The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (27 page)

But it would be foolish to suppose that such contemporaneity is a manifestation of anything especially significant, or to jump to the conclusion that the obvious preference shown for this room by the handful of English members present proves, in itself, their subconscious determination to identify themselves only with what is progressive and therefore superior. This lounge bar, giving on to a verandah from which the tennis can be watched, was always the favourite of the Mayapore ladies, and for the moment at any rate the only ladies in the club, apart from Lady Chatterjee, are English. If Indian ladies on the whole are still happier at home, who but they are to blame for the look the room has of being reserved for Europeans?

But then, why are there no Indian men in the room either? And why are some of the Englishmen not sitting with their own women in the lounge bar but standing in the other room where drinks are served,
talking to Indian men? And why do they manage to convey (even at a distance, in the glimpse you have of them between square pillars across the passage and through wide open doors to the old smoking room) a sense of almost old-maidish decorum, of physical fastidiousness unnatural to men when in the company of their own sex? Why, whenever one of them breaks away, crosses the passage and enters the lounge bar to rejoin his lady, is there presently a rather too noisy laugh from him and a shrug and secret little smile from her? Why does he now exude the aggressive, conscious masculinity that seemed to be held in abeyance in the smoking room?

The arrival in the lounge bar of a grey-haired, pale-brown man of some sixty-odd years puts only a temporary stop to such private speculations. Mr. Srinivasan is of medium height, thin, punctilious in manner. His skin has a high polish. He is immaculately turned out. The lightweight suit, the collar and tie, point another interesting difference. The inheritors come properly dressed but the Englishmen expose thick bare necks and beefy arms. Mr. Srinivasan makes a formal old-fashioned apology for being late, for having failed to arrive first and greet his guests. He also makes a joke (once current among the English) about Mayapore time which, it seems, is still generally reckoned to be half an hour in arrears of Indian Standard. One gets up to shake his hand, and meets the mild but penetrating gaze that reveals a readiness to withstand the subtlest insult that an experience-sharpened sensibility is capable of detecting. Lady Chatterjee who addresses him as Vassi, says, “You know Terry Grigson’s wife, of course?” and Srinivasan bows in the direction of the Englishwoman who, still protectively immersed in the shallow enchantment of the
Sunday Times Magazine,
achieves a token emergence by a slight lift of the head (which would be a look at Mr. Srinivasan if the eyelids did not simultaneously lower) and by a movement of the lips (that might be “Good Evening” if they actually opened more than a gummy fraction). Her companion, also introduced, nods, and being younger and less inhibited perhaps by ancient distinctions looks as if she might be drawn into the general conversation, but Mrs. Grigson, with a perfect sense of timing, turns the
Sunday Times Magazine
towards her and points out some extraordinary detail of Coventry Cathedral so that they are then both lost in the illustrated complexities of modern Anglo-Saxon art; and the uncharitable thought occurs that, for the English, art has anyway always had its timely, occupational value.

And it could occur to you, too, that Mr. Srinivasan is not at ease in the lounge bar, that if he had only managed to conduct his affairs in accordance with Indian Standard instead of Mayapore time he would have been waiting at the entrance when his second best car, the Ambassador, drove up and deposited its passengers, and would then have taken them into the old smoking room, not had to leave them to the jovial Terry Grigson whose wife finds nothing to laugh about but with whom Mr. Srinivasan and his guests are momentarily stuck, for politeness’ sake, at least until Terry comes back from the showers and changing room—

—As he does, beaming and raw-faced, in a creased bush shirt and floppy creased grey trousers, but not before Mr. Srinivasan with a thin, almost tubercular finger, has summoned a bearer and asked everybody what they are drinking and sent the bearer off to collect it, having been answered even by Mrs. Grigson, and by her companion who taking her cue from Mrs. Grigson also said, “Nothing for me, thank you.” Terry comes back between the sending away of the bearer with the curtailed order and his return with a tray of three lonely gins and tonics, by which time Terry has also been asked by Mr. Srinivasan what he will drink, thanked him, and said, “I’ll go a beer.” When the gins and tonics arrive and Srinivasan says to the bearer, “And a beer for Mr. Grigson,” Mrs. Grigson pushes her empty glass at Terry and says, “Order me another of these, Terry, will you?” which he does, with a brief, almost private gesture at the bearer. The other woman, lacking Mrs. Grigson’s nerve for studied insult, would go drinkless did Terry not say, while Srinivasan talks to Lili Chatterjee, “What about you, Betty?” which enables her to shrug, grimace, and say, “Well, I suppose I might as well.” Since no money passes and no bills are yet presented for signing, one wonders who in fact will pay for them, but trusts—because Grigson looks almost self-consciously trustworthy—that he will see to it afterwards that Mr. Srinivasan’s bar account is not debited with a charge it seems his wife and her friend would rather die than have an Indian settle.

