To The Coral Strand

by John Masters

  She watched the little Austin drive down the road, and slow to a crawl as it reached the outskirts of the crowd. Soon it was engulfed.

  Colonel Savage a sort of a spy, a secret agent of Chambal... It would fit what she had heard about him in the old days; but somehow it didn’t fit the new Savage, dancing and singing in that crowd there, the Savage of Pattan. This man seemed to be withdrawing from power, rather than meddling with it. She had not sensed any intrigue. What annoyed her was a feeling that he exerted a secret pull, like that of a hidden magnet, back towards the jungle, and a barbaric, sensual past. It was a strong pull, and it seemed to affect everyone who could be reached by the power of his personality, or his money. It affected her.

  His first batch of clients was coming any day now, she had heard. She wondered how it would go. It would certainly be nothing like the African safaris one read about...

  She glanced at the little chapel down the road. Henry’s grave was indistinguishable from those of his converts now. Sometimes there were only two people at Sunday morning prayer service. Henry had ordained her a lay preacher during his long illness, and she did her best to feel the inspiration ... but how could she guide souls when her own floated lost and desolate, here in the jungle, unable to go, without purpose to stay?

  Now they wanted her to be a spy. It sounded exciting. She would write secret messages, pay secret calls on the tehsildar at Sabora, creep stealthily through the jungle to Pattan and, unseen, watch Rodney Savage’s intrigues. Angrily she kicked a small stone off the veranda. What would Henry have said? No one would have suggested it to him. He was incapable of doing any work but God’s. The affairs of man had meant nothing to him.

  The sun was setting behind the Chambal hills to the west. Soon it would be dark. Time to check the oil in the lamps, and the wicks, and see whether the buffalo milk had curdled in the pantry, and read another chapter of the Bible, and pray, and wonder, and wait.

  Chapter 6

  March, 1949. The intrepid white hunter strode tirelessly across the rolling hills, the topi shading his keen handsome face from the tropical sun. His clothes were well worn but, oh, so obviously the work of a West End tailor, and his fingernails were clean, for Colonel Savage, O.B.E., M.C., late of His Majesty’s Indian Army, was first, last, and all the time a gentleman, and could no more be found with dirty fingernails than the Holy Roller down in Lapri could be dragged out from under a bus and, horror of horrors, have it revealed that the corpse was wearing off-white drawers. At the Colonel’s heels trotted his faithful native servants, doglike devotion written all over their inscrutable Oriental faces ...

  I was wearing a pair of khaki shorts and Bandelkhand slippers, as a matter of fact. Chadi, Mitoo, and Ganesha wore slippers and loincloths, mere ball bags. I’d have worn the same if I’d thought we might run into the Holy Roller, but that didn’t seem likely, and I prefer shorts. That woman hated me and I resented it. Hated, feared, and despised me. The unreason of it haunted me, so that I’d see her face in my imagination, wearing a number of expressions I’d never seen it wearing in real life - compassion, amusement, speculation. Very odd, in spite of her auburn hair and fine race-horse thighs.

  It kept drizzling a warm rain, and I tried to think of Sumitra, to keep my mind off being tired. The sweat and rain ran salt into my mouth. My legs and chest and face were thorn-scratched and bleeding in a dozen places. My stomach felt empty as a drum, the skin drawn back from the front against my backbone by a sheer sucking emptiness, and my mouth like a pot of stale glue. Not a sight of game all day, and now we were almost home again - only about four miles to go.

  Yesterday we’d done thirty-five miles, from Pattan to the Gond village of Bhilghat. I’d sat up most of the night with Gulu the chief, arranging to get their help in producing game for my clients. The Gonds live so close to nature that they can do almost anything with wild animals. Now we were on our way back, another thirty-five miles. And Sumitra probably arrived yesterday, expecting to find me there ...

