Authors: John Masters
Ranjit said, ‘Victoria, I think if you want a sari tonight you had better come out now. Har Singh usually goes to bed at about this time.’
Mr Surabhai looked at his wrist-watch, shook it, and looked again. ‘My goodness me, do you know it is seven minutes past eleven p.m.?’ he cried.
‘Yes,’ Ranjit said, dropping into Hindi, ‘I know. You would talk till five in the morning if I let you, wouldn’t you? You’d better get on home now or you’ll be in trouble. I can help Miss Jones with the saris.’
‘I am afraid you are quite correct,’ Mr Surabhai answered in English. ‘I must hurry to my home or Mrs Surabhai will give me six bells and all kinds of assorted hades.’ He went out, gesturing with joined palms toward each of us, and we heard his light shoes hop-hopping down the long staircase.
A minute later I followed with Ranjit. This time I felt very conspicuous and was glad the little shop was near. Har Singh lay comfortably stretched out there on several bolts of cloth, fast asleep, but the lamp was still burning above him, and the door was not locked.
I bought two khaki saris for uniform, three white ones for daytime, and two beautiful evening saris, one black and one of patterned pale blue silk. I bought plain borders for the white saris, a gold border for the black sari, and a silver border for the blue one. Har Singh stitched a border on to one of the plain white saris right away. The others I would do the next day, at home.
I put on the sari and waited while Har Singh fastened the rest and my organdie into a big bundle. When we got outs de, Ranjit looked anxiously up and down, and we waited for some
time in the street, but no tonga came. It was about midnight.
It was a lovely night, and a little cooler by then. There was a breeze. I asked Ranjit if he would mind walking home with me.
He smiled at me then, really smiled, and said, ‘I was hoping you would suggest that. Are those shoes all right for walking?’
I said, ‘They’re comfortable, but I can’t walk fast. Which way shall we go?’
‘The quickest way is down here,’ he said, pointing. I remembered that street. I had walked along there with him once before, at night, in a sari. I didn’t want to go that way ever again.
I said, ‘Let’s walk down the line from the Loco Sheds.’
He agreed, and we set off. We walked slowly, I because of my shoes, Ranjit because of me. We didn’t say much until we had climbed the low embankment by the Loco Sheds and turned up the main line. It was late by then, but someone in the sheds had a wireless set and must have been squatting in the dark listening to music among the big quiet engines.
‘Patna, I think,’ Ranjit said. ‘That is a Bihar love song. It is quite well known.’
‘Let’s stop and listen a minute,’ I said. ‘We can sit on the fence. I want to rest my feet. I have an awful lot to learn.’
‘About the music?’ he said.
I said, ‘Yes. That, and everything. I am ready to like the music, if you know what I mean, but it doesn’t make sense to me. I have heard it all my life and I’ve never really listened to it or tried to understand it.’
Ranjit lowered my bundle carefully to the ground. He said softly, ‘I cannot explain to you how glad I am about the sari, Victoria.’
I said, ‘You didn’t look very pleased when I came tonight. You looked more frightened.’ I examined him carefully. I could not see his face well, but I thought he was pleased and also nervous. I wondered if he was nervous because he was screwing up his courage to kiss me. What would I do then?
But he wouldn’t, he wasn’t going to, I was absolutely certain of it.
He said, ‘I am so pleased, but I am worried too. You know what happened at the cantonment cinema. I think something else like it must have happened tonight?’
I said, ‘Something happened—but I don’t want to talk about that. Let’s get on.’
Ranjit picked up the parcel. We walked side by side between the rails. He said, ‘You will never regret this. India will open up like a flower when she is free, Victoria. We will all share in ber beauty and happiness. India will sing like a bird out of its cage when she is free.’
I pressed his arm. It was strange to know I could do it and not be misunderstood—never with any other man in my life. I said, ‘I know. It’ll be wonderful for you personally too, won’t it?’
I meant he would feel that the railway was truly India’s, that he would be working at his own job for his own country, without despising himself half the time as a servant of the British.
He said, ‘It will be wonderful. I will go into politics. There is need of a new outlook. Congress has been very good in many ways, but it is too much controlled by the Bombay capitalists and the steel millionaires. I want to work on the educational programmes.’
