Читать книгу Bribery, Corruption Also - H. R. F Keating - Страница 7

Inspector Ghote – But for how much longer, he was thinking, will I be Inspector? – looked out at the Calcutta night from the airport bus. Calcutta, already he could feel how different it was from his familiar Bombay. Different, and better? Or different and worse?

Well, whatever is happening to me here at least I would not be facing up to criminal and anti-social elements at each and every moment. Perhaps my Protima is right and her native city is truly a better place than Bombay. A city, she was saying in the plane, where the people ‘are too intelligent not to know honesty is best policy, where we would be able to get the deeds and papers for this house I have inherited without paying any of dui-nambari money.’ So perhaps now at last I have seen the end of number-two money.

He sighed with careful pleasure.

And certainly the night outside was different from night in Bombay. The bus had suddenly become surrounded by celebrating crowds, celebrating more wildly, more frenziedly, than when Bombay had its festivals and people danced and sang and burst crackers under everybody’s feet, when idols of the gods were carried high above. But as, hooting and honking, the bus jutted and jabbed its way onwards and he peered across his wife out of the window, he was inescapably aware that celebrating Calcuttans were noisier, more exuberant, more carried away than any Bombayites.

Yes, he felt, there is something in the air here, hazy now with blueish smoke, that is somehow alien to me. Yes. Yes, it is that. Utter lack of restraint.

And am I definitely to be spending the remainder of my days in this place? And no longer Inspector. From here on just only one Mr Ghote. Ghote Babu, as they say in Bengal. Husband of the Bengali lady I was marrying those many years ago, who has now, so unexpectedly, inherited from her distant, distant cousin-uncle this big, big house she is hardly able even to remember from her childhood.

In Calcutta. In distant, different Bengal. All right, I am in fact still officer of Crime Branch, Bombay Police Headquarters. On Casual Leave only. But, if we come to live in this house that Protima is so much wishing not to be selling but to be staying in, with the tall rooms she is remembering, the sweeping staircase, the courtyards with fountains playing – and not much more than one week ago she was not even knowing it would come to her – then I must send in my resignation and begin a new life as a Calcuttawalla. Not Inspector Ghote, but just only Ghote Babu.

And one well-off man. Or, tell the whole truth, husband of one well-off woman, Bengali by birth. This wife of mine who, suddenly, is thinking nothing at all of spending out and spending out. Look at the way she was obtaining air tickets to come here. All flights full-house, and at once she was whispering to me that I must, against my each and every liking, offer a bribe, that I must say to the tickets walla I am betting you two hundred rupees that two seats together are not available. And, yes, at once it was tap-tap-tap on computer keys and Sorry, sir, you have lost the bet. But how did Protima know this was the way to do it? Truth is, she is not the woman I have all along believed.

Still, after all it was not a very big bribe. And it was oiling the wheels, as they are saying. So in a way good.

But, no, it would really be better if this wife of mine was agreeing to sell the house. We could go back to Bombay and end up there having a fine life in retirement with the money we are getting. I could finish my service in a decent way, doing what I am knowing I am able to do. Then afterwards we could have some fine rest and relief in a nice little house somewhere in the hills outside of the city. Outside of Bombay, where we have lived happily for all the years of our marriage.

But, no. No, she is wanting to stay here. In Calcutta. In her big house. Living a fine Bengali life. A life, she is telling, that is the only civilized one in entire India. In a city – ‘Yes, problems are there, but they are getting better, better’ – that is much more free from crime and corruption than Bombay, acknowledged by one and all as Crime Capital of India.

Why, oh why, was she seeing in some newspaper, just when there had come that letter from this Calcutta lawyer, A. K. Dutt-Dastar – if that is his high-and-mighty name – that Calcutta is holding almost lowest place in speed-money table? Very well, nice to live somewhere you are not having to pay a bribe to get anything done in right time. But – he glimpsed through the bus window a huge poster in Bengali script, almost unreadable to him – for me there would be still something of complications. And no work to be doing. No keeping of law and order, howsoever difficult to achieve same.

