by Damon Galgut
Morgan was making an early start in the morning, and had told Masood not to wake up. Although he’d said it firmly, he had wanted his friend to overrule him; he had wanted him to insist on waking and seeing him off on his journey. But Masood had yawned and agreed that he was very tired and that there was no point in getting up early. It was a sensible solution. So they had said goodbye just before going to sleep, in a stiff, incomplete way, both feeling shy, and then retreated. But almost immediately after, as he’d started to undress, Morgan had felt himself speared on the point of sharp emotion. He had gone back through to Masood’s room and sat on the edge of his bed and taken hold, very tightly, of his hand. Cold anguish made certain details stand out, the white hanging shroud of the mosquito net, the shadows in its folds. Even if he’d been able to speak, he could not have said what he wanted. But the yearning had made him lean towards Masood, trying to kiss him. In the fizzing white burn of the lamp-light, his friend’s face had been at first astonished, and then shocked. His hand had come up sharply, to push Morgan away, and that little movement had felt enormous, a force that could move a boulder. Morgan had accepted the refusal, because he’d known in advance it would come, and sat hunched miserably over his kernel of loneliness. By then Masood was merely irritated. He had rubbed Morgan’s shoulder and patted him on the back, in a way that was both reassuring and dismissive. Neither of them spoke, but both of them understood. He did not feel as Morgan did; that was all. There was nothing else to say.
So in the end one had to make the journey back to one’s own bed more alone even than before, the step down between the two rooms like the threshold between two worlds.
In the darkness afterwards, he experienced again what he’d just done with a fresh wave of shame. Aie-aie-aie! It was terrible, terrible—to have wanted so badly, to have been pushed so firmly away. The night and the land seemed to spread away around him, emphasising his smallness. He had cut himself open and showed the innermost part; it had been rash and unconsidered and regrettable. Now he had to close himself up again, to seal the carapace, and he began to do what was necessary. It was part of a willed cheerfulness he had learned, back in his childhood already, as protection against disappointment. The only defence against raw, naked feeling was reason. Understanding made sadness easier to bear.
So the thoughts that he followed, one by one, were like stairs ascending out of his misery, each of them valid and genuine, leading on from the one before. They went something like this: Masood cares for me more than for any other man, I have known that for a long time. That is comforting. And much that has passed between us on this visit has made me very happy. That is good. To have a little, even a very little, can be enough to go on with; indeed, it’s all I have. Better to hold to that than to yearn continually for what isn’t possible.
In the end, you had to return to your own life—which he did now with an effort, by swimming out, blinking and half-blind, into the vertical light, to let the normal day reclaim him. It was like emerging from the tomb. He hurried back down the hill faster than he needed to, as if he were being pursued, to the tents and the smouldering fire and the elephant, ponderously browsing.
Where by now breakfast was finally ready: after all the delay, a paltry smear of omelette with a cold chapatti and a mug of tea. But it was enough to restore his spirits and, as he sat in the shade chatting to Imdad Iman, he felt again the promise reviving in the vast landscape, with its blond, bleached colours, its scrubby bushes and old, tormented rocks. He knew already that this parting would eventually become a painful detail in a much larger event, one which was still unfolding before him.
Over the past three months, India had already violently rearranged his life, but it wasn’t done with him yet; not by a long way.
* * *
His journey had begun in Aligarh. He had come all the way around the world for one reason only. And although his travels had barely begun, in another sense they felt already complete as he stood on a railway station platform at two-thirty in the morning, embracing Masood.
“At last, you are here,” his friend told him.
“I believe I am.”
“How do I look? Am I older?”
He had thickened in the middle, and some stray hairs had turned white, but Morgan said, “You look no different.”
“Nor you. I have thought of nothing except this moment for the past ten years.”
“You have only known me for six.”
“Have I? Well, I speak metaphorically. My great love for you makes time seem much bigger.” But Masood was already yawning as he swept out of the station and towards the waiting tonga.
When Morgan had woken up the next morning, it was into rather than out of a dream: the window showed an acre of garden, filled with loud, brilliant and exotic birds. Weird lizards scuttled across the walls and unusual insects hovered in the air. Masood had given up his bedroom to him and was sleeping in the sitting room close by; Morgan knew where he was, and yet he wasn’t quite sure of anything. Here was an inversion of the world that had held them in England, where the view had always been known and tame, and it was only Masood who had been out of place. Now it was the Englishman’s turn to be the stranger, the visitor. The idea of it pleased him greatly, and took him some way into another world—yet that world refused entirely to open for him.
When Masood woke an hour or two later and came lazily through to his room, almost his first question was what Morgan wanted to do that day.
“Honestly, the most important undertaking, as far as I can see, is to meet your mother. I would like to thank her for giving birth to you. Or else to punish her for it, I can’t make up my mind.”
He had been wanting to greet Mahmoud Begum for a long time already, and he had brought some small gifts for her from England. But the suggestion was answered with a solemn headshake.
