Inspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes

by H. R. F. Keating

  Here again we are back to complications. How old is Ved? Seen first in The Perfect Murder, he was big enough to sleep in a bed. When filming the scene in which Protima accuses Ghote of leaving her to cope on her own with a suddenly fever-ridden Ved – as an illustration to a BBC documentary about myself and the Bombay police – he appeared to be as old as ten or eleven (the only boy we could easily get hold of). But in the film of The Perfect Murder, because Naseer and Ratna Shah had a charming baby about a year old, Ved slid rapidly back to early infancy. Just one in 1988, but ten in 1974?

  Whereas I can keep Ghote himself more or less stationary in age (though what exactly that age is depends, I suspect, as much on who is reading about him as on who writes about him) and I can keep his Protima ever elegant, ever her same self, a small boy must grow. So as the years pass my book-Ved gets bigger, though not by quite as much as the passing years dictate. If he did, his poor father would reach the early retirement age of the Indian Police Service much too soon for me, and the ore I mine so happily would abruptly prove exhausted.

  It was shortly after Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock – to abandon the chronological complications – that I happened to write a short story called ‘The Justice Boy’ for a contest for British writers organised by that splendid American publication, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Set in an English prep school, it won the second prize, running-up to that Golden Age great Christianna Brand. As a consequence Fred Dannay, the other half of the pseudonymous Ellery Queen who then edited the magazine, wrote to me asking if I had any more stories.

  So, in response, Ghote was set to begin a parallel life at shorter length and the story I eventually sent was the one that opens this volume, ‘The Test’. It illustrates the amount of Harry Keating that there is in Ganesh Ghote (although he had not in fact discovered his first name as early as this), because the incident in which the small Ved is overcome by horror when he thinks his father has vanished happened to me when I was much that age and my mother, not usually a practical joker, took it into her head to hide from me.

  However, Ghote did not live any more of his life in short stories for a year or two after that first small, but quite characteristic, appearance. Instead there was Inspector Ghote Plays A Joker, in which he solved the murder of a rajah who, unlike my mother, was an inveterate practical joker. Hovering, as it were below the surface here, there were thoughts about games and games-playing in life.

  Then there was Inspector Ghote Breaks An Egg, which took him out of Bombay to a small town in Maharashtra. This was one of the problems I faced: not to use and re-use the same setting, especially as my knowledge of never-visited Bombay was still confined to what I was able to discover about it from books, from the occasional Indian art-film featuring the city, from scraps of friends’ talk, from TV glimpses and from the pages of the Sunday edition of the Times of India, which I had begun to take. But in any case half my research went not outward, but inward. And there I discovered for my pages things about violence, the evil of violence and the good that sometimes cannot be brought about without it.

  It was not until the end of 1971 – when I was asked by a friend, Desmond Albrow, then editing the Catholic Herald, to write a Christmas story for him – that short-story Ghote came to life again. The story, called variously ‘Inspector Ghote and the Miracle Baby’ or just ‘The Miracle’, is the second in the pages ahead. In it I incorporated – rather impudently, since I was writing for a religious paper – a quality I had had to give to Ghote which is not particularly characteristic of Indian police officers, or of most Indians. I made him an unbeliever. Since I had arrived at that state myself, I found I could not – seeing Ghote as I do from an angel-over-the-shoulder position – enter properly into his mind if it was to be filled with simple belief. Imagine, then, my dismay when at last I got to India three years later, met Bombay CID officers and saw almost invariably under the glass tops of their desks a picture of a god. Imagine, too, my slightly lesser dismay when I realised their desks had the glass tops necessary in a stickily humid climate, as Ghote’s had never had.

  Short stories about Ghote were not exactly pouring from my pen, principally because there was hardly anywhere for them to be published. So he continued his life in books. In 1971 it had been Inspector Ghote Goes By Train, when I was able to make use of the mountain of Indian train lore I had accumulated – the extraordinary Indian railway system sets people a-writing and a-filming by the score – and send him (possibly moustached) all the way from Bombay to Calcutta and back, beset as ever with the difficulties that are a condition of his existence but triumphing finally, if not always to the complete satisfaction of his superiors.

