He found too that the Eminent Figure had spoken the exact truth. The retiring-room did great credit to the old and patchily fury-shaken station-master. It was as excellent an example of its kind as Ghote had ever seen. There was what the railways’ descriptions call ‘modern sanitation’ as well as a couple of shower cubicles positively gleaming with cleanliness. And in the bedroom cubicles there were neatly made-up beds with clean white sheets on them, deliciously inviting.
Ghote sank his last scruples and booked himself in. The old station-master actually salaamed as he accepted the bribe.
Next morning Ghote found the tearing zeal that had been with him since he had set foot in the town appeared to have vanished almost to nothing. He told himself at first that this was merely because even a good night’s sleep had not wiped out all his accumulated tiredness. Then he put this unexpected hollowness down to the effect of his near-defeat in the matter of the train to Nagpur the evening before. Next he tried to persuade himself that he was suffering from guilty feelings over having broken the regulations concerning the occupation of railway retiring-rooms.
But all along he knew secretly that his sudden reluctance to face the new day sprang from one thing only. It had come to him while he slept: he had a task that had to be performed, and the sooner the better.
He had to go and see the holy man face to face on this the sixty-second day of his fast. He had to find out from him, if he could, why he was opposing the investigation and he had to persuade him to change his mind. Only in this way could he buy himself enough time to complete his inquiries.
But he did not want to do it.
So he lingered atrociously under a luxurious shower and then went to the station restaurant where he indulged himself for breakfast with, not ‘Tea in cup (Readymade 200 cc)’ as the tariff called it, but with ‘Tea in pot (285 cc with separate milk and sugar)’. Yet, though he also ate heartily, he could not somehow bring himself to ‘Scram Bled Eggs (Eggs 3 Pieces)’, reluctant to eat any of the objects which had haunted him since he had come to the town, and which he supposed he would still have to take with him wherever he went.
At last he made his way, slowly as his heavy bicycle dictated, to the police-station where he found Superintendent Chavan already seated at his desk with a substantial work-load fast disappearing in front of him. And to the superintendent he reported, as convention imposed, an outline of the events of the day before. The superintendent was sympathetic, particularly when he heard about the disappearing dhobi.
‘Yes,’ he said, reaching forward to stub out a cigarette and adjust the position of his cap on the desk beside the gleaming polished brass ashtray, ‘yes, I am sorry to tell that this is exactly the type of action to expect from the person-in-question. He is a man of dynamic efficiency, I am telling you. That is why he has risen up so fast in the town altogether. He is not native-born here, you know, no more that I am. But I have heard a good deal about his early days in the town. They are something of a legend with us.’
Ghote let him talk on. He knew he should not really be spending time listening to what amounted to no more than gossip about the Municipal Chairman years before his first wife died. But he knew also that unless he was sitting in the superintendent’s spick-and-span office he should be out on his way to see the holy man.
‘Yes,’ said the superintendent, leaning his heavy bulk backwards in his substantial desk-chair, ‘yes, that man, you know, came to the town some twenty-five years ago with not an anna to his name. He had lost everything, his parents and whatever property they had had, as a result of communal strife. He was however Brahmin so at least the path to prosperity was open to him.’
He waved his right hand in the air to indicate the width of opportunity that had been open to the newly-arrived Vinayak Savarkar and that same right hand ended, as Ghote had known it would, obsessively stroking the uniform cap on the desk top.
‘I do not know the details of his early days,’ Superintendent Chavan went on, ‘but quite soon he was in the contracting business in a small way, and year by year this became a bigger way. Other businesses in the town were driven into ruin. There was talk, I am told, about greatly adulterated cement. But nothing was ever proved. And then, quite suddenly, he was the next most powerful man in the town to the then Municipal Chairman, who had great interests in property. So the contractor putting up buildings all over the place, and the property-owner with land everywhere soon formed an alliance.’
The superintendent reluctantly removed his hand from his cap.
‘Unfortunately for him,’ he said, ‘that alliance could not be strengthened, since he had married shortly after coming here, and there was the then Chairman with one daughter only.’
He laid a finger confidentially on the side of his somewhat fleshy nose.
‘She is ugly as sin, poor woman,’ he said. ‘I do not like to think what that man suffered to get the little son he has now.’
He leered hard before resuming.
‘But she was going to be rich as the very devil, and the father was married still to a wife who would bear him no more children. It was a terrible situation. And that is where this rumour you have doubtless heard of from your reading of the files comes in.’
Ghote duly produced what he had been asked for.
‘That was this reported remark of the former Chairman’s?’ he asked. ‘This “If only you were able to marry my daughter, my dear Vinayak”?’
‘Yes, that was it,’ agreed the superintendent. ‘God knows whether it was ever really said. But everybody knows what happened straightaway after.’
‘The terrible pains in the stomach and swift death of Mrs Sarojini Savarkar,’ Ghote concluded.
The words seemed to be a noisy bell summoning him to duty.
He stood up.
‘Well, Superintendent,’ he said, ‘I must not stay here all the day talking. I must get at the whole truth of the business somehow.’
