‘Come on,’ Rick said. ‘Why look like that? What’s wrong? It’s meat, right? Just meat. Can be good, too.’
But, as if he knew in himself why his interrogator had not been able to disguise his revulsion, he hurried on.
‘Yeah, so I’ve got to be buddy-buddy with the Dom Raja. Heck, no one else’ll talk to him, only the Doms. He likes new company.’
Now, Ghote thought. Now, again, while he is thoughtful only.
He took a small step back as if he needed to be able to see the boy’s face better, and then a good half-step forward.
‘Oh, no. You stay just where you are, mister. I said all you fuzz were two-timing bastards.’
Ghote registered a defeat. Even a just rebuke.
‘And you are stating you yourself are not at all two-timing?’ he replied.
Rick grinned.
‘Guess you’ll just have to trust me.’
‘So you are cent per cent trustworthy, yes?’
A wider grin in the pallid light.
‘Okay, point taken.’
For a moment or two Rick thought. Then he spoke again.
‘Right, tell you what I’ll do. I’ll let you have a sample. It’s real good of me, more than you deserve. But it’ll give you some incentive, your side of the bargain.’
Now Ghote put on an equal show of considering, though he had no intention of asking Inspector Mishra or anyone else what plans there were to raid the Dom Raja’s house.
Then he spoke in his turn.
‘Very well. It is not very much of loyal to my Banares colleagues. But after all what am I owing fellows here? Nothing. And I am very much needing to know each thing I can about the killing of Mrs Shoba Popatkar.’
‘Deal.’
‘So what is it you can tell?’
‘Oh, no. First we fix a time and a place for you to give me the dope on the raid.’
‘Very well.’
Will the boy even give me the taste he has promised, once a new meeting is arranged? Well, he will or he will not. Nothing to be done about it.
He waited.
‘Yeah, let’s say tomorrow night. They won’t come before that. So, midnight tomorrow. Right?’
‘Yes, midnight itself. But where?’
‘You know the Manikarnika Ghat? Seen it yet? Everybody comes to Banares wants to see that.’
The Manikarnika Ghat. And what had Mishra said about being on duty there at night? I tell you, my knees were made of butter only.
He swallowed.
‘Yes, I am knowing where is that ghat. I have not seen, but everyone in India is knowing the burning ghats of Banares, and hoping to die at same.’
‘Yeah, well, when and where you die’s your business. But just you be there tomorrow midnight. With what I need to hear.’
‘But I myself, what am I to hear now only?’
‘A name. I’ll give you a name. Guy that’s maybe involved.’
In the darkness under the shadow of the high compound wall he strained to hear, to see that ill-lit face.
‘Right. How about a well-known guy in this city? Name of H. K. Verma?’
And in an instant the boy tumbled out of sight.
Grimly H. K. Verma approached his familiar bathing place at the Man Mandir Ghat. Waking at his usual hour, he had thought of not going. What point was there in a sunrise dip if he had no intention of abandoning his sin? He had committed it. Killed the old woman. Strangled her. Thumbs in the pits in her neck. So no onion tears now. He had decided to escape the consequences of that act. And to do whatever proved necessary to make sure of it.
Very well, the business in Bombay had turned out, bitterly, to have been utterly pointless. But at least he was determined not to suffer for it if it could in any way be avoided. He was set now on a course of look after Number Ek. He had given up doing good to others. He had given up striving and striving to do the right thing. So why parade down to the Ganga, take off his clothes, shiver in its waters?
They were anyhow not only cold at this time of year but unpleasant. No, worse than unpleasant. Why now pretend anything else? Everything they had always said about the never-ending purity of the running river was nowadays a lie. The sometimes only half-burnt bodies of the dead floating in it were no longer made safe. The smallpox victims, the corpses of babies, the dead sacred cows all now added their putrefaction to the damage done by huge quantities of human excrement and industrial poisons that in these days cascaded into the water. Ganga jal no longer automatically neutralized them.
Any more than it neutralized your sin.
