The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (67 page)

I said, “So it’s amused you whenever we’ve been out together?”

He said, “Yes, you could put it that way. If you want to. But you’ve been very kind, and I’m grateful.”

I said, “I didn’t mean anything as kindness,” and stood up. He stood up too. He would only have had to touch me, for the stupidity to have ended then, but he didn’t. He was afraid to. He was too conscious of the weight that would have made touching a gesture of defiance of the rule Ronald had described a few evenings before as “basic,” and he didn’t have that kind of courage, and so I was deprived of my own. The
defiance had to come from him first, to make it human, to make it right.

I said, “Goodnight, Hari.” Oh, even in that goodnight there was a way left open to him that “good-bye” would have closed. But I mustn’t blame him. He had good reasons to be afraid. I rehearsed them to myself upstairs in my room, sitting, waiting, determining to have things out with Lili. When I heard the cycle-tonga go down the drive my determination began to go with it, and then I was worried, worried for him, because he was a man who would find it awfully difficult to hide, and I believed that was what he wanted to do. To hide. To disappear into a sea of brown faces.

That word Ronald Merrick used was the right one—association. Hari and I could be enemies, or strangers to each other, or lovers, but never friends because such a friendship was put to the test too often to survive. We were constantly having to ask the question, Is it worth it? Constantly having to examine our motives for wanting to be together. On my side the motive was physical attraction. I didn’t have enough self-confidence to assure myself that Hari felt the same for me. But this didn’t change what I felt. I was in love with him. I wanted him near me. I told myself I didn’t care what people said. I didn’t care what he’d done, or what people like Ronald Merrick thought he’d done or was capable of doing. I wanted to protect him from danger. If it helped him not to be seen with me any longer I was prepared to let him go, to let him hide. But because I was in love I kidded myself there was a time limit to “any longer,” a magic formula that took the sting out of the decision I made to let the next move come from him.

When Lili asked me next morning about the visit to the temple I chatted away as if nothing had happened. Several times I was on the point of saying, “Did you know it was Ronald who arrested Hari?” But I didn’t want to hear her say Yes. I didn’t want to pave the way to a discussion that might have forced Lili to confess for instance that she had since had doubts about Hari and regretted her haste in rushing to the defense of a man she didn’t know but had since learned more of that made her feel Ronald had been right to suspect him and done nothing he need be ashamed of when he took Hari in for questioning.

I knew that Lili would be the first to realize something had happened between Hari and myself if the days went by without any word from him or meeting between us. I was aware of helping him by keeping quiet, aware of distracting attention from him, but not aware then of the truth
of what I was actually doing—indulging my unfulfilled passion for him by weaving a protective web round him which even excluded me. I didn’t feel that it excluded me. Later I did.

I went about my job, my ordinary life. No letter from him. To avoid having to answer Lili’s questions, if she decided to ask them, I took to going almost every evening to the club. And people noticed it. I was glad they did. If I was at the club obviously I wasn’t out with Hari. The first time I saw Ronald there he came up to me and said, “Did you enjoy the temple?” I shrugged and said, “Oh, it was all right. A bit of a racket, though. You can’t say boo without it costing money.” He smiled. I couldn’t tell whether he was pleased or puzzled. I wondered whether he saw through my casual pretense, but then decided that even if he saw through it he wouldn’t see what lay behind it. I hated him that night. Hated him and smiled at him. Played the game. And again felt how easy it was, how simple. To act at conforming. Because all the time there was nothing to conform with, except an idea, a charade played round a phrase: white superiority.

And all the time wanting Hari. Seeing him in my imagination looking over the shoulder of every pink male face and seeing in every pink male face the strain of pretending that the world was this small. Hateful. Ingrown. About to explode like powder compressed ready for firing.

I thought that the whole bloody affair of
us
in India had reached flash point. It was bound to because it was based on a violation. Perhaps at one time there was a moral as well as a physical force at work. But the moral thing had gone sour. Has gone sour. Our faces reflect the sourness. The women look worse than the men because consciousness of physical superiority is unnatural to us. A white man in India can feel physically superior without unsexing himself. But what happens to a woman if she tells herself that 99 per cent of the men she sees are not men at all, but creatures of an inferior species whose colour is their main distinguishing mark? What happens when you unsex a nation, treat it like a nation of eunuchs? Because that’s what we’ve done, isn’t it?

