Inspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes

by H. R. F. Keating

  At much this time, too, I transcribed one of my old radio plays into short-story form, making The All-Bad Man into ‘The All-Bad Hat’. The story sums up, I think, where Ghote had got to by 1984. I also contrived, when the Police Review asked members of the Crime Writers Association for stories with a police setting, to get into words a small project I had long meditated – a story to be told purely in telephone conversations. ‘Hello, Hello, Inspector Ghote’ is my tribute to the magnificent imperfections of the Bombay telephone system, now considerably improved as Ghote notes in his 1988appearance, Dead on Time.

  In 1986 Ghote experienced existence in what, I suppose, has been his most comprehensive coming-to-life yet. In Under A Monsoon Cloud, I set out to consider the theme of anger, a quality which, looking back, I see was something in others which Ghote had singularly failed to come to terms with. But anger had also given him on more than one occasion an impetus helping an essentially nice man to take the sharp action which often brings about success in an ugly world.

  So I recalled an episode I had been told by a former Commissioner of the Bombay Police, for whom I had felt bound to write a disclaimer as a preface to Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart, which featured in a rather poor light such a Commissioner. Mr S. G. Pradhan, with immense kindness, had contacted me in Bombay and given me several hours of his time, for much of it explaining complications of Indian police life which I found dauntingly difficult to get into the pages of an onward-pressing story. One particular illustration he used certainly lodged in my mind. It concerned an officer of great promise who in a moment of rage had killed a subordinate. Now was the time to regurgitate those facts-from-life as fiction-facts in the life of Inspector Ghote.

  In the story that unwound itself in my head as a consequence of a similar rash act on the part of Ghote’s admired superior, ‘Tiger’ Kelkar, Ghote finds himself arraigned before a disciplinary tribunal. Conducting a defence of himself – as well as considering whether he ought to defend himself at all – I found he was bringing to the surface his whole attitude to life. ‘What good would I be as a security officer?’ he demands of his wife in the dark of the marital bedroom when the idea of resignation is in the air. ‘Oh, I could do that job all right, but what satisfaction would be there?’ (The phrasing comes from a notebook I have kept for twenty years, labelled and re-labelled ‘A Little Book of Indian English’.) Then he flares out: ‘It is not as if I have not been a good officer. Have I taken bribes? … Have I toadied and treated reverently superior officers? No, I have never so much as held open one car door to them. Have I had suspects beaten up even? … Did I buy my posting to the CID? And now am I to lose everything after I have sweated every ounce of my blood?’

  It was while I was in hospital having a ruptured knee-tendon hooked back into place and dealing, a little bad-temperedly, with my editor’s queries about the next Ghote novel, The Body in the Billiard Room (in which in the appropriately lingering Britain-of-the-1930s atmosphere of Ooty hill station Ghote finds himself harassed, as it were, by the shade of Agatha Christie and solves a murder in more or less the manner of a Great Detective), that I conceived the notion of the short story I called ‘Nil By Mouth’. Those words, odd when you come to think about them, I saw day after day above the beds of patients about to go to the operating theatre, and from the fascination the phrase exercised over me grew that quite intricate little tale. It shows once more, at one and the same time, the just-tough Ghote – tough enough by now to defy at least hospital authorities – and the perhaps too-easily-moved Ghote.

  Ghote’s major adventures appear at about yearly intervals, giving me time between books sometimes to embark u asksd on ashort story such as ‘APresent for Santa Sahib’, another Christmassy tale.

  A gap between books was the origin, too, of ‘The Purloined Parvati and Other Artefacts’, though its deeper beginning-point lay in a visit I paid to an extraordinary private museum when I was attending, as chairman of the Society of Authors, the conference of our Indian sister organisation in Jaipur. I said to myself (as the enthusiastic owner took me round, together with a solemnly appreciative lady from UNESCO), that somehow I must give the place a parallel, scarcely exaggerated existence in fiction. Some eight years later Inspector Ghote, standing outside the little Press hut I had noticed during the filming of The Perfect Murder, was able to set out on that brief morning’s work. It enabled him to bring to the fore a capacity for critical judgement that had lain underneath the almost totally uncritical attitude he had possessed when authority figures had pronounced at the start of his career.

