by Paul Scott
*
‘Then I’ll ring Mayapore and find out what is happening there,’ Miss Crane said.
She put down the reports she had been co-ordinating. There was a telephone in Mr Chaudhuri’s bungalow.
‘You can’t,’ he told her. ‘I have already tried. The lines have probably been cut.’
‘I see. Well then. One of us must take the children back to Kotali, rather than risk anything happening to them here. So I’d better do that and be getting on my way. You had better go back to look after Mrs Chaudhuri, and perhaps keep an eye on the school if you can manage it.’
Mr Chaudhuri looked round the shabby little room and then at Miss Crane.
‘There is nothing to safeguard here,’ he said, ‘except the children. Take them in the car and I will come with you on my bicycle. If there are bad people on the road you will be safer if I am also seen.’
‘Oh, I shall be safe enough. What about your wife?’
‘You are the only English person here,’ he said. ‘My wife will be all right. They may well come here after they have finished with the post office and the police station, or whatever it is they have in mind. They may come from either direction. So we will both go with the children to Kotali.’
Miss Crane looked round the room too. The schoolhouse had always reminded her of the one she visited years ago with Mr Grant. Mr Chaudhuri was right. There wasn’t much in the building worth saving, except the building itself, and even the worth of that was doubtful. She doubted, too, that either of them, in present circumstances, could stand in the doorway and successfully deny entry to an angry crowd. She glanced at Chaudhuri, remembering Muzzafirabad where she had been alone.
‘You seem pessimistic,’ she said.
‘I have seen the people and heard the talk.’
‘You’re sure about the telephone?’
‘Yes, I am sure.’
For a moment they looked at each other straight, and Miss Crane thought: This is the way it happens when there is real trouble – the little seed of doubt, of faint distrust, of suspicion that the truth is not actually being told. If the phone is cut, then it is cut. If it is not cut perhaps Mr Chaudhuri has picked it up, got no immediate answer and jumped to conclusions. Or it may not be cut and Mr Chaudhuri may know that it is not but tells me it is because he wants me to set off on the road to Kotali.
‘Very well, Mr Chaudhuri,’ she said. ‘I think you are right. We’ll cram the kids into the Ford somehow and you can come along on your bike.’
He said, ‘One thing I hope you understand. I am not afraid to stay here. If you wish the building to be protected I will stay and chance my arm.’
‘If they find it empty they may leave it alone,’ she said.
‘It is as I was thinking.’
She nodded, and stood up, collecting the reports, putting them tidily together, edge to edge. Chaudhuri waited. She said, ‘Tell me your honest opinion. Is it serious this time?’
‘It is serious.’
They always know, she thought, and then: This is how it happens too, to call them ‘they’ as though they are different.
‘All right then, Mr Chaudhuri. Perhaps you’d collect the children together.’
He nodded, went to the door and out to the courtyard at the back where the children were playing.
She put the reports into her brief-case and then remembered that her gladstone bag, although already packed for the journey home, was still at Mr Chaudhuri’s bungalow. She went out, called to him above the yelling of the children to whom he had just broken the news that school was over.
‘My bag,’ she shouted. ‘It’s at the bungalow. I’ll pop down and get it and say goodbye to your wife.’
‘I have sent my wife to the house of a friend,’ Mr Chaudhuri shouted back. ‘And your bag is in the car. I brought it with me.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, and went back into the office for the brief-case. She switched on the radio. Again there was only music, from All-India Radio, English music for the forces. She left the radio on while she closed the straps of the briefcase. The radio was a life-line of sorts. I am calm, she thought, automatically calm, as in 1914, and 1919, and 1930, other times. Over thirty-five years I have become used to sudden alarms. But I am also afraid. In such circumstances I am always a bit afraid. And I am ashamed, and am always ashamed, because of my suspicions – this time first over the telephone, and now over the gladstone bag.
‘Mr Chaudhuri,’ she called, going to the doorway. ‘When they’re ready bring them round to the front and I’ll get the car started.’
