Читать книгу Bribery, Corruption Also - H. R. F Keating - Страница 9

Eaten away, crumbling, a ruinous shadow of its former self, the once beautiful house may have been. But, Ghote realized, it was by no means deserted. From where they sat in the taxi, stunned into silence, he saw beyond the rusted, leaning gates, not a flock of smiling children emerging from the gatehouses to greet the bhadrolok sahibs coming to visit. Instead, naked, scabby-looking babies crawled in the dust of what once must have been a fine lawn. Bigger urchins were busy teasing a goat tethered to one of the patchily brick-exposed pillars of the porte-cochère under which in days gone by Protima’s father’s car would have come to a halt. And on what had been the smooth gravel of the entrance drive cooking fires smoked sulkily, women in almost colourless saris crouching over them.

‘Squattered,’ their taxi driver pronounced. ‘Madam, your house has been squattered.’

Protima looked round at Ghote.

‘What— What are we to do?’

He wished he could produce an answer that would bring her some comfort. But he could think of none. If only, he said to himself, on the way out here or in the plane as we flew from Bombay, I had said something to calm down those wild-flying hopes and plans she had.

But he had not dared say a word. Whatever he had ventured would have seemed to be rejecting the gift she had been offering him, the days and years of the rich life that had so unexpectedly been bequeathed to her. The life that, in her mind, had seemed to be the best life of all, Bengali life at its most civilized. The Calcutta life.

The life that, in his mind, foreshadowed aimless idleness cut off from all he had known, all that was familiar to him. Even if that familiarity was often black enough.

All he could do was to scrabble back in his mind through the details of the first letter that had come from A. K. Dutt-Dastar, through everything Protima had passed on to him of his telephone calls. But, no, there had been nothing anywhere to indicate that the house she had inherited was subject to any complications of the sort in front of them.

But it was. It was a house squattered. Squattered and eaten away.

‘I suppose all we can do just now,’ he said, ‘is to wait for—’

He had been about to say Mr Dutt-Dastar. But in deference to Protima’s recent Bengali sentiments he changed that.

‘No, we must simply wait till Dutt-Dastar Babu is coming.’

Protima looked at him.

‘Yes. Yes, I am supposing that is all we can do,’ she said, small voiced. ‘I— I hope he would not be as late as I was believing.’

‘Shall we sit in the taxi?’ Ghote asked. ‘We can drive to some shady patch.’

‘No, no. When Mr Dutt-Dastar is coming, he will take us back in whatever car he has. I am not wanting to see more of— Of— Of that ruin until I am hearing why it is in such a state. But there is some shade under the wall further along. Why not just stroll there? We must not be all the time spending out and spending out in taxi fares.’

So she, too, has thought what I have been thinking, Ghote said to himself, hearing the tang of bitterness in her voice. That if Mr Dutt-Dastar – and it said a lot she was calling him Mister now – had left them under the impression they were to take over a fine house in a wide compound, had his equal promise of enough money to be able to keep up the house been as much of a mirage?

The taxi with its cheerful Sikh gone, racketing and bouncing, emitting a cloud of blue-black, foul-smelling exhaust, they crossed the road and walked up and down in the shade of the long, high, glass-encrusted, graffiti-defying wall of the house. They spoke little. There was little enough to talk about.

‘I hope Mr Dutt-Dastar is on his way already,’ Protima said at last.

‘Perhaps, even with his so Bengali name,’ Ghote joked lugubriously, ‘he will defy prophecy and be here even ten minutes earlier than we must expect.’

Protima could produce no response. They walked back as near to the house gates as they dared, turned and walked in the other direction.

‘There must be another house not much further along,’ Protima tried as they repeated the up-and-down stroll for the third time. ‘We cannot see it round the bend, and it would not be worth going into the sun to look, but I remember it was there.’

‘It would have been where your playmates at your last visit here were coming from?’

‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so. Or perhaps not.’

Silence.

Approaching the bend in the patchily tarmacked road once more, Ghote said – and immediately regretted it – ‘But perhaps that other house has been sold and knocked down now.’

‘No. If it had they would have built some apartments. Even over this long wall we would see the top of the building at least.’

‘Yes, I suppose so. Unless apartments are forbidden to be built here.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

Another turn.

Oh, why I cannot think of something hundred per cent cheerful to say? But what there is?

‘Would you like— We could perhaps walk back the way we were coming and find some shop. No sandesh. But something to drink. Some Limca may be there.’

‘No. No, I do not want anything.’

Five or six more languid, yet inwardly tense, steps.

‘Thank you, though.’

