The Deceivers (3 page)

Haphazardly, ceremoniously, with India’s unique blend of pomp and squalor, the presentation began. George Angelsmith rummaged in the depths of his saddle holsters and pulled out a white scroll bound with red tape and heavily sealed with scarlet sealing wax. He broke the seals, unrolled the parchment with a flourish, and coughed to clear his throat. The villagers were silent. Chandra Sen had dismounted and now stood alone and dignified, a little stooped, beside his courtyard wall.

George intoned in a sonorous voice, ‘Know all men by these presents . . .’

At the tail of the throng the band struck up a mournful tune. They could not see what was going on at the front. Men ran back, shouting and gesticulating to them to be quiet. George flushed angrily. Mary giggled and William frowned. The noise died down in unwilling jerks.

George began to read again, his suppressed ill temper giving the banal phrases force and significance. ‘Know all men by these presents . . . His Excellency William Pitt Amherst, Earl Amherst, Governor-General of India . . . Mr Benjamin Wilson, Agent to the Governor-General. . . disturbed state at that time of the territories ceded to the Honourable East India Company by the Rajah of Nagpur . . . Krishna Chandra Sen . . . unfailing influence for good, unflagging endeavours for the betterment of his tenants . . . rising revenue ... no man more fitted to wield the sword of justice, the staff of discipline . . . Chandra Sen . . . record our high and enduring appreciation . . . Chandra Sen . . . Chandra Sen .. .’

Fitfully throughout the reading a child screamed, terrified of the great horses and the people with the bleached faces.

The village clerk stepped forward when George had finished, received the scroll, and began to read it again, translating into hand-hewn Hindi as he went.

At last it came to an end. The clerk gave the scroll back to George. George gave it to Chandra Sen. Chandra Sen bowed. The English party dismounted from their horses, the villagers ebbed away to their houses. William’s bullock carts squeaked down the street. Sher Dil, the butler, dusty and tired, dismounted from his donkey and walked up to ask about the accommodation allotted for the night.

Chandra Sen crossed the courtyard at William’s side, apologizing for the poverty of his house and its unsuitability for the reception of European ladies and gentlemen. William absently- brushed aside the protestations; he had stayed here before and knew that the patel’s words were a matter of form. His mind searched for the source of its present distraction. Something had unsettled him so that he could not attend to the patel, or George, or even Mary. It was not the confusion of the ceremony just ended. That was nothing; in his own court he had to hear cases and give judgements through a similar turmoil. It might be George Angelsmith’s attendance on his honeymoon and the palpable tension it aroused in Mary. He frowned and kicked at a pebble. The pebble rolled towards one of the dogs. They were still snarling. He noticed the flat, expressionless face of the man who held them, the thickset man, Bhimoo, the village watchman; a strong, taciturn man.

The black anger was running away in the recesses of his mind, but he saw it and caught it. It was George Angelsmith’s veiled insult at the river, about the crowd waiting upstream. Chandra Sen had not mentioned it; therefore it was none of his, William’s, business -- according to George. George could go to hell.

He said, interrupting Chandra Sen’s easy apologies, ‘Patel-ji, what was that crowd doing upstream from the ferry, on this bank?’

The patel stopped with one hand on the railing of the steps up to his house. He turned slowly to face William. His long face was contained and sad. He paused for a full minute. George came up, and stopped, and raised his eyebrows. William felt Mary’s hand come to rest on his arm.

Chandra Sen said, ‘I was going to speak about it when we were alone.’ He glanced at George as he spoke, and away again, and in his eyes there was a world of sorrow and distaste. William’s heart warmed to him, because he felt that there was an affinity between the man and himself; because the distaste in the large eyes was for the smart, the clever, the brilliant George Angelsmith; because the sorrow was for him, that he should have brought up this thing, its portent nameless still but taking an evil shape, at a time when George could hear to run back with the tale to Mr Wilson.

Chandra Sen said, ‘The wife of Gopal the weaver is going to become suttee tomorrow evening.’

Suttee
-- a Sanskrit word meaning ‘a virtuous woman’; hence, along a road of thought fitfully brightened by the Hindu spiritual values, ‘a woman who burns herself alive on her husband’s funeral pyre; the custom which expects her to do so’.

