Читать книгу Bribery, Corruption Also - H. R. F Keating - Страница 8

The bus jerked to a full halt. Above the still tumultuous din Ghote heard a voice shouting ‘Fairlawn Hotel, Fairlawn Hotel.’ Protima thrust a sharp elbow into his side.

‘We must get down. We must get down. This is it. Fairlawn Hotel, where Dutt-Dastar Babu has booked the room for us. Fairlawn Hotel.’

Fairlawn Hotel. Large letters, green, yellow-edged, shiny and smart stretched across the gateway. Beyond, the building itself loomed and faded in the ever-changing light from the fireworks above and the on-off, on-off coloured lamps of yet another Laxmi pandal. Loading himself up with their luggage, he felt a new dart of unease as he confronted the building. Plainly, despite its enveloping coat of pale green paint, it dated from Calcutta’s long-ago rich past. Not at all the sort of place he and Protima chose when they went on holiday. And even further away from the decent, workaday sort of hotel he stayed in if he was away on duty.

Too posh.

Altogether too posh. Why has this lawyer, A. K. Dutt-Dastar, put us in a place like this? The fellow knows, after all, that I am no more than inspector of police. Yet this is looking like somewhere for tourists with money-fat wallets or expense-account foreign executives, even in days gone by for the sahibs of the British Raj.

‘Come,’ said Protima sharply, heading for the entrance.

He followed, seething with suspicions.

Inside, more green paint. On walls, on pillars, underneath the elegantly rising stairs. And pictures and paintings. The British royal family in heavily framed photographs. Time and time again. In ones and twos, in groups. With little dogs, without little dogs.

Is this really the place for us to be?

There was a bell to ring on the green-painted marbled reception counter. Setting down his load of luggage – the back of his legs ached abominably – he gave its brass knob a gentle pat. The loud ring that resulted brought, from somewhere behind, a lady he guessed was an Anglo-Indian or possibly an Armenian, wearing a severe black skirt and a black and white blouse with an ornate pattern that seemed to echo the hotel’s heavy British-days architecture.

‘Yes?’ she said in a ringingly assured voice. ‘I am the proprietress. What are you wanting?’

Ghote swallowed, and told her that he believed Mr A. K. Dutt-Dastar had booked a room for them ‘under the names of Mr and Mrs Ghote’.

He wished he could have said Inspector Ghote and wife. But, even if he had, he doubted whether the statue-stern lady on the other side of the counter would have been much impressed.

But at least she reached for a large blue-covered book and slapped it down in front of them.

‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘Mr Dutt-Dastar, a good friend of ours. D. D., we call him. Yes, D. D. Though, of course, we have many other good friends here, film stars, famous authors. British film stars and American enjoy their stay when they come to the city to shoot. You know our hotel was shown in that great film about Calcutta, City of Joy? Patrick Swayze is a very good friend.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Protima broke in. ‘I was seeing that film. Many, many shots of Calcutta. Very good, first class.’

Her eagerness evidently pleased the proprietress.

‘I will call a bearer to show you your room as soon as you have signed in,’ she said. ‘But first let me tell you the rules of the hotel. Your room price’ – she glanced at the big blue book – ‘which is 750 rupees, non-airconditioned, includes all meals. They are served exactly to time. No Indian slackness here. If you are late, you are late. Dinner at eight. Breakfast, seven-thirty. English luncheon, one o’clock. Afternoon tea, quarter past four.’

Ghote, astonished at how much A. K. Dutt-Dastar had agreed they would pay – Must be very, very good friend of the management, he thought – hardly took in all the times and conditions that had been shot out at him. And, following the bearer carrying their cases, up the elegant stairs, out on to a balcony, in again, and on upwards, he felt nothing but a tiny glim of pleasure at the thought that in a few minutes he would be able to lie down on a bed.

