A Good Soldier

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  He stood panting with Sher Mahommed Khan and Karim Baksh, also gasping for breath. Many dead lay around them. One of Shakuntala’s elderly drivers and three of his own were among them.

  The girls came running, sobbing and crying out. Shakuntala’s arms went around Ramsey and her face, contorted with fear for him, looked up into his.

  She whispered “Lord, are you unharmed?”

  He tossed his sword aside and took her in his embrace, his cheek resting against the crown of her head, making soothing sounds and reassuring her.

  Sher Mahommed Khan said, wonderingly, “I do not understand why they did not use knives or guns. They outnumbered us by so many, they could have killed all three of us with knives or even with clubs.” He stopped and picked up a square of black silk. “Did they really expect to kill us with these flimsy bits of cloth?”

  *

  Four of the drivers were Dom, members of the lowest caste, one of whose tasks was to handle dead bodies. They carried the corpses to the grave the Thag had dug, and filled it in.

  On Ramsey’s orders the others set fire to the Thag’s carts and traps and all their possessions.

  It was only then that he found that while the fight was going on the fleeing Thag had robbed two of his carts and removed some of their merchandise.

  Ramsey, Sher Mahommed Khan and Karim Baksh sat up all night with primed rifles at the ready. Shakuntala shared the vigil at Ramsey’s side.

  Chapter Eight

  Travelling by road, especially when mounted on a good horse and not riding in one of those bone-shaking carts, was a lot pleasanter than being confined on board ship or surrounded by the squalor and smells of a great seaport. But it did not have the clean freshness of life with a train of prairie schooners wending their way across the Western plains.

  Ruth felt confined, as though the whole land were closing in on her. Every day the view was restricted by dense jungle. Whether the forests were ten miles away, beyond the vast flatness of rice or corn fields, pasture and barren earth or within a stone’s throw of the road, they seemed always to be crowding her. There were days when she saw on the horizon a low range of hills; but instead of giving her the urge to reach them and see what lay beyond, they increased the sense of physical and mental imprisonment.

  The air was damp and hot, heavy and clammy, enervating. It made her feel grubby. She longed for the fresh wind of the prairies carrying the good tang of sage and grass, invigorating and clean.

  Many of the farm and ranch buildings she had seen out West were humble, crudely built and sparsely furnished. The families who lived in them were often crowded into a couple of rooms. But the women kept them clean and there was always an air of brave confidence about the people that made her feel they ignored the hardships of the moment because they believed in the future. What was a two-room shack today would assuredly grow into a mansion in a year or two. The Western townships were built of boards and their streets were muddy in wet weather, dusty in dry. The few shops offered little beyond staple necessities. But if a place boasted a hotel or diner, the food was wholesome: rich meat, good vegetables, bread with some real sustenance in it. Wherever she had been, the atmosphere crackled with enthusiasm and aspirations.

  It seemed to her that India wallowed in apathy and hopelessness. The mean villages were clusters of hovels. The people were listless. The odours were appalling. Flies swarmed around every hamlet and isolated dwelling, pestered bullocks and horses, appeared from the trees during a roadside halt. The supplies they bought were execrable: scrawny fowls, scraggy meat, tiny eggs, stringy vegetables. After the first few days they had lived on whatever game they could provide for themselves: deer, peahens, jungle fowl, fish. The fruit was excellent, she allowed. Delicious mangoes, custard apples, guavas. But what wouldn’t she give for a glass of fresh, creamy milk!

  Above all it was the evident despondency and wretchedness she saw on every hand which angered her and was beginning to make her despair.

  Whatever had given her father the notion that he could make their fortune here?

  She and her parents studied assiduously with Mukerji. This and hunting game provided her with her only pleasures. For two or three hours every day, together or separately, they would travel in the cart with the Munshi, learning Hindustani. In the evening the four of them would spend at least an hour together over a lesson. They were making good progress and by the second week were able to make simple exchanges with the servants and drivers.

