Inspector Ghote stood deep in thought. He was in a dilemma. It was the matter of the Hashambhai son, young Musa. Undoubtedly the young fellow was the one responsible for the theft of rupees one lakh from his own parents. But no doubt either about two other things. The first was that those hundred thousand rupees were almost certainly ‘black money’, the hidden-away unbankable accumulation of cash payments not entered in the books of Mr Hashambhai’s watch-making business, one of the most prosperous in all Bombay. The second was that Mr Hashambhai was a person of ‘influence’. He had friends in high places. Doing anything that displeased Mr Hashambhai, like getting the Hashambhai name in the papers, would bring trouble. A word in the Commissioner’s ear. Something like that only.
But nonetheless, young Musa Hashambhai had stolen that money. He himself had all the evidence necessary. He ought to arrest the boy, no matter how indulgent about the whole matter his father might be. Even, he owed it to the boy himself. One big shock now, when he was seventeen-eighteen years of age, and he might behave himself well for the rest of his life.
On the other hand, Mr Hashambhai did have that influence and might well use it. Nor did he perhaps deserve to get back that tainted money.
Suddenly Ghote realised something. While he had been standing stock-still in thought here on the pavement beside Churchgate Station he had been witnessing a crime, witnessing it without taking it in at all.
Never mind that it was not the most serious crime in the Indian Penal Code. It was a crime. Never mind that the perpetrator was no more than a child, a chubby little boy of eight or so with an air of bouncy joyfulness about him, what he was doing there on the opposite pavement at this very moment was a crime.
Only, as the little devil was on the pavement opposite and half the roadway betweeen them was blocked by one of Bombay’s most curious sights, there was nothing that he himself could do to stop that crime taking place. But he could probably prevent the criminal getting away.
What the boy was doing was slitting with a razor blade stuck into an old cork the underneath of a big blue leather handbag on the arm of a rather plump European lady in a boldly flower-patterned dress, who stood peering into the view-finder of her camera recording Bombay’s curiosity, the dabbawallas.
The dabbawallas, who were occupying the roadway and blocking him off from his quarry, were very much worth photographing for a foreign tourist, Ghote thought. Each morning of Bombay’s working week they collected up from homes in the suburbs home-cooked tiffin for husbands working in offices in the heart of the city. Each lunch was placed in four round cans fitting neatly one on top of the other into their carrier marked in red paint with its code numbers. The dabbawallas took them to the nearest suburban rail station and went with them to the Churchgate terminus. There, in the roadway outside, the tiffin-carriers were rapidly sorted according to destination and placed in long wooden racks which other dabbawallas would carry on their heads at a fast trot to offices all over Bombay’s commercial and administrative heart. It was a sight to see – and to record on film. Only, unfortunately, while you were concentrating on doing that you were at risk of having your pocket picked. Or handbag slit open.
Ghote stepped through the criss-cross jumble of wooden racks. He waited impatiently while half a dozen trucks clattered by on the clear side of the road. At last he darted over, keeping his eye all the while on his chubby little target. Then, as the boy made off with suspicious nonchalance in the direction of the pavement-dwellers’ huts standing in tumble-down confusion some quarter of a mile distant, he launched himself forward at a run. In less than a minute he had the little thief firmly by the ear, digging a finger sharply in, a trick he had long ago learnt to make sure no slippery captive got away.
Even as he made his catch he was aware that the little thief’s crime had been discovered. From behind his back, some fifteen or twenty yards away there rose a wail of purest English anguish.
‘My bag. It’s empty. My purse. It’s gone. My passport.’
Keeping the urchin firmly held in his special grip, Ghote wheeled him round and marched him back towards the outraged lady in the flowery summer dress, her indignant voice joined now by other shrill comments. ‘It’s too bad, too bad.’ ‘I just hope they catch him, whoever it is.’ ‘Yes, and put him where he belongs – for as long as they can.’ ‘If they want tourists they should make sure they protect them.’
‘Madam,’ he said to the outraged victim, ‘kindly be no longer worrying. I am a police inspector, Inspector Ghote by name, and I have had the jolly good luck to catch the thief of your possessions.’
He reached down with his free hand, grasped the little criminal’s ragged khaki shorts by their top and gave a good tug. Passport and purse, cunningly tucked away, fell to the ground. The boy opened his mouth in a big round ‘O’ and let out a howl of dismay.
