Bhowani Junction (21 page)

I said, ‘We’d better get back.’

I wore the saris from then onward. Pater had seen me in them once or twice, but he had said nothing. He didn’t show astonishment, not even the first time, so Rose Mary must have warned him. He didn’t show anger either, which probably meant he was taking thought about what he should do.

It wasn’t many days, though, before he called me to the parlour one evening after supper. Rose Mary was in there, talking sweet to him, obviously intending to join in the attack on me. When Pater asked her to leave the room she grumbled but flounced out and left the house as well. Mater was in somewhere, but she didn’t come near the parlour. She never did normally, unless Pater told her to, and this time I thought Pater had definitely told her to keep away.

Pater was sitting in the big armchair on the right of the grate. He was having trouble lighting his pipe, and I sank into the chak opposite, watching and loving him but prepared to fight him, while he lit a dozen matches and at last got the pipe going. Then he said, ‘I want to talk with you, Victoria.’

I said, ‘Yes, Pater?’

He said, ‘You know what it is about. That!’ He pointed the stem of his pipe at my sari. ‘Why are you wearing those clothes now? Aren’t the clothes your mother and sister wear good enough for you? What is the matter? Please tell me, girl.’

I took a deep slow breath. I said, ‘I don’t mean to hurt you, Pater. I don’t think it’s any of your business, actually, but I will tell you. We are half Indian.’ Pater moved uncomfortably
in his chair. I went on, ‘Well, we are, aren’t we? But there’s not going to be any place for half-Indians soon. I can’t make myself a whole Indian, but I can show that I don’t think of myself as whole-English. I can show that I think India is my home.’

Pater shook his head obstinately. He said, ‘Of course I believe there is some Indian blood in our family. Very good blood, too. There is a rumour that my grandmother, Mrs Duck, was a princess. But even if the rumour is true—and of course it is nothing like as much as
half
Indian that we are—it is stepping down to pretend to be an Indian. Indians are dirty and lazy, Victoria. They will run around like chickens with their heads cut off if the English Government ever leave them to their own devices. God forbid! I hear you are great friends with Kasel. Now, he is not a bad fellow at all—mind you, I like lots of Indians very much—but have you thought that Kasel wipes his bottom with his hand, with nothing but water on it? That is the hand you shake, man!’

I said, ‘No, it isn’t. They use their left hands.’ I was short with him because I thought of just that, more than once. What Pater chose to ignore was that Mater did the same thing when she thought she wouldn’t be caught out. And I said so.

Pater banged his open palm down on the arm of his chair and cried, ‘I won’t have you saying such a horrible thing, Victoria! That is your own mother you are speaking of! What is the matter with you, girl? Do you hate us, all of a sudden? What would
he
think of you? He was a fine man.’ Pater pointed at the Sergeant’s empty, silly face.

‘You’ve just said he married an Indian,’ I answered.

Pater said, “Yes, but he didn’t take off his trousers and put on a dhoti, my God! He raised ber to
his
level, he did not sink down into all the Indian ways and use water instead of Bromo, and pick his nose and eat it, and belch after his meal, and go crawling on his stomach in front of the idols in the temples, and keep filthy statues in his room and worship them.’ He ran out of breath, then frowned at me as an idea came to him. He said, much more sharply, ‘
You
are not thinking of marrying an Indian, are you?’

I said, ‘I’m twenty-eight, Pater. Surely I can marry who
ever I want to. And how does a sergeant
raise
a princess to his level?’

I had got him sidetracked for the moment. He said, ‘How, you ask me? By being an English gentleman, that’s how. Well, my grandfather was not a real English gentleman, as a matter of fact, like Colonel Savage. He was only a sergeant, but he was a fine and upright man, and he raised my grandmother to behave decently. Oh, Victoria, for God’s sake tell me you are not thinking of marrying Kasel!’

I said, ‘Why shouldn’t I, if he asks me and I want to?’

There it was again. Now Pater was pushing me along Why didn’t he ask, instead, whether Ranjit was thinking of marrying me? Why were all the decisions left to me? The more he pushed one way, the more I would go the other.

