by Tom Stoppard
ANISH: Yes, I know. That is why I am here.
SCENE THREE: INDIA
On the verandah.
FLORA: Mr Das, I am considering whether to ask you a delicate question, as between friends and artists.
DAS: Oh, Miss Crewe, I am transported beyond my most fantastical hopes of our fellowship! This is a red-letter day without dispute!
FLORA: If you are going to be so Indian I shan’t ask it.
DAS: But I cannot be less Indian than I am.
FLORA: You could if you tried. I’m not sure I’m going to ask you now.
DAS: Then you need not, dear Miss Crewe! You considered. The unasked, the almost asked question, united us for a moment in its intimacy, we came together in your mind like a spark in a vacuum glass, and the redness of the day’s letter will not be denied.
FLORA: You are still doing it, Mr Das.
DAS: You wish me to be less Indian?
FLORA: I did say that but I think what I meant was for you to be more Indian, or at any rate Indian, not Englished-up and all over me like a labrador and knocking things off tables with your tail – so waggish of you, Mr Das, to compare my mind to a vacuum. You only do it with us. I don’t believe that left to yourself you can’t have an ordinary conversation without jumping backwards through hoops of delight, with whoops of delight, I think I mean; actually, I do know what I mean, I want you to be with me as you would be if I were Indian.
DAS: An Indian Miss Crewe! Oh dear, that is a mental construction which has no counterpart in the material world.
FLORA: A unicorn is a mental construction which has no counterpart in the material world but you can imagine it.
DAS: You can imagine it but you cannot mount it.
FLORA: Imagining it was all I was asking in my case.
DAS: (Terribly discomfited) Oh! Oh, my gracious! I had no intention – I assure you –
FLORA: (Amused) No, no, you cannot unwag your very best wag. You cleared the table, the bric-à-brac is on the parquet – the specimen vase, the snuff box, the souvenir of Broadstairs – (But she has misjudged.)
DAS: (Anguished) You are cruel to me, Miss Crewe!
FLORA: (Instantly repentant) Oh! I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to be. It’s my nature. Please come out from behind your easel – look at me.
DAS: May we fall silent, please. I prefer to work in silence.
FLORA: I’ve spoiled everything. I’m very sorry.
DAS: The shadow has moved. I must correct it.
FLORA: Yes, it has moved. It cannot be corrected. We must wait for tomorrow. I’m so sorry.
SCENE FOUR: ENGLAND
ANISH: When my father met Flora Crewe he had been a widower for several years, although he was still quite a young man, a year or two younger than her, yes … the beginning of the Hot Weather in 1930: he would have been not yet thirty-four. He had lost his wife to cholera and he was childless. I knew nothing of my father’s life before Swaraj. The British Empire was prehistory to me. By the time I was old enough to be curious, my father was over sixty, an old gentleman who spoke very little except when he sometimes read aloud to me. I say read to me but really he read to himself, with me in attendance. He liked to read in English. Robert Browning, Tennyson, Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, and Dickens, of course …
MRS SWAN: How surprising.
ANISH: Oh, yes. (Meaning ‘no’.) He went from a vernacular school to Elphinstone College in Bombay, and you only have to look at Elphinstone College to know it was built to give us a proper British education.
MRS SWAN: I really meant, how surprising in view of his ‘opinions’. But I spoke without thinking. Your father resented the British and loved English literature, which was prefectly consistent of him, and I have interrupted you. You haven’t mentioned your mother.
ANISH: My mother speaks no English. She is from a village, peasant farmers, no, plot-holders. She was born in the year Flora Crewe came to Jummapur, and she married when she was sixteen. It was not from her that I learned … that …
MRS SWAN: That …?
ANISH: That my father was a thorn in the flesh of the British; and was still remembered for it – I might say, is honoured for it.
MRS SWAN: By whom?
ANISH: By his son.
MRS SWAN: It does you credit.
ANISH: In Bengal and the United Provinces, all over British India, of course, there were thousands of people who did as much and more, and went to gaol, but in Jummapur we were ‘loyal’, as you would say, we had been loyal to the British right through the First War of Independence.
MRS SWAN: The …? What war was that?
ANISH: The Rising of 1857.
