Arctic Summer

by Damon Galgut

  His manner was innocent, but his eyes had narrowed. Morgan understood his meaning. He wanted to blame this vice on the Mohammedans, whom he held responsible for a great many ills in the world.

  “Certainly not,” Morgan said. “I never saw anything of the kind in Egypt.”

  “Ah, I only wondered.” And he changed the subject; in a minute they were talking of other things.

  It was the only moment in this period of trial when Morgan felt His Highness had behaved less than well. It wasn’t proper, he thought, that his behaviour outside of Dewas should be questioned. But for now the matter was put away, out of sight. No more candidates were sent for inspection and the topic wasn’t raised again. The whole problem seemed to have been forgotten and very soon the silence hardened into disappointment; the days became long and empty once more.

  Into this vacancy, desire swelled again, and he experienced its full futility one evening in the back seat of his carriage.

  It had become part of his daily routine to take a drive, once the heat of the day had gone, to a quiet garden about two miles away, where he could sit for a while under enormous trees at the edge of a cistern to think. It was a little island of repose and contemplation in the midst of pandemonium, and he was usually accompanied on these expeditions by the Mohammedan sais, who clung to the back of the Victoria, somewhere behind Morgan, out of sight. On this particular afternoon his thoughts had all been physical in nature, a performance in his mind of what he couldn’t accomplish with his body, and by the time he climbed back into the carriage for the drive home he had worked himself up into a feverish state. The bleached, bare landscape was like a thin sail, stretched to its limit by an unseen wind. Morgan’s arm lay extended across the top of the seat, and the idea came to him that the sais was about to touch his hand. They were close to each other; they both contained the same idea; only an inch divided them. The notion of the tiny gap closing, of the touch that was about to happen, was too much, and the stretched sail tore and broke. With a little cry, quickly stifled, Morgan ejaculated in his trousers, a visible embarrassment he had to conceal when he climbed down. It had happened without the touch ever taking place—and only as he scuttled away, half-twisted around his shame, he realised that it wasn’t even the right sais.

  * * *

  There might have been some outlet if he’d been able to write. He’d brought the damned manuscript of his novel with him, thinking that being in India might wake the story up again. But the effect, strangely, was the opposite: the continent pressed in on him so hugely that he could barely see it. When he looked at the pages he’d written, they seemed to be about an imaginary place, somewhere he’d never been. None of it was convincing, all of it was unreal. Feeling nauseous, he locked the book away again in his trunk.

  He simply couldn’t write at the moment. His senses were open to their fullest; the world was moving in one direction only. Better to watch, to take note, to take in. There were always details you could use, conversations that you needed to remember for later, sometimes in unexpected places.

  One such occurred now, in the palace dining room. The head engineer of the electric company had been sent up from Bombay with his wife, to install the unused batteries at the Electric House. Morgan was supposed to oversee him, but he knew nothing about electricity and it was a relief when the work was over and the social niceties resumed again. At dinner His Highness took over the burden of conversation and Morgan became quieter.

  Then the engineer’s wife told a story. On their last visit to Dewas, she said, they had been motoring back to Indore to catch their train when a strange incident occurred.

  “We had just crossed the Sipra,” she said, “and some kind of animal, we couldn’t see what it was, came running out of the ravine and charged our car. We had to swerve aside and almost hit the parapet.”

  The Maharajah had been drowsy, but he suddenly woke up. “It came from the left?”

  “Yes, it did.”

  “A large animal. Larger than a pig, but not as big as a buffalo?”

  “Yes, exactly.” She was staring at him. “But how did you know that?”

  “You really couldn’t be sure what kind of animal it was? You didn’t see?”

  “No.”

  He slumped a little in his chair again, becoming morose. “It is most unfortunate,” he said.

  “But how did you know?”

  He didn’t want to talk about it; he was staring at the table-top. “Years ago I ran over a man there. I wasn’t at all to blame—he was drunk and he ran out into the road. I was cleared at the inquiry and I gave money to his family. But ever since then he has been trying to kill me in the form that you describe.”

  All three of them were stupefied. Such an extraordinary event, described in such an ordinary voice: it was a challenge to the rational mind. And though Bapu Sahib soon changed the subject and spoke of other things, the story continued to bother his Private Secretary. Magic—a world of omens and portents: this was part of India, too, and inseparable from its mystery. It was a kind of thinking that had been worn away in England, lingering mostly in its literature. So that what struck Morgan most forcefully when he encountered it here was how casually it took place, almost underfoot, an accepted part of everyday life.

  He didn’t believe—not really—in the supernatural. But he didn’t entirely disbelieve either. India scraped up to the surface a kind of buried animism in him, a propensity towards the mystical. Although he’d shed his religion early on, it was only the Church of England that he’d dropped, with its safe morning prayers and Sunday services. He had never ceased to yearn for something rawer and rougher, something closer to the earth, or perhaps the sky, of which the brain could not partake. He remembered Pan rippling through the forest in Italy; he remembered the shepherd boy above Salisbury. Those moments were elusive and few in the life that he’d known, but they were far more frequent in the East. You could hardly walk a few steps without coming across a temple or a shrine, daubed with ghee and reeking of incense, and you had only to look into the faces of those worshipping to recognise blind, atavistic devotion.

