The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (36 page)

On the night of Shalini’s wedding he slept with his wife again. She wept. They both wept. And exchanged undertakings that in future they
would be kind, forgiving and understanding. On the morning of Shalini’s ritual departure he watched from the gateway. She entered the palanquin without hesitation.

And Duleep saw one thing at last: that in helping her to open her mind and broaden her horizons he had taught her the lesson he himself had never learned: the value of moral as well as physical courage. He only saw her on two subsequent occasions: the first during the week she spent after her marriage in her parental home, with Prakash, and the second five years later when on the eve of his departure for England with his two-year-old son Hari, he visited her in Mayapore during the festival of Rakhi-Bandan, bringing her gifts of clothing and receiving from her a bracelet made of elephant hair: the festival during which brothers and sisters reaffirm the bond between them and exchange vows of duty and affection. By this time his wife Kamala had been dead for two years and poor Shalini was still childless. Her husband, Duleep knew, spent most of his time with prostitutes. He died some years later of a seizure in the house of his favourite.

“Imagine,” Shalini wrote to her brother at that time, “Prakash’s sisters actually suggested I should become suttee to honour such a man and acquire merit for myself!”

And Duleep replied from Sidcot, “Leave Mayapore, and come to us in England.”

“No,” she wrote back. “My duty—such as it is—is here. I feel, Duleepji, that we shall never see each other again. Don’t you feel the same? We Indians are very fatalistic! Thank you for sending me books. They are my greatest pleasure. Also for the photograph of Hari. What a handsome boy he is! I think of him as my English Nephew. Perhaps one day, if ever he comes to India, I shall meet him if he can bear to visit his old Indian Aunt. Think of it—I shan’t see thirty again! Duleepji—I am so pleased and proud for you. In the picture of Hari I see again my kind brother on whose knee I used to sit. Well. Enough of this nonsense.”

These were all stories that Duleep eventually told to Hari. In turn, when Hari’s father was dead, in the few weeks of English boyhood that were left to him, Hari told them to Colin Lindsey. He thought of them as stories which had no bearing on his own life—even then, with his passage to India booked, and paid for by the aunt with the peculiar name, Shalini.

There was one other story. This too he told Colin. It seemed
incredible to both of them; not because they couldn’t imagine it happening, but because neither of them could think of it as happening in Harry Coomer’s family.

It went like this: that two weeks after Shalini’s ritual return to her parent’s home, and one week after her final departure to Mayapore with her husband, her father announced his intention to divest himself of all his worldly goods, to depart from his family and his responsibilities, and wander the countryside: become, eventually, sannyasi.

“I have done my duty,” he said. “It is necessary to recognize that it is finished. It is necessary not to become a burden. Now my duty is to God.”

His family were shocked. Duleep pleaded with him but his resolve was unshaken. “When are you leaving us, then?” Duleep asked.

“I shall go in six months’ time. It will take until then to order my affairs. The inheritance will be divided equally among the four of you. The house will belong to your elder brother. Your mother must be allowed to live here for as long as she wishes, but your elder brother and his wife will become heads of the household. All will be done as it would be done if I were dead.”

Duleep shouted, “You call this good? You call it holy? To leave our mother? To bury yourself alive in
nothing?
To beg your bread when you are rich enough to feed a hundred starving beggars?”

“Rich?” his father asked. “What is rich? Today I have riches. With one stroke of a pen on a document I can rid myself of what you call my riches. But what stroke of a pen on what kind of document will ensure my release from the burden of another lifespan after this? Such a release can only be hoped for, only earned by renouncing all earthly bonds.”

Duleep said, “Ah well, yes! How fine! In what way could you be ashamed now to find your son a little burra-sahib? What difference could it make to you now, what I was or where I was? Is it for this that I gave in to you? Is it to see you shrug me off and walk away from me and my brothers and our mother that I obeyed you?”

“While there is duty there must be obedience. My duty to you is over. Your obedience to me is no longer necessary. You have different obligations now. And I have a duty of still another kind.”

“It is monstrous!” Duleep shouted. “Monstrous and cruel and selfish! You have ruined my life. I have sacrificed myself for nothing.”

