The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (75 page)

No, my dear. Leave poor Hari Kumar to work out his own salvation, if he’s still alive to work it out and if there’s a salvation of any kind for a boy like him. He is the leftover, the loose end of our reign, the kind of person we created—I suppose with the best intentions. But for all Nehru’s current emergence as a potential moral force in world affairs, I see
nothing
in India that will withstand the pressure of the legacy of the division we English have allowed her to impose on herself, and are morally responsible for. In allowing it we created a precedent for
partition just at the moment when the opposite was needed, allowed it—again with the best intentions—as a result of tiredness, and failing moral and physical pretensions that just wouldn’t stand the strain of looking into the future to see what abdication on India’s terms instead of ours was going to mean. Perhaps finally we had no terms of our own because we weren’t clever enough to formulate them in twentieth century dress, and so the world is going to divide itself into isolated little pockets of dogma and mutual resistance, and the promise that always seemed to lie behind even the worst aspects of our colonialism will just evaporate into history as imperial mystique, foolish glorification of a severely practical and greedy policy.

Do you remember dear Nello with Henry’s pipe in his mouth, pacing up and down, copying Henry, saying, in Henry’s voice, “Policy? Policy? To hell with policy! What are you thinking and feeling, dear chap? That’s the point! Don’t let’s waste bloody time on second-rate notions of what is
likely.
Let’s consider the damned unlikely and see where we go from there.” How I laughed at the time. Remembering it now I don’t laugh anymore. Such a marvelous opportunity
wasted.
I mean for us, by us. Indians feel it too, don’t they? I mean, in spite of the proud chests and all the excitement of sitting down as free men at their own desks to work out a constitution. Won’t that constitution be a sort of love letter to the English—the kind an abandoned lover writes when the affair has ended in what passes at the time as civilized and dignified mutual recognition of incompatability? In a world grown suddenly dull because the beloved, thank God, has gone, offering his killing and unpredictable and selfish affections elsewhere, you attempt to recapture, don’t you, the moments of significant pleasure—which may not have been mutual at all, but anyway existed. But this recapture is always impossible. You settle for the second-rate, you settle for the lesson you appear to have learned and forget the lesson you hoped to learn and might have learned, and so learn nothing at all, because the second-rate is the world’s common factor, and any damned fool people can teach it, any damned fool people can inherit it.

What terrifies me is the thought that gradually, when the splendours of civilized divorce and protestations of continuing as good friends are worked out, the real animus will emerge, the one both our people just managed to keep in check when there was reason to suppose that it was wrong, because it could lead neither rulers nor ruled anywhere. I mean of course the dislike and fear that exists between black and white. And
this is a fifth-rate passion, appropriate only to a nation of vulgar shopkeepers and a nation of fat-bellied banias. I remember that time dear Nello mimicked Henry, the look of awful shock on the face of one of Henry’s aides (an awfully well-bred chap, whose grandfather made a fortune out of bottling sauce or something—not that this was against him, but he’d somehow never risen above it) and the way, while I was still laughing, this aide turned to me and seemed as if he were about to say, “Good Heavens, Lady Manners! Do you allow
that
in Sir Henry’s own drawing room?” And all he meant was that Nello was brown-skinned and poor Henry was white, although actually he was grey and yellow and ill, and on his way to the grave. I suppose everything gets stripped down to
that,
in the end, because that is the last division of all, isn’t it? The colour of the skin, I mean; not dying.

Well, you and I have always tried to keep open house.
You anyway, I suspect, will have to keep it open for a long time yet.
What this letter is really all about, Lili, is this: When I’m gone, will you give Parvati a roof?

My Love,
Ethel.

Imagine, then, a flat landscape, one that turns, upends, following in reverse the bends and twists of night flight 115, the Viscount Service to Calcutta; a landscape that is dark but shows immediately below as a system of lights, clustering neatly round a central point with a few minor galaxies beyond its periphery—the flarepath of the airfield, the suburb of Banyaganj, divorced from the parent body because the link with Mayapore, the Grand Trunk road, is unlit except by the occasional night traffic (miniature headlamps moving at what looks even from this height like excessive speed) and a relatively small and isolated constellation about midway, where the new English colony live on hand for the Technical College, the factories, and the airfield which they use as casually as a bus terminal. Apart from the stranger there is one other Englishman on flight 115—the same man who at the club that evening occasionally looked across at Srinivasan’s private party; perhaps less from curiosity than from a desire to obtain momentary relief from the business of concentrating on questions being put to him by talkative young men like Surendranath and Desai who were trying to make up for the time they think their fathers lost.

Similarly surrounded as he has been in the airport lounge, this other
Englishman now sits in the almost empty airliner several seats away from the stranger. The other passengers are Indian businessmen. They, too, sit separately from each other, on their way to deals in West Bengal. When the illuminated sign on the bulkhead goes out (
Fasten seat belts. No smoking
) portfolios will be opened and papers studied. The flight is of such short duration; the respite granted as precious to a man as the time he spends in more intimate surroundings reading the morning newspaper to find out what happened yesterday and judge how it might affect what could happen today. One of them—the man who sat in the airport lounge with his feet curled up on the interior-sprung chair, wears the dhoti. There is not room on the aircraft seat for him to continue in similar comfort, for which the stranger is grateful, because who knows where those feet have been in the past twenty-four hours?

