No Country: A Novel (26 page)

“I do, sir,” Tegart shot back. “I have gathered the basic facts. Do you want to hear them? Over fifteen hundred bullets spent, more than a dozen per soldier, about four hundred dead of multiple bullet wounds, of which more than forty were children, including a one-month-old. They haven’t yet retrieved the bodies of the women who chose to jump into the well with their children. Yes, Mr. Aherne, I know the facts better than anyone else. That is why this train has left for Delhi at all. To take
me
there. To report the facts.”

“And Christ wept,” murmured Reverend Kelly, but my father continued to stare angrily at Tegart. “How,” he fumed, “how do you know such exact numbers, Mr. Tegart?”

“Because I am the Deputy Inspector General of Police in charge of Intelligence. I rushed up here as soon as I could, but too late apparently, for O’Dwyer and the army idiot Dyer had already gone ahead.”

“And what would you have done, Mr. Tegart? Have the police commit the massacre, not the army idiot, as you call him?”

“I would have done no such thing, Mr. Aherne,” said Tegart calmly, without any apparent emotion, “for I had intelligence of the actual situation. Those villagers had nothing to do with it, the poor fools.”

After a moment’s pause he added, “Yes, there had been some disturbances following the Rowlatt Act, suspending press freedom, letting us arrest troublemakers without legal fuss. It certainly helps us make the locals behave. We had a couple of troublemakers picked up—a Muslim and a Hindu—fair warning to both communities. Some native hotheads threw brickbats at government offices. Fine by us—for it makes that Gandhi fellow with his blather of nonviolence look a liar. After that it was going to be routine police action—what we call ‘Watch and Ward.’ But that incompetent O’Dwyer had to grab the limelight by sending the nincompoop Dyer with guns and Gurkhas,” seethed Tegart.

“It could all have been avoided?” Reverend Kelly seemed to have trouble breathing.

“Of course,” crisply rejoined Tegart. “We remove just one or two troublemakers—and everything settles down.”

“Remove?” My father’s angry eyes seemed to bulge behind his thick lenses.

“Yes.” Tegart was unperturbed. “Easy as pulling teeth. You just need to know which ones to remove.”

“From this life?” challenged my father.

“Ah,” said Tegart, as if losing interest in the conversation, looking outside at the landscape under first light. “We should be just outside Ludhiana now.”

The train had come to a halt, although no station was in sight. In the distance stood a cluster of huts and a couple of houses with tin roofs. Before us stretched a small cornfield and a shallow pond in which a number of water buffaloes wallowed in mud with their calves.

“When they crucified Christ . . .” began the clergyman, gathering energy, but Tegart had closed his eyes pretending slumber, avoiding the theological debate.

That was the moment the first rock struck our compartment.

Startled, we involuntarily covered our faces. Tegart alone sat calmly, looking at an angle through the window. “There is just a cart blocking the tracks. The fool engine driver should have driven through.” But the train did not move. Two more rocks thudded against our coach.

“Wh-why?” wavered the Reverend Kelly, face blanched with fear.

“The local hacks must have used the telegraph before the authorities got to them. Now everyone in North India knows,” said Tegart. “A spot of bother.”

We saw more men emerge through the cornfield, screaming incoherently. Then we understood their words.
O Ingrez, Jallianwala ke badlaa, ya firanghee badmaash
 . . . More rocks flew at us. They were attacking only the First Class compartment. We could hear the people on the roofs of other compartments clambering down
and joining the mob, ready for mayhem. Reverend Kelly began to recite the Paternoster in a quavery voice.

“Let me out,” said my father, getting up, “I will talk to them.” Before I could say anything, he had unbolted the heavy door and stood at the entrance of our railroad carriage. The cries ceased abruptly as my father stood erect, his hand raised. He loosened his tie. I heard him clear his voice, and then begin speaking.

“Brothers,
bhai
,” he called out in Hindustani, “Stop. We are all grief-stricken. What happened in Amritsar is a matter of anger and sorrow. I-I am filled with sorrow.” A mutter spread across the crowd. Through the window, I saw the men turning to each other.

“A day of mourning for all of us,” said my father, his voice faltering with emotion, struggling to find the right words in Hindustani. The men’s faces were red in the sputtering fire of the torches.

