The trains came. The trains went. And that was all: they were never really Late for that presupposed an Early, indicated an On Time—a mensuration of false and arbitrary starts that diced into occidental segments and irreligiously bisected the Cyclic Sphere of Eternal Time, compressing all dharma, and, further, robbed man of the sweet resignation that billowed up like Arabia felix percolating from the incense in the thurible of his prayer: not action, but release from action. The Indian acted on that premise. It was a paradox. It was the smile that showed the dimple in the cheek of God, a Divine joke which proved the essence of all mysticism laughter.
“Hey, you’ll get a giggle out of this. One of me mates down to Ladbroke’s, a bit older,” Roland began, standing up like a Rhapsode reciting an epic passage, “a Welsh bloke, a right tearaway though, well, he spent a couple of years in India as a sergeant-major, I don’t know how long ago, and the reason I tell you this, and remember it, you see, was the trains! He used to ride the trains all over that bloody country, up and down, in and out, even up in that part where they wear pajamas in the street, just to see a Rajah, like a king, a Rajah, see? This here Rajah liked me mate who used to go visit the toms down on the chi-chi street, the tarts, you see?, get a good shag, have a bit of a go for nothing more than a bloody scrope, a ram, and all that, see what I mean? Chi-chi street, he said, up in India. Anyway ...”
Dilip lifted his eyes toward the clock with a hang-dog plea to get himself organized. “I am fearful lest I am not telephoning. My anticipations may not fructify.” Roland took his wrist and turned him to attention.
“So anyway, me mate’s off to see this Rajah Something or Other, I forget the name, they don’t have surnames anyway, not to worry—and he goes to this shindig up there, a party in a palace with everybody walking around in pointed slippers, veils, goony knickers, those red dots on the cheek—”
“Tika,” Dilip said.
“—red dots, like, curved knives, the lot. The real thing, this was. So what happens? That’s right. Me mate gets pissed as a cricket, walks up to this Rajah—and, mind you, it’s getting late—and he says, ‘Rajah, old boy, tell me something. Do lemons have feet?’ he says. Lemons, you know? Like oranges, the fruit, but lemons. ‘Do lemons have feet?’ he says. So this Rajah says, he says, no, you know, of course not. Then me mate, a Welsh bloke, see?—I mean, what did he know—then me mate comes right out and says, ‘Oh Christ, man, I just squeezed your canary into my flippin’ drink!’”
Roland socked both feet into the air and burst into a paroxysm of screaming laughter, wringing his arms with hilarity, tears starting to his eyes, and whooping out a fusillade of brackish cackles from lungs scratched black from farthing tobacco. He repeated the punch line twice.
“Peradwenture, my friend, would you do me the favour of allowing me to impose a wow?” asked Dilip.
“What’s this?” Roland cut the laughter short and soberly spat a ball of grey slaver across his shoulder.
“May I impose a wow?”
“A wow? I don’t know what that means. What are you saying, see? What are you getting at? Spit it out.” He buttoned his back pocket.
“Would you consider doing me a great serwice?”
There came a pause. Roland assumed a high-profile attitude and surveyed Dilip with a gimlet eye.
“You want money.”
“Indeed not, my dear friend. Simply, I am not happily circumstanced. I must only already call ahead to explain the tardiness wisited upon me due to the late-arriving train. Pray, would you be so kind enough as to observe over my goods for me? I will then, of course, hastily return and proceed with them as was my plan in the original.”
“Right, right, guv-nor,” Roland swept into a deep, unctuous bow. He unbuttoned his back pocket.
“Would you think me lacking in educated good taste to have required this of you?”
“Never mind all that. Telephone’s down by the loo, first left, near the stairs.”
“This is an eminent kindness.”
Dilip zipped off.
