Bhowani Junction

by John Masters

  I said, ‘Mine are. I’m not so sure about Victoria’s.’ Victoria looked at me, thinking I had made a bad joke, but I wasn’t joking. I went on. ‘I’m in love. But marriage lasts a long time. It’s supposed to be important. You know that there will be difficulties enough, made by other people, if Victoria does marry me, without our making difficulties for ourselves. I think if we can get away together for a few days it may help us to think straighter and reach the right answer.’ I didn’t mention Patrick, and I didn’t say in so many words that I wanted a chance to build up the kind of relationship with her which Patrick had grown into as he grew into his men’s clothes.

  ‘Oh,’ Pater said. He picked up the newspaper, smoothed the rumpled sheets, folded it and put it down again. He said. ‘You haven’t said anything, girl. Do you want to go with the colonel? Do you love him?’

  Victoria said, ‘Yes.’

  I could read her father’s mind as easily as I could read hers—My girl’s reputation means a lot to me. But the colonel is an Englishman and a real gentleman. But even if he is, he ought not to seduce my girl. But she was going out with that Indian fellow, and how wonderful it would be if she could get an Englishman instead—an English colonel. He might marry her, after all. If anything happens by mistake, he will, because he is a gentleman. It is too good to be true, really. But he ought not to seduce her. Why does he ask me, why doesn’t he just take her away and bring her back? He knows I will have to pretend to know nothing about it even if I know everything.

  Pater said, ‘It is like the companionate marriage that you have in mind, then, like they have in America?’

  I said, ‘Sort of. A week-end’s not enough for that, I suppose—but I’ve worked with Victoria a lot. We know each other pretty well.’

  Pater picked up his pipe, tapped the bowl on the floor beside him, and put it down again. He said, ‘I love my daughter, Colonel. I love both of them. I would be very happy if you are the right man for her. I am an old fogey. We were not so honest in my day. We’—he glanced at Victoria, his face damp and a blurred wink in his eye—‘had to take out the girls sub rosa—under the rose, you know. But our intention was the same, I should say. It didn’t always work out properly. We made mistakes then. Women are very good at deceiving you, Colonel.’

  ‘Some are,’ I said.

  He said, ‘Don’t let this little minx take you in.’ He reached out his arm, caught her round the waist, and squeezed. His eyes were brimming over with sentimental tears.

  He got up with sudden animation, nodding his head as he digested and understood what was happening there. His feelings came slowly to him, but they were true. He had realized the size of my love for Victoria. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, that will be a great thing for you, Victoria. Mind you do not deceive the colonel. If you do not really love him, if you cannot make him a good wife, you must say so.’ He paused in his pacing up and down the little floor, and said anxiously, ‘What about your mother? Shall we tell her? And Rose Mary? Are you going to keep it secret from the other officers, Colonel?’

  I said, ‘I’m not going to tell anyone what I’m doing. I never do. My second-in-command has to know where to find me.’

  Pater said gloomily, ‘Her mother will not ask any questions. Nor will Rose Mary. Because they will both know in no time.’ He cheered up. ‘But that can’t be helped. The important thing is to make sure you two do not make a mistake, eh? Oh, it is wonderful to be so young and in love, and a colonel too! Man, you are a lucky girl!’ He hugged her again and shook my hand and said, ‘Go on, Colonel. Kiss her. I won’t mind.’ I lifted her chin—only a little, she was so tall—and kissed her gently on the lips while Pater crowed with happiness beside us. Then Pater wouldn’t be satisfied until I had a bottle of beer with him, and over the beer we talked sentimentally for an hour.

  At last I said I must go, and Pater made me kiss her again behind the front door. Then we left Victoria inside, and Pater walked with me up Collett Road—to help me find a tonga, he said. I felt Victoria watching us from the parlour window. I could almost hear her saying to herself, Men are extraordinary.

