The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (7 page)

Sometimes she wondered to what extent her decision to entertain the soldiers had been due to an instinct finally to find refuge in that old charmed privileged circle that surrounded and protected the white community. Her social and political beliefs were, she could not help realizing, by the standards of the present day, somehow old-fashioned, oversimplified. Lacking a real education she had matured slowly and had, she supposed, grasped hold of the ideas of a generation previous to her own as if they were mint-new. Events had gone ahead of her, taking with them younger people who were, in their opinions, in advance of her. She understood, it seemed, little of practical present-day politics. This comparative ignorance defined the gulf that separated her not only from the younger liberal English people such as she met at the Deputy Commissioner’s and whom she found it difficult to talk to, but from Lady Chatterjee who, lending half an ear to what she might have to say about Indian independence and the sacred duty of the British to grant it, conveyed at once an impression of having heard it all too long ago for it to be worth hearing again.

“I am,” Miss Crane told herself, “a relic of the past,” mentally crossed out “of the past” as a redundant clause, and looked up at the picture of the old Queen, stared at it waiting for it to reveal something simple but irrefutable that perhaps the MacGregor House set had lost sight of. What seemed to her so extraordinary was that although her
own ladies had stopped coming to tea the parties at the MacGregor House continued. The English community apparently saw nothing wrong in this even though they knew they now had their backs to a wall that the Indians seemed set on removing, brick by brick. It was, they said, the duty of people like the DC and his wife to keep their ears to the ground, and where better to do that than at the MacGregor House? It was rumoured, for instance, that on instructions from Government the DC had already prepared a list of Congress Party members in the Mayapore district who would have to be arrested under the Defence of India Rules if Congress voted in favour of Mr. Gandhi’s civil disobedience resolution, a resolution under which the British would be called upon to leave India on pain of finding the realm impossible to defend, their armies on the Assam-Burma frontier impossible to feed, clothe, arm or support; impossible, for the simple reason that there would be no one who was willing to operate the railways, the pósts and telegraphs, the docks, the depots, the factories, the mines, the banks, the offices, or any of the administrative and productive services of a nation they had exploited for over two hundred years and, by failing to defend Burma, brought to the point of having to succumb to yet another set of imperialistic warmongers.

Miss Crane feared such an uprising. For her the only hope for the country she loved lay in the coming together at last of its population and its rulers as equal partners in a war to the death against totalitarianism. If Congress had not resigned from the provincial ministries in 1939 in a fit of pique because the Viceroy without going through the motions of consulting them had declared war in the name of the King-Emperor on India’s behalf, and if Mr. Gandhi had not had a brainstorm and seized the moment of Britain’s greatest misfortune to press home his demands for political freedom, if things had been left to Mr. Nehru who obviously found Gandhi an embarrassment and to Mr. Rajagopalachari (who had headed the provincial ministry in Madras and had wanted to arm and train the entire nation to fight the Japanese) then at this moment, Miss Crane believed, an Indian cabinet would have been in control in Delhi, Lord Linlithgow would have been Governor-General of a virtually independent dominion and all the things that she had hoped and prayed for to happen in India would have happened, and the war would be under process of firm and thoughtful prosecution.

Sometimes Miss Crane woke up in the night and lay sleepless, listening to the rain, and was alarmed, conscious of dangers that were
growing and which people were preparing to face but not to understand, so that virtually they were not facing them at all. We only understand, she said, the way to meet them, or, sometimes, the way to avert them.

But on this occasion they were not averted.

In the first week of August Miss Crane caught one of her rare colds. She had never believed in running risks with her health. She telephoned to the school in Dibrapur to say that she would not be coming on the Thursday but would come on the following Saturday. Then she went home and put herself to bed and sweated the chill out. By the weekend she felt perfectly fit again. And so on the morning of the 8th of August—on the day on which Congress were to vote on Mr. Gandhi’s resolution—Miss Crane set off in her Ford the seventy-odd miles to Dibrapur.

The school in Dibrapur, the third of Miss Crane’s responsibilities in Mayapore District, was situated in comparative isolation, on the road midway between the village of Kotali and the town of Dibrapur itself. Dibrapur lay on the southern border of the Mayapore District. There was no church, no European population. The Dibrapur mines, so-called, were now administered from Aligarh in the adjoining district of the province.

