One thought tapped away inside Inspector Ghote’s head as he ran off through the big garden of the Masters Foundation. Perhaps it was not too late. He had given the Paramour the five hundred rupees only that morning. She would hardly go hurrying round to the money-lender to pay off the debt on the boat right away. Money-lenders were not that popular.
So she would still have the rupees.
And from the way she had taken them, he would have every right to demand them back. She had shown no gratitude. All right, she would lose the money.
It was with this idea lodged solidly in his mind that he arrived in the hurly-burly of Churchgate Station again and set about finding a train to take him back. As he scanned the timetable and ran to make inquiries here and there the same thought kept hammering away in his head. It is not too late: she deserves to have to pay the money back.
And there was no train.
He could hardly believe it. He repeated his round of inquiries but had no more success. While he had been talking to the boys outside the Foundation and seeing Dr Diana in the dispensary time had passed. Then the trip across the city, though short, had been more than usually bedevilled with traffic hold-ups. And there it was. No train going out that far till early next day.
He thought of hiring a car but then remembered that after all the following day was Holi. There was even less chance of the Paramour handing the five hundred rupees over to a money-lender in the middle of all the festivities. He decided to get out to the village as early as possible next morning.
He spent a miserable evening. He did not dare go home till late in case there was talk about the refrigerator. He dared even less go to the office in case orders were waiting for him to get in touch with D.S.P. Naik. In the end he went to a cinema. The amorous intrigues of the film failed to grip. The music grated on his nerves. He left before it was over.
Next morning when he arrived, hot, sweaty and unoptimistic, at the village he found it looking very different from his previous visits. The overlying atmosphere of poverty had been temporarily swamped in an uprush of holiday gaiety. On the greenish, decaying walls of the huts bright, crudely coloured banners reflected the equal brightness of the sunshine and rippled happily in a strong breeze coming saltily off the sea. From the masts of the village boats, beached high and dry today on the soft sand, fluttered gay pennants, long and twisting, or stubby and forcefully patterned. More streamers and banners decorated the tall net-drying poles.
On the beach in front of the huts a positively enormous bonfire had been built. Ghote wondered for a moment how a community of such poverty could have gathered together the great pile of broken wood, discarded household objects, substantial pieces of furniture and even boat oars that made up the bulk of the merrily crackling blaze with its attendant circle of children, now excitedly jigging up and down, now suddenly solemn in front of the glowing heart of the fire.
But he had no time for idle speculation.
In all the stirring jubilation he was faced with the awkward business of broaching the reason for his visit to Tarzan’s family. The evening before, during the slow unwinding of the colourful love epic in the cinema, the notion that the Paramour had somehow forfeited any rights to the five hundred rupees had finally faded away in the harsh light of reality. He had handed the money over: he wanted it back. That was what it amounted to. He wanted it back because he had parted with it under a false impression. Frank Masters was not the person he had thought. The family had not been entitled to the money.
Even the very altered atmosphere of the village could not rob him of this cast-iron resolution. Even the sight of the family themselves standing outside their hut, on the verge of entering into the general jubilation, could not kill this.
One glance at the Paramour however was enough to make Ghote dismiss her as the best one to approach straight away. Her natural jollity had already so blended with the gaiety all around her that he doubted whether it would be possible to communicate at all. Tarzan’s brother, standing jigging a little in time to the rhythmical drumming coming from the far side of the great fire as if he knew his duty in times of merriment, he reserved as a last hope.
He concentrated on the father. Certainly the old man seemed impervious to the increasing noise and excitement. His face was as absolutely impassive as ever. His arms were folded indomitably across his ribby chest and he stood, legs just a little apart, still as a statue.
Ghote went up to him.
‘Good morning, good morning,’ he said cheerfully.
He looked back over his shoulder at the revelry behind him.
‘Happy holiday,’ he added.
Tarzan’s father moved his eyes. He looked at Ghote. But his expression did not alter.
‘Well,’ Ghote said, ‘how are things with you today? The village seems to be very happy. I hope you feel your troubles are a little less?’
