Bribery, Corruption Also

by H. R. F. Keating

  Ghote saw now a familiar look arrive on his wife's face. Not a look a casual observer would be able to read. But one well known to him. A slow build-up of immovable obstinacy.

  Immovable obstinacy, here just edged with unshed tears.

  So, he thought with plummeting dismay, it seems I am destined after all to become a Calcutta man?

  ‘Dutt-Dastar Babu,' Protima said. ‘Yes, take us round the house. But I am not someone who would know what repairs are needed. Repairs, however, must be undertaken. The house has been bequeathed to myself, and I am determined to stay in it. So after you have shown us what there may be to see, we can go to your chamber and you can give some advance on the money that is to come to me. Any person I find to examine the house would want a good fee.'

  'But— But, Mrs Ghote, when you have seen the house for yourself you will change your mind. You must. There are fallen walls. Fires have been lit. Rains have penetrated.'

  'No.'

  Ghote, who had heard that No more often than he had liked, knew now that A. K. Dutt-Dastar would never persuade his wife just by leading her round her squattered and eaten-away inheritance.

  However, the lawyer did not know Protima as well as he did, and in a moment he was ushering them through the half-collapsed, rusted-over gates.

  'Darwans' houses to either side. Very much occupied by these East Bengal refugees. Three-four families in each one.'

  No comment from Protima.

  They advanced up the dusty track that had once been the gravelled drive, weaving their way past the sullen little fires of dung and coal-dust, the equally sullen women tending their blackened cooking-pots, past their crawling and scrambling naked dust-covered babies.

  'These people are also keeping numerous livestock. Cows, goats. Dogs and cats also. You can see.'

  'Yes,' said Protima.

  At a corner of the porte-cochere, its once dazzlingly white-plastered pillars thick with green monsoon slime where they were not eaten away to the interior brick, the two young goondas scooting the carrom pieces over their board paused long enough to give A. K. Dutt-Dastar contemptuous glares.

  Hurriedly he began to manoeuvre Protima onwards.

  'Such people must go.' she said.

  They mounted the broad stone steps leading up to the wide door of the house, one leaf of which seemed to have been chopped away for firewood or hut-making. As he stepped in, Ghote could not help catching his breath at the sight of the wide, spacious entrance hall. Its marble floor was cracked and pot-holed and covered in cow dung and dead pigeons, discarded mango peels and rubbish of all sorts. A row of ribby tethered cows stood in pools of yellow urine all along one wall with two or three women extracting from them a wretched quantity of watery-looking milk. The ceiling, where evidently a massive chandelier had once hung - Is it even now one of those on that pipal tree we were seeing on our way here? - was stained with the smoke of years of fires. From the walls where fallen plaster had exposed the brickwork bougainvillaea, seeding in the cracks, tumbled downwards. Elsewhere thin growths of acacia trees reached for the light coming through the high windows, now mostly leaning lopsidedly from their frames. In one a three-parts tom away grass sun-blind still drooped. But, perhaps most depressing of all, the wide spiralling staircase now led up not to the swarga above that little Protima had once imagined but to nowhere.

  'Yes, yes,' A. K. Dutt-Dastar said, almost in answer to Ghote's stunned silence. 'Dilapidations of every kind. And then there is the effect of our Calcutta weather.' A brilliant, uneasy smile. 'You know, Mr Ghote, what the famous American writer, Mark Twain, was saying about our heat and humidity? That it was enough to make a brass door-knob mushy. Very good, yes?'

  Very typical of you, Mr Dutt-Dastar, Bengali, to turn that saying into one gold-shining compliment.

  ‘Very well,' Protima jabbed out, her tears-filled eyes fixed on the broad marble staircase leading to nowhere. ‘I have seen enough. You have made your point, Dutt-Dastar Babu. But nevertheless I intend to live here. And without all these people. So let us go to your chamber, and you can give me a cheque to cover such expenses as a qualified expert would need to make a thorough examination.'

  ‘Ah, Mrs Ghote, disbursement in advance will not be possible. Alas. I am not able to pay out any sum without prior notice. Arrangements would have to be made.'

  ‘Then when would we come?' Ghote snapped in, aligning himself instantly on his wife's side and giving full play to his still unaccounted-for distrust of the lawyer.

  A. K. Dutt-Dastar hesitated.

  Ghote felt his suspicions harden yet more.

