The Body in the Billiard Room. H. R. f. Keating
issued with no instructions whatsoever. He had not even been given expenses and allowances. How would he pay his way?
In the large, stinkingly hot shed-like structure that served as the airport lounge at Coimbatore, waiting for his bag to come off the plane, he had spotted, on the floor, a brightly coloured brochure for one of Ooty’s tourist hotels, formerly a maharajah’s palace. But its thumping claims had filled him only with dismay: rooms exuberating with luxury, a restaurant decorated beyond-the-words and a Lovers’ Lane intimately private for the needy couple, what had all that to do with him?
He made an effort to attain once more the calm which he had occasionally achieved in recent months in following the precepts of K. S. Joshi, MSc, MA, PhD, author of Yoga in Daily Life, Hind Pocket Books, price Rupees 3. But, concentrate as he would on the point at the tip of his nose, his thoughts only whirled faster and faster, more and more uselessly.
Mr Mehta. He must not forget to call him Your Excellency. Or Your Excellence? Which? Whichever was it?
A deep flush of embarrassment came over him in the steamy hotness of the packed, racketing bus. Which title had the ACP given him such a strong advice about? Excellency? Excellence?
Much as he repeated the two, trying them out again and again for sound and suitability, neither one seemed more right than the other.
The tip of his nose. The tip of his nose. Concentrate. Concentrate.
He became aware that the nature of the countryside had changed. The bus had slowed in its wild rush and was beginning to climb upwards. Now on either side there could be seen plantations of palm trees in long, ordered rows that ought to have been calming to the spirit, only they seemed somehow inhuman, unlike the random palms of other places.
Excellence? Excellency? Good evening, Your Excellency? Good evening, Your Excellence? Excuse me, is it that you are His Excellence Mr Surinder Mehta? His Excellency? Why, oh why, were there strict rules of precedence and protocol?
Damn it then, when the time came he would just say whichever came first to his lips. And if it was wrong, it would be wrong.
But all this was nothing compared to the real business that awaited him. Summoned as the very best man there was to investigate – what? A murder. A dead body on a billiard table in a club, some sort of sacred club apparently. It would be full of Englishmen, of white sahibs.
But no. No, surely all or most of those had long ago gone back to the UK. And even those who had stayed on would, many of them, have died off by now. It was more than forty years since Independence after all. Things had changed. Time had bit by bit battered away at the old rules and regulations, the order and dignity of the British Raj.
Outside now there were in the distance tea and coffee gardens, with bushes in long neat lines. The wildness tamed.
Yet, it seemed, this body in the billiard room was still considered so important that he himself had been brought here, with the fearsome reputation he had earned only through one success that happened to have been witnessed by a British writer of crime novels. So, surely there must be special circumstances about this murder – but who was it even who had been murdered? – that made the case a difficult and especially complex affair. Otherwise the CID from Madras, or even the Ooty police themselves, would surely have been capable of handling it.
Now the climbing road had begun to wind instead of charging straight ahead. The bus’s engine had taken on an unvarying, determinedly chugging note.
And would not the business up there in Ooty be as twisted and tortuous as the road? And even their ultimate destination had now become, in a way, less clear. The signpost he had last glimpsed said in English letters above the meaningless, to him, Tamil script, not Ooty or even Ootacamund but Udhagamandalam. To what mysterious place was he going?
But no point in letting his thoughts go aimlessly round and round. Better to prepare himself internally for what might lie ahead, in so far as he could. What other techniques besides concentrating on the tip of the nose had Dr Joshi recommended so as to arrive at that state of purely concentrated dharana in which the mind gathered to itself its true strength? Concentrating on the mid-point between the eyebrows? On an attractive idol of Lord Shiva?
No hope of getting at the book in his suitcase somewhere underneath the steadily grunting bus.
And in any case unremitting concentration did not seem possible with the sudden doubling-back twists in the road now coming every few minutes, sending the soft flesh of either one of the ladies on each side of him – both had lapsed into light sleep – flooding warmly against his own bony body.
He looked out of the windows ahead.
The landscape had changed once more. The neat tea gardens had abruptly ceded to jungle. At either side a wildly growing mass of creepers obscured and confused the tangled trees in a chaos of different greens and sudden bright flowers. Overhead, high branches cut out the light.
And in that riotous jungle would there be tigers lurking?
Well, perhaps not. But there would be panthers certainly. Panthers waiting to spring. And snakes. Venomous, unpredictable snakes.
Again he could not help feeling it was into something like this jungle that he himself was going. He saw trails of logic that would peter out almost at once as other trails superimposed themselves. He imagined sudden glimpses of the bright flower of suspicion, but no way of telling what plant it sprang from. He envisaged a mysterious darkness over all, and somewhere in it a murderer, a person past all the rules.
A gloom equal to the greenish mist under the tall trees’ shade settled into his mind.
Time passed. The bus engine roared unceasingly. The sleeping ladies on either side swayed into him and away again as the road hairpinned yet higher.
Then he saw, with a dart of apprehension, a large roadside notice boldly warning in English Sleeping While Driving Is Prohibited. He raised his head and peered at the outline of the driver in front. Was the fellow fully awake? Was prohibition only enough to stop sleep overcoming him?
He could not tell.
They must have been going now, he calculated a little desperately, for two and a half hours, or three. Perhaps more. He would have liked to look at his watch. But his left arm was wedged down by the weight of the silkily sari-clad lady beside him.
He tried once again to think of the tip of his nose.
But, almost imperceptibly, another change was manifesting itself. Ghote felt it first as a gradual lightening of the spirit. He then realized what the cause must be. They had climbed into coolness. The heat of the turbid plains, trapped in the bus, was at last yielding to the clear air outside.
That he had read of. It was the great thing about Ooty. The wonderfully cool and fresh air.
Perhaps, after all, he would get on well enough there. Damn it, he was a Bombay CID officer, and was not Bombay hailed as ‘India’s capital of crime’? Its CID was the best. They had to be. He himself might not be the very best that that fool of a British writer had made him out to be, but he was not altogether inefficient. Perhaps it would turn out that the case ahead was simply one that the police in Ooty could not cope up to, but which he, with all he had learnt over the years about ways of criminal humanity, would be able to see his way through to the end easily enough.
The snoozers on either side woke and began at once to clack out their incomprehensible conversation. Ghote eased his trapped arm free and rubbed his hands briskly together.
Soon the long climb began to level out. The jungle melted away and above the sky was clear and blue.
To either side of the road, now running straight there was extraordinary countryside. The famous Ooty country-side that was said to look so like distant England. Miles of sweet shorn grass, rising up in little rolling hills with the swelling lines of darker woodland here and there nestling among them.
So this was it. Ooty. Had someone not called it paradise? Well, he was in paradise then. Even if it was a paradise with one snake