  Pater wouldn’t go direct for a tonga, but forced me into the Institute and made me drink another couple of bottles of beer. He talked as though Victoria was already a bride. His mind was dancing rosily among nuptial delights and the spring of love. To him I had become not a seducer but the giver of those delights to his little girl. He never referred to her except as little’, and she was a big healthy girl. He began to tell me what a ‘pretty little girl’ she had been as a child. He showed me a snapshot of her in a goddamned pinafore and a topi, complete with waterproof cover. He sighed as he thought of love and young women and beds—and, Jesus Christ, so did I, and I put my hand on his arm and told him several good stories for no other reason than I felt drunk with pleasure. Men are indeed extraordinary.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The next day Victoria arrived at my bungalow in a tonga at about 0515. She was wearing khaki slacks and her WAC (I) bush shirt and carrying a small suitcase. The day was coming and the night going, and the streamers of both met high above us while the east was green and the west indigo. It was not cool, it was not hot. It was not light, it was not dark.

  I’d hired a bazaar lorry, and it was standing outside the bungalow with its sidelights burning. Birkhe had hung a hurricane lantern from the roof inside, and under its yellow gleam you could make out a satisfactory holiday-going litter of tents, cooking pots, bedding rolls, and sacks. The driver and cleaner were fiddling with the engine, their heads together under the raised side of the bonnet. I helped Victoria down from the tonga and kissed her hard. To let go at all I had to do it suddenly. She nearly fell. I turned away from her and asked the driver if we were ready to go yet.

  He said, ‘Nearly ready, sahib. One minute.’

  We sat on the verandah steps, smoking and talking, while the light strengthened, for twenty minutes. Then I walked over to the lorry and said, ‘How many more seconds, in this minute?’

  The driver grinned deprecatingly and said, ‘It is an old lorry, sahib. Twelve years.’

  ‘Twenty,’ I said. It was an old Chevrolet chassis, visibly bent out of true, on which the usual wooden body had been roughly fitted. A latter-day Cubist had painted it in blue below and yellow above, and had also put in the Taj Mahal and a cow with a Mona Lisa smile. The top was piled high with sacks and boxes which the driver was taking out to Pathoda and Devra for other people.

  After twenty more minutes the sun was thinking of coming up. Victoria had smoked half a dozen cigarettes, and I a couple of cheroots, and our mouths were hot and dry.

  I got out another cheroot. But I hated the cheroot and I hated the world. This trip wasn’t just a rutting expedition. It was my heart and bowels that wanted Victoria the most. All women are properly constructed for rutting, whether plain or fancy. There is a military proverb: Bad beginnings make good endings. I never believed it. And it was all her damned sister Rose Mary’s fault. I said that aloud.

  She said, ‘Rose Mary? What has she——’

  I said, ‘Rose Mary and Master George Albert Howland. Don’t you remember last Sunday?’ That was when Howland and Rose Mary had come to get permission to use a battalion vehicle and I had refused them. If it hadn’t been for them I’d have used one of the battalion trucks instead of hiring this wreck.

  Finally I relaxed and was able to laugh. If Victoria decided not to marry me on the ground that I couldn’t organize a shooting expedition properly we would both do better to confine our thoughts to fornication. I said, ‘What the hell, boys, what the hell, she had her boots on when she fell. Let’s have a drink.’

  ‘Now?’ She was really horrified. ‘Rodney, you’re not drinking too much, are you?’

  I said, ‘No, darling. I’m just living continental. Haven’t you ever seen those French workmen knocking back brioches, coffee, and anise at seven o’clock in the morning? Damn it, of course you haven’t.’ I kissed her cheek quickly. ‘But you will.
Christ, I have the right to disobey my own orders. I don’t know why I don’t get a six-by-six from the lines—but I’m not going to.’

  ‘Ready now, sahib,’ the driver said.

  Old Manbir Pun, the S.-M., appeared from the back of the bungalow, saluted, and climbed carefully into what was normally a second-class seat, the bench behind the driver. Birkhe wheeled up a G.S. bicycle, and he and the cleaner got it roped down, with a good deal of trouble, on top of the sacks on the roof. I started automatically to get into the front seat with Victoria, but changed my mind, and we pushed in alongside Manbir and Birkhe. Manbir was not pleased. He always had a liver first thing in the morning. The cleaner whirled the crank handle round and round. The engine spluttered, fired, hummed. The driver engaged gear, the cleaner darted round and hopped in beside him, and the lorry began to move.

