A man’s voice close by said, ‘
Ali bhai salaam!‘
Greetings to Ali, my brother
. Ali was a Mohammedan name. But how, in this mottled darkness, had the stranger recognized him for Ali, whoever Ali was? Did he look like Ali as well as Gopal?
Not knowing what to say, he did not answer. Between two trees fifteen feet off he could make out the shape of the speaker. The man had a dagger in his hand.
In a sudden spurt of anger William forgot who he was supposed to be and what clothes he was wearing. He stepped out toward the shadow and said sharply in Hindi, in his ordinary voice, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? Put up your knife at once!’
The stranger edged back, keeping fifteen feet of distance between them. He was slightly built and wore the usual white loincloth and white turban.
William repeated, ‘Who are you? Who is Ali? Come here, and let’s have a look at you.’
The man said quietly, ‘Who are
you
? You are not Gopal the weaver.’
William in turn stepped back into black shadow and said gruffly in his hoarse, assumed voice, ‘Yes, I am.’
The stranger did not answer and did not move. He sucked in his breath through his teeth and seemed to be making up his mind what he should do. He said at last, ‘I have been following you -- Gopal. I heard you speak to save the woman of your house. I, too, am in danger of my life.’
‘Have you killed someone?’ William said quickly.
The man evaded the question. ‘It is not the English who are after me. I have done nothing to harm them directly.’ He put a light emphasis on the word ‘them’.
William’s slow brain grappled with this new problem. How could he get away before the stranger’s questions probed too deeply into his disguise? The woman at the pyre still hovered in the background of his thoughts. This man seemed to know Gopal; he might know where he was, and William would like to find out; but any question would give away his deception. Also, what had the fellow done? Who threatened his life? William was responsible for law and order here. If the man had committed a crime he should answer for it; if he had not, it seemed that he was flying from private vengeance, a vendetta of some sort, perhaps. For eight years since they took over these territories the British had fought furiously to put down all the lawlessness rife in the old Mahratta empire. They had succeeded. He should arrest the stranger, take him back to Padwa, and there make him tell the truth.
But he could do none of these things. His own deception held him in a stranglehold. He was not William Savage but Gopal the weaver, who was thought to have killed a man and was on the run from English law, and from William Savage who represented it.
He must get away. He began to creep silently backwards, tensed to start running, feeling behind him with his hands.
The stranger said, ‘Don’t go. I want to show you something.’
William kept moving.
The half-seen shadow said, ‘I must go back to the river, then, and tell her at the pyre that the man who came was not Gopal.’
William cried desperately, ‘I am, I am! Let me go!’
‘Come and prove it. Perhaps you are, after all. She can ask a couple of questions which would tell at once. Or there may be some little mark on your body which she would know. But why go? Come with me. I want you to see something. There’s nothing more important in the world for you -- Gopal -- because you looked at the leopard’s pug mark, because you didn’t want to let the woman die.’
William drew in a deep, angry breath. He did not like being pushed. He strode forward heavily, an angry English official; but his slippers sounded so strange hitting the earth that he shuffled to a standstill, paused, and muttered dejectedly, ‘All right.’
‘Good. Follow me. Be quiet. And, above all -- Gopal -- do not cry out or move away from my side, whatever you see. Do you understand? Otherwise your neck will look like mine.’ He laughed bitterly and came into the moonlight. His bead was tilted slightly to the right of his neck. ‘Like mine, only more so -- so much more that you’ll never feel it.’
He had put up his dagger. He passed William without looking round, and William, after a last brief hesitation, followed in his footsteps.
The man moved easily, and after ten minutes William knew that the cross trails from and to Bhadora must be close; simultaneously the lopsided man ahead slowed the pace.
In front, the light of a big fire glinted among the trees. William started. Wondering whether he had lost his sense of direction altogether and they were back at the river and the pyre there had been lit. The shape of the trees ahead was familiar, but these did not stand beside the river. He remembered where, off the bullock-cart track west from Bhadora, there stood a large grove of shade trees, and in the middle of it a banyan. The grove was not beside the track, but a few hundred feet back to the south of it. It was a favourite place for travellers to pass the night -- eastbound, if they expected the ferry ahead to be shut down for the night; westbound, if they had crossed the river too late to proceed farther on their journey towards Madhya.
