To The Coral Strand Page 5

  ‘A more dangerous character than K.P.,’ Rodney said cheerfully. ‘I rather liked K.P. He was a Communist, but he had a sense of humour. I haven’t met L.P., but of course I’ve heard and read a good deal about him. His brother was a tiger - this one’s a man, a twisted, tortured fanatic. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t I who actually shot K.P. Another chap did ... But it doesn’t matter. I’m afraid, Max, it wouldn’t matter if they promised to keep me on for thirty years. I’ve seen Indian businesses at work. This is where I discover I’m English. This is the parting of the ways.’

  ‘You’d have stayed on in the army if they’d let you, wouldn’t you?’ Max said.

  Rodney looked up, grinning with the slightly wolfish grin that Max remembered best about him; it had been most common when he was under strain, in battle. ‘The Indian Army,’ he said, ‘is not an Indian business - yet. It rests exactly in the mode and tradition we made it. It will remain that way just as long as people like you are in charge. You don’t think or act like an Indian, even though you do put on protective camouflage sometimes, like that jodhpur coat ... That will change. Your political bosses don’t like it now and they’ll force the change. In a few years they’ll find chaps who think their way, not yours, and they’ll push them to the top. The pressure will come from inside, from underneath, too. Remember Iqbal?’

  ‘Commanding the 9/21st Punjabis?’

  ‘Yes. Just after the war nearly all his officers were Indian. His adjutant borrowed a battalion truck for non-military purposes - took his wife and kids to the flicks in it - not five hours after signing a strict order of Iqbal’s against such practices. Iqbal sacked him. Well, the adjutant’s wife was a friend of Iqbal’s wife. Know what happened? Iqbal’s wife refused to sleep with him unless he reinstated the chap as adjutant ... Things like that will happen. There’s an Indian way of dealing with them, I’m sure, and that’s how they will be dealt with. But there’s no British way of dealing with them. Iqbal was helpless. Know what he did? Applied for more British junior officers. Of course, there weren’t any to be had ... No, the bell has sounded. I realise now that I’ve been waiting for it, listening for it, ever since Independence. I got absolutely soused that night ... Perhaps that’s what made yesterday, with the Gonds, so particularly wonderful. The roulette game’s ended, the revolver’s gone off, and I’m dead. But I won’t lie down. I’m not going to go quietly. I’m going to fight, Max.’

  Max poured himself another drink. He felt much more unhappy than Rodney seemed to. ‘There must be lots of good jobs for you,’ he said. ‘You have so many friends here ...’

  Rodney went on as though he had not spoken: ‘I’m not going to go quietly, and I’m not going to stay quietly. Not like Great-aunt Mary ... great-aunt by marriage. She’s still here. Running a hill station hotel on the road to Lansdowne. Her friends used to go up and down in tongas and ekkas, and break journey there overnight. She made a good living, and the place was always full of handsome, sunburned sahibs and pretty ladies and rosy children. Then they built a motor road, and the traffic went by without stopping, though most of her friends would at least have a cup of tea. Then her generation got old, or retired, or were killed. Then no one came, except a few Indians, who were terribly polite to her. For ten years no one at all. She’s still there, nearly ninety, enormous wooden building, no servants but a crazy cook about the same age, with the same ideas and the same dreams, though he’s a U.P. Muslim. She dresses every night for dinner in the gown she wore at Curzon’s Viceregal Ball in ‘04, and eats a can of bully beef once a week, and the dust lies like a dense silent carpet over everything, and all the glass broken, and langurs swinging from the pines behind the house into the upstairs rooms. Is that what you’d like me to do?’

  Max made a helpless gesture with his hands.

  ‘What about smuggling? That’s more like it, for me. What about armed dacoity? It’s all here still, under the surface, the India my great-grandfather lived with, and the ones before him ... It wouldn’t be hard to re-create the Pindaris, motorised. With a little bit of skill and luck a thousand properly led men could take over a province, or a district at least - all in the most proper manner, votes and all... and I’d be in the background, just like the old days.’

  ‘You can’t turn the clock back, Rodney,’ Max said.

