Bribery, Corruption Also

by H. R. F. Keating

  Yes, Calcutta could produce, then, people of ferocious honesty. So, will I after all find something of pleasure to live here?

  He looked at his wife.

  She shrugged.

  He picked up the note, replaced it in his wallet, seeing the single black-ink fingermark on it as some sort of badge of dishonour.

  ‘Kindly tell Mr Dutt-Dastar,' he said, ‘that we would return at this time tomorrow, and that, if we do not see him then, we would take whatsoever steps we see as necessary.'

  But he knew they had suffered a defeat.

  Chapter Five

  ‘The clerk Haripada,' Protima said as they left the crumbling old building.

  'Haripada? But how are you knowing what is the name of that fellow?'

  'Duffer. Of course I am not knowing. Do you mean you have never heard of the clerk Haripada?'

  'I have never heard.'

  What was this? Some Bengali ridiculousness by the sound of it.

  'He is the hero of one world-famous poem by Tagore called "The Flute". Everybody should know it. Haripada is very poor. He shares his room with a fly-snapping gecko, covered by the same rent... the only difference: he doesn't lack food, Rabindranath wrote. Poor Haripada's umbrella is full of holes, like, he says, my pay after they have taken the fines. He feels he is chained hand and foot. But he continues to live. He listens to the flute.'

  'Well, I have never heard of this fellow.'

  'But, don't you see, Dutt-Dastar Babu's clerk is just like him, an eternal Calcutta figure, poor but upright. Despising your offer of speed money.'

  My offer. But offered with at least your silent agreement. And if there are honest, uribribable clerks in Calcutta, there are also bribable Bengalis. Your Dutt-Dastar Babu for one. I am sure of it.

  But it was not until next morning, the Fairlawn Hotel's British breakfast finished to the last spat-out hair-thin kipper bone - the white-haired Englishman still trying to get dog-faced Deen Kogan to see Lord Clive's ruined mansion - that he found he had to bring that near-certainty of his about A. K. Dutt-Dastar into the open.

  ‘Since we have nothing we have to do until we are seeing Dutt-Dastar Babu again,' Protima announced as they sat afterwards in the October sunshine on the hotel's stretch of lawn running down to Sudder Street, 'I am going to visit the Kali Tfemple. I have already left it too long. I am sure Mother Kali will answer my prayer, and Dutt-Dastar Babu will advance me enough to have the house fully examined.'

  'I would not be too sure.'

  'Not? What do you mean? How dare you say he would keep back money that is belonging to me? What nonsense you are speaking.'

  'If it is nonsense,' he shot back, prickling with anger at hearing that word once again from his more fiery than ever Bengali wife, 'then why it was that he did not give yesterday?'

  ‘But he had a client inside.'

  'When he knew we were coming? When he had given the order to your clerk Haripada to keep us out only?'

  'But you cannot be sure of that. Dutt-Dastar Babu is a gentleman. A Calcutta gentleman. There must have been some problem yesterday. When we are going there this afternoon you would see.'

  He managed not to say anything more. But he could not keep the look of disbelief off his face.

  Protima noticed it. She knew him too well.

  'Now I am going to Kalighat Tfemple,' she snapped. 'I suppose you are not willing to pray there also?'

  'No.'

  He had spotted a Bombay newspaper from the day before on the reception counter. He asked if he could see it. But he found, though he waded through every column, he could take little interest in any of it. Even the latest manoeuvrings of what was called Bombay's crime-politics nexus failed to arouse him. Only a front-page item, Pay Hike for Delhi MPs, briefly held his attention. Not because of the piffling extra 3,000 rupees a month they were to get, but because an accompanying cartoon implied the sum would hardly cover interest on the bribes they had had to pay to get elected ... in order to receive yet bigger bribes.

  But what does Bombay crime or Delhi MPs' corruption matter to me now, he thought glumly. I am to be a Calcuttawalla. However sure I am that this Dutt-Dastar fellow is playing some dirty game, Protima will not see it. She will get some money from him this afternoon. She will tell me Goddess Kali has answered her prayer. Then she will find someone to say the damages to the house, the fires, the destruction, the crumbling under monsoon rains, can be put into repair. She will get all those refugees out. We will have to live there for the rest of our days. Ganesh Ghote, Bengali bhadrolok, in well-pleated dhoti, well-ironed silk kurta, all complete.

