The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (22 page)

Perhaps in his bones, in his soul, Merrick was conscious of the meaning of the room he stood in, in his shorts and short-sleeved shirt and belt and holster. He looked at the polished floor and then with a sort of childish rudeness at my hands. Yes, they have always been soft and white. “Who does the work?” he asked. “Anyone,” I said, “who needs to earn a few rupees.” Why should I do the work myself when I had unearned, undeserved rupees that would help fill the cooking pot of one of the untouchable women you saw on your way here, washing in the stagnant tank? “Where are these helpers today?” he said. I led him out into the compound behind the building where the helpers’ quarters were.
Perhaps there he saw it too, the distinction between the place of the living and the place of the dead: the smoky cookhouse, the mud and thatch and the men and women who earned rupees and lived in what among the living passed as cleanliness but in comparison with the rooms for the dying was dirt. He made them come out of their quarters, and stand in the compound, and then entered those hovels, going alone and coming out empty-handed, having found no one in hiding.

He pointed at the people with his cane. “These are your regular helpers?” he asked, and I told him that in the Sanctuary nobody was regular, that I hired and fired without compunction, wishing to spread whatever benefit it was in my power to give. “Is Mr. de Souza also irregular?” he asked. “No,” I replied, “because the Sanctuary is as much his as mine. He sees the point of it. These people are only interested in the rupees.”

“In life,” he said, “rupees are a great consideration,” and continued to smile. But the smile of a man wearing a belt and holster is always a special smile. It was in the great war when I first noticed that an armed man smiles in a way that keeps you out of his thoughts. And this is how it was with Merrick. When he had satisfied himself that the death house had no secrets he said, “Then there is just your night visitor,” and went back to the front verandah, to that dangerous geometrical situation, pausing at the head of the steps, glancing to where the Subinspector still stood, and then at Kumar who was still standing by the pump, buttoning up his shirt. Smiling, Mr. Merrick I mean, smiling and standing there. He said, “Thank you, Sister Ludmila. I need take up no more of your time,” and saluted me by bringing the tip of his cane into touch with the peak of his cap, and ignored Mr. de Souza who was waiting behind us, and walked down the steps. And when he began to walk the Subinspector was also set in motion. And they converged, in this way, on young Kumar who also continued, standing, buttoning his shirt, doing up the cuffs. Waiting. Having seen, but making no attempt to avoid. Without moving I spoke quietly to Mr. de Souza. “Who is the boy?” “His name is Coomer.” “Coomer?” “In fact, Kumar. A nephew by marriage, I believe, of Romesh Chand Gupta Sen.” “Oh,” I said, and remembered having heard something. But where? When? “Why Coomer?” I asked. “Ah, why?” Mr. de Souza said. “It would be interesting, if not best, to go down.” So we went down, following a few yards behind Mr. Merrick, so that we heard the first words, the first words in the affair that led to Bibighar. As we approached. Merrick. A clear voice. As if speaking to a
servant. That tone. That language. The Englishman’s Urdu. Tumara nām kya hai? What’s your name? Using the familiar tum instead of the polite form. And Kumar. Looking surprised. Pretending a surprise not felt but giving himself up to its demands. Because it was a public place.

“What?” he said. And spoke for the first time in my hearing.
In perfect English. Better accented than Merrick’s.
“I’m afraid I don’t speak Indian.” That face. Dark. And handsome. Even in the western way, handsome, far handsomer than Merrick. And then Subinspector Rajendra Singh began to shout in Hindi, telling him not to be insolent, that the Sahib asking him questions was the District Superintendent of Police and he had better jump to it and answer properly when spoken to. When he had finished Kumar looked back at Merrick and asked, “Didn’t this man understand? It’s no use talking Indian at me.” “Sister Ludmila,” Merrick said, but still staring at young Kumar, “is there a room where we can question this man?” “Question? Why question?” Kumar asked. “Mr. Kumar,” I said, “these are the police. They are looking for someone. It is their duty to question anyone they find here for whom I cannot vouch. We brought you here last night because we found you lying in a ditch and thought you were ill or hurt, but only you were drunk. Now, what is so terrible in that? Except hangover.” I was trying to smooth over, you see, to make laughter or at least smiling of a different kind than Mr. Merrick’s. “Come,” I said, “come to the office,” and made to lead the way but already the Bibighar affair had gone too far. In those few seconds it had begun and could not be stopped because of what Mr. Merrick was and what young Kumar was. Oh, if they had never met! If young Kumar had never been drunk, or been brought back; if there had never been that night procession—the four of us, myself leading with the torch, Mr. de Souza and the boy bearing the stretcher, and Kumar on it, but now recovered, standing there by the pump in the compound, facing Merrick.

