A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (47 page)

What he knew was that his father was dead from an overdose of sleeping pills and that the lawyers said there was no money because the creditors would take everything. The
only Indian relative he knew of, the only one his father had ever written to, was his Aunt Shalini. The lawyers wrote to her. The assumption was that money to keep him at school, at least, might be forthcoming. It was not. Shalini, widowed and childless, was a dependant of her Mayapore brother-in-law, Romesh Chand. She borrowed money from him to pay for Hari’s passage. He would live with her. And still the assumption was that Hari would continue his studies and become an
ICS
candidate in India. His ignorance of India was as great as the lawyers’ ignorance. When he sailed he had not the smallest conception of the devastating change made to his life by his father’s failure and suicide.

*

Rowan told me that these facts emerged in the first five or ten minutes of the examination but that he had been able to build for himself a far more complex and disturbing picture, indeed had been unable to get it out of his mind since. He said that Hari’s old life must have ended and the new one begun the moment he stepped off the ship in Bombay. His link with England would have snapped, then, with shocking abruptness.

Rowan said, ‘Well. You know. Whatever kind of shock India is, pleasant or horrid, if you’re a young Englishman coming out to the civil or military or to any kind of job, you’re cushioned from the shock the moment you step off the gangplank because metaphorically you step off into a covered-way that extends from the dock – however many hundreds of miles – to your first station. When Elliott and I and Laura stepped off we were met by friends of Elliott’s parents. I’ve forgotten who, people I never saw again, but I remember that within an hour or two we were at the Gymkhana Club having a drink and everything was very English and reassuring. Everything was done for us. We didn’t have to lift a finger. I remember thinking, How good this is. But even if we’d not been met there would have been people to see us through, an agent to take charge of us, or people going up to the same station. And in any case we had our white faces and our official standing.’

Think, Rowan said, of Harry Coomer’s arrival. The bewilderment he must have felt was scarcely imaginable. It was to be hoped that if no one met him he had at least fallen in with some people on the boat who were helpful. Perhaps the bewilderment had started on the boat. Rowan doubted that he would have had a first-class passage. And when it came to the train to Mayapore, he suspected he would have had to travel third but sincerely hoped not. The boy spoke nothing but English and the kind of people who spoke his kind of English would have been, suddenly, on the other side of the fence. He would have been one more face in the multitude. And the graver revelation was still to come.

A few months ago Rowan had accompanied Malcolm on a tour that included a three-hour visit to Mayapore. He had not been in Mayapore before and thought the cantonment charming. But the cantonment had not been where Kumar was bound seven years earlier, in 1938. Rowan would have liked to slip away from the Governor’s entourage but this had been impossible. At one moment, though, the entourage was in the vicinity of the Mandir Gate Bridge, scene of one of the worst of the Mayapore civil riots in 1942, and there, across the river, he had a view and needed no further evidence.

Somewhere in that noisome mass Kumar had lived with his Aunt Shalini, had found himself put to work in his uncle’s warehouse in the Chillianwallah bazaar, had been regarded as a man who had lost caste, who ought to undergo ritual purification to rid himself of the stain of having lived abroad. There was to be no more education, no degree, no
ICS,
no entry even into the lower levels of the provincial administration. This was the orthodox urban middle-class Hindu India which hoarded its profits and kept itself to itself, and served no interests but its own and existed, quite unmoved, side by side with the India of unspeakable poverty and squalor. And this was the India in which Hari was expected to settle, grateful for the charity bestowed.

*

Rowan said, ‘I think if it had happened to me, once I’d realized that it was real and that there seemed no way out, I’d have
cried myself to sleep every night. Perhaps he did, old as he was.’

