A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (26 page)

‘A prepared speech,’ Bronowsky said, ‘but effective. I should think sincere. Yes. Very English in its sentiment, but of course very Indian too. He was testing your mettle and temper as well as getting something off his chest. What did you say?’

‘The first thing that came into my head. Afterwards I realized I was lucky he hadn’t made a speech like that when I first met him. In the interval I’d been around and cottoned on to the system, the one that calls for the ruler to stand his ground and you yours but for you both to open up the ground between without committing yourself to occupy it. I said I personally knew very little of the quarrel between them except that my uncle had been deeply affected by it, had presumably felt as strongly about the correctness of his own behaviour, that I’d always regretted my uncle’s career should have ended on such a note but would regret it far more had it seemed now that their differences after all hadn’t been so
serious that they couldn’t somehow have been overcome, and was most grateful to His Highness for speaking so frankly and relieving my mind of any such supposition.’

‘Were you alone with him?’

‘Yes, why?’

‘A pity. If your superior officer had heard that, I imagine you’d have received a most favourable report.’

‘Actually I’m not at all sure it didn’t raise a doubt about my fitness for political work. I was questioned pretty closely about what we’d said to each other and was made to feel I might do better if I applied myself more conscientiously to routine matters.’

‘Young men with an aptitude usually excite caution rather than enthusiasm. It has ever been so. But you will probably survive. I trust so. If you have ambitions there still. Do you?’

Rowan smiled. He said, quoting, ‘ “The body’s fever, dying like a fire, Sheds little light upon the heart’s concerns.” ’

‘Ah,’ Bronowsky said after a moment. ‘Gaffur. But a somewhat more elegant translation than the one in the existing English version. The fading fever in the blood is like a dying fire, de dum de dum etcetera. But how apt. Gaffur, recovering from a bout of malaria or dysentery. Is that other version your own? Yes? Then we have one vice in common, although my own translations from the Urdu come more under the heading of extra-curricular activities for Nawab Sahib. Of course you know the Gaffur connection?’

‘He was court poet in Mirat, in the eighteenth century.’

‘And connected to the ruling family. A Kasim. Nawab Sahib had never read Gaffur in English. But he has many exquisite volumes in the original. Whenever people feel they should give him a gift that shows forethought but not extravagance they usually hit upon the poems of his distinguished ancestor. For instance, the Laytons presented him with a copy when he offered them the hospitality of the guest house at the time of the wedding. But the habit is rarer in English people than in Indians. He was very pleased and expressed the wish to learn some of his favourite verses in English. He was horrified when he read Colonel Harvey-Fortescue’s Victorian effusions and since then I have had to try my own hand. I shan’t assume the false modesty of the
complacent amateur and pretend I’m not highly satisfied with some of the results. In fact I’ve become quite addicted to the exercise of this latent skill and sometimes fancy myself quite a little Pushkin. But it is hard on the eye. Having only one it is sensible to take care of it, but difficult to remember to do so. One adjusts so easily to such a slight impediment and seldom thinks of oneself as handicapped, unless one sees or hears of someone in the same or worse condition.’

The stories of Bronowsky’s blind left eye and lame left leg ranged from the possible to the scurrilously unlikely. It was Rowan’s chance to hear one of them and his chance to approach the subject of disability, the subject of lost limbs, the subject of Merrick. A chance again deliberately contrived? It was worth taking up. He realized how much he was enjoying talking to the old
wazir
and it pleased him to think that the conversation was no more than a ritual, a courtly circumnavigation of a subject they were both interested in but both too skilled to raise directly. Each had stood his ground. The space between was wide open. One could step on to it now without giving much away.

‘I notice,’ Rowan said, ‘that the blind eye and the lame leg are both on the left side. Does that mean there was a common cause or is it a coincidence?’

