The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (66 page)

The other thing Hari was doing, of course, was acting like an Indian male of that kind, very polite on the surface but underneath selfish and aggressive, ordering the arrangements to his own but not necessarily anyone else’s liking—the curtailment of the pre-dinner drinks, the early start on the meal—and now the equally early start going to the temple which ended up by being a late start because at the last moment he said perhaps we’d better listen to the records he’d bought so that we could get into the mood—a curious kind of hark-back to that dance record, which made me suddenly wary, conscious that the mood Hari was in was less comic than bitter.

And even over the playing of the gramophone he made us go through a typical sort of modern Indian farce. Raju was told to bring the gramophone out, but was shoved aside when it came to winding the damn’ thing up, and sent to look for the needles which were in the compartment of the gramophone where they were meant to be, all the time. Hari deliberately scratched the first record by being clumsy with it and then pretended not to notice the awful clack clack every time the needle jumped over the dent in the groove. And he had chosen Indian music, something terribly difficult, an evening raga that went on and on. What he didn’t reckon with was the fact that I instinctively loved it. When he saw that I did, he changed the record before it was finished, and put on
one that excited and moved me even more. The odd thing was I could see it really made
him
savagely irritated and seeing that, the idea that he had been having a joke with me just wouldn’t hold water any longer. I felt lost, because I realized he had been trying in his own way to put me off, as Ronald and everyone wanted, and that he was sufficiently fond of me personally to believe that what he hated—the music, and eating with your fingers—I would hate too. His discovery that I didn’t hate it, but loved it or didn’t mind it, was another gulf between us, one for which there was no accounting, because I was white and he was black, and my liking for what he hated or had never had the patience or inclination to learn to like, to get back to, made even his blackness look spurious; like that of someone made up to act a part.

He let the second record play to the end, and then
I
took charge and said, “We’d better go,” and called out to Raju to bring my scarf. I had an idea I’d need to cover my head to go into the temple. Hari had brought an umbrella in case it rained while we weren’t under cover. On the way to the temple in the cycle-tonga we said almost nothing. I’d not been in a cycle-tonga before. To shift the weight of two people the poor boy had to stand out of the saddle and lean his whole strength on each pedal alternately. But I liked it better than the horse-tongas, because we faced the way we were going. To travel in a horse-tonga, facing backwards (which I suppose one does to avoid the smell if the horse breaks wind) always gives me a feeling of trying to hang back, of not wanting things to disappear. With the cycle-tonga there was the opposite feeling, of facing the road ahead, of knowing it better and not being scared when you had to get out.

At the temple entrance there was a man waiting for us, a temple servant who spoke a bit of English. We took our shoes off in the archway of the main gate, and Hari paid some money over that his uncle had given him. I couldn’t see how much it was but guessed from the attention we got that it was probably quite a lot, more than Hari had ever been given by his uncle before.

Well, you’ve been in temples. Isn’t it odd how even with all that noise outside, to go in is like entering somewhere quite cut off—not a place of quiet—but cut off, reserved for a human activity that doesn’t need
other
human activity to make it function itself. Churches are quiet in this way, but then they are usually quiet because they are empty. The temple wasn’t quiet. It wasn’t empty. But it was cut off. Once through the
archway you walked into the
idea
of being alone. I was glad to have Hari with me, because my
skin
was afraid, although I wasn’t afraid
inside
the skin. I was astonished by the sight of men and women just squatting around, under the trees in the courtyard, squatting in that wholly Indian peasant way, self-supported on the haunches, with arms stretched out and balanced on the bent knees, and the bottom not quite touching the earth. Gossiping. At first I was critical of this, until I remembered that the shrine in the centre of the courtyard was the real temple, and outside it was like the outside of a church where our Sunday morning congregations gather and chat after the service.

Around the walls of the courtyard there were the shrines of various aspects of the Hindu gods. Some awake and lit, some asleep and dark. In those doll-like figures there’s a look of what Puritans call the tawdriness of Roman Catholicism, isn’t there? The dolls seemed to reflect that, but knowingly, as if pointing a moral—the absurdity of the need which the poor and ignorant have for images. Hari said, “The guide wants to know if we’d like to make puja to the Lord Venkataswara.”

