Zemindar

by Valerie Fitzgerald

  ‘And a very estimable sentiment, too. My opinion of the lady soars.’

  ‘Fancy managing to remember all the ill-natured tattling of cantonment tea-drinkings in our present situation.’

  ‘But tattle and tea-drinkings are far more enduring than “our present situation” as you term it. They’ll still be continuing long after you and I are mouldering in our well-earned graves. How else can the proprieties be defined—or defended?’

  ‘What a horrid thought; but I suppose you are right. Human beings never really learn anything, do they?’

  ‘Some do. You have.’

  ‘I wonder? I’ve tried to, but give me a week of comfort and cleanliness and butter on white bread, and I’ll probably forget everything I’ve learned.’

  Oliver put his hand under my chin, tilted up my face and kissed me on the lips. Then, murmuring my name, he placed his cheek against my hair, and we stood for a space very close together and allowed our nearness to engulf us in sweetness.

  ‘I’ll give you more, my dear,’ he said very tenderly, ‘never mind what you’ve learned. Everything I have, or will ever have, is yours now. Isn’t it time, Laura, that we had a serious talk … about the future?’

  The moment of decision was upon me. I did not want to meet it. Perhaps, with a little adroit manipulation of mood, I could again have avoided it, but sooner or later it would have to be faced, and suddenly, standing there above the storied pinnacles of the city, with his arms about me I felt strong enough to do so.

  ‘Yes. I … have been thinking about it a good deal.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Oliver, before you say anything more, there is one thing we must clear up.’

  ‘My lurid past?’ His lips twitched, but the hazel eyes looked at me with serious attention. ‘It shall be as an open book to you, if that is what you want.’

  ‘No! Oh, Oliver, of course not. What’s done is done, for both of us.’

  ‘I think it would be better so, but perhaps you feel that there is too much of me you do not know. That my—er—secret life of which Mrs Bonner knows so much will stand between us. Is that it?’

  ‘No. I think there may be something to stand between us, but not … not other women.’

  ‘What else can there be?’

  ‘Well, Jessie has told me of your offer. She is quite taken up with the idea of running your house in Hassanganj. But—oh, surely, Oliver, surely you don’t intend to go back there, or to remain in India at all? Not after what has happened here? What has happened to us all? But … Jessie thinks you mean it.’

  ‘I do mean it,’ he said quietly.

  ‘You really intend to go back?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  Perhaps the sun did not dip behind the mangoes at that moment; perhaps the minarets had already lost their light before he spoke. To me, however, that single word brought darkness.

  ‘Hassanganj is destroyed,’ I found myself pointing out in quiet panic. ‘It’s been destroyed.’

  ‘The house has, but that can be rebuilt. The estate is still there and still mine.’

  ‘But how can you know that?’ I objected, holding his hand very tightly in both my own. ‘The whole country is in confusion and, when they get the situation under control, who knows what the Government may decide … about your estate, about Oudh, about anything? Everything will have changed. It will have to change.’

  ‘Perhaps. But no one can take Hassanganj from me, Laura.’

  ‘You really think you can take up your life again, just as it was?’

  ‘Perhaps not just as it was. Perhaps I won’t want to. But much as it was. In time.’

  ‘And you could forget all you have been through? After your horrible experiences of treachery and barbarity, how can you even contemplate living again amongst such people?’

  ‘They have not all been treacherous—or cruel—and I owe my life to “barbarians” like the leather worker who pulled me from the river. And to Ishmial, and Ungud and … Moti too, most of all. As do you, Laura. And talking of barbarity, I could tell you tales of the behaviour of our own white-skinned, civilized and Christian fellows that bear dishonourable comparison with any of the evil things done by the others.’

  ‘How can you say such a thing?’

  ‘That is the first totally stupid remark I have ever heard you make, Laura,’ he said coldly. ‘When did the colour of a man’s skin ever control his virtue or lack of it? There have been things done here, in the name of British justice, of course, that are as foul and as vicious in intent as anything those men out there have done to us in the name of their freedom … their right to live in their own way. What they have done has been bad; no doubt of that. But what they did was in the heat of triumph or under the threat of fear—generally irrationally, as I believe. We have done similar things, will continue to do them, without the excuse of fanaticism or hysteria; things like Neill sentencing the Brahmins among the accused of Cawnpore to clean the blood from the floor of the Bibighar with their tongues before being hanged. In forcing them to that, he destroyed their souls as well as their caste. They would gladly have relinquished their mere bodies.’

  ‘But that is only what they believed …’

  ‘No man can be more than what he believes, or other than what he believes, in the last analysis. Who are you to be so sure they are wrong and that only our ideas on such matters can be correct?’

  ‘But after what they did to the women and children …’

  ‘I am not excusing them and, God knows, I am not defending them! What you forget is that their own people will be as horrorstruck by that episode as we are. I am only pointing out that not only they have been in the wrong, and we have no prerogative of right behaviour. Sometimes I wonder whether we have any hint of it, indeed. Perhaps you remember that among my more unpopular opinions is the theory that we British brought this whole damned rebellion on our own heads by our deliberate arrogance, our inertia and our ignorance of the people we are ruling.’