The lopsided man held out his arm as a bar. They could see nothing for intervening bushes and trees, but the man listened and seemed to hear something that satisfied him. William heard only the faint crackle of the fire. The stranger gestured to the right and said in an extraordinary, almost soundless voice that yet had none of the sibilance of a whisper, ‘This way. Keep low.’
They moved on. William’s heart tightened with unwilling excitement. The bushes grew thick in their path, and they crawled the last ten yards on their stomachs. The grove opened out before them. Still another yard the lopsided man inched forward and placed himself so that the roots of a bush spread across his face and broke up the firelight and shadow on it. William crawled up beside him and lay still, quietening his breath.
Back there he might have said he had smallpox, or plague. Then this man would have kept away from him. But these ideas always came too late. Now he could only lie still, remember the man’s face, and see what happened. He glanced sideways, and after two minutes pursed his lips and knew he could not describe his companion at all. Apart from the slight tilt of his head he was nondescript, indescribably average: brown skin, dark eyes, slight body; lips, chin, nose, hands -- nothing to say except that he had them. William turned his head carefully to the front.
From the middle of the grove the big fire painted moving designs on the trunks of the trees and dusted the undersides of the high boughs with pink light. Eight or nine travellers, all men, huddled about the grove in irregular grouping, the fire reddening their faces or silhouetting them against the lighter background. They peered out into the darkness from time to time, their eyes aglint with fear of the road.
Light blinked from cooking pots and brass lotahs. Rolled blankets and shapeless bundles threw black shadows on the grass. As William’s eyes became accustomed to the great fire he picked up other tiny fires sparkling among the trees. Two men squatted apart from the others and apart from each other: Brahmins, he thought. Across the big fire sat a man with a ruddy, healthy face; the complexion, the tightly curled beard, and the manner in which the turban was tied told that he was a Sikh from the north. A slim boy of about ten stepped out of the darkness and stood beside the Sikh. ‘Father, our food is cooked.’
It was clear that these people were not all of one party, but William could not yet see how they should be grouped; the father and son obviously; the two Brahmins probably, although they ate with their backs to each other; the others in the grove were lumps of shadow, small movements, low voices, half-seen faces.
The ruddy Sikh farmer stood up and looked about him. Lifting his voice, he said, ‘Our food is ready. I am of the Khalsa, as you can see. We have good food -- chupattis and dal. Who is hungry, that may by his religion eat from our hands?’
The Brahmins took no notice. A voice from the outer gloom called nervously, ‘I thought you had a companion with you to share your food.’
The farmer stared from left to right and lifted his shoulders. ‘So we did. A Mohammedan we met on the road. I could have sworn he came in here with us, but he must have gone on his way.’
The anxious voice said, ‘Perhaps he is a bad man, planning to destroy us. What do you know of him? What do we know of you?’
The Sikh lifted his head indignantly. ‘
I
am Gurdial Singh Garewal, of Qadian Mughlan by the Beas. This is my son, my only son, who will inherit many acres of fine land when they come to burn me.’ He squeezed his son’s shoulder, looking affectionately into the boy’s level eyes. The son was nearly as tall as the father.
Then, remembering he was a Sikh and had been insulted, at least by inference, he continued haughtily. ‘As for my companion, I know nothing. I met him down the road, not five miles the other side of Bhadora. Poor company he was, too. Perhaps he is a jewel carrier.’
‘Aah, tst!’ The man under the trees sighed and clucked his tongue, as if to say that explained everything. ‘Perhaps you are right.’ His voice dropped to a whine. ‘We are poor men. We have no gold with us, or anything of value. We are mortally afraid. You have a gun, but who can prevent the tiger eating his fill?’ The farmer spread his shoulders. His son piped in a clear treble. ‘See, here is the gun. We are Sikhs. Don’t be afraid.’ He dragged an old heavy musket out into the firelight. The farmer ran his hand up under his curled beard and smirked with father-pride. William felt his own face loosening in a smile. The farmer loved his son so much, and in a few sentences, a few attitudes, had shown so much of his character. And the son -- Mary would bear him a son one day, as fit for pride as the boy out there, white instead of wheaten gold.
