Why should they? he thought. They had all day. They were in no hurry. Perhaps they had never been in a hurry all their lives long.
By contrast, the thought of A.I. Lobo, the expeditious, came into his head. How different someone like that was from these old men. Yet was Lobo’s way of going about things perhaps after all the right one? And, worse, had he by his expeditiousness arrived at the right culprit in the Tick Tock Watchworks case? Was he in truth improving an already shining image in the eyes of the D.G.P. behind his big desk back in Bombay?
Should he himself, then, try to speed things up here? Lean forward and open a conversation? The thought of his rebuff on the outskirts of the village at the hands of the shoemaker deterred him. No, here there was no room for anything expeditious.
He saw he had emptied his cup, got up, and asked for another—the milk in it had tasted like buffalo’s—and tried to drink even more slowly. But all too soon the level of the pale brown liquid got dangerously low. How many cups could he manage before the elders opposite broke down and spoke?
He got up again and asked the bulging-bellied chaikhana owner for something to eat. He was offered a couple of chapattis and some pickle, with rather suspicious haste. As soon as he took a first bite he realized why the fat fellow had been so quick to pass them across his counter. They seemed to be composed as much of grit as of flour.
He eyed the rest of them. Would he have to grind his way through every mouthful before those old men addressed a word to him?
But his breakthrough, when it came, arrived from quite another quarter. As he sat, beginning himself almost dreamily to let the minutes drift past, he felt suddenly a sharp tap on his shoulder. Starting around with sweat springing up on his forehead, he saw behind him a very old man, much more ancient than the men on the bench opposite. His stained white beard straggled to his waist. His face was lined and seamed under its dirtyish red headcloth.
And the old creature was speaking. Speaking to him. Although what he said seemed almost as incomprehensible as if it were part of the dream he had been halfway into.
“Oh, you may think I have been here all my life, but not so, no, no, no.”
“You have not been here all your life?” He hastily took up the ancient fellow, snatching at this sole strand of communication that had been granted him, wildly lacking in logicality though it had seemed. “So you are a man who has traveled? Someone who has seen the world, is it?”
“I was born in this village,” the old man answered, infuriatingly indirect.
He lowered himself onto the bench beside Ghote, and, giving his beard a thorough scratching, seemed to have lapsed already into a silence as impenetrable as that of the elders on the other bench.
Ghote licked his lips, and tried furiously to hit on a way of carrying on the conversation. But he need not have worried. The ancient fellow eventually finished his beard scratching and, in a voice as cackling and uncertain as before, spoke again.
“Things were different then. Yes, yes. Then, you know”—he laid a hand on Ghote’s arm—“then if you caught a cold they gave you honey with ginger and some tulsi leaves in it. It did not make you better, but the cold went in the end. But now . . . now if they have cold, people want it to go before it has properly come. They take the bus all the way to Ramkhed and buy those things like stiff pieces of worm. They pay and pay for them. And the cold goes. They want to be cured all at once of their ills. Ah, we live in the age of evil. The age of evil. The age of Kali.”
Ghote ground his teeth in frustration. When at last someone had spoken, what was he getting but a long rigmarole about the evils of modern days? And from someone so old that plainly he was half out of his wits? How would he ever discover from this creature whether or not Ganpatrao Pendke had been at home two days ago?
“So I ran away,” the straggly bearded old man said with sudden inconsequence.
Ghote pounced.
“Yes, yes. You said you have not been here all your life. You have seen the world, isn’t it? You have seen”— he thought he glimpsed a way of getting to where he wanted— “you have seen bad men and good, no? Good men and bad. Tell me—”
But his tortuously arrived at lead was abruptly snatched away.
“I went to Poona,” the ancient old fellow said, shaking his arm urgently. “You know where is Poona?”
“Yes, yes. But—”
“Many, many soldiers in Poona. And somehow I had heard they wanted more. The big, big war was happening. Many soldiers were needed. So I walked to Poona. In this village I was trapped like a frog in a well, and I was at the height of my manhood then. I was full of juice. So I, too, became a soldier.”
Would the old fool never let him get a word in?
“I was in Africa. You know where is Africa? I was there. We fought. We fought the British. We got them out. In Africa, yes. You know where is Africa?”
Oh God, the damn fellow cannot even remember which side he was on, or where he did his fighting—Africa or here in the Independence struggle. If he did any fighting at all.
He is not far from being, out of sheer age, as mad as that bus-starter who grabbed me outside the Tick Tock Watch works. “Time kya? Time kya?” And if he is as confused in his mind as this, what good will be whatever I do manage to get out of him about Ganpatrao Pendke?
But then something the wandering old fellow had said mysteriously twanged an altogether different chord in his head. Running away. Rustom Fardoomji, too, was said to have run away. And been brought back to the scene of his crime. Almost at once. By a traffic constable, to be arrested by expeditious A.I. Lobo. But was there not something somehow wrong with that? How had the constable known Rustom Fardoomji was to be brought back as a culprit? The sequence of events was back to front. So was Lobo definitely wrong, too? And was the solution of the watch-shop murder, after all, to be found here in Dharbani?
“But now,” the old soldier was cackling on, “we have the panchayat. In those days people used to go to the brahmin’s house, and he would say what was right or wrong. But government is saying we must be having democracy. So there is a panchayat. And at the head of those five men we must vote for is the sarpanch. Bapurao, son of our patil, is our sarpanch. Bapurao’s son is known by the name of Ganpatrao, you know.” Home, Ghote thought in a burst of delight. Home, home, home. Ganpatrao Pendke arrived at.
Yet, surely, Ganpatrao’s father cannot be head of the village panchayat council. The D.G.P. had definitely stated that Gan-patrao was now, with the death of his cousin, heir to the Patil. So how could Ganpatrao’s father still be alive?
But never mind. Ganpatrao’s name had been spoken. How now’ to take advantage of that?
“Ganpatrao,” he said loudly into the old soldier’s ear. “Is he a good man? A bad man?”
“No.”
What the devil did that mean? He had been too hasty, damn it.
“No,” the ancient soldier said, clutching again at Ghote’s shirt sleeve. “No, Bapurao is dead. Sometimes I forget things. But, yes, Ganpatrao is dead. No, no, no. Bapurao is the one who is dead. Now. Last year. So Jambuvant, who is the husband of the Patil’s daughter, has been made by him sarpanch of our village. And what happens? You have a dispute with your neighbor. You take it to the panchayat for their decision. You pay the Sarpanch, as head of the panchayat, twenty-five rupees to tell the other four how to vote. And your neighbor pays him thirty. So the Sarpanch refuses any decision, and the dispute remains. Now, when I was a boy the brahmin settled everything. Oh, these are evil times, evil, evil.”
Oh God, on to evil times again. And Ganpatrao lost.
“Yes, yes. Evil times. The age of Kali. Evil. Evil. You are knowing Ganpatrao?”
And the old fellow actually stopped for Ghote’s answer. For a moment.
“Ganpatrao, the greatest murderer alive. I myself know it. I heard him say it. He killed his cousin-brother, you know. Killed him. And when the brahmin who serves the Patil’s house—he is just only a boy, but a brahmin is a brahmin—
when that boy comes to the house each day, does Ganpatrao show him any respect? No, no, no. So last year—no, the year before—just after the monsoons, he killed his cousin-brother Ramrao. You are knowing Ramrao?”
Ghote sat amazed. Ramrao, Ramrao Pendke, the victim of the Tick Tock Watchworks murder back in distant Bombay. Was this old man actually a witness to Ganpatrao confessing to the killing? But—but how could the old fool have been a witness to that confession if it had been made, as he seemed to believe, two years ago? Or perhaps one year ago?
Damn it, Ramrao Pendke had been battered to death in Bombay only some forty-eight hours ago. So how could, how possibly could this wandering-witted idiot have heard Ganpatrao confessing to the murder a year ago? Or, no, two years ago even?
It made no sense. No sense at all.
Was it, though, somehow conceivable that some rumor was flitting here and there about the village? A hint that the day before yesterday Ganpatrao, Ganpatrao the nefarious, had killed his cousin-brother in Bombay?
But could the times fit for that? Surely it must take some little while for even the tiniest hints of such a secret to become a matter of common gossip for this idiot of an old soldier to pick up? But, if he had not, then how was it he was saying this about Ganpatrao? Was it no more than a recollection of something the old fool had heard long ago coming to the surface now? Some talk of a quarrel between the cousins and somebody saying what they imagined Ganpatrao might have liked to have done?
And, damn it, the answer lay there in the old man’s head somewhere. In its inevitable place in the layers and layers of time laid down there.
Ghote was swept by a consuming spasm of rage. He would have liked to jump up, seize the old man by the shoulders, and shake and shake him until somehow the right one of those layers of time came to the top and he could take from it his right answer.
But there was no doing that. The years layered there inside had collapsed and subsided into one another like the floors of some rickety Bombay building succumbing at last to the toll of many, many disintegrating monsoons. If the old fellow had once seen or heard something that might even now be of use, it was lost. Lost forever.
Rage towering up to obliteration point, Ghote did now jump to his feet. Jumped to his feet and, almost snarling aloud, stamped away.
FOUR
It took Ghote a good long while to calm down. To seem to have been on the point of finding out something about Ganpatrao Pendke at last, and then to have been presented with a tale of murder some two years before the victim had been found dead, it was infuriating beyond endurance. And time had gone by. He had sat outside that wretched chaikhana for heaven knows how long waiting for the tea-slurping elders to open a conversation so that his inquiries should not be obvious, and in the end it had all been a waste of time.
With anger boiling in him, at countryside life and ways, at himself, he tramped here and there about the big village, along close-crowded, rubbish-strewn lanes, past scores of the little houses, their open doorways giving glimpses of everyday goings-on within, past children playing in the dust, past more than once the same cluster of men gambling with a pack of greasy cards, past the village blacksmith’s, the tree outside his hut adorned with a dozen dangling bicycle tires and orangey inner tubes. He stopped short once only, when turning a corner at the end of one more narrow, urine-smelling, dung-fires-aromatic lane, he found himself not twenty yards distant from the sole two-story building he had come across, a big, blank-walled, startlingly white-painted place that could only be the house of the Patil.
He had wheeled around then, as if confronted by a buffalo gone crazy. Plagued by the taunting thought that, while he himself had spent all that time getting nowhere, back in Bombay expeditious A.I. Lobo might well have persuaded Rustom Fardoomji to repeat his confession in front of a magistrate. Whether that confession was obtained by fair means or foul, once made, rescind in court later though Fardoomji might, he would have a hard time escaping being found guilty. While all that he himself had to set against such a case was the garbled talk of a man so advanced in years that he did not even remember whose side he had fought on long ago in Africa, or perhaps here in India. That, and the belief of the two Dhunjeebhoy brothers that the relative they hardly knew would not have committed a crime of such brutality.
At last, exhausted more by sustained fury than by his tramping march, he slumped onto the low wall surrounding a small whitewashed shrine near one edge of the village, a little red flag drooping from a bamboo mast above it. For as much as ten minutes—though he had ceased almost entirely to make any semiconscious count of time—he sat on, too tired even to think anymore.
But then, glancing up, he found he was looking straight into the open doorway of one of the village’s more prosperous houses—its roof was covered in red Mangalore tiles—and he was seeing a scene that took him back to his boyhood days and simultaneously sent a prickle of revived hope through his numbed brain.
All he had seen was a man, seated on the hut’s floor, having his underarms shaved by a barber. But the sight recalled for him, in an immediate flood of memories, the itinerant barber who had served his own village together with four or five others nearby. And the great thing about that man was that his duties, besides shaving beards and from time to time heads and underarms, as well as performing minor pieces of surgery and prescribing occasional herbal cures, included acting as a messenger between one village and the next, one household and another. He was the carrier of news, good and bad, and the maker of marriages.
And, perhaps really more important than any of this, it was his unofficial duty to be the retailer of plain gossip.
More, the barber of his youth had had a wife who performed similar offices for the better-off womenfolk, paring nails, rubbing away hair on legs with pumice-stone, cutting out corns, decorating the soles of brides’ feet, and gossiping and matchmaking. Between the pair of them, man and wife had known almost everything that went on in the four or five villages they used to visit, everything openly spoken of, very nearly everything kept secret.
So, surely, the barber here, whisking his open razor now on the stone slab at his side as he squatted next to his client, testing the sharpness on the inside of his arm, rapidly applying lather from his little brass basin and wiping the excess off on the ball of his thumb, surely he would know all about Ganpatrao Pendke. Surely he would be able to produce, if handled right, something more solid than the breath of a rumor from an ancient soldier.
He sat waiting on the shrine’s low wall till the barber, chattering hard all the time, had finished his task. At last the fellow—he seemed to be in his active early fifties, short, rather monkey-faced, bow-legged, wearing only a green and red head-cloth and the invariable dhoti draped round his waist—went striding off along the lane, walking rather faster than anybody he had yet seen in the unhurried village. He contrived in a few moments to catch up with him. He fell into step and risked at once opening a conversation.
“Namaste, Barberji,” he greeted him. “I used, you know, to love watching the barber at work in my own village as a boy. If it had not been for caste, I would have liked nothing better than to have been a barber myself. Going here and there, seeing life, hearing of people’s troubles and their good fortunes.”
There was a moment when he thought the fellow, talkative though he had seemed at his work, was not going to respond. But it was a moment only.
“And I myself, I have never wished to be anything but a barber. I was born to be a barber. My father before me was born to be a barber. His father before him was born so, and his before him again as long as the world has been.”
He could not have sounded more friendly, and Ghote realized that, if he himself wanted to learn something from the barber, the barber was more than ready to learn all he could about this stranger in the village to have some good fresh gossip to pass on. So he gave him as many details as he could about his family and early life, his wife’s name, his son’s age, how long he had been married, his fath
er’s name and profession of schoolmaster, his sisters’ names, their husbands’ occupations. And if he carefully avoided saying he himself was a police officer, what did it matter?
It mattered, he soon found out, quite a lot. Because the moment he had finished his somewhat embroidered account, the barber asked him directly the one question he had foolishly not prepared himself for.
“So what is bringing you to Dharbani?”
He swallowed.
And inspiration came. He grabbed it with both hands.
“I had learned that Dharbani is a prosperous place,” he said, recalling the electric lamp rising up through the banyan in the square and the row of well-stocked shops behind it and coupling that with a quick memory of Mr. Saxena of the watches-covered forearm in Bombay and the reason he had given for coming to look at Rustom Fardoomji’s shop. “And I am by trade a watchmaker. So I am thinking this would be a good place to set up a shop.”
The barber burst into laughter.
“Oh, my friend,” he said, “you have come to as unlucky a place for you as you could. You are not going to find any timepieces to mend in Dharbani. Never. The Patil has a clock in his house, yes. But it stopped, to my knowledge, four seasons past. And he has never thought of winding it since. No one else round about has anything of the sort. Why should we? We can see when the sun comes up, and when it is dark we can see that we can no longer see. We do not need any clock watches to tell us such things as that.”
Ghote felt totally deflated. He ought, he realized, to have foreseen everything the barber had said. Had not his own boyhood days been just as the fellow had described? He had made the comparison more than once since he had been in
Dharbani. In spite of the place’s touches of the modern, it was really almost unaffected by the counting of minutes and hours.
But evidently his mistake had put the barber into an even better frame of mind. He went chattering cheerfully on.
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