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘No one can. Besides, you’d have to go back too far. For the past century and a half you’ve been building things up here, not tearing them down. You’ve done the work pretty well, too. We might tear ourselves apart - but you couldn’t. Anyway, you’re joking.’

  ‘Believe me, I’m not.’

  ‘Rodney, be patient. Just wait a bit. Remember your friends. India badly needs people like you, and there are enough of us, and we’re strong enough not to have to take dictation from anyone, not even Nehru. If you want to stay, we’ll find something good, and worthy of you.’

  Rodney was looking at him, and seemed to be weighing his words. At last he said, ‘Tomorrow I shall probably agree with you. I shall probably do just what you recommend. At this moment I want to fight. I know you’ve had the feeling. Twice in your life, eh? Once, when that fellow yelled at you to stop playing bloody Wog music in the mess.’

  Max nodded. Rodney was referring to the incident which had given him his nickname, and made him popular with the inscrutable English. When he joined his Dogra battalion in 1927 the senior subaltern was a man who disliked educated Indians, though he loved the sepoys well enough. Max, the new second lieutenant, liked to play Indian music on the mess phonograph. The senior subaltern ordered him not to, in the language quoted by Rodney. Max respectfully refused to obey. The feud went on for three years until, in 1930, the senior subaltern seized his pile of records and smashed them on the stone floor. Max knocked him out. Hence the name ‘Max’, for ‘Max Schmeling’; and hence one year’s loss of leave privileges. A well-deserved punishment, Max thought. Right or wrong, the fellow was his senior officer, and there were other, proper channels of complaint.

  Rodney continued: ‘The second time was just after Independence, when Nehru and the boys wanted to promote some of the I.N.A. fellows, and you and Des and N. P. Satish and Chandra went and said that if they were made heroes, after what they’d done to Indian prisoners in Singapore, you were going out.’

  Max nodded again. The Japanese had formed the Indian National Army from Indian soldiers who fell prisoner into their hands in Malaya and Singapore. Himself, he had never felt strongly for or against the I.N.A., as an institution. There were many ways of being an Indian patriot in those days before Independence. But he and other Indian regulars could not forgive the I.N.A.’s treatment of such men as Hari Badhwar and Dhargal-kar, who had refused to join it. Them the I.N.A. had hung up by the thumbs, tortured, starved for months in solitary confinement. When the Congress leaders wanted to idolise the I.N.A. Max knew again - he had to fight.

  Rodney said, ‘Well... I feel now that I have to fight. And even though tomorrow I may decide not to, the need to fight will be very close under the surface, just suppressed. Remember that, Max, remember.’

  Max said, ‘What about the other letter?’

  ‘Ah, that. You ought to read that. It would make you cry. Cry for the gulf between people who are supposed to know each other pretty well. But I won’t give it to you, because it is a caddish thing to do, to reveal the soul of a lady ... This is from Frances Clayton, my ex-fiancée.’

  ‘Ex!’

  ‘It was written before the McFadden Pulley letter, so she knew nothing about that. She informs me she cannot face the prospect of living in India the rest of her life. I must go home to England, where brother John can guarantee me a good job with an M.P. subsidiary run by the people who own - used to own - M.P. She begs me to come to Delhi to discuss it. She’s a nice girl, Max. Very nice. If you can call a woman of twenty-nine a girl. I suppose so. Unfortunately, I don’t love her.’

  ‘Don’t say it!’ Max cried. ‘Go to Delhi and talk to her. It’l
l be all right.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Rodney said, grinning. ‘It took me time to get over Victoria Jones, the Anglo-Indian girl I met in Bhowani in ‘46, during the K. P. Roy affair. That was probably an attempt to avoid expulsion from India, the psychologists would say. There was an earlier love, which I shall never get over. Now I’ve spent a year of chastity for the sake of Frances, who is a very decent young woman - but nice, don’t forget that. Today, looking at Sumitra got me by the balls, and I’m sure I could love her if things worked out that way. But they won’t ... Meanwhile the manager of the cement works has informed me that the local harlots are superannuated, diseased, or both. He himself always sends to a little village called Pattan - it’s hidden in the jungles behind Lapri - where there are a pair of beauties. I have already taken his advice. Ratanbir went with the company jeep to fetch the girls some time ago. He ought to be back any moment.’

