The Setting Sun
Authors: Bart Moore-Gilbert
First published by Verso 2014
© Bart Moore-Gilbert 2014
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-268-5
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-269-2 (US)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-646-1 (UK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moore-Gilbert, B. J., 1952–
The setting sun : a memoir of empire and family secrets / Bart Moore-Gilbert.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-78168-268-5 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-78168-269-2 (ebook)
1. Police misconduct – India – Satara (District) – History – 20th century. 2. Police – India – Satara (District) – History – 20th century. 3. Terrorism – India – Satara (District) – History – 20th century. 4. India – History – Autonomy and independence movements. 5. India – History – British occupation, 1765–1947. 6. Moore-Gilbert, B. J., 1952 – Travel – India. I. Title.
HV8249.S37M66 2014
954.03’59092 – dc23
[B]
2013037732
v3.1
This book is for you, Madeleine. It’s no substitute for your grandfather, but it will help you to know him better.
‘We have to create our lives, create memory.’
Doris Lessing,
Under My Skin
‘So while, when I travel, I can move only according to what I find, I also live, as it were, in a novel of my own making, moving from not knowing to knowing, with person interweaving with person and incident opening out to incident.’
V.S. Naipaul,
Finding the Centre
Contents
Acknowledgements
Writing this book, I’ve accrued debts to many people. First I would like to thank everyone I met in India who facilitated my journey and the researches on which it is based. Several are mentioned in the text, one or two with their names changed – at their request. Without their friendship and help, there would be no narrative.
In the UK and elsewhere, many family members and friends helped by reading drafts and making comments, by providing information and photographs, or otherwise facilitating the progress of the text from uncertain beginnings. These include: Anthony and Pat Bicknell; Janice Biskin-Stanton; Bernadette Buckley; Patrick Gilbert-Hopkins; Keith Goldsmith; Anna Hartnell; Manali Jagtap-Nyheim (who provided invaluable help with translations from Mahratti); Ames and Lindsay Moore-Gilbert; Blake Morrison; Susheila Nasta (who published one extract from an earlier draft in
Wasafiri
); and Sanjay Seth (who published another in
Postcolonial Studies
).
My most important debts are to Francis Spufford, who provided huge support throughout and brilliant editorial interventions in early drafts. His sure feel for what was really at stake in the text and gimlet eye for what was redundant played a huge part in its final shape. And Leo Hollis at Verso responded with wonderful enthusiasm from the moment he received the unsolicited script.
Prologue
‘Get up, Nigger, quick,’ Wilson’s whisper rasps, ‘don’t wake the others.’
The boy stirs reluctantly, flinching at the icy draught from the window above his bed. Next to him, he can just make out the beached bulk of Greenwell, the largest pupil in his year, snoring softly
.
‘The Colonel wants to see you.’
The boy’s instantly alert. Wilson, the head prefect, who sleeps on the floor below with the senior boys, has never acknowledged his existence before. His housemaster? Why? He jerks back the blankets and reaches for the dressing gown on his chair. It feels like the middle of the night
.
‘In his study.’
The boy’s too intimidated to ask questions. His mind churns over recent misdemeanors. No, he’s already been called to account for those. Perhaps another prefect overheard him tonight, telling his tale, long after lights out. They often take turns. The boy’s generally reluctant to participate, even though he loves stories and there’s no set formula to follow. It can be made-up, a summary of a film, anecdotes about their fathers’ work, or a commentary on a recent sporting event. He can’t rehearse the plots of television programmes because his family has never owned one. They’ve only had electricity since he was eight. He loves football, but hasn’t been here long enough to have mastered recent developments in the league. Hearing about Herbert Chapman, or Highbury’s record crowd, things his father has passed on from when he lived in England before the war, interests no one
.
So when his turn comes, the boy usually talks of Africa, because that’s what he knows. Often he speaks about the minder he’s had since the age of four. Kimwaga can uncap a fizzing bottle of Pepsi with his back teeth, feather the boy’s arrows and locate wild hives by following the honeybird, which he answers with a special whistle. It’s Kimwaga who gave him the elephant-hair bangle to keep him safe in England and which the boy never removes, even in the shower. Some of his schoolmates insisted it was plastic, until one day he put a match to one of the ebony-coloured filaments and the stink convinced them
.
As the boy talks, he can almost smell the woodsmoke on Kimwaga’s warm black skin, see the dark eyes glinting above knobbly cheekbones, trace the crisped hair so different from his own. It’s his favourite way of insulating himself against this freezing country where there’s been no sun to speak of for half a year, where the birds all seem to be grey, brown or black and where he’s had to learn endless rules, most of which make no sense
.
Generally his classmates listen politely; but what he speaks of is so alien – rescuing stricken hens from safari ants, greasing tranquillised hippos to stop their hides cracking when the pools dry up, having his Wellingtons scoffed by a hyena. Sometimes, sensing their resistance, he tones it down to make it more like what they know, to make himself more acceptable. Tonight two of them had talked about their pets’ mishaps. So he decided to tell of how one of the boxers got into a fight with a leopard
.
