“No. No, with what is true. Listen, Inspector. When I was going back to the T.I.F.R., hurrying because I was late, the dabbawallas were just arriving at Churchgate Station with their tiffin-boxes of lunch for people in offices there. You know the dabbawallas, Inspector?”
“Everybody is knowing them,” Ghote answered angrily. “You cannot pretend that seeing those fellows coming with the lunches they had collected from housewives in the suburbs is proof that you were there at Churchgate Station then. They come there each day.”
“Yes, yes. But it is not just seeing those fellows. It is more. I was hurrying past where they are sorting the tiffin-boxes on the pavement there, and I was tripping over one of the long wooden trays they have. The men putting the dabbas into it abused me. They almost attacked me, only they were in too much of a hurry. ”
“Well, what are you claiming now?” Ghote said, full of doubt.
“Inspector, it is obvious. Those fellows are sure to remember me. And, as they are working always so much to time, not one minute to be lost each day, isn’t it, they would be able to state I was there at, shall we say, ten past eleven itself. Because I was there, at just round that time. I was.”
Ghote pursed his lips in vexation.
It could be that Raghu Barde had at last produced a proper alibi. Certainly, if it turned out that there were dabbawallas at Churchgate Station who remembered the incident—and if it had taken place at all they ought to remember such an interruption to their day-by-day routine—then it looked as though Raghu Barde must have been at Churchgate Station at the time when, according to that smashed watch, Ramrao Pendke was being beaten to death. But Barde had lied before, hoping to get away with a tiny inaccuracy. It might well be that he was lying again now.
And there had been a moment of hesitation as he had begun to tell his story. He had seemed to be about to say that he had been in the posh shop in Queen’s Road, and then he had claimed that he had remembered the T.I.F.R. meeting only as he was about to go into the shop. No, certainly he was not in the clear to one hundred percent.
“Dabbawallas and tripping over one tray,” he said, infusing his voice with a scorn that he hoped might push Barde into betraying the case he was beginning to make out for himself. “What good is such evidence only? There are fifty-sixty dabbawallas at Churchgate Station each day exchanging tiffin-carriers from one tray to another as each train is coming in from the suburbs. How can the men that you say abused you be found there?”
“But they can, Inspector. They can. Those fellows do exactly the same thing each day, yes? Moving the selfsame marked cans from one tray to another each and every time, no?”
“Well, what of it?”
“Inspector, when I was tripping over that one particular tray I happened to notice the numbers painted on two of the tiffin-carriers. I was telling you yesterday how I am always spotting interesting numbers. And those on those two cans were quite interesting, four thousand forty-nine and four thousand fifty-one, a pair of primes.”
“What primes?” Ghote shot back, a gust of fury springing up in him. “What is this primes crimes?”
“Inspector, a prime number is one that cannot be divided into any other numbers. Even you should know that.”
Doubly angry, Ghote remembered dimly that in school he had indeed been taught this useless fact. And he had forgotten it, just as he had forgotten, if he had ever known, where the kidneys came in the human body—he must look for that book of Ved’s—earning a similar rebuke from Dr. Mrs. Yadekar. But he did not have to take lack of respect from this fellow. No, by God.
“And what if you were seeing some magical numbers on a pair of tiffin-cans?” he said. “What is that to me only?”
“But, Inspector, surely you must see. Those cans are put into the same tray each day. So if you are going to Churchgate Station on any day at about that time, you would find the dabbawallas who were abusing me. They would tell you I was there. They would remember.”
Ghote thought.
“Very well,” he said at last. “I would check up. But until I have done so to the utmost I am going to hold you. It will be at Crawford Market Headquarters.”
The destination seemed to relieve Raghu Barde of his fears of lock-ups. He nodded agreement with resigned calm.
“Now you must come,” Ghote said sharply. “I have a jeep waiting just only outside the village. Come.”
