The Setting Sun (24 page)

‘That was the commissioner. We’re preparing for an inspection. If you’ll excuse me, there’s so much to organise.’

I get up, too. ‘I’m extremely grateful. Especially for the vehicle.’

‘The least we could do, dear Professor.’

I take a deep breath. ‘Would you mind if I took it as far as Chafal? I was thinking of going tomorrow.’

Mutilal’s eyes light up. ‘Ah, you want to visit the famous Mahadeo temple?’

I nod, relieved his prompt has made it so easy. The DSP beams approvingly.

‘One of the most important
mandirs
in all of Maharashtra.’

Back in Kulkarni’s office, Shinde’s arrived, looking extra smart today, silver braiding twisted through the epaulettes of his field-grey shirt.

‘Have to supervise the welcome for the commissioner,’ he explains, ‘there’s a practice parade at twelve. Now I have some good news for you. We managed to contact a veteran constable called Dhoni. He’s not very well, so he can’t come in person. He lives a couple of hours north.’

Brilliant. The morning’s getting better by the minute. ‘Could I drop by in the car, maybe?’

Shinde shakes his head with a wry grin. ‘His wife says he’s got diarrhoea, so it might be awkward. They’re expecting us to phone his son’s shop. You ask the questions and I’ll relay them.’

It takes time to get through various intermediaries before Dhoni gets to the receiver.

‘He says he’s happy to speak to the son of Gilbert. He would have liked to come to see you.’

I’m in a lather of expectancy. ‘In what capacity did he know my father?’

The answers emerge haltingly. Dhoni was promoted to the armed constabulary in 1944, the year Bill arrived. As a junior policeman, he never spoke with him at any length. But he remembers accompanying Bill on one raid. Usually, big anti-insurgency operations involved calling backup troops from something called the Special Reserve Police Battalion. But there wasn’t time on this occasion. Bill and his squad were already in the field when they received a tip-off. Dhoni can’t remember the name of the village for sure. It might have been Mangsoli. They all piled into the ‘Woodie’ for the occasion, some of them standing on the running boards, because their bus had broken down.

‘So nothing’s changed,’ Shinde comments wryly.

On the outskirts of the village, they were confronted by a sizeable crowd which had just burned down the
chavadi
and its store of village records. Thoroughly worked up, the mob could have overwhelmed them with a concerted rush. For some reason Bill was without his Sten gun, and the six constables and two head constables had only breech-action .410 muskets, painfully slow to load.

I’m surprised at the feeble firepower. As children in Africa, we used .410s to shoot birds.

‘What happened?’ I ask.

Bill and his team apparently faced down the demonstrators and made them disperse. In the confusion, however, the ringleaders vanished.

‘Were there any reprisals?’ I steel myself to ask.

Shinde looks uncomfortable, and for a moment Kulkarni’s sparkling teeth retire.

‘He says they left as soon as they’d had the fire put out and questioned witnesses.’

‘What were his impressions of my father?’

Shinde starts laughing as he listens to the answer.

‘What did he say?’

‘Your father was very strict. Everyone knew what they had to do. He didn’t tolerate slackness. You see?’ he grins. ‘Exactly as a senior officer should be.’

I next ask if the constable can remember any personal stories about Bill. He repeats that the gap in rank meant they had very little personal interaction.

‘He used to eat the same food as the men when they were in the field. He loved chapattis made with
jowar
. No pickles were too hot for him.’

I smile.

‘He’s complaining about his bowels,’ Shinde chuckles, one hand over the receiver, ‘perhaps it’s talking about pickles. Better let him go.’

I convey my thanks. I’m so relieved that Bill apparently didn’t abuse villagers as a matter of course. But would the constable really have told me if he did?

‘No word on Gaikwad or Pisal?’

They shake their heads. As we chat about preparations for the forthcoming
bandobast
, the attendant knocks.

‘Mr Walawalkar has found something for you,’ Kulkarni translates. ‘The car will come after lunch to give you a tour.’