“Is that your name:
Kumar?”
Merrick asked, and Kumar replied, “No, but it will do.” And Merrick, smiling again, said, “I see. And your address?”

And Kumar stared from Merrick to me, still pretending surprise, and said, “What is all this? Can anyone just barge in, then?”

“Come,” I said. “To the office. And don’t be silly.”

“I think,” Mr. Merrick said to me, “we won’t waste any more of your time. Thank you for your cooperation.” And signed to Rajendra Singh
who stepped forward and made to take the boy by the arm but was brushed aside. Not with a violent motion, more with a shrug away to avoid distasteful contact. At this moment perhaps Merrick could have stopped it. But did not. Rajendra Singh was not a man to be shrugged off if Mr. Merrick was there to back him up. And he was bigger than Kumar. He hit him across the cheek with the back of his hand. A soft, glancing blow, done to insult as much as to sting. I was angry. I shouted, “That will be enough of that.” It stopped them. It saved Kumar from the fatal act of retaliation. I said, “This is my property. In it I will not tolerate such behaviour.” That Subinspector—he was a coward. Now he was afraid that he had gone too far. When he struck Kumar he had also taken hold of his arm, but let it go. “And you,” I said to Kumar, “stop being silly. They are the police. Answer their questions. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. Come,” and again I made as if to lead them to the office. But Merrick, no, he was not going to take the smooth way out. He had already chosen the twisted, tragic way. He said, “We seem to have got beyond the stage when a talk in your office would have been a satisfactory preliminary. I am taking him into custody.”

“On what charge?” Kumar said.

“On no charge. My truck’s waiting. Now, collect your baggage.”

“But I have a charge,” Kumar said.

“Then make it at the Kotwali.”

“A charge of assault by this fellow with the beard.”

“Obstructing or resisting the police is also an offense,” Mr. Merrick said, and turned to me. “Sister Ludmila. Has this man any possessions to be returned to him?” I looked at Kumar. His hand went to his hip pocket. Only now had he thought to look for his wallet. I said to him, “We found nothing. We turn out pockets, you understand, for the purposes of identification.” Kumar stayed silent. Perhaps, I thought, he thinks it is we who have robbed him. Not until his hand went like that to his hip pocket was I certain that he had been robbed as he lay drunk the night before, out there in the fields, near the river bank. But in any case a lesser man would have cried out, “My wallet!” or “It’s gone! My money! Everything!” drawing, attempting to draw a red herring. Ah, a lesser man would have cried out like that, if not to create a diversion, then in the little agony of sudden loss that always, to an Indian, in those days anyway, looked like the end of his constricted little world. And Kumar was an Indian. But had not cried out. Instead, let his hand fall away, and said to Merrick, “No, I have nothing. Except one thing.”

“And that?” Merrick enquired, still smiling as if already knowing.

“A statement. I come with you under protest.”

And all the time in those accents so much more English even than Merrick’s. And in Merrick’s book, this counted against him. For in Merrick’s voice there was a different tone, a tone regulated by care and ambition rather than by upbringing. It was an enigma! Fascinating! Especially to me, a foreigner who had known an Englishman more of Merrick’s type than Kumar’s, and had heard this Englishman often rail against the sharp clipped-spoken accents of privilege and power. And here, in spite of the reversal implied by the colours of the skin, the old resentments were still at work, still further complicating the conflict. Kumar walked of his own accord towards the gateway and the waiting truck. But Merrick showed no sign of concern because he had the Sub-inspector to trot after the prisoner. Another Indian. In this way mating black with black, and, again, touching his cap with the tip of his cane and thanking me for my services, keeping me talking, while I watched, at increasing distance, the affair between Kumar and the Subinspector which was one of catching up, then push, and pull, and finally of what looked from where I stood like a violent meeting between Rajendra Singh, Kumar, a constable and the back of the truck with Kumar pushed, shoved, perhaps punched into the back of it, so that he fell inside rather than climbed. And the constable going in after him. And then the Subinspector waiting, for Merrick. “Why do you let them treat him like that?” I asked. I was not surprised. Only pained. For these were violent, difficult times. But Merrick had already turned and was on his way to the truck and pretended not to hear. When he reached the truck he talked to the Subinspector and then the Subinspector got into the back too. Well, so it went. Such things happened every day. And at this time, you understand, I had no way of telling what Kumar was suspected of, let alone of judging what he might have been guilty of. Only I had seen the darkness in him, and the darkness in the white man, in Merrick. Two such darknesses in opposition can create a blinding light. Against such a light ordinary mortals must hide their eyes.