“
Oye firanghi sahib
, sorry now? Talking of sorrow—after Jallianwala,
saala
?”

“I am no sahib,” said my father, “I have Indian blood in me, Indian blood.”

The crowd had drawn nearer. One man from the rear called out a question. “What is that
bhaynchot firanghi
saying about Indian blood,
kyaa
?” The voice sounded incredulous. “You want Indian blood?
Kyaa bola!
”

“No, no,
nehi nehi
,” my father shouted, “listen to me,
baat suno mera
 . . .”

The crowd hushed, and for a heart-thumping moment I thought they would turn away, but it was an ominous moment like still water on a stove just before it breaks into a boil. A large stone came flying out from inside the crowd and struck my father on his temple, and he staggered back into the doorway. I lunged and held him so he would not fall to the ground. Blood was running
down one side of his face, seeping into his collar, his eyeglasses shattered. With surprising force, he shook himself free of me and stood blinking at the crowd.

“I am your
bhai
, your brother. Here I am. If you think it right to hurt me,
maaro mujhe
, kill me.” The crowd seemed poised to do something—what, I could not imagine. I pulled my father inside with all my strength and slammed the door shut. I was certain that his nonviolent protest was going to get him killed. My father’s reckless bravery had halted them momentarily, but its spell was broken.

Larger rocks were being hurled now, and one crashed against the window, smashing the pane, and bounced off the metal bars. “
Nikaal aur galey kaat de
, drag them out and slit their throats!” The ragged cries could be heard clearly now through the shattered pane.

“Well, that’s enough,” said Tegart, getting up. He had been sitting silently, watching as I held my father down on the seat, trying to stanch the blood. I turned around and saw Tegart fling open the carriage door. He was silhouetted against the growing light. The crowd was roaring, as if it knew that the only thing it would encounter was fear.

“
Tafaat jaao
, get away,” Tegart called out in a loud peremptory voice. In his raised hand was a pistol. The crowd stopped, like a horse pawing the ground, uncertain whether to stand still or to break loose.

“If you don’t withdraw, I will shoot your
bhains
,” he said, pointing towards the water buffaloes.

Someone threw a rock, which thudded off the roof of the railway car. Tegart turned and shot. The crowd swiveled around in disbelief, following the direction of the pistol, and saw a buffalo buckle and fall.

“Jaao,”
he shouted, “leave.
Abbhi chaalo
, right now!” He raised his pistol and shot again. A second buffalo sank to its knees, mooing in distress.

I was certain the villagers would stampede the train and, pistol or not, overwhelm us by their sheer numbers. I saw a second pistol lying on the seat behind Tegart. I immediately picked it up and pointed it through the smashed window pane, thrusting my hand out and aiming at the crowd. “Let them see there is another man with a gun,” I thought between clenched teeth.

But Tegart knew his India. These were farmers, and for more than two millennia, their primal instinct, which overrode all other impulses, was to preserve their cattle. There were a dozen water buffaloes, not counting their calves, in danger. They stood in bovine confusion, staring at their dead. The crowd began to chivvy the livestock, coaxing them until the phlegmatic black cattle began to move out from the luxury of mud. The process robbed the moment of its tension, dissipating the mob’s murderous intent; they had become farmers again.

Even so, a straggler picked up a rock, and Tegart moved his arm, aiming the gun directly at the man’s head. The villager dropped the stone, and Tegart lowered his gun. The man stood irresolutely for a moment. Tegart motioned him to go away, almost a polite gesture of farewell. He stood watching the man leave, as the train started to move and gain speed.

“Thank you, Master Aherne,” he said, turning and taking back the gun from me. “Your father is a very brave man.”

“So are you, sir!” I burst out, unable to contain my admiration. This was like being in a storybook, better than Tony’s dad’s war stories.

“I am a copper with a gun. His is another kind of courage,” he said, adding, “You kept your head like a fine policeman. You’d
be a good man to have in a tight spot. Next time, I’ll show you how to take off the safety catch.” He winked at me. “You are too young yet.”

