Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 59, No. 1. Whole No. 338, January 1972

Inspector Ghote and the Miracle by H. R. F. Keating{©1971 by H. R. F. Keating.}

A new Christmas story in which Inspector Ghote of the Bombay C.I.D. is given a most delicate assignment — an investigation in Tulsi Pipe Road, among the teeming humanity of the hutments and the chawls, of an event that could set in motion the most dangerous civil disturbances — “big trouble… rioting… intercommunity outrages”…

What has Santa Claus got in store for me, Inspector Ghote said to himself, bleakly echoing the current cheerful Bombay newspaper advertisements, as he waited to enter the office of Deputy Superintendent Naik that morning of December 25th.

Whatever the D.S.P. had lined up for him, Ghote knew it was going to be nasty. Ever since he had recently declined to turn up for “voluntary” hockey, D.S.P. Naik had viewed him with sad-eyed disapproval. But what exact form would his displeasure take?

Almost certainly it would have something to do with the big Navy Week parade that afternoon, the chief preoccupation at the moment of most of the ever-excitable and drama-loving Bornbayites. Probably he would be ordered out into the crowds watching the Fire Power demonstration in the bay, ordered to come back with a beltful of pickpocketing arrests.

“Come,” the D.S.P.’s voice barked out.

Ghote went in and stood squaring his bony shoulders in front of the papers-strewn desk.

“Ah, Ghote, yes. Tulsi Pipe Road for you. Up at the north end. Going to be big trouble there. Rioting. Intercommunity outrages even.”

Ghote’s heart sank even deeper than he had expected. Tulsi Pipe Road was a two-kilometers-long thoroughfare that shot straight up from the Racecourse into the heart of a densely crowded mill district where badly paid Hindus, Muslims in hundreds and Goans by the thousand, all lived in prickling closeness, either in great areas of tumbledown hutments or in high tottering chawls, floor upon floor of massed humanity. Trouble between the religious communities there meant hell, no less.

“Yes, D.S.P.?” he said, striving not to sound appalled.

“We are having a virgin birth business, Inspector.”

“Virgin birth, D.S.P. sahib?”

“Come, man, you must have come across such cases.”

“I am sorry, D.S.P.,” Ghote said, feeling obliged to be true to hard-won scientific principles. “I am unable to believe in virgin birth.”

The D.S.P.’s round face suffused with instant wrath.

“Of course I am not asking you to believe in virgin birth, man! It is not you who are to believe: it is all those Christians in the Goan community who are believing it about a baby born two days ago. It is the time of year, of course. These affairs are always coming at Christmas. I have dealt with half a dozen in my day.”

“Yes, D.S.P.,” Ghote said, contriving to hit on the right note of awe.

“Yes. And there is only one way to deal with it. Get hold of the girl and find out the name of the man. Do that pretty damn quick and the whole affair drops away to nothing, like monsoon water down a drain.”

“Yes, D.S.P.”

“Well, what are you waiting for, man? Hop it!”

“Name and address of the girl in question, D.S.P. sahib.”

The D.S.P.’s face darkened once more. He padded furiously over the jumble of papers on his desk top. And at last he found, the chit he wanted.

“There you are, man. And also you will find there the name of the Head Constable who first reported the matter. See him straightaway. You have got a good man there, active, quick on his feet, sharp. If he could not make that girl talk, you will be having a first-class damn job, Inspector.”

Ghote located Head Constable Mudholkar one hour later at the local chowkey where he was stationed. The Head Constable confirmed at once the blossoming dislike for a sharp bully that Ghote had been harboring ever since D.S.P. Naik had praised the fellow. And, what was worse, the chap turned out to be very like the D.S.P. in looks as well. He had the same round type of face, the same puffy-looking lips, even a similar soft blur of mustache. But the Head Constable’s appearance was nevertheless a travesty of the D.S.P.’s. His face was, simply, slewed.

To Ghote’s prejudiced eyes, at the first moment of their encounter, the man’s features seemed grotesquely distorted, as if in some distant time some god had taken one of the Head Constable’s ancestors and had wrenched his whole head sideways between two omnipotent god-hands.