‘So what are you going to do now, my dear fellow?’
Ghote drew himself together.
‘I am going to visit the holy man,’ he said, ‘and see if I cannot get this ridiculous opposition brought to an end.’
*
But for all his decisiveness in front of Superintendent Chavan it was a leaden cyclist indeed who made his way out of the town to conduct his interview with the obstructive Swami. In his ears the faintly ominous directions the superintendent had given him rang still. ‘He is easy to find, my dear Inspector. You have only to go out along the road beside the river and you will see. You will see.’
And it had been plain from first striking the road, with the wide-swollen river running lustily beside it, that it would not be at all difficult to find the holy man. Every few yards a small party of people was to be seen either going to obtain advice or returning with expressions of almost vacant happiness on their faces – eloquent testimony of the holy man’s power.
But it seemed that the Swami had chosen to give his advice from well outside the town, and, as Ghote cycled on under the heavy grey of new rain clouds, the groups of advice-seekers at last became fewer and fewer. He was even beginning to wonder whether he had not after all mistaken the way when at last he saw the holy man.
He was unmistakable, sitting all alone beside a dangle-rooted banyan tree in the dark shade of which it was just possible to make out the short black stump of a lingam.
Hardly, thought Ghote, the ruined temple he had imagined he would find the holy man in, but come to that he had not somehow expected that the Swami would be a Jain either, yet a member of that sect he undoubtedly was. This was plain to see from his voluminous pure white robes, from the little white square of cloth he wore over his mouth, designed to prevent his accidentally swallowing and destroying the least living thing, and from the soft brush that lay propped against his knees as he squatted patiently looking out across the wide brown expanse of the river, a brush whose purpose it was gently to sweep any area where its possessor was going to sit lest he crush an insect
in doing so.
Some fifteen yards away, Ghote dismounted from his bicycle and laid it down by the roadside, careful not to smirch the startling orange of his protective egg-box on the machine’s rear carrier. Then he approached the holy man.
A plan, of some cunning, had formed in his mind. He would begin, not by tackling the Jain directly, but by appearing to be seeking spiritual comfort in general.
He stopped in front of the squatting white-masked dreamy-looking figure and made a reverent salaam.
When the elderly priest remained quite silent Ghote eventually spoke.
‘I have come for advice,’ he said.
He expected that such a well-known dispenser of comfort and exhortation would begin making pertinent inquiries at this point. But the reply he got surprised him.
‘There is only one thing to tell,’ the Jain said. ‘Do no injury to any living thing. That is the way.’
Ghote pondered this unexpected remark for some moments. It did not seem to fit in with the campaign of injury that had under this old man’s auspices been mounted against himself. The procession of protesters yesterday would have done considerable injury to a living thing if they had realized that the salesman on the bicycle watching them go by was the hated Inspector Ghote.
At last the resentment he always felt at any form of spiritual domination, and which he had been keeping in check hitherto, broke out.
‘To injure nothing,’ he spluttered. ‘That is all very well. But it is Inspector Ghote you are speaking with. The Inspector Ghote who is here because he very strongly suspects that Vinayak Savarkar may have done grievous injury to his former wife. And very well you know that this is so.’
The Jain looked up at him with a placid smile.
‘My son,’ he replied, ‘I am knowing nothing. I am not knowing who is this Vinayak Savarkar even.’
‘But – but –’
Ghote found himself totally incoherent with rage. What pious trick was this?
The Jain smiled again, a slow beautiful smile.
‘My son,’ he said gently, ‘perhaps it is the Swami at the temple round the bend in the road that you seek.’
Ghote saw his mild eyes gently blinking up at him.
‘Most people passing by go to seek that Swami,’ the old man said.
*
The ruined temple where the proper holy man held court was very easy to find round the gentle bend in the road not a hundred yards past the spot where the Jain sat. It was an old low-roofed building set among a grove of sweeping-branched pipal trees. In front of it there was a considerable strand where the river gently looped. On this were pitched a handful of temporary huts made from palm thatch, evidently by people who had come from a distance to be present during the Swami’s fast. There was nothing like a really good fast to attract onlookers, and invariably those onlookers were wholly on the side of the fasting man.
Ghote cycled on until he reached the first of the pipals. He dismounted and leant his weighty machine up against one of the gnarled and creased trunks, taking care to snap round the rear-wheel the padlock and chain and to take with him the egg-container.
You cannot trust the sort of people you would find here, he said to himself with savagely drummed-up cynicism.
He advanced to the temple steps.
The inside of the building was dark and cool. For a little while Ghote could see nothing in it but the vague outlines of two rows of short pillars running down each of the side walls until they were lost in the darkness. But as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom he was able to make out more.
