Arctic Summer

by Damon Galgut

  The nautch was full of its own dramatic intensity. There was a small crowd of onlookers, all male, all—except for him—charged with glandular anticipation. He tried to be attracted to the dancers, even in a theoretical way, because he supposed it was expected. There was a fat girl with a ring through her nose, and a thinner one with a weak but charming face; both in truth frightened him, and though he tried to enter the spectacle through its noise and harsh emotion, he remained outside its ritualised exterior. There were moments when he almost glimpsed what this display might mean to an Indian, but in the end he was exhausted by it and the screaming did violence to his head. Alarmingly, it threatened to continue for ever, until he understood that only his leaving would end it. Dr Ansari tried to make him kiss the singers, but he slipped away with a quick hand-squeeze of the older, thinner lady. He was possibly not the only one relieved.

  And then he was being seen off at the station at one o’clock in the morning and the first part of his Indian visit was over.

  * * *

  He knew he would see Masood again in a few weeks. But it was hard not to feel a sort of low-grade anguish, which was with him even in his better moments. He had hoped for more than he’d got, and the future might not deliver anything better.

  Certainly there was some comfort at his next stop, which was Lahore, with the Darlings. It wasn’t thinkable that he could come to India and not see them, though he wasn’t yet entirely at ease with Josie, or her Tory politics. Still, here she was, and their little boy John Jermyn too, giving him hospitality and kindness, showing him around the vast, soulless distances of the city, introducing him to their friends. Very soon any underlying anxiety had been dispelled and he felt relaxed in their company. Malcolm had always been all right; he was good-hearted and filled with idealistic principles, which accounted for his exile to these parts, in a minor post in the Punjab. In truth, Morgan found him a little too earnest, but in certain quarters Malcolm was considered a dangerous radical and his efforts to befriend Indians had made him genuinely unpopular. There was a lot to admire about Malcolm.

  In Lahore he was also reunited with Bob Trevy and Goldie, who had meanwhile been to Ellora. Goldie’s presence in particular was a consolation, with his familiar dry intelligence shot through with flashes of nonsensical humour. Goldie knew Masood, of course, and had some idea of Morgan’s expectations. So when he asked how Aligarh had been, and Morgan answered that it had been lovely, a deeper understanding passed between them, which didn’t need to be spoken.

  “And Masood is well?”

  “He seems to be, yes. A little preoccupied, perhaps. He is thinking about his future.”

  “Ah,” Goldie said, and nodded sagely. He had wasted years of his own life on a fruitless love with a German man, who had given him a lot of torment.

  And Goldie too seemed unsettled. When Morgan asked him about Ellora, he merely said, “Oh, it was fascinating. Yes, fascinating.” But his face tensed up, and when he added in an undertone a moment later, “though it isn’t England,” Morgan understood that something about the place had troubled him.

  With Goldie and Bob, he went on to Peshawar for their reunion with Searight. Morgan hadn’t forgotten his shipboard acquaintance or their remarkable conversations, though there was no trace here of his other, secret identity. No, in this place Searight was the very model of an English officer, aside from one sly wink soon after their arrival. He was heartily pleased to see them and hadn’t forgotten his promise that he would show them the edge of the Empire.

  A day or two later, he took them a little way into the Khyber Pass. They sat on a patch of grass at the bottom of a ravine and watched tumultuous caravans passing in both directions, donkeys and camels and horses and dogs and goats and chickens among their human minders, the gait and attire regal, the faces fierce and inscrutable, emblematic of unknowable lives. All of it raised a brown screen of dust through which the stately pandemonium seemed to pass, at a great remove of time and distance, for a full hour and a half. The way was only open twice a week, under armed guard, and each caravan was followed by an escort of the Khyber Rifles. In the early afternoon the pass was cleared again, and left to barbarism and bandits until the next caravan day. To the north and west, marked by impregnable peaks, stretched a no-man’s land of hostile tribes; beyond was Afghanistan; and beyond that was Russia, with its secret imperial designs. At their backs was English civilisation, and one felt it nowhere so keenly as here, where it ceased. Nothing had ever seemed quite so homelike as the white veranda posts outside the Mess when they returned there in the afternoon.