  Eventually Protima arrived back, splodgy red tilak implanted by the Kalighat Temple brahmans on her forehead. It irritated him. When she went to a temple in Bombay only the smallest of quick smudges was left on her forehead. Trust Calcutta to do even this to excess.

  But yet more irritating was the fact that she had got back ten minutes after the inflexible lunch gong of the Fairlawn had boomed out all over the big house. So, tails between legs, they had to go and look for somewhere else to eat. And, worse for Ghote, Protima at once announced she had noticed a small place in a lane off Sudder Street where, despite the fact that Calcutta restaurants seemed to serve food from any quarter of the world except Bengal, they could get good Bengali home cooking.

  They ate in silence. Protima had chosen a Calcutta favourite, fish heads, and, when he had refused to contemplate anything of the sort, had ordered for him hilsa fish. ‘That is one great Calcutta delight.' she said. 'If you are going to be staying here, you must get to love hilsa.' So he had sat watching her expertly deal with her fish heads while attempting himself to extract from his hilsa tiny bone after tiny bone. But try as he would, peer into the white flesh as he would, each time he ventured to put a piece into his mouth he found it as full of infuriating prickles as his breakfast kipper.

  At least dealing with all these damn bones means I am not having to talk, he said to himself. Because if I did, I would be bound to say something altogether to the detriment of one Dutt-Dastar Babu.

  And then he saw that his wife, with every sign of pleasure, was busy taking out the glazed-looking eyes from her fish. Before they went into her mouth he closed his eyes.

  At A. K. Dutt-Dastar's chamber his temper did not improve. No sooner had the limping peon with the long snake-like birthmark admitted them than upright, unbribable clerk Haripada said his master was waiting. 'You may go straight in.'

  Dapper A. K. Dutt-Dastar was dressed today in well-ironed pale green shirt, very much a contrast to his sweat-stained one at the squattered house. He was, however, still wearing his ultra-black wrap-around glasses, although the light coming through the dust-thick window of his room, its walls lined with leather-bound legal tomes, already needed to be supplemented by a dangling neon tube.

  Behind an enormous desk sitting stiffly upright in a wide, leather-backed chair, he nevertheless looked dwarfed between the two broad leather-padded arms. On the desk, its bare surface shining with hard polishing, there rested no papers, only a well-polished brass pen-set, its two pens planted like arrows either side of a glinting glass inkwell with beside it a domed brass bell, equally well-polished. The big leather-cornered blotter held a virgin sheet of almost exactly the same pale green as the lawyer's shirt.

  Does he have that sheet changed each day according to what he is wearing, Ghote wondered? The damn Bengali. And his outer office, where poor clerk Haripada is sitting at that ancient typewriter, bare almost as a police cell.

  However, they themselves were greeted with an excess of politeness.

  'Sit, sit. You must be tired. North Calcutta is nothing less than hell itself to get about in.'

  He is up to something nefarious, Ghote thought. And once more boasting about Calcutta. We have crowded streets in Bombay also.

  Then politeness was over.

  'Now, Mrs Ghote, let me put it to you once more. You have inherited what they are calling a white elephant. Unfortunately. Yes, a big h
ouse that was once in a fine state of repair. Now falling down. Overrun also by squatters who have no intention of being shifted. Always ready to bribe or fight their way out of whatsoever steps are taken. But you have your piece of the greatest luck in the buyer I have been able to secure for you. As I was telling you, once he was seeing the house he, as you may say, fell in love with it. And he is willing to pay the very large sums necessary to put all in good order. More, much more, my dear madam, than your resources will be equal to.'

  'But, Dutt-Dastar Babu, I am determined to live in the house. It is mine. I remember it from my childhood. The perfect place on earth to live. So— '

  'Madam, madam, hear me out. If you attempt to live in the house you saddle yourself with trouble after trouble. If you sell now you obtain a very decent sum. Yours to do with what you wish. A flat here in the city. Some nice South Calcutta part, say Rash Behari Avenue. Or you could return to Bombay and buy some very nice house in the countryside. A hill-station like Mahableshwar. I myself enjoyed a fine weekend there once when I had business in that too businesslike city. Madam, you really have no choice.'