But when at last they reached their room Protima refused to think of sleep. Eyes dancing with excited joy, she insisted that they should watch the continuing celebrations even though the window instead of looking out on to crowded and noisy Sudder Street at the front gave them only a view of a dark back-lane. But something could still be seen. So grimly he stood there beside her, fighting off draining fatigue, even a little chilled in the mild October night. Over and over again he reminded himself it had been Protima’s first thought when she had read that lawyer’s letter that now he himself would be able to start a comfortable retirement after his hard days struggling against Bombay’s criminal elements.

But, despite the muffled noise of celebration and the occasional sight of the pink and gold trail of a rocket ascending the moon-drenched sky, he was able to make out little more than that in the lane below there was a huge shapeless mound of something or other. To judge by the smell, distinct even at their height above, it had to be garbage deposited there layer by rotting layer over many months past.

Is that heap then, he asked himself, the reality of Calcutta? He managed to resist the temptation to point it out to his sky-gazing wife. But only just.

Then, at last and at last, he felt the time had come when he could reward himself for his forbearance. Silently, leaving Protima where she was, entranced, he slipped off to the waiting bed.

They missed breakfast. Ghote knew, as he jerked into wakefulness, that he had fallen at once into a deep sleep the night before. He had had no idea how late it had been when Protima had joined him. But now she was fast asleep still, lying flat on her back and, if not snoring, at least breathing deeply, regularly and rather noisily. He looked at his watch. Half past eight. From outside there was coming the distant irritable honking and hooting of a day’s busy traffic.

He woke Protima. As soon as he had told her how late it was she declared that what they would have to do was to get themselves ready as quickly as possible. ‘Then we must set off to see the house.’

‘But Mr Dutt-Dastar was saying he would reach us there by car, no? Leaving hotel at eleven?’

‘No, no,’ Protima had answered. ‘You don’t understand A, B or C. I cannot wait and wait for some dry stick of a lawyer. We will leave a message for him. I must see my house just only with you. It is my present from above.’

‘But you are not a child who must open whatsoever they are given at Diwali before they have even thanked the parents who have gifted it.’

‘Nonsense, nonsense. Best way to show you are pleased is tear off wrappings ek dum.’

A little offended at that quick Nonsense, nonsense, he had said not a word more.

So, quickly as they could, they washed and dressed and hurried out, finding without trouble a taxi in crowded, half-lazing, half-bustling Sudder Street. The Sikh driver when Protima showed him the address of the house was grinningly confident that he could get them there ‘in one hour time, less, less. No problem.’

But problems there were. The first of them still within sight of the hotel. An elderly Sikh stepped out blithely into the roadway right in front of them. As his co-religionist at the wheel brought their vehicle to a brake-screeching stop, the Sikh gave him a playfully joyous smile and went into an elaborate happy pantomime of hurry-scurrying out of the way. The performance took him to the far side a great deal less quickly than if he had crossed at full leisure.

City of joy, Ghote thought sourly. City of ridiculous play-acting.

However, if there were going to be as many stoppages as this – a barefoot, bare-chested rickshawalla taking a smartly uniformed ten-year-old girl to school had cut in right across their path – it looked as if Protima’s determination to get to the house early was going to prove a good thing. If for the wrong reason.

He ventured to say as much.

Protima gave a long, tinkling laugh.

Why is she wearing that sari, he asked himself in a sudden fit of irritation. It is one of her best, I am only just now noticing. And she has draped it down her back Bengali fashion, instead of having the pallu hanging down beside her, Bombay style. The way she has always put on a sari ever since our college days.

‘Surely,’ she said, ‘you cannot be thinking Dutt-Dastar Babu will come on time. We would be there well before, whatsoever delays there may be. You are in Calcutta now. He will be certainly more than one hour late. Not your Bombay ten-twenty minutes.’

He felt his simmering anger rise even higher. The fellow to be so appallingly late. And that name of his. Dutt-Dastar. Typical Calcutta idea, that both your family lines are so important, so— What was the Bengali word Protima sometimes used? Yes, so bhadrolok that both must be preserved for ever. And why must she call him Dutt-Dastar Babu? What was wrong with Shri Dutt-Dastar. Or English, Mr Dutt-Dastar?

Oh, will I ever be able to live in this place?

Now they were brought to a standstill once again.