  ‘Mr Dutt-Dastar,' he said, ‘kindly fix a time.'

  There must have been enough of an edge to his request. The lawyer produced his diary and began, despite the wrap-around dark glasses he still kept on, flipping through its pages. Ghote, unashamedly leaning forward in the interior gloom to peer at it, thought he did not see many entries.

  ‘Very well,' A. K. Dutt-Dastar said at last, closing the diary with a snap. ‘Shall we say this day week? At four-thirty p.m.?'

  'No.'

  Protima's No was again adamant. Ghote recalled occasions in their married years when he had heard it explode at him. But, he felt now, his wife was filled with new fire. A fire he had not quite experienced before. Was it Calcutta passion? The riot, fire and brimstone Mr Bhattacharya had spoken of?

  And, if it is, would it be with me for the rest of my life here?

  'We will come,' Protima went on, 'today itself. At four-thirty p.m.'

  'Madam, I cannot promise to be ready so early. Not at all. Not at all.'

  'Then we will come tomorrow. Four-thirty p.m. also.'

  'If you like. But I can promise nothing.'

  A thundercloud of sulkiness, A. K. Dutt-Dastar turned on his heel, tramped out of the devastated house, down its dusty drive and across the road back to his little red Maruti. Dust rose in a cloud behind him as he drove furiously away.

  And it was then that Ghote realized, out on the edge of the city as they were, taxis would be impossible to find. How were they to get back to the Fairlawn Hotel?

  So, when at four-thirty the following afternoon they arrived at A. K. Dutt-Dastar's chamber in North Calcutta, they were both fuming with long-checked impatience. A weary hunt for a taxi the day before had left them exhausted. Protima had insisted, as soon as they got back to the hotel at last, that she must have a sleep. Ghote who, though fatigued enough, found it hard to sleep in the day had left her there on the bed. He felt obscurely that this was a typical Bengali habit, to lie all afternoon on some big bed with other family members, dozing, chatting a little, singing perhaps, dozing again. He did not approve.

  His feeling of alienation persisted next day. He dutifully ate the Fairlawn Hotel's enormous British-style breakfast - they had been not a minute late for it -bowls of porridge and some British preserved fish called a kipper, a torture of unexpected sharp bones, toast and thick marmalade. Protima, the Bengali fish-lover, declared the kipper delicious.

  Am I to eat things like this for the rest of my life, he asked himself with a new plunge of gloom.

  Nearby a bald, white-haired Briton - almost all the breakfasters were from the West - was even managing while putting pieces of the pale brown bone-clustered fish into his mouth to talk to the lean, dog-faced American sharing his table.

  'My dear Mr Kogan— '

  'Deen. Deen. You gotta call me Deen.'

  'Very well, my dear Deen, spare me a morning to come and see Lord Clive's house. In ruins now. Ruins. But if you give us your advice - and there's no one better able to advise on these things - we could make it once again a really magnificent mansion, a real Calcutta palace in this City of Palaces.'

  'Well, I don't know,' the American replied dubiously. 'I guess Indians don't feel much gratitude to a guy like Clive. He was the one who conquered Bengal, right?'

  ‘Oh, but, you know, your Bengali takes the long view. That's the nice thing about them. No grudges. Calcutta businesses ha
ve contributed tremendously to our restoration project. Tremendously.'

  Bengalis, Ghote thought. Wanting to be the best once more.

  The mildly favourable feelings he had developed listening to old Mr Bhattacharya had, he found, now considerably faded.

  Such feelings disappeared altogether when, at Protima's insistence, the rest of the day up to the time of their half-made appointment with A. K. Dutt-Dastar was devoted to strolling in the Maidan. ‘A one hundred per cent Calcutta thing to do,' she had said. ‘Taking it easy, enjoying the fresh air, meeting a friend perhaps, hearing the news, discussing life.'

  'But perhaps we could arrive early to Mr Dutt-Dastar's chamber. I cannot be seeing any reason why it should be difficult for him to let you have some money out of your inheritance.'

  Even as he spoke he realized this meant he was attempting to hurry on acquiring the big squattered house. The house that would mean a lifetime cut off from his own Bombay and the work he did there. But he was not going to let A. K. Dutt-Dastar get away with his trickery. Whatever trickery it was.

