‘There are no untouchables in this country,’ said Kirpu firmly. ‘And there is no consideration of pollution.’
‘And if you compare that cafe to our cookhouse, you know what cleanliness means,’ said Lalu, enthusiastic and surprised at the change that had come into Uncle Kirpu’s outlook.
‘Son, that is a question of rupees,’ said Kirpu. ‘Some are rich here and run shops, some are poor and do the work of sweepers. Our cooks/shopkeepers have little money to spend on decorations. They are illiterate. And they have to sell food cheap. But oh! The bread baked in the oven! I wonder when we shall have some of that bread with clarified butter on it and a good pot of mustard spinach!’
Lalu agreed weakly. He had aspired to this Europe as to some heaven and sought to justify everything blighty.
He was inclined to forget the good things at home. ‘There seems more equality in this land,’ he added.
‘The sahibs travel first class,’ commented Kirpu with an air of finality. ‘The Indian officers second class, Tommies, havildars, naiks and sepoys in the third class — remember this and don’t be led astray.’
‘Look, look, a bridge!’ a group of sepoys called to those behind them as they began to run, their heavy boots clattering on the stone pavements. A few Frenchmen and women scattered away at their onrush.
‘Ohe, wild men, stop, go slowly!’ called Kirpu after them.
Lalu turned and saw that it was a quaint enough structure, this bridge, with its nine arches.
‘It is curious,’ he said reflecting more to himself than to Kirpu, ‘that most cities of the world were originally built near rivers, lakes or springs.’ And without waiting for an answer, he contemplated the tower of a church that probed the sky at the opposite end of the river, from the base of an intricate mesh of ancient architecture, decorated with statues, steeples, minarets and crevices in which pigeons fluttered as in the monolithic temples of India. So absorbed was he that he barred the way of a fat Frenchwoman who came across the bridge with a basket in her hand. And, as she was a veritable elephant, she in turn barred the way of a stream of men and women behind her.
‘Ohe, look, ohe look, get aside,’ called Kirpu.
And Lalu jumped away with a start, the fat woman burbled something, then bowed, and the young woman behind her laughed a laugh, which was so contagious that it caught the sepoys, and even Lalu. But, just then, a motor came rushing across the narrow road of the bridge and sent him scurrying up to the pavement till he nearly fell.
‘Come to your senses, son,’ admonished Kirpu.
Smiling at his own discomfiture, keeping to the edge of the pavement to make room for the Frenchwomen, Lalu caught up with Kirpu. And they both began to carve their way through a wide web of streets, crammed with little shops. All of these had transparent glass windows, like the shops in Marseilles. Some displayed wax effigies of men and women dressed in silken dresses, strangely shaped hats and coats, uncannily like real men and women, some showed shining silver utensils, watches and golden rings. And, wonder of wonders, even the great big carcasses of cows and goats hanging from hooks in butchers’ shops were kept behind windows, while in a grocer’s shop, legs of pig, covered with gauze, hung down, their flesh brown and green with what seemed like rot.
‘Let us go to the other side!’ Uncle Kirpu exclaimed on seeing these. And, with his handkerchief to his nose to ward off the imaginary smell, he darted across the street, saying, ‘I don’t know how men can eat them!’
So absorbed was Lalu that while Kirpu crossed the street, he continued on his way, fascinated by the chocolates, cakes and sweets arrayed in the window of an adjacent shop, and then by the tables and chairs, arrayed as if in a room, and by the neckties, shirts and collars, all the richest things he had ever seen and which he would never be able to buy, but among which he felt happy to be moving at leisure. He had not felt free at Marseilles, because he had been too humble then to stare at this superior life immediately after his arrival.
The shadow of the church he had seen from a distance now inclined in a great hulk across a street; its hoary sculptures seemed to be like some time-infused memorials to the strange incarnate spirits of the past, dressed in robes which had no connection with the straight-cut styles of the French of today, saints whose heads and bodies were covered with the droppings of pigeons and who seemed like crumbling images of a forlorn age in the midst of a new world.
Lalu’s gaze was staggered by the impact of this immense, ancient structure and groped among the dusky lengths of its florid pillars for some meaning.
He suddenly found himself in a square at the end of which was inscribed the name Place du Martin.
