To The Coral Strand

by John Masters

  The Wilsons were sitting out on the lawn, in the shade of the big neem tree in the corner, overlooking the stream. H. Huntington Blauvelt’s spot of dysentery seemed to have gone, for he was there, too, drinking pink gin. I ordered one for myself, drank it down, and ordered another. Wilson said, ‘I want you to know, Colonel, that I would have done the same thing in your place.’

  ‘And so would I,’ Blauvelt said.

  I thanked them. Dot. Wilson looked a little glum. Partly the sight of blood, I thought, and partly the departure of the peerage. It was she who, a little later, said, ‘It’s so pretty here, isn’t it?’ She waved her hand at the tents, the Rest House, the Irish bridge, the heavy trees. ‘So pretty. And quite different from what I expected, really.’

  ‘What did you expect?’ I asked. There was an edge to my voice, and in my mind I suddenly saw John Clayton’s worried face. I added in an oily tone, ‘If there’s anything we can do, please let me know.’

  Dot spread her plump hands. ‘Well, India, you know ... the splendour and the spiritualism.’ She burbled on. Yoga. Mysterious. The Razor’s Edge. Nice maharajah, met in Lander, Wyoming, hunting antelope. Lives of a Bengal Lancer. H. Huntington Blauvelt was looking at me with real sympathy in his eye. He poured two gins, and thrust one into my hand. George Wilson said nothing. He liked the shikar, but he too had expected something different.

  What they were saying, really, was that they were being cheated of India because they were being shown it by an Englishman. They wanted to be seated here, or in some more Oriental equivalent, but with a maharajah in my role, deep-thinking Hindus wandering in and out, a yogi (English-speaking) at the gate, ready to expound abstruse spiritual themes. I felt tired and a little ill. No place for me even here, if this were true.

  We did nothing much that afternoon. In the evening John Clayton came back. I was glad he did not speak again about the Hillburns. I suppose he had realised that, though some of his savings were at stake, my whole life was.

  The following morning Wilson and I fished - poor sport, unhappily - while Dot inspected the hand-loomed cloth I’d got some of the village women to start making, in bold patterns, for outside sale. At lunchtime we heard that Piroo was out of danger, though he’d be in hospital a month or so and might never be able to raise his left arm more than a few inches. In the evening we set out to sit up for panther. Again, Gulu and his Gonds had been at work for days on my behalf, the machans were ready, Blauvelt had no dysentery or ague, and I felt optimistic.

  Optimistic, but unsettled. During the afternoon I had a sudden terrible yearning for Sumitra, as definite as a fever, which left me trembly and full of an appalling loneliness. That was succeeded by another, this one mixed with intense curiosity - what sort of woman, what sort of human being was she, really? - and with a violent, stallion-like desire.

  Long before dusk we clambered up into the howdahs and rolled off along the cart track, past the temples, through Pattan with its usual crowd of onlookers, and then directly into the jungle, going slightly west of south. After a mile we came to the first machan, on the bank of a small stream, and Blauvelt scrambled down, carrying his rifle very professionally in the crook of his right arm. ‘I ought to be back in half an hour or less,’ I called down to him. A villager was there, tying up a lusty goat.

  ‘Fine,’ he answered. We left him gazing interestedly up at the machan in which he and I intended to sit. A few hundred yards farther on John Clayton and Dot Wilson got up into their machan and, farther on still, George Wilson and Ganesha, who had excellent night vision. Each machan had a goat tied up underneath it. I started back.

  At the first machan Blauvelt was sitting on the ground, his head back against a tree trunk. He put a hand to his forehead when he saw me coming, and struggled to his feet. I climbed down. He looked grey and weary, the mouth twisted into the familiar scorn.

  ‘A touch of the old neuralgia,’ he said, ‘got it at Saint-Mihiel in the trenches, in ‘18 ... ’

  For a moment I thought I was going to lose my temper. But I couldn’t, not with him. Instead, what I wanted to do came to me with great clarity and force. I wanted to get drunk with H. Huntington Blauvelt. The Wilsons were installed, there was no reason on earth why I should sit here, alone, and have my goat distract the leopards, if any, away from the Wilsons’. I untied the goat and it galloped off towards Pattan.

