‘And what do you allege he told you?’
‘He said she’d obviously asked us to meet her, egged us on, that then we’d given her more than she’d quite bargained for, and that she was now trying to have us punished for something we’d only been technically guilty of.’ A pause. ‘He made it sound very plausible. He left me to think about it. He seemed to be away for quite a long time. When he came back he had one of the other men with him. He told me one of my friends had come down to hear me confess. I don’t know which of the men it was. I heard this man trying to tell me he knew nothing and had said nothing. They started hitting me again.’ A pause. ‘After that I think Merrick sent everyone
out. I think we were alone. He spoke and acted even more obscenely.’
Rowan said, ‘The word obscene is open to different interpretations. Your allegation of obscenity – the second you have made – is against an officer of the Indian Police and is damaging to the reputation of that officer. You must give examples of obscenity so that anyone reading the record of this examination may form his own conclusion whether the word is justified in the context of the allegation.’
Kumar had slowly transferred his gaze from Gopal to Rowan. He said, ‘He asked me if I was enjoying it.’
‘Enjoying it?’
‘He said, “Aren’t you enjoying it? Surely a randy fellow like you can do better than this?”’
‘Is that all?’
‘He said, “Aren’t you enjoying it? Surely a randy fellow like you can do better than this? Surely a healthy fellow like you doesn’t exhaust himself just by having it once?”’ A pause. ‘He had his hand between my legs at the time.’
Gopal seemed to recoil. Rowan spoke sharply to the clerk. ‘Strike that from the record. Delete anything that followed the detenu’s statement “I think we were alone”. When you’ve done that leave your notebook on this desk and wait outside until I recall you.’
When the clerk had obeyed and closed the door behind him Gopal moved as if to protest, but Rowan said to Kumar:
‘Why are you making allegations of this kind?’
‘I’m answering your questions.’
‘Are you? Or are you lying?’
‘I’m not lying.’
‘I put it to you that you are, that you are telling a pack of lies, very carefully rehearsed over the past year or so for just such an occasion as this, or to cause trouble on your release. If such outrageous things were done to you – really done to you – you would have said so when examined by the magistrate specially appointed to question you on just this kind of point. I put it to you that you did not say so because they had not happened. I put it to you that you are basing this story on tales and rumours you’ve heard since being imprisoned, rumours that were investigated at the time and totally
unsubstantiated. I put it to you that you have made these things up in the belief that they may protect you from the danger you’d still be in if the charge of rape were made even at this late stage. I put it to you that your entire testimony this morning has been compounded of omission, exaggeration and downright falsehood and that your detention is no more than you richly deserve. You have now an opportunity to retract. I advise you to think most carefully whether you should or should not take that opportunity.’
‘I’ve nothing I wish to retract. I’m sorry. I seem to have misunderstood.’
‘What do you mean, misunderstood? Misunderstood the questions?’
‘Not the questions. The reason for asking them.’
‘The reason was made clear at the beginning.’
‘No, the form the questions would take was made clear. The reason for asking them was left for me to guess at. I made the wrong guess. Something has happened to her, hasn’t it?’
‘Do you mean to Miss Manners?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why do you ask that?’
‘Because the guess I made was that perhaps she’d finally managed to persuade someone I’d done nothing to deserve being kept locked up. But this examination increasingly smells of uneasy consciences. Something’s happened to her and I’m the loose end someone thought it would be a relief to tie neatly off. I’m sorry. When we began you were so fair-minded it would have hurt if I’d still been capable of feeling hurt. And it would have been nice if I’d been able to answer your questions truthfully without it becoming clear that I can’t be neatly tied off and that nobody’s conscience can be soothed down. But I answer them truthfully, as truthfully as I can, and you begin to see that I’m the least important factor and that without intending to you’re asking questions about what I call the situation. That’s why you’re annoyed and accuse me of lying, because the situation threatens to be more than any conscience can cope with. What’s happened to her? Is she dead?’ A pause. ‘I’ve sometimes felt it but never let myself think it. If she is, you should have said so. You should have said—’
‘We assumed that you knew. You’re not cut off completely from the outside world. You exchange letters with your aunt. You have newspapers, surely? You talk to fellow-prisoners – new arrivals, for instance.’
