Under a Monsoon Cloud: an Inspector Ghote Mystery

by H. R. F. Keating

  Mrs Ahmed, however, came marching up to Ghote.

  ‘Well, Inspector, are you going to come with me to Worli? Or have you had some mind-change?’

  He had nurtured a tiny hope that their spat of an altercation at the start of the session would have been forgotten, together with his promise. But he was not going to be seen as backing down.

  ‘Yes, I am ready to go,’ he said. ‘But first only I must telephone my wife to say I would be late.’

  ‘Very well. I mean to catch the Number 44 bus. You can meet me at the bus stand.’

  This was another blow. He had imagined that they would go up to Worli by taxi, with Mrs Ahmed paying. But evidently she was determined not to expend more than the barest minimum on her mission. Or, he thought with a squirt of savagery as he came away from giving his explanation to Protima, perhaps it was just that she was determined to make her P.U.C.L. path seem as stony as possible.

  He stepped out into the steadily teeming rain, letting the rancorous misery he had begun to feel rapidly take over the whole of his mind.

  Even the luck they had at the bus stand – the second No. 44 to arrive had room on board – did nothing to dispel his gloom. Throughout the long buffeting journey, up past the docks, through the mills area, the tall blank walls to either side drearily washed by the sweeping palls of rain, and across at last to Worli itself, he sat in fixed silence. On the windows of the jam-packed bus the steam of humanity condensed in water drops that ran endlessly down to wet the seat beside him.

  Mrs Ahmed, too, appeared lost in thought. Though, whenever he ventured a quick look towards her, he surmised that it was not dejected misery like himself she was feeling but rather a steadily mounting anger at the prospect of the difficulties she was going to experience.

  At last they arrived.

  ‘First to the police station,’ Mrs Ahmed said, decisively as if she was a senior officer – almost Tiger Kelkar himself – issuing orders. ‘Then we must go to the wives of these men in the slum where they have been found somewhere to stay in other huts.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Ghote dully.

  Drearily he tramped along beside the stout figure of the P.U.C.L. stalwart, her raised umbrella though it was large only partially sheltering him.

  The police station, when they squelched up to it, seemed to answer all his worst forebodings. The Station House Officer, a big, glowingly corpulent sub-inspector, declared brazenly that he had no knowledge of the men who had been arrested at the posh flats where they had taken refuge. So far as he was concerned there were no such people.

  ‘But I tell you I was seeing them this morning itself,’ Mrs Ahmed said, drawing herself up for battle. ‘Are you saying they have been let go free, Mr Sub-Inspector? Or is it that they have been so much maltreated that you are not daring to let a member of the legal profession see?’

  The colour rose on the sub-inspector’s well-fleshed cheeks.

  ‘Madam, I am saying you have no damn business here.’

  Ghote, who had been hovering back near the doorway, more than a little willing to disassociate himself from these P.U.C.L. matters, took an impulsive step forward.

  ‘S.I.,’ he said, ‘I am with this lady. Ghote, Crime Branch.’

  He was conscious, even as he spoke, that he was wearing uniform only by special dispensation for the Inquiry period and that, a suspended officer, it was straining a point even to claim he came from Headquarters. But the fellow’s attitude, vindicating at once Mrs Ahmed’s claims about police behaviour, brought up in him a brushfire of bad temper which had cracklingly swept away all discretion.

  The sub-inspector looked up from his desk.

  ‘Oh, if it is Crime Branch matter,’ he said with evident sullenness, ‘then go ahead, Inspector, do what you damn well like.’

  Led by Mrs Ahmed, Ghote marched then into the station and through to the lock-up, conscious of holding himself more upright than usual.

  The lock-up was neither worse nor better than most. But, seeing it through Mrs Ahmed’s eyes, Ghote felt a certain shame. There were some fifty men and boys confined in the narrow space between its grease-blackened walls and the stink of mere humanity, of urine and ordure, rolled heavily out in the humid air. Seeing his uniform, four or five of the prisoners who had been clutching the narrow bars which formed the whole outer wall retreated swiftly towards the interior darkness, plainly expecting blows if not worse.