As he had found earlier it was easier to blame anyone than to blame himself, but he regretted the attack. He suffered greatly at the
recollection of it. He tried to speak about it to his mother, but these days she went about her daily tasks dumb and unapproachable. When the time drew near for his father to go he went to him and begged his forgiveness.

“You were always my favourite son,” old Kumar admitted. “That was a sin, to feel more warmly towards one than to the others. Better you should have had no ambition. Better you should have been like your brothers. I could not help but exert authority more strongly over the only son who ever seemed ready to defy it. And I was ashamed of my preference. My exertion of authority perhaps went beyond the bounds of reason. A father does not ask his son to forgive him. It is only open to him to bless him and to commit to this son’s care that good woman, your mother.”

“No,” Duleep said, weeping. “That duty is not for me. That is for your eldest son. Don’t burden me with that.”

“A burden will fall upon the heart most ready to accept it,” old Kumar said, and then knelt and touched his youngest son’s feet, to humble himself.

Even in the business of becoming sannyasi old Kumar seemed determined upon the severest shock to his pride. He underwent no rituals. He did not put on the long gown. On the morning of his departure he appeared in the compound dressed only in a loin cloth, carrying a staff and a begging bowl. Into the bowl his stony-faced wife placed a handful of rice. And then he walked through the gateway and into the road, away from the village.

For a while they followed him, some distance behind. He did not look back. When Duleep and his brothers gave up following him their mother continued. They watched but said nothing to each other, waiting for their mother who, after a while, sat down on the roadside and stayed there until Duleep joined her, urged her to her feet and supported her back to the house.

“You must not give in to sorrow,” she told him later, lying on her bed in a darkened room from which she had ordered the servants to remove every article of comfort and luxury. “It is the will of God.”

Thereafter his mother lived the life of a widow. She gave her household keys into the care of her eldest daughter-in-law and moved into a room at the back of the house that overlooked the servants’ quarters. She cooked her own food and ate it in solitude. She never left the
compound. After a while her sons and daughters-in-law accepted the situation as inevitable. By such behaviour, they said, she was acquiring merit. They seemed content, then, to forget her. Alone, Duleep went every day to her room and sat with her for a while and watched while she spun khadi. To communicate at all he had to say things that needed no answer or ask simple questions which she could respond to with a nod or shake of the head.

In this way he brought her news: of the end of England’s war with Germany, of business affairs he had begun to take an interest in, of his wife Kamala’s latest pregnancy, of the birth of yet another stillborn child, a girl. Once he brought news, a rumour, that his father had been recognized but not spoken to by one of the Lucknow Kumars who had been traveling in Bihar and had seen him on the platform of a railway station with his begging bowl. His mother did not even pause in her spinning. In 1919 he told her something of the troubles in the Punjab, but did not mention the massacre of unarmed Indian civilians by British commanded Gurkha troops in Amritsar. In this same year he brought the news that Kamala was again with child, and in 1920, a few weeks after the festival of Holi, the news that he had a son. By now the old lady had taken to muttering while she spun. He could not be sure that she ever heard what he said. She did not look at him when he told her about Hari, nor two days later when he told her that Kamala was dead; that now he had a strong healthy son but no wife. She did not look at him either when he began to laugh. He laughed because he could not weep: for Kamala, or for his son, or his father or old mad mother. “She made it, you see, Mother,” he shouted at her hysterically in English. “She knew her duty all right. My God, yes! She knew her duty and did it in the end. It didn’t matter that it cost her her life. We all know our duty, don’t we? Just like I know mine. At last I’ve got a son and I have a duty to him, but I’ve also got you, and Father charged me with a duty to you as well.”

It was a duty that took another eighteen months to discharge. One morning he went to his mother’s room and found the spinning wheel abandoned and the old woman on her bed. When he spoke to her she opened her eyes and looked at him and said:

“Your father is dead, Duleepji.” Her voice was hoarse and cracked through long disuse. “I saw it in a dream. Is the fire kindled yet?”

“The fire, Mother?”

“Yes, son. The fire must be kindled.”

She slept.

In the evening she woke and asked him again, “Son, is the fire kindled?”

“They are making it ready.”

“Wake me when they have finished.”

She slept again, until morning, and then opened her eyes and asked him, “Do the flames leap high, Duleepji?”