God knows what happens. What will happen. The whole thing seems to go from bad to worse, year after year. There’s dishonesty on both sides because the moral issue has gone sour on them as well as on us. We’re back to basics, the basic issue of who jumps and who says jump. Call it by any fancy name you like, even “the greatest experiment of colonial government and civilizing influence since pre-Christian Rome,” to quote our old friend Mr. Swinson. It’s become a vulgar scramble for
power on their part and an equally vulgar smug hanging-on on ours. And the greater their scramble the greater our smugness. You can’t hide that any longer because the moral issue, if it ever really existed at all, is dead. It’s our fault it’s dead because it was our responsibility to widen it, but we narrowed it down and narrowed it down by never suiting actions to words. We never suited them because out here, where they
needed
to be suited and to be seen to be suited, that old primitive savage instinct to attack and destroy what we didn’t understand because it looked different and was different always got the upper hand. And God knows how many centuries you have to go back to trace to its source their apparent fear of skins paler than their own. God help us if they ever lose that fear. Perhaps fear is the wrong word. In India anyway. It is such a primitive emotion and their civilization is so old. So perhaps I should say God help us if ever they substitute fear for tiredness. But tiredness is the wrong word too. Perhaps we haven’t got a word for what they feel. Perhaps it’s hidden in that stone carving of Vishnu sleeping, looking as if he might wake at any minute and take them to oblivion in a crack of happy thunder.

Was this the difference between my own emotions and Hari’s? That he could wait and I couldn’t? In the end I couldn’t bear the silence, the inaction, the separation, the artificiality of my position. I wrote to him. I had no talent for self-denial. It’s an Anglo-Saxon failing, I suppose. Constantly we want proof, here and now, proof of our existence, of the mark we’ve made, the sort of mark we can wear round our necks, to label us, to make sure we’re never lost in that awful dark jungle of anonymity.

But in my impatience there was Anglo-Saxon planning, forethought, an acceptance that time went through certain fixed exercises that the clock and the calendar had been invented to define. The further away from the equator you get the more sensitive you become to the rhythm of light and dark, the way it expands and contracts and organizes the seasons, so that time itself develops a specific characteristic that alerts you to its absurd but meticulous demands. If I’d been an Indian girl perhaps I’d have said in my note to Hari: Tonight, please. Instead I gave three or four days’ notice. Three or four. I forget which, which shows how unimportant the actual number was, how unimportant as well the actual day suggested—although I remember that. As everybody probably does. August the ninth. In my note I said I was sorry for any
misunderstanding, and that I wanted to talk to him. I said I’d go to the Sanctuary on that evening and hoped to meet him there.

I got no reply, but when the day came I felt happy, almost lightheaded. At breakfast time the telephone rang. I thought it was Hari and rushed to answer before Raju could get there. It wasn’t Hari. It was little Mrs. Srinivasan wanting to speak to Lili. I sent Raju up to Lili’s bedroom to tell her to pick up the extension. When I went up to say goodbye to her Lili said, “They’ve arrested Vassi.”

Well, you know all that side of things. We’d been prepared for it but it was a shock when it actually happened. When I got to the hospital the girls were acting as if they’d been personally responsible for saving the day by locking up the Mahatma and his colleagues and Congressmen all over the count. A year earlier most of them wouldn’t have even known what Congress was. The atmosphere in the hospital that morning was like that in the club at the end of War Week. One of them said, “Have you noticed the orderlies? They’ve got their tails between their legs all right.” Once this had been pointed out the girls seemed to go out of their way to find new methods of humiliating them. And there was a subtle change in their attitude to me, as if they were trying to make me feel that I’d been backing the wrong horse for months.

