The Setting Sun (16 page)

‘I
went and said sorry, daddy,’ he mutters
.

‘Good boy. Come here,’ his father smiles, almost shyly. ‘Want some mango?’

Despite the smarting pain, the boy settles gratefully on his father’s knee
.

In turmoil, I get up to close the window. The temperature’s dropped dramatically. In these early hours, the street is jaundiced-looking under yellow sodium lights haloed with frantic insects. The front wheels of empty auto-rickshaws are turned inwards, like the heads of birds at rest. A ragged old man’s
sleeping on the pavement opposite. He seems so peaceful, stretched out like that, despite the chill, eyes closed, head on one crooked arm, the other hand tucked inside his tattered shirt. I envy him momentarily. There’s still Modak’s novel to read. I turn back to my rumpled bedclothes in dread.

CHAPTER 6

Bill or ‘Bill’

Opening
No Place for Crime
, I’m mindful of the blurb on the dust jacket of
Sentinel:

He [Modak] believes that if the writing of prose (in any genre) is to be meaningful, it must be true to life and reflect life. He believes that a writer who has had to face drama in his daily life, does not need to scour the recesses of his imagination to get lively and living detail; it is there waiting for his pen.

It’s soon clear the novel reflects this conviction. Many of the characters have identical names and functions to people in the memoir, including Bashir, Modak’s driver, and his trusted head constable, Pisal. Others are thinly disguised. The underground leader Vasantdada (Nana) Patil morphs into Anna Bala Jadhav, District Magistrate Chambers returns as DM Burke, and Inspector-General O’Gorman as IG O’Flynn. Some characters in
No Place
are composites, however, notably the wooden and hen-pecked DSP Tomkins, an amalgam of Hobson and his ineffectual predecessor, CMS Yates.

By contrast, the protagonist Arvind Kumar seems at first to bear little relation to the Modak of the memoir. He’s much more likeable, partly because he has a sense of humour – even, occasionally, at his own expense. You have to admire his stubborn pursuit of the murderers of the ‘untouchable’ woman Vasanti, who has no one to stand up for her. Like her, Kumar has fallen foul of outmoded social attitudes: his girlfriend’s family consider him beneath her. The protagonist shows both determination and ardour to overcome the obstacles they erect. But he’s altogether more vulnerable than the strident
Modak of
Sentinel
, on one occasion confessing to his fiancée that he sometimes suffers from an ‘inferiority complex’.

Yet Kumar is obviously autobiographical. Like Modak, he spends part of his childhood in Satara, where his father was an important official. He, too, is a Christian who marries a Bengali woman. Kumar is likewise highly anglicised and employs a similar stilted diction to his creator, peppering his speech with words like ‘thrice’ and ‘elevenses’. After probation at the PTS in Nasik, furthermore, Kumar’s posted to Satara, where the Parallel Government is beginning to cause problems. Not only does Modak’s memoir rehearse many of the major incidents from
No Place
, but whole conversations are repeated verbatim. These include not only fractious debates over strategy with his superiors, but even intimate conversations between Kumar and his wife.

The representation of his principal colleague therefore interests me compulsively. It’s soon obvious that Bill Pryce-Jones is a close approximation to the Bill Moore-Gilbert of Modak’s memoir. The novelistic ‘Bill’ differs in minor ways; he drinks and smokes and has an irritating verbal tic, exclaiming ‘Kiss me gently!’ whenever something surprises him. Can’t imagine my father being so precious. He’s also still at the PTS when Kumar arrives. Yet the similarities far outweigh these trivial divergences. The physical description of ‘Bill’ in
No Place
anticipates almost word for word the one given twenty years later in
Sentinel
. Many of the incidents involving him are already familiar, and some of his exchanges with Kumar have been cut-and-pasted. Here once more are the stories Modak told me, about the newspapers cut up for lavatory paper and his colleague’s problems with Marathi.

