‘A bad day’s play, I hear,’ he said to Divekar. ‘What did you think about Bolkpur?’
Divekar shook his head sadly.
‘A damn wrong decision, Inspectorji,’ he said. ‘I was sitting right behind the bat, and I could see. Damn wrong.’
He looked at them both with an expression of radiant guiltlessness. ‘That was where you also would have been sitting,’ he added.
You win, Ghote thought and turned grimly away. But on his way home he stopped for a moment at Headquarters to see if anything had turned up. His Deputy Superintendent was there.
‘Well, Inspector, they tell me you spotted Anil Divekar leaving the house.’
‘I am sorry, sir, but I do not think it was him now.’
He recounted his meeting with the man at the stadium a few minutes earlier; but the Deputy Superintendent was unimpressed.
‘Nonsense, man, whatever the fellow says, this is Divekar’s type of crime, one hundred per cent. You just identify him as running off from the scene and we’ve got him.’
For a moment Ghote was tempted. After all, Divekar was an inveterate thief: it would be justice of a sort. But then he knew that he had not really been sure who the running man had been.
‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘I am sorry, but no.’
The Deputy Superintendent’s eyes blazed, and it was only the insistent ringing of the telephone by his side that postponed his moment of wrath.
‘Yes? Yes? What is it? Oh, you, Inspector. Well? What? The gardener? But … Oh, on him? Every missing item? Very good then, charge him at once.’
He replaced the receiver and looked at Ghote.
‘Yes, Inspector,’ he said blandly, ‘that chap Divekar. As I was saying, he wants watching, you know. Close watching. I’ll swear he is up to something. Now, he’s bound to be at the Test Match tomorrow, so you had better be there too.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Ghote said.
A notion darted into his head.
‘And, sir, for cover for the operation should I take this boy of mine also?’
‘First-rate idea. Carry on, Inspector Ghote.’
1969
TWO
The Miracle Baby
What has Santa Claus got in store for me, Inspector Ghote said to himself, bleakly echoing the current cheerful Bombay newspaper advertisements as he waited to enter the office of Deputy Superintendent Naik that morning of December 25th.
Whatever the DSP had lined up for him, Ghote knew it was going to be nasty. Ever since he had recently declined to turn up for ‘voluntary’ hockey, DSP Naik had viewed him with sad-eyed disapproval. But what exact form would his displeasure take?
Almost certainly it would have something to do with the big Navy Week parade that afternoon, at the moment the chief preoccupation of most of the ever-excitable and drama-loving Bombayites. Probably he would be sent out into the crowds watching the Fire Power demonstration in the bay, ordered to come back with a beltful of pickpocketing arrests.
‘Come,’ the DSP’s voice barked out, in response to Ghote’s knock.
He went in and stood squaring his bony shoulders in front of the papers-strewn desk.
‘Ah, Ghote, yes. Tulsi Pipe Road for you. Up at the north end. Going to be big trouble there. Rioting. Intercommunity outrages even.’
Ghote’s heart sank even deeper than he had expected. Tulsi Pipe Road was a two-kilometres long thoroughfare that shot straight up from the Racecourse into the heart of a densely crowded mill district. There badly paid Hindus, Muslims by the thousand and Goans in hundreds all lived in prickling closeness, either in great areas of tumbledown hutments or in high tottering chawls, floor upon floor of massed humanity. Trouble between the religious communities there meant hell, no less.
‘Yes, DSP?’ he said, striving not to sound appalled.
‘We are having a virgin birth business, Inspector.’
‘Virgin birth, DSP sahib?’
‘Come, man, you must have come across such cases.’
‘I am sorry, DSP,’ Ghote said, feeling obliged to be true to hard-won scientific principles. ‘I am unable to believe in virgin birth.’
The DSP’s round face suffused with instant wrath.
‘I am not asking you to believe in virgin birth, man. It is not you who are to believe: it is all those Christians in the Goan community who are believing it about a baby born two days ago. It is the time of year, of course. These affairs are always coming at Christmas. I have dealt with half a dozen in my day.’
‘Yes, DSP,’ Ghote said, contriving to hit on the right note of awe.
‘Yes. And there is only one way to deal with it: get hold of the girl and find out the name of the man. Do that pretty damn quick and the whole affair drops away to nothing, like monsoon water down a drain.’
‘Yes, DSP.’
‘Well, what are you waiting for, man? Jump to it.’
‘Name and address of the girl in question, DSP sahib.’
The DSP’s face darkened once more. He paddled furiously over the jumble of papers on his desk. And at last he found the chit he wanted.
‘There you are, man. And you will find here the name of the Head Constable who first reported the matter. See him straight away. You have got a good man there, active, quick on his feet, sharp. If he could not make that girl talk, you will be having a first-class damn job, Inspector.’
Ghote located Head Constable Mudholkar one hour later at the local chowkey where he was stationed. Mudholkar at once confirmed the blossoming dislike for a sharp bully that Ghote had been harbouring ever since DSP Naik had praised the fellow. And, what was worse, the chap turned out to be very like the DSP in looks as well. He had the same round type of face, the same puffy-looking lips, even a similar soft blur of moustache. But the Head Constable’s appearance was nevertheless a travesty of the DSP’s. His face was, simply, slewed.
To Ghote’s prejudiced eyes at the first moment of their encounter, the man’s features seemed grotesquely distorted, as if in distant time some god had taken one of the Head Constable’s ancestors and wrenched his whole head sideways between two omnipotent god-hands.
But, as the fellow supplied the details of the affair, Ghote forced himself to regard him with an open mind, and he then had to admit that the facial twist which had seemed so pronounced was in fact no more than a drooping corner of the mouth and one ear being oddly longer than the other.
Ghote had to admit, too, that the chap was efficient. He had all the circumstances of the affair at his fingertips. The girl, named D’Mello – now in a hospital for her own safety – had been rigorously questioned both before and after the birth, but she had steadfastly denied that she had ever been with any man. She was indeed not the sort – the sole daughter of a Goan railway waiter on the Madras Express, a quiet girl, well brought-up though her parents were poor enough. She attended Mass regularly with her mother, and the whole family kept themselves to themselves.
‘But with those Christians you can never tell,’ Head Constable Mudholkar concluded.
Ghote felt inwardly inclined to agree. Fervid religion had always made him shrink inwardly, whether it was a Hindu holy man spending twenty years silent and standing upright or whether it was the Catholics, always caressing lifeless statues in their churches till glass protection had to be installed, and even then they still stroked the thick panes. Either manifestation rendered him uneasy.