Under a Monsoon Cloud: an Inspector Ghote Mystery

by H. R. F. Keating

  And next morning, arriving at the police station good and early, he found that he had, if anything, underestimated what would be required of him.

  To begin with, he found waiting to greet him in the small stone building’s entrance hall, standing idiotically smiling, an old acquaintance from Bombay. Or, more correctly, an old adversary. Lumpen and lazy, Sergeant Desai had for a short time come under him at Crime Branch, almost certainly after not a little cunning manoeuvring by whatever department had previously been saddled with him. In the end, thanks to an adroit move of his own, he had succeeded in getting the fellow off his neck, but he had hoped never to have to see him again.

  And now, at the very start of his difficult enough assignment here, there was Desai, grinning at him all over his big face, pleased as a dog thumping two tails.

  ‘Very good place, Vigatpore, Inspector,’ the fellow began at once, as if continuing some previous conversation. ‘Damn good posting. You will like. Oh, yes, sir, stay here as long as you can stop them knowing where you are. Damn fine place. Damn good lake, you know.’

  ‘Lake?’ Ghote shot out in fury, feeling the last thing he wanted was a description from this fool of the town’s famed Lake Helena. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Oh, everybody is knowing the lake here, Inspector. Vigatpore and Lake Helena. Two always go together.’

  And on to his smudgy nosed face Desai planked a look of comic-book superiority, the man of experience teaching the novice.

  ‘You remember what a damn fine champion I am in swimming,’ he added abruptly.

  Ghote did not remember. He doubted if he had ever known. But Sergeant Desai – how had the idiot managed to retain his stripes all this time? – began at once to provide details. At unstoppable length.

  ‘Oh, yes, Ghoteji, many bloody rupees I am winning at bets from that lake. You want to make a bet I cannot cross it, there and back, in two hours only? Five bucks? Ten?’

  ‘That will do, Sergeant.’

  He was not going to have the fellow taking familiarities on the strength of the few days they had once worked together, if having Desai sitting on one’s head could be called working with him.

  Ruffled with irritation he took possession of the office vacated by the suddenly ill Inspector Khan – had Desai’s persistent cocksure uselessness driven Khan to a breakdown? – and discovered in the course of the morning that in fact the whole station had been run with a lack of efficiency that made Desai’s cheerful clumsiness seem almost normal.

  He found the office itself monumentally untidy. Softly flaking files were heaped on every available surface, most of them thick with dust. From the ceiling there actually still hung the remains of a flapping punkah, surely dating from when the station had been built, in the British days, while prominent on the desk was a big brass inkpot, doubtless from the same era, unpolished and bone-dry. The Station House Diary, which he had sent for as soon as he had cleared enough of the desk to work at, did not contain a single entry for the whole past week.

  In the days and weeks that followed, more and more of Inspector Khan’s errors and omissions came to light. The Bad Character Roll proved to have had no additions made to it for two years. The Muddamal Room, when some time in his second week he got round to inspecting its items of lost property and articles retained as evidence, had no inventory of its contents. Inspector Khan’s own Case Diary, that most sacrosanct of volumes, had had more than one page inexpertly ripped out.

  As heinous, in a page-numbered book of First Information Reports all three top copies concerning a recent incident were missing and the final fourth copy, which could not be removed without leaving an obvious gap, was so faint as to be almost undecipherable. Attaching a note stating that further action might be required to the pallid blue carbon copy, Ghote saw, with his sense of dismay by then almost dulled, that the incident reported was an attack by goondas on the chairman of the dairy cooperative which had put his temporary landlord out of business. No doubt Shivram Patel had been in collusion with Inspector Khan to thwart an investigation which might show who had been behind the assault.

  No doubt, too, the reason he himself had been given such an uncomfortable billet in place of a room at one of the hotels was that Khan was doing the former extortionist owner of the creamery another favour.

  For the tenth or eleventh time Ghote wondered whether it was worth making a fuss and getting himself a new quarter. The straw mattress it was his lot to spend his nights on still contrived to prick him each time he turned over.

