Cheating Death

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘Well, man. Don’t take all day. Simple enough. Fine example of concise and accurate report. First-class fellows those CBI wallas. Now, are you fully understanding what is your duty in the matter?’

  Ghote would have liked to have answered ‘No’.

  ‘Yes, sir, yes,’ he said, however. ‘The CBI inquiry must have been altogether bogged down owing to the culprit being in state of coma. And, as you were saying, sir, it is nevertheless one hundred percent vital to find out exactly how the paper, the said paper, was stolen from that locked chamber. And I am to do that, sir, so that a full report to the Centre may be made.’

  Yet even as the words poured out he could not prevent himself wondering just how hundred percent vital it all was. The CBI men had traced the leak after all, though that had been something not in fact too difficult. So what was all the urgency to be able to say exactly how the paper had been removed from a chamber that was said to be locked?

  Well, anything from the Centre …

  ‘And, Ghote, I want that report not next year, or next month, or next week. I want it just as quickly as those CBI chaps were putting in theirs. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Which is why, Ghote, you will proceed to this place, Oceanic College, whatever that is, now. Now.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, look for it on my map, Inspector, and get to hell out there.’

  With an imperious finger the Additional Commissioner pointed to the huge map of Greater Bombay and its police districts that hung on his wall.

  Ghote hurried over, sweat springing up all over his back despite the two big ceiling fans that fluttered the documents under the paperweights on the desk and brought a little welcome coolness to the humid June heat. To his relief, he spotted at once the words ‘Oceanic College’, inked in approximately where he had first looked. The place was, he saw, even further from Crawford Market headquarters than he had thought. He would have a weary and miserable trip out there, almost certainly find no one to talk to, nothing happening, and then have to endure a long and miserable trip back home.

  By which time, he realised, it would be much, much too late to do what he had finally decided on just before the Additional Commissioner had called him. So that matter would have to be postponed till …

  But another thought struck him.

  If he was going to have to go all the way out to this Oceanic College this evening, then it was perfectly reasonable to interpret the Additional Commissioner’s ‘now’ with a certain amount of latitude. It would be asking too much, for example, for him to go all that distance and begin inquiries straightaway without taking some time for food. And food was best taken at home. Protima would have prepared a meal in fact. But, if he were to set off for home this minute, he would arrive well before the Regals meeting had reached the point of electing the team captain. So there would be nothing to prevent him doing the needful with Protima. Today. This evening. Almost at once.

  He gulped.

  TWO

  In the road outside his home Ghote paused and took stock.

  Yes, there was no doubt about it. What he had decided on must be done. Things had gone too far. There was one only way to put a halt to it. Just what they all said, mulling over life in general in the canteen or out taking a cold drink somewhere. Every now and again a woman, unless you are lucky enough to have found a real example of a good Hindu wife, needs a good thrashing up.

  And, certainly, Protima had got to the point of having to be put in her place. That business of going behind his back and seeking a favour through the wife of the Dean at Elphinston, it had been the end only of a long, long line creeping up from the smallest beginnings.

  Yes, how different it all was now from the first days of their marriage, even though he had known then that Protima was someone with opinions of her own. That he had realised the very first time he had set eyes on her. He could see her now, standing up in the lecture room and actually challenging what the lecturer had said. The only girl with the guts to do it. What a moment that had been.

  And then, later, she had, wonderfully, shown an equal independence. At a time when arranged marriages were even more the accepted way than nowadays, to have insisted on making a love match.

  A sudden flash of memory showed him lying with his head on her thigh when at last with difficulty they had found a patch of ground somewhere unfrequented – where had that been? – and she had let the pallu of her sari fall down from her head as she had leant over him to shroud him in her dark descending hair and over that the cotton’s bluey green shade.

  Oh, and in their first married years she had been a model Hindu wife, wholly devoted to her husband, dutiful, obedient, taking care always to serve him his favourite dish. The sweet carrot halwa he had once told her his mother used to make so well. Of course, it had been a sort of play-acting. They had both known it. Yet she had truly given him the place of honour in those days. Definitely.

  Now though. Now the see-saw had swung one hundred percent the other way. She was up and he was down. Now she was the one, it seemed, who said always what was to be done. He was the one who, sooner or later, did it. High time to put an end to that.

  It must really have begun, he thought, with the arrival of little Ved, now by no means so little. It had been natural enough then that she, the woman, the mother, should know what ought to be done for, first, the baby and as time went on for the growing child. And he himself had been altogether willing to follow. But that situation had gone on. And on. Grown and grown.

  Until this last unforgivable thing.

  He marched forward. On reaching his door he administered the sharpest of raps on its outer latch.

  The door opened.

  ‘What for are you home so early?’ Protima demanded.