  Others, more sanguine, less used to police-station life, pressed forward at the sight of Mrs Ahmed’s sari, extending naked arms through the bars, squeezing naked chests as near to freedom and the outside world as they could get.

  Happily, Mrs Ahmed recognized among them her own particular clients and, it seemed, she was bringing them comparatively good news. She had arranged, she said, for them to be represented when they were brought before the magistrate and she had also found temporary accommodation for their families.

  ‘We are going to see now,’ she reassured them. ‘And since one of our lawyers will be present when you are brought to court you can be sure that at most you will be fined. Then you can rejoin your wives.’

  But her words did not seem to bring as much comfort as they might have been expected to do, and Mrs Ahmed turned away, stopping to scrape some filth off one of her chappals, unthanked.

  Out in the rain again, making their way towards the slum where the huts that had disintegrated had been, Ghote felt bold enough to comment on the limited success of the visit.

  ‘Madam, I was sorry to observe that what you were doing for these people was not earning you very much of kudos.’

  ‘No, Inspector. These people are too much downtrodden to have many feelings, whether gratitude for what little anyone does for them or anger at the many things that are done against them. And you should be happy at that. If they were as altogether enraged as they ought to be, you policewallas would have nothing else to do from morning to night but attempt to put down rioting.’

  ‘Well, yes, I am seeing that. But, madam, all the same I was wondering …’

  ‘What wondering, Inspector?’

  ‘Oh, madam, why at all are you doing such work? Madam, if I may say it, here you are, an educated lady who could be having a fine job, if domestic duties are not making too much of calls upon your time. But instead you are doing this. Madam, why is that?’

  Mrs Ahmed turned her head under her big dripping umbrella and looked at him.

  ‘I am surprised that you ask, Inspector.’

  ‘Why surprised, madam?’

  Mrs Ahmed gave him a somewhat wry smile.

  ‘Because I do not think of policemen showing very much of concern about others, Inspector, if it is the truth you are wanting.’

  Ghote felt too abashed to reply. He skipped over a large yellowy brown puddle and walked on, his question unanswered.

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Ahmed said after they had gone in silence for some hundred yards, ‘I will tell you, Mr Ghote, how it all came about.’

  For a moment more she was silent, gathering her thoughts.

  ‘I am country-born, you know,’ she began at last. ‘My father was a landowner, we are a well-to-do family. But not at all educated. My mother was never English-speaking, and my father spoke it always quite badly. So when – ’

  She came to a halt. But, Ghote thought, this was not solely because they had come to a crossing and the rain-swirling gutter needed some care to negotiate.

  On the far side she stopped and turned to face him. He stepped a little closer to gain what shelter he could from her sturdy umbrella.

  ‘Mr Ghote,’ she said, plunging in, ‘I had a brother, one year younger, and you, you may imagine, how pleased and proud I was to be his didi, to teach and protect him. And then – Then one day he was seen to have leprosy. Yes, in our good, clean, rich family we had a leper. This was long ago, mind you, in the pre-Independence days. And so … So my parents at once believed that their small son had committed in his past life some sin so altogether vile that it would be si
n in them also to so much as touch him or talk to him. And they sent this little bright boy – he was ten years of age only – to a distant, distant leper colony. It was as if he had died suddenly. Worse, even.’

  She swirled abruptly round.

  ‘But we must not linger,’ she said. ‘I will tell you the rest while we walk.’

  ‘If you do not want,’ Ghote said, ‘kindly remain silent.’

  ‘No, I would like you to hear. I feel sometimes that you are not altogether well disposed to P.U.C.L. people, Inspector, and I would like you to know how one of them came to join.’

  ‘But – But I assure – ’

  ‘No. No need, Inspector. Listen only.’

  ‘Very well, madam.’

  ‘At first when my jewel brother was taken away like that I was bitterly angry. Angry with the gods, angry with my father and mother. Angry with everyone and everything. But after one year I thought that I had to go and see this brother who had been lifted out of our lives. So I asked and requested and altogether badgered my parents, and at last they consented to go on pilgrimage to Rishikesh where they had sent my Vasudev. You know where is Rishikesh, Inspector?’

