A Division of the Spoils

by Paul Scott

  Still; mutual recognition remains an assumption. But, if there was mutual recognition, one has to assume that Lindsey saw nothing so clearly as the embarrassment that would follow any attempt to renew an old acquaintance in such very different circumstances. His transfer to Division suggests that he probably applied for it directly he heard that he was going to Brigade, in Mayapore. Little to do with over-compensation for lack of confidence, but a lot to do with straightforward self-protection from the consequences of having a friend who was no longer socially acceptable and who might turn out to be a pest, the sort of Indian who as the raj so often said would try to take advantage, make demands it would be impossible to satisfy and which it would be wiser and more comfortable not to lay oneself open to.

  Where I agree with Rowan is in pinpointing the meeting with Lindsey as the one meeting in Kumar’s life which, leading directly to the other from which all his true misfortunes flowed, must bear a special significance: no Lindsey on the maidan that day, no drinking bout with young Vidyasagar and friends; no wandering on to waste-ground, no stretcher-bearers, no Sister Ludmila, no Sanctuary; no morning waking there, hungover, resentful and unco-operative.

  No Merrick.

  *

  And yet how logical that meeting was, between Kumar – one of Macaulay’s ‘brown-skinned Englishmen’ – and Merrick, English-born and English-bred, but a man whose country’s social and economic structure had denied him advantages and privileges which Kumar had initially enjoyed; a man, moreover, who lacked entirely that liberal instinct which is so dear to historians that they lay it out like a guideline through the unmapped forests of prejudice and self-interest as though this line, and not the forest, is our history.

  Place Merrick at home, in England, and Harry Coomer abroad, in England, and it is Coomer on whom the historian’s eye lovingly falls; he is a symbol of our virtue. In England it is Merrick who is invisible. Place them there, in India, and the historian cannot see either of them. They have wandered off the guideline, into the jungle. But throw a spotlight on them and it is Merrick on whom it falls. There he is, the unrecorded man, one of the kind of men we really are (as Sarah would say). Yes, their meeting was logical. And they had met before, countless times. You can say they are still meeting, that their meeting reveals the real animus, the one that historians won’t recognize, or which we relegate to our margins

  Neither Rowan nor I saw it like this, then. I doubt that he would see it like this now. Simply, he would remain appalled and puzzled, a man with a conscience that worked in favour of both men; more in favour of Kumar than of Merrick; but Merrick was given sufficient benefit of the liberal doubt to leave Rowan inert. What Rowan was doing, in telling me all this, was trying to set off against his own inertia someone else’s positive action: mine. He wanted me to do what he could not do: help Kumar. His ideas on the subject, it goes without saying, were woolly.

  *

  Kumar had been washing under a tap, trying to clear his head, when Merrick arrived at the Sanctuary looking for the escaped prisoner, Moti Lal. The first ball of the over. The merciless succession of deliveries after all came from the same hand. Merrick saw him, a young man of twenty-two, washing under a tap; and chose him. I wondered how ‘prepossessing’ Hari Kumar had been before prison had had its effect and made him look like one man peering out of the eyesockets of another. Self-punishment being out of the question, Merrick punished the men he chose. After Karim Muzzafir Khan’s suicide I was never in any doubt about Merrick’s repressed homosexuality. Rowan always evaded this issue, and the result was that for him I think it assumed a graver importance than it merited, except perhaps in regard to the proposed marriage to Susan Bingham. But he had found it quite impossible, obviously, to convey any suspicion of this kind to Colonel Layton, or to anyone whom it might concern. One can understand this. It was no business of his, just as it was no business of mine.

  For not answering Merrick’s questions smartly and respectfully, Kumar was taken forcibly from the Sanctuary, pushed, punched and thrown into a police truck; not by Merrick but by one of Merrick’s sub-inspectors (the same one, perhaps, who made an ‘erroneous’ report about the bicycle?).

  But Merrick saw him being punched. So did Sister Ludmila. After the truck had driven away she sent word to Hari’s uncle Romesh Chand. Romesh sent the lawyer Srinivasan to inquire why young Kumar had been ‘arrested’, but by the time he got there Kumar had been released. The word got round, though, that a young Indian of good character and good education had been roughed-up by the police and taken in for questioning – got round in those circles of Indian society which formed a link between the rulers and the ruled; Indians with a foot in both camps.

  Four years after his arrival in Mayapore this world became aware of him. He had to be hauled into a kotwali first. It must have intrigued Merrick that this world now took note of Kumar. Srinivasan, first; and then, no doubt through Srinivasan, no less a person than the District and Sessions Judge, an Indian, who apparently inquired gently why this young Indian had been taken to the kotwali with no obvious justification. For Srinivasan and the judge Merrick can only have had contempt.

  The doyenne of this official Indian society in Mayapore was Lady Chatterjee, a woman of cultured and cosmopolitan tastes, one imagines, since she was a friend of Lady Manners. Persona grata with the Deputy Commissioner, with whom she played bridge, she was neither blind nor deaf to evidence of the raj’s high-handedness even if (as one supposes) she often had to be to its frequent vulgarities. What Srinivasan, the lawyer, or Menen, the judge, told her about the young Kumar, interested her sufficiently to cause her to invite him to a party at her house.

