Читать книгу Dead on Time - H. R. F Keating - Страница 8

So Inspector Ghote traveled “WT” to Nagpur, without a ticket for the first time in his law-abiding life. And at the end of his long journey he contrived to stroll out of the night-quiet station unchallenged. He booked himself in at the Skylark Hotel, the first he came to in the dimly lit city. Resting in bed, he read for a few minutes the guidebook someone had left behind. He decided to buy, if he could, at the Bharat Stores, whose advertisement in the guide’s pages promised “Airplane Quality at Submarine Prices,” a genuine Nagpuri sari for his wife to make up for this sudden call away. He considered briefly the book’s assurance that he was here “far away from the clog clog of machines, the whizzing trains, the blaring horns and sirens” and that the people in this unhurried part of India were “very urbane and hospitable. Yet at times as nasty as anybody.” And with that tiny warning jab in his ears he fell asleep.

First thing in the morning he set out to discover the times for the long-distance bus that would take him to the nearest point on the highway to Village Dharbani. To his dismay he found it almost ready to depart. No submarine-priced sari for Protima just yet.

For three hours or more the chugging vehicle took him through the sun-scorched countryside. Past the orange orchards around Nagpur itself they went, into the cotton-growing area, through the little town of Ramkhed, where in the police station S.P. Verma would be at his desk safe from any possibility of upsetting the powerful Patil of Dharbani. Finally they came to the setting-down place for the village.

As the bus pulled away in a cloud of puffing dust, Ghote looked about him, senses alert.

He was, he realized abruptly, back home in a way. Home, not in familiar Bombay, but in the countryside in which he had spent his boyhood. A mile or so in the distance, down a meandering earth track, he could make out Dharbani itself, huddled in the shadow of a low hill. It was evidently a village a good deal larger than his own native place. But it was bound to be still, he thought, of much the same sort. And different from Bombay as milk from water, not just in that Nagpur guidebook’s freedom from the clog clog of machines and whizzing of trains, but in the very time that it moved by.

Here hours would no longer be ticked out in Sahar Airport’s digital seconds. Time would not be measured even in days and weeks, but in the slow round of the six seasons, spring into the hot weather, hot weather into the rains, rains into autumn, autumn into winter, winter into the cold weather, cold weather into spring once more.

And, he thought, coming back to the present with a swallow of apprehension, in the village ahead, where everybody had all the time in the world to stop, to stare, to wonder, it would not be at all as easy to make inquiries as in Bombay. There the police were an everyday sight. An officer was answered if he questioned. There people understood they were in danger, if they kept silent, of a swift slapping or being hustled into the lock-up. But here there would be, if he remembered village ways rightly, only sullen unwillingness. Yet before the day was over he had to find out for certain, without any official powers, whether or not Ganpatrao Pendke, grandson of the village’s powerful patil, had been away from home at the time his cousin-brother had been beaten to death in Bombay. If he were to fail it was more than likely A.I. Lobo would march his man in front of a magistrate and get that possibly dubious confession formally recorded.

He cleared his mouth of the dust from the departing bus, straightened his shoulders, and set off along the track to Dharbani and its secrets.

The path by no means led straight to its objective, though it could have nowhere but the village to go to. It jigged and jogged this way and that, as if no one walking its length could ever be in any sort of hurry. Here it skirted a miserable tree. There it slanted off toward a rock, time-sunk deep in the dusty earth, its side marked by a smear of bright red paste that showed it was an object of worship. But, Ghote observed, the path, for all its aimlessness, was not unused. Besides buffalo hoofmarks and the ruts of the lumbering carts they pulled, bicycle tracks crisscrossed each other plentifully.

So the inhabitants ahead are accustomed to go some way out into the wider world, he thought. Dharbani, unlike his own native village in his boyhood, had been touched by the hurrying world, if only lightly. Once or twice, indeed, he even made out the tracks of a motorcycle, and a powerful one, too, to judge by the long scatters of earth it had sent spurting away at the path’s twists and bends.

So, he thought, I will not be able to count all the time on my memories of village life. A mistake I must not make.

He marched steadily on.

At what he judged must be some two-thirds of the way to the village he saw the path seeming to lead to a field where a dozen or so women were at work, backs bent in the glare of the sun, harsh-colored saris tucked between their legs. Would they, if he stopped to talk, give him an idea of how things stood in the village ahead?

But, well before he reached the field, the meandering path took a turn away. He abandoned the idea of approaching the women in favor of later finding someone likely to be more awake to the village’s secret, inner life.

He came to the outskirts soon enough, a string of untidy mud huts with roofs of curling palm leaves. The quarter, he decided, where such necessary people as tanners, workers in leather, washermen, and the barber would be segregated from the higher castes. So Dharbani had not altogether joined the modern, bustling world too busy for ancient distinctions.

