The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (70 page)

I played for time. I said, “I don’t think so. I mean they all look alike, don’t they? Especially in the dark,” and was conscious of having said something that could be thought indelicate, as well as out of character. He asked me how they were dressed. I had a pretty clear recollection of white cotton clothing—you know, dhotis and high-necked shirts, peasant dress, dirty and smelly. But the warning bells rang again. I saw
the danger to Hari if the men were ever caught.
I think that if I were taken to the Bibighar, at night, and confronted with those men, I would know them. You can recognize people again, even when you think there’s been nothing to identify them by, even if there’s been only a second or two to get an impression you can hardly believe is an impression, or at least not one worth describing or trying to describe. I was afraid of
being
confronted, afraid of finding myself having to say, “Yes, these are the men,” because then they would plead provocation, they’d go on their knees and scream and beg for mercy and say that such a thing would never have occurred to them
if the white woman hadn’t already been making love to an Indian.

The trap was now fully sprung, Auntie, wasn’t it? Once you’ve started lying there’s no end to it. I’d lied myself into a position there was no escaping from except by way of the truth. I didn’t dare tell the truth so the only thing I could do was to confuse and puzzle people and make them hate me—
that,
and stretch every nerve end to keep Hari out of it by going on and on insisting that he was never there, making it so that they would never be able to accuse or bring to trial or punish the men who assaulted me because they knew that the principal witness would spike every gun they tried to bring into action.

But of course I was forgetting or anyway reckoning without the power they had to accuse and punish on suspicion alone. There was a moment when I nearly told the truth, because I saw the way things might go. I’m glad I didn’t because then I think they would have proved somehow that Hari was technically guilty of rape, because he’d been there and made love to me and incited others to follow his example. At least my lying spared him being punished for rape. It also spared those innocent boys being punished for it too. I’ve never asked what the punishment for rape is. Hanging? Life imprisonment? People talked about swinging them on the end of a rope. Or firing them from the mouth of a cannon, which is what we did to mutineers in the nineteenth century.

So when Jack Poulson asked me how the men were dressed I said I wasn’t sure, but then decided it was safer to tell the truth and say “Like peasants” than to leave the impression of men dressed like Hari, in shirts and trousers.

Mr. Poulson said, “Are you sure?” which rather played into my hands because he said it as if my evidence was contradicting the story he’d been building up, or other people had built up for him, a picture with Hari at its centre. So I said, Yes, like peasants or labourers. And I added for good measure, “They smelt like that, too.” Which was true. He said, “Did any of them smell of drink?” I thought of the time Hari was found on the waste ground by Sister Ludmila. For the moment it looked safer to tell the truth again and say I didn’t remember any special smell of drink.

Mr. Poulson said, “I’m sorry to have to subject you to this.” I told
him it was all right, I knew it had to be done. For the first time in the interrogation we looked at each other for longer than a split second. He said, “There’s the important question of the bicycle. You say you left it on the path near the pavilion. Did you leave your cape on the handlebars?”

I couldn’t immediately see the significance of this question. I assumed he knew that the cape had been used to cover my head because I’d told Lili and Anna. He’d got all this kind of detail from them. He never asked a single question about the assault itself. Poor fellow! I expect he’d rather have died than do so, magistrate though he was. But it was an English girl who’d been assaulted and his magisterial detachment just wouldn’t hold out. I decided to tell the truth about the cape. I said, “No, I’m pretty sure I took it with me onto the platform. In fact I did. I thought the mosaic might be damp, but it wasn’t. So I didn’t sit on the cape, I just kept it by me.”

He seemed to be satisfied with that, and later when the whole business of the bicycle and what had happened to it blew up in my face I realized what he’d been after. He was trying to establish at what stage “they’d” found the bicycle. If I’d left the cape on the handlebars that would mean they’d known the bicycle was there before they attacked me, because they’d used the cape. If I hadn’t left it on the handlebars it could mean they didn’t find the bicycle until they were making off along the path. And this would suggest that they had gone along the path and not out through the broken wall at the back of the garden. There couldn’t have been any footprints though, because the paths were all gravel, and anyway with the rains and the police bashing about in the dark all that kind of evidence would lead nowhere. His next question was, “You say you were suddenly surrounded. Do you mean they closed in on you from all sides of the platform?”

