He took one quick glance at his own watch—was it still going to time?—and saw that he had a few minutes in hand at least.
“I would very much like to talk,” he said to Shruti.
She gestured the salesman across.
“Sub-Inspector Miss, good morning,” he greeted her. “You would be asking yourself what for I am here again, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes, Mr. Saxena,” Shruti Shah answered. “That I was very much wondering.”
The watch salesman produced a smirking grin under his brush of a moustache.
“Oh, it is most easily explained,” he said. “Most easily. You see, it was coming into my head this morning itself that this shop may be up for selling, now that poor Rustom is no longer on the spot. And, though I am most happy in my job—”
He came to a stop, hauled up the left sleeve of his shirt, and revealed, on a hairy forearm, not just one watch but four, strapped one above the other.
“Hindustan Machine Tools products,” he said. “Look, each and every one telling exact same time. ‘H.M.T.—timekeeping within everyone’s reach.’ Our slogan itself.”
Abruptly he yanked the sleeve down again. But not before Ghote had noticed that the uppermost watch was in fact two minutes behind its fellows.
Evidently Mr. Saxena realized what he had seen.
He grinned his uneasy grin again.
“Yes, well,” he said, “I was altogether forgetting to wind up same this morning. In my state of excitement, you understand. Because—because of what I had thought about taking over this Tick Tock shop.”
Another smirk of a grin under the thick moustache.
“You see, it is these Tata Titan fellows. They are moving into the field, you know. Future is not too assured.”
“You definitely expect this Mr. Rustom to be found guilty and his shop to be available?” Ghote asked sharply.
“What else to think is there? The body was in his shop. Rustom himself was absconding. No other explanation.”
“Well, at least that is what A.I. Lobo is believing,” Ghote commented. “But you seem to know Mr. Rustom well. Tell me, please, you were not at all surprised at what he had done?”
“Oh, yes. Yes. Altogether surprised. I mean, a chap is not coming into a shop and finding one dead body on the floor without feelings of surprise, no?”
“But is it that you were surprised when you learned Mr. Rustom had been charge-sheeted?” Ghote persisted.
Mr. Saxena shook his head, this way and that, up and down.
“With the human being you cannot ever be telling,” he said at last. “That is my experience. Absolutely. Why, last month only Rustom would not take one single H.M.T. watch. Not one. Titans only, he was saying. Titans. What nonsense and rot.”
He lifted his sleeve again, as if to show that in the intervening minutes none of his three lower H.M.T. watches had varied from conformity by as much as one second.
And Ghote, looking idly at the array on that hairy forearm, saw that each one of the three said twenty-two minutes to two. He ought to be off at once if he was to get to V.T. Station in decent time to buy a ticket and catch that 14:15 train to Nagpur.
“Look, Shruti,” he said, “I must be off. But thank you very much for the help you have given. And—and not a word to Mike Lobo, please.”
He began to go. But he had hardly lugged his suitcase beyond the fringe of the small circle of onlookers when he felt his free arm grabbed by what seemed like a claw of steel. A harshly croaking voice in his ear demanded, “Time kya? Time kya?” He turned.
It was a madman who had grabbed him, a bushily gray-bearded fellow, dressed only in a pair of filth-grimed cotton trousers with a shirt flapping open to reveal a chest covered in festering scratch marks and a long ugly wound or scar running down under the rib cage. A waft of filthy breath, sour with the rottenness of food gone bad before it had ever been eaten, assailed his nostrils.
“Time for bus to be starting, yes?” the fellow went on, voice raw as a crow’s. “Time for bus. Oh, sahib, sahib, I was bus-starter before. . . . Yes, one first-class job. And then came Saturn.”
Ghote let his case drop, took the hand that had fixed so ferociously onto his arm, and tried to loosen it.
“Saturn?” he asked, hoping to distract the fellow’s attention.
Two mad creatures in one day, he thought. It was hardly fair. First there had been that woman with her banana peel just before he was due to go in to the D.G.P. And now this fellow, who once, if what he was saying was true, had been employed getting buses out of the depot neither before nor after the correct time and now was well past the limits of sanity.
