The shock of discovering he was someone else would do nicely to put Ganpatrao straightaway at a disadvantage. It would be as well to start from as strong a position as he could when tackling the haughty individual he had seen strolling through the fields in the morning ignoring him as he stood among the thorns beside the path with the barber. Ganpatrao certainly had selfconfidence, if no other good qualities. Anything that would rattle him was worth doing.
In silence he stood waiting.
All around the crickets had begun their night of shrill chur-ring, on and on, monotonous and unending. In the distance he could hear occasional faint sounds from the village, a voice raised in shouting, the bray of a donkey, a dog barking.
Then at last he made out, coming softly and steadily toward him, padding footsteps in the now almost completely settled dust of the path. Padding and somehow insolent footsteps.
He braced himself.
As soon as the swaggering figure of Ganpatrao was near enough for him to be able to make out against the pallor of his face the twin deep rolling curls of his moustache he came swiftly around from behind the big gleaming motorbike.
“Shri Ganpatrao Pendke, I am wanting one word with you.”
Ganpatrao’s swagger dropped from him like a loosened dhoti falling in a heap around the wearer’s ankles.
“What—who—who are you?”
The check-shirted figure came nearer.
“Yes,” he said, still with quick-jumping anxiety, “I have seen you before. Today, out in the fields. How do you know my name?”
“I know your name, Mr. Ganpatrao Pendke, because it was my duty as a police officer to find out such.”
“Police? You cannot be police. I know every policeman in this district from S.P. Verma down.”
“I am not at all an officer of this district,” Ghote replied, happy to have the opportunity of reinforcing the threat he represented. “I am one Inspector Ghote, Bombay C.I.D., detached for special, confidential duty here in Dharbani.”
But the extra edge of threat appeared now not to have the effect he had calculated on. In the fast-gathering dusk he thought he saw Ganpatrao begin to resume his habitual arrogance.
“Well, Inspector, I cannot see how your special duty is of any concern to me. So I will bid you good-night.”
Shoulders back, head lifted, he set off to go around Ghote to his waiting, chrome-gleaming machine.
Ghote moved firmly to block his way.
“Mr. Pendke,” he said, “I am thinking my duties here are very much concerning yourself. It is on account of you only that I have been sent here.”
Ganpatrao Pendke looked down at him. In the deepening gloom it was not easy to read that face adorned with its heavy curling moustaches. But Ghote thought its expression was hovering, delicately poised, between sharp aggression and snickering fear. He decided he must strike at once, and strike hard.
“Where were you on the morning of Tuesday last, being March the ninth?” he barked out.
“I—I—In Bombay. I was in Bombay.”
Then, after a long pause, with a trace of returning jauntiness, he added, “If you must know.”
“Oh, yes,” Ghote said. “Well I am aware that it was in Bombay itself that you were. But what I am asking is: Where in Bombay were you in the morning of that selfsame day?”
“What the hell business is that of yours?”
But Ghote had stamped on too many attempts at bluster from young men with money in their pockets to be overawed by this spurt of hardly achieved confidence.
“What business?” he snapped back. “It is police business, Mr. Pendke. Answer, please.”
For a moment it looked as if the tall young man was not going to respond. But the moment hardly lasted.
“I—I was looking over the inside of the Rajabi Tower, if you must have every last detail. I suppose you know what the Rajabi Tower is?”
“I am very well knowing what and where is such,” Ghote answered, seeing for an instant again the tall clock tower he had peered up at as he had prowled about waiting for it to be time to report to the D.G.P. and receive the awkward order that had sent him out here. “But I am not thinking that you were visiting Bombay just only for that. Was it? Was it?”
His grabbed-at bluff seemed to have gone home. In the fast-going light Ganpatrao’s face took on a look of darting uneasiness.
“You were going to Bombay on account of your cousin-brother, Mr. Ramrao Pendke,” Ghote charged, hammering home the advantage he felt he had gained.