Once more up to the leaning gates of the house. For a little now they stood cautiously watching two young men in garish shirts and dirty jeans who were skittering carrom pieces over the powdered surface of a battered board set up on two old oil drums. From the bright scarves knotted at their necks and what looked like knives stuck in their belts, Ghote had instantly labelled them as goondas, no different in Calcutta from the familiar hoodlums of Bombay.

Then from behind them there came a voice.

‘I think I am able to hazard a guess at whom you may be.’

They whirled round, almost guiltily.

A big, bulky individual of some considerable age was standing there, leaning his weight on a silver-topped cane and looking at them with a smile of gentle benevolence on his softly jowled face. He was dressed in a pure white dhoti, ironed to fall to his ankles in exact elegant folds, and a white silk kurta, its topmost button nicely calculated to leave a precise triangle of pale brown flesh at his throat.

‘Madam, it is you who is the inheritor of my dear old friend Amit Chattopadhyay’s sadly dilapidated mansion. Am I correct?’

‘Yes,’ Protima said slowly, as if she was once more daring to believe in her heaven-descended Diwali gift. ‘Yes, Mr Chattopadhyay is – was – my cousin-uncle.’

‘I think I detect the family resemblance. A most pleasing one. But let me introduce myself. Amit Chattopadhyay’s former neighbour, one Bhatukeshwar Bhattacharya by name. And this gentleman here beside you? He must be the Bombay jamai Amitji spoke of in the sad days when I sat by his hospital bed, the bed he hoped always to be leaving to return to his own home. A wish, alas, that was to be denied him for year upon year. Yet a wish that – determined fellow – he never abandoned, not even within hours of his end.’

Breaking like a swimmer through this torrent of talk, Protima acknowledged that she was accompanied by her Bombay jamai.

‘My husband, yes. Ganesh Ghote, Inspector of the Bombay Police.’

Ghote felt then a spurt of pride at the way she had introduced him. Yes, he was Inspector Ghote, Crime Branch, Bombay Police Headquarters.

Or am I such for just only some few weeks more? And then Bengali Protima’s Bombay jamai?

‘But how does it come about that I find you walking up and down outside the house my friend Amit bequeathed to you? Is there no one here to take you to look over this inheritance of yours, distressing as is the condition you find it in?’

‘It is kind of you to ask,’ Protima replied. ‘But the truth is I had no idea the house was in this state. Dutt-Dastar Babu, the lawyer who wrote to me in Bombay, had agreed to bring me here today. He had fixed on eleven o’clock at our hotel. But— But I wanted to see the old place for myself first, and I persuaded my husband to come early and left Dutt-Dastar Babu a message.’

‘Ah, I understand now. A very natural thing to do. Perhaps this Dutt-Dastar fellow should have thought … But no matter. No matter. The thing now is to take you away from this not altogether salubrious spot. You should have seen it once, Mr Ghote. In the old days … But they are gone, and we must put up with the changes. So, now. My house is not far, and I am happy to say it is still in a tolerable state of repair. I was just setting out for my morning constitutional when I noticed you walking here, and drew my conclusions. Happily right, happily right. So, if you would do me the kindness to accompany me, we will see what some tea and some sweetmeats can do.’

Sandesh, Ghote wondered. Will Protima get her sandesh after all? And, if I am offered it also, will I like it?

‘But, excuse me, sir,’ he said. ‘What if Mr Dutt-Dastar – Dutt-Dastar Babu, perhaps I should say – what if he is coming just now?’

Mr Bhattacharya consulted his watch.

‘Did you say you had made an appointment for eleven o’clock at your hotel? It is scarcely twenty minutes to eleven now. I think I can promise you your Dutt-Dastar Babu will not be here for a full hour yet. More, in all probability. Much more. We in Bengal, my dear sir, have our own ideas about time. Ideas rather more … Shall I say, expansive? Yes, more expansive than anywhere else in India, I am happy to state. But in any case I can send my darwan in due course to keep an eye out. So you need have no worries on that score.’

But at this new sweeping and superior Bengali assertion about the uniqueness of Calcutta Ghote, to his surprise, felt hardly a twinge of resentment.

Wondering, he set out beside Mr Bhattacharya as he slowly led the way to his house, leaning heavily on his elegant cane, each single step a separate deliberate manoeuvre. And it seemed he was no more inclined to jib at any of the references to the glories of Calcutta that the aged Bengali continued to pour out.

‘Oh, yes, Mr Ghote, this is a city I love, despite all the terrible things that have happened to it over the years. Yes, it has been a city of riot, of fire and brimstone, as you may say. But those, even those, are signs of the passion with which life is lived in Calcutta. It is a passion that has always found an answer to the worst of calamities. An answer, if I may so claim it, in wit. In healing satire and, yes, not seldom in the ribald retort. Ours is a city ever new, ever bringing forth new ideas, new politics, new religious impulses. Yet it is, too, a city for ever locked in its haunting past. A city poised, yes, poised always between death and life.’

