Cheating Death

by H. R. F. Keating

  The boy turned away.

  ‘Stop,’ Ghote snapped.

  His tone was enough to bring the young man to a quivering halt.

  ‘What year is it you are?’ Ghote demanded, trying hard at the same time to recollect how long Bala had been at the college. Someone had mentioned it. Had it been fat little Dean Potdar?

  But it seemed the effort of trying to remember had taken something from the authority with which he had made his demand. The boy hesitated for an instant and then said with loud bravado ‘I am first-year. Definitely first-year. Bala was second-year only.’

  Ghote was almost certain the claim was a blatant lie. But, he decided, disproving it would entail altogether too many complications. And, besides, there were plenty of other witnesses there waiting.

  It proved, however, that this encounter with the liar had been overheard by all the students at the cycle stand. Some had simply walked hurriedly away, and each of the others he detained immediately claimed also to be a first-year and not to have known Bala.

  For a moment Ghote wondered why they were so reluctant.

  But it was easy enough to understand. Bala had got himself mixed up with the police. The only sure way to avoid getting caught up in the same net was to deny and deny. And denying and denying each of his potential witnesses was.

  He had been vaguely aware all the time that other students were arriving, mostly girls in bright saris or trousered salwar-kameez, and had been hurrying into the building behind him. He glanced at his watch now. Already twenty-eight minutes past seven. Had he missed all his chances? Were the spines and whippy lengths of bamboo of the adage – he found he was sure now it was some sort of monkey trap – flicking across behind him even more thickly?

  But then a last boy on a bicycle came swerving in through the gate and headed at speed for the cycle stand. Ghote recognised him. He was the young shaven but turban-wearing, rebellious Sikh who had been one of the leaders of the night morcha.

  The boy brought his cycle to a sideways-tilting halt, swung a leg over the saddle and thrust the machine towards the attendant.

  Ghote stepped up to him and laid a hand on his arm.

  ‘I am wanting one word.’

  The young Sikh looked at him, evidently recognising him from that night encounter. Sparking rebellion gathered in every limb of his body.

  ‘It is our right to take out any procession we are wishing,’ he said, his voice rising. ‘What for are you damned policewallas interfering and interfering?’

  ‘I am not at all interfering,’ Ghote answered, secretly delighted that the boy had retorted with such fire since just one conciliatory word should make him pliable as wax from a bees’ nest. ‘Take out as many morchas as you are liking, by night or by day.’

  And it seemed to work. The boy looked almost comically astonished.

  ‘What is your good name?’ Ghote asked, following up this success with all the friendliness he could muster.

  ‘It is Mohinder Singh Mann,’ the boy replied. ‘But what it is you are wanting?’

  Ghote smiled.

  ‘Just only to find out two-three little things,’ he said. ‘You are knowing Bala Chambhar, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I am knowing.’

  But a note of caution had at once crept in. Plain to be heard.

  ‘Were you seeing Bala last Tuesday?’ Ghote asked quickly. ‘I am trying to learn where he was in the time before the poor fellow was taking those pills that were almost causing him to expire.’

  ‘Pills?’

  Mohinder gave him a quick look he found hard to interpret.

  ‘Yes,’ Ghote said, ‘were you not knowing that it was with sleeping pills that Bala was attempting his suicide?’

  ‘No, no. It is news to me only,’ the boy answered, his voice becoming vaguer and more distant with every word.

  ‘Well, yes. That much I am ascertaining at KEM Hospital yesterday. But swallowing many, many pills or throwing oneself in front of oncoming train or into some well, it is all the same if one is determined to end one’s life. No, what I am interested to find out is who Bala was seeing, who he was talking with, in those hours before he made up his mind to do that thing.’

  He saw Mohinder stiffening in front of his eyes.

  ‘Then, Inspector, I am not at all able to help. I was not seeing Bala that day, or for many days before. Not to be talking with.’

  ‘I see. But are you knowing anybody who was? Who were his special friends in the college?’

  Mohinder shrugged.

  ‘I do not know, Inspector. I think he did not have too many friends. You know what it is with those harijan boys. You try to be nice to them but it is not easy to become fast friends when they are having such different lives.’

