Ghote, confronted with this fairly formidable figure, took a quick decision. He launched into Gujarati himself, although only moderately fluent in the language.
In this part of India, unlike Bombay, Gujaratis were few and far between. Would this appeal to the man’s home roots establish between them a sort of link to counter any loyalty he had for the Municipal Chairman?
Dr Patil at least replied in Gujarati and seemed to be deriving some pleasure from the use of his home tongue as in answer to Ghote’s polite inquiry he said he came originally from Walkeshwar, the Gujarati area of Bombay. But in what way, he asked with detectable friendliness, could he assist Inspector Ghote?
‘No doubt,’ Ghote said, ‘you will know.’
Dr Patil made a widespreading gesture with his well-manicured left hand as much as to say, ‘We all have unpleasant things to do in this life.’
‘Then let me tell you,’ Ghote went on cautiously, ‘that in the course of my inquiries to date I have been unable to trace any reports concerning the organs of the deceased after they were removed from the body by the pathologist at this hospital.’
Dr Patil raised a hand to request a halt.
‘Let me think,’ he said, ‘I can remember the name of the person in question.’
He lifted his eyes for a moment or two to the steadily whirring ceiling-fan just above him.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘Adhikari. Hemu, if I am not mistaken, Adhikari.’
‘That is the man,’ Ghote acknowledged. ‘You had him on your staff for some time then?’
Dr Patil nodded a brief negative.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘As a matter of fact Mr Adhikari took up a post in some distant part – was it Nagaland? I think it was – shortly before my own appointment here.’
‘But his name seems very familiar to you?’ Ghote said.
Dr Patil smiled somewhat ruefully.
‘I remember the name,’ he said, ‘because I seemed plagued by it in the first months of my stay here. To begin with, he left rather suddenly and we had to manage for some time without a replacement. And secondly there was the matter to which you have referred.’
‘The organs of the deceased?’ Ghote asked with a dart of hope.
‘The organs of the deceased. I was asked what had become of them, and I had to spend a considerable amount of time making inquiries when I had many other matters I would have wished to have devoted myself to. The administration of the hospital was not all that I could have desired in those days.’
Dr Patil looked down at the glass top of his desk in mild and distant disapproval.
‘And your inquiries?’ Ghote asked. ‘What was the result of them?’
‘Negative. Totally negative. I will say for Adhikari that he was an admirably methodical fellow. He kept the most complete records. The arrival of the cadaver was duly noted. Its return under the instructions of the Coroner’s Committee was equally noted. Nothing whatsoever was noted about the organs.’
‘And did you make inquiries of Adhikari himself?’ Ghote asked. ‘You must have had a forwarding address.’
Dr Patil once more sought guidance from the whirring fan blades above him. And found it.
‘Yes, I remember writing a number of letters,’ he said. ‘It was one of the minor irritations of my first days here.’
Suddenly he smiled.
‘And,’ he added, his eyes twinkling, ‘I think I can tell you exactly what happened to Adhikari’s replies to me.’
Ghote felt a distinct surge of hope, which even the unaccountable frivolity of the Medical Superintendent’s approach to the question could not dispel.
‘Yes?’ he asked anxiously.
Dr Patil smiled again, benignly.
‘I have no doubt,’ he said, ‘that Adhikari penned any number of replies to my inquiries. And that he never posted one of them.’
Ghote could only look astonished.
‘Yes,’ Dr Patil said, still enjoying his joke, ‘that was a distinctive characteristic of Mr Hemu Adhikari’s. He was perhaps the greatest writer of unsent letters this town has ever known.’
‘But you came here only after he had gone?’ Ghote said.
‘Yes. And what did he leave me with? A considerable file of correspondence addressed to a number of surgical instrument makers, generally detailing complaints, and all of it requiring answers. And never an answer came.’
Dr Patil rubbed his large strong-fingered hands together.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Since I had no pathologist I undertook to deal with the matter myself. And do you know what I discovered? That not a single one of those letters was recorded in the post-book going out.’
Ghote began to feel again that a promising trail was rapidly being lost this time in a wild undergrowth of inefficiency. But he persisted with his questions.
‘You say there was no record of the organs having been dispatched to the Chemical Examiner in Bombay,’ he said, ‘but did you carry out any search for them here?’
‘Oh, indeed, I did,’ Dr Patil replied with gusto. ‘In hours which I could ill spare. Down on my hands and knees myself in dusty forgotten corners of the pathology store-rooms. I told you Adhikari was methodical. Innumerable specimens were preserved there – I dare say they still are – and all meticulously labelled. But none of them was labelled as being organs removed from the body of the first Mrs Savarkar.’
The words fell like successive hammer strokes on Ghote’s hopes. Taken whatever way he might, they seemed to spell the end of this particular line of inquiry. If the link he had established with Dr Patil by means of his makeshift Gujarati meant anything, then he had been told the truth and the organs extracted from the late Mrs Savarkar, with all their possibilities for analysis, had long ago been destroyed. And even if Dr Patil had all along acted in the Municipal Chairman’s interests, had he ever found the stored organs he would have handed them to his friend for destruction.
Ghote rose to his feet.
