His journey seemed to be going to take place under good auspices too. As he pushed his way past the Post Office, he saw that the banner with the words GHOTE GO on it had been allowed to fall sideways and had not been picked up. Its brightly white material was bedraggled and mud-stamped.
Had any emissary from the Chairman yet told the Swami as he embarked on the sixty-third day of his fast that Inspector Ghote was no longer causing trouble in the town, he wondered. Probably not. The Chairman would want a circumstantial account of what had happened to him before allowing this news to go running through its swift channels out to the ruined temple and those ashen hair-hidden ears. And no doubt too Time magazine would still be ignorant that its ‘Saint-v-C.I.D’ story was supposed to have come to an abrupt end.
Swinging round a particularly deep and large puddle in the roadway, Ghote smiled to himself.
He was still smiling a little when he arrived outside the heavy carved wooden gates of the compound of the Chairman’s house, after a short halt not far away to conceal his egg-box just inside the big patch of fan-leaved kika thorns where the fireflies had hovered the night before. He called out loudly to the turbaned chaprassi to open up as he had done on his visit in state the evening before.
But now he got a very different reception.
The tall burly figure surveyed him disdainfully through the thick carving of the gates.
‘What is it you are wanting?’ he demanded.
‘I have come to carry out certain interviews in the house,’ Ghote replied briskly.
‘And you are permitted to come interviewing here?’ answered the chaprassi with a coarse scorn which Ghote decided he could not possibly ignore.
He drew himself up to his full height, impeded only a little by the necessity of holding his bicycle.
‘I am Inspector Ghote of the Bombay C.I.D,’ he said. ‘You will open these gates immediately.’
But the chaprassi made no move. Instead he leant back a little and carried out a leisurely survey both of Ghote and his means of transport.
‘You are police inspector?’ he said at length. ‘Then I am brothel girl.’
The expression he had hit on evidently pleased him. He relaxed his lofty stance to smile broadly at the gardeners and other servants whom Ghote could see beyond the thick gates creeping one by one nearer to enjoy the spectacle of a suppliant being sent away at the gates.
Ghote saw that the whole dignity of the police was at stake. He did not hesitate.
‘Get those gates open, man,’ he shouted in a sudden violent blast of sound. ‘Get them open pretty damn quick, or you will find yourself in gaol.’
It was as if he had fired a gun through the solid wood carvings in front of him. The tall chaprassi positively cowered. Then he swung round to the small crowd of servants.
‘Get away back to your work,’ he yelled at them. ‘Get away this instant. Inspector Ghote is coming.’
And with a salaam of the utmost courtliness he applied himself to the business of dragging back both halves of the heavy gates for Ghote’s entrance, while inside the compound a scurry of terrified servants – there was even, Ghote saw, a footless cripple wildly swinging a pair of crutches – shot away in all directions as if a tiger had been dropped down among a flock of goats.
‘Take my bicycle,’ Ghote said to the chaprassi. ‘And see that it is well looked after.’
‘Yes, sahib. Of course, sahib,’ the man said, reverently wheeling the machine away.
Ghote walked solemnly and alone up the immaculately swept drive to the door of the house.
And it seemed that the fracas at the gate had alerted the whole house to his arrival. When he was within five yards of the wide door it swung respectfully back and Moti, the head bearer, appeared.
‘Good morning, Inspector sahib,’ he said. ‘Madam is here to see you.’
Ghote, inwardly a little disappointed to find that his tentative plans for getting into the servants’ quarter in one taking-all-before-him rush had come unstuck, inclined his head gravely and entered the spacious marble-chequered entrance hall.
Very well, he reflected, I shall just have to go about the business in another way.
He felt, comfortingly, the fresh impulse that his outwitting of the goondas had given him still filling his sails, freshened if anything by his brush with the chaprassi at the gates.
The second Mrs Savarkar, who was waiting for him at the far end of the hall, was certainly every bit as ugly as Superintendent Chavan had said. Despite her sari of bright green silk, her large gold earrings and the numerous gold and silver bangles she wore on both arms, she looked like a man. She had close-set eyes, one of which seemed to be subject to squint, a large aggressively beaky nose, a little downward-turning mouth, and putting all the rest into comparative insignificance, a real boxer’s jaw.
‘Well, well, Inspector,’ she said sharply, ‘what is it that you are doing here? My husband is at office. You ought to be knowing that.’
‘It was not your husband I came to see, Mrs Savarkar,’ Ghote replied soothingly.
‘Not my husband? Then who is it you have come for? We cannot be having police here at whatever time they choose.’
‘I quite understand, madam,’ Ghote replied. ‘But my inquiries will not take long, and they are chiefly concerned with someone who, I understand, no longer has any duties in the household.’
‘What is this? What is this? Who no longer has duties in this household?’
Mrs Savarkar’s formidable jaw bit at her questions savagely.
‘It is the former nurse of Mr Savarkar’s first wife I am wishing to see,’ Ghote admitted with some reluctance.
‘What person is this? Former wife? Former wife? It is fifteen years now since I am married to Mr Savarkar. What is this former wife?’