And in my voice, she said to herself, there – always there – the note of authority, the special note of us talking to them, which perhaps passes unnoticed when what we talk about is the small change of everyday routine but at times of stress always sounds like taking charge. But then, she thought, we are, we are in charge. Because we have an obligation and a responsibility. In this present instance her main responsibility lay seventy miles away in Mayapore. Things were always worse in the towns.
When she brought the car from its shelter at the side of the schoolhouse, Mr D. R. Chaudhuri, BA, BSc, was standing waiting, with the children of the poor and the sometimes hungry gathered round him, playing their games.
*
In times of civil disturbance news or rumours of riots in the towns attracted from the villages men whose main preoccupation was the prospect of loot. This is what Mr Chaudhuri had in mind when he spoke of bad people on the road between Dibrapur and Kotali, and Miss Crane knew that in leaving Dibrapur behind they were probably running into trouble as well as away from it.
There was also the question, for her, of continuing on from Kotali the seventy-odd miles through village after village to Mayapore. In this southern part of the district the land was slightly undulating, but still open, with cultivation on both sides of a good metalled road, and few trees. At least on most parts of the road you would be able to see trouble coming from a distance. From experience Miss Crane knew what to look out for: in the dry weather, when the dirt strips on either side of the metal were powdered to the consistency of ground chalk, the cloud of dust which as it got nearer revealed men strung out across the road; in the wet, the same men, but more suddenly, without the earlier warning of the dust they raised, so that at first glimpse you could already make out that some were carrying staves. Starting from one village, three or four men in the course of several miles could become a score. A car, coming at speed, showing no signs of stopping, could scatter them at the last moment, but still be vulnerable to the stones they might pick up at the car’s approach. Miss Crane had, once in her life, in the troubles of 1919, run such a gauntlet, but the car she was in that time was driven by a determined young European policeman who had come to rescue her from an outlying schoolhouse where, as her superintendent back at headquarters had suspected, she was virtually a prisoner.
‘Whether I could do the same as the young policeman,’ she thought, ‘blowing the horn and driving like mad, will depend on the size of the crowd.’ Mr Chaudhuri could not drive. She did not know whether to be glad or sorry.
The size of the crowd depended on three things: the nature of the disturbance in the town which dictated the likely quantity of loot to be expected; the general temper of the surrounding villages and the number of men in each of them who had time and inclination to take the opportunity of filling their pockets; and finally the degree of control that the village headmen and rural police were able to exercise.
Each village had its watchman or chaukidar, a paid servant of the Government, and the villages were organised in groups under police detachments. A gang reaching a village where the police post was effectively manned, might then be dispersed. At a post where the police decided to look the other way or judged from the temper of the crowd that it was wiser to lock themselves in, the crowd passed by; and grew.
Reaching the village of Kotali with the cargo of laughing children, Mr Chaudhuri still pedalling some distance behind, Miss
Crane was met by the chaukidar and the headman and several men and women who had been on the point of setting out to bring the children back from school. The chief constable in charge of the police post in Garhwar, the next village along the road, had sent a message to say that he could no longer get through on the telephone to sub-divisional police headquarters in Dibrapur, that he assumed trouble had broken out following the news of Mr Gandhi’s arrest, and that the people of Kotali should therefore be on their guard to protect their property and their lives from dacoits and rioters.
The people of Kotali were, the headman said, very angry with the chief constable in Garhwar. They said he must have been warned at least the day before to expect trouble, and had not bothered to tell them. If they had been told they would not have let the children go to school that morning. The mothers thanked Miss Crane for returning them safely and offered her some tea, which she drank by the roadside, sitting on the chair they brought out and put under a tree. They gave Mr Chaudhuri tea as well.
‘I shall pray for rain,’ she told him, smiling. ‘There’s nothing like a good downpour to cool people off. If it’s wet they’ll stay at home.’
