'Sir- '
'No, let me finish. Goddess Kali is, as you know, our tutelary goddess. And she is a goddess of destruction. The ten blood-dripping heads she holds in her hand are not there without a purpose. Oh yes, people will tell you that Kali is the goddess of destruction of the wrongdoers, and so she is. But she is also the goddess of the destruction of the city she presides over. A destruction she lets us bring down upon our own heads.'
Chapter Fourteen
There was no story in The Sentinel. They had had to wait almost the full length of the long taxi ride back -Mr Bhattacharya's sombre words echoing and reechoing in Ghote's head - before they saw any street trader with newspapers. As soon as they found one Ghote stopped the taxi, darted out and bought The Sentinel. Nothing on the front page. Nothing, search as they both might, each disbelieving the other, on any of the sheet's scanty inside pages. They sat there in the stationary taxi in bewildered despondency.
There had been nothing more to say at Bhattacharya Babu's. The old man had stayed where he was on his broad bench, drooped in silence, until recollecting his bhadrolok obligations, he had rung a little bell for a servant and, with profuse apologies, offered tea. They could not, of course, do other than accept it. And so they sat, all three, in exhausted silence relieved just occasionally by some comment on the weather or the excellence of the sandesh the servant had also brought up. ‘We in Calcutta have the sweetest tooth in all. . .' Mr Bhattacharya had begun but, catching himself once more praising his native city, he abandoned the thought with a gesture of complex ambiguity.
Soon afterwards they had left. And now, arriving at the Fairlawn with the prospect, after a wait of precisely thirty-five minutes until the gong would boom, of another large pallid curry lunch, they retreated to their room like a pair of vanquished mud-covered wrestlers from the shore of the Hooghly underneath the Howrah Bridge.
Once more they searched the few pages of their now tattered Sentinel.
‘Nothing,' Protima admitted at last. ‘What devils some people are. Promising and promising. Or did you misunderstand what you were told?'
‘No. I am not making such mistakes.'
‘You are sure? Was that Mr Roy speaking Bengali? You do so little to master it.'
‘He was not speaking Bengali. He was speaking good English. He promised that in the paper today there would be a story naming this Mr Gopal Deb, mentioning also the wetlands.'
‘Then it is where?'
He felt a spurt of anger.
‘I am going now to telephone and ask.' He checked himself. ‘No. No, I will go round there itself. At once.'
‘Are you now saying Calcutta phones are no good? Yes, I was telling you about our famous memorial to the Dead Telephone. But, you duffer, that was from long ago.’
‘No, I am saying nothing about Calcutta telephones. I am just only wanting to see Mr Khokon Roy face to face.'
'But lunch. We have paid for all meals.'
"To hell with lunching and munching. I am going now, this instant.'
Twenty minutes later - for speed's sake he had let himself be carried through the jammed traffic by a running, dodging barefoot rickshawalla - he was facing the young journalist across his ancient table with its two VDUs and its three coloured telephones.
'Mr Roy, you were promising something to me yesterday.'
'My dear chap, I know I was. I told you in good faith that we would run a story about Gopal Deb, ICS retired, as forced purchaser of a house, plus a paragraph mentioning a proposed new colony in the wetlands.'
'And . . .?'
'And, after I had made all necessary inquiries with my editor's full backing, this telephone rang' - he gave his green one a sharply infuriated tap - 'and he told me to spike the whole damn thing.'
'But why? And what is spike? It is cancel?'
'Yes. Cancel. I've been ordered to cancel the whole operation.'
'Once more I am asking why?'
Khokon Roy bit his underlip.
'I'm afraid I can't tell you. Officially, in fact, I don't even know myself. I can only guess. And I may have guessed wrong. All I know is that when my editor gives me instructions in a certain way there is no point in questioning and arguing. There it is.'
For two seconds Ghote sat, taut with baulked fury.
‘Very well,' he exploded at last. ‘I am going to see your editor. Now.'
'Old man, best of luck. But I doubt if you'll get to learn from Soumitra Mukerjee, good man that he is -and he is that, believe me - one bit more than I have.'
