The Deceivers Read online

  ‘Is that this fellow—Chandra Sen—who’s going to get the scroll?’

  George’s voice was at his ear. He answered, ‘Yes. The thin one in white, alone, in front of the others.’ It always astonished him that the people at headquarters should know so little about the districts. Chandra Sen, Jagirdar, Patel of Padwa and Kahari, was a very important man. He had been a senior revenue official for a time to the Bhonslas’ court in Nagpur. As patel of two villages, he owned most of the lands, was the police chief, magistrate, mayor, and tax collector. As jagirdar, he held fifty thousand acres of jungle in feudal tenure and was responsible for the protection of the hamlets enclosed in it.

  George’s supercilious tone nettled William, and, as much to change the subject as for any other reason, he added, ‘I wonder what that crowd upstream is doing.’

  George said, ‘Your friend Chandra Sen will tell us, I expect, if it’s any of our business.’

  William flushed slightly. It was very easy here to imagine that everything was your business. He turned his eyes away from the mysterious crowd, dismounted, and watched the ferryboat come to land.

  As the flat, straight prow touched the bank and the passengers began to scramble off, the waiting Indians surged forward to get on. Goats bleated, cows mooed, children yelled, mothers screamed. The ferryman, a tall old fellow with bloodshot eyes, jumped down on to the grass, while his four big sons rested on their poles and held the boat steady. The old man bawled, ‘Get back, you daughters of darkness! Do you think the great lord Collector-sahib wishes to smell your stinking carcasses in the same boat with him?’

  The crowd halted, muttered, and ebbed patiently back. William cried, ‘Let them on. Just leave room for us and our three horses.’ The crowd surged forward once more, grinning and chattering.

  ‘Your worship is a great king,’ the ferryman said, bowing briefly. ‘The quality of your honour’s magnificence is such as to dazzle the eye.’ He broke off to kick a young farmer out of the way.

  William handed Mary into the boat, and George followed. The grooms, who all day and every day ran unnoticed thirty paces behind the horses, led them up the ramp. William made way for George to stand in the very front of the boat.

  On the far bank Chandra Sen moved slowly down toward the river. A jumbled array of servants, coolies, and tenant farmers surrounded a palanquin among the trees. The members of a six-piece band marched into view, formed a rough circle, raised their instruments, and waited.

  Mary reached out her hand and twined her fingers in William’s. The brown women in the boat stared at her slim back and whispered excitedly to one another, nodding their heads so that their nose ornaments flashed in the sun and their gold necklaces jangled together.

  The boat grounded, grated forward under the thrust of the poles, and stopped. Mary made to move forward, but William held her back, while Mr. George Angelsmith, the accredited representative of the Agent to the Governor-General of India, stepped down and stood alone on the bank, one foot slightly advanced, his head up and his left hand negligently on his sword hilt. The bank struck up a loud cacophony. Chandra Sen bowed from the waist. The servants and farmers bowed. William saluted. From the barge a kid bleated for its mother’s milk, a long agonized maaa-a-a-a-ah! George Angelsmith touched the peak of his cap and stepped forward.

  William and Mary jumped down from the boat. A servant handed garlands of flowers one by one to Chandra Sen, and Chandra Sen lowered them in turn over George’s neck, then Mary’s, then William’s. At last he stepped back and stood with head bowed and hands joined in front of his face. He was tall, thin, and pale, dressed in white and wearing a white turban. A white caste mark was painted on his forehead. His face had a tired charm, and his large eyes were wide open, as if in perpetual mild surprise.

  The bank made a deafening noise a few feet off. Mary shouted in English, laughing and blushing. ‘Thank you so much, Mr. Chandra Sen.’ The patel bowed, took her by the hand, and led her to the palanquin. William saw that George, watching the easy swing of her riding habit, did not seem to notice the goats and children and women easing past him off the barge. Mary stooped and put her head through the curtains of the palanquin to talk to Chandra Sen’s wife, and George looked away.

