by Paul Scott
Well: it can be pictured all those years ago, especially on a Saturday evening, with a band thumping in the lounge-bar from which the old wicker tables and chairs have been cleared, and the dining-room rearranged to provide for a cold buffet supper. In the flagged yard at the back that fringes the tennis courts there are coloured lights slung in the trees, and couples used to sit out there to cool off between dances, waiting for the next foxtrot or quickstep. Some swam in the little floodlit pool that lies behind the changing- and shower-rooms, the pool which, tonight, is in darkness, in need of scraping (Mr Srinivasan says as he conducts his guests on a tour of inspection after the ice-cream that followed the curried mutton), and is seldom used because it is open to all and neither race seems particularly to fancy the idea of using it when it can’t be guaranteed that the person last using it was clean. There is a story that two or three years ago an Englishman emptied all the chamber pots from the ablution cubicles into it.
*
‘But I was telling you earlier on,’ Mr Srinivasan says, leading the way back through the now deserted lounge-bar to the smoking-room – which has filled up and even sports a few ladies in sarees who are, one gathers, military wives – ‘I was telling you about the kind of man whom old fellows like myself who were reared on briefs and files and nurtured on politics now find it easier to fit in with than we find it here at the Gymkhana.’
Mr Srinivasan raises his finger and a bearer appears and takes an order for coffee and brandy.
‘And I mentioned Romesh Chand Gupta Sen,’ he continues. ‘He is a case in point. With Romesh Chand it has always been a question of business first and politics last. Well, not even last. Nowhere. He has made three fortunes, the first during the old peace-time days, the second during the war and the third since independence. None of his sons was allowed to continue education beyond Government Higher School. I asked him why this was. He said, “To succeed in life it is necessary to read a little, to write less, to be able to calculate a simple multiplication and to develop a sharp eye for the main chance.” He married a girl who could not even write her name. She could not run a household either, but his mother trained her up to that, which is what Hindu mothers are for. When his younger brother married a girl called Shalini Kumar, Romesh prophesied no good coming of the union, because she came of a family who allowed education even if they did not wholly believe in it, and as a result Shalini’s brother went to live in England and Shalini herself could write beautifully in English. She was widowed at an early age. You may find this difficult to believe, but on her husband’s death the women of Romesh Chand’s family did their best to persuade her to defy the law and become suttee. Of course she refused. What woman in her right mind wants to burn alive on her husband’s funeral pyre? Also she refused to leave her dead husband’s house in Chillianwallah Bagh. I tell you this because it is perhaps relevant to your interest?
‘It was Romesh Chand who insisted that that Anglicised nephew of hers, Hari Kumar, should be brought back from England when her brother, Hari’s father, died and left him homeless and penniless. Actually we suspected Hari’s father of committing suicide when he realised he’d come to the end of a series of foolish speculations. Be that as it may, when Mrs Gupta Sen heard the news of her brother’s death she went to Romesh and asked him for money that would enable Hari to stay in Berkshire to finish at his public school and go on to a university. This would be, what? 1938. She had almost no means of her own. She lived as a widow, alone in the house in Chillianwallah Bagh, mainly on her brother-in-law Romesh’s charity. It was because she had always wanted a son, a child of her own, that she fell in with Romesh’s counter-proposal that Hari should be brought home to live with her and learn how to be a good Hindu. To bring about this satisfactory state of affairs Romesh said he would even be willing to pay Hari’s passage and increase Mrs Gupta Sen’s monthly allowance. She had lived a long time alone, you know, seldom leaving the house. Almost she had become a good Hindu herself.
