To The Coral Strand

by John Masters

  Then we all looked at each other awhile, smiling in contentment, and I waved my hand and went on towards the Rest House. They, my people, turned back towards Pattan.

  Sumitra was standing on the veranda when I came round the last bend in the track. She was wearing slim-cut fawn slacks of drill and a pale-blue silk blouse, with a wide belt and a big silver buckle. I went slowly up the steps to her, dirty and wet and smelling of woodsmoke and sweat. She held out a tall cold glass of lemonade. ‘Congratulations. I hear it was a beauty.’

  I nodded, busy drinking the lemonade.

  ‘Too good for your clients,’ she said. She laughed. ‘Really, Rodney, you are impossible. Don’t you have any sense of self- preservation?’

  I didn’t answer that, but I said, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here. Things got urgent and I had to go.’

  She said, ‘Don’t worry. It was nice being alone for a change.’

  It was getting dark under the rain clouds and Ratanbir had appeared to take the rifle from my hand. ‘Ghusl tayyar chha,’ he said, saluting. I needed a bath more than anything just then, so I went in, with a word of apology to Sumitra.

  Half an hour later, clean-scrubbed and dressed in a thin black dinner jacket and white trousers, I rejoined her. The butler brought us whisky and soda, and hot meat titbits to nibble on.

  I said, ‘I thought Dip was coming with you again.’

  She said, ‘He was. Then something turned up - a sudden visit by the Grand Wazir of Chambal. Dip had to stay.’

  ‘Chambal?’ I said. ‘Oh, more bribes and threats, I suppose.’

  She said, ‘I suppose so ... I had hell getting across the border yesterday, you know. The Chambal police practically turned my car, and all my luggage, inside out. It’s that speech the Nawab made.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. Three days ago the Nawab of Chambal had made a fierce radio speech, all about how the great, ancient independent, and sovereign kingdom of Chambal would take no nonsense from anyone. And that was in response to a speech by L. P. Roy in Delhi, who’d said that India’s patience was not inexhaustible, that India could not stand by for ever with folded hands while the Chambal despots threw democracy-loving citizens into jail and forced Hindus to eat beef at bayonet point.

  ‘A pox on both your houses,’ I said rather irritably. It didn’t require much nous to realise that here at Pattan, peaceably going about my business, I was nevertheless in the firing line. Max had obviously done some snooping while on his shooting trip, and doubtless even now some Chambal general, bent over a map in Chambalpur, was announcing ‘We’ll stop them here’ - with a large forefinger covering the words ‘Lapri’ and ‘Pattan’.

  ‘Aren’t you going to take sides?’ Sumitra asked. ‘Or perhaps you already have?’ Outwardly she looked very un-Indian, like a sun-tanned French brunette just in from riding round the grounds of her chateau. But her eyes, and the particular pose she adopted, relaxed in the long chair, and the set of her head, were pure Indian. Then there was something peculiarly Sumitra, special to her, which I recognised at once even though I’d seen her only three times: her eyes were alert, examining, and set, in the way a trigger is set, ready to go tock and set off a propellant charge of enormous power.

  I wanted that charge to go off, aimed at me, though I knew it would be dangerous. I was lonely, and, busy as I kept myself, I could not prevent Janaki and Victoria Jones coming to me in my dreams - only to look at me with the helpless, puzzled look of people who see each other out of trains in a station, and then the trains begin to move in opposite directions, leaving me more lonely, more in need.

  I said, ‘No, I am not going to take sides.’ I added in Hindi, ‘I am a poor man of Pattan. Let the mighty ones fight over my head while I cultivate the soil.’

  I reached out my hand, took hers, and said, ‘I hope you’ve come to sleep with me.’

  She let her hand lie in mine, and her eyes kept on mine, but the trigger notion was not in them so strongly now, or perhaps not at all, just a mirror-like self-inquiry.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I don’t think so.’

  I had a right to ask her, bluntly and without a gavotte of preparation. That first night she came to the Rest House and stayed the night - she and the two girls from Pattan. If I hadn’t already seen Khajuraho and the Pattan temples I would have been hard put to it to know how to comport myself in such a situation. As it was, everything fitted into place, not only physically but spiritually. By morning my body was drained clean of any animal emotion whatever - love, hate, jealousy, anxiety, what have you. This was the original design: after the orgy those medieval Hindus went thus, empty, to the temple, to understand God. And so I had gone, empty, to Delhi.

