by Paul Scott
The day after Hari’s visit he sent me a note, thanking me formally for the evening, and a few days later I got an invitation from Mrs Gupta Sen to have dinner at her house in the Chillianwallah Bagh the following Saturday. Lili had one too, but she said it was only for form’s sake, and that anyway she was playing bridge again, so couldn’t go. After I’d accepted I got another note, this time from Hari, saying that as the house was difficult to find (all the numbers were haywire and the Chillianwallah Bagh was really a system of roads, not just one road) he would call for me in a tonga at about 7.15, if that was all right. He said he hoped I wouldn’t find the evening too dull, there was no gramophone or anything like that. I asked Lili if she thought this was a hint that he’d like it if I took ours along, with a few records, but she said that wouldn’t do at all, you couldn’t take a thing like a gramophone because not only might Mrs Gupta Sen think it wrong to have such a thing in the house (especially when the records were all European music, which probably hurt her ears) but she would more likely than not look upon it as an insult, a criticism of the kind of hospitality she had to offer. So I took Lili at her word, and I think she was right.
His Aunt Shalini was sweet, and spoke very good English. She said Hari’s father taught her when she was a little girl and that she loved having Hari living with her because now she’d been able to pick it up again and improve her accent. She showed me some snaps of Hari taken in England, which her brother, Hari’s father Duleep, had sent her from time to time. There were several taken in the garden, showing the house they lived in in Berkshire, which looked to me like a small mansion. Then there were later pictures of Hari, with some English friends, whose name was Lindsey.
I’d been pretty nervous, anticipating this visit to the Chillianwallah Bagh, and it didn’t help when Hari was late picking me up and I was sitting alone on the verandah of the MacGregor waiting for him to arrive. Lili had already gone off to bridge. She’d warned me to have at least a couple of drinks before Hari arrived in case Mrs Gupta Sen was teetotal, and I got a bit squiffy, drinking more than I needed because of the extra twenty minutes or so that I had to wait. He was awfully embarrassed about being late, which I think he thought I’d see as a typical Indian failing. He said he’d had difficulty getting a tonga because they had all seemed to be out ferrying people to the first house of the flicks. I was relieved when we got into the tonga and I saw the shapes of a wrapped bottle of gin and a bottle of lime or lemon in a little canvas bag on the seat. It was as good as dark by the time we got across the Bibighar bridge – actually it was as we went past the Bibighar wall that I asked Hari what he thought of the gardens. We had a bit of a laugh when it turned out he didn’t even know properly what they were or that they were there. I said, ‘I’ve only been in Mayapore a few months and you’ve been here for four years, and I know it better than you. But then that’s like living in London and never going to the Tower.’
We turned off the Chillianwallah Bagh Extension road. The streets were badly lit and there was an awful smell from the river. I wondered what on earth I’d let myself in for, and I must confess my heart sank. It rose again a bit when I saw the type of house in the district we’d driven in to – cheek by jowl, but modern-looking and civilised, all squares and angles. I was amused the way Hari had to keep telling the driver things like ‘Dahne ki taraf aur ek dam sidhe ki rasta’ just like me, muddling through in pidgin Hindi. I chipped him about it and gradually he relaxed.
But then when we had stopped at his house he became unrelaxed again because one of the servants had closed the gate. He shouted out but no one came and the tonga-wallah didn’t seem prepared to get out and open it himself. So Hari climbed down and opened it. It was only a few paces between the gate and the open area in front of the porch, which was lit by an unshaded electric light bulb, and we could have walked it, which might have been better because the tonga-wallah started making trouble about the tiny space he had to turn round in, which was something I had to leave Hari to deal with. Because his Hindi was as bad as mine I understood what was going on, and how he had to bribe the fellow to come back at ‘gyarah baje’ and refused to pay him meanwhile.
Suddenly I was fed up with the awful position Hari was being put in by a bloody-minded tonga-wallah, and was about to say ‘Oh, tell the stupid man I’d rather walk home than put him to any bother,’ but stopped myself in time, because that would have been taking charge and would have made matters worse, so instead when Hari had got his way and the man had reluctantly agreed to come back at eleven, I said, ‘What a fuss they make,’ as if I was personally used to it, which he probably knew I wasn’t, and which made it look as if I was acting like a Mem, slumming. Sort of amused, at Hari’s expense. Knowing what I’d done I wanted to get back into the tonga and go home, and have an enormous drink.
Instead we went indoors, encased in a sort of gloom, a sort of trembling expectancy of disaster, or if not disaster then awful boredom and discomfort, and unease. Thank heaven for Aunt Shalini, who came into the little hall like a miniature Rajput princess, beautifully and almost undetectably made-up, wearing a pale lilac saree, perfectly simple and plain, just cotton, but looking marvellous and cool. She shook hands, which made my feeble self-conscious efforts at namaste look silly. She said, ‘Come in and have a drink,’ and led us into the living-room, small but beautifully bare and uncluttered, with a rug or two, a divan and one tiny but very comfortable wicker chair which she made me sit in while, as she said, Hari ‘did the honours’ at the drinks table – a Benares brass tray on a carved ebony mother-of-pearl inlaid stand, on which there were exactly three glasses and the bottles Hari had taken out of the canvas bag as surreptitiously as he could. While she was talking to me I saw the physical likeness between herself and Hari, although of course she was tiny. In front of her I felt a bit of a gawk, big, clumsy, dressed unsuitably and showing far too much bare skin. Hari was wearing a grey cotton suit, but he had to take the jacket off presently because the fans were only working at half power.
