The Deceivers

by John Masters

  ‘No.’

  ‘Haven’t I told you it is greater than anything you English suspect? You would uncover a million murders—and end them.’

  ‘A million!’ William jumped. ‘In my district? It’s not possible!’

  The voice was impatient. ‘Not in your district alone—all over India. I told you—Gopal—that night at the grove by Kahari that this was the biggest thing in your life. Would the Lat Sahib then dare not to give you honour and a higher place?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  He was not sure. Organizations as big as the Honourable East India Company did not like admitting mistakes. The bigger the scandal uncovered, the more highly placed the official who would have to take the responsibility. No one would believe it, anyway. It couldn’t happen.

  ‘I suppose not,’ he said again slowly, ‘but——’

  ‘Will you promise to make me a chuprassi?’

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Mary broke in. ‘I’m sorry, darling, but I must know. It is awful just hearing you mutter and whisper—oh, there’s a bat in the room!’

  ‘It won’t hurt you. He says he will lead me to uncover a million murders if I promise to make him a chuprassi. He’s mad.’

  ‘Promise me a deed in writing, in fadeless ink, with your thumb mark on it; then I will show you how we can do it.’

  William stared at the shadow. What did it matter now? He had failed, and the taste of failure was not too bad. He would have to live with it in his mouth and had better learn to like it.

  Mary said softly, ‘He’s not mad, William. He sounds very sane. A chuprassi has a lovely red coat with the arms of the Company on it, and is a part of something big, and doesn’t have to travel the roads. Find out what his plan is.’

  William said to Hussein, ‘What is your proposal?’

  The man on the floor was silent for a full two minutes. At last he spoke, beginning slowly, with gaps and pauses, gaining fluency and emphasis as he went.

  ‘First, the thakur is dead. And six men with him. You followed them and found them. Do you believe now that there is nothing more important in the world for you than this task of rooting out the men who did it?’

  William said, ‘Yes,’ briefly and surely.

  ‘Well, you must see more. When you have seen, and learned to fear our gods, you will understand everything. You will understand why I want above all else to have a red coat and be like ordinary people. You must leave your law behind and become an Indian and take to the road with me. That will be possible because you have dark eyes and can speak good Hindi. We already know that, as an Indian, you look like Gopal the weaver—which will be useful, and perhaps dangerous.’

  ‘Why?’ William interjected. ‘Surely Gopal’s dead?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But he’s far away. And he’s a servant of Kali. That’s what I had to find out. I told you in the jail … why I had to frighten your old fool of a jailer and escape. Now you must come away with me. You will be gone five months.’

  ‘Five months? What’s the need to stay out that length of time?’

  ‘To complete one whole travel season on the roads, from the beginning to the final dispersal of the bands. To understand. Anything less, and you’ll just scratch the surface. In all that time you have to keep silence. You will have to watch murder and do nothing; worse, perhaps, and say nothing, until we return and are ready to act. Oh!’ His voice changed as he thought of something. ‘Is it true that you white people eat with a knife and fork because your fingernails are poisonous? If it is——’

  ‘No,’ William interrupted impatiently. He had heard the superstition before. ‘We don’t like grease and food on our hands, that’s all. I can eat like an Indian. Are these servants of Kali called by any special name?’

  ‘Yes. The Deceivers.’

  The shadow on the floor used an uncommon word, thug, derived from the verb thugna, to deceive. He said it as Mr. Wilson might have said ‘Satan and all his angels.’

  William said, ‘I’ve never heard of them.’

  ‘Others have. The Bara-sahib returns to Sagthali tomorrow morning, I hear. I will come for you tomorrow night at this hour. We have much to do. We need several days alone in the jungle before we set out, because you have to learn many things, many words. The Deceivers use a language of their own. Will you come?’

  William waited for Mary to say something, to urge him on or hold him back. The question had been put in very simple, direct Hindustani: she must have understood. She did not speak. She was there beside him, warm and strong, but she did not speak.

  He said, ‘I’ll come.’

