by Paul Scott
I’ve never described the Sanctuary to you, have I? You turn off the Chillianwallah Bagh Extension road along a track that skirts the waste ground near the river where the poorest untouchables live in horrible squalid huts. Then you come to a walled compound in which there are three old buildings that date back to the early nineteenth century. One is the office, the other the clinic and Sister Ludmila’s ‘cell’ and the third and largest the place where she tends the sick and dying. There must be nearly an acre of ground enclosed by those walls. The place looks derelict and you can smell the river most of the time. But inside the buildings everything is clean and neat, scrubbed and whitewashed.
She has one principal assistant, a middle-aged Goanese called de Souza, and several men and women whom she hires at random. I’ve always wondered where her money comes from.
Hari wasn’t there. I went to the office first and saw Mr de Souza. He said Sister Ludmila was in her room, and that no one had turned up so far for the evening clinic, probably because of the rumours of trouble. I went across to the clinic and knocked at her door. I’d not seen her since the week of the visit to the temple. She knew Hari and I had been planning to go there. She asked me to come in and tell her about it.
The rain stopped and in about ten minutes or so the sun came out, as if often does, at the end of an afternoon’s wet, but of course it was already setting. She said, ‘Will Hari be coming?’ I told her I wasn’t sure. And then she asked me about the temple. She herself had never been inside it. I described our puja to the Lord Venkataswara and the image of the sleeping Vishnu. I wanted to ask her about the night she found Hari lying drunk in a ditch in the waste-land outside the Sanctuary, but didn’t. As the minutes went by and he still did not come I thought, ‘It’s all going, going away before I’ve touched any of it or understood any of it.’ I watched the wooden carving of the Dancing Siva. It seemed to move. There came a point when I couldn’t watch it any longer because it was draining me of my own mobility. I felt I was becoming lost in it.
I turned to her. She always sat very upright, on a hard wooden chair, with her hands folded on her lap, showing her wedding ring. I never saw her without her cap so I don’t know whether she’d shorn her hair. On other occasions when I’d been in her room its bareness and simplicity had always conveyed an idea to me of its safety, but this evening I thought, ‘No, it’s her safety, not the room’s.’ I felt this going away from me too. There was so much I wanted to know about her, but I’d only once asked her a personal question. She spoke English very well, but with a strong accent. I’d asked her where she’d learned it and she said, ‘From my husband. His name was Smith.’ One heard many different tales about her – for instance that she had run away from a convent as a young novice and wore the nunnish clothing in the hope of being forgiven. I don’t think this was true. I think there was no tale about her that was true. Only her charity was true. For me it always outweighed my curiosity. When you spoke to her there wasn’t any mystery. In herself she was all the explanation I felt she needed. And that is rare, isn’t it? To be explained by yourself, by what you are and what you do, and not by what you’ve done, or were, or by what people think you might be or might become.
I stayed for an hour, until it was dusk. I told myself that Hari was probably working late, but I knew this didn’t explain his silence. I wondered whether he had been arrested again but decided that was unlikely. The arrests that had been made were of prominent members of the local Congress, like Vasi. I thought of calling in at Aunt Shalini’s but when I got out on the Chillianwallah Bagh Extension road I changed my mind and turned in the direction of the Bibighar bridge. It was almost dark. Thinking it might rain again I’d put my cape and sou’wester back on instead of strapping them to the carrier, and it was warm and clammy. I crossed the bridge and the level crossing. When I got to the street lamp opposite the Bibighar I stopped and took the cape off, and put it over the handlebars. It was stopping like this that made me wheel the bike across the road to look in through the gate of the Bibighar. When I stopped I’d had a strong impression of Hari in the Bibighar, sitting in the pavilion alone, not expecting me, but thinking of me, wondering whether I would turn up.
