Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (42 page)

“Where
did we go wrong mother? Where did we go wrong?”

The Inspector Ghote
stories are a throwback to the Golden Age of Mystery. Bombay’s intrepid CID
representative dominates each moment in a way few detectives have since Charlie
Chan and Philo Vance. And, in contrast to the more anonymous heroes who came to
prominence in the hard-boiled era and beyond, Ganesh Ghote stays in the
reader’s mind as a presence long after the book has been closed.

Fortunately, unlike the
great masters who created those heroes of the Golden Age, H. R. F. Keating is
very much alive and working at the top of his form. His style, like his
characters, is warm and ingratiating. He persuades his reader gently with the
strength of his writing skills.

Keating is active in
other areas of the mystery field, as an essayist, editor, and for a time, a
distinguished mystery reviewer for the
Times
of London.

“Inspector Ghote and the
Miracle Baby”first appeared in the
Catholic Herald
in England, and later in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
under the title
“Inspector Ghote and the Miracle” in 1973. Unique among Christmas stories, it
is highly satisfying with its understated humor. Detective fiction needs more
heroes like Inspector Ghote, and more Ghote stories.

What has Santa Claus got
in store for me, Inspector Ghote said to himself, bleakly echoing the current
cheerful Bombay newspaper advertisements, as he waited to enter the office of
Assistant Commissioner Naik that morning of December 25th.

Whatever the A.C.had
lined up for him, Ghote knew it was going to be nasty. Ever since he had
recently declined to turn up for “voluntary” hockey, A.C.Naik had viewed him
with sad-eyed disapproval. But what exact form would his displeasure take?

Almost certainly it would
have something to do with the big Navy Week parade that afternoon, the chief
preoccupation at the moment of most of the ever-excitable and drama-loving
Bombayites. Probably he would be ordered out into the crowds watching the Fire
Power demonstration in the bay, ordered to come back with a beltful of
pickpocketing arrests.

“Come,” the A.C.‘s voice
barked out.

Ghote went in and stood
squaring his bony shoulders in front of the papers-strewn desk.

“Ah, Ghote, yes. Tulsi
Pipe Road for you. Up at the north end. Going to be big trouble there. Rioting.
Intercommunity outrages even.”

Ghote’s heart sank even
deeper than he had expected. Tulsi Pipe Road was a two-kilometers-long
thoroughfare that shot straight up from the Racecourse into the heart of a
densely crowded mill district where badly paid Hindus, Muslims in hundreds and
Goans by the thousand, all lived in prickling closeness, either in great areas
of tumbledown hutments or in high tottering chawls, floor upon floor of massed
humanity. Trouble between the religious communities there meant hell, no less.

“Yes, A.C.?” he said,
striving not to sound appalled.

“We are having a virgin
birth business, Inspector.”

“Virgin birth, A.C.sahib?”

“Come, man, you must have
come across such cases.”

 “I am sorry, A.C.,” Ghote
said, feeling obliged to be true to hard-won scientific principles. “I am
unable to believe in virgin birth.”

The A.C.’s round face
suffused with instant wrath.

“Of course I am not
asking you to believe in virgin birth, man! It is not you who are to believe:
it is all those Christians in the Goan community who are believing it about a
baby born two days ago. It is the time of year, of course. These affairs are
always coming at Christmas. I have dealt with half a dozen in my day.”

“Yes, A.C.,” Ghote said,
contriving to hit on the right note of awe.

“Yes. And there is only
one way to deal with it. Get hold of the girl and find out the name of the man.
Do that pretty damn quick and the whole affair drops away to nothing, like
monsoon water down a drain.”

“Yes, A.C.”

“Well, what are you
waiting for, man? Hop it!”

“Name and address of the
girl in question, A.C.sahib.”

The A.C.’s face darkened
once more. He padded furiously over the jumble of papers on his desk top. And
at last he found the chit he wanted.

“There you are, man. And
also you will find there the name of the Head Constable who first reported the
matter. See him straightaway. You have got a good man there, active, quick on
his feet, sharp. If he could not make that girl talk, you will be having a first-class
damn job, Inspector.”

Ghote located Head
Constable Mudholkar one hour later at the local chowkey where he was stationed.
The Head Constable confirmed at once the blossoming dislike for a sharp bully
that Ghote had been harboring ever since A.C.Naik had praised the fellow. And,
what was worse, the chap turned out to be very like the A.C.in looks as well.
He had the same round type of face, the same puffy-looking lips, even a similar
soft blur of mustache. But the Head Constable’s appearance was nevertheless a
travesty of the A.C.‘s. His face was, simply, slewed.

To Ghote’s prejudiced
eyes, at the first moment of their encounter, the man’s features seemed
grotesquely distorted, as if in some distant time some god had taken one of the
Head Constable’s ancestors and had wrenched his whole head sideways between two
omnipotent god-hands.

But, as the fellow supplied
him with the details of the affair, Ghote forced himself to regard him with an
open mind, and he then had to admit that the facial twist which had seemed so
pronounced was in fact no more than a drooping corner of the mouth and of one
ear being oddly longer than the other.

