Arctic Summer (10 page)

Breakfast was still not ready. The Nawab sighed and tugged at his beard in rumination and spoke fiercely to his nephews. Then, more kindly, he said to Morgan, “You go and see the other caves. After, we eat.”

More caves! There had been nothing sufficiently inspiring in the ones he'd already seen to make him excited. But he plodded behind the nephews, who were sulking and hitting at weeds by the roadside with sticks, for a mile or two along the bottom of the hills. The sun was fierce by now, and the temperature seemed to match an emptiness he felt inside.

Nor did the other caves help. There were three of them, also carved out of boulders, and harder to find. They were similar to the ones he'd already seen, all variations on the same theme, with polished walls and geometric outlines, though none of them had the dark inner chamber where no light could reach. The last required a climb, up stairs cut into the stone. But when he got there, perspiring and weak in the knees, because he was really very hungry by now, he couldn't summon up the necessary enthusiasm. The inside of one rock was much the same as another and the echoes were all alike too.

By the time they made their way back to the encampment, breakfast was still not ready. The Nawab looked wretched. One of the nephews said angrily to Morgan, “You come.” There was one last cave, apparently, part of the first group, which they had somehow overlooked. With his hunger very insistent now, and the start of a headache, he returned to where he'd begun.

The cave was off to the side, past a sullen pond of green water, over some slippery rocks. It really wasn't worth the effort; it was much rougher than the others, hardly more than a hole crudely hewn out of the hillside. But he lingered in it for a while, half-crouched under the low roof, to keep out of the sun. He became fascinated by a wasp that was clinging to the wall, trailing its yellow back legs behind it and, by the time he came to himself again, he realised that the nephew had departed, leaving him alone.

Wandering slowly back to the path, he decided to return to the middle cave in the first group, the one that had impressed him the most. It would be good to have a few minutes unaccompanied, sequestered in the rock. Looking out from the first arched room through the entranceway, he had the sense of the sunlit world beyond as a remote dream, which he was looking at through a window. Then he retreated deeper, into the second chamber. Instantly, he felt sunken profoundly into the world, or into himself. He spoke his own name aloud; the cave repeated it endlessly. He said Masood's name too, and then the word “love”—all of it rumbled back at him.

For the first time today, he allowed himself to experience his feelings. He had spent the last two and a half weeks with Masood in Bankipore, which was a small, ugly town on the outskirts of Patna. Masood had his legal practice there and Morgan felt a little like an intruder. But it was a benign intrusion, and they had managed to have a companionable, pleasant time together. The knowledge of his coming departure, however, had made him heavy for the past week already, and the previous day in particular had been long and slow and sad, culminating in their peculiar farewell in the middle of the night.

Morgan was making an early start in the morning, and had told Masood not to wake up. Although he'd said it firmly, he had wanted his friend to overrule him; he had wanted him to insist on waking and seeing him off on his journey. But Masood had yawned and agreed that he was very tired and that there was no point in getting up early. It was a sensible solution. So they had said goodbye just before going to sleep, in a stiff, incomplete way, both feeling shy, and then retreated. But almost immediately after, as he'd started to undress, Morgan had felt himself speared on the point of sharp emotion. He had gone back through to Masood's room and sat on the edge of his bed and taken hold, very tightly, of his hand. Cold anguish made certain details stand out, the white hanging shroud of the mosquito net, the shadows in its folds. Even if he'd been able to speak, he could not have said what he wanted. But the yearning had made him lean towards Masood, trying to kiss him. In the fizzing white burn of the lamp-light, his friend's face had been at first astonished, and then shocked. His hand had come up sharply, to push Morgan away, and that little movement had felt enormous, a force that could move a boulder. Morgan had accepted the refusal, because he'd known in advance it would come, and sat hunched miserably over his kernel of loneliness. By then Masood was merely irritated. He had rubbed Morgan's shoulder and patted him on the back, in a way that was both reassuring and dismissive. Neither of them spoke, but both of them understood. He did not feel as Morgan did; that was all. There was nothing else to say.