The boy brought chupattis on a maul leaf, kneeled to place them before his father, then went off and returned with the bowl of dal. Father and son broke off fids of chupatti, stirred them into the dal, and picked them out all green, hot, and dripping. They threw back their heads together, dropped the pieces into their mouths with the right hands, and chewed noisily.
William shifted impatiently. He was getting stiff. The man beside him did not turn his head or move his lips, but said in that far-off voice, ‘Do not move. Wait.’
When the farmer had eaten, and belched his satisfaction, and sat back on his haunches, a new voice spoke out of the semi-darkness beyond. ‘You go north, sirdar-ji?’ A man waddled out into the light, a fat man with a grey face and protruding brown eyes. William saw he was a Hindu merchant but could not tell where he was from. He had travelled certainly, because he knew how to address a Sikh.
The Sikh answered the question. ‘Yes, north. Towards Allahabad. Thence, Delhi. Thence, to my house. And you?’
‘In the opposite direction. I hear the ferryman at Bhadora is a villain, who demands much money or he will work one evil. You must have crossed there. Is it true?’ He leaned towards the farmer, his eyes popping in the firelight and his lips moving, like a rabbit’s, on an invisible green stalk.
The Sikh stuck out his chest. ‘He tried! Right in the middle of the stream he and his sons stopped the boat and asked for money. From me! I offered to cut their ears off!’ He whipped a twelve-inch dagger, the Sikh kirpan, from his belt and held it out. ‘We reached land safely.’
The fat man nibbled furiously. ‘All Sikhs are warriors. But what can I do? I am a poor man.’ His face shone with the grease of good living. The farmer snorted under his breath, and his son giggled. Beneath the bush William smiled. The fat man continued earnestly, ‘A poor man, I say. Are we not all poor on the road, if we have any sense? Heavens, this middle land of Gondwana is a wild and terrible place. We have jungles in Bengal, but the ground is flat, and not rocky, and there are more fields between, and the people are civilized. Here’ -- he leaned farther over -- ‘there are savage jungle dwarfs, with blowpipes and poisoned darts!’
The farmer said thoughtfully, ‘It is strange. Here, for a few hours, we meet in the jungle. We have never met before. We eat our evening meal in this grove together. Probably we will sit around this fire until it is late, and tell stories of our homes and our travels. Tomorrow, pouf! we will be gone. Who can tell that we ever met? that we ever existed? I wager that one who was with us, the jewel carrier, could tell tales.’
‘Could but won’t,’ said another, who had come up to join the circle in the firelight. ‘Men of that profession do not talk.’ ‘You are right,’ the fat merchant said. ‘I have had occasion to employ them, and they are secretive fellows.’
‘You?’ said the farmer. ‘You, sending jewels? Now I had an idea you were a poor man.’
The merchant joined in the laughter and raised his hand to signal a hit. It seemed that, as he overcame his fears, he was not averse to letting these strangers know that he was a power in his own place. He nibbled at nothing still, from some nervous tic, but his eyes crinkled, and William liked him.
William’s chin rested on his hands, and he felt strangely relaxed, considering the circumstances. The smell of food made him hungry, and he would have liked to crawl out and join the travellers. He wanted to find out more about the ferryman at Bhadora. It was a disgrace that these extortions should go on in his district, and something of a slap in the face that he should not know of them. It was worth lying here in discomfort and eavesdropping from this hiding-place under the bushes just to have found out that one fact. More: never in his life had he been among Indians without their knowing it and adjusting their talk and their attitudes accordingly. They had not seemed to, but he knew that they had, and what he saw now proved it. The travellers in the grove were not acting any parts. He was glad to be here, below the surface of the district. He was learning something.
Mary should see him now. She’d have a strange vision of him, but a true one, to set against the coming actuality -- her husband at work with exasperating slowness over the revenue records and the convolutions of the written law and the logarithms of land survey. In his office the dusty, massed tomes of judgements seemed to lean forward in their shelves and threaten him:
Be careful!
His clerk, so quick and smug, always gave him the right reference before he had thought to wonder where to find it. Brown-stained, dressed in alien clothes, hiding under a bush -- he was more comfortable here than there. Perhaps it was the cool night air, or the nearness of the road he loved to travel, or the rough earth under his hands.