He thought he had succeeded in bringing the subject of the five hundred rupees neatly to the fore.
Tarzan’s father looked away.
Ghote tried again.
‘This is not a day for the money-lender to come round, is it?’ he said.
He laughed.
The laugh ended up on a cracked note he did not like. And Tarzan’s father ignored it all.
‘So you have not had to pay off your debt yet?’ Ghote said, feeling the time for delicacy had come to an abrupt end.
‘Our debt?’
The Paramour had evidently been more attentive to the conversation than her lolloping half-dance to the drumming rhythm had indicated. She turned round now to Ghote, still dancing and still smiling with as much all-embracing benevolence as ever, and put out a podgy finger to dig him in the ribs.
‘You have come to see us paying our debt with that money?’ she asked.
‘Yes. No.’
‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Perhaps later. This is no day for debt paying. Holi hai.’
Ghote felt obliged to smile and even essay a slight dance step. And, in fact, he did already feel suddenly much more light-hearted.
So the debt was unpaid. Then the five hundred rupees were still safely tucked away somewhere. Though it was not going to be easy in the middle of dancing, smiling and shouting ‘Holi hai’ to broach the delicate core of the problem.
Ghote tried.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I did not come to watch such a thing. I would not do that.’
‘You came for Holi?’
The Paramour seized him with two solid, chunky hands and swung him three times round to the beat of the drums.
‘No, no, no.’
Ghote managed to break free. He thrust his face close to the Paramour’s bouncing, jiggling fat orb. He spoke sharply and clearly, and with a touch of desperation.
‘I came to take back the money, some of the money,’ he said. ‘For a little while. I find I need – I must have it. I must have the money back. Now.’
The grin across the Paramour’s huge face split into an enormous crease, deep pink, dotted and littered with stumps of white tooth, wide as a crater.
‘You want the money back now?’
‘Yes, yes. I am sorry. I do. It is most urgent. I will talk about it later. After this …’
He looked past the great wobbling bulk of the Paramour at the festivities on the sand in front of the village. They were really beginning to warm up now. The drums were beating madly and almost everybody had joined in the dance.
‘It is gone. All gone. Gone.’
‘Gone?’
Ghote felt a great cold wedge of ice descending crushingly down on to him.
‘What do you mean gone?’ he said. ‘Where has it gone?’
It was the Paramour’s turn to wave at the rising tide of celebration on the sands. The high-piled blazing fire, the teams of musicians, the flags and banners everywhere, the fireworks screaming up into the blue sky, the food clutched in happy hands, the bottles waving high above heads.
‘It has gone for Holi,’ she said. ‘Such a Holi the village has never known. It has gone to honour the great Krishna. Every anna.’
Ghote turned slowly away.
The sight of that huge face, stupidly happy, reasonlessly gay, maddened him. She had spent every anna of his five hundred rupees in treating the whole village to a wildly extravagant fiesta. Every one of the rupees that at least ought to have gone to make the family’s whole life easier by lifting the crushing burden of their debt. Gone. Spent. Going up in smoke.
No wonder the big fire had been blazing so merry on such a fine assortment of rubbish. When money was being thrown about in that way, anyone would be willing to sacrifice a dilapidated piece of furniture or even an oar past its prime.
Waves of pure rage swept through and through him as he marched away.
And quite suddenly, approaching the swirling crowd of merry-makers on the sand, his mood changed. The rage fell apart to leave a hard residue of bitter determination. Never again was he going to set himself up to help or judge other people. They had their lives to lead: he had his. And he knew too what the life he had to lead was. The life of a policeman. Doing his duty as he should. All right, so D.S.P. Naik was prepared to tell plain lies to improve the case against Amrit Singh. Well, he was probably correct. After all, this was the formed opinion of a respected and senior police officer. Who was Ganesh Ghote to go getting himself up against that? No, from now on he would do his duty as it was put to him. And first of all he would go and pull in Amrit Singh. On the murder charge. And the moment he had seen him safely behind bars he would go out to the Masters Foundation, get hold of those damned boys and see that they came into line. He would get up such a case against Amrit Singh that the D.S.P. himself would not be able to better it.