Suttee
-- the next morning William’s mind still ran with the word, and the idea, and with the particular example of it now facing him. All his life in India he had tried to feel for suttee the automatic revulsion of his fellow Englishmen and Christians. In part he had succeeded, but always underneath there was a glow of respect and admiration. His slow mind fought with itself. A man died; his wife had loved him, perhaps as Eve loved Adam -- ‘he for God only, she for God in him’; then her spirit, which was as part of his, had no house on earth; she became a husk of flesh, untenanted, blown through by cold winds; only when her body had gone to join her spirit, which was with him, could she live again. Was there any concept more beautiful? But why, then, was not man a part of woman? Why did a man who had loved his wife not go to her in the same way?

Still, the idea was beautiful. When the time came for a woman to become a widow her body might indeed be an ugly husk, scarred and distorted by the hardship of the years. With faith, it was so small a step to climb up into the fire and away from the bending back and the aching joints and the cold hearth. One step up into the flames, then to soar on the rising oil-fed smoke to a place near the brilliant sun, where there was no night and no hunger.

But what if the woman was young, what if there had been no love? He had heard of cases where a man’s relatives had a place in the world to maintain, and the strict observance of religious customs was a part of that place. Then sometimes they came in the evening, muffled the young widow’s face so that she could not cry out, and carried her soundlessly screaming to the burning ghat. They ran in silent procession with the draped thing, among the trees, and cast it on to the scented flames, and struck up a loud noise of music and wailing.

William tried to understand, tried in the Western fashion to separate the good from the evil, to balance the beauty of sacrifice against the ugliness of waste, which is an essential of all sacrifice. But to these Hindus there was no conflict between God, who is all-powerful, and Satan, who yet flouts and perverts His intentions. Here, creation and destruction were opposite faces of the same medal, equal energies of the same universal spirit. He had to understand it if he could. Men and women who thought and acted in those beliefs were his charge. If he failed to understand, he could work only from a single sweeping generalization: that Indians were fatalistic, brutal, and loveless. That was the depth of untruth, in spite of the many who believed it.

The battle within himself formed only a part of his trouble. He was a servant of the Honourable East India Company, and that huge organization was as torn by indecision as he was. Suttee was the people’s custom and religion; only an act of despotic power could abolish it. Yet, could Christians, having power, tolerate wilful self-murder?

Talk of abolishing suttee had been going on for years. Nothing had been decided. William and the other officers in civil charge of districts lived in a vice, squeezed between the Hindus, who wanted to be left alone, and the superior British officials, who thought that suttee ought to be put down. A district officer might expect official disapproval if he failed to prevent a public suttee, though he had no power to forbid it. Mr Wilson’s disapproval, for instance, would be genuine and severe; the Garhakota suttee of last year still obsessed his militant Christianity. It was easy to say that Mr Wilson was a long way off and did not have to deal with the problem face to face, but it was an excuse. William knew that no doubts perturbed his father-in-law. If Mr Wilson had been the Collector of Madhya, there would have been no suttee in Garhakota then, and there would be none now, whatever the cost.

Mary, George Angelsmith, and William sat on low stools in the patel’s sunny courtyard. The dogs, chained up, lay silent ten feet off under the house, their noses resting on their paws and their eyes unwinkingly fixed on William’s face.

George pulled a heavy gold watch from his fob, glanced at it, and put it back. ‘I must go, William, and leave you and your bride to connubial bliss. But I’d like to have some word to take back to Mr Wilson. What I can’t make out is why the woman’s doing it if her husband’s not definitely dead. She doesn’t know whether he is or not. Seems an awful waste.’

‘He has been gone for over a year,’ said Chandra Sen respectfully. He was standing against the wall at William’s side. ‘He went away on a journey and has not come back. Journeys do take a long time -- we all know what the road is like -- and the woman was not worried until recently. Then she dreamed the same dream three times. In the dream she saw her husband’s dead body in a dark place, with a mark on his neck and another woman looking at him. So she knows that he is dead, and she must go to him.’