•  •  •

T
EN MINUTES LATER,
the train lumbered into Ludhiana station, where we heard that the mob had indeed put a cart across the tracks to make the train halt. Mr. Tegart got a railway doctor to sit with my father on a platform bench and stitch up and bandage his aching head. A carriage with armed policemen had been added to the train by the time we were ready to start.

In a few hours we had raced into Delhi station, where Tegart conferred with a number of officials and left abruptly in a government car. I did not get a chance to say goodbye. We would meet up someday, I promised myself, and pushed through the crowd to return to my father’s side. The Reverend Kelly told me that Mr. Tegart had arranged for the railway officials to put us on another train headed for Calcutta. We were led to a First Class compartment, but my father refused to enter.

“I shall happily ride First Class when all Indians can,” he said simply.

The Reverend Kelly decided to travel with us. We ordered Railway Chicken, for the old Irishman and I were very hungry. Together, we took care of Baba. His face was swollen, and he had developed a fever. I slept fitfully, starting awake, unable to rid my head of the images of Amritsar. Neither could I shake off the picture of the policeman sitting in our railroad car, his pistol full of bullets, surveying the world as it hurtled past, daring it to misbehave.

When we reached Howrah station the next night, the Reverend Kelly insisted on dropping us home in his barouche.

“I think I shall return to Ireland soon,” said the clergyman to my father, who was in the midst of thanking him.

•  •  •

T
HE NEWS FROM
Jallianwala Bagh broke over the land like a thunderclap.

“The Butcher of Amritsar: That’s what the vernacular newspapers are calling General Dyer,” my father said. “Our Nobel Laureate Sir Rabindranath Tagore has renounced his knighthood. You know, Robert, he is a friend of the Irish poet William Yeats. And Gandhi-ji has asked the British to quit India.” My father was reading and gathering all the news he could.

Upon his return from the Bagh, Reginald Dyer reported his complete victory when “confronted by a revolutionary army.” He was immediately congratulated by Sir Michael O’Dwyer in an official telegram, which read:
Your action is correct. Lieutenant Governor approves.
Martial law was clamped down on Amritsar. Reginald Dyer closed off the stretch of the lane where Miss Sherwood had been assaulted, forcing Indians on that stretch to crawl on all fours, heads hung low. On the scaffold he erected at the bottom of that lane, six local youths were whipped. There had been no trials.

“Reginald Dyer was born to rich Irish parents, local brewers in India,” my father told me what he had garnered from the papers. “He was raised in the lovely hill resort of Murree and their opulent bungalow in Simla, but soon packed off to a school in Ireland. He squeaked into Sandhurst, the great military academy, after which he was sent to control the obstinate Irish in Belfast.”

“And O’Dwyer?”

“O’Dwyer is Irish-born, from County Tipperary. His family gathered their resources and sent him to Oxford. Failing to find a good job in England, he took colonial service in India. He spoke ceaselessly of Oxford to any who would listen, but was shunted off to provincial Punjab, far from the Delhi galaxy around the Viceroy. Well, now he is being invited to the right tables and clubs—once and for all beyond Tipperary. Dyer and O’Dwyer,” agonized my father over his tea, burdened by his own Irishness, as if distant members of the family had been found to be murderers, “how could they?”

“Tegart would have stopped them if he got there in time,” I commented.

“Son, did you not see that Tegart is a similar bird of a different shade? Well, I pray you never have to,” he sounded somber. I did not agree.

•  •  •

A
FTER WHAT IT
called the “incident” at Jallianwala, the
Morning Post
had started a public subscription as a reward for Reginald Dyer: They raised the mighty sum of 26,000 pounds sterling, publishing the names of prominent donors, among them Rudyard Kipling, who made a generous and exemplary contribution.

“Oh, but I love his story of Kim! Remember, you bought me that book?”

The two men were scrambling to the zenith of the colonial social ladder. O’Dwyer promptly favoured the world by publishing
India As I Know It.
The book sold extremely well. He was now being invited to all the right dinners. His protégé Dyer solicited local English language newspapers to write for them.

I had told my friends what I had witnessed in Punjab, but Tony’s dad, Tom Hart’s uncle Georgie, even Tony himself, were reluctant to talk. Our Anglo-Indian community had always held the Army above reproach; they changed the topic. Besides, the House of Lords had formally congratulated Reginald Dyer, so there.