by John Masters
‘So had Frederick the Great’s mule,’ I snapped. The brigadier turned pale, and I expected Gokal to rebuke me. He certainly should have; and I would have accepted it and apologised. He did not and I thought, even in my fury, he wants dissension.
A second cousin of the Nawab got up. Oh, God, here it comes! ‘Since I am of the Blood Royal, I must be right...’ It wasn’t as bad as that. He wanted to know why I had not given the place of honour to the horsed cavalry squadron of the Nawab’s Bodyguard.
Gokal summed up. He played both sides against the middle in a masterly appraisal in which he supported my solution in every particular, but ended by pointing out that the battle might not be fought anywhere near the Sakti Plain. Once again I suffered a sharp spasm of doubt, of suspicion. If we didn’t fight on the Sakti Plain we would not fight at all. The Chambal Army had its virtues, but it definitely did not have the training or the confidence to fight after a long withdrawal.
I thanked General Gokal profusely and hurried out. I was meeting him again in fifteen minutes at the C-in-C’s office. I had to rush upstairs and collect a secret file from my safe. The lock had been tampered with, and I swore, and congratulated myself on keeping all really important papers in the safe at home. Besides, this was very unlikely to be the work of an enemy agent. It was a henchman of the Nawab’s, or of Gokal’s, sent to learn what I had said to one about the other, and vice versa.
In his office the old C-in-C, General Prince Afif, was squatting on cushions on the carpet, being fanned by a pretty girl and smoking an ornate hookah. The girl was some sort of slave. Oh, yes, slavery had been officially outlawed in Chambal a century earlier, to please Queen Victoria, but it still flourished.
Afif was a delightful old man and the soul of courtesy. He had made his battle plan: he was going to drive out to the fight in his Rolls-Royce, the Rolls drawing a horsebox containing his favourite charger. He would wear the full war costume of the Bokharis, and would charge waving his scimitar. At the funeral a mullah would recite the appropriate chapter from the Holy Koran.
The business at hand was unfortunately more complicated. Gokal and I squatted on the carpet, facing the Prince. The old boy passed round the mouthpiece of the hookah.
I began the negotiating. I’ve forgotten now what the problem was, except that it ought to have been solved three months ago by a junior captain. Now a general, a lieutenant-general, and a brigadier thrashed it like a dog, for an hour.
We wrangled and fiddled on, the cloud of hookah smoke thickening and fine perspiration beading the girl’s bare torso. Next we had to appoint a new paymaster for the guerrillas. X wouldn’t do because he was already responsible for meat procurements - a lucrative post. Y had trodden on the Nawab’s great-uncle’s cousin’s mother’s nephew’s toe at a reception in 1898. Not him, Allah forfend! ... The centuries surrounded me, not in succession but all at the same time, in a frightening jumble. I was De Boigne, teeth set, trying to convince Scindia that if he didn’t patch up his feud with Holkar, both of them would be swallowed by the Peshwa. I was Dupleix, listening while two maharajahs squabbled over precedence and Clive marched. I was a lone Amir of Sind, shouting, ‘The English, they come!’ to a tentful of torpid despots while Napier brought his troops into the battle line. The disciplined combination of intrigue, diplomacy, and brute force was on the other side, down there with Max and Roy and Nehru. They were Warren Hastings, Stringer Lawrence, and Eyre Coote; I, squatting on this carpet, was the old, free, chaotic India ….
We agreed on a name. Next problem.
Poor old Afif closed his eyes in pain. We were giving him a headache.
Gokal stated his case. I stated mine ... Wrangle, wrangle, wrangle. I had, in effect, won on the first problem, and I knew the C-in-C would rule for Gokal this time, and he did.
Military police to control traffic. There weren’t enough. There ought to be. Something must be done ... What?
Two hours later Gokal and I stood up. Afif remained squatting, looking very much his age. A chuprassy sidled in with a signal form, and handed it to him. He fumbled around for his spectacles. The girl found them and gave them to him. He put them on. He read the signal. He read it again, aloud. ‘ “Tanks, trucks and infantry moving from Bhowani towards Bijoli ... Deciphered at 11.30 a.m.” ... Why wasn’t this given to me sooner?’ he said querulously.
