The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (65 page)

I suppose I thought that everything I did was an adventure of some sort. An evening at the MacGregor House with Lili and a few “mixed” friends, an evening at the club with Ronald or the girls and boys, an hour or two at Sister Ludmila’s clinic, a walk with Hari on a Sunday morning to the Bibighar. Well, they were adventures, weren’t they? because each of these things was done—unintentionally but for all practical purposes—in defiance of the others. I was breaking every rule there was. The funny thing is that people couldn’t be absolutely certain which rule I was breaking in what way at what time because they were so hedged about with their own particular rule they could only follow me far enough to see that I’d broken it and gone away, and become temporarily invisible, so that when I came back, when I returned to their own fold they didn’t know enough about what I’d been doing and where I’d been to make real charges against me, other than the general one of being—what? Unstable? Asking for trouble? Unaligned? Bad enough of course, but people do like to be able to define other people’s instability and nonalignment, and if they can’t their own fear of what you might come to represent forces them to make another bid for your allegiance.

To be rejected—which I suppose is one of the easiest ways of making your mark, you have to come
right out
with something they see as directly and forcefully opposed to what they think they believe in. To be accepted you have to be seen and heard to appear to stand for what they think they believe in. To be neither one thing nor the other is probably unforgivable.

But, Auntie, it was awfully difficult for me. I did genuinely
like
several of the girls and boys I mixed with at the club. I genuinely liked Ronald, when he was the closest he could ever get to being easy and
natural with me. I even liked him when he was difficult and “official” because I thought I knew why he acted like that. And I loved Lili, even at her most standoffish, when that old Rajput princess blood showed through and she sort of gathered up the hem of her cloak. Saree, I mean! I liked the
fun
of the English before it became self-conscious and vulgar and violent, and I liked the simple almost childish fun of the Indians, and their seriousness, before it became prissy and prickly and imitative of European sulks. With Hari I can’t connect a word such as “like,” because my liking was hopelessly encumbered with the physical effect he had on me, which turned liking into love but didn’t leave me insensitive to his pigheadedness and prickliness. All of which makes me sound on paper like a paragon of virtuous broad-mindedness, until you remember the horrible mess I made of everything.

I hate the impression we automatically get of things and places and people that make us say, for instance, “This is Indian. This is British.” When I first saw the Bibighar I thought: How Indian! Not Indian as I’d have thought of a place as Indian before I came out, but Indian as it struck me then. But when you say something like that, in circumstances like that, I think you’re responding to the attraction of a place which you see as alien on the surface but underneath as proof of something general and universal. I wish I could get hold of the right words to say just what I mean. The Taj Mahal is “typically Indian,” isn’t it? Picture-book Moghul stuff. But what makes you give out to it emotionally is the feeling of a man’s worship of his wife, which is neither Indian nor un-Indian, but a general human emotion, expressed in this case in an “Indian” way. This is what I got from the Bibighar. It was a place in which you sensed something having gone badly wrong at one time that hadn’t yet been put right but could be if only you knew how. That’s the sort of thing you could imagine about any place, but imagining it there, feeling that it was still alive, I said, “How Indian,” because it was the first place in Mayapore that hit me in this way, and the surprise of being hit made me think I’d come across something typical when all the time it was typical of no place, but only of human acts and desires that leave their mark in the most unexpected and sometimes chilling way.

Usually it was a Sunday morning place, but one day Hari and I sheltered there from the rain, dashing in from the road in the late afternoon, on our bikes, and running up the steps that divided one level of old lawn from another, to the “pavilion,” the roofed-over mosaic. We
stood under it and I had a cigarette. We’d been on our way to tea at Aunt Shalini’s. It was a Saturday. I had a half-day off from the hospital and after lunch I’d cycled to the cantonment bazaar to see if those awful photographs I’d had taken for your birthday were ready at Gulab Singh’s where that little man Subhas Chand had a booth. I saw Hari coming out of the
Gazette
offices and called out to him. I said, “Come and help me choose my picture for Auntie Ethel, then if they’re any good you can have one.” So we went to Subhas Chand and looked at the proofs. I said, “Oh, Lord,” but Hari said they were all pretty good and helped me choose the one to make up cabinet size for you. Afterwards I made him come to Darwaza Chand’s with me while I chose that dress length. There were hardly any people shopping at that time. Those who were stared at us in the usual unpleasant manner. When I looked at my watch and saw it was already four o’clock I invited him back to the MacGregor House for tea, but he said, “No, come to see Aunt Shalini.” I’d not been to his house since the night before the rains set in. I told him I’d like to but I’d better change first. He said, “Why? Unless you want to tell Lady Chatterjee where you’re going.” But it was her purdah hospital committee afternoon, and there wasn’t any need to tell Raju, so we set off. We went the Bibighar bridge side. He hated taking me over by the Mandir Gate bridge because that way we had to go through the bazaar. And that’s how we were caught, cycling past the Bibighar. Down it came, as it does, and we dashed in there, expecting it to dry up in twenty minutes or so. But it went on and on, and blew up a storm.