He said, ‘You are a beautiful girl, Victoria. You can do better for yourself than that. Oh, I know some of our girls have married Indians—just one or two that I have heard of—but it has always been unhappy, a terrible mistake. You are not getting any younger, but you could marry anyone. If you don’t put it off too long you could even marry one of the officers of the Gurkhas.’

‘Like Lieutenant Macaulay?’ I snapped.

Pater shook his head and said, ‘That man would not have asked you to marry him, Victoria. He would only have taken your affection and then cast you away like an old shoe. He was not a gentleman. He was not as much of a gentleman as my grandfather, who was only a sergeant. But I don’t like to speak badly of the dead. I hear he is missing. They think he has been murdered?’

I said, ‘Yes.’

Pater shook his head and relit his pipe. When he next looked at me I saw that his eyes were damp, and immediately my own eyes began to water. When he spoke, his voice was low and trembly. He said, ‘I am not really a fool, Victoria, like you think. I know I am only a cheechee engine driver, and my grandmother was not a princess at all; she was nobody—she may have been a loose woman, even. I know as well as you do that a high-caste Indian girl would not marry a sergeant, not
in those days. But that is exactly why we have to fight so hard, that is why we must pretend and keep our self-respect, even if we shut our eyes like ostriches to do it. Because that is what we will go back to if we don’t. You don’t realize that if the English had not helped us and given us jobs, and if we had not held on to our self-respect, we would have been worse than outcasts. We would be lower than our grandmothers. And now you talk of going back, stepping down. You are throwing away what we have taken a very long time to build. I shall never go Home, but you could. You say there will be changes in India, and I am afraid it is true—but
you
don’t have to see them.’

He pulled out a big handkerchief and dabbed his eyes. He said, ‘I think I know how badly you feel sometimes about this. But don’t you realize you could set yourself to marry a British officer, and then you could go Home and never see us or think of us again? You could live at Home in a big cantonment all your life and have an English butler. No one will know what you are. You can say you are partly Spanish. That is what Jimmy D’Souza’s girl did. She wrote secretly once and said it was fine. In England no one cares, she said; no one even suspects, unless they have been to India. You could have all that instead of this.’ He waved his arm round the pokey little parlour—at my sari, at Sergeant Duck, at the glaring road and the barren barrack-like little houses.

I muttered, ‘Perhaps. But how much self-respect could I keep then, Pater? I’d be not much better than a loose woman myself if I did that. It is now, doing what I am doing, that I am beginning to be able to respect myself.’

He didn’t answer. We sat for a little longer; then I got up and ran over to kiss the top of his head and put my arms round him. He caught my waist and muttered, ‘Don’t think I am against you, Victoria. I am only thinking of your own good, nothing else.’

I said, ‘I know, Pater I’ll always trust you.’

I did not sleep well that night. In my thoughts I saw myself always in one or another of my saris. Sometimes I saw things of the past, things that had happened; sometimes I imagined
things to come. Like—in the past: On Saturday morning Colonel Savage had looked me up and down and said, ‘Please remember that caste marks may not be worn when in uniform.’ George Howland, the awful young man, had come into my office and started back with his hand across his eyes, crying, ‘What’s the fancy dress in aid of, Vicky?’ Major Dickson had looked at me, opened his mouth, and said, ‘Good morning, Miss Jones—er—good morning.’ Rifleman Birkhe had smiled at me and said nothing.

But the subadar-major had marched in to return a map, saluted, frowned, and said brusquely in his painful Hindustani, ‘You have got oil mark on sari, miss-sahiba. Sari is not good clothes for running or bicycling.’

And—in the future: I was a bride, being prepared for marriage. I stood in a light and airy room with my arms outstretched while Indian girls ministered to me, I and they in flowing diaphanous saris. There was no bridegroom in that room, of course. Then I was in a big hall of parliament, and again I had my arms lifted up and stretched out, but that time I was exhorting the men in there, and the sari made me like one of those pictures of Romans in the school history books.