What’s strikingly different, however, is the tone in which
No Place
portrays ‘Bill’: far more positive, affectionate at times. We’re introduced to him as the author of an elaborate practical joke which he co-ordinates in his capacity as mess president. En route at night from Nasik station to the PTS,
the new recruit’s car gets flagged down by ‘bandits’. Kumar’s Indian escort leaps out of the car and opens fire, forcing the ‘assailants’ to scatter. At dinner, a still-shaken Kumar is solemnly informed that he must swear on the Police Manual to sleep with his sword. Only as he’s about to head off to bed, weapon to hand, is Kumar told the whole evening’s been an initiation rite. Thereafter ‘Bill’ is thoroughly obliging and helpful to his new colleague, explaining everything from the peculiarities of particular instructors to where to shop in Nasik. Contrary to what one might expect of such an institution (‘Bill’ even warns Kumar against ‘sucking up’ to the teachers), the mess president insists from the outset on the use of first names.

‘Bill’ is represented well in other ways. For example, he’s strikingly polite to the mess staff, bookending the most trivial request with ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. He’s also an outstanding probationer. On one practice operation, he’s given the role of dacoit leader and hunted by colleagues through the hills round Nasik. Despite the logistical advantages the ‘police’ enjoy, ‘Bill’ eludes capture, turning himself in only long after the rest of his gang has been captured and his pursuers have returned to base. True, ‘Bill’ spoils his success by ‘smirking’, but Kumar’s nonetheless impressed, as he is once again when his fellow-cadet completes an assault course – under live fire, for God’s sake – in record time. After graduation, ‘Bill’ carries many of these qualities into his police work. He even runs up to the fort overlooking Satara in five minutes, not the fifteen of Modak’s memoir. And contradicting
Sentinel
’s account of Bill’s lazy exploitation of Gaikwad to carry him over the stream,
No Place
records how ‘Bill’ once walked crosscountry for two miles in his stockings, in order to surprise some saboteurs. Time and again, furthermore, the novel emphasises his personal courage during the pursuit of the Parallel Government.

Indeed, Kumar’s relationship with ‘Bill’ in Satara is initially
far less conflictual than the corresponding one in
Sentinel
. It’s ‘Bill’ who supplies the tip which enables his subordinate to arrest a notorious dacoit, providing the newly qualified ASP with his first major professional success. While several raids which they mount together end disappointingly, in this narrative the failures are clearly joint ones. Also starkly contrasting with Modak’s memoir, there’s acknowledgement that his colleague achieved considerable success against the Parallel Government (thereby justifying the award of real-life Bill’s Indian Police Medal). Look here: immediately before ‘Bill’s’ transfer from Satara, Kumar ruefully acknowledges that ‘the other Sub-Divisions are free of sabotage activity while all the gangsters have come over to mine.’

Very dishearteningly, however, this success is accounted for by his comrade’s brutal methods.
No Place
refers to one incident, not recorded in
Sentinel
, in a place called Kumtha. Capturing someone suspected of sheltering dissidents, ‘Bill’ begins to ‘beat him on the buttocks with a
bharmappa
[a stiffened piece of leather with a handle attached] in front of all the villagers. Priya howled and yelled, but did not disclose anything. Pryce-Jones then made him lie down flat on the floor and began to beat him with the edge of the
bharmappa
. He had a theory that it hurt more.’ The beating only stops when Kumar protests that enough is enough. After quarrelling with ‘Bill’ over his cruelty, the still-protesting subordinate storms back alone to Satara. I get up and check my map. Yes, Kumtha’s a real village in the southern part of the district.

The narrative of ‘Bill’s’ violence is shocking. Nonetheless it feels less damaging than the allegations in
Sentinel
, for three reasons. First, ‘only’ a single individual is beaten by the character in the novel. Second, the violence employed by the Parallel Government both precedes ‘Bill’s’ and is much more extreme, echoing Modak’s remarks yesterday afternoon. The novel also repeats his claims about the gratuitous killing of the train crew, and follows it with a graphic description of
the thrashing of a suspected informer. After several warm-up blows, the unfortunate victim is ‘roughly upended’ and his feet tied together. A ‘gangster’ begins

to beat him on the soles with a stick slowly and rhythmically. After a few strokes, Thakur began to howl and yell but the gangsters continued the beating. Thakur defecated. The gangsters poured a bucket of water over him, but continued the beating. The villagers watched all round without uttering a word, until one of them said, ‘He seems to have fainted.’ But still the
dhup-dhup
of the beating went on.

