Ellis Peters - George Felse 11 - Death To The Landlords (9 page)

‘It sounds perfect,’ said Patti dutifully. Too perfect, she thought, exchanging a glance with Priya, we’re being disposed of while the business men confer. And suddenly she would have liked to think of a way of piercing through that impregnable defence, that barrier of attentive politeness that fended them off so successfully and yet left them no ground for complaint. ‘I don’t suppose Inspector Raju would mind if we make a day-trip, Priya, do you?’

‘Inspector Raju?’ said Purushottam, drawing his fine black brows together in a frown of inquiry.

‘Oh! – I see Dominic didn’t tell you everything on the phone. So he didn’t explain how they came to acquire two girls as well as the original party. I’m sorry, I didn’t realise.’ But she had realised; how could Dominic possibly have put over that entire long story in the few minutes he had taken over his call from Thekady? ‘It isn’t such a pleasant story, I’m sorry now I spoke. We got mixed up with a police inquiry, that’s all, and we’re supposed to be on call if needed. But we shall be back here by evening. And I would like to go, very much.’

She knew, of course, that it could not rest there; once she had said so much, somebody had to tell all the rest, otherwise no one would have any peace of mind. It was Dominic who took on the job of filling in the gaps, since Purushottam was primarily his concern.

‘I didn’t go into it on the phone because the inspector was waiting, and time was precious. But I should probably have told you tomorrow in any case.’ Tomorrow again, when they would have got rid of the women, and have the whole day for their own concerns, thought Patti. But instead he told it now, briefly but accurately. Purushottam listened with close and shocked attention, and his brows levelled into a ruled line across his forehead. Once he looked at Priya, and not involuntarily or fleetingly, but a long, straight, piercing look, as though he saw her for the first time. In the face of his own overwhelming preoccupations, it was an achievement to have astonished Purushottam.

‘And you think there may be other Naxalite agents active in these parts? It wouldn’t be the first time, of course, there have been cases here before. A couple of them were picked up near the Nepalese border a week or so ago, so there doesn’t seem to be much of a limit on their movements. I’m so sorry that you had to go through an ordeal like that.’

Patti asked, with wincing curiosity: ‘It doesn’t make you wish you hadn’t come home? Or that you were in some different line, and not stuck with all this big estate? It’s such a vulnerable position once you’ve got a revolutionary Left with members prepared to throw away their own lives for a cause – like this man Ajit Ghose?’

He gave a brief, almost scornful heave of his shoulders, and his mobile lips curled in what was not quite a smile. ‘I’ve got work to do here, and I’m going to do it. I want to see this land twice as productive and twice as effectively run as ever before, and chalking up a substantial profit annually to prove it. I’m going to make two crops of rice grow where only one grew before, and where we’re already getting a
thaladi
crop of sorts, I’m going to boost it by at least fifty per cent. And I don’t want this to be a monoculture farm, either, I want banana plantations and some other crops, so that we can provide better than just casual work. I’m going to see this land paying and producing the way I want it to – or die trying. You know what it says in the Baghavadgita: Do what you must, and give no thought to the consequences. “But if thou wilt not wage this lawful battle, then wilt thou fail thine own law and thine own honour, and get sin.” ’

‘The trouble is,’ Patti said after a moment of silence, ‘the Naxalites probably quote the Baghavadgita, too, and I bet Krishna says exactly the same to them.’

The three of them came slowly down the long hillside together, to where they had left the Land-Rover parked in the meal-white dust at the side of the track. Behind them the ground rose in broken folds, and there were the sparse beginnings of the forests that proliferated, far above, into dense jungle. Before them the open, rolling land lay outspread, fields and groves and villages, threads of shrunken water, standing crops and grazing cattle. They walked alongside the almost dry watercourse, marking at each decline the ridges in the ground where once the bunds of the irrigation tanks had been, mysterious hummocks under the grass.

They were talking hard enough now, with animation and point. The tanks could, Larry was positive, be put back into operation at comparatively little expense, given ample and willing labour. And much could be done at the same time to level some of these bordering fields, and conserve water and soil by discreet terracing.

