by M A Bennett
‘What do you mean?’
‘Only that I never heard my father apologise for anything in his life.’ Henry paused. ‘He certainly never apologised to me.’
17
Back in the car Shafeen was silent, staring out of the window, his profile unreadable.
I was desperate for him to explain what Henry had said about his mother. But Henry had also touched on something that I’d vaguely heard about before, which I thought would be safer ground.
‘What did Henry mean by the caste system?’
I saw Hari look briefly into the mirror, directly at us, before his eyes returned to the road.
After an uncomfortable pause Shafeen said, rather stiffly, ‘It’s the way in which Hindu society has traditionally been divided. Different social strata.’
I thought of what Henry had said. ‘Like the class system?’
‘If you like. It has Brahmins at the top, and Dalits – the “untouchables” – at the bottom.’
‘So you – the Jadejas – are Brahmins?’
‘Yes.’
I remembered. ‘Like the man in the story, yes? The Brahmin, the Tiger and the Fox.’
‘Sort of. He was a holy man – Brahmins were traditionally priests, teachers, intellectuals. Then there are Kshatriyas, the warriors and rulers. Next come Vaishyas, who are farmers, traders and merchants. Then Shudras, the labourers. Hari’s a Shudra.’
I glanced at the driver in the rear-view mirror. As ever, he had his sunglasses on and it was hard to read his expression. I knew Hari didn’t have much English, but he knew his name all right and had looked up at the sound of it. Shafeen said something in Hindi, obviously explaining what we’d been talking about, and for a moment I wondered if Hari minded being breezily categorised like that; in some ways Shafeen could be as high-handed as Henry. But Hari was nodding fervently, and then said to me in halting English, ‘Caste good. If no caste, no society. No good. Finish.’
I smiled politely and nodded myself, and then said to Shafeen, ‘And who did you say were at the bottom?’
‘The Dalits,’ he said. ‘They do the most menial jobs: sweeping streets, cleaning toilets. They are also known as the “untouchables”.’
The only Untouchables I knew about were from the Kevin Costner movie. But this was hardly that. This sounded brutal. A dreadful, degrading name for what sounded like a dreadful, degrading life. Perhaps Henry had a point. No society was perfect.
‘Do you know any untouchables?’
‘Of course. Prem.’
By a weird coincidence Prem was the first person we saw back at the house, smoking happily on the front porch. He stood up as we walked past, giving his odd Britisher salute, deferring to his Brahmin master.
And then it struck me, the answer to the riddle: if Abbot Ridley was the fox, and Shafeen was the Brahmin, then it was Henry who was the tiger in the trap.
18
Shafeen opened the front door for me, as he always did, but when he closed it behind his back he leaned heavily on it and closed his eyes too.
I could see then that he’d been holding it together in the car, in front of Hari, but now Hari had gone to put the car away he could crumble. When he opened his eyes they were wet. ‘I don’t know what to do, Greer. I genuinely don’t know what to do now. What can I do? We went to the hospital. We went to the temple. We tried science, we tried religion. We even went to the Tiger Club. Where do I go now? How can I help Father?’
I ushered him to a divan near the door. He pushed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets, as if forcing the tears back in. I put my arm around him. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, in answer to his question. But as we sat there, I thought about our days in India: the skin of Melati lying flattened in the dining room; the ridiculous genius of the guy in Junoon turning into a tiger at the full moon; Durga riding her tiger into battle against a demon and the strange Raj hangover that was the Tiger Club, preserved in tiger-coloured amber, like the nugget the bearer wore in his white turban. ‘All I can tell you is: it has something to do with tigers.’
At that, he abruptly escaped the circle of my arm and got up. He wrenched open a drawer in the carved chest that stood by the front door and pulled something out. It was a picture – or, more accurately, a photograph.
It was a big photo, about A3 in size, and as he held it up before him something clicked into place like a piece of a jigsaw. It was the exact same size and shape as the pale square of wall above his head. This, then, was the picture he had taken down.