When we’d had just one drink – and by this time I felt I really needed two – she said, ‘Shall we go in?’ and stood up and led the way next door to a small box-like dining-room. She called out to the boy to switch the fans on, and then we began to eat.
She’d taken so much trouble with the table, to make me feel at home. There was a bowl of water in the centre with frangipani blooms floating in it. And handwoven lace mats at the three places. She described every dish, but I’ve forgotten most of the names, and some of them I found difficult. When the main dish came on – Chicken tandoori – she said to Hari, ‘Haven’t we any iced beer?’ and he got up and went away for a while and came back with the beer in bottles, followed by a servant with glasses and a tray. She said, ‘Haven’t we a jug, Hari?’ So he sent the servant back for a jug, then went out himself again with the bottles. The boy brought the beer back decanted in a jug. The rest of the servants were watching from doorways and through the barred-window openings into the adjoining rooms. Aunt Shalini drank nothing, not even water, so Hari and I had the beer between us. My glass was an old tumbler with the Roman ‘key’ design, and his was smaller and thicker. He was conscious, overly-conscious, of the insignificant ways in which the table fell short of what he had once been used to and thought I would consider essential – but towards the end of the meal, when I had been watching him without realising I did so, he caught my eye, and I think he saw then that whatever I noticed as ‘faults’ had only added to my feeling of being ‘at home’, and to my feeling for him and his aunt as people honouring me, expressing some kind of groping hope that one day our different usages would mean nothing, mean as little as they meant that evening to me.
After dinner was the time she showed me the snaps. I was longing for a cigarette but didn’t dare open my bag. Suddenly she said, ‘Hari, haven’t we any Virginia cigarettes for Miss Manners?’ How sensitive she was to every change of mood in her guests! How tolerant of any taste she personally found distasteful – like the s
moking and the drinking. And I think Hari was surprised too at the tremendous ability she had to entertain an English girl – her first English guest ever, so I discovered. What I admired Hari for was the way he didn’t press things like drink and cigarettes, but left his aunt in control, in her own house, which an insensitive blustering boy intent on proving his Englishness probably wouldn’t have done. The other nice thing he did was to have a cigarette too, so that I shouldn’t feel I was the only messy person in the room, but I noticed how he just let it burn away without smoking it properly. He was afraid to get the taste for it again.
The only thing that went a bit wrong was over the business of going to the wc! When we got up from the dinner-table Hari made himself scarce for a while. I think he’d told Aunt Shalini to be sure to give me the opportunity to go, but that she didn’t quite have the nerve to say anything to me when the time came. The next time I went to the house she had got over this embarrassment, but on this particular evening I think Hari’s realisation that I hadn’t ‘been’ rather cast a blight on his evening. Round about 10.30 it began to cast a blight on mine too. I began to wonder whether they even had a wc of the kind they felt I could be invited to use. Actually it turned out that there was a downstairs as well as whatever there might have been upstairs. No seat, but she’d thoughtfully put a chamber pot on a little stool which I didn’t dare use, and there was a bowl and a jug of water, on a table that looked as if it didn’t always belong there, and some soap and towels and a hand mirror. I went in there after we heard the tonga-wallah come back and Hari went out to speak to him. I stood up and said, ‘May I powder my nose?’ So she took me into the passage near the kitchens and opened the door and switched on the light and said, ‘Please, anytime you come, here it is.’ There were a couple of cockroaches running up and down, but I didn’t care. Lili shrieks blue murder if she so much as glimpses one, but although when I first got to India I was horrified to find them sharing places like bathrooms and wc’s I no longer care.
When I said goodbye to Aunt Shalini I wanted to stoop down and kiss her, but didn’t in case that offended her. Hari insisted on coming back in the tonga with me, but wouldn’t come in for a nightcap. I think he was trying to avoid doing anything that would create an atmosphere of Well, that’s all over, now we can relax. So after he’d driven off in the tonga I sat on the verandah and had a long cool drink of nimbo and waited for Lili to come home.
*
The next day I sent one of the boys round to Aunt Shalini’s with an enormous bunch of flowers I’d raided the garden for, and a note of thanks. Bhalu was very cross with me, so I gave him ten chips and asked him not to complain to Madam and get me in trouble, which made him grin, the old rascal. After that he had me wound round his little finger. Perhaps he was wound round mine too, and we were partners in crime – crime because Lili paid all the servants extra when she had anyone staying in the house and it was understood guests weren’t to tip them. He never complained again to Lili about my cutting flowers, but round about the first of each month when he’d been paid his wages he used to stand about saluting and grinning, until I gave him a few chips. He bought a new pair of chappals with the first lot of money I gave him, and looked very smart, but oddly more tortoiselike than ever, with his khaki shorts and knobbly black bare legs and these enormous army-style sandals, clopping about on the gravel. You could tell he preferred bare feet, but the chappals represented status. He was once a gardener to a Colonel James in Madras, and Colonel James’s household has been Bhalu’s standard of pukka life ever since, even though I think he knows the garden of the MacGregor House is far superior to any other garden he’s ever worked in, which may be why he has to feel the whole of it belongs to him, and that he’s tending it to the honour and glory of James Sahib rather than of Lili.
