‘Yes, sir.'
But am I? In Protima's view, yes, I am. But in my view? Each time ACP Sahib was calling me Inspector just now I was feeling one small jump of pride. I am here, I was feeling, where I ought to be. In a police headquarters.
But now. . . Now he is saying to me, Your task is done. I am to go back to being Ghote Babu, plastic Bengali.
Suddenly he saw that ACP Bhowmick had unlocked a drawer in his desk and was folding up the Memorandum of a Confidential Conversation with the evident intention of putting it away there.
‘Sir, no,' he blurted out.
‘No? What- '
‘Sir, I would wish to retain that document.'
The Assistant Commissioner looked at him. The faint air of surprise on his long, grave face plain to see.
‘But surely you realize that this is evidence?'
‘Yes, sir. Yes, I do. What else was I— Why else was I obtaining? But, sir, I do not think it is evidence for court of law. It is evidence only that some corruption matter is happening.'
'Well, yes, I suppose you're correct. Strictly speaking. But all the same I think I ought to keep it.'
He pulled the drawer further open.
‘Sir, you do not need. Sir, you have seen what is written there. You must be able to remember same. You can tell whomsoever you need what it is. But, sir . . . Sir, I must confess I was obtaining that document through some bribery, and I would not wish that to be more known. So, sir, I am thinking it is best if I retain same.'
The ACP looked at him, long and steadily.
‘Mr Ghote, you are sure of this?'
So, no more Inspector. For this man of principle the offerer of bribes is just only Mr Ghote.
‘Yes, sir,' he said, despite that judgement. ‘I am one hundred per cent sure.'
The ACP gave a long, long sigh.
‘Very well, Mr Ghote. Keep the paper. But keep it safe. On your head be it.'
‘Yes, sir.'
‘Well, thank you again for coming to me. Not every Ram or Shyam, as we say, would do as much.'
Ghote felt a little less unhappy. But not much. It seemed a far step down from Inspector to being just the common man dressed in the common man's simple shirt and trousers. Not that he was not a little glad that the shirt happened to be, if not his best, at least a decent one, in a green-and-yellow check that toned in with his green trousers.
He took up the smudgily typed document, gave it one more fold, stuffed it into his wallet and buttoned that safely into his back pocket.
‘So, off you go now and enjoy yourself, enjoy our splendid city,' the ACP said. ‘Have you seen much of it as yet?'
'No, sir. My wife was showing me the St John's Church and also the Hastings House. Most historical.'
'Hastings, yes. A great man, a great man. Imagine. Coming all the way from the small island of Britain, on the edge of Europe, and ending by establishing British India, its first Governor-General ruling many millions of people from here in Calcutta, a remarkable achievement.'
And this Hastings also a bribe taker, Ghote thought to himself, the sourness of his verbal demotion from Inspector still rankling.
'And where else in the city have you been?'
No doubt this Assistant Commissioner is stepping down to be talking man-to-man with a mere Inspector, soon to be ex-inspector. But it is stepping down, and he is knowing he is doing it.
'I have not had time for elsewhere,' he answered dourly.
'Ah, but you should make time. Calcutta has so much to offer. It is not for nothing, you know, that we were once called the City of Palaces. You should see the Marble Palace. Subject to some decay, of course. But in many ways all the more interesting for that. You should wander the streets round here, in Lalbag, in Bow Bazaar, and look at the variety of our old buildings, the true Bengali, the Palladian, the neo-Gothic, the Art Nouveau and Art Deco, all painted and painted over and over again and then washed and washed by our tumultuous monsoon rains until they show to the full the beauty of decay. And, yes, visit the Park Street Cemetery, all those graves of Englishmen who laid their bones here, the father of William Makepeace Thackeray, a son of Charles Dickens, Rose Aylmer to whom the poem was written. Ah what avails the sceptred race, Ah what the form divine! What every virtue, every grace! Rose Aylmer, all were thine!
Ghote, inwardly groaning at yet another outburst of Bengali self-love, thought he could see, just, a tear at the comer of one of ACP Bhowmick's eyes.
'Yes. And then there are our painters. You must see what you can of their art. Our musicians. You enjoy music?'