  ‘Yes, all right. But can you think of one single boy or girl he was more friendly with than with others?’

  ‘No. No, Inspector. I cannot. And I must go now. I must not be late for class.’

  Ghote put a detaining hand on the boy’s arm again and smiled.

  ‘Oh, come,’ he said, ‘I am betting you have done many worse things than be two – three minutes late.’

  ‘Yes. No. No, I must go.’

  And the boy pulled his arm from Ghote’s grasp and set off at a run towards the blank concrete-faced college building.

  Ghote stood where he was, experiencing a vague sense of puzzlement. Something was not as it ought to be. Or as he had thought it was.

  But he could not get at it.

  He gave a shrug and turned towards the gate, with the half-formed idea in his mind that the best he could do now was to go over to the Paris Hotel tea shop and hope to find a few students idling there as there had been the day before.

  Then just as he set off – the feeling of puzzlement dragged at him still – a loud voice spoke almost in his ear.

  ‘Oah, that Mohinder Singh Mann is one damn bloody liar. Yes, I am saying it. Krishna Iyer, MA Madras, reduced to cycle-stand attendant.’

  Ghote turned, taking his first good look at the man.

  He was a big fellow, somehow of a slobbering build, all the more apparent since he wore only a bright, multi-coloured lungi wrapped round his waist and falling to somewhere near his ankles. His face, which was oval and fresh-looking as an egg, was marked by the single vertical thick white-painted line that indicated mastery of one of the sacred Vedas.

  ‘What it is you are saying?’ he asked him, more sharply than he had meant.

  Krishna Iyer, MA Madras, grinned with wobbly unease.

  ‘Oah, Inspector, I am not telling one word of untruth. I am always speaking truth, exact and complete. Oah yes. And I am saying that Mohinder Singh Mann is one bloody liar.’

  ‘Very well, what was he lying about?’

  ‘Bala Chambhar he is knowing very well. Student leader he may be and Bala Chambhar worst boy in whole damn college, but they are heads together often and always.’

  ‘Are they? But why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Oah, Inspector, truth must prevail. That I am saying and stating. Truth must prevail. Never will I hesitate to say same.’

  Ghote looked at him again.

  ‘But I am thinking,’ he said, the sight abruptly sharp in his mind of the Sikh boy carelessly shoving his bicycle towards the attendant, ‘you would not be so keen for truth to prevail if it was someone else than Mohinder Singh Mann you were calling as a liar.’

  ‘Oah, yes, Inspector. Too bloody right. That fellow is treating Krishna Iyer, MA Madras, as if he was a coolie only, fourth–fifth class.’

  ‘So perhaps Mohinder is not so much of a liar?’

  ‘No, no, Inspector. Truth must prevail. Mohinder Singh Mann was telling most gigantic whopper when he was saying he was not at all knowing Bala Chambhar.’

  ‘Well, I believe you then.’

  Ghote turned away, wondering whether he was in fact right to believe the slobbery South Indian, who after all seemed to be possibly a little mad, or more than a little. On the other hand,
though, he might be no more than somewhat eccentric, and with graduate unemployment what it was it was no shame to him that, if he was indeed an MA, he was working as a cycle-stand attendant.

  ‘Oah, Inspector, in one hour in canteen. Always.’

  For a moment Ghote wondered how the cycle-stand attendant could know that. But then he thought how in a place like this, or anywhere really in talkative Bombay, everybody was apt to know everything about everybody. The fellow’s loudly voiced hint reverberated after him, too, as he made his way towards the Paris Hotel. Was he merely attempting to gain revenge on Mohinder Singh Mann? Or was he, for all his oddity, really a believer that ‘truth must prevail’ in every circumstance?

  Well, yes, he thought, whichever way it is, I suppose I had better go to the canteen in an hour and tackle that young man. After all, that is almost the only line I have.

  TEN

  The Paris Hotel provided Ghote with no new line to pursue. There was no one at all at its tables. The proprietor, the moment he had stepped inside, greeted him with even more eagerness than he had welcomed the blustering Punjabi security officer, Amar Nath with.