There were quite a few people, it seemed, inside the low-roofed building. Not far beyond the entrance doorway, in fact, there were half a dozen beggars, squatting or stretched listlessly displaying their poverty or their sores, silent at present, waiting no doubt till he should come right by before setting up their inevitable beseeching clamour. Farther inside a number of women were moving about here and there on mysterious business. Most of them were old and bent, hunched figures in white saris, but two or three appeared younger, wearing coloured saris and carrying heavy pots on their heads. There were some men as well, Ghote observed. One of them was ringing a small handbell at intervals, its tinkle deadened by the massive stone walls. Another, a man wearing a white dhoti coming well down to his ankles and a short pink vest, was carrying a large gong and striding about, an expression of blissful contentedness on his face. As Ghote watched he stopped and began to strike his gong quite softly with a knobbed stick. It gave out a low melodious note.
Somehow Ghote accepted it as a signal. He entered the temple and, ignoring the immediate whining clamour of the beggars, moved quickly down towards the far end.
As he had expected, it was here that the holy man was installed.
Thanks to a patch of daylight that came through the roof where one of the time-blackened granite slabs had fallen in, Ghote was able to get a good view of the fiercely bearded figure sitting cross-legged in an alcove between two of the wall pillars, keeping perfectly still and hardly regarding the comings and goings.
Approaching yet nearer, Ghote saw that the Swami was sitting on a mat which covered most of the floor of the alcove. On the mat were a number of framed photographs, of other holy men to judge from their matted and ash-strewn hair. Each one was in a different frame, some of silver, others of much battered wood, most with small marigold garlands over them. The smell of the decaying flowers was sharp on the cool air. Behind the Swami, neatly rolled up, was his bedroll, dyed to the same orange colour as his robe.
But all details faded into insignificance beside the visage of the holy man. Hair positively gushed out of his head and his face at every point. It jutted forth, defying the ashes that had been liberally sprinkled on it, and it curled angrily. Inside this lively forest it was just possible to make out two deep-set baleful eyes, a thin hooked nose and two small segments of cheek. And even this small amount of flesh had about it an unmistakable look. It seemed to be not so much human skin as some vaguely luminous substance, glowing with a pale inner light.
It was the flesh of a fasting man.
For a long while Ghote stood looking. Somewhere behind him in the temple a woman began chanting those verses from the Gita in which the god, who has chosen to be Arjuna’s charioteer in his fight with his uncles, explains the need to do battle. The ash-covered, sprouting-bearded Swami seemed not even to hear. He remained still as a statue, and only the bright burning eyes, deep in their sockets, betrayed the fact that he was awake and alert. No one went near him, though it was perfectly obvious that all the life of the dim low-roofed building was revolving round this one still figure.
At last Ghote decided that the time had come to break through the trance-like atmosphere, shatter what it might to do so.
He took three or four brisk steps forward until he was standing at the edge of the stone platform of the alcove and confronting the holy man face to face.
‘My name is Ghote,’ he said. ‘Ganesh Ghote, Inspector of Police, Bombay.’
He had known from the moment he set eyes on this figure that this was no occasion for guile. The direct approach and nothing else was what was needed.
For four or five long seconds the Swami remained silent and motionless. Then the lips under the jutting beard parted.
‘Inspector Ghote,’ said a harsh, and it seemed scornful voice.
‘Yes,’ Ghote replied boldly, though with the attendants hovering in the background he felt obliged to keep his voice low. ‘Yes,’ he repeated. ‘It is I, Inspector Ghote, the man you are fasting against.’
‘What have you come here for? Here?’ demanded the fierce face not two feet away from his own.
Ghote drew himself up.
‘I have come,’ he said, ‘to request that you cease this agitation against my presence in the town.’
‘Request denied,’ snapped the ferocious old man.
‘Why?’ Ghote demanded, low-voiced and urgent. ‘Why? Why are you denying? Why are you supporti
ng this man? Why are you obstructing justice?’
The Swami glared back at him, his eyes spitting.
‘I tell you,’ he snarled, ‘that man is to be left in peace. I have said.’
‘But why? Why?’ Ghote asked again.
‘It is enough that I have said,’ the Swami answered. ‘Now go. While you are here in this town I will fast. Fast to death.’
‘I will not go,’ Ghote said, a counter-anger coming up to boil and bubble in his veins. ‘I will not go. I am here as an investigating officer. I have been ordered to investigate, and investigate I will until my case is completed. What are you doing standing in the way of justice like this?’
But even this appeal to higher things fell, it seemed, on totally deaf ears.
‘Go. You are not wanted. Go. Go.’
‘But listen,’ Ghote expostulated, ‘I will find the truth, and whatever it is I will report. So if Mr Savarkar is not guilty of anything that is what I will find. What have you to fear in that?’
Again the gushingly bearded Swami was adamant.
‘You are not wanted here, poking and poking into a man’s life,’ he said. ‘And until your back is turned on this town I will be fasting. Unto death.’
The translucent skin blazed in anger.
Ghote tried changing his track.
‘But what if he is guilty?’ he asked. ‘Is it right to shield him from the law? There must be one law for all. For the rich and for the poor.’
‘And I say you are not to break the peace of that man,’ the Swami grated back at him, every inch fury.
‘No,’ Ghote returned. ‘That is wrong. I am telling you there is prima facie case. It is my duty to investigate. And it is yours as citizen before the law not to stand in my way.’
Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg Page 7
