The Setting Sun (36 page)

Over refreshments, Keitan asks about my plans.

‘Think I’ll just relax tomorrow. Read a bit. And you?’

His round face deflates. ‘Family business. Would you like to see Ganpatipule the day after? There’s a wonderful temple.’

Presumably the one my fellow-passenger on the bus from Kolhapur was headed to.

‘I have to go back to the police station to see if they’ve found any documents for me.’

‘The beach is very clean. And good for swimming.’

It’s an enticing prospect. ‘Don’t you have to study?’

Keitan shrugs. ‘I will be practising my English with you. It’s about fifty minutes on the scooter. You can see some of the country.’

Go with the flow. ‘I’d love to.’

He makes to high-five me. ‘Yo, Professor, right on,’ he declaims, in a terrible American accent.

We catch an auto-rickshaw back to the bridge, where Keitan fires up his scooter and drops me at the hotel. Much of it’s candlelit. No reading until the electricity ‘load-shedding’ is over. I eat a delicious spicy kingfish curry. Later, in the bar, I find myself talking to a Chinese-Malayan man who’s working at a shipbuilder’s further down the coast. David Khoo’s on his second two-year contract, but says he’s unlikely to renew. He has silky black hair and an ageless face.

‘This country’s too frustrating. You know, the local police wanted a fat whack to confirm my residency permit last time. I already paid in Mumbai. Had to phone my embassy, get them to fix it. I suppose it’s not their fault. Even a commissioner only earns 100,000 rupees a month. That’s 2,000 dollars. Yet every assistant deputy superintendent sends their kids to college overseas.’ He sips his drink thoughtfully. ‘Look around. What do you see?’

I say it’s hard to make out anything through the thick cigarette fug of the bar.

‘Right. But alcohol permit rooms are non-smoking by law. How do you think they get round that?’ He sighs as he rubs two fingers against his thumb. ‘India could be like China, if they got it together. But they’re so divided.’

I think of the invisible line between ‘Bangladesh’ and the Hindu beach, the ethnic sniping at Briha’s party.

‘And the infrastructure,’ he says, shaking his head in
exasperation. ‘Most of the money goes straight into the pockets of the politicians. You know how long it took to get my business cards from Mumbai? Seventy days, man. It’s 390 kilometres or something. If the postman walked here with them, it wouldn’t take that long.’

Sounds as if I’ll be home before my postcards after all.

‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ he smiles. ‘I go fishing every Sunday with a friend, if you want to come along. We know a few nice places. We leave about midday.’

‘Sounds perfect.’ It’s something I haven’t done since my African childhood.

Back in my room, I lie sweatily on the bed, staring at reflections of candlelight in the blank television screen, trying to summon the energy to write my daily log. What a day it’s been. Never a dull moment in India. I smile at my earlier premonitions of boredom in Ratnagiri. Then I think about Bill. I’ve had a tiny taste today of what he must often have faced, especially during his time in Ahmedabad, as Partition approached and communalist tensions spilled over. Facing down adult rioters armed with stones, home-made bombs and bottles of acid isn’t something I can envisage myself doing. Only some perverse instinct made me run at the boys. Attack as the best form of defence. Perhaps circumstances sometimes goaded Bill into the same animal reflex of rage? Didn’t I want the malefactors punished, just as I did the poacher during the Ugalla River safari? It feels less easy than ever to pass judgement on him, calibrate the behaviour of a father who was less than half my present age. Not least because my reaction this afternoon now makes me feel directly implicated in what he did. How would I have behaved if I’d got hold of one of the lads? And what if I hadn’t surprised them, or they’d stood their ground? To my chagrin, I start trembling again.