The holy of holies! I was excited. I hadn’t expected to be allowed in there, and I was very conscious of the uniqueness of being allowed. Every so often one was startled by the ringing of a bell at the entrance to the central shrine. There were men and women waiting. Our guide forced his way through to take us in ahead of them. I hated that. He spoke to a priest who was standing watching us. Then he came and said something long and involved to Hari. I was surprised that Hari seemed to understand. When he replied to the man’s question I realized Hari had learned more of the language than he was prepared to let on and only here, in the temple, couldn’t keep up the pretense. He turned to me and said, “I have to ring the bell to warn the god that we’re here. When I’ve done so, look as if you’re praying. Goodness knows what we’re in for.”

I put my scarf on my head. The priest was watching us all the time. The bell was hung on a chain from the roof of the shrine at the head of the steps. I could see the inside now, a narrow passage leading to a brightly lit grotto, and the idol with a black face and gilt robes and silver ornaments. Hari reached up and pulled the rope that moved the tongue of the bell, then put his hands together. I followed suit and closed my eyes and waited until I heard him say, “We go in now.”

He led the way. There were ordinary tubular steel bars in the passage, forming a barricade. We took up position round them with several other
people—rather as at a communion rail, except that we stood and didn’t kneel, and the bars formed a rectangle, with us on the outside and a space on the inside for the priest to come down from the little grotto. He was standing by the grotto while we were sorting ourselves out, and then came with a gilt cup. We held our hands out, as for the Host, and he poured what looked like water into them. He went to the Indians first, to make sure we’d know what to do. We raised the liquid to our lips. It was sweet-sour tasting, and stung a bit. Perhaps because our lips were dry. After we’d carried our hands to our lips we had to pass them over our heads, rather like making a sign of the cross. Then the priest came back with a golden cap—a sort of basin, and held it over our heads, and intoned prayers for each of us. He also had a gilt tray and when he’d finished with the cap he put it back on the tray. Round the tray there were little mounds of coloured powder and some petals. He stuck his finger in the powder and marked our foreheads. The petals turned out to be a small string of roses, and he gave them to me, putting them round my neck. It seemed to be all over in a second or two. On the way out Hari put some more money on a tray held by another priest at the door.

I felt nothing while I was doing “puja.” But when I came out my lips were still stinging and I could smell the sweet-sourness everywhere. I had a suspicion that we’d drunk cow urine. People were staring at us. I felt protected from their hostility, if it was hostility and not just curiosity, protected by the mark on my forehead and the little string of rose petals. I still have the petals, Auntie. They are in a white paper bag, with Sister Ludmila’s text, in the suitcase. Dry and brown now. The faintest wind would blow them into fragments.

There was one other thing to do, something to see, an image of the sleeping Vishnu. Lord Venkataswara, the god of the temple, is a manifestation of Vishnu, although the black, silver and gold image looked to me far from that of a preserver. The sleeping Vishnu had a grotto to himself, behind the main shrine. The grotto was built into the outer wall. You had to go into it and then turn a corner before you found the god asleep on his stone bed. Only three or four people could get in at once. Inside it was cool. The place was lit by oil lamps and the god was quite a shock. One had expected something small, miniature, like the rest: instead, this bigger than lifesize reclining figure that overpowered you with a sense of greater strength in sleep than in wakefulness. And such good dreams he was dreaming! Dreams that made him smile.

I could have stood and watched him for ages, but Hari nudged me and whispered that there were other people waiting to come in. We had to force our way through them, back into the courtyard. We went to the other gateway, the one that looked out on to the steps leading down to the river. After puja one should bathe, but there was only one man doing so at the moment. We could just make him out, standing in the water up to his waist. His head was shaved. Nearby there was a shed and platform where the temple barbers worked, and where devotees gave their hair to the god.

Hari said, “Shall we go and get our shoes?” He had had enough. Perhaps I had too, because I wasn’t part of its outwardness at all. I felt like a trespasser. So we went back through the courtyard and collected our shoes. More money passed. I suppose it all goes into the pockets of the priests. At the gateway we were besieged by beggars. Our tonga boy was waiting for us and saw us before we saw him, and came pressing forward, ringing his bell and shouting, afraid that one of the other tonga boys would slip in and take us away. We were back in the din and the dirt. There was music from a coffee shop over the road. With my shoes back on, my feet felt gritty. Deliberately I’d not worn stockings.

When we got back to the MacGregor House we sat on the verandah. I asked Hari to send the tonga boy round to the back to get some food. He didn’t look more than seventeen or so—a cheerful, pleasant boy who obviously felt that with this long evening hire his luck was in. Alone for a moment I went round the back and called Raju, and asked him to bring the boy to me. He appeared from nowhere, as if he’d been expecting me. I gave him ten chips. A fortune. But he deserved it. And it was part of my puja. I think Raju disapproved. Perhaps he extracted a percentage, or gave the boy short commons or no commons at all. In the end one can’t bear it anymore—the indifference of one Indian for another—and doesn’t want to know what goes on.