The editor of The Sentinel sat in a room higher up in the narrow old building and rather less bare than that alloted to Khokon Roy on the ground floor. It was poky enough, however, although there were here and there touches of, not luxury, but a certain artistic display. Behind the desk there hung in an ornate frame a painting of the great Rabindranath Tagore, all flowing white hair, flowing white beard, long sombre robe. Poet, novelist, painter, sage and rebel, too. Behind, as Ghote was shown in, on the wall by the door where the man sitting at the desk could see them at every instant were four posters, curling with age at their edges, pinned at their corners to the otherwise bare dust-dimmed white wall. Ghote, glancing back, had recognized from the statue he had seen on the Maidan the topmost one as Netaji Subhas Bose, Calcutta's fighting hero, revered in the exuberant city high above peace-loving Gandhi. A round, fattish face, faintly double-chinned, with typical Bengali rounded nose and eyes fire-flashing behind ever-present spectacles.
Then, since he felt his looking at the poster was winning the approval of Soumitra Mukerjee, who in fact rather resembled Bose himself, he took a good look at the three posters below. And saw at once the names printed in the Bengali script he could just make out, Binoy - Badal - Dinesh, the three martyrs of revolution for ever commemorated in the name of BBD Bagh.
‘Yes,' came the editor's voice from behind him, ‘four heroic men who look me sternly in the face if ever I am inclined to falter in my pursuit of truth and justice. But please be seated, my dear sir. How may I help you?'
Ghote was tempted not to sit but to stand there, accusingly. Just the day before, according to Khokon Roy, Soumitra Mukeijee had faltered more than a little in his pursuit of truth. Time to tell him so, blunt Bombay fashion. But he let second thoughts prevail.
If I am to get this man to change his mind and put out a story naming Mr Gopal Deb, he thought, then I must go about it in some more cunning way.
‘Sir,' he said, introducing himself as he settled into the middle one of the three chairs lined up in front of the desk, ‘I have not been very long in Calcutta but I have heard nothing but praise itself for you and your paper.'
On the editor's distinctly double-chinned face a look of unconcealed pleasure appeared behind his round spectacles.
‘Well, Mr Ghote, young Khokon has told me about the business that has brought you to us, and let me say at once how much I sympathize with the difficulties yourself and your wife have got into. They cannot have made Calcutta seem as welcoming as she always is.'
‘No, sir, I must admit, Calcutta has not been altogether welcoming. But I had thought that was changing when Mr Khokon Roy was so helpful to me.'
Soumitra Mukeijee's face swiftly took on a look of comprehensive vagueness.
Ghote, taking this in, almost gave up there and then. Plainly the man was anxious to avoid considering the plea he guessed was coming. But he was not going to let himself be easily fobbed off.
‘Sir,' he went on, 'it was, I must confess, something of shock to me, to my wife also, when we were not reading in The Sentinel this morning a story with in it the name of a certain Mr Gopal Deb.'
‘Yes,' the editor replied with evident reluctance. ‘Yes, well, I am afraid that Khokon, who is full of true Bengali enthusiasm, does sometimes promise rather more than he can perform.'
No, again I am not going to let him off the hooks so easily.
‘But, sir, I am understanding that he was altogether ready with that story, and that he was
finding same had to be - is it? - spiked.'
‘Spiked, yes. Mr Ghote, you have picked up with admirable rapidity the jargon of our unholy trade.'
And that appeared to be all the comment the editor of The Sentinel was willing to make. But, again, Ghote pursued him.
‘Sir, I must be blunt. Kindly put it down to Bombay directness. But it was you yourself, yes, who was spiking?'
For a long moment Soumitra Mukerjee sat in silence. Ghote noticed that he was looking, not at the array of heroic figures on the wall opposite him, but down at whatever papers he had on his desk.
But at last he spoke.
‘Mr Ghote, I do not know whether you will understand. But let me tell you something of the situation this paper finds itself in. You see, we have no financial backing. We are not a paper like The Statesman, in existence for many, many years, read and bought by thousands in Calcutta and sought out in consequence by advertisers by the score. No, The Sentinel lives almost hand-to-mouth. But nevertheless we do not hesitate -no, no, I must correct myself - The Sentinel does not often hesitate to expose the evils in our midst. And sometimes, I flatter myself, we are successful. An evil is wiped out.'