  Chandra Sen returned, and William grasped his hand. ‘I’m glad to see you.’ Crinkles sprang up round the corners of the patel’s eyes. He replied, ‘And I am glad to see your memsahib. It was time you married—past time. It is not rude of me, by your custom, to say she is beautiful? A princess!’

  George joined them, and they chatted idly. From the corner of his eye William watched the other ferry passengers group themselves and prepare to face the road. As a score of times before, it struck him that India was always moving, always going somewhere. Between Kashmir and Cape Comorin, how many hundreds of thousands of people daily faced the dangers, known and guessed and unguessed, of the road? In the sixty-year anarchy of the dying Mahratta power, how many had failed to reach the place they were going to? How many still died on the way and were not missed?

  Chandra Sen was talking, a little hurriedly, about a court case; telling him the ins and outs of the relationships involved; whose mother had quarrelled with whose great-aunt how many years ago; the exact amount paid by one ancestor for false title deeds in the time of the Saugor Pandits, and by another for later, falser deeds. William knew Chandra Sen well and thought he seemed to be disturbed about something. As for the court case, it was too involved. George was nodding as though he understood perfectly; he probably did, but William himself could only shake his head unhappily.

  In the background Mary straightened up under a shrill volley of congratulations from the voice inside the palanquin. A small brown hand, a-glitter with many rings, slipped through the gap in the curtain and gestured violently.

  The grooms led up the horses; George swung easily into the saddle; William cupped his hands between his knees, heaved Mary up, and mounted his own horse. The band straggled into place ahead of them, the leader shouted, ‘Ah!’ and with a tumultuous noise the procession started off.

  George rode a horse’s length ahead of the others, just behind the band. Chandra Sen, the patel, stepped delicately forward with long strides, the dust squirting up and over his open sandals. William and Mary rode behind him. Then came the palanquin, then the patel’s servants, then the tenant farmers.

  The road led through jungle so thick that the undergrowth threatened to strangle the trees. Flocks of green pigeons whirred up in alarm at the racket; monkeys swung from bough to bough among the recesses of the trees. William glanced at Mary; she rode with her lips slightly parted, and he thought she was looking anywhere but at George’s back ahead of her. He did not know what she was thinking about.

  She turned suddenly. ‘Isn’t this bizarre?’

  ‘What is?’ he said foolishly.

  ‘Oh, this. Bands are for big streets, big parades, not for marching, through a jungle with so few of us here, and no spectators.’

  He considered what she had said. ‘There’s us, dear.’

  She laughed. ‘My dear, literal husband, I love you … husband … husband.’ She spoke the word louder each time, as if there were magic in it, and so loud that George must have heard even over the tumult of the band.

  She went on, shouting to make herself heard, ‘This Eastern music is fascinating, weird. Do you know if this tune they’re playing has a name?’

  ‘Yes. “Rule, Britannia.”’

  She choked, catching her hand to her face and spluttering. William was puzzled. The bandsmen weren’t playing very well, but they were doing their best. Perhaps he too wouldn’t have recognized the tune if he had not heard bands like this one play it so often. He did not see anything particularly funny about it though.

  The road forked, and the bandsmen shuffled to a halt while two servants ran up with Chandra Sen’s horse and helped him into the saddle. ‘Now, sahib,’ he said to George, ‘it is fitting that I ride, for I am on my own land.’

 
The side track curved sharply off to the right. After a mile the forest began to thin out, small fields ate into it, then the fields grew together and lonely hovels dotted them, and the trail came into the open. The village of Padwa stood on a little knoll ahead, raised above the level of the September floods. Wild plum, peepul, and tamarind trees surrounded it; the sun shone down on thatch and tile, on the broad brown acres and the green carpets of jungle. William fidgeted in the saddle and knotted his right hand against his thigh. What extra value, or importance, did a parchment scroll place on a man who owned this?

