Inspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes. H. R. f. Keating
also makes a fleeting appearance, the most fleeting appearance possible, in The Murder of the Maharajah, a book set in 1930. In its last lines the Maharajah’s umbrella-toting schoolmaster expresses a hope that if he is ever to have a son to add to the tally of his numerous daughters that boy will become a police officer. It is then revealed that his name is Ghote. Safe to write this much pre-history. But later, when I came to set down incidents from my hero’s childhood, I am not sure that I didn’t occasionally add confusion to what is called in India his ‘bio-datas’.
Two more book-length accounts add to the picture before Ghote appeared in a short story again. In Go West, Inspector Ghote he found himself ordered off to America, California even, and discovered that that extraordinary part of the world is a place steeped in a mysticism which strongly contrasts with materialist Bombay. He only solved the locked-room murder when he admitted to the existence of that mystical phenomenon translocation of the body (instantaneous travel, if you like, often over hundreds of miles). Atheist with all the ardour of the convert that I am, this was something that I had had to acknowledge as likely when during my first visit to India I met the representative of a pharmaceuticals firm. He had hailed me out of the darkness of the evening, recognising me from smudgy newspaper photos, and then recounted to me unabashed stories of a friend capable of summoning out of the very air money and sweets and more. Why should he have told me tarradiddles? He was a serious fellow, and not unscientific. (His job I borrowed for one of the suspects in ‘The Wicked Lady’.)
In The Sheriff of Bombay, which appeared in 1984, Ghote encountered his most harassing experience ‘till date’, as we say in India. He met sex. This was something I had not been able to bring myself to put into his world before, but during my second visit to Bombay I had been asked by one of the Crime Branch inspectors if I would like to see ‘the Cages’, the red-light area of Bombay regularly produced as one of the city’s sights, along with the Hanging Gardens (cover for a huge reservoir on top of Malabar Hill) and Elephanta Island. I had thought it my duty to succumb. The so-called cages – they are in fact no more than the barred windows behind which the girls display themselves – proved both sordid and lively, depending on the way I looked on them. So when ten years later I felt ready to use what I saw that night, The Sheriff of Bombay (that name I had seen on a plaque in the stern splendour of Bombay’s Gothic-style Old Secretariat) taught Ghote, myself – and, I trust, my readers – that much in life can appear either black or white according to the way it is seen.
Now, for some reason or another, I entered on a whole spate of short stories about the man who over the space of some ten years had come to occupy such a deep niche in my mind. Frequently now, seeing some sight or hearing a few words that particularly caught my attention, I would ask, ‘How does Ghote react to that?’ and know the answer. Some such questions have already resulted in books or stories. Others lie waiting, either like the pearls maharajahs were apt to hide away too long in the dark strongrooms of their palaces only to fade into colourlessness, or else perhaps to prove ever-shining diamonds.
In answer to a request from the editor of the magazine of the Townswomen’s Guilds, Ghote had an encounter with a party of ladies touring India and demonstrated that latent toughness that gives the tale its title, ‘The Cruel Inspector Ghote’. I think that quality came to Ghote’s surface when it lodged itself in my mind as I read a life of Rudyard Kipling, which pointed out that in The Jungle Book fatherly Baloo the Bear is wholesomely strict with young Mowgli. Then, in answer to a request for something filmable from a charming young woman rejoicing in the typically Indian nickname of Pooh, I wrote ‘Murder Must Not At All Advertise, Isn’t It?’. It was a passing tribute to my predecessor in detection, Dorothy L. Sayers, and set in the Bombay advertising world where Pooh Sayani made her living. In it, of course, was a charming creature called Tigga.
Although no film eventuated, the story, which shows a Ghote who has now just about got the balance between softness and shrewdness right, winged its way across the Atlantic to see the light of day there, complete with the third or fourth villain I had called Budhoo. So I crossed out that name in the long list I have in the front of my alphabetical notebook of things Indian. Ghote, lucky fellow, must have learnt the infinite complexities of Indian nomenclature as he grew up. But somehow he has been slow in passing on his knowledge to me, though nowadays, with care, I think I get most names right.
At much this time, too, I transcribed one of my old radio plays into short-story form, making The All-Bad Man into ‘The All-Bad Hat’. The story sums up, I think, where Ghote had got to by 1984. I also contrived, when the Police Review asked members of the Crime Writers Association for stories with a police setting, to get into words a small project I had long meditated – a story to be told purely in telephone conversations. ‘Hello, Hello, Inspector Ghote’ is my tribute to the magnificent imperfections of the Bombay telephone system, now considerably improved as Ghote notes in his 1988appearance, Dead on Time.
In 1986 Ghote experienced existence in what, I suppose, has been his most comprehensive coming-to-life yet. In Under A Monsoon Cloud, I set out to consider the theme of anger, a quality which, looking back, I see was something in others which Ghote had singularly failed to come to terms with. But anger had also given him on more than one occasion an impetus helping an essentially nice man to take the sharp action which often brings about success in an ugly world.
So I recalled an episode I had been told by a former Commissioner of the Bombay Police, for whom I had felt bound to write a disclaimer as a preface to Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart, which featured in a rather poor light such a Commissioner. Mr S. G. Pradhan, with immense kindness, had contacted me in Bombay and given me several hours of his time, for much of it explaining complications of Indian police life which I found dauntingly difficult to get into the pages of an onward-pressing story. One particular illustration he used certainly lodged in my mind. It concerned an officer of great promise who in a moment of rage had killed a subordinate. Now was the time to regurgitate those facts-from-life as fiction-facts in the life of Inspector Ghote.
In the story that unwound itself in my head as a consequence of a similar rash act on the part of Ghote’s admired superior, ‘Tiger’ Kelkar, Ghote finds himself arraigned before a disciplinary tribunal. Conducting a defence of himself – as well as considering whether he ought to defend himself at all – I found he was bringing to the surface his whole attitude to life. ‘What good would I be as a security officer?’ he demands of his wife in the dark of the marital bedroom when the idea of resignation is in the air. ‘Oh, I could do that job all right, but what satisfaction would be there?’ (The phrasing comes from a notebook I have kept for twenty years, labelled and re-labelled ‘A Little Book of Indian English’.) Then he flares out: ‘It is not as if I have not been a good officer. Have I taken bribes? … Have I toadied and treated reverently superior officers? No, I have never so much as held open one car door to them. Have I had suspects beaten up even? … Did I buy my posting to the CID? And now am I to lose everything after I have sweated every ounce of my blood?’
It was while I was in hospital having a ruptured knee-tendon hooked back into place and dealing, a little bad-temperedly, with my editor’s queries about the next Ghote novel, The Body in the Billiard Room (in which in the appropriately lingering Britain-of-the-1930s atmosphere of Ooty hill station Ghote finds himself harassed, as it were, by the shade of Agatha Christie and solves a murder in more or less the manner of a Great Detective), that I conceived the notion of the short story I called ‘Nil By Mouth’. Those words, odd when you come to think about them, I saw day after day above the beds of patients about to go to the operating theatre, and from the fascination the phrase exercised over me grew that quite intricate little tale. It shows once more, at one and the same time, the just-tough Ghote – tough enough by now to defy at least hospital authorities – and the perhaps too-easily-moved Ghote.
Ghote’s major adventures appear at about yearly intervals, giving me time between books sometimes to embark u asksd on ashort story such as ‘APresent for Santa Sahib’, another Christmassy tale.
A gap between books was the origin, too, of ‘The Purloined Parvati and Other Artefacts’, though its deeper beginning-point lay in a visit I paid to an extraordinary private museum when I was attending, as chairman of the Society of Authors, the conference