Outside the last of these separate huts, a shoemaker was at work, squatting bare-chested on the dusty earth. Ghote crossed over to him, realizing well that his approach had been long noticed, for all that the fellow was pretending to be wholly absorbed in the stout thread running from his needle, round the big toe of his outstretched foot, and back to the thick-soled chappal he was slowly stitching together.

“Ram, Ram, mochiji,” Ghote said loudly, causing the cobbler at once to look up with a tremendously badly acted show of surprise.

“Is this Village Dharbani?”

The man gave him a glance full of malign suspicion.

“Since you have come, you must know that.”

Ghote sighed inwardly. No use with these slow-witted villagers opening a conversation with any sort of courtesy question …

Direct attack, then.

“Ganpatrao Pendke, has he returned home yet?”

But direct attack was not the way either. At the fired-out question the shoemaker simply lowered his head and put another coarse stitch into the thick sole of the chappal.

Ghote waited to see whether he was, in the timeless way of the countryside, merely making up his mind about how to answer. But the fellow’s silence persisted. Another stitch went into the chappal.

Ghote turned away.

Well, he thought, one thing at least is clear: Ganpatrao Pendke is not a man whose business it is wise to talk about.

He would have to go cunningly if he was to learn, without news of his approaches getting to the ears of the Patil, anything at all about the fellow. Let alone where he had been forty-eight hours before—if the people he contrived to question had any clear notion of what was meant by forty-eight hours …

He walked more slowly onward.

The huts on either side of the dusty road became, after a gap of a hundred yards or so, better built. Roofs here were of corrugated iron held down by heavy stones. Holy tulsi plants grew in tubs or hanging pots outside each one. Through open doorways he glimpsed women blowing cooking fires into life or poking sticks under them. Outside, men sat idly and children played or sprawled on the ground. Dogs prowled and sniffed. Chickens scratched for sustenance. A donkey, tethered to a stump of tree, shook its long ears at him as he went by.

But he made no new attempt to learn anything more. He was going to need time in plenty to extract information. Of that he was now certain. However short time might be.

Soon he came to the vague square that marked the village’s center. Would the Patil’s house be somewhere near? Did his grandson, Ganpatrao, still live there in the joint family?

He saw no building that seemed large enough for the home of a man with ten thousand votes in his pocket. There was only the village temple, old and crumbling, its forecourt dominated by a single squat stone pillar with projecting from it half a dozen little stone shelves or brackets. With a jolt, he recognized the object as precisely similar to the pillar that had stood outside the temple in his own, long-ago village. That, too, had had those little shelves. And he had once in a fit of youthful curiosity, or even antireligious rebellion, asked the temple’s pujari what the projections were for. Only to be told sharply that they had always been there, and that was all anybody needed to know.

A row of prosperous-looking shops stood to one side of the square, half hidden behind an ancient banyan tree, its ropelike roots dangling to the ground to provide a pleasant shade for a surrounding stone bench, now unoccupied. Through the tree’s knotty tumbling branches, incongruously a tall metal pole holding an electric lamp thrust itself upward, rust-patched. One more sign of the progress that had edged in.

Then, as he advanced farther into the rubbish-strewn, tracks-marked square, he caught sight, just into one of the lanes leading away from it, of a chaikhana. A cup of tea there would provide him with a fine excuse to sit opposite the half-dozen villagers on its benches. If he waited long enough, surely out of suppressed curiosity someone would eventually open a conversation. Then it might take little more than half an hour—he glanced at his unreliable watch, but at once realized that whatever it said, right or wrong, had no significance here—before he could lead the talk around to the Patil and then on to his grandson.

He made his way across, circling a black goat tied to a heavy stone, stepping boldly over the open drain on the far side and wrinkling his nose a little at its blatant odor, past a group of chattering women with big brass pots drippingly tucked on hips or balanced on heads, evidently returning from the well. As their laughter and gossip suddenly ceased at the sight of a stranger he did his best to seem to take no notice.

The chaikhana, small and tin-roofed, was presided over by a grossly fat individual wearing only a splash-stained dhoti tucked into one of the folds of his wobbling belly. On the clay stove at the back of his open-sided establishment, a large black kettle sullenly puffed. Above it there hung from a plastic strap a transistor radio feebly wailing filmi music from distant Bombay.

Ghote ordered tea and watched the proprietor as he poured it milkily from the kettle into a steel tumbler and from that at maximum height so as to cool it into a large white chipped cup. This, when he judged the right moment had come, he set on a saucer with a pattern of blue flowers, much too small for the cup. Ghote took it and made his way over to one of the two benches placed opposite each other outside.

Somewhat to his dismay the two young men who had been sitting on the bench sharing a cigarette promptly got up and moved away, nudging each other and whispering. However, the row of three elderly villagers on the other bench, each slurping tea from a saucer carefully held in front of him, their cups on the ground at their feet, stayed where they were, staring into nothing between sips, letting time flow past.