CHAPTER 14

An Act of Restitution

I spend Sunday morning reading
The Glass Palace
. Affecting though Ghosh’s account of Thibaw is, what really resonates with me comes later, as we follow the fortunes of an Indian officer in the army of the Raj, in the period contemporaneous with Bill. He finds himself in Singapore, participating in the doomed rearguard action against the Japanese. Once made prisoners of war, many of his men swap sides and join the Indian National Army, led by S.C. Bhose, the exiled ‘Extremist’ whom Naganath Nayakwadi so admired. After heartfelt conflict over what to do, and despite deep reservations about Japan’s true intentions, the officer throws in his lot with the forces aiming to liberate India from British rule. The fateful decision leads him eventually to a miserable death.

In the ‘Author’s Notes’, Ghosh confesses that this part of the narrative is based on his own father’s experience, although Lt. Colonel Ghosh was ‘among those “loyal” Indians who found themselves across the lines from the “traitors” of the Indian National Army’. While writing his book, Ghosh clearly found himself – like me – caught between loyalty to his beloved father and recognition that the imperial cause the latter fought for was essentially indefensible: witness the barbarous treatment of Thibaw. Like me, too, Ghosh interviewed some of the rebel leaders his father fought against. He also clearly admires some of them although, equally clearly, he has qualms about aspects of the way they prosecuted their cause.

Putting the book down, I feel a surging sense of liberation. I’m not alone in the kind of dilemmas and challenges this trip has thrown up. Moreover, I’m particularly struck that Ghosh
seeks neither to judge nor to condemn, but to understand the complexity of the particular problems and pressures of wartime which his characterrs face. Shades of Gandhi in Yeravda jail. Above all, he emphasizes the possibilities of reconciliation between former antagonists, through empathy with both sides. I think back to Chafal. If the villagers are prepared to forgive Bill, there’s no need to beat myself up further about what happened there. If Nayakwadi can acknowledge that mistakes were made by both parties to the conflict and draw a line under the past – without forgetting its lessons – I see no reason to contradict him.

Suddenly, my quest to find Bill’s confidential weekly reports, to hear his version of events, seems much less pressing. Haven’t I learned what I need about his role in 1940s Indian history? And understood better why he sometimes behaved as he did, even if it was wrong affronting all my postcolonial principles? I’ll see Bill differently from now on. I suddenly realise that my dream of meeting him again at the party perhaps symbolises the idea that we’re equals at last. And the anger I so belatedly expressed at his ‘deserting’ me, which I was unable to vent at the time because of the circumstances of his death, is entirely consistent with the deep and loving relationship we had. Further, I’m beginning to realise that my memories of Bill are more complex and dynamic than seemed the case while they sat undisturbed in my mental archive. I can now see in them nuances and shades invisible under the sunny glare of nostalgia, or beneath the frozen gaze of grief. As a result of my coming to India, Bill’s been resurrected, but as a much more fully human being than the outsize figure in the immobile tableaux of aberrated mourning and childhood mythology.

The rest of the day has a holiday feel. I buy some beers for the picnic and after a brief stop at a cannery to pick up ice, set off with David Khoo for an afternoon’s fishing. We’re joined by a Polish colleague of David’s, dressed in parakeet-bright Lycra, as if for the Tour de France. He fixes his skeletal racing
machine on the roof rack, explaining that he finds cycling the coastal roads a perfect way to ‘decompress’ before another hectic week at the shipyard. Lukas has vivid ginger hair and alabaster skin and despite his swallowtail shades and slathers of suncream, long-distance cycling doesn’t seem wise in this sweltering heat. He’s the only other Westerner I’ve seen in Ratnagiri, and I wonder what the rural folk think when this vision whirls by in a Joan Miró splash.

A few miles north, we stop by an inlet. Lukas sets off at an alarming sprint up the adjoining headland, leaving David and me in the shade of the bridge. After setting up camp stools, the driver settles himself to doze amongst cooling-boxes ready for the catch. Sipping my beer, I watch David bait his line and cast into the tidal stream, fringed on the other side by flat-topped mangroves. I’m no expert, but I can’t think the middle of a white-hot day is the right time for fish. After lunch and a snooze, at last I get my swim. The water’s bracing where the gentle current meets the sea, and I let myself be carried towards the breakers which mark the ocean’s beginning. It’s exhilarating to bodysurf the bouncing white-caps or dive to examine shells on the sea floor, before another playful wave nudges me back towards the bridge. It’s good to be a proper tourist in India at last.