  Indeed in the next of his adventures, Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart, in which he is put temporarily in charge of a child-kidnapping case – I had read a three-line story in The Times about the son of a rich man’s chauffeur in Japan snatched in mistake for his own boy – he ends in terrible hot water for having continued to hunt for the victim unofficially, and successfully: for, in fact, trusting his heart over his head.

  One other short story then followed, written originally with an airline while-away in mind, though it eventually appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine: ‘The Hooked Fisherman’, as Fred Dannay (who never could resist altering a title) called it in place of my ‘The Not So Fly Fisherman’. I had hoped that with its gentle knocking of the bucket-shops which got round the law – as it then stood – about cheap seats, BOAC would lap it up. But airlines stick together and my ingenious use of the cover of the Bombay telephone directory, a volume I had discovered in my local library, never entertained any in-flight passengers.

  One more book carried Ghote onwards before I too, became a passenger to Bombay. This was Bats Fly Up for Inspector Ghote, a consideration of suspicion, suspiciousness and its consequences – good and bad – occasioned by dinner-party talk with a senior Pakistani Customs official in London. It begins with a wild inaccuracy. As I had already hinted at in ‘The Miracle Baby’, I put poor Ghote on anti-pickpocketing duty. But this, I was soon to discover, was as unlikely as detaching a Scotland Yard Murder Squad man to move on the traffic.

  Then one morning, some time in 1974, I got a letter from Air India saying they had heard of this author writing about Bombay without ever having seen the sub-continent, so would I like a flight there in exchange for whatever publicity there was to be made? Immediate reaction: marvellous, now at last I can overcome the financial difficulties of staying in India for adecent period. Subsequent reaction: Oh God, but what if those real smells, those real crippled beggars, those real lepers so appal me that I can no longer write about their city? A justifiable fear. Holding imaginary worlds in your head is achancy business at best.

  But I thought eventually that it would be chicken indeed to turn down such an offer. So on 12 October 1974, with eight novels, three radio plays and four short stories about Inspector Ghote behind me, I set foot for the first time on Indian soil. On landing, I had intended to say, if possible not aloud, ‘One small step for Harry Keating, a giant stride for Inspector Ghote.’ But instead, struck as if by an immense hot, damp wash-cloth by Bombay’s post-monsoon humidity, all that emerged was amuttered ‘Cripes.’

  However, I spent three splendid weeks thereafter learning alot, mopping up atmosphere, filling notebook after notebook and finding there was not so much to correct in my notion of the city – only, rather, things to enhance what I had managed to put into my subconscious and thence onto the pages. Everything was more than I had believed. The colours were brighter. The clamour was louder. The rich were richer. The poor were, yes, poorer and occasionally more outwardly wretched than I had been able to conceive of. Yet I was able to accept that. My fears had proved grou dless. I credit the power of the imagination. I had seen in my mind’s eye the worst, if not quite the whole, already. I suffered no crippling culture shock.

  In fact, I followed up that first visit with another soon afterwards. I had had the temerity to put to BBC
Television the idea of making adocumentary about this writer who had, for so long, chronicled the life of a Bombay detective without ever having seen his stamping ground, and who now at last was doing so. The BBC had taken up the idea, but tactfully left me to make my first visit unencumbered. Now, seven months later, we pretended to maks that visit again. In between and during filming, I filled yet more notebooks. And I had abonus. As a strand in the documentary, we filmed the work of the Bombay police as it really was. So I got to see, amid much else, the office, the ‘cabin’ of the head of Crime Branch CID, Ghote’s boss. I got to interview him, too, and Deputy Commissioner Kulkarni said, on air, ‘I would like to have Ghote on my team. He has the essential quality of being able to put himself into the mind of the criminal he is seeking.’ Delicious praise.

