Doing Wrong (Inspector Ghote)

by Keating, H. R. F.

  A rocking sway to left and right.

  ‘No,’ Ghote heard himself murmur aloud. ‘No.’

  And on again. Two yards. A yard.

  The heavy figure fell forward.

  Feet clear of the roadway. In Holy Kashi.

  As if released from some supernatural bondage everyone there, Ghote, Mishra, the helpers, the onlookers, the old gentleman with the black, bulgy umbrella, surged forward.

  If there had been any traffic there would have been a massacre. No one looked. In less than a minute they were on the far side, surrounding the unmoving bulk, face buried in the roadside dust.

  Ghote knelt beside him, felt for a pulse.

  Nothing.

  Ghote stood on one of the higher steps at the Manikarnika Ghat watching in the fast fading light the body of H. K. Verma burn. H. K. Verma, whose motive for killing Mrs Shoba Popatkar he now knew. A rapid reading of the Recollections before he had solemnly handed them back to Mr Srivastava had been enough. If Mrs Popatkar had ever told the world that the unbending figure of the great KK had in his last days renounced his firmest beliefs, then the party that had upheld his stern view of what was right and what wrong over so many years would in a moment have been laughed into oblivion.

  Below, silhouetted from time to time against the brightly licking flames, Verma’s son, Krishnakanta, head shaved, dressed in seamless white, looking thoroughly sulky, stood with that spoilt brat Vikram, other male members of the family and a gathering of Banares notables, all properly barefoot, white-clad.

  Led by the priest conducting the ceremony, as bullying a pandit as any in Banares – the mourners had been rebuked for dipping too deeply in the pot of Ganges water before scattering it on the unlit pyre – Krishnakanta had managed to carry out the rituals. He had poured more Ganges water into the mouth of the dead man. He had gone five times counter-clockwise round the pyre, prodded on by numerous nudges and hissed commands. And then he had put the torch of holy kusha grass twigs, lit at the ever-burning fire kept up by the Doms, to the three hundred kilos of high-piled, ghee-smeared wood. And the flames had leapt up.

  No question H. K. Verma is being conducted to the afterlife in the fully correct manner, Ghote thought. If, having died inside Holy Kashi, he is needing any conducting.

  It was a knotty little theological point he had put to Inspector Mishra the evening before. Why, he had asked, if by dying within the boundaries of Kashi as H. K. Verma had done you immediately attained moksha, was it necessary to have a funeral conducted according to a ritual designed to pass you without danger into your next life?

  Mishra had seemed a little embarrassed.

  ‘Always as well to be safe than sorry,’ he had offered.

  ‘But surely that is indicating not much of faith in the merit of dying inside Kashi?’

  ‘Well, it is the way it is done. The way they are saying is correct. The right way.’

  He had thought it best then not to pursue it.

  In any case conversation had been difficult. They had been talking jammed tightly side by side in the middle of an enormous crowd. At Mishra’s invitation he had gone, to occupy the time till his evidence about H. K. Verma’s accident had been given and he was free to return to Bombay, to watch the final play in the Ram Lila story. The Bharat Milap, held by tradition in the short time between daylight and night in Banares itself, at Nat Imli near the Sanskrit University, had been about to begin.

  The Maharajah of Banares, small, dumpy, dressed in cloth-of-gold, under a huge white umbrella, riding high on the back of a stately, much-caparisoned elephant, had arrived. Now there was a sudden stillness in the huge throng that had been slowly gathering over the past two hours and more, a jam-packed mass of humanity in clothes of every colour, threaded through with the khaki of the police.

  ‘Sometimes up to fifty thousand onlookers,’ Mishra had murmured.

  Up on the flat, red-silk adorned roof of a small temple the twelve-year-old boy enacting Bharat, brother of hero Rama, who had guarded his kingdom for all the fourteen years of Rama’s forced exile in the dangerous forest, sat, solemn in yellow robe. An elaborately tall golden taj crowned his head. The innocent youthfulness of his face was still manifest under the hours-long make-up of paints and plastered-on sequins. Quietly he awaited the return of Rama, reunited at last, after tremendous warfare, with his wife the faithful Sita, and accompanied as always by his brother Laxman, companion in exile.

  Then at last the longed-for moment came. The three twelve-year-olds playing Rama, Sita and Laxman appeared. ‘In olden days,’ Mishra said, ‘they would have by now been fed a poisoned meal. They were altogether too holy to be allowed to go back to ordinary life.’ Slow step by slow step they advanced towards the temple. Beside them the brahmin regulating the ceremony hovered and darted, obsessed with getting every last detail right. Then suddenly the three broke into a joyous, unrestrained run, on and up to the temple roof and the brotherly embrace that ends the long, long years of exile and danger.

  At that moment Ghote, for all that he had not gone through the dangers and the fears of the Ram Lila plays as they had been enacted out at Ramnagar, felt the tears come to his eyes. Tears of joy.

  Rama and Bharat embraced. Each proclaimed, voices high and fluting, the words of greeting. Garlands were exchanged. It was over, the long struggle of the perfect man to do right whatever adversities befell. From the immense crowd there had come a huge shout of wondering triumph, repeated and repeated to the now star-bright sky, ‘Rama ki jai, Bharatabhai ki jai.’ Right, the long story has told them, must triumph, must be served.

  Ghote, standing now at the Manikarnika Ghat watching the sharp flames eat into the weighty body of the murderer he had seen die, acknowledged to himself that at that moment of the Bharat Milap the evening before he had sighed, deeply sighed.

  Sighed for what? For a world where right did triumph? Or for the world where right so seldom seemed to triumph? Or for his own failure to nourish enough in himself the ineradicable urge to do right he knew to be there?

  He could not say.

  Down where the pyre had consumed by more than half H. K. Verma’s body Krishnakanta was performing his final duties. Handed by the brahmin a stout length of bamboo, he stepped forward and struck the now fleshless skull one single hard blow. With a dull pop of an explosion the fragile, calcified bone broke open, freeing the spirit within. Then, taking between his two hands a large clay vessel of Ganga water, Krishnakanta turned his back and threw it over his left shoulder to shatter on the pyre. With a great hiss of rising steam the flames were doused to a solid core of red heat. Finally he walked away without, as the ritual dictated, looking back.

  The other mourners had already begun to move away, down to the river, in accord with custom, however little they had gone near the corpse, to wash themselves once more pure.

  Soon they had all left. Only a single Dom, his long iron pole resting on his shoulder, stood guard over the smouldering mass that had been H. K. Verma.

  Ghote stayed where he was.

  Over the still waters of the river the sun was setting in a wide swath of fading red. The lonely figure of a widow, the very last of the light catching her thin white sari, crept, bent double, between him and the mound of smoking ash.

  Protima, he thought. Will one day she be a widow here in this city of death? If I should die before her, be taken to the electric crematorium back in Bombay . . . Or even if, as perhaps H. K. Verma contemplated, I had had my mouth shut for ever here in Banares as he shut Mrs Shoba Popatkar’s in Dadar, Protima might very well decide this was where to end her days.

  And perhaps, even at this moment, some tiny inner event has occurred in my own body that is the beginning of my end.

  My life may be in its last stage. This life, if they are right, the pandits and the pandas, this life in the long, long cycle of life upon life we are condemned to.

  Well, but how have I lived that life? Will I come back as a pandit myself, or as a maharajah to ride on an elephant?
Or – he looked out across the wide Ganges to where the light of the sinking sun had turned the Sandbank into one long sullen black hump – will it be as a donkey?

  Have I done enough of the right in my life? Have I?