That night, pleasantly worn out by swimming, I fall asleep at once, into a second dream about Bill. I’m in a small plane, something I’ve avoided pretty much all my life. Weirder still, I’m flying it. For some reason I can’t turn my head. But I’m intensely aware of a large, oppressive presence beside me, made more threatening because it’s getting dark. The engine cuts out suddenly and I know we only have seconds before we crash-land. I do a reasonable job of wrestling the rudder to hit the field rushing towards us at the correct angle. It’s bumpy and before I can slow the plane sufficiently, we hit a ridge and it flips violently onto its nose. I bang my head and lose consciousness for a moment.

When I come to, we’re tilting slowly and my companion’s been thrown onto my side of the cockpit. His weight is such that I can barely move. Worse, I smell smoke. With a superhuman shove, I wrest myself from under him, punch out the windscreen, crawl through it and drop to the ground. I begin to run away over sticky ploughed furrows. I’m barely fifty metres clear when the plane explodes, the fireball rising slow and graceful as a hot-air balloon, turning the landscape orange. As the plane disintegrates from the force of the blast, I wake, the image so intense that I’m shielding my eyes. Shaken up, I spend the rest of the night trying to work out what it all means. By dawn, I think I’m there. What a relief. It wasn’t Bill I left to his fate, but the brooding burden of his loss that I’ve cast off at last. It’s taken four decades and a trip to the other side of the world to get here.

I’m still smiling foolishly to myself when the waiter brings over the paper at breakfast. Inside, there’s an item about the hundred most influential institutions in the development of modern India. All the armed services are cited, and there are honourable mentions for various educational, wildlife, even fashion, institutes. However, today’s Indian Police Service is notably absent from the list. Remembering David Khoo’s denunciations, I wonder whether this reflects its degeneration from the IP of Bill’s time, or is the outcome of tendencies present in its predecessor’s ethos and practices. It’s saddening that the modern force, which has been so good to me, enjoys such low esteem.

I get a further taste of how today’s police is regarded by ordinary Indians when I set off to photograph Bill’s old residence. To my surprise, Keitan’s already waiting outside the hotel, polishing the chrome on his scooter. He’s wearing a Nirvana t-shirt today, and embroidered jeans.

‘Yo, Professor, just wanted to confirm a time to meet later.’

‘How about after lunch, to be on the safe side? Want to join me?’

He smiles deprecatingly. ‘I only eat food prepared at home.’

‘Too bad. Could you give me a lift?’ It’s so hot that I began sweating the moment I left the lobby. ‘I need to go to the DSP’s house to take some pictures.’

Keitan looks as uncomfortable as when I suggested going to ‘Bangladesh’.

‘OK, jump on,’ he eventually offers.

However, he pulls up a hundred yards short of the entrance to the bungalow.

‘I can’t drop you there,’ he says. ‘They may ask questions.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why I’m with a foreigner. How we know each other and everything.’

Is he just being wacky again? But I’m all too aware of the consequences of having pressed him to enter ‘Bangladesh’.

‘They may think I’ve requested you to take photos to pass on to robbers or a terror cell. Please, if anyone asks, you met me on a trip last year.’

I’m flabbergasted. ‘OK. You head off. See you at the hotel at two?’

‘But how will you get back?’

‘If it gets too hot, I’ll jump in an auto-rickshaw.’

The sentry waves me though with barely a glance at my card. Because I’m white? No sign of Indore’s police car, and the bungalow has the same blank look as on my previous visit. Once I’ve got my photos, I wander back to the station. The DSP’s busy in his office. I wait on the veranda for half an hour before being shown in. Marble-patterned ledgers, like those I saw in Satara, sit piled on his desk.

‘Part IVs for that time,’ he smiles. ‘Please to examine them at the back of the room. You may make notes.’

‘Any luck with the weekly confidentials?’