  But some of Ghote’s everyday circumstances did have to change as a result of what I saw. His boss’s rank shot up from Deputy Superintendent to Deputy Commissioner. His desk had mysteriously become glass-topped, losing the whorled, scratched and ink-stained top it had had as at the opening of the story ‘The Not So Fly Fisherman’, relic of school desks where I had sat learning amongst other more forgettable things the elements of English composition.

  Ghote’s home, too, had to undergo a sea-change. In my earliest days with him I had read of houses in Police Quarters somewhere. But what I had failed to realise was that in incredibly crowded, sea-surrounded Bombay, where property values now compare with Manhattan, police officers, however high their rank, live in flats. So the house Ghote once occupied became for a while simply a ‘home’ and eventually took on bit by bit the characteristics of a flat, such as the ones in which flattered – and flattering – Crime Branch inspectors had entertained me.

  So, how would all I had learnt affect what I was to write about Ghote after India? I worried. So I decided to try my unprentice hand on a short story. ‘Inspector Ghote and the Noted British Author’ has in it a version of a case Crime Branch was handling at the time of my visit, with the addition of a visiting author (one of the Bombay papers had described me with the delightful expression of the title) who makes more of a nuisance of himself than I hoped I had done, and is rather fatter than I hope I was.

  When I had written some dozen pages of the story and Ghote was still in that cabin I now knew so well, receiving orders, I began to realise that visiting the scene of the crime has its pitfalls as well as its perks. I had put into those pages every detail of that big room, the positioning of the chairs in front of the desk (significantly different in Indian offices, but …), the map on the wall and what it showed, even the names of the police dogs on the duties-board. And it was then that I understood that absence from the scene can be a help to the writer; automatically cutting down the dross that obscures the picture. I had to go back and be pretty severe with the blue pencil. But in the story I was now able to show a side to Ghote, until then not in evidence, that he shares with real-life Indian police officers, the ability to obtain answers at the end of a fist. Or of an open slapping hand. It is something he and I do not have in common.

  I gave the first post-India novel a background I had scented long before but had hung back from using till I had had a chance to see the real thing – Bombay’s film world, the filmi duniya as, picking up a few words of Bombay Hindi (a fearful bastard language), I had learnt to say.

  Luckily, I had had an introduction to a film distributor who in turn introduced me to one of the superstars of the Bombay studios. Thus when Inspector Ghote became infected with an echo version of the dizzying ambition that is apt to afflict quite ordinary men and women who get caught up in the swirling spiral of stardom, I had in Filmi, Filmi, Inspector Ghote plenty of circumstances to place him in. He goes, for instance, to a star’s party – ‘Come. Come, Mr Keating,’ my star had said to me. ‘A small party, sixty-eighty people’ – and that affair is truthful to reality in every particular. On the other hand, when the star in the book is late for the auspicious ceremony that starts a film, the mahurrat, which must be held to the minute, it was my idea to have the clock stopped in the studio. And afterwards I think – I think – I heard this was done in reality.

  Bit by bit, then, Ghote was learning about himself and about life. Or I was learning about Ghote. Sometimes a lot, sometimes just an extra detail, such as the chewy paans that can (filled with aphrodisiac and thus called ‘bed-smashers’) cost as much as a hundred rupees. They are to be found in the story I wrote for broadcasting in 1976, ‘The Wicked Lady’. Originally this was to be a pilot for a series where the authors would interrupt just before the dénouement and invite listeners to guess who done it. Shamelessly, I had pinched a plot from Agatha Christie and Indianised it. The series was abandoned, so I turned the tale into a straight story. It proved to be the last about Ghote for some years, while instead I contributed tales about a charlady sleuth, Mrs Craggs, to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  Back in his novel life, in Inspector Ghote Draws A Line, the poor fellow – in the unlikely disguise of Dr Ghote, research scholar – is sent to the home of an ancient and cantankerous judge deep in the Indian countryside when the aged relic is threatened with assassination. There my alter ego came to ponder (with the reader?) at what point and how firmly you should say, ‘Thus far and no further’.

