Ghote, who now had leisure to look at Mr Pendharkar’s desk more closely, saw on it a copy of a newspaper folded so that a familiar headline was uppermost. ‘Holy Man’s Fast Against Probe Goes On.’ Mr Pendharkar was no doubt well acquainted indeed with the purpose of his visit, but with a venerated holy man fasting to death it was going to be most unlikely that he would be giving any assistance.
And at once his worst forebodings were justified.
He had opened his mouth to explain the imperative need to establish the truth of any allegations that might have been made when Mr Pendharkar addressed a further observation to his folded hands.
‘Yes, Inspector,’ he said, ‘I know well what you are here for, and straightaway I must tell you something which I fear you ought to have known for yourself already.’
‘Yes?’ Ghote managed to interject.
‘It is simply this. That my sole connection with the unfortunate business that has brought you here was to act as foreman of the duly appointed Coroner’s Committee that investigated the matter when it occurred. And, of course, I cannot as a duly appointed officer divulge one word of the deliberations of the said committee.’
Mr Pendharkar smiled with content.
Ghote, who knew when he was beaten, apologized hastily for having troubled the gentleman and took his leave. He omitted to replace the bundle of files on the chair he had sat on.
Outside, standing among the racked bicycles of the tax clerks, he considered the situation. Thanks to the so much venerated holy man having taken his stand, and he wished he knew why he should have done so, it was plain that there was going to be little help got from anybody in the town. And if already there had been one protest march in the streets, how long was it going to be before there were more? Or before there were crowds milling about everywhere determined to expel, if not outright kill, this interloper who was forcing to his death their dispenser of wisdom?
Was it even worth attempting now to go through the rest of the list of Coroner’s Committee members? Yet, if he were to do nothing, there would soon be an awkward accounting to have with an Eminent Figure back in Bombay. He would be expecting another report by telephone before long.
Wearily Ghote took out the list to see who was next on it. It was the committee member called Ram Phalke, a barber.
Then an idea flashed into his mind. He would switch round and tackle instead the man called Bhatu, a basketmaker. The basketmakers lived on the other side of the town, but he would go out of his way to go there. It was possible, just possible, that someone as cut off from the mainstream of local affairs as this Bhatu would be as a low caste citizen in a town like this, might have heard next to nothing of the agitation. If so, perhaps something could yet be got out of him about what had gone on at that Coroner’s Committee all those years ago.
Lugging the ton-weight bicycle out of the rack, Ghote set off at a great rate, swerving wildly from the edge of one lake-like puddle to the edge of the next.
Ploughing along the wide main street as yet another solid shower began to fall, he saw the banner that had been carried in the morning’s procession. It had been propped against the wall of the post office so that people going there had to walk right under to get in. The words on it now could be clearly read. GHOTE GO. He hunched himself yet more determinedly over his handlebars.
6
Ghote had to go through a long process of inquiry before, two-thirds of the way along the winding basketmakers’ lane, a house was pointed out to him as belonging to his quarry. It was in fact the second hut sheltering a Bhatu that he had discovered, but as the first Bhatu had proved to be a boy of fourteen only, Ghote had not been faced with deciding which of them was the man he was seeking. Because, he had calculated, it was perfectly likely that the man would deny altogether that he was the person the hated Bombay inspector wanted to see.
But at last, with his clothes that had got thoroughly soaked by two successive downpours that afternoon clinging uncomfortably to his body, he was able to put his first question to the man sitting cross-legged in the doorway of the hut busily twining together thin dried rushes.
‘Are you named Bhatu?’
A wide grin appeared on the man’s face as he looked up.
‘Oh, yes, sahib,’ he said, his fingers not ceasing from their dexterous work. ‘Oh, yes, I am Bhatu.’
Ghote, despite the aura of cheerful helplessness that radiated from his quarry, could not bring himself to sound less stern yet.
‘Did you,’ he demanded, ‘serve on a Coroner’s Committee that inquired into the death fifteen years ago of one Sarojini Savarkar?’
Again there came a split-mouth grin and vigorous head-shakings of agreement.