It came on to rain, which drove us in from the verandah. Hari’s earlier mood had gone. He looked exhausted, as if he had failed—not just at whatever he had set out to achieve that evening but at everything he’d set his heart on. I wanted to have it out with him, but it was difficult to know how to begin. And when we began it started off all wrong because I said, “You’ve been trying to put me off, haven’t you?”

He pretended not to understand and said, “Put off? What do you mean, put off?” Which frustrated me so that I said, as if I were in a
temper, “Oh, put off, put me off, put me off
you,
like everybody else has tried.”

He asked who “everybody else” was.

I said, “Well, everybody. People like Mr. Merrick for instance. He thinks you’re a bad bet.”

Hari said, “Well, he should know, I suppose.”

I told him that was a ridiculous thing to say because only he knew what kind of bet he was. He said, “What’s all this talk about anyway? What does it mean, bet? Good bet, bad bet? What am I supposed to be, a racehorse or something? Some kind of stock or share people keep an eye on to see if it’s worth investing in?”

I’d not seen him angry before. He’d not seen me angry either. We lost our tempers, which is why I don’t remember just what it was we said that led me to accuse him of criticizing a man he’d probably never met, and then to the realization that we’d been talking at cross purposes because no one had ever told me it was Ronald who took him into custody and stood by and watched him hit by one of his subordinates. I remember saying something like, “You mean it was Ronald himself?” and I can still see the surprise on his face when the penny dropped at last and he knew I really hadn’t known.

If only I’d contained my anger then. Well, I tried, because I wasn’t angry with him but with Ronald, other people, myself as much as anybody. I said, “Where did it happen, then?” and again he looked astonished. He said, “Well, in the Sanctuary of course.” That was another blow. I asked him to tell me about it.

He’d been drunk. He wouldn’t say why. He’d wandered out as drunk as a coot and collapsed in a ditch in that awful waste ground near the river and been picked up by Sister Ludmila and her helpers who thought he’d been attacked or was ill, or dying, until they got him back to the Sanctuary. He slept it off there, and in the morning Ronald came to the Sanctuary with some policemen, looking for a man who’d escaped from a jail and was thought to have come back to Mayapore because that was where the escaped man used to live. He wasn’t there, but Hari was. Well, you can imagine it, I expect, imagine how Hari would react to being browbeaten by a man like Ronald. The subinspector accompanying Ronald hit Hari in the face for not answering “smartly,” and in the end he was hustled away and punched and kicked when he got into the back of the truck.

One trouble was that he knew the man the police were looking for.
This came out while Ronald questioned him in front of the subinspector at the kotwali. But he’d only known him as a clerk in his uncle’s warehouse. Another trouble was that Hari deliberately made a point of confusing the police about his name. Coomer. Kumar. He said “either would do.” Finally Ronald sent the subinspector out of the room and talked to Hari alone, or tried to talk to him, which was probably difficult because Hari had taken a dislike to him. I don’t know why Hari got drunk. Perhaps from an accumulation of blows that had finally made him feel he cared for nothing and believed in nothing. He told me he was convinced he was going to be locked up anyway, so didn’t watch his tongue. I think from the way he told me all this he was trying to help find excuses for Ronald that he couldn’t find himself. Ronald asked him why he’d got drunk, and where. Hari wouldn’t say where because he thought—and said—that where was none of Ronald’s business—but gladly explained why. He explained it by saying he’d got drunk because he hated the whole damned stinking country, the people who lived in it and the people who ran it. He even said, “And that goes for you, too, Merrick.” He knew Merrick’s name because he’d often been in the courts as a reporter. He said Merrick only smiled when he said “and that goes for you, too,” and then told him he could go, and even apologized—sarcastically of course—for having “inconvenienced him.” When he got back home he discovered Sister Ludmila had scared up some influential people to ask questions about his “arrest” but this only amused him, if amused is the right word to use when he was really feeling bitter. He said it had amused him when eventually Lili invited him to a party, and also amused him to see Merrick watching the way I went up to him that day on the maidan. I didn’t know Ronald had seen that, but it fitted in. Hari thought I had always known the whole story, and was only condescending to him when I broke away from the white officers and white nurses to throw a crumb of comfort to him.