How long would it be before one of them broke into speech?

Ghote slowly drank his cooling tea and waited. It was plain to see that the men opposite, for all their solemn staring, were gradually becoming consumed with curiosity about this stranger who had descended on the village like an avatar of a god coming down to earth. But none of them ventured a word or even a sign of acknowledging his presence.

Why should they? he thought. They had all day. They were in no hurry. Perhaps they had never been in a hurry all their lives long.

By contrast, the thought of A.I. Lobo, the expeditious, came into his head. How different someone like that was from these old men. Yet was Lobo’s way of going about things perhaps after all the right one? And, worse, had he by his expeditiousness arrived at the right culprit in the Tick Tock Watchworks case? Was he in truth improving an already shining image in the eyes of the D.G.P. behind his big desk back in Bombay?

Should he himself, then, try to speed things up here? Lean forward and open a conversation? The thought of his rebuff on the outskirts of the village at the hands of the shoemaker deterred him. No, here there was no room for anything expeditious.

He saw he had emptied his cup, got up, and asked for another—the milk in it had tasted like buffalo’s—and tried to drink even more slowly. But all too soon the level of the pale brown liquid got dangerously low. How many cups could he manage before the elders opposite broke down and spoke?

He got up again and asked the bulging-bellied chaikhana owner for something to eat. He was offered a couple of chapattis and some pickle, with rather suspicious haste. As soon as he took a first bite he realized why the fat fellow had been so quick to pass them across his counter. They seemed to be composed as much of grit as of flour.

He eyed the rest of them. Would he have to grind his way through every mouthful before those old men addressed a word to him?

But his breakthrough, when it came, arrived from quite another quarter. As he sat, beginning himself almost dreamily to let the minutes drift past, he felt suddenly a sharp tap on his shoulder. Starting around with sweat springing up on his forehead, he saw behind him a very old man, much more ancient than the men on the bench opposite. His stained white beard straggled to his waist. His face was lined and seamed under its dirtyish red headcloth.

And the old creature was speaking. Speaking to him. Although what he said seemed almost as incomprehensible as if it were part of the dream he had been halfway into.

“Oh, you may think I have been here all my life, but not so, no, no, no.”

“You have not been here all your life?” He hastily took up the ancient fellow, snatching at this sole strand of communication that had been granted him, wildly lacking in logicality though it had seemed. “So you are a man who has traveled? Someone who has seen the world, is it?”

“I was born in this village,” the old man answered, infuriatingly indirect.

He lowered himself onto the bench beside Ghote, and, giving his beard a thorough scratching, seemed to have lapsed already into a silence as impenetrable as that of the elders on the other bench.

Ghote licked his lips, and tried furiously to hit on a way of carrying on the conversation. But he need not have worried. The ancient fellow eventually finished his beard scratching and, in a voice as cackling and uncertain as before, spoke again.

“Things were different then. Yes, yes. Then, you know”—he laid a hand on Ghote’s arm—“then if you caught a cold they gave you honey with ginger and some tulsi leaves in it. It did not make you better, but the cold went in the end. But now … now if they have cold, people want it to go before it has properly come. They take the bus all the way to Ramkhed and buy those things like stiff pieces of worm. They pay and pay for them. And the cold goes. They want to be cured all at once of their ills. Ah, we live in the age of evil. The age of evil. The age of Kali.”

Ghote ground his teeth in frustration. When at last someone had spoken, what was he getting but a long rigmarole about the evils of modern days? And from someone so old that plainly he was half out of his wits? How would he ever discover from this creature whether or not Ganpatrao Pendke had been at home two days ago?

“So I ran away,” the straggly bearded old man said with sudden inconsequence.

Ghote pounced.

“Yes, yes. You said you have not been here all your life. You have seen the world, isn’t it? You have seen”—he thought he glimpsed a way of getting to where he wanted—“you have seen bad men and good, no? Good men and bad. Tell me—”

But his tortuously arrived at lead was abruptly snatched away.

“I went to Poona,” the ancient old fellow said, shaking his arm urgently. “You know where is Poona?”

“Yes, yes. But—”

“Many, many soldiers in Poona. And somehow I had heard they wanted more. The big, big war was happening. Many soldiers were needed. So I walked to Poona. In this village I was trapped like a frog in a well, and I was at the height of my manhood then. I was full of juice. So I, too, became a soldier.”

Would the old fool never let him get a word in?

“I was in Africa. You know where is Africa? I was there. We fought. We fought the British. We got them out. In Africa, yes. You know where is Africa?”

Oh God, the damn fellow cannot even remember which side he was on, or where he did his fighting—Africa or here in the Independence struggle. If he did any fighting at all.