There remained for him now only the hope that back at the police-station Superintendent Chavan’s men had been able to discover the present whereabouts of the members of the Coroner’s Committee who had deliberated over the body of the first Mrs Savarkar.
He bicycled away from the hospital a great deal more slowly than he had bicycled towards it.
*
Toilingly he began pushing his heavy machine through the sticky slush towards the town’s main street, keeping more than half his attention fixed on the ground immediately ahead of him to avoid the lake-like puddles that dotted the mud-churned road, one of which had already sent the bicycle skewing sideways under him. The rest of his thoughts still battered at the problem of just how he was to get proof of this fifteen-year-old crime, as if by mere thinking he could force open other avenues in the dead, impenetrable mass that seemed to confront him. And a small section of his mind, too, was insistently registering the fact that he was extremely hungry and that the midday meal time had come.
As he entered the top end of the broad main street all these thoughts seemed to coalesce into a single rhythm.
‘Ghote go. Go Ghote.’
‘Ghote go. Go Ghote.’
With a start he realized what the words he was inwardly chanting meant. Was this some subconscious cowardice making itself heard?
It was not.
Abruptly he saw that the rhythm was nothing emanating from his own head at all. It came from a substantial crowd of citizens some fifty yards ahead of him in the middle of the wide street. They were marching in his direction in procession and were chanting the words as they marched. They even carried a banner on two swaying bamboo poles. It drooped too much in the middle to be completely legible, but the last two letters were GO and the first GH.
Icy panic gripped him from throat to knees. He was possessed of a violent desire to wheel his ironclad bicycle round anyhow on the slippery mud and to pedal off as hard as his legs could make the machine go in any direction that would take him away from the advancing mob, with its shou
ting emotional faces worked upon by thoughts of the good holy man slowly starving himself to death.
But, as quickly, he saw that this would not do. If an angry crowd like this saw a newcomer to the town turn and flee before them they were very likely to decide that he must be the hated Ghote. And in any chase hereabouts bare feet would have no mean advantage over bicycle wheels on the slimy surfaces of the puddle-pocked town streets.
He forced himself not to turn. More, he forced himself to cycle slowly towards the oncoming protesters.
Only when he was almost level with the head of the procession did he permit himself to bring his machine to a halt and wait by the roadside, in as natural a manner as he could force himself to show, while the chanting mob passed by.
Allowing for the ragtag and bobtail that came at the end of the procession in the way of small boys dancing and squawking, dogs yapping and snapping and a mild madman uttering from time to time shrieks of whistle-high pitch, the whole affair took a good five minutes to unroll. Ghote stood by the roadside, giving each passer-by a long uninhibited stare, and contriving in the interests of his own safety to make sure that every single protester got a good look at the egg-box on his bicycle’s rear carrier.
When at last even the mild madman had passed Ghote found that he was noticeably trembling as he slowly remounted.
Perhaps these fifty or so protesters had not been too formidable. But what if they had realized whom it was standing there, and had surrounded him? He could at this moment have been lying face down in the broad puddle that spread at his feet, battered insensible even if still alive.
One thing was clear. The time at his disposal in the town was getting hourly shorter and shorter.
5
So it was a hasty meal indeed that Ghote ate before setting out again to try the other trail he had unearthed in his all-night examination of the files that had been accumulated when the sudden death of Sarojini Savarkar had been investigated fifteen years before.
Yet he felt a shade more hopeful than he had done when he had arrived at the police-station. Superintendent Chavan’s claim about the efficiency of his men had not proved illusory. A team of constable clerks working without cease had succeeded in discovering the present whereabouts of all five of the men who had served on the Coroner’s Committee which had, in defiance of customary procedure, granted permission for a suspected victim of poisoning to be burned instead of being buried.
And more than this, Superintendent Chavan himself had remembered that one man in particular on that committee was very likely strongly indebted to the Municipal Chairman.
‘He is the fellow by name of Ram Dhulup, my dear Inspector,’ the superintendent had said, his heavy frame positively bursting with pride. ‘The man is accident victim, you know, and would have been altogether reduced to beggary except that some person of wealth makes him a monthly retainer.’
The superintendent had leant across his desk at this point and had beaten an absolute tattoo of finger taps on his braided cap so delighted was he with his discovery.
‘I have personally myself checked with one or two very good friends of mine in the town, and I can assure you, my dear Inspector, that man is not in receipt of any kind of State pension whatsoever.’
‘That is most interesting, sir.’
‘It points to one person, eh, Inspector? One person who shall be nameless, I think you would agree. Hah!’
Ghote had hurried off at this, a typed list of the addresses of his five possible leads neatly folded in the top pocket of his shirt. And it was to Ram Dhulup’s home that he had cycled first.
Ram Dhulup may have been in receipt of a mysterious pension from someone or other, but it cannot have been a very large one since his house was simply one of a number of mud-walled buildings, scarcely more than huts, in a lane near the river inhabited by the town’s dhobis, some of whom Ghote saw down by their steps on the riverbank holding out various washed garments in the heavy breeze that forecast a new shower, forlornly hoping to get them a little drier before the new downpour came.