The stream of Bengali eloquence, coming as it was from such a happily enthusiastic source, began to make Ghote feel that perhaps life in the city of joy, if that was to be his future, might be not altogether the exile he had feared to the city of dreadful night.

‘I don’t know, my dear fellow, how well you are acquainted with Calcutta,’ Mr Bhattacharya plunged voluminously on. ‘But I feel obliged to tell anyone newly coming here that my city is not as bad as she has been painted. Painted? No, there must be another word for what the journalists and the travel writers have done to us. Yes. Yes, they have cartooned us. And cartooned us in no very friendly manner. You would agree, I take it, that the essence of the true cartoon – I instance the charming drawing of your Bombay’s Laxman – should be to hit at an evil, yes, but hit, as it were, with a buttoned foil?’

Ghote thought an answer was required, or at least requested. But he had no strong ideas on the subject of newspaper cartoons. He was even a little unsure what a foil with a button was. So he reverted to one of the affable Bengali’s questions which he felt he had been able to grasp.

‘You were asking, sir, have I been to Calcutta before. It has been just only once, and some years ago also. My time here, which was on police duty, was a matter of just only come-and-go. To my regret I was not able even to see your Great Banyan. Oldest in existence, isn’t it?’

For a kind, if hard to follow, mention of Bombay’s best-known cartoonist, a balancing mention of Calcutta’s world-renowned tree.

‘Well, we must hope, Mr Ghote, that before many days have passed your charming wife will take you to our Botanical Gardens. Certainly, they are among the few remaining delights of our city that have not been affected by the disasters that have over the years rained down upon us. Not, however, that the gardens have entirely escaped. The banyan itself, you know, no longer possesses its central trunk, mother of almost two thousand sons of dangling roots, which embrace, if I may so put it, a circle of astonishing circumference. You must walk all round it, savour it to the full. And there are other remains of our past glory that you must immediately acquaint yourself with. The Victoria Memorial, British built of course, but nonetheless—’

His meander of praise was abruptly overwhelmed by a storm of hooting from a car, a bright red little Maruti, that had come to a halt a short distance away.

From its window the driver, a man of about forty, his face distinguished by a small, close-cropped moustache and densely black, wrap-around glare glasses, called across to them in a sharply high-pitched voice.

‘Mrs Ghote? Are you Mrs Ghote? Your husband here, too?’

Ghote, after a moment of police officer’s ineradicable suspicion, answered for both of them.

‘Yes. Yes, it is correct. You are addressing Mrs Ghote, and I am her husband also.’

‘A. K. Dutt-Dastar at your service.’

In an instant the lawyer, a slight, dapper figure in a pale blue shirt – smart doubtless first thing but now sweat-limp – and matching pale blue trousers, was out of the car and darting across the road.

‘My dear madam, my good sir, most delighted at last to meet you. Had I known you intended to come as early, I would have arranged to be here to welcome you. As it is, I rang your hotel. Wanted to know you had arrived safely last night. All those Laxmi Puja celebrations. I found you had left by taxi, guessed where you might have gone, hastened to come out here.’

Ghote, blinking at this machine-gun burst of not very clear explanation, saw out of the corner of his eye that Mr Bhattacharya, perhaps upset because his confident claim that the lawyer would be more than an hour late had been disproved, was looking a little withdrawn. Hurriedly he introduced him.

‘Mr Dutt-Dastar, this is Mr Bhattacharya, a gentleman from a house not far off who has been so kind as to take us into tow.’

The dapper, blue-shirted lawyer offered a palms-folded greeting which Mr Bhattacharya solemnly returned.

‘Should have been here in time to explain about your property, my dear Mrs Ghote,’ A. K. Dutt-Dastar rapped on. ‘The unfortunate developments. But I was badly held up. Some damn protest meeting or other at the Maidan. Chowringhee almost impassable.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Ghote said, eager to show he was up to date with Calcutta events. ‘Demonstration against the filling in of the eutrophic lakes.’

To his surprise, his swiftly developed interest in Calcutta did not bring a gratified Bengali response. Instead a quick come-and-gone frown showed itself on what could be seen of the lawyer’s black-bespectacled face.

A jab of irritation. How difficult it is to please these self-satisfied Bengalis.

Now Mr Bhattacharya took his leave of them, a process that evidently could not be gone through in less than five solid minutes of mingled good wishes, regrets and protestations.

‘Yes,’ A. K. Dutt-Dastar said after he had watched the aged house-owner move step by ponderous step out of hearing. ‘Yes, Mrs Ghote, I regret to say there are complications concerning your property. Perhaps you have grasped their nature. No question of living in the place. None at all.’