“You can’t do that, I’m afraid. My mother keeps strict purdah. She sends you her blessings, but she cannot show herself before you.”
“But this is her house.”
“Even so.”
It took a moment for the smile to fade from Morgan’s face; it had seemed like a joke at first. He was in India now, and he would have to do as the Indians did. His gifts were despatched via Masood, and thanks returned to him the same way. In this house—and in some others he would stop in—the closest he would come to a female presence was the sound of soft voices in a neighbouring room.
He hadn’t expected this, but then nothing was the way he’d thought it would be. When Masood took him that first morning to see the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College which his grandfather had founded, Morgan was taken aback. In England, Masood had spoken of it rapturously as a centre of scientific excellence, where the finest of Western thought could be taught in an Islamic atmosphere; it represented, he’d insisted, the most modern approach to education. Yet when Morgan saw it, there was nothing very modern or inspiring about the disorderly scattering of reddish, ugly buildings, none of which seemed to have a single telephone in it, so that messages had to be carried around great distances by hand.
And there were other oddities, which for some reason had never featured in what he’d imagined. For one thing, though all the students were Mohammedans, wearing beards and fezzes, half of the teachers were foreigners. They seemed so stranded and out of place here, with their alien customs and their improbable accents, though they tried to pretend it was home. There were a lot of them, not only teaching at the college. At one moment he was rubbing up against a Kingsman, who was headmaster of the local school, or chatting to a German professor of Oriental languages; and at the next dining with a barrister called Khan, or discussing politics with a Persian professor of Arabic.
The atmosphere at the college, he would come to realise, was highly charged. There was a great gulf between the Indian staff and students on one hand, and the Europeans on the other. The two groups seemed to mix compatibly together, but when he
found himself alone with one or the other, the conversation changed. The English staff in particular lamented that they weren’t trusted here and seemed to live in fear that the Mohammedans would turn them out; the Mohammedans wrung their hands and declared that the Balkan War was the death-battle of Islam and asked why Sir Edward Grey should have been the very first to recognise Italian rule in Tripoli.
In these conversations, Morgan was never exactly sure where his loyalties lay; he experienced a complicated inner conflict which pulled him one way or the other.
“How do you manage it?” he asked Masood, on one of those early days. For his friend had always been adept, he saw now, at crossing the social frontier between East and West. For all his nationalist rhetoric, he was very much at ease in European company, yet he could drop all his Occidental ways in a moment, as if they were a piece of clothing.
“It is a skill,” Masood told him. “Think of it as camouflage, in order to survive in hostile territory.”
“What nonsense you speak. There are thousands of Indians who lack this skill, yet they survive perfectly well.”
“Yes, but they do not flourish. They are always nervous, always anxious. They don’t mix well with the paler types, can you not see it? Some strategy is needed.”
“I am a paler type,” Morgan told him stiffly, “as you may have noticed. You have never needed strategy to survive me.”
“Can you be so sure?”
“Don’t joke, Masood.”
His friend smiled—still rakish and handsome, despite a faint fatigue that made his face puffy. He took Morgan’s hand and instantly the bond between them was renewed. “My dear fellow,” he said, “you must put all of it into your book.”
“My book?”
He was genuinely nonplussed for a second.
“The one you came here to write.”
“Yes, yes, my book. Of course.”
He had almost forgotten his book. Although he had gone so far as to mention it to his publishers, it had ceased to matter as a reason for being here. His true reason was the one in front of him, still holding his hand, and telling him that an outing had been arranged.
“An outing? To where?”
Masood waved vaguely, looking bored. “Some villages,” he said, “you will see. You will get material.”
The outing was lovely—almost two full days, careering around the flat countryside in a tikka ghari, being fed and entertained by lowly Indian officials. But however much he enjoyed himself, it didn’t provide material for anything except distraction.
He knew that his friend was fobbing him off. They had been speaking for years, in a feverish way, about being in India together and everything they would do there, but now that the happy day had arrived, Masood wasn’t much interested. Morgan could see that he was preoccupied and morose. But when he tried to find out what the matter was, he was deflected with generalities:
“The future, the future . . . I have to make decisions.”
“Decisions concerning what?”
“As I told you, the future. Don’t cross-examine me, Morgan, I have enough of that in court. Would you like a mango?”
Even more distressing was the realisation that they wouldn’t be spending much time together. Plans had been left blurry and undefined, but Morgan had hoped that Masood might join him as he travelled around. He quickly learned that it wasn’t to be.
“I have to go back to Bankipore for work. I am not a free man here, you see, no, not at all. But I will go with you to Delhi next week and we will have a fine time together.”
“And after that?”
“And after that you will travel. Oh, you will see many things, especially the Moghul splendour I have often mentioned. All of it will go into your book!”
“But when will we see each other again?” He tried to ask it casually, but his voice shot up into a higher pitch, giving him away.
“You will come to Bankipore to visit. I am returning there very soon. It is an awful place, I don’t think you’ll like it.”