*
I’m gossiping, aren’t I, Auntie? Putting off the moment when I have to write about the thing you really want to know. But yet, not gossiping, because you can’t isolate the good and happy things from the bad and unhappy ones. And you see for me there was a growing sense of joy, whatever there was for the people who watched and waited.
It was now that Mayapore seemed to change for me. It was no longer just the house, the road to the cantonment bazaar, the road to the hospital, the hospital, the maidan, the club. It extended to the other side of the river and, because of that, in all directions, across that enormous flat plain that I used to stand staring at from the balcony of my room, putting on my glasses and taking them off, doing what Lili called my eye exercises. I felt that Mayapore had got bigger, and so had made me smaller, had sort of split my life into three parts. There was my life in the hospital, which also included the club and the boys and girls and all the good-time stuff that wasn’t really good-time at all, just the easiest, the least exacting, so long as you ignored the fact that it was only the easiest for the least admirable part of your nature. There was my life at the MacGregor House, where I lived with Lili and mixed with Indians and English, the kind who made an effort to work together. But this mixing was just as self-conscious as the segregation. At the club you stood on loud, committed ground. At the MacGregor House it was silent and determinedly neutral. With Hari I began to feel that here at last was ground wholly personal to me, where I might learn to talk in my own tone of voice. Perhaps this is why I felt Mayapore had got bigger but made me smaller, because my association with Hari – the one thing that was beginning to make me feel like a person again – was hedged about, restricted, pressed in on until only by making yourself tiny could you squeeze into it and stand, imprisoned but free, diminished by everything that loomed from outside, but not diminished from the inside; and that was the point, that’s why I speak of joy.
Sometimes, knowing the effort it cost to squeeze into this restricted, dangerous little space, I was afraid, as I was that evening Ronald Merrick ‘proposed’ to me and brought me back to the MacGregor House, and I wanted to run back down the stairs and call out to Ronald, and was afraid of seeing the ghost of Janet MacGregor. This occasion, the occasion of his proposal after our dinner and my coming back to the MacGregor and being afraid, was in the middle of June. The rains were late. We were all exhausted, physically and mentally. That probably also accounts for my fear that night. That, and the feeling I had that Ronald represented something I didn’t fully understand, but probably ought to trust. There’s an awful weight still on my mind about Ronald. I feel that just as you and the others may know where Hari is, so there are things about Ronald that no one is prepared to discuss in front of me. I think about him a lot. He is like a dark shadow, just on the edge of my life.
Auntie, did he hurt Hari in some special horrible way? I think he did. But no one would say, at least would not say to me. And I didn’t dare question anyone too closely. I was equally a party to the conspiracy to keep me a prisoner in the MacGregor House after that night in the Bibighar. I only left it twice, once to visit Aunt Shalini, who wouldn’t see me, and then on the day before Lili took me up to ‘Pindi and I went to the Sanctuary to say goodbye to Sister Ludmila. Ronald Merrick was on Sister Ludmila’s conscience too. It seems she hadn’t realised that he and I knew each other more than casually, hadn’t realised that I might not know that it was Ronald who took Hari in for questioning that day he found him at the Sanctuary. But by then I was afraid to probe too deeply. I trusted no one. Only to my silence. And to Hari’s. But I remembered how after the Bibighar on the one occasion we came briefly face to face Ronald would not look at me straight, the time the Assistant Commissioner came with Judge Menen and a young English sub-divisional officer and held a sort of ‘inquiry’ at which Ronald gave evidence and I made everybody uneasy, perhaps angry, with my answers to their questions.
Before I tell you what actually happened in the Bibighar, I must say something about Ronald, and something about Sister Ludmila. I think Ronald first took real notice of me that day on the maidan, when I went to the War Week Exhibition; took notice of me because he saw me go up to Hari and talk
to him, as a lot of English people did. If he already had his eye on Hari, as some sort of potential subversive type (nothing could have been farther from the truth, but Ronald had his job to do) he probably looked at my going up to him like that, as a policeman would, but also as an Englishman who didn’t want an English girl getting mixed up with the ‘wrong’ type of Indian. I mean that would account for the fact that when he saw me in the club that evening he came straight up to me and said, ‘Did you enjoy the parade? I saw you on the maidan,’ when usually we only nodded, or occasionally had a drink if circumstances made it awkward for him not to offer me one.
He probably had an idea that it would be kind to head me off, but also – because he was a policeman – wasn’t above looking at me as a possible source of information about Hari: Do you remember my saying in a letter that with Ronald I never felt there was any real candour between him and the person he was dealing with? He took his job so seriously, and I think he felt he had to prove his worth all the time, so that nothing came naturally to him, nothing came spontaneously, or easily or happily.