“Oh, sahib, I am under curse of Saturn. Astrologer foretold all. Seven years under Saturn in my horoscope. Oh, why did I have it cast?”
“But—but that is perhaps nonsense only,” Ghote said, still trying to pry away the grimy claw.
“No, no, sahib. True, true. From the first day he told it. My job retrenched. Then no money. Turned out from the room we had. Wife was dying. Son gambling, gambling, and then, when I had got all he needed to pay off those fellows, running away. So many rupees, gone, gone, gone. No money, no wife, no son, no watch. Oh, sahib, sahib ...”
Ghote had managed to force back only two of the grime-flaked fingers. He thought of his train. If he could do no better than this he would still be here at 14:15 when it left.
“Let go, let go,” he shouted into the fellow’s face.
“Time kya? Time kya, sahib? Bus must start.”
“Will you let go?”
“Now, gently, gently.”
It was Shruti Shah. Seeing his predicament, she had come up behind the madman and now she put a coaxing arm round the filthy, flapping shirt on his back.
Her crooning reassurance worked almost magically. Ghote felt the claw grip slacken. He slid his arm away. Shruti was still hushing the wild fellow, but she contrived to glance away to Ghote with a grin of complicity and a nod of the head that told him to make off while he could.
He stooped, grabbed his suitcase, looked hastily up to the lane end, spotted the yellow roof of a stationary taxi, and ran.
He got to V.T. Station with a decent amount of time in hand and breathed a sigh of relief before paying off the taxiwalla. He marched hurriedly into the huge, pillared concourse, trying to remember where exactly the ticket office was.
In a moment he saw it. And above its windows the implacable painted notice closed for accounting 14.00 to 14:30 hours. The windows were shuttered. He looked at his watch. It was 14:01.
THREE
So Inspector Ghote traveled “WT” to Nagpur, without a ticket for the first time in his law-abiding life. And at the end of his long journey he contrived to stroll out of the night-quiet station unchallenged. He booked himself in at the Skylark Hotel, the first he came to in the dimly lit city. Resting in bed, he read for a few minutes the guidebook someone had left behind. He decided to buy, if he could, at the Bharat Stores, whose advertisement in the guide’s pages promised “Airplane Quality at Submarine Prices,” a genuine Nagpuri sari for his wife to make up for this sudden call away. He considered briefly the book’s assurance that he was here “far away from the clog clog of machines, the whizzing trains, the blaring horns and sirens” and that the people in this unhurried part of India were “very urbane and hospitable. Yet at times as nasty as anybody.” And with that tiny warning jab in his ears he fell asleep.
First thing in the morning he set out to discover the times for the long-distance bus that would take him to the nearest point on the highway to Village Dharbani. To his dismay he found it almost ready to depart. No submarine-priced sari for Protima just yet.
For three hours or more the chugging vehicle took him through the sun-scorched countryside. Past the orange orchards around Nagpur itself they went, into the cotton-growing area, through the little town of Ramkhed, where in the police station S.P. Verma would be at his desk safe from any possibility of upsetting the powerful Patil of Dharbani. Fi
nally they came to the setting-down place for the village.
As the bus pulled away in a cloud of puffing dust, Ghote looked about him, senses alert.
He was, he realized abruptly, back home in a way. Home, not in familiar Bombay, but in the countryside in which he had spent his boyhood. A mile or so in the distance, down a meandering earth track, he could make out Dharbani itself, huddled in the shadow of a low hill. It was evidently a village a good deal larger than his own native place. But it was bound to be still, he thought, of much the same sort. And different from Bombay as milk from water, not just in that Nagpur guidebook’s freedom from the clog clog of machines and whizzing of trains, but in the very time that it moved by.
Here hours would no longer be ticked out in Sahar Airport’s digital seconds. Time would not be measured even in days and weeks, but in the slow round of the six seasons, spring into the hot weather, hot weather into the rains, rains into autumn, autumn into winter, winter into the cold weather, cold weather into spring once more.