  He went, one imagines, out of curiosity; prickly curiosity, as resentful of the interest his ‘case’ had aroused as he was resentful of the fact that it had taken so long for this privileged section of Indian society to notice him. Rowan gathered it had been a mixed party – a further irony. Kumar would have been under observation by both sides. Admitting to Rowan that from his point of view the party wasn’t a success (nor, he thought, from Lady Chatterjee’s, whom he failed to thank), he said he had forgotten how to behave in this sort of company.

  One questions that until remembering that he had never been in that sort of company before, and realizes that what he really meant was that he had no idea how to behave in a gathering of people, white and brown, who even when they mingled were observing certain rules which hinted at segregation. These were rules which only Miss Manners seemed unaware of. At first he thought she was merely trying over-hard to put him at his ease. It was a long time since an English person had talked to him without either condescension or self-consciousness, which was what Miss Manners seemed to be doing and what subsequent events suggested she had been doing. And that would make her the first Englishwoman to have talked to him on the simple human level of woman to man. When last in England he had still been a schoolboy. One wonders about the effect this would have on him. Rowan had never seen a photograph of her. The one the police found in Kumar’s room was not in the file. But he had heard her described as not much to look at; but this was afterwards, when people had no time for her and assumed she had rigged the evidence to save a man she was infatuated with or terrified of.

  One really knew nothing about Daphne Manners except that she was in some degree or other attracted to Kumar. One knew nothing about Kumar’s feelings. The history of their relationship could be made to fit almost any theory one could have of Kumar’s character and intentions. Here he was, for instance, doing as little as he could to encourage her because he found her embarrassing. Or here, doing that same little in order to excite her more. Or here, genuinely fond of her, perhaps falling in love with her, but seeing no future for either of them and doing his best to make her see that there was no future. The theory most people had was that he egged her on, made her chase after him, to humiliate her, but subtly, so that she did not realize that she was being humiliated.

  ‘Which theory do you subscribe to?’
I asked Rowan.

  ‘I think he was fond of her. I don’t believe he meant her any harm. I think she fell in love with him quite early on. And eventually I think they started making love. I think they were making love in the Bibighar Gardens. It’s the only explanation that makes sense of all the rest. They were making love and were interrupted by the men who assaulted her.’

  ‘His friends?’

  ‘They weren’t his friends. He’d only been out with them once, the night he got drunk. They weren’t his enemies either. And they were really only kids. If Hari and Miss Manners were making love in the Bibighar that night then I think the men who attacked them and assaulted her really were the kind she described later when she had to admit she’d had a glimpse of them. Badmashes who’d come into Mayapore to pick up what they could in the riots everyone was expecting and which had already started down in districts like Dibrapur. The Bibighar Gardens sounds like a public place but it was a derelict site. The kind of place men like that would collect in, waiting for dark. And the kind of place Kumar and Miss Manners would go to, to be on their own.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask Kumar whether this is what happened?’

  ‘It only occurred to me later. Quite recently, in fact. In any case Kumar wouldn’t have admitted it. He refused to say anything about her. He went on insisting he’d not seen her for something like three weeks, after the night they visited the temple. Exactly the same as he insisted when Merrick arrested him. And then of course don’t forget I was trying not to examine him about the rape. I was taking a very literal view of the terms of reference, which were for the examination of a political detenu. But the rape couldn’t be avoided. Everything came back to it because everything came back to Merrick. Kumar seemed to want it to come back to Merrick. So did Gopal. So for that matter did Lady Manners. Gopal started asking him about his first interrogation – I don’t mean the one in February – I mean after Merrick had carted him away from his home on the night of the rape. He told Gopal Merrick had had him stripped and that his genitals had been examined. Lady Manners was listening in and watching through the grille. The microphone was in a telephone on my desk but she and I could use the telephone to communicate. When she realized I was trying to stop things going along these lines she rang through and told me I mustn’t bother about her hearing unpleasant things. The other thing she wanted to know was whether Kumar knew her niece had died in childbirth. I pretended it was an outside call, naturally, and took that opportunity to call a break and send Kumar out. I tried to explain to Gopal that if we started concentrating on the alleged rape the record of the examination might be thrown out as irrelevant. But he insisted. I thought it pretty dangerous. You have to realize, Guy, that at this time I was fairly convinced that Kumar was mixed up in the assault somehow or other and that Gopal was being very naïve, over-anxious to show that Kumar had been a victim of raj terrorism. And, well, to be quite frank, it went against the grain to hear Kumar beginning to accuse an English police officer, a man who wasn’t there to defend himself.

  ‘Kumar wasn’t on oath, the examination was private. The police officer couldn’t legally be affected by anything Kumar decided to say or make up. And I wondered why he was suddenly so co-operative about answering questions he’d previously refused to answer. In 1942 his reply to every question according to the file had been that he had nothing to say. The only thing he still had nothing to say about was what he’d been doing between leaving the Gazette office as usual about six in the evening and arriving home about 9.30 in mud-stained clothes and with scratches and abrasions on his face. On the other hand –’

  I waited.

