by Paul Scott
I could have stood and watched him for ages, but Hari nudged me and whispered that there were other people waiting to come in. We had to force our way through them, back into the courtyard. We went to the other gateway, the one that looked out on to the steps leading down to the river. After puja one should bathe, but there was only one man doing so at that moment. We could just make him out, standing in the water up to his waist. His head was shaved. Nearby there was a shed and platform where the temple barbers worked, and where devotees gave their hair to the god.
Hari said, ‘Shall we go and get our shoes?’ He had had enough. Perhaps I had too, because I wasn’t part of its outwardness at all. I felt like a trespasser. So we went back through the courtyard and collected our shoes. More money passed. I suppose it all goes into the pockets of the priests. At the gateway we were besieged by beggars. Our tonga boy was waiting for us and saw us before we saw him, and came pressing forward, ringing his bell and shouting, afraid that one of the other tonga boys would slip in and take us away. We were back in the din and the dirt. There was music from a coffee shop over the road. With my shoes back on, my feet felt gritty. Deliberately I’d not worn stockings.
*
When we got back to the MacGregor House we sat on the verandah. I asked Hari to send the tonga boy round to the back to get some food. He didn’t look more than seventeen or so – a cheerful, pleasant boy who obviously felt that with this long evening hire his luck was in. Alone for a moment I went round the back and called Raju, and asked him to bring the boy to me. He appeared from nowhere, as if he’d been expecting me. I gave him ten chips. A fortune. But he deserved it. And it was part of my puja. I think Raju disapproved. Perhaps he extracted a precentage, or gave the boy short commons or no commons at all. In the end one can’t bear it any more – the indifference of one Indian for another – and doesn’t want to know what goes on.
It came on to rain, which drove us in from the verandah. Hari’s earlier mood had gone. He looked exhausted, as if he had failed – not just at whatever he had set out to achieve that evening but at everything he’d set his heart on. I wanted to have it out with him, but it was difficult to know how to begin. And when we began it started off all wrong because I said, ‘You’ve been trying to put me off, haven’t you?’
He pretended not to understand and said, ‘Put off? What do you mean, put off?’ Which frustrated me so that I said, as if I were in a temper, ‘Oh, put off, put me off, put me off you, like everybody else has tried.’
He asked who ‘everybody else’ was.
I said, ‘Well, everybody. People like Mr Merrick for instance. He thinks you’re a bad bet.’
Hari said, ‘Well, he should know, I suppose.’
I told him that was a ridiculous thing to say because only he knew what kind of bet he was. He said, ‘What’s all this talk about anyway? What does it mean, bet? Good bet, bad bet? What am I supposed to be, a racehorse or something? Some kind of stock or share people keep an eye on to see if it’s worth investing in?’
I’d not seen him angry before. He’d not seen me angry either. We lost our tempers, which is why I don’t remember just what it was we said that led me to accuse him of criticising a man he’d probably never met, and then to the realisation that we’d been talking at cross purposes because no one had ever told me it was Ronald who took him into custody and stood by and watched him hit by one of his subordinates. I remember saying something like, ‘You mean it was Ronald himself?’ and I can still see the surprise on his face when the penny dropped at last and he knew I really hadn’t known.
If only I’d contained my anger then. Well, I tried, because I wasn’t angry with him but with Ronald, other people, myself as much as anybody. I said, ‘Where did it happen, then?’ and again he looked astonished. He said, ‘Well, in the Sanctuary of course.’ That was another blow. I asked him to tell me about it.
He’d been drunk. He wouldn’t say why. He’d wandered out as drunk as a coot and collapsed in a ditch in that awful waste ground near the river and been picked up by Sister Ludmila and her helpers who thought he’d been attacked or was ill, or dying, until they got him back to the Sanctuary. He slept it off there, and in the morning Ronald came to the Sanctuary with some policemen, looking for a man who’d escaped from a jail and was thought to have come back to Mayapore because that was where the escaped man used to live. He wasn’t there, but Hari was. Well, you can imagine it, I expect, imagine how Hari would react to being browbeaten by a man like Ronald. The sub-inspector accompanying Ronald hit Hari in the face for not answering ‘smartly’, and in the end he was hustled away and punched and kicked when he got into the back of the truck.
