Inspector ghotes first c.., p.1
Inspector Ghote's First Case, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
INSPECTOR GHOTE’S FIRST CASE
An Inspector Ghote Mystery
H.R.F. Keating
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Allison & Busby.
This eBook edition first published in 2020 by Severn House Digital,
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited.
Copyright © 2008 by H. R. F. Keating.
Introduction copyright © 2020 by Vaseem Khan.
The right of H. R. F. Keating to be identified as the author of this work and the right of Vaseem Khan to be identified as the author of the introduction has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0407-3 (e-book)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
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INTRODUCTION
Sitting on my bookshelf in my east London study is a twenty-year-old and somewhat dog-eared copy of The Perfect Murder. Some of the pages are marked by my own all but illegible scribbles, others are crinkled by a combination of damp and rainwater; not just any rain, mind you, but honest-to-goodness monsoon rain. I bought the book from a roadside seller while living in Mumbai in my twenties, the sort of grinning, roadside sprite that is as much in evidence in H.R.F. Keating’s 1960s vision of India as he was in the India I found myself in. I’d gone there in 1997 to work as a management consultant, and ended up spending ten wonderful years ‘in-country’. My parents hailed from the subcontinent but I’d grown up in Thatcher’s Britain – all I knew of India came from hazy memories handed down to me by my father (he’d been unceremoniously shunted across the newly-created border to Pakistan as a child during Partition) and bits and pieces I’d gleaned from Bollywood movies.
The India that I discovered was a nation on the cusp of transformation, a country beginning the journey from a semi-industrialised agrarian economy – the post-colonial India that Keating introduced to us decades earlier and that had largely stagnated since – to the status, today, of superpower-in-waiting. A country of swamis and snake charmers – as it had always been – but now, increasingly, a country of call-centres and coffee shops, of shopping malls and software firms, of MTV and McDonald’s. A country that Inspector Ghote would find both recognisable and wholly beyond his imagining.
By the time I returned to the UK, a decade later, I had already decided that I would encapsulate those incredible memories of India into a novel. The result was The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, the first in my Baby Ganesh Agency series. These crime stories, featuring a policeman forced into early retirement from the Mumbai police service and subsequently compelled to ‘adopt’ a one-year-old baby elephant, are my attempt to chronicle the tumultuous landscape of the India that I observed first-hand. Five novels and two novellas in the series later, I can admit that these tales of the subcontinent owe a debt to H.R.F. Keating’s Inspector Ghote series.
Back when I was casting around for a suitable template upon which to base The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, my eye alighted on that old copy of The Perfect Murder. I had already had the idea of a policeman who inherits a baby elephant, but I was seeking inspiration that such a work – a crime novel set on the subcontinent – might find an audience. The modern publishing industry was not prone to experimentation, or so my investigations at the time informed me.
As I reread Keating’s novel and recalled the success that his series had enjoyed, I was emboldened. Two years later I completed my manuscript and whizzed it off to a small selection of agents. The rest, as they say, is history.
My protagonist, Inspector Ashwin Chopra, could not be more different to Inspector Ghote. Whereas Ghote is a timid, sometimes obsequious fellow, often forced to bend to the prevailing winds of authority, Chopra is a rigid, bristly-moustachioed man, unfailingly honest, and intractably unyielding. And yet in their DNA we find a common gene – an unwavering commitment to that dark flame that flickers so elusively on the subcontinent – justice. For India is a place where justice is often at the mercy of those with wealth and power. This did not sit well with Ghote, and neither does it sit well with Chopra.
Both Keating and I set out to bring to life these two policemen and the city that they inhabit – Bombay/Mumbai – India’s city of dreams. Yet the respective roads that we travelled to do so could not have been more different. I spent ten years living and working in India; Keating only visited India for the first time a decade after The Perfect Murder was published.
That being the case, one might rightly ask why he chose the subcontinent as his muse in the first place? The answer: he picked up an atlas, flicked through it, and randomly chanced upon a map of India. From such moments of serendipity are legends born.