So in the end one had to make the journey back to one's own bed more alone even than before, the step down between the two rooms like the threshold between two worlds.

In the darkness afterwards, he experienced again what he'd just done with a fresh wave of shame.
Aie-aie-aie!
It was terrible, terrible—to have wanted so badly, to have been pushed so firmly away. The night and the land seemed to spread away around him, emphasising his smallness. He had cut himself open and showed the innermost part; it had been rash and unconsidered and regrettable. Now he had to close himself up again, to seal the carapace, and he began to do what was necessary. It was part of a willed cheerfulness he had learned, back in his childhood already, as protection against disappointment. The only defence against raw, naked feeling was reason. Understanding made sadness easier to bear.

So the thoughts that he followed, one by one, were like stairs ascending out of his misery, each of them valid and genuine, leading on from the one before. They went something like this:
Masood cares for me more than for any other man, I have known that for a long time. That is comforting. And much that has passed between us on this visit has made me very happy. That is good. To have a little, even a very little, can be enough to go on with; indeed, it's all I have. Better to hold to that than to yearn continually for what isn't possible
.

In the end, you had to return to your own life—which he did now with an effort, by swimming out, blinking and half-blind, into the vertical light, to let the normal day reclaim him. It was like emerging from the tomb. He hurried back down the hill faster than he needed to, as if he were being pursued, to the tents and the smouldering fire and the elephant, ponderously browsing.

Where by now breakfast was finally ready: after all the delay, a paltry smear of omelette with a cold chapatti and a mug of tea. But it was enough to restore his spirits and, as he sat in the shade chatting to Imdad Iman, he felt again the promise reviving in the vast landscape, with its blond, bleached colours, its scrubby bushes and old, tormented rocks. He knew already that this parting would eventually become a painful detail in a much larger event, one which was still unfolding before him.

Over the past three months, India had already violently rearranged his life, but it wasn't done with him yet; not by a long way.

 

* * *

 

His journey had begun in Aligarh. He had come all the way around the world for one reason only. And although his travels had barely begun, in another sense they felt already complete as he stood on a railway station platform at two-thirty in the morning, embracing Masood.

“At last, you are here,” his friend told him.

“I believe I am.”

“How do I look? Am I older?”

He had thickened in the middle, and some stray hairs had turned white, but Morgan said, “You look no different.”

“Nor you. I have thought of nothing except this moment for the past ten years.”

“You have only known me for six.”

“Have I? Well, I speak metaphorically. My great love for you makes time seem much bigger.” But Masood was already yawning as he swept out of the station and towards the waiting tonga.

When Morgan had woken up the next morning, it was into rather than out of a dream: the window showed an acre of garden, filled with loud, brilliant and exotic birds. Weird lizards scuttled across the walls and unusual insects hovered in the air. Masood had given up his bedroom to him and was sleeping in the sitting room close by; Morgan knew where he was, and yet he wasn't quite sure of anything. Here was an inversion of the world that had held them in England, where the view had always been known and tame, and it was only Masood who had been out of place. Now it was the Englishman's turn to be the stranger, the visitor. The idea of it pleased him greatly, and took him some way into another world—yet that world refused entirely to open for him.

When Masood woke an hour or two later and came lazily through to his room, almost his first question was what Morgan wanted to do that day.

“Honestly, the most important undertaking, as far as I can see, is to meet your mother. I would like to thank her for giving birth to you. Or else to punish her for it, I can't make up my mind.”

He had been wanting to greet Mahmoud Begum for a long time already, and he had brought some small gifts for her from England. But the suggestion was answered with a solemn headshake.

“You can't do that, I'm afraid. My mother keeps strict purdah. She sends you her blessings, but she cannot show herself before you.”

“But this is her house.”

“Even so.”

