by Paul Scott
In this way Colin Lindsey never had the opportunity of guessing the weight of the burden of exile his friend struggled under. In one letter, he wrote to Harry: ‘I’m glad you seem to be settling down. I’m reading quite a lot about India to try and get a clearer picture of you in it. Sounds terrific. Wish I could come out. Have you stuck any good pig lately? If you do, don’t leave the carcase in front of a mosque, or the devotees of the Prophet will have you by the knackers. Advice from an old hand! We drew the match with Wardens last Saturday. We miss that Coomer touch – those elegant sweeps to his noble leg and those slow snazzy off-breaks. Funny to think that your cricket will be starting just about the time the school here begins its football season. Not that I shall be seeing the football this year. Has it been decided yet what you are going to do? I’m definitely leaving at the end of this summer term. Dad says he’ll stump up for a crammer if I want to matriculate (some hopes) but I’ve decided to accept my uncle’s offer to go into the London office of that petroleum company he’s something to do with.’
To this, after several days, Hari replied, ‘The idea always was, you remember, that I’d swot for the ICS exams after leaving Chillingborough and sit for them in London, then come out here and learn the ropes. These days you can sit for the exams over here as well, but I don’t think I’ll be doing that. My aunt’s old brother-in-law runs some kind of business in Mayapore and I gather the idea is that I should go into it. But first I’m supposed to learn the language. Although my uncle-in-law thinks my own language could be useful he says it’s not much good to him if I can’t understand a word of what 90% of the people I’d be dealing with were talking about. It’s raining cats and dogs here these days. Sometimes it gives over and the sun comes out and the whole place steams. But the rain goes on, I’m told, until September, and then it begins to cool down, but only for a few weeks. It starts getting hot again pretty soon in the new year, and by April and May I gather you can’t even sweat. I’m down with gippytum, and can only face eating fruit, although I wake up thinking of bacon and eggs. Please give my love to your mother and father, and remember me to Connolly and Jarvis, and of course to old Toad-in-the-hole.’
Sealing such a letter once he was tempted to tear it up and write another that would give Colin some idea of what it had meant to find himself living on the wrong side of the river in a town like Mayapore. Then he would have said: ‘There is nothing that isn’t ugly. Houses, town, river, landscape. All of them are reduced to sordid uniform squalor by the people who live in them. If there’s an exception to this, you’d no doubt find it on the other side of the river, in what are called the civil lines. And perhaps you’d eventually get used to it, even enjoy it, because the civil lines are where you’d be; that would be your retreat. But I am here in the Chillianwallah Bagh. It’s what they call modern. You’re somebody by their standards if you live in one of these stifling concrete monstrosities. The whole place stinks of drains, though. In my room – if you can call it a room: with unglazed barred windows it looks more like a cell – there’s a bed (a wooden frame with a string mesh), a chair, a table which Aunt Shalini has covered with a ghastly piece of purple cloth embroidered in silver thread, a wardrobe called an almirah with a door that doesn’t work. My trunk and suitcases are mildewed. There’s a fan in the middle of the ceiling. More often than not it stops working during the night and you wake up suffocating. My aunt and I live alone. We have four servants. They live in the compound at the back. They speak no English. When I’m in a room downstairs they watch me from doorways and through windows because I’m the nephew from ‘Bilaiti’. My aunt, I suppose, is a good woman. She’s not forty yet, but looks more than fifty. We don’t understand each other. She tries to understand me harder than I can bother to try to understand her. But at least she is bearable. I detest the others. From their point of view I’m unclean. They want me to drink cow-piss to purify myself of the stain of living abroad, crossing the forbidden water. Purify! I have seen men and women defaecate in the open, in some wasteland near the river. At night the smell of the river comes into my bedroom. In my bathroom, in one corner, there is a hole in the floor and two sole-shaped ledges to put your feet on before you squat. There are always flies in the bathroom. And cockroaches. You get used to them, but only by debasing your own civilised instincts. At first they fill you with horror. Even terror. It is purgatory, at first, to empty the bowels.
