by John Masters
When he opened them, Yasin’s luminous face swam into focus a foot away. Yasin was a saint, transported now into the arms of his goddess, and love ached in his voice.
Take, eat … William put out his right hand.
This is the sweetness of Kali… William bowed his head and touched his lips to the sugar. He picked it up with his tongue. His stomach rose to meet it. He had expected it to taste of the death that tainted it, and of silver, but he swallowed it—it was just sugar. He ate it down.
You are hers and she is yours. Yasin moved on to the next man.
All his nausea gone, William glanced over his shoulder and saw that those on the grass were handing round their unconsecrated sugar and eating it. Yasin returned to his place, picked up the lotah, and began again, at the right of the blankets, offering each man water.
‘Take, drink, this is the milk of Kali. You are hers and she is yours.’
Each man held his right hand to his mouth and Yasin poured a little water on to his palm and so down his throat. William drank confidently. It was all rank superstition, and only the chill of the dawn and the remembered horrors of last night had upset his stomach.
When all had drunk, Yasin returned to his place, filled in the hole and covered it with leaves and twigs, and put the pick-axe back into his waistband. The Deceivers stood in silence and waited. Yasin stepped off the blankets.
The Deceivers relaxed, and moved away, and began to chatter excitedly. ‘Do you think the crow could see the stream from up there?’ ‘Of course it could! Look, over those bushes. We can almost see it from down here.’
The Jemadar seized William’s arm. ‘I don’t remember omens as good as that for—oh, many, many years! The crow was on a tree’—he ticked off on his fingers—‘on our left, in sight of water. The omen on the right came within one second—less!’ He smoothed down his moustache and beard. ‘Come on, let us ride to Manikwal, you and I. We’ve got some horses now. Yasin Khan and your friend Hussein can come with us, on foot. Everyone else knows what to do.’
‘All right. Give me a few minutes to get packed and saddled up.’
‘I’ll meet you in the grove.’
The walled town of Manikwal lay fifteen miles to the north-east. William had heard of it as a populous little place with the provincial reputation of a Gomorrah. Its ruler he had met once in Madhya, a bawdy old reprobate who ruled his people with an open but heavy hand. In this country, on the southern marches of Bandelkhand, a tangle of tiny states overlapped and interlaced; wars and marriages had given them the most unlikely geographies—some were actually contained complete within others, and few were of any size.
William walked his horse at the Jemadar’s side. The November sun warmed them. They could see the town for two hours before they reached it in the afternoon. Like Jalpura, its houses stepped up, one behind the other, on the side of a hill. It, too, had a lake, but the rajah took little care of anything except his pleasures, and the townspeople had planted water chestnut, and the lake would soon be a clogged, noisome swamp. But the town wall was in good repair, and an armed man guarded the gate. They rode past him into the town.
A press of people filled the narrow street. William looked up the hill to see what excited them, for they were all peering in that direction. He heard distant, isolated shouts and the echoing boom of a cannon fired from the rajah’s fort at the crown of the slope. The Jemadar leaned down—he was so trimly correct today, the ideal of a competent tradesman—and said to a man at his stirrup, ‘What’s happening, friend?’
‘Don’t know. Someone being executed, I suppose.’
The Jemadar looked at William meaningfully. When on the road, the Deceivers counted it a good omen to see a man being taken to execution or a corpse on its way to the burning.
A camel lurched over the brow of the hill and walked down with short, rubbery strides between the heaving crowds. The man on its back jerked to its movements till William thought he must fall off. The camel strode closer, and William saw that the rider’s feet were roped together under its belly. He was a little rabbit of a man with protruding teeth and a mean, close face. His clothes were in the disarray of one already dead, torn down the front and hanging in tatters at his sides, and his head was bare. From the lonely height of the camel’s hump he looked about with lacklustre eyes, seeking escape but knowing there was none. The camel passed, and the horses stamped and snorted, backing away from its acrid-stale smell. The camel held its head high, its lips curled in the perpetual camel sneer.
Behind the camel an elephant paced gingerly down the steep. Two men in ragged uniform on its back shouted continually, ‘See the justice of our prince! A thief goes to execution! See the justice of our prince!’