Allowing Barde a few minutes to talk with his old mother, who had sat watching uncomprehendingly their bristling exchanges in English, Ghote led him off out of the little, lost village. The village which, but for the death of the knowledgeable Ramrao Pendke, would almost certainly soon have become no more than a squalid settlement for casual laborers at the newly opened manganese mines. Unless it were blotted out entirely by some wide road thundering day and night with huge trucks urgently carrying away the spoils of the earth beneath.
At the edge of the little collection of huts he saw Raghu Barde take a long, lingering look at a tall pile of baskets made by one of the villagers squatting patiently at work weaving the tough strips of grass into an age-old, intricate pattern. He was struck, looking in his turn, by the simple rightness that seemed to emanate from the basket in the man’s hands. Baskets like this, he thought, must have been made in this place for generation on generation, exactly like the one being made now, unhurried by any pressures of fashion, of any here-today gone-tomorrow.
And he recalled abruptly a recent Sunday when back in Bombay he had taken Protima and young Ved to visit the Prince of Wales Museum and had seen outside it the market that had arisen to sell garments intended for Europe and America that had missed, by perhaps a day only, the deadlines imposed by sales organizations in the West. Protima had insisted on looking at the racks of bright shirts, frocks, skirts, and maxis, and had bought Ved a shirt. She had said it was at a very good price, and that latest-craze purchase had become the boy’s special delight.
Or, he thought, a one-but-latest craze for the Europe it had originally been destined for.
He felt a growing cold bleakness entering him as, with Raghu Barde at his side, he made his way along the narrow path from the village toward the mango grove where he had hidden his jeep. It was a bleakness, he knew, not induced only by the prospect of the long, long drive back to Bombay.
A long and deeply wearying drive it turned out to be, however. Although he was in no such hurry returning as he had been to get out to Khindgaon before there was any chance of Raghu Barde arriving there, he had a sleepless night at the wheel behind him already. Now deadly fatigue swept up in him at intervals like a welling tide of oily black mud. He would have liked to have stopped at some convenient place and slept for an hour, for two hours, even three. But, though Raghu Barde was showing no signs of being anything but submissive to his fate, he did not dare take any risk with someone who had tried once before to escape.
So he contented himself with stopping as often as he could for tea or a cold Thums Up. He did not even feel it would be right to talk to his prisoner, other than on the most trivial matters connected with their journey. The fellow was, after all, still under suspicion. It was his duty not to allow him to try to influence the investigation.
Nor did Barde, sitting lost in thought, appear to want to talk. So mile after silent mile they drove onward. Until at last they reached Bombay again.
Where, of course, they landed full in the middle of the hour of car fumes.
Grimly Ghote battled his way through the traffic to Crawford Market Headquarters and at last disposed safely of his prisoner. Then he had himself driven home, already nodding off to sleep every two or three minutes, oblivious of jerky stops, frantic horn-blowing, everything.
At home he was barely able to find words to greet Protima and young Ved, only just managing to ask Protima to make sure he was up before ten o’clock next morning. He would need to be in good time to go down to Churchgate and check Barde’s new alibi with the dabbawallas there.
Then he lowered his batter
ed, bruised-black body onto his bed and in an instant was lost in sleep.
Only a bare moment later, it seemed to him, to feel Protima shaking him by the shoulder.
“You were wanting to be wakened,” she said.
He shook his head muzzily, and the recollection of where he was and what he had to do came lumberingly back to him. The dabbawallas, he had to check up on them. And those numbers on two of their cans, 4,049 and 4,051. Thank God, he could remember them.
He looked blearily at his borrowed watch hanging from the nail on the wall beside his bed. He had no recollection at all of having put it the evening before in the familiar place.
But there was something wrong with it.
Then he realized. He had hung its face to the wall. All he was looking at was Mike Lobo’s name and that damn, somehow taunting motto: “First Past the Post.”
He unhooked the wretched thing, twirled it around, and peered at its impossible faceted glass and copper face. Nine minutes past ten.
Nine minutes past ten.
He shot a furious glance at Protima.
“I said to be woken before ten a.m.,” he exploded. “It is nine-ten minutes past already.”