Round him the excited holidaymakers suddenly whirled.
He found himself in an instant surrounded by smiling, smiling faces. Everywhere bodies jerked and swayed in dance. In his ears shout after shout, ‘Holi hai, Holi hai, Holi hai’ rang and echoed. Fireworks fizzed and banged right, left and centre. Their smell mingled dramatically with that of a hundred sweaty bodies. For a few moments a broad-shouldered fisherman stood pressed close to him, his head thrown back and his mouth opening and shutting rhythmically in the words of a song of consistent and remarkable lewdness.
Krishna and the milkmaids, Ghote thought sourly, hemmed in and pressed upon from every side.
And then the real business of the day began. With a multitude of high, screaming whoops the saturnalian colour throwers came roaring into the fray. With big, crude syringes they sprayed long, drenching streams of coloured water, red, yellow, blue, high into the air and down on to one and all. Other swooping troops puffed huge clouds of pink and purple powder at anyone and everyone, but especially at anybody in the least way high and mighty.
And in all the simple village throng, who looked higher or mightier or more worthy of drenching and powdering than Inspector Ganesh Ghote, C.I.D.? Tossing powder by the handful, squirting ink by the bicycle pumpful, they came at him from every side. In seconds he was wet through, red wet, blue wet, yellow wet. And on to the wetness the coloured powders, pink, turquoise and orange, clung and smeared. He put his head glumly down and pushed forward. Dancing bodies bumped him, hands seized him and whirled him bouncing round. The drums beat in his ears, and everywhere the faces were smiling, smiling like maniacs.
I have deserved this, he thought. This is a fit punishment for coming here with my money and telling people how to live their lives. Exactly fit. They have taken my money and used it to buy all these pots of powder and buckets of dye and they have jumped on me and put me down to the lowest level of the low. Well, there it is.
Buffeted and banged, swung and tossed, he endured it till at last he found himself quite suddenly ejected from the whirling crowd.
He staggered a few paces clear and stopped to draw breath. He flapped at his multi-coloured clothes in an ineffectual attempt to get them looking a little more presentable. Then he gave up. He would have to go home looking like this, and that would be the crowning blow of his punishment. He looked round to see where he was and how he could get to the inland path without going through the crowd again.
And just twenty yards away he saw Amrit Singh.
This time the big Sikh was doing more than spy over the village. He was down on his hands and knees round at the back of the palisaded curing yard scraping up the soft muddy earth with his bare hands like a dog.
An energetic and extremely purposeful dog.
At once Ghote realized what it was that he must be doing. The patch of earth he was working at was clearly marked out by lying in the exact centre of a triangle formed by three singularly ugly, stunted and battered banana palms. If ever there was a place to bury something in the sure hope of digging it up again, this was it. And what had anyone here to bury that Amrit Singh would want to dig up but gold?
He had caught him in the very act.
Ghote stood where he was, poised. Surely this must be it? He would get Amrit Singh now, get him for smuggling. Fair and square. And after that he could see once more what he could make of the mystery of Krishna Chatterjee.
The big Sikh’s broad back lifted and from behind the heap of dark earth he picked up a small but heavy bundle wrapped in a piece of dirty coarse gunny. This was the moment.
Ghote ran forward silently across the soft, dry sand.
And something – a scatter of little sharp-beaked paddy birds, a fleeting shadow – warned the Sikh. With half a glance behind he was up and off, his long legs striding out, heading down the gentle slope of the seashore, out and away by the quickest route that came.
Ghote ran. He felt his legs moving swiftly under him. He would do it. In spite of whatever unlucky accident had warned the Sikh he would catch him.
But one thing he had forgotten.
His own appearance. The multi-coloured fool. Flashing down towards the distant sea, covered from head to foot in a dazzling array of the brightest shades, with the strong sun catching every colour and the breeze sending every loose end flying, he was a sight to catch the eye of even the most absorbed Holi reveller.
