LITMIR.BIZ

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the temple’s pujari what the projections were for. Only to be told sharply that they had always been there, and that was all anybody needed to know.

      A row of prosperous-looking shops stood to one side of the square, half hidden behind an ancient banyan tree, its ropelike roots dangling to the ground to provide a pleasant shade for a surrounding stone bench, now unoccupied. Through the tree’s knotty tumbling branches, incongruously a tall metal pole holding an electric lamp thrust itself upward, rust-patched. One more sign of the progress that had edged in.

      Then, as he advanced farther into the rubbish-strewn, tracks-marked square, he caught sight, just into one of the lanes leading away from it, of a chaikhana. A cup of tea there would provide him with a fine excuse to sit opposite the half-dozen villagers on its benches. If he waited long enough, surely out of suppressed curiosity someone would eventually open a conversation. Then it might take little more than half an hour—he glanced at his unreliable watch, but at once realized that whatever it said, right or wrong, had no significance here—before he could lead the talk around to the Patil and then on to his grandson.

      He made his way across, circling a black goat tied to a heavy stone, stepping boldly over the open drain on the far side and wrinkling his nose a little at its blatant odor, past a group of chattering women with big brass pots drippingly tucked on hips or balanced on heads, evidently returning from the well. As their laughter and gossip suddenly ceased at the sight of a stranger he did his best to seem to take no notice.

      The chaikhana, small and tin-roofed, was presided over by a grossly fat individual wearing only a splash-stained dhoti tucked into one of the folds of his wobbling belly. On the clay stove at the back of his open-sided establishment, a large black kettle sullenly puffed. Above it there hung from a plastic strap a transistor radio feebly wailing filmi music from distant Bombay.

      Ghote ordered tea and watched the proprietor as he poured it milkily from the kettle into a steel tumbler and from that at maximum height so as to cool it into a large white chipped cup. This, when he judged the right moment had come, he set on a saucer with a pattern of blue flowers, much too small for the cup. Ghote took it and made his way over to one of the two benches placed opposite each other outside.

      Somewhat to his dismay the two young men who had been sitting on the bench sharing a cigarette promptly got up and moved away, nudging each other and whispering. However, the row of three elderly villagers on the other bench, each slurping tea from a saucer carefully held in front of him, their cups on the ground at their feet, stayed where they were, staring into nothing between sips, letting time flow past.

      How long would it be before one of them broke into speech?

      Ghote slowly drank his cooling tea and waited. It was plain to see that the men opposite, for all their solemn staring, were gradually becoming consumed with curiosity about this stranger who had descended on the village like an avatar of a god coming down to earth. But none of them ventured a word or even a sign of acknowledging his presence.

      Why should they? he thought. They had all day. They were in no hurry. Perhaps they had never been in a hurry all their lives long.

      By contrast, the thought of A.I. Lobo, the expeditious, came into his head. How different someone like that was from these old men. Yet was Lobo’s way of going about things perhaps after all the right one? And, worse, had he by his expeditiousness arrived at the right culprit in the Tick Tock Watchworks case? Was he in truth improving an already shining image in the eyes of the D.G.P. behind his big desk back in Bombay?

      Should he himself, then, try to speed things up here? Lean forward and open a conversation? The thought of his rebuff on the outskirts of the village at the hands of the shoemaker deterred him. No, here there was no room for anything expeditious.

      He saw he had emptied his cup, got up, and asked for another—the milk in it had tasted like buffalo’s—and tried to drink even more slowly. But all too soon the level of the pale brown liquid got dangerously low. How many cups could he manage before the elders opposite broke down and spoke?

      He got up again and asked the bulging-bellied chaikhana owner for something to eat. He was offered a couple of chapattis and some pickle, with rather suspicious haste. As soon as he took a first bite he realized why the fat fellow had been so quick to pass them across his counter. They seemed to be composed as much of grit as of flour.

      He eyed the rest of them. Would he have to grind his way through every mouthful before those old men addressed a word to him?

      But his breakthrough, when it came, arrived from quite another quarter. As he sat, beginning himself almost dreamily to let the minutes drift past, he felt suddenly a sharp tap on his shoulder. Starting around with sweat springing up on his forehead, he saw behind him a very old man, much more ancient than the men on the bench opposite. His stained white beard straggled to his waist. His face was lined and seamed under its dirtyish red headcloth.

      And the old creature was speaking. Speaking to him. Although what he said seemed almost as incomprehensible as if it were part of the dream he had been halfway into.

      “Oh, you may think I have been here all my life, but not so, no, no, no.”

      “You have not been here all your life?” He hastily took up the ancient fellow, snatching at this sole strand of communication that had been granted him, wildly lacking in logicality though it had seemed. “So you are a man who has traveled? Someone who has seen the world, is it?”

      “I was born in this village,” the old man answered, infuriatingly indirect.

      He lowered himself onto the bench beside Ghote, and, giving his beard a thorough scratching, seemed to have lapsed already into a silence as impenetrable as that of the elders on the other bench.

      Ghote licked his lips, and tried furiously to hit on a way of carrying on the conversation. But he need not have worried. The ancient fellow eventually finished his beard scratching and, in a voice as cackling and uncertain as before, spoke again.

      “Things were different then. Yes, yes. Then, you know”—he laid a hand on Ghote’s arm—“then if you caught a cold they gave you honey with ginger and some tulsi leaves in it. It did not make you better, but the cold went in the end. But now … now if they have cold, people want it to go before it has properly come. They take the bus all the way to Ramkhed and buy those things like stiff pieces of worm. They pay and pay for them. And the cold goes. They want to be cured all at once of their ills. Ah, we live in the age of evil. The age of evil. The age of Kali.”

      Ghote ground his teeth in frustration. When at last someone had spoken, what was he getting but a long rigmarole about the evils of modern days? And from someone so old that plainly he was half out of his wits? How would he ever discover from this creature whether or not Ganpatrao Pendke had been at home two days ago?

      “So I ran away,” the straggly bearded old man said with sudden inconsequence.

      Ghote pounced.

      “Yes, yes. You said you have not been here all your life. You have seen the world, isn’t it? You have seen”—he thought he glimpsed a way of getting to where he wanted—“you have seen bad men and good, no? Good men and bad. Tell me—”

      But his tortuously arrived at lead was abruptly snatched away.

      “I went to Poona,” the ancient old fellow said, shaking his arm urgently. “You know where is Poona?”

      “Yes, yes. But—”

      “Many, many soldiers in Poona. And somehow I had heard they wanted more. The big, big war was happening. Many soldiers were needed. So I walked to Poona. In this village I was trapped like a frog in a well, and I was at the height of my manhood then. I was full of juice. So I, too, became a soldier.”

      Would the old fool never let him get a word in?

      “I was in Africa. You know where is Africa? I was there. We fought. We fought the British. We got them out. In Africa, yes. You know where is Africa?”

      Oh God, the damn fellow cannot even remember which side he was on, or where he did his fighting—Africa

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