“You will be there, Masood. That is the point.”
“Yes, of course, that is the point.” But even now—or perhaps especially at this moment—his friend was looking out of the window, his eyes anxious and unsettled.
“And will we travel together then?”
“Perhaps so. Yes, perhaps by then it will be possible.” His voice became fuller and more confident. “My life is simply too big for me at the moment, you must forgive me, my dear, it does not detract one tiny bit from my devotion to you, you know that.”
When they moved on to Delhi a week later, things didn’t greatly improve. They were staying with a friend of Masood’s, Dr Ansari, whose wife was also invisible, though she sent continual little gifts of betel nut and scent. The house was very small, and Morgan and Masood shared a room. Not only with each other: a constant stream of visitors passed through, perching and squatting everywhere, while a cat and three dogs roamed about, and a shrieking cockatoo defecated on the mosquito net. Masood had recently had a cholera inoculation and spent most of his time in bed, worrying that he was sick, or that he wasn’t sick enough. Now and then he reflected aloud that he was dying.
“But don’t languish here with me, Morgan, my dear chap. I have organised a car to take you on some sightseeing expeditions. History awaits you.”
“Won’t you come?”
“I am too ill, my dear, truly. But you must go. I beg you, no, I order you, and if you don’t I shall never, never speak to you again.”
So Morgan went to old Delhi alone. He went to the Jama Masjid, and visited the Red Fort, where the spaces between the scattered buildings suddenly seemed very big and cold, overshadowed by the looming ugliness of the military barracks. He saw the great stone elephants, and the parapet where the English King and Queen had showed themselves to the crowd, but all the while unhappiness scratched at him inside. He had a headache, there was nobody to talk to, the grand sights left him disappointed.
Only on the very first morning did his friend accompany him, because they were visiting the Qutb Minar. The ruined remnants of Moghul times elicited Masood’s highest flights of rhetoric, but it was hard not to feel the tension between these crumbling remnants of the past and the throbbing, smelly motor car that had brought them there. This same tension was especially evident at Humayun’s Tomb, where a view out over a plain of broken forts and old mosques was undercut by modern Delhi in the distance, and the Marconi radio apparatus that was used for signalling at the 1911 Durbar.
At this Durbar, Morgan knew, George V had announced sweeping changes to the political system in India. The capital was to move from Calcutta to Delhi; the hated partition of Bengal had been reversed and the province reunited. The breeze of democracy had picked up a little, dispersing some of the noxious fumes that still swirled heavily after the Mutiny, nearly half a century ago.
Politics, back in England, had a leaden, immovable weight, as if history could not be altered very much. That wasn’t the case here. In India, when people talked politics they were talking about the future—and it mattered a great deal. When Morgan spoke to Masood’s friends about it, their voices took on a tense, knotted quality; their eyes became hooded. It was clear that they spent a lot of time thinking about their freedom, not as an abstract concept, but as a concrete and achievable goal. There was no little corner of life that seemed untouched by it, either in hope or despair.
Masood, too, could become excited on this topic. Back in England, his political musings had always had a theatrical quality, as if he were performing his beliefs rather than feeling them, but on a few occasions here the temperature of his blood did momentarily rise. One such moment came on Morgan’s last night in Delhi, when Dr Ansari insisted on treating him to a nautch, a party with dancing girls. This couldn’t be held in his own house, because his neighbour, an Englishwoman, wouldn’t approve, so it was arranged i
n the home of a friend of his in the old city. But next door were the offices of The Comrade, a political journal run by the Ali brothers, who were friends of Masood’s. Morgan had already looked through its pages in Aligarh and had been unnerved by what he found inside. It didn’t seem untruthful to him, but it was so very angry, with a rage leavened only slightly by jokes and doggerel.
When they called in at the offices of The Comrade now, Mohammed Ali was in an agitated state, and greeted them by announcing that he was about to commit suicide.
“What is it?” Masood said. “What has happened?”
“Oh, I am absolutely miserable. It is too terrible to think about. The Bulgarian army is within twenty-five miles of Constantinople.” On the verge of tears, he swept into the next room, from which his voice carried out ringingly. “Let no quarter be asked, and none given now. This is the end!”
The emotion of this drama touched Morgan, though the history did not. He had already been exposed to these feelings among Masood’s friends in Aligarh. It was clear that some sort of international Islamic sentiment was stirring Mohammedans in India. The fortunes of Turkey, which was facing defeat in the Balkan War, left Morgan indifferent, but it was hard to be unmoved when Masood became roused, as he did now. “This is the turning point of my career,” he cried out dramatically. “We shall give the Turks all the money we have collected for the university!”
But ten minutes later, typically, all this high feeling had left Masood again. It became important to him that Mohammed Ali join them for the nautch. But Ali didn’t want to go; he was steeped in his morose hysteria. “Nonsense, nonsense,” Masood told him imperiously, “we can be serious again tomorrow,” and he picked him up bodily and carried him out of the office.