  ‘I’ll come back with you,’ I said.

  Blauvelt’s eyes lit up and his face brightened. He licked his lips. Then he remembered the neuralgia. After all, he had his pride. This kind of drinking, to sodden oblivion, was better done alone. ‘If my head gets any better,’ he said, ‘otherwise I’m afraid ... ’

  ‘A couple of aspirins will fix that,’ I said cheerfully. I felt good, bounding with vitality. We climbed back into the howdah and set out for the Rest House. On our way through Pattan I told Lok Chand to make sure that no one from the village left the houses after dark, so as not to disturb the leopards; and spoke to Gulu, who said he thought there were at least four leopards in the area, and all hungry. I felt better yet.

  We rolled on. As we passed the temples Blauvelt said, ‘You know, I’ve never had a look at those.’

  ‘Now’s the time,’ I cried. ‘We can see well enough. Besides, we have a lantern.’

  Our elephant knelt and I lit the hurricane lantern I’d taken along. I also had a powerful flashlight. I told the head mahout to take all the elephants back to the Rest House, and warn the cook that two of us would be in for dinner, and we wanted a good one.

  Blauvelt and I walked through the short grass to the platform and climbed up. Blauvelt shone the flashlight around - it was not fully dark yet, but without the light there were only vague shapes, no clear outlines. The wavering powerful beam picked up a red group towering above us on the wall of the nearest temple. ‘My God!’ Blauvelt muttered. It was a woman standing with right hip curved out in a pose of utter pride and joy in being a woman. Two men stood beside her, one cupping her right breast, the other pleasuring her loins. All three smiled proudly up at the night sky. Blauvelt stood transfixed, a dim insubstantial shadow-being linked by the bar of light to the real life up there in the stone. Jackals cackled in the jungle behind and Blauvelt moved the light on.

  We walked slowly around, stumbling now and then, for Blauvelt held the light upwards and I too was looking up. There were many garlands and offerings on and around the base of the great phallus. When Blauvelt switched off the flashlight the more diffuse light of the hurricane lantern put us in the middle of a huge cave of darkness, peopled by these vital images of love - all kinds of love, for there were women holding babies, and couples holding hands, totally loving but not linked sexually at that moment, and an old man playing in the dust with his grandson, and children in a long frieze riding the buffaloes back to the village, as you could see them any day now if you went out to look.

  After half an hour we left. ‘I need a drink,’ Blauvelt said.

  ‘You shall have one,’ I said. ‘And so shall I. Many drinks.’

  He didn’t speak on the short walk to the Rest House. He didn’t speak until we were sitting in the common-room, where the bar was, large brandy-and-sodas in our hands. He finished his in two gulps, and put it down with a sigh.

  He looked at me. ‘Colonel, you have been thinking you didn’t get much value out of me, especially as I am a non-paying guest, eh?’

  It was true, and I didn’t attempt to deny it. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘After what I did to Lady Hillburn, and realising that tourists want something more exotically Indian, I don’t think it’s going to work anyway.’

  He said, ‘More exotic? Well, yes, you might fix up a bare-ass holy man or two, and a snake charmer, and maybe arrange a visit to a maharajah. You’d better do that, next time, because I shall write that you had it all this time. And I shall write about the near record heads I got, thrilling days on the trail of the king of beasts, the hard comradeship of the jungle, the quiet luxury of the hunting lodge
. And all of that will hinge on the central character - the tough, hard-bitten white hunter. Women swoon for him, but he doesn’t give a damn. He’d as soon slap a beautiful countess’s face as undress her.’

  I poured myself another brandy.

  ‘There are two kinds of truth, Colonel,’ he said pontifically, ‘and you know only one. I am going to write the best, most exciting piece, about you and about this place, that I’ve ever written. Then that will be truth for everyone who reads it, which is going to be approximately fifteen million people in the United States alone. Afterwards, when they start coming here in droves, you’ll find that events will conform to what I’ve written, and you will conform to the character I’ve painted. You’ll have to.’

  I knew, without a moment’s thought, that he was speaking the truth. That was just how it would be. The jungle recluse, dedicated to his village and his animals, the ‘character’ whom one had to meet ....