It wasn’t until the afternoon that they began to get scared. First there was the rumour of rioting in the subdivisions, then the confirmation that the assistant commissioner had gone out with police patrols to find out why contact couldn’t be made with a place called Tanpur. It came on to rain. And about a quarter to five, when I was getting ready to go off duty, there was a flap because Mr. Poulson had brought in the mission teacher, Miss Crane. At first we thought she’d been raped, but I got the true story from Mr. Poulson. I saw him as I was going to Matron’s office. Miss Crane had been attacked on her way home from Dibrapur, and had her car burned out, and had seen one of her teachers—an Indian—murdered. She was suffering from shock and exposure. She’d sat on the roadside guarding the murdered man’s body. As I’d met Miss Crane once at the Deputy Commissioner’s bungalow I got permission from Matron to go in and see her. But she was already wandering and didn’t recognize me. I thought she was for it. She kept saying, “I’m sorry. Sorry it’s too late,” mumbling about there having been too many chappattis for her to eat alone, and asking why I hadn’t shared them, why had I gone hungry? I held her hand and tried to make contact with her but all she would do for a while was keep repeating, “I’m sorry it’s
too late.” But suddenly she said, “Mine’s Edwina Crane and my mother’s been dead for longer than I care to remember,” and then went off into a delirium about mending the roof and there being nothing she could do. “Nothing,” she said, over and over. “There’s nothing I can do.”

It was raining when I left the hospital.
1
There was no sign of Ronald’s driver or of the truck. He would have been busy that evening anyway. But I had my bicycle and my rain cape and sou’wester. I’d told Lili that I’d be calling in at the club and I’d also promised to see the girls there, but looking in on Miss Crane had made me late and so I cycled direct to the Sanctuary, down Hospital road, Victoria road, and over the river by way of the Bibighar bridge. Perhaps the rain as well as the rumours was keeping nearly everyone indoors, because I saw few people. I got to the Sanctuary about five forty-five. The rain was letting up a bit then.

I’ve never described the Sanctuary to you, have I? You turn in off the Chillianwallah Bagh Extension road along a track that skirts the waste ground near the river where the poorest untouchables live in horrible squalid huts. Then you come to a walled compound in which there are three old buildings that date back to the early nineteenth century. One is the office, the other the clinic and Sister Ludmila’s “cell” and the third and largest the place where she tends the sick and dying. There must be nearly an acre of ground enclosed by those walls. The place looks derelict and you can smell the river most of the time. But inside the buildings everything is clean and neat, scrubbed and whitewashed.

She has one principal assistant, a middle-aged Goanese called de Souza, and several men and women whom she hires at random. I’ve always wondered where her money comes from.

Hari wasn’t there. I went to the office first and saw Mr. de Souza. He said Sister Ludmila was in her room, and that no one had turned up so far for the evening clinic, probably because of the rumours of trouble. I went across to the clinic and knocked at her door. I’d not seen her since the week of the visit to the temple. She knew Hari and I had been planning to go there. She asked me to come in and tell her about it.

The rain stopped and in about ten minutes or so the sun came out, as it often does, at the end of an afternoon’s wet, but of course it was already setting. She said, “Will Hari be coming?” I told her I wasn’t sure. And then she asked me about the temple. She herself had never
seen inside it. I described our puja to the Lord Venkataswara and the image of the sleeping Vishnu. I wanted to ask her about the night she found Hari lying drunk in a ditch in the wasteland outside the Sanctuary, but didn’t. As the minutes went by and he still did not come I thought “It’s all going, going away before I’ve touched any of it or understood any of it.” I watched the wooden carving of the Dancing Siva. It seemed to move. There came a point when I couldn’t watch it any longer because it was draining me of my own mobility. I felt I was becoming lost in it.

I turned to her. She always sat very upright, on a hard wooden chair, with her hands folded on her lap, showing her wedding ring. I never saw her without her cap so I don’t know whether she’d shorn her hair. On other occasions when I’d been in her room its bareness and simplicity had always conveyed an idea to me of its safety, but this evening I thought, “No, it’s her safety, not the room’s.” I felt this going away from me too. There was so much I wanted to know about her, but I’d only once asked her a personal question. She spoke English very well, but with a strong accent. I’d asked her where she’d learned it and she said, “From my husband. His name was Smith.” One heard many different tales about her—for instance that she had run away from a convent as a young novice and wore the nunnish clothing in the hope of being forgiven. I don’t think this was true. I think there was no tale about her that was true. Only her charity was true. For me it always outweighed my curiosity. When you spoke to her there wasn’t any mystery. In herself she was all the explanation I felt she needed. And that is rare, isn’t it? To be explained by yourself, by what you are and what you do, and not by what you’ve done, or were, or by what people think you might be or might become.