Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker

by H. R. F. Keating

  “All-”

  The fluting, gentle voice went on.

  “We must all lose all the money we have. That is the way.”

  Ghote shifted uneasily. It was not that the soft sand was uncomfortable underneath him.

  “I know that these must be your views,” he said stiffly.

  “No,” said Lai Dass.

  “No, they are not your views?”

  “They are not my views: they are the way.”

  Ghote began to feel some exasperation. He welcomed it. With a steam-head of annoyance he could ride over the uneasiness that such religious talk always produced in him.

  “If members of the public lose sums of money through the activities of some joker,” he said, “then that is police matter and must be investigated until a satisfactory conclusion is reached.”

  But his sharpness did not seem to impinge on Lai Dass. The plump, smooth-skinned hathayogi simply smiled again.

  “Yes,” he said, “whether it is money or police it is the same thing.”

  Ghote saw well enough what he was getting at.

  “I do not understand,” he said, with great stiffness.

  “You must try to,” Lai Dass replied.

  The patient tone tipped Ghote over the edge into real irritability.

  “All right, I do understand,” he barked. “I understand quite well. You are saying that the world ought to be able to get on without money and without policemen. You are saying that to someone who is a policeman.”

  “Yes.”

  The gentle statement. Ghote had not meant to get involved in this sort of argument. But he leant forward determinedly now.

  “You think that just because I am a policeman,” he said, “that I am incapable of thinking for myself. That is the mistake all you people make. I may not think about the role of the policeman very often, but let me tell you I have thought about it, and having thought I am very happy to stay as police officer.”

  Lai Dass smiled. He smiled his smile of distant, bland unbelief.

  “No,” Ghote said, as if the word was a heavy spear he hoped might penetrate the thick armour.

  He looked at the smoothly shining uncreased face in front of him.

  “No,” he said, “a world without money, a world without crime, a world without police—all that is just too good to be true.”

  “The good is the true, my son.”

  Ghote fought back a sharp temptation to snap that he was no son of anybody but his own dead father.

  “You are not listening," he said instead. “You will not pay attention. That is your trouble, the trouble of you and all like you. You will not pay attention to what is, what really is, around you. There is crime in the world. It is no use saying only there is not. There is. And when you have crime it is better for everybody that you have policemen to stop it.”

  Lal Dass's smiling face kept its gentle meditative expression, as Ghote had all along known it would.

  “And if it is the other way" the hathayogi said calmly. “If it is the police that bring the crime?"

  “But it is not" Ghote replied, unfoxed by this. “That is the unreal world. In the real world you have crime, and policemen to stop it if they can. And you have to live in that real world."

  “No," said Lai Dass simply. “You do not."

  “You did not" Ghote retorted.

  “I did not?"

  “No" Ghote said, no longer doing anything to make life easy for the man who had been hoaxed. “No, you let yourself be made a public fool of by real tricksters in this real world."

  Lal Dass considered this in silence for a little while. His plump body stayed as absolutely still as it had done from the first moment Ghote had sat in front of him under the scanty shade of the awning. Ghote, once more, shifted a little in the soft sand. Then Lal Dass spoke, gentle voiced as ever.

  “Perhaps I was tricked" he said.

  “Yes" Ghote said, taking off the pressure now, “I am sorry, but you were tricked. Can you tell please just how it happened?"

  Again Lai Dass considered in silence. Would he speak, Ghote wondered. Or would he seize on the chance to say nothing, and, if indeed he had been responsible for the death of the Rajah of Bhedwar, avoid the risk of giving himself away?

  And under the shade of the awning on the sun-hot beach the silence grew.

  CHAPTER XII

  At last Lal Dass gave Ghote another smile of benign sweetness.

  “Yes" he said, gently as the tiniest breeze, “yes, I will tell.”

