by Paul Scott
I told him the sort of thing I felt about the Bibighar. It was odd, sitting there on the mosaic floor, having to shout to make ourselves heard, then relapsing into silence until the noise outside got less. I asked him to have his picture taken too, but he said he made a rotten photograph. I said, ‘Don’t be silly. What about those Aunt Shalini showed me?’ He said he ‘was younger then’! I asked him whether he still heard from those English friends of his, the Lindseys, but he shrugged the question away. He’d always been prickly about them when Aunt Shalini mentioned them. I thought they’d given up writing to him and he felt badly about it, but from something Sister Ludmila asked me the last time I saw her I got the feeling there was more to it than that, something to do with the boy, the Lindsey son, whom Aunt Shalini always described as Hari’s greatest friend ‘at home’.
Anyway, we were marooned there in the Bibighar and it began to get dark. We’d missed having tea, and I knew I had to be back by seven to change for dinner, because Aunt Lili was having Judge Menen and his wife in, to celebrate Mrs Menen coming out of hospital. I was shivering a bit, and I thought I’d caught a chill. I wanted him to warm me. An English boy would have snuggled up, I suppose, but there we were, with at least a foot or two between us. I got edgy. I wanted to take his hand and hold it to my face.
*
When we came away, that evening we sheltered from the rains, it felt just as if we had had a quarrel, a lovers’ quarrel. But we weren’t lovers and there’d been no quarrel. And again I thought: It’s wrong, wrong because it doesn’t work. He saw me home, and although the next day was Sunday neither of us mentioned any arrangement to meet. I was back at the MacGregor a few minutes before Aunt Lili and was soaking in a bath when I heard her calling to Raju on the landing. It was like hearing a homely sound after a long absence. I didn’t see Hari again for over a week. I spent an evening or two at the club, once with Ronald and once with the boys and girls, and the rest of my evenings with Lili. But all the time I was thinking of Hari, wanting to see him but not doing anything about it. It was like sitting on a beach as a kid, watching the sea, wanting to go in but not having the courage. Yes – you promise yourself – when this cloud has gone by and the sun comes out then I’ll go in. And the cloud goes by and the sun is warm and comforting, and the sea looks chilly.
I told myself the trouble was we’d run out of places to go where the risk of being stared at, the risk of creating a situation, could be minimised. In the club I was definitely getting the cold shoulder from the women. It was this thrashing about for ideas for new places that made me think of the Tirupati temple.
I asked Aunt Lili if English people were ever allowed in. She said she had no idea but imagined none had ever asked, because Mayapore wasn’t a tourist town and the temple wasn’t famous, but she’d have a word with one of the teachers at the Higher School or Technical College because if an Englishman had been in it would most likely have been a teacher or someone interested in art and culture. She wasn’t sure about an English girl being allowed, though. I told her not to bother, because I would ask Hari. She said, ‘Yes, you could do that I suppose,’ and looked as if she was about to question the whole business of Hari, so I started talking about my day in the hospital to head her off. I wrote a note to Hari just saying, ‘I’d love to see inside the Tirupati temple. Could we go together one day? Preferably at night because it always looks more exciting after dark.’
A day or two later he rang up from the Gazette office. They hadn’t a telephone at Aunt Shalini’s. He caught me a few moments before I was due to start out for the hospital and told me that if I really wanted to go he’d ask his uncle. His uncle was the kind of man who paid a lot of money to the priests in the hopes of buying the merit he didn’t have time to acquire in any other way. At least that’s how Hari put it. I said I really did want to go and that if he’d arrange it for the Saturday evening we could have a quiet dinner together at the MacGregor first, and then come back and play the gramophone. He sounded a bit cool. I had an idea I’d done the wrong thing asking him to take me to a temple. But we fixed it on a to-be-confirmed basis for the following Saturday when I knew Lili was playing bridge. Neither of us said anything about meeting meanwhile, although I thought he might turn up on the Tuesday evening at the Sanctuary. He didn’t though, and I still hadn’t heard from him by the Friday evening.