  He found himself speechless. Somehow he could not reply to that abrupt question by saying with blank brutality, ‘I have come to give you one good beating’. But he was at once determined that he would not answer with a meek explanation of his having to go out on duty and wanting to take food before he set off.

  ‘It is not so early,’ he got out at last.

  ‘But are you expecting food to be ready?’ Protima banged back. ‘How can I be knowing just only when you are wanting?’

  He decided that this, vigorously though it had been put, acknowledged enough that it was a wife’s duty to provide food just as soon as the husband required it. So he could say now that he did in fact need something to eat as soon as it could be got.

  And Protima went at once into the kitchen. Even though as she turned away every line in her body expressed sharp disapproval of a husband who could make such a demand.

  It was a disapproval reinforced by the length of time she chose to take in getting something cooked. He knew well enough that the preparations necessary for what she had intended to provide that evening – it was seldom nowadays that she asked him in the morning if there was anything he would particularly like – would have been made well in advance. So, in fact, it should not have taken more than a few minutes to give the food its finishing touches on the stove. But time went by and went by and no appetising odour emerged from the little room at the back.

  Should he call out and ask how long she would be? But he had failed to say in the first place that he was under orders to go out to Oceanic College with all speed. If he was to say this now, she would take it into her head that he had invented the need for haste by way of a rebuke.

  So he sat where he was. And fumed.

  Should he forget about having something to eat? Storm into the kitchen at this moment, seize Protima by the arm, drag her out here and do what had to be done?

  But what exactly had to be done? It was all very well for his canteen cronies to boast about ‘giving the biwi a good thrashing up’, but they never mentioned the details. What did they do it with? What would be fair-play only? How did they ensure that, far from being just only the awarding of due and proper punishment, the business did not end up as
one undignified struggle?

  No, this was not the time. The whole thing needed to be thought out with very much more of care.

  But, after only a little longer, he was unable to prevent himself creeping over to the kitchen doorway and parting the bead curtain an inch or two.

  But it was two inches too much.

  ‘I am getting as quickly as I can,’ Protima turned and said. ‘Why must you be so impatient?’

  He returned to his chair.

  More minutes passed. He began to suspect that, had he not gone to the kitchen, he would not still be waiting. But there did not seem to be anything he could do about that now. At least some spicy odours were beginning to float in. Twistingly hungry though they were making him.

  At last Protima came in with the thali. The little heaps of food on it looked every bit as delicious as their wafting smells had indicated. But he felt he had to wolf them down fast as he could.

  All very well to have thought as he was leaving Headquarters that it would be one hundred percent fair to stop at home for some quick sustenance. But he had been here already far longer than he had counted on.

  ‘I am not knowing why I take trouble to cook when you are eating like a pi-dog only,’ Protima said.

  ‘Hurry. Must go.’

  He rose from the table, mouth still full and with a vague gesture that could have meant anything – ‘Thank you for getting food so quickly’ or ‘Wait, and you will find out who is giving orders here’ – he left almost at a run.

  But it was well past dark before at last he located Oceanic College. At first, from the unlit, deserted road on which it lay all he could make out in the light of a solitary bent street-lamp, was a wide stretch of grass with beyond it the faint outlines of what looked like a building constructed not many years before, all slabby concrete and sharp rectangles, even after he had gone right up to the padlocked gate in the high surrounding railing. Every window was blank and lightless. The sole massive door he could just make out as a darker patch on the white front wall was firmly shut. There was no sign even of a watchman.

  Very well, he said to himself, I will be able to report tomorrow that as per instructions I came here and the only one fact I was able to discover is that Oceanic College is altogether damn far from any part of the sea.

  Only, much as I would be liking to say same to Additional Commissioner sahib, he added, I know to one hundred percent I will not at all risk uttering same.

  He gave a weary shrug and began to turn away.

  But then there just caught his eye at a corner of the big building a glimmer of light. It was not from any electric bulb or neon tube, or even from a flashlight. It might have been the light of a match, only it looked larger and stronger.

  He stepped closer to the tall surrounding railing and peered between two of the bars, their iron cool on his forehead.

  At once he saw a second distant point of light split off from that first, and then a third and a fourth. Then he realised what it was he was watching. Torches, tar-soaked sticks, being lit one from another. And, as quickly, he guessed what they were being lit for. It would be for a night morcha.

  Yes, some people were taking out a procession of protest. Students, no doubt. Only young hotheads would think that any protest would be more effective for being carried out by torchlight. And only dreamy students would be so idiotic as to protest where nobody would see.

  And what would they be protesting about? Was this in any way connected with the business he had been sent out here for? Were perhaps Bala Chambhar’s fellow students objecting to police inquiries? Inquiries which, it seemed, had driven the boy to attempt suicide? Had put him into the coma that had blocked further investigations?