The novel that Keating subsequently wrote was published in 1964 and entitled The Perfect Murder. It featured Inspector Ganesh Ghote (pronounced Goh-té) of what was then known as the Bombay crime branch, a detective of considerable resourcefulness and tenacity. Ghote is not your typical western policeman. There is little of the maverick about him, no melodrama, no bitter divorces in his past (he is dedicated to his wife Protima), no hard-charging, hard-drinking machismo. He is a minor cog within a vast engine of bureaucracy and at the same time accepts this and chafes against it. He is set above the common man – by virtue of his uniform – and yet condemned to forever belong to the lower echelons of that vast stratified populace that gives India such colour and depth. Time and again in these immensely readable novels we see Ghote at the mercy of bombastic senior officers, villainous landlords and wealthy industrialists. In the face of abuse, obstacles and evil machinations, Ghote remains undeterred, finding his way to resolution in every case through a combination of understated intellect and quiet bloody-mindedness. When asked about the genesis of his seminal character, Keating would later reply, ‘Inspector Ghote came to me in a single flash: I pictured him exactly as he was, transposed as it were by some magic arc from Bombay to London. It was a tremendous piece of luck really, because I don’t think Inspector Ghote will now ever die. At least he’ll live as long as I do.’
Prophetic words. The Perfect Murder has met with enduring success. Upon publication it won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger in the UK and claimed an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Keating was on his way. And after twenty-five wonderful books and a short story collection, Inspector Ghote has joined the pantheon of great sleuths: Holmes, Poirot, Maigret. In his own way, Ghote has that shimmering of Golden Age stardust about him.
The first Ghote arrived more than half a century ago. The world has changed since then and literary sensibilities have moved with the times. Today, controversies abound under the banner of ‘cultural appropriation’, some justified, others perhaps trumpeted beyond the merits of the case by vested interests. Seasoned literary commentators and social media trolls alike are quick to pronounce judgment on writers they feel have not earned the right to depict a particular lived experience. No doubt they would make much of the fact that H.R.F. Keating, by his own admission, knew very little about India when he began researching these novels. His portrayals of India and Indians might offend some, an example of what they might term post-colonial hubris.
I think this is missing the point. That was a different era, with different dynamics at work. Yes, there will be some who find offence merely in the fact that a middle-aged white man who had never been to India should achieve literary acclaim for novels set in the country. Personally, I believe that writers must have the licence to write that which inspires them. Whilst diversity and cultural authenticity in publishing is something I fervently believe in – for obvious reasons – I will also stand by the right of authors to be authors, that is, to journey on those fantastical oceans of the imagination that
We only have to look at how appreciative Indian readers themselves were of his portrayal.
In a 1981 article for India Today (updated in 2014), Sunil Sethi tells the story of Keating’s third visit to Bombay. He is mildly astonished when a young woman, a fan of his books, approaches him to express her admiration. Keating, Sethi tells us, can’t quite believe the reception he received in India: ‘There you are quietly writing away at your desk, and you produce this little book. Your wife likes it, but she’s an interested party. Your agent approves, but he’s also an interested party. Then you come 5,000 miles from home, and people stop you on street-corners to tell you how much they love reading your books. Isn’t it wonderful?’
Of course, the country has changed dramatically since then. I wonder what Keating would make of this modern India? And what would modern Indians make of him and his work? More importantly, how would Ghote fare? I have a feeling that the inspector, a beacon of decency in a sometimes indecent world, would find himself quite at home as India continues its struggle to undo millennia of entrenched social attitudes: corruption, inequality, nepotism, and the debilitating effects of the caste system.
Ultimately, as a lifelong crime reader and now a relatively seasoned writer in the genre, I believe that there is nothing so likeable in the annals of crime fiction as an honourable detective. And in Ghote we find just such a man, a man for the times in which we live.
Vaseem Khan
London, 2020
ONE
Let us find Inspector Ghote in the days when he was simply an Assistant Inspector in the crowded and confused area of Bombay called Dadar. He is holding a letter that has just come through the door of his flat. A long official-looking envelope, the surplus glue sealing its flap – the work of an over-enthusiastic peon – plain to see. So he is careful to tap the letter inside right down to one end of the envelope and then at the opposite end, between twisting thumb and steady finger, he carefully tears off a thin strip. At last he is able to fish out the folded enclosure. A notably stiff sheet. He opens it up, wondering what it can be, and reads.
From the Commissioner of Police, Bombay March 15th, 1960 1 Chaitra, 2017
I am informing you herewith that w.e.f. today’s date you are appointed to the rank of Inspector and posted to the Detection of Crime Branch, Bombay Police. You will take up your duties beginning April 1st next, and should regard yourself as on casual leave during the intervening period.