  'No, no. Nonsense. We told Dutt-Dastar Babu we would come at four-thirty. At four-thirty we will be there.'

  So they had walked solemnly from one end of the huge Maidan to the other. First, from a distance taking a long look at the imposing, domed, colonnaded and minareted Victoria Memorial behind its veil of dusty haze.

  ‘We will go inside another day. For now enjoy what it tells of the calm of Calcutta.'

  ‘But it was built by the British, isn't it?' And dwarfed, Ghote could not help inwardly registering, by the towering square-cut mass of the commercial Tata Centre beyond.

  Then they had walked slowly northwards, past informal cricket matches, past mud-smeared sadhus sitting in contemplation under trees, past vigorous games of catch-as-catch-can kabadi, past monkeywallas putting their charges through their paces. They had lingered watching the activity round one of the Maidan's three wide-stretching tanks, the Manohar Das, the people washing, the people beating the dirt out of clothes, the naked children splashing and shouting. They had taken long detours to avoid herds of browsing, flap-eared goats. They had peered in at the hedge-surrounded little bungalows belonging to various clubs, the Calcutta Kennel, the Armenian Sports. They had noted a small pandal under which were sitting three emaciated men, members of the Headmasters Association of West Bengal, fasting, their banner proclaiming, 'unto death to secure monies due but unpaid owing to corrupt activities'.

  Corrupt activities, Ghote thought then. So Calcutta, according to these Calcutta headmasters, not at all free of corruption. And . . . And, when later they confronted that somehow dubious Bengali lawyer A. K. Dutt-Dastar would there be a whiff of some other corrupt activity?

  Sitting eventually to eat a snack beneath the startling white walls of Fort William, with its sun-scintillating, much-polished ceremonial cannon -Protima at last sampling her sandesh: Ghote deciding he was not going to like it - prey still to his feelings of distrust, he could not prevent himself glancing again and again at his watch.

  The glances had to be quick, since at the second of them Protima had burst out in reproof.

  'What nonsense is this? This-all watch-hands watching. Dutt-Dastar Babu will be there when he is there. It will be four-thirty when it is four-thirty. You are in Calcutta now. Enjoy what is here for you to enjoy.'

  Eventually, standing staring up at the sky-reaching Ochterlony Monument at the vast park's northern end, he had listened, reining in his impatience hard, to Protima passing on to him what she remembered her father had told her about it. 'Put up by one Sir David Ochterlony. He was having, you know, thirteen wives. Thirteen, and they would go out in the early morning, before the heat, along the bank of the Hooghly, each one on her own elephant. Thirteen elephants all in a line. There is Calcutta for you. One rich, rich past. And something else also. That Sir David Ochterlony was dying without one rupee to his name. He never took all the bribes the other British nabobs were getting fat on. He is deserving this monument. Every inch of it.'

  Resenting once again all the praise poured on Calcutta, past and present, Ghote was unable to stop himself taking a full, uninhibited look at his watch.

  ‘What I was telling?' Protima bounced in before he had properly registered the position of the hands. ‘We will be there with Dutt-Dastar Babu at four-thirty on dot. Neither before or after. And he will give me what money I am needing to find out just exactly how bad it is with my house.'

  Perhaps he will, Ghote thought. Hard to see how anyone could deny this so Bengali tempestuous wife I have married. And then . . . Then it will be the Calcutta life for me.

  Mouth down-curved, he followed her onwards, resolutely declining to take in a word of what she said when she stopped in front of the arm-upraised statue of Calcutta's hero, Netaji Subhas Bose, lost leader of the army that had been intended in the days of World War Two to chase the British out of Bengal and perhaps the whole of India.

  Entering at last the Curzon Park extension of the Maidan - statue of an orating Lenin gesturing as expansively as Netaji Bose - they came upon an odd sight. In a tree-shaded comer, a green-painted iron railing enclosed an area of dusty earth milling with dozens of rats, even a hundred or more. Brown, fat and busily happy, they kept popping out of their little tunnels and squirming back in again, utterly ignoring half a dozen voracious crows swooping down among them. It was little wonder why. Pressing up against the rails a tight crowd of all sorts of everyday Calcuttans were tossing in, fast and furious, nuts, peas and potato chips that vendors surrounding them were vigorously selling.

