Authors: Paul Scott
But in Mayapore there is the Tirupati Temple. Mandir means temple. It is a word from the north. And so you have the meeting of south and north. The Tirupati Temple, the Mandir Gate. In ancient days the town was walled. At night the gates were closed. The Mandir Gate then opened onto the Mandir Gate steps. Coming from the north you would have had to cross the river by boat and climb the steps to the Mandir Gate. Later they built the Mandir Gate bridge. The steps remained but became simply the steps you see that lead up to the Tirupati Temple. There were other gates to the south. There was never a Bibighar gate. The wall had gone, I think, before the Bibighar was built. The Bibighar bridge was built after MacGregor’s day. What a mixture! MacGregor, Bibighar, Mandir and Tirupati.
Leaving the bank that day with the boy following, armed with his stick, I passed through the Eurasian quarters, and went past the church of the mission where the Eurasians worshiped. A little church of England in miniature. . And waited at the grade crossing because it was closed to allow a train to pass. And eventually moved, going with the
crowd over the Mandir Gate bridge, and paused on the other side, to distribute some money to the beggars and to the leper who always sat there, with his limbs cut back like those of a bush that had to be pruned in order to ensure the bloom. And then, taking the left fork from the holy tree, past the open shop-fronts, turning a deaf ear to the offers of pān, cloth, soda water, melons and jasmine, and through by the open archway in the wall surrounding the Chillianwallah bazaar, stopping to buy green chillis which Mr. de Souza had a liking for, and going then to the other side of the market square, past the loud meat and the stinking fish and the hunched figures of the market women with their scales lying idle like sleeping metal reptiles and up the stairway to the offices of Romesh Chand Gupta Sen, whose dead brother’s widow, Mrs. Gupta Sen, lived in one of those concrete houses built on the Chillianwallah reclamation, in the Chillianwallah Bagh.
“Arrested!” he said. The uncle-by-marriage. Romesh Chand. “That boy,” he said, “that boy will be the death of me. Who does he think he is? Why cannot he learn the ways of honour and obedience, the ways befitting a young Indian?” And called, ringing a little brass bell as though the office were a temple, so that I understood better young Kumar’s disobedience, remembering from that morning the voice, the Englishness, and those northern sinews, that handsomeness. Do you understand? How it was alien, this background, this warren of little dirty rooms above the warehouse of the contractor? To him. Alien to him, to Kumar? Who spoke English with what you call a public school accent? Who had been taken to England by his father when he was too young to remember the place he was born in, and lived there, lived in England, until he was eighteen years old? But whose uncle back in India was a bania, sitting at a desk wearing the achkan, the high-necked coat, and with clerks under him, squatting in little partitioned cells, among grubby papers, one even holding paper money in his toes? For a time, after his father’s death and his return to India, young Kumar was made to work there. But had rebelled and now did some work for the
Mayapore Gazette.
So much I gathered. I did not ask questions. Simply I went there to tell the uncle of Mr. Merrick’s action. So that steps could be taken. What steps I did not know. But he rang the little bell for his head clerk and sent him away with a chit, a note to a lawyer to come at once. There was no telephone in that place. One could tell that Romesh Chand was a man who did not believe in telephones, in the necessity for telephones, or in acting in any way that could be counted “modern” or
foreign. But who believed in his own power, his own importance. He asked how it was that his nephew came to be at the Sanctuary. I did not tell the whole truth. I said only that he had stayed the night there, that in the morning the police had come looking for a man they wanted and had taken Kumar away for questioning because he was the only stranger there. “It is kind of you to take trouble to inform me,” he said. I said it was no trouble and came away. But all day I did not get young Kumar out of my mind. That afternoon I sent Mr. de Souza into the bazaar to find out what he could and went myself to the purdah hospital to speak to Anna Klaus, the doctor from Berlin who came to India to escape from Hitler and who was my good friend. After she had heard my opinion of the kind of boy young Kumar was, she telephoned Lady Chatterjee who was on the hospital committee. And said after she had telephoned, “Well, that is