  That evening, Morgan managed to lose his collar stud and was ten minutes late for dinner. He imagined that everything would have continued without him, but only when he arrived did the band strike up “The Roast Beef of Old England” and the evening properly begin. It was a good hour or two before he shed his embarrassment on Searight’s account, but nobody else seemed to mind very much. Most of the soldiers were young and rosy-cheeked—still almost boys—but even the older ones seemed full of a kindly forbearance that forgave all differences. After dinner, while the band played on, they danced pas seuls up and down the veranda in their scarlet coats. Searight, almost unrecognisably glorious in his full regalia, carried Bob Trevy on his back and then seized hold of Morgan and whirled him around in a drunken foxtrot. The cheerful comradeship that surrounded them was like a balm that cleaned away every bad impression he’d ever formed of the English abroad, and for the first time he understood a little of how Searight had made a life for himself in unlikely outposts such as these, where women were intruders and the only real love was between men. A couple of days later, when they said goodbye again, they promised each other they would meet many times in the future, and some letters did pass back and forth over the years, but in fact they would never be true friends.

  He was parting again here from Goldie and Bob, who were travelling on to Delhi, while he was going to Simla. They would meet once more in Agra in a few days, but meanwhile Morgan was on his own. He had wandered alone in Europe, and found it unsettling, but India had called something forth in him that Italy and Greece never did. A peculiar second nature seemed to have showed itself in him; a capable other Morgan, who traversed great distances and made decisive choices, often in the face of resistance. And as he moved about, it was hard to keep his mind from slipping sideways, off Masood and onto the landscape that contained him.

  Over the two days of his journey up from Bombay to Aligarh, the strangeness, the distant otherness of India, had already marked itself on his mind. Even the light had seemed different, till he’d realised that the windows of the train had a darkened cast to them. Somehow, though, that bluish colouring still overlaid what also seemed familiar: certain pastoral vistas resembled Surrey, though particular details (the shocking brightness of a woman’s sari, a cow blissfully chewing the cud on a station platform) tilted the world off its axis. Not even the Indian moon, with its power to evoke deep yellows and purples from the surrounding sky, seemed to match its English equivalent. And the sky itself had a hugeness, a blankness untextured by cloud, that could annul the whole earth beneath it.

  The people themselves were a different sort of landscape and they claimed his attention too. Searight had not been lying about the legs, which were universally visible—the vigorous, toned, muscular legs of the lower classes, and their feet. Flesh, as Searight had said, was everywhere on display, usually toiling, and often on his own behalf. The figures he saw in passing seemed to move with a deliberateness, a distinctness, that made him notice them afresh. The Indians were inside their bodies, he decided, in a way that the British were not. His own flesh impeded his spirit. He was terribly excited, in the daytime, by the way young Indian men strolled about, hand in hand, or hung onto each other like vines; and at night he was stirred by erotic dreams of a sort that hadn’t troubled him since childhood.

  He had started to notice, too, the rigid hierarchy of
the society around him. Among the Indians, the first division was between Mohammedan and Hindu. Beyond that, everything was stratified by caste: the Untouchables and the Brahmins were in adjacent, contiguous worlds. But the British, too, had succumbed to caste—or at any rate, as they usually did, to class. At the bottom of the heap were the Eurasians, those of mixed-race. Then came the non-official Europeans—professional men, railway employees, tea-planters and the like. Then came the army officers, followed by the smug government servants and the political players and finally, at the very top, floating in the high ethereal zone, were the Viceroy and his circle. Each was conscious of their place, and guarded it against incursions from below; yet they mixed socially at the club, of which every town had one, and where for the most part Indians were not allowed—though in some establishments the rules had relaxed enough to let the occasional Maharajah slip through.