And, he thought, coming back to the present with a swallow of apprehension, in the village ahead, where everybody had all the time in the world to stop, to stare, to wonder, it would not be at all as easy to make inquiries as in Bombay. There the police were an everyday sight. An officer was answered if he questioned. There people understood they were in danger, if they kept silent, of a swift slapping or being hustled into the lock-up. But here there would be, if he remembered village ways rightly, only sullen unwillingness. Yet before the day was over he had to find out for certain, without any official powers, whether or not Ganpatrao Pendke, grandson of the village’s powerful patil, had been away from home at the time his cousin-brother had been beaten to death in Bombay. If he were to fail it was more than likely A.I. Lobo would march his man in front of a magistrate and get that possibly dubious confession formally recorded.
He cleared his mouth of the dust from the departing bus, straightened his shoulders, and set off along the track to Dharbani and its secrets.
The path by no means led straight to its objective, though it could have nowhere but the village to go to. It jigged and jogged this way and that, as if no one walking its length could ever be in any sort of hurry. Here it skirted a miserable tree. There it slanted off toward a rock, time-sunk deep in the dusty earth, its side marked by a smear of bright red paste that showed it was an object of worship. But, Ghote observed, the path, for all its aimlessness, was not unused. Besides buffalo hoofmarks and the ruts of the lumbering carts they pulled, bicycle tracks crisscrossed each other plentifully.
So the inhabitants ahead are accustomed to go some way out into the wider world, he thought. Dharbani, unlike his own native village in his boyhood, had been touched by the hurrying world, if only lightly. Once or twice, indeed, he even made out the tracks of a motorcycle, and a powerful one, too, to judge by the long scatters of earth it had sent spurting away at the path’s twists and bends.
So, he thought, I will not be able to count all the time on my memories of village life. A mistake I must not make.
He marched steadily on.
At what he judged must be some two-thirds of the way to the village he saw the path seeming to lead to a field where a dozen or so women were at work, backs bent in the glare of the sun, harsh-colored saris tucked between their legs. Would they, if he stopped to talk, give him an idea of how things stood in the village ahead?
But, well before he reached the field, the meandering path took a turn away. He abandoned the idea of approaching the women in favor of later finding someone likely to be more awake to the village’s secret, inner life.
He came to the outskirts soon enough, a string of untidy mud huts with roofs of curling palm leaves. The quarter, he decided, where such necessary people as tanners, workers in leather, washermen, and the barber would be segregated from the higher castes. So Dharbani had not altogether joined the modern, bustling world too busy for ancient distinctions.
Outside the last of these separate huts, a shoemaker was at work, squatting bare-chested on the dusty earth. Ghote crossed over to him, realizing well that his approach had been long noticed, for all that the fellow was pretending to be wholly absorbed in the stout thread running from his needle, round the big toe of his outstretched foot, and back to the thick-soled chappal he was slowly stitching together.
“Ram, Ram, mochiji,” Ghote said loudly, causing the cobbler at once to look up with a tremendously badly acted show of surprise.
“Is this Village Dharbani?”
The man gave him a glance full of malign suspicion.
“Since you have come, you must know that.”
Ghote sighed inwardly. No use with these slow-witted villagers opening a conversation with any sort of courtesy question. . . .
Direct attack, then.
“Ganpatrao Pendke, has he returned home yet?”
But direct attack was not the way either. At the fired-out question the shoemaker simply lowered his head and put another coarse stitch into the thick sole of the chappal.
Ghote waited to see whether he was, in the timeless way of the countryside, merely making up his mind about how to answer. But the fellow’s silence persisted. Another stitch went into the chappal.
Ghote turned away.
Well, he thought, one thing at least is clear: Ganpatrao Pendke is not a man whose business it is wise to talk about.