  In theory, he didn’t believe in God, certainly not in the avuncular versions that his own upbringing had formed. But the myriad godlets that Hinduism threw up were a more interesting proposition altogether. The sadhus at the riverside who had so horrified Masood: they stirred something else in Morgan, something not unrelated to envy. And he felt these stirrings at other moments, too, whenever Indians spoke about religion. Though he couldn’t let go of himself enough to worship, he had never lost a sense of an ultimate cause, a Thing at the back of things, which propelled events without actually shaping them. Whatever the ruptures and ructions of human life, he felt, the universe operated according to some vast, unfolding principle, and to abandon oneself to its rhythms wasn’t a senseless undertaking.

  It came to him now that his book might express something of this unity through its structure. It was always a useful moment when a story revealed its deeper nature to him—told him, as it were, why he was writing it—and he experienced such a realisation now. He had a sense of a gathering shape, of an underlying architecture to his narrative. Part of the reason that he’d faltered was because he couldn’t see further than politics; to write merely of Indians and Englishmen wasn’t enough. But the story had broadened, suddenly, into a much larger channel, in which politics was only one stream. Religion, the lifeblood of India, flowed more strongly, and he saw now that the temple would offset the mosque and the caves; it would replace the one god and the no-god with a multiplicity of gods. If it wasn’t order exactly, it was something better, because it more closely resembled the world. Things were not rounded off and resolved; rather, they expanded outwards, perhaps for ever, and his book could suggest that possibility.

  Mosque, caves and temple. Three kinds of spirituality; three sections to his novel. A trinity, for its own spiritual reasons, was always sym
metrical and pleasing. And it could be made to resonate further, by being linked to the seasons of India: the cold weather, the hot weather, and the rains. Though Morgan himself hadn’t yet experienced the latter, the skies had been pregnant and moody for some time and the monsoon would soon be here.

  * * *

  One evening the Maharajah sighed and said, “That barber I told you about. He has been hanging about the palace. I don’t like it. It’s no good for the servants.”

  They hadn’t discussed him in weeks, but the interval might not have happened. Morgan said immediately, “I do wish you could get somebody for me.”

  “I was waiting for you to mention it. There’s not the least difficulty.”

  Kanaya arrived at noon, a time Morgan had chosen because Baldeo was eating his dinner. He was a good-looking young man, perhaps a little effeminate, wearing a coat that was too yellow and a turban that was too blue, with a wispy moustache and thick black eyebrows that formed a single bar over his eyes.

  This first meeting was an innocent one. The idea was that Morgan would decide if he liked the barber, and only then would he be asked to return. Kanaya shaved him, his fingers thin and delicate on the Englishman’s pink face, and when he was done they smiled at each other.

  “Come back tomorrow. At the same time.”

  He went tripping away under a canvas umbrella, trailing the smell of cheap scent.

  The next day he arrived a little late. The shaving ritual was repeated and in the middle of it Morgan stretched out a hand to touch the buttons on his coat. The razor stopped moving, Kanaya stood still. They looked at each other and then Morgan took hold of his sleeve and drew him closer. The little barber smiled and wobbled his head. It was a moment before Morgan remembered that in India this movement indicated assent.

  To be sure, he asked, “Are you willing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  The reply had seemed too quick. Perhaps they were misunderstanding one another. To add to the confusion, Kanaya resumed his work, moving the razor smoothly over his skin. But when he was finished, and he had packed away his equipment, he came back to Morgan expectantly. “Yes,” he said again.

  Morgan bent his head clumsily—he was taller than the young man—and kissed him. It was a pleasant if passionless contact, and the Englishman was still nervous, because the other was so calm. But no upset occurred, and he hurried to the door to bolt it.

  Almost immediately there was a small explosion. Baldeo had returned early from his meal and was hurling water at the tattie on the outside veranda. Haste and panic! Morgan hurried his visitor to the other door, on the inner veranda, to escape. As they parted, fumblingly, he hissed at Kanaya to arrive on time the next day.

  That afternoon, when they met to play cards together, Bapu Sahib enquired how things were going, and Morgan told him everything.

  “That is good,” His Highness said encouragingly. “But it is important that, the next time you see him, you make sure of it. Once you have taken action, he won’t talk about it to anybody. And something else—you must be sure not to be the weaker partner. You understand me, I hope? You are not to be the lady. That sort of rumour would be bad.”

  Shifting around uncomfortably, Morgan tried to change the subject. “We are to meet tomorrow at the same hour, that is to say—”

  Instantly, His Highness blocked his ears. “No, no,” he said. “Don’t tell me, because when the time comes I shall think of you, and that I don’t want.”

  The next day Kanaya arrived early, and was gone before Baldeo returned from lunch.

  * * *

  A week later, the rains came at last. The situation had been dire for some time. The cisterns were so low that Morgan’s bath couldn’t be filled, and buckets had to be carried in from the fish-ponds outside. The two wells had run completely dry and the gardens, lovingly designed by his predecessor, were a charred plain of dust. Pipes had been laid to water the gardens, but they led from an empty tank, which led in turn to one of the empty wells.