  ‘Yes, yes. It is in the foothills of the Himalayas.’

  ‘Well, there when we went I at last found my little brother. He was a beggar, Inspector. Clothed in rags, squatting by the bridge that is there, crying and whining for the alms which people wishing to acquire merit threw from a safe distance. Well, Inspector, twelve years of age only though I was, it did not take me one minute then to make up my mind that something had to be done. And I asked and asked and made myself a thorough nuisance to one and all, and at last I found that there was nearby a good, clean colony where lepers were not seen as outcasts but were helped to live a decent life. And I made my parents take Vasudev to that place.’

  She had been walking at a tremendous rate, splashing regardlessly through puddles and slime. Ghote, beside her, had been aware that his trousers were getting extremely muddy, if not to the fearful extent they had got to be on his terrible march with Tiger Kelkar.

  But now she slowed and looked at him again.

  ‘Well, from that day on, Inspector,’ she said, ‘I knew what I had to do in this world. To fight for the poor and to fight against all hypocrisies.’

  ‘Yes, madam,’ Ghote said.

  And he tramped onwards in thoughtful silence.

  They arrived at the slum, a collection of lopsided patchy constructions of the inevitable beaten-out tins and jaggedy pieces of polythene sheeting, perched crazily on the steep side of a small hill overlooking the sea. On the opposite side of the wide road were the big pink, green and yellow blocks of the posh flats in the stairways of which the families whose huts had been washed away had taken illicit refuge.

  A few sodden goats and two cows slowly disputed over some edible strands of something on a huge rubbish heap at the foot of the slope.

  They entered the area. From hut to hut Mrs Ahmed went, slipping and sliding on the narrow earth paths, deep now in glutinous mud. Time and again she dipped her head low, pushing aside a dripping rag that served as a hut door, and inquired of the wretched people huddled inside – more than once Ghote saw a whole family crouched on a charpoy out of a sullen flood on the floor, holding pieces of cardboard over their heads against leaks – where the families of the men in the lock-up were to be found.

  They located them at last and, to Ghote’s shamed relief, Mrs Ahmed told him then that she felt he had seen enough.

  ‘Well, goodbye, madam,’ he said. ‘Until the Inquiry tomorrow.’

  Soaked and sombre, he made his way, by two different buses, back home. He said nothing to Protima of the reason for his lateness, and that night he dreamt that he had become a leper.

  12

  Setting off for the Inquiry next morning, pressed uniform protected from the dolloping rain by a voluminous cape, Duck Back gumboots replacing polished shoes for the journey, Ghote found it hard to believe it was all such a life-and-death business as up to now he had believed it to be.

  But it was not long before once again he found he was fully caught up.

  As soon as S.M. Motabhoy and his fellow Board members had taken their places R.K. Sankar’s next promised witness, former Inspector Nadkarni, was ushered in by the Inquiry orderly.

  He walked across to the witness table with some show of the smart police officer of old. But Ghote saw with sudden sadness that since they had last seen each other Nadkarni had lost almost everything of the inward vitality he had once possessed, very different from Tiger Kelkar’s aggressiveness but unmistakably there. White-haired now and markedly round-shouldered, his face behind the familiar pair of gold-rimmed spectacles of the last years of his service was plainly withered, the cheeks paunchy and slack.

  But, whatever changes there were in his appearance, he must be still the Nadkarni of old, his mentor, kind always yet unsparing in quiet criticism when such had been his due. There would come, if at any time he had said or done something even a little foolish, a small dry cough, a steady, mild but inescapable look and some such words as ‘Not altogether wise, I think.’ A rebuke more effective than any shouted abuse.

  R.K. Sankar rose now from his papers-covered table smoothly as a cobra, his long black atchkan elegantly uncreased as ever, its row of silver buttons softly glinting.

  ‘You are Mr G.P. Nadkarni, formerly an inspector of police, Bombay Crime Branch?’