Now he did look up, for just a moment, to Binoy, Badal and Dinesh.
‘But, Mr Ghote, there are areas when, if it gets known that we are on the verge - how shall I put it? - of putting our finger on too tender a place, well, then we get to learn that there are limits we must not cross. Limits which we must respect, or risk even extinction. Mr Ghote, let me put it this way: is it better to have in Calcutta a crusading paper which sometimes does not crusade, or not to have any such journal at all?'
It was plain that he did not really expect an answer to the question, and Ghote did not give him one directly. Instead he got up from his chair.
'So The Sentinel will not be using any story with in it the name of Mr Gopal Deb,' he said.
'Mr Ghote, I am sorry that I have not been able to be more helpful.'
On his way out Ghote looked in on Khokon Roy, who grinned at him, if wryly.
'Well, I see by your face that I was right. You got nowhere.'
'True. So there is one thing I am asking.'
'Yes? My dear chap. ask. Ask, ask. ask. And. I trust, receive, receive, receive.'
The address of one Mr Gopal Deb. ICS retired.’
'Oh my dear fellow, no. No, no, no. You cannot have any idea what going further wth this business may bring down on you. I say no more. But I do say Don’t, Be sensible, don't go one step further.'
Ghote heard him without interrupting. Then he spoke up.
'Mr Roy, kindly give me that address. I am not your editor, even if I may perhaps somewhere in me like to be such a man as I have found him to be.'
Khokon Roy shook his head.
'My dear chap, you may at this moment have a somewhat low opinion of the courage and resolution of my esteemed editor But let me tell you: a pretty grave threat has to be made before he at last gives in. A very grave threat.'
‘And you are thinking that one grave threat has been made to him just now?’
‘I know no details. But I can deduce. And that is what I believe has happened.'
'But that threat was just only to the future of your paper; yes? Not the kind of threat you are hinting would be made to mvself?’
‘Listen to me, I beg of you. There are people who are ready to threaten the existence of The Sentinel. And those same people are very likely to threaten the existence of an individual, of any individual who offers to trouble them as much as you seem minded to do.’
He looked up at Ghote, his hitherto smiling face abruptly grim.
'Listen,' he said, 'Mr Gopal Deb may be no more than a nominee there to conceal the identity of whoever so desperately wants to get hold of your wife's house. But he will be some sort of associate of Dutt-Dastar's, if not of the person behind him. Let him so much as guess you are poking and prying into this affair, even though The Sentinel has been silenced, and he will let those whose cat's-paw he is know. And then you will be in the gravest danger, my good chap. So think, I beg you. Think.'
'Mr Roy, thank you for saying that. Not every person would venture so much for a stranger. But nevertheless I am asking once more. What is the address you have found for Mr Gopal Deb?'
Khokon Roy, unsmiling, sighed.
'Try Apartment 93, Blue Haven, Lord Sinha Road.'
He looked as if he wished he had not uttered the words.
Chapter Fifteen
Ghote went straight to Lord Sinha Road, which the driver of the taxi he hailed had no difficulty in locating. Briefly he wondered if every taxiwalla in Calcutta knew and loved the city so well that its every street was familiar to them, as was certainly not the case in Bombay where sometimes it seemed every ride ended with directions being asked for, in loud shouts, from every passer-by. Lord Sinha Road was not far off Chowringhee at the southern end of the Maidan, a short street looming with tall buildings, mostly dating, he guessed, from the 1960s.
In no time at all, swept up in the lift - handsome fountain in the front courtyard, but dry - he was ringing at the bell of Apartment 93 and hearing from inside a melodious chime. He looked at the solid dark-wood door in front of him, stainless steel letters on its plaque spelling out GOPAL DEB. What would this man be like? The nominee ready to buy Protima's house so as to pass it to the person, whoever he was, who intended to build a road over it to the wetlands site for a new colony productive eventually of vast wealth? More, this Gopal Deb must be a man who would not hesitate to pass a warning to his mysterious backer, the person who had given instructions after hearing from ACP Bhowmick, to have me attacked there in the Botanical Gardens? lb spare me my life then. But is it to be spared now?