There was a sudden, sharp, directed roar of laughter, and then the crowd closed in on him again.
He was caught by both hands, flung round in circles, jumped high, swung low, sluiced once more from chunky syringe and venomous bicycle pump, sloshed and soaked from bucket and jug, puffed and dusted again, green, blue, yellow and above all red. The very air he breathed was smoking with colour.
There was nothing he could do. All the while he kept thinking of the big Sikh, striding out across the beach with the heavy package in the dirty, earth-stained sacking clutched firmly to his chest. And taking with him that sudden, last delusive hope.
As abruptly as he had been caught up the capricious crowd let him go.
Dazed and half-blinded he took a few drunken steps clear of the noise and wild movement. One idea he had kept in his head. Amrit Singh had been running towards the sea. Hardly looking where he was going he set off at a loping run down the gentle slope of the grey sand.
At last he found himself well clear of the revellers, dodging through the scattered groups of narrow beached fishing craft lying careened over to one side or the other. He stopped for a moment and looked both ways along the shore.
Amrit Singh was there.
His tall figure, a single lone presence on this day of mass celebration, could be distinctly seen making its way along the edge of the sea over to where the sluggish creek broke the low coastline. And he was walking. He thought he was safe.
Ghote set out in pursuit, cutting straight across the grey sands to head off the Sikh following the shore line. He wondered why Amrit Singh had not taken the same short cut.
And then he knew. Abruptly his feet began to sink in soft, wet, rippled sucking sand. Should he go back? To retrace his steps and then go round the long way would mean that he would almost certainly lose sight of Amrit Singh. And above all he must stay where he could see him. If the Sikh stopped to bury the heavy little package again while he was unobserved all would be lost.
Ghote decided to plunge on. A little crab scuttled across the wet sand in front of him.
He cursed himself for not having noted that wet gleam as the Sikh must have done. But there was nothing he could do now. Supposing the water-saturated patch got suddenly deeper? People were sucked to death in places like this.
And then he was out.
The sand under his soaked and heavy shoes was suddenly firm. Wet still, but hard now, almost like a cement floor. He began to run.
He found himself moving easily forward and smiled a little to himself, thinking he was not as out of training as D.S.P. Naik had supposed. Tramping the hot, crowded and hard streets of the city was probably every bit as good for the stamina as playing games of hockey. Even if it lacked the same touch of glamour.
He moved swiftly forward, almost as if in a dream. And everything began to take on a matching dreamlike quality. Behind him the sound of the Holi revellers was faint now, shrill, musical and distant. The pounding, brutal noise of reality had simply been left far behind. Above the solid black smudge that represented the dancing crowd he saw, when he glanced for a moment over his shoulder, a light, fabulous and unlikely cloud of pinkish red, the dazing, dazzling powder of a short time before. And, turning back, ahead of him walking with his head down and arms still clutching tight the heavy little bundle, was Amrit Singh. On the smooth, caked sand Ghote’s heavy shoes were making no noise. As if still in a dream he let his legs stretch out in a quiet increase of pace and a second later launched himself almost gently through the air.
His arms closed hard round the tall Sikh’s legs. And he had him. Gold-handed.
But he never got Amrit Singh safely behind the locked door of a C.I.D. headquarters cell. At the railway station he enlisted the help of the local police to make sure his hard-won captive, for all that by then he was being held at his own gunpoint, did not succeed in making a break for it. It was a sensible precaution. But it was Ghote’s undoing.
As he stepped out of the train at Churchgate Station he was greeted by the immaculately white-clad form of Inspector Patel of the Customs. In the sudden realization of the contrast between his own clothes after the Holi assault on them and the Customs man’s spotless appearance he even almost forgot the existence of Amrit Singh, handcuffed firmly to his wrist. But Inspector Patel could plainly think of nothing else.
‘Well, well,’ he said, giving Ghote a quick, piercing look from his thin, chopping blade face. ‘This is a very unfortunate business indeed.’
Ghote looked at him. His bewilderment must have been all too obvious.
