Under a Monsoon Cloud: an Inspector Ghote Mystery Page 8

  Protima made no answer to this tirade. But when at last she did speak what she said came at Ghote like a flung bucket of cold water.

  ‘Then there is one thing to do only. You must give out a lie.’

  Her voice in the dark was calm and resolved.

  ‘But – But – But I cannot do that. Oh, cover up for a fellow officer when it would not make much of difference, that I could do. That was what I was doing for Tiger Kelkar. That was all I was doing. But to lie for myself now that he has gone. To lie not just only to someone who is asking something, but to lie and lie before an Inquiry. No, I cannot do it.’

  ‘But you must. If you do not you would not have your work and we shall be ground down to beggars also. You, I myself, Ved. To beggars.’

  Ghote lay there in the darkness. Protima, a vague outline against the lesser darkness of the window behind her, was no longer that softly emanating presence, wafting towards him sympathy, hope. Useless hope and ineffectual sympathy, but hope nevertheless. Now she was the tower of a fort looking down on an enemy country. Refusing passage.

  The minutes passed.

  He felt that he must say something more. But he was not going to give in. He had told her what was in the core of his heart, and there it was.

  At last he found a few words.

  ‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow we would talk again. Perhaps I shall be able to sleep now … You must sleep also.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Protima answered, rising silently from the cot. ‘But you must tell that lie. I know it.’

  He did sleep, but not much and not for a long time after Protima had gone back to her own bed. And when morning came he knew he was not going to keep his half-promise of talking again.

  He knew still, grittily and snarlingly, that he did not want to put himself in a position to be persuaded or cajoled or bribed or bullied into changing his mind. He had not been ready, when it had come down to it, to lie his way out of the black trouble he had got himself into. And now, in the light of day, he was prepared to do it still less.

  So, as soon as he decently could, he announced that he was going for a walk. Taking a Sunday morning stroll had never been a custom with him, but Protima made no comment when he said he was going and she even, with a quick flash of fire, silenced young Ved when he seemed inclined to question this departure from the normal.

  He tramped out – the pavements seemed hardly to have lost the stored heat of the sultry day before – and set off in the first direction that occurred to him.

  He knew that what he ought to be doing was thinking out precisely what he should say in the memo he had to have on the Commissioner’s desk by 0900 hours next morning. But he knew that he was going to do no such thing. He was too full of a glowering determination to have done with the whole business, to come out with the entire truth about that appalling, muddled night and let what would happen then happen.

  So he marched grimly along scarcely seeing any of the city’s Sunday morning sights, the squatting man holding an arm high to have the hair shaved from under it by a pavement barber, boys playing cricket in a side lane happily free of passers-by, the card in the window of a television and radio shop reading loftily Forgiveness is Better Than Revenge – Yes, he thought briefly, but is weakness better than anger? – a pair of khaki-clad municipal cleaners, baskets on heads, drifting along picking up rubbish from the gutter, a madman holding in one hand a hole-pocked umbrella against the sun and with the other furiously menacing unseen enemies.

  Somewhere on his determined, black-thoughted tramp he realized that a cloud had darkened the sun and looked up.

  Yes, dark enough as a cloud but nowhere near to being filled with the monsoon rain that would tumble out in a delicious cooling downpour.

  He wondered then if Protima had made all her monsoon preparations. She ought to have put silica gel pouches in his shoes. At an Inquiry he would have to wear uniform, probably his review uniform, and what if the shoes were green with mould? But gels cost three rupees each, and in a month or two, perhaps less, he might have no income at all.

  His eye was caught by a huddle of street boys beside the kerb, very much intent on whatever it was they were doing, arguing hotly among themselves, oblivious of anyone near.

  And abruptly he knew what it was they were busy about. They were blocking a drain so that, when the monsoon did come, the torrential rainwater would not be able to gurgle away and there would be a deep flood – Yes, the road dipped just here – and cars that had come to a stop could be pushed to dry land by boys who happened to be there, and who would be rewarded.