  He was looking at me now as he had looked at me when Charles had found us kissing after Mr Roberts’s funeral, with a wary, detached curiosity. His expression cut me more cruelly than his words. I released his hand and walked away from him with bent head. At the corner of the roof I paused and looked with tear-filled eyes over the darkening vista.

  ‘Very well. On this I cannot argue with you. You know much more than I, both of the Indian and of the British in India. But tell me—let’s leave the rest aside for the moment—just tell me what you believe you can do in Hassanganj now. What you will be free to do? You know as well as I that everyone is saying the Company must go now, that the country will be taken over by the Crown and everything must change as a consequence. What will you be able to do in Hassanganj? And when?’

  ‘When? I cannot answer that unfortunately. And it is not of any very vital importance. The land will remain, even if abused; the villages may have been burned down, but the villagers will return to them. Perhaps the roads were washed away in the last monsoon, the canals breached for their water. I don’t know. But these things can be remedied. These people, my people of Hassanganj, are patient in adversity. If they were not, the villages would long since have returned to the earth of which they are made. Whatever has happened, when I get back I will find them rebuilding their mud houses, scratching out of the hard earth once again the fields that give them sustenance and dignity; returning bit by bit and slow day by slow day to the onerous cycle of their seasonal tasks. To their life. And what will I do, you ask? I will help them to the best of my ability. I will try to repair, to build up, what the folly of my kind and the ignorance of their own have joined in destroying. I will go on living the life and doing the work I was intended for. I have no other option.’

  He had not followed me, but when I turned, I found him leaning on the pock-marked balustrade, looking over the city as it faded momentarily into the gathering dusk. From a mosque came the call of the muezzin, cracked tenor notes scratching aside the bass growl of th
e distant bazaars, and the smoke settled closer to the rooftops.

  My shoes were now so worn, perhaps he did not hear me as I returned to his side. He did not turn or look at me, and I was not sure he knew I was close to him.

  ‘Oh, woman dear!’ And the words were so soft a whisper, I could not have heard them had I not been near. ‘You must give me a chance. You must try to understand. There is so much you have no way of knowing—of me and of my life … and of India. But India is my life, Laura. My only life …’

  CHAPTER 2

  After a pause, during which he had seemed to forget my presence, he went on: ‘There is so much about me that you still cannot know; give me a hearing.’

  ‘Oh, Oliver, of course! You must see how much I want to understand?’

  ‘Then why should it be so difficult for you to appreciate my point of view?’

  For a moment his eyes held mine, then he looked away again.

  ‘Laura … India, as I have said, is my life. To you it is an interlude only, and now an unpleasant interlude; but it is my native land. I am India’s as surely as you and your relatives feel they belong to England, and only your ignorance of how things really are with me forces me to say so. You cannot really believe that I, with my white skin, can have as strong an affection for this country as you have for England. Yet it is so, and quite understandable.

  ‘You know my grandfather was granted his land at Hassanganj by the Nawab of Oudh over sixty years ago; my father was born in the old house, as I was myself. Three generations of us now have loved the place and felt it home.

  ‘When my grandfather first went to Hassanganj, it was part wilderness and part desert, damned nearly untouched by human hand unless in destruction. There were no roads, no waterways, no villages; a few tiny, transient hamlets of gonds and gypsies only. The land had never been tilled nor the forest cleared.

  ‘Old Adam created Hassanganj. He populated it with the inhabitants of a neighbouring district then suffering a famine; he decided on the best sites for the villages, laid them out and helped build them with his own hands; he pushed back the forest-line, irrigated the scrubland, built roads. He imported the seed for the first crops, experimented with the first orchards, bored the first wells and provided the bullocks to work them. It took him years, and all in the midst of the usual difficulties: the climate, the loneliness, the misinterpretation of his motives by his own people and by the natives. As well, he had the Rohilla raiders to contend with, the jealousy and spite of the talukhdars, and the corrupt politics of the Nawab’s court. A dozen times in half a century we have had as much reason to abandon the country in disgust, as you feel I now have. But we did not abandon it, and I never will. We have made something where there was almost nothing, Laura, something durable and worthwhile. My grandfather loved India with single-mindedness and passion. My father loved India. I have inherited their love—and with it their responsibilities.’

  While he was speaking, his injured arm had fallen out from between the buttons of his corduroy jacket. Impatiently he thrust the limp wrist into his pocket with the aid of his left hand, and glanced at me in embarrassment as he did so.

  ‘Do you not see?’ he asked.

  ‘But I have always known how much you cared for Hassanganj, Oliver …’

  ‘It is more than that. Every man feels affection for his home, yet can leave it when the time comes. Hassanganj is more than my home and the home of my family. It is my life; my work. I can think of no other way of living, no other work to do. That’s the difference. And the work has only just begun. Now, after all this … this wretched business is over, the Company will go. The Crown will take over, and with the Nawab out of the way, I believe things will be easier. I will be able to do much more, and more quickly. With a more stable government, the villages will prosper; within a few years the railway will connect every corner of India, and trade must expand. The indigo has been doing well over the past few years and in a couple more will prove a profitable crop for those of the villagers who have learned from my experiment and are prepared to cultivate it. Then there’s sugar. As soon as the railway reaches us, I intend to build a factory where we can process the stuff straight from the Hassanganj fields, and my poor damned peasants will at last see some more tangible reward for their labours than a half-filled belly and an evergrowing debt to the bunnia.