  ‘Ratanbir!’ Max exclaimed. ‘You wouldn’t have ...’

  ‘No,’ Rodney said, smiling the wolfish smile. ‘I wouldn’t have. I have never involved any soldier or servant or friend in anything of the kind, as far as in me lay. That is the sahib’s way. I am no longer a sahib ... I won’t ask you to stay, because I know you - and I know Janaki. Thanks for coming. Good night, old boy.’ Max stopped in the doorway. ‘For God’s sake, Rodney, remember what I said. You’re not alone.’

  Rodney stood in the middle of the room, unswaying, smiling, saying nothing. Max strode heavily out and down the veranda steps. In the drive the headlights of the jeep flared on to him, half blinding him. When it had passed, slowing rapidly, he noticed two women, their saris drawn across their faces, sitting huddled together in the back seat behind the dark, stolid silhouette of Ratanbir.

  Arrived back at the dak bungalow, Max felt very tired. I’m forty-four, he thought, but sometimes I feel like ninety. Perhaps it had something to do with the long fight for Independence, twenty years of being shot at from two sides, the anti-Indian British sneering at him for a Wog, the anti-British Indians sneering at him for a lackey. Rodney’s reminding him of it had brought out the feeling of fatigue, of sheer exhaustion, that used to assail him. There had been days when he felt he had lost all his friends, all love, everything. Only an inner conviction that he was doing right, could indeed do no other, had supported him, and a sense that the tide must turn, and bring all to him - freedom, and respect, and love.

  To his embarrassment he found Sumitra the Rani sitting in the main room with his wife. He had not had time to adjust his face, and came in showing the heavy thoughts that had weighed on his mind, as after a bloody failure in Burma, and for the same reason - the inevitability, and the waste.

  ‘What’s happened? What’s the matter with him?’ Janaki was on her feet, her hand urgent on his sleeve.

  He said, ‘Quite a lot, I’m afraid.’

  He sat down and told them, as briefly as he could, about Rodney’s state. When he ended he looked up and saw tears glistening in his wife’s lower lashes and a shining wet line down her left cheek. Sumitra’s heavy, perfectly curved brows were bent down in a frown over her huge eyes. It was she who spoke first. ‘A casualty of history. Just as the D.C. said.’

  Janaki muttered, ‘But it’s dreadful. He wouldn’t be a casualty if he didn’t care.’

  Sumitra said, ‘Unfortunately, that is always true, everywhere, nahin?’

  Her eyes shone and the frown had gone, and her face had taken back its ancient-seeming statuary beauty. She stood up, the rich sari rustling heavily over her thighs. She arranged the end of it lightly over her head, drawing it over the curve of her breast in a slow sweeping motion of great provocativeness.

  ‘I will go to him,’ she said. ‘Casualties need nurses.’

  After a moment of stunned inaction Max sprang to his feet. ‘Sumitra, I don’t think ... he’s drinking, you know. He must have put away a bottle by now. It’s bound to hit him soon.’

  ‘Perhaps I can stop him drinking,’ Sumitra said, smiling slightly.

  ‘Really,’ Max mumbled, ‘really, I wouldn’t, I don’t think you … ‘

  She gazed at him steadily. ‘You mean he has more than a couple of bottles to keep him company?’

  ‘Yes’, Max mumbled. He felt acutely uncomfortable. This woman was pure Indian by blood, by manner pure foreign - French perhaps, French grande-dame, courtesan, actress, God knows what.

  ‘You’re blushing like a schoolgirl, Max. I shall go to him. No, I’d rather walk.’ She spoke with finality, and, trailing her hand in a small graceful gesture, left the room.

