Under a Monsoon Cloud: an Inspector Ghote Mystery

by H. R. F. Keating

  He was serving the same cause, he thought, as when he had taken that first impulsive, fraught with consequences, rock-firm resolution to help Tiger. He had done that because he felt Tiger, sending his fire and vigour down through the ranks, was a force for good. Well, he himself in his lesser way would be that, too. He would, if he got through the time of trial that was awaiting him, take Tiger as his ever-to-be-followed model. He would be a better police officer for having told the lies that, all too soon, he must tell.

  Yet the time of trial proved not to come as soon as, sitting there looking at the Commissioner’s notification, he had seen it as beginning.

  Evidence, he realized in the next few days, would still have to be gathered. That was something that could take weeks. A Presiding Officer for the Inquiry had to be found. He himself had to be given time in which to decide whether he wanted to be defended by a brother officer or to exercise his right to be represented legally, and in consequence face questioning not from the Presiding Officer himself but from a lawyer of equal eminence to his own – and perhaps even greater cross-examining skills.

  So for an indefinite period he found himself at home with nothing to do. Day by day the pre-monsoon heat built up. And tension grew with it, in the city where there were frequent outbreaks of communal and domestic violence, and in his own home.

  There was, about three weeks after his suspension had begun, the absurd incident of the umbrella. He had undertaken to go to Lohar Chawl in Protima’s place to see if among all the hardware items the area specialized in, the plastic buckets in their bright towers, the electric toasters, the fan-shaped arrays of padlocks and furniture castors, the pyramids of crockery and glassware, he could find, cheap, an indoors clothesline so that this year when the rains came there would be less trouble getting garments dry.

  Just as he had stepped out, the patchy clouds above had begun to produce a faint drizzle, as often happened before the monsoon itself started. He decided to go back for his umbrella. It would hardly be necessary, but finding it and taking it out would lengthen nicely this interruption in the idle monotony.

  He spotted it in the first place he thought of as likely for it to have been put away at the end of the previous monsoon shortly after he had returned from Vigatpore. It was under the bed, and he groped for it, blew off some dust and set out once more.

  But, when he came to open it, standing in the soft drizzle again and already beginning to feel stickily hot, something appeared to be wrong. It was a mechanical umbrella, useful in that it would fold compactly if he was using his scooter. Protima had given it to him in place of his former long one, which in fact he was proud of having kept intact, more or less, through four whole monsoons.

  But now, wrestle with this one’s catch as he might, nothing happened. The affair remained obstinately a small black tube.

  Eventually, covered now in sweat, he attempted to prise the damn thing apart with his fingers. And at last it moved. Suddenly and with a loud ripping sound.

  And there it was in his hands. Ruined.

  Fury swept up in him, red, screaming fury, filling every corner of his mind, wildly blotting out everything.

  ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ he shouted, careless of what neighbour wives might hear. ‘Damn, bloody, mother-raping thing.’

  He hurled it on to the pavement and jumped up and down with both feet on the little heap of wreckage.

  In a moment Protima appeared, curious to know what the disturbance was about.

  ‘Blood, bloody stupid umbrella,’ he yelled at her.

  He knew he was rejecting her gift, and that this would hurt her. But in his pent-up rage, at last released after days and weeks of frustration, he was careless of any harm he might inflict on anyone.

  ‘Where is my old umbrella?’ he demanded. ‘Where is an umbrella that is some damn bloody use?’

  ‘It was of no use,’ Protima answered with an air of calm that he knew she was deliberately putting on. ‘There were holes all over. I was selling it long ago to the raddiwalla.’

  ‘Then how do you expect me to go and get your damn clothesline in all this rain?’ he stormed back at her.

  ‘There is not much of rain and if you do not want to go you do not need.’

  ‘Oh, well, I will go then. I will go. And if I am catching a cold and getting ill, then it is you who must take the blame.’

  And off he marched.