  The man on the floor said quietly, ‘You had no choice. Language, dress, customs are important, but our first need is a strong spirit. The goddess Kali is our adversary. Are you protected against her? Do you carry your God’s sign, the cross?’

  William licked his lips. The bat in the room swooped across the open windows. The bonfires to Kali still burned in the town. He said, ‘I do not wear a cross. I believe my God is everywhere at my side.’ He supposed he believed that. Mr. Wilson did—but Mr. Wilson would fight Kali in a different way, confronting her with an icy wall of disbelief. He could never understand her.

  The shadow bulked higher and came close. William could see better now, and it was indeed Hussein, the lopsided ordinary man, whose eyes gleamed large and intense close to his own. The man’s voice was not steady. ‘Give me a cross, then. Allah and Mohammed his prophet have failed me against Kali. Give me a cross. Your God is a foreigner and does not know Kali’s strength, and will fight better against her than ours, who do, and are frightened. We must fear, but we must not fall. Give me a cross.’

  Mary whispered, ‘What does he say? What does he want?’

  ‘He wants a cross to protect him in what he—what we are going to do.’ Mr. Wilson would have called it gross superstition, and it was.

  Mary pulled out the tiny cross of English oak she wore inside her bosom, snapped the thin gold links of its chain, and gave the cross to Hussein. Hussein fingered it and muttered, ‘Wood. I was afraid it would be silver or gold. Wood is better.’ A spurt of affection for the man warmed William’s heart. Hussein too knew what the feel of plain wood meant; silver was something else, subtle, superior.

  Hussein tucked the cross away. ‘Tomorrow. It doesn’t matter what plans you make to get away, except that you must let no one, no one whatever, know what you are doing. And you should try and prevent your absence being discovered for as long as possible. And have the paper ready for me about my post as a chuprassi.’

  He was gone. The voice was silent, the shadow faded. The soundless beat of the bat’s wings, felt as a thud in the inner ear when the bat had passed close, died as it too flew out and over the drive.

  Mary closed the windows and leaned back against them. ‘Is that man a bat? Now tell me everything. I know you’re going somewhere with him and, William’—she reached for his hand and held it tight—‘you have to. But I’m frightened. I’ve never been so frightened.’

  He told her, and she was silent a long time. At last she said, ‘To let people be killed in order to save others. We’ve done it once already. To do evil that good may come of it. I don’t know what it will make of us. You’ll have to be very strong.’ She shivered, seeing visions William could not see. She clung tightly to him. ‘Promise me you will not kill anybody yourself. Darling, you’re my husband, promise, promise!’

  ‘Mary, I couldn’t murder anyone. You know I couldn’t.’ Her vehemence astonished him and touched him a little with her fear. He realized he was holding her tighter than he knew, because she could hardly breathe. He relaxed the grip of his hands on her.

  Other, material fears closed in on him. Armed men roamed the roads, and he would be unarmed. Everywhere men died by violence, or died gently, their blood clogged by snake venom, or died in a ditch, excreting their life in cholera and dysentery. He saw the road now as an Indian saw it, and for the first time knew he would have to find the Indian, not the
British, type of courage to face it

  He said, ‘I will go. I will not kill. How am I to get away?’

  Mary’s trembling had stopped. She sat down carefully and looked up, a dim face and a white gleam in the chair. Her voice was steady. ‘That’s not going to be difficult. After Daddy’s gone, you pretend to fall ill and go to bed. Only Sher Dil and I will be allowed into your room. Sher Dil will have to know you’ve gone, of course, but that’s all. Later we’ll give out that you’re still weak and going to do the work from your bed. I’ll actually do it. Wait! You’ll have to have a bad wrist or something so that you can’t write. We’ll get found out—two weeks, a month perhaps. Then I’ll say I don’t know what happened. You told me to do it but didn’t say why. You just vanished.’

  Her voice throbbed, and William remembered the baby; and, as he had become an Indian and seen the road, he became a woman and faced Mary’s lonely fight. He wanted to speak and comfort her but could not.