The elephant passed, its ridiculously trousered backside clowning in the presence of death. The cries of the executioners passed. The people closed in across the street behind the elephant and followed. They were going to see the execution. Soon, after many ceremonies, the ragged soldiers would rope the thief to the elephant’s forefoot and make it run about on the flat earth beside the lake. The elephant would try to lift its feet and not tread on the man as he dragged along under is belly; but in the end it had to trample him.
The street was deserted. The Jemadar said softly, ‘Just an ordinary little thief. They always get caught—and serves them right! They’re so weak.’
William did not know whether he agreed. Certainly the little thieves of the world led weak, ordinary lives.
The Jemadar continued, ‘I’m not sure that we won’t get like that soon. Things aren’t what they used to be in our brotherhood. Piroo’s very pessimistic. Of course, he’s jealous’—he smiled at William—‘he threatened to quit the road. Says he’s going to retire, buy some land, and take up his trade.’
‘What’s that?’ William asked idly, not really listening but waiting with painful expectancy for his inner ear to catch the elephant’s bewildered trumpeting and the scream of the crowd.
The Jemadar said, ‘He’s a carpenter.’
William said, ‘Oh, is he?’ and thought of Piroo afresh. Jealous, wanting to be strong, a little weak, a little stupid. He himself was a carpenter. They were not unlike.
The Jemadar said, ‘Here,’ and turned into a lane between tall houses. The boarded lower storeys facing the street showed that this was the harlot’s quarter of the town. The boards would be removed at dusk. The lane smelled of filth and human urine. Behind the houses they entered a stable yard and dismounted. Hussein and Yasin stabled the horses.
An old woman stuck her head out of a glassless window opening. ‘Hey, what do you want?’
The Jemadar turned. ‘Travellers, princess. We would like to use your upper back room for a week or so.’
The old woman chuckled. ‘Princess, my arse! How many of you, haji?’
‘Four here, one more to come.’
‘All right. Find your own way up.’
They dragged their kits up a steep, straight, very narrow flight of stairs which was walled in with bare brick. The room at the top was big and completely unfurnished. Two small square window holes in one wall, under the eaves of the house, let in light and air. Numerous stains and splotches discoloured the splintered wood floor. A patch of dried mud-plaster covered the wood in one corner. A heap of grey ash, and the dark smoke smudges on the wall, and the bricks lying ready for use as pot rests, showed that that was the cooking place. Loosely joined tiles paved a second corner; there a drain hole made by removing two bricks from the outer wall denoted that it was the washing place. William did not ask where the toilet was; that, he knew, would be anywhere in the stable yard or along the alley.
The Jemadar threw his belongings down in the middle of the floor. ‘This’ll do. Phuh, the whole place smells of women. Piroo won’t like that—he’s terrified of ’em. Leave room for him, by the way.’ He pulled a small mirror out of his saddlebag and hung it on a nail that stuck out from between the bricks. He got out a pair of tweezers and began to prune his upper l
ip. He said, speaking with his mouth twisted to one side. ‘We’ll stay here a week. It’s a good town to rest up and get information about who and what is moving on the roads. We’ll have the feast on our last day, the Friday—ow!—and women afterward. There’s a woman waiting for you, my old friend!’ He grinned at William and put away the tweezers.
There’s a woman waiting.… William thought of Mary, who waited for him in Madhya, and sewed, and got up, and sat down again, and listened to every sound inside and outside the bungalow, and waited for him to ripen in her womb. He thought of the woman who waited at the pyre beside the Seonath, and did not move, and listened, and hoped.
Yasin laid the pick-axe on the floor, turned it until its head pointed north, then unrolled his blanket over it and put his saddlebags over all. The Jemadar watched respectfully and, when Yasin was ready, said, ‘Are you coming out? I want to see about selling these nags and getting some others a little less good-looking.’
‘All right.’
‘You?’ The Jemadar turned to William.
‘I don’t think so, Jemadar-sahib. I’ll rest here a while.’
‘Me too,’ Hussein said.
