A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (45 page)

The next point of interest to emerge from the file was that Kumar was the man Daphne Manners was supposed to have been infatuated with. The longer Rowan studied the file the stronger the evidence seemed to him to be that Kumar, having formed an association with Miss Manners, had then plotted with several Indian friends of his to attack and rape her. In custody after the rape he had virtually given the game away according to the police report by mentioning Miss Manners’s name before her name had been mentioned by the police. Moreover when arrested at the house where he lived with his aunt he had been bathing scratches and bruises on his face such as might have been given by a girl fighting her attackers in the dark; and the clothes out of which he had just changed were mud-stained. Throughout his interrogation he stated repeatedly, mechanically, that he had not seen Miss Manners since a night some weeks before when they visited a temple. (Miss Manners had used virtually the same words.) But he refused to account for his movements on the night of the rape or for the state of his clothes and the marks on his face. His almost invariable answer to questions was: I have nothing to say.

The one document in the file that caused Rowan uneasiness was one relating to the alleged discovery by a junior police officer of Miss Manners’s bicycle in a ditch
outside Kumar’s house, and an accompanying document, attested by the District Superintendent of Police, stating that this curious piece of evidence (with its ridiculous implication that Kumar had cockily ridden Miss Manners’s bicycle home from the Bibighar and then left it outside his own home) had been the result of a misunderstanding. The bicycle had actually been found by the superintendent in the Bibighar Gardens when the site was searched after the assault had been reported. It had been put into a police truck. The truck had then been driven to Kumar’s house – to Kumar’s house because of the known association between Kumar and Miss Manners and because the District Superintendent had called there earlier in the evening after Miss Manners had been reported missing by a Lady Chatterjee, at whose house Miss Manners was staying, and found Kumar not at home, and his aunt unable to say where he was. On the way to Kumar’s house this second time (with the cycle in the back of the truck) the police’s attention had been attracted by a lighted hut in some waste ground not far from the Bibighar. Inside the hut they had found five young men, all of them ‘known to the police’ for ‘political affiliations’ and several of them ‘known to the police as friends of Kumar’. These men were ‘fairly intoxicated’ and were drinking home-made liquor, itself an offence that warranted arrest, but also in the District Superintendent’s opinion certainly deserving investigation on a night when the authorities were on the alert for demonstrations against the government for its imprisonment of Congress leaders and when a European woman had been assaulted by five or six Indians. In arresting these young men, in putting them into one truck, in the continuation of the journey to Kumar’s house, in the ‘change of police personnel’ from one truck to the other and the despatch of the five arrested men back to the police headquarters, ‘a misunderstanding’ had ‘assumed that this was where the bicycle inspector finding the bicycle on the road outside Kumar’s house’ where ‘it must have been temporarily placed, again as a result of a misunderstanding’ had ‘assumed that this was where the bicycle was found’ and had accordingly put in a report which, even if that was not his intention, might certainly have led to ‘this erroneous conclusion’.

The District Superintendent was Merrick. This was the first time Rowan came across his name. Someone, either in the Inspector-General’s department or the Secretariat had minuted in the margin of this disclaimer about the bicycle, ‘Pity about this’; an ambiguous phrase which did little to subdue Rowan’s uneasiness; but initially the disclaimer gave him a favourable impression, not of the Mayapore police, but of the superintendent as a man who had not hesitated to sort out a muddle which would have been helpful in bringing Kumar to trial if left as it was. Subsequently, he was uneasy for a different reason. He could not help wondering whether the evidence of the bicycle had been planted by Merrick or with Merrick’s blind-eye approval and then refuted by Merrick when he saw that it was too dangerous a piece of falsification.

Two other points of interest arose in the account of the actual arrest. In Kumar’s room there were found (a) a photograph of Miss Manners and (b) a letter from England signed ‘Colin’ which referred to a letter Kumar had written to
him
but which he’d been unable to read because his father had opened and then destroyed it as one unsuitable for his officer son to receive – a letter, so it seemed, of a political and anti-British nature. The letter from Colin dated back to the post-Dunkirk era.