  ‘On the other hand, if he’d spent his time in prison making up fantasies about Merrick’s treatment of him I felt he could have made up a plausible story to cover that ominous gap. But he hadn’t. And whatever he said sounded like the truth. I didn’t know what to think. But I felt like a defending lawyer who knows he can get his client off so long as he sticks to the point – the minor legal issue – and avoids anything controversial. I think I could have stuck to that and overridden Gopal if Kumar had co-operated. But he kept on saying that the real situation couldn’t be avoided. He didn’t mean the rape, he said he meant the situation between Merrick and himself. So when he came back after the recess I let everyone pull out the stops. I felt I’d exchanged briefs and was now prosecuting. If I let him talk about what he called the situation I thought he’d inadvertently give something away. It wasn’t what I wanted. It was what I felt I couldn’t resist any more. Do you see that? Or do I sound like someone covering up a prejudice and pretending the prejudice was never there?’

  It was a difficult question. I couldn’t answer it. I didn’t try. What worried Rowan was the thought that after all his suspicion of Hari’s complicity in the rape was not based so much on the evidence in the file as on the fact that Hari was an Indian and the colour of his skin coloured one’s attitude to him, and that in fact it was a relief to exchange his brief, throw off the mask and let Hari condemn himself while he was trying to condemn Merrick.

  And I think it was then, with Rowan sitting opposite me, showing not a trace of anxiety (carve him in stone and nothing would have emerged so clearly as his rigid pro-consular self-assurance, remoteness and dignity), that I understood the comic dilemma of the raj – the dilemma of men who hoped to inspire trust but couldn’t even trust themselves. The air around us and in the grounds of the summer residence was soft, pungent with aromatic gums, but melancholy – charged with this self-mistrust and the odour of an unreality which only exile made seem real. I had an almost irrepressible urge to burst out laughing. I fought it because he would have misinterpreted it. But I would have been laughing for him. I suppose that to laugh for people, to see the comic side of their lives when they can’t see it for themselves, is a way of expressing affection for them; and even admiration – of a kind – for the lives they try so seriously to lead.

  *

  It was Gopal’s theory that the cuts and abrasions Kumar was said to have been bathing when the police turned up at his house hadn’t been there until after the police turned up, or until he arrived at police headquarters, or even until later; that is, not there until they started getting rough with him and needed a report on the file that would explain the state of his face and at the same time harden the evidence against him. When the examination got under way again Rowan read out to him Merrick’s statement about his arrival at Kumar’s house and his discovery of Kumar, bathing his face, which was cut and bruised, and of the discarded muddy clothes.

  Was that an accurate report? Rowan asked.

  Yes, Kumar replied. It was.

  *

  Gopal was deflated but bided his time. There was another report on Kumar’s file, quite a brief one, a copy of a statement by a magistrate who’d been asked by the Deputy Commissioner to question Kumar on two rather unpleasant aspects of the handling of the case. Word had got round in Mayapore that to try to make them confess the arrested boys, all Hindus, had been forced to eat beef. Also that they’d been whipped. The magistrate’s name was Iyenagar. Rowan hadn’t seen the files on the five other boys; he’d only been shown Kumar’s. According to this file Kumar told Iyenagar that he had no complaint to make about his treatment, a simple enough refutation of the rumours and one that seemed to be borne out by the report from the medical officer at the Kandipat jail who examined Kumar physically the day he was sent there as a detenu – more than two weeks later. The only mark of physical violence noted down by the prison doctor was a contusion on his cheek. But that had been there when Merrick found him bathing his face.

  The bruise, however, gave Mr Gopal an argument which he tried to turn to Kumar’s advantage. He said that the marks on Hari’s face, which Hari himself refused to explain, had been interpreted by the police as marks got from Miss Manners in the struggle with her attackers. He said that in a court of law a lawyer might reasonably have asked whether a woman could hit a man hard enough for a bruise to stay on his c
heek for as long as two weeks. He was still trying to get Hari to say that the police had beaten him up. But Hari wouldn’t say this. He said it was a good point but that in a court a prosecuting counsel might well have turned it against him by suggesting that the men who attacked Miss Manners also fought with each other.

  ‘I saw an opening there,’ Rowan told me. ‘I asked him casually if that was what had happened. I remember how he looked at me. He said he’d no idea what happened among the men who attacked her. But he realized I’d exchanged briefs. I tried again to get him to say what had happened to him that night, gave him the chance to go back over the ground, back to the question of Colin, back to his relationship with Miss Manners, but all I got out of him was the information that sometimes he and Miss Manners had helped Sister Ludmila at the Sanctuary, occasionally visited one another’s homes, and sometimes on a Sunday morning met in the Bibighar Gardens, the kind of places where they could go without attracting what he called abusive attention, but that all this ended on the night they visited the temple, when they had some sort of tiff.

  ‘I saw another opening. I said, “But you made the quarrel up later.” He didn’t fall for that. He pointed out that I was forgetting he and Miss Manners hadn’t seen each other since that night – the night they visited the temple. So I let Gopal take over, which meant letting Gopal get Hari to say what happened after Merrick arrested him.’