Most of the children who attended the school came from Kotali. They had only three miles to walk. If they went to the school run by the District Board in a neighbouring village the distance was four miles. The mission schoolhouse had been built in its isolated position years ago so that it could serve the surrounding villages as well as Dibrapur. Since the expansion of the Government’s own educational program and the setting up of primary schools by District Boards the mission school had not lost many pupils for the simple reason that it had never attracted many. The Kotali children came because it was nearer and a few children still came from Dibrapur because at the mission school the English language was taught. The Dibrapur children were usually the sons—very occasionally the daughters—of shopkeepers, men who fancied their male offspring’s chances as government contractors or petty civil servants and who knew that the gift of conversing fluently in English was therefore invaluable. And so, from Dibrapur, up to half a dozen boys and two or three girls would tramp the three miles every day to the school of the mission, carrying with them, like the children from Kotali, their food-tins and
their canvas bags. In the school of the mission there were no chappattis; only instruction, good intentions and medicine for upset stomachs.

Having stood now for nearly thirty years the Dibrapur schoolhouse was in constant need of some kind of repair, and, in the summer of 1942, certainly a coat of whitewash that it would have to wait for until the end of the rains. What it most urgently needed was attention to the roof and during this summer Miss Crane’s thoughts in connection with the school had been almost exclusively concerned with the estimates periodically obtained by Mr. Chaudhuri, the teacher, and the allocation, which in crude terms meant the money available. So far Mr. Chaudhuri had failed to obtain an estimate from any local builder that came within sight of balancing what had to be spent with what there was to spend. He did not seem to have much of a head for business or talent for bargaining. “We need,” Miss Crane had been thinking, “another five hundred rupees. We need, in fact, more; not only a repair to the roof, but a new roof, in fact practically a new school.” Sometimes she could not help wondering whether they also needed a new teacher-in-charge, but always put the thought out of her head as uncharitable, as one sparked off by personal prejudice. The fact that for one reason or another she and Mr. Chaudhuri had never hit it off should not, she realized, blind her to his remarkable qualities as a teacher.

Mr. Chaudhuri had held the Dibrapur appointment for not quite a year. His predecessor, old Miss de Silva, a Eurasian woman from Goa, had been dead for just a bit longer. With Mary de Silva’s death Miss Crane had lost the last person in the world who called her Edwina. On her first visit to Dibrapur as superintendent, seven years ago, the older woman—fat, white-haired, ponderous, and with a voice as dark and forthcoming as her extraordinary popping black eyes—had said, “You got the job
I
wanted. My name’s Mary de Silva. My mother was as black as your hat.”

“Mine’s Edwina Crane,” Miss Crane said, shaking the pudgy, man-strong hand. “I didn’t
know
you wanted the job, and my mother’s been dead for longer than I care to remember.”

“Well in that case I’ll call you Edwina if you don’t mind. I’m too old to bow and scrape to a
new
superintendent. And also if you don’t mind we’ll start by talking about the bloody roof.”

So they had talked about the roof, and the walls, and the tube well that wanted resinking in another place, and then about the children, and Mary de Silva’s intention to send, by hook or crook, a boy called
Balarachama Rao to the Government Higher School in Mayapore. “His parents won’t hear of it. But
I’ll
hear of it. Where do
you
stand, Edwina Crane?”

“In matters of this sort, Mary de Silva,” she replied, “I stand to do what the teachers on the spot advise me should be done.”

“Then find a decent lodging in Mayapore for Master Balarachama. That’s the snag. He’s got no place to live if he’s admitted. The parents say they’ve no relatives there. Which is nonsense. Indians have relatives
every
where. I ought to know.” Her skin was no sallower than little Miss Williams’ had been.