‘Prince,’ the chuprassy whined, ‘you were in conference. Your orders …. ‘
It was a strict rule, true enough. No one could disturb the Prince when he had the girl and the hookah in there. It was now two o’clock and I was ready to die of hunger.
‘You will move your troops, then?’ the Prince said.
Gokal scratched his chin. ‘Perhaps we should first inform His Highness ...?’
‘We can’t reach him till evening,’ I broke in. ‘He’s spending the day out hunting with the Rajah at Maragan. We have his signature, approving this movement as soon as we get this information.’
Gokal said, ‘It is a big decision to make without His Highness’s knowledge. Action might precipitate war.’
I said, ‘Sir, inaction might precipitate some executions.’ I saluted, and went out.
In my office I told the chuprassy to get me food, quickly. The C-in-C sent me a note, telling me that he had ordered the troop movements, in writing, and I felt a little better. After eating I drove out to the barracks and found remarkably little turmoil. I was congratulating the Chambal Army, in my mind, on a higher state of training than I had thought it possessed, when I stopped behind a group of officers, under the brigadier who had been so angry at the cloth model. I found that they were conducting an exercise. It had only just begun, and they were doing it with five tanks. I counted forty of them out in the plain a couple of miles away.
I took the brigadier aside, saluting punctiliously and using ‘sir’ every other word, and asked him whether he had yet received the order to move. ‘Yes,’ he said, his eyes glinting nastily, ‘but we are to finish this exercise first. After all, remember Drake finishing his game of bowls ...’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said, ‘but I understand that the C-in-C gave definite orders for the move to begin at once.’ By God, over an hour had passed since the order went out. The leading troops should have been ten miles out.
The brigadier became ugly. ‘This is my business, Savage.’
I said, ‘Sir, I assure you that Prince Afif has given his personal and most stringent orders to move at once, according to Plan Panipat. Any disobedience is likely to be punished by death.’
‘That’s very funny,’ the brigadier said, with a wolfish grin. ‘General Gokal told me personally, ten minutes ago, to continue my exercise.’
That’s when I became positive that Gokal was on the other side. The commander of our striking force!
It was a moment of doubt and indecision. All at once the full weight of the situation came upon my shoulders. What was I doing, involved with these bunglers and traitors and idiots? How was it possible that I stood here, prepared to fight and kill Max, my friend, to whom I had handed my Colours, my country, my love? What possible hope of success was there, and even if we won, what possible hope of improvement, of progress? From all that I had seen, an independent Chambal, loosened from the stringent supervision of England, would go back to those jolly days when a Nawab could burn a couple of dancing girls alive for some minor peccadillo. (It was undoubtedly his right, since he was sovereign - but that had not prevented the viceroy of the time from summarily removing him from the gaddi and appointing his son instead.)
I should leave this bloody mess at once, go to Sumitra and ask her what was to be done. Hold a council of war with her, and Hayden, and the few other Englishmen in Chambal...
I remembered that all this had happened before: to Clive in the mango grove before Plassey. If Clive, the boldest man India ever knew, had had his moment of doubt, surely I could be allowed mine?
The thought of Gokal and his friends winning their victory exactly as they planned, from i
nertia, was too much for me. What a laugh they’d have, in the years to come, over how they’d hoodwinked the stupid Englishman!
I drove furiously into the barrack area. Gokal had vanished - east towards Sakti, it was said. I found two dozen tank transporters drawn up on the polo field, waiting. I told the major in command to take his transporters out to Brigadier Narain Singh and say, as from the C-in-C, ‘Load! Move!’ Then I went to the C-in-C’s house and got him to send a personal order to the brigadier - to all officers of the corps - to get going. Then I drove back out to the barracks and watched for two hours while the order was obeyed. At five o’clock the movement was in full swing. Where now? Where was the focal point?
As far as I knew there’d been no diplomatic démarche, no ultimatum from India. We must get hold of the Nawab and bring him back to the capital. We must expect news that Indian troops were also advancing closer to our northern border. I must prevent the Nawab or the C-in-C detaching any part of our armour to face that threat. I decided that my place, for the moment, was here in Chambalpur.