  Ghote held his face impassive. He dared not wonder what it was that had induced the hathayogi to speak rather than to drift off on some long, happy meditation—or to pretend to do so. But he was going to speak. And if he was not what he seemed, if he was a man of passions who had been intolerably insulted and had taken his revenge, then something might show through. He listened intentlv.

  “People came to me" said Lal Dass. “Once people came. Now they do not come. But they came once. First in twos and threes, then in dozens, at last in hundreds.”

  The gentle voice ran down to nothingness and silence fell again under the hot awning.

  “Go on,” said Ghote quiedy.

  “Soon I did not know who they were the ones who came, and soon I did not know even who were the ones that stayed. It did not seem to matter. They listened to what I had to say.”

  The placid eyes resting on Ghote seemed to note the tiny expression of cynicism he had been unable quite to keep from flitting on to his face.

  “Oh, yes" Lal Dass said gently. “There is not much in listening, I know. But I knew too that sometimes, even against the will, sometimes something lodges there and cannot be removed.”

  Ghote wondered at the deep-down astuteness the hathayogi had shown in pulling him up so quickly. Was it a sort of genuine spiritual shrewdness, or was it a man trying the first feint in a long wrestling match?

  He waited for Lal Dass to continue in his own time. And soon enough he did so.

  “They had watched me,” he said. “They had watched the growing signs I was able to give of mastery over this body of ours. They knew I fasted. None better: they ate the food that was given to me. And they saw that the fasting did me no harm.”

  Ghote glanced involuntarily at the glowing, golden belly so close in front of him.

  “Yes,” Lai Dass said, speaking quickly for him. “Yes, I fast still.”

  Again Ghote was aware of the alert mind. Of the man fighting for his life? Of the saint?

  “And then,” Lai Dass resumed, “when I suggested that one day I would walk on water as a test of my growth there was much excitement. Soon there was much talk about it. And then they asked me to try.”

  Lai Dass stopped.

  “They suggested to you the tank you should try on?” Ghote prompted.

  “Yes. One day they took me to the tank, very early in the morning. They asked me to try.”

  The large glistening eyes fixed on Ghote with a new brighter light.

  “I tried,” Lai Dass said, “to show them I could not do it. I thought it would be a lesson for them.”

  He lowered his head.

  “And you succeeded?” Ghote asked.

  “Yes. I walked on the water of that tank as easily as I could walk across a smoothly polished floor,” Lai Dass answered.

  And then for the first time that Ghote had noticed a small frown crinkled the smooth, baby-bland serenity of his brow.

  “I was not happy," Lai Dass said. “I was not happy that it had happened before I knew I was ready. But I could not think how it had happened if I was not ready. No other explanation came to me. I did not even know where to look for one.”

  “And did you know that there was so much public interest in the feat you had tried and were to be asked to perform again?” Ghote said.

  “No,” Lai Dass replied.

  And almost immediately he added something.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I did know. I paid little attention to all the talk of all those
people. But I did know. It had become something that I knew. And I found I had agreed. And I thought: perhaps someone, one only, will think about what he sees. I did not go back.”

  “And you never suspected then that you were being set up as victim of a huge hoax?” Ghote said, making no attempt to soften the bluntness.

  “No,” Lai Dass answered.

  “Do you know the Rajah of Bhedwar?” Ghote shot out next.

  “No,” replied the hathayogi simply.

  “He was shot,” Ghote said. “Do you ever go out to Juhu Beach?”

  “No.”

  Again the simple negative.

  Ghote abandoned this attempt at shock tactics.

  “You say you never suspected about the hoax at all,” he said. “Why was that?”

  “I was too worried.”

  “Too worried?”

  “By what had happened already,” Lal Dass explained calmly. “By finding myself walking across that tank when I should not have been able.”

  “And this worry,” Ghote asked, “did it lead you to look more carefully at the people who had persuaded you to do what you knew should have been impossible?”

  “I paid them less attention even,” the hathayogi answered. “I was concerned with myself.”