Or was stainless-steel Gopal Deb not just the nominee but the Eventual Assignee himself? It might be. It might be.
He felt in the pit of his stomach a hollow ball of apprehension.
A servant swept open the door in front of him.
He straightened his shoulders.
'I am wishing to see Mr Gopal Deb.'
Would the fellow answer Sahib, not at home? He half-wished he would.
'Your good name please? I will ask Deb Babu.'
And then there was the man himself. He was standing against a big window leading on to a balcony with, behind, a widespread panorama of Calcutta, distant and magical in its shroud of dust. Dressed in tweed jacket, white shirt, quietly striped tie and grey trousers, just wearable at the onset of winter, stern pipe in mouth, heavy spectacles on nose, he was the very picture of an almost British respectability. A man of sombre, settled look. A deceptive look?
'Mr Ghote, did my servant say? I don't believe we have met.'
His English was clipped, almost as if he was in fact someone from the distant days of the British Raj.
'No, sir,' Ghote replied, conscious that his very next words would be the first signs to this man that he was being probed about the house, the wetlands, the new colony. 'But perhaps you are knowing the matter of business that is bringing me.'
‘Business? Well, I don't have much to do with business. You aren't going to try to sell me something? A car? Life insurance?'
A sharp look.
‘No, no, sir, not at all. It is— It is this. I understand you are interested in buying a certain house.'
Sharp look for sharp look. But no apparent response.
Surely he must be alerted? If he is attempting to buy Protima's inheritance to advance that corrupt plan, then when I was mentioning a certain house he must have realized who I am. Even if at first the name Ghote did not mean anything to him.
‘Yes, it is true, Mr Ghote, I am— Ah, wait, yes. I believe Mr Dutt-Dastar told me that the name of the seller of the house he was advising me to acquire was Ghote. But didn't he say it was a Mrs Ghote?'
‘My wife.’
‘Ah, yes, I see. Of course. But what is it you want with me, sir? I expected the whole transaction to be dealt with by Dutt-Dastar.'
/> Either he is being one hundred per cent cunning, or there is some mistake. Certainly he is not at all sounding like the Eventual Assignee I had hoped to reach.
‘Yes, sir,' he answered with care, measuring out each word. ‘Mr Dutt-Dastar is the person who was approaching my wife hoping to induce her to sell. But, sir, kindly understand. She has no desire to sell. She wishes to have the house put in order, to have some squatters that are there sent away. And then she is wishing for us to live there for the whole remainder of our days.'
Well, that is what she is wishing, and no point to say my wishes maybe different.
But Gopal Deb was frowning in what seemed to be a wholly puzzled way.
'You say your wife does not wish to sell? You are sure? It was certainly my impression that she was eager to disembarrass herself of a place presenting nothing but problems for her.'
'Sir, no. She is very much keen to stay.'
Another puzzled frown.
'Sit down, Mr Ghote. Sit down. I see we shall have to go into this at some length. There seems to have been a considerable misunderstanding.'
Ghote sat down on, almost collapsed on to, the soft armchair behind him. Gopal Deb, face pursed in a look of dawning worry, took a chair opposite.
Can it possibly still be the Eventual Assignee I am sitting with, Ghote asked himself? If he is, this sitting together and considerable misunderstanding talk is playing one very deep game. And I am not at all seeing why. Look at it. He is intending to buy Protima's house to use it for that road to the wetlands. He has gone to some lengths to make sure he is getting, and keeping his secret also, even to the extent of having me robbed of that document. Then I myself am coming here and beginning to question. Surely he must then deny everything, turn myself out of his apartment and then call in some goondas to me? He would have to deny everything also even if he is just a man put there by the Eventual Assignee, and pass on the warning that will see myself dealt with. But he is showing no signs of doing any of those things. Why?
Bribery, Corruption Also Page 14