all I can do. Lady Chatterjee will speak to Judge Menen or the Deputy Commissioner. Perhaps. And your Mr. Merrick will find himself asked questions. Which is all right as far as it goes. But it depends, doesn’t it, depends on your young Mr. Kumar, on what he has done? Or on what he is suspected of having done? If it is anything remotely subversive they can lock him up without a by-your-leave.” Which I knew. And came back here, and found Mr. de Souza ahead of me. “It is all right,” he said, “the police only kept him a couple of hours. When the lawyer sent by Romesh Chand arrived at the police station they had already let him go.” I asked de Souza how he knew this. He said he had spoken to Romesh Chand’s head clerk who was not supposed to have known what was going on but had found out by gossiping to the lawyer’s clerk. So, Mr. de Souza said, it is all right, and we can forget Mr. Kumar. Yes, I said. It is all right. Dr. Klaus, also she came that evening. And I told her. She said, “Well, that’s all right then. That’s all over.” And again I said yes. But did not think so. When we went out that night with the stretcher I could not get it out of my mind that it was not all right and not all over. I asked myself, Did I then do wrong? To warn Romesh Chand? To get Dr. Klaus to arrange it that important people would ask questions? Young Kumar was questioned and then allowed to go. And after he had gone his uncle’s lawyer arrived. Merrick probably knew this but took no notice. An Indian lawyer was nothing. But later that day, when perhaps so far as Merrick was concerned the case of young Kumar had been settled and forgotten, he would have been rung by the Judge or Deputy Commissioner, or by someone ringing on the Deputy Commissioner’s or the Judge’s
instructions and asked: Who is this boy Kumar you’ve got at one of the kotwalis for questioning? And Merrick would have said, He’s not there any longer, why do you ask? And whoever it was who was ringing would say, Well, that’s probably a good thing. We have been asked what’s happening. Your young suspect seems to have a lot of influential friends.
To be asked after by people in authority could undo all the good Kumar might have done for himself by answering questions properly once he got to the police station, would count against him in Merrick’s book—in Merrick’s book, where Kumar had already gone down as a boy who spoke better English than he, and would now go down as a boy who had friends who were able to speak to Judge Menen or the Deputy Commissioner, just as if he were a white boy, and not a black boy. And had stared arrogantly and said, Didn’t this fellow understand it’s no good talking Indian to me?
And later, yes, later, walked in public, here in the Sanctuary in view of anyone who cared to watch, hand in hand with the white girl, Miss Manners. And perhaps walked like that elsewhere, where Merrick would hear about it, or see it. I did not know until too late that Merrick also knew Miss Manners. All Europeans all knew each other, but theirs, Merrick’s and Miss Manners’, was a special way of knowing, it seemed. And that night of Bibighar I understood that it was this special way. Merrick came when it was dark. In his truck. Alone. He said, “I believe you know a girl called Daphne Manners? I have just come from the MacGregor House. She isn’t home yet. Have you seen her?” “Yes,” I said. “She was here. But left just before it got dark.” I did not think there was any personal interest in his inquiry. There was trouble in the district. And he was a policeman. I thought only of the girl. Of what could have happened to her. I assumed, you see, that Lady Chatterjee had rung the police because Miss Manners had not reached home.
He said, “Why was she here?” I told him she sometimes came to help at the clinic. He seemed surprised and said, “I didn’t know that. I knew she came here once because she talked about it. How often does she come?” “Very rarely,” I said. For suddenly I was cautious. And then he asked, did she come alone, had she been alone tonight, did I know where she had planned to go when she left at dusk? Yes, alone, I said, alone tonight, and home so far as I knew, back to the MacGregor House. By which route? “Well, from here,” I said, “it’s quicker by the Bibighar. Didn’t you come that way from the MacGregor House?” It seemed that he hadn’t, that from the MacGregor House he had driven
first to the kotwali on the Mandir Gate bridge side, and then remembered she had once talked to him of a visit to the Sanctuary and drove here from that direction. “So you probably missed her,” I said, and Merrick replied, “But you say she left at dusk. I was at the MacGregor House more than an hour after dusk and until nearly nine o’clock and she hadn’t got back.”