It’s the girl, Roland thought, it’s the girl! The telephone call was obviously urgent, and even now the line would be jumping with his wheedling artifices, or, worse—like that movie of The Incredible Hulk—filled with evil commands whispered huskily in likerish and diabolical croaks, the brain-trepanning spells that those bottle-nosed nigs, Congoids, and Hottentots cast at midnight in pointed hats and trick coats, using corpsedust, newtliver, and toads filled with mercury as magic barometers to swallow children, blow up churches, and work love potions on those harmless but not terribly percipient English salesgirls, who were later posted off in lumpy parcels to Port Saïd or Bombay, too ashamed, of course, to go back to Chepstow or Boodle and the happy life they had known there selling lollies over the toy counter in Woolworth’s or shining the torch down the stalls at the Roxy. It was clear. It was horrible even to think of someone exposed to the fleers of this lustmonger, ready to wipe his smears of shoe-polishy discharge on some poor Trilby with skin like goldenrod and hair like down, probably now bound hand and foot and stuffed like a Norfolk pheasant into some dirty old wardrobe in a Brighton hotel, where her mother didn’t even know where she was, never mind her father. It was a dead giveaway. But he had to have proof.
Roland was alone in the waiting room. He quickly looked about him, then again. Then he jumped like a cat to Dilip’s valise, charged with the expectation that would infallibly reveal, if not a stack of hypnotic books, packets of thaumaturgic seeds, and vials of the devil’s oatmeal, then at least some kind of evidence, damning and vivid. The snaps, unlocked, flew open. First came the light and faint odour of cheap talc—and then, inside, two neatly folded drip-dry shirts, a book, a pair of green tennis shorts, a comb, a little image of Ganapati, the Hindu god of good fortune, and there in the middle, brightly wrapped in a large bow, red transparent cellophane, goldleaf, and tulle fluff, a goodly sized box of chocolates. The tag read:
Your Diligence,
Miss L. Bunn.
—My Dedicatedness, Dilip
It was the kiss of death.
III
The Jain Code held forth one major rubric, long-established and inviolable in its tradition: women could never reach the state of nirvana. They could dip roses in the lake and brush them across the lips of Krishna, incarnation of Vishnu. They could worship at Shiva’s temple and pour melted butter on the huge iron bull, several times life-size, and watch it glisten, dripping with ghee. They could kiss the noble phallus, weave on the loom, pick hog-plum, use the tandoori oven, rub the soles of their feet with red powder, and like the blessed kine, high-humped and lactate, splash out a vigourous progeny of offspring and thick, sweet milk, in agony or joy, and populate the earth. A woman could flute, and sing, and moan with love in the night, or she could drench her hip-long hair in the cool, dark wells and scamper her happy life away through scarlet crotons and sheets of zinnias, four feet high—and, yet, even if she should die spread out in that idealized and hierophantic contortion, her bare feet touching Mother Earth and her hand grasping the tail of Mother Cow, it was her disconsolate lot, horribile dictu, to be forever excluded from a future life as a holy never-to-be-extinguished filament burning hot in the great Bulb of Eternity.
At Cambridge, however, Dilip was to meet a woman.
In the beginning, Dilip had never been assigned a tutor. Once, actually, he did speak to a don—upon the occasion of the opening-day sherry party—at which time he expressed a desire, when asked if he had one, to reach across a continent and light up all of India; the red-faced don in question, who had been swaying unsteadily, hiccuped and lurched backwards in bug-eyed shock, delivering to Dilip an on-the-spot lecture on Terminus, the god of boundaries, after which he pulled Dilip’s nose and reeled away.
