More, the barber of his youth had had a wife who performed similar offices for the better-off womenfolk, paring nails, rubbing away hair on legs with pumice-stone, cutting out corns, decorating the soles of brides’ feet, and gossiping and matchmaking. Between the pair of them, man and wife had known almost everything that went on in the four or five villages they used to visit, everything openly spoken of, very nearly everything kept secret.
So, surely, the barber here, whisking his open razor now on the stone slab at his side as he squatted next to his client, testing the sharpness on the inside of his arm, rapidly applying lather from his little brass basin and wiping the excess off on the ball of his thumb, surely he would know all about Ganpatrao Pendke. Surely he would be able to produce, if handled right, something more solid than the breath of a rumor from an ancient soldier.
He sat waiting on the shrine’s low wall till the barber, chattering hard all the time, had finished his task. At last the fellow—he seemed to be in his active early fifties, short, rather monkey-faced, bow-legged, wearing only a green and red headcloth and the invariable dhoti draped round his waist—went striding off along the lane, walking rather faster than anybody he had yet seen in the unhurried village. He contrived in a few moments to catch up with him. He fell into step and risked at once opening a conversation.
“Namaste, Barberji,” he greeted him. “I used, you know, to love watching the barber at work in my own village as a boy. If it had not been for caste, I would have liked nothing better than to have been a barber myself. Going here and there, seeing life, hearing of people’s troubles and their good fortunes.”
There was a moment when he thought the fellow, talkative though he had seemed at his work, was not going to respond. But it was a moment only.
“And I myself, I have never wished to be anything but a barber. I was born to be a barber. My father before me was born to be a barber. His father before him was born so, and his before him again as long as the world has been.”
He could not have sounded more friendly, and Ghote realized that, if he himself wanted to learn something from the barber, the barber was more than ready to learn all he could about this stranger in the village to have some good fresh gossip to pass on. So he gave him as many details as he could about his family and early life, his wife’s name, his son’s age, how long he had been married, his father’s name and profession of schoolmaster, his sisters’ names, their husbands’ occupations. And if he carefully avoided saying he himself was a police officer, what did it matter?
It mattered, he soon found out, quite a lot. Because the moment he had finished his somewhat embroidered account, the barber asked him directly the one question he had foolishly not prepared himself for.
“So what is bringing you to Dharbani?”
He swallowed.
And inspiration came. He grabbed it with both hands.
“I had learned that Dharbani is a prosperous place,” he said, recalling the electric lamp rising up through the banyan in the square and the row of well-stocked shops behind it and coupling that with a quick memory of Mr. Saxena of the watches-covered forearm in Bombay and the reason he had given for coming to look at Rustom Fardoomji’s shop. “And I am by trade a watchmaker. So I am thinking this would be a good place to set up a shop.”
The barber burst into laughter.
“Oh, my friend,” he said, “you have come to as unlucky a place for you as you could. You are not going to find any timepieces to mend in Dharbani. Never. The Patil has a clock in his house, yes. But it stopped, to my knowledge, four seasons past. And he has never thought of winding it since. No one else round about has anything of the sort. Why should we? We can see when the sun comes up, and when it is dark we can see that we can no longer see. We do not need any clock watches to tell us such things as that.”
Ghote felt totally deflated. He ought, he realized, to have foreseen everything the barber had said. Had not his own boyhood days been just as the fellow had described? He had made the comparison more than once since he had been in Dharbani. In spite of the place’s touches of the modern, it was really almost unaffected by the counting of minutes and hours.
But evidently his mistake had put the barber into an even better frame of mind. He went chattering cheerfully on.
“Yes, yes. No clocks and watches here. True, times have changed a little. There is the bus now. It can take you into Ramkhed whenever you are wishing. There is even a girl from the outcaste quarter here who goes on it every day to work as a steno for a lawyer. She went to school, you know. We are that much of forward-looking here. But you will not find any watch on Sitabai’s little wrist. Bangles only, my friend. Bangles such as they have always been, if nowadays they are coming from Bombay or somewhere instead of being made here itself.”
“A forward-looking place?” Ghote asked, recovering enough to try to steer the talk again in the direction he wanted it to go. “Tell me, is the Patil, despite that clock he has forgotten to start up, is he then a forward-looking man?”
“No, no,” the barber answered, plainly delighted to have the chance of laying out a character study he must have worked on over the years. “No, Bhagwantrao Pendke, Patil of Dharbani, believes that things were well long ago when he was a boy, and as much as is in his power, he means them to stay that way here forever.”
“And a great deal is in his power?” Ghote asked, glimpsing his way ahead.
“Oh, yes, yes. Government in Delhi may rule India. But, as they say, Delhi is far away. The ruler in all District Ramkhed is the Patil here. He is the one who says what is the law. Not any chief minister in Bombay, not the collector in Ramkhed, not those swines of police there.”
Ghote swallowed the “swines of police” without a catch. He was getting nearer, surely.
“So if I myself lived in Dharbani,” he said cautiously, “and was a good friend of the Patil, I could commit as many crimes as I was liking? Is that the way of it?”
“No, no. Once more wrong.”
They had come out of the village now and were walking through the fields. Evidently the barber was on his way to some neighboring smaller place.
“No,” he went on, “you could do what is against government law only if Patilji thought it was not wrong. He is a just man. But it is his own justice.”
So would the Patil, Ghote thought, protect his grandson Ganpatrao if he was convinced he had committed murder? He had, according to S.P. Verma, committed a good many lesser offenses, things that at least ought to have got his name on to the police Bad Character Roll, and the Patil had arranged to have them all ignored. But murder? Would the Patil consider murder as something against government law but not against his own? Perhaps it would depend on what his feelings were for each of his grandsons. If, for some reason, he had nothing good to say of the sickly Ramrao and delighted in the nefarious exploits of Ganpatrao …
He decided to explore the barber’s opinions of the Patil a little further, a little nearer dangerous ground.
“I was saying, if I was just only a good friend of the Patil,” he ventured. “But if it was a matter, for example, of a relative? Does the Patil have sons who might commit serious crimes?”
“Ah, no. Patilji has lost his sons. Lord Yama has taken each and every one. But grandsons he—but one grandson he has remaining. His first grandson, Ramrao, was murdered, you know. Yes, just two days ago. In Bombay. Where such things happen.”
“Murdered? Does anybody know why? Do they know who did it?”
“Yes,