*

But, Rowan said, apart from this hearsay evidence of anti-Britishness, and unless the assault on Miss Manners could be interpreted as political, the evidence on the file of Kumar’s political commitment was thin to the point of non-existence. He had – just once – been taken in for questioning because his attitude to a police officer had been unsatisfactory and arrogant.

The officer was Merrick. This incident occurred some six months prior to the rape. Searching an area of the native town for an escaped political prisoner called Moti Lal, Merrick had visited a place known as The Sanctuary, a clinic and feeding centre for the homeless and destitute run by a Mrs Ludmila Smith. Mrs Smith (also known as Sister Ludmila) went out
every night with stretcher-bearers, searching for men and women who had come into Mayapore to beg, or to die. On the night before Merrick arrived looking for the escaped Moti Lal, she had picked up a young man found lying unconscious near the banks of the river.

This was Kumar, and all that was wrong with him was that he was dead drunk. When Merrick arrived in the morning he asked Kumar who he was, where he lived, what he had been doing. Kumar had a hangover. The interview went badly. Merrick decided to continue it at the nearest police station.

At this point in the file, Rowan said, there was a brief summary of Kumar’s background. Kumar (according to Merrick) had not been frank about his identity but had ‘finally admitted’ that his name was Kumar, that he knew Moti Lal because Moti Lal had once been employed by Romesh Chand Gupta Sen, a contractor. Kumar had himself been employed by Romesh Chand who was in fact Kumar’s aunt’s brother-in-law. Romesh Chand had sacked Moti Lal because he didn’t like his clerks to concern themselves with anything except the business, and that included not concerning themselves with politics. Kumar had left Romesh Chand later, when offered a job as a sub-editor and occasional reporter on the Indian-owned English language newspaper,
The Mayapore Gazette.

There was then a statement that ‘the man Kumar claimed to have been brought up in England by his father, Duleep Kumar, since deceased, and to have been educated at a public school which he named as Chillingborough College’.

Subsequent notes suggested that Merrick had investigated Kumar’s claim and had got further information; that Kumar was born in the
UP,
that his mother died while he was still an infant and that aged two he had been taken to England by his father, who had sold his land to his brothers and now set up in business, anglicizing the name to Coomer. But in 1938 Duleep Kumar’s businesses failed. He committed suicide. Hari was penniless. At the age of eighteen, through arrangements made between lawyers in London and his Aunt Shalini, widowed sister-in-law of Romesh Chand, and his own father’s sister, Hari came out to India.

From the date Kumar was first questioned by Merrick he
was under surveillance. Kumar never explained why he was drunk but the names of his drinking companions were obtained and there were cross-references to other files kept on these young men. The surveillance seemed to have been fairly casual, but Merrick had been thorough in recording what was known locally about this English public-school educated Indian reporter. He’d discovered that Kumar had once applied to an English firm, British-Indian Electric, for a post as a trainee but been turned down on the recommendation of the technical training manager who thought him not intelligent enough.

A young man whose place Kumar had taken on
The Mayapore Gazette
, one Vidyasagar, was also under surveillance. Vidyasagar was now working on a nationalist local,
Mayapore Hindu.
There were notes of several occasions when Kumar and Vidyasagar had been ‘seen together’, but these couldn’t strike a reader as very significant because the occasions were invariably those when they had simply been in the same place at the same time, as reporters (at District and Sessions Court, for example, and local functions on the
maidan
).

The most important items in Merrick’s notes were those concerning Kumar’s friendship with the English girl, Daphne Manners, who had come to Mayapore to stay with a Lady Chatterjee – a friend of Lady Manners in Rawalpindi. Miss Manners’s parents were dead. She had lost her brother in the war and had come out to India quite recently to stay with her surviving relative, her aunt, Lady Manners. Since coming to Mayapore she had been doing voluntary work at the Mayapore General Hospital.

The notes about her association with Kumar began with one dated in April 1942. ‘At the War Week exhibition on the
maidan
Miss M left her party to speak to K who was hovering in the vicinity.’ The next note suggested that Merrick had taken the trouble to find out how Miss M and K had previously met. ‘It seems K was invited to Lady Chatterjees’s place, The MacGregor House, where Miss M was staying, shortly after K was questioned in the matter of Moti Lal, probably through the suggestion of the lawyer Srinivasan who was sent to police headquarters to inquire why I’d had K taken
to the kotwali for questioning. Srinivasan is Romesh C’s lawyer.’