‘Yes, yes, that is what I did, sahib. Never am I forgetting that time. Never, never.’
Ghote felt an actual prickle of excitement run up his back under his clinging shirt.
‘You remember it well, do you?’ he said. ‘Then perhaps you can tell me about it.’
Bhatu’s fingers did not cease to tug and twist at his pliant strips of rush, but he nevertheless leant back against the doorway of the hut in an attitude of relaxed story-telling.
‘Oh, sahib,’ he said, ‘those were terrible days.’
‘Terrible?’ Ghote asked. ‘How were they terrible?’
‘Sahib, sahib, such a worry I was in I did not know what I was to think, which way I was to turn. Oh, sahib, you cannot expect me to forget those days.’
‘I do not,’ Ghote answered joyously. ‘Tell me, though, just why was it that you were in a worry?’
‘So many things they were telling me, sahib. And, sahib, I am a simple man. I do not know why I was taken to be on that Committee. Sahib, I had done nothing. Only baskets have I made, sahib, since I was old enough to twist a rush. And then came the policewallas and said I must be on Coroner’s Committee.’
Ghote thought he could see why poor Bhatu had been chosen for this particular committee. If you were looking for a thoroughly simple man who would not in the least understand what was going on, then Bhatu filled the bill to a nicety.
He sat himself down comfortably beside the basketmaker, reflecting that being able to make such a gesture of friendly interest was one advantage he possessed in a caste-ridden place like this.
‘You were asked to tell why the late Sarojini Savarkar had died?’ he said.
‘Yes, yes, that is it. That is it indeed, sahib.’
‘And did you learn many things about the way she had died?’
Bhatu smiled even more brilliantly than before.
‘That was the trouble indeed, sahib,’ he said. ‘They told all the pains she had had. First the sicknesses never stopping and the great thirstiness and in the throat a burning, then the pains in the stomach and the fast coming of motions of the bowels of very bad odours, and then the pains like cramp in the lower legs and very strong and at the end the great weakness, while all along the eyes are open and there is knowing what is happening.’
Ghote listened in considerable astonishment. It was fifteen years, after all, since Bhatu had heard these symptoms described, and yet here he was retailing them all as if they had happened to someone he had seen only that week. But what was even more astonishing was that here were being retailed one by one the symptoms of acute arsenical poisoning, just as he himself had read them in Gross’s Criminal Investigation amid the hurried preparations for his departure from Bombay.
‘You have told much,’ he said cautiously to Bhatu.
‘Oh yes,’ replied the basketmaker cheerfully. ‘I remember much. Many times have I thought about those terrible days.’
‘Those terrible days of the Coroner’s Committee?’
‘What else?’ Bhatu said in surprise. ‘No other terrible days have I known.’
‘But why were those days so terrible?’ Ghote asked.
‘Because of what they told, the others,’ Bhatu answered. ‘So strongly they told. These are what happens when bad food is by mistaken eaten they said. An
d I knew it was not so.’
‘You knew it was not so?’
‘But do you not know,’ Bhatu asked, his fingers actually ceasing to move for a few moments, ‘do you not know the way my mother’s cousin’s aunt is dying long ago?’
‘No,’ said Ghote.
‘In great agony she is dying,’ Bhatu said. ‘First there is the sickness, and the terrible thirstiness and feeling of burning in the throat, and then the pains in the stomach, then the many motions and the great smell, then the pains of cramp in the lower legs and afterwards the end with all the while the eyes open and knowing.’
‘Your mother’s aunt’s cousin died like that?’ Ghote asked.
‘No,’ said Bhatu.
Ghote’s hopes crumbled to nothing in an instant.
‘No,’ Bhatu repeated firmly. ‘Not my mother’s aunt’s cousin. It was my mother’s cousin’s aunt. And I knew it well that she died because, being nearly blind, she took instead of a sweetmeat at a wedding feast an amount of rat poison that had been left there also.’
Rat poison, Ghote thought. At the time of Bhatu’s mother’s cousin’s aunt arsenic had been very generally employed as a rat poison.
