Cheating Death

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘Sir, the problem is this. Your chamber is said to be locked whenever you are not inside itself, and you are possessing its sole and only key. So when and how could the boy Bala have got in here? Delhi itself is wanting to know.’

  Suck, suck, suck at the empty pipe.

  But now Ghote steeled himself once again not to respond, however long he had to endure the sound. The silence across the wide gleaming teak table grew.

  And grew.

  Suck.

  Suck, suck.

  Suck, suck, suck.

  Suck.

  Till, again, it was Ghote’s nerve that broke.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I am understanding from Dean Potdar that last Monday when this theft must have taken place you had occasion to come out from this chamber to rebuke some student rag or prank.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Principal did at least answer. ‘Yes, a disgraceful scene.’

  He sighed, almost groaned.

  ‘You know, Inspector – Inspector Khote, was it?’

  ‘Ghote, sir. Inspector Ghote.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. Forgive me. But, you know, Inspector, the student today is a very different young person from when I was in college myself, or even I suppose when you were. They demand, you know, even the right to cheat. The right to cheat. You can imagine the difficulties we have in invigilating examinations. It is nothing short of a nightmare. A nightmare.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I am sure that it must be such,’ Ghote said quickly, before that suck-sucking could start again. ‘And, sir, you must also have to take very much of precaution to guard question-papers before exams are beginning. And that is why –’

  But Dr Bembalkar, as if Ghote had not intervened at all, stumbled into heavy speech once more.

  ‘I can understand their feelings, however. Yes, their situation is considerably different from what it was in my day. Yes. Then an examination was a test, a test of one’s abilities. One read all the syllabus, putting in as much effort as one was capable of. Then one wrote the exam, and one abided by the result. But now … Now these young people expect to succeed.’

  For a moment the stem of the pipe hovered near his mouth, and Ghote searched desperately for something to say to avert a new spell of silence and sucking.

  However, he need not have worried. More bullock-cart creaking speech came from the pipeless lips.

  ‘An exam to the youth today – and we in India are gravely to blame for this – an exam to them is, one might say, no more than a necessary step on their path to their chosen profession, or the profession parents have chosen for them. It is necessary for them that they should pass. That they should put the obstacle behind them. It is no more than something that has to be, in whatsoever way, surmounted. So to them the word cheat has a very different complexion than it did in my young day. Then it was a sin, no less. Now it means something more like a ruse, a necessary and even commendable ruse.’

  Ghote, who in his time at Elphinston had felt the examinations he faced were, like those of Principal Bembalkar’s youth, tests of how much he had learnt and nothing else, absorbed the meaning of this ponderous lecture.

  And felt a spasm of irritation that it had come between him and finding the answer to the mystery he had come to solve.

  Hastily he made an effort to get back to what he had been asking when Dr Bembalkar’s long and gloomy diatribe had begun.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I was inquiring about the incident that was occurring below your veranda on the day the paper was taken itself.’

  The Principal fell back into thought. But the pipe, mercifully, stayed reasonably far from his mouth.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘I was hearing some sort of a disturbance. Noise, shouts and so forth. Eventually I went out to see what was causing such a fearful hullabaloo. I am afraid I found one of my lecturers, indeed a lecturer in my own discipline, English Literature, was being – I can only say – attacked. I addressed those responsible. Gentlemen, I said, as your senior I beg you to cease this unseemly business. But they took little notice. Yes, little notice.’

  He lapsed again into silence, and before Ghote could think of any way of stopping it the pipe once more got to his mouth. But he sucked at it only twice. Then, with the stem still between his lips, he gave a long sigh and resumed.

  ‘The truth, I am sorry to have to say, is that I am sometimes not as strict with delinquent students as perhaps I ought to be. Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet, Inspector, I am often too much sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’

  Briefly Ghote thought about those poetic words. They certainly seemed to say something he had himself sometimes half-thought. Yes, certainly the – what it was? – pale cast of thought could sickly over decisions to act. It happened to himself, no doubt about it. Protima, and his decision to … But he must stick to the matter in hand.