Ganpatrao licked his lips under the thick black curl of his moustaches.
“But—but that was only natural,” he answered, forcing the words out. “He—he had been most serious. We had thought he would die. But then they had succeeded, so they were saying, to bring him back to life. So naturally I went to see him, to find out if he truly was well again. How—how was I to know that next day he would be murdered? That was nothing to do with me. Nothing.”
At this moment Ghote wished with twanging intensity that he had something more to go on, something with which to press home the ascendancy he had achieved. To break his suspect at last.
If only he had been able when he had visited the station where A.I. Lobo was holding the wretched Rustom Fardoomji to get hold of that First Information Report on the murder. . . . What he wanted now above all was some hard facts to face Ganpatrao with. Some times. Where were you at just exactly 11:00 a.m.? Oh, yes, so you say. So where were you at 10:47?
Armed with hard information to be able to put questions like that he could break Ganpatrao in ten minutes. Or perhaps find definitely that he could not have been his cousin’s killer and that therefore his uncle by marriage, Jambuvant Dhoble, the Sarpanch, was the man to go for. But he did not have a single one of those facts.
Deprived as he was, he could only utter a threat which he hoped might be effective.
“Nothing to do with you, the murder of your cousin? Are you expecting me to believe that, Mr. Pendke?”
“Yes, by God, I am. Why should poor Ramrao’s murder be anything to do with me, Inspector? He was my cousin-brother. We grew up together here in Dharbani. We shared things. WThy on earth should I want to batter the poor fellow to death?”
“Batter him to death?” Ghote retorted, though inside he sensed he was moment by moment losing ground. “And how is it you are knowing victim was battered to death, please?” Ganpatrao gave him a supercilious smile, black moustaches curling more deeply.
“For the simple reason, Inspector, that your superior officer, S.P. Verma, so informed us. And now, if you please, I must be on my way.”
And Ghote knew then that there was nothing more he could do to detain his suspect. He had lost.
Whether Ganpatrao was or was not the man who had killed his cousin in the Tick Tock Watch works, unarmed with any ammunition of facts and times he could only withdraw.
He stepped aside from the big motorbike.
Ganpatrao marched across to it, swung a leg over its wide saddle, sat for a moment, tall and proud, before kicking the engine into violent, roaring life. He flicked at a switch and the machine’s powerful headlamp sent a beam of dazzling white light out in front of him, turning in an instant everything around into blotting-out darkness.
Then, with a redoubled roar of sound, he plunged off down the path toward Ramkhed and its doubtful pleasures.
Ghote set off slowly back toward the village. The serenity with which he had waited to tackle his suspect had been gale-blown away. If he had been able to have his wish at that moment, he would have summoned from thin air the bus he had not been in time to catch and in it been steadily rumbled back to Nagpur, and then have been able to go on to Bombay, to his home, to oblivion. But the time for the bus had long gone past, and there awaited him in the village only the task he had been set with such authority by the Patil. To find who had killed the Patil’s favorite grandson, and to make sure that person was hanged.
And that person might or might not be the Sarpanc
h of the village, Jambuvant Dhoble. Jambuvant Dhoble, who if what that wandering-witted old soldier had spoken of had any basis in fact, was one of those people in the area the Nagpur guidebook in the Skylark Hotel had described as being “as nasty as anybody.”
A sudden disquieting thought shot in to add to his depression.
In a village like Dharbani, or his own boyhood one, news of any sort traveled with the speed of fire spreading from hut to hut. And there could hardly be a more interesting piece of news in Dharbani at this moment than the presence in the village of an inquisitive stranger who had had a long talk with the grandfather of the murdered heir to the wide lands around. So, if the Sarpanch had not already learned of his being here, he was likely to do so very soon. And once he had become aware of that, he was likely enough to have a shrewd idea of what this stranger had come to Dharbani to find out. He would have time in plenty, if he indeed had beaten his nephew Ramrao to death in Bombay, to prepare alibi after alibi.