  Insidiously India was working its way into Ruth’s susceptibilities. She began to look forward to dusk, when they pulled off the road for the night. There was a gratifying sense of achievement and pleasant weariness. So many miles covered, so many new words and rules of grammar mastered. An exhilarating chase across country after a buck and a good shot which brought it down. The quality of the light that seeped over the darkening countryside, the grey-blue sky streaked with yellow at its lower edge. The creeping acrid presence of burning cow dung and wood. The drift of spice from the slab and grinding stone where Bishen squatted among his cooking pots. If they were near a river or a village, the homeward-wending herd of cows or buffaloes in charge of small, often naked, boys. The tolling of cowbells. The day’s last cawing from India’s omnipresent black and white, impudent crows. The long cold drink of fresh lime juice sweetened with the coarse brown palm sugar called gur and diluted with water from an earthenware jar, its exterior kept damp so that evaporation would cool its contents.

  She was storing memories and sensations which she knew she would recall with a certain reluctant fondness; but, just the same, they did not reconcile her to this country. The same doubt recurred daily: what possible advantage could such pervasive poverty and hopelessness offer them?

  There was something else that made her uneasy. She had known danger from the age of 16 when the family had first left Massachusetts and gone out to the wild frontier country. There had been Indian raids on their wagon train and on remote homesteads where they happened to be breaking the journey. There had been hold-ups by masked bandits who ambushed travellers along the prairie and mountain trails. She had become used to having to use a gun to defend her life. Side by side with her mother and father she had had to shoot marauding Indians who were after their goods and their scalps, and white road agents who had held up a stage coach in which they were passengers or waylaid a convoy of wagons in which they were travelling. On this journey she had felt no physical danger but she had experienced an indefinable fear. It was a fear of the unknown and it had grown on her from the moment when she had seen the naked Gosain in Bombay. Three or four times along the road she had noticed, in lonely places, solitary figures sitting cross-legged in apparent contemplation: either naked or wearing a scrap of loincloth. She had seen many Hindu temples, some of them garishly decorated, and heard chanting, smelled incense. She had seen Muslim mosques and heard priests crying the call to prayer. She had passed roadside shrines decorated with flowers and unmistakably dedicated to the worship of the male lingam or female yoni. All this was not only mystifying but also oppressive and awesome in a way in which simple Redskin totem poles, medicine men and crude animal carvings had never been.

  It made her feel that every white person in this country was an intruder. Unwanted, excluded, ridiculed because they could never have access to any of the mystiques which were an essential part of the fabric of native life. She felt both threatened and derided.

  *

  When they pulled off the side of the road to a patch of grass beside a narrow river, they didn’t notice the man with his back against a deodar tree at the far end. He was in shadow and his dingy garments blended into the background.

  For the last two hours the road had crossed a stretch of plain unrelieved by trees or cultivation. When the river came in sight, making a curve towards the road, Whittaker pointed to it.

  “That’ll be a good place to stop a while and have some food.”

  Trees lined the bank at that point. They halted under them and l
ed the horses down to drink while the servants made lunch ready. It was Ruth who saw the man move from beneath his tree a hundred yards away and come towards them.

  “We have company, Mother. And he has all his clothes on.”

  “Ruth! Don’t be coarse.”

  The man stopped to speak to one of the drivers. Mukerji bustled officiously forward and joined them. In a moment he turned towards Ruth and her parents, followed by the stranger.

  “Whittaker Sahib, this man says he is magician and conjuror. He offers to show you trick.”

  “Is he such a magician that he’s been waiting there all morning knowing we’d turn up?”

  Mukerji’s sense of humour did not encompass this and he looked puzzled. He spoke to the conjuror.

  “He says he had premonition important traveller would stop, sir. He is on way to next town, isn’t it.”

  “What’s the trick?”

  “For two rupees he will show.”

  “All right.”

  A further exchange between the Munshi and the magician.

  “Sahib, he says look around and you will see nothing but empty ground, isn’t it. No trees nearby. No house. No birds in these trees here by river.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  “Now we watch him, sir.”