“Yes, Mother,” he said. “The fire is kindling.”

“Then it is time,” she said. And smiled, and closed her eyes, and told him: “I am not afraid,” and did not wake again.

It was in the October of 1921 that his mother died. A year later, when he had sold his property to his brothers and paid a visit to his sister Shalini, in Mayapore, he took his son to Bombay and there embarked for England. When he sailed he was comparatively well-off and during the course of the next sixteen years he managed from time to time to increase his capital and income with fortunate investments and lucky enterprises. Perhaps it was true that he had in him what he once referred to as a fatal flaw, although if there was a flaw like this it was not one that led to compromise, as he had thought. He had compromised, certainly, in his youth, but had stood by his duty in early manhood. The flaw was perhaps more likely to be found in the quality of his passion. There may have been impurities in it from the beginning, or the impurities may have entered with the frustrations that, in another man, could so easily have diluted the passion but in him roused and strengthened it to the point where the passion alone guided his thoughts and actions, and centred them all on Hari.

A stranger could look at the life, times and character of Duleep Kumar—or Coomer as he became—and see a man and a career and a background which in themselves, separately or in combination, made no sense. The only sense they made lay in Hari: Hari’s health, Hari’s happiness, Hari’s prospects, power for Hari in a world where boys like Hari normally expected none; these were the notches on the rule Duleep used to measure his own success or failure; and these were what he looked for as the end-results of any enterprise he embarked upon.

When Colin Lindsey’s father kept his promise to see the lawyers, to try and make some sense out of the apparently absurd report that Duleep Kumar had died a bankrupt, the senior partner of that firm said to him:

“In his own country, Coomer would probably have made a fortune and kept it. He told me once that as a boy he’d only wanted to be a civil servant or a lawyer, and had never once thought of becoming a businessman. The curious thing is that he really had a flair for financial manipulation. I mean a flair in the European sense. It was the most English thing about him when you boiled it down. In his own country he might have knocked spots off the average businessman out there. He saw things in a broad light, not a narrow one. At least, I should say he always began every enterprise seeing it that way, but then narrowed it all down to a question of making money as fast as possible for that son of his so that he could become something he isn’t. What a pity! In the last year or two when his affairs began to go down hill, I was always warning him, trying to head him off from foolish speculation. And I suppose this is where—well, blood, background, that sort of thing, finally begin to tell. He got frightened. In the end he went right off his head, to judge from the mess he’s left behind. And of course couldn’t face it. I don’t think he committed suicide because he couldn’t face the consequences but because he couldn’t face what he knew those consequences would mean for that boy of his. Back home to India, in other words, with his tail between his legs. Coomer, you know, might have found himself in pretty serious trouble. I’ve said nothing to the son on that score. It’s probably best that he shouldn’t get to know. But there’s one aspect of the business that the bank says looks like a clear case of forgery.”

Mr. Lindsey was shocked.

The lawyer, seeing his expression, said, “You can be thankful you haven’t invested in any of Coomer’s businesses.”

“I never had that sort of money,” Lindsey replied. “And actually I scarcely knew him. We were sorry for the boy, that’s all. As the matter of fact, it’s a surprise to me to hear you say his father was so devoted to him. So far as we could see the opposite was true. I suppose we’re a pretty soft-hearted family. My own son included. He asked Harry to spend a summer holiday with us some years ago when he found out that he was going to be on his own. It’s been like that ever since.”

The lawyer said, “But you see, Mr. Lindsey, keeping himself out of Harry’s light was Coomer’s way of devoting himself to his son’s best interests. I don’t mean that he deliberately tried to give people the impression his son was neglected so that they’d invite him to their homes and he’d grow up knowing what English people were really like. He kept out of Harry’s way because he knew that if Harry grew up as he wanted
him to there’d come a time when Harry would be ashamed of him. For instance, there was the question of Coomer’s accent. It seemed pretty good to me, but of course it
was
an Indian accent. He certainly didn’t want Harry to learn anything from it. He didn’t want Harry to learn anything from him at all. He told me so. He said he looked forward to the day when he’d see Harry didn’t care much for his company. He didn’t want the boy to be ashamed of him but too dutiful to show it. All he wanted for Harry was the best English education and background that money could buy.”