  We swept noisily out of the drive. Soon we turned off the Pike on to the Kishanpur Road. The driver tucked his left foot under him on the seat, and the cleaner pressed down the clutch for him when he wanted to change gear. As we bumped across the railway line at the level-crossing I said, ‘Is it safe to say “We’re off” yet?’ which was a bloody silly question to ask, considering the number of years I’d been in India. But Victoria nodded and smiled and got out her cigarette case. Birkhe stood up at once, swaying with the lorry, lit a match, and held it cupped in his hands till long after the cigarette was drawing.

  Birkhe was one of the nicest people I’d ever known. He didn’t have a mean thought in him. He was shy and intelligent, and he pulled my leg when he felt like it.

  Old Subadar-Major Manbir sat on the far end of the row, his eyes half closed, smoking a pipe. The dust-cloud rose behind us and was sucked forward in our wake so that soon we were sitting in a thin gritty fog. Manbir hated the dust. He coughed and hawked and spat over the side and glowered at the road ahead, but there was nothing he could do about it—except one thing; he could take it out on someone else. In one sense we were the C.O., the S.-M., and a rifleman of the 1/13th. Not in another sense, but in another plane of the same sense, we were father, son, and grandson.

  Birkhe was saying something, and Manbir interrupted him by leaning across him to tap Victoria on the knee. He said, ‘Miss-sahiba, you must marry the colonel.’

  Victoria was completely nonplussed. Hell, she was only a woman. She looked wildly at me for help and stammered, ‘Why, Subadar-Major-sahib, I don’t know, I don’t think——’

  I was enjoying myself. This was something Victoria ought to know about. I didn’t say a word, and Manbir took no notice of me at all.

  ‘You must,’ Manbir repeated. He tapped her on the knee again. He said, ‘You make his heart big. With you he will not spend so much time wondering what people think of him. Besides, you will have many children.’

  Birkhe sat sandwiched between them. He knew better than to open his mouth.

  The old man was wearing grey flannel trousers, a brilliant green shirt, and his small round black mufti cap. Victoria mumbled something. Manbir said, ‘I did not think it would be good for you to marry him at first. Most of your people are like jackals, who follow the tiger but are always yelping, always frightened. But you are different. You must marry him.’ He fell into a fit of angry coughing, spat over the side, and said, ‘This dust! Stop the lorry, sahib. I want to blow my nose.’

  I told the driver, and we squealed slowly to a halt. Manbir got out, blew his nose on his fingers for a couple of minutes, patted dust out of his clothes, and got back in. He said, ‘All right now.’

  I told the driver to start up and said, ‘Off we go again!’ I was feeling as cheerful as a cricket. Manbir’s liver always made me laugh.

  The lorry would not start.

  We sat there for five minutes, all squeezed together in the heat. I began to feel less cheerful. Manbir said, ‘This is foolish. I’m going to send Birkhe back to get one of our six-by-sixes.’

  I said, ‘No!’ I jumped down and stared up and down the empty road. I recognized the place. There was a field on the right, and beyond the field the railway—the Bhanas branch—and beyond that the jungle and rough grass where K. P. Roy had escaped from the brake van. I could just make out the houses of Devra about two miles ahead at the foot of the rising brown hills. Behind, between us and Bhowani, a column of black smoke hung in the air. It must be a goods train.

  I said, ‘Father, you’re responsible for this because you couldn’t blow your nose out of the window like any ordinary human being. Get all the kit over to the railway there, and stop that train. The miss-sahiba and I will go on the bicycle.’

  Manbir paused as he hoisted a tent on to his shoulders. He said, ‘Both of you? In this heat?’

  I said, ‘Why not? When everything goes wrong, make it worse. We’ll see you at the camp.’

  The old man muttered, ‘This is not sensible,’ and staggered off across the field. The train was appreciably nearer. Birkhe was already half-way to the line, and the driver and cleaner were staggering along with more kit. Victoria and I stood a minute, watching them; then I picked up the bicycle.

  I felt good again. Everything had become very funny and exactly right. I said, ‘Hop on. You’re well padded.’

  She looked doubtfully at the heavy green bicycle and said, ‘Where? On the carrier?’ I said, ‘In the Army we call it the arse.’ I was really feeling like that. I told her that sitting sidesaddle across the bar was best. She heaved herself up. My arms were on each side of her, and she said she felt quite comfortable for the moment. We wobbled off.