His Aunt Shalini had adored her brother, Hari’s father. They had kept up a correspondence through all the years of separation. She was proud of her ‘English’ nephew as she called Hari and there’s no doubt that she loved him and did her best for him, her best to help him to adjust; but as a childless widow of Romesh Chand’s brother she herself was little more than one of Romesh’s chattels and the means she had to help were limited. How long Kumar worked in his uncle’s warehouse Rowan didn’t know, but in the examination he had found out more about Hari’s attempt to get a job with British-Indian Electric. The technical training manager who had turned him down as ‘not intelligent enough’ was obviously the sort of man – self-conscious about his own education and background – who disliked his own English bosses and despised all Indians on principle. Hari Kumar, with his brown skin and public school voice and manner, was a sitting duck. Ignoring Hari’s statement that he had no technical knowledge but was willing to learn he asked him a series of technical questions and when he’d finished and Hari had been unable to answer, he said, ‘Where are you from, laddie? Straight down off the tree?’

Hari walked out. A mistake, perhaps, but Rowan thought it showed how deep his instinct still was, how automatic his response to any threat to what he still possessed and still prized; prized because it was all he did possess: his sense of what he owed himself and had to keep on paying to himself, even at the expense of a lost job; the debt incurred by his English upbringing.

*

He got his job on the
Mayapore Gazette
because of his knowledge of the language in which the paper was supposed to be printed. He had no ambition to be a journalist. By this time he must have picked up some Hindi, but he had abandoned attempts to learn it systematically. For a while his aunt had paid for him to have lessons from a local pandit, one Pandit Baba Sahib – apparently an unfortunate choice since
Baba Sahib was known by the police to recruit young men to the cause of Hindu extremism under cover of having scholarly discussions with them about Hindu mythology. From Hari’s point of view the lessons weren’t a success. Baba Sahib was always late and always smelt strongly of garlic. After a while Hari told him not to bother to come again. His association with this tiresome old man was brief but it probably counted against him eventually. Rowan imagined that Hari gave up learning Hindi because he did not want to pick it up sufficiently to start thinking in it, or to acquire an Indian tone of voice.

His knowledge of English was the one asset he had that could be put to practical use. When he joined the
Mayapore Gazette
as a sub-editor his uncle reduced his Aunt Shalini’s allowance. Rowan imagined he’d been paid little or nothing for working in his uncle’s warehouse. There couldn’t have been any overall financial gain from the change of jobs but the offices of the
Gazette
were far more congenial. They were in the cantonment.

Hari crossed the river from the native to the English quarter. The new job brought him into closer physical contact with the kind of people he thought he knew because he had once been one of them. He realized he no longer was and that he had become invisible to them. But there was always Colin to write to and Colin to get letters from although Colin’s letters changed in tone as he responded to the political crisis in Europe. To Hari, Europe seemed so far away that he could not share Colin’s concern. He was aware of growing areas of estrangement. Colin might have been aware of them too had Hari ever described the kind of life he was living now. This he never did. He allowed Colin to go on thinking of India as a glamorous sort of place. He didn’t want to appeal to Colin for pity and he wanted to keep in touch.

Colin joined the Territorial Army and thereafter wrote of nothing else. When war broke out he at once became a full-time soldier. It was between the outbreak of war and the defeat of the
BEF
and its evacuation from Dunkirk that Hari wrote the letter Colin’s father destroyed because it was full of what he later described to his wounded son as ‘a lot of hotheaded political stuff’. According to Hari, this letter had just
been an attempt to discuss the pros and cons of the Congress resignation from the provincial ministries in protest against India’s automatic involvement in the war against Germany. If the British Government could not declare war on behalf of dominions like Canada and Australia, but had to leave them to come in voluntarily, why should war be declared on India’s behalf through the Viceroy, without consultation even? That was the basis of the Congress argument. Legally, of course, this was the only way war could be declared; but a point which Hari must have made (after the liberal education which men like Bagshaw had ensured remained a Chillingborough tradition) was that with Dominion status ranking as a declared principal aim of the British for India, the outbreak of war had been as good a moment as any to show that the spirit rather than the letter of the law was to be the guiding factor in the British-Indian relationship. But there hadn’t been even a pretence of consultation between the Viceroy and his provincial ministers and central legislative assembly. Piqued, the Congress had resigned, declaring that a war against the European dictator could only be waged by free men.