‘Ours isn’t a delta economy, we’re never going to get three crops off our ground. But we can get two, given these quick-maturing new hybrids the government are producing at Adutharai.’

‘We’ve been doing some work along the same lines ourselves,’ said Dominic, ‘in our own laboratory. And our situation isn’t very different from yours here. The Swami will probably bring Satyavan Kumar along to have a look at your land, as soon as he can. He’s the man you want on seeds.’

‘You know what we could do with most of all? Some sort of small, agriculturally-based industries. Something that will give a chance of steady employment, instead of casual. Capital isn’t going to be a problem so much. My father left a great deal of money. And you’ve seen my place – what do I want with all that accommodation? It will make central stores and offices, and there’s plenty of room to build more plant and workshops as we grow. And we’ve got plenty of skills, and some good, shrewd heads among the village councils. Three of the villages are bold enough and clever enough to come in from the start, two more will probably follow them in. The others will take a season or two to make up their minds, and all we’ve got to do to get them in is show an improved profit. Once they see their neighbours growing more prosperous, they’ll want to come in, too.’

They had reached the road and the Land-Rover. Purushottam stooped and took up a few caked fragments of the brown earth, and crumbled them in his fingers, frowning down at them thoughtfully.

‘I was very fond of my father, but I never did see eye to eye with him. That made me feel terribly guilty when he died, and I had to come home. Not that coming home is very easy, in any case, after living such a different life there in England. You feel a stranger here and an alien there. But I couldn’t live anywhere else than in India, not permanently, so the thing to do seems to be to settle down as fast as possible. Not by following up what my father was trying to do, though. That would be a thumping lie for me. He tried to hang on to every acre, you know – he was a good landlord, mind you, and what he felt was partly out of loyalty to his tenants, but he didn’t know how to change. He was a bit of a litigant by inclination, too, in his middle years, and there’ve been complications. Now I’ve got the clearing up to do, and I know what I want, and with the Swami’s help we may be able to strike an agreement with the authorities.’

‘His credit’s high, in the state and centrally,’ said Dominic, ‘and he’ll do everything he can, you can rely on that.’

‘I’ve no ambition to be a landlord, none at all, but I do want to see all this land being put to the best possible use and paying good money to everybody who farms it, and it seemed to me that a co-operative grouping was the best way. And if the co-operative does get floated, and will find me a useful job, I’ll be satisfied. I’m ready to plough as much as possible of my father’s money into the funds.’ He ran the fine brown dust through his fingers and let it sift to the ground. ‘Water’s the main need. Not much use looking for ground water here, though. Pity!’

‘Those tanks can be brought back into service,’ Larry assured him, ‘and once you’ve got your fields levelled, contour channels will cost you very little. You’ll get your water if you get your labour. And if they don’t make you chairman of the co-operative, there’s no gratitude or justice.’

Purushottam tilted his head back and laughed aloud. It was the first time they had heard him laugh, and it was a gay, impulsive, almost startling sound. Only now did they realise that something of the quality of defensive isolation had been banished from his eyes, and the pale, finely-drawn tension had left his features as the formal self-consciousness had been shed from his gait and gestures. It was an unobtrusive transformation, but a complete one. For these two or three weeks, since his homecoming to perform the son’s part at a funeral, he must have been the loneliest young man in India, and suddenly he had companions, even allies.

‘I don’t think I’m cut out for a chairman, somehow. I’ll probably end up as general dog’s-body and mechanic, like Dominic. Do you think I can keep up a household like mine on that? At least until we convert them all into agricultural workers?’

They drove back to the house in the early evening in high content, and the light grew rose-coloured in the sky to westward. Patti and Priya and Lakshman were home before them from Kuttalam, and the servants were keeping watch on the dinner with one eye and the courtyard with the other, waiting for the last of the company to return before serving the meal.

During dinner Purushottam made a valiant effort to keep the conversation general, and defer to everything the girls had to say; but once the big table was cleared it was not long before the large-scale maps came out to cover it again, and the men gathered round with heads bent seriously together, tracing the fall of the land and the course of the meagre rivers, and marking out the possible immediate scope of the new farm.