He would have to go cunningly if he was to learn, without news of his approaches getting to the ears of the Patil, anything at all about the fellow. Let alone where he had been forty-eight hours before—if the people he contrived to question had any clear notion of what was meant by forty-eight hours. . . .
He walked more slowly onward.
The huts on either side of the dusty road became, after a gap of a hundred yards or so, better built. Roofs here were of corrugated iron held down by heavy stones. Holy tulsi plants grew in tubs or hanging pots outside each one. Through open doorways he glimpsed women blowing cooking fires into life or poking sticks under them. Outside, men sat idly and children played or sprawled on the ground. Dogs prowled and sniffed. Chickens scratched for sustenance. A donkey, tethered to a stump of tree, shook its long ears at him as he went by.
But he made no new attempt to learn anything more. He was going to need time in plenty to extract information. Of that he was now certain. However short time might be.
Soon he came to the vague square that marked the village’s center. Would the Patil’s house be somewhere near? Did his grandson, Ganpatrao, still live there in the joint family?
He saw no building that seemed large enough for the home of a man with ten thousand votes in his pocket. There was only the village temple, old and crumbling, its forecourt dominated by a single squat stone pillar with projecting from it half a dozen little stone shelves or brackets. With a jolt, he recognized the object as precisely similar to the pillar that had stood outside the temple in his own, long-ago village. That, too, had had those little shelves. And he had once in a fit of youthful curiosity, or even antireligious rebellion, asked the temple’s pujari what the projections were for. Only to be told sharply that they had always been there, and that was all anybody needed to know.
A row of prosperous-looking shops stood to one side of the square, half hidden behind an ancient banyan tree, its ropelike roots dangling to the ground to provide a pleasant shade for a surrounding stone bench, now unoccupied. Through the tree’s knotty tumbling branches, incongruously a tall metal pole holding an electric lamp thrust itself upward, rust-patched. One more sign of the progress that had edged in.
Then, as he advanced farther into the rubbish-strewn, tracks-marked square, he caught sight, just into one of the lanes leading away from it, of a chaikhana. A cup of tea there would provide him with a fine excuse to sit opposite the half-dozen villagers on its benches. If he waited long enough, surely out of suppressed curiosity someone would eventually open a conversation. Then it might take little more than half an hour—he glanced at his
unreliable watch, but at once realized that whatever it said, right or wrong, had no significance here—before he could lead the talk around to the Patil and then on to his grandson.
He made his way across, circling a black goat tied to a heavy stone, stepping boldly over the open drain on the far side and wrinkling his nose a little at its blatant odor, past a group of chattering women with big brass pots drippingly tucked on hips or balanced on heads, evidently returning from the well. As their laughter and gossip suddenly ceased at the sight of a stranger he did his best to seem to take no notice.
The chaikhana, small and tin-roofed, was presided over by a grossly fat individual wearing only a splash-stained dhoti tucked into one of the folds of his wobbling belly. On the clay stove at the back of his open-sided establishment, a large black kettle sullenly puffed. Above it there hung from a plastic strap a transistor radio feebly wailing filmi music from distant Bombay.
Ghote ordered tea and watched the proprietor as he poured it milkily from the kettle into a steel tumbler and from that at maximum height so as to cool it into a large white chipped cup. This, when he judged the right moment had come, he set on a saucer with a pattern of blue flowers, much too small for the cup. Ghote took it and made his way over to one of the two benches placed opposite each other outside.
Somewhat to his dismay the two young men who had been sitting on the bench sharing a cigarette promptly got up and moved away, nudging each other and whispering. However, the row of three elderly villagers on the other bench, each slurping tea from a saucer carefully held in front of him, their cups on the ground at their feet, stayed where they were, staring into nothing between sips, letting time flow past.
How long would it be before one of them broke into speech?
Ghote slowly drank his cooling tea and waited. It was plain to see that the men opposite, for all their solemn staring, were gradually becoming consumed with curiosity about this stranger who had descended on the village like an avatar of a god coming down to earth. But none of them ventured a word or even a sign of acknowledging his presence.
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