And, damn it, he himself did not even know where the Sarpanch’s house was.
By now he had got well back inside the village, already with the coming of darkness shut up and inhospitable. Through the doorways of huts here and there, true, he could see the glow of cooking fires or the occasional dim light from the flickering floating wick in a clay lamp or the orangey gleam of the rarer electric bulb. But he doubted whether, if he had the temerity to knock and ask directions, he would get any very welcoming reply. The Sarpanch might not be a figure as all-powerful as the Patil, his father-in-law, but he must yet be someone feared throughout the village.
He heaved a sigh of blanketing frustration.
And at once saw, by the pallid light of the lamp thrusting up through the dangling air roots of the banyan in the village square, the one person who should be able to extricate him from this once more infuriating dilemma. The aged astrologer who had been the silent victim of the Patil’s prowess on the chess cloth was coming toward him, tapping his way along with the aid of a stick.
“Panditji,” he hailed him.
The old man came hobbling up.
“Ram, Ram, my good sir. So we meet again.”
He looked up at Ghote through the steel-rimmed spectacles askew on his nose with a little wry smile.
“Do you know,” he said, “I have been playing chess with the Patil for more years than I am able to count, and never once have I beaten him.”
Ghote felt a rush of warmth for this cheerful old man he had almost completely ignored as he had sat on the floor opposite the overwhelming Patil.
He smiled.
“But could you have beaten him, Panditji?” he asked. “I suspect that perhaps you could.”
The old astrologer grinned back at him, his spectacles glinting pale yellow in the light of the lamp inside the banyan.
“Yes,” he answered, “I could perhaps have trapped his rajah. But would that be to beat him in the end?”
Ghote savored the reply. He felt that in hostile Dharbani he had found an ally. Perhaps an ally who could do little to help him. But an ally whose simple existence gave him courage.
“Panditji,” he said, “there is one thing you can do for me. You can tell me where is the house of the Sarpanch.”
“My son,” the old man answered, “I can do more than that for you. I can take you there myself. It would not be easy for you to find it in the darkness of the night and on the other side of the village.”
He turned to lead the way back in the direction from which he had been coming.
“But, Panditji,” Ghote said, “you were coming this way. Just only give me directions.”
“No, no. What else can an old man like myself do? I have all the time I want. I sleep little. I do not care when or how much I eat. Come. Come. We would be there in the time it takes to chew a paan.”
Ghote set off beside his new-found ally, hope-filled once more.
But almost at once he began to regret having accepted the offer the old man had made. Bent-backed and bandy-legged, the astrologer walked appallingly slowly, and it was possible that even at this moment someone in the village was flitting along the darkened lanes toward the Sarpanch’s house to warn him about the mysterious stranger who had had that talk with the Patil.
He attempted to compensate for the tortoiselike speed of their progress through the shut-up, silent village—how Bombay would be buzzing at this time of the evening, he thought—by asking about the Sarpanch. Any information he could gather about the suspect he was about to interview might be helpful. But the astrologer did not seem to realize that what he had to say about the Patil’s son-in-law could be of interest. He answered only in the briefest way before falling back into commenting on their progress through the village.
“It is just here when I was a boy only that I was bitten by the dog belonging to one Motiram.
“In a hut down that lane—you would not be able to see it now in the dark—there lived a woman by the name of Yamunabai who was making the best sweetmeats I have ever eaten. But she has been dead these many years. Yes, dead.”
Ghote, forcing himself to take the shortest of steps so as not to outpace his guide, wondered with fierce impatience how long the old man must be able to keep a paan in his mouth if their journey was to last, as he had said in the time-vague way of village life, “as long as it takes to chew a paan.”
