The Sheriff of Bombay. H. R. f. Keating
nodding his head behind him. ‘Did I hear you call her Kamla?’
‘Yes, she was Kamla.’
He heard a choke in the girl’s voice and realized that his question had aroused a deeper response in her than might have seemed likely from the coolness she had shown when she had made her gruesome discovery.
‘You liked her?’ he asked. ‘She was a particular friend?’
‘She — She was my ma,’ plump little Munni answered, the sound of grief yet clearer in her voice as she continued to wield her broom. ‘She was the only ma I ever had. All I can remember of my child days is sleeping on the footpath wherever it was that I was born, and then one day, just after I had become a woman, you know, I was begging at the railway station there and all of a sudden I thought “Shall I see where that train goes?” and I hid in it and it came to Bombay. At VT Station a man saw me and said he would take me to somewhere nice. He brought me here and sold me to Heerabai.’
She looked up at him, an unexpected glow of pride holding back her looming tears.
‘Rupees five hundred he got for me,’ she said, ‘because even then I was just the sort of girl men are liking.’
‘And you began — began the business then?’ Ghote asked.
‘Yes, yes. I was ready. And I enjoyed. But the best thing was to have Kamla. She was always good to me, a true ma.’
And now the tears did come flooding out, bringing with them down her plump cheeks black streaks of the kohl with which she had darkened her eyes.
Ghote did not quite know what to do. He put out a hand and hugged the girl’s shoulder as she half-squatted, half-knelt in front of him with her broom.
At once she looked up at him, feeling the pressure of his hand on the springy softness of her flesh.
‘You want?’ she asked. ‘We cannot go into that room but we can go into one of the others.’
‘No, no.’
He withdrew his comforting hand quickly as if he had accidentally laid it on a sun-scorched rock.
Munni did not seem in any way put out.
‘Yes, Kamla was like me,’ she said. ‘She was older, of course. Perhaps old enough to be my real ma. But she too liked always the business. That is why so many men liked her. You know she was —’
‘So many men liked her?’ Ghote was unable to prevent himself breaking in. ‘But do you know who she was with — who she was with when it happened?’
‘No,’ Munni answered, a sudden animal-fierce look drying her tears. ‘If I did — If I did I would tear out his eyes only with my fingers.’
She held up her little hands — the nails were clumsily painted with bright red varnish — and made them into a pair of small claws. But Ghote had no doubt that, pathetic though they looked, she would indeed dart them at the face of any man she knew to have killed her substitute mother and have truly tried to tear out his eyes.
‘But do you know anything about the fellow?’ he asked.
Now that he had, against his better judgment, begun to do the work that properly belonged to the investigating officer from the nearby Nagpada station — and when was the fellow going to turn up? — he felt he might as well go on with it and hand on any information he gathered.
But again Munni shook her head in negative.
‘No, you see,’ she said, ‘it was the beginning of the night only. Heerabai had not even finished her bath. I was busy rubbing her with mustard oil the way she likes. So I do not know how that man came. He did not come by the front, I know that. When I saw that Kamla’s door was shut already I asked the others down there who she had got, and they said she had taken no one. So it must have been a man who has been here before and knows how to come in by the back.’
‘There are many like that?’ Ghote asked.
‘Some. Not many. Some rich ones who are liking us low-caste girls, the ones who want you to have some smell to you, you know, they come in that back way because they are afraid to be seen in a house like this.’
Ghote made a mental note to pass on to the officer from Nagpada station a suggestion to question the house’s madam closely about such men. But he doubted very much whether Heera would be helpful. She had nothing to gain and, more than likely, a reputation for discretion to lose.
‘But you were going to tell me what your friend Kamla was like,’ he said to Munni, sensing that the girl would be the happier for talking.
And certainly she looked at once more cheerful.
‘Kamla was like me,’ she said. ‘To her the business was always fun, even with the men who liked to whip her. She knew how to keep them from doing too much. Until — Until —’
The tears looked as if they were going to pour out again.
‘But she enjoyed?’ Ghote said, putting a little unbelief into his voice so as to provoke a retort that would stave off a new access of grief. ‘She really enjoyed what she did?’
‘But, yes. It’s nice, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you like to be making fun all the time with many, many different girls?’
‘Never mind about me,’ Ghote said quickly. ‘Tell me about Kamla.’
‘She was a Kolati girl,’ Munni answered. ‘You know in that community when they are old enough they have to choose: will they have a husband or will they go in for prostitution line? And Kamla — she told me often — had seen the jogtis walking happily, carrying shining images of gods and goddesses and shouting praises and laughing always, and she knew she wanted to be one of them.’
‘And when she — when she became one, did it seem as good to her then?’
‘Oh, there are some bad days always, but it was better than she thought even. Better, better. She liked and liked and liked.’
The words were, as it turned out, a final epitaph for the murdered girl. No sooner had Munni pronounced them, her pretty plump face a-glow, than there came the sound of heavy feet on the stairs and the police party from the Nagpada station arrived.
It was led, Ghote saw with a jolt of dismay, by Sub-Inspector D’Silva.
D’Silva, a young Christian officer, had been posted at CID headquarters until about a year before and he had not won Ghote’s good opinion. A stocky, well-built, swaggering young man who affected the pencil-thin moustache of an airline captain and wore a succession of boldly colourful shirts day after day, he had never hesitated to display his knowledge of the seamier parts of the city, knowledge gained he made tiresomely clear through excessive practical experience. Whether it was because of this or because he invariably cut every corner he could and bullied suspects beyond the limit, he had had a particularly good clear-up rate on the cases that had come his way. So much so that he had soon been posted away to the Nagpada station to take charge of the Vigilance Branch there with its manifold responsibilities for the sexual life of the area, embracing as it did much of notorious Kamatipura.
No, Ghote thought instantly as he recognized that cocky, moustache-embroidered face, if this fellow gets an inkling that someone as rich and with such a high position in society as the Sheriff of Bombay is a suspect in this case there will never be any question of any of it becoming public.
‘My God, who have we here?’ D’Silva burst out as soon as in the dim light he had spotted Ghote. ‘Old Ganesh, ace sleuth from Crawford Market. Been up here to sample the wares, have you, Ganeshji? You should have come and seen your old pal first. I could have put you on to some much juicier stuff than these five-rupeewalis.’
‘I was not here for any such purposes,’ Ghote answered, more swiftly than he would have liked.
‘Oh ho, such morality. You’re worse than old D’Sa, bhai. And how is my fellow