Heat and Dust (22 page)

The only person not to be reticent about Olivia was Dr. Saunders. It was he who had found her out. The midwives at Khatm had done their work well, and Olivia began to miscarry that same night. She woke up Douglas who took her to the hospital, and early next morning Dr. Saunders curetted her. But he knew about Indian “miscarriages” and the means employed to bring them about. The most common of these was the insertion of a twig smeared with the juice of a certain plant known only to Indian midwives. In his time Dr. Saunders had extracted many such twigs from women brought to him with so-called miscarriages. Afterwards he confronted the guilty women and threw them out of the hospital. Sometimes he slapped them – he had strong ideas about morality and how to uphold it. But even he admitted that certain allowances might be made for these native women born in ignorance and dirt. There was no such extenuating circumstance for Olivia. “Now my young madam,” he said as he confronted her. The matron, a Scottish woman born in India – between them, she and Dr.
Saunders kept the hospital clean and strict – stood grim-faced behind him. Both were outraged, but Dr. Saunders was somewhat triumphant as well, having been proved right. He had always known that there was something rotten about Olivia: something weak and rotten which of course the Nawab (rotten himself) had found out and used to his advantage.

No one ever doubted that the Nawab had used Olivia as a means of revenge. Even the most liberal and sympathetic Anglo-Indian, such as Major Minnies, was convinced of it. Like the Crawfords, and presumably Douglas himself (who allowed no one to guess his feelings), Major Minnies banished Olivia from his thoughts. She had gone in too far. Yet for many years he reflected not so much on her particular case as on its implications. It all fitted in with his theories. Later, during his retirement in Ooty, he had a lot more time to think about the whole question, and he even published – at his own expense, it was not a subject of much general interest – a monograph on the influence of India on the European consciousness and character. He sent it around to his friends, and that was how Great-Aunt Beth had a copy which I read.

Although the Major was so sympathetic to India, his piece sounds like a warning. He said that one has to be very determined to withstand – to stand up to – India. And the most vulnerable, he said, are always those who love her best. There are many ways of loving India, many things to love her for – the scenery, the history, the poetry, the music, and indeed the physical beauty of the men and women – but all, said the Major, are dangerous for the European who allows himself to love too much. India always, he said, finds out the weak spot and presses on it. Both Dr. Saunders and Major
Minnies spoke of the weak spot. But whereas for Dr. Saunders it is something, or someone, rotten, for the Major this weak spot is to be found in the most sensitive, often the finest people-and, moreover, in their finest feelings. It is there that India seeks them out and pulls them over into what the Major called the other dimension. He also referred to it as another element, one in which the European is not accustomed to live so that by immersion in it he becomes debilitated, or even (like Olivia) destroyed. Yes, concluded the Major, it is all very well to love and admire India – intellectually, aesthetically, he did not mention sexually but he must have been aware of that factor too – but always with a virile, measured,
European
feeling. One should never, he warned, allow oneself to become softened (like Indians) by an excess of feeling; because the moment that happens – the moment one exceeds one's measure – one is in danger of being dragged over to the other side. That seems to be the last word Major Minnies had to say on the subject and his final conclusion. He who loved India so much, knew her so well, chose to spend the end of his days here! But she always remained for him an opponent, even sometimes an enemy, to be guarded and if necessary fought against from without and, especially, from within: from within one's own being.

Olivia never returned to Douglas but, escaping from the hospital, she went straight to the Palace. The last clear picture I have of her is not from her letters but from what Harry has told us. He was in the Palace when she arrived there from the hospital. She was so pale, he said, that she seemed drained of blood. (Of course she had suffered great blood loss from her abortion.) It isn't so very far from Satipur to Khatm
– about 15 miles – and it was a journey that she had been doing daily by one of the Nawab's cars. But that time when she ran away from the hospital there was no car. Harry never knew how she came but presumed it was by what he called some native mode of transport. She was also in native dress – a servant's coarse sari – so that she reminded him of a print he had seen called
Mrs. Secombe in Flight from the Mutineers.
Mrs. Secombe was also in native dress and in a state of great agitation, with her hair awry and smears of dirt on her face: naturally, since she was flying for her life from the mutineers at Sikrora to the safety of the British Residency at Lucknow. Olivia was also in flight – but, as Harry pointed out, in the opposite direction.

Harry left India shortly afterwards. He never had been able to decide what were the Nawab's motives in taking on Olivia. In any case, the question – like the Nawab himself – dropped out of Harry's view for many years. He was glad. When he looked back on his time spent in the Palace, it was always with dislike, even sometimes with abhorrence. Yet he had been very, very happy there. Back in England he felt that it had been a happiness too strong for him. Now he wanted only to lead his quiet life with his mother in their flat in Kensington. Later, after his mother died, his friend Ferdie moved in with him, giving up his job in a laundry in order to look after Harry. Ferdie also met the Nawab, but that was many years later by which time – Harry thought – the Nawab was quite changed. His circumstances were changed too, and when he came to London now, he no longer lived at Claridges but was quite hard up. Perhaps that was why he never brought Olivia, because he couldn't afford it; or perhaps she just didn't want to come. She never came to England again but stayed in the house in the mountains he
had bought for her.

When I told Maji that I was leaving Satipur, she asked “Like Chid?” Chid's departure back to England had amused her as everything else about him had always amused her. “Poor boy,” she said. “He had to run away.” Her broad shoulders shook with laughter.

I assured her that I was not running away but on the contrary was going further, up into the mountains. She was pleased with that. I then plucked up courage and asked her, as I had wanted to for some time, what she had been doing to me that day when she said she was giving me an abortion. To my relief nothing had happened – but I felt that, if she had wanted something to happen, her efforts would not have been unsuccessful. What
had
she done? I asked her. Of course she wouldn't tell me, but from her sly laugh I gathered that she was not innocent. I thought of the way she had sat astride me, a supernatural figure with supernatural powers which it now seemed to me she had used not to terminate my pregnancy but to make sure of it: make sure I saw it through.

