The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (61 page)

Anyway, I introduced the boys and girls, which rather made their day, but also helped to make mine later, when we were on our way across the maidan to the parade and I saw Hari and went up to him and talked to him for about five minutes while the others waited where I’d left them, and were prepared to wait because they couldn’t be sure who
Hari might be if I was on chatting terms with the DC and the Brig. When I got back to them one of the subalterns said, “Who was that?” so I just said, “Oh, a boy who was at Chillingborough,” as if I had known him then and he had been a friend of my brother or some other male relation. Which shut them up, because none of them had been to anywhere as good. I was quite shameless. About being so snobbish, I mean. Because this was
their
weapon, not mine. I mean it was their weapon, then, in Mayapore, even if it wasn’t at home. I enjoyed the brief sensation I had of turning their world momentarily upside down.

Hari was at the War Week Exhibition for the
Gazette.
I didn’t recognize him at first—partly because I don’t see people very well without my glasses, but mainly because he looked different. It took me several meetings before I realized that since the cocktail party he’d spent money on new clothes—narrower, better fitting trousers (and not “babu” white). In spite of his awkwardness at that party, I think that after it he had expected more invitations, and spent money he couldn’t afford so that he wouldn’t feel so out of place. At one of our later meetings I said, “But I’m sure you used to smoke. You had a cigarette at the party.” He admitted this but said he’d given it up. Even then I didn’t immediately connect the new clothes and the money saved from giving up smoking, or see what these things meant in terms of the hopes Lili’s invitation had raised for him.

He’d spent all his life in England, or anyway from the age of two when his father sold all his land in the U.P. and went to live there. His mother had died when he was born, and once they were in England his father cut himself off from everyone except this one sister, Hari’s Aunt Shalini who had been married off at sixteen to a Gupta Sen, the brother of a rich Mayapore bania. In England Hari’s father made a lot of money, but then lost it, and died and left Hari penniless and homeless. And so there he was, just in his last year at Chillingborough, quite alone. His Aunt Shalini borrowed money from her well-off brother-in-law to pay Hari’s passage back to India. He worked for a time in the uncle’s office in the bazaar, but eventually got this job on the newspaper, because of his knowledge of English. Aunt Lili told me a bit of this (she got it from Vassi) but for ages I assumed that because his aunt’s brother-in-law was rich money was no problem to him, and I thought his working on a newspaper was from choice, not necessity. It took some time as well for me to understand that all the plans he and his father had had for
him had come to nothing, because his “Uncle” Romesh wouldn’t spend a penny on further education, but set him to work, and his Aunt Shalini had virtually no money of her own. And then, of course, it took some time for the penny to drop that Hari’s Englishness meant nothing in India, because he lived with his aunt in one of the houses in the Chillianwallah Bagh—which was on the wrong side of the river.

When I went up to him on the maidan that day I said, “It’s Mr. Kumar, isn’t it?” which the white people nearby obviously took note of. I misjudged the reason for his silence and the reluctant way he shook hands. I said, “I’m Daphne Manners, we met at Lili Chatterjee’s,” and he said, Yes, he remembered, and asked how we both were. We chatted on like that for a while, with me doing most of the chatting and feeling more and more like the squire’s daughter condescending to the son of one of her father’s tenants, because that’s how he seemed to
want
to make me feel. I wondered why. I broke off finally, saying, “Come along any evening. It’s open house,” for which he thanked me with that expression that meant he wouldn’t dream of coming along unless specially asked and perhaps not even then because he took the invitation as a meaningless form of politeness.