The circle of British ladies – they all looked much alike to Ghote, large, pink-faced, heads tight with curls golden or greying, all flowery-frocked – peered down at the small figure.
‘Oh,’ said a voice from among them. ‘The poor mite.’
A chorus broke out at once. ‘Yes, the poor little thing.’ ‘Oh, he can’t be more than six or seven.’ ‘Was it him really?’
The lady with the razor-ripped blue bag was as transformed as any of her companions.
‘Inspector,’ she said, bending forward and addressing Ghote confidentially, ‘Inspector, don’t you think – he’s only a bit of a thing, isn’t he? – don’t you think you could let him go? I’ve got my purse back. I don’t mind.’
Ghote, finger crooked hard in the boy’s ear, looked at her stone-faced.
‘Madam,’ he replied, ‘I have caught the little riff-raff red-handed only.’
‘Yes, I know Inspector. But all the same … I’m sure he’ll never be so naughty again. He’s got such a sweet little face.’
And it was true that the boy, who probably hardly understood a word of English but who knew a tone of voice when he heard one, had stopped howling and was looking up at the ring of large pink faces with the hint of an endearing smile trembling on his chubby features.
‘Madam,’ Ghote said once more, ‘I am suspecting that you are wanting this little anti-social to go free because you are thinking what a very, very great nuisance it would be for you to give evidence tomorrow morning at Esplanade Police Court.’
‘Inspector. What a suggestion.’
And the lady was supported by a new chorus asserting her public-spiritedness on numerous occasions, and explaining that they were a group on a tour of India specially designed for ladies with ‘inquiring minds’ and that they were not due to leave for Agra and the Taj Mahal for another three days.
But Inspector Ghote’s countenance remained unmoved.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It is no good your hearts becoming pools of tears. I must hand the culprit to some passing constable to be kept in custody until his appearance before the Magistrate. Yes, definitely.’
And indeed, as if by magic, at that moment a constable hove into sight, not at all Bobby-like in his floppy blue uniform and little boat-shaped blue and yellow cap, but a formidably tough-looking figure for all that.
Ghote led his captive away. By the ear.
But, somewhat to the surprise of the British ladies, after speaking to the constable for a minute or so he returned still gripping the little chubby bag-slitter.
‘That fellow was not at all suitable,’ he said, jerking his chin in the direction of the departing policeman.
And then, apparently thinking it was not quite the proper thing to imply to these foreign visitors that any of the Bombay police force was not ready for whatever task they were called on to perform, he added hastily, ‘He had many, many other important duties at this time only.’
So they waited, a fairly silent little crowd, while the dabbawallas in the roadway completed their sorting-out, swept up their long wooden racks on to their heads and departed briskly for where lunchers waited at their desks. Once or twice one or two of the group tried suggesting again that the little thief, now looking doubly appealing, should be let off after all. But one glance at Ghote’s stern face shrivelled their pleas half spoken.
‘What is your good name, please?’ he inquired firmly of the theft’s victim.
‘And at which hotel are you staying?’
Name and address were supplied, and once more silence fell. But before long another constable came into view, a stout old veteran by the look of him. Ghote called out sharply and the man broke into a slow, dignified trot, only to arrive puffing and panting.
The little thief was handed into his custody. He grasped him by the arm and set off at a ponderous pace. Ghote took a rapid farewell of the assembled British ladies and departed, rather hurriedly, in the direction of the distant tumble of pavement-dwellers’ huts.
The visitors stood where they were, watching the sad little thief being led off and clucking in helpless dismay at his fate. But he was hardly fifty yards distant when, with a swift wriggle and a sharp jerk, he slipped from the grip of the puffing old veteran constable, whirled round and headed away in the direction he had first made off in, weaving through the crowds on the pavement and in the roadway like a tiny tadpole slipping between slow-moving carp.
‘Well, I never,’ exclaimed the lady with the ruined blue handbag.
But time was getting on. There were other items on the group’s morning itinerary, more for ‘inquiring minds’ to see and assimilate. The hire cars that had brought them to Churchgate Station were waiting with the guide that the tour operator had supplied.
‘We are now going to Victoria Gardens Zoo,’ he announced. ‘It is very, very interesting.’