Peering forward, he saw the whole road far ahead was now even more crammed with people. People dancing, singing, rhythmically chanting. Noise came battering at him from every angle, loudspeakers booming and blaring distorted music, fireworks popping and exploding, and from the lanes to either side piercing blasts from gaudily uniformed bands playing their trumpets, trombones, drums at unrelenting maximum volume.

‘Oh, yes, yes,’ Protima exclaimed abruptly. ‘Of course, it is Laxmi Poornima tonight. How could I have forgotten? All Calcutta must be celebrating. Yes, look, look. There. A beautiful pandal for Goddess Laxmi. And now, on the other side, there is another.’

Ghote made an obedient effort to see, flipping his head from side to side. But the bus at that moment lumbered a few feet further forward and he got only a single fleeting glance at one of the decorated platforms. A glimpse of the brightly painted statue of the goddess of wealth, golden crowned, gorgeous in vermilion sari, seated on a wide-petalled lotus, her white owl beside her, clasping her golden vessel. Then chaos again.

Huddled in his seat with their heavy flight bag cutting cruelly into his thighs, he made himself think that, after all, Bengal was just another part of India. In his faraway village childhood, he remembered, in the puja alcove where his mother had weaved the smoking incense to and fro and rung and rung her little bell there had been, too, an idol of Laxmi. Smaller than the image of elephant-headed Lord Ganesh presiding there, but still present to beg blessings from.

But this Laxmi celebration here was an altogether different matter. Such extravagance, such richness, such wild abandon, all making so many more demands than the simple daily puja he recalled.

The glimpse he had had of that Calcutta Laxmi showed her as somehow more elegant, more swirlingly dazzling than his mother’s little statue, complete though that also had been with the goddess’s lotus seat, white owl and golden vessel. No, this was altogether too much.

He shut his eyes – after the flight across India from Bombay he was tired enough – and tried to blot out even the sound of the bawling loudspeakers, the brazen band music, the shouts and the shrieks, the firework cracks and bangs.

‘This is our Calcutta season of festivals, you know,’ he eventually heard Protima saying in his ear. ‘The ten days of Durga Puja just past. Now Laxmi Puja. And in two weeks exactly, on the next moonless night, it will be Kali Puja. Yes, now look. Look up out of the window. You can see the Poornima full moon.’

Dutifully he opened his eyes and peered. But, seated on the inside, he was not in fact able to see the moon any better than earlier when he had caught no more than a quick sight of the pandals enshrining Goddess Laxmi. But, true enough, in such patches of the road where there was less glare from the strings of coloured lights cool moonlight was flooding down. However ineffectually.

Where will I be, he wondered, when this full moon above me now has turned to its dark phase? On the moonless night of – What was it Protima said? Yes, of Kali Puja?

‘Oh, how I remember Laxmi Poornima in our house in Rash Behari Avenue when I was a little girl,’ she burst out again now. ‘Ma always set up a big, big basket filled with rice, garlanded and covered with a beautiful cloth. And all the way from the door to our own idol of Laxmi there would be the tiny footsteps Ma had made with rice paste, for Laxmi to tread along as she came in to bring us prosperity. We would set a line of lighted lamps outside to welcome her, and then we would sit up all night to— Look, look. In that doorway you can see a basket and the people of the house sitting there just as we did. You know, they won’t be gifting any baksheesh tonight. You must not waste or lose any money tonight, or Laxmi will be angry.’

Ghote looked out as directed. But once again, from his inside seat and encumbered by the heavy flight bag on his knees, he was unable to see what he had been told to take in.

‘And my father,’ Protima went on excitedly, ‘he would always tell me how on this one night of all the year you were allowed to steal if you wanted. Whatsoever you were thieving became yours by grace of the goddess. He would tease me by saying some dacoits would come to take my best doll. But, when he saw I was scared, then he would smile and say, It’s all right, baba, because there is so much moonlight, we may easily see any thief who is coming and tell them you are needing your doll too much.’

But Ghote, exhausted as he was by the long flight from Bombay and the sudden reversal in his life that the news of Protima’s inheritance had brought, could not bring himself to share her delight. Instead, illogically reacting to the word dacoit, he simply clutched all the harder at the handle of the bag on his knees, suddenly feeling himself menaced here by unknown assailants. A stranger in a strange land.