  ‘Inspector, Inspector. Very nice to see. You are liking Paris Hotel very much, yes? You are coming here each and every day? Inspector, you will never have to pay one paisa. It is an honour to have such a burra sahib to eat my food. Boy! One double egg omelet for the inspector. Big eggs, big eggs. The biggest.’

  ‘No,’ Ghote said in an explosion of rejection, fuelled not a little by the horrible odour everywhere of over-boiled tea. ‘No, I was just only looking in. I must go. I must go. Appointment.’

  He retreated, at once furious with himself for reacting so violently to that gush of ridiculous flattery. But perhaps, he thought, he had been still somehow put off-balance by something in his encounter with Mohinder Singh Mann, or by the cycle-stand attendant’s comments afterwards.

  However, sorting that out must wait till the Sikh boy got to the canteen.

  To pass the time till then he made his way round the whole stretch of Oceanic College’s railings-guarded compound. It was, he soon realised, absurd to walk so far in the already strongly sullen heat. But once begun there was nothing else for it but to go on.

  There must be a lot of money invested in the college, he thought idly as he tramped along, if it could occupy so much land. Would it be a profitable investment? Well, if someone like Mrs Rajwani, wife of Rajwani Enterprises, was at the head of the trustees, the concern was almost certainly worth her time. So, was it important that its Principal should be a mild academic, easily made to do whatsoever the trustees wanted? Or to overlook whatsoever they wanted overlooked?

  And did this have any bearing on the theft of the question-paper? It might do. It might. After all, demands now had been made for Principal Bembalkar’s resignation. Demands, if what he had gathered had been going on behind the Principal’s door was right, Dr Bembalkar had been prevented from yielding to only with a prolonged barrage of arguments.

  But what to do by way of finding out if all that was part and parcel of the business? Nothing, until he had some hard facts about what had actually happened. And those, as the CBI wallas had quickly realised, were not going to come from that boy lying in a coma in the KEM Hospital.

  Still, they might, just might, come from a few determined words with young Mohinder Singh Mann.

  The hour before classes broke was not yet up. But as soon as he reached the gates again he marched into the building. A painted arrow on the far wall, for all that it was almost smothered by vaguely political messages in Marathi and English scrawled all over the once-white surface, directed him to the student canteen.

  It turned out to be a depressing, low-ceilinged room crammed with too many grey plastic-topped tables and cooled by too few ceiling fans. At the far end a tea-urn stood on a counter, also in grey plastic, with ranged behind it a stack of crates containing Limca and Fanta bottles, pale greenish yellow or full orange. Otherwise the place was empty.

  He looked at his watch.

  As he flopped down at a table in a corner, glad to rest after his long walk in the sun, he found his thoughts sliding away. To his wife.

  What was it going to be best to use for what he had to do? A chappal off one of his feet? No, too much of a childish thing. A whip then? A good whipping? No, no. Altogether too much of cruel. What was wanted was simply to show Protima, definitely, who was boss. So some sort of a cane? Like the one his father had had as a schoolmaster, and had not hesitated to use? Or a belt? That was what the gup-shup at Headquarters usually mentioned. A good leather belt.

  Only he did not, as it happened, possess such a thing.

  He sighed.

  It was difficult. Difficult. But action had to be taken, definitely.

  From outside there came a sudden loud splat of clattering feet. First classes over. Mohinder Singh Mann would be here at any moment.

  Good. Something really to get down to. Instead of …

  Mohinder did not come with the first rush of students, racing across to the counter and calling clamorously for service. But, to Ghote’s relief, the young Sikh was not far behind. He watched him as he went to the crush at the counter and eventually came away with two bottles of Fanta.

  Getting to his feet, he set off on a path that would cross the boy’s. Other students, precariously holding cups of tea or clutching handfuls of cold-drink bottles, were hurrying to any vacant table, shouting to friends, exchanging insults, fooling. In the turmoil he momentarily lost sight of his quarry.