And again, the warning bell. If I said, Yes, from all sides, the next question wouldn’t be a question at all, but a statement impossible to refute: “So you never got an impression of the man or men who came at you from behind.”

I realized it was going to be difficult to kill completely the idea of there having been at least one man I never saw, especially if he was a man who kept out of sight in case I recognized him. Hari, for instance. The pavilion is open on all sides. I could only minimize the danger. I said, “Well, no, not from all sides. Originally I was sitting on the edge of the platform, then I threw my cigarette away and turned round—as you
would, to get to your feet. They were coming at me from behind. I don’t know—perhaps I’d heard a sound that made me decide to get out of the place. It
was
pretty creepy. When I turned round there were these two just standing upright after climbing onto the platform and the other three or four vaulting onto it.”

Did I call out? No—I was too surprised to call out. Did any of them say anything? I think one of them giggled.

Mr. Poulson questioned the margin of error there might be in my statement about “the other three or four.” Was it three, or was it four? Was the total number of men five or six? I said I couldn’t remember. All I remembered was the awful sensation of being attacked swiftly by as many men as there were, five or six. Men of that kind, labourers, hooligans, stinking to high heaven. I said it was like being thrown into one of those disgusting third class compartments on an Indian train. And that I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

Anna came to life then. She turned round and said, “Yes, I think it is enough, Mr. Poulson,” in that very forthright German voice of hers. He got up at once, glad enough to be out of it, if only for a while. Anna saw him to the door. She came back for a moment to make sure I was all right, then left me alone. Lili brought up some fruit and curds for my lunch and after that I dozed until late afternoon. I woke and found Lili in the room and Raju just leaving it. He’d brought up tea.

When I’d had a cup Lili said, “I think Mr. Poulson should have told you. Some boys were arrested last night. One of them was Hari.”

My bicycle had been found in the ditch outside Hari’s house in the Chillianwallah Bagh. I didn’t believe it. It was such a monstrous
fatal
intervention. I said, “But he wasn’t there! It wasn’t Hari!” She wanted to believe me. I tried not to panic. If some men had been arrested I thought they must be the ones responsible and that they would already have talked about the Indian who’d been making love to me there. I was going to have to deny this, deny it and go on denying it, and hope that Hari would keep his promise to say nothing, to know nothing. I felt that he had
given
me that promise when he let me go. I asked Lili when he’d been arrested and why, and who by. When I took it in that he’d been in custody ever since the night before and that Ronald was responsible, that Ronald had found the bicycle outside Hari’s house, I said, “He’s lying, isn’t he? He found the bicycle in the Bibighar and took it to Hari’s house and planted it in the ditch.”

Lili was shocked because she knew it
could
be true, but she refused to believe it. She couldn’t accept that an English official would stoop to that. But there are only three possible explanations for the bicycle and only one is likely. I left the bicycle by the path against a tree. It was very dark on the path. You’d easily miss seeing the bicycle if you didn’t know just where it was and if you had no lamp. I think when Hari carried me down the path we’d gone past the place before I said, “It’s here somewhere,” and he put me down. He wasn’t interested in the bicycle. He was only concerned to carry me home. I suppose he had some dim idea that if the bicycle were there he could put me on it and wheel me home. But the bicycle was a bad joke, just at that moment, wasn’t it? He hardly bothered to look. I think the bicycle was still where I’d left it, and that when Ronald rushed to the Bibighar with his police patrol they found it almost at once and Ronald put it into the back of a truck and drove to Hari’s house and dumped it in the ditch. I think he was the sort of officer who let his men have a lot of elbow room and in return could get them to plant evidence like this for him and say nothing. Remember the incident of the subinspector hitting Hari and getting away with it? There was nothing to connect Hari with the assault in the Bibighar except his known association with me and Ronald’s jealousy and suspicion and prejudice. What else made him go to Hari’s house? And why when he got there did he spend time searching for the bicycle? If it was in a ditch outside it would have had to be
searched
for, wouldn’t it?