I said, ‘Don’t you want to stay on the railway?’ I was surprised and perhaps a little shocked to bear what he said.
He was becoming less constrained with me. He swung the parcel on its strings as he walked, and waved his other hand in the air to emphasize what he said. ‘The railway is merely a mechanical thing. It takes our bodies from one place to another, that is all. It is material. But the mind, the soul, is what is important to India. There are so many bars here that it is like a prison for many people. India is like a giant chained, and not all the chains are ones that the British have tied on. I say, I am using almost as many metaphors as V. K.—Mr Surabhai.’ He smiled at me, boyish for that moment, and yet not quite carefree.
He said, ‘The future will excuse our metaphors. It will justify them.’
I said, ‘I suppose your mother approves of your plans?’
The parcel stopped swinging in his hand. He held it then carefully in both hands. I could not miss the change in his voice as he said, ‘She approves. Oh yes.’
I didh’t believe him, but I didn’t want to corner him. He was too defenceless. I wanted to pat his hand and say, ‘There, there, it doesn’t matter.’ We were at the signal, and it was off, for Number 599 Down Passenger, nearly an hour late. I stopped there because that was where we would have to say goodnight.
Ranjit’s hand came out slowly, as though someone invisible behind him was forcing his elbow forward. He took my hand and squeezed it. He said, stammering and more nervous than I had ever seen a man with me, ‘Miss Jones—Victoria, I am getting—I admire you more than—I think you are the bravest girl in the world. Please don’t think I’m pushing you.’ He was perspiring freely, and his hand was clammy. He looked the same as he had the night Macaulay was killed.
He burst out, ‘I don’t want to hurry you, Victoria.’
‘Then why do you?’ I said as gently as I could. I held his hand, instead of his holding mine, and said, ‘I like you too, Ranjit, very much. I think you are the nicest man I’ve ever met. I think—I think this may be too valuable to hurry. Don’t forget how strange everything is to me—even the music.’ I finished with a laugh and let his hand go, and stood back from him. Far away I saw the bright little eye of the train as it came on down.
My words seemed to have opened a gate for Ranjit. Still keeping well apart from me, he cried, ‘I am honourably in love with you, Victoria. I didn’t want to say it yet. I wanted you to have time to know me. And I am afraid of you. I am afraid for your sake as well. But——’
I waited, knowing what must be coming.
He said miserably, ‘But you have said you are going to think of yourself as an Indian. My mother——’ I sighed. Here it was. ‘My mother told me to hurry up or you would marry someone else. She told me that if I didn’t make up your mind for you, she would’
I was wearing a sari, and I did understand. Girls who wore saris had their marriages arranged for them. Everything should have been settled for me long ago, before I knew what it was about years before I was twenty-eight. The light of the train was bright in my eyes, and the earth shook under it as it came on.
I said. ‘I don’t want to hurry, even for your mother, Ranjit. I’d rather you asked me.’ I was ready to cry of vexation. Here I was, so proud of my new sari, and this was what happened the first time I wore it. I felt as if I were insisting on wearing a topi on top of it.
He muttered ‘I will not know how to ask you.’
I said, ‘Well, I will ask you—when I want to!’
I had to put out my arm and pull him away from the line as 599 Down Passenger rocked past us behind an ancient 4–6–0, the brakes grinding and the sparks flying from the brake shoes as the driver slowed for his stop at Bhowani Junction.
Dear Ranjit was not really a railwayman at heart, or he would have felt that train in his bones even though he had his back to it—even though I had been promising to marry him.
I struggled out of sleep, miles down. My sister was knocking on the wall between our rooms. There was another noise—the telephone ringing, standing silent, ringing again. Rose Mary’s muffled sleepy voice called. ‘For God’s sake go and answer it Vicky. It’s always for you.’
I scrambled out of the sheet and the mosquito net and found the light. I stood by the telephone, one hand on the wall and my eyes closed against the light, and lifted the receiver. I thought dazedly it would be something to do with the mutiny. But the mutiny was over at last, and the sailors had gone back
peacefully to their duty.
The man said, ‘Duty Officer, First Thirteenth Gurkhas. The C.O. wants you to get into uniform at once. A jeep will come and pick you up in ten minutes. There’s been a crash.’
