A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (48 page)

But Colin was in Mayapore. On the
maidan
– to report a cricket match – Hari saw him. They were within a few feet of one another. They looked at one another. Neither spoke. The kindest construction Hari could put on Colin’s failure to speak was that he didn’t recognize one brown face among so many. This, at least, was the suggestion he made when Rowan was examining him. Kumar described the incident in the course of answering the board’s question, why – on a date in February 1942 – he had been found on waste ground near the river, dead drunk, and taken to Sister Ludmila’s Sanctuary.

He said he’d always avoided intimacy with young men like
Vidyasagar and his companions, always refused invitations to go with them to coffee-houses. After the meeting with Colin on the
maidan
he’d met Vidyasagar and on the spur of the moment accepted an invitation to go home with him. It was as if he knew that his one true link with the past had now been snapped, as if he could see no reason to go on deceiving himself that he was any different from these semi-westernized youths. That night he discovered that they distilled or had access to illicit liquor. They were used to it. He was not. He got very drunk. They took him home but after they had gone he wandered off again, across the derelict ground where destitutes and untouchables camped out and where Sister Ludmila and her stretcher-bearers found him.

*

You could begin with me
, Rowan had said,
I have very little real confidence. But it would be dangerous to give that impression. I expect I over-compensate. Most of us do. It’s probably what happened to Colin Lindsey.

Assuming mutual recognition, over-compensation for lack of confidence seemed to me a curious way of describing Lindsey’s behaviour. Could one assume mutual recognition? Could one even assume that the man Kumar thought he recognized as Lindsey had been Lindsey? Apparently he must have been. Subsequently Rowan checked, through the military secretary’s department. A Captain Colin Lindsey had been in Mayapore, not actually with his battalion but on the staff of the formation with which the battalion had been brigaded for training, and had then been transferred at his own request away from Mayapore to divisional headquarters.

Still; mutual recognition remains an assumption. But, if there was mutual recognition, one has to assume that Lindsey saw nothing so clearly as the embarrassment that would follow any attempt to renew an old acquaintance in such very different circumstances. His transfer to Division suggests that he probably applied for it directly he heard that he was going to Brigade, in Mayapore. Little to do with over-compensation for lack of confidence, but a lot to do with straightforward self-protection from the consequences of having a
friend who was no longer socially acceptable and who might turn out to be a pest, the sort of Indian who as the
raj
so often said would try to take advantage, make demands it would be impossible to satisfy and which it would be wiser and more comfortable not to lay oneself open to.

Where I agree with Rowan is in pinpointing the meeting with Lindsey as the one meeting in Kumar’s life which, leading directly to the other from which all his true misfortunes flowed, must bear a special significance: no Lindsey on the
maidan
that day, no drinking bout with young Vidyasagar and friends; no wandering on to waste-ground, no stretcher-bearers, no Sister Ludmila, no Sanctuary; no morning waking there, hungover, resentful and unco-operative.

No Merrick.

*

And yet how logical that meeting was, between Kumar – one of Macaulay’s ‘brown-skinned Englishmen’ – and Merrick, English-born and English-bred, but a man whose country’s social and economic structure had denied him advantages and privileges which Kumar had initially enjoyed; a man, moreover, who lacked entirely that liberal instinct which is so dear to historians that they lay it out like a guideline through the unmapped forests of prejudice and self-interest as though this line, and not the forest, is our history.

Place Merrick at home, in England, and Harry Coomer abroad, in England, and it is Coomer on whom the historian’s eye lovingly falls; he is a symbol of our virtue. In England it is Merrick who is invisible. Place them there, in India, and the historian cannot see either of them. They have wandered off the guideline, into the jungle. But throw a spotlight on them and it is Merrick on whom it falls. There he is, the unrecorded man, one of the kind of men we really are (as Sarah would say). Yes, their meeting was logical. And they had met before, countless times. You can say they are still meeting, that their meeting reveals the real animus, the one that historians won’t recognize, or which we relegate to our margins

Neither Rowan nor I saw it like this, then. I doubt that he would see it like this now. Simply, he would remain appalled
and puzzled, a man with a conscience that worked in favour of both men; more in favour of Kumar than of Merrick; but Merrick was given sufficient benefit of the liberal doubt to leave Rowan inert. What Rowan was doing, in telling me all this, was trying to set off against his own inertia someone else’s positive action: mine. He wanted me to do what he could not do: help Kumar. His ideas on the subject, it goes without saying, were woolly.