‘She lived with great simplicity. Young Hari must have had a shock. From the outside the house in Chillianwallah Bagh looked modern. I suppose it still does. What I believe you used to call suntrap. All the houses on the Chillianwallah Bagh reclamation and development were put up in the late ’twenties. It was waste ground before then, and was called Chillianwallah Bagh because the land belonged to the estate of a Parsee called Chillianwallah. The Parsees have also always concentrated on business but they are much more westernised, hardly Indians at all. The land was bought from the Chillianwallah heirs by a syndicate of Mayapore businessmen headed by old Romesh Chand, who would never have lived in the sort of modern European-style house that was to be put up there, but saw nothing new-fangled in the anticipated profits. In fact it was to make sure of the amenities for development, such as lighting and water and drainage, and a Government grant-in-aid, that he saw to it his otherwise unsatisfactory younger brother – the one who married Shalini Kumar – got a seat on the Municipal Board. So, in time, up went these concrete suntrap-style monstrosities – suntrap only in the style because with so much sun about it’s necessary to keep it out, not trap it, to have very small windows, you see, unless you have wide old-fashioned verandahs. And into one of them, into number twelve, Romesh’s brother moved with his wife Shalini, the same house young Hari came to live in nearly ten years later and must have been shocked by, because inside they are dark and airless, with small rooms and steep stairs and no interior plan and Indian-style bathrooms. And in number twelve there was almost no furniture because although Mrs Gupta Sen’s husband had bought a lot to go with the house, Romesh paid for it with a loan, and had since sold most of it to pay himself back. The house itself also belonged to him on mortgage. I know these things because I was what in England you would call the family lawyer.
‘Yes, you are right. Lili bet me you’d cotton on. Indeed yes. It was I. I was the lawyer Romesh Chand sent for that morning Sister Ludmila went to his office and told him Hari Kumar had been taken away by the police. They thought he was arrested. This, of course, was about six months before my own arrest. It never bothered Romesh that I was politically committed. He understood the uses of politics in the same way that he understood the law of diminishing returns. After I had gone to the police station and found that Hari was already released I went back to my office, sent my clerk with a message to Romesh, and then went on to the house in Chillianwallah Bagh, to find out what it had all been about.
‘Hari would not come down from his room to see me. But Mrs Gupta Sen and I were good friends. We always spoke in English. With Romesh I had to talk in Hindi. She said, “Tell Romesh everything was a mistake. There is nothing for him to go to botheration over.” I asked her whether it was true, what the police had told me, that Hari had been drunk and taken by that mad woman to what she called her sanctuary. I had not known him ever to drink heavily. He was a great worry to his family but he had always seemed to be sober in his habits. She did not know whether he had been drunk. She said, “But I know that his life here, and therefore mine, is becoming unbearable.”’
‘Young Hari Kumar, you know, was typical of the kind of boy Nello had in mind when he financed and founded the Mayapore club. But by Hari’s time it was already choc-a-bloc with the banias looking like squatting Buddhas contemplating the mysteries of profit and loss. And of course there were no women. It wasn’t intended to be a club for men only but that is what it had become and has remained. Which is one of the reasons why I am the exception to the rule, a staunch Gymkhana supporter! The lady over there is the wife of Colonel Varma. She is delightful. You must meet her. General and Mrs Mukerji aren’t here tonight, but that is because no doubt they are invited to Roger’s number one farewell. Next Saturday will be number two farewell and even I am invited to that.’
‘So am I,’ Lady Chatterjee says. ‘I was supposed to go to number one with the other governors of the Technical Coll, but said I couldn’t, so I’m at number two as well.’
‘Then we will go together?
Good. Meanwhile you, my dear fellow, have noticed, I expect, that all the English have now left the club?’
‘To go to Roger’s?’
‘Oh, no. Of your fellow-countrymen who were here this evening only Mr and Mrs Grigson and the lady who was with Mrs Grigson will be at number one party. The Grigsons are senior. The other English you saw were junior. They will go to number two. Roger refers to them as foremen. In fact Roger has been known to call the Gymkhana the Foreman’s Club. It was one of the gentlemen of the type Roger refers to as foremen who emptied the chamber pots into the swimming pool. After he had emptied them one of his friends had the idea of making a little Diwali, a parody of our festival of lights. So they got hold of some candles and stuck them into the pots and lighted them and set them afloat. A few of our Indian members who were present complained to the secretary, and one of our youngest and strongest members even complained directly to the gentlemen who were having such an enjoyable time at our expense. But they threatened to throw him into the pool, and used language that I cannot repeat. As an innocent bystander I found the whole situation most interesting. It was an example of the kind of club horseplay we had heard of at second or third hand and a person like myself couldn’t help but remember student rags from his college days. This particular demonstration was hardly a student rag, however. Of course they were drunk, but in vino Veritas. They were acting without inhibition. Forgive me, Lili, you find the subject disagreeable. Let us have Colonel Varma and his wife to join us.’