‘My aunt’s letters are heavily censored. In any case she would never refer to Miss Manners. She’s never forgiven her. I think she found it easier to blame Miss Manners than anything or anyone else for what happened to me. And I’m in the special security block here. We’re allowed books, but not newspapers. Once a week they circulate a foolscap page of war news, full of victories and pious platitudes. How and when did she die?’
‘She died of peritonitis. About a year ago.’
‘A year ago? Peritonitis?’ A pause.’ – That’s blood-poisoning, isn’t it? Burst appendix, that sort of thing?’
‘I gather the peritonitis was the result of a Caesarean operation undergone in far from ideal conditions.’
‘A Caesarean? Yes. I see.’ A pause. ‘She married?’
‘No. She didn’t marry.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you still have nothing to retract?’
‘Nothing.’ A pause. ‘Nothing.’
For a while after that he did not speak. He sat staring at Rowan. At first she did not detect it – there was no sound of it, no sign of it – except (and now she saw it) this curious unemotional expulsion from the deep-set eyes of rivulets that coursed down his cheeks: opaque in the glaring light like phosphorescent trails, a substance that released itself without disturbing the other mechanisms of his body. She shut her own eyes. She had had a sudden, astonishingly strong compulsion to touch him. No one had ever cried for Daphne, except herself; and this one person beside herself she could not reach. Between them there was a panel of thick glass and downwardly directed slats of wood or metal. The barrier that separated them was impenetrable. It was as if Hari Kumar were buried alive in a grave she could see down into but could not reach into or even speak to, establish a connection with of any kind.
She opened her eyes again. The twin rivulets gleamed on his prison cheeks, and then the image became blurred and
she felt a corresponding wetness on her own – tears for Daphne that were also tears for him; for lovers who could never be described as star-crossed because they had had no stars. For them heaven had drawn an implacable band of dark across its constellations and the dark was lit by nothing except the trust they had had in each other not to tell the truth because the truth had seemed too dangerous to tell.
In her mind was the image of Suleiman with the box held to his breast in the manner of someone holding a reliquary. The truth was in the reliquary and in the mind that held the image of Suleiman and in the mind of the man in the room behind the glass panel: the truth and memory of their having been in the Bibighar that night, as lovers, moving to the motion of the joy of union; and of the terror of their separation and of how, afterwards, she had crawled on hands and knees across the floor of the pavilion and untied the strips of cotton cloth the spoilers had torn from their own ragged clothing and bound him with. For a while they held each other like children afraid of the dark, and then he picked her up and began to carry her away from the pavilion.
I look for similes (she had written – secretly, in the last stages of her pregnancy, her insurance against permanent silence) for something that explains it more clearly, but find nothing, because there is nothing. It is itself; an Indian carrying an English girl he has made love to and been forced to watch being assaulted – carrying her back to where
she
would be safe. It is its own simile. It says all that needs to be said, doesn’t it? If you extend it – if you think of him carrying me all the way to the MacGregor House, giving me into Aunt Lili’s care, ringing for the doctor, ringing for the police, answering questions, and being treated as a man who’d rescued me, the absurdity, the implausibility became almost unbearable. Directly you get to the point where Hari, taken on one side by Ronald Merrick for instance, has to say, ‘Yes, we were making love,’ the nod of understanding that
must
come from Ronald
won’t
, unless you blanch Hari’s skin, blanch it until it looks not just like that of a white man but like that of a white man too shaken for another white man not to feel sorry for, however much he may reproach him.
The image sharpened. She understood it in an exact depth
and dimension as if she were Daphne and the man sitting in the chair down there were actually standing, waiting to pick her up again after a brief rest. He tried to take hold of my arm. I moved away from him. I said, ‘No. Let me go. You’ve not been near me. You don’t know anything. You know nothing. Say nothing.’ He wouldn’t listen to me. He caught me, tried to hold me close, but I struggled. I was in a panic, thinking of what they’d do to him. No one would believe me. He said, ‘I’ve got to be with you. I love you. Please let me be with you.’ I beat at him, not to escape myself but to make
him
escape. I was trying to beat sense and reason and cunning into him. I kept saying, ‘We’ve not seen each other. You’ve been at home. You say nothing. You know nothing. Promise me.’ I was free and began to run without waiting to hear him promise. At the gate he caught me and tried to hold me back. Again I asked him to let me go, please to let me go, to say nothing, to know nothing for my sake if that was the only way he could say nothing and know nothing for his own. For an instant I held him close – it was the last time I touched him – and then I broke free again and was out of the gateway, and running; running into and out of the light of the street lamp opposite, running into the dark and grateful for the dark, going without any understanding of direction. I stopped and leaned against a wall. I wanted to turn back. I wanted to admit that I couldn’t face it alone. And I wanted him to know that I thought I’d done it all wrong. He wouldn’t know what I felt, what I meant. I was in pain. I was exhausted. And frightened. Too frightened to turn back. I said, ‘There’s nothing I can do, nothing, nothing,’ and wondered where I’d heard those words before, and began to run again, through those awful ill-lit deserted roads that should have been leading me home but were leading me nowhere I recognized; into safety that wasn’t safety because beyond it there were the plains and the openness that made it seem that if I ran long enough I would run clear off the rim of the world.
Well – she had gone. Yes, eventually, she had gone clear off the rim of the world – then or later; keeping faith with a promise that was as well an imprisonment. For him it would have been then that she had gone. He must have watched her, perhaps he followed, perhaps followed her nearly all the way
to the house and then felt for himself something of the terror she had felt for him, so that he too ran home and in the privacy of his room began to bathe his face because it was cut and bruised by the men who had come at them out of the dark; the unknown watchers, the unknown spoilers, the men for whom a taboo had been broken by watching Hari love her. He had said nothing, explained nothing. ‘Say nothing,’ she had begged. He had kept faith with that. They had both kept faith. She wondered whether he would see her death as releasing him from a promise made and almost absurdly kept. The promise had betrayed and imprisoned them both. Considering this she felt soiled as from an invasion of territory she had no title to.
‘Do you want a few moments to compose yourself?’ Rowan asked.
‘I am composed. But you should have told me. You should have made it clear.’
‘Are you saying that if you’d known Miss Manners was no longer alive your answers to some of our questions might have been different?’
‘I answered the questions because I thought the examination was the result of some effort of hers. I answered the questions because I thought she wanted you to ask them. If I’d known she had nothing to do with it, and that it was only a case of bad consciences I wouldn’t have answered the questions at all.’
‘There was one important question you didn’t answer.’
‘I shall never answer it.’
‘Did it strike you at the time that your refusal to answer questions was unhelpful not only to you but to those five other men who were suspected?’
‘Yes, I had to consider that. It was part of the situation.’
‘Do you know what happened to them?’
‘I was told they were sent to detention.’
‘Did you think that justified?’
‘No.’
‘You believed them innocent of anything, except perhaps illicit distilling and drinking?’
‘On that night I’m sure they were innocent of anything
else. I don’t know how or why they were arrested but I know none of us would have been arrested if it hadn’t been for the assault. We were all punished for the assault, when it came to it. There was nothing I could do about that. Whether they deserved detention for political crimes, more or less than I do, I can’t say. I wasn’t able to let that enter into it.’
‘Would it be in your power at all to remove the last shred of suspicion that they were implicated in the assault? It is accepted by this board that those suspicions were unavoidably part of the atmosphere in which your cases had to be examined when the question of detention under the Defence of India Rules came up. If you were being absolutely frank with us – for instance about your activities and movements on the night of the assault – would that frankness be helpful to those five men?’