A number of sepoys stood here with elementary stares, round a statue in the middle of an empty space, while some Frenchmen waved with their hands quick and impatient gestures, and repeated, ‘Something… something…Jindac…’ in their soft but unintelligible lingo. Some of the soldiers walked away with clumsy steps and awkward movements as if they were bored. But Lalu rushed up and craned his neck to see the figure of a young girl with a sword in her hand, her head thrust heroically forward and her whole body speaking of some brave deed she had performed. Jean d’Arc, the inscription at the foot of the statue said. In a flash, the last clue to Orleans returned to his memory from the story of Joan of Arc in the Highroads of History, which he had read at the Church Mission School at Sherkot.
‘Who is it supposed to be?’ one sepoy was asking.
‘What a gigantic statue!’ another exclaimed.
‘Who is it, anyhow?’ queried Uncle Kirpu, walking up with an abounding curiosity.
And the whole place seemed to be in a ferment, the bulging eyes of the sepoys bewildered by the figure, while French were bewildered by them in turn.
Lalu explored the aisles of his memory for details and, supplementing the incomprehensible explanations of the natives, volunteered the information to the sepoys, in his own tongue.
‘In the fourteenth century, there was a Hundred Years’ War in which the English were fighting the French…’
‘Then, do you mean to say, that the Angrez sahibs and the Francisis were enemies at one time?’ one of the sepoys asked, rather shocked.
‘Haan,’ Lalu answered, and continued his narrative while a whole group of sepoys clustered round him.
The sepoys who had kept turning to the statue of the girl even as they heard Lalu’s story now contemplated the dark image with a naive sense of awe and wonder.
‘Is this really true?’ one said.
‘Could such things be?’ put in a second.
‘A girl Jarnel who drove out the Angrezi army!’ commented a third.
And the maid seemed to become a heroine like the Rani of Jhansi. Lalu felt blood coursing in his veins with the ambition to follow her on the path of glory.
‘Come, come let us go to a cafe!’ came Subah’s voice suddenly, ‘you have suddenly become a very learned man, come!’ And the Jemadar strode up from behind the statue with a swagger and thumped Lalu on the back with the old heartiness of an equal.
‘Come, come, my hero!’ said Kirpu, noticing that Lalu was getting carried away. ‘Come, us folk have different work, we are sepoys of the Sarkar and let us not forget that when we talk brave words.’
Lalu’s eyes fell upon a couple of French girls. He was fascinated by the profile of one of them, a stately girl of about twenty, and stared hard at her.
She smiled coquettishly and then turned her blue eyes away.
‘Come,’ said Jemadar Subah Singh and dragged him away.
Lalu followed but took the opportunity of turning round and caressing in his eyes the shapely contours of the girl’s breasts, her hips and her legs with a hunger that spread the panic of abandon in his body.
‘You will be court-martialled if you don’t behave!’ warned Kirpu and pulled him away. Lalu strode forward, excited, exultant, yet sad and alone and frustrated in some curious way.
Sitting in a comfortable basket-chair by a table
like a sahib, under the awnings outside a cafe by a busy boulevard, watching the crowd of casual, courteous, laughing Frenchmen and gaily painted, pretty women, sitting in the half dark of the evening, was the utterest happiness for Lalu.
The difficulty was that they did not know the name of any drink when the waiter sahib came to get their order, a brisk little man as big as a thumb, dressed in a crisp white shirt and black coat, which the sahibs wore at night — a veritable juggler the way he balanced a tray full of glasses and bottles on the palm of his left hand. Subah tried hard to remember what it was that he had drunk at Marseilles and looked among the hundreds of bottles arrayed in the cafe to recognize the wine, in vain, till Lalu suddenly recalled the word ‘Graves’ and the Jemadar shouted, ‘Haan, haan, Graves.’ The waiter and the customers in the cafe seemed amused at the order. But the French were indulgent and kindly. The only wine Uncle Kirpu had ever drunk was rum, and, since Lalu had felt warmer after a ration of this, these two said rum, a word the waiter sahib could not understand till a Tommy, who sat in a group nearby, got up and, trying to interpret the word, pointed his finger to a bottle of Martell Cognac in the window, as he could not see any rum.