The colonel is a tall wiry man and his wife a neat wiry woman who seems to wear traditional Indian costume more for its theatrical effect than for comfort or from conviction. The tough little shell of skin-thin masculinity that used to harden the outward appearance of the British military wives also encloses Mrs Varma. What terror she must strike in the tender heart of every newly commissioned subaltern! Her wit is sharp, probably as capable of wounding as her husband’s ceremonial sword. Tonight he is in mufti. They are going to the pictures, the ten o’clock performance; the English pictures at the Eros, not the Indian pictures at the Majestic. For a while the talk is of Paris, because the film is about Paris – the film itself is said to be rotten but the photography interesting – and then the Varmas say goodbye; Mr Srinivasan’s party breaks up and Lili goes to powder her nose.
‘While we wait for Lili,’ he says, ‘let me show you something—’ and leads the way into the black and white tiled hall where between two mounted buffalo heads there is a closed mahogany door with brass finger-plates and a brass knob. The mounted heads and the door all bear inscriptions: the latter on enamel and the former on ivory. The first buffalo was presented by Major W.A. Tyrrell-Smith in 1915, and the second by Mr Brian Lloyd in 1925. The enamel plate on the door bears the single word: Secretary.
Mr Srinivasan knocks and getting no answer opens the door and switches on the light and so reveals a small office with an old roll-top desk and an air of desuetude. ‘As the first Indian secretary of the Gymkhana, from 1947 to 1950 actually, I have a certain right of entry,’ he says and goes to a bookcase in which a few musty volumes mark the stages of the club’s administrative history. Among them are books bound like ledgers and blocked on the spine in gilt with the words ‘Members’ Book’, and in black with the numerals denoting the years covered.
‘You would be interested in this,’ he says, and takes down the book imprinted ‘1939–1945’.
The pages are feint-ruled horizontally in blue and vertically in red to provide columns for the date, the member’s name and the name of his guest.
‘If you look through the pages you will see the signatures of one or two Indian members. But they were of course all officers who held the King-Emperor’s commission. By and large such gentlemen found it only comfortable to play tennis here and then go back to their quarters. The committee were in rather a quandary when King’s commissioned Indian officers first began to turn up in Mayapore. It was always accepted that any officer on the station should automatically become a member. Indeed it was compulsory for him to pay his subscription whether he ever entered the place or not. And you could not keep him out if he was an Indian because that would have been to insult the King’s uniform. There was talk in the ‘thirties of founding another club and reserving the Gymkhana for senior officers, which would have made it unlikely that any Indian officer on station would have been eligible. But the money simply wasn’t available. In any case the Indian officers more or less solved the problem themselves by limiting their visits to appearances on the tennis courts. One was never known to swim in the pool, seldom to enter the bar, never to dine. There were plenty of face-saving excuses that both sides could make. The Indian could pretend to be teetotal and to be reluctant to come to the club and not share fully in its real life. The English would accept this as a polite, really very gentlemanly way of not directly referring to the fact that his pay was lower than that of his white fellow-officer and that therefore he could not afford to stand what I believe is still called his whack. If he was married the situation was easier still. The English always assumed that Indian women found it distasteful to be publicly in mixed company and so there was a tacit understanding that a married Indian officer would appear even less frequently than his bachelor colleagues, because he preferred to stay in quarters with his wife.