‘Oh, common. And common enough in those days. St Petersburg. A makeshift bomb. An explosive little incident at dusk on the drive from the Winter Palace.’ Bronowsky leant back in his chair. ‘An explosion like a scarlet flower in black foliage, thrusting out of the snow. A little summer miracle in winter. That and the pressure. One did not recall a noise. Perhaps the snow muffled it. Such are one’s recollections. Later the discomfort. And the strange remote satisfaction of knowing it was no worse. No limb lost. A mere eye. A bad leg. Growing pleasure. The distinction of a limp and an eye-patch. The poor young fellow who threw the bomb was the only fatal casualty. He mistook me for Another. I made a callous joke. That now I had only one eye to weep with and mourn his useless little death. But that was to disguise less insensitive feelings. I thought, How strange. He did not know me, nor I him, but all through his life, from birth, for twenty years, without realizing it he had been moving towards me, step by
inevitable step, and I had been waiting for him, preparing to set out on that drive through the snow, to keep an appointment, wrapped in my furs, well muffled, well disguised, so that he would not recognize me at the very last moment as the agent of his death. I saw his photograph. They had it, of course. And one from the morgue of his remains. They showed me this too, as if it would please me. Extraordinarily his face was unmarked. Very pale against the blackness of his hair and the wispy adolescent growth of beard on cheeks and chin. A dark young man, I thought, of random destiny and private passions. It was a revelation. As I looked at the photograph I realized that
he
could have been
my
death, that perhaps fate had decreed this, but had wound the machinery up wrong and was now aghast at the error. It struck me that, well, I must watch out, that perhaps even now a birth was taking place in some remote village, to rectify things. It seemed to me that fate would work this way, that the destiny so apparently random must be shaped even so from the beginning, that I had at least twenty years grace before I must keep the next appointment, this time with a young man who would complete the task. I pictured his life. How it would be. Not privileged like mine but harsh and sombre, so that his heart would grow into a habit of sadness which it pleased me to think of as also a sadness for me, because of what he must do that he did not know. I fell a little in love with him. And there were times when things were not good with me that I wished to hasten the consummation. This was in nineteen hundred. When I left Russia nearly twenty years later it was with the feelings almost of a deserter. By then, you see, he would have been in the prime of youth with only a few years to wait. In Berlin and in Paris I watched out for him, at first only among the young men of our emigration but then among young Germans too and young Frenchmen, because I realized that the appointed agent need not after all be of Russian nationality and that one of fate’s little jokes might be that I should think myself secure merely because I had crossed a frontier. Even in India I used to watch.’

‘But not any longer?’

‘Oh, sometimes. India particularly is rich in possibilities. It is easy here to be a marked man. I spoke of this to our friend
Merrick during the interesting conversation I had with him in Mirat.’

‘Merrick? Oh, you mean the Mayapore case. Miss Layton’s friend.’

‘When I say spoke of it I mean spoke in general to him of being a marked man, of the part played by these young men of random destiny and private passions. I did not mention my own case. Mine after all is illusory. His was real. He had been a marked man ever since Mayapore. Persecuted even, but in subtle ways to remind him that he was not forgotten, that his transfer into the army had not shaken off whoever it was, whoever it is, who wishes him to be under no delusion, but know that his actions in Mayapore will have to be answered for one day. To give him that uncomfortable impression, anyway. My own feeling was that these people were less interested in retribution than in the use that could be made of a controversial figure, such as Merrick’s, to stir young men up to create trouble, to achieve some particular political or religious objective.’

‘People like the venerable gentleman from Mayapore? The one you said was in Mirat last year engaged in some tortuous process of intimidation?’

The train passed over a network of points, rocking gently. The lights dimmed, then brightened, flickered out, came on again. In the very brief spasm of darkness it seemed to Rowan that Bronowsky had altered position. But there would not have been time for him to do so unobserved: a second or two. But he looked different. Rowan could not say in what way. It was strange.

‘The venerable gentleman, yes.’ Even his voice had altered, it seemed, but the whole thing must be a trick of the mind, or something to do with a change in the pressure in the carriage. Perhaps the country through which they were passing had altered. Or someone had opened a door or a window further down the coach.

‘You mentioned a stone being thrown. Thrown at this man Merrick, did you mean?’

‘Quite so.’

‘At the instigation of this slippery customer?’

‘How accurately you recall my words. Let us simplify things for each other. His name was Pandit Baba.’

‘And he went all the way from Mayapore to Mirat to incite someone to throw a stone at poor Mr Merrick?’

Bronowsky laughed. He said, ‘Precisely. Such a gesture would also strike me as excessive. The pandit, I think, would not expend energy on such an inconsiderable thing. Which was why I took note. It is too long a story, the story of the stone and Mr Merrick. In itself irrelevant and in its wider context of concern only to me, in so far as it concerns me as well as our chief of police to protect Mirat from these tiresome infiltrations.’

‘I’m not quite with you.’

‘When you people in British India clamp down, when you have a sweep and clap subversives and firebrands into jails, proscribe political parties or in any way make things unhealthy for Indians who stand up to you, then those who escape your nets go to ground. And where better than in the self-governing princely states where your formal writ does not so easily run? When you had that grand round-up in nineteen-forty-two, at the time of the Quit India campaign, I do not know how many activists, terrorists, anarchists, militant communalists or simple Congress extremists hitched up their dhotis and hot-footed it to places like Mirat. I know which of them turned up
in
Mirat, because I saw to it that they quickly hitched their dhotis up again and hot-footed it back across our borders.’