But, as the fellow supplied him with the details of the affair, Ghote forced himself to regard him with an open mind, and he then had to admit that the facial twist which had seemed so pronounced was in fact no more than a drooping corner of the mouth and of one ear being oddly longer than the other.

Ghote had to admit, too, that the chap was efficient. He had all the circumstances of the affair at his fingertips. The girl, named D’Mello, now in a hospital for her own safety, had been rigorously questioned both before and after the birth, but she had steadfastly denied that she had ever been with any man. She was indeed not the sort, the sole daughter of a Goan railway waiter on the Madras Express, a quiet girl, well brought up though her parents were poor enough; she attended Mass regularly with her mother, and the whole family kept themselves to themselves.

“But with those Christians you can never tell,” Head Constable Mudholkar concluded.

Ghote felt inwardly inclined to agree. Fervid religion had always made him shrink inwardly, whether it was a Hindu holy man spending 20 years silent and standing upright or whether it was the Catholics, always caressing lifeless statues in their churches till glass protection had to be installed, and even then they still stroked the thick panes. Either manifestation rendered him uneasy.

That was the real reason, he now acknowledged to himself, why he did not want to go and see Miss D’Mello in the hospital where she would be surrounded by nuns amid all the trappings of an alien religion, surrounded with all the panoply of a newly found goddess.

Yet go and see the girl he must.

But first he permitted himself to do every other thing that might possibly be necessary to the case. He visited Mrs. D’Mello, and by dint of patient wheedling, and a little forced toughness, confirmed from her the names of the only two men that Head Constable Mudholkar — who certainly proved to know inside-out the particular chawl where the D’Mellos lived — had suggested as possible fathers. They were both young men — a Goan, Charlie Lobo, and a Sikh, Kuldip Singh.

The Lobo family lived one floor below the D’Mellos. But that one flight of dirt-spattered stairs, bringing them just that much nearer the courtyard tap that served the whole crazily leaning chawl, represented a whole layer higher in social status. And Mrs. Lobo, a huge, tightly fat woman in a brightly flowered Western-style dress, had decided views about the unexpected fame that had come to the people upstairs.

“Has my Charlie been going with that girl?” she repeated after Ghote had managed to put the question, suitably wrapped up, to the boy. “No, he has not. Charlie, tell the man you hate and despise trash like that.”

“Oh, Mum,” said Charlie, a teen-age wisp of a figure suffocating in a necktie beside his balloon-hard mother.

“Tell the man, Charlie.”

And obediently Charlie muttered something that satisfied his passion-filled parent. Ghote I put a few more questions for form’s sake, but he realized that only by getting hold of the boy on his own was he going to get any worthwhile answers. Yet it turned out that he did not have to employ any cunning. Charlie proved to have a strain of sharp slyness of his own, and hardly had Ghote climbed the stairs to the floor above the D’Mellos where Kuldip Singh lived when he heard a whispered call from the shadow-filled darkness below.

“Mum’s got her head over the stove,” Charlie said. “She don’t know I slipped out.”

“There is something you have to tell me?” Ghote said, acting the indulgent uncle. “You are in trouble — that’s it, isn’t it?”

“My only trouble is Mum,” the boy replied. “Listen, mister, I had to tell you. I love Miss D’Mello — yes, I love her. She’s the most wonderful girl ever was.”

“And you want to marry her, and because you went too far before—”

“No, no, no. She’s far and away too good for me. Mister, I’ve never even said ‘Good morning’ to her in the two years we’ve lived here. But I love her, mister, and I’m not going to have Mum make me say different.”

Watching him slip cunningly back home, Ghote made his mental notes and then turned to tackle Kuldip Singh, his last comparatively easy task before the looming interview at the nun-ridden hospital he knew he must have.

Kuldip Singh, as Ghote had heard from Head Constable Mudholkar, was different from his neighbors. He lived in this teeming area from choice not necessity. Officially a student, he spent all his time in a series of antisocial activities — protesting, writing manifestoes, drinking. He seemed an ideal candidate for the unknown and elusive father.