‘What is that trouble along there?’ Protima said, breaking in on his shrouded state of sullen ill-humour. ‘Are you able to see?’

Coming to, he realized they had reached the broad stretch of Chowringhee running beside the huge green extent of the Maidan. The Maidan he knew about. Any Calcuttan you ever met was sure to tell you it was the largest public park in the world, a vast area cleared two centuries or more ago to provide a field of fire for the cannons of Fort William after the Battle of Plassey. Somehow, he told himself with satisfying bitterness, most Bengalis would gather up this battle as adding to the glories of their city, making it India’s capital before that was shifted to New Delhi. Even though the battle had been won by the British when Governor Clive bribed the all-India notorious Mir Jafar to turn traitor.

Looking along the road now in the direction Protima had indicated, he made out a long stationary line of open trucks. So far as he could see – the air was hazy with floating dust – each was full of protesters of some sort, packed upright together beneath long white slogan-bearing banners. No doubt this was why the traffic was delaying so infuriatingly their progress towards Protima’s inheritance.

But what was the protest about? Impossible to make out what the banners were saying.

He rolled the smeary window beside him further down and thrust his head out. But the haze was still too thick to be able to make out any of the writing, even if it turned out to be in English and not that different, damn Bengali script.

‘Sirdarji,’ he asked the driver, ‘are you knowing what-all this morcha is for?’

The Sikh turned back, grinning a wide, white-toothed smile through his curling and twirling beard.

‘Oh, sahib, always protestings in Calcutta. How else would we be getting some fun?’

For a moment he wanted to question that attitude. Fun? A protest meeting should not be fun. If a wrong was worth demonstrating against, it should be demonstrated against with resolution. But to get fun out of a demonstration? A very, very Calcutta attitude surely.

However, this was not the time to state his criticism aloud. Instead he asked simply, ‘But do you know what this protest is?’

The driver in his turn peered into the distance, craning his turbaned head.

‘Wetlands,’ he said at last.

‘Wetlands? Wetlands? What is that?’ Ghote asked.

‘Oh, duffer,’ Protima snapped in. ‘Don’t you even know Calcutta is built on silt? Did you never hear those lines from Rudyard Kipling, Chance-directed, chance-erected, laid and built on the silt? Everything in the city was once wetlands. And did you never read, even in the Bombay papers, that Calcutta has been twice invaded by millions of refugees, once from East Bengal when it was part of Pakistan and then from the same place when it became Bangladesh? Did you never realize that to accommodate all those millions living and eating and sleeping on the pavements, or beside the railway lines, or at night on the tram tracks – more, many, many more than you ever were having in Delhi, Bombay or anywhere else – it would be necessary to extend the boundaries? But where could they be extended? Only on the wetlands stretching away from the Hooghly River.’

More Calcutta pride, Ghote jetted out in his head. The city is made into one gigantic refugee camp, and they take pride in the world-record misery. Then that British Kipling has only to call the city as coming up by chance only, and all these Bengalis take it as one first-class compliment. My wife adding more now to these praises and applaudings.

But it seemed Protima’s song of praise was, at least for the moment, at an end.

‘But why there should be some protest over that I cannot think,’ she said, puzzled.

‘Oh, memsahib,’ the taxi driver broke in. ‘Now I am knowing all about. It is for what they are calling U-traffic lakes.’

U-traffic, Ghote thought in a new burst of rage, rattling in fury the extraordinary word round in his head. What in God’s name did U-traffic mean? And, surely, only in high-and-mighty Calcutta would a taxiwalla produce such a word. And this fellow is a Sikh, not even a full Bengali.

‘What are you talking?’ he snapped at him.

But it was Protima who answered. ‘Ah, yes, now I remember hearing about this. Water from the Hooghly River, with all the foulness of the city drained into it, is pumped back into these shallow lakes, called eutrophic lakes – eutrophic – and there fish digest all the contamination without doing any harm whatsoever to their flesh. So we in Bengal can eat the dishes we are so much loving in perfect safety.’