The aircraft seems to be having difficulty attaining height. From the oval-shaped port the flarepath comes again into view, not much further below than it was the last time of looking, and then the lights of Mayapore come back in focus, slightly blurred, which may be due to the condensation on the double glazing of the windows, but at least they conform to the pattern that is known and is now recognizable, because the watcher has had time to orientate himself.

One can even detect where the maidan lies: a dark space enclosed by evenly plotted points of illumination, Hospital road, Club road, Church road (a name unaltered in spite of Victoria having become Mahatma Gandhi), and Artillery road. The plane banks, nosing East, almost taking the course of the river that leads to Miss Crane’s unimaginable coast. With this God’s-eye view of the created world she never had to cope, which perhaps was a pity, because the topography she found so inhibiting from ground level reveals itself from this height, and at this speed, as random and unplanned, with designs hacked into it by people who only worked things out as they went along.

The neon standard that lights the faithful from the Tirupati Temple to the river and back again shows up relatively brightly, and plotting from this and the neon light above the keeper’s hut at the grade crossing at the northern head of the Bibighar bridge, the stranger (returning to Calcutta for a second inspection of mouldering missionary relics) is able to fix the approximate position of the Bibighar gardens and the MacGregor House.

The Bibighar gardens are dark (now, as then)—but from the MacGregor House there is the burst of light that Lili Chatterjee promised:
all the lights turned on in the occupied rooms and all the floodlights in the garden; pale from here but suddenly unmistakable, so that foolishly one searches that distant area for signs of Lili herself, and imagines that she stands below the steps of the verandah with Parvati, staring up at the winking red, green and amber riding lights of the airborne commercial juggernaut.

This is the last image then—the MacGregor House—in which there are sounds of occupation other than those made by Lili and Parvati: of tinkling broken glass, of sensibly shod feet taking the rise from the black and white tiled hallway to the corridor above from which brass-knobbed mahogany doors lead into rooms that give their occupants the opportunity to view the reality for themselves and the dream for others, and to make up their own minds about the precise meaning of what lies beyond.

These sounds are ones that the casual visitor will today attribute to Parvati’s presence, not to her mother’s. But Parvati steps lightly and breaks nothing (except perhaps a young man’s heart). She is another story, which is why her presence here is tentative, although this suits her, because of her shyness and the impression you get of her as a girl who has not yet met the world face to face, let alone subjected it to the force of her personality. To come upon her unexpectedly, to find her standing alone in a room of the MacGregor House or sitting in the shade in the garden counting the petals of a flower—to see her expression of intense but distant pleasure (distant because in spite of its intensity the source of it is obviously far away in some private world that trembles on the brink between her youthful illusions and her maturer judgment), to hear her early in the mornings and evenings practising her singing, to listen to the grave and studious application with which she attacks a difficult phrase, admits defeat with a low cry of exasperation, then re-attacks it, this is to leave the MacGregor House with an idea of Parvati as a girl admirably suited to her surroundings where there is always the promise of a story continuing instead of finishing, and of Lady Chatterjee as the repository of a tradition established for the sake of the future rather than of the past.

“Well, I don’t know about that” (Lady Chatterjee says, taking the stranger for one last look round the old place, accepting the support of his arm, shading her eyes from the late afternoon sun with her free hand—and Shafi already waiting to take him in good time to the
airport), “I mean, a repository sounds like a place for storing furniture when you bash off to some other station. I suppose an Englishman could say that the whole of India is that sort of place. You all went, but left so much behind that you couldn’t carry with you wherever you were going, and these days those of you who come back can more often than not hardly bother to think about it, let alone ask for the key to go in and root about among all the old dust sheets to see that everything worthwhile that you left is still there and isn’t falling to pieces with dry rot.” She pauses and then asks, “Has Parvati said good-bye to you properly?”

Yes, Parvati has said good-bye, and now runs down the steps from the verandah (late, because she tends to work on Mayapore time instead of Indian Standard), making her way to her evening lesson with her guru who has sung in London, New York and Paris, and these days receives for instruction only the most promising pupils—girls who have both the talent and the stamina for a course of training that lasts eight years. One day, perhaps, Parvati will also sing in those western capitals, and then become a guru herself, instructing a new generation of girls in the formal complexities of the songs her English mother once described as the only music in the world she knew that sounded conscious of breaking silence and going back into it when it was finished. Before she goes out of sight—running in a pale pink saree—she pauses and waves, and the stranger waves back, wishing her well for the evening lesson. Twice a day she runs like this, and in the intervals locks herself up for hours of rigorous practice. Sometimes a young man appears, bearing the twin drums, the tablas, to help her with the necessary percussion which otherwise she provides herself with sharp little flicks of her supple fingers on the onion-shaped tamboura. Her skin is the palest brown and in certain lights her long dark hair reveals a redness more familiar in the north.

    
Dooliya le ao re more babul ke kaharwa.

    
Chali hoon sajan ba ke des.

    
Sangaki sakha saba bicchuda gayee hai

    
apne ri apne ghar jaun.

    
Oh, my father’s servants, bring my palanquin.

    
I am going to the land of my husband. All my

    
companions are scattered. They have gone to

    
different homes.

A morning raga.

Translation by Dipali Nag.

NOTES

PART SEVEN THE BIBIGHAR GARDENS

1.
Section of Journal shown to Robin White begins here.

2.
End of section of Journal shown to Robin White.