  He failed to find a clothesline at a sum he thought they could afford, now that his salary was ‘held in arrears’. All the pavement umbrella sellers he saw, too, appeared to have hiked their prices in anticipation of the days of rain ahead. But nevertheless by the time he returned home, exhausted, his fury had blown itself out.

  The days went slowly by. He saw few of his colleagues, and soon realized that most of them were avoiding the man with the dark shadow hanging over him. Even those who did go out of their way to greet him when he had occasion to go near Headquarters did so, he felt, too heartily.

  How among such friends, he asked himself, could he find one to defend him before the Inquiry? None of them was his true bosom pal.

  Eventually he was officially informed of the terms of the charges he would have to face. But the statutory words from Section 7 of the Police Act of 1861 told him nothing. They amounted in effect to the single accusation that he had helped Tiger. And he had done that. And he was going to lie and lie about it. That was enough.

  The heat seemed to get worse by a measurable amount each succeeding day. Tempers everywhere were frayed. There were outbreaks of rioting, giving him the empty consolation that at least this year it was not his task to sort out the cause of some particular incident at the behest of an interested politician. Once, on one of the long, aimless walks he took so as to eat away the slow hours, he saw an enraged Muslim pull a sword out of the gupti that had seemed to be his innocent walking-stick and set off in chase after a member of a rival sect. He began to pursue the fellow, but when he saw the quarry was going to escape in any case he gave up. What business was it of his?

  In the tingling heat the very crows in the streets were going about with open, gaping beaks. At home crawling columns of black ants came in successive invasions, and each day the kitchen seemed to spawn a new family of avaricious, predatory cockroaches.

  There were a few interruptions in this long, blank, time-out-of-life period, with the dull rage ever in the back of his head. Once he had to give evidence in a case at the Esplanade Magistrate’s Court, a comparatively trifling affair that for one reason or another had been long delayed. It was to have an unexpected outcome for him, in more ways than one.

  He had been involved originally only because the victim of the theft was a person of influence and in consequence Crime Branch had been called in. However, he had not been displeased with the part he had played. It had so happened that no one in that influential victim’s home had thought to record just where the Goan servant who had run off with some of the family jewellery had originally lived. But by patiently tracking the fellow back from employer to employer he had at last discovered the exact address and one quick telephone call to his native place had secured his arrest.

  Now at the hearing, which should have gone without a hitch, trouble suddenly blew up. The absconding man had been offered the services of a lawyer, a lady barrister belonging to the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, an organization he himself viewed with no little mistrust. And the lady, a Mrs Vimala Ahmed, a person of some notoriety in legal and police circles, he again had faint, irrational reservations about as being a Hindu married to a Muslim. Shortly after the accused, who seemed much cowed by the formality of the court, had begun his evidence Mrs Ahmed jumped up and asked him to take off his shirt. And there, plain to see, were the marks of a severe beating.

  Ghote, sitting listening after giving his own evidence, cursed the damn fool of a sub-inspector at the local police station who had had custody of the man. There had been no need to get a confession out of him. The case was perfectly strong. And
now this …

  Mrs Ahmed, an unusual figure among Bombay’s colourfully dressed women in that she chose always to clothe her not unimpressive, stout person in absolutely plain saris of drab, workmanlike green cotton, relieved now only by the starched white barrister’s bands round her bare neck, at once asked to call the sub-inspector to the witness-box. Then with question after question in a tone of finely controlled anger she ripped into him. Each answer showed him more clearly as the stupid brute that he was, and at the climax he even asked, in a voice filled with truculence, ‘Was I to feed the fellow chocolate pudding?’

  Mrs Ahmed, matronly and magnificent in her outrage, stood back then and simply looked across at the Magistrate.

  And he threw the case out there and then.

  Ghote had been fuming increasingly as he realized that all his own good work was in more and more danger of going for nothing. He had looked forward to blasting the sub-inspector as soon as the hearing was over with all the fury he had pent up. But when the Magistrate announced his decision a quite different thought shot into his head.