I went to the palace and found Hayden, the ex-I.C.S. Englishman the Nawab had hired as constitutional adviser. There was some commotion in the streets and an unusual number of police about. I was not surprised to hear that half an hour earlier the Indian National Congress had issued a proclamation, calling on the people of Chambal to resist the Nawab’s tyranny. Hayden had somehow contacted the Nawab, who was already on his way back.
Hayden said, ‘Five minutes ago the Home Minister ordered the arrest of Dunawal and all his crowd.’
Dunawal was head of the pro-Indian Congress group in Chambal. We had refrained from arresting him, thus far, in order to avoid provoking India.
Hayden said, ‘All India Radio announced the arrest twenty minutes ago ... It was all fixed in December. He was to take out an illegal procession, and force us to arrest him, on such-and-such a signal. He got it, he did it, we arrested him.’
‘What now?’ I asked.
He indicated a mass of paper on his table. ‘Preparing this cable to the United Nations. It’ll go off as soon as the Nawab arrives.’
‘And what will the UN do?’
He shrugged. ‘Just what they did in Kashmir.’
‘Pakistan?’ I asked.
He lit a cigarette. ‘On the edge of bankruptcy. Their only real use was as a threat. Bluff, if you like. Nehru is calling it. Look, you go and get a good night’s rest. I’ll see that you are told if anything happens or they try to do something silly with the army.’
I drove home.
When I walked up the steps into the house the doors were open, and I left them like that, as I usually did. Sumitra was waiting for me in the hall, and the first thing she did even before kissing me was to go and close them. At once it became quieter in the house, and the load on my back began to lighten. I leaned on her, my hand on her shoulder, and she guided me like a sick man to the drawing-room. As we entered the room she left me and walked over to the radio. Someone was making an angry speech, and probably the speech piled more fuel around us, ready for the spark that invisible demons were even then carrying down from Indra’s Abode of the Thunderbolt. At that moment I could not care. As the voice hiccuped into silence in the middle of a sentence I sank back into a chair and closed my eyes.
It took me all the early part of the evening merely to return to a full awareness of myself as a human being with ten fingers, ten toes, one nose, two ears, and the rest. I bathed and changed, I know. I ate, I know, but did not record it until afterwards when the sense of well-being that surrounded me included, I noted, a well-filled belly and a glass of liqueur brandy on the coffee table. I noted, properly then, the closed doors and the turned-off radio. For this night she and I would be alone. Let it be so.
Later we walked together to my bedroom, she now leaning against me, my arm round her waist and under her breast, her legs languid and her pace voluptuous. In the bedroom, having undressed myself, I unfastened the knot of her sari and she stood like Niobe, her eyes slightly averted and downcast, while the heavy silk slid slowly down the coppery satin of her thighs. I loosened her choli, and she extended her arms slightly so that I might the more easily draw it off them.
There are many degrees of love and sometimes it is easy to know what degree you are experiencing at a particular moment - as when the slim column of a woman’s neck is all tenderness, all beauty, nothing else; as when the rough texture of her bush and the slippery passage between, contrasted with the daintiness of the underclothes she may still be wearing, jolts you with the electricity of desire; as when tired hands work for you, tired eyes search for the aches that they can soothe in body or soul, and you know only the dependence of love; as when, standing together against sorrow, there is only the dignity of love.
This was not such a moment, classifiable into its category, but one of the others, rare and so total that there is no experience like it except probably death, when all the degrees and kinds are fused into one, when you are overwhelmed by the simultaneous flooding over of every channel of your being. I saw her eye, large, the lashes curled upwards, brimming with the Madonna’s bliss. I felt, pouring into me from her brain, her deep respect for me. Her generous spirit overflowed with no more and no less of grandeur than overflowed the secretions of her loins, soaking the rose petals between. The twin awareness of shared danger and affection thrust into my heart no less and no more than did the rigid, extended nipples crowning her full breasts. I could not tell, when I poured the liquid essence of my love into her, whether it was the commonplace of animal husbandry, the thing every bull has done to every cow since the world began, or whether it really was my life that I was giving her, all that I am, spiritual as well as physical. I know only that I was immeasurably increased - just as Christ said - by giving away all that I had. We did not make love, we were love.