  “And then came the day of the great walk,” Ghote prompted him before he could go off into more introspection.

  “Yes. Then came that day. And I thought : if I have done it once I can do it again. I tried to prepare myself for it.”

  Ghote changed his position a little in his soft hollow of sand, and put a question that was off the strict line of his inquiries but which he could not help asking.

  “Did you get yourself to a full state of preparation?” “No,” Lal Dass answered without hesitation.

  He thought for a moment and then added an explanation. “No, I did not get myself prepared. I am far away from that. But what I did was to persuade myself that I was truly ready.”

  “And you were made a laughing-stock,” Ghote said.

  “Yes.”

  There was nothing to be learnt from the simple syllable. Ghote tried a new tack.

  “I had gone from the tank before you recovered consciousness,” he began.

  Lal Dass moved then. He leant forward two or three inches.

  “It was you,” he said.

  “Me?”

  “You were the police inspector they told me had pulled me from under the water.”

  “Yes, that was me," Ghote said.

  “It was a good action" Lai Dass replied.

  His limpid eyes beamed at Ghote.

  “It was doing my duty,” Ghote replied. “Doing a policeman’s duty in the real world where sometimes people are found drowning.”

  Lai Dass moved his head in a gentle negative.

  “It was a good action for this world,” he said. “But if you had not made it, nothing would have been different.” “You might have been dead,” Ghote said.

  “Yes, I might have been dead. What of it?”

  “You were ready to die then?” Ghote asked.

  “Yes, I was ready to die.”

  “You were shamed enough to wish to be dead?”

  “Oh no. I am always ready to die,” Lai Dass replied, with it seemed a twinkle of humour. “Always ready to move to the next phase.”

  Ghote was rattled a little by the rebuff.

  “Very well,” he said. “But when you did regain consciousness, what were your feelings then? You felt anger?”

  “No. Why should I have felt anger?”

  A spurt of irritation sprang up in Ghote’s mind.

  “You should have felt anger because someone had made you look the biggest fool Bombay has seen for years,” he said, his voice beginning to rise to a shout.

  “But it does not matter to me what people think about a thing like that,” Lai Dass replied with the blandest calm.

  Ghote sat and considered. He had lost, certainly. From this wrestling bout he must retire defeated. But that did not mean that there might not be a way of catching his man yet. Unless . . . unless his man was not the man he suspected at all, but in truth the figure he gave himself out to be.

  A black, heavy bar of shadow fell across the yard of scuffled sand between himself and Lal Dass. Ghote looked up. It was Desai, standing stiffly to attention. And grinning.

  “Well, what the hell do you want?” Ghote snarled.

  “Message from H.Q., Inspector. Damn' urgent.”

  He stood there, still grinning, waiting.

  “If it’s urgent, man you had better tell, isn’t it?"

  Ghote lunged to his feet. His back just caught the edge of the sack awning. One of the bamboo stakes came out of the sand. The awning flopped down till it rested against the hathayogi’s left shoulder. He did not stir. Furiously Ghote picked up the stick and began pushing it into the yielding, hopeless sand.

  “Well, man, well?” he barked at Desai.

  “There has been request for you to report in person to Ministry of Police Affairs, Inspector. D.S.P. Naik say you better get there ek dum”

  The bamboo stick would not stay upright. Ghote knelt on the soft sand, seized it with both hands and jabbed desperately. He felt the sweat springing up.

  “Please to leave it."

  It was Lai Dass’s gentle voice.

  “I will not,” Ghote shouted. “I knocked it down and I will put it back if it is the last thing I do."

  He jabbed again. The bamboo flopped lurchingly sideways once more.

  “But leave it," Lai Dass said. “Ten or twenty times a day boys knock it down as a joke. Perhaps it would be best to leave it altogether."

  “No," Ghote snorted.

  Once more he drove the short, bendy pole in with all his force. And this time it did stay. He leapt to his feet.

  “I must go,” he said. “Business. Important business."

