by John Masters
Our campfires blossomed like potted geraniums under the trees and Charlie, Beetle, and I were sharing a big bowl of rice against the temple wall. The desolation of the ruins, twenty miles from anywhere, long forgotten even by the villagers, only emphasised the comradeship of our own company. The beat of madals throbbed up from the far end of the camp, where a sluggish stream ran under a low rock bank. Nearby the colonel was writing a letter to his wife.
We ate rice and dal, and sat back, at peace, in our sweaty clothes. Tomorrow we would march to Telaghat, the day after to Charria, the day after ... on always to the day after, the same, and the petals of the gold mohur falling in an orange shower over the stone phallus in the courtyard. ..
I smelled hot steel and oil, heard a locomotive breathing in the dusty twilight of an April evening, the metal scorched from its hours in the sun, from its rushing passage through the still, hot jungles, and rock ovens of the Vindhya hills, over the rumbling iron bridges, along the metalled track cut like a sword through the trees, the dust whirling in plumes alongside the wheels. Victoria stood beside me. I smelled the cheap perfume she used to wear, a touchingly innocent perfume trying in vain to counteract the unambiguous femaleness of a ripened woman at the end of a hot day. I smelled my own sweat, strong and male, and, in all, the drifting invisible presence of coal smoke. Then she went and I was alone.
Early in the morning, the light vague and tentative, I awoke suddenly, in my ears the dying tones of what had awakened me - an exclamation in a human voice. I sat up quickly and made out a dark figure below me, crouching on the earth at the foot of the slab where I was. I heard a low mumbling.
He raised his head and I saw that he was an old man, wearing only loincloth and puggaree. I put my pistol back in its holster. He quavered, ‘Guru-ji, you have come back?’ With a convulsive gesture he spread his hand. A bunch of fresh flowers fell in my lap, then again he bowed his head to the ground.
I did not remember ever being in this place before, though in plenty like it, as in my dream. Guru-ji, the title he gave me, means ‘teacher’.
He said, ‘Guru-ji, this time you will stay? After sixty years, the village needs you.’
Sixty years? The old man was in a state of shock, or trance. He was not much more than seventy himself. The dawnlight was growing and spreading fast over the world and I saw him clearly, saw his thin eager face and hungry eyes. I remembered that I had not shaved for three days, that my clothes were torn and filthy, and I myself sunburned and weathered like any Indian. But boots and trousers were surely out of place, whatever ‘teacher’ he thought I was. He was just not seeing them, any more than he was seeing my age. Time did not exist for the teacher of the shrine, whoever he had been.
The old man said, ‘Good morning, Briju. Good-bye, Briju. Be good to your mother. Thank you.’
‘Who taught you English?’ I asked amazed.
He said, ‘You spoke such words to me so many times that I learned them by heart, to please you. Don’t you remember? ... We never told anyone you were here. Not once, all those three years, no one outside the village ever knew. You asked for peace and we gave it to you, didn’t we? We have told no one since ... You are hungry, guru-ji? I will bring food for you! Everything will again be as it was when I was a boy, and we came to you and you talked with us, and sometimes being children we played jokes on you. We were afraid - at first because you were an English sahib, later because we knew we were committing sacrilege against an elect of God, but you only laughed with us. And do you remember my sister - aihh, long since gone! - coming with gifts because you gave her a blessing that got her with child? But you laughed again and said it was her husband’s love that had done it. And the days the elders came to sit at your feet when the crops failed, or the deer ate the young corn, or there was bad blood between families, and we boys and girls hid in the jungle close there, lying on our stomachs, listening. It will all be the same!’
A picture of the past came clear. A man, an Englishman, had come here sixty years or so ago, about 1890. He had taken up residence in this shrine - perhaps it had a roof then. He had asked the villagers not to tell anyone. Whether he was a fugitive from the police, or from the world in general, from his own people, or from some particular person, I would never find out. But he had stayed three years as the village’s guru, the resident spirit of the shrine. The old man’s eyes beseeched me - you have returned, stay!