‘Complications I am just only finding out,’ Protima replied, not without a touch of sharpness.

‘Yes, yes. I quite understand you may have felt dismay. A certain dismay. I had hoped to explain everything before you came to see the house. I had considered it best. Best not to attempt to tell you the exact situation before you arrived in Calcutta.’

‘So what is that situation?’ Protima pounced before Ghote could ask, as he had wanted to, just why it had been better to await their arrival.

‘In a nutshell, a nutshell,’ A. K. Dutt-Dastar went yakking on, ‘the house and the compound have been occupied, for years. Some years now, by a number of the immigrants. The immigrants by whom Calcutta has been invaded. I can use no other word – invaded. So, fundamentally the situation is difficult. Where property has been occupied for a certain length of time, it … It becomes almost impossible to have persons in occupancy expelled.’

‘But, surely, the police …?’

‘Madam, there is no difficulty in bribing a Calcutta policeman.’

No, Ghote thought sadly, nor a Bombay police jawan either.

‘But you were looking after the property while late Mr Chattopadhyay was in hospital, yes?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Yes, I was. To a certain degree, yes.’

‘Then why were you not putting in security guards before all these people were entering?’ Protima banged out.

‘Madam, I reply again. There are bribes. A security man is just as easily to be bribed as a policeman.’

And I had somehow thought, Ghote inwardly admitted, that after what Protima was telling, in Calcutta with all its high sentiments bribery and corruption also would be at a decent minimum. I am not able, for instance, to imagine Mr Bhattacharya, just now going out of sight round that corner, as being some bribe taker or bribe user. But it seems the city may not be so far in this from Bombay itself.

And, while Protima was plainly racking her brains to find some other way of securing for herself the changeling gift that had come to her, A. K. Dutt-Dastar, darting glances at them from behind his impenetrable wrap-around dark glasses, rattled on full pelt.

‘You must know, dear madam, your relative was in hospital for some years before his sad demise. Some years. As his lawyer, he asked me to make occasional visits. A general supervision. At best I was able to come perhaps every six months. More than once I suggested to Mr Chattopadhyay he would be well advised to sell. Before the house fell into yet worse disrepair. And, yes, yes, he wished to do so. However, for a number of reasons – I will not trouble you with them – sale did not prove possible. Then also some planning restrictions came in. No longer possible to build apartment blocks. So it seemed the property was almost valueless.’

Ghote, whose mind had drifted away a little under this rattling of Bengali verbiage, was just conscious that something in it ought perhaps to have had his full attention. What should that general supervision have consisted of? How much had A. K. Dutt-Dastar’s firm been paid to exercise it? Why had so little apparently been done? Just when had those planning restrictions come in?

No. He could not quite lay a finger on what he felt was wrong.

‘But,’ A. K. Dutt-Dastar flashed Protima a quick, white-toothed smile, ‘I am happy to be able to tell you now, madam, that end is in sight. A purchaser is anxious to acquire the house. As it is. Most anxious. He has, as you may say, fallen in love with it. There are some small problems still remaining. But nothing, I assure you, that a certain distribution of funds will not put right.’

Ghote experienced a little uprush of delight. If instead of acquiring a big house in Calcutta Protima simply inherited a sum of money, then perhaps they could go back to Bombay. To Bombay where his work was. And, to do himself justice, where Protima had lived happily for many years, where she had friends, where young Ved, born and bred in the city and now almost at the end of his time at college there, would like to stay and would be near to them for years to come. Yes, Bombay.

Then a thud of dismay.

If this sale went through … Because A. K. Dutt-Dastar had slipped in those words, a certain distribution of funds. And that meant, no doubt about it, that a bribe was going to have to be paid. To someone, somewhere. A good, large bribe by the sound of it. And the payment of a bribe of that size did not always produce an immediate response. It did not necessarily mean that whatever process had to be speeded up was speeded up. Dangerous territory could be entered. A large sum of money illegally handed over could, in the murky world it led into, result in a request for yet another bribe. And then another, and another. With nothing in the end achieved.

He was puzzling over these implications, in a haze of depression, when something else suddenly struck him. Abruptly he realized what A. K. Dutt-Dastar had said earlier that had started a warning light flashing in his mind. The fellow had said that old Mr Amit Chattopadhyay had been wanting to sell his house. Yet Mr Bhattacharya, Protima’s uncle’s long-standing friend, sitting often at his hospital bedside, had distinctly declared that the old man saw himself as coming back to his own house. Saw himself as doing so almost up to his last gasp.

Something wrong.

Surely something distinctly wrong about A. K. Dutt-Dastar, Calcutta lawyer.