This capacity for objective judgement he retains, if sensibly inside his head, when in Dead on Time he dares to assess as mighty a figure as the Director General of Police for the State of Maharashtra. There he comes to terms, too, with his own attitude to the ever-pressing minute in time-ruled (though often time-flouting) Bombay, seeing that pressure in contrast to the almost timeless life of India’s villages. And it is in one of those, I discovered as I planned the book (or Ghote brought reminiscently to mind as he lived its events, as he does again in my final little tale ‘Light Coming’, where he is something of an authority figure himself), that Ghote had experienced various formative happenings. His life began there. Or did it begin one day as I was sitting in that red armchair in my study?
H.R.F Keating
1989
ONE
The Test
From the very beginning Inspector Ghote had doubts about Anil Divekar and the Test Match. Cricket and Divekar did not really mix. Divekar’s sport was something quite different: he was a daylight entry ace. Excitement for him lay not in perfectly timing a stroke with the bat that would send the ball skimming along the grass to the boundary, but in the patient sizing up of a big Bombay house, the layout of its rooms, the routine of its servants, and then choosing the right moment to slip in and out carrying away the best of the portable loot.
But here Divekar was, as Ghote on a free day stood with his little son Ved outside the high walls of Brabourne Stadium, ticketless and enviously watching the crowds pouring in for the start of the day’s play. He even came up to them, smiling broadly.
‘Inspector, you would like seats?’
At Ghote’s side, clutching his hand, little Ved’s face lit up as from a sudden inward glow. And Ghote nearly accepted the offer. Ved deserved the treat. He was well-behaved and already working hard at school – and it was only a question of a pair of tickets. Some of his own colleagues would have taken them as a right.
But Ghote knew all along that he could not do it. Whatever the others did, he had always kept his integrity. No criminal could ever reproach him with past favours.
Angrily he tugged Ved off. But, marching away from the stadium, he could not help speculating as to why Divekar should have been there at all. Of course, when every two years or so a team from England or Australia or the West Indies came to Bombay, Test Match fever suddenly gripped the most unexpected people. But all the same …
The crowd outside the stadium had not been all college students and the excited schoolboys you might expect. Smart business executives had jostled with simple shopkeepers and grain merchants. The film stars’ huge cars had nosed their way past anxious, basket-clutching housewives, their best saris already looking crumpled and dusty.
Fifty thousand people, ready to roast all day in the sun to watch a sedate game that most of them hardly understood. Waiting for someone to ‘hit a sixer’ so that they could launch into frenzied clapping, or for someone to drop a catch and give them a chance to indulge in some vigorous booing, or – the height of heights – for a home player to get a century and permit them to invade the pitch with garlands held high to drape their hero.
Where did they all get the entrance money, Ghote wondered. With even eighteen-rupee seats selling for a hundred, getting in was way beyond his own means. Little Ved’s treat would have to be, once more, a visit to the Hanging Gardens.
But when they reached this mildly pleasurable – and free – spot, everywhere they went transistor radios were tuned teasingly to the Test Match commentary. Nothing Ghote offered his son was in the least successful.
He bought coconuts, but Ved would not even watch the squatting naralwallah dexterously chop off the tops of the dark fruit. He held out the gruesome spectacle of the vultures that hovered over the Towers of Silence where the Parsis laid out their dead, but Ved just shrugged. He purchased various bottled drinks, each more hectically coloured and more expensive than the previous one, but Ved drank them with increasing apathy.
He even attempted to enliven things by starting a game of hide-and-seek. Disastrously. After he had twice prolonged finding Ved – whose idea of hiding did not seem to stretch beyond standing sideways behind rather too narrow trees – as long as he possibly could, he decided that the game might go better if he himself were to be the one to go into hiding. So while Ved was temporarily absorbed in examining a cicada which, in a moment of aberration, had mistaken day for night and emitted its shrill squeak, he dropped to the ground behind a nicely sturdy bush and crouched there keeping a paternal eye on his small son through the leaves.
For some time Ved stayed deeply engaged with the cicada, squatting beside it and turning it over with one delicate finger in an effort to see how such a small stick of a creature could produce that single extraordinarily loud squeak. But then he looked up, as if he were going to consult the parental oracle. For an instant he looked round merely puzzled. But then …
Then it was plain that the end of the world had come, the end of his small safe world. He lifted up his head and gave vent to a howl of pure, desolate anguish.
In a flash Ghote was beside him, hugging, patting, reassuring. But nothing seemed to restore that confidence there had been before. Not another offer of a cold drink. Not pointing out half a dozen ‘funny men’, though none of them was in fact particularly odd. Not promises of future treats, not stern injunctions to ‘be a little man’. Ved’s face remained tear-stained and immovable.
At last Ghote gave up in a spasm of irritation.
‘If that is all you care, we will go home.’
Ved made no reply.
They set off, Ghote walking fast and getting unnecessarily hot. And still, going down Malabar Hill with its huge garden-surrounded mansions and great shady trees, there were passers-by with transistors and the unwearying commentator’s voice.
‘What a pity for India. A glorious captain’s knock by the Rajah of Bolkpur ends in a doubtful decision by Umpire Khan.’
Ved swung round on him with an outraged glare. Whether this was because of the umpire’s perfidy or because of simply not being there it was hard to tell.
And at that moment Ghote saw him. Anil Divekar. At least the figure that he half glimpsed ahead, sneaking out of a narrow gate and cradling in his arms a heavy-looking sack looked remarkably like Divekar. Ghote launched himself into the chase.
But the sound of running steps alerted the distant figure and in moments the fellow had disappeared altogether.
Ghote went quickly back to the house from whose side entrance he had seen the suspicious figure emerge. And there things began to add up. The big house had been rented temporarily to none other than the Rajah of Bolkpur himself, and a few minutes’ search revealed that all the Rajah’s silver trophies and personal jewellery had just been neatly spirited away.
Ghote got through to CID Headquarters on the telephone and reported. Then he and Ved endured a long wait till a squad arrived to take over. But they did get away in time to go down to the stadium again to see if Ved could catch a glimpse of the departing players.
And no sooner had they arrived at the stadium, just as the crowds were beginning to stream out, when there was Anil Divekar right in front of them. He made no attempt to run. On the contrary he came pushing his way through the throng, smiling broadly.
No doubt he thought he had fixed himself a neat alibi. But Ghote saw in an instant how he could trap Divekar if he had