I went through the open gateway and along the path to the place where we always left our cycles – a place where we could lean them against the wall but keep an eye on them from the pavilion. When I got to this place there was no cycle. I looked across in the direction of the pavilion. At first there was nothing, but then I saw the glow of a cigarette being drawn on. I suppose the distance between the path by the wall and the pavilion is about a hundred yards. You can walk it straight by going up over what was once the lawn and the series of little steps. That’s why we usually left our cycles against the wall, to save lugging them up the steps. The other way to the pavilion is by the path that skirts the grounds. I wasn’t sure whether it was Hari in the pavilion and so I went up by the path.
When I got round to the side of the pavilion I could see the man standing on the mosaic platform. I said, ‘Hari, is that you?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I turned the lamp off and left the cycle against a tree and then went up to the pavilion. When I got there I found I’d brought the cape with me.
I said, ‘Didn’t you get my note?’ But it was a silly thing to ask. He didn’t answer. I felt for a cigarette and realised I’d run out. I asked him for one of his. He gave it to me. It made me cough, so I threw it away. I sat down on the mosaic. The roof overhangs the edge and the mosaic is always dry. There was no need for the cape. I put it on the ground nearby. With so many trees around it sounds as if it’s raining long after it has stopped. The water drips from the roof as well as from the leaves. Eventually he sat down too and lit another cigarette. I said, ‘Let me try one of those again.’ He opened the packet and held it out. I took a cigarette. Then I took hold of his hand, the one in which he held his own cigarette, and lit mine from his. I smoked without inhaling. After a while he said, ‘What were you trying to prove? That you don’t mind our touching?’
I said, ‘I thought we’d got beyond that.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘we can never get beyond it.’
I said, ‘But we have. I have. It was never an obstacle anyway. At least not for me.’
He asked why I’d come to the Bibighar. I told him I’d waited for an hour at the Sanctuary, that I’d looked in on my way past because I thought he might be there.
After a while he said, ‘You oughtn’t to be out alone tonight. I’ll see you home. Throw that disgusting thing away.’
He waited, then leaned towards me and held my wrist and took the cigarette and threw it into the garden. I couldn’t bear it, having him so near, knowing I was about to lose him. That catching hold of my wrist was like the impatient gesture of a lover. For him it was like that too. I willed him not to let go. There was an instant when I was afraid, perhaps because he wanted me to be. But then we were kissing. His shirt had rucked up because he was wearing it loose over his waistband and my hand was touching his bare back, and then we were both lost. There was nothing gentle in the way he took me. I felt myself lifted on to the mosaic. He tore at my underclothes and pressed down on me with all his strength. But this was not me and Hari. Entering me he made me cry out. And then it was us.
*
They came when we lay half-asleep listening to the croaking of the frogs, his hand covering one breast, my own in his black hair, moving to trace the miracle of his black ear.
Five or six men. Suddenly. Climbing on to the platform. My nightmare faces. But not faces. Black shapes in white cotton clothing; stinking, ragged clothing. Converging on Hari, pulling him away. And then darkness. And a familiar smell. But hot and suffocating. Covering my head. As I began to struggle I could think of nothing but the thing that covered my head. I knew it, but did not know it because it was smothering me. And then there was a moment – the moment, I suppose, when the man holding me down and covering me with this suffocating but familiar thing, lifted his weight away – a moment wh
en I forgot the covering and felt only my exposed nakedness. He must have lifted his weight away when the others had finished dealing with Hari and came to help. There was pressure on my knees and ankles and then my wrists – a moment of terrible openness and vulnerability and then the first experience of that awful animal thrusting, the motion of love without one saving split-second of affection.