  Then he saw him. He had found a place at a table. But there waiting was green-blooming, wind-swayed Sarita Karatkar, last seen when he had cunningly thwarted her by implying in front of her fellow night marchers that she had been helping the police, fearful treason.

  He cursed. He had seen himself getting Mohinder on his own and observing his least reaction as he banged at him an accusation of lying about his friendship with Bala Chambhar. But, with that sparky creature there, it might not be so easy to get the boy away on his own.

  He strode across, however.

  ‘Mohinder Singh Mann,’ he said, grimly formal. ‘I am wanting one word. In private.’

  ‘It is Inspector Ghote,’ Sarita Karatkar bounced in, mischief at once twinkling in her eyes.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he answered, somehow pleased she did not seem to bear him a grudge. ‘Good morning, Miss Karatkar.’

  He turned again to the Sikh.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘kindly come with me.’

  But again it was the girl who answered.

  ‘Whatever do you want with Mohinder, Inspector? You’re not going to drag him off in handcuffs for leading our morcha?’

  ‘No, no. Already I have told, he can take out as many morchas as he is wanting. No, it is something altogether different I am wishing to talk.’

  ‘Then talk away, Inspector. There’s nothing about Mohinder I don’t know.’

  She turned to the boy then.

  ‘Or is there?’ she asked, sparkling with innocent enjoyment. ‘What have you been hiding in the Student Union office, Mohinderji? Was it some dirty books that whoever it was who tried to break in there last week was wanting? Or are you living on immoral earnings only? Or – I know – you have outraged the modesty of one–two thousand women. Confess, confess.’

  The tall young Sikh grinned at her.

  ‘Oh, if it was just only dirty books that thief, whoever he was, wanted he would be welcome to take and to take,’ he said. ‘But what it was, if you are asking me, is documents about how we are planning to get something of justice in this college.’

  And Ghote found that, despite what might be illegal activities the young Sikh and his friends were planning, there had been such a shining light of idealism in what he had said that he could not but look on him favourably. If India still produced young people as well-intentioned and bubbling with energy as Mohinder, and for the matter of that as impudent Sarita, then perhaps the student world was not in such a bad state as
he had come to believe.

  He realised too, that, since he would not in fact be taking the boy away for any offence, he had better reconcile himself to putting his question about Bala Chambhar with Sarita sitting there and with the noise of all the other students – a group at one table were blowing tunes across the tops of their partly empty Limca bottles – all around.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Mohinder, I have to ask just only one thing. Why did you lie to me about how well you were knowing Bala Chambhar?’

  But yet again Sarita Karatkar bounced cheerfully in.

  ‘Oh, Mohinderji, were you trying to lie to Inspector Ghote? You should know he is not at all a person you can deceive. Very, very clever man.’

  Mohinder pulled a face.

  ‘I’m sorry, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I really should have known better.’

  ‘You should have been better,’ Sarita said. ‘Telling lies. Oh, Mohinder.’

  ‘Yes, well, I do try not to tell more lies than I have to,’ the boy conceded. ‘But, to tell you the truth –’

  ‘Shabash, shabash,’ Sarita broke in. ‘Holy truth at last.’

  ‘To tell you the truth, Inspector,’ Mohinder went on, ‘I had from the moment I was hearing that Bala had tried to take his life, a feeling of uneasy. And because I didn’t want too much to look that feeling in the full face I pretended I knew Bala less well than I did.’

  Ghote remained silent. He was conscious that he had just learnt something. Something perhaps well worth learning.

  ‘Well, Inspector, aren’t you going to slap this boy about just a little?’ Sarita demanded. ‘Such a lying riff-raff as he is.’

  ‘No,’ Ghote answered slowly. ‘No, I shall have to leave you now.’

  He got up and went quickly out of the noisy, crowded room – ‘Pass the cigarette, pass the cigarette,’ a boy shouted as he went by – because there were things he had to think about. What Mohinder Singh Mann had said had been just the little push needed to send a whole train of incidents and observations sliding and rattling into place.

  What it is, he said to himself, crystallising it, is that Bala Chambhar was not at all trying to commit suicide. Someone has attempted to murder him.