The rainy season is not the best time of year to go up into the mountains. There are always landslides and the roads become impassable for days on end. The mountains are invisible. One knows they are there – the ranges of the Himalayas stretching God knows into what distances and to what heights – one even feels, or imagines, their presence, but they can't be seen. They are completely blotted out and in their place are clouds, vapours, mists.

Just above the small town of X, there is a handful of houses scattered along the steepest side of the mountain. Even at the
best of times they are difficult to get to except by the sturdiest climbers; and now during the rains they are almost inaccessible. I have been told that, up till a few years ago, there were several other Europeans besides Olivia living in these houses. The Norwegian widow of an Indian historian devoting herself to sorting out her husband's papers; a German turned Buddhist; and two ex-missionaries who had tried to start a Christian “ashram”. Now they are all dead and are buried in the old British cemetery on a plateau a few hundred feet down (there are British cemeteries everywhere! they have turned out to be the most lasting monument). Only the German Buddhist was cremated on the Hindu cremation ground, and Olivia. The ex-missionaries tried to raise some objection to Olivia's cremation – they said she belonged in the cemetery, never having been converted to any Indian religion. But she had specifically requested cremation, so it was done. I presume that her ashes were scattered over these mountains since there was no one to take charge of them, the Nawab having died before her.

Her house is still there. I had to wait several days for the rain to clear sufficiently before I could climb up. It stands quite by itself on a mountain ledge; I suppose it has a superb view, though at this time of year there is nothing to view except, as I said, clouds. There is some dispute about possession of the house which Karim and Kitty are trying to get settled along with other disputed properties of the Nawab's. They hope to do so before the Army requisitions the house. It has developed dangerous cracks, and inside everything is covered in mildew.

But it retains what I imagine to have been Olivia's ambience. There is a piano of course – not the upright she had in Satipur but a grand piano the Nawab had sent up
from Khatm (together with the tuner from Bombay). The curtains and cushions, now tattered, are yellow, the lampshades tasselled; there is a gramophone. A chair and embroidery frame stand in a window embrasure: I don't know whether this is just a decorative tableau or whether she actually used to sit here, glancing up from her embroidery to look out over the mountains (now invisible). There is a row of stables outside but all they ever stabled was the sedan chair – it is still there, though dusty and broken – in which the Nawab was carried up and down the mountain. He had got too fat and lazy to climb.

Harry said that he had a shock when he saw him again in London. Fifteen years had passed, the Nawab was fifty years old and so fat that there was something womanly about him. And the way he embraced Harry was womanly too: he held him against his plump chest with both arms and kept him there for a long time. And then all the old feelings came back to Harry. But afterwards he found that his feelings towards the Nawab
had
changed – probably because the Nawab himself had changed so much. He seemed softer and milder, and with many troubles of a domestic nature.

The court of enquiry set up in 1923 had gone against him, and as a result a prime minister had been appointed to take charge of the affairs of Khatm. Although still in name the ruler of the state, the Nawab did not under these circumstances care to spend much time there. The Begum too was not often in residence but had taken a house in Bombay for herself and her ladies. The Nawab often stayed with them there, when he was not with Olivia in X. Sometimes he also stayed with his wife, Sandy, things having been more or less compounded with the Cabobpur family. But Sandy's health
was not good, and at present she was in a place in Switzerland undergoing treatment for her mental troubles.

The Nawab's own troubles were mainly financial. Not only did he have to keep up the Palace and three separate establishments – for his mother, wife, and Olivia – but he still had many dependents in Khatm. He had to provide for all those young men – now young no longer – who had been his companions in the Palace, for they were either his blood relatives or descendants of family retainers some of whom went right back to the time of Amanullah Khan. The Nawab felt deeply ashamed of no longer being able to keep them in the manner to which they were accustomed. For years he had been haggling with the British authorities for an increase in the income they had stipulated for him out of the state revenues: but they were completely un-understanding, they had no conception at all of the obligations a ruler like himself had to discharge. That was why he had now come to London, in order to appeal directly to a higher authority. He made, or tried to make, many appointments and was for ever pulling scraps of paper out of his pocket with names and telephone numbers scribbled on them, though often he could not remember whose they were.

He spent most of his time with Harry and Ferdie. It was not easy for them. They lived in a very orderly way but he was not an orderly person. He also seemed physically too large for the flat, and in fact broke two of the dining room chairs just by sitting on them. And they had difficulty feeding him for he could not be satisfied on the meals Ferdie cooked for Harry's delicate digestion (which had never recovered from India). The Nawab had developed a sweet tooth and, unable to obtain Indian sweetmeats in London, had got into the habit of eating a great number of cream
pastries. His afternoons were usually spent in a popular restaurant – a palatial hall with marble pillars not unlike the Palace at Khatm. Three times in the course of the afternoon a lady in a long tea gown played selections on a multi-coloured organ; and listening to her with pleasure, the Nawab would turn to Harry: “How nicely she plays – just like Olivia. “He had always been quite unmusical.

Like his father, he had in recent years become very fond of reciting Persian and Urdu couplets, especially those that dealt, as most of them did, with the transience of worldly glory. He would point to himself as a living illustration of this theme. Besides the question of increased allowance, his most urgent problem at the time was that of the state jewels, which were missing. The government of Khatm was accusing the Begum of having purloined them: to which she answered with spirit that she had taken nothing that was not her own. This case was indeed destined to linger on for many years and, after Independence, became the problem of the Government of India who tried to bring a case against the Begum. However, by that time both she and the jewels were safely in New York.