But I’d seen Ronald at the club, and stayed on to dinner with him. He drove me back to the MacGregor and on the way there he asked me to have dinner with him on the Saturday. I said I couldn’t because I was hoping to visit the temple. When he stopped the car at the house there was no one on the porch, no sign of Raju, but he didn’t get out to open the door for me. Instead he said, ‘Who’s taking you? Mr Kumar?’ After I’d admitted it he was quiet for a bit, but then came out with what he said he’d been meaning to say for some time, that people were talking about my going out and about with an Indian, which was always tricky, but more tricky these days, especially when the man in question ‘hadn’t got a very good reputation’ and ‘tried to make capital out of the fact that he’d lived for a while in England’, a fact which he seemed to think ‘made him English’.
Then Ronald said, ‘You know what I feel for you. It’s because I feel it that I haven’t said anything to you before. But it’s my duty to warn you against this association with Mr Kumar.’
That’s when I laughed and said, ‘Oh, stop acting like a policeman.’
He said, ‘Well, it’s partly a police matter. He was under suspicion at one time, and still is, but of course you must know all about that.’
I told him I knew nothing about it at all, and wasn’t interested because I’d met Hari at a party at the MacGregor and if Lili thought him the kind of man she could invite to her house that was good enough for me. I said I’d be grateful if people would stop telling me who could be my friends and who not, and that I personally didn’t care what colour people were, and it was obviously only Hari’s colour, the fact that he was an Indian, that got people’s goat.
Ronald said, ‘That’s the oldest trick in the game, to say colour doesn’t matter. It does matter. It’s basic. It matters like hell.’
I started getting out of the car. He tried to stop me, and took my hand. He said, ‘I’ve put it badly. But I can’t help it. The whole idea revolts me.’
I don’t know why I was sorry for him. Perhaps because of his honesty. It was like a child’s. The kind of self-centred honesty a child shows. We call it innocence. But it is ignorance and cruelty as well. I said, ‘It’s all right, Ronald. I understand.’
He let go of me as if my arm had scalded him. I shut the door and said, ‘Thanks for the meal and for bringing me home,’ but it seemed to be the wrong thing to say. There simply wasn’t a right thing to say. He drove off and I went into the house.
*
On Friday evening Hari sent round a chit saying that it was fixed for us to visit the temple the following evening, between 9.30 and 10.30, so I sent the boy back with an answer asking him to come to dinner at 7.30 for 8.
Came Saturday, he arrived promptly, as if to make up for past mistakes. He came in a cycle tonga, which explained the promptness but was probably also meant to point the difference between his life and mine. Somehow that difference became the theme of the evening. He was deliberately trying to put me off. I’m sure of that. For instance, he’d started smoking again, cheap Indian cigarettes – not bidis, but smelly and cumulatively unpleasant. I tried one but hated it, so we ended up smoking our own. He’d also brought a couple of records which he said were a present to me. I wanted to play them right away but he said, no, we’d wait until we got back from the temple, and looked at his watch. It was only 7.45 but he suggested that we ought to start eating. I said, ‘Don’t you want the other half?’ He said he didn’t but would wait while I did, which meant he didn’t want to, so I told Raju to tell cook we’d eat right away, and we went into the dining-room. When we got in there he complained that the fans were going too fas
t. I told Raju to turn them to half speed. It got very hot. When the food came in he ignored the forks and began scoffing up mouthfuls with pieces of chappatti. I followed suit. He called out to Raju, ‘Boy, bring water’, and I began to giggle because it reminded me of the time you and I sat next to that rich Indian family in Delhi and how shocked I was at the apparently rude way the man talked to the waiter, ‘Boy, bring this. Boy, bring that’, but you pointed out that it was an exact English translation of the pukka sahib’s ‘Bearer, pani lao.’ I thought Hari was having a game, taking off rich Indians of the English-speaking middle class, and wondered if he’d been drinking before he came. Our fingers and mouths were in a bit of a mess by the time we’d finished. Raju – who noticed what was happening even if he didn’t understand it – brought in napkins and bowls of warm water, and we washed. I half expected Hari to belch and ask for a toothpick. In its way it was a perfect imitation. Normally he smiled at Raju but apart from his ‘Boy, do so and so’ he treated him as if he weren’t in the room. And I began to wonder whether the Indians had got this habit from the English, or the English from the Indians, or whether the whole thing dated back to some time when servants were treated like dirt everywhere and the habit had only been kept up in the Empire by Sahibs and Memsahibs and modern Indians wanting to be smart.