‘But the house is a haven of peace and cleanliness compared with what’s outside and what goes on out there. We get our milk straight from a cow. Aunt Shalini boils it, thank God. The milkman comes in the morning and milks his cow outside the house, near a telegraph pole. To this pole he ties a dead, stuffed calf which the cow nuzzles. This keeps her in milk. The calf was starved to death because the cow’s milk was taken by the milkman to sell to good Hindus. Since I knew that, I take only lemon or lime in my tea when Aunt Shalini can get them from the bazaar. I’ve only been to the bazaar once. That was during the first week I was here, towards the end of May. The temperature was 110 degrees. I hadn’t yet taken in what was happening to me. I went to the bazaar with Aunt Shalini because I wanted to be decent to her and she seemed keen for me to go. What was it? Some kind of nightmare? The leper, for instance, who hung about at the entrance to the bazaar and whom nobody seemed to take any special notice of. Was he real? Yes, he was real enough. What was left of his hand came close to my sleeve. Aunt Shalini put a coin into his bowl. She knows about lepers. They are part of her daily experience. And when she put the coin into his bowl I remembered that story my father told me, which I told you, and neither of us quite believed about the way my grandfather was said to have left his home and gone begging to acquire merit and become part of the Absolute. Well – did he end up as a leper too? Or did he just find himself communing with God?
‘All those stories that my father told me; at the time they seemed to be simply stories. A bit romantic even. To get the full flavour of them you have to imagine them taking place here, or somewhere like it, somewhere even more primitive. I look at Aunt Shalini and try to see her as that young kid who was married off at all that cost to the fellow who died of syphilis or something. Died in a brothel, anyway. I wish Father hadn’t told me about that. I find myself watching her at table, hoping she won’t touch anything but the outer rim of the plate. Poor Aunt Shalini! She asks me questions about England, the kind of question you can’t answer because at home it never gets asked.
‘Home. It still slips out. But this is home, isn’t it, Colin? I mean I shan’t wake up tomorrow at Chillingborough or Sidcot, or in what we always called”my” room at Didbury? I shall wake up here, and the first thing I’ll be conscious of will be the sound of the crows. I shall wake up at seven and the household will have been up and about for at least an hour. There’ll be a smell from the compound of something being cooked in ghi. My stomach will turn over at the thought of breakfast. I’ll hear the servants shouting at each other. In India everybody shouts. There’ll be a pedlar or beggar at the gate out front. And he’ll be shouting. Or there may be the man who screams. When I first heard him I thought he was a madman who’d got loose. But he is a madman who has never been locked up. His madness is thought of as a sign that God has personally noticed him. He is therefore holier than any of the so-called sane people. Perhaps underneath this idea that he’s holy is the other idea that insane is the only sensible thing for an Indian to be, and what they all wish they were.
‘The sun will probably be out in the morning. It hurts the eyes to look out of the window. There’s no gradation of light. Just flat hard glare and sudden shadow as a cloud passes. Later it will rain. If the rain falls heavily enough you won’t be able to hear the people shouting. But after a bit the sound of the rain sends you barmy too. Since coming here I’ve started smoking. The cigarettes are always damp though. About eleven o’clock an old man called Pandit Babu Sahib arrives, ostensibly to teach me Hindi. My aunt pays for the lessons. The pandit has a dirty turban and a grey beard. He smel
ls of garlic. It sickens me to catch his breath. The lessons are a farce because he speaks no English I recognise. Sometimes he doesn’t turn up at all, or turns up an hour late. They have no conception of time. To me they are still “they”.
‘You ask me what I’m going to do. I don’t know. I’m at the mercy of my aunt’s in-laws for the moment. There are some Kumars still in Lucknow, apparently, and a brother of Aunt Shalini’s and his wife in the old Kumar house in the United Provinces. But they want nothing to do with me. Aunt Shalini wrote to them when she got the news of Father’s death. They weren’t interested. Father cut himself off from everyone but Aunt Shalini. He sold his land to his brothers before emigrating to England. This brother of his who’s still alive is afraid – so Aunt Shalini thinks – that I plan to claim back part of the property. She suggests going to a lawyer to see if the original sale was in order. In this she’s like every other Indian. If they can get involved in a long and crippling lawsuit they seem to be happy. But I want nothing to do with that sort of thing. So I’m dependent on her and her brother-in-law, Romesh Chand Gupta Sen, until I can earn a living. But what decent living can I earn without some kind of recognised qualification? Aunt Shalini would let me go to one of the Indian colleges, but it’s not for her to say, because Romesh Chand controls the purse-strings. (After all, the Gupta Sens own her.) There’s a Technical College here that was founded by a rich Indian called Chatterjee. Sometimes I think I might try and get in there and work for an engineering degree or diploma or whatever it is a place like that hands out.
