A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (93 page)

‘Shall I see you again?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’ She was still shivering. ‘What is there to see?’

He touched her shoulder. ‘A great deal,’ he said. Then leant down and kissed her. He let her go. She turned and climbed back into the carriage. He smiled at her, then followed the naik. At the exit he looked back; she was at the carriage door, holding her elbows in that way; watching him. Briefly she released one hand and raised it. And then went in.

*

I’m sure (Sarah has written) that he did say, ‘It seems to be me they want.’ It’s what Guy heard, what I heard, what we heard at the time, and it made sense. And the fact that he smiled encouraged me to think that if he went out to the people who called out to him everything would be all right. This is what it was like at the time. I can’t justify it now except by saying that there were so many conflicting claims; how to stop Edward crying, how to stop Susan shrieking, how to explain even to myself just why ayah was hiding under the bench. When he first looked out of the window when the train stopped he must have seen them dragging Muslims out. If we’d been travelling only a week or two later we’d have been prepared for it, because by then the business of stopping trains
and slaughtering people had become part of life. No English were ever harmed. And it became quite the ordinary thing to hide Indians, friends and servants, under the seats – Hindus if it was the Muslims who were attacking, Muslims if it was Hindus. And if people hammered on the doors you just told them to go away. But we didn’t know that. We weren’t prepared for it. I suppose Ahmed was, or saw at once how things were. And whoever wanted to kill him knew he was travelling that day. The massacre itself must have been a retaliation for the killings and burnings the night before in Mirat when Muslims attacked Hindus because Mirat was going under Congress rule. I suppose Ahmed was marked out as a victim not just because he was a Muslim but because the people who killed him didn’t want Muslims in the Congress, or didn’t trust Muslims in Congress and his father was still in Congress. And perhaps because they knew his brother was a rabid Pakistani and perhaps because on top of that they hadn’t forgotten that Ahmed’s father hadn’t stood by the
INA,
which made it senseless anyway because Sayed had been
INA.
But it was all so senseless. Such a damned bloody senseless mess. The kind which Ahmed tried to shut himself off from, the mess the
raj
had never been able to sort out. The only difference between Ahmed and me was that he didn’t take the mess seriously and I did. I felt it was our responsibility, our fault that after a hundred years or more it still existed.

Ahmed and I weren’t in love. But we loved one another. We recognized in each other the compulsion to break away from what I can only call a
received
life. When I knelt at the tap, filling up those somehow meaningless little brass jugs and lotas and pots, whatever there was, it was driven home to me that what I was doing was just as useless as what he’d just done. I’ve never hated myself so much as I did then. I felt like throwing the jugs down and saying, Well, get on with it. And I hated Ahmed for not keeping the door locked and telling us he damned well wasn’t going to die unless they smashed right through the windows and climbed in with their swords and slaughtered the lot of us, or started a fire under the compartment to smoke us out, so that they could cut us down one by one. All those possibilities must have been in his mind. But when it came to it he didn’t let any of it even begin to happen
to us. And
I
couldn’t stop filling the bloody jars, going through my brave little memsahib act.

I’m sure he smiled just before he went, and I’m sure he said, ‘It seems to be me they want.’ Major Peabody said he thought he said, ‘Make sure you lock it after me.’ But I think that’s what Major Peabody wanted to hear. Perhaps we all heard only what we wanted to hear. Perhaps there was nothing to hear because he said nothing, but just smiled and went, in which case I suppose that meant he knew there was nothing to say because there wasn’t any alternative, because everyone else in the carriage automatically knew what he had to do. It was part of the bloody code. The moment he got into the carriage
he
sub-consciously knew that sub-consciously
we
had cast lots even before there was any question of lots having to be cast to see who would survive and who wouldn’t.

No. I don’t know what was in the canvas bag. And Guy never looked. A bottle of whisky, perhaps, and a clove or two of garlic.

Coda

Ranagunj airfield (Ranpur). Saturday August 9, 1947.

The tannoy system crackled. An Indian voice speaking in English told the few people sitting on the hard benches of the little airfield lounge that the plane from Mayapore was now landing and that departure for Delhi would be in twenty minutes.