‘So you see,’ Bhatu went on, his whole face expressing delighted joy at being able to tell Ghote what he wanted to hear, ‘all the time in those terrible days I am knowing that they ought to be thinking that the memsahib was dying of poison. But no one is saying.’
He stopped and gave Ghote one single almighty grin.
‘In the end,’ he avowed, ‘I am telling them. I, Bhatu the basketmaker, am telling.’
He sighed like a pair of bellows.
‘But they are very steady not to listen,’ he said.
No wonder, Ghote thought. He pictured the scene to himself. This simple fellow, brought in to make up the quota for the Coroner’s Committee in the certainty that he would not in any way see through the deceit that was to be practised, and it turning out that his mother’s aunt’s cousin – no, cousin’s aunt – had died in precisely the same way that the late Mrs Savarkar had done. No wonder they had ignored the poor fellow into silence.
And now he was going on with his long-remembered tale of woe.
‘So you can see,’ he said, ‘often I am wondering what did happen in those terrible days. Why was I wrong? Because you know in the end they brought in Verdict.’
‘Yes,’ said Ghote, ‘a verdict of Death by Misadventure.’
‘You are knowing that?’ Bhatu said, his eyes lighting up. ‘And you are knowing what it means?’
‘It means they said she had died by accident.’
‘Yes,’ Bhatu rejoined. ‘She died by accident and all along I was wrong.’
‘Wrong?’ said Ghote.
‘Oh yes, wrong. It was by bad food not by poison that she died.’
‘But,’ Ghote said carefully and slowly, ‘you know that she died just in the way your mother’s cousin’s aunt died who ate arsenic.’
‘But no,’ Bhatu replied. ‘That is what I am telling. But the memsahib did not die that way. She died from bad food.’
And, although Ghote spent altogether another full half-hour there outside the basketmaker’s hut, he could not succeed in convincing Bhatu that what he thought he knew to be so was not so. Fifteen years before he had been told that it was not arsenic but bad food that had brought about the death of Sarojini Savarkar and so it would always be.
At last Ghote got up and took his leave, reflecting that though he had failed to obtain a witness ready to denounce the working of the Coroner’s Committee he had at least acquired one thing of value – the personal certainty that the late Mrs Sarojini Savarkar had really died from arsenic poisoning.
He reflected, too, that he must get hold of Ram Dhulup. If something had been put over on the Coroner’s Committee the pensioned dhobi was most likely to be the man responsible for doing it. A train journey to Nagpur was indicated at the first opportunity.
And, after all, there were too the organs that had been removed from the body. Might they still exist somewhere in the hospital store-rooms? Dr Patil had said it was possible. And they would constitute the proof of poisoning that poor Bhatu was incapable of supplying. Here was something else he would spare no pains to pursue to the end.
As he cycled slowly off through the mud he saw a man walking towards him carrying with care a folded newspaper. He was not certain but it looked very like the identical edition he had seen that afternoon on chubby Mr Pendharkar’s desk.
He bent to pedal with a will. The news of the holy man’s continuing fight against him was spreading to the most neglected corners of the town.
*
He found too that the news was certainly well in circulation in the middle of the town when he came to tackle the other two members of the Coroner’s Committee, first Ram Phalke, barber, at work beneath the tattered awning that protected his raised platform pitch just off the main street, and then Govind Gokhale, letter-writer, actually sitting not ten yards from the banner that now draped the entrance to the post office.
Ram Phalke had flown into a tearing rage the moment he had understood who Ghote was. Waving, in a highly ominous manner, the open razor that a moment earlier he had been lovingly curling round a squatting customer’s jawline, he yelled and shrieked that he would have nothing to do with such an impious project, that he and his family had often derived great benefits from the holy man who had deigned to grace the town with his presence and that it was a scandal that anyone should attempt to flout him.