So off I went and rejoined the gang and sat for an hour watching the parade and listening to the band. And in the club that evening I stayed on for dinner and we talked about the marching and the drill. All the boys were awfully proud of themselves because of the boxing and the regimental precision of the Berkshires. You could sense flags flying everywhere. When Ronald Merrick turned up he came straight over to me, which wasn’t at all usual. Since the dinner party at Aunt Lili’s, when we didn’t particularly hit it off, we’d only exchanged a few words and had the odd drink or two for form’s sake if we bumped into each other at the club. He always seemed busy and unrelaxed, and happiest in the smoking room talking to other men and getting into arguments. He had a bit of a reputation for being on the quarrelsome side, and apart from a number of unmarried girls who chased him people didn’t like him much. But this evening he came straight over to me and said, “Did you enjoy the parade? I saw you on the maidan.” He sat and had drinks with us, and then came out with this semi-invitation to me to come along one evening and listen to his Sousa records, which the other girls chipped me about when he’d gone, coming out with that old joke about etchings, and never trusting a policeman. One of them said, “Daphne’s obviously got what it takes for Mr. Merrick. I’ve been trying to land
that
fish for
ages.” One of the boys made a joke about what she meant by “takes,” so the subject was back to normal. Being a Saturday there was a dance on too, and the usual horseplay at the swimming pool. And out on the terrace you didn’t only
sense
the flags waving, you could see them. Scores of little flags strung among the fairy lights. There was an atmosphere of “We’ll show them.” The boy I was dancing with said that War Week had given the bloody Indians something to think about. Then he began to get amorous and I had to fight him off. I left him and went into the ladies and sat on the seat and listened to the scurrilous chat going on on the other side of the door and thought, No, it’s wrong, wrong. And later, back in the lounge bar, deafened by the thumping band, I thought, “I haven’t this time to waste. I haven’t this time to spare.”

I felt as if the club were an ocean-going liner, like the
Titanic,
with all the lights blazing and the bands playing, heading into the dark, with no one on the bridge.

Auntie, promise me one thing, that if the child survives but you can’t bear to have it near you, you’ll try to see that the money I leave is used to give it some kind of decent start in life? I look around, trying to think where the child might go if it lives and I don’t. I don’t presume on your affection for me to extend to what is only half my flesh and blood, and half that of someone unknown to you—perhaps someone unknown to me, someone disreputable. I have got myself used to the idea that you won’t want it under your roof, in fact, please don’t worry on that score. It’s inevitable that a child so badly
mis
conceived should suffer a bit for
my
faults. In any case, let’s be frank, you probably won’t live for as long as the child would need you to if he first came to a fully conscious, recollective existence while under your roof. I think of Lili. But wonder, too. Perhaps as the child grows, some likeness to Hari will become apparent. I so much hope so. Because that will be my vindication. I have nightmares of the child growing up to resemble no one, black-skinned, beyond redemption, a creature of the dark, a tiny living mirror of that awful night. And yet, even so, it will be a child. A God-given creature, if there is a God, and even if there isn’t, deserving of that portion of our blessing we can spare.

I suppose the child—if I’m not here to nurture him—will have to go into a home. Couldn’t it be as well my home in a way? There is that woman whom they call Sister Ludmila. I asked her once whether she needed money. She said not, but promised to tell me if she ever did.
Perhaps as she gets older (and I don’t know how old she is) she will spare a thought for the newborn as well as for the dying. It’s a logical progression.

By “decent start in life,” I don’t mean background or education, but much simpler things like warmth, comfort, enough to eat, and kindness and affection. Oh, all the things squandered on me—

If it is a boy, please name him Harry, or Hari if his skin is dark enough to
honour
that kind of spelling. If a girl—I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind. I haven’t thought of “it” as a girl. But if she is please
don’t
call her Daphne. That’s the girl who ran from Apollo, and was changed into a laurel bush! With me it’s been the other way round, hasn’t it? Rooted clumsily in the earth, thinking I’m running free, chasing the sun god. When I was in my teens Mother once said, “Oh, for goodness’ sake, stop
gallumping!”
which puzzled and then hurt me because being tall I had an idea that I was a sort of graceful Diana type—long-legged and slender, taut as a bow, flitting through the forest! Poor Mother! She had a frightful talent for pouring cold water on people. It was David who taught me to see that she did this because she never knew from one minute to the next what it was she really wanted, so she felt that things were always going wrong around her, and had to hit out at the nearest likely culprit, usually Daddy, but often me. She adored David, though, which is probably why he saw through her more easily than Daddy and I did and was able to explain her to me. She never had her defenses up for
him.
I suppose it was because even after years of living comfortably in England she still talked about India as if she had only just escaped from it a minute ago that I grew to feel sorry for it, and then to love it and want it for its own sake, as well as for Daddy’s. When I was old enough to understand them he used to show me snaps and photographs and tell me what I thought were wonderful tales of the “land where I was born,” so that when I first came back out here I was always looking for the India I thought I knew because I had seen it in my imagination, like a kind of mirage, shimmering on the horizon, with hot, scented breezes blowing in from faraway hills. . . .