The next morning Lanson’s Chevrolet was standing outside the offices when I got there. The orderly told me the colonel-sahib wanted to see me. I went in at once, saluted, and waited.

Savage and Lanson were standing beside the big desk. Savage said, ‘Mr Lanson wants to talk to you in his office at the Kutcherry. They have found Macaulay’s body. I have just identified it. You have the right to have a legal adviser present with you during the D.S.P.’s questioning.’

‘I haven’t accused her of anything, Savage,’ Lanson pro
tested indignantly. ‘What do you want to frighten her like that for?’

‘I’m telling her her rights, in case you forget to,’ Savage said. ‘Well, Miss Jones? I can get anybody you want.’

‘No, thank you, sir,’ I said. ‘There’s no need.

He said, ‘All right. Will you send her back afterwards, Lanson?’

‘Of course I will,’ Lanson said stiffly. Savage sat down at his desk, and I followed Lanson out into the passage.

His office in the Kutcherry was three doors from the Collector’s. It was a small book-littered place with a table, three or four chairs, shelves, an almirah or two, and a typewriter. It was very hot in there. Lanson brought me a chair and began to light his pipe. He took longer over it even than Pater did. I noticed his eyes wandering over my sari and thought he did not like it. When he began to speak his tone was noticeably harder than at our last interview. He said, ‘Macaulay’s body was found this morning in a dungheap in the city. It had a notice hung round the neck—“Quit India”, which is the current Congress slogan. His head had been battered in, his stomach ripped open, and other mutilations carried out.’

I kept my mouth tight closed. Too tight, for he was watching me sharply, and he said, ‘You’re surprised? Why?’

I shook my head. I said, ‘I was thinking, how horrible. A dungheap, and—all those horrible things.’

Lanson looked at me for a minute, the pipe rattling as he sucked on it. He said, ‘I expect you’ve read a good many detective stories, so you’ll know that the police always have to ask a lot of questions of the last person who saw the victim alive.’

I nodded. I didn’t feel a bit sick. I wanted to know why Ghanshyam had done those things to Macaulay’s dead body.

Lanson said, ‘I have to find out what you were doing during all the hours in which Macaulay might have been killed. I have to have proof of everything you say.’

‘When was he killed?’ I asked automatically. About eight o’clock, it had been, but I would be supposed to ask.

‘We know when he was killed, Miss Jones,’ Lanson said
shortly. ‘To the hour, and nearly to the minute.’

I didn’t know what to do with my eyes. If I looked out of the window at the pleaders and their clients in front of the court opposite, I’d be avoiding Lanson’s eyes. If I stared at him, I’d be over-anxious. But he couldn’t know the exact time, Ghanshyam had said, because of the dungheap. But suppose Macaulay’s watch had been broken in the struggle? They might be bluffing, though. Ghanshyam was quite as clever as they were.

Lanson said, ‘Well? Can you give me these proofs?’

I said, ‘I can’t prove I was in bed, Mr Lanson.’

He said, ‘No, but tell me everything you can.’

I said, ‘You’ve got it all already. I’ve told you.’

He said, ‘I want to check it again.’

I told my story again. If they did know the exact time of Macaulay’s death it would sound thin. Why had Ghanshyam put the ‘Quit India’ sign on his body? That threw suspicion on Congress.

I interrupted myself to say, ‘But why do you think I did it, Mr Lanson? It must have been some Congress extremist, or someone who wanted to put the blame on Congress.’

He said, ‘Perhaps, Miss Jones. You know the Congress crowd here pretty well by now, though, don’t you? And I haven’t said you did it. But I have my duty, you know, just as much as Colonel Savage has his. Now, who saw you in the reading-room at the Institute?’

The interrogation went on.

At the end Lanson relaxed a little He said, Thank you, Miss Jones. Have you ever heard anyone threaten—or promise, or talk—about derailing a troop train?’

I held my hands close in my lap and shook my head. I answered, ‘No,’ but my voice was very small.

‘Are you sure?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

He said, ‘I asked because about twenty people
have
heard such talk. From Mr Surabhai. He’s made no secret of his belief that an Indian patriot would be justified in derailing a troop train, regardless of the fact that the R.I.N. mutiny is
over. It’s funny you haven’t heard him, because nearly everybody else who knows him has.’