‘Your chief of police must be very efficient.’

Bronowsky glanced away, smiling to himself. ‘I suppose one or two escaped our combined vigilance. But we were very vigilant. It is wise to be. The states offer a wide variety of opportunities for political intrigue and some states I think deserve what they get in that way. But I will not have political or communal disturbances stirred up in Mirat by people who do not belong to Mirat. Both the major Indian political parties have been guilty of attempting it in the past twenty years. I need not elaborate. Quite apart from the fact that Nawab Sahib is by definition an autocrat he is also a Muslim. The majority of his subjects are Hindu. My life in Mirat has been spent trying to ensure that the two communities have equal
opportunities, which was not always so, that they live in amity and have reason to be perfectly content to live as subjects of the Nawab, and do not hanker after the democratic millennium promised by Gandhiji on the one hand or the theistic paradise-state on earth envisaged by Mr Jinnah on the other.’

For a while he was silent, looking now at the shoe on his left foot, which was thrust out, the heel on the thick carpet that helped to muffle the drumming of the wheels. He said, ‘Eventually, of course, there can be no separate future for us, and latterly I have been directing my thoughts to the problem of how best to ensure a smooth and advantageous transition.’

‘No separate future?’

‘When the British finally go. No freedom separate from India’s freedom. No separate future for Mirat nor for any of the states, with the possible exception of the largest and most powerful such as Hyderabad or those whose territories merge into each other and who might combine administratively. The alternative is Balkanization, which of course even if permitted would be disastrous.’

‘There is an obligation to the princes on our part. I should say that it’s been made clear often enough that we recognize it.’

‘Well. Come. Come. You are all going, aren’t you? One day. When? In five years? Ten years? Even five is not long. Perhaps I shan’t live to see it. On the whole I hope not, because when you go the princes will be abandoned. In spite of all your protestations to the contrary. They will be abandoned. I have told Nawab Sahib so. He pretends not to believe it. I show him the map. I point to the tiny isolated yellow speck that is Mirat and to the pink areas that surround it which are the provinces directly ruled by the British. Since India passed under the Crown, I say to him, you have relied on the pink bits to honour the treaty that allows the yellow speck to exist. But you cannot have a treaty with people who have disappeared and taken the crown with them. The treaty will not be torn up but it will have no validity. It will be a piece of paper. A new treaty will have to be made with the people who have taken the pink parts over from the British. You will have to negotiate a new treaty with Mr Gandhi and Mr Nehru. You
can forget Mr Jinnah because even if he gets Pakistan it will be so far away from you that it will be meaningless. So you will have to bargain for the continuing existence of the yellow speck which is Mirat with Mr Nehru and the Congress High Command. Nawab Sahib smiles. He can see it as clearly as I can see it – the form such bargaining might take. But he smiles also at what he likes to persuade himself is my simplicity. No, Dmitri, he says, we have supplied the British with money and men in two world wars. And there are over five hundred little yellow specks, and some not so little. The British are pledged to protect our rights and our privileges and our authority. I nod my head. I say, this is true, Nawab Sahib. But they are pledged as well one day to hand over
their
rights and privileges and authority to Mr Gandhi and Mr Nehru. They are pledged in two directions but can only go in one. Nawab Sahib smiles again. That, Dmitri, is where they are so cunning. He does not say what cunning he sees. He knows that if he puts it into words his illusion of it will collapse. So the words will not come. But in his mind he tells himself that the pledge to Mr Gandhi and to Mr Nehru cannot be fulfilled because of the pledge to the princes, or that it can only be fulfilled if the princes agree that it should be and that the princes will only agree if their territories are first secured to them in perpetuity. Therefore, my dear Captain Rowan, with Nawab Sahib adopting this reverent attitude to his piece of paper, you will appreciate that I am very much alone in this business of working and planning for the most advantageous position for my prince. And because I need peace and quiet to work and plan I do not welcome venerable gentlemen from Mayapore, or any of their like from wheresoever, who seek to cause the sort of unrest which our future masters will point to as proof that Nawab Sahib’s subjects groan under the yoke of an iron, archaic dictatorship. A Muslim dictatorship at that. I do not welcome venerable gentlemen from Mayapore, because in their wake, in their footsteps, springing up like sharp little teeth, are these dark young men of random destiny and private passions – destinies and passions that can be shaped and directed to violent ends.’