  Ghote did not leave it to Protima to reply.

  'Nevertheless, Mr Dutt-Dastar,' he said, with all the emphasis he could manage, ‘my wife would like to have the house inspected with a view to ourselves occupying same, and she would be most grateful if you could hand to her whatsoever sum is necessary to put that work in hand. Forthwith.'

  What have I done, he asked himself immediately. Have I now fully admitted I am willing to live the bhad-rolok life here in Calcutta? I have.

  But A. K. Dutt-Dastar was not, it seemed, to be so easily deflected from his aim.

  ‘Yes, yes,' he replied, ‘you need have no worries there. But other problems ...' He turned to address Protima directly. ‘Other problems, my dear madam, there maybe.'

  ‘What other problems? You have said nothing of other problems.'

  'My dear madam, it is a somewhat complex matter. Which will not at all arise if you are willing to sell, to accept my earnest advice to that effect. So I have not hitherto mentioned the matter.'

  'Then now is the time to mention and mention.'

  For an instant Ghote felt a jounce of pride in his fiery Bengali wife, not letting any evasion deflect her.

  Until he thought of the likely years ahead as her Bombay jamai.

  'Mrs Ghote, I will of course fully inform you without delay. Let me call for the file.'

  He gave a sharp tap to the brass bell on his desk -in Bombay, Ghote thought sourly, fellow would have decent intercom - and when the snake-birthmarked peon lumbered in told him to fetch the Mrs Protima Ghote file.

  For two or three minutes they all sat in silence. Ghote would have liked to have asked Protima whether she still saw Dutt-Dastar Babu as a Bengali gentleman, or whether this latest, hitherto unmentioned obstacle to her living in the house that had been bequeathed to her had not made even her a little suspicious. But he could hardly do that in front of the lawyer himself. And the man had evidently decided that nothing he could urge in words was now going to shift Protima. So he was simply waiting to show her whatever it was in the file that might finally convince her. And Protima? Ghote had no idea what was going on in her head. But, whatever it was, for once it was not spouting out in a torrent of Bengali talk.

  At last the peon appeared, clutching a fraying buff-coloured file with the words Mrs Protima Ghote -Bombay scrawled across it in bold green ink. He slapped it down on the blotter and lurched out.

  A. K. Dutt-Dastar glanced across at the two of them on the chairs drawn up to his desk. Then, with a touch of solemnity, he opened the file. For almost half a minute he stared down at the topmost sheet of the thin batch of documents it contained.

  Ghote managed to produce a small belch and leant forward as if to ease some internal discomfort.

  And succeeded in seeing that the page the lawyer was studying so intently had on it no more than two lines of heavy blotched typing.

  Mrs Protima Ghote

  Last Will and Testament of

  Amit Nirad Chattopadhyay Babu

  No doubt the thumping work of the clerk Haripada.

  Hastily A. K. Dutt-Dastar turned over two or three further sheets.

  ‘Ah, yes,' he said. ‘Yes.'

  He shot a glance across the wide desk at Ghote and, with the appearance of needing to look more intently at what he was about to read, brought a hand up and cupped it at the top of the new sheet.

  ‘Yes,' he said after some moments. ‘This is the matter I had in mind. Complex business. If not altogether vital. It notifies me of what may seem to be a prior claim to a part of the compound of the house.' He looked up, though still keeping his hand concealing the page. ‘Yes, a matter that has been pending many years. That has, as you may say, gone almost into desuetude. But is still there.'

  ‘What it is exactly?' Protima bluntly demanded.

  ‘A claim probably emanating from a neighbouring property,' A. K. Dutt-Dastar replied. ‘Simply that.'

  ‘The property belonging to one Mr Bhattacharya?'

  ‘Oh, no, no. Not that gentleman - you were introducing him the other morning, yes? - no, not that gentleman at all.'

  ‘Then who it is? I may request to see them. I could persuade them that something so long neglected should not stand in the way.'