  The conjuror crossed the road to the bare ground on the far side. He carried a stick which he stuck into the earth. He took a blanket from the roll slung on his back and arranged it on and around the stick so that it made a small tent. He squatted by it, cupped his hands in his mouth, inflated his cheeks and blew, producing a shrill, whistling wail. He filled his lungs again and repeated it. He spoke to Mukerji.

  “He says look in that direction, Sahib.”

  Everyone turned to gaze across the open landscape. The conjuror blew into his cupped hands for the third time.

  Ruth felt a prickling sensation in her scalp as she saw a small distant smudge resolve itself into a bird that was flying towards them. A crow landed beside the conjuror, hopped towards the blanket, appeared to peer through the gap between its edges, then hopped away. Again the shrill wailing sound and more birds appeared in the distance. And more. Then scores. In two or three minutes, more than a hundred crows had alighted beside the first one. The conjuror produced his call once more. More crows came flying to him and landed, so that within five or six minutes there were hundreds of them surrounding him.

  He stood up and held out his hands. It was impossible to walk through the mass of crows. Whittaker tossed him two coins. He caught them, tucked them away: clapped his hands and with a rush of air and a noisy flapping of wings the vast flock of crows rose from the ground and scattered. A minute later there was not one in sight.

  Ruth sat down on the grass feeling dizzy.

  “That was weird. I... I wish I hadn’t seen it.”

  *

  Two days later, as night was coming on, they arrived on the outskirts of a town on a low hill beside a small, shallow, reedy lake. They chose not to camp by the lake because of the insects which would infest them during the night and because the hilltop would provide them with welcome coolness. Outside the town they found an open space with trees on two sides, to make camp.

  During the last hour or so, Mukerji, the servants and drivers had been talking to other travellers and Mukerji said to Whittaker “There is big fair here... new word for you to learn, sir... mela... that is fair. Very interesting for you to see, Sahib. I will go and fetch tonga or tikka gari, take you and Memsahib and Miss-Sahib to see, after dinner.”

  The fair occupied about an acre of dusty ground. There were a few tents and areas fenced off by canvas screens where dancing girls, jugglers, conjurors, wrestlers, acrobats and performing dogs, a dancing bear and a puppeteer displayed their skills. A strong smell of humanity was almost enough to deter the Whittakers from venturing into the throng.

  On the fringe of the fair two heavily tattooed men sat on the ground beside a tray of metal instruments, pigments and vividly coloured pictures: butterflies, birds, bees, gods and goddesses. One of them held a thin chain attached to a small, sad-looking monkey in scarlet jacket and red-and-gilt embroidered pillbox cap.

  Ruth stopped. “Look at that poor little creature. Can’t we buy it, Daddy, and let it go free?”

  The monkey, as soon as they stopped to look at it, began to dance a jig. Its eyes were dull and forlorn. Its owners grinned up at them. The monkey turned somersaults and back flips, walked on its hands and beat on a tambourine.

  Mukerji made a clucking noise and shook his head, his jowls wobbling. “Very bad peoples, Miss-Sahib. Kaikadi, always they have performing monkey and are doing tattooing. Also are dacoits, violent peoples. Coming to mela to rob, isn’t it. Tonight we tell chaukidar to keep eyes i-skinned. If two Kaikadi are here, many more here also.”

  Whittaker threw a coin into the velvet cap the monkey had taken off and was holding out to him. “Tell this fellow I’ll give him ten rupees to let the poor animal go. You can also tell him if he and his friends come anywhere near our camp I’ll blast their heads off.”

  “He will take money, Sahib, and cheat you.”

  The other Kaikadi was making cheeky gestures to Constance and Ruth, offering to tattoo them.

  Whittaker turned on his heel. “Come on, let’s go before I lose my temper and hit this fellow.”

  They pushed their way through the throng, Mukerji forcing a passage ahead of them.

  Constance exhaled with a sound of disgust and held her handkerchief to her nose. “I don’t think I want to stay here.”

  Mukerji peered back over his shoulder, a picture of dejection and disappointment. “Memsahib, there is holy man here can perform marvellous things. You see, Memsahib, then we go. Please.”