  It happened every monsoon.

  Purposefully he set off towards the group. He could think of no particular section of the Indian Penal Code to hammer down on to their trifling crime. But crime it was and he was a police officer.

  He came to a dead halt some two or three paces from the unnoticing huddle. Yes, he was a police officer now, but for how long was he going to go on being one? In a few weeks at the most he would be no more than an ordinary citizen, no longer specifically charged with upholding the law, keeping the peace, righting wrong, protecting the innocent.

  He stood looking unseeingly now at the jabbering conspiracy of urchins, his lips pursed.

  Then he turned slowly, and slowly made his way home. He knew that Protima would at once ask him what he intended to do, as if the purpose of his walk could only have been to think out his position. But nevertheless he went home.

  And Protima, at once, pulled him into the little windowless kitchen so as to be able to talk out of sight of Ved, engrossed in a paperback Sunny Gavaskar, Cricket Hero. In her eagerness she did not even allow him time to kick the chappals off his feet before entering the little room. And there she looked him straight in the eye and fired out one short question.

  ‘Well, you have decided to lie as much as you must?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  But he knew that he had failed to put into that single syllable all the force he would have done the night before. And Protima detected instantly the undertone of doubt.

  ‘How can I persuade?’ she said, almost with tears. ‘Why you will not see reason? It is your whole life you would be saving. It is our livelihood also.’

  ‘But how can I lie and lie?’ he asked, and again knew he had been less adamant than he should have been.

  She darted him a glance then which, he knew, would at any other time have been the prelude to an outburst of within-the-family fury. But now she was forcing that back. The situation was too serious for everyday ways.

  ‘Please, my husband,’ she said, ‘if you will not listen to me, will you do one thing for me?’

  He scented a trap. But she had earned an answer.

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘Would you come with me to the temple, to Pandit Balkrishan? He would give you a good advice.’

  A flame of revolt shot up in him.

  ‘No. No. You know I am never having anything to do with those priest fellows.’

  ‘Yes, well I am knowing. But till now you have never been on the edge of being no longer a police officer.’

  Ghote felt the words as a thumping blow. They had done no more than put before him what he had looked at in his mind a hundred times in the last few days, the very thought that had sent him turning on his heels as he had advanced upon the urchin wrongdoers at the road drain. But somehow, coming from his wife’s own lips, they seemed to have a force that was redoubled. More than redoubled, was twenty, fifty times more affecting.

  But to go to Protima’s latest hero-worshipped pandit? The man whose praises he had had to hear sung for the past year or more. And had had difficulty keeping his mouth shut each time. To go to that fellow for wisdom: it would be a double betrayal. It would be betraying his long-held convictions about the mumbo-jumbo of religion, and it would be admitting the possibility of abandoning his brick-built determination not to stand before the Commissioner’s Inquiry and lie.

  ‘But – But – ’ he said, searching more to
find a stance he could justify than for words of answer.

  Protima stood facing him in the little kitchen, its air still tangily smoky from the puris she had fried for breakfast. In the confined space she was of necessity almost close up against him. He could not avoid her gaze, direct as an upwards dagger thrust.

  ‘My husband, I have not often begged of you in the years of our marriage, and I would not beg for myself. But it is for you, you yourself, that I am begging. Come and hear what Panditji has to tell.’

  ‘Oh, yes then, yes, yes, yes,’ he shouted, and turned and marched out again, out of the kitchen, out to the street.

  But he knew that he would return in time to be led like a goat about to be sacrificed to visit that afternoon Pandit Balkrishan.