The English officer sitting next to Perron closed
The Reader’s Digest
and said, ‘How civilized we make it sound. Do you know an extraordinary thing? As far back as December in nineteen forty-five when I flew from Singapore to Rangoon and on to Calcutta on an
RAF
plane and we landed for fuel in the middle of Burma, the door opened and an erk in white dungarees looked in and said, “You’ve now landed in Meiktila.” ’

‘Meiktila?’

‘Yes. I’d lost quite a lot of good men there scarcely more than six months before in the battle for the airstrip. But here we were, practising for the courteous world of civil aviation. I thought, How quickly the grass grows.’

*

The plane was delayed, delayed by storms. It was nearly midnight. It had rained throughout most of the day. The old Dakota was parked about a hundred yards from the airfield buildings. An immense puddle had to be negotiated by the six or seven people who having taken leave of friends walked ahead of or behind Perron towards the steps leading to the open port. Inside, bucket seats, thinly cushioned, had replaced the old port and starboard benches. About ten passengers were already seated. Passengers from Mayapore. Officers. Officers’ wives. A blue-rinsed grey-haired woman who was probably Red Cross. Two beefy-looking fellows in shorts and shirts who might have been Australians but turned out to be English: technicians, perhaps, from the British-Indian Electric Company. Their shirts were black with sweat. They were drinking beer from the bottle.

Perron found a single seat on the port side. He stowed his hand luggage. Sat. Closed his eyes.

Mayapore, Ranpur, Delhi. He wondered how many of the passengers from Mayapore had been in the town in nineteen forty-two; at the time of the Bibighar. Perhaps none. The
raj
had always led a nomadic existence. And these little airfields, relics of the war, now merely hastened their movements from place to place. Some of them were moving out for the last time.

He opened his eyes and stared out of the window at what remained for him of Ranpur: an illuminated puddle. The airfield building. A petrol tanker, now hauling away. Beyond this darkness and this light – after these absurd little marks and portents of human occupation – the adventure. The port engine fired, exploding the silence. The port airscrew began to spin. Little ripples showed on the surface of the puddle, as though the fishermen on the Izzat Bagh lake had cast a net. Another small explosion, on the starboard side. He shut his eyes again. Whenever he travelled by air he prayed just before take-off and just before landing. These were nowadays his only offerings to God. It was inconceivable to him that the prayers could be heard because he felt that if there were a God, God would be praying too, watching these extraordinary
machines shudder and flutter their frail way along the tarmac towards the lit runway.

And there was always that moment as the aeroplane squared up and seemed to pause; the moment of dying intention, and then the moment when defiance set in again and the paper-tiger roared and vibrated. It was like being drawn back and then shot in slow motion from a bow, so slowly that sometimes you felt that the pilot’s inspiration had run out and left him with nothing but a grinding determination to prove against all evidence that the thing could be done.

The sensation of being no longer ground-borne always came as a shock. The extraordinary thing had again been achieved. Following which, even at night, when there was no visible horizon, there was this sense of exultation.

*

He opened Bronowsky’s gift, the book, not of Pushkin poems but Bronowsky’s own translations of Gaffur (privately printed, in Bombay, dedicated to the Nawab). From its leaves he took out and read what he had begun writing to Sarah in the airport lounge.

‘I’m waiting for a plane that should have come in an hour ago but is delayed by storms. My watch says 1045 so by now you’ll be back and have had the message from your father that I rang. I hope Susan will be better soon. Please give her my best wishes. Your father said you’d all be staying at Commandant House for a few weeks because the new Indian commandant’s wife isn’t joining him yet and he’s making other temporary arrangements. But after that? I didn’t ask all the questions I wanted to, questions like where are you going when the few weeks are up? Back home? How absurd it is that suddenly there is this question of a roof over one’s head. I gathered Susan was only suffering reaction and shock and should be out of hospital in a day or two.

