The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (8 page)

Tall, wiry, and square-shouldered, Mr. Chaudhuri had the fine-boned face of a Bengali, was handsome in a way Miss Crane recognized but did not personally consider handsome. With every feature and plane of his face sharp and prominent and in itself indicative of strength, the whole face, for her, still suggested weakness—and yet not weakness, because even weakness required to be conveyed as a special expression, and Mr. Chaudhuri’s face was capable of conveying only two: blank indifference or petulant annoyance. His smile, she saw, would have been pleasant if it had ever got up into his eyes as well.

His English was excellent, typically Indian in its inflections and rhythms, but fluent as spoken and crisply correct when written. He also taught it very well. He made Mr. Narayan, by comparison, look and sound like a bazaar comedian. And yet, with Mr. Narayan, Miss Crane found conversation easy and direct. Not so, with Mr. Chaudhuri. There had been a period in her career when, highly sensitive herself to the sensitivity of Indians who knew the English language, even some of its subtlest nuances, but seldom if ever the rough and tumble of its everyday idiom, she had inured herself to the temptation to say things like, Don’t be silly; or, Nonsense. For some years now, though, she had not bothered to put a curb on her tongue, and wished she never had. When you chose your words the spontaneity went out of the things you wanted to say. She had learned to hate the feeling it gave her of unnaturalness. If she had always been as outspoken as she was now, she thought, then even if she had made enemies she might also have made friends. By developing self-confidence in the manner of her speech earlier in her
career she believed she might have developed an inner confidence as well, the kind that communicated itself to people of another race as evidence of sincerity, trustworthiness. Too late for that, the outspokenness, she knew, often looked to Indians like the workaday thoughtless rudeness of any Englishwoman. Only Englishwomen themselves admired it, although with men like Mr. Narayan she could conduct a slanging match and feel no bones were broken. With Mr. Chaudhuri she found herself reverting to the soft phrase, the cautious sentiment, and then spoiling whatever effect this had had by letting slip words that came more easily to her. She had said Nonsense! to him early on in their association and had seen at once that her tenuous hold on his willingness to cooperate was temporarily lost. From this unfortunate setback they had never made much advance. If Mrs. Chaudhuri had been a more sophisticated woman Miss Crane felt she might have made progress with Mr. Chaudhuri through intimate contact with his wife, but apart from a High School education and her years spent at the feet of a music teacher, Mrs. Chaudhuri was uninstructed in the ways of the sophisticated world and had a remarkably old-fashioned notion of the role of a wife.

Before Miss Crane set out in the Ford for Dibrapur on the morning of the 8th of August Joseph tried to dissuade her from going. He said there would be trouble. He had heard rumours.

She said, “We are always hearing rumours. Does that stop you from doing your work? Of course not. I have work in Dibrapur. So to Dibrapur I must go.”

He offered to come with her.

“And who will look after the house, then?” she asked. “No, Joseph for both of us it is business as usual.”

It was business as usual all the way to Dibrapur which she reached at four o’clock in the afternoon, having stopped on the way to eat her sandwiches and drink coffee from the flask. In the villages there were people who shouted Quit India! and others who asked for baksheesh. Driving slowly to avoid hitting cows and buffalo, dogs, hens and children, she smiled and waved at the people whatever they shouted.

In Kotali, the last village before the schoolhouse, she stopped the car and spoke to some of the mothers whose children went to Mr. Chaudhuri for lessons. The mothers said nothing about trouble. She did not mention it herself. They would know better than she what was to be
expected. Kotali looked very peaceful. Leaving the village behind she met the children making their way home, carrying their food-tins and canvas bags. Their average age was eight. She stopped the car again and distributed some of the boiled sweets.

Reaching the schoolhouse she drove into the compound. Here there were trees and shade. She found Mr. Chaudhuri tidying up the schoolroom. “Is there any news?” she asked, rather hoping that if trouble were coming and this were to be an eleventh hour it would be made productive of something more than politeness.

“News?” he replied. “What sort of news, Miss Crane?”

“Of the Congress vote.”

“Oh, that,” he said. “No, I have not listened.”