Ghote’s suspicions were at once heightened when the young Sikh opened his door. The boy, though old enough to have a beard, lacked this status symbol. Equally he had discarded the obligatory turban of his religion. But all the Sikh bounce was there, as Ghote discovered when he identified himself.

“Policewallah, is it? Then I want nothing at all to do with you. Me and the police are enemies, bhai. Natural enemies.”

“Irrespective of such considerations,” Ghote said stiffly, “it is my duty to put to you certain questions concerning one Miss D’Mello.”

The young Sikh burst into a roar of laughter.

“The miracle girl, is it?” he said. “Plenty of trouble for policemen there, I promise you.

Top-level rioting coming from that business. The fellow who fathered that baby did us a lot of good.”

Ghote plugged away a good while longer — the hospital nuns awaited — but for all his efforts he learned no more than he had in that first brief exchange. And in the end he still had to go and meet his doom.

Just what he had expected at the hospital he never quite formulated to himself. What he did find was certainly almost the exact opposite of his fears. A calm reigned. White-habited nuns, mostly Indian but with a few Europeans, flitted silently to and fro or talked quietly to the patients whom Ghote glimpsed lying on beds in long wards. Above them swung frail but bright paper chains in honor of the feast day, and these were all the excitement there was.

The small separate ward in which Miss D’Mello lay in a broad bed all alone was no different. Except that the girl was isolated, she seemed to be treated in just the same way as the other new mothers in the big maternity ward that Ghote had been led through on his way in. In the face of such matter-of-factness he felt hollowly cheated.

Suddenly, too, to his own utter surprise he found, looking down at the big calm-after-storm eyes of the Goan girl, that he wanted the story she was about to tell him to be true. Part of him knew that, if it were so, or if it was widely believed to be so, appalling disorders could result from the feverish religious excitement that was bound to mount day by day. But another part of him now simply wanted a miracle to have happened.

He began, quietly and almost diffidently, to put his questions. Miss D’Mello would hardly answer at all, but such syllables as she did whisper were of blank inability to name anyone as the father of her child. After a while Ghote brought himself, with a distinct effort of will, to change his tactics. He banged out the hard line. Miss D’Mello went quietly and totally mute.

Then Ghote slipped in, with adroit suddenness, the name of Charlie Lobo. He got only a small puzzled frown.

Then, in an effort to make sure that her silence was not a silence of fear, he presented, with equal suddenness, the name of Kuldip Singh. If the care-for-nothing young Sikh had forced this timid creature, this might be the way to get an admission. But instead there came something approaching a laugh.

“That Kuldip is a funny fellow,” the girl said, with an out-of-place and unexpected offhandedness.

Ghote almost gave up. But at that moment a nun nurse appeared carrying in her arms a small, long, white-wrapped, minutely crying bundle — the baby.

While she handed the hungry scrap to its mother Ghote stood and watched. Perhaps holding the child she would—?

He looked down at the scene on the broad bed, awaiting his moment again. The girl fiercely held the tiny agitated thing to her breast and in a moment or two quiet came, the tiny head applied to the life-giving nipple. How human the child looked already, Ghote thought. How much a man at two days old. The round skull, almost bald, as it might become again toward the end of its span. The frown on the forehead that would last a lifetime, the tiny, perfectly formed, plainly asymmetrical ears—

And then Ghote knew that there had not been any miracle. It was as he had surmised, but with different circumstances. Miss D’Mello was indeed too frightened to talk. No wonder, when the local bully, Head Constable Mudholkar with his slewed head and its one ear so characteristically longer than the other, was the man who had forced himself on her.

A deep smothering of disappointment floated down on Ghote. So it had been nothing miraculous after all. Just a sad case, to be cleared up painfully. He stared down at the bed.

The tiny boy suckled energetically. And with a topsy-turvy welling up of rose-pink pleasure, Ghote saw that there had after all been a miracle. The daily, hourly, every-minute miracle of a new life, of a new flicker of hope in the tired world.