‘A false alarm. Someone said the plane had landed. It hadn’t. But I shall have to finish this letter in Delhi. I gave your father my address there. I don’t know whether I shall go down to Gopalakand as Nigel suggested. Wire me if you want
me to come back to Ranpur, or up to Pankot. Your father said you’d had Nigel’s telegram, the one he sent from Mirat on Thursday night, finally confirming what was never really in doubt. I tried to ring you that night, and yesterday, but the lines were hopeless. I came up to Ranpur on the night train and got in about 8 a.m. this morning and tried to ring you again from the air force mess where Major Blake arranged for me to put up during the day. He’s arranged this flight for me, too. I left Mirat because there was nothing more for me to do there. Ahmed’s father arrived there yesterday morning. I met him for a few moments. An impressive man. Hiding his grief.

‘When I got back to Mirat from Premanagar last Thursday, and to the place where all the bodies had been taken, Dmitri and Nigel were already there, and had identified and made some of the necessary arrangements. Nigel told me – and perhaps I should tell you – that the only person Dmitri blames is himself for letting Ahmed go on that particular day and for not anticipating that something like that might happen. Before I left last night Dmitri asked me to give you his love, then made us sit down for a moment on a couch and say nothing. It was like a Tchekov play. But shall I ever return to Mirat?’

The letter ended there.

But I thought (he said silently to Sarah, putting the letter away as the lights of Ranpur performed geometrical movements as if they were man-made constellations) I thought – today in Ranpur – of solving once and for all the mystery of Hari, if he is a mystery. Before I came to the airport I went with that little piece of paper on which Nigel had written words and numbers which established an idea of an address, a place where Hari might be found, where he might actually live, exist, eat, perform duties, make love perhaps, follow a life through, be content, be happy, or at least survive and be contacted by strangers, visitors, people carrying messages, and words from Rome. I found the place but it wasn’t easy. The taxidriver demanded more money when he reached the street he said led to Hari’s. He wanted to go no further. Taxis, he said, did not go into such places. So I paid him off and went on foot. Immediately, I was appalled, and then frightened. I had to remind myself that this was where
Hari lived, where he
had
survived. Three or four small beggar boys accompanied me, demanding money. The street was very narrow. Perhaps no Englishman had ever walked down it. To the beggar boys were added a beggar-man and three beggar-women. Other people called out to me from dirty-looking open shops. The smell of animal and human ordure and human sweat was overpowering. I almost turned back. But in the midst of all this squalor a boy of twelve or fourteen confronted me. He was so clean, neat shorts and neat white shirt, anxious to be of service, anxious to speak English to the Englishman. I trusted him. I stopped being frightened. I showed him the piece of paper. He walked ahead, saying: Come, sir, this way, sir. Within a hundred yards or so he turned into a narrow stairway. It led up between two shop fronts to a kind of tenement. The walls of the stairway were stained and greasy. The boy stopped at the second landing. But by now other people were crowding the stairs.

The door the boy and I stood at was bolted outside and padlocked. But there was a card pinned to the jamb on which was typed the name. H. Kumar. The people on the stairs were shouting to the boy. I thought perhaps they were warning him not to disclose anything. I couldn’t translate the bazaar dialect. But then the boy said the people were saying that Kumar Sahib was out, visiting a pupil. His aunt was out at the market in the Koti bazaar. She would be back soon. Kumar Sahib would be back later. The boy added: ‘Please sir, meanwhile come and have coffee, clean shop. Brahmin shop.’

But I told him I hadn’t time. I began to get out a card to give to the boy to give to Hari. But when I looked at the card it seemed like a cruel intrusion. I remembered saying to Hari: What is the difference between
karma
and
dharma
? He didn’t know. I had learned the answer long ago. So had Hari. He was living it.

I went down the stairs, passing through that crowd of inquisitive people. Some of them followed us out. The boy eventually gave up pressing his invitation to drink coffee with him and said he would take me to the place where I could find a taxi. We went back through the narrow street, still followed by several youths and men and women. But now that I was out in the open I believed they were only people who wished Hari
well, people who merely hoped to keep me there until he got back, so that they could offer me to him as a gift.