‘Cognac! Cognac!’ the waiter repeated and ran with the agility of a clown towards the bar inside the cafe, studded with tall mirrors and huge chandeliers and decorated with plush sofas on which sat well-dressed superior sahibs, eating with silver forks and knives on tables covered with immaculate white cloths.
‘So even the Tommies don’t know the language of the Francisis!’ Uncle Kirpu said.
‘What is more, they are not allowed to sit with the big sahibs and officers inside there!’ said Subah.
‘You are an officer — why don’t you go and sit inside there?’ Lalu wanted to say. But he restrained himself and only cast a furtive glance at the rich atmosphere inside and felt ashamed and inferior and afraid lest the intrusion of his stare be interpreted as rudeness by the sahibs there. For, it was said in the cantonment that the sahibs did not like the idea of being stared at while they were eating in the officers’ mess or even drinking by the hockey pitch after a match.
‘Compared to them, we folk from Punjab are truly like oxen,’ Uncle Kirpu said, moving his head as if he were very impressed with the splendour of the place.‘Ohe, this is nothing compared to what I shall show you if you come with me,’ said Subah, thumping Kirpu on the thigh. ‘You wait till the Indian merchant, whose friendship I made this afternoon, comes.’
‘In every land, even in our own country, it could be like this,’ said Lalu. ‘But our elders say, “It is not the custom to do this, it is not the custom to do that.” Fools! If you are seen drinking a pot of wine you are automatically declared a drunkard, and if you look at a woman you at once become notorious as a rogue, a pimp and a whoremonger and your parents tell you that you have cut their nose in the brotherhood and no one will give you his daughter in marriage. Burnt up people! Owls!’
‘Oh! Grave! Grave! Grave!’ Subah shouted, recognising the bottle of white wine he had drunk at Marseilles on the waiter’s tray, and interrupted Lalu’s diatribe.
The waiter sahib came smiling, brushed the marble top of the table, put his tray on it, opened a bottle and poured their drinks into glasses. He bowed and was retreating when the Jemadar lifted his glass and gulped down the liquid and, recalling the word for waiter, shouted, ‘Garçon!’ The waiter came back, smiled, bowed and poured some more Graves into his glass. Subah gulped that too. At this, the waiter laughed and the sahibs sitting by stared at the Jemadar. Subah’s face was flushed and, for a moment, it seemed he would be angry and resentful at becoming the object of a joke. But some sepoys of the 69th, a Baluchi and two Sikhs, came over to the Jemadar’s table and, in order to ingratiate themselves with the officer, called flatteringly, ‘Wah! Wah! Jemadar Sahib.’
‘Come brave men and sit down with me,’ Subah shouted and, turning to the Baluchi, began to recite a Persian verse, ‘O Saki, bring the cup…’
Lalu sat away detached, as he was too frightened after the curt manner in which Subah had, in the pride of his advancement to a direct commission, condemned him and Kirpu, his old cronies, to fatigue duty the other day. He was happy, sipping a cognac, sipping it gently without the spitting, spattering, spluttering noises with which he was wont to drink milk or tea in India, and without gulping it like Subab. Sipping a cognac had warmed his senses to an indulgent tenderness. And he merely watched the flashing of fine forms clad in superior silks and serge, the flowering of the spirit in the accents of Francisi, as polished and gentle to the ear as well-spoken Hindustani, and the gorgeous interplay of colour and movement and speech, which seemed to him the very essence of life here.
‘All men in all countries are perhaps the same,’ Uncle Kirpu reflected. ‘At least, all are equal in the grave. And in life all must have duties and responsibilities. These people must have families: they are probably fathers, mothers, sons, daughters and sisters.’
‘Only their customs are different,’ Lalu said, with a trace of bitterness in his voice at Kirpu’s reference to the family.
‘Life wouldn’t be worth living, my son, without the spirit of service which is in the members of a family,’ said Uncle Kirpu vaguely.
‘But the spirit of service ought not to become a way of extracting pain out of people in the guise of duties,’ said Lalu, raising his voice a little so that he sounded priggish in his denunciation. ‘You must always put on a miserable expression and remain quiet in the presence of your elders, that is respect. And, of course, you must never commit the crime of being happy! Always follow custom!’
