The boy regarded him with a steady, limpid-eyed gaze. And said nothing.
Ghote, standing looking down at him, could do no more than attempt to direct at him a beam of thought that would induce some answer. He knew that it would do no good to put the question in words a third time.
Minutes passed. Ghote did not dare to look down at the watch on his wrist to see how many of them, two, three, or even four. But in the end he realized that there was nothing left for him to do but leave. The boy had decided, for whatever reason, that he would tell him no more. And nothing, no beam of thought, no demand in words, was going to shake that placid resolve.
Ghote muttered a good-bye, and the boy gave him a reply, calm as ever.
He turned and began the long walk down to the village, upbraiding himself at every step as soon as he was out of the boy’s sight. But what else could he have done? he asked. Should he have threatened the boy? Cuffed an answer out of him? But he knew he would have learned no more. Should he have offered money? To that boy? To the god of the temple even? But no. Again he knew he would have gotten nothing more. Nothing more than that rigmarole about a water pot and mango leaves—
And then the inner vision of such a pot with two or three sharp-pointed, glossy leaves floating in it called back to him in a single instant his boyhood. It had been his mother who had always insisted on putting a water pot with mango leaves in it by the doorway when anyone . . . yes, when someone was setting out on a journey. And something more. Yes. Yes. His mother, too, had believed it was unlucky to see a brahmin when anyone was departing from the house.
So the boy had been tactful enough, four days ago, when he had seen the water pot and the mango leaves in it by the doorway of the Patil’s house, to take himself out of the way so that a departing traveler would not encounter a brahmin.
And he himself could have been told this only because it was an answer to his question. His question about Ganpatrao. The boy had been indicating to him, without breaking the trust he felt he owed, that he knew Ganpatrao Pendke had left on a journey four days ago.
But what to do next? The D.G.P. was hardly going to be so impressed by the tale of a young brahmin, a water pot, and some mango leaves as to believe his favored A.I. Lobo was wrong about the Tick Tock Watchworks murder and that he himself had got a case against a killer who had shown no signs of guilt, much less had poured out a confession. However strongly, having seen the boy and spoken with him, he himself was convinced that he had been given an incriminating fact.
But if it was Bombay that Ganpatrao had set out for that morning, how would he have made the journey? Scarcely by motorbike, all four hundred miles. Indeed, the barber had said as much, had said that Ganpatrao could go by motorbike to Nagpur and afterward on to anywhere he liked by train, even to his favorite Bombay.
Could he check at Nagpur Station? With hundreds of passengers traveling each day it would be a slim chance at best. If he could persuade the D.G.P. that Ganpatrao was likely to have been in Bombay when the murder had taken place, the full resources of the city police could be used to check hotels and to question the many idlers always to be found in the streets in such places as Ganpatrao was likely to have been. But the D.G.P. would need harder evidence than what he could bring him now before ordering an operation on as massive a scale as that.
But wait. There was the Sarpanch. He, too, had been absent from Dharbani at the time of the murder. The barber had vouched for that. Now, if he could convince the D.G.P. that there was a good case against the Sarpanch as well, then perhaps some investigation in Bombay into both suspects would be permitted.
The Sarpanch had no motorbike. So how would he have made the journey? Simply, surely, by setting off on the bus to Nagpur.
And . . . and there was something else he had learned from the barber that should help him there. Something he had heard from that chattering gossip without at the time realizing it could be useful. There was a girl who each morning went by bus from the Dharbani stopping place on the highway into Ramkhed. The outcaste who had learned enough to become a steno and take dictation from a lawyer in Ramkhed. What was her name? Yes. Sitabai. Sitabai. She ought to be able to tell him if the Sarpanch had been on that bus one recent morning.
And not many hours from now, he thought, Sitabai will be getting down from the bus on her way home.