*

Kumar had been washing under a tap, trying to clear his head, when Merrick arrived at the Sanctuary looking for the escaped prisoner, Moti Lal. The first ball of the over. The merciless succession of deliveries after all came from the same hand. Merrick saw him, a young man of twenty-two, washing under a tap; and chose him. I wondered how ‘prepossessing’ Hari Kumar had been before prison had had its effect and made him look like one man peering out of the eyesockets of another. Self-punishment being out of the question, Merrick punished the men he chose. After Karim Muzzafir Khan’s suicide I was never in any doubt about Merrick’s repressed homosexuality. Rowan always evaded this issue, and the result was that for him I think it assumed a graver importance than it merited, except perhaps in regard to the proposed marriage to Susan Bingham. But he had found it quite impossible, obviously, to convey any suspicion of this kind to Colonel Layton, or to anyone whom it might concern. One can understand this. It was no business of his, just as it was no business of mine.

For not answering Merrick’s questions smartly and respectfully, Kumar was taken forcibly from the Sanctuary, pushed, punched and thrown into a police truck; not by Merrick but by one of Merrick’s sub-inspectors (the same one, perhaps, who made an ‘erroneous’ report about the bicycle?).

But Merrick saw him being punched. So did Sister Ludmila. After the truck had driven away she sent word to Hari’s uncle Romesh Chand. Romesh sent the lawyer Srinivasan to inquire why young Kumar had been ‘arrested’, but by the time he got there Kumar had been released. The word got round,
though, that a young Indian of good character and good education had been roughed-up by the police and taken in for questioning – got round in those circles of Indian society which formed a link between the rulers and the ruled; Indians with a foot in both camps.

Four years after his arrival in Mayapore this world became aware of him. He had to be hauled into a kotwali first. It must have intrigued Merrick that this world now took note of Kumar. Srinivasan, first; and then, no doubt through Srinivasan, no less a person than the District and Sessions Judge, an Indian, who apparently inquired gently why this young Indian had been taken to the kotwali with no obvious justification. For Srinivasan and the judge Merrick can only have had contempt.

The
doyenne
of this official Indian society in Mayapore was Lady Chatterjee, a woman of cultured and cosmopolitan tastes, one imagines, since she was a friend of Lady Manners.
Persona grata
with the Deputy Commissioner, with whom she played bridge, she was neither blind nor deaf to evidence of the
raj’s
high-handedness even if (as one supposes) she often had to be to its frequent vulgarities. What Srinivasan, the lawyer, or Menen, the judge, told her about the young Kumar, interested her sufficiently to cause her to invite him to a party at her house.

He went, one imagines, out of curiosity; prickly curiosity, as resentful of the interest his ‘case’ had aroused as he was resentful of the fact that it had taken so long for this privileged section of Indian society to notice him. Rowan gathered it had been a mixed party – a further irony. Kumar would have been under observation by both sides. Admitting to Rowan that from his point of view the party wasn’t a success (nor, he thought, from Lady Chatterjee’s, whom he failed to thank), he said he had forgotten how to behave in this sort of company.

One questions that until remembering that he had never been in that sort of company before, and realizes that what he really meant was that he had no idea how to behave in a gathering of people, white and brown, who even when they mingled were observing certain rules which hinted at segregation. These were rules which only Miss Manners seemed unaware of. At first he thought she was merely trying
over-hard to put him at his ease. It was a long time since an English person had talked to him without either condescension or self-consciousness, which was what Miss Manners
seemed
to be doing and what subsequent events suggested she
had
been doing. And that would make her the first Englishwoman to have talked to him on the simple human level of woman to man. When last in England he had still been a schoolboy. One wonders about the effect this would have on him. Rowan had never seen a photograph of her. The one the police found in Kumar’s room was not in the file. But he had heard her described as not much to look at; but this was afterwards, when people had no time for her and assumed she had rigged the evidence to save a man she was infatuated with or terrified of.