Govind Gokhale had taken a different tack. But one no less effective. He had forgotten, he said. He had really forgotten almost that he had ever served on that particular Coroner’s Committee. He had served on so many he explained, as the illiterate old farmer hunched in front of his table under the post office portico had looked on in amazement. He was a man, he had let Ghote understand, of some consequence. He had a great deal to do. Affairs pressed down on him. There were letters to be written in pencil, in pen, or typed even, if the client could afford it. He advised these poor people. They needed him. How among all this could he remember trifling circumstances fifteen years ago? Was it fifteen only? He had thought it was more.
But Ghote had not felt too discouraged. The information that he had got from happy open Bhatu – and before the holy man’s campaign had awed him into silence too – was a positive gain. Ghote warmed it to his breast as if it was one of the double-sized eggs that still followed him on the bicycle carrier in their grease coating and their loudly marked cardboard box.
He made his way, with the smell of evening meals nearing readiness wafting into his nostrils on the damp air, out of the town centre along towards the railway station. It might be late in the day and he was certainly feeling tired enough after his two nights with next to no sleep. But he made up his mind he would not yet seek a bed in the station retiring-room as the Eminent Figure had so insistently advised. He would ask instead if there was still a train to Nagpur, and if there was he would damn well take it. He might not have the widespread resources of the Municipal Chairman, but at least he could move with speed.
*
It was the station-master himself, an elderly individual with a prominent pair of silver-rimmed spectacles with one cracked lens, out of which he viewed the whole world with a good deal of suspicion, of whom Ghote made his inquiries about whether there was still a train to Nagpur.
And from whom he received a most unexpected answer.
‘Train to Nagpur?’ the old man said testily. ‘Of course there is no train to Nagpur, not today, not tomorrow, not the next day.’
‘But surely trains must run to a place like Nagpur more often than this?’ Ghote said.
‘Run? Run? Of course they are running to Nagpur every two hours.’
‘But you said there were none, damn it, man.’
Ghote too expressed irritation. He had been a long time with little sleep.
The station-master’s spate of rage died totally away.
‘Is flooding,’ he explained. ‘All the timetable is most thoroughly upset. The line is cut from early this morning and all the time they are ringing through, telling first this then that. How am I to run a station in these conditions?’
‘Flooding?’ Ghote asked in sheer amazement. ‘You mean that the line to Nagpur is impassable?’
‘Of course that is what I am meaning,’ the station-master shouted suddenly, his rage returning as swiftly as it had gone. ‘That is what I am telling you, isn’t it? The line to Nagpur is cut. The road also. Any moment I am expecting to learn that the telegraph is out of action. And then where will I be getting my instructions from?’
Ghote forbore to tell the old man that if his instructions were so contrary he would be better off without any. There was something much more important to think about.
So Nagpur had been cut off from the town since early that morning. Then how had Ram Dhulup managed to go there for the wedding of his cousin? Or, not to put too fine a point upon it, where was the Municipal Chairman keeping Ram Dhulup in hiding since plainly the former dhobi had never attempted to go to Nagpur at all?
7
Ghote very nearly took his bicycle once more and pedalled straight back to the dhobi’s quarter to ask Ram Dhulup’s wife the answer to the question that had erupted so forcefully on his horizon with the news of the effect of the floods. But almost at once he reflected that the buxom Mrs Dhulup, after being so reluctant to tell him anything at all at first, had suddenly come out very generously with the name and address of the cousins at Nagpur. No doubt this had simply been because she knew very well that there were no such people.
A hot flush spread down his body at the thought of how nearly he had gone rushing off to Nagpur to the invented address he had been given so glibly. How the Municipal Chairman would have laughed when some hireling at the station – perhaps even the old station-master himself – had telephoned through to tell him that the intrusive Bombay C.I.D man had safely departed on a wild-goose chase.
A wave of tiredness flooded over him in the wake of this thought. At some time he would have to tackle again that proud liar who had married Ram Dhulup. But he would need to have all his wits about him. In the meantime sleep called so insistently that it dulled all pangs of conscience and he sought out without hesitation the retiring-room of which the Eminent Figure had spoken so highly and had made such good, if illicit, use on his own visit to the town.
Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg Page 6
