Yet go and see the girl he must.
But first he permitted himself to do every other thing that might possibly be necessary to the case. He visited Mrs D’Mello and, by dint of patient wheedling and a little forced toughness, confirmed from her the names of the only two men that Head Constable Mudholkar – who certainly proved to know inside out the particular chawl where the D’Mellos lived – had suggested as possible fathers. They were both young men; a Goan, Charlie Lobo, and a Sikh, Kuldip Singh.
The Lobo family lived one floor below the D’Mellos. But that one flight of dirt-spattered stairs, bringing them just that much nearer the courtyard tap which served the whole crazily leaning chawl, represented a whole layer higher in social status. And Mrs Lobo, a huge, tightly fat woman in a brightly flowered Western-style dress, had decided views about the unexpected fame that had come to the people upstairs.
‘Has my Charlie been going with that girl?’ she repeated after Ghote had managed to put the question, suitably wrapped up, to the boy. ‘No, he has not. Charlie, tell the man you hate and despise trash like that.’
‘Oh, Mum,’ said Charlie, a downtrodden teenage wisp of a figure suffocating in a necktie beside his balloon-hard mother.
‘Tell the man, Charlie.’
And obediently Charlie muttered something that satisfied his passion-filled parent. Ghote put a few more questions for form’s sake, but he realised that only by getting hold of the boy on his own was he going to get any worthwhile answers. Yet it turned out that he did not have to employ any cunning. Charlie proved to have a strain of sharp slyness of his own, and hardly had Ghote started climbing the stairs to the floor above the D’Mellos where Kuldip Singh lived when he heard a whispered call from the shadow-filled darkness below.
‘Mum’s got her head over the stove,’ Charlie said. ‘She don’t know I slipped out.’
‘There is something you have to tell me?’ Ghote asked, acting the indulgent uncle, turning back to the boy. ‘You are in trouble. That’s it, isn’t it?’
‘My only trouble is Mum,’ the boy replied. ‘Listen, mister, I had to tell you. I love Miss D’Mello. Yes, I love her. She’s the most wonderful girl ever was.’
‘And you want to marry her, and because you went too far before –’
‘No, no, no. She’s far and away too good for me, mister. I’ve never even said “Good Morning” to her in the two years we’ve lived here. But I love her, mister, and I’m not going to have Mum make me say different.’
Watching him slip cleverly through his door, Ghote made his mental notes and then continued up the stairs to tackle Kuldip Singh, his last comparatively easy task before the looming interview at the nun-ridden hospital.
Kuldip Singh, as Ghote had heard from Head Constable Mudholkar, was different from his neighbours. He lived in this teeming area from choice, not necessity. Officially a student, he spent all his time in a series of anti-social activities – protesting, writing manifestoes, drinking. He seemed an ideal candidate for the unknown and elusive father.
Ghote’s suspicions were at once heightened when the young Sikh opened his door. The boy, though old enough to have a beard, lacked this symbol of his faith. Equally he had discarded the obligatory turban. But all the Sikh bounce was there, as Ghote discovered when he identified himself.
‘Policewallah, is it? Then I want nothing at all to do with you. Me and the police are enemies, bhai. Natural enemies.’
‘Irrespective of such considerations,’ Ghote said, ‘it is my duty to put to you certain questions concerning one Miss D’Mello.’
The young Sikh burst into a roar of laughter.
‘The miracle girl, is it?’ he said. ‘Plenty of trouble for policemen there, I promise you. Top-level rioting coming from that business. The fellow who fathered that baby did us a lot of good.’
Ghote plugged away a good while longer – the hospital nuns awaited – but for all his efforts he learned no more than he had done in that first brief exchange. And in the end he still had to go and meet his doom.
Just what he had expected at the hospital he never quite formulated to himself. What he did find was certainly almost the exact opposite of his fears. A calm reigned. White-habited nuns, mostly Indian but a few Europeans, flitted silently to and fro or talked quietly to the patients whom Ghote glimpsed lying on beds in long wards. Above them swung frail but bright paper-chains in honour of the feast day. These were the only excitement.
The small separate ward in which Miss D’Mello lay all alone in a broad bed was no different. Except that the girl was isolated, she seemed to be treated in just the same way as the other new mothers in the maternity ward which Ghote had been led through on his way. In the face of such matter-of-factness, he felt hollowly cheated.
Suddenly, too, to his own utter surprise he found – looking down at the big, calm-after-storm eyes of the Goan girl – that he wanted the story she was about to tell him to be true. Part of him knew that, if it were so, or if it was widely believed to be so, appalling disorders could result from the feverish religious excitement that was bound to mount day by day. But another part of him now simply wanted a miracle to have happened.
He began, quietly and almost diffidently, to put his questions. Miss D’Mello would hardly answer at all, but such syllables as she did whisper were of blank inability to name anyone as the father of her child. After a while, with a distinct effort of will, Ghote brought himself to change his tactics. He banged out the hard line. Miss D’Mello went quietly and totally mute.
Then Ghote slipped in, with adroit suddenness, the name of Charlie Lobo. He got only a small puzzled frown.
Then, in an effort to make sure that her silence was not one of fear, he presented with equal suddenness the name of Kuldip Singh. If the care-for-nothing young Sikh had forced this timid creature, this might be the way to get an admission. But instead there came something approaching a laugh.
‘That Kuldip is a funny fellow,’ the girl said, with an out-of-place and unexpected offhandedness.
Ghote almost gave up. But at that moment a nun nurse appeared carrying in her arms a small, long, white-wrapped minutely crying bundle. The baby.
While she handed the hungry scrap to his mother Ghote stood and watched. Perhaps, holding the child, she would …
He looked down at the scene, awaiting his moment again. The girl fiercely held the tiny agitated thing to her breast and in a moment or two quiet came, the tiny hand applied to the life-giving source. How human the child looked already, Ghote thought. How much a man at two days old. The round skull almost bald, as it might become again towards the end of its span. The frown on the forehead that would last a lifetime. The tiny, perfectly formed plainly asymmetrical ears …
And then he knew that there had not been any miracle. It was as he had surmised, but with different circumstances. Miss D’Mello was indeed too frightened to talk. No wonder when the local bully, Head Constable Mudholkar, with his slewed head and his one ear so characteristically longer than the other, was the man who had forced himself on her, not the anti-social Kuldip Singh, not the timid worshipper Charlie Lobo.
A deep smothering of disappointment floated down on Ghote. So it had been nothing miraculous after all. Just a sad case, to be cleared up painfully. He stared down at the bed.
The tiny boy suckled energetically. And with a topsy-turvy welling up of rose-pink pleasure, Ghote saw that after all there had been a miracle. The daily, hourly, every-minute miracle of a new life, of a new flicker of hope in the tired world.
1971
THREE
The Not So Fly Fisherman
The