I got up, walked over to him and joined him in gazing at the photograph he held in his hands.
It was black and white, and gilt framed, just like the ones in the Tiger Club. It showed a group of people, both men and women, standing together, but my eye was drawn not to them, but to the magnificent tiger that lay stretched on the ground in front of them, clearly very dead. An Indian boy of maybe ten or eleven had his foot on its neck. Shafeen pointed to the boy. ‘That’s him. That’s my father.’ I looked at the other people around the boy – all adults. A quick scan of them gave me a massive shock. One of the women, standing just to the right of the boy, was very, very familiar. ‘Is that … is that the queen?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘So that –’ I pointed to a tall man on the far right of the picture – ‘must be Prince Philip.’
‘Yup. And look. That, I realise now, is our old friend Monty.’ He pointed to a tall, blond moustachioed guy – unmistakably him.
‘You didn’t know that was him until now?’
‘No. Remember, I never laid eyes on him until today. I didn’t see the picture in Louis’s room. I didn’t ever go in there.’ He looked back at the picture. ‘This is the maharajah, my grandfather.’ He pointed to a smiling man who very much resembled Shafeen’s father as he was now. ‘And the maharani, my grandmother.’ The maharani was a very striking woman, rivalling even the Queen of England in beauty and poise.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘What a glamour puss.’
‘Don’t forget the ultimate glamour puss.’ He pointed to the tiger. ‘That’s Melati. She went on to be our rug.’
‘Jeez. But your father loved her, you said.’
‘Always.’
‘But didn’t he shoot her?’
‘He was there, yes. But he was only …’ He did a quick calculation: ‘1961, he would have been eleven.’
I could see why he’d taken the picture down. It was such a club, such an elite of predators. And even the expression on the boy’s face was complicated. So serious and … oddly triumphant. But now Shafeen stroked the small, fierce features. ‘If only he was here to tell me what to do.’
Maybe that was the answer. ‘If he was here, what would he say?’
‘He would say …’ He stopped, then looked at me, eyes wide. ‘He would say, Sometimes you have to put your hand in the tiger’s mouth.’
‘Melati,’ I said.
Shafeen shoved the photograph back in the drawer and took off into the house. I followed him to the dining room. We sank down onto the floor at the head of the tiger-skin rug, just as we had knelt to pray before Durga the day before.
I looked at Shafeen – this strange, crazy part had to be done by him. Slowly, carefully, he slid long, brown fingers between the sharp, white teeth and pushed his hand down the tiger’s throat. What he felt there made his expression change. The hand withdrew, holding a little book the size of a diary. It was bound in faded orange leather and tied up with a thin strip of the same skin. Shaking, Shafeen unwrapped the tie from the book and opened the cover. I leaned in and read over his shoulder. The writing on the first page, although spidery and ink-blotted, was quite clear.
It said:
Longcross Hall
24th October
1969
We looked at each other, wide-eyed. ‘A diary,’ I said. ‘It’s a diary.’
‘It’s his diary,’ said Shafeen.
‘Let’s have a read then,’ I said, impatient.
‘Not her
e,’ he said. ‘Somewhere quiet where we won’t be disturbed. The roof terrace.’
It was an enormous act of will to wait while Shafeen gathered lamps and cushions and things to eat. It can’t have been more than five minutes but it felt like five hours. At last we were settled on a comfortable divan on the roof of the house. There was a peerless view of Jaipur but I had eyes for nothing but that little orange book. ‘Come on then,’ I urged.
And Shafeen opened his father’s diary, and we started to read.
Friday, 24th October 1969
Afternoon
I have three names.
Aadhish, which is my name.
Hardy, which is what I call myself.
And Mowgli, which is what they call me.
The Abbot, who takes us for theology, says God has three names too – Father, Son and Holy Ghost. They talk about God a lot at STAGS, probably because the school is named after a saint. I told the Abbot about the Indian goddess Durga who rides a tiger. But he told me to stop talking nonsense, boy.