In the room of the schoolhouse that served as an office there was a radio. Sometimes Mr. Chaudhuri used the radio as a medium of instruction. She turned it on now. There was music. She switched off. It was European music. The only music she ever listened to when with the Chaudhuris was Indian classical music.

“Perhaps, however,” he said, “there is news of the roof?”

“No, there isn’t. I’ve checked through all the estimates again and there’s not one that’s low enough. Can’t you find someone to do it cheaper?”

“I have tried all who are willing to do it at all. If we wait much longer even the low estimates will go up. And these people cannot work for nothing.”

She was about to say, Well, that’s not what I’m asking, I’m not asking them to do it for nothing. She would have said that to Mr. Narayan. She held back from saying it to Mr. Chaudhuri. Instead she said, “No. Well come on. I’d like a cup of tea.” And even that sounded brusque.

Mr. Chaudhuri closed the school, padlocked the door, and joined her in the Ford. At his bungalow tea was not ready. He did not apologize; but while she was resting on her bed, waiting to be called, she heard him taking his wife to task for not ordering things better. When tea was ready it was served on the verandah. Mrs. Chaudhuri did not join them. She moved between kitchen and verandah, carrying things with her own hands, smiling but saying little, and when there seemed to be nothing more that they wanted stood in the shadow of the doorway, pretending not to be there, but watching her husband for the slightest indication from him that something had been forgotten, or was wrong, or needed to be replenished.

“It is
this,”
Miss Crane often told herself, “this awful feudal attitude to his wife that makes it difficult for me to like him.”

But it was not that. In the evenings Mrs. Chaudhuri sometimes sang to them. Directly she was seated cross-legged on the rush mat, gently supporting the onion-shaped tamboura, she became a different woman; self-assured, holding her bony body gracefully erect, not unlike the way Lady Chatterjee held hers when sitting on a sofa at the DC’s. After Mrs. Chaudhuri had sung a couple of songs Mr. Chaudhuri would say, almost under his breath, “It is enough,” and then Mrs. Chaudhuri would rise, take up the tamboura and disappear into an inner room. And Miss Crane knew that Mr. and Mrs. Chaudhuri loved one another, that Mr. Chaudhuri was not a tyrant, that the woman herself preferred the old ways to the new because for her the old ways were a discipline and a tradition, a means of acquiring and maintaining peace of mind and inner stillness.

On this night, the night of August the 8th, which Miss Crane felt in her bones was a special night, one of crisis, she longed to make Mr. Chaudhuri talk, to find the key to his reticence, a way of breaking down his reserve. It would have been easier for her if he had been as old-fashioned in his manners as his wife, because then their association would have been of an altogether different kind. But he was not. He was westernized. He wore European clothes at the school and, at least when she was staying with them, at home. They ate at a table, seated on hardwood chairs and talked about art and music and the affairs of the school, but never politics. There was a cloth on the table, there were knives and forks to eat with, and ordinary china plates. At dinner Mrs. Chaudhuri sat with them, although she took almost no part in the conversation and ate practically nothing. A woman servant waited on them, the same woman who did the cooking. Miss Crane would have felt more comfortable if the woman had been an untouchable because that would have proved, in the Chaudhuris, emancipation from the rigidity of caste. But the woman was a Brahmin.

They had coffee in the room that overlooked the verandah, in which she and Miss de Silva had sat on old cane chairs, but where they now sat on low divans with their feet on Kashmiri rugs. Miss de Silva had been content with an oil lamp; Mr. Chaudhuri had rigged up an electric light that ran from a generator in the compound. They sat in the unflattering light of one naked electric bulb around which moths and insects danced their nightly ritual of primitive desire for what might burn their wings.
At this point, between the eating and the singing, Mrs. Chaudhuri always left them, presumably to help or supervise the woman in the kitchen.

Tonight Miss Crane drank the bitter coffee, more conscious than ever of the unsympathetic silence that always fell directly she and Mr. Chaudhuri were alone. She longed to know the news but accepted in its place as proof that in one respect at least the night was normal: the croaking—beyond the verandah—of the frogs who had come out in their invisible battalions after the evening rains.