  This capacity for objective judgement he retains, if sensibly inside his head, when in Dead on Time he dares to assess as mighty a figure as the Director General of Police for the State of Maharashtra. There he comes to terms, too, with his own attitude to the ever-pressing minute in time-ruled (though often time-flouting) Bombay, seeing that pressure in contrast to the almost timeless life of India’s villages. And it is in one of those, I discovered as I planned the book (or Ghote brought reminiscently to mind as he lived its events, as he does again in my final little tale ‘Light Coming’, where he is something of an authority figure himself), that Ghote had experienced various formative happenings. His life began there. Or did it begin one day as I was sitting in that red armchair in my study?

  H.R.F Keating

  1989

  ONE

  The Test

  From the very beginning Inspector Ghote had doubts about Anil Divekar and the Test Match. Cricket and Divekar did not really mix. Divekar’s sport was something quite different: he was a daylight entry ace. Excitement for him lay not in perfectly timing a stroke with the bat that would send the ball skimming along the grass to the boundary, but in the patient sizing up of a big Bombay house, the layout of its rooms, the routine of its servants, and then choosing the right moment to slip in and out carrying away the best of the portable loot.

  But here Divekar was, as Ghote on a free day stood with his little son Ved outside the high walls of Brabourne Stadium, ticketless and enviously watching the crowds pouring in for the start of the day’s play. He even came up to them, smiling broadly.

  ‘Inspector, you would like seats?’

  At Ghote’s side, clutching his hand, little Ved’s face lit up as from a sudden inward glow. And Ghote nearly accepted the offer. Ved deserved the treat. He was well-behaved and already working hard at school – and it was only a question of a pair of tickets. Some of his own colleagues would have taken them as a right.

  But Ghote knew all along that he could not do it. Whatever the others did, he had always kept his integrity. No criminal could ever reproach him with past favours.

  Angrily he tugged Ved off. But, marching away from the stadium, he could not help speculating as to why Divekar should have been there at all. Of course, when every two years or so a team from England or Australia or the West Indies came to Bombay, Test Match fever suddenly gripped the most unexpected people. But all the same …

  The crowd outside the stadium had not been all college students and the excited schoolboys you might expect. Smart business executives had jostled with simple shopkeepers and grain merchants. The film stars’ huge cars had nosed their way past anxious, basket-clutching housewives, their best saris already looking crumpled and dusty.

  Fifty thousand people, ready to roast all day in the sun to watch a sedate game that most of them hardly understood. Waiting for someone to ‘hit a sixer’ so that they could launch into frenzied clapping, or for someone to drop a catch and give them a chance to indulge in some vigorous booing, or – the height of heights – for a home player to get a century and permit them to invade the pitch with garlands held high to drape their hero.

  Where did they all get the entrance money, Ghote wondered. With even eighteen-rupee seats selling for a hundred, getting in was way beyond his own means. Little Ved’s treat would have to be, once more, a visit to the Hanging Gardens.

  But when they reached this mildly pleasurable – an
d free – spot, everywhere they went transistor radios were tuned teasingly to the Test Match commentary. Nothing Ghote offered his son was in the least successful.

  He bought coconuts, but Ved would not even watch the squatting naralwallah dexterously chop off the tops of the dark fruit. He held out the gruesome spectacle of the vultures that hovered over the Towers of Silence where the Parsis laid out their dead, but Ved just shrugged. He purchased various bottled drinks, each more hectically coloured and more expensive than the previous one, but Ved drank them with increasing apathy.

  He even attempted to enliven things by starting a game of hide-and-seek. Disastrously. After he had twice prolonged finding Ved – whose idea of hiding did not seem to stretch beyond standing sideways behind rather too narrow trees – as long as he possibly could, he decided that the game might go better if he himself were to be the one to go into hiding. So while Ved was temporarily absorbed in examining a cicada which, in a moment of aberration, had mistaken day for night and emitted its shrill squeak, he dropped to the ground behind a nicely sturdy bush and crouched there keeping a paternal eye on his small son through the leaves.