My head swam with hunger, and a lifting of material problems which had seemed reality. Why not? In Pattan I had destroyed my vision by mixing into it a desire for power. I no longer wanted power, or responsibility. I no longer wanted women. I no longer wanted anything. I could not be an Indian, they would not let me five as an Englishman - but a tree, a stone I could be, in this soil which had made me.
I sat cross-legged and raised my hand to bless the old man ... ‘Grandfather? Grandfather?’
The old man stood up. ‘It is my grandson. Wait till he sees!’
A young man of about twenty-five came through the trees on a path from the south, which I had not noticed the evening before. He wore trousers, a shirt, a grey homespun cap and spectacles and I could tell at once that he had some education.
He was saying, ‘You did not come back and my mother sent...’ He stopped, astonished. ‘Who is this?’
‘It is he,’ the old man crowed. ‘Our guru, came back to us. Ah, I knew you thought we old men were dreaming when we talked of him!’
The young man’s eyes were round and his mouth agape. ‘I did not know,’ he whispered. ‘Is it really you? ... It is such a long time.’
‘Is there death, or age, for such as these?’ the old man cried.
The young man dropped to his knees. Education had eroded the edges of his simple faith, such as the old man possessed, but the core was still there. He was not a town man, just a young village man with a little education. ‘You will stay, guru-ji?’ he asked.
I made up my mind. ‘I will stay,’ I said.
The old man wrung his hands in an agony of happiness and tears streamed down his cheeks.
The young man’s eyes shone like beacons behind the cheap lenses. He cried, ‘Now we will have a guru of our own! We will be famous all over Bandelkhand and Chambal! All over India! No other village has an English guru.’
I said, ‘No one must know. I want peace, total peace.’
The young man’s face fell. ‘No one?’ He brightened. ‘But someone will have to know, guru-ji ... for the government census. The officials are in the next village now, but they will reach us today. The question is, are you in our village of Chahar or in the village of Lihur? The subtehsil boundary runs close, but it has never been settled whether the shrine is ...’
‘Leave me out of the census,’ I cried, ‘I do not exist!’
Now it was the old man who looked worried. ‘But there is the smallpox vaccination, guru-ji,’ he said. ‘Everyone must have it.’ The young man chimed in: ‘And in our district the officials are making a pilot surwey--’ he spoke the words in English - ‘showing exact details of land use, number of dwellings, number of inhabitants per dwelling, agricultural and home-industry production per head. It will be pilot surwey for all India, so you see--’
‘We will discuss that later,’ I interrupted, controlling my voice. ‘I am hungry. Bring me food. Be sure to enter it in the proper column in the printed paper.’
‘Oh, there is no record of that,’ the young man began, but I waved, ‘Go, go!’
As soon as they had disappeared down the path I grabbed up my haversack and hurried east through the jungle. After two hours, when I thought I would die of melancholy, I lay down and tried to relieve my misery by tears. No tears came and after a time I went on again.
It was a day without purpose, except movement. I walked, saw no one, nothing, only two vultures very high in the blue sky, who watched me until dark. I walked east all day except for an hour, when I got up after a rest and walked west, and did not know it until I fell down a low rock cliff. In
the pain and shock of the moment I realised that it was the same cliff I had scrambled up, in the opposite direction, an hour before my rest.
I do not know where I lay down for the night. It was, like the day, a nothing place, non-existent, and the night the same except that it contained aimless stillness instead of aimless motion.
The third morning, after vomiting, I felt better and ate most of the rest of my food, and it stayed down. I would have to use Max’s pistol - I had stolen it from the yakdan in his office just before I heard Roy’s car arriving - to kill some food. That would be easy, but dangerous.
I went on east. Near ten o’clock in the morning, the sun bright and a fresh breeze blowing through the jungle, myself feeling weak but not in pain, I heard the sharp crack of breaking wood somewhere close ahead, followed by a scream and a crash. I was going downhill towards a river, seen once through the trees from the ridge crest. I knew the river must be the upper Harpal. I stopped. I heard a woman crying urgently, but could not make out her meaning. I hurried down among the trees and came in a few seconds to the edge of the river. It ran about fifty feet wide there, between red-laterite cliffs twenty feet high. A wooden cart bridge had spanned the river from this bank to the village crowding the far cliff. Now the rickety structure, a hundred times half-repaired, had broken. Part hung down from the farther side, where a woman shrieked and shrieked, calling up to the village. Part swirled round and round in the pool below the bridge, where I saw too the floating red skirt and hair of another woman.