The other thing Hari was doing, of course, was acting like an Indian male of that kind, very polite on the surface but underneath selfish and aggressive, ordering the arrangements to his own but not necessarily anyone else’s liking – the curtailment of the pre-dinner drinks, the early start on the meal – and now the equally early start going to the temple which ended up by being a late start because at the last moment he said perhaps we’d better listen to the records he’d bought so that we could get into the mood – a curious kind of hark-back to that dance record, which made me suddenly wary, conscious that the mood Hari was in was less comic than bitter.
And even over the playing of the gramophone he made us go through a typical sort of modern Indian farce. Raju was told to bring the gramophone out, but was shoved aside when it came to winding the damn’ thing up, and sent to look for the needles which were in the compartment of the gramophone where they were meant to be, all the time. Hari deliberately scratched the first record by being clumsy with it and then pretended not to notice the awful clack clack every time the needle jumped over the dent in the groove. And he had chosen Indian music, something terribly difficult, an evening raga that went on and on. What he didn’t reckon with was the fact that I instinctively loved it. When he saw that I did, he changed the record before it was finished, and put on one that excited and moved me even more. The odd thing was I could see it really made him savagely irritated and seeing that, the idea that he had been having a joke with me just wouldn’t hold water any longer. I felt lost, because I realised he had been trying in his own way to put me off, as Ronald and everyone wanted, and that he was sufficiently fond of me personally to believe that what he hated – the music, and eating with your fingers – I would hate too. His discovery that I didn’t hate it, but loved it or didn’t mind it, was another gulf between us, one for which there was no accounting, because I was white and he was black, and my liking for what he hated or had never had the patience or inclination to learn to like, to get back to, made even his blackness look spurious; like that of someone made up to act a part.
He let the second record play to the end, and then I took charge and said, ‘We’d better go’, and called out to Raju to bring my scarf. I had an idea I’d need to cover my head to go into the temple. Hari had brought an umbrella in case it rained while we weren’t under cover. On the way to the temple in the cycle tonga we said almost nothing. I’d not been in a cycle tonga before. To shift the weight of two people the poor boy had to stand out of the saddle and lean his whole strength on each pedal alternately. But I liked it better than the horse tongas, because we faced the way we were going. To travel in a horse tonga, facing backwards (which I suppose one does to avoid the smell if the horse breaks wind) always gives me a feeling of trying to hang back, of not wanting things to disappear. With the cycle tonga there was the opposite feeling, of facing the road ahead, of knowing it better and not being scared when you had to get out.
*
At the temple entrance there was a man waiting for us, a temple servant who spoke a bit of English. We took our shoes off in the archway of the main gate, and Hari paid some money over that his uncle had given him. I couldn’t see how much it was but guessed from the attention we got that it was probably quite a lot, more than Hari had ever been given by his uncle before.
Well, you’ve been in temples. Isn’t it odd how even with all that noise outside, to go in is like entering somewhere quite cut off – not a place of quiet – but cut off, reserved for a human activity that doesn’t need other human activity to make it function itself. Churches are quiet in this way, but then they are usually quiet because they are empty. The temple wasn’t quiet. It wasn’t empty. But it was cut off. Once through the archway you walked into the idea of being alone. I was glad to have Hari with me, because my skin was afraid, although I wasn’t afraid inside the skin. I was astonished by the sight of men and women just squatting around, under the trees in the courtyard, squatting in that wholly Indian peasant way, self-supported on the haunches, with arms stretched out and balanced on the bent knees, and the bottom not quite touching the earth. Gossiping. At first I was critical of this, until I remembered that the shrine in the centre of the courtyard was the real temple, and outside it was like the outside of a church where our Sunday morning congregations gather and chat after the service.