There was a good deal more of properly bureaucratic information in the letter. But do not imagine that newly created Inspector Ghote is able to read any of it. Tears have come into his eyes. Tears of irrepressible joy. This is the moment he has been hoping for ever since he was old enough to understand what a police officer was and what it was that a detective did. His father, then schoolmaster to the many, many sons, both legitimate and illegitimate, of the Maharajah of Bhopore, had recounted to him, almost before he could understand the words, how once he had watched one Detective Superintendent of Police Howard discover almost magically who had contrived to murder the Maharajah, even aiding him a little in his investigation.
He had recounted, too, many a time, how at their parting from that British deity he had said that, should to his tally of daughters there would ever be added a son, ‘that boy, please God, shall become a police officer.’ The often repeated words had implanted in Ghote’s young mind a determination to one day become one of those demi-gods possessed of an iron resolution to bring to light the perpetrators of crimes of all kinds, and especially the crime of murder.
Now it seemed, at last, the possibility was solidly in his grasp, though the father who had held it up to him and had brought him to Bombay and to college there had long departed this life to await another.
Yes, now, he found himself thinking, my dream has burst into the light of day. And, yes, yes, look at the Hindi version of the date on this letter. The first of Chaitra, Gudi Padva day, the very start of the Hindu calendar. What a fine moment for my new life to begin.
Thoughts pouring on, he said to himself I am no more an officer caught up all day in the petty crimes happening in Dadar. I am at last a member of the Detection of Crime Branch. I am one among the set-apart band of officers who handle only important murder cases or affairs concerning people of the highest influence. I, not all that long out of Nasik Police Training School, son of a lowly schoolmaster, am to be a detective of detectives.
‘Protima,’ he managed at last to call out. ‘Wife, wife. The letter that is just only being pushed through the door. Come and hear what it is telling.’
Protima, the folds of her sari spread wide by the baby she was soon to give birth to, hurried out from the kitchen of the sun-broiled flat right at the top of the barracks block in Dadar police station compound. A home Ghote had sometimes feared he was destined never to leave.
In a moment now he read out to Protima the whole of the Commissioner’s letter, down to the final masterfully scrawled signature.
‘Think, think only, how proud my father would be today,’ he exclaimed, voice rising word by word to a chanted climax. ‘I am at the beginning of the career Pitajee was always hoping would be mine.’
‘If he would be proud,’ Protima answered, her eyes bright with delight, ‘how much more of proud am I. Husband, husband, if … If what is here—’ She patted the rounded shape under her sari. ‘If what is here is a boy, then perhaps he too will one day be following your footsteps.’
‘But-but even so,’ Ghote went on, heart pounding, ‘even so my son should not be born in this hundred per cent too small junior officer’s flat.’
He came to a sudden, perhaps a too sudden, decision.
‘No. We must ek dum be finding somewhere altogether more right for a full inspector to have. Yes, a flat where I can be having a phone. A phone. An officer of Detection of Crime Branch must be in constant touch. Yes, a flat where we can at least get, before long, a priority phone. Definitely. We must begin this evening itself to look for something, and it must be not too far from Crawford Market HQ also.’
But unexpectedly now Protima failed to throw herself into the plan. She stood there altogether silent.
Looking at her face, a picture of doubt now, Ghote frowned.
‘But what for are you all at once unhappy?’ he asked.
‘Oh, well … But-but—’
‘What it is? You are feeling not so good, is it?’
‘No, no. Not at all. Baby is altogether happy.’
‘You are sure? You are not hiding from me something?’
‘No. No, I am saying it. All is well-well. But-but it is something else.’
‘What of else? What can there be?’
She looked down to the concrete floor at her feet.
‘But what it is?’
‘I-I cannot say.’
‘No, come, you can be saying whatsoever you are wanting to your husband, just only now full Inspector Ghote.’
‘But it is that.’
‘That? That? What that is this?’
‘It is because you are now Inspector Ghote and must be shifting straight away to a better flat. And I had so hoped …’
‘Hoped? I am not at all understanding.’
Then, in a burst of words, Protima brought it out.
‘It is Hamlet. Tonight, when you were still an Assistant Inspector here at Dadar PS, we were going – you had promised and promised – to see that film they are at last again showing. One week only at Eros in Queen’s Road. I have been longing and longing to see since I was at college only.’
‘Hamlet. My news was driving it altogether out of my mind. Your favourite play of all, the one you are reading aloud so often. But we must go. We can go. Why did you not remind at once?’
‘You were deciding, deciding so firmly. We had to go to look for a flat. One with a phone, and not too far from Crawford Market. All of a sudden you were deciding. It was so unlike you.’