Mr Chaudhuri said nothing. He finished his tea and walked away and spoke for some time to the chaukidar and the headman. When he came back Miss Crane was finishing her second cup. She was hungry but had refused the offer of food.
‘You must stay here, Miss Crane,’ Mr Chaudhuri told her. ‘In this village everyone is your friend because of the children. It is dangerous to drive to Mayapore.’
She shook her head, put the cup down on the tray a young girl stood holding in readiness. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I have to be getting on.’
‘They will look after you. The headman invites you to stay in his home.’
‘It’s very kind of him and I truly appreciate it, but I must try to get back.’
‘Then stay for just an hour or two only. I will go back to Dibrapur. Who knows but that it is all a storm in a teapot? If it is then you can stay one more night in the bungalow and go to Mayapore tomorrow. The telephone will probably be working again by then.’
‘And if it isn’t all a storm in a teapot?’
‘Then you shouldn’t go to Mayapore at all. You should stay here where everyone is your friend.’
‘I’ve got friends in Mayapore too. And Mr Chaudhuri, I also have responsibilities. I know you mean it kindly but I do really have to be getting on.’
‘You have had nothing to eat.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘I will get you something to eat.’
‘I don’t think I could eat. You see this sort of thing always makes me feel a bit sick.’ It wasn’t true. This sort of thing always made her ravenously hungry. But if she stayed for the food, she thought, her determination to be on her way might weaken.
Mr Chaudhuri raised his arms slightly, a gesture of surrender. ‘Then I am coming with you,’ he said, ‘we had better go now,’ and turned away, ignoring her reply of, ‘Don’t be silly, it’s quite unnecessary,’ went to speak again to the chaukidar and the headman. Two or three of the children gathered round her. To please her they recited ‘One, Two, Buckle my Shoe’. She laughed and said that it was well done. Mr Chaudhuri was walking up the road to the headman’s house. He glanced back and indicated he would not be very long. A mother came with a plate covered by a napkin. Beneath it there were piping hot chappattis. More tea was offered. Another woman brought a bowl of dal, and a spoon. She waved the spoon aside and began to eat, breaking off bits of chappatti and scooping the dal up with them. The sweat was forming on her forehead. It was so hot and humid. While she ate the people stood watching. I hate it, she thought, I have always hated it, this being watched, like something in a zoo, seated on a chair, under a tree, by the roadside.
‘You see,’ she said to Mr Chaudhuri when he came back, ‘they’ve forced it on me.’
‘It is for kindness,’ he said, as if giving her a lesson she had never learned properly, ‘and for hospitality.’
‘Well, I know that,’ she couldn’t help replying. ‘But help me out with the chappattis. There are far more here than I can cope with.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘they are for you. Try to finish them. Do not give offence. I also will eat. They are preparing. Then we will go to Mayapore.’
‘What about Mrs Chaudhuri?’ she asked.
‘She is safe with her friend. They will send someone from here to tell her where I have gone.’
After a moment, looking up, catching his watchful eye, she said, ‘Thank you, Mr Chaudhuri,’ and then, after a bit of difficulty, ‘I should have been afraid alone.’
*
In the next village, Garhwar, the police were waiting, squatting by the roadside in the shade of a banyan tree. Near the tree there was a whitewashed Hindu shrine. The priest in charge of the shrine sat half-naked on the hard-mud verandah of his hut, watching them. The police were armed with sticks. Seeing the car approach, the head constable got up from his haunches and flagged them to a stop. It was his duty to warn her, he told Miss Crane in Urdu, having saluted her and glanced at Mr Chaudhuri, that it was dangerous to proceed. He had been instructed to stand by and to expect trouble.
‘When were you so instructed?’ Miss Crane asked, also in Urdu.
He had been instructed early that morning to stand by, and yesterday to be prepared for trouble.
‘You should have sent a message at once to Kotali,’ she said.
He had sent a message to Kotali. He had done so on his own initiative. He had not been instructed to send any message but only to stand by and be prepared for trouble.