'No, sir. Not very very much.'
'Pity. Well, what are your interests then?'
He thought.
What to say? Something must be said.
'Sir, I have always very much wanted to see the banyan in the Botanical Gardens. Oldest in the world, biggest also, isn't it?'
'Yes. Yes, you should certainly see that.' The ACP pursed his lips in thought for a moment. 'I tell you what. Go now. Go this very afternoon. The Gardens are wonderful, hard to find better anywhere in the world. Been there since seventeen-eighty something. Beautiful, tranquil, interesting. You've done a good job, Mr Ghote. You should have some reward at least. I'll get a jeep to take you to Chandpal Ghat. From there you can go by the ferry along the Hooghly to the Gardens. Another of Calcutta's pleasures.'
'Thank you, sir.'
It was all he could say.
But, as he went out, he saw ACP Bhowmick reaching for one of the telephones on his wide desk. The look on his face was even more gravely thoughtful than it had been. Was he making the call that would be the first step towards bringing down the tower of corruption that A. K. Dutt-Dastar's one small lie about Amit Chattopadhyay's intentions had given the first glimpse of?
Slowly moving southwards as the crowded ferry pushed its way along the swift-flowing, khaki-coloured Hooghly, Ghote found he could not throw off his feelings of disappointment. He had been once again, if only unofficially and intermittently, an investigating officer. He had had a case. That was what his work in the world was, for better or worse. His dharma. To be a police officer. A detective. But then it had all been snatched away from him.
He had been sent off to go and moon about in the Botanical Gardens. As if he had had some breakdown. As if, at best, he was on sick leave. What did it matter now that he had been whisked in a police jeep, swerving through the traffic, furiously hooting, to the Chandpal Ghat? All right, then for a. few minutes, a very few minutes, he had felt a last touch of respect. But, once at the Ghat, what had happened? Nothing. A long wait to get on board the ferry, pushed and tugged at like any other no-account passenger. One of Calcutta's faceless millions. Not by any manner of means an Inspector of Police.
Arid never more to be one.
He stared at the rippling, sun-struck sparkling surface of the river as the ferry made its laborious way along against the current. And all he saw were the dead dogs floating alongside. And even these made him think, with a dagger pang, of his case. No doubt their rotting flesh was soon to contribute to the rich silt that was somewhere being pumped out of the river and off to the eutrophic lakes, there to feed the fish that existed to feed the Bengali fish-lovers. The Sikh taxiwalla's U-traffic lakes, which someone was planning to fill with truckloads of earth, taken on a wide new road that would begin its route through the ruin of Protima's house. And on the solid land created there someone intended houses, shops, apartment blocks to rise and would line his pockets deep and deep. Unless ACP Bhowmick was able to put some spoke in the wheels.
ACP Bhowmick. Not Inspector Ghote.
Slowly the ferry made its way onwards. Along the bank nearest to him Ghote saw the remains of the fine buildings that had once made Calcutta the second city of the British Empire. And, despite his gloom, found he was admiring them.
Could I get to like this place after all? Even if it is what is expected of me? Will old Calcutta at last work her charms upon myself? And if she does, will I really be happy to
be her kept man?
Then ahead there loomed the new high and elegant Vivekananda Setu Bridge. 'It was twenty years to be made,' he heard a voice from the packed deck beside him say. He turned and saw behind, still just in sight as the river bent, the high, criss-cross steel girders of the old Howrah Bridge, reaching up into the hazed-over sky, glinting like silver in the sun, dominating the whole river behind him, symbol of Calcutta in a thousand photographs.
And he wished and wished then that the sight in his eyes was the symbol of Bombay, the arch of the Gateway of India, even if nowadays it lead to nowhere in particular.
A barge loaded with straw till it looked like a floating stack went past, swept onwards by the current twice as fast, it seemed, as his chugging ferry. An inlet on the left with, behind it, a diverging waterway. And that same high-pitched informative voice from somewhere inside the knot of pleasure-goers nearby saying, ‘Tolly's Nullah. Same was dredged in year 1775 by one Major Tolly, first-class chap, so that pilgrims at Kalighat Temple may immerse in pure Ganga water, since Hooghly River itself is branch only of Mother Ganga.'