I told him the sort of thing I felt about the Bibighar. It was odd, sitting there on the mosaic floor, having to shout to make ourselves heard, then relapsing into silence until the noise outside got less. I asked him to have his picture taken too, but he said he made a rotten photograph. I said, “Don’t be silly. What about those Aunt Shalini showed me?” He said he “was younger then”! I asked him whether he still heard from those English friends of his, the Lindseys, but he shrugged the question away. He’d always been prickly about them when Aunt Shalini mentioned them. I thought they’d given up writing to him and he felt badly about it, but from something Sister Ludmila asked me the last time I saw her I got the feeling there was more to it than that, something to do with the boy, the Lindsey son, whom Aunt Shalini always described as Hari’s greatest friend “at home.”

Anyway, we were marooned there in the Bibighar and it began to get dark. We’d missed having tea, and I knew I had to be back by seven to
change for dinner, because Aunt Lili was having Judge Menen and his wife in, to celebrate Mrs. Menen coming out of hospital. I was shivering a bit, and I thought I’d caught a chill. I wanted him to warm me. An English boy would have snuggled up, I suppose, but there we were, with at least a foot or two between us. I got edgy. I wanted to take his hand and hold it to my face.

When we came away, that evening we sheltered from the rains, it felt just as if we had had a quarrel, a lovers’ quarrel. But we weren’t lovers and there’d been no quarrel. And again I thought: It’s wrong, wrong because it doesn’t
work.
He saw me home, and although the next day was Sunday neither of us mentioned any arrangement to meet. I was back at the MacGregor a few minutes before Aunt Lili and was soaking in a bath when I heard her calling to Raju on the landing. It was like hearing a homely sound after a long absence. I didn’t see Hari again for over a week. I spent an evening or two at the club, once with Ronald and once with the boys and girls, and the rest of my evenings with Lili. But all the time I was thinking of Hari, wanting to see him but not doing anything about it. It was like sitting on a beach as a kid, watching the sea, wanting to go in but not having the courage. Yes—you promise yourself—when this cloud has gone by and the sun comes out then I’ll go in. And the cloud goes by and the sun is warm and comforting, and the sea looks chilly.

I told myself the trouble was we’d run out of places to go where the risk of being stared at, the risk of creating a situation, could be minimized. In the club I was definitely getting the cold shoulder from the women. It was this thrashing about for ideas for new places that made me think of the Tirupati Temple.

I asked Aunt Lili if English people were ever allowed in. She said she had no idea but imagined none had ever asked, because Mayapore wasn’t a tourist town and the temple wasn’t famous, but she’d have a word with one of the teachers at the Higher School or Technical College because if an Englishman had been in it would most likely have been a teacher or someone interested in art and culture. She wasn’t sure about an English girl being allowed, though. I told her not to bother, because I would ask Hari. She said, “Yes, you could do that I suppose,” and looked as if she was about to question the whole business of Hari, so I started talking about my day in the hospital to head her off. I wrote a note to Hari just saying, “I’d love to see inside the Tirupati Temple.
Could we go together one day? Preferably at night because it always looks more exciting after dark.”

A day or two later he rang up from the
Gazette
office. They hadn’t a telephone at Aunt Shalini’s. He caught me a few moments before I was due to start out for the hospital and told me that if I really wanted to go he’d ask his uncle. His uncle was the kind of man who paid a lot of money to the priests in the hope of buying the merit he didn’t have time to acquire in any other way. At least that’s how Hari put it. I said I really did want to go and that if he’d arrange it for a Saturday evening we could have a quiet dinner together at the MacGregor first, and then come back and play the gramophone. He sounded a bit cool. I had an idea I’d done the wrong thing asking him to take me to a
temple.
But we fixed it on a to-be-confirmed basis for the following Saturday when I knew Lili was playing bridge. Neither of us said anything about meeting meanwhile, although I thought he might turn up on the Tuesday evening at the Sanctuary. He didn’t, though, and I still hadn’t heard from him by the Friday evening.