  She gasped, ‘Be careful, Rodney!’

  I said, ‘I’m being careful. Keep still, woman.’

  I managed to look back once or twice, but soon a grove of trees hid the broken-down lorry and the little group waiting by the line. Farther on, we heard the engine’s outraged whistling. I described Manbir, complete with his liver, standing foursquare in the middle of the line, his hand raised, and the cowcatcher stopping a foot from him, and the heads stuck out of the cab windows, and the shouting and swearing. She began to giggle.

  ‘Two miles of level, and then about ten miles uphill,’ I said. ‘What the hell are you laughing at?’ My mouth was close to her ear, and I wanted to nibble at it, and I did. I said, ‘Lean back on me. It’s more comfortable. It’ll keep us warm, too.’

  She snuggled back againt me. Devra passed behind, and the road left the fields and rolled slowly into scattered trees, into heavy jungle. The sun poured through the trees to make burning red and yellow pools of light in the road, their edges indistinct among blue-green shadows. There weren’t many travellers about. A little naked girl in charge of a flock of goats stared at us from a clearing and ran off to hide herself when we came so close that she could see it really was a new kind of monster that climbed puffing up to her.

  On the climb I leaned rhythmically from side to side to increase my weight on the pedals, and breathed heavily in her ear. She said, ‘Don’t strain yourself, darling.’

  I gasped. ‘I—won’t—I—like—this.’

  She said, ‘You are a babee,’ and I could hardly make the bike go for the ecstasy of loving her. I began to sing, gasping breathlessly, in time with my slow heaves on the pedals. I sang: ‘ “In tropical climes there are certain times of day,” ’ but all I could remember after that was ‘out in the midday sun’, about twenty times over. Away to the right the goods train passed us, labouring out of sight in the jungle. My girl leaned back more comfortably and sang with me.

  ‘Bharru,’ I said after some time and stopped pedalling. She slid off, eased her legs, and smoothed out the seat of her trousers.

  ‘Sore?’ I asked.

  ‘A little,’ she said.

  I said, ‘Let’s get a drink.’ I wheeled the bicycle toward an old man sitting outside his house at the edge of the village. He brought us milk in an earthenware jar. Victoria drank dubiously. It had not been boiled, and I bet she’d been told a thousand times never to drink milk that had not been boiled. Quite right too. I told the
old man about the leopard we were going to shoot, and when he refused payment for the milk I gave him a couple of Trichinopolies. Then Victoria and I sat down under a tree and played scissors-paper-stone for an hour, and afterward dozed off with our backs against the tree for another hour.

  When we set off again the hill seemed steeper. I tried to sing but soon gave up for lack of breath. I said, ‘Oh, why didn’t I fall for a petite little piece, instead of a great healthy lump of female?’ and she made the bike wobble from side to side, and it was like that all the way up.

  Near Pathoda the road and railway came together again. The road curved down to cross a stream which the railway jumped over on a small girder bridge. There had been a derailment there just before I arrived in Bhowani. During the week Manbir and I had come out here and reconnoitred the place for this camp. It had seemed to me then that this valley would be good ground on which to fight my last battle against Patrick Taylor. The gong kept striking—was it seven or eight it had got to?—and I knew this would be the last battle.

  It was not in my mind to use the camp to show Victoria what a fine open-air type I was, and by feats of prowess against our dumb chums invite comparisons between myself and the clumsy Patrick. My hopes were deeper and, I think, truer. I wanted to delete every frame of reference, both hers and mine, so that we could examine each other by nothing but what was in us. This valley was to be our Eden. In the jungle there is neither white nor brown, black nor khaki. In the jungle the history of men doesn’t count; the quality of one man does. I prayed that I had that quality for her.

  I had not thought Patrick was deep enough for her. Now that we had reached the jungle, I was not so sure. The mere fact that he shot animals meant nothing—but those heads were good. To get heads like that you have to spend many hours, many weeks, alone. It might have been the pot-hunter’s lust that drove him—but he had never mentioned his trophies. It might have been incredible good luck—but the words ‘Patrick Taylor’ and ‘good luck’ were not in the same dictionary. If he’d got those heads, with his clumsiness and his unserendipity, he’d got them by will-power, determination, and nothing else.