  ‘And there’ll be other benefits, things I can put my hand to now that were impossible before. Schools in the villages, medical help—by God, perhaps even a hospital if I can prevail on the Government to help me; certainly a dispensary …’

  ‘No wonder they call you a radical,’ I commented as he paused, half caught, despite myself, in the sweep of his hopes.

  ‘Is that what they call me?’

  I nodded.

  ‘That is a compliment. A real compliment,’ he said seriously. ‘It is the roots I am interested in. The roots of India. This that is happening here, all around us, is only a beginning, Laura. I do not know what the outcome will be, but I recognize that it is a turning-point. The old ideas by which we have lived here, and which brought us here in the first place, are dead, or at least no longer sufficient to enable us to rule this enormous country—which is what we have now committed ourselves to do. I can only guess at what will take their place, but when everything has cooled down, it will be found that all our notions and expectations will have changed because of an entirely new situation. The British will at last have to forego the extraordinary pretence that they are merely agents of a commercial concern; they will openly become, as they have long been in effect, the only rulers of India. Somehow we—the Government, the Crown, whatever you care to call it—are going to have to create and then deal with a cohesion of interest and direction among all the races, creeds and kingdoms of India, and we are going to discover that we have created out of our tradesmen’s lust a creature much larger than ourselves. I doubt whether it will be an angel; I hope it will not prove a dragon! But there, Laura, out there under that smoky sky is one part of that problematical new creature. An infant part, I suppose. Perhaps it will be a couple of lifetimes before it acquires any stature, maybe more. But I want to help it grow, not with money and White Papers in a Parliament thousands of miles away, but with my own effort, my own understanding, my own capacities—such as they are.’

  ‘You’re a dreamer of dreams,’ I said, mostly to fill the enquiring silence.

  ‘Of only one dream—that I have been bred in.’

  Moved by the intensity of his manner, I walked a few paces along the flat roof.

  ‘Laura?’

  I paused, without turning.

  ‘What do you say?’

  ‘What am I to say?’

  He followed me and stood looking down at my bent head as I pretended to gaze over the almost invisible city.

  ‘I have told you this because I want you with me.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘In holy wedlock, of course!’ he added with a brief resumption of his old sardonic manner.

  ‘I had paid you the compliment of presuming so.’

  ‘My idea in approaching Jessie was that she would make an excellent companion for you. You know and like her well, and I suppose it might be strange for you in Hassanganj at first. She could take all the dreary household tasks out of your hands.’

  ‘And thus leave me free to minister to my master!’ I said tartly.

  ‘Oho! So she talked then!’ And he grinned, quite unabashed. He was relaxed now, at ease. Apparently he considered his battle won. I turned and looked up at his hawkish face, so thin and strained despite the smile. There was so much I wished to say to him, to explain, even to discover for myself through my own words. All I said, however, was, ‘Her exact words were that your wife would have her hands full taking care of you!’

  ‘And so she will,’ he smiled, taking both my hands in his one. ‘So she will! I’ll want you by me every moment of life, waking and sleeping. I want you with me in the office; you were always good with figures
and quite a help to me over those inventories, do you remember? I had great trouble persuading Benarsi Das to destroy the perfectly good copies he had made, so that I could give you something to do that would keep you near me. And when I ride to the villages you will come with me, and you will sit in the kutcheri, the court, three times a week to see that I temper justice with mercy. We will plan our new house together, and watch it being built together. We’ll go shooting and hawking and fishing and will climb in the hills in the summers. I’ll teach you Persian on cold winter evenings—oh! and you must continue with your Urdu, of course; it will prove very useful with the women, and the local lingo you’ll pick up in no time. By God, how I wish we could start right away! I’m back where my grandfather was, in a way, but with all his experience to help me, and with luck a surer foundation to build on. It will be magnificent, Laura. Exhilarating!’

  ‘Aren’t you overlooking one thing?’ I said, disengaging my hands and turning from him. I knew he was looking at my averted face steadily but he made no response, and I was furious because my voice quivered as I went on: ‘I cannot think of living in Hassanganj.’

  Still he remained silent, and I was forced to continue without any encouragement but that of my own unhappy conviction.

  ‘I cannot … I cannot continue to live in India! I know you do not understand; I cannot expect you to. But it is the truth, none the less. I cannot remain out here. Once before, long before all this took place, I remember feeling the same thing, not so strongly of course. It was when we had encountered the suttee procession in the forest. I found myself filled with an overwhelming repugnance for India and everything Indian—because I could not understand it, sympathize with it. Because, I suppose, I knew I could never change it. In time I overcame that. But now, all that has happened to us in the last few months, and to our friends and to you too, Oliver—it has all accumulated and … and solidified in my mind, so that, while I am trying not to loathe India, I know I will never now love it. Never forgive it sufficiently, I suppose, to live in it without fear.’