But I’d seen Ronald at the club, and stayed on to dinner with him. He drove me back to the MacGregor and on the way there he asked me to have dinner with him on the Saturday. I said I couldn’t because I was hoping to visit the temple. When he stopped the car at the house there was no one on the porch, no sign of Raju, but he didn’t get out to open the door for me. Instead he said, “Who’s taking you? Mr. Kumar?” After I’d admitted it he was quiet for a bit, but then came out with what he said he’d been meaning to say for some time, that people were talking about my going out and about with an Indian, which was always tricky, but more tricky these days, especially when the man in question “hadn’t got a very good reputation” and “tried to make capital out of the fact that he’d lived for a while in England,” a fact which he seemed to think “made him English.”

Then Ronald said, “You know what I feel for you. It’s because I feel it that I haven’t said anything to you before. But it’s my duty to warn you against this association with Mr. Kumar.”

That’s when I laughed and said, “Oh, stop acting like a policeman.”

He said, “Well, it’s partly a police matter. He was under suspicion at one time, and still is, but of course you must know all about that.”

I told him I knew nothing about it at all, and wasn’t interested because I’d met Hari at a party at the MacGregor and if Lili thought him the kind of man she could invite to her house that was good enough for
me. I said I’d be grateful if people would stop telling me who could be my friends and who not, and that I personally didn’t care
what
colour people were, and it was obviously only Hari’s colour, the fact that he was an Indian, that got people’s goat.

Ronald said, “That’s the oldest trick in the game, to say colour doesn’t matter. It does matter. It’s basic. It matters like hell.”

I started getting out of the car. He tried to stop me, and took my hand. He said, “I’ve put it badly. But I can’t help it. The whole idea revolts me.”

I don’t know why I was sorry for him. Perhaps because of his honesty. It was like a child’s. The kind of self-centred honesty a child shows. We call it innocence. But it is ignorance and cruelty as well. I said, “It’s all right, Ronald. I understand.”

He let go of me as if my arm had scalded him. I shut the door and said, “Thanks for the meal and for bringing me home,” but it seemed to be the wrong thing to say. There simply wasn’t a right thing to say. He drove off and I went into the house.

On Friday evening Hari sent round a chit saying that it was fixed for us to visit the temple the following evening, between nine thirty and ten thirty, so I sent the boy back with an answer asking him to come to dinner at seven thirty for eight.

Came Saturday, he arrived promptly, as if to make up for past mistakes. He came in a cycle-tonga, which explained the promptness but was probably also meant to point the difference between his life and mine. Somehow that difference became the theme of the evening. He was deliberately trying to put me off. I’m sure of that. For instance, he’d started smoking again, cheap Indian cigarettes—not bidis, but smelly and cumulatively unpleasant. I tried one but hated it, so we ended up smoking our own. He’d also brought a couple of records which he said were a present to me. I wanted to play them right away but he said, No, we’d wait until we got back from the temple, and looked at his watch. It was only seven forty-five but he suggested that we ought to start eating. I said, “Don’t you want the other half?” He said he didn’t but would wait while I did, which meant he didn’t want to, so I told Raju to tell cook we’d eat right away, and we went into the dining room. When we got in there he complained that the fans were going too fast. I told Raju to turn them to half speed. It got very hot. When the food came in he ignored the forks and began scoffing up mouthfuls with pieces of chappatti. I
followed suit. He called out to Raju, “Boy, bring water,” and I began to giggle because it reminded me of the time you and I sat next to that rich Indian family in Delhi and how shocked I was at the apparently rude way the man talked to the waiter, “Boy, bring this. Boy, bring that,” but you pointed out that it was an exact English translation of the pukka sahib’s “Bearer, pani lao.” I thought Hari was having a game, taking off rich Indians of the English-speaking middle class, and wondered if he’d been drinking before he came. Our fingers and mouths were in a bit of a mess by the time we’d finished. Raju—who noticed what was happening even if he didn’t understand it—brought in napkins and bowls of warm water, and we washed. I half expected Hari to belch and ask for a toothpick. In its way it was a perfect imitation. Normally he smiled at Raju but apart from his “Boy, do so and so” he treated him as if he weren’t in the room. And I began to wonder whether the Indians had got this habit from the English, or the English from the Indians, or whether the whole thing dated back to some time when servants were treated like dirt everywhere and the habit had only been kept up in the Empire by Sahibs and Memsahibs and modern Indians wanting to be smart.