  But surely his posting must come to an end before much longer.

  Certainly there was nothing to be done by complaining to Shivram Patel himself. He had tried that on the first occasion he had met him, several days after his arrival.

  He had come upon him unexpectedly as, stomach gurgling from a wretched wayside-stall meal of lukewarm greasy parathas and poor over-stewed tea with buffalo milk, he had been making his way last thing at night to his bare room at the far end of the big old denuded house.

  Shivram Patel was carrying a lamp, the sole form of lighting in the house to which electricity was no longer supplied. Seeing his guest, he had held the lantern high and, thrusting a big, bull-like head forward, had peered at him with ferocious dislike.

  ‘Good evening. It is Mr Patel?’

  ‘You. Why for do you have to be in my house?’

  ‘Well, Inspector Khan was arranging that I should be your paying-guest.’

  ‘Paying-guest. Paying-guest. And I have had true guests in this house by the hundred. Musicians I have had for entertaining. Dancing girls also. And now what do I have? A police inspector from Bombay only. Thrust into my middle.’

  ‘Well, but for that you are well paid. And while we are talking the matter, the mattress you are giving me is not at all good.’

  ‘Good-tood. You are lucky to be getting what you are.’

  And the big bear of a man had turned and marched away into the darkness.

  Ghote saw him only two or three times more during the whole course of his stay. Clearly the former Zilla Parishad chairman had no very high sense of the obligations of the host of a paying-guest. He simply kept out of the way, nursing his grievances like a bear with a fine store of honey suddenly snatched from him. On each occasion they met it was plain that Shivram Patel had somehow focused on this visitor in his house much of the feelings of resentment he had been letting gather like rumbling monsoon clouds over all the time since the rich livelihood he had considered himself entitled to had been brought to an end.

  At first Ghote had felt some sympathy for him. His vanished prosperity had been perhaps no more than he deserved after years of living in luxury on what he had extorted from peasants owning only a single cow or a couple of buffaloes. Yet no doubt he had been brought up from childhood to expect as of right the good things the world had to offer, and to have had all this inherited ease swept from underneath him must have been a devastating blow. However, since he had done nothing to come to terms with his changed circumstances, after the second of their meetings, which had been as thunder-charged as the first, Ghote had simply made as little use as he could of the expensive and impoverished accommodation that had been wished on him – doubtless in doing so only adding to his landlord’s dislike.

  But he had enough worries, as the weeks went by, in battling against the tumbledown neglect and general indiscipline at the station while the heat building up to the monsoon had grown more and more oppressive. Vigatpore as a hill station had a reputation for being delightfully cool in summer. But now it was simply stinkingly hot. Even to think became difficult, and patches of prickly heat, maddeningly itchy on neck and shoulders, made keeping an even temper almost impossible.

  The very crows pecking at carrion in Shivram Patel’s neglected compound were covered with the reddish dry dust that was everywhere, desiccating tongue and throat, tormenting nostrils. Once in the road on his way to work Ghote saw a bullock that had collapsed from sheer heat between the shafts
of its crude country cart. And up and down the little town bands of boys roamed chanting God, oh God, send us rain, God, oh God, send us grain.

  Even when, at last, clouds began to mass over the surrounding hills they brought no more than an occasional single sigh of breeze to rattle the hard dried leaves of the trees and once or twice short periods of fine drizzle that did nothing to lessen the heat and discomfort. Sergeant Desai, that idiot, took to proclaiming each tinglingly hot day ‘The galloping of a horse, the mind of a woman, whether the monsoon will be good or bad, even the gods cannot be predicting.’

  Then one afternoon of electric stiflingness, under an ominous hanging mauvish pall of cloud, the clerk from the station’s Writers Room came in to Ghote with a message. The station was to be subjected, next day, to an Inspection. Nor was that all. Of all the senior officers who might have had this duty, Vigatpore PS was to be visited by Additional Deputy Inspector-General of Police Kelkar. Tiger Kelkar.

