But, just as he became aware of the room-bearer quietly beginning his work behind him, even the bull was shoved aside. It seemed, typically of a Bengali he thought, not to be as fierce as its charges at the pi-dog had indicated. Now at last a man in a battered khaki uniform had appeared. Ignoring everything but the dead dog, he unwrapped a length of rope from round his waist and with it lassoed the reeking corpse and dragged it off.
The room-bearer, who had idly joined him at the window, explained what had happened. The man hauling the foul-smelling body away was, he said, a Corporation jamadar who during the night had dumped the dead dog at the side of the mound, there to stink out the whole neighbourhood. This afternoon the fellow had appeared at the hotel reception desk. And had been given his usual bribe to remove the offensive object.
Bribery not so bad, Ghote thought as he left the room to the bearer. In this way the worst odours and putridity are got rid of, and a poor man also ends up a little better off.
The hotel's proprietress, dressed today in a chiffon blouse of purest white and a blue skirt ironed to the last degree, was in the entrance hall when he got down there, giving brisk orders to the servant who each day took her white, white poodle dog for its walks.
‘Ah, Mr Goat,' she said. He had corrected her pronunciation of his name - natural enough in Bengal where a Bose is just one syllable - twice before, but now he gave up. ‘If you are going to be here all afternoon, let me remind you tea is served at a quarter past four, not later. We have a very nice fruit cake always. You will enjoy that. Come at once when the gong is sounded.'
Her dog-walker had left. She turned and ascended the stairs to her private apartment.
A fellow guest, a smartly bearded Sikh in blazer, blue turban and knife-edge trousers, gave Ghote a conspiratorial wink.
‘Better be on parade on the dot, old man. Memsahib doesn't really care for Indians, you know. We weren't allowed in at all, any of us, until recently.'
‘Thank you. But I am thinking fruit cake is not what I am liking at this time of the day.'
So that is why, he thought, there has been somewhat of stiffness when we have come down to that breakfast. It was not because Protima and I were not on time. To the minute. We were. It is because that cunning Dutt-Dastar put us into this altogether British-like place.
Well, when I tell Assistant Commissioner Bhowmick what he has been attempting to do, he will find his chalak has not at all paid off.
He secured the day before's copy of The Times of India Bombay edition, and took it out to the hotel's pleasant little leafy courtyard. There, mercifully alone, under the coolly disparaging gaze of a plaster copy of the Venus de Milo, he sat at one of the green plastic marble tables and read. Ex-Prime Minister on Corruption Charge.
He groaned softly aloud. Corruption, corruption, corruption. Suspected even in the highest places, known of beyond doubt in place after place lower in society. Would it ever be rooted out? Could it be rooted out?
He turned the page. But, once more, found all the Bombay news, even of the scandals and scams, deprived of the savour he would have relished only a week earlier.
If I am not to be any kind of a Bombayman henceforth, he said to himself, then what is there here of interest and meaning also?
A sharp hissing sound broke in on his gloomy reverie.
It was loud enough and insistent enough to make him look all round for its source. In half a minute he spotted it. At the top of one of the courtyard's walls a head had been thrust through the tangle of vegetation growing up from a row of big reddish pots below.
Plainly the insistent hissing had issued from the pair of thick lips in the face staring in at him. But there was something else also about the face.
Then, as the head was pushed even further in, he realized what it was. All down its left-hand side there ran a thin, snake-like birthmark.
The peon from A. K. Dutt-Dastar's chamber.
But could it really be him? What had the fellow's name been? Ah, yes. Shibu.
'Shibu, it is you?'
'Jee, sahib. I am wanting to see. But they saying no natives allowed. Just only servants.'
'I see. But why are you here itself? You are bringing a chit from Dutt-Dastar Babu? They should have let you leave it at the desk.'
'No chit, sahib.'
'Then what it is? Are you wanting myself?'
'Jee, sahib.'
'Well, say what you have got to say and jump down.'
'No, sahib. Talking wanted.'
"Talking? What talking? Tell whatsoever you have got to tell here and now.'
'No, sahib. Much of talk needed. Private. Very-very private.'