I hesitated. Some men were running down from the village, others along the cliff to the right, but there was no way down the cliff there for at least a hundred yards. The pool where the woman floated was a whirlpool, but the current very slow. Even a little effort would have taken her to the bank, or to the shallows. Perhaps she had been stunned by the fall of the rest of the bridge on top of her. Perhaps she was already dead.
Cursing my luck, I jumped over the cliff. When I came up the woman was close to me. I caught her and turned her face up. Blood stained the water from a gash in her forehead. I took her under the armpits and dragged her to the strip of sand.
My tiredness had gone in the shock and excitement of action. I stretched her at once on to her stomach, tore off her choli and began artificial respiration. Villagers called down to me from the clifftop, others ran up the narrow bank of sand and stones from the washing place downstream. When these arrived I was very tired again, and the particular motions of artificial respiration could not have been worse for my wound. I called to the first arrival, an agitated young man who might have been the husband, ‘Watch me, watch!’
‘Yes, sahib,’ he gabbled, ‘I see.’
‘Come here.’ He knelt beside me. ‘Do it with me ... there ... there ... there ... Now go on doing that...’
I stood up and spoke to another man. ‘You, watch him. When he is tired, do the same. Let there be no stopping of the work, even for a breath.’
From the cliff above an old grandmother wailed, ‘She is dead! Aiiih, my daughter is dead!’
I said nothing. Three minutes later, to my surprise, the woman groaned and retched. ‘My head,’ she moaned. I turned away. It was clear that the blow on the head had been her main trouble. She had not swallowed much water, and would soon be all right.
An old gentleman in clean white dhoti, shirt, and puggarree made a deep salaam. ‘I am the headman, sahib . . . She whom you saved has five children. How can we ever thank you?’
I found myself swaying. ‘I am hungry,’ I heard myself say. ‘Is there anything to eat?’
‘Of course, sahib. Only our poor desi food, I fear, but ...’
‘Let me eat,’ I said.
The old man led down the bank to the place where the path went up to the village. Twenty huddled women, who had been washing clothes, smiled at me. We went up the path in a great crowd, all the people chattering like magpies.
A policeman came running out of the village adjusting his puggaree as he ran. ‘What happened? Is she dead?’ he cried.
‘She is alive,’ the headman said. ‘No thanks to you. What were you doing? Sleeping under the peepul as usual? The sahib bahadur here leaped into the river and saved her. I saw it.’
The policeman saluted me. Then his eyes widened. He cried, ‘This is ... this the sahib who did the murder! We have captured him!’
‘What do you mean?’ the headman said irritably. ‘He has saved the life of Nathu’s woman.’
I edged sideways through the mob, my hand on my pistol. The women crowded towards the policeman, shouting and waving their fists. ‘Murder, fool? He saved her life! He is a hero! A sahib bahadur!’
Then the policeman spoke the fateful words. ‘Five thousand rupees reward!’ he said. ‘Five thousand rupees.’
I pushed the nearest woman into him and ran. As soon as I was clear of them I drew my pistol and shouted, ‘Keep back!’ The policeman was unarmed, and they all fell back.
I heard the grumble and murmur of their voices. They weren’t saying save him. They weren’t saying, he saved her life. They weren’t saying, Murder. They were saying, five thousand rupees.
I backed into the woods and when I could only just see them, gathered there staring after me, I fired a shot over their heads. Then I turned and ran. I heard the collective rising yell: ‘After him! Five thousand rupees!’
I ran down the valley for a time, then turned up through the trees, and stopped. A young man was coming fast up the slope after me, with two companions. They were young and fit and I hated them. I aimed carefully at the centre of the young man’s chest and fired. My hand shook so from fatigue and hate I did not kill him as I had intended. The bullet hit him high in the shoulder. He screamed, fell, picked himself up, and stumbled and fell back down the hill, screaming in pain. His two companions were by then well ahead of him. They vanished and I turned again.