Some of the ladies appeared to doubt this. They looked as if they felt Bombay ought to provide something meatier for their inquiring minds than a mere zoo.
But they were destined to see a sight that would provide them with plenty of mental fodder, and plenty to talk about, well before they reached Victoria Gardens.
In fact, they had gone less than a quarter of a mile on their northwards journey before, with their cars stuck in a minor jam, they had the unexpected sight of Inspector Ghote once more.
He was loping along on the far side of the road, looking somehow simultaneously intent and uninterested, but moving all the time with tremendous purposefulness. And then – there, only some ten yards ahead of him – the keener-sighted of the touring ladies spotted the little chubby escapee pickpocket.
They had better luck than that even. Before the bullock pulling a little kerosene-tank cart that had been holding them up had been persuaded to move on, the craning ladies actually saw the boy dive into one of the pavement shacks, a desperately slanting affair of sagging bamboo poles, pieces of rusted corrugated iron, stretched gunny sacks and odd lengths of soiled plastic. A moment later Ghote plunged in after him to emerge grasping this time, not the chubby eight-year-old but a tall, hangdog individual in a greasy European-style suit.
Then, surprise on surprise, who should come running up from behind but the very constable Ghote had not handed the little thief over to, the tough-looking one who had had ‘many, many other important duties’. And in a trice a pair of handcuffs was round the wrists of the man in the greasy suit and the constable was marching him off, a grin of triumph on his face.
‘How very strange,’ one of the ladies in the first car said.
‘It certainly is,’ another echoed.
‘I wonder what’s happened,’ said a third.
The next day, after a letter had been delivered to the hotel summoning the victim of the bag-slitting to the Esplanade Police Court, the ladies of the tour, accompanying her en masse, had their inquiring minds happily satisfied.
First, the summoned witness had had to give her evidence. Then Inspector Ghote had recounted how he had followed the absconding thief and had tracked him down to a pavement hut in Maharishi Karve Road where he had found the accused in possession of numerous articles stolen on such-and-such dates. And finally the man in the greasy suit, which was looking even greasier for a night in the lock-up, had been sentenced to six months Rigorous Imprisonment.
As soon as the ladies had their chance, they surrounded Inspector Ghote on the courthouse steps, demanding the full story in their pink-faced clucking voices. And Ghote, with a deprecating wag of his head, eventually obliged.
‘You see, ladies,’ he said, ‘it was like this. I was not wishing for that boy to be too much punished. He was after all seven or eight years of age only. But I was thinking that it would be a very, very good thing if we could put behind the bars the blacksheep who was making him commit those acts of thieving. As you know the golden opportunity never knocks twice. So I was wanting the boy to escape, hoping he would go straight back to the boss of his gang.’
‘And that was why you handed him over to that fat old constable and not to the other?’ said the lady with the most inquiring mind of them all.
‘Oh, yes, madam, you are seeing that straight away. It is most sagacious of you. Very, very sagacious indeed.’
‘So, when you had that little talk with the first one, you were telling him to back you up when you started to follow the boy?’ asked another of the ladies, not to be outdone in the sagacious line.
‘Very, very correct, madam.’
‘And the boy?’ asked a third lady, not perhaps as sagacious but very tender-hearted.
‘Well, madam, I am thinking that finding himself caught in the act would scare him to the bones, especially when he found in the end he had not escaped so jolly easily. So I am letting him go with one cuff on the head only.’
‘Oh, the poor mite,’ exclaimed the tender-hearted lady.
But she was alone in her tenderness. ‘No more than he deserved.’ ‘He’ll have learnt his lesson.’ ‘A bit of cuff does ’em no harm.’ That was the chorus.
‘Well, Inspector,’ said the lady who had stood in the witness-box and delivered her testimony with assurance, ‘it’s not far off lunch-time, and I think all of us would be delighted if you would join us at our hotel.’
But Inspector Ghote shook his head.
‘Very regret, madam and ladies,’ he said, ‘I am still having to give evidence in a case here. You see, yesterday after we had met I was arresting the son of a certain very, very wealthy watch-maker. The boy had stolen a large sum from the house of his parents itself and, whatever they are feeling and whatever they are saying to anybody influential, it is right only that the young fellow should receive some kind of shock treatment. So good day to you, ladies. Good day, please.’
1984