‘Yes, I quite understand that you have been married for a long time,’ Ghote said placatingly, since it was very plain that Mrs Savarkar took great pride in her marital status, and no wonder.
He coughed apologetically.
‘But Mr Savarkar was married before he became your husband,’ he added. ‘And I understand that the nurse of his first wife came with him to this house. It is her I wish to speak with.’
‘There is no such person,’ Mrs Savarkar stated abruptly.
Ghote drew in a breath.
‘I regret,’ he said, ‘but it is my distinct information that such a person exists, and I require to see her in connection with inquiries.’
Mrs Savarkar shrugged her bony-ridged shoulders, displacing a little the vivid sari. Hastily she drew it back into position, as if it would be grossly unfair to any man to expose him to the least bit more of her charms than convention dictated.
‘But she will tell you nothing,’ she said.
‘Nevertheless,’ Ghote replied, ‘it is my duty to see.’
‘She is blind only. What can she tell you?’
‘But she was not blind fifteen years ago. And it is the events of that time I am investigating.’
‘She knows nothing of that.’
‘Nevertheless she was a member of the household in which a certain tragic event occurred. She was an intimate member even. I would like to see her at once.’
Mrs Savarkar hitched at her sari impatiently.
‘Oh see, see,’ she said. ‘She can tell you nothing.’
She darted Ghote a glance of confident triumph.
Ghote, secretly agreeing that since the old woman had not been sent away to the remotest corner of India it was pretty likely that she would not in fact have anything really helpful to say, felt obliged nevertheless to stand his ground.
‘Kindly have the goodness,’ he said stiffly, ‘to have me taken to see her.’
And it looked as if he had won his probably empty victory too, because Mrs Savarkar turned towards the silent Moti, who had placed himself beside the telephone on its ivory-inlaid table, and began telling him to escort Ghote to the servants’ quarter.
But before she had finishe
d a door into the hall opened abruptly, and Mrs Savarkar, when she saw who was there, swung round again to Ghote, not without showing some relief.
‘Aha,’ she said, ‘it is my little son, my Vasant. First you must talk with him.’
Ghote, beginning to worry once more that the old nurse with whom his interview was once more being delayed might after all have something to tell him, turned ungraciously to appraise the fruit of the Savarkar union now coming, a little reluctantly, into the hall.
He found he was confronting the boy he had met at the tank.
11
Ghote stood stock still looking at the boy, so surprised that he could not think what to do or say.
He had somehow imagined that the offspring of the Savarkar union was still very young, and to find that he was this adolescent, and one with whom he had had such an intimate conversation, was altogether disrupting.
And what thoughts must be tumbling through young Vasant’s head? Here was the mysterious, anonymous stranger in whom he had confided his innermost secrets revealed not merely as a real person actually present in his own home, but as the very inspector of police sent to harass his own father, a sworn enemy.
In his own young days, he knew, he would have wanted the ground to open and swallow him up. And, in default of this ideal solution, he would have at least turned and fled and have hidden away for as long as he possibly could.
He must say something. It was up to him to make the situation tolerable.
‘Good morning,’ he grated out, his voice sounding to his ears impossibly strained. ‘I am most pleased to make your acquaintance.’
That should do it, he thought. At least it makes it clear that the incident of the night before is blotted out.
Vasant, staring at him as if he had lost the power of movement, made no reply. And he was struggling to concoct another remark of his own when he was saved from further effort by a sudden sharp shout somewhere outside.
‘Where is he? Where is that man?’
He recognized the voice at once. It was the Municipal Chairman. He knew too without having to be told who ‘that man’ was. It was himself.
‘Inspector Ghote,’ he shouted. ‘They are telling me you are here. And straightaway I am coming.’
Ghote felt trapped. He had no strict right to be here at all.
All he could find to say were the same words with which he had greeted the Chairman’s son.
‘Good morning.’
‘For you,’ the Chairman replied, with a crocodile flash of his white teeth above the boat-shaped birthmark, ‘it is not a good morning. You have come to my house without authority. You are trying to question my servants when you have no right. You are in trouble, Inspector.’
‘If necessary I will obtain search warrant,’ Ghote replied, all the more hotly for knowing how weak his case was.
‘Apply, Inspector, apply,’ the Chairman answered. ‘But in this town you will not find it so easy to get. And now, since you have not warrant, you will leave.’
And all Ghote could do, knowing he had been utterly defeated, was to go. He went down the steps outside the front door of the big house and along the beautifully-kept driveway. He took his bicycle from the chaprassi, who was contriving to hold it upright while touching it with only one finger. Then he wheeled the desperately heavy machine out of the tall carved gates of the compound, all the while conscious of the eyes of the Chairman, his wife, his son and his servants upon him.
Trudgingly he pushed the machine along the whole length of the high mud-wall surrounding the Chairman’s establishment and on until he reached the patch of kika thorn where he had hidden his egg-box. And there he stood while the heat from the glaring grey sky twanged down at him and savoured his setback to its last bitter drop.