When finally, this state of unearthly union having continued several hours, we could bear to separate the bodies that had served so well as the vehicles of emotions far larger than they could in themselves contain, I laid my hand upon hers and said, ‘Will you marry me?’
I thought it sacrilegious to mention marriage after what we had shared, but in a material sense I wanted to weld the link, to let her know that I never would wish to escape from this mutual bondage.
She must have felt the same, for she said, after a time, ‘My darling, is it necessary to decide that now? What more can life possibly give us, whether you put a ring on my finger or take me by the hand and lead me round the sacred fire? We have just been living in it.’
But now I was obstinately decided that the inward miracle should wear the conventional label for all to see and wonder at. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘I love you.’
‘I love you,’ she said, and relapsed into silence.
After a time she said, ‘Would you want to take me to England?’
‘No!’ I said violently. ‘Here, here .... Do you want to go to England?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘but if you did, terribly badly ... or if you had to ... I could not go with you. At least, I didn’t think I could before tonight. Now, I don’t know. Could you ask me ... in the middle?’
Neither of us could tell when such a miracle would happen again. And, no, I could not ask her anything ‘in the middle’. Nothing existed, during the miracle, outside of it - so how could I refer to some exterior thought or event?
‘Why England?’ I said. ‘We are here. We have work to do here. There is a sink of corruption to be cleaned up before the genuine ideals of the Chambal people can be realised. Who knows, perhaps our son will be prime minister, and finish what we begin.’
She took my hand and placed the fingers to her lips, and kissed them sweetly. ‘I can’t answer you now,’ she said. ‘I can say neither yes nor no. There is nothing left of my will or thought except you, and the knowledge that I touch you and lie beside you. Good night, sweet prince.’
I lay on my side, propped on one elbow, for a long time, examining the beauty tha
t seemed to grow more troubled as the body that fed it sank into sleep, so that gradually the exhausted calm of the face began to ebb, the warm, wet lips to move without sound, the rounded thighs to twitch against me, and hair-fine creases to mar the broad forehead. Deeply stirred, and fearful, I thought I would never sleep, but sleep came upon me with so sudden and powerful an assault that I knew nothing until I awoke, tense and alert, in the hour before dawn.
Where was the Nawab? What was Gokal doing down at Sakti and Lapri? Why did I dream our cruiser had opened fire on an Indian submarine? Had Max’s boys crossed the frontier? What was Prince Afif doing? Birds chattered, and it was dark, one window wide open. A thin cold mist from the lake filled the world and our room, so that neither eyes nor any other sense could find the line of demarcation between the mist and the night, or between them and humanity - we were all one, beings with no defined limit, Sumitra, and the mist, and I, and the lake.
I thought of Ratanbir. Where was the poor devil now, what thinking? How was he finding it, to live with wealth stolen from my trust? That hurt too much and I turned to curl up against Sumitra’s back. In that instant I heard the heavy, dull crash of distant bombs, and the tearing roar of aircraft’s multiple machine guns.
Sumitra sprang out of bed in one motion and crouched naked, staring out the window. The first light of dawn was coming, and the mist clearing. The crash and crash of bombs came from the northeast, about five miles away. Two Spitfires flew low over the city and I saw the Indian Air Force roundels on their sides.
I switched on the bedside radio and began to pull on the first clothes that came to hand - the shirt and dinner jacket I had worn last night. The radio was in the middle of an announcement, but it had nothing to do with the air raid. It was the Nawab’s own voice, speaking in his classical Urdu. He repeated his announcement: ‘We, Mohammed Akbar Bokhari, Nawab of Chambal, being independent of all earthly powers, by the Grace of God, being encumbered by no treaty or other hindrance, do hereby declare ourselves King of Chambal, to be known from this moment on as His Majesty King Mohammed I. In the name of Allah the compassionate, the merciful! There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the prophet of God.’