‘Ohe! Leave such talk, come drink up and let us have some more, and let us go and be happy,’ said Subah, boisterously thumping the table before him. And he began to sing.
‘Wah! Wah! Jemadar Sahib!’ said the Baluchi sepoy.
‘Son of a lion!’ flattered the Sikh, impressed to see the Subedar Major’s son drinking as only a peasant could.
The waiter sahib who, incredible as it seemed to the sepoys, was their servant for the while, mistook Subah’s thump for a gesture demanding his services and came smiling up to the table with a polite,‘Vee Musia?’
‘Hancore!’ Subah said, pointing to his glass and then thinking that brandy was the drink of those lower orders of the human species, sepoys and the like, raised four fingers above the glasses of cognac with an exaggerated flourish of his hand, so that the neighbours who, apart from an occasional stare, had taken the Indians for granted, laughed affectionately. Then the Jemadar’s eyes fell upon a young girl who had joined in the laughter. He breathed a deep sigh as if his heart had been suddenly punctured, and then burst in the highest-pitched Punjabi: ‘Hai! May I die for you! May I become a sacrifice for your laughter! Hai! May I take you in my arms!’
‘Ohe, ohe, son, have some shame, have some respect for yourself before these sepoys and before everyone else!’ said Uncle Kirpu.
‘Don’t you care for the limp lord!’ said Subah, loudly.
‘We are now in the fair land of France and in this land, as Lalu says, there is complete liberty. Look at that man kissing a girl in the corner.’
‘But some British officer may see you and report us,’ said Kirpu.
‘I don’t care, I don’t care,’ sang Subah in a boisterous sing-song, his face flushed.
Kirpu sat aside frightened and anxious.
Lalu felt that if Kirpu persisted in his admonitions, Subah might lose his head altogether, and, anyhow, as he looked into himself, he felt very much like Subah and thought that he was only restrained from confessing his admiration for French girls by his inferior status as a sepoy: he wished he could again see that girl with the bronzed oval face who had fascinated him near the statue… And be lent himself to the subtle, indefinable air which bubbled like the froth on open bottles, trailed along the talk, along thin wisps of curling smoke and drifted among the shadows; which mingled with waves from the quickened heartbeats of all men and women, the strivings of
their wills in the irregular, irrelevant movements of their gestures. Life had become action. He was no longer half-dead as at home in the village.
The waiter sahib brought the drinks and Subah put a bundle of notes on the table from which the garcon chose one, saying something like,‘Fron, fron.’
‘Come then, brothers, come and gulp it down,’ said Subah. ‘And then let us go and meet the Hindustani merchant. He said he would be near the statue, and he knows all about the secret life here.’
Before they had gulped down their drinks, however, the Indian merchant arrived. With the effusive heartiness that marked him out as a Punjabi, though he could otherwise have passed for a Frenchman with his little pointed beard and his affectation of the outer bearing of the· natives of his country, he embraced Subah, shouting the while: ‘Ah, Jemadar Sahib, so you can see that I never break a promise.’
‘Come, come, what will you have to drink?’ Subah said, glowing with enthusiasm.
‘Now listen,’ the merchant said, raising his finger, ‘I don’t meet a countryman of mine for days, sometimes for months and years, so you are to be my guests.’
‘No, take this,’ said Subah, and began to pour some of his Graves into his own glass for his friend.
‘What is this? Oh no, thank you very much, but I would like you to order some absinthe for me if you really must insist on treating me.’ And he called the garcon, who happened to be standing by, and said something to him in French.
‘We are very happy to meet you in this foreign land,’ said Kirpu with characteristic Indian informality. ‘What is your respected name and what kind of business do you do here?’
‘They call your servant Diwan Amar Nath,’ the merchant replied with a calculated politeness, which twisted his padded, pockmarked face, with the thick lips and beady eyes, into a patently clear expression of feigned humility. And he continued with an exalted air: ‘I do all kinds of things. I have sold diamonds and jewels in my time. And I have supplied carpets and rugs to the princes of Europe. I have done many things… I know some of the richest men in this country and, to be sure, they are in every way above the rabble, for they honour us and our ancient country.’
The Great War Page 11