  Without waiting for an answer he hurried them to a tent in which lamplight glowed. A youth in a dhoti stood at the closed entrance. A crowd of apparently aimless lookers-on wearing vacuous expressions, hawking and spitting, chewing and expectorating betel nut, stood around.

  Mukerji spoke to the youth, who went into the tent.

  “We wait three, two, one minute, Sahib... Memsahib... Miss-Sahib. Please to wait. You will not be disappointed. This man very holy yogi.”

  Two prosperous-looking men emerged presently, followed by the youth, who beckoned to Mukerji.

  “Come, please, now to go inside.”

  A gaunt man sat with his legs crossed on a palm-leaf mat. There was a day’s growth of grey stubble on his face. He wore a dhoti which was arranged so that a fold covered his head and half his chest was left bare. He stared at them unwaveringly for almost a minute before speaking or moving. Then he picked up a low table at his side and proffered it to them. Mukerji took it. The man said a few words and Mukerji turned the table over, examined both the top and the underside.

  “The yogi says we must examine table carefully to be sure he is not playing tricks.”

  Whittaker took the table from the Munshi and also turned it around. “Looks like an ordinary table to me.” Mukerji replaced it on the ground.

  The Yogi picked up four small wax dolls with legs of plaited straw and feet of metal discs, and placed them on the table. He asked Mukerji to move it beyond his reach. With arms folded he began to talk to the dolls. Presently he gave a command and the four dolls slid in unison some inches forward. He gave another command and they gyrated completely about their axis. Another sharp word and they moved in different directions.

  Ruth again felt the strange sensation she had experienced on the day of the crows. Her scalp tingled and her stomach muscles cramped.

  The yogi picked up a short bamboo and began to move it as though conducting music. The dolls hopped up and down in time with his beat. He stopped, took the dolls off the table and again asked the watchers to pick it up and examine it. He replaced the dolls and looked up at Ruth. She felt hot and uncomfortable but did not flinch. She saw his lips move and heard his voice.

  Mukerji said “Miss-Sahib, the yogi wants you to
point to any part of the table.”

  She raised her hand and indicated a corner. Several seconds passed, then slowly the dolls grouped together and slid in that direction. She pointed elsewhere and again they followed her finger. And a third time. The yogi carefully placed the dolls on the ground. He spoke to Mukerji.

  “Sahib, please to put one rupee on table.”

  When Whittaker had placed the coin there was another pause of about half a minute before it suddenly began to slide and hop towards the yogi. It reached the edge of the table and fell into his hand. He spoke again, his eyes on Ruth. Mukerji translated.

  “Miss-Sahib, please to take off the ring and put on table.”

  Ruth took off the gold ring set with a small opal she wore on her right hand and with trembling fingers laid it on the table. The yogi spoke sharply, one word, and the ring rose from the table then fell back. He repeated the word, the ring again rose an inch and clinked back onto the wood. He took a small, shallow drum like a tambourine in his left hand and with his right played a simple rhythm on it. The ring jigged about in time with the rapping of his fingers on the taut drumskin.

  Ruth felt dazed. She put out a hand to steady herself against her father and he slipped an arm about her waist. The yogi stopped playing, the gold ring lay still. He held it out to her on the palm of his hand and smiled.

  Mukerji murmured “Sahib, I think two rupees more for yogi is merited abundantly.”

  “I’m astonished he has to ask me for it. After what we’ve seen, I’d expect him to spirit it out of my pocket for himself.”

  Mukerji looked as baffled by this occidental irony as Ruth and her parents were by oriental magic, mysticism or hypnosis; or whatever it was.

  *

  They entered Zafarala by ferry many miles to the west of the point where Ramsey had crossed the river, two and a half days still from Nekshahr. They had been on the road for nearly four weeks.

  The country here was barren, the soil and rocks were of harsh shades between orange and ochre. Despite the heavy rains, the fierce intervals of sunshine quickly dried the road and clouds of dust rose from wheels, hoofs and trudging feet.