It took a moment for the smile to fade from Morgan's face; it had seemed like a joke at first. He was in India now, and he would have to do as the Indians did. His gifts were despatched via Masood, and thanks returned to him the same way. In this house—and in some others he would stop in—the closest he would come to a female presence was the sound of soft voices in a neighbouring room.

He hadn't expected this, but then nothing was the way he'd thought it would be. When Masood took him that first morning to see the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College which his grandfather had founded, Morgan was taken aback. In England, Masood had spoken of it rapturously as a centre of scientific excellence, where the finest of Western thought could be taught in an Islamic atmosphere; it represented, he'd insisted, the most modern approach to education. Yet when Morgan saw it, there was nothing very modern or inspiring about the disorderly scattering of reddish, ugly buildings, none of which seemed to have a single telephone in it, so that messages had to be carried around great distances by hand.

And there were other oddities, which for some reason had never featured in what he'd imagined. For one thing, though all the students were Mohammedans, wearing beards and fezzes, half of the teachers were foreigners. They seemed so stranded and out of place here, with their alien customs and their improbable accents, though they tried to pretend it was home. There were a lot of them, not only teaching at the college. At one moment he was rubbing up against a Kingsman, who was headmaster of the local school, or chatting to a German professor of Oriental languages; and at the next dining with a barrister called Khan, or discussing politics with a Persian professor of Arabic.

The atmosphere at the college, he would come to realise, was highly charged. There was a great gulf between the Indian staff and students on one hand, and the Europeans on the other. The two groups seemed to mix compatibly together, but when he found himself alone with one or the other, the conversation changed. The English staff in particular lamented that they weren't trusted here and seemed to live in fear that the Mohammedans would turn them out; the Mohammedans wrung their hands and declared that the Balkan War was the death-battle of Islam and asked why Sir Edward Grey should have been the very
first
to recognise Italian rule in Tripoli.

In these conversations, Morgan was never exactly sure where his loyalties lay; he experienced a complicated inner conflict which pulled him one way or the other.

“How do you manage it?” he asked Masood, on one of those early days. For his friend had always been adept, he saw now, at crossing the social frontier between East and West. For all his nationalist rhetoric, he was very much at ease in European company, yet he could drop all his Occidental ways in a moment, as if they were a piece of clothing.

“It is a skill,” Masood told him. “Think of it as camouflage, in order to survive in hostile territory.”

“What nonsense you speak. There are thousands of Indians who lack this skill, yet they survive perfectly well.”

“Yes, but they do not flourish. They are always nervous, always anxious. They don't mix well with the paler types, can you not see it? Some strategy is needed.”

“I am a paler type,” Morgan told him stiffly, “as you may have noticed. You have never needed strategy to survive me.”

“Can you be so sure?”

“Don't joke, Masood.”

His friend smiled—still rakish and handsome, despite a faint fatigue that made his face puffy. He took Morgan's hand and instantly the bond between them was renewed. “My dear fellow,” he said, “you must put all of it into your book.”

“My book?”

He was genuinely nonplussed for a second.

“The one you came here to write.”

“Yes, yes, my book. Of course.”

He had almost forgotten his book. Although he had gone so far as to mention it to his publishers, it had ceased to matter as a reason for being here. His true reason was the one in front of him, still holding his hand, and telling him that an outing had been arranged.

“An outing? To where?”

Masood waved vaguely, looking bored. “Some villages,” he said, “you will see. You will get material.”

The outing was lovely—almost two full days, careering around the flat countryside in a
tikka ghari
, being fed and entertained by lowly Indian officials. But however much he enjoyed himself, it didn't provide material for anything except distraction.

He knew that his friend was fobbing him off. They had been speaking for years, in a feverish way, about being in India together and everything they would do there, but now that the happy day had arrived, Masood wasn't much interested. Morgan could see that he was preoccupied and morose. But when he tried to find out what the matter was, he was deflected with generalities: