She said, ‘Is this the
main
road?’
‘Yes. Well, there isn’t exactly a main road. They’re all like this, some wider, some narrower. A track from one jungle village to another might be as wide as this in places. It depends whether the zemindar or patel wants to make an impression.
You see, people always choose their own course. If a hundred travellers were to set out separately from Delhi for Madras, perhaps no five of them would follow the same roads. They have to cross the rivers at the fords, of course -- that’s where a road really becomes “main”. At the deepest rivers there are ferryboats, usually leaky old barges. In the hills, too, the road has to squeeze through where it can -- even through the Bhanrers. Do you remember?’
Yesterday evening they had passed under the ghostly slope of Jarod and come out of the hills. She had asked him about the half-discernible extent of its ruins, and he had told her.
With her he was experiencing a new ability to speak. Even now he was not fluent, but at least he could find the words to express and transmit his feeling for this country and his absorption in his work. The flame-of-the-forest broke out in scarlet splashes along the roadside. Brick-coloured dust dulled the surface of the leaves on all the trees; under the dust they held still a remnant of their monsoon richness.
He reined in at the top of a small rise, remembering that the rest of the party would be a mile or more behind. Back there a string of coolies carried the palanquin, which Mary refused to use. Beside it went his butler, Sher Dil, on a donkey; a trudging trio of servants; Mary’s tirewoman; two bullock carts loaded with trunks and boxes and new furniture -- and George Angelsmith. George had protested many times that he did not want to come with them on this honeymoon journey, but duty was duty, and he had to come as far as Bhadora.
William hunched his shoulders, feeling uncomfortable for the first time today. He muttered, ‘We’re just about there. Better wait for George. He has the scroll.’
Down the shallow slope ahead water gleamed among the trees. Mary laid her hand on his bridle, stooped over, and turned her face to his. ‘Don’t mind about it, William. This is -- oh, I can’t think of the words -- peaceful. Look at the smoke among the trees, so blue.’
William tried not to mind that Mr Wilson had deputed George to present the commendatory scroll to Chandra Sen. Perhaps it was a more signal honour for Chandra Sen that a personal representative of the Agent to the Governor-General should come specially from Sagthali. Certainly he himself wanted Chandra Sen to have all possible honour. But this was his District; it was he who had cited Chandra Sen for his good work; he would have liked to make the presentation; and George Angelsmith was officially his junior.
He said, ‘That’s Bhadora. It has thirty-six houses -- no thirty-five. One burned down in December. The river’s the Seonath. The village was a ruin when we took this area over from the Bhonslas eight years ago. Wars. Civil wars. Dacoits. Pindaris. Every kind of robbery under arms. My predecessor put the place on its feet, with Chandra Sen’s help. It’s grown even in my time -- that’s three years.’
He turned at the dust-dulled thud of hoofs from behind. George was approaching at a slow trot. They had not seen him since leaving Jabera early in the morning, but he was as immaculate now as he had been then. He lifted his hand in salute as he came up. Mary smiled curtly, and blushed, and turned down her eyes. William saw, jerked his reins, and led the way at a canter down the hill, not turning to look at the others.
The village of Bhadora lay on this, the east bank of the Seonath River. The dusty road became a paved street where it passed through between the houses. Generally there would be women and children and old men about at this hour, but today the place was deserted. Down by the river the usual crowd of travellers waited, the usual piles of blackened stones and grey wood-ash littered the grass, the usual chatter and clamour arose. The ferryboat was on the far side, loaded for its return trip. William saw a small crowd over there, not at the ferry site but a good distance farther to the left, upstream. That was not usual, but they were too far away for him to see what they were doing. It did not seem to be anything violent; he made out that some of the people were walking about, some apparently arguing, the majority squatting motionless in irregular groups on the ground, all waiting for something.
He turned back and looked at the ferry site directly opposite. Beyond the approaching barge, he saw Chandra Sen’s party at the front edge of the jungle. He half raised his hand to wave a greeting, but lowered it again. It would be poor etiquette for them to notice each other before they met at the appointed place, which was the west bank of the river.
‘Is that this fellow -- Chandra Sen -- who’s going to get the scroll?’
George’s voice was at his ear. He answered, ‘Yes. The thin one in white, alone, in front of the others.’ It always astonished him that the people at headquarters should know so little about the districts. Chandra Sen, Jagirdar, Patel of Padwa and Kahari, was a very important man. He had been a senior revenue official for a time to the Bhonslas’ court in Nagpur. As patel of two villages, he owned most of the lands, was the police chief, magistrate, mayor, and tax collector. As jagirdar, he held fifty thousand acres of jungle in feudal tenure and was responsible for the protection of the hamlets enclosed in it.
George’s supercilious tone nettled William, and, as much to change the subject as for any other reason, he added, ‘I wonder what that crowd upstream is doing.’
George said, ‘Your friend Chandra Sen will tell us, I expect, if it’s any of our business.’
William flushed slightly. It was very easy here to imagine that everything was your business. He turned his eyes away from the mysterious crowd, dismounted, and watched the ferryboat come to land.
As the flat, straight prow touched the bank and the passengers began to scramble off, the waiting Indians surged forward to get on. Goats bleated, cows mooed, children yelled, mothers screamed. The ferryman, a tall old fellow with bloodshot eyes, jumped down on to the grass, while his four big sons rested on their poles and held the boat steady. The old man bawled, ‘Get back, you daughters of darkness! Do you think the great lord Collector-sahib wishes to smell your stinking carcasses in the same boat with him?’
The crowd halted, muttered, and ebbed patiently back. William cried, ‘Let them on. Just leave room for us and our three horses.’ The crowd surged forward once more, grinning and chattering.
‘Your worship is a great king,’ the ferryman said, bowing briefly. ‘The quality of your honour’s magnificence is such as to dazzle the eye.’ He broke off to kick a young farmer out of the way.
William handed Mary into the boat, and George followed. The grooms, who all day and every day ran unnoticed thirty paces behind the horses, led them up the ramp. William made way for George to stand in the very front of the boat.
On the far bank Chandra Sen moved slowly down towards the river. A jumbled array of servants, coolies, and tenant farmers surrounded a palanquin among the trees. The members of a six-piece band marched into view, formed a rough circle, raised their instruments, and waited.
Mary reached out her hand and twined her fingers in William’s. The brown women in the boat stared at her slim back and whispered excitedly to one another, nodding their heads so that their nose ornaments flashed in the sun and their gold necklaces jangled together.
The boat grounded, grated forward under the thrust of the poles, and stopped. Mary made to move forward, but William held her back, while Mr George Angelsmith, the accredited representative of the Agent to the Governor-General of India, stepped down and stood alone on the bank, one foot slightly advanced, his head up and his left hand negligently on his sword hilt. The band struck up a loud cacophony. Chandra Sen bowed from the waist. The servants and farmers bowed. William saluted. From the barge a kid bleated for its mother’s milk, a long agonized
maaa-a-a-a-ah!
George Angelsmith touched the peak of his cap and stepped forward.
William and Mary jumped down from the boat. A servant handed garlands of flowers one by one to Chandra Sen, and Chandra Sen lowered them in turn over George’s neck, then Mary’s, then William’s. At last he stepped back and stood with head bowed and hands joined in front of his face. He was tall, thin, and pale, dressed in white and wearing a white turban. A white caste mark was painted on his forehead. His face had a tired charm, and his large eyes were wide open, as if in perpetual mild surprise.
The band made a deafening noise a few feet off. Mary shouted in English, laughing and blushing. ‘Thank you so much, Mr Chandra Sen.’ The patel bowed, took her by the hand, and led her to the palanquin. William saw that George, watching the easy swing of her riding habit, did not seem to notice the goats and children and women easing past him off the barge. Mary stooped and put her head through the curtains of the palanquin to talk to Chandra Sen’s wife, and George looked away.
Chandra Sen returned, and William grasped his hand. ‘I’m glad to see you.’ Crinkles sprang up round the corners of the patel’s eyes. He replied, ‘And
I
am glad to see your memsahib. It was time you married -- past time. It is not rude of me, by your custom, to say she is beautiful? A princess!’
George joined them, and they chatted idly. From the corner of his eye William watched the other ferry passengers group themselves and prepare to face the road. As a score of times before, it struck him that India was always moving, always going somewhere. Between Kashmir and Cape Comorin, how many hundreds of thousands of people daily faced the dangers, known and guessed and unguessed, of the road? In the sixty-year anarchy of the dying Mahratta power, how many had failed to reach the place they were going to? How many still died on the way and were not missed?
Chandra Sen was talking, a little hurriedly, about a court case; telling him the ins and outs of the relationships involved; whose mother had quarrelled with whose great-aunt how many years ago; the exact amount paid by one ancestor for false title deeds in the time of the Saugor Pandits, and by another for later, falser deeds. William knew Chandra Sen well and thought he seemed to be about something. As for the court case, it was too involved. George was nodding as though he understood perfectly; he probably did but William himself could only shake his head unhappily.
In the background Mary straightened up under a shrill volley of congratulations from the voice inside the palanquin. A small brown hand, a-glitter with many rings, slipped through the gap in the curtain and gestured violently.
The grooms led up the horses; George swung easily into the saddle; William cupped his hands between his knees, heaved Mary up, and mounted his own horse. The band straggled into place ahead of them, the leader shouted, ‘Ah!’ and with a tumultuous noise the procession started off.
George rode a horse’s length ahead of the others, just behind the band. Chandra Sen, the patel, stepped delicately forward with long strides, the dust squirting up and over his open sandals. William and Mary rode behind him. Then came the palanquin, then the patel’s servants, then the tenant farmers.
The road led through jungle so thick that the undergrowth threatened to strangle the trees. Flocks of green pigeons whirred up in alarm at the racket; monkeys swung from bough to bough among the recesses of the trees. William glanced at Mary; she rode with her lips slightly parted, and he thought she was looking anywhere but at George’s back ahead of her. He did not know what she was thinking about.
She turned suddenly. ‘Isn’t this bizarre?’
‘What is?’ he said foolishly.
‘Oh, this. Bands are for big streets, big parades, not for marching, through a jungle with so few of us here, and no spectators.’
He considered what she had said. ‘There’s us, dear.’
She laughed. ‘My dear, literal husband, I love you . . . husband . . . husband.’ She spoke the word louder each time, as if there were magic in it, and so loud that George must have heard even over the tumult of the band.
She went on, shouting to make herself heard, ‘This Eastern music is fascinating, weird. Do you know if this tune they’re playing has a name?’
‘Yes. “Rule, Britannia.” ‘
She choked, catching her hand to her face and spluttering. William was puzzled. The bandsmen weren’t playing very well, but they were doing their best. Perhaps he too wouldn’t have recognized the tune if he had not heard bands like this one play it so often. He did not see anything particularly funny about it though.
The road forked, and the bandsmen shuffled to a halt while two servants ran up with Chandra Sen’s horse and helped him into the saddle. ‘Now, sahib,’ he said to George, ‘it is fitting that I ride, for I am on my own land.’
The side track curved sharply off to the right. After a mile the forest began to thin out, small fields ate into it, then the fields grew together and lonely hovels dotted them, and the trail came into the open. The village of Padwa stood on a little knoll ahead, raised above the level of the September floods. Wild plum, peepul, and tamarind trees surrounded it; the sun shone down on thatch and tile, on the broad brown acres and the green carpets of jungle. William fidgeted in the saddle and knotted his right hand against his thigh. What extra value, or importance, did a parchment scroll place on a man who owned this?
The village did not contain many houses, but they were all in good repair, grouped tidily around Chandra Sen’s own house, a large two-storeyed building of white-painted brick with a tiled red roof. The other houses were made of earth and cow dung and straw. The living quarters of Chandra Sen’s house occupied the upper storey, which was reached by a flight of wooden steps. The ground level was walled only at the back; cows and carts and piles of straw could be seen among the wooden uprights supporting the upper storey. A deep courtyard, stone paved and surrounded by a low dry-stone wall, extended back from the street to the house.
Most of the men of the village were already in the patel’s procession. The women stood in the doorways of the houses, their hands or an end of clothing thrown up to cover their faces. A thickset man stood under the patel’s steps, holding two grey-coated dogs by the collars. The dogs snarled and strained forward to get at the strange men and horses approaching.