  She said, ‘I have never slept with a cultivator of the soil.’

  ‘Quelle snob!’ I said; but it had always been clear that a man’s mental state, his condition of tension and effort, what one might call being strung like a bow against his fate, meant more to her than the physical side. Her way and walk of life had not brought her into contact with a cultivator in rebellion against the soil, that was all. I was no longer in rebellion, and was digging my way into Pattan and rural Indian life so fast that in a year or two there’d be nothing left of me visible above ground.

  She turned away her brilliant eyes and spoke to the night. ‘I can see you want to fall in love. I don’t wish to act as a substitute for Janaki, much as I admire her. And it wouldn’t do you much good either, would it?’

  Dip Rao, her husband, was a friend of mine and always had been, though we had not seen much of each other since boyhood. In the Western world, and in the old days, twinges of guilt would have assailed me about sleeping with a close friend’s wife, but Sumitra’s original kindness had altered that, at least in respect of her, and life in Pattan had confirmed the change. Here, in the pattern that seemed to be modelling itself on the ancient temple statuary, you slept only with friends’ wives. After all, it is a situation which calls for a lot of understanding, sympathy, and affection.

  ‘You have those two girls, I suppose, for your needs?’ she said.

  ‘Kunthi and Devi? I have been teaching them what I know of hygiene, sanitation, and elementary first aid. I think the village needs something like that. But I have not had them professionally since Sabora, in spite of the Holy Roller’s tales to the contrary.’

  She sank her hand on mine and squeezed it, ‘Oh, Rodney, you are a fool! Why do you try to hurt yourself?’

  She was as sharp as a razor. However energetically I sank into the life of Pattan I could not conceal from myself that something vital was missing; and that something was a woman of intelligence and power to share my secret life and thoughts. It was a desperate lack, and because of it I could not bring myself to waste my substance, the substance of my loneliness and need, on the frivolity of sheer fornication.

  ‘This is impossible,’ she said suddenly. She pulled her hand away and got up. ‘I never thought it would be as hard as this. I’m going.’

  She ran into the bungalow. It was nearly seven. She had 120 miles to go to Kishanpur. Well, she could always stop the night with Max and Janaki in Bhowani. She came out carrying a small suitcase.

  I got up. ‘Good-bye,’ she said. ‘Will you promise me something, Rodney? Send for those two girls. If you’re going to give up the rest of the world, do it thoroughly. Otherwise - you’ll get torn in pieces... Oh, I passed our elephants on the road. They’ll be here tomorrow morning.’

  She held out her hand and I raised it to my lips. A moment later she had slid behind the wheel of the Rolls shooting brake, and the lights came on, shining down the long avenue of the forest road to Lapri, and shining on the place by the stream, near the Irish bridge, where I had doused the Holy Roller with water, and then the red tail light shone dim and dimmer and she was gone.

  After a long silent time, sitting slumped in the chair, I stirred myself and called for a double whisky. The rain clouds seemed to be lifting and perhaps my clients would not get soaked ev
ery day, though conditions would still be most unpromising. Tomorrow they’d arrive, Lord and Lady Poop, Mr J. Theophilus Hackenschmidt, Mr and Mrs whatever their bloody names were. My purpose in being here, my original object in becoming involved so closely with Pattan, was to prepare for them, and yet ever since the first preparations began, the clients had been taking shape in my mind as intruders.

  The stretch of grass beside the Rest House, that had once been empty, was covered with big tents. Tomorrow I must move out into one of them myself. It wouldn’t do for the clients to live in tents while the White Hunter, the paid servant, slept under a roof. We would use the Rest House for dining, bar, and common-room purposes. The servants’ quarters and other smaller tents alongside them were full of servants. We had a Goanese butler and a Goanese cook, Carlos and Francis, respectively, and half a dozen bearers, plus sweepers and bhistis from Pattan. None of the men from outside was happy, and I’d had to pay vast sums to get them. The kind of servant who is at home in the jungle is apt to look primitive to the eyes of people straight from England or America - like my mother’s old sweeper in Manali, who’d stride through the drawing-room while she was having a tea party, a full chamber pot in his hand, crying genially, ‘Going to empty piss-paat, memsahib!’ Conversely, such men as these, who knew how to handle all the complicated requirements of tourists, hated and feared the jungle. So they, even though Indians, were intruders too.