The steno’s office, which doubles as the records room, is further along the veranda and offers a now-familiar mix of mouldy mailbags, broken-down chairs and ancient typewriters.
On the desk, however, are some promising-looking ledgers with marbled covers, tied with faded ribbon. Walawalkar motions me to sit beside him.

‘I think this is what you’re after.’

The Part IVs, covering the station’s work from 1938 to 1947, are brisk and to the point. First I examine ‘Subversive and Revolutionary Movements’. For the years 1938–41, successive DSPs record ‘nil’. However, in April 1943, CMS Yates declares: ‘I could write a book about what has gone on here since August 1942 [the month of Gandhi’s arrest].’ Was it that bad? He then corroborates what D.Y. Patil told me: ‘Suffice to say that the movement would have been comparatively negligible in this district were it not for the activities of Congress persons in Aundh State, helped, behind the scenes, by the APPA Sahib, the Raja’s son … He is a menace. The Politicals at Kolhapur are carried away by his charm and think he can do no wrong.’ What a ludicrous position the British put themselves in.

I’m also struck that neither Gandhi’s release nor the war’s end effected much improvement in the security of the District. In July 1945, just after Bill’s departure from Satara, James Hobson complains: ‘Saboteur activities still continue and at the moment it has taken the form of bastinadoing government servants and private individuals who have helped government … everyone is too frightened to give information.’ Modak’s bête noire seconds Yates’s complaints about the continuing malign influence of Aundh, but conjectures that the Rajah is increasingly frightened by the number of ‘gangsters’ lodged in his territory. The DSP’s frustration is expressed forthrightly:

The trouble is particularly difficult to deal with and the police have had little or no success in dealing with it generally. Officers with the very highest reputation, when posted here, seem to get an attack of palsy, for none of them seem to assert themselves to effect arrests, though all will talk for hours about some indefinite action in the future. It is a disheartening business.

I’m jolted by these last remarks. Given that Hobson was his immediate superior, it’s impossible to escape the inference that Bill was one such ineffectual ‘officer with the very highest reputation’. This lends support to Modak’s more jaundiced observations about his colleague. Perhaps I need to rethink my initial responses to
Sentinel
. Interestingly, Hobson also seconds aspects of his subordinate’s ambivalence towards the Parallel Government: ‘So far everyone … who has been dealt with [by the movement], in addition to being government servants, are privately all bad characters who have extorted money or goods from the public for their private use under colour of their office.’ However, a later entry by Bill’s old friend Keki Nanavatty provides a rather different perspective. In July 1947, weeks before Independence, he decries the amnesty offered to Parallel Government activists in April 1946: ‘It was a mistake to have pardoned such heinous crimes as cutting off a man’s limbs or murdering him because he helped the Govt.’

I then browse other entries, to investigate the effect of the political unrest on law and order more widely. From 1938 to 1941, Satara seems to have been as quiet as today. According to ‘Labour Movements and Strikes’, however, 1942 was clearly a turning point. Trouble flared at Cooper Engineering and other industrial works in the region during attempts to form a trade union. ‘Ordinary’ crime also increased exponentially. In April 1943, Yates comments that a Mang gang in Patan
taluka
(subdivision) has ‘committed over seventy dacoities [armed robberies] in a few months … They thought, and rightly, that the Police were busy with the [unreadable] movement and that their vigilance was reduced.’ Isn’t Patan where Bill picked up the woman torture victim? The following year
Hobson observes that ‘the ordinary criminals cash in on political crime to further their object.’ Taken together, the records paint a picture of a district almost out of control at the time Bill arrived and continuing very restive after he left.

‘Are you finding everything needful?’ Walawalkar asks, when I gather up my notes.

‘Very helpful.’ I show him a couple of entries which refer to the confidential diaries kept by DSPs.

‘We’re still looking, sir Professor.’

I lunch in my hotel room, trying to make sense of what I’ve read. Why did Bill get the IP medal if, as Hobson seems to suggest, his work in Satara was ineffective? And why, indeed, did Hobson? Perhaps Modak was right to be bitter about the awards. Am I ever going to get to the bottom of things? My baffled speculations are interrupted by the receptionist, who calls up to say the vehicle’s arrived. When I go downstairs, instead of Kulkarni, who I’d assumed would be my guide, a tall, languid man gets out. He’s dressed in a blinding white shirt, black slacks and impenetrable sunglasses, which he doesn’t remove before saluting.

