Or.
Despite the stifling blanket of the afternoon heat Ghote’s mind began to work a little.
Or where perhaps Begum Roshan herself had deliberately placed a note so that she could pretend to find it and thus by bringing in some official police pressure persuade her father to do something – but what? what? – that earlier completely anonymous threats had failed to induce him to do.
But no – the heat must be making him stupid – Begum Roshan could not possibly have any connection with the men her father had sentenced to death in the famous Madurai Conspiracy Case, and it was clear from the wording of the note that they had been told about – why had Begum Roshan not thought to mention that it had been typed? – that the Madurai case was at the heart of the affair.
17 days only remaining. Sentence of death will be carried out in accordance with the law by means of an explosive detonation. Justice must be seen to be done.
That, so far as Begum Roshan had been able to remember and her influential cousin to repeat, had been the precise wording of the one note that anyone other than Sir Asif had seen, though he had admitted to his daughter that he had received others. And its message had seemed clear enough. Seventeen days from when the note had been found came exactly to the thirtieth anniversary of the day on which Justice Sir Asif Ibrahim had pronounced sentence of death on the group of patriots who had become known far and wide as the Madurai Conspirators. It had been a sentence imposed in accordance with the strictest legality. But, with the end of the British Raj then clearly in sight, it had been a piece of judicial intransigence that had brought a tempest of abuse on to Sir Asif’s head, still remembered by people such as the Deputy Commissioner, and had led as soon as Independence had been achieved to his rapid retirement.
What had made it clear beyond doubt that the note Begum Roshan had seen referred to the Madurai Conspirators was the expression ‘by means of an explosive detonation’. Ghote in his hurried reading back in Bombay of the yellow-dried reports of the ancient case had found that exact phrase running through them from start to finish. It had been ‘by means of an explosive detonation’ that the conspirators had intended to assassinate the Governor of Madras, and it had been because of that intention that Justice Sir Asif Ibrahim had sentenced the prisoners to death. For all that they had been arrested before they could carry out their plan.
But of those ‘17 days remaining’ now only twelve were left.
By the time Begum Roshan had made up her mind that with her father blankly refusing to have the local police informed, though they had since at a request from Bombay discreetly checked any strangers in the locality, she must seek the help of her influential cousin, the MLA, and by the time the latter had contacted the Deputy Commissioner a good many precious hours had been lost.
Not that, once his own long journey culminating in the slow progress through the baking heat of the lumbering bullock cart had been completed, he had been able to make anything approaching rapid progress.
He stirred angrily on the hard surface of the sheet-covered mattress. He must do something more. He must take more decisive steps than conduct almost furtive conversations with the other inhabitants of the old slowly decaying house, trying all the time to avoid the Judge’s coldly caustic eye.
And trying equally to keep up the ridiculous pretence of being ‘Doctor Ghote’. Doctor Ghote helping old Sir Asif with his suddenly appearing from nowhere Memoirs. As if anyone anywhere in India would dare, surely even now, to publish the autobiography of the man who had sentenced the Madurai Conspirators.
At least the people he had to investigate in this doubly clumsy manner were few in number. The fact that the threatening notes had been written in English, and good English too, and had been typed had put out of reckoning at one stroke all the servants. Not that there were so many of them now. And he had as well been able to discount such villagers who had occasion to come up to the house, individuals like the milkman appearing just after dawn with his heavy-uddered cow, a bleating calf at her side, its head half-covered in a muslin muzzle to prevent it getting at the milk its noise was helping to make flow, or, from further away, the postman on his bicycle, white Gandhi cap hardly fending off the oppressive sun, making his rare calls.
So there had remained really only three possibilities. A curious collection, and each in a different way unlikely.
First, and unlikeliest of all, though not, he felt, totally to be dismissed, was Begum Roshan herself. Clearly she had no connection with the Madurai Conspirators. But, from what he had been able to gather, in those distant days, when she would have been in her early twenties at most, she had not been cooped up in a house in the mofussil as housekeeper to her father but had been out in the world, aware of events around her.
Next, there was the Saint. And how could you really suspect such a figure, a man devoted to walking the length and breadth of India, with the mission of making all men brothers? But it was true nevertheless, a well-known fact, that in those distant days of the freedom struggle he had been one of the foremost in the fight. Yet that was long ago. And he had since beyond doubt ‘changed his garb’, as they said, put on the saffron garments of the holy man and adopted the name of Anand Baba, father of bliss. He might be an unapproachable figure – as yet there had been no opportunity of speaking to him – but he was not a figure to suspect. Never.
Yet what was he doing here, in the house of a well-known Muslim landlord family? It seemed that he stayed here whenever his wanderings brought him anywhere near the district. Yet he and the Judge appeared to have nothing in common. Certainly they were less fiercely opposed than when one had been a leader in the Quit India movement and the other an inflexible upholder of the law of the British Raj. But they were still poles apart. The Hindu ascetic and the Muslim lover of fine things; the preacher of an all-embracing love and the fierce believer in a limiting and restrictive legal code.
It was a puzzle.
But hardly more of a puzzle than the third English-speaker, possible typewriter-user, in the house. The American. The priest, if he was a priest, Father Adam.
When he had first met him, on the evening of his own arrival, he thought he had misheard the Judge’s introduction. As if, with that precise Englishman’s English, that was possible. But ‘Father Adam’? And the lean, pale, young American with his tangle of dark eyebrows meeting above intense hollow eyes, wearing, not one of the billowing white robes tied at the waist with white rope that a Christian priest ought to wear, but a check shirt in bold red and blue and informal khaki pants with only a plain black necktie loosely tied as an evident concession to the Judge’s views on the dress appropriate for dinner.
Nor when he had addressed him, cautiously, as ‘Father’ had his quick ‘Mort, call me Mort’ been in any way reassuring. And as for his conversation during the rest of the evening, it had been more suitable for some Communist journalist rehearsing scathing editorials for Bombay’s extremist, muck-raking Blitz than for any man of religion.
So, although the fellow was plainly much too young to remember anything at all of the Madurai Conspiracy Case, it was certainly possible that he felt himself to be somehow a representative of a once-oppressed people. But why was such a firebrand a guest in this house?
His one attempt so far, in a wary conversation, to get out of him at least an answer to that had been swept away, when he had learnt that ‘Doctor Ghote’ was from Bombay, in a wild flood of talk about the iniquity of the conditions endured by the city’s jhopadpatty dwellers in their huddles of makeshift huts in the shadows of ever-rising tall new office blocks and apartment towers.
Perhaps some time this evening another try at the fellow might meet with more success. A cunningly framed, casual question about using a typewriter. That might hit a tender spot.
And the time for that, surely, would not be long now. He must have been lying stewing under his absurdly useless fan for nearly three hours. Before too long it would be possible to get up and move about with the promise of the relative coolness of evening