Authors: Bart Moore-Gilbert
I have no idea what to say. Still, it seems impolite to decline. Inside, there are perhaps 150 male recruits, seated at desks like exam candidates. They rise as one as we take our places, and Shinde addresses them in Marathi. He taps his swagger stick in one palm, turning occasionally to gesture towards me, while I try to imagine Bill here, giving his troops a pep talk before a raid. When the introduction finishes, the audience breaks into enthusiastic clapping, seemingly delighted at this unexpected diversion. I briefly explain my family connection with the Satara force and wish them luck in their future careers. I receive more thunderous applause, and the probationers all rise again as we exit. I’m bemused and flattered in equal measure.
Once we’ve inspected the armoury, where Shinde explains the different training programmes of the ordinary and armed constabulary, which Bill had charge of, we return to Kulkarni’s office. Two men in civilian clothes are waiting outside, one fiddling with his camera.
‘We hope you don’t mind,’ Shinde smiles, ‘this is a reporter from
Young India.’
Wasn’t that Gandhi’s newspaper? I tell my story once again while the correspondent makes notes. His teeth protrude slightly, making his mouth look swollen. Then I sit between Shinde and Kulkarni for photos. That accomplished, the reporter gives me his card and invites me to get in touch if he can be of help. I explain I’m after a constable of the time and he nods genially, promising to ask his contacts. My hosts offer more tea, which I decline. I’ve taken enough of their time. Besides, I’m dog-tired from all the emotion of Pune.
‘It’s been a long day. But I’d like to come again tomorrow and take some photos myself.’
Shinde smiles. ‘Of course. Your transport awaits.’
Once again, I’m thrown. ‘Transport?’
Kulkarni laughs. ‘Mr Mutilal’s orders. You are our VIP guest.’
This is unbelievable. ‘But aren’t you short of vehicles?’
Shinde shrugs. ‘It’s yours as long as you’re in Satara.’
Sure enough, here’s a police 4×4 outside the main entrance, with uniformed driver. It’s painted black and white, strips of yellow and red lights across the roof and the gold Maharashtra Police logo on the front doors.
‘And a constable will be posted outside the door of your hotel room.’
Kulkarni must be joking. ‘That’s too much,’ I protest, when I see he isn’t.
‘Same for every VIP.’
Thoroughly embarrassed, I try to joke my way out of it. ‘But everyone at the hotel will think I’m a criminal.’
Shinde laughs, before turning to Kulkarni. They each take out a visiting card. ‘Ring either of us whenever you need the car. Someone will be available as your guide.’
‘I can’t thank you enough. It’s so wonderful to be here.’
Head spinning, I get in the vehicle and am driven back to the hotel. I’m relieved that it’s just the driver and me. Perhaps they’ve forgotten about the room guard. Modak’s certainly pulled out all the stops; despite my reservations about him, I’m intensely grateful. What kind of reception would an Indian receive, if he came to a police station in England and said his father had worked there during the war and could he look at the files? Probably be banged up. However, there’s no chance to make sense of my astonishing welcome. A squat man in jacket and tie is waiting in reception, thinning hair, very fair skin and pouchy, grey-blue eyes.
‘Farrokh Cooper,’ he announces, hand outstretched. ‘Room alright?’
‘Really kind of you to organise it.’
‘Erna’s a very old friend. She told me about your father. My parents must have known him. Now I thought we might go to the Club for a drink.’ There’s no ‘might’ in his tone. ‘All the British belonged before Independence.’
There’s icy air-con in Farrokh’s luxury saloon, and
Turandot
blares from the speakers.
‘What school did you go to?’ he suddenly asks as we swing past the Eiffel Tower. ‘I was at Bryanston.’
‘Enjoy it?’
‘Very much. Often drop in when I’m in the UK on business. We have designers in Shoreham-on-Sea. We’re one of the biggest industries in Maharashtra. Automotive products mainly. Sell all over the world.’
Soon we’re curving down a long drive shaded by gigantic jacarandas and Farrokh pulls up in front of a long, low building with lancet windows which reminds me of a church. According to Kipling, such places were the social cement which held the Raj together. The foundation stone proclaims the Club was opened by a Mrs Piers, wife of the collector, in 1895. My heart’s racing as we sign in at the desk. Bill must have spent a lot of his leisure time here, when he wasn’t at the Modaks’ or the homes of other officials.