  Max blew out his cheeks in a long sigh. ‘I need another drink,’ he said. ‘She’s incredible. Rodney’s got two girls from some village there - tarts. Heaven knows what they’ll be doing by the time Sumitra arrives ... She’s immoral! And yet, I don’t think she’s going down there for her own sake, for her own gratification, do you? ... I suppose it’s a wonderful thing to do, when you think of it, even though he has two tarts with him ... especially if he has two tarts with him.’ He found the whisky in the corner cupboard and poured out a stiff peg. ‘She doesn’t give a damn. Poor Dip ... poor Rodney. I wish I knew what he was talking about, half the time. Some woman who’s his ideal. They were lovers and then she left him . . . grew away. He said it was inevitable. Because she was Indian? I’m not sure he said that, but I somehow feel that’s what he meant.’

  He was talking to himself, revolving his glass in his hand, staring at the tabletop, trying to see in its polished teak surface the solution of Rodney’s riddles and allusions, trying to bring into the framework of his common sense these mysteries of sensitivity which so many others, especially Indians, knew about while he didn’t. Well, I’m a Jat, he thought. We’re supposed to be as dense as buffaloes ...

  He looked up and saw his wife’s head bent over the table, her hands to her face. The violence of her silent sobbing had loosened the fastenings of her hair, and already it was falling down. He stumbled to his feet, whispering, ‘Kya hua, piari?’ and stretched out his hand to her. It brushed hard against her shaking head and completed the undoing of the smooth-swept hair. Her head bent farther down and her black hair swept out across the table, a shining river of light and shadow.

  Max gasped, and staggered. ‘Janaki!’ he cried.

  The hidden head nodded and the hair moved on the table, heaving and writhing and then lying again still, a dark river, frozen in motion. The hair fell back and her face came up, tear streaked, working, ugly in grief.

  ‘Yes. Yes, it was I. All true. The love, why it came ... and what kind. What happened afterwards... true ... all so many years ago ... I was not hurt, till now, now, when it’s all been over so long. He’s only hurt because he cared. And I can’t do anything for him, I just can’t ... I’m your wife. I always have been.’ Again her head sank, and again the heavy sobbing filled the room.

  The General looked at her a long time. Hers was the flowing hair that haunted Rodney Savage’s dreams. He himself was the husband who had possessed, but not possessed. The same man who had saved his career had taken his honour. A surge of anger rose slowly in him and his thick fingers clenched.

  Why hadn’t they run away together? Why was she still here? Why had she stayed with him all these years, fourteen years since the Peshawar days? Fourteen years of love, comradeship, affliction, partings, joinings, children. The woman of Rodney’s dream was Janaki, but it was also India.

  The astrologer had chosen the date for his marriage, but he’d had to change it - exigency of the service. So perhaps these sorrows were inevitable, no human being to blame. It seemed to him, as the anger sank and vanished, to be replaced by a deep thankfulness, that perhaps he could never suffer, now, as Rodney and Janaki had, and would.

  He walked round the table, gathered his wife gently in his arms, so that her face rested against his shoulder, and carried her to their room, murmuring to her in their own language as he went.

  Chapter 4

  Frances Clayton turned the page and glance
d up. The three overstuffed armchairs were arranged in a group at the edge of the lawn, just in the shade of the trees. From behind the trees, beyond the low brick wall, came the hum of motor traffic and the steady clip-clop of a tonga pony’s hoofs.

  A sudden jangle of the tonga bell made her start. On the invisible road someone poured out a torrent of blurred, angry Hindustani. Someone else answered, other voices joined in ... Another near miss, another argument, Indians yelling and screaming at each other. Why couldn’t they settle their differences sensibly, without hysterics and bad temper? And dust everywhere even though the rains were hardly over. Frowning, she looked at the men in the other two chairs.

  ‘I think you’re mistaking Roy’s character. He’s not cheap. It’s not you he’s against, but all British. And you’re over-estimating his influence. The men who have floated the new company are out to make money ... ’

  That was her brother John speaking. A ray of sunlight streaming through the branches had landed, like a magician, on his head, making the thin blond hairs vanish and turning the head into a pink football. His long face was pale, and he seemed worried, as usual. Well, now he’d got something to worry about.

  He continued: ‘You don’t seem to realise that you’ve made more money for M.P. in one year than I have in twenty - well, say thirteen, not counting the years I was in the army. That bakelite deal which you suggested has been snowballing ever since.’

  ‘I heard it was going well. But all I did was read that this American chemical wizard was in Bombay, and go and see him.’