Protima was undismayed. She gave a little shrug and looked down at him with mildly contemptuous pity.
“Just only ten minutes,” she said. “What is to complain? Are you not knowing how long this world has been going on? Have we not passed through three yugas already and entered Kali Yuga itself with all its evils? And each yuga is it not lasting three thousand celestial years, and each one of those is three thousand six hundred years of this world? What is your five-ten minutes to that?”
Ghote felt rage bubble up inside him like water boiling over in a vessel. Protima and her beliefs. Kali Yuga mumbo jumbo.
And, worse, he was again being scorned for his ignorance. Celestial years and world years, prime numbers and expressi-bles, and the damned kidneys somewhere in the body. Would it never end?
“All I am knowing,” he spat out, “is that if I do not hurry like hell I am going to be late for a number-one important task. Late. Late. Late.”
Furiously he rushed to the bathroom. Furiously he dragged on the fresh clothes Protima had set out for him. Furiously he banged out. Yet more furiously he kicked his scooter into spluttering life and shot off.
And I could have had time to eat something, he thought. And even I might have had a chance to look at that book of Ved’s, The Human Body in Pictures, and have found out where are the kidneys.
But he was destined to be delayed even more before reaching Churchgate Station and the dabbawallas who might or might not be placing the dabbas numbered 4,049 and 4,051 in one of their long carrying trays. As he waited impatiently, halted at a red signal at Flora Fountain almost within reach of his destination, a voice called out to him from the pavement.
“Ghote sahib. Inspector.”
He turned his head.
Mike Lobo was coming toward him, a cheerful grin all over his round face.
“Hey, God’s grace seeing you here. Something I’ve got to tell you.”
“Yes? What is it, A.I.? I am in one hell of a hurry,” he shouted above the phut-phutting of his scooter.
“Oh, won’t take a sec, man. Just this. I happened to pop up to the Shrimati Usha Yadekar Clinic yesterday. Thought I’d better find out just when Ramrao Pendke left there before he got himself and his made-in-Ulhasnagar gold Rolex hammered to bits.”
“Yes? Yes?” Ghote shouted.
The driver of a taxi, hemmed in because he himself had failed to move as the signal ahead turned green, had begun to hoot at him with wild gusto.
Mike Lobo flashed his wide grin again.
“Found out from that uppity, America-returned Doctor Mrs.,” he said, “that you were interested in who visited Ramrao. Like his cousin and uncle from some backwood called Dharbani, isn’t it? Then it came to me that, God bless you, you were thinking one of them could be fixed up with the Tick Tock murder.”
Red anger blew up in Ghote’s head. And the taxi walla behind was hooting even more venemously.
“Yeah,” Lobo went breezily on, “so I made a few inquiries. And you can write them both off, Inspector. Got perfect alibis. They were together at the Rajabi Tower at just past eleven a.m. I spoke to the fellow from Lund and Blockley Watchmakers, who looks after the tower clock. He confirms it, all the way. Sorry for you, man.”
Ghote sat astride his scooter wishing he could at that instant do something that would annihilate Mike Lobo in one single act of vengeful fury. But nothing came to him.
Until, just as the taxi behind managed to ease its way past and its driver leaned across to yell at him “Shaitan!” he found a thing to do. He tore the unreadable, motto-garnished borrowed watch from his wrist and hurled it across at Mike Lobo—the bastard caught it—and then, wrenching his machine into motion, he yelled back, “Take it, take it, it’s no bloody damn good whatsoever. ”
SIXTEEN
The moment Ghote finally arrived at Churchgate Station he realized he very much needed Mike Lobo’s watch. He had to have the exact time if he was going to be able to tell whether the dabbawallas Raghu Barde had claimed he had tripped over had been where he had said they were when he had said they were.
He cursed.
Cursed himself for having given way to petty fury just because of Lobo’s interference. Cursed Lobo for interfering, and worse, much worse, for having proved apparently that both Ganpatrao Pendke and the Sarpanch had been far away from the Tick Tock Watchworks when Ramrao had been battered to death.