  Tiger Kelkar was another old Bombay acquaintance of Ghote’s, but of a very different sort from Desai. Even when Ghote had worked with him he had had a formidable reputation for drive and efficiency. But – and this made his forthcoming Inspection all the more potentially embarrassing – it had been Ghote’s task at that time to suspect Tiger, together with the handful of other picked officers in a cell which had been specially recruited to combat Bombay’s powerful black-money bosses, of corruptly selling information. Tiger, of course, had proved not to be the rotten apple in the basket, but it had been a duty to view him for all of that period as capable of that betrayal.

  However, besides this embarrassment, Tiger Kelkar had a reputation now as an implacable hunter-down of the inefficient with a zeal that showed itself in outbursts of anger feared throughout the force. His Inspection was bound to bring to light omissions and inefficiencies still remaining in the station, and blame for them would descend on the officer in charge, however short the time that he had occupied his seat. Scorching and fearful blame.

  2

  When early next morning Additional Deputy Inspector-General of Police Kelkar arrived at the station, tall, broad-shouldered, keen-eyed and blade-faced, neat moustache showing only a hint of grey, all Ghote’s anxieties rapidly proved justified. Except one. Not by the least flicker of an eyelid did Tiger Kelkar show he harboured resentment over what it had once been Ghote’s duty to suspect him of.

  ‘Ah, Inspector,’ he said, as Ghote in his best, seldom-worn, rather too tight regular uniform gave him his smartest salute, ‘we have been colleagues in the past, have we not?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Kelkar Sahib.’

  Ghote had been unable to think of anything more to reply. The already oppressive heat of the day brought sweat prickling to his forehead.

  ‘I will add one thing only, Ghote, while no one else is nearby, so we know where we are standing from the word go.’

  ‘Yes, A.D.I.G.?’

  ‘The fact that we once worked together will make no difference to the manner in which I shall conduct my Inspection. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, A.D.I.G.’

  Ghote looked up at him with something akin to awe.

  Such a sense of duty. What other senior officer would be able to cut away so completely all pettiness? There were some, he knew, who would have been ready to treat an Inspection with a lenient eye on account of shared experiences in the past. And more, he guessed, would flame with resentment at having once been regarded by his junior with suspicion, and would seize gleefully on a chance to make life hell.

  But Tiger Kelkar, upright and strict, had at once shown himself above either attitude.

  His Inspection, however, was still a nerve-wracking business, despite the furious preparations Ghote had ordered the day before – the scrubbing, the whitewashing, the tucking away of awkward objects, the polishing.

  For a little at the start he was simply all admiration for the way Tiger Kelkar missed not the smallest detail. The torn-out pages from Inspector Khan’s Case Diary were snapped up as if by a gecko flicking out its tongue at a passing fly. The long absence of entries in the Bad Character Roll received a single fierce jotting in red ballpoint in Tiger’s notebook, and Ghote knew that for years to come no such slackness would be repeated. Wooden chair L4 was found to be missing, something which neither Ghote nor anyone else had noticed. And Sergeant Desai, that fool, came in for a truly terrible pulling-up for having a broken lace in his right boot, something Ghote felt he had really asked for since he himself had not only pointed it out but had also taken the precaution of finding the fellow a task, investigating a minor theft at one of the hotels, that ought to have kept him out of Tiger’s way.

  But all too soon Tiger’s fiery attacks began to search out weaknesses of his own. Even down to the most trivial.

  ‘Inspector, what is this inkpot?’

  Ghote looked down at the desk he had ceded to the A.D.I.G. He had long before cleared it of all Inspector Khan’s clutter and now it had been polished till it glowed. The brass inkpot, which had been there when he had taken over, was still in what was presumably its correct place, though shining now more than it appeared to have done for years. So why was Tiger asking about it?

  ‘Inkpot, A.D.I.G. Sahib?’

  ‘Yes, man, inkpot. Inkpot. What the hell did you think I was asking about?’