  ‘You’ll have to,’ he repeated bitterly. ‘Once a certain image of you has been created, you have to conform to it. I know. The Doughboy and the Duchess was a freak. I didn’t really feel at all like that. I was copying someone else, and it worked. Afterwards I tried to write the way I really wanted to ... tender, sensitive, introspective things, about what makes men and women tick, without drama or excitement, no violence, all the action inward. They flopped. There was this enormous pressure on me to be the man who’d created that tough, sexy, the-hell-with-it bastard Bill Carden. Everyone thought it was autobiographical. Jesus, it wasn’t even wish fulfilment . . . And what do you want to be?’

  I couldn’t answer him at once. I had wanted to be a good soldier, a good businessman, a good lover, many more or less unconnected things. Now I didn’t know. Perhaps more than anything else I wanted to escape the present, and sink into Pattan. But, then, I felt lonely.

  Slowly, with unusual hesitation, I tried to tell Blauvelt something of this. He listened, drinking from time to time, his sad eyes fixed intently on mine. He said at once, when I finished, ‘Why haven’t you got a village girl?’

  I mumbled something unintelligible.

  He said, ‘As long as you hold aloof, it means you are not satisfied, you have not yourself accepted what you say you want. There’s someone else, isn’t there, and you’re thinking she will come here to you ... to complete your happiness? Well, she won’t, and if she does, it won’t be to sink into Pattan with you, but to drag you out... It happened to me, you know. I married my first wife in the full flush of fame after Doughboy. It seemed like the final touch of happiness - but remember, I wanted to sink into an introspective life, and she not only wanted to bring me back to the “real” outside world - she was that world. It failed after two years ... I’m afraid, Rodney, you’ve got to marry someone who is interested in you, involved with you, not with what you do, or might do, or can do.’

  I thought of Janaki. Yes, she had been involved in me; but now she was the other side of the wall, and would be for as long as Max lived, and, very probably, beyond that. Sumitra ... Blauvelt’s uncanny empathy had felt, through God knows how many protective layers, that her interest in all men was in their capacities and capabilities, not in them. And that this interest would not extend to a man’s capacity for self-withdrawal. And, remember, he hadn’t even met her.

  Blauvelt said, ‘You’re here. You’re going to stay here. Take a girl from Pattan, and settle down. This camp is going to be a success. I personally guarantee it. I’m going on to Chambalpur from here, as a guest of the Nawab - I don’t know why they’re inviting me, but I’m sure I’ll find out soon enough what it is they want publicised ... and I’ll write the piece about you as soon as I get there. By mid-summer you’ll be snowed under with applications.’

  I knew why they were inviting him to Chambalpur - to put Chambal’s case for independence before the world, especially the American public, in a roundabout sort of way. Well, that was the world I was trying to get away from, the world which involvement with Sumitra - or any other woman from ‘civilisation’ - would drag me back into.

  Blauvelt stood up suddenly. ‘Come on, let’s send for a couple of girls. Break it up! Make up your mind. The temples, and Pattan ... or this lady of yours, and the God-damned, stinking rat race outside. I know what I want. I want the temples ... right now.’

  I hesitated a little longer. It was easy for him. He didn’t really mean that he wanted the lost, all-loving world of the temples - he meant he wanted it tonight, as a respite from the rat race. For me, the choice was permanent.

  I made up my mind, by what process or accident I do not know. ‘All right,’ I said. I called for Ratanbir and told him to take the jeep and fetch Devi and Kunthi. He saluted woodenly and went out. One of the things I was giving up was being a sahib, with a sahib’s standards, and it came surprisingly hard. A sahib does not involve his servant with his amours, or he will upset the man’s sense of values and of his own position.

  Half an hour later the girls slipped in, making deep namasti.

  Kunthi had her war paint on - a diaphanous sari, made of material I’d given her, with no underclothes or bodice, her nipples painted red, reddish-blue lines drawn with face paint under the swell of her breasts to make them stand out more, and the sari itself slightly damped so that it clung to every curve and fold of her body. Devi never used those artifices. She was thin and intense, tonight looking almost demonic, her eyes huge and heavily rimmed with kohl in her small, pointed face.