‘Yes, yes,’ the driver joined in with enthusiasm. ‘Behind the city, which as you must be knowing is running north to south beside the Hooghly, those U-traffic lakes are being fed with water that is dirtiest in whole world.’

Oh, yes, Ghote thought. If it is Calcutta water it must be the dirtiest in the world. Or the cleanest. Or the brownest. Or the greenest. The maximum of anything, whatever it is. But haven’t we got plenty of dirty water in Bombay itself? Isn’t our slum at Dharavi acknowledged by one and all to be the biggest in the world, except only one in Mexico. Let this fellow drink some water from a gutter in Dharavi. Then he would have a stomach ache worth having.

But myself, he added with a sudden downward swoop. For the rest of my life am I to be a fish-loving Bengali? He felt depression welling up and up in him as if he, too, was being pumped full of filthy Hooghly water.

‘Yes, yes, memsahib,’ the driver said, as at last he was able to get them on the move again, ‘you are one hundred per cent right. That is what our U-traffic lakes are doing. But, you see, those people up there, those Corporation and State Government burra sahibs, are wanting now to fill up even more of the lakes than they were doing before. So they can build houses, houses, houses and make money, money, money. Number-two money, black money, under-table money, with just only some tax-declare white money. But not too much, yes?’

And, Ghote added to himself, thick with misery, today is no longer Laxmi Poornima. No one has licence to steal now. Yet they are doing it in full swing. Here in this city Protima was telling is so hundred per cent corruption-free.

Into his mind there came another phrase from Kipling about Calcutta, one his schoolmaster father had delighted to repeat. City of Dreadful Night.

Slowly they ground and jerked their way past the long lines of trucks and their jam-packed demonstrators, the men almost all in neat white shirts and the girls in bright saris. From time to time a chant broke out, and fell silent. After a little Ghote was able to make it out. Wetlands Minister, out, out, out. Wetlands Minister, out, out, out. At one point a whole squad of girls, students most likely, was being marched along the roadway from one truck to another, causing yet more delay to the traffic. Shepherding the bright dazzle of the young there was a single grey-haired lady in a less colourful sari, fierce, motherly, stick-upright, proud.

Another thing Calcutta is famous for, Ghote registered. Its immense demonstrations. Well-ordered, until the car and bus burnings begin.

At last they got clear of the traffic tangle and began to move with some speed, their driver at the least gap in oncoming traffic happily ignoring any notion of keeping to his proper side of the road.

Worse driving than any in Bombay, Ghote registered sternly. No discipline. No discipline whatsoever.

Soon Protima, as if freed of complexities, began talking about the house they were on their way to see, the unexpected inheritance brought her by a dozen deaths of relatives she had scarcely heard of. Her huge Diwali present waiting for her to tear off its wrappings.

‘I don’t suppose it will be just exactly as it was when I visited there,’ she admitted eventually. ‘I must have been only seven or eight then. It would be just before Father was posted to Bombay. Long ago. But I remember a tall gateway, with two darwans who came running out to open the gates when we stopped outside. In those days the place must have been almost beyond the city. And there were little houses belonging to the darwans on either side and out of them came, it seemed to me, dozens of children. I hoped I might play with them, but we swept on and came to rest under the big porte-cochère, as they called it. But I did – I remember this now – get to play with some other children. I don’t know who they were. They can’t have been related to us or, I suppose, one of them would have inherited now. But we played Snatch Hanky out on a big green, green lawn, I remember that. There must have been so many malis, you know, to walk over that grass day by day in the heat of summer squirting their goatskins of water to keep up that wonderful green. In winter, of course, everything would stay green. In one visit there – it must have been some time after the monsoons – we went up the big, big sweeping round staircase on to the roof. I think I believed I was going to swarga above. And from there you could see far, far into the distance. Everything green, green. A beautiful, bright green.’

Before long she recalled something more about this last visit she had paid to the distant – no longer quite so distant – house.