The other two left the room. William listened to the Jemadar’s riding slippers clack down the long stair. He watched through a window until the men had crossed the yard and gone out of view.
He turned to Hussein. ‘Piroo won’t be here for an hour or so yet, will he?’
‘No, not till after dark.’
‘Good. I’ll get on with the first instalment of my report. Tomorrow you or I can go out and bury it outside the town.’
He got out the fine sheets of paper, lay down on his stomach under one of the windows, and began to write against the uneven surface of the floor, using a short pencil and forming the letters as small as he could. He had much to record, much that would help the world and his superiors to understand the Deceivers, even if he himself did not live to write another word. He licked his lip, licked the end of the pencil, and struggled on.
After half an hour Hussein, whom he had realized as a silent, vaguely unhappy presence in the room, blurted, ‘What do you think you’re going to do with those notes?’
William put the pencil down carefully, rubbed his eyes, and looked up. ‘I told you. I’m going to take them outside the town and bury them, and pick them up later when we’ve finished this—this expedition.’
Hussein’s face was compressed with misery. ‘You’re never going to use any of those notes against the Deceivers.’
‘Of course I am,’ William said, growing unreasonably angry.
‘You’re not, because you are a Deceiver, from this dawn on for ever. A strangler. Only stranglers may stand on the blanket: you stood on it. Only stranglers may take the consecrated sugar of communion: you took it. It doesn’t matter what a man thinks he is. When he eats consecrated sugar, on the blanket, in front of the pickaxe, he is a strangler, because Kali enters into him. It has happened before that men with no training or aptitude have got on the blanket by mistake. Always Kail gives them the skill and the strength they need.’ He took his head in his hands and groaned. ‘Now you are a strangler. Now you will never return to your office. Now I will never be a chuprassi. We could not help it,’ he finished, suddenly resigned. ‘Kali wills it, so it is.’
William said furiously, ‘You’re talking the rankest, most idiotic superstition!’ In himself he did not think so, and was frightened, and uncannily elated. He went on, ‘Besides, you had eaten the sugar before, when you first became a Deceiver, and you had given up your old ways.’
‘Had I? Had I? That’s what I thought! Did you see me last night?’
Hussein came close and pushed his contorted face down into William’s. William remembered a traveller across the fire last night, listening dreamily to the zither; Hussein’s sharpened nose and drawn-back lips; the traveller’s bolting eyes. He was silent.
Hussein continued urgently, ‘Gopal, do you realize that not one Deceiver’s wife in a hundred knows what he is? That the Deceivers have homes and places in society? That they leave their homes, and travel as if on ordinary business, and come back? That their children never know, unless a son is initiated into his father’s band? I think perhaps I have been a servant of Kali even in my treachery to her, when I preferred the woman to her, and ran away, and at last found you. Why couldn’t you be a Deceiver? Why not? The Saint Nizam-ud-Din was one, The Rajah of—oh, many great men for hundreds of years past. Why not you? You travel, don’t you? You meet travellers who seek the protection of your convoys. We Deceivers could find men for all your staff, all your police, clerks, bungalow servants, jailers, chuprassis.’
William sprang to his feet. ‘You dirty murderous filth! Hold your tongue! I am not a strangler. I never will be. I am not going to kill, whatever happens. I’m not going to! Do you understand?’
Hussein said again, ‘You are a strangler. You cannot help yourself now.’
William raised his hand to strike, but Hussein was not angry, only sad. Shivering a little, William tucked away his papers and pencil and left the room.
For a time he wandered about the streets, now sunless and grey in the hour before the lamps were lit. From the foot of the town he heard the scream of an elephant and a faint, faint human cry, caught up at once in the shrill, formless cacophony of a crowd. They had spent a long time in the lovely sunset glow beside the lake, and the ordinary little thief had given them good night.
William stood in a place where the street widened. A few small boys had foregone the execution for the equal thrill of watching a newly arrived troupe of travelling conjurers set up their pitch. The leader of the troupe led a dancing bear round and round on its chain and called shrilly to the people to come and see the wonders of his show.
‘See the bear that dances like a girl! O come and see! See the cut rope that heals itself! O come and see!’