  From one level to the next, up and down the bewildering social staircase, Morgan passed. He was an outsider; he settled nowhere long enough to take a place. Yet he himself wasn’t free, either of his skin or the designation it bestowed on him. And he had a shadow in tow, to remind him of the depths underfoot.

  On board a ship in Greece years before, he had met an Oxford undergraduate by the name of Rupert Smith. They were very different types in temperament and in outlook, but they had maintained a touchy, long-distance friendship ever since. Smith was part of the Indian Civil Service, stationed in Allahabad, and he had organised a servant for Morgan, who had come to meet him off the ship. So Baldeo, in fact, had been the first person Morgan spoke to on Indian soil.

  But Morgan was used to English housekeepers and maids and gardeners, removed from him only by class. A great deal more than that intervened between him and Baldeo: race and language and custom thickened the air, so that they couldn’t see each other clearly, and therefore they had begun with a farce. After meeting him, Morgan had instantly forgotten Baldeo’s face, and did not recognise him the next morning, sleeping outside his hotel room door. Instead he had searched everywhere for him, and sent messages, and suspected Goldie’s servant of hiding him away, and all the while he had resisted the attentions of the strange, wizened, persistent man who followed him around, waiting for instructions. By the time he knew him again, he had humiliated himself and his folly hung over their subsequent relations like a debt that had not yet been paid.

  Misunderstanding continued to dog them. Morgan found Baldeo’s pocketbook, with all his credentials, laid on top of his clothes in his big travelling trunk. He was irritated, thinking it cheeky that this had been done without permission, but said nothing. Fortunately so, because he discovered some days later that as Baldeo’s employer he was entitled to these papers. His servant had merely done the necessary, being ahead of him on every question.

  He had come to realise that he could not manage without Baldeo. Like a familiar spirit, he was always with Morgan or, more accurately, just in front of him, going ahead to stations with the luggage, securing seats on the train, finding porters and tonga-wallahs, running errands, readying clothing and bringing hot water when it was required, cooking for him. Without Baldeo, India would have fallen in on Morgan, burying him in confusion.

  Though it was true that much of what he did see confused him nevertheless. When he had first met Masood, his only knowledge of this country was a vague mix-up: elephants and holy men and hookahs and temples swirled around in a gauzy idea of a place. He had done a lot since then to educate himself and, once his visit was certain, he had read a great deal in preparation. Now all of that seemed useless. The reality he was passing through displaced many of his previous notions, and his notion of a novel too.

  Insofar as he’d considered it at all, the book he’d imagined he might write would repeat his previous novels, where the chilly reserve of his English characters had broken down in the warmth and abandonment of Italy. Whatever their differences, surely Indians and their British rulers had their humanity in common, and he might place that at the forefront of his story. But how could these literary aspirations withstand what he was experiencing now? Every day served up a scene, a conversation, that was like two sharp edges grinding against each other. It was the meeting of the two worldviews, one way of life imposed upon another, which brought out the worst in both. In Simla, for example, he lived through the following, which was his first genuinely miserable vision of India’s future.

  He had been on several enforced jaunts already on his journey. There had been the outing in Aligarh, and in Lahore there had been a spiritless garden tea, featuring a cast of educated Indians making small talk. Such “bridge parties” had become fashionable in recent times, in an attempt to stem the rising tide of Indian nationalism. And it was in the same spirit, perhaps, that Morgan was taken now as a guest to what had been described, optimistically, as an “advanced” Mohammedan wedding.

  It was a memory that wrung his heart anew each time he returned to it in his mind. The rationalist elements of the wedding seemed to have been put on for the benefit of the watching Europeans; certainly the Mohammedans were uneasy, muttering about how it was all contrary to Islamic law. The bride was unveiled, sitting with the groom on a sofa on a dais. The Moulvi who married them read from the Koran in a desultory way, before a local poet recited overwrought poetry about Conscience singing like a bulbul in some metaphorical garden. But the saddest moment was an involuntary one: a gramophone at one end of the garden blared out “I’d rather be busy with my little Lizzie”, while on a terrace at the other side a gathering of devout Muslim men performed their evening prayer.