And then because I was worried for her and momentarily forgot about Merrick and Kumar, I said what I had not intended to say, said what could not help putting the name Kumar into his mind. I said, “perhaps she called at Mrs. Gupta Sen’s.” Seeing his face I wished that I had not said it. It was as if in mentioning Mrs. Gupta Sen I had actually pronounced the name Kumar. He said, “I see.” Behind his eyes there was a smile. And everything fitted into place, fitted back into that dangerous geometrical position I had had warning of, with Merrick and Kumar as two points of a triangle, with the third point made this time not by Rajendra Singh but by Miss Manners. I had that sensation which sometimes comes to us all, of returning to a situation that had already been resolved on some previous occasion, of being again committed to a tragic course of action, having learned nothing from that other time or those other times when Merrick and I may have stood like this, here in this room where I am bedridden and you ask your questions, with the name Kumar in our minds and the name of a girl who was missing and who had to be found. The revelation that Merrick was concerned as more than a policeman and my own betrayal of the boy, of Kumar, through talking of the house in Chillianwallah Bagh, talking of Mrs. Gupta Sen’s—these were the springs that had to be touched each time our lives completed one revolution and again reached the point where Merrick and I stood in the room. And each time the springs
were
touched, touched as surely as night follows day, touched before they could be recognized for what they were. I should have known that Merrick knew the girl. It was stupid of me. It was the price I paid for devoting myself to the interests of the dying instead of the living. I should not have assumed that just because she was a friend of Hari Kumar she could not also be a friend of Mr. Merrick. If I had not been stupid then we might have escaped from the cycle of inevitability and Merrick would not have left, as he did, already convinced that Kumar alone could solve the mystery of the girl’s disappearance.
But I had not known that Merrick knew the girl or that in his own curious way he was fond of her. But I guessed it then, after I had said,
“Perhaps she called in at Mrs. Gupta Sen’s,” and saw the excitement behind his otherwise blank but revealing china blue eyes. For he had long ago chosen Hari Kumar, chosen him as a victim, having stood and watched him washing at the pump, and afterwards taken him away for questioning, to observe more closely the darkness that attracted the darkness in himself. A different darkness, but still a darkness. On Kumar’s part a darkness of the soul. On Merrick’s a darkness of the mind and heart and flesh. And again, but in an unnatural context, the attraction of white to black, the attraction of an opposite, of someone this time who had perhaps never even leapt into the depths of his own private compulsion, let alone into those of life or of the world at large, but had stood high and dry on the sterile banks, thicketed around with his own secrecy and also with the prejudice he had learned because he was one of the white men in control of a black man’s country.
Merrick had known for a long time about Miss Manners and Kumar. I realize that therefore Kumar was already in his mind as someone who might know where she was. But there is something that perhaps you do not know yet. Something I partly gathered when she came that night of Bibighar, the night when Kumar did not arrive, something I learned more fully of on a later occasion, when she came to say good-bye because she was going up north to stay with her aunt, Lady Manners, until it was all over. She was pregnant. She made no secret of it. For a time we spoke of ordinary unimportant things. I was greatly struck by her calmness. I remember thinking, It is the calmness of a beautiful woman. And yet she was not beautiful, as you know, as everyone you have spoken to will have told you, as you have seen for yourself from her photograph. At one point we both fell silent. It was not the silence of people who have run out of things to say. It was the silence of people who felt understanding and affection, who were only uncertain just how much at that moment the friendship should be presumed upon. It was I who made the decision. To speak of Kumar. I said, “Do you know where he is?” meaning where he was imprisoned. I did not need actually to pronouce his name. She looked at me and the expression on her face told me two things, that she did not know but hoped, just for a second or two before the hope faded, that I did. She shook her head. She had asked. But nobody in authority would tell her. She had also called at the house in Chillianwallah Bagh, hoping that his aunt might know. But Mrs. Gupta Sen would not so much as come out of her room to speak to her. More than this, I think, for the moment she had not dared to do in
case she did him harm. He had been arrested, that night of Bibighar, with some other boys. Earlier that day, you remember, several people had been taken into custody for political reasons. It was said they had been put into closed railway carriages and taken away, no one knew where. It was also said that the arrests of five or six boys on the night of the Bibighar affair had caused the riots in the town. But the riots no doubt were already planned. Perhaps the riots were worse because of the rumours of the terrible things that were happening to the boys arrested after Bibighar. Or perhaps they seemed to be worse because among the English there was this belief that after Bibighar none of their women was safe. They said it was because of Bibighar that the Deputy Commissioner was persuaded to see the situation as one that was out of hand and called in the military before it was actually necessary. Perhaps the truth of these things will never be known. Before Miss Manners came to say good-bye to me it had occurred to me that perhaps it weighed on her mind that unwittingly she had been at the very centre of all these troubles. But when she came she had this look of calmness, of concentration, the look, I think, of all women who for the first time are with child and find that the world around them has become relatively unimportant. I put my hand on hers and said, “You
will
go through? Go through to the end?” She said, “Why do you ask?” and smiled, so that I knew she would go through. I said, “Have they tried to dissuade you?” She nodded. Yes, they had tried. She said, “They make it sound awfully simple. Like a duty.”