The Mowgli thing started two years ago, in 1967, when The Jungle Book came out at the cinema. I do not blame Mr Walt Disney. I do not think Mr Walt Disney knew, when he decided to make The Jungle Book, that he would be making life hell for the only Indian boy in an English public school. But ever since the film came out, they started calling me Mowgli.
They are the Medievals. Three girls and three boys who are the prefects of the school. They hate me. Or rather, I thought they did. When I am writing this I am very happy, because it turns out they do not hate me. I have been invited to spend the autumn term Justitium weekend at Longcross Hall, the home of one of them – Rollo de Warlencourt. And because I am embarking on something Momentous, I thought I would write a diary of the weekend. Well, more of an account, really – I will try to include Dialogue and Feelings like Mr Kipling, so that anyone who reads this will know how IT happened – how I became a Proper English Gentleman. Also, I have no one to talk to, and have never had anyone to talk to since I started at STAGS. So I am going to talk to you.
Because this is definitely the beginning of something. This is what my father meant by acceptance. He said that once I was accepted, I would be in. The name Hardy was my father’s idea. He said it was a good English name, and it sounded a bit like Aadhish, so he registered me at the school under that name. It was his idea too to send me to STAGS in the first place, so that I should endeavour to become a Proper English Gentleman. Ever since we went on a tiger hunt with the Queen of England herself, he has been obsessed with the idea of my being an English gentleman. And I think The Invitation – which was pushed under my door last night – is the start of that.
I have been waiting for years for such an invitation. I heard rumours at school – not directly, for no one has ever confided in me; just stories of legendary country-house weekends, of hunting, shooting and fishing, of lavish dinners and luscious lunches. But I was always excluded, always marginalised. Until this: my eighteenth year and my last autumn at school.
The Invitation changed everything. It was addressed to Hardy, not Mowgli, so I know it was for real and not one of their ‘japes’. And once I had it, I was not about to refuse – no, indeed. I followed every instruction to the letter. That commanding piece of card became my holy text. It told me to take the train from school to a station called Alnwick, where there would be a car waiting to take me to the house. I do not know how the others were getting there, but I was relieved to have the train carriage to myself. Even though I am now technically a man, I still would struggle to carry on a polite conversation with three English young ladies and gentlemen. Especially those ones.
When I saw the sign saying ALNWICK I got my suitcase down from the luggage rack above my head. Father made sure that I had all the proper equipment for school – he’d taken me to London himself when we’d come over for the beginning of term. I wanted to go to Carnaby Street and see all the shops that people call groovy. But we’d spent the morning instead in the outfitters of St James’s – what you might call the Medieval part of London, not the Savage part. I was measured and trimmed and brushed and pushed and pulled, getting all the right clothes and shoes. And my suitcase. I was very proud of my suitcase. It was a proper English gentleman’s suitcase in caramel-coloured leather. The vendor called it a weekend suitcase, for ‘when you go away with your chums’. That was when I was eleven. For the seven years I have been at STAGS I have never once taken the suitcase down from my wardrobe. My trunk has been used every holiday, to pack up my clothes for India, but my weekend case sat, year in, year out, waiting in tissue paper.
It was only when I got off the train and the driver took it from my hand that I saw that my lovely English suitcase had been chalked with a design. Two sweeps of white with little branches coming off them.
Deer antlers.
I wonder what they mean.
Evening
If I was lucky to have the train carriage to myself, I certainly paid for it when I had to walk into the entrance hall of Longcross on my own.
They were all there, all the Medievals, gathered around the fire. These were the six people who had dubbed me ‘Mowgli’ and kept the nickname going for two years, fuelling the fire whenever anyone showed signs of forgetting to call me that. It felt like they were waiting for me.
It was not until that moment that I found out who was actually going to be there for the weekend. And it was really most peculiar, because outside of themselves – that is, those three young ladies and young men who ruled the school – I seemed to be the only other guest.