  Mrs Ahmed, with all that angry power, would she not make a fine defender in his own case?

  She was already leaving the courtroom, having stuffed her papers into a large, battered-looking, shapeless bag of thick leather, which she swung by a broad strap over her shoulder. Without more time for reflection, he moved swiftly to intercept her.

  He caught up with her on the steps outside.

  ‘Madam, madam,’ he called. ‘One word, please, if you would be so good.’

  ‘It is Inspector – You gave evidence. Inspector Ghote. I did not think it worthwhile to cross-examine.’

  ‘No. No, madam, I am glad.’

  ‘Glad you did not have to face what I gave to that evil fellow? Lucky for you, I do not know anything to your detriment.’

  Ghote drew himself up.

  ‘There is nothing I have done to be ashamed,’ he said.

  For a moment he thought Mrs Ahmed was going to challenge the statement. A civil-libertieswalli to the core, she probably believed that each and every police officer was like that brutal fool just now.

  But instead a sudden shrewd look appeared on her well-flashed, time-lined face.

  ‘Perhaps you have not done anything to be ashamed of, Inspector,’ she said. ‘It is easy to think the police are corrupt and brutal from top to bottom when you have seen as much as I have. But exception must be there.’

  ‘Let me kindly assure you such is the case with me.’

  ‘Well, I am happy to believe it. But what can I do for you?’

  ‘You can defend me, madam,’ Ghote said. ‘I am under suspension.’

  As soon as he had spoken the words he wished he had not. Mrs Ahmed’s readiness to admit her prejudices had made him see she was a person not only with fire in her belly but with a particular regard for the truth. And, if he was to tell her that, yes, he had done just what he was to be accused of at the coming Inquiry, would she then agree to take up his cause? With the majority of advocates, he knew well, the questions would not arise. They saw the law as if it was a game of chess with only right moves or wrong, with no concern over right and wrong themselves. But Mrs Ahmed, he guessed now, was not a chess player but a worker at life.

  ‘To defend you, Inspector?’ she asked in return. ‘Well, what is it you are accused of? Let me warn you, I will not take up a case of police brutality or corruption. In the unlikely event of any officer coming to trial on such charges.’

  ‘No,’ Ghote answered, feeling every word pushing against the grain. ‘It is not any such offence I am charged with. It is a disciplinary matter. A certain senior officer a year ago unlawfully killed a subordinate, and I am charged with aiding the said officer to conceal evidence.’

  Mrs Ahmed, erect in her workmanlike drab sari on the steps of the court building in the electrically oppressive heat of the cloud-shrouded day, looked at him fair and squarely.

  ‘And did you aid this officer?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Inspector Ghote.

  The lie hurt him, as if it was a splinter of wood pushed up under one of his nails. But he said to himself that he had to have told it. He doubted if he would find an advocate more likely to fight for him when the Inquiry produced traps and pits to fall into. And to win through unscathed to its end was what he must do if he was to stay as a police officer, to work in the long future as Tiger would have done.

  ‘Then it is a matter of the powers-that-be wishing,’ Mrs Ahmed asked, ‘to lift up some blame by also involving a person of junior rank?’

  There was very little of the question in her query. And, with only one last instant of inner hesitation, Ghote agreed that her supposition was most probably correct.

  ‘Then you can count on me,’ Mrs Ahmed said. ‘Up to my level best.’

  Making his way slowly home, while overhead the clouds rumbled with outbreaks of thunder that sounded a little less empty than in the past few days, Ghote felt he had taken a step which might at the end of everything lead him out of his maze of trouble.

  Then, just as he dismounted from his scooter, there came a tremendous gust of wind, almost knocking over both man and machine and bending the nearby palm trees as if they were no more than reeds. There followed a half minute of awed, mysterious, empty silence with the sky a tense coppery cloud-dome from horizon to horizon. And then came a great double crack of thunder like a warning from the gods and the first monsoon downpour bucketed on to him.