  The opened hands, the kneeling, the forehead pressed to the ground: he had seen Masood go through these ritualistic motions many times, and found them moving, perhaps because of what they meant to his friend; but it was impossible to feel anything except horror today. It was because of the whole straitened, strained gathering, and the awful song on the gramophone—which by chance came to its end at the exact moment the prayer did. To Morgan’s eyes, the only loveliness in the proceedings belonged to those devout figures, now returning without a fuss to the milling crowd.

  The wedding, rather desperately, was termed a success. The bridegroom’s brother visited the next morning to thank everybody for coming and to tell them, emphatically, that all those who had objected yesterday had been pacified by the Moulvi’s speech. But Morgan was more convinced by an Englishwoman, a Miss Masters, with whom he took an afternoon stroll later that day around one of the hills of Simla. She didn’t mention the wedding, and perhaps hadn’t even attended, but she launched without any preamble into a confession of how much she disliked Indians.

  “I didn’t used to,” she told him. “I came out here with no feeling against them. But now I can’t endure them. It is their own fault, really. Have you a bad feeling against Indians, Mr. Forster?”

  Morgan murmured that he did not.

  “Oh, it will come, believe me, in time. The change came slowly in my case. Even the Indians expect it. They say all the English, but especially the women, change inside six months. And I think they are not wrong.”

  Morgan didn’t answer. Simla was built on a ridge, so that views opened on both sides, and he kept his attention on a vista of mountains, rippling away.

  “But one has to have servants, of course,” she added quickly. “I myself have many. Have you any servants, Mr. Forster?”

  He admitted that he did have one.

  “You will hate him in due course,” she said.

  * * *

  There had scarcely been a moment since he’d arrived in this country when he’d been alone, and he wanted to think about everything he’d seen. To escape from the humans for a while, he headed into the mountains. Baldeo was sent in advance with two coolies, carrying bedding on their heads, to the dak bungalow on the Tibet road.

  He left Simla at noon with his lunch in a pack on his back, and walked for four hours to Fagu, with the wild road twisting t
hrough a wilder landscape, and the horizon splintered into a thousand jagged lines. He thought about his mother as he tramped. Time and distance had softened her outlines, so that he longed for her without ambivalence. Their alliance was occasionally sisterly, pinned together with cackling and gossip, and these moments had strengthened with her absence. Despite their difficulties, she had always been a good travelling companion and he imagined her beside him now, keeping pace in a rickshaw. Though he was very aware of his solitude too, through which the mountains pressed upon his mind.

  He was still in the foothills; the Himalayas proper were seventy miles away, but the massive snowy peaks seemed to hang overhead. The air was icy and clear, and that night the stars burned with a close, cold fire. But their clarity was like a knife that cut too deep: Morgan woke in the small hours into a disturbing knowledge about Masood.

  He saw his time in Aligarh properly at last, and understood what it meant. Masood had been affectionate and loving, as always; he had been happy to see Morgan and had made him feel welcome. But his distraction wasn’t a temporary state, which would pass of its own accord. Indeed, it had always been the deepest aspect of his nature. Masood was slipping away from him; might, in fact, already have slipped. Now that he was back in India, his own country, where he belonged in a way that he never could in England, another kind of life had taken hold of him. He didn’t need Latin lessons from Morgan any more; in truth, he didn’t need anything. Morgan would see him again, of course, and they would probably have an enjoyable time together—and then Morgan would leave.

  In the morning when he woke up, the mountains seemed somehow smaller than yesterday. Nevertheless, he might have travelled into them further, along the road to Tibet, if he had not arranged to meet Goldie and Bob in the other direction. Agra was the first place where local hospitality ran out and at last they had to check into a hotel. Bob was fretful and restless by now, not liking India, wanting to get on to China and then back home, and they hurried on to Gwalior.