‘This business of arresting the man yourself for a purely smuggling offence,’ Inspector Patel explained painstakingly.
‘I had the gold put into the safe at the chowkey where I took him first,’ Ghote said.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Inspector Patel. ‘I dare say that can be put right. But you cannot expect this other business to be forgotten just like that. You had no right to do it, you know. No right. Not for a purely smuggling offence.’
And so it was that Ghote, stained and spattered from his encounter with the celebrating villagers, had to stand mutely among the noisy crowds at Churchgate Station and watch Inspector Patel, in the full glory of a properly entitled Customs officer, lead away the faintly sardonic figure of the notorious Amrit Singh.
Suddenly he thought of the refrigerator fund and what it had been spent on. His world looked very flat.
He waited till late that night to make his apology to Protima. Longer than this he felt he could not put it off. It must be done that day.
But the day could be prolonged.
They were sitting outside in the yard at the back of the house. Already it was beginning to feel a little cooler.
‘We could sleep now,’ Protima said.
‘Just a few minutes more. It is only now that it is pleasant.’
‘And tomorrow? Are you going to be fresh tomorrow if you have such a short night when for once you do not need to?’
‘Tomorrow will be different,’ Ghote said.
Tomorrow you will know that your cherished plans for the refrigerator have fallen to pieces, he thought.
He said nothing more.
From the neatly shaped, heavy bulk of the neem tree nearby came the muffled cheep of a sleepy bird. Ghote sighed.
It was true, it was pleasant out here at this time of day. It was cool. It was calm. Everything was peaceful. You could put everything finally into its place, if you wanted to. Except, perhaps, that some things would have to be looked at before they were put away, and. …
So in the end it was Protima who brought up the subject of the refrigerator fund.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow will be a great day for me. Can you get the money out early?’
Ghote took a breath. One. Two. Three.
‘There is no money,’ he said.
‘No money? But you told –’
‘There was. There was. I did. But – But I have done a very silly thing. I have given the money away.’
‘You have given away five hundred rupees?’
Protima was too astounded, it was obvious, to keep the sheer incredulity out of her voice.
‘Yes,’ Ghote said.
His disappointment at not having the confession received with more understanding put an edge on his voice.
‘Yes,’ he repeated with a touch of bravado, ‘I have given away five hundred rupees.’
Protima rose to her feet like a sudden whirlwind.
‘Who have you given it to? How could you give away so much? Have you no thought of your family even?’
‘Whose money was it?’ Ghote shouted, suddenly swept right away. ‘Who earned the money? Who saved it up? If I had said nothing you would never have even known there was five hundred rupees.’
‘That has nothing to do with it. There were five hundred rupees. Five hundred rupees. And you gave them away. Gave them.’
‘What do you mean that that has nothing to do with it? It has everything to do with it. I have just explained. As far as you are concerned the money simply does not exist.’
‘Oh, I know that. It does not exist indeed. You have given it away.’
‘That is not what I meant at all. Not at all. Why can you never understand a simple piece of logic? If I had given the money away, of course it would exist. But I was saying that it does not exist. As far as you are concerned.’
‘Have you or have you not given the money away?’
‘I told you I had given it away.’
‘Then what do you mean about “if you had given it away”? You have. You have given away the money that was to buy me a refrigerator. After all the years when I needed one so much, when it is the day before we get it, you give the money away. My money.’
‘Your –’
And he stopped himself. He took a deep breath and told himself that he was in the wrong. He had given the money away. Protima was right to be angry. But how to tell her what had happened to the money after he had given it away?
‘Listen, my little one,’ he said.
This was almost his last card. The special term of endearment he kept for her. The expression that meant so much because it was so plainly not really true. The tall, invariably elegant Protima, fine, chiselled, fiery, was never anyone’s ‘little one’. Except his. It was his right.
‘Listen, my little one.’
She stopped. She stood looking at him, even though it was with smouldering, guarded eyes.
‘I can explain everything. It was all the fault of this damned case.’