  All this because of the weather. Six days of rain now, to ruin scent, drive the animals to shelter, reduce visibility - just before my first clients came. Weather bad, crops bad. I knew the crops had been bad, but I didn’t know quite how bad until a month or so ago when I found a child, a little girl of eight, lying in the path between the Rest House and Pattan village, almost in front of the old temples. She was starving to death, and had fainted. I carried her into the Rest House and fed her up, and swore I’d eat the same as the poorest people in Pattan until I really knew what it was like to starve. I found the poorest family in the village, and for a week ate exactly what they ate, no more, no less. Then I took my rifle and started poaching game for the village to eat. It might have been more helpful to give them some money, or go and beg grain from the Holy Roller - she had a few rupees for such charity, I believe - or go and tell Ranjit the D.C. ... but life isn’t all sense, thank God. These were my people and we were going to come through it together, by our own efforts.

  Chadi, Mitoo, and Ganesha were the faithful natives, trotting at my heels. Actually they were padding along in slow time, almost as dead beat as I - not quite, because they were all three typical hill-men from the Vindhyas, wiry, no surplus flesh, the skin tight on the bones but wrinkled at the joints, legs like match sticks with lengths of dark muscle cord wrapped over the bone and knotted here and there.

  Chadi saw the stag first and touched my bare elbow. We all stopped. The stag was a monster, one of the best heads I’ve ever seen. He was feeding near the edge of the escarpment. Behind him the land dropped sharply away to the Shakkar valley, the Rest House, and the cart track from Pattan to Lapri. By then we were less than a mile from Pattan. The rain slanted gently from the northwest, not quite from the stag towards us, but diagonally. We sank down, the four of us, and stared at the stag. The three experts sniffed the air, looked at the trees, felt the earth. I couldn’t help thinking, what a trophy! I could leave one of the men to mark his movements, and give H. Huntington Blauvelt or Lord Hillburn a near-record head - their first day. And we would still eat the carcass. My mouth began to water and my jaw to ache. No, this was food. Patten needed food, and I couldn’t afford to risk losing it.

  I wanted to shoot at once, but the beast was a good six hundred yards off, moving in and out among scrub teak and scattered bijasals. A flame-of-the-forest tree spread a kind of dull, wet- sheened scarlet light over him for a moment and my heart cried, don’t fire, he lives here too, he walks these hills, and feels the earth underfoot, and the sun on his back, and smells the jungle at night, and caresses the does clustering round him. Then my jaw hurt more and saliva squirted out suddenly into the corner of my mouth and it hurt so much that I bit my tongue to avoid groaning aloud.

  Chadi and Ganesha, the oldest and the youngest of the three, slipped away to the left. I understood well enough. They intended to drop over the edge of the escarpment and work along the slope below the stag until they were upwind of him. They’d have to get pretty close, in this weather. Then he’d raise his head and start moving, more or less towards me. We must not let him turn across the wind and down towards the Rest House, which he might easily do with the scent so indecisive and occasionally distorted by rain flurries.

  When the others had been gone ten minutes Mitoo slipped away from my side. He would follow in their path, but closer to the top of the escarpment. When the stag began to move, he would come up to the crest line and show himself. No, that would be too crude. He would move subtly, make a noise that might mean anything, not enough to frighten the stag, enough to puzzle him. I had to remember that their hunting methods were based on the bow and arrow, and even the spear. They had no firearms, except one old blunderbuss in the village, which the government allowed them for the watchman. Nor could they afford cartridges.

  I knelt beside a pterocarpus, my body hidden behind the bole, and watched the stag. My rifle was cocked now and I kept nervously examining the sights. Suppose I had hit a rock with the foresight sometime, an
d not noticed it? Suppose I’d bent the backsight against a tree trunk?

  The stag flung up his head and stared west, towards the edge of the escarpment. He took a couple of steps in that direction - away from me. My heart sank and my throat contracted in pain. None of the men were carrying any weapon but the long-handled hatchet.

  The stag began to move along the edge of the escarpment. Now was the bad time. He was moving away from Chadi and Ganesha, but would not reach Mitoo for another couple of minutes. He only had to take a couple of steps to the right and he’d disappear over the edge. I had the sights on him, but there was no strength in my arms, and the rifle barrel wavered and swung so that sometimes I could see all of him above the foresight, sometimes the barrel blocked him out altogether, and bushes and trees kept obscuring him.