One trouble was that he knew the man the police were looking for. This came out while Ronald questioned him in front of the sub-inspector at the kotwali. But he’d only known him as a clerk in his uncle’s warehouse. Another trouble was that Hari deliberately made a point of confusing the police about his name. Coomer. Kumar. He said ‘either would do’. Finally Ronald sent the sub-inspector out of the room and talked to Hari alone, or tried to talk to him, which was probably difficult because Hari had taken a dislike to him. I don’t know why Hari got drunk. Perhaps from an accumulation of blows that had finally made him feel he cared for nothing and believed in nothing. He told me he was convinced he was going to be locked up anyway, so didn’t watch his tongue. I think from the way he told me all this he was trying to help find excuses for Ronald that he couldn’t find himself. Ronald asked him why he’d got drunk, and where. Hari wouldn’t say where because he thought – and said – that where was none of Ronald’s business – but gladly explained why. He explained it by saying he’d got drunk because he hated the whole damned stinking country, the people who lived in it and the people who ran it. He even said, ‘And that goes for you too, Merrick.’ He knew Merrick’s name because he’d often been in the courts as a reporter. He said Merrick only smiled when he said ‘and that goes for you too’, and then told him he could go, and even apologised – sarcastically of course – for having ‘inconvenienced him’. When he got back home he discovered Sister Ludmila had scared up some influential people to ask questions about his ‘arrest’ but this only amused him, if amused is the right word to use when he was really feeling bitter. He said it had amused him when eventually Lili invited him to a party, and also amused him to see Merrick watching the way I went up to him that day on the maidan. I didn’t know Ronald had seen that, but it fitted in. Hari thought I had always known the whole story, and was only condescending to him when I broke away from the white officers and white nurses to throw a crumb of comfort to him.
I said, ‘So it’s amused you whenever we’ve been out together?’
He said, ‘Yes, you could put it that way. If you want to. But you’ve been very kind, and I’m grateful.’
I said, ‘I didn’t mean anything as kindness,’ and stood up. He stood up too. He would only have had to touch me, for the stupidity to have ended then, but he didn’t. He was afraid to. He was too conscious of the weight that would have made touching a gesture of defiance of the rule Ronald had described a few evenings before as ‘basic’, and he didn’t have that kind of courage, and so I was deprived of my own. The defiance had to come from him first, to make it human, to make it right.
I said, ‘Goodnight, Hari.’ Oh, even in that goodnight there was a way left open to him that ‘goodbye’ would have closed. But I mustn’t blame him. He had good reasons to be afraid. I rehearsed them to myself upstairs in my room, sitting, waiting, determining to have things out with Lili. When I heard the cycle tonga go down the drive my determination began to go with it, and then I was worried, worried for him, because he was a man who would find it awfully difficult to hide, and I believed that was what he wanted to do. To hide. To disappear into a sea of brown faces.
That word Ronald Merrick used was the right one – association. Hari and I could be enemies, or strangers to each other, or lovers, but never friends because such a friendship w
as put to the test too often to survive. We were constantly having to ask the question, Is it worth it? Constantly having to examine our motives for wanting to be together. On my side the motive was physical attraction. I didn’t have enough self-confidence to assure myself that Hari felt the same for me. But this didn’t change what I felt. I was in love with him. I wanted him near me. I told myself I didn’t care what people said. I didn’t care what he’d done, or what people like Ronald Merrick thought he’d done or was capable of doing. I wanted to protect him from danger. If it helped him not to be seen with me any longer I was prepared to let him go, to let him hide. But because I was in love I kidded myself there was a time limit to ‘any longer’, a magic formula that took the sting out of the decision I made to let the next move come from him.