One really knew nothing about Daphne Manners except that she was in some degree or other attracted to Kumar. One knew nothing about Kumar’s feelings. The history of their relationship could be made to fit almost any theory one could have of Kumar’s character and intentions. Here he was, for instance, doing as little as he could to encourage her because he found her embarrassing. Or here, doing that same little in order to excite her more. Or here, genuinely fond of her, perhaps falling in love with her, but seeing no future for either of them and doing his best to make her see that there was no future. The theory most people had was that he egged her on, made her chase after him, to humiliate her, but subtly, so that she did not realize that she was being humiliated.

‘Which theory do you subscribe to?’ I asked Rowan.

‘I think he was fond of her. I don’t believe he meant her any harm. I think she fell in love with him quite early on. And eventually I think they started making love. I think they were making love in the Bibighar Gardens. It’s the only explanation that makes sense of all the rest. They were making love and were interrupted by the men who assaulted her.’

‘His friends?’

‘They weren’t his friends. He’d only been out with them once, the night he got drunk. They weren’t his enemies either. And they were really only kids. If Hari and Miss Manners were making love in the Bibighar that night then I
think the men who attacked them and assaulted her really were the kind she described later when she had to admit she’d had a glimpse of them. Badmashes who’d come into Mayapore to pick up what they could in the riots everyone was expecting and which had already started down in districts like Dibrapur. The Bibighar Gardens sounds like a public place but it was a derelict site. The kind of place men like that would collect in, waiting for dark. And the kind of place Kumar and Miss Manners would go to, to be on their own.’

‘Didn’t you ask Kumar whether this is what happened?’

‘It only occurred to me later. Quite recently, in fact. In any case Kumar wouldn’t have admitted it. He refused to say anything about her. He went on insisting he’d not seen her for something like three weeks, after the night they visited the temple. Exactly the same as he insisted when Merrick arrested him. And then of course don’t forget I was trying not to examine him about the rape. I was taking a very literal view of the terms of reference, which were for the examination of a political detenu. But the rape couldn’t be avoided. Everything came back to it because everything came back to Merrick. Kumar seemed to want it to come back to Merrick. So did Gopal. So for that matter did Lady Manners. Gopal started asking him about his first interrogation – I don’t mean the one in February – I mean after Merrick had carted him away from his home on the night of the rape. He told Gopal Merrick had had him stripped and that his genitals had been examined. Lady Manners was listening in and watching through the grille. The microphone was in a telephone on my desk but she and I could use the telephone to communicate. When she realized I was trying to stop things going along these lines she rang through and told me I mustn’t bother about her hearing unpleasant things. The other thing she wanted to know was whether Kumar knew her niece had died in childbirth. I pretended it was an outside call, naturally, and took that opportunity to call a break and send Kumar out. I tried to explain to Gopal that if we started concentrating on the alleged rape the record of the examination might be thrown out as irrelevant. But he insisted. I thought it pretty dangerous. You have to realize, Guy, that at this time I was fairly convinced that Kumar was mixed up in the assault somehow
or other and that Gopal was being very naïve, over-anxious to show that Kumar had been a victim of
raj
terrorism. And, well, to be quite frank, it went against the grain to hear Kumar beginning to accuse an English police officer, a man who wasn’t there to defend himself.

‘Kumar wasn’t on oath, the examination was private. The police officer couldn’t legally be affected by anything Kumar decided to say or make up. And I wondered why he was suddenly so co-operative about answering questions he’d previously refused to answer. In 1942 his reply to every question according to the file had been that he had nothing to say. The only thing he still had nothing to say about was what he’d been doing between leaving the
Gazette
office as usual about six in the evening and arriving home about 9.30 in mud-stained clothes and with scratches and abrasions on his face. On the other hand –’