  The village did not contain many houses, but they were all in good repair, grouped tidily around Chandra Sen’s own house, a large two-storied building of white-painted brick with a tiled red roof. The other houses were made of earth and cow dung and straw. The living quarters of Chandra Sen’s house occupied the upper storey, which was reached by a flight of wooden steps. The ground level was walled only at the back; cows and carts and piles of straw could be seen among the wooden uprights supporting the upper storey. A deep courtyard, stone paved and surrounded by a low dry-stone wall, extended back from the street to the house.

  Most of the men of the village were already in the patel’s procession. The women stood in the doorways of the houses, their hands or an end of clothing thrown up to cover their faces. A thickset man stood under the patel’s steps, holding two grey-coated dogs by the collars. The dogs snarled and strained forward to get at the strange men and horses approaching.

  Haphazardly, ceremoniously, with India’s unique blend of pomp and squalor, the presentation began. George Angelsmith rummaged in the depths of his saddle holsters and pulled out a white scroll bound with red tape and heavily sealed with scarlet sealing wax. He broke the seals, unrolled the parchment with a flourish, and coughed to clear his throat. The villagers were silent. Chandra Sen had dismounted and now stood alone and dignified, a little stooped, beside his courtyard wall.

  George intoned in a sonorous voice, ‘Know all men by these presents …’

  At the tail of the throng the band struck up a mournful tune. They could not see what was going on at the front. Men ran back, shouting and gesticulating to them to be quiet. George flushed angrily. Mary giggled and William frowned. The noise died down in unwilling jerks.

  George began to read again, his suppressed ill temper giving the banal phrases force and significance. ‘Know all men by these presents … His Excellency William Pitt Amherst, Earl Amherst, Governor-General of India … Mr. Benjamin Wilson, Agent to the Governor-General … disturbed state at that time of the territories ceded to the Honourable East India Company by the Rajah of Nagpur … Krishna Chandra Sen … unfailing influence for good, unflagging endeavours for the betterment of his tenants … rising revenue … no man more fitted to wield the sword of justice, the staff of discipline … Chandra Sen … record our high and enduring appreciation … Chandra Sen … Chandra Sen …’

  Fitfully throughout the reading a child screamed, terrified of the great horses and the people with the bleached faces.

  The village clerk stepped forward when George had finished, received the scroll, and began to read it again, translating into hand-hewn Hindi as he went.

  At last it came to an end. The clerk gave the scroll back to George. George gave it to Chandra Sen. Chandra Sen bowed. The English party dismounted from their horses, the villagers ebbed away to their houses. William’s bullock carts squeaked down the street. Sher Dil, the butler, dusty and tired, dismounted from his donkey and walked up to ask about the accommodation allotted for the night.

  Chandra Sen crossed the courtyard at William’s side, apologizing for the poverty of his house and its un-suitability for the reception of European ladies and gentlemen. William absently brushed aside the protestations; he had stayed here before and knew that the patel’s words were a matter of form. His mind searched for the source of its present distraction. Something had unsettled him so that he could not attend to the patel, or George, or even Mary. It was not the confusion of the ceremony just ended. That was nothing; in his own court he had to hear cases and give judgments through a similar turmoil. It might be George Angelsmith’s attendance on his honeymoon and the palpable tension it aroused in Mary. He frowned and kicked at a pebble. The pebble rolled toward one of the dogs. They were still snarling. He noticed the flat, expressionless face of the man who held them, the thickset man, Bhimoo, the village watchman; a strong, taciturn man.

  The black anger was running away in the recesses of his mind, but he saw it and caught it. It was George’s veiled insult at the river, about the crowd waiting upstream. Chandra Sen had not mentioned it; therefore it was none of his, William’s, business—according to George. George could go to hell.

  He said, interrupting Chandra Sen’s easy apologies, ‘Patel-ji, what was that crowd doing upstream from the ferry, on this bank?’

  The patel stopped with one hand on the railing of the steps up to his house. He turned slowly to face William. His long face was contained and sad. He paused for a full minute. George came up, and stopped, and raised his eyebrows. William felt Mary’s hand come to rest on his arm.