‘It was closed for forty years, but we’re slowly redoing it. There’s a swimming pool now. Otherwise it’s pretty much as always.’
The first room Farrokh shows me has a beautiful wooden floor, with faded lines painted on the parquet.
‘This is the badminton room, which doubled up as the ballroom in the old days.’
So here’s where Modak and Bill thrashed a shuttlecock across the net after frustrating days chasing the Parallel Government. It looks gloomy in the gathering dusk, bare bulbs strung along the apex of the roof.
‘What’s that?’ I ask, pointing to a large-scale model of a fort in a glass case.
‘Pratapgad,’ Farrokh responds, ‘one of Shivaji’s most important strongholds. He built them all over the district. It’s where he killed the Mughal general Afzal Khan. Disembowelled him with a clasp in the form of a tiger’s claw,’ he adds with relish.
‘Look here,’ he beckons, leading me into a billiard room with a full-size table; he whips the cover back to reveal immaculate forest-green baize. On the walls hang evocative cartoons from British times. ‘Snookered!’ one proclaims, showing a Bertie Wooster type in Rupert Bear trousers leaning ruefully on his cue as a fat old man ushers a pretty girl out of the room before him. A water-stained poster in a battered frame explains the rules of ‘Russian Pool’. Through an arch is the card room, darkly varnished chairs grouped in fours round felt-topped tables. I can almost hear clipped voices calling for someone to make up a hand of whist or rummy.
‘Today’s members are more interested in the gym.’
‘How many are you?’
‘Thirty or so. Not enough of the right kind of people nowadays.’
The bar’s been redone with formica. To one side’s a shelf of dimpled tankards, opaque with age. I wonder if Bill brought his with him to Tanganyika. To my surprise, no bottles are displayed.
‘One of the conditions of our alcohol permit, strangely enough,’ Farrokh explains.
We sit outside in the flagstoned courtyard while the waiter prepares our drinks. A smell of boiling lentils wafts from the kitchen. As Farrokh barks into his mobile, I examine a shallow trough jewelled with water lilies, over which a dragonfly hovers on wings of azure gauze. The temperature’s perfect now the sun is setting.
‘Ah, here they are,’ Farrokh announces as two men, well into their sixties, come through the bar. ‘Gujur, my press secretary and Mr-, head of personnel.’ I don’t catch the name.
Farrokh waves me impatiently to stay seated and they take their places deferentially where he points.
‘Now we’re all assembled,’ Farrokh says, once he’s ordered them soft drinks, ‘tell us about yourself and why you’re here.’
For the third time today, I tell my story. My host looks absent-minded and the personnel man struggles to keep up. But Gujur’s clearly interested. The problem is that I can barely understand his English. I think he’s talking about the Parallel Government.
‘Villains,’ Farrokh interrupts him acidly. ‘The amount of trouble they caused us.’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
‘Always agitating our workers to go on strike, sabotage the war effort. What did they expect them to eat if they downed tools? There was endless intimidation. The police were always coming out. Probably your father did, too. After the war, we learned they had a cell in the workforce.’
Gujur says nothing during the tirade, but the personnel man seconds his employer with nods and grunts.
‘I also work for G-TV,’ I understand Gujur to be saying.
‘He’d like you to do an interview tomorrow morning.’ Farrokh makes it sound like a fait accompli. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll bring along someone to interpret,’ he adds ungraciously.
I hope Gujur doesn’t register the rudeness. The personnel man then tells some halting stories about the Parallel Government, repeating the one Modak told about its adherents shoeing their victims like donkeys.
‘When Nana Patil had his leg amputated later in life,’ Farrokh butts in again, ‘it was poetic justice. The police were too soft, that’s why they didn’t crack them. They should have used the same methods as the Patri Sarkar.’
Farrokh’s manner and his peremptory assertions jar. But I resist the temptation to suggest that, as Modak asserts in his books, the police did do things which weren’t entirely dissimilar. ‘Is Cooper a Parsi name?’ I inquire instead.
He chuckles. ‘No. We Parsis often took the names of our trades. Paymaster, Engineer and so forth. My great-grandfather made barrels in Bombay.’
As Farrokh drives me back to the hotel, I ask how he feels about the Raj now. I guess he might just be old enough to remember it. He turns down
Turandot
for a moment.