She wanted to say: Mr. Chaudhuri, what honestly is the school to you? but did not. To say that to a man was to question a course which, to judge by his actions, he had set his mind, even his heart on.

“You are a fool, Edwina Crane,” she told herself later as she undressed, preparing for bed. “You have lost another opportunity, because hearts are no longer set on anything and minds function as the bowels decide, and Mr. Chaudhuri would talk if you knew the questions to ask and the way to ask them. But he is of that younger generation of men and women who have seen what I have seen, understood what I understand, but see and understand other things as well.”

And so she slept, and woke at four, as if aware that at such an hour people of her colour might have cause to be wakeful, on their guard. For at this hour the old man in spectacles was also woken and taken, and the Deputy Commissioner in Mayapore was woken, and warned, and told to set in motion those plans whose object was to prevent, to deter. And in the morning, having slept again only fitfully, Miss Crane was also woken and told by Mr. Chaudhuri that on the day before in Bombay the Congress had voted in favour of the working committee’s resolution, that the Mahatma was arrested, that the entire working committee were arrested, that this no doubt was the signal for arrests all over the country. At nine she walked to the school with Chaudhuri to take the Sunday morning Bible class and found that only the children from Kotali had arrived. So she sent him on his bicycle into Dibrapur. He returned shortly before eleven and told her that the shops were closing in the town, that the police were out in force, that the rumour was that three of the municipal officers had been arrested by order of the District Superintendent of Police in Mayapore and taken to Aligarh, that crowds were collecting and threatening to attack the post office and the police station.

“Then I’ll ring Mayapore and find out what is happening there,” Miss Crane said.

She put down the reports she had been coordinating. There was a telephone in Mr. Chaudhuri’s bungalow.

“You can’t,” he told her. “I have already tried. The lines have probably been cut.”

“I see. Well then. One of us must take the children back to Kotali. rather than risk anything happening to them here. So I’d better do that and be getting on my way. You had better go back to look after Mrs. Chaudhuri, and perhaps keep an eye on the school if you can manage it.”

Mr. Chaudhuri looked round the shabby little room and then at Miss Crane.

“There is nothing to safeguard here,” he said, “except the children. Take them in the car and I will come with you on my bicycle. If there are bad people on the road you will be safer if I am also seen.”

“Oh I shall be safe enough. What about your wife?”

“You are the only English person here,” he said. “My wife will be all right. They may well come here after they have finished with the post office and the police station, or whatever it is they have in mind. They may come from either direction. So we will both go with the children to Kotali.”

Miss Crane looked round the room too. The schoolhouse had always reminded her of the one she visited years ago with Mr. Grant. Mr. Chaudhuri was right. There wasn’t much in the building worth saving, except the building itself and even the worth of that was doubtful. She doubted too, that either of them, in present circumstances, could stand in the doorway and successfully deny entry to an angry crowd. She glanced at Chaudhuri, remembering Muzzafirabad where she had been alone.

“You seem pessimistic,” she said.

“I have seen the people and heard the talk.”

“You’re
sure
about the telephone?”

“Yes, I am sure.”

For a moment they looked at each other straight, and Miss Crane thought: This is the way it happens when there is real trouble—the little seed of doubt, of faint distrust, of suspicion that the truth is not actually being told. If the phone is cut, then it is cut. If it is not cut perhaps Mr. Chaudhuri has picked it up, got no immediate answer and jumped to
conclusions. Or it may not be cut and Mr. Chaudhuri may know that it is not but tells me it is because he wants me to set off on the road to Kotali.

“Very well, Mr. Chaudhuri,” she said. “I think you are right. We’ll cram the kids into the Ford somehow and you can come along on your bike.”

He said, “One thing I hope you understand. I am not afraid to stay here. If you wish the building to be protected I will stay and chance my arm.”

“If they find it empty they may leave it alone,” she said.

“It is as I was thinking.”

She nodded, and stood up, collecting the reports, putting them tidily together, edge to edge. Chaudhuri waited. She said, “Tell me your honest opinion. Is it serious this time?”

“It is serious.”

They always know, she thought, and then: This is how it happens too, to call them “they” as though they are different.