There were several further notes giving dates when K and Miss M were seen in one another’s company, one of which – ‘Miss M dined with K and his aunt at their house in the Chillianwallah Bagh extension’ – Rowan found particularly distasteful since it indicated that Kumar could not even have someone to dinner without the fact being reported.

Finally, among the documents, there were two statements and a report from the Divisional Commissioner. The first statement, by Merrick, described how Kumar had first come to his notice and the opinion he had formed of him as a result of this, what was known locally about the characters of the young men in whose company he had been on the night he got drunk, how Merrick eventually thought it his duty to warn Miss Manners ‘that the young Indian with whom she had struck up a friendship, which few Europeans on station had failed to notice, was not the kind of man one could recommend her to take into her confidence’.

Merrick’s statements ended with an account of his own actions on the night when he had called on Lady Chatterjee and found her ‘alarmed’ at Miss Manners’s failure to arrive home, and of his second visit when he found Miss M arrived at last but ‘in a distressed condition as a result of having been attacked and criminally used by five or six men in the Bibighar Gardens’. He continued with a description of his discovery of the young men in the hut near by, of the state in which he found Kumar when calling again at the house in Chillianwallah Bagh and of the obstinate but suspicious behaviour of Kumar when taken into custody.

The second statement was a report made by three officers of the civil administration after a private interview with Miss Manners. According to this report, Miss Manners had not confirmed her earlier verbal statement that the men had come at her in the dark, covered her with her own raincape, dragged her off her bicycle and into the Bibighar, and that she had therefore not been able to identify them. She now stated that she had been
in
the Bibighar, alone, and that although it was dark, and the men came at her suddenly, and did cover her head with the raincape, she had had just sufficient glimpse
and smell of them to swear on oath that they were all of the badmash or criminal type, not educated or westernized boys of the kind who had been arrested; that it would be ridiculous to bring such boys into court, that she could not fail to deny that they were the men involved, and that it would be just as reasonable to bring in a group of young British soldiers and accuse them of having blacked their faces in order to attack her.

The report from the Divisional Commissioner was simply to the effect that he had studied the files on the arrested men and all the statements and while agreeing that in view of Miss Manners’s attitude the evidence against them in the matter of criminal assault was insufficient on which to charge them and bring them to trial, he agreed with the opinion that quite apart from suspicion of criminal assault the evidence obtained over several months of their conduct and political affiliations warranted their detention under Rule 26 of the Defence of India Rules.

When Rowan had studied all this material he returned the file to Malcolm who asked him whether he thought Kumar wrongfully imprisoned. Rowan said he thought so, technically, but that suspicion of complicity in rape was strong enough to take the view that he may have got off extremely lightly. The Governor then asked him whether there was any doubt about this Kumar being the Kumar Rowan had known at school – and handed him a police photograph; full face and profile. He hadn’t seen Kumar since Kumar was about fifteen, but he thought the features were like those of the boy he remembered; apart from which everything on the file about Kumar’s history fitted what he had known of Kumar’s background. The Kumar he knew
had
spent all his life in England, was known as Harry Coomer. His accent had been as English as Colin Lindsey’s and Rowan’s own. You would only have to hear him speak to know whether they were one and the same man.

The Governor said Rowan would have an opportunity to confirm this. He was to arrange and lead a private examination of the prisoner at the Kandipat jail, in a room known as Room O. He would have a shorthand writer and an official from the Department of Home and Law to assist him.
There would also be a fourth person, a woman, who would watch and listen to the interview from a specially equipped adjoining room. The Governor had had many pleas from Kumar’s aunt, Shalini Gupta Sen, to review the case against her nephew, and the poor woman had in fact come to Ranpur to be near by in case some steps were taken. But the request for this examination and the request to be present were from Lady Manners. Her visit was to be kept secret. Of the members of the examining board only Rowan was to know of her presence. The examination would not be made under oath and the entire affair was to be conducted in as discreet and confidential manner as possible.