She seemed restive at this and he hurried on.
‘Look. It was. I tell you it was having to think all the time about such a person as Frank Masters. I saw him as a man of such generosity, coming to this country from the luxuries of America, devoting his time to caring for the vagrants that most of us do nothing about. I began to think about what sort of person he must be, and what sort of person I was.’
‘And so you set up as a little Frank Masters of your own and gave away my refrigerator money?’
He would not be roused.
‘Yes, I did. That is what I did. And only afterwards did I begin to find out what Frank Masters was really like.’
‘What?’ she exclaimed. ‘His death was caused by something bad he had done? Underneath all the while he was –’
‘No, no, no. It was not that. Frank Masters was not a bad man. But he was not the all-good man that I thought either. I found that out in the end. He had his faults. And one of them was even giving away too much.’
Protima was looking doubtful now. He stared at her intently.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘that is what my mistake was. I tried to be like him, and instead of doing my work I began thinking about whether I was a good man or a bad man. And – And there is worse.’
‘What worse?’
‘What happened to the money after I had given it to the poor family of fishing people who needed it to pay off the debt on their boat.’
He was whispering now.
‘They took the money,’ he went on, ‘and they spent every anna on celebrating Holi. It all went up in smoke. Down to the last pie.’
And Protima threw back her head and laughed.
He sat where he was on the rattan chair with the sagging arm and looked up at her. In the faint light he could see her neck, smooth and columnar, as she laughed and laughed with her head back and her whole body shaking.
‘Oh, Mr Policeman,’ she gasped at last. ‘Mr Policeman, what a judge of character you are.’
‘If it comes to a criminal …’
He had begun stiffly, but he could not keep it up. In a moment he too was shaking with mad outbursts of laughter.
From the open window of the house behind them came a plaintive voice.
‘What is it? Why are you laughing?’
Ved.
‘It is all right,’ Protima called. ‘It is just your father. He is such a funny man.’
No reply came. After they had stood in silence for a little Protima walked softly into the house. She came out again almost at once.
‘Asleep,’ she said.
She looked at Ghote down her nose, her eyes sparkling a little.
‘You with your difficult case,’ she said.
‘But it is difficult,’ Ghote said.
‘When you have arrested Amrit Singh with smuggled gold on him?’
‘Yes. I know that. But still I am just in the same position as before over the Masters affair. Certainly Amrit Singh would say nothing more to me all the way back in the train. And I suppose he will never say anything.’
‘Does it matter now?’
‘But of course it does. The situation is exactly the same as before. Frank Masters started to be sick soon after he ate a beef curry. He was poisoned by arsenic trioxide. Arsenic trioxide was stolen from the dispensary at the Masters Foundation just before the meal. Only two people went into that dispensary, both of them without any right to, Amrit Singh and Krishna Chatterjee. It rests exactly equally between them.’
‘But just because Frank Masters was sick,’ Protima said, ‘why should it be poison? I think you are quite wrong about that. Little Ved is sick sometimes, and no one says it is poison then.’
Ghote sighed deeply.
He knew there was never any point in going over such details with Protima. She might be wonderful when you had made a terrible mistake, but she lacked any powers of logical reasoning.
‘Well?’ she said in face of his sigh and silence. ‘Well, is that not right?’
Ghote shook his head.
‘No, I am afraid it cannot be that,’ he said.
‘But why not? Are you saying that Ved has been poisoned so many times? I think you policemen need to come and do a woman’s work in the house.’
‘No,’ Ghote said. ‘I have explained everything.’
‘But I have told you that children get sick for all sorts of reasons. That was something you forgot.’
Suddenly Ghote felt nettled.
‘I did not forget,’ he said sharply. ‘Just, please, leave police work to me and I will leave house matters to you.’
He saw that Protima was ready with a reply. As she invariably was. And he made up his mind that he would not hear it. This was his business.
He jumped up and walked quickly into the house, his head tilted up proudly.
But, once out of Protima’s sight, he checked himself. His old fault again. And it was at that moment that he solved the Masters case.