  The first shower was mild, releasing odd odours from the ground. But the air had changed, turning misty and pastel-coloured, and there was the promise of more. It came two days afterwards, while Morgan was in the garden, planting seeds. At first there had been only rumbling dark clouds and a few stray drops, but suddenly the sky turned liquid. Violent wind made the rain horizontal, switching direction constantly, and took away the palm roof of the one available shelter. When the storm had eased a little, he staggered back towards the palace, his feet encased in mud.

  Just as the dryness had been the defining feature of life, so the monsoon now took over. The rains had come in time to save the crops, and there were celebrations from the local townsfolk, with naked wrestlers and brightly clad women, and the faces of elephants garishly painted. The rush of water was a daily event and, though the heat persisted between showers, Morgan’s mind revived. The feeling of stupidity that had slowed him down was washed away. The colours of the world returned, and his perception of those colours too.

  It had only been a few days, but his meetings with Kanaya were a regular part of his life now, though they continued to be furtive and fraught. His rooms were on the first floor, at the end of a wing, and visible to the public eye. Both the inside veranda and the staircase that descended from the outside one were on full display, and his bathroom was overlooked by stairs that went up to the second floor. All comings and goings could be observed, and even the interior wasn’t safe. There was no such thing as privacy in the palace; the warped and swollen doors meant that few of them could be properly closed, and it wasn’t unusual, when one was sleeping, to be woken by the sound of servants creeping about the room.

  A possible solution was to try to meet outside the palace. Beyond the guest house was the Naya Bagh, a garden that might provide some cover. One afternoon, they arranged to go there. Morgan went in first, and ensconced himself among leaves. But when Kanaya tried to follow, there was a commotion of shouting and blows: he had fallen into the grip of a gardener, who thought he was a thief. Morgan extracted him and they tried to proceed further, into the countryside beyond, but you could hardly walk five steps without coming across spectators, sitting or lying about, filled with curiosity. By the time he retraced his steps towards the palace it was fully dark.

  Crossing the almost-empty tank in front of the guest house, Morgan became lost. The farce was complete as he ended up wailing Kanaya’s name. The barber appeared in a moment.

  “Sahib?”

  “I don’t know my way.”

  “I help.”

  He held out his hand. The Sahib took it. As they stumbled together across the pitted mud of the tank floor, they seemed joined in a childlike friendship. It came to Morgan that this, the tenderest moment that had passed between them, was what he was really after: the linked companionship in the dark, a guide who was keeping him from harm. The sex didn’t matter so much.

  But of course it did matter. He couldn’t talk or laugh with Kanaya in the way he had with Mohammed. The barber couldn’t speak much English and was, in any case, not very interested in Morgan. He was there to provide a service; he didn’t understand anything else. So they were left with the same situation: namely, their bodies, and how to unite them unobserved.

  The next day, he talked over the problem with Bapu Sahib.

  “You know,” the Maharajah said at last, “there is a suite of rooms downstairs where you could meet. Nobody uses them, I think they could be ideal.” He explained which rooms he meant. “But it is important, Morgan, that you impress on Kanaya not to loiter in the palace. And he must not talk in the bazaars, that would be fatal. Tell him he will lose his job in consequence.”

  “I have told him, Bapu Sahib, but I will tell him again.”

  He had talked sternly to the barber, more than once, who had nodded earnestly in response. Kanaya was frightened of the Maharajah
, who had a reputation for treating servants harshly. But in this case His Highness had been kind, going so far as to bestow on the barber a largesse of twenty-five rupees. Perhaps because of this generosity, Kanaya’s discretion had slackened, and Bapu Sahib was right to be concerned.

  People had begun to talk. Or perhaps they were only teasing; it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. Mocking people for supposed minorite tendencies was common among the courtiers; the Maharajah himself sometimes joined in. But it was one thing to joke and another to ridicule, and Morgan didn’t want to cross the line.

  When Malarao started to chaff, it was bothersome. Kanaya had a reputation, and his frequent visits to the Private Secretary had been noticed.

  “You must be good-humoured in return,” His Highness told Morgan. “Do not ever become angry. And I will tease you myself, just a little, so that everybody knows it isn’t serious.”

  It was a good line of defence. The next time Malarao brought it up, Morgan asked him with a smile whether he was jealous. This made the other courtiers laugh, and the moment was softened. Not long after that, the Maharajah made a point of mentioning Morgan’s age. This was a less obvious argument, which had to be explained.

  “At forty-two,” Bapu Sahib told him, “no Indian can keep an erection. That part of life is over. Now nobody will believe that you can be having sexual relations with anybody.”

  He chortled at his own devious wit.

  * * *

  The new rooms had been a success. Hardly anybody went there, and they had an outside entrance which Morgan could unbolt from within. Despite lavish furnishings, there was no bed, only a big divan in the middle of the main room. The place had a hushed, hot feeling to it, thin strips of light coming in through the shutters. Morgan wanted to roll naked with Kanaya among the cushions, whispering endearments, but wasn’t brave enough to take off his clothes. And the little barber was without imagination or passion.