MRS SWAN: Oh, you mean the Mutiny. What did you call it?
ANISH: Dear Mrs Swan, imperial history is only the view from … no, no – please let us not argue. I promise you I didn’t come to give you a history lesson.
MRS SWAN: You seem ill-equipped to do so. We were your Romans, you know. We might have been your Normans.
ANISH: And did you expect us to be grateful?
MRS SWAN: That’s neither here nor there. I don’t suppose I’d have been grateful if a lot of Romans turned up and started laying down the law and the language and telling us we were all one country now, so Wessex had to stop fighting Mercia, and so forth. ‘What a cheek,’ is probably what I would have thought. ‘Go away, and take your roads and your baths with you.’ It doesn’t matter what I would have thought. It’s what I think now that matters. You speak English better than most young people I meet. Did you go to school here?
ANISH: No, I went to a convent school in … You are spreading a net for me, Mrs Swan.
MRS SWAN: What net would that be? Have some more cake.
ANISH: Mrs Swan, you are a very wicked woman. You advance a preposterous argument and try to fill my mouth with cake so I cannot answer you. I will resist you and your cake. We were the Romans! We were up to date when you were a backward nation. The foreigners who invaded you found a third-world country! Even when you discovered India in the age of Shakespeare, we already had our Shakespeares. And our science, architecture, our literature and art, we had a culture older and more splendid, we were rich! After all, that’s why you came. (But he has misjudged.)
MRS SWAN: (Angrily) We made you a proper country! And when we left you fell straight to pieces like Humpty Dumpty! Look at the map! You should feel nothing but shame!
ANISH: Oh, yes … I am ashamed. I am a guest in your house and I have been … mrs swan: … no, only provocative. We will change the subject.
ANISH: I’m sorry.
(The clock chimes.)
MRS SWAN: That clock has gone quite mad. It has gained twenty minutes since this morning … There seems no point in putting it back.
ANISH: No, we cannot put it back. I’m so sorry.
SCENE FIVE: INDIA
FLORA: While having tiffin on the verandah of my bungalow I spilled kedgeree on my dungarees and had to go to the gymkhana in my pyjamas looking like a coolie.
DAS: I was buying chutney in the bazaar when a thug who had escaped from the choky ran amuck and killed a box-wallah for his loot, creating a hullabaloo and landing himself in the mulligatawny.
FLORA: I went doolally at the durbar and was sent back to Blighty in a dooley feeling rather dikki with a cup of char and a chit for a chotapeg.
DAS: Yes, and the burra sahib who looked so pukka in his topi sent a coolie to the memsahib –
FLORA: No, no. You can’t have memsahib and sahib, that’s cheating – and anyway, I’ve already said coolie.
DAS: I concede, Miss Crewe. You are the Hobson-Jobson champion!
FLORA: You are chivalrous, Mr Das. So I’ll confess I had help. I found a whole list of Anglo-Indian words in my bedside drawer, for the benefit of travellers.
DAS: But I know both languages, so you still win on handicap.
FLORA: Where did you learn everything, Mr Das?
DAS: From books. I like Dickens and Browning and Shakespeare of c
ourse – but my favourite is Agatha Christie! The Mysterious Affair at Styles! Oh, the woman is a genius! But I would like to write like Macaulay.
FLORA: Oh dear.
DAS: I have to thank Lord Macaulay for English, you know. It was his idea when he was in the government of India that English should be taught to us all. He wanted to supply the East India Company with clerks, but he was sowing dragon’s teeth. Instead of babus he produced lawyers, journalists, civil servants – he produced Gandhi! We have so many, many languages, you know, that English is the only language the nationalists can communicate in! That is a very good joke on Macaulay, don’t you think?
FLORA: Are you a nationalist, Mr Das?
DAS: Ah, that is a very interesting question! But we shouldn’t have stopped. It’s getting late for you. I must work more quickly.
FLORA: It’s only half-past ten.
DAS: No, it’s already April, and that is becoming late.
FLORA: Yes, it seems hotter than ever. Would you like some more lemonade?
DAS: No, thank you, no lemonade. Miss Crewe, you haven’t looked at my painting yet.
FLORA: No. Not yet. I never look. Do you mind?
DAS: No.