  He went on, fast but not trotting, his head high, suspicion in the curve of his back and the set of his tail and the carriage of his great head. Another minute and I began to feel easier. He would be almost directly above Mitoo now.

  He jerked his head sideways, stopped dead for a fraction of a second, then turned and trotted straight towards me. After a hundred yards his trot eased to a walk and he stopped, turned again. Another bad time - if he continued now in his original direction he’d disappear into a patch of thicker jungle, still nearly 500 yards away.

  Mitoo appeared, rather to the left of where he must have been when he made his little sound. He stood now between the stag and the stand of dense jungle. The stag swung heavily round and broke into a full gallop. He passed me at thirty yards, and I hit him exactly behind the point of the left elbow. He dived head first on to his nose and never moved again, his head ploughing through the fallen leaves like a bulldozer, the horns remaining spread and upright.

  They came, running, dancing, waving their axes in the air. I threw down my rifle and grabbed two by the waist, and we danced round the corpse, yelling. I broke it up by grabbing Ganesha’s arm and shaking him. ‘Run down to the village,’ I shouted, ‘and bring men to carry the stag. We cannot manage it by ourselves.’

  Ganesha ran off, a huge grin splitting his dark narrow face. The two older men stopped their prancing, and we went slowly down over the edge of the escarpment towards Pattan.

  We came in on a game trail that passes half a mile behind the temples, and about there met Ganesha and a dozen men carrying long bamboo poles, all trotting up the path and chanting a vigorous song: Question from Ganesha in front, ‘Who saw the stag?’ Response from the crowd behind, ‘Who saw the stag, wah!’ Then, in chorus:

  ‘Chadi saw the stag, Chadi saw the stag, wah!

  The Gora Raja waited, the Gora Raja waited, wah!

  The Gora Raja fired, wah!

  We shall eat, we shall eat, wah!’

  Gora Raja means Pale Face King. That was me, and it was the best title, the sweetest in my ears, of any that I’d ever held. No one awarded it to me. I earned it.

  We entered the village at about half past five in heavy rain. All the small boys ran out, shrieking and dancing and singing round me. I gave one of them my rifle to carry, and he put it on his shoulder and marched beside me like a bodyguard. I soon had a naked little girl in each hand and another riding on my shoulders, her thin legs clasped round my neck and her fists beating a tattoo on the top of my head. Their mothers and elder sisters were out, too, some smiling from the doorways, a couple of girls running out and throwing hurriedly made garlands round my neck. Mitoo’s wife hugged me, and I held her naked waist with one arm and cried to Mitoo, ‘Hey, this one wants to fornicate in the street in broad daylight. No wonder you look so tired.’

  Mitoo yelled, ‘She is a bottomless pit! She would like to be one of the stone women at the temples!’

  The Pattan temples were covered with statues of communal love-making. For some time the near-famine had been scraping layers of repression and layers of modern organisation off the villagers. The temples and the kind of communal life they portrayed was now, again, very near the actuality. There wasn’t a mixture of poverty and wealth. Everyone was the same - poor. One man’s poverty or starvation affected everyone, because everyone shared in it. One man’s good fortune affected everyone the same way, just as they were all dancing and laughing now. It was not at all hard to see in the present excitement, caused by the prospect of eating meat, that desire also would affect everyone. It only required a small step - forward or backward - for it, too, to be equally shared.

  When we reached the headman’s house the whole population of the village, about four hundred, was with us, except the men who had gone back up the hill. Lok Chand, the headman, came out of his little house, his wife behind him. They were both short, and usually cheerful, though they were no richer than anyone else. They both used to be fat, but had lost many pounds during the lean spell.

  I called out to Lok Chand that we had killed a stag and he said, ‘Do you think there is anyone here who doesn’t know that? How shall I divide it?’

  ‘The usual way,’ I said. ‘I do not want anything for myself.’

  His wife pushed through the crowd, holding a brass jar of warm milk, and gave it to me. I drank some and passed it to Chadi, who drank and passed it to Mitoo. Everyone in Pattan was the same caste, a Sivaite sect of Sudras, except the village Brahmin. I had long ago been elected an honorary Sudra too, inasmuch as that mattered here. As the Brahmin and I had discussed several times, the Hinduism of Pattan seemed in many ways to be pre-Brahmin, Tantric and Rudric. Max had noticed it and commented on it during his visit in December.