When Lili asked me next morning about the visit to the temple I chatted away as if nothing had happened. Several times I was on the point of saying, ‘Did you know it was Ronald who arrested Hari?’ But I didn’t want to hear her say yes. I didn’t want to pave the way to a discussion that might have forced Lili to confess for instance that she had since had doubts about Hari and regretted her haste in rushing to the defence of a man she didn’t know but had since learned more of that made her feel Ronald had been right to suspect him and done nothing he need be ashamed of when he took Hari in for questioning.
I knew that Lili would be the first to realise something had happened between Hari and myself if the days went by without any word from him or meeting between us. I was aware of helping him by keeping quiet, aware of distracting attention from him, but not aware then of the truth of what I was actually doing – indulging my unfulfilled passion for him by weaving a protective web round him which even excluded me. I didn’t feel that it excluded me. Later I did.
I went about my job, my ordinary life. No letter from him. To avoid having to answer Lili’s questions, if she decided to ask them, I took to going almost every evening to the club. And people noticed it. I was glad they did. If I was at the club obviously I wasn’t out with Hari. The first time I saw Ronald there he came up to me and said, ‘Did you enjoy the temple?’ I shrugged and said, ‘Oh, it was all right. A bit of a racket, though. You can’t say boo without it costing money.’ He smiled. I couldn’t tell whether he was pleased or puzzled. I wondered whether he saw through my casual pretence, but then decided that even if he saw through it he wouldn’t see what lay behind it. I hated him that night. Hated him and smiled at him. Played the game. And again felt how easy it was, how simple. To act at conforming. Because all the time there was nothing to conform with, except an idea, a charade played round a phrase: white superiority.
And all the time wanting Hari. Seeing him in my imagination looking over the shoulder of every pink male face and seeing in every pink male face the strain of pretending that the world was this small. Hateful. Ingrown. About to explode like powder compressed ready for firing.
I thought that the whole bloody affair of us in India had reached flash point. It was bound to because it was based on a violation. Perhaps at one time there was a moral as well as a physical force at work. But the moral thing had gone sour. Has gone sour. Our faces reflect the sourness. The women look worse than the men because consciousness of physical superiority is unnatural to us. A white man in India can feel physically superior without unsexing himself. But what happens to a woman if she tells herself that ninety-nine per cent of the men she sees are not men at all, but creatures of an inferior species whose colour is their main distinguishing mark? What happens when you unsex a nation, treat it like a nation of eunuchs? Because that’s what we’ve done, isn’t it?
God knows what happens. What will happen. The whole thing seems to go from bad to worse, year after year. There’s dishonesty on both sides because the moral issue has gone sour on them as well as on us. We’re back to basics, the basic issue of who jumps and who says jump. Call it by any fancy name you like, even ‘the greatest experiment of colonial government and civilising influence since pre-Christian Rome’, to quote our old friend Mr Swinson. It’s become a vulgar scramble for power on their part and an equally vulgar smug hanging on on ours. And the greater their scramble the greater our smugness. You can’t hide that any longer because the moral issue, if it ever really existed at all, is dead. It’s our fault it’s dead because it was our responsibility to widen it, but we narrowed it down and narrowed it down by never suiting actions to words. We never suited them because out here, where they needed to be suited and to be seen to be suited, that old primitive savage instinct to attack and destroy what we didn’t understand because it looked different and was different always got the upper hand. And God knows how many centuries you have to go back to trace to its source their apparent fear of skins paler than their own. God help us if they ever lose that fear. Perhaps fear is the wrong word. In India anyway. It is such a primitive emotion and their civilisation is so old. So perhaps I should say God help us if ever they substitute fear for tiredness. But tiredness is the wrong word too. Perhaps we haven’t got a word for what they feel. Perhaps it’s hidden in that stone carving of Vishnu sleeping, looking as if he might wake at any minute and take them to oblivion in a crack of happy thunder.
*
Was this the difference between my own emotions and Hari’s? That he could wait and I couldn’t? In the end I couldn’t bear the silence, the inaction, the separation, the artificiality of my position. I wrote to him. I had no talent for self-denial. It’s an Anglo-Saxon failing, I suppose. Constantly we want proof, here and now, proof of our existence, of the mark we’ve made, the sort of mark we can wear round our necks, to label us, to make sure we’re never lost in that awful dark jungle of anonymity.