  Sure enough, late afternoon found him with Protima in one of her best saris making his way, silent and rebelliously sulky within, up the steps of the narrow crowded path leading to the Banganga Tank on the heights of Walkeshwar and to the temple by its waters where Pandit Balkrishan was a priest. At another time he might have enjoyed the bright and busy scene: a pair of men pounding green coriander and purplish onions to prepare masala, the dark open interior of a shop, its shelves lined with metal bowls heaped high with spices and condiments, rich brown, pure white, vibrant yellow, a woman leading a bony cow on a rope with grass to sell by the handful to anyone wishing to gain merit by feeding the slowly chewing animal. But all he could think of now was how much he hated the trappings and tarnishings of religion and how in a few minutes he was to be plunged into the middle of them for the first time in years.

  Soon they came to the big, green-watered expanse of the Tank, that holiest of places, held to be equal to Mother Ganges, shaded at its sides by delicate light green pipal trees, looked down upon by old heaped-high buildings, its steps crumbling but thronged with half-naked or wet sari-clinging pilgrims all among the chickens scratching and pecking in the sun, with other worshippers by the score in the water, dipping and praying.

  Now Protima was leading him past the chief temple with the polished black stone Nandi bull outside and pilgrims entering in a constant stream, tugging each one at the cord of the bell over their heads as they passed. And then they were at the temple where Pandit Balkrishan was a pujari.

  He was conducting worship as they entered, a big shaven-headed man with his one remaining long tuft dangling down on massive fleshy pale brown shoulders and the pair of heavy spectacles he wore slipping off the tops of his ears as he ducked and sang.

  But it was what he was singing that struck at Ghote like a snake rearing up from deep unsuspected darkness. Jai Jagdish Hare. It was the song of prayer he remembered from the days when his mother had taken him with her to the village temple when he was too young even to have dreamt of the rebellion of later years. He could feel now, suddenly, the texture of her sari as his hand had clutched its corner. And he could hear again the pujari of that small, ill-kept temple of long ago. His son, Ram, had been his own best friend, a boy marked out by the violence of his fits of temper, which perhaps accounted for his father’s seldom abated air of bitterness. But bitterness did not affect him when he sang the praises of the god.

  That voice, pure and love-filled, came into his ears again now. The old cranky pujari in the little, sweat-smelling, dirty temple put Pandit Balkrishan, careful, melodious and oozing contentment, right out of count. And the memory brought back a longing for the days that had been simple.

  But those days were no more.

  Ten minutes later he was sitting cross-legged on the floor of Pandit Balkrishan’s room at the rear of the temple. The pandit, naked above the waist but for the white line of his sacred thread running across almost pendulous breasts and down to a rounded stomach, its feathering of hair just catching the light, faced him, one elbow resting on the bedroll behind him.

  Any hopes of simply talking about any subject at all bar what was most in his mind and pretending at the end to take the fellow’s blessing were quickly and thoroughly crushed by Protima. With many a ‘Panditji’ she simply explained the full extent of his dilemma.

  Ghote, listening to the recital of his woes that he had poured out only the night before in the privacy and intimacy of their bedroom, felt a new resentment spring up in him.

  ‘Yes, beta,’ the pujari said, turning to Ghote when Protima had finished, ‘you do well to come to me. What for is a pandit but to show how the teachings of religion help the difficulties of life?’

  Ghote’s barely suppressed distaste rose up at once. Why should this fellow, hardly older than himself despite his girth and air of contented authority, why should he call him beta? He was not the man’s child. They were equals. Or should be.

  ‘I have come because my wife was insisting,’ he said, scarcely keeping the rage out of his voice.

  ‘Yes, it is fine to have the hopes and the prayers of a good Hindu wife when times are troublesome.’

  ‘They are not so much of troublesome.’

  ‘No, beta? What your good wife was telling makes me think you are in great trouble. Very great trouble.’

  ‘Well, I will think what I must do before long.’

  Behind the heavy horn-rims on the pandit’s fleshy curving nose his eyes glinted acutely.

  ‘But you have not got long to think. By nine pip emma tomorrow you must give your answer, isn’t it?’

