LITMIR.BIZ

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is not far from being, out of sheer age, as mad as that bus-starter who grabbed me outside the Tick Tock Watchworks. “Time kya? Time kya?” And if he is as confused in his mind as this, what good will be whatever I do manage to get out of him about Ganpatrao Pendke?

      But then something the wandering old fellow had said mysteriously twanged an altogether different chord in his head. Running away. Rustom Fardoomji, too, was said to have run away. And been brought back to the scene of his crime. Almost at once. By a traffic constable, to be arrested by expeditious A.I. Lobo. But was there not something somehow wrong with that? How had the constable known Rustom Fardoomji was to be brought back as a culprit? The sequence of events was back to front. So was Lobo definitely wrong, too? And was the solution of the watch-shop murder, after all, to be found here in Dharbani?

      “But now,” the old soldier was cackling on, “we have the panchayat. In those days people used to go to the brahmin’s house, and he would say what was right or wrong. But government is saying we must be having democracy. So there is a panchayat. And at the head of those five men we must vote for is the sarpanch. Bapurao, son of our patil, is our sarpanch. Bapurao’s son is known by the name of Ganpatrao, you know.”

      Home, Ghote thought in a burst of delight. Home, home, home. Ganpatrao Pendke arrived at.

      Yet, surely, Ganpatrao’s father cannot be head of the village panchayat council. The D.G.P. had definitely stated that Ganpatrao was now, with the death of his cousin, heir to the Patil. So how could Ganpatrao’s father still be alive?

      But never mind. Ganpatrao’s name had been spoken. How now to take advantage of that?

      “Ganpatrao,” he said loudly into the old soldier’s ear. “Is he a good man? A bad man?”

      “No.”

      What the devil did that mean? He had been too hasty, damn it.

      “No,” the ancient soldier said, clutching again at Ghote’s shirt sleeve. “No, Bapurao is dead. Sometimes I forget things. But, yes, Ganpatrao is dead. No, no, no. Bapurao is the one who is dead. Now. Last year. So Jambuvant, who is the husband of the Patil’s daughter, has been made by him sarpanch of our village. And what happens? You have a dispute with your neighbor. You take it to the panchayat for their decision. You pay the Sarpanch, as head of the panchayat, twenty-five rupees to tell the other four how to vote. And your neighbor pays him thirty. So the Sarpanch refuses any decision, and the dispute remains. Now, when I was a boy the brahmin settled everything. Oh, these are evil times, evil, evil.”

      Oh God, on to evil times again. And Ganpatrao lost.

      “Yes, yes. Evil times. The age of Kali. Evil. Evil. You are knowing Ganpatrao?”

      And the old fellow actually stopped for Ghote’s answer. For a moment.

      “Ganpatrao, the greatest murderer alive. I myself know it. I heard him say it. He killed his cousin-brother, you know. Killed him. And when the brahmin who serves the Patil’s house—he is just only a boy, but a brahmin is a brahmin—when that boy comes to the house each day, does Ganpatrao show him any respect? No, no, no. So last year—no, the year before—just after the monsoons, he killed his cousin-brother Ramrao. You are knowing Ramrao?”

      Ghote sat amazed. Ramrao, Ramrao Pendke, the victim of the Tick Tock Watchworks murder back in distant Bombay. Was this old man actually a witness to Ganpatrao confessing to the killing? But—but how could the old fool have been a witness to that confession if it had been made, as he seemed to believe, two years ago? Or perhaps one year ago?

      Damn it, Ramrao Pendke had been battered to death in Bombay only some forty-eight hours ago. So how could, how possibly could this wandering-witted idiot have heard Ganpatrao confessing to the murder a year ago? Or, no, two years ago even?

      It made no sense. No sense at all.

      Was it, though, somehow conceivable that some rumor was flitting here and there about the village? A hint that the day before yesterday Ganpatrao, Ganpatrao the nefarious, had killed his cousin-brother in Bombay?

      But could the times fit for that? Surely it must take some little while for even the tiniest hints of such a secret to become a matter of common gossip for this idiot of an old soldier to pick up? But, if he had not, then how was it he was saying this about Ganpatrao? Was it no more than a recollection of something the old fool had heard long ago coming to the surface now? Some talk of a quarrel between the cousins and somebody saying what they imagined Ganpatrao might have liked to have done?

      And, damn it, the answer lay there in the old man’s head somewhere. In its inevitable place in the layers and layers of time laid down there.

      Ghote was swept by a consuming spasm of rage. He would have liked to jump up, seize the old man by the shoulders, and shake and shake him until somehow the right one of those layers of time came to the top and he could take from it his right answer.

      But there was no doing that. The years layered there inside had collapsed and subsided into one another like the floors of some rickety Bombay building succumbing at last to the toll of many, many disintegrating monsoons. If the old fellow had once seen or heard something that might even now be of use, it was lost. Lost forever.

      Rage towering up to obliteration point, Ghote did now jump to his feet. Jumped to his feet and, almost snarling aloud, stamped away.

      FOUR

      It took Ghote a good long while to calm down. To seem to have been on the point of finding out something about Ganpatrao Pendke at last, and then to have been presented with a tale of murder some two years before the victim had been found dead, it was infuriating beyond endurance. And time had gone by. He had sat outside that wretched chaikhana for heaven knows how long waiting for the tea-slurping elders to open a conversation so that his inquiries should not be obvious, and in the end it had all been a waste of time.

      With anger boiling in him, at countryside life and ways, at himself, he tramped here and there about the big village, along close-crowded, rubbish-strewn lanes, past scores of the little houses, their open doorways giving glimpses of everyday goings-on within, past children playing in the dust, past more than once the same cluster of men gambling with a pack of greasy cards, past the village blacksmith’s, the tree outside his hut adorned with a dozen dangling bicycle tires and orangey inner tubes. He stopped short once only, when turning a corner at the end of one more narrow, urine-smelling, dung-fires-aromatic lane, he found himself not twenty yards distant from the sole two-story building he had come across, a big, blank-walled, startlingly white-painted place that could only be the house of the Patil.

      He had wheeled around then, as if confronted by a buffalo gone crazy. Plagued by the taunting thought that, while he himself had spent all that time getting nowhere, back in Bombay expeditious A.I. Lobo might well have persuaded Rustom Fardoomji to repeat his confession in front of a magistrate. Whether that confession was obtained by fair means or foul, once made, rescind in court later though Fardoomji might, he would have a hard time escaping being found guilty. While all that he himself had to set against such a case was the garbled talk of a man so advanced in years that he did not even remember whose side he had fought on long ago in Africa, or perhaps here in India. That, and the belief of the two Dhunjeebhoy brothers that the relative they hardly knew would not have committed a crime of such brutality.

      At last, exhausted more by sustained fury than by his tramping march, he slumped onto the low wall surrounding a small whitewashed shrine near one edge of the village, a little red flag drooping from a bamboo mast above it. For as much as ten minutes—though he had ceased almost entirely to make any semiconscious count of time—he sat on, too tired even to think anymore.

      But then, glancing up, he found he was looking straight into the open doorway of one of the village’s more prosperous houses—its roof was covered in red Mangalore tiles—and he was seeing a scene that took him back to his boyhood days and simultaneously sent a prickle of revived hope through his numbed brain.

      All he had seen was a man, seated on the hut’s floor, having his underarms shaved

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