‘Is he old? Is she?’ Mary asked in halting Hindustani.

‘No, memsahib. She is young, your age, no more, and beautiful. I have not seen her recently. Gopal her husband was no older than Savage-sahib, in the prime of life.’ He looked thoughtfully down at William. ‘He was very like you, sahib; a broad forehead, short jaw, your height, strongly built. He was rather dark in skin, and not disfigured by smallpox like so many of us. Brown eyes. His hair was blacker, of course -- what you could see of it under his turban.’

William listened self-consciously. Every morning he looked in the mirror to shave, but he could not have described himself.

‘Well, old boy,’ George said heartily, ‘what are you going to do? Six hours to lighting-up time? As far as I can see, it ought to be easy enough. Just go down there and tell ‘em not to.’

‘You know I have no authority to do that,’ said William uneasily. ‘Besides . . .’ He did not finish the sentence. Mary was on her feet, walking to the wall, stooping over it to play with a small brown girl in the street. She had gone a little distance away, and left William to fend for himself against George and Mr Wilson and Chandra Sen and his own indecision.

Chandra Sen said earnestly to George, ‘It is not easy here. Your honour holds office in Sagthali. Here the people are so pleased with the new security, the first there has been in living memory, that they have found time and energy to complain about the things they do not like. Ten years ago they struggled from dawn to dusk, from sowing time to reaping time, just to keep alive, and dodge the freebooters and robbers, and fend off new tax extortions. Do you know the Saugor Pandits made me collect, and pay, twenty-seven different kinds of tax in a
good
year? Now the people have a little time to think. And no one fills their mouths with gunpowder and explodes it if they make a protest about something. Life has changed under your benevolent government. Much is for the better. But the people want this changed and that left alone. In this matter of suttee they are ready for violence here.’

Are you afraid of a riot, patel-ji?’ said George with a small sneer. ‘What about all your power and influence mentioned in the scroll? Look here, William, my horse is saddled, I’ve got to go. What shall I tell the Old Man?’

The little naked girl ran off to recount her bravery to her friends. Mary came back and stood to one side, watching the three men, her face expressionless and strong.

George was on his feet. William rose slowly. He didn’t know what to say, what to do. George waited, and behind George, Mr Wilson; on the other side, Chandra Sen, all the people who wanted to live their own lives and die their own deaths; the young wife of Gopal the weaver. He stood in unhappy indecision. He said, ‘Tell Mr Wilson -- tell Mr Wilson . . .’ Chandra Sen wanted to help but could not; Mary could help but did not want to. He got out some words at last. ‘Tell Mr Wilson I’ll see to it.’

George hesitated briefly, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘All right. I’ll tell him that. You’ll report in due course, won’t you?’ He turned to Mary with a smile. ‘Your father takes a keen interest in these things.’ Then he was on his horse, and in a minute the clop of hoofs faded away down the street.

When he had gone, and the dust had settled, the three in the courtyard were still standing where they had been. William felt a little sick; Kali, the Destroyer Goddess of the Hindus, was close, pressing down on him, and he did not know whether Kali was lovely or detestable or both, and Mary had deserted him. It was no problem of hers; but she knew, and had known from the time of their first glances, that he needed her. He turned away to go up into the house and be alone. He would have to make his decision by himself, as in the past, before Mary with the bright eyes stood so firm and strong against his uncertainties.

Her voice was soft in his ear. ‘You know what you want to do, William, don’t you, really? You don’t need me. You couldn’t make a mistake if you trusted yourself. But I’m always here.’

It was her voice, gentle-toned, hard-based, of the days when they were discovering each other. Her face had softened and was quite unlike the combative provocation of her attitude while George had been here. A thin gold chain hung round her neck; the little oak cross on it was hidden in her bosom.

He said humbly, ‘I’m not sure, darling, really I’m not.’

‘Don’t let her die, William.’

Yes, he could take the thought and the decision from there. Now that the words had been spoken he knew he could follow no other course. But how -- without letting other people die, perhaps, inflamed to riot by their anger? He did not know just how strained things were, down there in Kahari. In George’s presence Chandra Sen had been uncommunicative.