  10

  With the arrival of the monsoon the remaining weeks until the Inquiry began were yet more stultifyingly aimless for Ghote, despite the ending of the tension-tingling premonsoon heat with the advent of the cooling rains. But he was no longer able to get out of the house by taking long walks about the city, like poor retired Inspector D’Sa. The roads he had slowly moved along in the days of stifling heat were often deep under floodwater now, and where they were not blocked by a foot or more of muddy brown water – sometimes no doubt the work of urchins like those he had failed to rebuke – pavements and roadways were frequently swirling with the fast-flowing excess of the walls and walls of warm rain.

  Indoors, everything smelt day and night of damp cotton and every surface that could hold mould was, unless Protima had wiped it hard, covered in greeny, pungent fungus. He himself attended each day to his uniform shoes – out of economy they had never had silica pouches – and to the seldom-worn Sam Browne belt that went with his review uniform. It was young Ved’s duty, in which with pouncing pleasure he delighted, to wring out at regular intervals the towels placed at the foot of each window to catch the fast-dripping moisture.

  Oh yes, Ghote had thought when the boy had done this in former years, he can stick at it also. He would do well.

  Out of doors, cars by the hundred were either brought to a halt in the floods or made immobile by damp in their engines. The trains were, as always, frequently unable to run where water covered the rails, and the city’s hundreds of thousands of commuters had to struggle in to their offices on foot, trousers rolled to the calf, saris hoisted almost as high, the ends of draped dhotis tucked into jacket pockets, a moving mass of black umbrellas. Gallantly they would manage to reach their destinations often as late as two in the afternoon, by which time it was only sensible to turn round and start off home again.

  Houses in the more crowded parts collapsed, pumped into sogginess by the hosing storms. And from the more affluent areas there were stories of flat roofs turned by the torrents into swimming baths that suddenly descended into the rooms below.

  But then at last came the letter informing Ghote of the date the Inquiry was to begin. He took out his shoes and belt once more and gave them an extra polish. He got Protima to iron with double care his uniform. And he made an appointment to see Mrs Vimala Ahmed.

  She insisted on him coming to the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, and the fears he had had about her almost from the moment of making his abrupt request to her to represent him g
rew sharply more insistent. What did he want with P.U.C.L. trouble-makers? He was a police officer.

  However, at the office Mrs Ahmed, dipping every now and again into her sturdy leather bag for a notebook or even a law volume, kept their discussion strictly to practical points. Little by little Ghote found himself coming to admire her. P.U.C.L.-walli she might be, but she was no fluttering butterfly sipping at the showiest flower only. She could work. He felt a link of warmth with her.

  ‘And this man – ’ She flicked a glance at her notebook. ‘This Shivram Patel, you did not see him when you were reaching that house that night about midnight?’

  ‘No,’ he answered firmly. ‘No, not at all. He was sleeping at the other end of the house altogether. I saw his servant only.’

  ‘Good. Yes. And the servant would give evidence about the exact time of your arrival?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, he must,’ Ghote answered, thinking of the trick he had played on the fellow at Tiger’s insistence, and wondering whether Mrs Ahmed would turn him out if she knew.

  By the day on which the Inquiry started he felt, despite inner qualms, that, with Mrs Ahmed on his side, he must stand a good chance of coming out of it cleared.

  The affair was to be held in the Old Secretariat building, looking out stone-faced and British on to the now verdant, puddly expanse of the Oval Maidan. Ghote got there some minutes early, uniform stiff with starch, Sam Browne gleaming with polish, black necktie arranged to a nicety, to meet Mrs Ahmed once more for a last few words of consultation.

  She arrived almost as soon as he had, her leather bag bulging more than ever.

  ‘Well, do you know who it is they have chosen as Presiding Officer?’ she said at once, bristling with indignation.