  ‘I am.’

  The voice, Ghote heard with dismay, had now the faintest quaver in it.

  ‘You have, since your retirement from the police service, occupied the onerous position of Head of Security at the Bombay office of the Reserve Bank of India?’

  ‘I did occupy that post, but I have finally retired since the past one year.’

  ‘I see. But you would agree that among the many qualities required in such a responsible position is the ability to make sound judgements concerning a variety of different people?’

  Nadkarni gave the little cough which Ghote remembered so well. ‘Yes, that would be an asset, though I would not claim that I myself possessed it in particular abundance.’

  ‘You are too modest, Mr Nadkarni. But let us move on to the particular matter in which you have agreed to assist us. You were in the past, I understand, a close colleague of Inspector Ghote, now before this Inquiry?’

  Nadkarni did not answer immediately.

  Ghote, sitting tensely on his hard wooden chair, asked himself if this could be because he knew that what he would have to say would be harmful to himself. Because he was sure that old Nadkarni had liked him, had done his best for him in the past, had been almost a father to him.

  Oh, if only he had still been in the service. Then there would have been a brother officer to whom he could have entrusted his defence without a second thought. Only Nadkarni, surely, would never have agreed to defend him were he to have been told the guilty facts.

  ‘I did work with Inspector Ghote, yes.’

  ‘At one time in particular you were, I understand, close colleagues?’

  ‘Yes. That could be said. We were both members of a cell recruited to launch a drive against black-money transactions.’

  ‘And the late A.D.I.G. Kelkar was also a member of this cell or squad?’

  ‘He was.’

  ‘So you would have had many opportunities of observing Inspector Ghote’s relations with Inspector Kelkar, as he was at that time?’

  ‘We were all much in each other’s company, yes.’

  ‘Would you care to describe for the benefit of this Inquiry what in your view were the relations between Inspectors Ghote and Kelkar?’

  Again Nadkarni was silent.

  But, Ghote thought, this is the moment when he will have to bring the first log to my funeral pyre. And he hesitates to do it.

  ‘I think Ghote had a great respect for Kelkar, as a more experienced officer.’

  ‘An experienced man who was setting him an example of all that a first-c
lass police officer should be?’

  ‘Yes. You could be saying that.’

  ‘You would say that Inspector Ghote had the greatest admiration for this man, soon to be promoted to a higher rank and with a fine record already behind him?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that was so.’

  Nadkarni, letting his round shoulders sag yet more, looked down at the bare table in front of him.

  ‘Perhaps you would go so far as to characterize Ghote’s attitude as a guru-chela relationship?’

  Once more Nadkarni hesitated, weighing what words he could utter.

  ‘No. No, I would not go quite as far as that. Ghote certainly admired Kelkar. We all did. He was even then a much respected officer. But I do not think that Ghote regarded himself quite as a disciple, nor Kelkar exactly as a teacher.’

  R.K. thoughtfully lowered himself on to his chair, evidently thinking he had got as much out of his witness as he was likely to get, and that it was enough.

  Ghote turned and whispered urgently to Mrs Ahmed behind him.

  She rose to her feet.

  ‘Mr Nadkarni, one question only. Would you in fact say that if Inspector Ghote had any sort of a guru-chela relationship it existed between yourself and him?’

  Nadkarni looked up and gave her a smile of great sweetness.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I was perhaps something of a guru to Ghote when he first joined duty in the C.I.D. And I may say that he made an excellent chela, quick to learn and eager to carry out each and every allotted task.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Nadkarni.’

  The words of praise, in that voice which so sadly had in it all too obviously the quaver of old age, went like an arrow into Ghote’s heart. He had hoped in the past that this, or something like it, was what Nadkarni might feel about him. But in those days his mentor had never spoken openly in such a way. And to hear himself praised now, when he was in the very act of behaving in a way Nadkarni certainly would not have given his blessing to: it was a moment of biting shame.

  But R.K. had stood to put another question, doubtless feeling that Mrs Ahmed had significantly eroded the impression he hoped he had created.