  For some time Ved stayed deeply engaged with the cicada, squatting beside it and turning it over with one delicate finger in an effort to see how such a small stick of a creature could produce that single extraordinarily loud squeak. But then he looked up, as if he were going to consult the parental oracle. For an instant he looked round merely puzzled. But then …

  Then it was plain that the end of the world had come, the end of his small safe world. He lifted up his head and gave vent to a howl of pure, desolate anguish.

  In a flash Ghote was beside him, hugging, patting, reassuring. But nothing seemed to restore that confidence there had been before. Not another offer of a cold drink. Not pointing out half a dozen ‘funny men’, though none of them was in fact particularly odd. Not promises of future treats, not stern injunctions to ‘be a little man’. Ved’s face remained tear-stained and immovable.

  At last Ghote gave up in a spasm of irritation.

  ‘If that is all you care, we will go home.’

  Ved made no reply.

  They set off, Ghote walking fast and getting unnecessarily hot. And still, going down Malabar Hill with its huge garden-surrounded mansions and great shady trees, there were passers-by with transistors and the unwearying commentator’s voice.

  ‘What a pity for India. A glorious captain’s knock by the Rajah of Bolkpur ends in a doubtful decision by Umpire Khan.’

  Ved swung round on him with an outraged glare. Whether this was because of the umpire’s perfidy or because of simply not being there it was hard to tell.

  And at that moment Ghote saw him. Anil Divekar. At least the figure that he half glimpsed ahead, sneaking out of a narrow gate and cradling in his arms a heavy-looking sack looked remarkably like Divekar. Ghote launched himself into the chase.

  But the sound of running steps alerted the distant figure and in moments the fellow had disappeared altogether.

  Ghote went quickly back to the house from whose side entrance he had seen the suspicious figure emerge. And there things began to add up. The big house had been rented temporarily to none other than the Rajah of Bolkpur himself, and a few minutes’ search revealed that all the Rajah’s silver trophies and personal jewellery had just been neatly spirited away.

  Ghote got through to CID Headquarters on the telephone and reported. Then he and Ved endured a long wait till a squad arrived to take over. But they did get away in time to go down to the stadium again to see if Ved could catch a glimpse of the departing players.

  And no sooner had they arrived at the stadium, just as the crowds were beginning to stream out, when there was Anil Divekar right in front of them. He made no attempt to run. On the contrary he came pushing his way through the throng, smiling broadly.

  No doubt he thought he had fixed himself a neat alibi. But Ghote saw in an instant how he could trap Divekar if he had slipped away from the game just long enough to commit the robbery. Because it so happened that he himself knew exactly what had been occurring in the stadium at the moment the thief had slipped out of that house on Malabar Hill.

  ‘A bad day’s play, I hear,’ he said to Divekar. ‘What did you think about Bolkpur?’

  Divekar shook his head sadly.

  ‘A damn wrong decision, Inspectorji,’ he said. ‘I was sitting right behind the bat, and I could see. Damn wrong.’

  He looked at them both with an expression of radiant guiltlessness. ‘That was where you also would have been sitting,’ he added.

  You win, Ghote thought and turned grimly away. But on his way home he stopped for a moment at Headquarters to see if anything had turned up. His Deputy Superintendent was there.

  ‘Well, Inspector, they tell me you spotted Anil Divekar leaving the house.’

  ‘I am sorry, sir, but I do not think it was him now.’

  He recounted his meeting with the man at the stadium a few minutes earlier; but the Deputy Superintendent was unimpressed.

  ‘Nonsense, man, whatever the fellow says, this is Divekar’s type of crime, one hundred per cent. You just identify him as running off from the scene and we’ve got him.’

  For a moment Ghote was tempted. After all, Divekar was an inveterate thief: it would be justice of a sort. But then he knew that he had not really been sure who the running man had been.

  ‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘I am sorry, but no.’

  The Deputy Superintendent’s eyes blazed, and it was only the insistent ringing of the telephone by his side that postponed his moment of wrath.