But, lying in bed with these thoughts marching through his head, he had soon enough realized that after all he did have to go down to the ghat. It was what he did every morning. It was what he had done for years, every day he had been here at home in sacred Banares. Suddenly to stop would draw attention to himself.
With set features, at the spot where he always left his fresh clothes he peeled off yesterday’s kurta, tugged yesterday’s dhoti from his waist, kicked off his chappals.
That morning when, back from Bombay, after half a night of skulking here and there in the city avoiding being seen, he had come at last to Ganga Ma, had taken off that other creased and grimy kurta and travel-stained dhoti and had stepped down with such relief into the chill just-at-sunrise water. He had felt his sin being washed away then. He had truly felt it.
What mockeries.
He planked down the stone steps, heavy-footed, and waded in. Stood then with arms lifted to greet the new-risen sun just lipping, a red ball, over the Sandbank opposite.
Go through it all. Leave out nothing. Not one customary action, not one customary word of prayer. However hollow.
Perhaps if he kept to it all with absolute strictness, perhaps it would at least bring him luck. Perhaps he already had been lucky. Perhaps that mosquito of a Bombay CIDwalla had been convinced there was nothing here in Banares for him. Even at this moment he could be flying back to Bombay.
No, all that he needed now was no ill-luck. Nothing to happen that he had not counted on. If he could have that, he was safe. Truly. He had been clever, after all. Once that appalling moment was past. Once he had let that suddenly limp, not very heavy body fall.
And he had been lucky then also. Flying with young Vikki had in the end been altogether the best way of getting to Bombay. The boy would never give him away. He probably still had not the least notion why actually he had been asked to go there at such short notice. And Vikki was the only link that could altogether betray him.
He was safe. Safe. Surely he was safe.
‘Arise! Life’s breath has returned,’ he spouted out to the wide dawn-grey stretch of the unresponsive river. ‘Darkness has fled, light comes! Now is the path opened for our Lord, the Sun. Now our days will stretch out before us.’
Ash in the mouth. Unnourishing, grating ash.
Ghote woke after a night of turmoiling thoughts knowing what he would have to do. He had even asked himself the moment Rick had vanished as if he was not a creature of flesh and blood at all – dried-out flesh, thin, fevered blood – if he should go straight down to H. K. Verma’s house near the Golden Temple and confront him there and then.
But, he had thought at once, Rick had not actually claimed H. K. Verma was Mrs Popatkar’s murderer. All he had said was that he was ‘maybe involved’.
And what reason could a man like H. K. Verma have for killing Mrs Popatkar? What could possibly drive such a respectable figure to go all the way from Banares to Bombay, strangle someone they had probably never even met and then return? No, it was absurd. Absurd.
And certainly if he was to go as far as questioning a man of so much influence he would have to be very clear about what he was going to say. He could scarcely march in and state that a witness had named him, Shri H. K. Verma, party leader, as being involved in murder. All he would get would be a scornful denial. And then H. K. Verma would start pulling his strings, telephoning Delhi, using his contacts. In no time he would find h
imself ordered back to Bombay. To get such a firing from the Assistant Commissioner as he had never had before.
So he had plodded heavily back to the Hotel Relax, had taken a shower but felt no relief. He had succeeded then in getting Inspector Wagh in Dadar on the phone. Only to find his faint hope the case had been solved in Bombay met with a furious ‘No bloody progress, Inspector’. At dinner he had hardly eaten a thing and in bed he had been unable to sleep. His thoughts had whined at him as insistently as the mosquitoes that made him at last wrap the sheet round body and head as if he was a corpse on a litter on its way to the burning ghat, jogging bearers chanting and chanting, Rama nama, satya hai, Rama nama, satya hai. Rama name, truth is.
Was it possible that a man like H. K. Verma had even gone so far as to order Mrs Popatkar’s murder? Send some hired fellow from the holy Banares? No doubt there were such men. The two-rupee murderers Mishra spoke about. Or someone from the city’s wrestling pits. Mishra had swerved away from saying very much about those. Not wanting to spoil his picture of happy, masti-filled Banares.