  A. K. Dutt-Dastar looked shocked.

  ‘Madam, madam. That would be fatal. Fatal. To give an opposing party some indication that their case is better than they had thought. It would never do. Never. Never. No, the only way to solve the matter is careful and delicate negotiation. An expensive procedure, I feel bound to warn you. And inevitably long drawn-out also.'

  ‘If it must be, it must be,' Protima retorted.

  Ghote had secretly hoped that this final obstacle, however delayed it had been in coming, might at last deter his wife. A decent sum as the selling price, A. K. Dutt-Dastar had said. He thought of how pleasant life could be in or near Bombay with money to spend on some good accommodation. And he would work out his full time at Crime Branch. To the last day.

  But, no. Repulse seemed only to increase the lawyer's determination.

  ‘Madam,' he battled on. 'Let me recommend this. You go to the house with some fully qualified person and take his advice. I can give you the name of a very reputable man.'

  He pulled open the long middle drawer of his desk, extracted a card, pushed it forward.

  ‘You cannot do better than this gentleman.'

  Ghote saw his chance. The lawyer's cupped hand had moved as he leant forward. A paragraph on the sheet he had been reading was momentarily visible. He strained to take in the blotchily typed words.

  'Very well,' A. K. Dutt-Dastar said, swinging back to his original position almost crouched over the file. ‘Let the gentleman I am introducing explain to you the condition the house is in. Trust his judgement. And only then, if you are still determined to take up occupancy, we will commence proceedings in this other matter.'

  Trust the judgement of a man you have recommended, Ghote thought. I would rather trust a rat from that Rat Park.

  Protima had been thinking.

  ‘Very well,' she said eventually, taking up the card the lawyer had slid across his shiny desk.

  'I may tell you,' A. K. Dutt-Dastar went on, leaning back more comfortably in his big chair, 'I have already instructed my clerk to have a cheque drawn up in anticipation of your continuing to believe you would be able to take up occupancy of the house. You may apply to him.'

  Protima turned and directed a glance at her husband which said, more plainly than even a loudspeaker announcement, I told you so, a Bengali gentleman to the last.

  But Ghote hardly noticed. He was puzzling hard over the few words he had managed to read when the lawyer's cupped hand was not hiding them.

  Chapter Six

  With right of passage unimpeded. Ghote sat in the taxi returning to the hotel. Protima beside him, with A. K. Dutt-Dastar's cheque in her purse, was lo
oking to his mind insufferably smug and Bengali. In his head he mulled once more over those words.

  Very well, that tricky fellow - proven liar also - is making out that the query hanging over the property is because of a claim to land in its compound. And, yes, that may well involve a right of way. But if that is all, why was he so very much concerned not to let me see same?

  And, another thing. That page he was reading from was in heavily smudged typing. I can see the words now only. With right of passage unimpeded. And, surety, the typing was one and the same as the typing I was seeing on Document Page One, Mrs Protima Ghote -Last Will and Testament of Amit Nirad Chattopadhyay Babu. But A. K. Dutt-Dastar stated he was reading out some document notifying him of a claim on the house. So it should have come from somewhere else than his own chamber. The typing should be altogether different.

  With right of passage unimpeded. Be clear about this.

  A. K. Dutt-Dastar has in that file a document prepared in his own chamber, somehow concerned with Pro-tima's inherited house, and mentioning some right of passage. Unimpeded also.

  But what exactly is right of passage? How much may such a right interfere with Protima's getting the house? Take away from its value, yes. But that should not stop her getting the place, having it put in order, having the squatters moved out. If she can pay for that.

  But how to find out more? Consult some other lawyer? Calcutta at least full of those. But which to choose?

  No, wait. Yes, do it this way.

  He leant forward and spoke to their driver.

  ‘Not Fairlawn Hotel. Go instead to Writers' Building.'

  Even I, hundred per cent Bombay man that I am, know about Calcutta's famous Writers' Building. That there are no writers inside it, only talkers. Because the secretariat of the West Bengal government is naturally full-full of incessantly talking Bengalis. When did I first hear that joke cut? I even know the place was called Writers' Building because in far-off British days it housed junior British servants of the East India Company, known as writers. There they had lived, it was said, one highly riotous life. Calcutta style.