Miss Crane found lodgings in Mayapore for Balarachama and spent a month, which is to say most of her time in four weekly visits to Dibrapur, persuading his parents to let him go. When she had at last succeeded Mary de Silva said, “I’m not going to thank you. It was your duty. And it was mine. But come back now and help me break into the bottle of rum I’ve been saving since Christmas.” So she went back with Mary de Silva to the bungalow the Chaudhuris now lived in, half a mile down the road from the school, and drank rum, heard the story of Mary de Silva’s life and told her own. There had been many other occasions of drinking rum and lime in Mary de Silva’s living room, discreetly, but in enough quantity for tongues to be loosened and for Miss Crane to feel that here, in Dibrapur, with Mary de Silva, she had come home again after a lifetime traveling. For six years she went weekly to Dibrapur, and stayed the night with Mary de Silva. “It’s not necessary you know,” Miss de Silva said, “but it’s nice. The last superintendent only came once a month and never stayed the night. That was nice too.”

At the end of the six years, when the roof of the school had been repaired once and needed repairing again, and the new tube well had been sunk, the walls patched and painted twice, there came the day she reached the schoolhouse and found it closed, and, driving on to Mary de Silva’s bungalow, found the old teacher in bed, lying quietly, temporarily deserted by the servant who had gone down to Dibrapur to fetch the doctor. Miss de Silva was mumbling to herself. When she had finished what she had to say, and nodded, her eyes focused on Miss Crane. She smiled and said, “Well Edwina. I’m for it. You might see to the roof again,” then closed her eyes and died as if someone had simply disconnected a battery.

After seeing Mary de Silva’s body safely and quickly transported to Mayapore and buried in the churchyard of St. Mary, Miss Crane put the
task of finding a temporary teacher into the hands of Mr. Narayan to give him something to do, and went back to Dibrapur to reopen the school and keep it going until the temporary arrived. She also wrote to the headquarters of the mission to report Miss de Silva’s death and the steps she had taken to keep the school going until a permanent appointment was made. She recommended a Miss Smithers, with whom she had worked in Bihar. She did not get Miss Smithers. She got first of all a cousin of Mr. Narayan who drank, and then, from Calcutta, Mr. D. R. Chaudhuri, BA, BSc—qualifications which not only astonished her but made her suspicious. Mission headquarters had been rather astounded too, so she gathered from their letter, but not suspicious. Mr. Chaudhuri did not profess to be a Christian, they told her. On the other hand he did not profess any other religion. He had resigned from an appointment in a Government training college and had asked the mission to employ him in the humblest teaching capacity. They had offered him several posts, all of which he declined until, suddenly, the post in Dibrapur fell vacant, and this, from their description, had appealed to him as “the right kind of beginning.” “He will be wasted in Dibrapur, of course, and is unlikely to be with you for long,” they wrote, in confidence. “He will be accompanied by his wife, so perhaps you would arrange to see that the late Miss de Silva’s bungalow is made ready for them. We understand he has private but limited means. You will find Mr. Chaudhuri a reserved young man and, by and large, unwilling to discuss the reasons for his decision to abandon a more distinguished academic career. We have, however, satisfied ourselves from interviews with Mr. Chaudhuri and inquiries outside, that his wish to teach young children in the villages arises from a genuine sympathy for the depressed classes of his own race and a genuine belief that educated men like himself should more often be prepared to sacrifice their private interests in the interest of the country as a whole. It appears, too, that he feels his work in this direction should be with schools such as our own, not because of the religious basis of our teaching but because he has a low opinion of the local Government primary schools and thinks of them as staffed by teachers to whom politics are more important than any educational consideration.”

In spite of this promising situation there had been between herself and Mr. Chaudhuri right from the beginning what Miss Crane thought of as an almost classical reserve—classical in the sense that she felt they each suspected the other of hypocrisy, of unrevealed motives, of hiding
under the thinnest of liberal skins deeply conservative natures, so that all conversations they had that were not strictly to do with the affairs of the school seemed to be either double-edged or meaningless.

For weeks Miss Crane fought against her own reserve. She did not minimize her grief for and memories of Miss de Silva when it came to analyzing the possible causes of it. Knowing that Mr. Chaudhuri had been told she visited Miss de Silva once a week she visited him once a week too and stayed overnight in old Miss de Silva’s bungalow, now unrecognizable as the same place, furnished as it was by Mr. and Mrs. Chaudhuri in the westernized-Indian style. She did this in case he should misunderstand her not doing it; at the same time she was aware that he might have taken her visits as a sign of her not trusting in his competence. She continued the visits in the hope that eventually she would feel at home there once more.