“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.
Grandfather and the Little Bone
by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.{© 1971 by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.}
The time has come — indeed, it’s long overdue — to begin a Detective Dossier on Lloyd Biggie, Jr.’s Grandfather William Rastin…
The octogenarian sleuth, though past his biblical span, still has the build of a blacksmith, which he was until the horseless carriage took over; a stubborn coot, he has never changed his opinion of a contraption he considers noisier, smellier, and less dependable than a horse.
Grandfather Rastin is a lifelong resident and senior citizen of Borgville, Michigan, and its most prominent landmark. His other opinions in this “age of anxiety” are also worth your attention: for example, he does not think it’s a coincidence that the rocking chair and 20th Century civilization declined simultaneously. (For other opinions, especially of human nature, see stories.) And he regards himself as more of a bucolic philosopher than a detective. He once opined: “A bad apple may spoil the barrel, but it can make a much more interesting cider.”
Grandfather’s “Watson” is his grandson, Johnny Rastin, a precociously mature high-school student who also functions as the old gentleman’s chauffeur, errand boy, Number One assistant, and partner-in-plots against Grandfather’s pet peeve, Sheriff Pilkins. Grandfather and grandson don’t always see eye to eye — but they do agree that while the local townspeople are not the most interesting human beings in the world, they are the most interesting in Borg County, Michigan…