*
I no longer dream of faces. In bad dreams now I’m usually blind. This kind of dream begins with the image of Siva. I see him only with my sense of recollection. Suddenly he leaves his circle of cosmic fire and covers me, imprisons my arms and legs in darkness. Surreptitiously, I grow an extra arm to fight him or embrace him, but he always has an arm to spare to pin me down, a new lingam growing to replace the one that’s spent. This dream ends when I’m no longer blind and see the expression on his face which is one of absolution and invitation. I wake then, remembering how after they had gone I found myself holding my raincape, breathing, aware of the blessing of there being air with which to fill my lungs, and thinking, ‘It was mine, my own cape that I use to keep the rain off, mine all the time, part of my life.’ I clung to the cape. I held it to my body, covering myself. I thought I was alone. I had this idea that Hari had gone with them because he had been one of them.
But then I saw him, the shape of him, lying as I was lying, on the mosaic. They had bound his hands and mouth and ankles with strips of cloth, torn for all I knew from their own clothing, and then placed him where he would have had to close his eyes if he didn’t want to see what was happening.
I crawled like a kid across the mosaic and struggled with the knots, struggled because they were tight and difficult and because I was also trying to cover myself with the cape. I untied the gag round his mouth first, in case he was finding it difficult to breathe, and then the strips of rag round his ankles, and then the one round his wrists. And as I untied him he continued to lie as they had left him, so that presently I gathered him in my arms because I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear the sound of him crying.
*
He cried for shame, I suppose, and for what had happened to me that he’d been powerless to stop. He said something that I was too dazed to catch but thinking back on it it always comes to me as an inarticulate begging for forgiveness.
I was suddenly very cold. He felt me shivering. Now he held me, and for a time we clung to each other like two children frightened of the dark. But I couldn’t stop shivering. He moved the cape until it was round my shoulders and then covered me at the front. He got up and searched for things that belonged to me. I felt them in his hands and took them from him. He said, ‘Put your arms round my neck.’ I did so. He lifted me and carried me over to the steps and down them one at a time. I thought of all the steps between the pavilion and the gate, and then of the bicycle. I thought he was going to carry me across the garden, but he turned on to the path. When he went past the place where I’d left the bicycle I said, ‘No, it’s here somewhere.’ He didn’t understand. I said, ‘My bicycle.’ He put me down but continued to hold me. He said he couldn’t see it, that the men must have stolen it or hidden it. He said he’d come back in the morning to look for it. I asked him about his own bicycle. He’d left it in the bazaar to be repaired. He’d not had it all day. He picked me up again and carried me down the path. I felt myself becoming a dead weight in his arms. I asked him to put me down. He did so but then lifted me again. While we were in the garden I let him do this. If I’d asked him to carry me all the way to the MacGregor House I think he’d have managed it somehow. But when we got to the gateway and he put me down again – as if to catch his breath – the world outside the garden came back into focus. On the other side of the gate there was the beginning of what another white girl would have thought of as safety. It was safety of a kind for me too. But not for him. When he moved to pick me up again I pushed him away – as you’d push away a child who was reaching out to touch something that would burn it or scald it. Seeing the gateway I imagined him carrying me through it, into the light, into the cantonment.
I said, ‘No. I’ve got to go home alone. We’ve not been together. I’ve not seen you.’
He tried to take hold of my arm. I moved away from him. I said, ‘No. Let me go. You’ve not been near me. You don’t know anything. You know nothing. Say nothing.’ He wouldn’t listen. He caught me, tried to hold me close, but I struggled. I was in a panic, thinking of what they’d do to him. No one would believe me. He said, ‘I’ve got to be with you. I love you. Please let me be with you.’
If he hadn’t said that perhaps I’d have given in. The thought that he was right and I was wrong and that the only way to have faced it was with the truth is one of the things I have to puzzle over now and carry with me – a burden as heavy if less obvious than the child. And you may wonder why when he said he loved me my determination to resist didn’t come abruptly to an end. But love isn’t like that, is it? It wasn’t for me. It bewildered me. It sent me from panic to worse panic, because of what they might do to him if he said to them, ‘I love her. We love each other.’