  He straightened himself up, determined not to be diverted again.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I must ask this. When you were attempting to deal with that disturbance is it possible that you left your door open behind you? Was Mrs Cooper present at that time, sir? I think she must have been somehow absent. Otherwise she would have told you what was occurring, rather than you yourself just only hearing the row. So, sir, can it have been at that short moment that Bala Chambhar was slipping into this room?’

  But this question Dr Bembalkar answered without giving himself any time for thought.

  ‘No, Inspector,’ he said. ‘Mrs Cooper was absent at that time, yes. It was her lunch period. But what you have proposed would nevertheless be quite impossible.’

  ‘Impossible? But, sir –’

  ‘No, you see, Inspector, that ragging party – and I fear that is too weak a term for it – was led by just this young man Chambhar.’

  ‘It was led by Bala Chambhar?’

  ‘Yes, yes, Inspector. I have had occasion to rebuke the young man more than once. So I clearly recognised him. I even called to him by name, though without any success I regret to say.’

  Principal Bembalkar went back at that to his blank sucking at his pipe. But now Ghote was oblivious of the sound. He had too much to think about.

  The point is, he inwardly addressed himself, however much it is now seeming Bala Chambhar is off the hooks, that question-paper nevertheless disappeared from this chamber itself, and next day Bala Chambhar was selling copies to each and every BCom student he could find. So there must be some link-up between whoever was that thief and Bala. What it is? And – this is something else – Principal Bembalkar is not happy. He is at this moment looking one hundred percent like a man with very much of worry. What is the cause of that? It may be just only that he is wanting to resign and for some reason that very influential lady, Mrs Rajwani, is not letting. But also he has not at all been good at answering my questions about this selfsame disappearance. No, there is something more to be got here. Definitely.

  He gave a sharp little cough.

  ‘Dr Bembalkar,’ he said, ‘can you, despite what you have told, in any way account for Bala Chambhar selling that paper, stolen from this room itself? How was that happening? How?’

  The Principal’s head jerked up. But he made no immediate reply.

  For a moment Ghote thought of repeating what he had said, even more forcefully. But then it struck him that silence, after all, might yet be his best weapon.

  He sat still and waited.

  The minutes passed, marked out by the regular sucks at the Principal’s pipe. One minute. Two, certainly. Had they stretched to three?

  Suddenly Dr Bembalkar gave a loud groan.

  ‘Inspector.’

  Ghote said nothing.

  ‘Inspector, there is something I should tell you.’

  Still Ghote said not a word.

  ‘Inspector, on that Monday, that black, black Monday, I was remiss. More than remiss. I was derelict in my duty. Inspector, after I had attempted to deal with that disturbance I was so – so upset in myself that I decided to take my lunch early. To settle m
y nerves. And – And, Inspector, I walked away from this chamber and left in its door my keys.’

  EIGHT

  Ghote’s first reaction, emerging from the Principal’s office on to the long balcony outside, was one of triumph. The cat in the adage had scratched and bitten its way to freedom. He had found the answer to a mystery that had defeated the men from the Central Bureau of Investigation itself.

  But then, as he began to think about the report he would write and how he would have to suppress direct criticism of the CBI wallas but at the same time make it clear that he had bested them, he saw that his task was, in fact, by no means over. Yes, he had solved the mystery of how that question-paper could have been spirited out of a locked room. But at the same time Principal Bembalkar had made it clear beyond doubt that Bala Chambhar had been actively taking part in that rag when his chamber was unlocked and its guardian rakshas absent. So, until it was established how the stolen paper had actually got into Bala’s hands his report would have to remain unwritten.

  And finding that link was not going to be all plain sailings, he thought. Perhaps those Delhi fellows had not been checked by such a minor obstacle after all.

  Was the poor cat yet more tangled up in that adage?