One piece of information about the suspect he was being led so slowly toward he did, however, manage to acquire. It confirmed the ramblings of the old soldier at the chaikhana. The Sarpanch, it seemed, had certainly used his position as head of the village council, at least once, to line his own pockets. There had been a big irrigation scheme, and a sum of government money had been allocated to Dharbani. But the work had never been carried out. The Sarpanch, though, had shortly afterward made considerable improvements to his house.
If I ever get to see that house, Ghote fumed. If inside it at this moment there is not someone warning the Sarpanch about myself and what perhaps has been overheard of my talk with the Patil. Find which of those two was killing my Ramrao, and see that he is hanged. Now in all probability he would come up at his destination against hedge after hedge of spiky lies.
Politely he expressed indignation about what the astrologer had told him, although he knew that such milking of public funds as the Sarpanch had contrived was common enough.
“But the Patil,” he asked, “did he not prevent his son-in-law? The Patil is a good man, is he not?”
“Oh, yes, Patilji is good at heart. But he has his manhood also. If people had lost what should have come to them, more fools they, he is saying.”
“Yes. I understand.”
In silence they crept farther along. Ghote wondered whether to ask once again to be given directions. But he had not the heart to reject the old man’s kindness. Especially now that he himself had felt that here was his only true source of support in these alien surroundings.
Perhaps talk would make the old man, whose stick seemed to stay stuck to the tramped earth under them for whole seconds before each new forward pace, proceed a little faster. He racked his brain for something more to say.
At last he recalled his recent encounter with, not an astrologer, but a man oppressed by astrology, the mad bus-starter he had been rescued from by Shruti Shah. The fellow had wildly claimed that Saturn had entered his astrological house and in absolute consequence he was suffering seven years of disaster. Did this kindly old man equally deal out such punishments, poring over his scratched palm-leaf predictions?
“Panditji,” he said, “tell me, if a person born at such and such an hour at such and such a place is coming under the influence of Saturn, is he bound to have seven years of bad luck? Is there no escape from that?”
The old man stopped his doddering walk and turned to face him.
He almost exploded with anger at this apparent failure of his little ruse. Were they now going to stay where they were all night?
“My son, my son,” his aged guide said,
“is it that you yourself have come under such influence? Has your jatak been cast and revealed this?”
“No, no. No, no. It is—it is just only somebody I was meeting.”
“Well, if this friend of yours has truly fallen under the doom of Saturn, if that planet was truly found in the tenth place in his house, then it is there. It has come to be there, and it will take its seven years to traverse his life. It cannot be hurried by as much as one minute, and it will not stay one minute less than its proper period.”
Ghote, seeing in his mind’s eye the mad bus-starter, bushy-bearded, shirt flapping to reveal a wealed and wounded body, demanding with fierce insistence “Time kya? Time kya?” asked almost with anger, “Is there no hope for him? No hope at all?”
“Oh, there are ways to counter such bad influence, yes, yes. If this friend of yours is undertaking many pujas, if he is burning much ghee, if he is chanting many, many mantras.”
Abruptly he chuckled.
“Patilji is believing a jatak may be changed by bribing the man who cast it,” he said. “When his grandson Ganpatrao was to marry and the jatak I cast foretold the girl would be a cobra to him he was giving rupees fifty to have it altered. I told him it would be better to get the girl married to a sugarcane stick and let Ganpatrao have someone else. But he was insisting. So I let him understand I had changed the jatak, just like I am letting him win at chess always. And the marriage took place. But, though Patilji had trapped my rajah on the chess cloth, it was the planets who were beating him in the end. The girl had no living child, a daughter that died, and now the doctor sahibs are saying she is not able to have another.”
At last the old man turned and began hobbling onward again. Ghote walked beside him, thinking.
So it was definite now that Ganpatrao could never have a son to inherit in his turn the Patil’s lands and influence. What he had gathered from the boy Brahmin’s face was right. The Sarpanch was next in line now; he did have reason for murder. As I shall bear in mind, he added to himself. If I ever reach the fellow’s house.
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