‘And really there was remarkably little bad feeling about all this kind of thing on either side. An Indian who sought and obtained a commission knew what problems he was likely to encounter. Usually it was enough for him to know that he couldn’t actually be blackballed at the Gymkhana merely because he was Indian, and enough for the English members to know that he was unlikely to put in any prolonged or embarrassing appearance. And of course British commanding officers could always be relied upon to iron out any difficulties that arose in individual cases. It wasn’t until the war began and the station began to fill up not only with a larger number of Indian King’s commissioned officers but also with English officers holding emergency commissions that the committee actually had to meet and pass a rule. But then happily, you see, a realistic analysis of the situation provided its own solution. In the first place the influx of officers into the station obviously meant a severe strain on the club’s facilities. In the second place the new officers were not only holders of temporary commissions but tended to be temporary in themselves, I mean liable to posting at almost any time. And of course among them there were likely to be men called up from all walks of civilian life, men of the type who, well, wouldn’t be at home in the atmosphere of the club. And so for once the committee found themselves thinking of ways of keeping out some of their own countrymen as well as Indians. We, who were not eligible, watched all this from the sidelines with great interest. The rule the committee passed was a splendid English compromise. It was to the effect that for the duration of the war special arrangements would need to be made to extend club hospitality to as many officers on station as possible. To do this the compulsory subscription was waived in the case of all but regular officers and two new types of membership were introduced. Officers with temporary or emergency commissions could enjoy either what was called Special Membership, which involved paying the subscription and was meant of course to attract well-brought-up officers who could be assumed to know how to behave, or Privileged Temporary Membership which entitled the privileged temporary member to use the club’s facilities on certain specific days of the week but which could be withdrawn without notice. Outwardly the no notice provision was meant to advertise the committee’s thoughtful recognition of the temporary nature of war-time postings to the station. What it really meant was that an emergency officer who misbehaved once could be barred from entry thenceforth. The privileged temporary member had to pay his bills on the spot. He also had to pay a cover charge if he used the dining-room and what was called a Club Maintenance Subscription if he used the pool or the tennis courts. He was allowed to bring only one “approved” guest at any one time, for whom he paid an extra cover charge. A
pproved was officially held to mean approved by the committee but it also meant approved by the man’s commanding officer who no doubt made it clear to these young innocents who were in uniform for a specific and limited purpose what kind of guest would be admitted. Officially it was said to be an insurance against a young man bringing the wrong sort of woman. Unofficially it meant bringing no Anglo-Indian or Indian woman, and no Anglo-Indian or Indian man unless that man was himself a King’s commissioned officer. In any case, the expense of an evening at the club was usually reckoned to have been raised to the level that no war-time temporary officer would be able to afford more than once a month unless he was well-off. This was the period during which Smith’s Hotel really flourished. So did the station restaurant, and of course the Mayapore Indian club enjoyed unaccustomed affluence. The Chinese restaurant in the cantonment bazaar made a fortune and you had to book a seat at the Eros Cinema two or three days in advance. As for the old Gymkhana club, well, it had its unhappy experiences, but by and large managed to maintain its air of all-white social superiority.
‘The curious anomaly was, though, that even in those expansive days which the die-hards used to refer to as the thin end of the wedge, Indian officers of the civil service, even of the covenanted civil service, were not admitted as guests let alone as members. Which meant that the District and Sessions Judge, dear old Menen, such a distinguished fellow, couldn’t enter, even if brought by the Deputy Commissioner. There was no written rule about it. It was simply an unwritten rule rigorously applied by the committee and if you take Menen as a leading example, never challenged by those who were excluded.
‘Here in this book, though, you will see that as far back as May the twenty-second, 1939, the Deputy Commissioner, Mr Robin White, had the temerity to bring to and the luck to succeed in bringing in no less than three Indians who did not hold the King Emperor’s commission – the provincial Minister for Education and Social Services, the Minister’s secretary – my old friend Desai – and myself. That is Mr White’s own handwriting, of course. Perhaps you can judge character from handwriting? Well, but all this is a long story. We must leave it for tonight. Lili will be looking for us.’