  Ghote felt a new resentment. Why should this priest, this fellow who was meant to be unworldly if anyone was, have seized so accurately on the details of his predicament?

  ‘Well, by that time I will have thought,’ he said.

  ‘And what will be the answer you give? Will you tell all the truth of this terrible-terrible situation you have put yourself into? Or will you find this is a time when the truth that floats on the surface must give way to the truth under the water?’

  Hypocrite, Ghote exploded internally. Just like all temple-wallas. Hypocrite. Hypocrite. Hypocrite.

  ‘Well, beta, which answer will you give?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  Why, why, had he said that? He did know. He had known from the moment Protima had forced him to consider the question, there in the darkness of their room. He was not going to lie. Not to save himself. So why had he told this smooth-bellied creature in front of him that he did not know what answer to give?

  Was it because he did not, in fact, know?

  ‘Then let me repeat to you a verse of the Geeta.’

  At once the pujari launched into a high singsong recitation.

  ‘Do you follow that?’ he asked, a look of satisfaction on his ample face at the mellifluousness he had brought to the quotation.

  ‘No,’ Ghote answered, such Sanskrit as he had half-mastered forgotten long ago.

  ‘Then I will tell it to you in chaste Marathi. From anger comes bewilderment, from bewilderment wandering of the mind, from wandering of the mind destruction of the soul; once the soul is destroyed the man is lost. And you are lost in anger, beta, isn’t it?’

  Ghote sat silent.

  Opposite him, rounded and heavy as a sack of grain, Pandit Balkrishan was equally silent.

  At last Ghote spoke.

  ‘But what to blame if I am angry?’ he said. ‘Fate has played me one bitch of a trick, no? All I was doing was helping a senior officer, a man I am altogether admiring, when by some bad chance a terrible thing had happened to him. And now I am staring in the face the end of everything I have always wanted to do.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pandit Balkrishan, ‘now you begin to see.’

  ‘See? What see?’

  ‘What your life is. What is your karma for this time of yours in the world. To see that. Do you remember in the Mahabharata what advice Mareecha was giving to Ravana when he did not wish to fight against his brother?’

  Ghote looked at the floor between his knees.

  ‘Not altogether,’ he answered.

  ‘Well then, I will quote it to you. He was saying: You are a warrior. The exercise of valour is your proper
task. What are your gifts worth if you let them go unused?’

  He gave Ghote a wide-grinning, inquiring smile.

  ‘Are you going to go on trying to use those gifts which you have?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Inspector Ghote.

  9

  Sir, Most respectfully it is submitted as under:

  On the night of June 24/25 last I, as in-charge, temporary, at Vigatpore P.S., left duty at approximately 2330 hours when I had ascertained that A.D.I.G. Kelkar, conducting the Inspection then proceeding, no longer required my presence. In consequence I am not able to make any comment of my own knowledge on events that occurred later that night.

  G. V. Ghote, Inspector

  By noon on Monday, June 4, Ghote had been notified in answer to his memo that he was to appear before a Commissioner’s Inquiry, his explanation of the Vigatpore events being in the opinion of the Commissioner ‘not satisfactory’. In view of the seriousness of the matter he was suspended from duty ‘as from this day’s date’.

  He had expected nothing else.

  But – suspended. The notification still came as a blow. He had never remotely seen himself as doing anything in the course of his career that would bring about his suspension. He sat there at his desk – he must remember to take home his towel – and forced himself to think of the good side.

  Withholding from the Commissioner what he could have told him about Desai’s death was something that he had decided, after much doubt, was what he ought to do. By his silence, and the direct lies that in due course would have to spring from it, he would be, unless something unimaginable occurred, ensuring his own future as a police officer. Not for his own benefit. Nor was it even so that his wife and son could live as they had always done, though this would be a bonus to his decision. It was in order that he should be able to go on doing what he did best, serving his fellow man by bringing the guilty to book, by seeing that the law was upheld.