Dilip, eventually, began to find his feet. In pursuit of the honours degree, he signed for a three-year sandwich course and subsequently passed the C.G.L.I. exams in advanced telephony, analogue computers, and microwave radio relay systems. On h
is own, he burrowed like a mole into the libraries, sitting up and crunching apples in the half-light, and proceeded to master in amazing detail three-fourths of Applied Electronics; he studied crystal lattices, radar, waveforms, and transitone diodes. He got to work with the new harmonic oscillator, a laser, the interferiometric machine, and Gunn-effect devices. Then, he wrote a monograph for the periodical, Noise Studies, which attracted some attention, and perhaps on the strength of that, he was extended an invitation to escape to East Berlin and, as well, offered a blank cheque book from an American university to go over there and do nothing but simply allow his name to be used in the catalogue. And it soon fell out afterwards, refusing, as he did, the two money-bruised offers, that he was given permission to work in the famous laboratories off the Fen Causeway—at the specific request of a resident don there, whose reputation, among other things, reached everywhere. Though the don was English thoroughly, she was a woman just. She wanted to teach Dilip vibration and thermionic emission.
Miss Lorna Bunn, D. Sc. (elec. eng.), M.I.E.E., was 63 years old. She looked like she lived in a cottage of gingerbread and brewed toads. Her breath was as sour as endive. She walked in a slouch, boneless as a snail, and the constantly crapulous expression on her face, which showed her somewhat like an unsuccessful Hogarth, was due partially to a skin of rather high pilosity and, along with marked epicanthic folds, an obvious case of shingles, in the eyes—all which tended to support a campus rumour that she was one of the Weird Sisters, born in a coven during the invasions of Ereenwine in the year of the big wind. Two other of the many theories, those handmaids who service enigma, were that she was luminous in the dark and that she suffered acutely from the “green sickness,” the disease of maids, the medieval mind has it, occasioned by richly deserved celibacy. Some said she discovered electricity. Some said she created it. “Sexy” (her nickname) kept fifteen cats, read avidly in sci-fi, and, away from the academy, kept alive with fitful bouts of lawn tennis. Her passion—if of passion we may speak—her passion for tennis was superceded, however, by only one other—and it was to him alone that she extended invitations: to go for rambling walks along Christ’s Pieces (occasional) and to come for visits at her seaside pied-à-terre in Brighton (open). Briefly, it was a late fling; by definition, presumably, one has few. Dilip had always hesitated to go, but on this particular weekend she had lost a bit of poise and begged, slipping him, as she did, a pair of green tennis shorts, a super-annuated racquet, and the train schedule. He had consulted the Menu: “The aged are only young people in wrinkled costumes.” It was an errand of mercy. He then decided he would go just this once, for he had great compassion for his don. She was “Sexy” to the students, a don to the college, Miss Bunn to the world, but for Dilip she was always Burra Beebee.
“I am contacted,” Dilip happily announced at the end of four jubilant strides that brought him well through the doors of the waiting room. “Everything is understood. I circumambulated thrice the station, seeking into what niche lay the telephone. Forgive me my delay. I thank you profusely for tending my goods.”
“Bite?” Roland was eating a sandwich. “Probably not.”
“Many thanks, no.”
“Good roast beef.”
“I do not take beeves.”
“English cut.”
“Sorry, please.”
“Aitchbone. From the haunch.”
“Nor eggs, nor poults, nor the feathered chicken,” Dilip smiled. “These I am not taking.”
Fussy bastard, thought Roland, eyeing Dilip with a pollution of limp assumptions. They come over here, pitch their tents on our doorsteps, and try to prong anything in a skirt, then turn up their noses when offered a bit of good nosh. He thought of the food they shovelled in: bitter saline tea; grungy vegetables, the colour of kidney; rubberized desserts; and bread that tasted like canvatex.
“I see your name is Dilip or something. Saw it on the trap there.”
“Dilip, yes,” he replied, extending a hand. Roland ignored it, devouring the last bit of sandwich, his cheek bulging out in a goiterlike distention.
“Roland’s mine. Roland McGuffey. Easy to remember because one name is English and one is Irish. Just like the countries, right next to each other, in a manner of speaking.”
“I see.”
“Don’t get along though, the English and the Micks. The Micks get a few under the belt and they’re ready to go for you. Bethnal Green’s full of them, Micks. Three or four of them always down in the doss houses or the sheds, nourishing themselves on saltines and into the bottles of cheap plonk until the day they cock up their toes. But that’s what spoils it; they have a few jars and they’re ready to climb onto you. Do you see what I mean? Am I talking too fast?”