  She went on, ‘I’ll stay in Madhya as long as I can, even after it’s been discovered, so that you can send me messages and I can do things for you, perhaps. I—I don’t think it’s going to be easy. Later, if I have to, I’ll go to Daddy in Sagthali.’

  She got up and stood close to him, not touching him. ‘William, I love you. I think sometimes you don’t trust yourself to believe it. I don’t know what faces me, but I know it’s going to be bad. And you, you who are so—so shy, you can become a mad red dog. I’m frightened.’

  She began to cry and pressed her wet face into his chest.

  Chapter Fourteen

  William and Hussein walked between fields, and ahead the lights of a little town sparkled through the chilly night. William breathed deeply and wrinkled his nostrils. India was beautiful, above all on this night of the year. It was the Dewali, the festival dedicated to lights and gambling, which fell always on the twentieth day after Dussehra. Hundreds of open lights, in tiny earthenware bowls, flickered outside each house and hut.

  Tonight, as for two weeks past, he was truly a part of India. He had worked here all his adult life—nineteen years, the last three in Madhya. As an Englishman he had fallen in love with Madhya, and this central land’s pattern of beauty had grown into him—its earthy reds and deep greens, the shading of its still water in old masonry tanks, its rivers that flowed by white and smoky blue villages. Yet always his race had held him back from complete absorption in it. He had been physically unable to see or hear or smell beauty without noticing the dirt and disease that were part of it. Then, when he noticed, his love changed to something else—to reforming zeal, desire to raise up, to alter.

  These weeks alone with Hussein, as in the months to come, he had to be Indian to keep his life, and nothing but Indian. He had to make no mistakes in feel or tone; he had not to reform but to accept, not to fight squalor and cruelty but to become part of them. Only by being Indian and thinking Indian and feeling Indian could he hold any hope that he would return at last to his English ways and his English wife. Already they were altering in the perspective of his mind. He knew that the man who had stepped out of the bungalow, clung briefly in Mary’s arms, and then vanished in the darkness with Hussein would never go back. It would be another man who returned to Mary, and William did not know what kind of man that would be.

  At his side Hussein walked with shorter strides, and William thought of the cross in the little fellow’s loincloth. Their second day in a jungle hiding-place, before the lessons had begun, Hussein asked him with sudden aggressiveness, ‘This god, this Christ of yours, this cross is his symbol, isn’t it? For all his followers? It isn’t a trick, a secret sign, to show him which are black people and which are white?’ William tried to reassure him, but Hussein was nervous and did not settle down until they set out on the road. Since then they had walked together for six days north-westward on a little-used road east of and roughly parallel to the main Madhya–Saugor–Lalitpur–Jhansi artery.

  William looked down. It was dark, but even by daylight he had confidence in his disguise. Those who looked at him saw what the woman by the pyre had seen that February evening by the Seonath—Gopal the weaver. There had been no question of making him up to look like Gopal; when stained, he did. His legs worried him a little. The colour had taken well and evenly, as it had all over his body, but the shape of his calves was wrong; they were fatter and smoother than the muscle-corded sticks of a working peasant, thinner than the suet curves of a merchant or bannia. For the rest, he was Gopal, plus the high ankled Bandelkhand slippers.

  There had been a strange incident one evening in a lonely place where Hussein was showing William the rumal. It was the three-foot-square cloth the Deceivers used for strangling, and Hussein was instructing him how to stow it in the loincloth, one end just peeping out ready for the hand to grab. William said, ‘It doesn’t matter, of course, because I’m not going to use it, but surely it would be safer to carry it like this.’ The rumal turned easily in his fingers; he twisted the top corner over and down and back inside the coil of the rest in a loose knot; it was all hidden from sight. ‘And it’s just as easy to get out.’ He flipped one forefinger into the loincloth, the rumal sprang out in his hand. Hussein leaped away from him, his eyes starting from his head, and stammered, ‘Who—who taught you that?’ William tucked the rumal away. ‘No one. It’s obvious, isn’t it?’ Hussein said, ‘All the gods help us!’