‘You should have sent a message yesterday, but it’s no matter,’ Miss Crane said. Perhaps he would be good enough to tell her if he had any information about what was happening in Mayapore and between Garhwar and Mayapore.
‘I have no information,’ he said. ‘The telephone line to Dibrapur is now out of order,’
‘You mean cut?’
It was possible that it was cut. Also possible that it was just out of order. It was because he had been warned to stand by and to expect trouble and because immediately afterwards he found the telephone out of order that he had sent messages to Kotali and to the other villages in his jurisdiction. He had sent the messages by ordinary men and women from Garhwar as he could not afford to send any of his men in case trouble came suddenly. He had done everything possible. There was not much he could do with a handful of men if real trouble came. There were many bad people in the villages. His life and the lives of his men were in danger. Perhaps the memsahib would tell the sub-inspector sahib in Tanpur that Head Constable Akbar Ali in Garhwar was standing by as instructed but was without means of communication.
‘Shall we reach Tanpur safely then, do you think?’ Miss Crane asked.
He did not know, but the police in the Tanpur division of the district, under whose jurisdiction the Dibrapur sub-division came, were all men of character and determination. He thought it possible that she would reach Tanpur, but it was his duty to warn her that it was dangerous to proceed, and of course he could not answer for the division beyond Tanpur, where there were many villages full of bad people who might be converging on Tanpur, and perhaps on Mayapore, if Mayapore was in a state of civil disturbance. But Sub-Inspector Govindas Lai Sahib in Tanpur would no doubt be in a better position to advise her about that.
They reached Tanpur at two o’clock. Tanpur was a small town, dirty, poor, and smelling of ordure. The police who were out in force, patrolling the main street, consisted of six men and the assistant sub-inspector. But there was no sign of Sub-Inspector Govindas Lai who, his assistant said, had been trying to make contact with the District Superintendent Sahib’s headquarters in Mayapore and had gone out an hour ago in a truck with one constable and three linesmen from the posts and telegraphs to find out where the wires were cut between Tanpur and Mayapore. The lines were also cut between Tanpur and Dibrapur, but the line to Mayapore was the most vital. Mr Chaudhuri
told the assistant sub-inspector that the police post in Garhwar was also cut off, but that they had seen no lines down between there and Tanpur itself, or indeed any lines down all the way from the schoolhouse in Dibrapur. The assistant sub-inspector explained that to telephone from Garhwar to Tanpur or from Tanpur to Garhwar the call had to go through the Dibrapur exchange, and that it looked as though the lines must have been cut close to the Dibrapur exchange or even that the Dibrapur posts and telegraphs had been destroyed.
‘Is it safe to proceed?’ Mr Chaudhuri asked.
‘Who can say?’ the man replied. ‘If no harm has come to the sub-inspector sahib, then you will find him on the road ahead.’ In Tanpur itself there had been crowds collecting in the morning but the sub-inspector sahib had persuaded them to disperse. He had put it about that the military were on their way from Mayapore to maintain order. The shops were still closed, which was contrary to regulations, but the people were staying in their homes and the last instructions from Mayapore, early that morning, were to the effect that crowds should be persuaded to disperse if possible, but not provoked. The shopkeepers could have been forced to open their shops, but if people were not to be provoked it was better to let them stay shut. So far, then, all was quiet, but if the sub-inspector sahib did not return soon he did not know how long this state of affairs would continue. ‘But we are pulling on all right,’ he said to Miss Crane, suddenly, in English.
‘We’ll see the sub-inspector and tell him.’
But they did not see the sub-inspector. Five miles beyond Tanpur they found what looked like his truck, upside down on the roadside where it had been overturned in the place where it must have been parked, next to a telegraph pole. If the truck belonged to the sub-inspector then he had found where the wires were cut, but not been given time to repair them. They lay tangled and coiled in the ditch at the side of the road.
‘We must go back,’ Mr Chaudhuri said. ‘They have abducted Sub-Inspector Govindas Lai.’