‘Oh, a crash,’ I said, still dazed. ‘On the road? I haven’t had any nursing training, you know.’
The young man at the other end was excited and exasperated. He said, ‘A rail crash, a troop train derailed near Pathoda, Miss Jones!’
I woke up properly and said, ‘What does he want me for?’
The duty officer said, ‘Good God, I don’t know, but you’d better hurry up. I’ve got a hundred things to do. Good-bye.’ He hung up.
I went back to my room and began to dress. When I was stepping into my skirt I remembered that I had been wearing a sari since yesterday. This was Sunday, I muttered crossly to myself, took off the skirt, and found my uniform sari.
‘What’s happened?’ Rose Mary called.
I told her. She said, ‘Near Pathoda again! I bet I know who’s done that. Your Congress friends!’
‘Oh, shut up!’ I said.
I wrestled with the sari and my hair, and with powder and lipstick and sari brooch. The jeep arrived before I was quite ready. The driver did not toot his horn or come running up the path to knock on the door, so I knew Colonel Savage wasn’t in it. I found my watch, saw it was two o’clock, and hurried out. Birkhe was waiting, and I scrambled in beside him. The sari took some managing. I had always wondered how the Indian girls in the WAC (I) managed to ride bicycles and get in and out of jeeps and do their parade-ground drills so efficiently.
Birkhe smiled shyly at me, his beautiful white teeth gleaming in the faint starlight, but he did not speak then or on the short drive up the Pike. The battalion offices were alive with lights and men and the sound of talking and the throb of engines. Savage called me at once and said, ‘Ranjit’s at the Traffic Office now, and Taylor’s on his way there. Find out at once what they’re doing. Tell them Chaney’s already gone up with our Regimental Aid Post, and that I’m going in fifteen min
utes with Howland and B Company. Tell them Lanson wants me to cordon off the roads round the crash, and I’m doing that.’
I picked up my telephone and began to find out what was happening. I knew from the tone of Ranjit’s flat, non-committal voice that Patrick had arrived in the Traffic Office. Then, in the background, I heard Patrick booming on another telephone. Ranjit told me that the Divisional Traffic Superintendent was taking the necessary steps. They wanted all the help Colonel Savage could give at the scene of the accident. Ranjit gave me details of the movements of breakdown trains, of extra engines, of medical rescue parties. I listened, my chest beginning to feel empty as the urgent instructions and messages piled up. I made notes and with the other ear overheard snatches of Savage’s orders next door. I heard him phoning to the D.S.P., and it sounded as if Lanson would be on his way to the accident at once. I heard Savage tell someone to get Kishanpur 6, priority. From the signal office down the passage I heard the duty officer on the R/T: ‘Dogfish Six speaking Hello, Able Zebra Uncle, Able Zebra Uncle calling Christ, I want your Number Nine.
Timi ko ho?
… Roger, over.’
Savage got his connection and began to speak in his special ‘languid’ tone. He managed to suppress all the force he’d just been using and somehow blunt the edge of his voice. He must have been bursting with the effort. He drawled, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you at this ungodly hour, Nigel…. Yes, of course. There’s been a derailment near Pathoda…. Yes. It’s a troop train with about half a British battalion on board…. Well, yes—you see, Pathoda’s almost as close to you as it is to here, and I was going to suggest that if you hadn’t made any other plans you might consider sending a few men to help dig in the wreckage. I expect some doctors and ambulances would be well received too…. Oh, yes, I think so, Nigel, really quite serious…. Well, thank you…. Yes, I’ll take care of it if I may have your authority to pass on your suggestion…. It
is
a beautiful night. Quite wonderful…. It is extraordinary, I agree…. Yes, I can see it from here…. Yes. Beautiful. Good
night, Nigel.’
I heard him put down the receiver and lift it up. In a voice with an edge like a saw he said, ‘Kishanpur three-one-one, priority.’ There was a short wait. Then Savage snarled, ‘Say who you are! … I don’t care a purple—if your name’s Reginald or Ramfurley. Are you the staff captain of Kishanpur Sub-Area? … For Christ’s sake, wake up, you chairborne bastatd. This is Savage, C.O. of the First Thirteenth Gurkhas. Take these orders, they are from the brigadier….’ He began giving orders in an emphatic monotone.