I looked around the room at them all. Francesca Mowbray, with wild red curly hair and freckles. Serena Styles, her hair smooth and blonde. Miranda Petrie, dark-haired and serious. (I have observed over my seven years at STAGS that all the names of well-to-do young English ladies seem to end in A.) Then the boys. Gideon Villiers, fair and tall; an expert sportsman. Charles Skelton, bookish, bespectacled and scarily intelligent. And, at the centre of them all, Rollo de Warlencourt, flanked by faithful Labradors as if he were a painting. Fair like Gideon but blonder and taller and bluer of eye; the friendliest of all; the most frightening of all; the very model of a modern English gentleman.
I feel I know Rollo de Warlencourt better than I know myself. I certainly look at him more than I look at my own reflection, know his face better than my own. I watch him constantly – have watched him for seven years. My father knew Rollo’s father back in Jaipur, and it was Rollo’s father who suggested I attend STAGS. ‘Colonel Monty’s boy goes to the school,’ said my father. ‘If you want to know how to behave, just copy him.’ I’ve taken this very much to heart. And although Rollo has barely noticed me in all that time, I’ve done little else but notice him.
Rollo was the only one to greet me, but I didn’t interpret this as friendship so much as the duty of the host to his guest. ‘Hardy, old chap.’ His host’s manners obviously demanded the use of my adopted name for once. ‘Glad you could come. Train all right?’
‘Perfectly, thank you.’
‘Drink?’
He nodded to the butler, who stepped forward. I knew the answer to this one, thanks to my Saturdays at the Tiger Club. Gin and tonic. I did not say please. One does not.
Drink in hand, I glanced at Rollo in an effort to copy his stance. Like him, I rested one hand on the fireplace, drink in the other hand, but I’m not sure I quite pulled it off. Wholly uncomfortable, I nodded at the rest, and they eyed me back. Some smiled, some didn’t, but all of them looked happy to see me. Not in a friendly way exactly, but in a sort of … hungry way.
Perhaps they had been waiting for me in order to dine, but they were all still in their travel clothes. The thought of food made my stomach growl like a tiger. It had been a long time since lunch, and ever since I reached my full height – I am taller than any of them apart from Rollo – I seem to want to eat all the time. I thought of samosas and raab and ghevar but knew there would be nothing like that here.
I’ve been t
hinking long and hard about the correct things to say at a country-house weekend for all the years I’ve known that weekends like this were happening without me being invited. I have practised what I would say in front of the small looking glass in my room at STAGS, and mouthed English platitudes to myself at night. My mother has been my guide in all this; she taught me a very valuable secret, which is that in English society everything you say is either U (good) or non-U (bad). U is the right way to say things – but if you slip and accidentally say something non-U, you will be found out and scorned and shunned, and people will laugh at you behind their hands.
Luckily Rollo took the lead. ‘A toast,’ he said. ‘To the Siege of Gibraltar.’
As everyone raised their glasses, heartily repeating the toast, I made my first mistake. ‘I had no idea Gibraltar was besieged, currently.’ I tried to keep abreast of current events and could have spoken, with tolerable knowledge, about the Vietnam War or the Cuban Missile Crisis. But it was news to me that that particular British territory was in dispute.
‘It’s not,’ said Charles, the walking encyclopaedia.
I saw them all exchanging smiles with each other and my face grew hot. I stood there awkwardly, uncomfortably silent and regretting my chosen position by the fireplace. I supposed I ought to make conversation, but I was not at all sure what to say, or even if it was good form for the guest to introduce a topic. One thing my father told me was on no account to talk about India. ‘Not if you want to be accepted. Remember, they ruled over us for 300 years,’ he said. ‘The English gentlemen do not care about maharajahs, temples and tigers. To them, an Indian king is lower than the man who sweeps the streets in England.’ So I had to rely on my mother’s advice. One phrase she taught me floated into my head. It seemed suitable, so I deployed it now. ‘Do we dress for dinner?’