  Ghote also makes a fleeting appearance, the most fleeting appearance possible, in The Murder of the Maharajah, a book set in 1930. In its last lines the Maharajah’s umbrella-toting schoolmaster expresses a hope that if he is ever to have a son to add to the tally of his numerous daughters that boy will become a police officer. It is then revealed that his name is Ghote. Safe to write this much pre-history. But later, when I came to set down incidents from my hero’s childhood, I am not sure that I didn’t occasionally add confusion to what is called in India his ‘bio-datas’.

  Two more book-length accounts add to the picture before Ghote appeared in a short story again. In Go West, Inspector Ghote he found himself ordered off to America, California even, and discovered that that extraordinary part of the world is a place steeped in a mysticism which strongly contrasts with materialist Bombay. He only solved the locked-room murder when he admitted to the existence of that mystical phenomenon translocation of the body (instantaneous travel, if you like, often over hundreds of miles). Atheist with all the ardour of the convert that I am, this was something that I had had to acknowledge as likely when during my first visit to India I met the representative of a pharmaceuticals firm. He had hailed me out of the darkness of the evening, recognising me from smudgy newspaper photos, and then recounted to me unabashed stories of a friend capable of summoning out of the very air money and sweets and more. Why should he have told me tarradiddles? He was a serious fellow, and not unscientific. (His job I borrowed for one of the suspects in ‘The Wicked Lady’.)

  In The Sheriff of Bombay, which appeared in 1984, Ghote encountered his most harassing experience ‘till date’, as we say in India. He met sex. This was something I had not been able to bring myself to put into his world before, but during my second visit to Bombay I had been asked by one of the Crime Branch inspectors if I would like to see ‘the Cages’, the red-light area of Bombay regularly produced as one of the city’s sights, along with the Hanging Gardens (cover for a huge reservoir on top of Malabar Hill) and Elephanta Island. I had thought it my duty to succumb. The so-called cages – they are in fact no more than the barred windows behind which the girls display themselves – proved both sordid and lively, depending on the way I looked on them. So when ten years later I felt ready to use what I saw that night, The Sheriff of Bombay (that name I had seen on a plaque in the stern splendour of Bombay’s Gothic-style Old Secretariat) taught Ghote, myself – and, I trust, my readers – that much in life can appear either black or white according to the way it is seen.

  Now, for some reason or another, I entered on a whole spate of short stories about the man who over the space of some ten years had come to occupy such a deep niche in my mind. Frequently now, seeing so
me sight or hearing a few words that particularly caught my attention, I would ask, ‘How does Ghote react to that?’ and know the answer. Some such questions have already resulted in books or stories. Others lie waiting, either like the pearls maharajahs were apt to hide away too long in the dark strongrooms of their palaces only to fade into colourlessness, or else perhaps to prove ever-shining diamonds.

  In answer to a request from the editor of the magazine of the Townswomen’s Guilds, Ghote had an encounter with a party of ladies touring India and demonstrated that latent toughness that gives the tale its title, ‘The Cruel Inspector Ghote’. I think that quality came to Ghote’s surface when it lodged itself in my mind as I read a life of Rudyard Kipling, which pointed out that in The Jungle Book fatherly Baloo the Bear is wholesomely strict with young Mowgli. Then, in answer to a request for something filmable from a charming young woman rejoicing in the typically Indian nickname of Pooh, I wrote ‘Murder Must Not At All Advertise, Isn’t It?’. It was a passing tribute to my predecessor in detection, Dorothy L. Sayers, and set in the Bombay advertising world where Pooh Sayani made her living. In it, of course, was a charming creature called Tigga.

  Although no film eventuated, the story, which shows a Ghote who has now just about got the balance between softness and shrewdness right, winged its way across the Atlantic to see the light of day there, complete with the third or fourth villain I had called Budhoo. So I crossed out that name in the long list I have in the front of my alphabetical notebook of things Indian. Ghote, lucky fellow, must have learnt the infinite complexities of Indian nomenclature as he grew up. But somehow he has been slow in passing on his knowledge to me, though nowadays, with care, I think I get most names right.