  Chandra Sen said, ‘I was going to speak about it when we were alone.’ He glanced at George as he spoke, and away again, and in his eyes there was a world of sorrow and distaste. William’s heart warmed to him, because he felt that there was an affinity between the man and himself; because the distaste in the large eyes was for the smart, the clever, the brilliant George Angelsmith; because the sorrow was for him, that he should have brought up this thing, its portent nameless still but taking an evil shape, at a time when George could hear to run back with the tale to Mr. Wilson.

  Chandra Sen said, ‘The wife of Gopal the weaver is going to become suttee tomorrow evening.’

  Chapter Three

  Suttee—a Sanskrit word meaning ‘a virtuous woman’; hence, along a road of thought fitfully brightened by the Hindu spiritual values, ‘a woman who burns herself alive on her husband’s funeral pyre; the custom which expects her to do so.’

  Suttee—the next morning William’s mind still ran with the word, and the idea, and with the particular example of it now facing him. All his life in India he had tried to feel for suttee the automatic revulsion of his fellow Englishmen and Christians. In part he had succeeded, but always underneath there was a glow of respect and admiration. His slow mind fought with itself. A man died; his wife had loved him, perhaps as Eve loved Adam—‘he for God only, she for God in him’; then her spirit, which was a part of his, had no house on earth; she became a husk of flesh, untenanted, blown through by cold winds; only when her body had gone to join her spirit, which was with him, could she live again. Was there any concept more beautiful? But why, then, was not man a part of woman? Why did a man who had loved his wife not go to her in the same way?

  Still, the idea was beautiful. When the time came for a woman to become a widow her body might indeed be an ugly husk, scarred and distorted by the hardship of the years. With faith, it was so small a step to climb up into the fire and away from the bending back and the aching joints and the cold hearth. One step up into the flames, then to soar on the rising oil-fed smoke to a place near the brilliant sun, where there was no night and no hunger.

  But what if the woman was young, what if there had been no love? He had heard of cases where a man’s relatives had a place in the world to maintain, and the strict observance of religious customs was a part of that place. Then sometimes they came in the evening, muffled the young widow’s face so that she could not cry out, and carried her soundlessly screaming to the burning ghat. They ran in silent procession with the draped thing, among the trees, and cast it on to the scented flames, and struck up a loud noise of music and wailing.

  William tried to understand, tried in the Western fashion to separate the good from the evil, to balance the beauty of sacrifice against the ugliness of waste, which is an essential of all sacrifice. But to these Hindus there was no conflict between God, who i
s all-powerful, and Satan, who yet flouts and perverts His intentions. Here, creation and destruction were opposite faces of the same medal, equal energies of the same universal spirit. He had to understand it if he could. Men and women who thought and acted in those beliefs were his charge. If he failed to understand, he could work only from a single sweeping generalization: that Indians were fatalistic, brutal, and loveless. That was the depth of untruth, in spite of the many who believed it.

  The battle within himself formed only a part of his trouble. He was a servant of the Honourable East India Company, and that huge organization was as torn by indecision as he was. Suttee was the people’s custom and religion; only an act of despotic power could abolish it. Yet, could Christians, having power, tolerate wilful self-murder?

  Talk of abolishing suttee had been going on for years. Nothing had been decided. William and the other officers in civil charge of districts lived in a vice, squeezed between the Hindus, who wanted to be left alone, and the superior British officials, who thought that suttee ought to be put down. A district officer might expect official disapproval if he failed to prevent a public suttee, though he had no power to forbid it. Mr. Wilson’s disapproval, for instance, would be genuine and severe; the Garhakota suttee of last year still obsessed his militant Christianity. It was easy to say that Mr. Wilson was a long way off and did not have to deal with the problem face to face, but it was an excuse. William knew that no doubts perturbed his father-in-law. If Mr. Wilson had been the Collector of Madhya, there would have been no suttee in Garhakota then, and there would be none now, whatever the cost.

  Mary, George Angelsmith, and William sat on low stools in the patel’s sunny courtyard. The dogs, chained up, lay silent ten feet off under the house, their noses resting on their paws and their eyes unwinkingly fixed on William’s face.