FLORA: You do really. But I once asked a painter, ‘Can I look?’ and he said, ‘Why? When I paint a table I don’t have to show it to the table.’
DAS: I said you had been painted before.
FLORA: Only once.
DAS: A portrait?
FLORA: Not in the way you mean. It was a nude.
DAS: Oh.
FLORA: Unusually. He painted his friends clothed. For nudes he used models. I believe I was his friend. But perhaps not. Perhaps a used model only. It hardly matters. He was dead so soon afterwards. He was not so kind to me as you are. I had to lie with my shoulders flat but my hips twisted towards the canvas; I could hardly move afterwards.
DAS: Do you have the painting?
FLORA: No.
DAS: Where is it?
FLORA: Nowhere. A man I thought I might marry destroyed it. So after that, I didn’t want to be painted again.
DAS: Oh …
FLORA: But luckily I forgot that, when you asked me. I must have got over it without realizing. My goodness, what a red-letter day you are having. There’s a man on a horse.
DURANCE: (Off) Good morning! Miss Crewe, I think!
FLORA: Yes, good morning! (Aside to DAS.) Do you know him? (To DURANCE.) How do you do!
DAS: He is the Assistant.
DURANCE: (Off) May I get down a moment?
FLORA: Of course. What a beautiful animal! (Aside to DAS.) Assistant what?
DAS: Captain Durance!
DURANCE: Thank you!
FLORA: Come on up, do join us.
(We have heard the horse walking forward, perhaps snorting, and DURANCE dismounting, and now coming up the three or four wooden steps on to the verandah.)
DURANCE: (Arriving) Oh, it’s Mr Das, isn’t it?
DAS: Good morning, sir. But we have never met.
DURANCE: Oh, but I know you. And Miss Crewe, your fame precedes you.
FLORA: Thank you … but …
DURANCE: I’m from the Residency. David Durance.
FLORA: How do you do?
DURANCE: Oh, but look here – I’m interrupting the artist.
FLORA: We had stopped.
DURANCE: May one look? Oh, I say! Coming along jolly well! Don’t you think so, Miss Crewe?
DAS: I must be going. I have overstayed my time today.
FLORA: But we’ll continue tomorrow?
DAS: Yes. Perhaps a little earlier if it suits you. I will leave everything just inside the door, if that is all right … and the easel … (DAS is moving the objects, bumping them down in the interior.)
FLORA: Yes, of course. Why don’t you leave the canvas too? It will be quite safe.
DAS: I … yes … I have a drape for it. Thank you. There.
FLORA: Like shutting up the parrot for the night.
DAS: There we are. Thank you for the lemonade, Miss Crewe. An absolute treat. I promise you! Goodbye, sir – and – yes – and until tomorrow … (He goes down the steps to the outside and mounts a bicycle and pedals away.)
FLORA: Yes … goodbye! (To DURANCE.) I’ll put my shoes on. Sorry about my toes, but I like to wriggle them when I’m working.
DURANCE: I’ll only stay a moment. My chief asked me to look in. Just to make sure there’s nothing we can do for you.
FLORA: There’s a servant who seems to come with the guesthouse, though he has a way of disappearing, but would you like some tea?
DURANCE: No, nothing for me. Really. We might have found you more comfortable quarters, you know, not quite so in-the-town.
FLORA: How did you know I was here?
DURANCE: Now there’s a point. Usually we know of arrivals because the first thing they do is drop in a card, but in your case … rumours in the bazaar, so to speak. Are you an old hand here, Miss Crewe?
FLORA: No, I’ve never been to India before. I came up from Bombay just a few days ago.
DURANCE: But you have friends here, perhaps?
FLORA: No. I got on a boat and I came, knowing no one. I have friends in England who have friends here. Actually, one friend.
DURANCE: In Jummapur, this friend?
FLORA: No – the friend – my friend – is in London, of course; his friends are in different places in Rajputana, and I will also be going to Delhi and then up to the Punjab, I hope.
DURANCE: Now I see. And your friend in London has friends in Jummapur?
FLORA: Yes.
DURANCE: Like Mr Das?
FLORA: No. Are you a policeman of some kind, Mr Durance?
DURANCE: Me? No. I’m sorry if I sound like one.