It’s funny how in spite of what you know about the rains before you come to India you think of it as endlessly dry and scorched, one vast Moghul desert, with walled, scattered towns where all the buildings are shaped like mosques, with arches of fretted stone. Occasionally from the window of a train—the one I went up to ’Pindi on when I first came
out—there are glimpses of the country you’ve imagined. I’m glad I came before and not in the middle of the rains. It’s best to undergo the exhaustion of that heat, the heat of April and May that brings out the scarlet flowers of the gol mohurs, the “flames of the forest” (such a dead, dry, lifeless-looking tree before the blossoms burst), the better to know the joy of the wild storms and lashing rains of the first downpours that turn everything green. That is
my
India. The India of the rains.

There’s another name besides Hari’s that we never mention. Bibighar. So although you were in Mayapore once, and may have visited the gardens, I don’t know whether you have a picture of them in your mind or not. There it is all greenness. Even in the hottest months, before the rains, there is a feeling of greenness, a bit faded and tired, but still green—wild and overgrown, a walled enclosure of trees and undergrowth, with pathways and sudden open spaces where a hundred years ago there were probably formal gardens and fountains. You can still see the foundations of the old house, the Bibighar itself. In one part of them there is a mosaic floor with steps up to it as if it was once the entrance. They’ve built pillars round the mosaic since and roofed it over, to make it into a sort of shelter or pavilion. Men from the Public Works come once or twice a year and cut back the shrubbery and creepers. At the back of the grounds the wall is crumbled and broken and gives on to waste ground. At the front of the garden there is an open archway on to the road but no gate. So the garden is never closed. But few people go in. Children think it is haunted. Brave boys and girls play there in the morning, and in the dry weather well-off Indians sometimes picnic. But mostly it’s deserted. The house was built by a prince, so Lili told me, and destroyed by that man MacGregor, whose house is named after him, and whose wife Janet is supposed to haunt the verandah, nursing her dead baby. It was Lili who first took me into the Bibighar. Hari had heard somthing about it, but had never seen it, or realized that the long wall on the Bibighar bridge road was the wall surrounding it, and had never been in it until I took him there one day. There were children playing the first time I visited it with Lili but they ran off when they saw us. I expect they thought we were daylight Bibighar ghosts. And afterwards I never saw anyone there at all.

Hari and I got into the habit of going to the Bibighar, and sitting there in the pavilion, because it was the one place in Mayapore where we
could be together and be utterly natural with each other. And even then there was the feeling that we were having to hide ourselves away from the inquisitive, the amused, and the disapproving. Going in there, through the archway, or standing up and getting ready to go back into the cantonment—those were the moments when this feeling of being about to hide or about to come out of hiding to face things was strongest. And even while we were there, there was often a feeling of preparedness, in case someone came in and saw us together, even though we were doing nothing but sitting side by side on the edge of the mosaic “platform” with our feet dangling, like two kids sitting on a wall. But at least we could be pretty sure no white man or woman would come into the gardens. They never did. The gardens always seemed to have a purely Indian connection, just as the maidan really had a purely English one.

Perhaps you say: But if you wanted to be with Hari, and he wanted to be with you, that was no crime, surely, and there were tons of places you could have gone and been happy together? Well, but where? The MacGregor House? Yes. His house in the Chillianwallah Bagh? Yes. But where else? Auntie, where else? Where else that people wouldn’t have stared and made us self-conscious, armed us in preparation to withstand an insult or a vulgar scene? The club was out. There was the other club, what they call the Indian club, but Hari wouldn’t take me there because there
I
would have been stared at by what he called the banias with their feet on the chairs. The English Coffee Shop was out. The Chinese Restaurant was out—after one visit when he was stopped from following me upstairs. I’d been there before with an English officer—and automatically, without thinking, began to go up. So we had to sit downstairs while I was subjected to the stage whisper comments of the people going to the room above, and the curious, uncomfortable stares of the British noncommissioned soldiers who shared the downstairs room with us. Even the poor little fleapit cinema in the cantonment was out because I wouldn’t have had the nerve to try to take Hari into the sacrosanct little “balcony” and he wouldn’t have made me sit on a wooden form in the pit. Neither would he take me to the Indian cinema opposite the Tirupati Temple, although I asked him to. He said, “What, and sit through four hours of the Ramayana, holding our noses, getting fleas and sweating our guts out?”