‘You cannot farm this land by smallholding, and that is what people here are still trying to do. The result is debt everywhere at the first monsoon failure, or the first blight, because there are never any reserves. It can only be made effective on a large scale.’

‘And with a diversified economy.’

‘Exactly. And we are not dealing with a silt-fertilised soil like the deltas, where even on a big scale hand-labour pays off better than mechanical methods. We have less to lose and more to gain.’

They called in Lakshman to view the land they had surveyed during the day, and left the two girls to the newspapers and the radio. Patti watched the hands of the clock slip slowly past the hour of nine, and asked Purushottam resignedly: ‘Have you got a typewriter, by any chance? If you wouldn’t mind, I should like to write a letter home. What with all the trouble at Thekady, I haven’t written for a while, and they do rather tend to expect them every few days.’

He jumped up remorsefully from the table. ‘I’m so sorry, we’re neglecting you terribly. Yes, there’s a typewriter in the office, but it’s a huge old table machine. I could have them bring it up here for you…’

‘No, really, there’s no need, if I can borrow the office for an hour or so. I won’t disturb anything there. It’s just that there really hasn’t been a chance until now, and my mother is the worrying kind.’

‘Of course, if you’ll be comfortable enough there. It might be quieter for you, that’s true, it’s right across at the edge of the yard. I’ll come down with you.’

She protested that she would find it, but he came, all the same. Above the beaten earth of the lower yard the sky arched immense and full of stars, the darkest of blues, and yet so clear that it seemed to have a luminous quality of its own. The low white buildings gathered out of the air whatever light remained, and shone faintly lambent, hollow-eyed with deep windows and doorways, with here and there the murmur of voices and the spark of a lamp. The office, as he had said, was the most remote of all the buildings, even its windows turned away from the yard which all through the day was the centre of activity in the household. It was thick-walled and not very large, one wall stacked high with cupboards and filing cabinets, a big desk set near the window. Both it and the typewriter on it were littered with papers and folders.

‘You were in the middle of something. I’m sorry!’

‘No, I’m nearly straight now. When Mr Das Gupta gets here tomorrow morning I shall be ready for him.’ He swept up the scattered papers and moved them out of her way, and whipped the current sheet out of the machine in such a hurry that he tore it. She exclaimed in regret, and he laughed. ‘It doesn’t matter. I left it so hurriedly this morning that I should have had to do it again in any case, I’ve completely lost the thread. It isn’t more than a quarter of an hour’s work, I’ll do it early in the morning.’

‘A lot of money certainly makes a lot of work,’ she said, so gravely that there was no offence in it. ‘Don’t you ever want to drop the whole thing and just walk out?’

‘I never walked out on anything yet. You can’t abdicate your responsibilities, whatever they are.’

‘No,’ she agreed, ‘you can’t do that. Krishna was right.’

Purashottam shook up the cushion to make the typing chair a little higher for her, and looked round to make sure the light was adequate on the carriage. ‘My father hated figures so much – on paper, that is, he was clever enough with them in his head – that he made this office right away in the corner by the kitchen garden to be free from distractions while he struggled with them. I’ve had cause to be glad about that myself now. You’re sure you have everything you need? There are stamps here, do take whatever you want.’

He left her to it; and only a few paces from the door she heard him break into a light, fleet run, so eager was he to get back to the plans for his super-farm. She sat down at the desk, and fed a clean sheet of paper into the machine, and began to type her letter home.

By the time Priya and Dominic came to look for her, more than an hour later, she had finished not one letter, but two, and was just folding the second into its envelope.

‘One to my grandmother in Scotland, too. They’re both edited rather radically – I could hardly tell them we were so close to what happened in Thekady, could I, they’d be having fits! There,’ she said, thumping down the flap of the envelope, ‘that’s duty done for the next two or three days.’ And she reached into her big shoulder-bag, which was slung over the arm of the chair, for her own store of stamps. She was glad it was not Purushottam who had come to fetch her back to the house; he might have been hurt at seeing her use her own stamps when he had offered her his, and she would have been sorry to hurt him.