He calculated. Yes, he could afford to wait here in Dharbani until the time the bus came on its second trip of the day from Nagpur and Ramkhed. He could then question the girl as soon as she had arrived and, with what he had learned, wait till the bus had reached the far end of its journey and pick it up again on its way to Nagpur. He might even get a night train and be in Bombay in the morning with enough evidence to impress the D.G.P. Or, if he had to spend the night in Nagpur, he would have time to buy Protima that airplane-quality, submarine-priced sari before catching a morning train.
He felt a wave of hopefulness.
But before very long that began to fade away. In the hours before the bus was due from Ramkhed with Sitabai the steno on it, there was nothing for him to do. He dared not risk making more inquiries. He had learned enough, more than he could have hoped for. To go about trying to add a crumb or two extra would be to put himself in danger of his presence in the village coming to the ears of the Patil.
He disposed of a short half hour of all he had to get through by visiting the chaikhana again, and insisting on getting something to eat better than gritty chapattis. But after that there was nothing to occupy the time.
And it passed so slowly. He found he was looking at his watch almost before its hands had moved from the time he had looked at it before. And then he kept lifting it to his ear to make sure it had not stopped. Silently he cursed the villagers he saw going about their lives in complete obliviousness to the prickle of punctuality. And he looked at his watch again. And again.
He arrived eventually at the bus setting-down point far too early. The bus in any case, as he knew from his morning journey, hardly kept up with the times laid down in the timetable at the bus station in Nagpur. But the thought that he might miss Sitabai if somehow for once the bus happened to run early had sent him walking out to meet the girl an hour or more before it was possible for her to arrive.
He sat on the low grassy earth bank beside the narrow dusty black ribbon of the highway in the shade of one of the bushes that contrived to grow there and watched the traffic thundering along. There was surprisingly much of it, more than he had realized when he had traveled the same stretch of road in the bus. Trucks were coming by at frequent intervals, brightly painted, rattling vehicles hurrying goods of all sorts from one place to another.
Yes, he thought, I am hardly more than a mile away from lost-to-time Dharbani itself, but here the world of schedules and appointments is all the time noisily going by. That truck coming up now with public carrier in those nicely painted, differently colored letters on its front, it is going at full speed to meet one deadline somewhere. Some person is even now perhaps looking up at a clock to see how much longer it would be before it arrives to be unloaded. And, just down the path behind me in the Patil’s house, the clock has stopped four seasons past and nobody has remembered to wind it.
But the bus. How much longer before that would come?
He looked at his watch for the twentieth, thirtieth, fiftieth time. Was it in any case still right? And if it was, how late was the bus going to be?
Or could it have come already? No. No, surely, that was impossible. However badly to time it was running, it could not have reached the setting-down place an hour before it was due.
Two more trucks, running one behind the other, came into view, rattled and thundered up, thundered and rattled away in a double cloud of dust.
Silence descended. Slowly the dust settled. Ghote looked at his watch once more. From the village, away down the winding hoof-marked path, there came the faint sound of a donkey braying to the wide, washed-blue sky above.
Then, very distantly, the sound o
f a motor engine. The bus? Was this chug-chug different from the noise the trucks made?
He strained to hear.
No, it was clear that once again only a rattling, hoarse truck was coming full-pelt from the direction of Nagpur. And a minute or two later it came into view. Soon it was possible to make out behind the windshield the driver, a mauve-turbaned Sikh, crouching happily over the wheel, his accompanying “cleaner” apparently asleep beside him.
Surely the bus was late now. But how late might it be on its afternoon run? Would the driver have waited to pick up regular travelers who for some reason had let the time go by and been in danger of missing their ride? Perhaps the lawyer in Ramkhed who employed Sitabai had fallen into conversation with a client or a friend and she had not dared to leave his office without taking permission. Did that sometimes happen? And would the girl have somewhere she could sleep the night in Ramkhed if it did?
Another truck, battering along in a cloud of dust and a waft of noise, this time with a human cargo, twenty or more laborers, bare-chested and grimed with dirt, being taken from heaven knew where to heaven knew where in an endless round of drudgery. One of them, perched on the truck’s tail board, took it into his head to wave.