  A sudden spurt of determination fountained up in his mind. Yes, by God, he would show those chaps. If they had gone flying back to Delhi, leaving that unfledged chick of a report behind them, well, he would find the answer to how the Statistical Techniques question-paper had been taken from that locked chamber and show them just what a simple Bombay detective could do. By God, he would.

  And – the thought suddenly struck him – could it be that those students down by the college building might at least give him some line to go on in the morning when he came back here and questioned the Principal and any other staff members who ought to know what might have happened? If his own distant college experience was anything to go by, students delighted in gossips and rumours about their lecturers, the more senior the better. And about their fellow students too. So he might well learn something here. He very well might.

  In the distance the torches now had grown to be twenty or more in number and were burning well. By their brighter light he could make out a huddle of figures and, above them, a dozen or more placards, showing palely white in the humidly thick surrounding darkness.

  They were too far away for him to be able to read the slogans that would be scrawled on them. But it would not be long before the march began and then he would perhaps get an idea of what Bala Chambhar’s fellow students thought about the theft of the question-paper.

  Quietly he slipped away along beside the college’s high railing until he came to a patch of dense shadow underneath a thick-leaved neem tree. There he waited.

  In less than two minutes the head of the procession of protest had reached the gate. Evidently someone had possessed themselves of a key to its padlock, easy enough to ‘borrow’, because after a short pause and a good deal of wavering from the leading torch the wide gates were drawn back, the harsh squeal of metal on concrete plain to be heard over the distant excited chattering.

  Then he saw the morcha set off in earnest. Torches held more steadily. Placards lifted in defiance. And a steady chanting beginning to rise up.

  ‘Autocracy murdabad!’

  ‘Principal Bembalkar out! Out, out, out!’

  ‘Autocracy murdabad!’

  ‘Princi, resign! Resign! Resign!’

  So they were demanding that Dr Shambu Bembalkar should quit his post. Why? Could it be because he had somehow let that question-paper be stolen from his chamber? Had done something wrong? Or failed to do something he should have?

  The shouts, often jumbled one on top of the other, were continuing. He listened hard in the darkness and soon made others out.

  ‘We demand right to write BCom!’

  ‘Autocracy murdabad!’

  ‘Give us back our exam!’

  ‘Autocracy murdabad! Princi resign!’

  Ah, so that was it. They had been ready to write their Bachelor of Commerce exam, and because of the theft it had been cancelled. So they were protesting, making their feelings felt. Under the safe cover of darkness.

  Well, all right. Young men must let off steam somehow.

  Now, as the head of the procession got nearer his neem-tree lurking place, he was able even by the chancy light of the torches to read what was written on the upraised placards, much though they were bobbing up and down in time to the chanting.

  Exam Cancel Unfair – We Demand Right to Cheat – You Rig Elections Let Us Rig Exams – Bring Back BCom Exam Now

  He blinked.

  Were these full-scale idiots really and truly insisting that an exam for which one paper at least had been leaked up and down entire Bombay should all the same be held? What sort of a madhouse was it where he was going to have to make his inquiries?

  THREE

  Ghote was so astonished that he almost let the morcha go out of sight into the thick darkness between the rare light-poles along the road. Then he remembered with a jerk that it had been his intention to find out as much as he could about Oceanic College from the protesters. He might, if he was very lucky, actually get to know a possible way in which the Statistical Techniques question-paper had been removed from the Principal’s locked chamber.

  He shot out of his place of concealment under the neem-tree and set off at a loping run after the straggling, chanting line of placard carriers. Soon enough he caught up with the rear rank. But, reckoning that
anyone timid enough to choose that safe position in a demonstration would not be much use to him, he ran on a few steps more and fell into step beside another small cluster of protesters. Only to find himself walking shoulder to shoulder with a girl.

  ‘Miss, Miss,’ he blurted out, all other considerations chased from his head by the discovery of the daughter of some respectable, educated family out alone in the hours of darkness with a mob of hothead boys. ‘Miss, what is it you are doing here at nine – ten o’clock in the night? Are your parents knowing? What do you mean by it all?’

  In the sideways glance he had given the girl he had seen she was appallingly young, perhaps only just seventeen, dangerously young. And, so far as he could see, she was pretty too, dangerously pretty. Her light-green patterned sari shimmered and swayed in the torchlight as she strode purposefully along, proudly holding up one of the placards. If only she knew as much as any police officer about what might happen to a young, pretty girl out late in the night …

  His outburst had caused her to come to a full check in the middle of a particularly loud ‘Princi out, out, out, out’. But now she broke into a peal of laughter. Lively laughter and free.