  William did not know the name of the town ahead, but Hussein did—Jalpura; he’d been this way once, twenty-odd years before. A small lake bordered the road in front of the town, and William stopped, muttering, ‘Let’s rest here a minute before we go in. Dewali’s so beautiful.’

  Hussein answered, ‘It’s not beautiful, but unbelievers like you think it is holy. We will stop, but only to rest.’

  ‘All right. I understand.’

  ‘Then we will go into the town and look in the harlots’ quarter for—them.’

  The lights rode like swarming fireflies along the houses at the edge of the town. The lake reflected them, and lights floated on the surface of the water. Brighter lights glared in the streets. Light glowed over the housetops, imprisoned in dust. It was November. The rains had long gone and the raw depth of air made a tiny jagged halo around each flame and light.

  Soon Hussein trudged forward again; William followed. In the narrow principal street of Jalpura the shops crowded together, standing for the most part closed and shuttered. In one or two the owner worked with abacus and quill to finish the task of closing his annual accounts. Once, glancing down an open passage, they saw a shopman bending in prayer before his ledgers; a lamp flashed on a single bright rupee laid on the topmost tome. Hussein checked his step, then muttered, ‘You idolaters! I forgot that all the bannias do that at Dewali. Come on.’

  Groups of kneeling men gambled in the dust at the side of the street, shouting cheerfully and watched by small crowds. Everywhere travellers mingled with townsmen.

  Hussein paused at the open front of a spice shop. The proprietor, a young fat man with a cheerful face, was playing cards with three other men and calling bets. Wooden tokens and some pieces of the Company’s copper coinage littered the mat they squatted on. Hussein said, ‘Friend, which way are the women?’

  The spice merchant laughed good-humouredly and waved his hand up the street. ‘Up there, second turning on the right. You can’t miss them.’

  ‘God be with you.’

  They pushed slowly on through the crowd. The harlots displayed themselves, each squatting on a cushion, in open-fronted rooms at street level. The rooms were bare, except that in some a small clay image of Krishna stood on a pedestal in a back corner. In all, an open staircase at the side ran up out of sight to the second storey. The old retired crones who were the harlots’ body-servants leered toothlessly down through half-drawn curtains from the upper balconies.

  Always a dim lamp on the floor shone up under the harlot’s chin and into her face, erasing the lines of age and transmuting into living flesh th
e heavy mask of makeup. Every harlot wore a layer of white powder on her face and circles of violent rouge on her cheekbones; black antimony ringed their eyes. They stared unseeing at the crowds that jostled up and down the narrow slope of street before them.

  Occasionally, without fervour or coquetry, a harlot’s eyes locked with a man’s. Occasionally a man stepped over the low sill and squatted close to the woman inside and talked. The passers-by paused to hear them haggle about the price. The woman gestured unemphatically, the man argued.

  An old peasant beside William said clearly, ‘Thank God my loins no longer squander what my fields produce!’ and went on his way, shaking his head. The haggling customer shrugged at last. The woman rose and stalked up the stairs, her head high. The man followed her. Above, the old crone jabbered, pulled her head back, and closed the curtains. Hussein and William moved on.

  In front of the next house the crowd pressed thicker. Inside, a young girl sat on the cushion. William saw that most of the staring men were travellers. He noticed Hussein carefully inspecting them. Finally Hussein made up his mind about something and said to one of the strangers, ‘Greetings, brother Ali. How much does this one cost? She ought to be good.’

  William had learned that the form of greeting was the challenge and countersign of the Deceivers. Ali was no particular person; the Deceivers used the name in their salutations, adding a Hindu or Mohammedan phrase according to the religion of the speaker. He remembered when he had first heard it and clenched his fists involuntarily. He had wondered then who Ali was, but had since come to understand that an Indian so greeted would not even notice the phrase unless his own name was Ali, or he was a Deceiver. Most sects and many areas of India had their own customary form of greeting; a Sikh would work in the word Khalsa, a Mohammedan Allah, a Hindu Ram.