But, even supposing H. K. Verma had had Mrs Popatkar killed or even had actually killed her himself, why would he have wanted it done? Very hard to see.
What if – this was a possibility, just – Mrs Popatkar had gone to H. K. Verma requesting permission to read the Recollections when she was first refused? And something had passed between them then that made it imperative for her to be silenced? Mr Srivastava at the library had said nothing about her going, but what if she had tried to take H. K. Verma’s permission?
But, no. No, it was ridiculously unlikely that anything said between them, if they had ever even met, could have been so loaded with vital consequences.
Yet Rick, pale-faced Rick in the thin light on top of the compound wall, had given him H. K. Verma’s name. Why? Of course Rick could have been selling him dummy goods. He could have simply hit on H. K. Verma, for some reason, for no reason, and made use of the name as bait to get the information he wanted. But why should he have picked on H. K. Verma unless . . .
With the first white glimmer of the new day he knew beyond argument he would have to go and see the man again. Right or wrong, Rick’s hinted accusation had to be put to the test.
He would go at once. No doubt the fellow was one of the holy dip at sunrise brigade. The pious smirk on his face when he had talked about KK having died by the side of the Ganges was evidence enough of that. But, as soon as he was back from whichever ghat he went to, he would see him and get at the truth.
Turning the corner of the lane just by that impudent wall-slogan Please to Vote for Communist Party (Marxist), H. K. Verma saw Karim. Standing proudly, as ever at this particular time of the morning, legs astride, twirling his lathi as if about to repel a whole army of rioters.
He felt a little upwards bounce of satisfaction. At least he had contrived, when he had returned from his holy dip that terrible morning, to trick the stupid Pathan into having to swear he had seen him leaving earlier to go down to the Ganges. In all probability such a small piece of false alibi would never be needed. Impossible to imagine any circumstances where a police investigator, the little runt from Bombay for instance, would question Karim. But all the same one dangling end neatly tucked away.
‘Ha, Karim, I was not spotting you when I was going out. Was it sleep–sleeping, eh?’
But now there came no instant Every moment of the night I was awake, awake like a tiger only. Instead a more than usually cunning leer came on to the Pathan’s narrow face behind the massively curling moustache.
‘What is it, Karim?’
A cold finger of doubt suddenly touched him.
‘Huzoor, a watchman as never-sleeping as I, he is deserving more of pay than you are giving.’
‘What? What nonsense only. You are damn well paid, Karim, considering how you spend most of the night sound asleep, as I very well know.’
‘Ah, no, huzoor. Sometimes I am damn awake. Like on the morning, early, when you were coming back wearing dirty clothes only.’
A chill spread all through him.
What could Karim know? How could he possibly know he been in Bombay the night before? That he had hidden here and there in the city after Vikki had brought him back, waiting till he could pretend to have gone for his holy dip?
‘Oh, huzoor, very well I am knowing, when at last I am thinking, that I was not at all seeing you come out that day just before the sun was rising. Huzoor, if you are wanting to spend night at Dal Mandi, you should be giving Karim one damn good tip first.’
‘Dal Mandi, but I was not—’
He stopped himself.
What madness. He had been on the very point of denying it was at the prostitute quarter he had spent that night.
‘Very well, Karim, and what if I was at Dal Mandi? I dare say you yourself have been there many, many times.’
He felt relief pouring down on to him like a blessing.
‘Oh, yes, huzoor, but I am not a man that is having his name in the Aj and the Gandiva.’
‘What do you know about that, you fool? Since when have you been able to read?’
‘No, huzoor, I am not able, true. But all the more, huzoor, I am keeping open my ears. I am knowing what they are putting in those papers. And what in their gossips and rumours they would like to put.’
What to do? Pay the rogue?
And let him think what he knows is worth money because it would hurt my name and fame? No, too dangerous. Somehow he may learn one day how much more valuable is his little piece of knowledge.