The Chairman had won again. How quickly the situation had changed. First thing this morning he had felt himself in a totally superior situation: he had been supposed dead or at least beaten senseless and he was priding himself on having grabbed all the advantages that that situation had given him. And now … Now the Chairman had won again. He had defied the expected course of events and had come tearing out back to his house to dismiss like a beggar a man who was making a nuisance of himself.
Ghote stood under the grey glare of the sky and let the misery seep through and through him.
So it must have been quite a long time before the persistent voice registered with him.
‘Inspector. Inspector. Inspector, please.’
But at last the hissed sound penetrated. He looked round a little wildly, jerking sharply back to the present.
There seemed to be nothing, no one.
His already sweating back broke out in a fresh upswelling. What was happening to him?
And then he saw what it was. At the far side of the scrubby patch of kika-thorn, there was someone crouching, a figure wearing white. He took a step nearer to see if he could discover whom it was.
‘Inspector, come round this side. We can talk with no one to see.’
Ghote hesitated for a moment. Was this a trap? Had the Chairman already set a new lot of goondas on to him?
And then he realized quite suddenly whom the mysterious whisperer was. It was young Vasant.
Quickly he scrambled down from the road, through a narrow path in the thorns and round to where the boy crouched.
‘You were calling?’ he said.
‘Yes, Inspector, there is something important I must tell.’
Ghote forced himself to take an interest. Bowed down he might be with the heavy weight of his repeated failure to best the Chairman, but, after all, no doubt to the boy his own worries seemed as weighty. So he would have to listen with attention to a plea not to tell anybody of what had happened at the tank the night before, and solemnly accede to a request that never need have been made.
‘Well, what is it you want?’ he said gravely.
‘Inspector, it is the Swami.’
‘The Swami?’
For a moment Ghote scarcely knew what Vasant was talking about so unexpected was this reply. Then, when he realized whom the boy was speaking of, all his former bitterness came rushing back to him. What was this child doing poking his nose into a man’s business? The Swami represented the Chairman’s most successful attempt to prevent any investigation of the case. Why was this boy thrusting him down his throat now?
‘What is it? What is it you have to tell?’ he said testily.
The boy, crouching in the shadow of the thorn patch, took a long deep breath.
‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘do you know who the Swami is?’
‘Who he is?’ Ghote said impatiently. ‘He is a holy man. He came to the town some years ago. The people listen to him. He is telling them that I must go.’
‘But do you know who he is, Inspector?’
Ghote realized that he did not in fact know the holy man’s name. He doubted very much if more than a handful of people in the whole town did, if that. It was enough that he was a holy man.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I do not know his name. What importance is that?’
The boy looked up at him, his eyes wide with the overriding importance of what he had to say. And what would it be? Nothing.
‘Inspector, his name is Gandharva, the same name as my grandfather. Inspector, he is my grandfather’s brother.’
Ghote stood leaning over young Vasant rapidly working out the consequences of what the boy had told him.
So the Swami was a relative by marriage of the Municipal Chairman. He was, if what the boy had said was true, the brother of the former Chairman, the man who had lacked a son to pass on his power and wealth to and had caused Vinayak Savarkar to murder his wife in order that he could marry the ugly daughter who was his sole offspring. And if this was so, then what a hold it was for him to have over the Swami. It would be necessary only to tell him that this relationship was known to have him call off his long campaign at once.
He straightened up and brushed a hand across his sweat-globule
d face.
‘It is not generally known, this relationship?’ he asked the boy.
‘No, no. My father always wanted it kept most secret. The Swami would always tell him he was a wicked man. And he knew that if people heard he was disobeying his own wife’s uncle they would think he was very wicked.’
‘And so how did it happen that the Swami protected your father?’ Ghote asked.
‘My father went to him.’
‘Went to him? He went to beg the Swami’s help?’
This was getting better and better.
‘Yes,’ the boy said, ‘when my father got to know that the people in Bombay were determined to have him thrown out of office and the way they were planning to do it he went to the Swami for help. He knew that if it was the Swami who was objecting to the investigation then he himself could not be accused of obstructing. He is a very clever man, you know.’
‘I know,’ Ghote said. ‘But, tell me, why did the Swami agree to do it? You said he did not approve of your father.’
‘It is true. That is why my father had to go to him himself, in secret. And even then he had to beg and beg. But the Swami is a relative after all.’
‘Yes,’ Ghote said.
And he saw the force of the boy’s statement. There was an obligation to help one’s family in this world. Look at the Eminent Figure in Bombay insisting that he himself went round this distant town with that brightly coloured egg-box. That was helping your family. And the Swami’s action was no more. It was understandable. But it would be easy enough to stop now.
Suddenly Ghote came back to the boy sitting at his feet.
‘But you,’ he said. ‘Will your father realize you have told me this? They must know you went out at the house. There is only the one gate to go through, isn’t there?’
The boy looked at his sandal-shod feet.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there is one gate only, and they will know. But I do not care.’
‘But if your father hears, he will make trouble for you. He is not a man to cross.’
The boy looked up at him now.
‘Already he has made much trouble,’ he said. ‘Though I do not so much mind doing what he says I must now. I have been thinking about what you said last night.’
Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg Page 11