Sitting outside the house on a low earthen platform only just higher than the immense puddles which almost completely covered the ground in this low-lying area, there was a handsome young woman – she would be, Ghote calculated, perhaps twenty-five – busy sifting grain.
‘You are the daughter of Ram Dhulup?’ Ghote inquired.
The young woman was instantly and lithely on her feet. She snatched at her somewhat gaudy sari to take its end decorously across her head, though in doing so she allowed – or contrived – to let the garment slip well down from her bosom.
And, looking modestly at her feet, she giggled.
Ghote, who had seen any amount of this sort of thing in Bombay, stood waiting for an answer with what patience he could muster.
At last it came.
‘Not daughter. It is wife I am.’
Ghote acknowledged his surprise. If Ram Dhulup had been a senior enough citizen to look well on a Coroner’s Committee fifteen years before he ought not to have a wife of this age. However, the discrepancy in years between the couple did not seem to be his immediate concern.
‘Your husband is inside?’ he asked.
Again the buxom young woman standing statuesquely in front of him giggled.
Again Ghote waited.
‘No,’ she replied at last. ‘No, he is not inside.’
‘He is talking with neighbours?’ Ghote asked.
‘No, he is not talking with neighbours.’
The sari had slipped back off the head now, and Ghote was able to see quite clearly that the young woman was, if not a beauty, decidedly attractive. And, plainly too, she knew it. The jewel in her nostril was a large one, and the hand that soon came up to carry out more play with the folds of the sari over the bosom was heavy with bangles.
Ghote took a breath and patiently went on with his interrogation.
‘He has gone to buy something?’
‘No, he has not gone to buy anything.’
‘He is visiting friends?’
‘No, it is not friends that he is visiting.’
‘Ah, but he is visiting somewhere in the town?’
‘No, he is not in the town.’
‘Not in the town? Then where is he?’
‘To Nagpur he has gone. More than three hours ago he has departed.’
‘Why has he gone to Nagpur?’
She smiled at him brazenly, as much as to say ‘What a ridiculously stupid question.’
‘He has gone to wedding of cousin. Many guests they are having.’
‘And you have not gone also?’ Ghote asked sharply.
Ram Dhulup’s young wife modestly looked down at the ground once again. She turned her hip outwards voluptuously to do so.
‘The cousins are not knowing we are married,’ she said. ‘He is widower, my husband.’
Ghote thought he grasped the situation. A poverty-stricken dhobi is involved in some sort of serious accident which prevents him crouching on a stone step by the river’s edge and beating lustily at other people’s dirty clothes. At some point he is able to do a certain wealthy individual a much needed good turn. He finds himself afterwards with a pension, not much but enough to put him in a state of comparative affluence among his neighbours. An astute mother with a hard-to-hold daughter to get off her hands seizes on this suddenly well-off widower and before he knows what has happened to him he is married again and to a prime young wife. Some people have to know about it, but cousins in distant Nagpur, thirty or forty long miles away, can safely be left in ignorance, thus avoiding the recriminations that doubtless would have followed.
‘When is your husband returning from Nagpur?’ Ghote demanded sternly.
‘Not for many days,’ replied the buxom creature in front of him.
She did not seem at all unhappy at this.
‘And where do his cousins live in Nagpur?’ Ghote asked.
To his considerable surprise he was rewarded for this question with
not only the address of the cousins but their name and occupation as well. He made a careful note of them, said a cold good-bye to the roving-eyed Mrs Dhulup and clambered back on to his bicycle.
He had four other Coroner’s Committee members to see, but if they did not prove satisfactory he could always go quickly to Nagpur and get hold of Ram Dhulup. Perhaps by doing so he would get ahead of the Municipal Chairman, and he needed to do that only once.
*
The next person after Ram Dhulup on the list Ghote had been given by Superintendent Chavan was the foreman of that Coroner’s Committee of so long ago, Janardan Pendharkar, a minor official in the local tax office. Ghote left his dreadnought bicycle with the dozens of others in racks inside the office compound and entered the building all ready to be the inspector from Bombay once again.
After obtaining a good many contradictory answers from the various file-carrying peons whom he had made inquiries of, he at last located the office of the ex-foreman of the Coroner’s Committee.
Somewhat to his surprise he was immediately admitted when, in accordance with the system he had developed, he sent in his name in a sealed note by the peon he found lightly dozing on a bench in the corridor.
Janardan Pendharkar was a man of about sixty, round, chubby and immovable, like a little god.
‘Sit, sit, Inspector,’ he said with a gracious gesture but without actually giving this one client among many anything in the nature of a direct look.
Ghote would have sat immediately, only it seemed that Mr Pendharkar had not ascertained whether there was anything available to sit on, each of the three chairs in the office being heaped high with a pile of dog-eared and battered files. At last Ghote boldly took hold of the smallest stack and deposited it on the floor.
Rotund little Mr Pendharkar carefully read a document picked from his crowded desk while this was going on and only when Ghote was well seated did he give him one quick glance before fixing his eyes on his own plumply folded hands and launching into an observation.
‘Please not to think,’ he said, ‘that I am not very well acquainted with the purpose of your visit on this occasion.’
Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg Page 5