  What inquiries could he make now that the CBI wallas had not? Bala Chambhar, lying almost as if dead in the KEM Hospital, was an immovable obstacle between himself and the truth, just as he had been for the CBI men. Without a clue from the boy, some hint which, had he been in a cell, could have been tricked out of him, or threatened out of him, or even got out of him with slapping or worse – those fellows from the Centre would not have hesitated – there was no telling who to see here in the college, what to ask.

  There was nowhere to turn. Yes, no way out of the thick, twining branches and creepers making up, one after the other, his adage.

  For a moment he contemplated simply giving up for the time being, trusting to luck or to something, to anything to give him some lead of some sort eventually. In the meanwhile he could go home, take rest.

  Or, no, he could do what he had already put off doing for longer than he had meant to. He could get the business of beating Protima over and done with. He could make it plain once and for all who was master.

  Yes, he would go back home and at least achieve one thing.

  Or …

  Well, perhaps he ought just to go to the KEM Hospital first and check on Bala Chambhar. The boy might have come out of his coma. Or he might, perhaps, have risen out of coma enough to have murmured some words. And, after all, if he had just done that, surely those words would very likely be concerned with what he had poisoned himself over, what would have been obsessing him at the time. And a nurse or a doctor might have heard them, remembered them.

  Yes, it was definitely his duty to go, not back home, but to the hospital.

  Getting there, however, was not as easy as all that, thanks to the traffic-jostling distance between far-out Oceanic College and Acharya Dhonde Marg, or King Edward Road as it had been when he had first come to Bombay, hence the King Edward Memorial Hospital. And when at last he got down to the southern heart of the city the mere bulk of the huge hospital almost proved too much for him.

  It was not until well into the afternoon, long after he had abandoned his intolerably over-heated vehicle in the big dusty compound in front of the vast building, that he succeeded in locating the Dr P. P. Shah mentioned in the CBI officers’ report as having Bala Chambhar under his care. Back and forth he had made his way through the endless labyrinth of long, white-tiled corridors, spittle splashed with red betelnut juice. A dozen times he was told by a dozen different, indifferent people ranging from the Resident Medical Officer down to ward boys that without Dr Shah’s agreement there could be no question of his even seeing Bala Chambhar, let alone of finding out whether he had emerged from his coma.

  But at last he found himself outside an office with a peon squatting next to its doorway and, beside the drooping green curtain that hung across it, a board saying Dr P. P. Shah.

  ‘Doctor is inside?’ he brusquely asked the peon, almost at exhaustion point now.

  The man scrambled to his feet.

  ‘No one may be seeing,’ he muttered.

  ‘I am a police officer. I am making inquiries. I need to see Dr Shah.’

  ‘No one may be –’

  Ghote jerked the green curtain aside and stepped through.

  The reason, he found at once, why no one might be seeing Dr P. P. Shah was that the doctor was fast asleep in his not very clean white coat on a bare cot at the back of his little cabin.

  Without hesitation Ghote marched across, took him by the shoulder and shook.

  ‘What – What –’

  ‘Dr Shah, I am a police officer. Inspector Ghote, Crime Branch. I am here to make inquiry about one Bala Chambhar admitted here suffering from poisoning, self-administered. And I am requiring your full assistance.’

  Dr Shah heaved himself upright on the cot, blinked several times and scratched hard at his left armpit.

  ‘What Bala Chambhar it is?’ he said drowsily. ‘I am having too many patients to know names and what-all.’

  ‘He is a boy who was brought in here after attempting suicide only,’ Ghote said. ‘He was called as the culprit in one exam paper theft.’

  ‘Ah. Ah, yes. Bed 52. Very, very interesting case.’

  Dr Shah rubbed vigorously at his eyes, turned back to the cot, located his spectacles at the bed’s head, and put them on.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Ghote said, his spirits reviving as he saw the doctor taking more notice. ‘A case Delhi itself is altogether interested in.’

  ‘Delhi, Delhi. What am I caring about Delhi?’ Dr Shah answered, heaving himself to his feet.

  He went over to a basin in the corner and spat.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘case is interesting from medical point of view. It was I myself who was spotting unusual symptoms and sending specimens for analysis. And you are knowing result?’

