’ she said. ‘There is the meal to get for these men. They are always hungry, always eating.’
She laughed.
‘Then they will not be at sea long?’ Ghote asked.
‘Long? Long? Who can tell? Who can ever tell with a fisherman? He sets sail when the sea is calm and in a moment the sky darkens and the wind blows, the whirlpools come and he is drowned.’
This thought was too much for her composure. She roared with elephantine laughter, bent forward and doubled up as far as her vast bulk would allow.
Ghote waited.
The two men by the boat, without exchanging a word, began suddenly to push the narrow craft through the sand towards the lapping wavelets. Ghote kept his eyes on the great laughing woman.
‘Now you must tell me the names,’ he said loudly.
The boat had grated its way to the edge of the sea. The fisherman and his son ran round to the stern and bent low to shove it harder.
Ghote leapt to his feet. Still clutching his notebook, he sprinted over the loose, slippery sand.
The boat was afloat now. The fisherman scrambled in over the side. His son stayed at the stern pushing with all his might, the dark greenish water up to the backs of his knees.
Ghote reached the water’s edge. He plunged in, shoes and all.
The boy gave a final, wild shove and flung himself into the boat at the back. It glided easily forward over the little chopping waves. Ghote waded on, leaning against the heaviness of the water all around his legs.
He flung himself almost full length. One outstretched hand just made contact with the rough edge of the little vessel at the side somewhere near the prow. He flung his notebook in with the other hand and heaved with all his strength.
The fisherman came towards him along the length of the narrow, swaying craft. Ghote managed to get his other hand on to the boat’s side. The fisherman stooped and lifted up a heavy wooden gaff. He leant over Ghote’s tightly clutching hands and brought the wooden handle chopping hard down on Ghote’s fingers.
Ghote tightened his grip.
His legs were clear of the bottom now. He gave a terrific jerk with them and felt himself shoot through the water. He heaved hard and got his head up to the edge of the little boat, which leant deeply over towards him.
‘Let go, let go,’ the young man shouted. ‘You will sink the boat. It is wrong to do that.’
‘I am coming with you,’ Ghote gasped out.
‘No,’ said the fisherman.
‘I am coming. Help me in or I will upset the boat.’
He tugged down on the edge of the frail craft as hard as he could. Underneath him he felt the water slipping past his soaking trousers, tugging and pulling.
TWELVE
Suddenly Ghote felt the tugging strain on his arms cease. The unsmiling fisherman and his tubby, self-righteous son had grasped him under the armpits and were carefully easing him over the side of their frail craft. He had won.
Once he was aboard and the danger to the narrow little boat had been averted, the two fishermen let him flop like a sodden sack down near the prow and turned their backs on him. For some minutes he was content that they should do so. He wanted only to be left alone. If he could just have time to ease the wrenched muscles of his arms and sides, he felt, nothing else mattered.
But soon he began to feel better and started to look about him. The fisherman had by now hoisted their tall, thinly triangular white sail, patched here and there with old flour sacks. The wind was beginning to fill it out and send the little boat skimming through the slightly choppy sea, heading out away from the creek and the fishing village towards the distant blue line of the horizon.
Ghote noticed his notebook lying in the bottom of the boat near three plump pomfret left there after the morning’s catch. He gently pushed himself off the hard beams of the thin gunwale and reached for it. It was soaked with cold, salty water but looked as if it would be salvageable. He pressed the covers together so that a thin stream of water, slightly blue from ink that had run, trickled out. Then he pushed the wet mass into his pocket, where it thumped heavily against his side.
He lay back and thought.
At least he had achieved his first object. He had stuck close to the two fishermen at what was obviously the start of a trip to pick up something smuggled. The signs had been too plain to be anything else. The trip out to sea at this time of day when the routine was to leave before dawn and come back on the wind that could be relied on to sweep in from the sea during the morning. The two men’s obvious keenness to leave at a certain time and to have got rid of him before they went. No doubt some sort of rendezvous had to be kept. The patent excuse of needing extra money because the morning’s catch had been poor when these three plump evidently eatable fish had been actually left in the boat.
So now the task was to watch the two of them like a cat to see what it was they had come out to sea to do. One thing was in his favour already. Evidently the old fisherman had decided that in spite of his presence the rendezvous must be kept.
Ghote stretched forward and began trying to wring the heavy seawater out of his trouser legs. In
the stern of the narrow boat, cleaving its way swiftly through the little waves, the two fishermen talked together in muttered voices over the long steering oar. Ghote pretended not to notice. It would be hopeless to try to overhear them. The thing to do was to lull their suspicions.
He sat up straighter. The fresh wind, laced with spray, chilled his face. He envied the close-fitting caps the other two wore.
‘Well,’ he said in a loud voice, ‘I think it is most important to have an idea how a boy like your son would earn his living.’
From the other end of the long, narrow boat the old fisherman looked at him sourly.
‘Yes,’ Ghote went on, shouting a little in case his words were being whipped away by the breeze even before they reached the stern of the skiff, ‘Yes, someone like me has to know just what it feels like to work the way the boys we help will have to.’
He warmed to his theme.
‘When I saw the very hut the boy lived in,’ he said, ‘I realized already much more about him. The damp walls, the palm leaves on the roof. Do they let in the rain?’
For a little he thought his question was going to go unanswered. But the lure of all this pity was too much for Tarzan’s brother.
‘Yes,’ he said at last, making his way forward a bit, ‘always the rain comes in when it is heavy. But we have no money for a better roof. We work so hard. We get up while it is still dark and set out to sea, and then the merchants give us so little for our catch. It is not fair.’
Ghote edged along the boat towards him. At the stern his father, taking no notice, threw out a long baited line and watched it unblinkingly.
‘This is what I want to hear,’ Ghote said. ‘I want to know the way you live. To see how to help your brother. That is why it was so important for me to come out to sea with you.’
The young man nodded gravely.
‘That boy,’ he said. ‘He must not be helped. He has run away from home when he should be working with us. He should be sent to prison.’
‘But no,’ said Ghote loudly, carried away by his role as social worker. ‘That is not the way. When a boy runs off from home, we have to ask what made him do it. To see if we can put that right.’
Inspector Ghote's Good Crusade Page 15