When he had finished I went in to him and told him what I had learned. He was dressed in fighting order. He picked up his hat and carbine and shoved me out to the jeep ahead of him as I struggled to put my information into short concise phrases. Birkhe had already moved into the back seat. The radio jeep and the escort jeep were waiting. A line of lorries and six-by-sixes, with lights blazing and engines running, stood along the side of the approach road. Dickson was waiting on the office steps, his brow deeply furrowed and a paper in his hand. Young Chris Glass, the new adjutant replacing Macaulay, was gabbling excitedly with Howland, the commander of B Company.
To Dickson, Savage said, ‘Deal with it, Henry. You’re a major, aren’t you? Christ, tell them to stuff it up, then!’ He jumped into the driver’s seat, engaged gear, and we shot off.
After a mile I looked round and said, ‘The trucks can’t keep up, sir.’
He said, ‘Do you think I’m running a kindergarten? My God, I nearly broke a blood vessel when I was talking to People-Psmythe. He didn’t understand how the engine driver could run off the rails on a beautiful night like this, with the Great Bear so clean and sparkling. Jesus! Pathoda again. The goods train must have been just a rehearsal.’
He was in one of his strange ferocious good tempers, and I could not understand why. A deer stood peering into the lights at a corner and did not move till Savage swung the jeep six inches dear of its nose. I saw its little white tail flashing among the trees at the edge of the jungle as it bounded away.
Farther on a pair of eyes reflected back like headlamps from a thicket beside the road. ‘Leopard, sahib,’ Birkhe said Savage answered in Gurkhali, and Birkhe chuckled.
I said, ‘Do you know if many people have been killed, sir?’
Savage said, ‘The Stationmaster thinks so. His first telegram was practically incoherent, Ranjit told me.’
I was listening for the sound of the breakdown train. The road was not far from the railway here. I asked which way the troop train had been going, and Savage said, ‘West. From Allahabad.’
He meant up. I said, ‘It must have been going downhill, then.’
Savage hooted at a jackal standing bewildered in the lights, and said, ‘Yes, it will be a thoroughly unpleasant scene. That sari suits you, as I forgot to tell you yesterday, but it’s an impractical garment for this kind of life.’
The two remarks were not altogether unconnected, I was sure. ‘It will be a thoroughly unpleasant scene,’ he said, and he meant, That’s why I’m taking you to it, so that you can see with your own eyes what happens when Mr Surabhai’s kind of patriotism runs wild. I remembered Mr Surabhai’s justification of train wrecking and started suddenly in my seat.
Savage said, ‘Thought of something?’ He didn’t give me time to reply but went on, ‘or just got ants in your pants?’
He had nearly forced me to say something then. My start had been so obviously connected with the wreck and the carnage and nationalism and my sari. Then he’d saved me from having to answer.
‘Something is on fire,’ he said. I recognized Pathoda station, the lights burning in it, just ahead on the right. The road ran straight for some distance there, and Savage slowed down and ran without lights. Then I saw a jumpy glow in the dark jungle-covered hills to the east. It was perhaps a mile or two away. I sniffed but could smell nothing. ‘West wind,’ Savage said curtly.
He stopped the jeep at the Pathoda station, jumped out, and talked hurriedly to two men there. The jeeps and the rest soon caught up, and at once we started off again. After a bit the
jungle thinned on the right, and I saw the dim gleam of steel rails. The rails swung away from the road, and almost immediately the jungle in there was aglow with red and yellow light, the trees standing in thick ranks against it, all silhouetted and motionless on a gentle slope.
The convoy halted, and the Gurkhas jumped down. I hurried into the jungle at Savage’s heels, thorns plucking at my sari, and twigs whipping across my face. As we came near to the railway I saw the long hard line of a carriage standing on one end, the other end high among the branches. The carriage was dark and still, and the trees creaked under its weight, and there was a smell of newly broken wood. I saw other carriages, and men moving about. I had thought the men would be running, with the flames crackling so loudly in front of them, but they were moving slowly, or standing or sitting. The track ran in a shallow cutting there, and some of the grass on the banks had caught fire. British troops in every stage of uniform and undress were moving about like sleepwalkers and padding at the fire with coats and rolled trousers.