‘Do you know the worst thing? Well, not the worst, but the thing that makes me feel really up against it? Neither Aunt Shalini nor Romesh Chand, nor any of their friends and relatives, know any English people, at least not socially, or any who matter. Aunt Shalini doesn’t know any because she doesn’t have any social life. The others make it a point of principle not even to try to mix. This is a tight, closed, pseudo-orthodox Hindu society. I’m beginning to see just what it was that my father rebelled against. If they knew a few English I don’t think it would be long before some kind of special interest was taken in my future. My five years at Chillingborough can’t mean nothing, and there must be all kinds of scholarships and grants I could be put on to. But Aunt Shalini knows nothing about them, and seems afraid to raise the subject with anyone, and the Gupta Sens clearly don’t want to know. Romesh Chand says I’ll be useful to him in his business. I’ve seen his offices. I think I’d go mad if I had to work there. The main office is over a warehouse that overlooks the Chillianwallah Bazaar, and there’s a sub-office at the railway sidings. He’s a grain and fresh vegetable contractor to the military station on the other side of the river. He’s also a grain dealer on his own account. And Aunt Shalini says he’s got his fingers in a lot of other enterprises. He owns most of the Chillianwallah Bagh property. This is the India you won’t read about in your pig-sticking books. This is the acquisitive middle-class merchant India of money under the floorboards, and wheat and rice hoarded up until there is a famine somewhere and you can off-load it at a handsome profit, even if most of it has gone bad. Then you sell it to the Government and bribe the government agent not to notice that it’s full of weevils. Or you can sell it to the Government while it’s still in good condition and there’s no famine and the Government can let it go bad – unless of course it’s stolen from their warehouses and bought up cheap and stored until a government official can be bribed to buy it all over again. Aunt Shalini tells me about such things. She is very naïve. She tells me things like this to make me laugh. She does not realise that she is talking about the people I’m supposed to feel kindred affection for, men like her husband, for instance, the late Prakash Gupta Sen. Somehow I must fight my way out of this impossible situation. But fight my way to where?’
*
Indeed, to where? It was not a question Colin could have helped him to answer because Hari never asked it of anyone but himself, and it was several months before he put it even to himself so directly, in such unequivocal terms. He had not asked himself the question before because he could not accept the situation as a real one. In that situation there was a powerful element of fantasy, sometimes laughable, mostly not; but a fantasy that was always inimical to the idea of a future stemming directly from it. In terms of a future, first the fantasy had to be destroyed. Something projected from the real world outside had to hit and shatter it. During this period he hung on to his Englishness as if it were some kind of protective armour, hung on to it with a passionate conviction the equal of that which his father had once had that to live in England was probably enough in itself to transform life. And because he now felt that his Englishness was the one and only precious gift his father had given him he liked to forget that he had once been critical of him and year by year more ashamed of him. He fell into the habit of saying to himself whenever a new horror was revealed to him: ‘This is what my father hated and drove himself mad trying to ensure I’d never be touched by.’ Madness was the only way he could explain his father’s ‘suicide’. And he was old enough, too, to guess that loneliness had heightened the degree of insanity. If Duleep Kumar had not been lonely perhaps he might have found the courage to face up to the financial disaster which the lawyers had succeeded in convincing his son of but never in explaining to that son’s satisfaction. In Mayapore, Hari saw that disaster as the work of the same malign spirit that now made his own life miserable.