Tunney had disappeared one afternoon, and came hobbling back at dusk from the direction of the nearby hill, gabled with great bald rocks and thicketed with thorn and cactus. Much of his right shoulder was missing, skin, muscle and sinew ripped away. The shiny grey cartilage and glistening bone beneath had made the boy want to vomit. It looked like one of the cheaper cuts hung outside the butcher’s stall in the village in central Tanganyika where they live. Tunney’s joint, too, was already attracting the fat green flies that buzzed round the wedges of crimson flesh hanging from hooks above the counter or settling on the plates of marbled brains along it. The dog’s blood smelled like warm brass. At first the boy’s father frowned, his brow knitting in the expression which withers the boy when it’s turned on him
.
‘He’ll be alright,’ he suddenly smiled, pinching his son’s cheek. ‘Don’t cry, now. It won’t help. Go and get some water.’
When the boy returned at a run, bowl slopping, his father was fiddling in the green canvas medicine bag. As the dog lapped and lapped, he took out a squat steel hypodermic, attached the long needle and punched it into a phial. Clamping the boxer’s back legs between his thighs, his father squirted some liquid from the needle, before stabbing it briskly into the dog’s haunch. Then, refilling from a different phial, he repeated the process. Both times Tunney yelped, but didn’t struggle. His long tongue drooped, showing damp squiggles of gold and black fur wedged round his canines. While his father was gently cleaning the wound, the boy held Tunney’s chest in his hands, willing the panting slower. When the dog at last flopped down on one side, the boy began to pick grey ticks from between his pet’s toes, rolling them like blobs of plasticine under the sole of his
takkie
and setting them aside to burn later
.
His father’s face was close to him. By this time of day the shadow deepened round the chin, as if the thick dark growth on his head, convict-short at the sides and lightly Brylcreemed on top, needed to find somewhere else to emerge
.
‘At least it’s not a snake. It’s that damned
chui.
Look at the claw-marks down his back.’
For several nights, since they’d first heard the leopard’s growling cough from the hill, Tunney and Dempsey had been shut indoors. Leopards like dogs almost as much as goats. His father put an arm round the boy’s shoulder
.
‘He’ll be fine. I promise.’
The boy sighed with relief, laying Tunney on a blanket on the floor of the veranda. He couldn’t go through the grief of losing another dog. His father must know; he is Bwana
Nyama,
the game ranger. And he never breaks promises
.
‘I’ve given him something to sleep. Come on, get your bat. We can keep an eye on him while we work on your sweep.’
That story had been the boy’s contribution to the evening’s dormitory entertainment. He’d realised it didn’t have a plot like the stories they read in English. There’d been the usual silence when he finished. Eventually a voice piped up from the far end of the dormitory
.
‘Boxers are brave,’ Jones conceded, ‘but a bit ugly, don’t you think?’
The boy had bitten his lip, aggrieved
.
He tries to borrow Tunney’s courage now as he follows Wilson down the flights of wooden stairs. In slippers they can be deadly; but that’s not why the boy takes his time. The Colonel usually dispenses justice straight after prep. The boy racks his brain again. He’s learned there’s nothing worse than being unprepared. Even if he’s done nothing wrong, his lower lip has a tendency to wobble betrayingly when he’s caught off guard. Surely no one’s sneaked about the fight in the shoe-room? Fighting’s a beating offence, but the prefects almost always turn a blind eye. In any case, he didn’t have a choice, once Congleton challenged him. The boy had shaken his pudding-bowl fringe as if to confirm that he was indeed the blondest boy in the school, after Congleton called him Nigger. There are no niggers in Tanganyika, he’d insisted after further provocation, only Africans. In any case, if he’s a nigger, the Africans certainly can’t be. Congleton reddened, before smirking triumphantly and demanding satisfaction for being cheeked
.
At the brown drape dividing off the housemaster’s quarters from the stairs, Wilson pauses
.
‘Go on. He’s expecting you.’ Then the prefect does something extraordinary, intimate. He squeezes the boy’s bicep. ‘I’ll be waiting here.’
Thoroughly perplexed, the boy pulls the curtain back and knocks timidly. There are sounds of movement, as if people are taking up position
.
‘Come.’ The Colonel’s usual bark is somewhat muted
.
The room’s overheated by the log fire snapping in the grate. A crumpet-fork lies on the mantelpiece beside a gilded clock, which confirms that the boy’s only been asleep an hour or so. He glances fearfully at the bag of golf clubs in one corner, amongst which the housemaster keeps his canes. Has he never pulled one out by mistake on the golf course? The Colonel’s in his usual uniform, navy blazer with silver buttons, grey trousers, narrow-striped tie. To the boy’s increasing confusion, the housemaster’s wife is also there, flopped in a maroon leather armchair with cushions as saggy as her upper arms. Her orange dress jars with the green lampshades. She must have been pretty once; now her blonde hair has rusted and her eyes are puffy. It’s an article of faith among the boys that she’s mad, though one of the gardeners says the problem is drink. The most important thing in her life is Oswald, a liver-and-white Blenheim. It’s the only dog the boy has ever disliked. It shepherds the junior boys on their pre-breakfast run around the walled gardens to the prefabricated refectory. The threat of Oswald prompts all but the sleepiest to maintain at least a trot. He’s been known to grab slowcoaches with his front paws, bouncing behind on his hind legs, like a hairy shrimp, groin pumping furiously against an unwary calf
.