‘You know the biggest mistake the British made? Not allowing us to develop a motor industry. My father suggested it, but they didn’t fancy the competition. You see? They had a habit of alienating even those who were most pro them. And now we’re buying up what’s left of your car firms, Jaguar and Land Rover,’ he smirks, exhaling whisky over me. ‘Not allowing us to industrialise was a serious error of judgement, though no doubt people like Gandhi would have disagreed.’
But what about Nehru’s five-year plans and the great leaps forward, I want to ask; surely India didn’t awake only when globalisation and deregulation arrived?
It’s still only eight o’clock when he drops me, and after dinner I wonder what to do for the evening. Back in my room I turn on the television to check out G-TV. I can’t find it, but the bombing of Gaza is apparently continuing relentlessly, to silence from Western governments, according to the reporter. There’s a problem with my reception and I get only spectral black and white. Perhaps that’s why the footage reminds me of the assault on the Warsaw Ghetto. A youth stalks a broken-up pavement, armed with a slingshot, scanning the skies. Gaunt, cowled women crouch in the ruins of buildings, small children huddling in their skirts like chicks, choked in the drifting smoke of intermittent fires. A howling man accompanies an ambulance crew wheeling a girl burnt by white phosphorus, which has apparently bored through to the bone. Who are the terrorists, who the terrorised, here?
I switch off the TV in disgust and pick up
Sentinel
. The account of Modak’s career after Satara offers little relief, however. I look first for references to Rebeiro. The first comes
while Modak was police chief in Pune in the 1950s, when a communalist riot erupted. Judging by the author’s tediously detailed justification of his actions, particularly his apparent sudden disappearance during the trouble, as well as acid comments about Rebeiro’s own role in events, I guess this was the occasion for the latter’s charges against his superior. There are several further bitter passages about his subordinate, in which the accusations of cowardice and incompetence are repaid with interest. The rancorous point-scoring casts tantalising new light on
Sentinel
’s caustic representations of Bill.
More interesting still, especially in relation to the Mumbai attacks and what I’ve just seen on TV, is Modak’s account of his role as police chief in Kashmir in the 1960s. Once again, much of this is a knotted narrative of accusation and rebuttal. In particular the author’s at pains to deny that he contributed in any way to the vortex of civil disobedience and repression into which Kashmir descended during his time in charge. Instead, Modak shifts the blame onto politicians, whose interference prevents him doing his job effectively. Shades of his denunciations of Hobson during the PG disturbances. He re-emerges from this part of the text as an injured idealist, the unwitting dupe of dark forces in Delhi determined to impose India’s will on Kashmir’s Muslim majority. Summary executions, rape, ethnic cleansing to make way for the transfer of Hindu settlers, looting, detention without trial – all appear to have been staple behaviour among the Indian police and army units brought in to deal with the unrest. It makes the British repression in Satara seem like the proverbial picnic. Rajeev’s denials notwithstanding, I wonder again how far this wretched history of occupation created a thirst for revenge among the Mumbai attackers, or at least their handlers. But it doesn’t take me a great deal further in understanding Modak’s take on Bill.
Putting the book down, I consider my options. Much depends on when Rajeev gets back to me about Poel and
whether my new friends at the police station here can turn up the documents and people I’m after. But then the thought occurs to me in a blinding flash. Since DSP Mutilal’s put the car at my disposal … My heart starts pounding. Getting out my file, I pore over the notes from Shinde which I managed to salvage before fleeing the SIB archives. I cross-reference them with Modak’s texts. Amongst the villages where Shinde alleges outrages involving Bill allegedly took place, Kumtha’s the only one mentioned by Modak. At first I think it’s the best place to ask to be taken. But according to
No Place for Crime
, ‘only’ a single individual was abused there and the chances that he’ll still be alive are probably remote. At Chafal, I remember, scores of people claimed to have been victimised. Here it is on the map. A bit far from Satara, perhaps seventy kilometres. Would the police let me have the 4×4 for a whole afternoon? The enigmatic Modak’s words echo through my mind: ‘Only those who were there really know what happened.’ Is this the place to test Shinde’s account?
But I’m soon overtaken by uncertainty. How will I react if the villagers confirm Shinde’s evidence? I can’t even be sure they’ll want to meet the son of their former persecutor, if that’s what Bill was. Yet having come this far, I can’t let nerves get in the way of my investigations. Too much rides on them. As I thrash over the possibilities, the phone jangles. I assume it’s Rajeev. Perhaps he’s going to summon me back to Mumbai.