He wondered what to do. What the devil could the fellow be wanting? Something of very-very private. But what? What?
Curiosity won. After all, the fellow did come from the chamber of that proven liar A. K. Dutt-Dastar.
'Jump down. I will come out into Sudder Street.'
Outside, amid the lazing throng of Western backpack tourists, of wretched dealers in poor quality 'brown sugar' heroin, of vegetable vendors, of beggars, of kerb-side barbers skilfully swishing their razors round the scantily soaped faces of their squatting customers, of drivers leaning out of their battered vehicles to call to every passing tourist 'Want taxi? Want taxi?', Ghote eventually spotted the peon's bald head.
He pushed his way over to him.
'Well, what it is you are wanting?'
'Sahib, it is what you are wanting.'
'What do you mean? What do you think I could be wanting?'
'Mislaid, sahib.'
'Mislaid? Mis— ' Light dawned. 'That file? The file Dutt-Dastar Babu was saying you had put in wrong place? You have it?'
'Jee, sahib.'
'Where? Where is it?'
He looked at the shambling, birthmarked fellow. There was nothing he was carrying. He had nowhere to conceal anything anywhere about his flapping khaki shorts and dirt-seamed khaki shirt, let alone a large buff file with the green-ink words Mrs Protima Ghote -Bombay scrawled across it.
'What are you telling?' he shouted over the hubbub of the street all round. .
A seller of oranges was calling, 'Yaagh, yaagh. Yaagh, yaagh,' just behind him.
'Sahib, I have it. Misfile file.'
'No. I am not at all believing. Where it is? Where it is?'
'Sahib, not far. But when it is matter of very good price is best not to keep in open.'
He felt a little affronted. Didn't this fellow know he was a senior Bombay policeman? He wouldn't. . . Well, perhaps there were officers of his rank who might. And there could even be some in the Calcutta force.
'All right,' he said. 'But you may give now. I will find you some chai-pani.'
'Chai-pani. Tea water only. By Kali, I will eat file first,' Shibu's indignation rose up over the noise of the grating traffic, the shouting vendors, the jabbering Bengalis.
'No,' Ghote answered. 'You were mislaying my wife's file. You have found same now. It is your bounden duty to hand over. But I will show I am grateful to some extent.' *
'Shibu not mislay. Dutt-Dastar Babu giving order. You want? Five hundred rupee.'
Shibu's answer, brief and plain.
'No. Do you think I offer bribes? Not everyone who is coming into Dutt-Dastar Babu's chamber is a giver of bribes. Learn that.'
‘Five hundred rupee.'
Shibu simply stood in front of him. Leaning towards his bad leg. But not moving in any way.
And at once he realized why. The fellow had believed refusing to meet the sum demanded was simply the classic opening move in bargaining over a bribe.
And here he was himself, not moving any more than the bribe-taker.
So am I going to pay him? Will I sink each and every one of my principles? Oh, to shell out a few rupees to someone like the clerk Haripada, as I was trying to do, for speed money. No harm in that. A few rupees oil the wheels. But this? Five hundred rupees is not such a small sum.
But. ..
But that fi
le contains perhaps full details of a major corruption scandal. It may even name the man who is behind that former permit-broker A. K. Dutt-Dastar. Getting hold of it may break a huge criminal conspiracy. And secure Protima her house.
So what to do? Stick to principles only? Tell this money-greedy fellow to take the file back and put it where A. K. Dutt-Dastar has hidden it? Or give him his five hundred rupees, small fortune for him - and I will not bargain over a bribe, no - and get evidence to take tomorrow to Assistant Commissioner Bhowmick? Evidence that he will have to act upon?
‘Do you think I am carrying rupees five hundred in my pocket itself?'
‘No, sahib. But I know gentleman like you can get same. Soon as you are giving, you will be having file Mrs Protima Ghote - Bombay!
That settles it. He is in possession of that file, definitely. No doubt he has it tucked away somewhere quite near. Where he is able to keep his eye on it. Behind some scraps of rubbish. Under a loose paving stone. Anywhere. Anywhere safe.