But in my impatience there was Anglo-Saxon planning, forethought, an acceptance that time went through certain fixed exercises that the clock and the calendar had been invented to define. The farther away from the equator you get the more sensitive you become to the rhythm of light and dark, the way it expands and contracts and organises the seasons, so that time itself develops a specific characteristic that alerts you to its absurd but meticulous demands. If I’d been an Indian girl perhaps I’d have said in my note to Hari: Tonight, please. Instead I gave three or four days’ notice. Three or four. I forget which, which shows how unimportant the actual number was, how unimportant as well the actual day suggested – although I remember that. As everybody probably does. August the ninth. In my note I said I was sorry for any misunderstanding, and that I wanted to talk to him. I said I’d go to the Sanctuary on that evening and hoped to meet him there.
I got no reply, but when the day came I felt happy, almost lightheaded. At breakfast time the telephone rang. I thought it was Hari and rushed to answer before Raju could get there. It wasn’t Hari. It was little Mrs Srinivasan wanting to speak to Lili. I sent Raju up to Lili’s bedroom to tell her to pick up the extension. When I went up to say goodbye to her Lili said, They’ve arrested Vassi.’
Well, you know all that side of things. We’d been prepared for it but it was a shock when it actually happened. When I got to the hospital the girls were acting as if they’d been personally responsible for saving the day by locking up the Mahatma and his colleagues and Congressmen all over the country. A year earlier most of them wouldn’t even have known what Congress was. The atmosphere in the hospital that morning was like that in the club at the end of War Week. One of them said, ‘Have you noticed the orderlies? They’ve got their tails between their legs all right.’ Once this had been pointed out the girls seemed to go out of their way to find new methods of humiliating them. And there was a subtle change in their attitude to me, as if they were trying to make me feel that I’d been backing the wrong horse for months.
It wasn’t until the afternoon that they began to get scared. First there was the rumour of rioting in the sub-divisions, then the confirmation that the assistant commissioner had gone out with police patrols to find out why contact couldn’t be made with a place called Tanpur. It came on to r
ain. And about a quarter to five, when I was getting ready to go off duty, there was a flap because Mr Poulson had brought in the mission teacher, Miss Crane. At first we thought she’d been raped, but I got the true story from Mr Poulson. I saw him as I was going to Matron’s office. Miss Crane had been attacked on her way home from Dibrapur, and had her car burnt out, and had seen one of her teachers – an Indian – murdered. She was suffering from shock and exposure. She’d sat on the roadside guarding the murdered man’s body. As I’d met Miss Crane once at the Deputy Commissioner’s bungalow I got permission from Matron to go in and see her. But she was already wandering and didn’t recognise me. I thought she was for it. She kept saying, ‘I’m sorry. Sorry it’s too late,’ mumbling about there having been too many chappattis for her to eat alone, and asking why I hadn’t shared them, why had I gone hungry? I held her hand and tried to make contact with her but all she would do for a while was keep repeating,
‘I’m sorry it’s too late.’ But suddenly she said, ‘Mine’s Edwina Crane and my mother’s been dead for longer than I care to remember,’ and then went off into a delirium about mending the roof and there being nothing she could do. ‘Nothing,’ she said, over and over. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’
*
It was raining when I left the hospital.* There was no sign of Ronald’s driver or of the truck. He would have been busy that evening anyway. But I had my bicycle and my rain cape and sou’wester. I’d told Lili that I’d be calling in at the club and I’d also promised to see the girls there, but looking in on Miss Crane had made me late and so I cycled direct to the Sanctuary, down Hospital road, Victoria road, and over the river by way of the Bibighar bridge. Perhaps the rain as well as the rumours was keeping nearly everyone indoors, because I saw few people. I got to the Sanctuary at about 5.45. The rain was letting up a bit then.