And now, perhaps abiding by yet another unwritten rule, perhaps having even received some secret, clan-gathering sign, a dumpy Englishwoman at an adjacent table leans across and asks Mrs. Grigson a question which causes Mrs. Grigson to incline her angular body by a degree or two and with this inclination fractionally shift the position of her chair, so that by a narrow but perceptible margin she succeeds in dissociating herself from those with whom she actually shares a table. It is
difficult to hear what it is that so arouses her interest, because Lili Chatterjee, Mr. Srinivasan and (to his lone, team-captain’s credit) Mr. Grigson are also talking with animation, and the stranger can only observe and make possibly erroneous deductions: possibly erroneous but not probably. There is nothing so inwardly clear as social rebuff—a rebuff which in this case is also directed at the stranger because he has arrived with one Indian as the guest of another.

And in the momentary hiatus of not knowing exactly what it is that anyone is talking about, one may observe Terry Grigson’s off-handsome face and see that old familiar expression of strain, of deep-seated reservation that qualifies the smile and points up the diplomatic purpose; a purpose which, given a bit more time, may not prevail against the persistence of his sulky segregationist wife. And this, perhaps, is a pity, considering all the chat that goes on at home about the importance of trade and exports and of making a good impression abroad.

“Well no,” Terry Grigson says, in answer to Mr. Srinivasan’s for-form’s-sake inquiry whether he and his wife will join the trio of Srinivasan, Lili Chatterjee and her house-guest for dinner at the club, “It’s very kind of you, but we’re going on to Roger’s farewell and have to get back and change.”

The Roger referred to is, one gathers, the retiring managing director of British-Indian Electrical. Almost every month one more member of this transient European population ups stakes, retires, returns to England or moves on to another station. For each farewell, however, there is a housewarming, or a party to mark the occasion of a wife’s arrival to join her husband in the place where for the next year or two he will earn his living. Whatever that living actually is—with the British-Indian Electrical, with one of the other industrial developments or teaching something abstruse at the Mayapore Technical College—it will be earned by someone considered superiorly equipped to manage, guide, execute or instruct. He will be a member of that new race of Sahibs. He will be, in whatsoever field, an Expert.

“There is actually a most interesting but undoubtedly apocryphal story about the status of English experts in India nowadays,” Mr. Srinivasan says in his rather high-pitched but melodious lawyer’s voice when the party in the lounge bar has been broken up by the quick-downing by Terry Grigson of his beer and by the ladies of their gin-fizzes, and their departure to change into clothes that will be more suitable for the purpose of bidding Roger God-speed. Upon that
departure Mr. Srinivasan has led Lady Chatterjee and the stranger across the lounge, through the pillared passage and the open doors into the comfortable old smoking room that has club chairs, potted palms, fly-blown hunting prints and—in spite of the spicy curry-smells wafted in from the adjacent dining room by the action of the leisurely turning ceiling fans—an air somehow evocative of warmed-up gravy and cold mutton. In here, only one Englishman now remains. He glances at Mr. Srinivasan’s party—but retains the pale mask of his anonymity, a mask that he seems to wear as a defense against the young, presumably inexpert Indians who form the group of which he is the restrained, withheld, interrogated, talked-at centre. It is because one asks Mr. Srinivasan who this white man is, and because Mr. Srinivasan says he does not know but supposes he is a “visiting expert” that the interesting but perhaps apocryphal story is told.