But he thrust off the sullen, lightning-quivering cloud of depression which that knowledge threatened him with. Instead he hurried into the station itself to check the time on its clock before going to look for the dabbawallas who, if Raghu Barde was telling the truth, dealt each day with dabbas numbered 4,049 and 4,051, the pair of primes.
Back outside round the corner, conscious that the time was just before ten past eleven, he walked rapidly along the yellow-tiled pavement. Squatting or hurrying dabbawallas by the dozen were loading scores of their eight-foot-long carrying trays with hundreds of the round aluminum dabbas before they were whisked away to offices, shops, banks, and markets, each one with its four inner containers, one on top of the other, filled with curry, rice, a vegetable, a chappatti or two—meat for Muslims, their own particular styles for Parsis and Christians—with sometimes nestling at the top inside a loving note from a distant new wife in the suburbs or a demanding or angry one from a distant old wife. He scanned the painted tops, coded in red, yellow, green, or blue letters and figures.
Then suddenly he spotted the two curious numbers he had in his head. They were the more easily seen because their coding, he now realized, was for some reason different from the majority of the other cans.
But he still had to question the pair of white-capped dabbawal-las crouched one on each side of the long wooden tray where dabbas 4,049 and 4,051 had just been placed. Had they been here at this time the previous Tuesday? At precisely this time? And had they then been tripped over by a very tall, quite bald young man? On this occasion he was not going to let a single, tiny detail go unasked about.
“Bhai sahib,” he addressed the nearer of the two dabbawallas, “can you help me? I am wanting to know if you are here always at just this time.”
The man made no reply. Instead he rose from his squatting position, trotted over to a newly arrived supply of cans, picked out four of them, and, holding them by their swinging wooden handles, scuttered back, quickly as a monkey, to place them in the carrying frame at Ghote’s feet.
“Bhai sahib, I am asking.”
Still rapidly arranging the cans in the tray, the man continued not to offer any reply.
“Police,” Ghote rapped out. “Tell me what I am wanting ek dum, or for once Bombay’s great lunch delivery system will break down when one of its dabbawallas finds himself in the lock-up.”
The dabbawalla did now look up, his face dul
l with anger.
“Speak, then,” he muttered.
“Is it that you are here at this time, with those two dabbas with those long numbers on them, each day?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Then you were here last Tuesday?”
“Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, every day. Now, won’t you leave me alone? Don’t you know how little time we have? At the station where we load up, train is stopping just only two minutes. Calamities are happening, split-second work.”
“And last Tuesday,” Ghote persisted, ignoring the self-pitying plea, “was there a man who was tripping over your tray here?”
“I do not know. Why should I know?”
But the man’s companion, squatting equally busy on the other side of the long tray, looked up briefly at this.
“Bhai,” he said to his co-worker, “you must remember. Young fellow with one bald head, bald-bald, walking like in a dream and tripping right over us. You gave him plenty of abuses.”
“Oh, yes. Him. I remember. Idiot.”
The surly fellow bent again to his work. But Ghote, with simple determination, got out of the pair of them names and addresses. Then he retired to where he had left his scooter in the dappled shade of a tree on the other side of the road and began to think.
It seemed that this second alibi that Raghu Barde had produced was absolutely correct. If the fellow had tripped over the dabbawallas’ carrying tray at, to within a minute or two, 11:10 a.m., as checked by Churchgate Station clock, then he could not possibly have been battering Ramrao Pendke to death at the Tick Tock Watchworks at almost the same hour.
Yet, if he was guiltless of the crime, why was it that he had not produced this alibi when first questioned in his room at the T.I.F.R.? Why had he produced an account of his whereabouts that he must have known was inaccurate, relying on the hope that it v/ould not be really closely checked?
Perhaps it was that he had said the first thing that had come into his head then. He had admitted that he had been put into a state of fear at the thought that he was in the hands of the police. Perhaps that was it.
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