Through most of his first experience of the rains he was chronically and depressingly off-colour. Whatever he ate turned his bowels to water. In such circumstances a human being goes short on courage. His indisposition and his distaste for what lay outside Number 12 Chillianwallah Bagh kept him confined to the house for days at a time. He slept through the humid afternoons as if drugged and grew to fear the moment when his Aunt Shalini would want his company, or suggest a walk because the rains had let up and the evening was what she called cool. They would go, then, towards the stinking river, along the Chillianwallah Bagh Extension road to the Bibighar bridge, but turn back there as if what lay on the other side was prohibited, or, if not actually prohibited, undesirable. In all that time from May until the middle of September he did not cross over into the civil lines. At first he did not cross because there was no call to; but later he did not cross because the other side of the river became synonymous with freedom and the time did not strike him as ripe to test it. He did not want to tempt the malign spirit.
He crossed the river in the third week of September, in 1938, when the rains had gone and his illness was over and he could no longer find any excuse not to go through the motions of pleasing his uncle, Romesh Chand Gupta Sen; when, in fact, he had decided to please his uncle as much as was in his power, because he had talked to his uncle’s lawyer, a man called Srinivasan, and now had hopes of persuading the uncle to send him to the Mayapore Technical College, or to the college in the provincial capital.
‘I will become,’ he told himself, ‘exactly what my father wanted me to become, and like this pay the malign spirit out. I’ll become an Indian the English will welcome and recognise.’
His father’s death had raised the question of moral indebtedness.
*
He went with some documents Romesh Chand told him were needed by a Mr Nair, the chief clerk at the warehouse near the railway sidings. He travelled by cycle-rickshaw. Few of the clothes he had brought from England were of any use to him. His aunt had helped to fit him out with shirts and trousers run up by the bazaar tailor. The trousers he wore today were white and wide-bottomed. With them he wore a white short-sleeved shirt, and carried a buff-coloured sola topee. Only his shoes were English; and those were handmade and very expensive. One of Aunt Shalini’s servants had polished them by now to a brilliance he himself had never achieved.
The traffic was held up on the Mandir Gate bridge. Immediately in front of the rickshaw, obstructing the view, was an open lorry loaded with sacks of grain. A sweating, half-naked coolie sat on top of the
sacks smoking a bidi. Abreast of the rickshaw was another; behind, a bus. The rickshaw had come to a halt opposite the temple. There were beggars squatting in the roadway near the temple gate. He looked away in case he should recognise the leper. He heard the clanking of the train on the opposite bank but could not see it because of the lorry. Five minutes after he heard the train the traffic began to move. The bridge had a parapet of whitened stone. He had a brief impression of water and openness, and banks curving away in muddy inlets and promontories, and then the three wheels of the rickshaw were juddering over the wooden planks of the level crossing and he was translated into this other half of the world.
His disappointment was as keen as his anticipation had been. The road from the Mandir Gate bridge to the railway station was lined with buildings that reminded him of those on the Chillianwallah Bagh Extension road: but before the rickshaw boy took a turn to the right, ringing his bell and shouting a warning to an old man who was chasing a berserk water-buffalo, he saw a vista of trees and a hint, beyond the trees, of space and air. When the rickshaw boy drew up in the forecourt of the station goods-yard, which looked like all goods-yards, graceless and functional, he told him to wait. The boy seemed to object, but young Kumar could not understand what he said, and walked away without paying, the one sure way he knew of keeping him there. He entered the godown that bore across its front the sign Romesh Chand Gupta Sen and Co., Contractors. Inside there was the nutty fibrous smell of all such places. It was dark and comparatively cool. Labourers were carrying sacks of grain from a stack out into the sunlit siding on the other side of the warehouse and loading them into a goods wagon. The air was full of floating dust and chaff. Set into the wall closest to him was an open door and a bank of windows that overlooked the vast cavern of the godown. This was the office. It was lit by naked electric light-bulbs. He entered. The head clerk was not there. Two or three young men in dhotis and shirts of home-spun cotton sat at trestle tables writing in ledgers. They remained seated. In his uncle’s office over the warehouse in the Chillianwallah Bazaar the young clerks stood up whenever he went into their musty ill-lit rooms. That embarrassed him. All the same, suspecting that these clerks at the railway godown knew who he was, he could not help noticing the difference in their behaviour and momentarily feeling diminished by it. He asked where the chief clerk was. The man he spoke to replied fluently enough, answering English for English, but in a manner that was obviously intended to be offensive.