Someone else getting a history lecture, he thought maliciously. And then with a quick flowering of guilt he regretted that he had not told ACP Bhowmick he would wait to visit the Botanical Gardens until Protima could accompany him.
The river broadened and he saw the masts and moored ships of Kidderpore Docks. Little white birds were diving into the thickly turbid water.
Oh why am I going to see this banyan? Do I really want? I did once, yes, when I was here before and could not get to see it. And I thought I did again when I was at last getting on to this ferry. But now, do I want? Tbday, when some hopes have been trodden down into mud?
Well, I am not able to step off this ferry. So I will at least get to the Gardens, and when I am landing at the ghat there I can decide not to go in or to go in. Whichever I am wanting.
At last the ferry docked, with Ghote still feeling uneasily that he did not really want to have arrived, that ACP Bhowmick had somehow, with Bengali enthusiasm, rushed him into making the trip. Why had he ever told him that he wanted to see the Great Banyan? All he needed to have said when he was asked what his interests were was something like Oh, sir, there are so many things to see in your wonderful city of Calcutta. Something just only to satisfy an avid Bengali.
So, as he followed the eager crowd, freed from their cripplingly slow passage, tumbling down the ferry's gangplank, it was only because he could not prevent himself being swept along.
A good many of the freed passengers at once surrounded the refreshment stall near the gate. But one group moved on. Idly he followed them, followed in turn, equally idly, by a few others, either from the ferry or from coaches that had crossed the Vivekananda Setu Bridge. And the Gardens, he grudgingly conceded before long, were as beautiful as ACP Bhowmick had claimed. Tall palms against the blue sky, a true blue here, this far removed from the city's dust and petrol-fume haze. Lakes, glinting in the sun and promising coolness. Long shaded paths. Glasshouses with glimpses of vivid orchids inside, of monstrously shaped cactus plants.
And then there in front of him suddenly was the Great Banyan.
It was, yes, immense. A whole forest in itself. A huge umbrella of dangling roots, some still only ropethick and pale, others over the tree's two hundred and fifty years of life grown into sturdy twisted trunks. And high. The dome at its peak, he calculated, a good thirty metres above the level ground. Altogether more gripping to the imagination than old Mr Bhattacharya's mildly boastful talk about its huge circumference, its missing central mother-trunk. The missing centre. Perhaps, he thought, that is like Calcutta itself now, all busyness and no core.
But, in a sudden shift of sentiment, he ceased abruptly to feel he did not want to let the huge old tree become an abiding memory. No, suddenly now he wanted to step underneath its generous shade. To savour it all. To fulfil completely the ambition he had once had. To taste to the full the pleasure he saw the great overhanging umbrella as offering.
So he did it. He walked into gloom. And found it delightfully cool, wonderfully restful, twinklingly alive with the whistlings of the dozens, the hundreds, of mynah birds hopping here and there among the interlaced tangle of the branches. He breathed a deep sigh of contentment.
Here, if I can, he thought, I will finally accept staying all my life in Calcutta, to being not-Inspector Ghote, to being a somehow Bengali. To being just only a person. A person living in this city, this city with, yes, its pleasures. To not being a police officer.
And then, instant as a thunderbolt, from somewhere above in the darkness of the close interwoven branches something, someone, dropped down on to him with crushing force. He was flattened into the soft leaf-mould of the ground at his feet. Breath squirted out of his lungs. Pain shot up and down inside him.
He was aware after a moment that there were two men, not one, on top of him. One had a sharp knee in the small of his back and clawing hands holding down his shoulders. And the other - were there even only two? - seemed to be tugging and tearing at the back of his trousers.
Then, as suddenly as the attack had come, the pressure was lifted. A moment later he was just aware of the two attackers running off in the under-tree gloom.
He lay where he was. Shocked. Hurting. Dazed. Puzzled.
Cautiously he began at last to feel at his body where he could, not daring to roll over. And then he made his discovery.
His wallet was missing. Gone.
Chapter Twelve
Lying there, face-down, in the Great Banyan's shade, the uninterrupted whistlings and chatter of the mynahs in his ears, the sharp smell of the soft earth in his nostrils, Ghote slowly began to piece things together.