  He almost ran along the sliding slippery sand back to the truck. And he was unable to prevent himself noticing that before he had reached the vehicle the bamboo stick had fallen once more.

  Driving through the turmoil of traffic towards the imposing new building of the State Ministry of Police Affairs and the Arts, Ghote felt a solid thundercloud of tiredness building up inexorably at the back of his head. He knew that in fact he had been lucky: more often than not a murder investigation meant forty-eight hours without sleep to begin with, covering the ground fast before any trails got cold. But he had at least seen his bed for a few hours the night before. The ground to be covered in this case was so small in extent that all the routine work that could be quickly done had been done in hours. And had produced nothing.

  So he ought not to have been too tired. But he knew why suddenly now he was having to fight off that overwhelming sensation: it was the prospect of appearing before the Minister himself. And especially as he did not really know what would be expected of him.

  He brought the truck to a careful halt outside the huge, white smooth-walled building in Mayo Road. He left Desai, whom he had simply and firmly ordered to stay silent, sitting despondently in the passenger seat. He climbed the long wide steps and entered the great pillared and marbled entrance hall.

  And the moment he gave his name to the tall, magnificently turbaned chaprassi who reigned over these wide spaces he knew that things were not good. The man’s eyes instantly brightened.

  “Yes, Inspector,” he said vigorously. “This way, if you please.”

  And he led him with brisk, military steps into the high-corridored interior of the vast building. Somebody, plainly as could be, meant business.

  The chaprassi flung open an outer office door without ceremony. A secretary, an Anglo-Indian girl in a short skirt, all brazen efficiency, sprang to her feet.

  “Inspector Ghote" the chaprassi announced impressively.

  The girl sank back on her swivelling typist's chair, bent to her intercom box and pressed a discreet button.

  “Inspector Ghote" she announced respectfully.
r />   A voice, mangled and incomprehensible, said something in reply.

  “Would you go in at once please?" the girl said to Ghote.

  The chaprassi himself, well over six foot six of muscled body, swept forward, opened the door at the far end of the outer office and held it wide.

  Ghote gave himself one quarter of a second to straighten his back and marched forward.

  “My dear Ganesh."

  Behind an immense desk, dark glasses heavily framed in white, smart suit beautifully laundered and plangent tie shining, was Ram Kamdar.

  Ghote, nerved up for a personal Ministerial reprimand of the first order, was completely silenced.

  “But take a pew, take a pew, old boy," Ram Kamdar said.

  He bustled round the huge desk and shifted by half an inch a low, springy-looking little arm-chair placed in front of it for visitors. Ghote, as much to give himself time to adjust as anything, slowly sat down.

  “Cigarette," said Ram Kamdar.

  He seized from the glass surface of the desk a large, elaborately carved box (support indigenous craftsmen) and pushed it towards Ghote.

  “I-I do not smoke. I am sorry," Ghote brought out.

  “First-class decision," Ram Kamdar said, making his way back to his own plump chair behind the desk. “First-class decision. All the statistical evidence is firmly behind you. Nothing has a greater risk-bearing element than smoking.”

  He took a cigarette and flipped a flame from a tiny gold-plated lighter.

  “Well now,” he said.

  “It is you who want to see me or the Minister?” Ghote asked.

  “Oh, you’re to see me. The Minister only likes to be presented with an appropriate end-product. And before he is given that a certain amount of idea-orientation will probably be necessary.”

  “Yes?” said Ghote.

  “Yes. The presentation format is always of prime importance, especially when we’re dealing with top echelon. It might be vital for me to build up a climate of acceptance before any factual items were brought forward.”

  Ghote thought he grasped the point. He waited.

  “That’s why I was so anxious to get hold of you, my dear Ganesh. You realise I simply haven’t the information to base any motivation study on?”

  “You mean,” Ghote asked, determined to be clear before he embarked on any answer, “you mean you do not know anything about that joker business?”