If the bicycle
was
in the ditch before Ronald got there I suppose it’s possible that one of his men found it during the course of whatever drill they go through when they go to a place to pick up a suspect. But the impression I got before the so-called inquiry was that according to Ronald they only went into the house because they found the bicycle outside it, and that it was only then that Ronald realized that the house was Hari’s. If this was the impression he gave people at first he can’t have been thinking very clearly because he wouldn’t have to give English people any reason for going to Hari’s house. Apparently he’d been there once that night already. He was probably not thinking clearly because Lili had repeated to him what I’d told her—that Hari wasn’t with me, that Hari wasn’t responsible. He wanted Hari to be responsible. I think he had to change the emphasis when it came to making a proper report, had to say that he’d gone to Hari’s house and
then
found the bicycle, not the other way round.

I give Ronald this much benefit of the doubt, that after he left the
MacGregor House, knowing what had happened to me, he went to his headquarters, collected a patrol, rushed to the Bibighar, found nothing, and then searched the area in the vicinity, arrested those boys who were drinking hooch in a hut on the other side of the river, and then headed straight for the house in the Chillianwallah Bagh, where he found Hari with cuts on his face and where his police found the bicycle. He went to the Chillianwallah Bagh because he thought I was lying, knew I was lying, and because the boys he arrested in the hut on the other side of the bridge were known to be acquaintances of Hari’s. But he went mainly because he hated Hari. He wanted to prove that Hari was guilty. And this leaves only the two other explanations for the bicycle. Either Hari went back for it after I’d left him, found it, rode it home, then realized the danger and shoved it into the ditch—which would mean he lost his head because if he
saw
the danger he wouldn’t leave the bicycle outside his own house. Or one of the men who attacked me knew Hari, knew where he lived, stole the bicycle and left it outside Hari’s house, guessing that the police would search near there—which means that whoever it was who knew Hari also knew that Hari and I were friends. And this leads, surely, to the proposition that such a man anticipated that we’d be in the Bibighar that night. But we didn’t even anticipate that ourselves. The coincidence of there being one man or several men in the Bibighar that night who recognized Hari in the dark and thought fast enough to steal the bicycle and leave it outside his house is too much to swallow, isn’t it? And who could such a man be? One of Lili’s servants? One of Mrs. Gupta Sen’s? One who might have been able to read my note, in English, asking Hari to meet me on the night of August the ninth,
in the Sanctuary?
No, it won’t wash. It won’t even wash if you think—as I did for a while—of this unknown but very clever or very lucky man or boy being one of those stretcher bearers Sister Ludmila used to hire, never for more than a few weeks because after that they got bored and “their thoughts turned to mischief.” On the day I went to say good-bye to her I noticed that she had a new boy. She told me about the boys who wrote to her after they’d left, and how only one of them had ever come back to beg. And it did cross my mind that perhaps the one who came back to beg was the one who was with her and Mr. de Souza the night they brought Hari into the Sanctuary. Such a boy might have taken an interest in Hari, followed him around, got to know his movements, even watched us on those occasions we went to the Bibighar. But why? Such a boy, back in his village, might have talked about the Indian
and the white girl, and led a gang of fellow hooligans into Mayapore, attracted by rumours of trouble and the idea of loot, and come to the Bibighar from the waste ground at the back to shelter for the night, and seen Hari there, and me, watched our love making. The men who attacked us
had
been watching. That is certain. But the coincidence is too much to take. The men were hooligans. It was Ronald Merrick who planted the bicycle. I know it. I don’t think Hari had many friends, but I don’t think he had any enemies either, except for Ronald—none, anyway, who would go to the lengths that were gone to to incriminate him.