  Outside, a sudden pre-monsoon windstorm had got up. Two or three doors in the building had smacked back against the walls before anybody could shut them. Somewhere on the other side of the road a sheet of corrugated iron had been half-torn from its moorings and was banging and booming like a minor outbreak of gunfire.

  Ghote felt as if much such a racketing blast had struck at him.

  ‘The inkpot is a cent per cent correct issue, A.D.I.G. Sahib,’ he lied hastily. ‘I am already checking up myself.’

  ‘And if it is a proper issue, Inspector, why is it minus any sort of ink? What use do you think is an inkpot minus ink?’

  ‘None, sir. None.’

  ‘Then get it filled, man. Get it filled.’

  Quickly Ghote stepped out to look for his peon, whose task presumably it ought to have been to keep the inkpot full. But he scarcely blamed the man – his name was Shinde – for his failure. The fellow was one of the very few things in Vigatpore he felt inclined to put in the credit column. For some reason right from his very first day in the station Shinde, his face lit in splay-toothed smiles, had fixed on him a dog-like admiration. At whatever hour he needed anything the fellow was there, saluting left-handedly and with widespread fingers, ready to get it for him. All that he lacked, and Ghote felt guilty even for recognizing this, was any spark of assertiveness. Almost as soon as he had first met him some odd words his father had been fond of repeating, a bit of English poetry, had come into his mind, ‘Lords without anger or honour, Who dare not carry their swords’, and they came again almost every time he saw the fellow. Poor Shinde would never be asked to carry any sort of sword, but even if he were it was certain he would not dare.

  But in the meanwhile, thank goodness, he was quick to get hold of ink and fill the wretched object that had aroused Tiger’s wrath.

  And as the days of the Inspection went by Tiger’s sharp eye spotted more and more deficiencies, and with blasting anger he pointed them out. Soon there was a new air of bustle in the station which he himself, despite all he had achieved, had not wholly managed to instil. The constables looked smarter, the naiks issued orders with more snap, the whole place buzzed. Tiger’s temper might be scalding but it certainly produced results. More, Ghote realized, than all his own efforts ever could have done.

  Then, as the last day but one of the visit came towards its end and Ghote was beginning to allow himself a glimpse of how pleasant it would be when Tiger was no longer sitting on his head, the first mighty rainstorm of the monsoon burst down on to them. It brought to an end the tingling tension – half caused by the electric heat, half by Tiger’s electric rages – that had grown and grown in the station.

  It
also caused all the lights instantly to go out.

  Tiger’s voice rose like the crack of a thunderbolt above the sudden mad tom-tomming of the rain on the station roof.

  ‘Emergency generator. Get it going. Get it going.’

  With a jolt of pleasure Ghote recalled that, not a week earlier, he had thought to acquaint himself with the emergency lighting arrangements. He set off at once himself for the small annexe where the generator was housed and with his own hands started it up.

  It worked. The lights of the building flickered once or twice and then came fully on.

  Ghote went back in, secretly patting himself on the back that for this once he had under Tiger’s ferocious eye got something altogether right. And Tiger himself was there, standing in the entrance hall.

  ‘Good man,’ he said.

  Ghote felt a wave of pure warmth spread through him.

  But at that precise moment the main door crashed wide open and into the gleamingly polished entrance hall there came staggering Sergeant Desai. Rainwater cascaded off him on to the floor like torrents down a mountainside, and he wore a face-splitting grin as if there had been nothing so delightful since Nataraja danced the world into existence.

  ‘Get that man out of here,’ Tiger Kelkar roared.

  Desai ought to have turned and fled. Any reasonable individual encountering such a bolt of anger would have done so. But Desai was not a reasonable individual.

  ‘Yes, sir, Mr Kelkar, sir,’ he said. ‘What man is that, please, sir?’

  ‘You, you idiot,’ Ghote shouted, knowing however that his exasperation was more like one of the gusts of wind hurling rain at the station’s windows than the lightning of Tiger’s anger. ‘It is you, you bewakoof. You are making one hell of a mess in here. Get out. Go round and come in somewhere where you won’t spoil the whole place.’