LITMIR.BIZ

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buy, if he could, at the Bharat Stores, whose advertisement in the guide’s pages promised “Airplane Quality at Submarine Prices,” a genuine Nagpuri sari for his wife to make up for this sudden call away. He considered briefly the book’s assurance that he was here “far away from the clog clog of machines, the whizzing trains, the blaring horns and sirens” and that the people in this unhurried part of India were “very urbane and hospitable. Yet at times as nasty as anybody.” And with that tiny warning jab in his ears he fell asleep.

      First thing in the morning he set out to discover the times for the long-distance bus that would take him to the nearest point on the highway to Village Dharbani. To his dismay he found it almost ready to depart. No submarine-priced sari for Protima just yet.

      For three hours or more the chugging vehicle took him through the sun-scorched countryside. Past the orange orchards around Nagpur itself they went, into the cotton-growing area, through the little town of Ramkhed, where in the police station S.P. Verma would be at his desk safe from any possibility of upsetting the powerful Patil of Dharbani. Finally they came to the setting-down place for the village.

      As the bus pulled away in a cloud of puffing dust, Ghote looked about him, senses alert.

      He was, he realized abruptly, back home in a way. Home, not in familiar Bombay, but in the countryside in which he had spent his boyhood. A mile or so in the distance, down a meandering earth track, he could make out Dharbani itself, huddled in the shadow of a low hill. It was evidently a village a good deal larger than his own native place. But it was bound to be still, he thought, of much the same sort. And different from Bombay as milk from water, not just in that Nagpur guidebook’s freedom from the clog clog of machines and whizzing of trains, but in the very time that it moved by.

      Here hours would no longer be ticked out in Sahar Airport’s digital seconds. Time would not be measured even in days and weeks, but in the slow round of the six seasons, spring into the hot weather, hot weather into the rains, rains into autumn, autumn into winter, winter into the cold weather, cold weather into spring once more.

      And, he thought, coming back to the present with a swallow of apprehension, in the village ahead, where everybody had all the time in the world to stop, to stare, to wonder, it would not be at all as easy to make inquiries as in Bombay. There the police were an everyday sight. An officer was answered if he questioned. There people understood they were in danger, if they kept silent, of a swift slapping or being hustled into the lock-up. But here there would be, if he remembered village ways rightly, only sullen unwillingness. Yet before the day was over he had to find out for certain, without any official powers, whether or not Ganpatrao Pendke, grandson of the village’s powerful patil, had been away from home at the time his cousin-brother had been beaten to death in Bombay. If he were to fail it was more than likely A.I. Lobo would march his man in front of a magistrate and get that possibly dubious confession formally recorded.

      He cleared his mouth of the dust from the departing bus, straightened his shoulders, and set off along the track to Dharbani and its secrets.

      The path by no means led straight to its objective, though it could have nowhere but the village to go to. It jigged and jogged this way and that, as if no one walking its length could ever be in any sort of hurry. Here it skirted a miserable tree. There it slanted off toward a rock, time-sunk deep in the dusty earth, its side marked by a smear of bright red paste that showed it was an object of worship. But, Ghote observed, the path, for all its aimlessness, was not unused. Besides buffalo hoofmarks and the ruts of the lumbering carts they pulled, bicycle tracks crisscrossed each other plentifully.

      So the inhabitants ahead are accustomed to go some way out into the wider world, he thought. Dharbani, unlike his own native village in his boyhood, had been touched by the hurrying world, if only lightly. Once or twice, indeed, he even made out the tracks of a motorcycle, and a powerful one, too, to judge by the long scatters of earth it had sent spurting away at the path’s twists and bends.

      So, he thought, I will not be able to count all the time on my memories of village life. A mistake I must not make.

      He marched steadily on.

      At what he judged must be some two-thirds of the way to the village he saw the path seeming to lead to a field where a dozen or so women were at work, backs bent in the glare of the sun, harsh-colored saris tucked between their legs. Would they, if he stopped to talk, give him an idea of how things stood in the village ahead?

      But, well before he reached the field, the meandering path took a turn away. He abandoned the idea of approaching the women in favor of later finding someone likely to be more awake to the village’s secret, inner life.

      He came to the outskirts soon enough, a string of untidy mud huts with roofs of curling palm leaves. The quarter, he decided, where such necessary people as tanners, workers in leather, washermen, and the barber would be segregated from the higher castes. So Dharbani had not altogether joined the modern, bustling world too busy for ancient distinctions.

      Outside the last of these separate huts, a shoemaker was at work, squatting bare-chested on the dusty earth. Ghote crossed over to him, realizing well that his approach had been long noticed, for all that the fellow was pretending to be wholly absorbed in the stout thread running from his needle, round the big toe of his outstretched foot, and back to the thick-soled chappal he was slowly stitching together.

      “Ram, Ram, mochiji,” Ghote said loudly, causing the cobbler at once to look up with a tremendously badly acted show of surprise.

      “Is this Village Dharbani?”

      The man gave him a glance full of malign suspicion.

      “Since you have come, you must know that.”

      Ghote sighed inwardly. No use with these slow-witted villagers opening a conversation with any sort of courtesy question …

      Direct attack, then.

      “Ganpatrao Pendke, has he returned home yet?”

      But direct attack was not the way either. At the fired-out question the shoemaker simply lowered his head and put another coarse stitch into the thick sole of the chappal.

      Ghote waited to see whether he was, in the timeless way of the countryside, merely making up his mind about how to answer. But the fellow’s silence persisted. Another stitch went into the chappal.

      Ghote turned away.

      Well, he thought, one thing at least is clear: Ganpatrao Pendke is not a man whose business it is wise to talk about.

      He would have to go cunningly if he was to learn, without news of his approaches getting to the ears of the Patil, anything at all about the fellow. Let alone where he had been forty-eight hours before—if the people he contrived to question had any clear notion of what was meant by forty-eight hours …

      He walked more slowly onward.

      The huts on either side of the dusty road became, after a gap of a hundred yards or so, better built. Roofs here were of corrugated iron held down by heavy stones. Holy tulsi plants grew in tubs or hanging pots outside each one. Through open doorways he glimpsed women blowing cooking fires into life or poking sticks under them. Outside, men sat idly and children played or sprawled on the ground. Dogs prowled and sniffed. Chickens scratched for sustenance. A donkey, tethered to a stump of tree, shook its long ears at him as he went by.

      But he made no new attempt to learn anything more. He was going to need time in plenty to extract information. Of that he was now certain. However short time might be.

      Soon he came to the vague square that marked the village’s center. Would the Patil’s house be somewhere near? Did his grandson, Ganpatrao, still live there in the joint family?

      He saw no building that seemed large enough for the home of a man with ten thousand votes in his pocket. There was only the village temple, old and crumbling, its forecourt dominated by a single squat stone pillar with projecting from it half a dozen little stone shelves or brackets. With a jolt, he recognized the object as precisely similar to the pillar that had stood outside the temple in his own, long-ago village. That, too, had had those little shelves.

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