  I noticed that a couple of the older villagers who had been squatting outside the headman’s house - combined hovel and byre would be a better word - were now arguing fiercely with each other, waving their arms, shaking their palms in the air, and gabbling away at high speed, though they kept their voices low. I called over the heads of the crowd, ‘What is this, brothers? Should we quarrel when there is food?’

  The two stopped, rather shamefaced, and the headman said, ‘It is the old land dispute, sahib.’

  ‘Are you two still quarrelling over five square yards of rock and one thornbush?’ I cried. Everyone laughed. Lok Chand said, ‘There is no bringing them to reason. I shall have to ask the Deputy Commissioner Sahib to settle it when he comes next.’

  ‘The Deputy Commissioner?’ I said. ‘What do we in Pattan need of him? Can we not settle our affairs by ourselves? Come here, brothers.’ The two men came forward. ‘It’s that piece of land at the southeast corner of your maize field, eh?’ I said to one.

  ‘At the southwest corner of my maize field,’ the other said.

  ‘My father ...’

  ‘My uncle ...’

  ‘Who were one and the same person,’ I bellowed. ‘Shut up! ... Listen, will you accept my judgment? It will be either mine or the Sikh’s. Make up your minds.’

  The two old fools looked at each other. They spoke simultaneously. ‘We will abide by your judgment, Gora Raja.’

  ‘All right. Give me a coin, Lok Chand.’ Lok Chand ran back into his house. Coinage wasn’t used much in that village, where payments were made by exchange or barter or in kind. He came out with a two-anna piece. ‘You,’ I pointed to one of the old men, ‘you will call either heads or tails when I flip this coin in the air. If you call it correct, the land will belong to you, but you will lease it to the other, without rental payment, for a period of ten years from this moment. If you call wrong, the opposite ... Call.’

  He called wrong. ‘It is settled,’ I said.

  ‘It is settled,’ they said gravely. Their old wives appeared from nowhere, beaming at each other - they’d been glaring and glowering like little old witches for the past three months and more. I covered my eyes with the palm of my hand and cried, ‘Those eyes! Take me away before I faint from desire.’ More shrieking and cackling. I could have kissed them all.

  I beckoned Lok Chand. ‘Come with me a little way ...’ We walked on between the houses, the crowd still with us. It was something like those old pre-war n
ewsreels of Hitler entering Vienna or the Prince of Wales in the Welsh coal valleys: take your pick. I’d had the little naked girl wrapped round my neck all the time, and wondered whether any previous Solon gave his judgments wearing such a becoming scarf. I lowered her, smacked her behind, and told her to go home. She ran off, laughing.

  ‘Listen, friend,’ I said to Lok Chand. ‘That stag is a big one, but it will not go far among four hundred. Tomorrow, leave behind in the village all the men I shall need as beaters and shikaris. Take a party of the rest to Bhilghat, and fish in the lakes.’

  Lok Chand cried, ‘The Gonds will kill us, sahib!’

  I said, ‘No, they won’t. I have their chief’s promise. Once a week, until your new crops ripen, you may take two hundred pounds of fish from their lakes and rivers.’

  Lok Chand said, ‘Sahib, in this weather not even our best fishermen will catch anything.’

  I whispered in his ear. ‘Dynamite. I have it and the detonators at the Rest House. Grimoo and Maldi and Taharu have all worked at the Sabora quarries, and know something of the business.’

  Lok Chand dropped back, his palms joined. He had a deep sense of responsibility for his village, and usually no means to discharge that responsibility, being as helpless as the rest of them in the face of natural calamity and hardship. He was a good man.

  By then we were almost at the temples. I went up the steps on to the great platform, followed by about half the original crowd - the rest had drifted back into the village. I took off my battered little garlands, kicked off my slippers, and went into the temple with the great red phallus, and hung the garlands carefully round the head of it. Most of the others came forward after me, with flowers they’d picked along the track, and green twigs, whatever they had in their hands, and laid their offerings at the base of the phallus.