I beat at him, not to escape myself but to make him escape. I was trying to beat sense and reason and cunning into him. I kept saying, ‘We’ve never seen each other. You’ve been at home. You say nothing. You know nothing. Promise me.’
I was free and began to run without waiting to hear him promise. At the gate he caught me and tried to hold me back.
Again I asked him to let me go, please to let me go, to say nothing, to know nothing, for my sake if that was the only way he could say nothing and know nothing for his own. For an instant I held him close – it was the last time I touched him – and then I broke free again and was out of the gateway and running; running into and out of the light of the street lamp opposite, running into the dark and grateful for the dark, going without any understanding of direction. I stopped and leaned against a wall. I wanted to turn back. I wanted to admit that I couldn’t face it alone. And I wanted him to know that I thought I’d done it all wrong. He wouldn’t know what I felt, what I meant. I was in pain. I was exhausted. And frightened. Too frightened to turn back.
I said, ‘There’s nothing I can do, nothing, nothing,’ and wondered where I’d heard those words before, and began to run again, through those awful ill-lit deserted roads that should have been leading me home but were leading me nowhere I recognised; into safety that wasn’t safety because beyond it there were the plains and the openness that made it seem that if I ran long enough I would run clear off the rim of the world.*
*
It seemed so simple at the time to say, ‘Hari wasn’t there,’ and to feel, just by saying it, that I put him out of harm’s reach. It’s all too easy now to think that his only real protection was the truth, however disagreeable it would have been for us to tell it, to have it told, however threatening and dangerous the truth would have been for him. Well, if he had been an Englishman – that young subaltern who began to paw me at the War Week dance, for instance – the truth would have worked and it would never have occurred to us to tell anything else, I suppose. When people realised what he and I had been doing in the Bibighar they would have stood by us while they tried to see justice done, and then when it had been done or when they’d pursued every possible line to an end short of justice because the men couldn’t be caught turned round and made it clear that it was now our duty, mine in particular, to make ourselves scarce.
But it wasn’t an Englishman. And of course there are people who would say that it would never have happened if it had been, and I expect they would be right because he and I would never have had to go to the Bibighar to be alone, we would never have been there after dark. He would have seduced me in the back of a truck in the car park of the Gymkhana club, or in the place behind the changing-rooms of the swimming-pool, or in a room in one of the chummeries, or even in my bedroom at the MacGregor on a night Lili was out playing bridge. And there are people who would say that even if this subaltern and I had mad
e love in the pavilion in the Bibighar we would never have been attacked by a gang of Indian hooligans. Which is probably right too, although their reasons for saying so wouldn’t be strictly correct. They’d invest the subaltern with some sort of superman quality that enabled him to make short work of a gang of bloody wogs, whereas, in fact, the gang of bloody wogs would have been made short work of by their own fear of white people. Miss Crane was hit a few times, but it was the Indian teacher with her who was murdered. They assaulted me because they had watched an Indian making love to me. The taboo was broken for them.
I think Hari understood this. I think this is what he saw and was ashamed of and asked to be forgiven for. All that I saw was the danger to him as a black man carrying me through a gateway that opened on to the world of white people.
I look for similes, for something that explains it more clearly, but find nothing, because there is nothing. It is itself; an Indian carrying an English girl he has made love to and been forced to watch being assaulted – carrying her back to where she would be safe. It is its own simile. It says all that needs to be said, doesn’t it? If you extend it, if you think of him carrying me all the way to the MacGregor House, giving me into Aunt Lili’s care, ringing for the doctor, ringing for the police, answering questions, and being treated as a man who’d rescued me, the absurdity, the implausibility become almost unbearable. Directly you get to the point where Hari, taken on one side by Ronald for instance, has to say, ‘Yes, we were making love,’ the nod of understanding that must come from Ronald won’t, unless you blanch Hari’s skin, blanch it until it looks not just like that of a white man but like that of a white man too shaken for another white man not to feel sorry for, however much he may reproach him.