  I poured them drinks. Like most of the people of Pattan, they either didn’t drink at all or they drank to extinction, but I hoped to keep them from passing out tonight.

  I pulled Devi down on my knee. Kunthi went to Blauvelt. We fondled them and they smiled. We all drank. Blauvelt got excited. I told the girls to take their saris off, it wasn’t going to make much difference. They did so, and danced a languid indecent dance, gliding round the table, bending over us and in front of us, singing softly in their high wavering voices.

  We ate, off and on. Carlos the butler dropped the soup when he first came into the room, later became so uplifted that Blauvelt invited him to join us at the table. He looked nervously at me, but, as I said, this was good-bye to sahibdom, and I held him by the shoulders and forced him to sit down. Also Ratanbir. More girls appeared, and some men from Pattan.

  At about two in the morning I had a great idea, the sort that often strikes at that hour. We went in a body, singing lewd songs, to the temples, and lit several bonfires on the platform. Ratanbir in the jeep brought along two or three cases of rum. No one wore any clothes, or, if so, they were peripheral and decorative rather than prurient in purpose. Devi’s mother, Piroo’s wife, for instance, wore a bodice but nothing else. Most men kept on their ragged puggarees. Many women wore the red garghara, the short swinging skirt of the peasant women, feeling that it was more proper - as the temple carvings often showed - to lift them or have them lifted while they danced and coupled, rather than go stark-naked. Blauvelt, forgetting which particular past he was re-entering, pranced about like a long, thin Pan, blowing tunelessly on someone’s wooden pipe. He also took off his toupee and threw it away. Whatever I did I kept thinking of Sumitra.

  It was said afterwards that the whole village of Pattan joined in the orgy on the old temple platform. This is not true. The population of Pattan was 403 at my last count before this, and there were some too old, some ill, some shocked, many tired, some disinterested. At dawn we had about forty present and active. The number had fluctuated all night, starting low, building, decreasing, increasing again. Nor was it an orgy, but a re-creation of the time and mood of the temples themselves, most religiously exact.

  I saw the dawn coming. A greenish light spread fast over the eastern trees. The soaring temple towers, lit by the jumping red light of the fires on one side, all darkening into silhouette as the day drew on, made a most impressive and moving vision.

  With Kunthi, Devi, and another woman, as a last triumphal act, I was trying to get into one of the most comp
licated of the interlocking positions shown in the carvings. It started with my standing on my head against a temple wall. Opposite me, between Kunthi’s spread legs, I could see the model we were imitating, carved in red on another temple. Then, to the side, something alien and out of tune caught my eye. Out of tune because it was fearful, and shocked. It was the white, strained face of the Holy Roller, Margaret Wood.

  She stood, frozen. I overbalanced, landed right way up, and walked over to her, the three women clinging to me wherever they could get a hold. Devi was by now on the edge of extinction.

  ‘What can I do for you, madam?’ I asked. I was not far from oblivion myself.

  Her lips moved, whispering. ‘A jackal... in the operating room ... It has rabies.’

  The light was strong but without any forewarning of the sun, yet. Devi slid slowly down my right side and collapsed gently, smiling, on the stone, her face to the sky.

  The night was over.

  ‘And you have no rifle, or anything?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No one in Lapri would help. They wouldn’t even open the doors to me. It was dark. There was no one at the Rest House.’ She was sweating, her face cold and wet and white.

  I jumped down from the platform and climbed into the jeep. ‘Get in,’ I said. Like a sleepwalker she climbed in, looking straight ahead. On the platform the music and the shouting were dying, and men and women staggering home, others lying down where they were, out to the world.

  I drove off. The light struck with a jolly warmth against my eyes and my head felt full of a joyous nothing. The road curved continuously when I wasn’t looking, the cunning devil, so I had to swing the jeep nose fast and keep my wits about me or it would have slipped away from me. Once it got away and I had to dash in among the trees to catch it again. Margaret Wood bit off a cry but said nothing. The jeep seemed to want to fly and once or twice we actually took off, but there wasn’t enough power, or the aerodynamics weren’t quite right, and we returned to earth a few yards farther on.