It is good of you to come again so soon. Have you yet seen Bibighar? The ruins of the house, and the garden gone wild in the way most Indians like gardens to be? They tell me it has not changed, that sometimes even now Indian families have picnics there, and children play. The Europeans seldom went, except to look and sneer and be reminded
of that other Bibighar in Cawnpore. And at night it was always deserted. People said it was haunted and not a good place then, even for lovers. It was built by a prince and destroyed by an Englishman. I’m sorry. You are right to correct me. A Scotsman. Forgive me for momentarily forgetting. Such nice distinctions.

Bibighar. It means the house of women. There he kept his courtesans. The prince I mean. You have seen the purdah hospital here in the town, in the old black town as it used to be called? Beyond Chillianwallah? Surrounded now by houses? And changed. But it was a palace in the days when Mayapore was the seat of a native ruler and the only foothold the English had was one cut out by trade, need, avarice, a concern to open the world God had given them, like an oyster suspected of a pearl. Here all the pearls were black. Rare. Oh, infinitely desirable. But it must have taken courage as well as greed to harvest them. Go into the old palace now, the purdah hospital, and look at what remains of the old building, the narrow gallery of tiny airless rooms, the kind of room these English merchants had to enter to strike bargains, and there is an impression—from the size of the rooms—of cruelty, of something pitiless. And it must have been like this in the Bibighar. We cannot know for sure because only the foundations are left and there never was an artist’s impression of the place as it was before the Scotsman destroyed it. The Bibighar bridge was a later construction, and so to visit his women the prince must have gone either by the Mandir Gate bridge or by palanquin and boat, and so must his father in order to visit the singer in the house that he also had built on that side of the river, the house the Scotsman rebuilt and renamed after himself. Indeed yes, the house where you are staying. Before the Scotsman rebuilt and renamed it, was the MacGregor House also a warren of tiny rooms and low, dark galleries? Or was the singer given unaccustomed space, room for her voice to spread, her soul to expand?

Go to the purdah hospital. Lady Chatterjee will take you. Ask to go to the room at the top of the old tower. From there you can see over the roofs of the black town across the river and make out the roof of the MacGregor House. I wonder how often the prince who loved the singer climbed the steps of the tower to look at it? And I wonder whether his son also climbed the tower to look across the river at the Bibighar? From the Bibighar also it must have been possible in those days to see the house of the singer. They are only one mile distant. Not far, but far enough for a girl running at night.

In those days, when Mayapore was a kingdom, on that side of the river there were no other buildings, and so those two houses were marks on the landscape, monuments to love, the love of the father for the singer and the love of the son for the courtesans, the son who despised his father for an attachment which, so the story goes, was never consummated. Day by day I think the son climbed the tower of the palace or to the highest room in the Bibighar to survey that other house, the singer’s house, to glory in its decay, and said to himself,
Such is the fate of love never made manifest.
And night after night caroused in the Bibighar, his private brothel, aware of the ruin that grew stone by mouldering stone one mile distant. Now it is the Bibighar that is nothing and the singer’s house that still stands, the one destroyed and the other rebuilt, in each case by this man, this MacGregor.

Let me explain something. In 1942, the year of Bibighar, I am in Mayapore more than seven years and knew little of Bibighar, little of MacGregor. This was the case with most people. Bibighar. MacGregor. These were just names to us. Take the road, we might say, over the Bibighar bridge, past the Bibighar gardens, and then turn into the MacGregor road and follow it along until you reach the MacGregor House which stands at the junction of MacGregor and Curzon roads, and Curzon road will lead you straight to the Victoria road and the cantonment bazaar.