  Tomorrow the rape would become final, the actual violation of Pattan. The peace would be broken, the enclosed entity shattered. I felt as though I were holding down a little girl, perhaps the naked nine-year-old who had ridden wrapped round my neck through the village just now, and guiding some ignorant foreign sod into her secret place. I felt terribly lonely, and for a moment fought against a frantic desire to send for Kunthi and Devi. Then my deeper longing won, and I called instead for dinner to be served at once.

  The next morning dawned well, and the elephants arrived. These were half a dozen State elephants belonging to Dip Rao. He had to use them for ceremonial processions during Holi and again in October, for Dussehra. The rest of the time he was lending them to me, free of charge - in fact he was paying for their upkeep. I had promised to pay him back when we got going properly.

  Later the first clients arrived. The hired cars made the journey from Bhowani Junction, where I went to meet the mail train, with only one puncture and no mechanical breakdowns. The clients rolled happily along with many Ohs! and Ahs! at the sight of the Romantic Orient. They thought the Rest House picturesque, the tents thrilling, and the servants amusing. At dinner the roast lamb was dreadful, but liberal lubrication with champagne did its work and by the end of the evening we all knew each other pretty well.

  There were five of them - Lord and Lady Hillburn, Mr and Mrs Wilson, and H. Huntington Blauvelt. Hillburn was a shortish, fat fellow with a paunch and a face like a butcher’s. The peeress - Cynthia, she told us to call her - was several inches taller, a natural blonde, long face, long legs, small breasts, hard blue eyes. She was obviously the boss, and the better athlete of that pair.

  The Americans were the other way round. George Wilson was a rugged six-foot specimen, about forty-five, black hair cut short, an oil man from Wyoming. He assured me three times that his company had no connection whatever with teapots, and never did have. Baffled but polite, I agreed, and then he relaxed. His hunting equipment was workmanlike, and I enjoyed his manner. His weakness was an excessive fondness for his wife, Mother, as he called her. Dot Wilson was just what you’d have expected, a little plump friendly woman, totally unused to the wilds.

  H. Huntington Blauvelt was the really important member of the group as far as we were concerned. Who hasn’t read The Doughboy and the Duchess? Well, I hadn’t until a month before, but apparently everyone else in the world had, certainly everyone in the U.S.A., and even I had heard of it. He wrote it in 1919, and followed it with three or four flops - (John Clayton got all this from the Indian Government and they from the consulate in New York) and then he more or less disappeared from view, though making millions writing scripts in Hollywood, until the 1930’s, when he emerged as a writer on shooting. Some of these later books I had read - King of the Icefloes, Safari, An American Hunter. Then he’d been a war correspondent, and just a couple of years ago had written something called Return to the Duchess ... He’d had numerous wives, and looked like Apollo - thirty years on. He was bald but wore a toupee, not a very good one. His skin was a peculiar grey shade, odd in a man who spent so much time out of doors. He had blurred grey-blue eyes and a fine sensitive mouth.

  Then there was John Clayton, come down to assist me in dealing with this first and all-important batch of clients. Frances sent her best wishes, he said. After that we did not mention her again.

  We went to bed about eleven o’clock. The clients were excited, and I was keyed up. The next day we were kicking off with a tiger hunt on elephants.

  Came the dawn. I checked that the clients had been awakened with chota hazri, and went back to the kitchen to see that breakfast was coming along. All well. I found the chief mahout in charge of the elephants. Work in progress there.

  By 7.0 a.m. we had finished breakfast, but Blauvelt hadn’t appeared. I went to his tent. He was lying in the camp bed, his face greyer than ever. His mouth twisted slightly when I entered, and he motioned wearily to the bedside table, where there was a glass of water and four bottles of pills. ‘I’m sorry, Colonel... a touch of the old fever.’