  Ghote, weary in body and mind, did not in the least care what the result of any medical analysis might be. But he had to keep on the good side of Dr Shah.

  ‘Yes? What it is?’ he asked.

  ‘Somnomax Five,’ Dr Shah answered triumphantly.

  ‘Somnomax? What is that? There were five of them only?’

  ‘No, no. Somnomax Five is one somnifacient.’

  A little leap in Ghote’s brain saved him from having to ask what the long word meant. ‘Somnolent’, was it not an equivalent of ‘sleepy’?

  ‘They are sleeping pills?’ he said briskly. ‘The boy, Bala Chambhar, was committing suicide by taking sleeping pills?’

  ‘Yes, that is so,’ Dr Shah replied, evidently a little put out that his diagnosis should have been so quickly caught up with by a layman. ‘He had taken almost the fatal dose of this new American somnifacient. First case we have had in whole hospital.’

  ‘Oh, too good,’ Ghote said. ‘Too good, Doctor. First-class work.’

  From Dr Shah’s complacent expression it seemed the praise had been enough. Ghote ventured on what he had come all the way to ask.

  ‘And the boy? I may see? He is out of coma now you are knowing what is the poison?’

  Dr Shah laughed.

  ‘Out of coma? Not at all. No, I tell you, Inspector, it is a hundred-to-one against that the boy will ever come out of that state. A thousand-to-one even.’

  Ghote felt depression sweep down.

  ‘He is not even murmuring? Saying one or two words only?’

  ‘No, no. Nothing at all of that sort. It is profound coma. Profound. Not too far from expiry itself.’

  ‘But I may see?’ he said with a sigh he could not suppress.

  ‘If you are wishing. Why not?’

  Dr Shah led him along to what proved to be the nearest ward and, marching rapidly down its long lines of close-packed white-painted iron bedsteads with patients sitting cross-legged on them or apathetically lying on top of their thin striped matt
resses, he came at last to Bed No 52.

  A white, or whitish coarse sheet with K E M Hospital in red several times stamped on it had been drawn up over the inert body. But at the bed’s foot the boy’s calves and feet protruded, the soles calloused from long going without shoe or chappal, the calves pitted with the marks of years of boils, signs of poor nutrition. While, above, the boy’s face stared up sightless to the ceiling.

  And there was nothing more to see. That was it. A body, just visibly and slowly breathing. Those feet. A face that had lost any expression and might have been almost any age from fifteen to forty.

  Ghote stood for a moment or two more looking.

  There was not the slightest movement other than the faint up and down motion of the grey-white sheet over the chest.

  He turned to Dr Shah.

  ‘Thank you for all your helps,’ he said.

  End of trail. Nothing for it now but to go home. Protima would quickly get him something to eat. Or … Ought he to get that business over first? And afterwards state he wanted to eat whatever it was he wanted to eat and not what Protima insisted that he really wanted?

  He wandered slowly through the maze of white-tiled, red-splashed corridors. But all too soon he came out to the pale brown, stony expanse of the compound where his vehicle stood waiting.

  Then – he felt it as a sudden mercy – a thought struck him. Bala Chambhar had a home address. It was Chawl No 4, Dadasaheb Phalke Marg. Opposite somewhere called the Vishnu Shoe Clinic. The details had been in the CBI report. He had them by-hearted. Surely it would be worth going there to see if the boy had left any sort of clues.

  It might take him all the rest of the afternoon to find the place. Perhaps even longer. There was a whole slum behind Dada Phalke Marg. Ved would be back at home before he reached there himself. So there would be no question of carrying out that beating today. A pity, but it could not be helped.

  It did not take him long to find the Vishnu Shoe Clinic. It was a bright shop, with a red and yellow painted sign, devoted to the repair of shoes more complex than the simple chappals that pavement mochis dealt with as they squatted at street corners. A strong odour of new leather pervaded the whole pavement outside it. Chawl No 4 ought to be somewhere behind the shops on the other side.