  'Oh, it is the Rat Colony,' Protima said. 'I have read about it. Those tunnels they have made are said to go right across to the other side of the road there. I don't think it was here when I was a child. Or at least my parents never brought me to see it. But it is good, yes? Calcutta, the warm, welcoming even her rats.'

  Yes, Ghote thought. Welcoming rats and an inspector of police from Bombay-side. But do I want any welcome, howevermuch warm?

  'But why are you lingering and lingering here?' Protima demanded almost in the same breath. 'It would be disgraceful not to see Dutt-Dastar Babu just when we have said. Come.'

  So, with his watch recording the time as precisely four-thirty, he stood at last beside Protima at the doorway of A. K. Dutt-Dastar's chamber on the ground floor of a crumbling building just inside a lane leading off Rabindra Sarani.

  'Sarani is what they are calling in Bombay marg a big street,' Protima had explained. 'Since Independence we have re-named many, many Calcutta roads. What was Theatre Street is now Shakespeare Sarani. Shakespeare is almost a Bengali writer, you know.'

  He had thought of saying that this really could not be true. But decided against. And he had noted, too, her we have named. Had she already let all her Bombay years fall away?

  'And, best of all, when British had gone Clive Street was named as Netaji Subhas Road in honour of our great Bengali fighter against the British. Then, even better, in the days of the Vietnam War they re-named

  Harrington Street where the U.S. consulate was as Ho Chi Minh Sarani.'

  Ghote might have enjoyed this example of sharp Bengali wit. But the door of A. K. Dutt-Dastar's chamber had been opened by a greasy-shirted, bald-headed peon, a long thin birthmark slithering snake-like from above his left ear down to his chin.

  As the fellow led into the outer office - he had a bobbing, this-side-and-that limp - Ghote had to acknowledge that, whatever trickery A. K. Dutt-Dastar might be up to, he certainly did not seem to be a person who had much benefited from any doubtful activities. The paint on the room's walls was peeling in patches. Its years-old marble floor was black-lined in every crack. The ceiling was high enough, but grey with age, its plaster flaking. True, there were rows of businesslike filing cabinets against all the walls, but their shabby green paint made it clear they had been there unreplaced for many, many years.

  At a plain wooden table crammed up against a large, grey-painted, old iron safe, a
crop-haired individual, erect as a rod, chin grey-stubbled, sat on a tall bentwood chair thumping with ink-covered fingers at a large outdated office typewriter. He wore a much-washed shirt, each of its pockets jostling with rows of ballpoints and plastic-knobbed pencils.

  "To see Dutt-Dastar Babu,' Protima said briskly. 'I am Mrs Ghote. Appointment for four-thirty.'

  'Not available.'

  The upright old clerk had hardly looked up from his typewriter. But over the clatter of its keys Ghote thought he could hear from behind the door of an inner room, A. K. Dutt-Dastar's high-pitched, rattling voice, talking evidently to a client.

  Before his Bengali wife could explode into another Bengali rage, he stepped in.

  'Our appointment was for four-thirty, yes,' he said. 'But if Mr Dutt-Dastar will be available soon we would wait.'

  The old clerk had stopped his typing. But it was only, peering down and tut-tutting pettishly, to remove a jammed ribbon and replace it with another, evidently re-inked, almost dripping from between his fingers. Otherwise he took no more notice of them.

  So now Protima did explode.

  'My husband was telling we had appointment. The time for that has already passed, by almost ten minutes. You will go in now and tell Dutt-Dastar Babu we are here and we wish to see him ek dum.'

  'Madam, my duty is to remain at my post.'

  Ghote thought quickly. Plainly rage was hardly going to get them in to see the shifty lawyer. He guessed it was very likely his clerk had been given orders that if they appeared he was to forbid them entry. How to get round the embargo?

  Only one way. Speed money.

  He slipped his hand into his back pocket and took from his wallet a ten-rupee note. Without a word, he laid it on the old clerk's table.

  Scarcely taking his quick-working fingers from the typewriter keyboard the clerk slid the note to the very edge of the table and left it there.

  Ghote wondered whether he was expected to put another of equal value on top of the first. But a single look at the grey-stubbled face, bent intently over the typewriter's keys once more, clacking hard away, convinced him that, were he to pile note after note on top of his ten rupees till they were as high as the flaking ceiling above, he would find the barrier between themselves and A. K. Dutt-Dastar still in place.