I tripped over something and cried out, seeing it was a man sprawled on his side in the undergrowth. His head lay anyhow on his arms, and he was wearing a pair of wrinkled drawers, a white vest, ammunition boots, and nothing else. He rolled over when I trod on him, and mumbled, ‘Go ‘way.’
Savage laughed suddenly. ‘Asleep!’ he muttered. ‘Good old Mr Atkins. Now, let’s see.’
He stood on top of the side of the cutting, while the Gurkhas gathered behind him and to the right and left. The battalion doctor’s jeep was a little farther up, and I wondered how he could possibly have got it there. An Englishman in blue and white striped pyjamas came up to Savage and began to point and explain. I could see seven carriages now—one on the rails, one burning, one up-ended in the jungle, one half into the jungle, and three welded into a single Z-shaped heap across the cutting. There must be more carriages behind there, out of sight and probably undamaged.
I hadn’t seen the engine and began desperately to look for it. An engine and tender couldn’t disappear. They weighed a
hundred and fifty tons together, and carried three men. I saw them at last, recognizing the engine’s funnel and then the battered curve of its boiler among the wreckage of the three tangled carriages.
Now I was alone with Savage. All the Gurkhas were at work. The breakdown train had arrived without my noticing it, and now its searchlights flashed on so that the dying red flames of the burning carriage flickered and jerked against a background of even white light. Savage said, ‘Go and help Chaney in the R.A.P.’
I hadn’t then seen any dead or injured men, not close to. The soldiers were pulling lumps out of the wreck., and some of the lumps were strangely shaped. They might have been bedding rolls, or frame members, or men. I didn’t want to go to the Regimental Aid Post. There I would have to see those strange shapes close to, and look at them. The men would have raw wounds, and some of them would be bent and blind and dead. In truth I felt that I had somehow done all this by wearing a sari.
‘Go on,’ Savage said.
I said, ‘I won’t! I’m not a nurse. I
didn
’
t
do this.’
Savage put out his arm and caught my shoulder. His fingers tightened into my flesh, and his eyes glittered. He said, ‘Go and help Chaney to help the poor sods who’ve been hurt. They didn’t do it either.’
‘Don’t use filthy language to me!’ I said. ‘I won’t have it. I’ll report you to Mrs Fortescue. I’ll——’ I was struggling back as though Savage were pushing me, but he wasn’t.
He said, ‘Go on.’
I gasped. ‘They did do it. It’s their fault for——’
Savage stepped away from me and said, ‘You mustn’t let the old school sari down—you little slut.’
To get away from him I turned and stumbled along the top of the cutting. After twenty steps I got hold of myself. In trying to hurt me, Savage had only cleared my mind. Everyone must help now. If Mr Surabhai had been there he would be killing himself trying to help—even if he’d done it. But he couldn’t have done it. He wouldn’t. What he had said was just
talk, principle, theory—surely?
I came to the R.A.P., swallowed, and went down to report to Captain Chaney. There was a strong smell of cooking meat and burned sugar there, downwind from the burning carriage.
I began to bandage and patch, inject and splint and bathe, blindly doing whatever Captain Chaney told me to. The soldiers were mostly young men, obviously conscripts because they were very polite especially when they were badly hurt. They lay in a quiet row at the edge of the jungle and called me ‘miss’. Some of the injured were excited, and then often, later, they’d relapse as the shock hit them. While they were ‘high’ they talked to me in tense bursts of soldier-Urdu. I was puzzled at that until I remembered the sari.
The pieces and the strange shapes were there in the corners of the R.A.P., but Chaney did not ask me to help with them.
Suddenly as I worked it was light, and I started up, thinking there must be another fire, but it was the dawn, and then I saw two breakdown trains and two big mobile cranes working, and there was a locomotive under steam at the back of the wreck, and there were scores of railway coolies and gangers and men in topis. Chaney told me to go and have a cup of tea.
The Gurkhas had brought degchies with them, and lit cooking fires among the trees and made lakes of stewed tea. I walked to the nearest fire and sat down slowly on the dry leaves. A Gurkha came, gave me tea in half of a mess-tin, and begged me to drink it. I saw it was Birkhe, Savage’s orderly, and watched him fill the other half of his mess-tin and carry it carefully away between the trees.