But after it, emerging softly from the disappearing welter of noise, surely there was a different steady chugging sound.
And, yes, yes, yes, a moment later the bus came into sight. The same vehicle he had traveled out in, its roof piled high with bundles, baskets and cases, more baskets dangling from its sides.
Slowly it ground its way toward him, and then with a short squeal of brakes came to a halt. Its door opened. A girl in a green cotton sari, lunch box in hand, stood on the step for an instant, clambered down. No one else got off. The bus jerked into motion again, drew away belching bluey-black exhaust smoke.
The outcaste steno was not the pretty girl Ghote had somehow imagined as, time and again, he had rehearsed this meeting in his head while watching the highway’s trucks thundering by. Her face was noticeably pockmarked, her nose sharp and angular.
He marched straight up to her.
“You are one Sitabai by name?”
She looked at him quickly, a mixture of fear and pertness in her eyes.
“Who are you?” she demanded, though at once seeming to regret the boldness.
Ghote knew now that he was going to have no trouble getting what he wanted out of her. He had questioned too many girls not unlike her in Bombay, outwardly hard-shelled but inwardly floating on seas of uncertainty. Petty thieves, servants from the country, prostitutes.
“I am wanting to know just only one thing from you,” he snapped out. “You tell me without any nonsense and lies, and we would hear no more about it. You will keep your mouth shut: I will forget all about you.”
He had not even had to tell her that he was police. He knew that she knew, that she was hearing the voice of authority she had heard before and knew she must kowtow to.
“Yes?” she breathed, hardly audible.
“Now, three or four mornings past one Jambuvant Dhoble left Village Dharbani. Did he travel on the selfsame bus as yourself? Yes or no?”
“The Sarpanch,” Sitabai whispered, the look of fear coming more clearly onto her face.
“Never mind if he is sarpanch or schoolmaster or whatever. Was he or was he not on the bus?”
“Yes. He was. Yes. He came almost late. He sent a servant, running, running before him. The bus had to wait. Five minutes, more. I do not know. Then—”
Ghote cut sharply in on the girl’s frightened flow of words, an outpouring of anything she hoped might please.
“Did he go past Ramkhed, the Sarpanch? Was he going to Nagpur itself?”
“He sat just only behind me. He was beside that man who is at Tata Institute in Bombay. One Mr. Raghu Barde, he who is always and always coming back to his village of Khindgaon to help the villagers there who are very, very poor. He is sending the baskets and cloth they are making to Bombay. He is saying it is vital—she dropped the English word into her terrified stream of Marathi—“vital for them to stay happy as they are and not have to leave the village where they—”
“Stop. Never mind all that. Are you telling that Jambuvant Dhoble was talking with this individual? What was he saying to him? What?”
“I am telling, I am telling. The Sarpanch was saying he also was going to Bombay. He was saying they could go together.”
“Enough. Now, listen, say nothing of this to any person whatsoever. Understand? To no one. And then you would hear no more.”
He had no need to make the threat any clearer. The mere smell of police would keep the girl’s mouth shut. Not a word of his inquiries would get back to the Sarpanch or to the Patil.
“Go. Go home. Now.”
Sitabai took to her heels. After twenty or thirty yards one of her chappals kicked itself off her foot. She stumbled to a halt, stooped, and scrabbled it up, snatched off the other and with the pair of them clutched in one hand and her lunch box in the other ran more quickly off. To safety, to the familiar hut where she had lived all her life in the outcaste quarter, to its sparse comfort, to escape from the stinging flick she had received from the great nasty world beyond.
Ghote sat himself down in the shade of his roadside bush. He had learned all he needed. There would be an hour at least before the bus returned to take him back to the nasty world, its demands and its schedules, its murders and its extracted confessions to murder.
Above him the sky was clear. The heat of the day was just beginning to wane. He sat holding his knees, breathing the cooling air. In front of him the road, running a thin black line to north and south, seemed to have lost the last of its traffic. Not the least sound of a grinding, rattling truck. A bird in the bushes nearby ventured a few notes of song.