“There was,” Mr. Srinivasan says, “this Englishman who was due to go home. An ordinary tourist actually. He fell into conversation with a Hindu businessman who for months had been trying to get a loan from Government in order to expand his factory. A friend had told the businessman, ‘But it is impossible for you to get a loan from Government because you are not employing any English technical adviser.’ So the businessman asked himself: ‘Where can I get such an adviser and how much will it cost me seeing that he would expect two or three years’ guarantee contract at minimum?’ Then he met this English tourist who had no rupees left. And the Hindu gentleman said, ‘Sir, I think you are interested in earning rupees five thousand?’ The English tourist agreed straightaway. ‘Then all you will do, sir,’ the Hindu gentleman said, ‘is to postpone departure for two weeks while I write to certain people in New Delhi.’ Then he telegraphed Government saying, ‘What about loan? Here already I am at the expense of employing technical expert from England and there is no answer coming from you.’ To which at once he received a telegraph reply to the effect that his factory would be inspected by representatives of Government on such and such a day. So he went back to the English tourist and gave him five thousand rupees and said, ‘Please be at my factory on Monday. Are you by any chance knowing anything about radio components?’ To which the English tourist replied, ‘No, unfortunately, only I am knowing about ancient monuments.’ ‘No matter,’ the Hindu gentleman said. ‘On Monday whenever I jog your elbow simply be saying—“This is how it is done in Birmingham.”
’ So on Monday there was this most impressive meeting in the
executive suite of the factory between the Hindu businessman who knew all about radio component manufacture, the English tourist who knew nothing and the representatives of Government who also knew nothing. Before lunch they went round the premises and sometimes one of the officials of Government asked the Englishman, ‘What is happening here?’ and the Hindu gentleman jogged the Englishman’s elbow, and the Englishman who was a man of honour, a man to be depended upon to keep his word said, ‘This is how we do it in Birmingham.’ And after a convivial lunch the Government representatives flew back to Delhi and the English tourist booked his flight home first class by BOAC and within a week the Hindu businessman was in receipt of a substantial Government loan with a message of goodwill from Prime Minister Nehru himself.”

And one notes, marginally, that the new wave of satire has also broken on the Indian shore and sent minor floodstreams into the interior, as far as Mayapore.

Mr. Srinivasan is the oldest man in the smoking room.

“Yes, of course,” he says, speaking of the younger men—the Indians, “they are all businessmen. No sensible young man in India today goes into civil administration or into politics. These fellows are all budding executives.”

Several of the budding executives wear bush shirts, but the shirts are beautifully laundered. Their watchstraps are of gold-plated expanding metal. One of them comes over and asks Lady Chatterjee how she is. He declines Srinivasan’s invitation to have a drink and says he must be dashing off to keep a date. He is a bold, vigorous-looking boy. His name is Surendranath. When he has gone Mr. Srinivasan says, “There is a case in point. His father is old ICS on the judicial side. But young Surendranath is an electrical engineer, or rather a boy with a degree in electrical engineering who is working as personal assistant to the Indian assistant sales director of British-Indian Electrical. He took his degree in Calcutta and studied sales techniques in England, which is a reversal of the old order when the degree would have been taken in London and the sales technique either ignored or left to be picked up as one went blundering along from one shaky stage of prestige and influence to another. He is commercially astute and a very advanced young man in everything except his private life, that is to say his forthcoming marriage, which he has been quite happy to leave his parents to arrange, because he trusts to their judgment in such relatively minor matters.

“The thin, studious-looking boy is also a case in point. His name is Desai. His father was interned with me in 1942 because we were both leading members of the local Congress party subcommittee. His father told me last year when we chanced to meet in New Delhi that young Desai said to him once, ‘Just because you were in jail you think this entitles you to believe you know everything?’ They were quarreling about Mr. Nehru whom this mild-looking young man had called a megalomaniac who had already outlived his usefulness by 1948 but gone on living disastrously in the past and dragging India back to conditions worse than in the days of the British because he knew nothing of world economic structure and pressures. My old friend Desai was secretary to the minister for education and social services in the provincial Congress Ministry that took office in 1937, and resigned in 1939. Before becoming secretary to the Minister he was in the uncovenanted provincial civil service and a lawyer like myself. But his son, this young man over there, is an expert on centrifugal pumps and says that people like us are to blame for India’s industrial and agricultural backwardness because instead of learning everything we could about really important things we spent our time playing at politics with an imperial power any fool could have told us would beat us at that particular game with both hands tied. Such accusations are a salutary experience to old men like me who at the time thought they were doing rather well.