“No, sir,” said Dilip.
“I’m not talking too fast, am I?”
“No, it is that the Irishmen sadly drink too much and seek out someone to go punch, punch, thus generating a drubbing.”
“You do get me then. No sooner he has a glass of flip in him, a glass of crowdy, then, bang!, he’s going for you, for the throat. Watch.” Roland suddenly grabbed Dilip’s arm and began to bend it, gritting his teeth and delivering sharp little knocks on the tight, twisted elbow: “really (knock) hurts (knock) don’t (knock) it (knock)?” Smiling, Roland let go. “Micks. Turn you into a doodlesack, they will.”
Dilip sat pale. A flame of fear shot up in his heart but he was not afraid of fear. Fear, in fact, was a kind of violence. He recognized it but refused to accept it, primarily because of what he had been taught in that most important lesson of his life: the law of ahimsa. And as he then suddenly thought of non-violence, he seemed, in an epiphanic moment, to also hear the voices of people faintly speaking words that, in point of fact, had echoed down through all the years of his wandering: “Jai, Jai, Mahatmaji!” He saw rising in his mind a picture of a little wizened, owlish figure in a loincloth, spinning at his charka; he was bald, with a pointed nose, spindly shanks, prominent jutting ears, and eyes twinkling behind his cheap spectacles. Simultaneously, Dilip was taken back to the very first night he had spent in England when he had stood alone in the pouring rain, in the middle of Tavistock Square in London, before a bronze statue of this little fellow, a man who had fallen down in a gunshot so many years ago, but probably, from somewhere, able to have heard Dilip’s soft, plaintive cry on that same night: “Bapugi, Bapugi!” For Dilip had always loved Gandhi, the little grocer who peddled peace.
The clock in the waiting room showed half-ten. It could be heard ticking in the void of silence that had now fallen between them, almost reverberating in the strained atmosphere. Like tension along an earth-fault, it seemed slippage would soon occur.
This dear fellow is impaled upon my silence, thought Dilip, and it is the nub of my duty to show him I bear no ill will. And he nodded pleasantly toward Roland with the tu quoque gesture that spells out empathy between free-speaking intimates.
“You have terminated your work this morning, sir?”
“Me? If you mean me, then yes. I’m a wiper, me. Wiping down the buses is my job, downstairs. I won’t be doing it for long, just til, ah, things blow over. I’m going down to Inchy next week and get some work on the ships, well, simply because I like to work on the ships, if you see what I’m driving at,” said Roland, standing up. “You can learn a bloody lot about ships just by looking at them.” Seconds passed. Dilip again had to break the silence.
“How?”
A vivid how contradicts.
“How?” Roland screamed. He walked to the tea machine, spun around. “How? It’s the shape! What, you don’t know? In the ship, chrissakes, you’re on top of the flaming plumbing, see?, the guts! All them ... pipes.” Roland’s eyes suddenly went vacant, glazed, and his voice slipped out of its normal tone into a strange, incredible brown study. “It’s ... all confusing. All ... them pipes.” He was soon back to life. “You see, ships don’t get the hold on you. The grip, see? A mate of mine down the docks? Blimey, man, he’s all af
ternoon down at the Monkey, the pub, The Drum and Monkey, the pub. Goes back to the job, he does, and signs on as if he was there all day,” said Roland. He paused, looked straight at Dilip. “It’s a night club really, not one of your caffs. So anyway, when things, ah, blow over, as I was telling you—what’s your name again?”
“Dilip.”
“Right, that’s what you said. Well, anyway, when things turn over I won’t be wiping anymore, won’t be sitting around or jacking around waiting to get on with it.” Roland hitched at his socks. “You probably thinking I’m jacking around all the time.”
“Oh, no, sir.”
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