Ghote had to admit, too,
that the chap was efficient. He had all the circumstances of the affair at his
fingertips. The girl, named D’Mello, now in a hospital for her own safety, had
been rigorously questioned both before and after the birth, but she had
steadfastly denied that she had ever been with any man. She was indeed not the
sort, the sole daughter of a Goan railway waiter on the Madras Express, a quiet
girl, well brought up though her parents were poor enough; she attended Mass
regularly with her mother, and the whole family kept themselves to themselves.

“But with those
Christians you can never tell,” Head Constable Mudholkar concluded.

Ghote felt inwardly
inclined to agree. Fervid religion had always made him shrink inwardly, whether
it was a Hindu holy man spending 20 years silent and standing upright or
whether it was the Catholics, always caressing lifeless statues in their
churches till glass protection had to be installed, and even then they still
stroked the thick panes. Either manifestation rendered him uneasy.

That was the real reason,
he now acknowledged to himself, why he did not want to go and see Miss D’Mello
in the hospital where she would be surrounded by nuns amid all the trappings of
an alien religion, surrounded with all the panoply of a newly found goddess.

Yet go and see the girl
he must.

But first he permitted
himself to do every other thing that might possibly be necessary to the case.
He visited Mrs. D’Mello, and by dint of patient wheedling, and a little forced
toughness, confirmed from her the names of the only two men that Head Constable
Mudholkar—who certainly proved to know inside-out the particular chawl where
the D’Mellos lived—had suggested as possible fathers. They were both young
men—a Goan, Charlie Lobo, and a Sikh, Kuldip Singh.

The Lobo family lived one
floor below the D’Mellos. But that one flight of dirt-spattered stairs,
bringing them just that much nearer the courtyard tap that served the whole
crazily leaning chawl, represented a whole layer higher in social status. And
Mrs. Lobo, a huge, tightly fat woman in a brightly flowered Western-style
dress, had decided views about the unexpected fame that had come to the people
upstairs.

“Has my Charlie been
going with that girl?” she repeated after Ghote had managed to put the
question, suitably wrapped up, to the boy. “No, he has not. Charlie, tell the
man you hate and despise trash like that.”

“Oh, Mum,” said Charlie,
a teen-age wisp of a figure suffocating in a necktie beside his balloon-hard
mother.

“Tell the man, Charlie.”

And obediently Charlie
muttered something that satisfied his passion-filled parent. Ghote put a few
more questions for form’s sake, but he realized that only by getting hold of
the boy on his own was he going to get any worthwhile answers. Yet it turned
out that he did not have to employ any cunning. Charlie proved to have a strain
of sharp slyness of his own, and hardly had Ghote climbed the stairs to the
floor above the D’Mellos where Kuldip Singh lived when he heard a whispered
call from the shadow-filled darkness below.

“Mum’s got her head over
the stove,” Charlie said. “She don’t know I slipped out.”

“There is something you
have to tell me?” Ghote said, acting the indulgent uncle. “You are in
trouble—that’s it, isn’t it?”

“My only trouble is Mum,”
the boy replied. “Listen, mister, I had to tell you. I love Miss D’Mello—yes, I
love her. She’s the most wonderful girl ever was.”

“And you want to marry
her, and because you went too far before—”

“No, no, no. She’s far
and away too good for me. Mister, I’ve never even said ‘Good morning’ to her in
the two years we’ve lived here. But I love her, mister, and I’m not going to
have Mum make me say different.”

Watching him slip
cunningly back home, Ghote made his mental notes and then turned to tackle
Kuldip Singh, his last comparatively easy task before the looming interview at
the nun-ridden hospital he knew he must have.

Kuldip Singh, as Ghote
had heard from Head Constable Mudholkar, was different from his neighbors. He
lived in this teeming area from choice not necessity. Officially a student, he
spent all his time in a series of antisocial activities—protesting, writing manifestoes,
drinking. He seemed an ideal candidate for the unknown and elusive father.

Ghote’s suspicions were
at once heightened when the young Sikh opened his door. The boy, though old
enough to have a beard, lacked this status symbol. Equally he had discarded the
obligatory turban of his religion. But all the Sikh bounce was there, as Ghote
discovered when he identified himself.

“Policewallah, is it?
Then I want nothing at all to do with you. Me and the police are enemies, bhai.
Natural enemies.”

“Irrespective of such
considerations,” Ghote said stiffly, “it is my duty to put to you certain
questions concerning one Miss D’Mello.”

The young Sikh burst into
a roar of laughter.

“The miracle girl, is it?”
he said. “Plenty of trouble for policemen there, I promise you. Top-level
rioting coming from that business. The fellow who fathered that baby did us a
lot of good.”

Ghote plugged away a good
while longer—the hospital nuns awaited— but for all his efforts he learned no
more than he had in that first brief exchange. And in the end he still had to
go and meet his doom.

Just what he had expected
at the hospital he never quite formulated to himself. What he did find was
certainly almost the exact opposite of his fears. A calm reigned. White-habited
nuns, mostly Indian but with a few Europeans, flitted silently to and fro or
talked quietly to the patients whom Ghote glimpsed lying on beds in long wards.
Above them swung frail but bright paper chains in honor of the feast day, and
these were all the excitement there was.