And when he got back to Bombay, he thought, he would have something worth taking to the D.G.P. He had done his work better than he could ever have hoped.
He had been sitting at ease, letting the minutes slip by, for little more than half an hour when he heard voices on the path from the village behind him. He felt a twinge of annoyance. He would have liked to have stayed alone hugging his triumph to himself. But he shrugged. Others after all had a right to take the bus into Ramkhed.
Then, as he carefully avoided turning to look at the newcomers in the hope that they would leave him to his thoughts, a voice spoke loudly from right behind him.
“You are to come. Patilji would speak with you.”
SIX
For an instant Ghote thought of resisting. Who were these men—they were a brutal enough pair, one squat and bulging with knotted muscle, the other less well built but with a deep scar under one eye that told of no-holds-barred fighting—who were they that they should order him to accompany them to the Patil? He would refuse. He had the bus to catch. And if they attempted to use force, let them try, tough as they looked, and see what would happen.
But then he knew that refusal, whether it led to a physical encounter or not, would be pointless. Here within a mile or so of Dharbani he was in the heart of the Patil’s territory. In the grasp of a man who, as the talkative barber had said, was more powerful than the government in Delhi, than any state minister in Bombay.
Eventually he was bound to be hunted down and dragged in front of the man. All right at some later distant date he might be able to claim justice. But the Patil’s influence could well be too strong even for that.
“Very good,” he said, “if Patil sahib is wishing to see me, I also am happy to see him.”
Neither of the Patil’s messengers answered a word. Not without a sinking inner feeling of apprehension, Ghote set out with them back along the winding path to the village.
For a little he asked himself who it might have been who had told the Patil he was in Dharbani. The barber? The boy brahmin? But it might have been anyone who had seen or heard him, the elders on the bench at the chaikhana, anyone.
In the village he was marched—he felt this
was what was happening though not a hand was laid on him—through the narrow lanes, across the square, and at last to the tall two-storied house he had seen just once as he had gone about the place earlier. As they entered it he had a confused impression of richness. Rural richness. He glimpsed just before they went through the wide outer doorway, broad enough to admit a groaning bullock-cart, a pair of modeled peacocks on the wall above, painted in bright detail down to the last eye on the last feather. The outer wall itself, he saw as he was led into the courtyard beyond, was so thick that there was room in it for a narrow stairway leading upward.
Inside, he saw that the wide courtyard was opulently encircled by low open-fronted rooms in almost all of which stood huge baskets plastered with mud and heavy, if his boyhood memories were anything to go by, with grain. Above, to one side there was a long platform where more grain was stored in fatly bulging sacks. Corresponding to it on the other side was a verandah with on it, lined up next to each other, a bed covered with a rich colored cloth and a shiny red rexine sofa that might have come straight from Akbarali’s Department Store in Bombay.
And, sitting precisely in the middle of the sofa, was the person Ghote knew instantly must be the Patil.
He was huge. Weighty as the bulging sacks of grain in his store. Age had slackened the skin of his face and left it hanging like a blotched bag under his heavy turban. But the eyes in that face were plainly still as shrewd as in the prime of manhood.
No, not just shrewd, Ghote thought, as, walking away from his two heavy-muscled escorts, he mounted the wooden steps up to the verandah. The Patil’s eyes were also those of a man who gave orders, who had given them for many long years, and had seldom found them disobeyed.
“Namaskerji, Patil sahib,” he greeted him, determined to retain what initiative he could.
The Patil looked up from the game of chess he was playing— his opponent appeared from the three broad white lines across his forehead to be the village astrologer—and then, having taken the merest quick glance, looked down again at the chess cloth laid out on a small table beside him. After a moment his hand went out, strong, fat, and age-mottled, and with cautious deliberation he moved his rani diagonally from one corner of the cloth to the other to take an opposing vizier, clicking the two pieces together in loud triumph. The astrologer, a shrunken, shriveled old man, cross-legged on the floor, uttered a tiny squeak of dismay.
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