‘Sub-Inspector Phule, sir. To escort your outing.’

The road to Shivaji’s fort overlooking Satara is steep and winding, flanked by thick bush. Unless some now hidden path existed, there’s no way anyone could run up to it in half an hour, let alone five, or even fifteen, minutes. It takes us a good quarter of an hour in the groaning 4×4, the driver lurching against Phule as he negotiates the hairpin bends. Another myth about Bill is being debunked, somewhat to my chagrin. We labour to a stop at a massive gatehouse, its narrow aperture easily defended from the bulging towers either side. From here a precipitous footpath leads to the crest of the hill, where thick walls girdle the cliff-edge. They enclose several acres of coarse, parched grass, where there’s nothing except for some ancient stone rainwater tanks, telecommunications masts and a windswept guardian’s cottage, its tiny garden bursting with
sweet-bright flowers. To the south, the drop’s even more sheer, the distant dual carriageway I came on a frail thread through the landscape.

Phule keeps half a pace behind, swinging his binoculars, more like a bodyguard than a guide. I eventually tease out that he’s from Pune, where his wife and two children live. He’s been in the force for eight years and loves it, he insists lugubriously. In his wrap-around shades, he looks like an actor and I half hope he’ll break into a Bollywood routine when we climb the ramparts. But he’s more concerned about snakes than the panorama. It’s eerie here, wind howling with the sorrows of the hosts who died attacking and defending the fort. I wonder how often Bill came up here. Would it have been safe to walk on his own, or did Gaikwad accompany him as Phule does me?

On the ramparts, he hands me the field glasses. Following his pointing finger, I can just make out another fort, Sajjanghad, on a distant peak. The same style and period as Ajinkya Tara, it’s a place of pilgrimage now, Phule explains, containing a seventeenth-century temple and the mausoleum of Shivaji’s guru, Samarth Ramdas. He describes the hold Ramdas had over Shivaji, and how the saint’s commitment to the independence struggle of his time began one dark night when he bumped his head against something while walking a path through local woods.

‘When he looked more closely, he realised it was the dangling feet of a villager hanged for refusing Mughal tax demands,’ Phule concludes gloomily.

I wonder if Bill heard these stories, and understood how deep-rooted resistance to foreign rule was in this area’s traditions. What did he know about the indigenous religions?

‘Did Ramdas have family?’ I ask. I can’t remember whether Hindu priests are allowed to marry.

Phule nods. ‘Yes, his descendants are still an important clan with extensive land holdings round Chafal.’

I almost squeal with surprise. The cue’s irresistible. But my heart’s beating so violently it takes me a while to broach the subject. Phule looks surprised.

‘Why not a hill station like Mahabeleshwar? Especially now, in the strawberry season. Or Aundh museum? Many curiosities, from all over the world.’

‘I’m told the temple of Mahadeo’s very beautiful.’

Phule frowns. Perhaps he’s been anticipating more exotic outings. But the die is cast. We agree to head for Chafal tomorrow afternoon.

Farrokh seems in a bad mood when he swings by the hotel soon after Phule drops me. He complains his wife and daughter have stayed on another day in Pune, to do some extra shopping for the little party they’re having. Will I still be around next week-end?

‘I may be going to Kolhapur.’ I almost certainly will if I don’t hear from Rajeev soon.

He looks surprised. ‘Well, come and have a drink now.’

Farrokh’s tone doesn’t brook any hesitation. This time he takes me to his home. It’s near D.Y.’s, with a watchman at the gate and a posse of guard dogs chained to stakes, which erupt aggressively as we approach. The house is large, hard to tell what period. The interior’s modern Western, with an enormous open-plan kitchen boasting a humming chrome fridge and shiny worktops. Farrokh takes me upstairs into an equally spacious drawing room, cool and cream with plump armchairs and sofas. He puts on a CD, so loud I can barely hear him as he stoops over the drinks cabinet.