  ‘What a shame,’ I said. The place stank of whisky, and I knew, if I looked, I’d see an empty bottle under the bed.

  ‘It always does this to me,’ he said. ‘Been suffering with it since ‘24, when I went to Uganda.’

  ‘Damned shame,’ I said. Blauvelt’s eyes flicked on to mine, passed by. He knew that I knew. One observed the amenities.

  ‘I’ll probably be all right tomorrow, maybe even this afternoon. The temperature usually goes down in the afternoon,’ he said.

  I nodded and slipped out. I’d have to rearrange the groupings on the elephants.

  The elephants appeared, swinging round the corner of the Rest House in single file. They knelt and we climbed up into the how- dahs on a little stepladder. I put myself on the lead elephant, with Lady Hillburn; Hillburn and Dot Wilson on the second; George Wilson and John Clayton on the third. Two spare elephants followed. Everyone had a good heavy rifle except Dot Wilson, who said, quite rightly, that she couldn’t lift it. Naturally, John and I were not going to shoot except in emergency.

  We rolled off down the drive, on to the cart track, left towards Pattan. The mahouts sagged comfortably on the elephants’ necks. Everyone except John and me was wearing a huge quilted sola topi. Cynthia Hillburn wore a daringly cut bush shirt and khaki slacks.

  We rolled majestically past the old temples, and Cynthia looked at the carvings with a clinical sort of interest. On through Pattan, where what was left of the population (half the men were out as beaters) lined the muddy path to watch us pass. Kunthi and Devi stood in a doorway in Kunthi’s parents’ house, looking very sexy. Lok Chand came out, made salaam, and told me the beaters had left two hours earlier. Chadi would meet me at the rendezvous and confirm that all was in order.

  We heaved on, a convoy of little ships in line in the great ocean of the jungle. We passed a small lake set among red rocks, and there was a man burning brushwood on the far side. Two pictures came together before my eyes, unconnected in time or space but superimposed now by a combination of stimuli - I saw Rifleman Jitbahadur Gurung, dead the previous evening from a tribesman’s rifle bullet through the chest, lying on a rough platform of logs. Nearby the battalion Brahmin intoned a prayer. My company subadar squatted beside me, and the flames were beginning to rise from the pyre. That picture was from 1937. Behind and in that picture there was the water of a lake, not this one, another, but it was water, and a pale grey-green light along the horizon, and I waited with shotgun ready. Above the crackle of the logs, where Jitbahadur
burned in the first picture, I heard the whirring wings of the wild duck flighting, and felt my orderly stiffen behind me, and we crouched deeper into the reeds. That was a cold-weather dawn in the Punjab - 1936 perhaps?

  The elephant rolled on.

  But where else had I smelled the incense burning, and rich oils on a flame? I saw a man and a woman in gorgeous clothes kneeling over a brazier, and the flames leaping up red on to his face. The girl kept her head down and her sari drawn far forward, and I saw nothing of her skin. Hand in hand, round and round the fire they went in the ceremony of marriage. Now, as before, a second picture superimposed - this time a long file of men and women struggling up a stony path, a strong cold river beside them. Where was that? Why so many old men with sticks, and old women carried on beds on the shoulders of coolies?

  ‘Badrinath,’ I cried, ‘the pilgrim road to Badrinath!’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  The peeress was staring at me. Hard as a bar of steel, I thought. I must make sure she got at least two good trophies, or she would see that the word went round - Savage is a fake.

  I said, ‘Sorry. My mind was wandering.’

  ‘So it appeared,’ she said, ‘you were looking straight through me.’

  ‘What a waste,’ I said lightly, and then she smiled. I made sure we weren’t touching in the howdah. No Francis Macomber stuff for me.

  When we reached the rendezvous Chadi and Gulu, the Gond chief, and a dozen villagers were waiting there. We had covered four miles and were in scattered jungle near the head of the Shakkar River. Here the valley, which had been climbing gradually between the steep walls of the escarpments, spread and widened. The river was only a stream, and we looked south over a sea of waving tall brown grass, with a few trees dotted among it. It must have been an old lake bed, for it was quite flat, and nearly two miles long by a mile wide. Tigers frequently lay up in there, and it was just the country for a hunt from elephants, the only such area anywhere near Pattan.