‘Oh, and we had lunch that time. Or perhaps it was some visit there before. A proper Bengali meal. Suddenly it comes back to me. I can see myself sitting at the big polished table. The only child there. So those children I played Snatch Hanky with, if that was the same time, must have been neighbours’ children. And we ate … We ate … Yes, we began with karela with a little rice – very Bengali – and at that time I didn’t much like karela, too bitter for a little girl. But my father told me, if I ate it up, at the end of the meal I could have lots and lots of misti-doi, our delicious Bengali sweet, pale brown and so chewy, and, of course, sandesh, the best of all. Every little Bengali girl has a sweet tooth, you know. Boys also. And grown men and women.’

She turned eagerly to Ghote, who had begun faintly to wonder if it was right for a father to bribe a child in that way. Was it the beginning of a whole slow slide-away from doing the right thing?

‘To think,’ she said, ‘I have been in Calcutta more than twelve hours now and not so much as one single sandesh has passed my lips. Sirdarji, do you think there is a shop round here? Could you stop?’

‘Oh, memsahib, there would not be any such here. Look how far we have come. This is a bad area. Look only.’

True enough, the road had narrowed. It was lined now with occasional tall dirty blocks with between them lines of makeshift huts, grey and dusty. At a point where it divided they saw, hanging from the branches of a pipal tree, a cluster of glittering chandeliers, evidently taken for sale from houses pulled down to make way for apartment blocks. The people on the street, or rather all over it, were as numerous as they had been in crowded Sudder Street. But they did not look like buyers of fancy sweetmeats.

Ghote began to wonder what this house of his wife’s would really be like. The contrast between her memories and their present surroundings could hardly be greater.

At last they came to a turning the driver had been anxiously looking out for. A large, very battered sign in English stretching right across a single-storey, slabby, monsoon-stained concrete building, Nufurnico – Dealers in All Pillow and Foam Matters.

‘Not far now,’ he said, cheerful again. ‘What number you saying, memsahib?’

‘My letter says thirty-four,’ Protima answered, her voice beginning to show some uncertainty. ‘But I don’t remember us looking for any number when I came here as a child, though there were other houses not far away, big places behind walls. But— But, yes, there was a little shrine just opposite, blue-painted. Yes, and my mother said it was a Durga temple. You should be able to see the goddess. If it is still there.’

‘Oh,’ the driver answered, ‘that will be there. Nobody is knocking down temples to put up petrol pumps.’

They drove on again in silence. Through the rolled-down windows there penetrated a strong smell of fish, pungent and hinting at rottenness. And it was dustier even than it had been beside the Maidan.

Ghote felt suddenly sharply sorry for Protima. What if things went wrong for this dream of hers? Where is it Mr A. K. Dutt-Dastar is sending us? Could it be that his letter and the phone calls after it were some sort of hoax?

And it seemed their driver’s optimism about how near they were to their destination was unfounded. They drove steadily on, unable on this pot-holed, bare tarmac road to go at all fast. Seeing no sign of a big house or a Durga shrine. The minutes went by. No one said anything.

Ghote fought down the flicker of joy that had come to him with the thought that the house and all Protima’s inheritance might be no more than some inexplicable confidence trick. No, that would be too much of a blow for her. All right, he himself would be delighted to know that the Calcutta life she had offered him was not going to happen. But Protima, who as soon as she had read that letter had seen the promised idleness of Calcutta as a reward for him, the idleness and the pleasures she remembered of that old, rich life: she would be hit by the vanishing of her hopes, hit as if she had been struck in full Maidan by a bolt of lightning.

‘Here. It is here,’ the driver suddenly exclaimed, his delight proclaiming the fears he had kept hidden. ‘Look, look, memsahib. Look, sahib. There is blue-painted shrine, and on other side one high, high house wall.’

He put his foot hard down and the ancient taxi, rattling and shaking, leapt forward. And came to a brake-shrieking, juddering halt.

Yes, there was a long tall white wall, dotted for all its length with glinting pieces of embedded glass, and in it there was a pair of high iron gates with behind to either side the darwans’ houses Protima had spoken of. But the gates, leaning crazily half-open, were red with rust and entwined with tendrils of scabby growth. Beyond, Ghote saw now the house itself.

It was a battered, eaten-away ruin.