‘So it is blackmail you are trying, no? Well, you have tried it with the wrong man. Out. Out of my house this moment. Take your possessions and get back to your native place, damn you. And think yourself lucky it is not the jail you find yourself inside.’
It worked. As he had guessed it would. Only shout loud enough.
The leering smile went from Karim’s face like the lights being extinguished at the end of each Ram Lila play out at Ramnagar. He dropped his now useless lathi with a rattling clatter. Left it lying on the stones of the lane and slunk off like a jackal towards his quarter.
Good riddance. Very good riddance.
With a last contemptuous glare at the fellow’s back, he stepped in at the gate.
‘Mr Verma! Mr H. K. Verma, can I be having just only one word?’
He turned.
It was the Bombay detective.
10
‘Well, Inspector – Inspector – I have forgotten what is your good name.’
‘It is Ghote, sir. Inspector Ghote.’
‘Well, Inspector Ghote, what can I be doing for you?’
H. K. Verma heard the note of frank calmness in his voice with a surge of pleasure. Mounting the stairs in front of this unexpected apparition, he had felt nervousness running up and down inside him like so many gecko lizards on a wall. He had let himself believe the man must have gone back to Bombay. So at once, under the shock of turning at the gate to see him there, the temptation had come flooding back. To stop as soon as he reached the head of the stairs, to draw himself up and . . . confess.
But, as quickly, the resolve he had arrived at out at the Sandbank had come back to him. No, he was not going to suffer twice for his defeat at Jagmohan Nagpal’s hands. If he had gained nothing by what he had done there in that little flat in Bombay, he was not going to lose his liberty, his life, because of it.
What could this sneaking fellow following him possibly know? Nothing. No doubt all he had come for was to beg once more to go through the Recollections. Well, he would get the same answer as before. This time in terms to make him really go whistling back.
But the man’s demand when it was made – the fellow seemed to be in some difficulty about what he was going to say – was not what he had expected.
‘Sir, you were explaining . . . Sir, when I was here before you were stating that the Recollections of the late Krishnan Kalgutkar were not to be made public for one hundred and one years after h
is decease. You were saying, sir, that it would be ninety-seven years more before I could see and examine same. But, sir, I am not hundred per cent clear. Did you yourself ever go through those Recollections?’
What to answer? When the fellow was here before I succeeded to give the impression I had not read the Recollections. That I had only just spoken about them once with KK. I remember I was doing that. So has the fellow been digging and pigging and found out something? Perhaps that chatterbox Srivastava believes I must be well acquainted with every word KK left behind.
Or does this fellow know that it was I myself and not KK who made that stipulation of one hundred and one years? Is he attempting to catch me out in a lie? Is he convinced now I am a liar altogether? That I am the murderer of Mrs Shoba Popatkar?
But, no, surely he cannot be. I am too far separated from that woman. No, it will be safe to repeat my denial. Altogether safe.
‘Inspector, that ban which the late Krishnan Kalgutkar was imposing is applying, naturally, to myself. Absolutely to the same extent as to any other person.’
Hah. That seems to have dealt with him. His face has fallen one mile.
‘I see, sir. And that is definite?’
‘Definite, Inspector.’
‘Then . . . Then, sir, there is something else also I must be asking. Sir, is it that— Sir, were you yourself meeting Mrs Shoba Popatkar when she was here in Banares? Was she coming here to your house?’
‘No, no, Inspector. Mrs Popatkar was never inside this house. You may ask anybody. Ask my peon. By the name of Raman. Ask Raman. He would tell you. Mrs Popatkar has never been here.’
The little mongoose is standing there thinking and thinking. I can see it, as if I was inside his head only. He is going over and over in his mind for some way to be catching me out.
Speak, damn you. Speak.
Now a little cough. As if he is not sure whether he can say what he is going to say. But I am up to your each and every trickery, Mr Inspector. So speak. Let me hear it.
‘And you were never – excuse me, sir, for asking – you were never meeting Mrs Popatkar somewhere else in Banares? Perhaps she was visiting some temple, and you were there also?’
Doing Wrong (Inspector Ghote) Page 9