Of course, it may have been just only a chance attack. ACP Bhowmick was talking about Calcutta's anti-socials. But it was hardly a pair of child kingalis who dropped down on to me from some hiding-place in those criss-crossed dark branches up there. And if I was no more than the victim of pickpockets, chhentais, their work would have been cleverer. In the crowd hurrying off the ferry easy to cut off the button of my trouser pocket with a razor blade, slide out my wallet. No, this was goonda work. A pair of Calcutta's goondas, the goondas ACP Bhowmick almost boasted were not afraid to kill just to get hold of any tiny sum.
To kill. But I was not killed. Not even much hurt.
He rolled over now and, with care, sat up.
And, something more, that attack ended altogether suddenly. As if, task completed, the goondas at once hurried off.
So surely their aim was not just only to take what rupee notes I had. Dressed as I am in my common-man's cotton shirt and green cotton trousers, I do not at all have the look of someone who would be carrying one fatly stuffed wallet. And, in fact, despite those folded and re-folded sheets of A. K. Dutt-Dastar's document, my wallet did not make a heavy bulge on my hip.
So, what is the conclusion?
That I was marked out as those fellows' victim? That it was not any passing stranger who was ambushed in that way? That it was just only a man definitely dressed in a green-and-yellow check shirt and matching green trousers. A man not difficult to spot coming off the ferry after that long, long, slow journey from the Chandpal Ghat. A typical Maharashtrian it would not be too difficult to describe over the telephone to someone who had a pair of useful Bengali goondas at his disposal.
The man only one person knew would be at the Botanical Gardens and wanting to visit the Great Banyan at just the time I was there.
ACP Bhowmick. He alone knew that.
Is it possible? ACP Bhowmick? But, yes, even as I was leaving his cabin he had been reaching for his telephone. Was it not just only to order up a police vehicle for myself? Was it not even to start the machinery that would bring about the end of this road-building scam I had put my finger on?
And, yes, he had seemed for a long moment lost in thought when in answer to his pressing question I was saying I wanted to see this tree. Had he been saying to himself Ah. My
chance. Get this nose-poking fellow pickpocketed out there. Get back that document leading to the person whose good friend I am?
And old Mr Bhattacharya, he had said it would be necessary to go carefully in trying to push this matter higher up, yes? That you could never be sure every senior officer in the police was free from taint of corruption? Could be bribed with rapid promotions or a good posting or with large sums of money brought to them in crammed briefcases?
Yes. Question asking finished. Facts no longer to be doubted. Assistant Commissioner Bhowmick must be some friend of the hidden figure behind the wetlands scam. And now . . . Now the only real hard evidence that the scam is there, one document headed Memorandum of Confidential Conversation Between A. K. Dutt-Dastar and the Eventual Assignee is once again out of reach, not any more hidden in A. K. Dutt-Dastar's old filing cabinets. But hidden as effectively somewhere else. If not totally destroyed.
The gate of the Fairlawn was closed, shutting out the bustle of still lively Sudder Street, the backpack young tourists, the brown-sugar sellers, the shouting taxi-wallas, the beggars and the vendors. It was early evening, not long dark. Only later would the cycle rick-shawallas who spend the night on the pavement just outside the locked gate arrive. Inside, in the courtyard it was cool and pleasant. Ghote and Protima, her forehead once again heavily smudged with a tikka from the Kalighat Tfemple brahmins, had secured a table and were sitting with cold drinks.
A calm and peaceful scene.
'This afternoon, after I was talking with ACP Bhowmick; Ghote said slowly and carefully, easing his bruised back against the hard plastic chair, 'I was visiting the Botanical Gardens.'
'I remember afternoons there with my mother. It is a wonderful place. Only in Calcutta can you— '
'Not one hundred per cent wonderful.'
'Oh, you are always and always trying to make out Calcutta is not as good as it is. You cannot compare Calcutta with Bombay. Never.'
'No. I was not saying Calcutta is not wonderful. I was saying just only that the Botanical Gardens were not as wonderful for me as they were for yourself as a child.'
Bribery, Corruption Also Page 11