‘If I am going for five-ten minutes only, I will find you here itself, yes?'
‘Jee, sahib. Not move. Not ek inch.'
It took him a little more than ten minutes. He had to go back into the hotel, persuade the receptionist at the flimsy marbled counter to open the safe behind him, show his identification, get hold of the purse where they had put the money Protima had cashed from the cheque A. K. Dutt-Dastar had given her and then extract, his back turned, exactly five hundred rupees from it.
And after that there had been the business of the purse being put back into the safe and watching it being signed for. With laborious care.
He ran out, managed to slow to a walk through the courtyard - if Shibu thought he was so anxious he might put up the price - and sauntered into the noisy, bustling, dust-shrouded street again.
Shibu was there.
Exactly where he had been before. But, clutched hard in both his hands, there was now a buff file with, easily to be seen, scrawled writing in green ink on it.
He confronted him.
‘The file.'
‘Money.’
All right, let the fellow get the money first.
He watched the calloused fingers riffle through the notes and the thick lips silently counting.
'Correct.'
Shibu thrust the file towards him.
'Here, sahib.'
He could hardly believe he had it. The deliberately mislaid file. But it was in his possession. Here. One swift look inside, while keeping a no-tricks eye on Shibu, and he knew that he was looking at the very papers A. K. Dutt-Dastar had had on his desk. Yes, there was the document in heavily smudged typing that had included those words with right of passage unimpeded.
Here. Now. In his hands. The evidence.
Chapter Eleven
He hurried back in and up to their room, relieved to find when he got there that the bearer had finished his work. The flowered curtains were drawn across the window to some exactly prescribed point. The little lacy mats underneath every object were in their correct place to the nearest quarter-inch. The big bath tub on its four claw-footed legs, glimpsed through the halfopen door of the bathroom, was gleamingly clean.
If it is not for that tall thermos of boiled drinking water, he said to himself, I might be in England itself.
But no time for idle thoughts.
He went over to the dressing-table, pushed aside all the neatly re-arranged array of combs, brushes, lipsticks, tilak paints for forehead mark, pot of sindur to redden hair-parting, wooden tree for bangles, sat down on the flowery-topped stool and spread fully open the file marked Mrs Protima Ghote - Bombay.
There at the start was the first sheet he had craned forward to see in A. K. Dutt-Dastar's chamber, Mrs Protima Ghote - Last Will and Testament of Amit Nirad Chattopadhyay Babu. Then a copy of the will itself, duplicate of the one they had had in Bombay. A copy next of A. K. Dutt-Dastar's first letter to Protima. Her reply. Letter on official stamped paper certifying that Protima Ghote was Protima Ghote. And then . . .
The familiar blotchily typed document.
He read at a gallop. The heading Memorandum of Confidential Conversation Between A. K. Dutt-Dastar and Eventual Assignee. Details about the house and its previous ownership. On . . . On . . . And then his eye hit on wetlands.
The very word. The confirmation of all his guesswork, of all Mr Bhattacharya's suppositions. And, yes, here again those familiar, once glimpsed words with right of passage unimpeded followed by a lot of word-spinning legalistic mumbo-jumbo. A. K. Dutt-Dastar making sure that he was given his due, no doubt. But it all made clear, eventually, that getting hold of the squattered house in the near future was the key. The key to building a wide road to the housing colony proposed for the newly drained area.
Skim on.
Thing is who is going to be that Eventual Assignee so infuriatingly not named at the head of the document? That would be the person behind the whole corrupt transaction, the one who would benefit most from A. K. Dutt-Dastar's attempt to get Protima to sell cheaply, and above all quickly.
But why did he, this mystery figure, want the sale to be quick? No way of knowing.
Skim along, skim along. What a wordy fool Dutt-Dastar is.
But then the end. And not a single name.
No, not the least hint or indication of who it is who is organizing this piece of massive corruption.
Nevertheless, still things to be done. First of all, to take this document to Assistant Commissioner Bhowmick tomorrow afternoon at the appointed time and there to watch him do the needful. See the start of whatever in the end will bring down this whole tower of rottenness.