He is not far from being, out of sheer age, as mad as that bus-starter who grabbed me outside the Tick Tock Watchworks. “Time kya? Time kya?” And if he is as confused in his mind as this, what good will be whatever I do manage to get out of him about Ganpatrao Pendke?

But then something the wandering old fellow had said mysteriously twanged an altogether different chord in his head. Running away. Rustom Fardoomji, too, was said to have run away. And been brought back to the scene of his crime. Almost at once. By a traffic constable, to be arrested by expeditious A.I. Lobo. But was there not something somehow wrong with that? How had the constable known Rustom Fardoomji was to be brought back as a culprit? The sequence of events was back to front. So was Lobo definitely wrong, too? And was the solution of the watch-shop murder, after all, to be found here in Dharbani?

“But now,” the old soldier was cackling on, “we have the panchayat. In those days people used to go to the brahmin’s house, and he would say what was right or wrong. But government is saying we must be having democracy. So there is a panchayat. And at the head of those five men we must vote for is the sarpanch. Bapurao, son of our patil, is our sarpanch. Bapurao’s son is known by the name of Ganpatrao, you know.”

Home, Ghote thought in a burst of delight. Home, home, home. Ganpatrao Pendke arrived at.

Yet, surely, Ganpatrao’s father cannot be head of the village panchayat council. The D.G.P. had definitely stated that Ganpatrao was now, with the death of his cousin, heir to the Patil. So how could Ganpatrao’s father still be alive?

But never mind. Ganpatrao’s name had been spoken. How now to take advantage of that?

“Ganpatrao,” he said loudly into the old soldier’s ear. “Is he a good man? A bad man?”

“No.”

What the devil did that mean? He had been too hasty, damn it.

“No,” the ancient soldier said, clutching again at Ghote’s shirt sleeve. “No, Bapurao is dead. Sometimes I forget things. But, yes, Ganpatrao is dead. No, no, no. Bapurao is the one who is dead. Now. Last year. So Jambuvant, who is the husband of the Patil’s daughter, has been made by him sarpanch of our village. And what happens? You have a dispute with your neighbor. You take it to the panchayat for their decision. You pay the Sarpanch, as head of the panchayat, twenty-five rupees to tell the other four how to vote. And your neighbor pays him thirty. So the Sarpanch refuses any decision, and the dispute remains. Now, when I was a boy the brahmin settled everything. Oh, these are evil times, evil, evil.”

Oh God, on to evil times again. And Ganpatrao lost.

“Yes, yes. Evil times. The age of Kali. Evil. Evil. You are knowing Ganpatrao?”

And the old fellow actually stopped for Ghote’s answer. For a moment.

“Ganpatrao, the greatest murderer alive. I myself know it. I heard him say it. He killed his cousin-brother, you know. Killed him. And when the brahmin who serves the Patil’s house—he is just only a boy, but a brahmin is a brahmin—when that boy comes to the house each day, does Ganpatrao show him any respect? No, no, no. So last year—no, the year before—just after the monsoons, he killed his cousin-brother Ramrao. You are knowing Ramrao?”

Ghote sat amazed. Ramrao, Ramrao Pendke, the victim of the Tick Tock Watchworks murder back in distant Bombay. Was this old man actually a witness to Ganpatrao confessing to the killing? But—but how could the old fool have been a witness to that confession if it had been made, as he seemed to believe, two years ago? Or perhaps one year ago?

Damn it, Ramrao Pendke had been battered to death in Bombay only some forty-eight hours ago. So how could, how possibly could this wandering-witted idiot have heard Ganpatrao confessing to the murder a year ago? Or, no, two years ago even?

It made no sense. No sense at all.

Was it, though, somehow conceivable that some rumor was flitting here and there about the village? A hint that the day before yesterday Ganpatrao, Ganpatrao the nefarious, had killed his cousin-brother in Bombay?

But could the times fit for that? Surely it must take some little while for even the tiniest hints of such a secret to become a matter of common gossip for this idiot of an old soldier to pick up? But, if he had not, then how was it he was saying this about Ganpatrao? Was it no more than a recollection of something the old fool had heard long ago coming to the surface now? Some talk of a quarrel between the cousins and somebody saying what they imagined Ganpatrao might have liked to have done?

And, damn it, the answer lay there in the old man’s head somewhere. In its inevitable place in the layers and layers of time laid down there.

Ghote was swept by a consuming spasm of rage. He would have liked to jump up, seize the old man by the shoulders, and shake and shake him until somehow the right one of those layers of time came to the top and he could take from it his right answer.

But there was no doing that. The years layered there inside had collapsed and subsided into one another like the floors of some rickety Bombay building succumbing at last to the toll of many, many disintegrating monsoons. If the old fellow had once seen or heard something that might even now be of use, it was lost. Lost forever.

Rage towering up to obliteration point, Ghote did now jump to his feet. Jumped to his feet and, almost snarling aloud, stamped away.