  ‘Yes? Yes? What is it? Oh, you, Inspector. Well? What? The gardener? But … Oh, on him? Every missing item? Very good then, charge him at once.’

  He replaced the receiver and looked at Ghote.

  ‘Yes, Inspector,’ he said blandly, ‘that chap Divekar. As I was saying, he wants watching, you know. Close watching. I’ll swear he is up to something. Now, he’s bound to be at the Test Match tomorrow, so you had better be there too.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ghote said.

  A notion darted into his head.

  ‘And, sir, for cover for the operation should I take this boy of mine also?’

  ‘First-rate idea. Carry on, Inspector Ghote.’

  1969

  TWO

  The Miracle Baby

  What has Santa Claus got in store for me, Inspector Ghote said to himself, bleakly echoing the current cheerful Bombay newspaper advertisements as he waited to enter the office of Deputy Superintendent Naik that morning of December 25th.

  Whatever the DSP had lined up for him, Ghote knew it was going to be nasty. Ever since he had recently declined to turn up for ‘voluntary’ hockey, DSP Naik had viewed him with sad-eyed disapproval. But what exact form would his displeasure take?

  Almost certainly it would have something to do with the big Navy Week parade that afternoon, at the moment the chief preoccupation of most of the ever-excitable and drama-loving Bombayites. Probably he would be sent out into the crowds watching the Fire Power demonstration in the bay, ordered to come back with a beltful of pickpocketing arrests.

  ‘Come,’ the DSP’s voice barked out, in response to Ghote’s knock.

  He went in and stood squaring his bony shoulders in front of the papers-strewn desk.

  ‘Ah, Ghote, yes. Tulsi Pipe Road for you. Up at the north end. Going to be big trouble there. Rioting. Intercommunity outrages even.’

  Ghote’s heart sank even deeper than he had expected. Tulsi Pipe Road was a two-kilometres long thoroughfare that shot straight up from the Racecourse into the heart of a densely crowded mill district. There badly paid Hindus, Muslims by the thousand and Goans in hundreds all lived in prickling closeness, either in great areas of tumbledown hutments or in high tottering chawls, floor upon floor of massed humanity. Trouble between the religious communities there meant hell, no less.

  ‘Yes, DSP?’ he said, striving not to sound appalled.
/>   ‘We are having a virgin birth business, Inspector.’

  ‘Virgin birth, DSP sahib?’

  ‘Come, man, you must have come across such cases.’

  ‘I am sorry, DSP,’ Ghote said, feeling obliged to be true to hard-won scientific principles. ‘I am unable to believe in virgin birth.’

  The DSP’s round face suffused with instant wrath.

  ‘I am not asking you to believe in virgin birth, man. It is not you who are to believe: it is all those Christians in the Goan community who are believing it about a baby born two days ago. It is the time of year, of course. These affairs are always coming at Christmas. I have dealt with half a dozen in my day.’

  ‘Yes, DSP,’ Ghote said, contriving to hit on the right note of awe.

  ‘Yes. And there is only one way to deal with it: get hold of the girl and find out the name of the man. Do that pretty damn quick and the whole affair drops away to nothing, like monsoon water down a drain.’

  ‘Yes, DSP.’

  ‘Well, what are you waiting for, man? Jump to it.’

  ‘Name and address of the girl in question, DSP sahib.’

  The DSP’s face darkened once more. He paddled furiously over the jumble of papers on his desk. And at last he found the chit he wanted.

  ‘There you are, man. And you will find here the name of the Head Constable who first reported the matter. See him straight away. You have got a good man there, active, quick on his feet, sharp. If he could not make that girl talk, you will be having a first-class damn job, Inspector.’

  Ghote located Head Constable Mudholkar one hour later at the local chowkey where he was stationed. Mudholkar at once confirmed the blossoming dislike for a sharp bully that Ghote had been harbouring ever since DSP Naik had praised the fellow. And, what was worse, the chap turned out to be very like the DSP in looks as well. He had the same round type of face, the same puffy-looking lips, even a similar soft blur of moustache. But the Head Constable’s appearance was nevertheless a travesty of the DSP’s. His face was, simply, slewed.