The assailants only desist when even a woman whom Thakur has supposedly victimised protests that any more and they’ll ‘murder’ the now unconscious man.

Above all, ‘Bill’s’ behaviour seems slightly less reprehensible here because his Indian colleague is himself clearly complicit in police violence. Whereas
Sentinel
denies any such involvement on Modak’s part, early in the novel Kumar witnesses a constable using the
bharmappa
on a prisoner: ‘Shiva was held by two policemen in the posture of a public school boy getting six of the best.’ This beating, however, continues for fully fifteen minutes. Although he throws up later, the ASP doesn’t intervene at the time, despite knowing such methods are strictly prohibited by the Police Manual. Indeed, Kumar’s subordinates are later allowed to justify their brutality as follows: ‘ “What other kind of interrogation could have helped in getting Shiva to admit the offence? … What choice have we? If we can’t detect cases, we’re branded as inefficient.” ’ Further, it’s notable that while arresting the nationalist leader, the pinnacle of his career in Satara, Kumar himself administers several blows to an obstructive henchman.

So the novel makes it clear that the culture of police violence which Kumar belatedly complains about long preceded ‘Bill’s’ arrival in the district. Significantly, when he first witnesses the use of the
bharmappa
on a suspect, Kumar steels
himself because he ‘remembered how another ASP had cried when he had seen a similar interrogation, and how he was ever afterwards branded as a weak and soft officer.’ Here’s something else.
No Place
harps on the pressure exerted by successive inspector-generals to end disturbances which were beginning to pose a serious threat to British rule. But if a green light had been given to use extreme measures against the dissidents, why did Bill intervene against the rogue Sub-Inspector Walawalkar and on behalf of the tortured woman in Tasgaon?

Something else also unsettles me Modak’s half-admiring, half-deprecating insistence on his colleague’s womanising. I picked up on my host’s ambiguous tone when he referred to Bill’s ‘lady friend’ during our meeting. Now I see that
Sentinel
comments: ‘As for the ladies, they were all charmed with his “shy” smile and his boyish behaviour.’ He’s also represented as having an eye for Indian village beauties.

Beryl Grey, one of Bill’s ‘girl-friends in India’

In the novel such hints are developed. ‘Bill’s’ ‘shy, naïve smile’ particularly charms the DSP’s wife, who becomes tongue-tied when talking about him. His relations with Indian women are more troubling, however. While at the PTS, ‘Bill’ has an affair with the servant of a colleague – much to Kumar’s horror. It’s not clear whether the protagonist’s disgusted by ‘Bill’ sleeping with a low-caste woman, or the crossing of racial barriers, or – by contrast – whether he objects to the unequal power relations involved. Later, ‘Bill’ plans to sleep with another Indian woman while spending the night at a colleague’s. The woman mistakenly goes to the wrong end of the veranda and gets into bed with his fellow-officer, an orthodox Brahmin, whose scandalised protests abort the tryst. Neither Kumar nor his creator appear to appreciate what strikes me as the obviously farcical nature of the scene. In another incident with similar comic potential, ‘Bill’ offers the recently married Kumar some man-to-man advice about how to keep his wife happy, leaving the young Indian ASP boggling haughtily at his colleague’s worldliness.

I spend hours trying to square Modak’s two accounts of Bill. Given the strongly documentary feel of
No Place
, I can’t help inferring that the older author edited his memoir to Bill’s disadvantage, for reasons which I can’t fathom. What is the relative truth status of each text, one apparently fictional, the other non-fiction. It’s a problem much debated in autobiography criticism? Didn’t Richard Steele famously claim that ‘the word
Memoir
is French for a novel’? And Paul de Man once commented that ‘the distinction between fiction and autobiography is not an either/or polarity but one that it is undecidable.’ Yet I have no reason to distrust the thrust of Modak’s descriptions of Bill’s behaviour towards suspected supporters of the Parallel Government, whether in real life or fictional guise. It’s dawn before my heartache soothes enough to let me fall asleep.