‘Well, I haven’t,’ snapped, getting angry.

He said, ‘Very good. Have you seen this man recently?’ he pushed the photograph of K. P. Roy into my hands.

I gave it back at once and flared up because anger and fear were pressing together in me. I said, ‘No, I haven’t, and the Collector’s asked me all this already, and you know he has. Why do you keep on at me? Just because I wear a sari now, I haven’t become a murderess, a train-wrecker!’

Lanson said calmly, ‘I’m asking you because we think this man’—he tapped the photograph—‘has been seen in the district around the Sirdarni-sahiba’s house. You’ve been there quite a lot, naturally, since you are engaged to Ranjit Singh.’

‘I’m not engaged to him,’ I gasped. ‘Who told you that?’

He said, ‘No one told me directly. But the Sirdarni is telling other people. About this man, though—I hear that someone rather like him was talking to you in the tunnel where Station Road crosses under the railway lines, the day the two processions clashed….’ He gave details.

I thought of two things at once. How dare the Sirdarni announce my engagement before I had consented, before Ranjit had even asked me properly? Someone must have passed by while Ghanshyam was putting my bicycle chain back on. Or Someone might just have been able to see into the tunnel from the lower windows of one of the houses beyond.

I said, ‘I remember that a man helped me to put my bicycle chain on when it fell off. I don’t remember him at all. I gave him a few annas.’

Lanson stood up, his chair squeaking back on the stone floor. His pipe was rattling again. He said, Then that will be all for now, Miss Jones.’

I had been thinking. I said, ‘If this man hangs about near the Sirdarni-sahiba’s house, why don’t you search it or surround it or something?’

The telephone rang. Lanson spoke into it stolidly and slowly in Hindustani. When he put it down he said, ‘That was a message from the tehsildar in Pathoda. A fire started in the
jungle just west of a little village called Maslan at about six o’clock this morning. There was a pretty strong west wind up there then, he says. The fire has completely destroyed Maslan. There were only about twelve houses, but they’ve all gone.’

I said, ‘Oh,’ wondering what was coming next.

Lanson nodded and said, ‘It’s interesting, and I’ll tell you why. We’ve been able to get a little information bearing, perhaps, on the accident to the troop train. Nothing much—only that, the evening before, a villager crossing the line on his way back from an errand in Pathoda saw three men moving through the jungle near the place where the train was later derailed. They weren’t local people, he said. They didn’t see him. When we began our inquiries up there, this villager came forward at once and told us what he had seen—told us publicly.’

‘Oh,’ I said again.

Lanson went on. ‘He was from Maslan. He gave us help. Now his home is burned and his cattle dead. He’s penniless. So is everybody else in Maslan. It is very unlikely that the fire was accidental. You were asking why we don’t search or watch the Kasel house for K. P. Roy. The answer, Miss Jones, is that we have, several times, and we are. But I think the bird has flown. Not far, but he’s not in the house, if he ever was—unless he can turn himself into a rat and hide under the floor. That’s what he is, Miss Jones, as a matter of fact—a murdering rat, a red rat.’

Hearing this was far more terrible than killing Macaulay. Ranjit and his mother were sheltering K. P. Roy, and I was helping them. But for the moment I’d have to control my doubt and fear.

Lanson walked round the table and held out his hand. He said, ‘Good-bye for the moment. I think I can tell you that we have a pretty good idea about Macaulay’s murder. We won’t be able to clear it up—dispose of it tidily, you know—until we find this fellow K. P. Roy and stop the derailments and everything else that has been going on in the district, such as this fire at Maslan.’ He walked beside me to the door. Then he said, and looked straight at me, The murder’s bad, of course, if it was a real murder and not, say, self-defence—but it’s not
important compared with Roy. If the murderer would get all the people who know something about Roy and the stolen explosives and the derailments to talk—we’d be very pleased with him. My driver will take you back, and I think you’d better not leave Bhowani without my permission until all this has been cleared up.’