He looked straight at William as he passed and held out his bowl for alms. The bear sniffed at William’s feet and whined, but the man gave no sign that he had ever seen William before. William turned and hurried back to the room above the house of the harlots.
Chapter Seventeen
On the morning of the feast, a Friday six days later, William and Hussein were appointed as ceremonial assistants to Yasin. The preparations were an endless rite, hedged about with exact instructions which had come in the beginning from the mouth of the goddess herself. Generations of Deceivers had passed on the sacred words, and Yasin knew them all; that was why he was the priest of the band.
While Piroo and the Jemadar went round the town completing their purchases and gossiping with merchants and travellers, the other three worked hard. In the morning they walked into the fields and brought back covered baskets of earth and cow dung and pitchers of water; with these materials they plastered twenty square feet in the middle of the floor and let it dry. That work was a token; usually the Deceivers held their feasts on the ground level, where the whole earth floor would have to be so prepared.
At noon Yasin covered the windows with blankets, swept out the room, and stowed the baggage neatly in one far corner. Afterward he mixed turmeric and lime together and with the powder drew lines on the dried plaster of the floor, enclosing a square of one-cubit sides. Then he damped some of the same powder with water, slipped out to the landing, and rapidly painted an eye on the outside of the door, to frighten away idle visitors. Then he put rice to boil in great pots. There was not enough water, and he said briefly, intent on his sacraments of preparation, ‘You two, go and fetch more water. Hurry!’
William and Hussein took the pitchers and hastened down the stairs. It was hot in the mid afternoon sun, and they went quickly to the wells beside the lake and drew water. The women there giggled at them because the fetching and carrying of water was women’s work, but they did not laugh and the women fell silent. They stumbled back up the steep street, the sweat running down their foreheads into their eyes, and came to the stable yard.
Wil
liam set down his pitcher and wiped his forehead with his hand. Flies buzzed about his ears, and dung beetles rolled away huge balls of treasure under his feet. He saw a flicker of white in the stable, and the hindquarters of a pony that had not been there before. He turned to pick up the pitcher. Here strangers could be no concern of his. This was a whore-house, and anyone had a right to come.
Hussein stared into the stable, his eyes wide and his mouth drooping open. The stranger in there hummed to himself, muttered, ‘Move over, you!’ in a pleasant, hoarse voice to his pony. The sun glared down on the dried filth in the yard. Under the stable roof it was black, but William looked hard, and the stranger’s face came a little clearer.
William walked forward. A dreadful unease ruled in his stomach and he did not know what it was. He passed into the stable beside the horse farthest from the stranger. The stranger heard him and stopped humming and cried softly, ‘Greetings, Ali, my brother.’
William answered over the horses’ backs, ‘Greetings to you, O brother Ali,’ and slipped under the head ropes, approaching the stranger. They stood close at last, beside the pony’s head in the half darkness, and the stranger said, ‘Whose band?’
‘Khuda Baksh’s.’ William’s voice was hoarser than the stranger’s, and quavering. The light contracted as Hussein came into the stable, and spread again. The stranger’s eyes were flecked brown; his shoulders wide; his forehead broad and low under the turban. He looked at William and said slowly, ‘Who—who in the name of Kali are you?’
William’s unease concentrated in one swooping lurch of his bowels. It was himself that he saw in the expanding grey light. This face stared at him from the cracked mirror when he plucked his whiskers. This face reflected his own face, and reflected too the panic in his eyes. The stranger stepped back, stumbled over a saddlebag in the dirt, and began to fall. He fell, and the light snapped in his brown eyes, and William saw understanding there, and death. The single flash stabbed him, strangled, garroted, broke his joints, drove a stake through his belly, through all love, through Mary, through all sacrifice and success, through life. The stranger was himself, and failure, and Death. He was Death. The rumal came to his hand, the rupee in the knotted corner swinging easily. He stepped forward as Gopal the weaver began to fall. He kicked at Gopal’s crotch. Gopal turned away and began to say, ‘Ali…’ William’s rumal swung. The sound mewed like a hungry cat and choked off.