On, over the brow of the slope. On, down the other side. On, miles across a shadeless flat volcanic plateau covered by stunted thorn bushes and spear grass, the sun high and every part of my body aching. On, through the afternoon. On, to the side of a main road, just in time to edge back as a truck passed full of police armed with rifles. On, across the road in the dust cloud behind the truck. On, east, over hill and valley, stream and marsh and plateau and ridge and scrub and field. On, until my legs gave way and I fell in the middle of the game trail I had been following. I crawled under a thornbush to the side, pulled up my legs tight under me and passed away, whether in faint, sleep, or death, I did not know.
It was a long straight road on the outskirts of the old Hira Mandi bazaar in Lahore. Inside there is a narrow lane, stone paved, between wooden houses whose upper balconies almost meet overhead. At street level the whores sit in open-fronted booths, and a dense crowd of men walk up and down the alley jostling and staring at the women, who stare back over their heads, impersonal and impervious. Christ came out of the old city gate below that alley, but it was in daylight, and we were standing to arms at the crossroads, a platoon of Gurkhas and my company headquarters. There had been a week of rioting between Sikhs and Muslims already, over the destruction of a Muslim mosque; and that over the encroachment of a Sikh gurdwara; and that over the building of a Muslim slaughterhouse, where cows were killed; and that ... We had nothing to do with the quarrels but as soon as we came to stop it, of course, we had. The Sikhs took out a procession against the Commissioner’s order. They advanced on us out of the old bazaar and down the wide road, waving banners in Gurmukhi. The banners called for Muslim blood, but it was not the Muslims barring their path, it was us. He was their leader, Christ. He had a long, saintly face, very fair of skin, and he had not tied his puggaree, so that his black hair fell over his shoulders in a wave almost to his waist, like the pictures of Christ in old Bibles, only they made Him a blond. The Assistant Magistrate with us gabbled through the formalities of the Riot Act. After that the responsibility was mine. Christ walked slowly on, calling out to the Gurkhas kneeling in the road th
at they had no business here. Were they not Hindus? He was on his way to throw the moneychangers out of the temple.
I pointed him out to Rifleman Manraj. Manraj jerked his bolt, putting one round in the magazine. I called to the crowd, but spoke to Christ: ‘If you pass that chalk line in the road, we fire.’
He did not bother to look down, but came on. When his front foot passed the chalk line I tapped Manraj on the shoulder. Manraj fired, hitting Christ in the left eye. He fell backward and the rest of the crowd dropped their banners, turned and ran. He did not die for a few seconds, but died in my arms as I ran forward. He could not speak but his other eye was open, staring up at me, wonderingly.
The Governor commended the battalion for quelling the riots with so little loss of life - one man killed; after they had already killed nearly two hundred of each other. One man, I thought, that’s the trouble with figures, and in the last resort, with democracy. I’d rather have killed two hundred more, but not that man ...
In the morning, that nowhere under the bush in nowhere became a hillside of stones and brown grass, thinly sown with bushes, and the lowing of cattle not far off. My mind was sharp with hunger and my wounds hurt with a dry pain, like a scab almost healed that is torn open. I was making it too easy for them, plodding on east as though one dawn I hoped to catch the sun rising from its forge and hurl myself into that burning abyss. I must have been seen half a dozen times yesterday after the episode of the drowning woman.
I started off south-westward. When I saw a village I watched it from cover, resting to re-gather my nervous strength - there was not much of any other kind left - wondering whether to invite a little attention to myself, and whether it could be done without causing my immediate capture. Three times I decided against it - because there was no nearby jungle - because I saw an old bus parked - because natural obstacles would channel my flight in a certain, obvious direction.
The fourth time, I saw that it could be done with only a reasonable risk, and, after preparing myself, I walked past the village on the south, skirting small fields and thorn fences well within sight of the backs of the houses. An old woman emptying pots outside her hut saw me, and later two men. They stared, but did not come closer, nor did they run for cover as they would have if they had suspected I was an armed and dangerous criminal. Yet it was enough; they would talk; the gossip would reach the ears of some busybody; the message would go out.