Rowan said it must have been the kind of letter ‘one old Chillingburian would have written to another’, as strong in its arguments for the Viceroy as in those against him. It was unfortunate that it had reached Colin’s home at a time when Colin was in hospital recovering from wounds and when – as Mr Lindsey probably put it – Britain was ‘standing alone’. One could imagine all too easily the sort of man Lindsey was or had become; the sort who, if he had tenants or male servants would have liked to round them up and march them to the nearest recruiting office; the sort who stuck pins in maps and nursed a sense of personal injury if anyone, man or nation, cast any doubt whatsoever on the conduct of those whom God had raised to positions of power and responsibility. The attitude of Indian politicians since 1939 wouldn’t have endeared any Indian to him. Deliberately opening Hari’s letter he would have had his suspicions of that country’s population confirmed.

‘A lot of hot-headed political nonsense.’ A thoughtless, empty phrase. But how damaging it had seemed two years
later when the police found the letter from Colin in which it was repeated and apologized for. It was the only letter from Colin which Hari kept. That was unfortunate. It was like preserving the one real piece of evidence against oneself. Hari kept it because it was the only letter he had had from Colin which struck him as coming from the fair-minded boy he had known. Young Lindsey’s baptism of fire had knocked some of the jingoism out of him. He had stopped flag-wagging. The war had become too real for that. Perhaps for the first time since Hari left for India Colin wondered what
Hari’s
reality was like.

In 1941 he was to find out. His regiment came out to India. He wrote to Hari in Mayapore saying he hoped he would get down to see him or that somehow they could meet. He wrote again from another station, this time saying how difficult such a trip would be. Then he stopped writing. Hari told himself that the regiment had probably been sent down into Burma or Malaya; and at the turn of the year when the Japanese attacked, he felt sorry for him, in the thick again, having a bad war.

*

Rowan hesitated. I took the opportunity to interrupt, to ask a question that had been nagging for the past few minutes.

‘He could have joined up himself, couldn’t he? He’d have got in at once as an officer-cadet.’

‘I know. It’s a question I intended to ask him, but didn’t, because I realized he’d have been quite justified in saying something like, “Why the hell should I have? Why should one pip on my shoulder have made me visible and acceptable to English people all of a sudden?” An answer like that, however justified, would have looked bad on the record.’

‘Evidence of anti-Britishness?’

‘On paper, yes. But I haven’t told you the other thing that technical training manager said to him. “I don’t like bolshie black laddies on my side of the business.” If you have a thing like that said to you by a member of a firm like British-Indian Electric in Mayapore, I think it follows that you don’t rush to join the colours when their country goes to war in Europe.
What I don’t think followed in Hari’s case was a rush to join the opposition. I don’t believe he saw any
political
significance in what was happening to him.’

As a reporter on the
Gazette
he often attended English social functions such as flower-shows, gymkhanas, cricket matches. Occasionally an Englishman would compliment him on his English accent, ask him where he’d acquired it, and show such disbelief when told that Hari stopped saying ‘Chillingborough’. A Chillingborough man didn’t end up as a tuppenny-hapenny reporter on a fifth-rate local Indian newspaper. So he steered clear of these embarrassing confrontations.

And then early in 1942 he saw officers and men of Colin’s regiment in the cantonment. The battalion had come into Mayapore. He wondered whether he would arrive home one night and find that Colin had visited him. He rather hoped not. It was unlikely anyway. The city on his side of the river was out-of-bounds to troops and although an officer could always get an official pass Hari thought it more likely that Colin would write, or perhaps turn up at the office of the
Gazette.
No letter came. He never saw Colin among the officers who shopped in the cantonment bazaar. It was possible, he realized, that Colin was no longer with the battalion, but in his heart he must have suspected that a few months in India had shown Colin the truth about the kind of life a young Indian with no official position would have to lead. A glance at the map of Mayapore would have shown him how close they were, how far they were separated socially.