FLORA: Well, you do a bit. I’m travelling with letters of introduction from Mr Joshua Chamberlain to a number of social clubs and literary societies. I speak on the subject of ‘Literary Life in London’, in return for board and lodging … So you see I couldn’t have taken advantage of your kindness without giving offence to my hosts.
DURANCE: The game is different here. By putting up at the Residency you would have gained respect, not lost it.
FLORA: Thank you, but what about self respect?
DURANCE: Well … as long as all is well. So you are following in Chamberlain’s footsteps. All is explained.
FLORA: I don’t think I explained it. But yes, I am. He spoke in Jummapur three years ago, on the subject of Empire.
DURANCE: Yes. Is he a good friend?
FLORA: Yes.
DURANCE: Did you know he was some sort of Communist?
FLORA: I thought he might be. He stood twice for Parliament as the Communist candidate.
DURANCE: (Unoffended, pleasant as before) I amuse you. That’s all right, amusing our distinguished visitors is among my duties.
FLORA: Well, don’t be so stuffy. And call again if you like.
DURANCE: Thank you. How long will you be with us?
FLORA: I’m expected in Jaipur but they don’t mind when I come.
DURANCE: I’m sure you’ll have a marvellous time. There are wonderful things to see. Meanwhile, please consider yourself an honorary member of the Club – mention my name, but I’ll put you in the book.
FLORA: Thank you.
DURANCE: Well …
FLORA: I wish I had a lump of sugar for your horse. Next time.
DURANCE: He’s my main indulgence. I wish I’d been here when a good horse went with the job.
FLORA: Yes … what is your job? You mentioned your chief.
DURANCE: The Resident. He represents the government here.
FLORA: The British government?
DURANCE: Delhi. The Viceroy, in fact. Jummapur is not British India … you understand that?
FLORA: Yes … but it’s all the Empire, isn’t it?
DURANCE: Oh, yes. Absolutely. But there’s about five hundred rajahs and maharajahs and nabobs and so on who run bits of it, well, nearly half of
it actually, by treaty. And we’re here to make sure they don’t get up to mischief.
FLORA: I knew you were a kind of policeman.
DURANCE: (Laughs) Miss Crewe, would you have dinner with us while you are here?
FLORA: With you and your wife, do you mean?
DURANCE: No … at the Club. Us. With me. I don’t run to a wife, I’m afraid. But do come. We’re a reasonably civilized lot, and there’s usually dancing on Saturdays; only a gramophone but lots of fun.
FLORA: I’d love to. On Saturday, then.
DURANCE: Oh … splendid! I’ll come by. (He mounts his horse.)
FLORA: I haven’t got a horse, you know.
DURANCE: We have a Daimler at the Residency. I’ll see if I can wangle it. Pick you up about eight?
FLORA: Yes.
DURANCE: We don’t dress, normally, except on dress nights.
(Laughs at himself.) Obviously.
FLORA: I’ll be ready.
DURANCE: Jolly good.
FLORA: Goodbye.
DURANCE: Goodbye.
FLORA: (Calling out) Wangle the Daimler!
SCENE SIX: ENGLAND
ANISH: I apologize if I was rude. You didn’t put my father in gaol, after all.
MRS SWAN: Not in any sense. Jummapur was a native state, so your father was put in gaol by his own people.
ANISH: (Cautiously) Well …
MRS SWAN: (Firmly) Whatever your father may have done, the Resident would have had no authority to imprison an Indian. The Rajah of Jummapur had his own justice.
ANISH: Even so, you – (corrects himself) the British …
MRS SWAN: Oh, I’m not saying we wouldn’t have boxed his ears and sent him packing if he forgot which side his bread was buttered, but facts are facts. The Rajah put your father in the choky. How long for, by the way?
ANISH: Six months, actually.
MRS SWAN: There you are. In Bengal or the UP he would have got a year at least. After the war it may have been different. With Independence round the corner, people were queuing up to go to prison; it was their ticket to the show. They’d do their bit of civil disobedience and hop into the paddy-wagon thoroughly pleased with themselves. Francis – that’s my husband – would let them off with a small fine if he thought they were Johnny-come-latelies, and they’d be furious. That was when Francis had his District. We were right up near Nepal …