When at last Ghote penetrated the big red-brick mass of Calcutta Police Headquarters opposite the clutter of electrical fittings and musical instrument shops of Tiretta Bazaar, he allowed himself to stand and savour the authentic police-station smell and mix of grubbiness and rigid order, no different here than in Bombay. Then he told the desk havildar he had an appointment with Assistant Commissioner Bhowmick.
Five minutes later, ushered by a peon into the man's cabin, he saw a decidedly Bengali bhadrolok figure. Long, thoughtful oval face, clean-shaven, with deep-set eyes and a high, pale-brown forehead. Somehow he even imagined him, although he was in fact wearing uniform, as being dressed in the way Mr Bhattacharya was at home, in elaborately pleated pure white dhoti and fine white kurta. His expression, as he gestured Ghote to one of the chairs fronting his wide desk, was one of distant melancholy.
'Sir,' Ghote said, in reaction to that sadness, 'it is most good of you, with your many responsibilities, to be seeing me.'
'No, no, Inspector. My cousin, who dropped me a note about you, made it clear that it would be my duty to hear what you have got to say. Now, I won't pretend to you that Calcutta is a city of unsmirched integrity. Indeed, from the lowest rungs upwards we have our anti-socials, like any other big city in India, like any big city in the world, from the kangalis, as we call them in Bengali, the homeless urchins, on up through our chhentais, our pickpockets, to your fully-fledged goonda, often ready to kill for an altogether paltry sum. But I have always hoped, despite the many pressures there are on us - of which the city's traffic, my own particular burden, is not the worst - that we have managed to be a little more law-abiding, a little more conscious of what we owe to our fellow citizens, than in the other cities of India. All the more reason, therefore, why any sign of a major departure from those standards should be looked at with all the thoroughness one can bring to bear.'
Yes, Ghote thought to himself, a very, very Bengali fellow. I was right. Nothing able to be said except at length. And with digressions.
‘Sir, then let me at once inform you of the corruption I am thinking I have, by chance, put one finger upon.'
Then he corrected himself. Sharply.
‘No, sir, I have done more now than put just only one finger. Sir, I have some proof of what is occurring.'
He tugged from his back trouser pocket his wallet a
nd took from it the double-folded sheets of A. K. Dutt-Dastar's Memorandum of Confidential Conversation.
Briefly as he could he ran over what had first roused his suspicions and what he had been able to do to confirm them.
‘Sir,' he ended, ‘I have now acquired - I am preferring not to say altogether how - this document. Sir, kindly peruse same.'
He spread out the two sheets of blotchy typing in front of the grave-faced Assistant Commissioner.
ACP Bhowmick leant forward, took out a pair of dark-framed spectacles, put them on and read.
Ghote, sitting opposite, tried to see if the serious face showed any signs of, hopefully, anger. Or of disturbance at least. Of amazement. Of disgust.
But there was not a flicker.
At last he realized that the steady progress of the Assistant Commissioner's eyes down the second blurred sheet had ceased. But he neither looked up nor spoke.
What it is he is thinking? Must be some deep Bengali intellectual ideas. Is it mulling and mulling like Mr Bhattacharya after he was hearing all the views and news at that adda he was mentioning?
Or will this Bengali, too, need even to discuss the case at another adda, carefully putting before what he is saying an if for instance one happened to . . . ?
But, no. At last the spectacles were removed and the deep-set eyes focused on him.
‘Yes, Inspector, I see that here is something that needs looking into. To be frank, I do not think at the present stage it is a matter for Delhi and the Central Vigilance Commission. It may come to that, though we in Bengal prefer to tidy up our own messes. I can see, however, that it could well be something that may reach up to the highest levels in the West Bengal Government. So, as you will understand, it will be necessary to move with extreme care.'
He sighed. A burden settling.
‘However, Inspector, all that will hardly concern you. Your task is done. You have seen what was wrong. You have found someone of standing to tell what you know. You may safely set it all aside now. You are here in Calcutta - my cousin's letter said - with a view to retiring from the police and living in our city with your Bengali wife.'
Bribery, Corruption Also Page 10