Around the walls of the courtyard there were the shrines of various aspects of the Hindu gods. Some awake and lit, some asleep and dark. In those doll-like figures there’s a look of what puritans call the tawdriness of Roman Catholicism, isn’t there? The dolls seemed to reflect that, but knowingly, as if pointing a moral – the absurdity of the need which the poor and ignorant have for images. Hari said, ‘The guide wants to know if we’d like to make puja to the Lord Venkataswara.’
The holy of holies! I was excited. I hadn’t expected to be allowed in there, and I was very conscious of the uniqueness of being allowed. Every so often one was startled by the ringing of a bell at the entrance to the central shrine. There were men and women waiting. Our guide forced his way through to take us in ahead of them. I hated that. He spoke to a priest who was standing watching us. Then he came and said something long and involved to Hari. I was surprised that Hari seemed to understand. When he replied to the man’s question I realised Hari had learned more of the language than he was prepared to let on and only here, in the temple, couldn’t keep up the pretence. He turned to me and said, ‘I have to ring the bell to warn the god that we’re here. When I’ve done so, look as if you’re praying. Goodness knows what we’re in for.’
I put my scarf on my head. The priest was watching us all the time. The bell was hung on a chain from the roof of the shrine at the head of the steps. I could see the inside now, a narrow passage leading to a brightly lit grotto, and the idol with a black face and gilt robes and silver ornaments. Hari reached up and pulled the rope that moved the tongue of the bell, then put his hands together. I followed suit and closed my eyes and waited until I heard him say, ‘We go in now’
He led the way. There were ordinary tubular steel bars in the passage, forming a barricade. We took up position round them with several other people – rather as at a communion rail, except that we stood and didn’t kneel, and the bars formed a rectangle, with us on the outside and a space on the inside for the priest to come down from the little grotto. He was standing by the grotto while we were sorting ourselves out, and then came with a gilt cup. We held our hands out, as for the Host, and he poured what looked like water into them. He went to the Indians first, to make sure we’d know what to do. We raised the liquid to our lips. It was sweet-sour tasting, and stung a bit. Perhaps because our lips were dry. After we
’d carried our hands to our lips we had to pass them over our heads, rather like making a sign of the cross. Then the priest came back with a golden cap – a sort of basin, and held it over our heads, and intoned prayers for each of us. He also had a gilt tray and when he’d finished with the cap he put it back on the tray. Round the tray there were little mounds of coloured powder and some petals. He stuck his finger in the powder and marked our foreheads. The petals turned out to be a small string of roses, and he gave them to me, putting them round my neck. It seemed to be all over in a second or two. On the way out Hari put some more money on a tray held by another priest at the door.
I felt nothing while I was doing puja. But when I came out my lips were still stinging and I could smell the sweet-sourness everywhere. I had a suspicion that we’d drunk cow urine. People were staring at us. I felt protected from their hostility, if it was hostility and not just curiosity, protected by the mark on my forehead and the little string of red rose petals. I still have the petals, Auntie. They are in a white paper bag, with Sister Ludmila’s text, in the suitcase. Dry and brown now. The faintest wind would blow them into fragments.
There was one other thing to do, something to see, an image of the sleeping Vishnu. Lord Venkataswara, the god of the temple, is a manifestation of Vishnu, although the black, silver and gold image looked to me far from that of a preserver. The sleeping Vishnu had a grotto to himself, behind the main shrine. The grotto was built into the outer wall. You had to go into it and then turn a corner before you found the god asleep on his stone bed. Only three or four people could get in at once. Inside it was cool. The place was lit by oil lamps and the god was quite a shock. One had expected something small, miniature, like the rest: instead, this bigger than lifesize reclining figure that overpowered you with a sense of greater strength in sleep than in wakefulness. And such good dreams he was dreaming! Dreams that made him smile.
