The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (28 page)

“Also you will have noticed, I think, that there are no old men in this room except for myself. Where are my old companions in political crime? Lili, please do not put on your inscrutable Rajput princess face. You know the answer. Dead, gone, retired, or hidden in our burrows grinding the mills of the administration exceeding slow but not always exceeding fine. You might find one or two of us at the other club. Didn’t you know about the other club? Oh well, now, that is an interesting story. We sit with the lady whose husband was one of the founder members.”

“Nello put up money but rarely went,” Lady Chatterjee says.

“Also he chose the name, isn’t it?”

Sometimes one could suspect Mr. Srinivasan of deliberate self-parody.

Lady Chatterjee explains, “They wanted to call it the MHC. All Nello did was get them to drop the H.”

“So MHC became MC, which stands simply for Mayapore Club. The H would have made it the Mayapore Hindu Club. No matter. An English wag anyway dubbed it the Indian Club which I believe is an
instrument for body-building. Also it was known among Indian wits as the Mayapore Chatterjee Club, or MCC for short. But whatever you called it it was always the
wrong
club. Of course it was originally meant to be an English-type club for Indians who were clubbable, but it was not for nothing that the H for Hindu was suggested. It became a place where the word Hindu was actually more important than the word Club. And Hindu did not mean Congress. No, no. Please be aware of the distinction. In this case Hindu meant Hindu Mahasabha. Hindu nationalism. Hindu narrowness. It meant rich banias with little education, landowners who spoke worse English than the youngest English subdivisional officer his eager but halting Hindi. It meant sitting without shoes and with your feet curled up on the chair, eating only horrible vegetarian dishes and drinking disgusting fruit juices. Mayapore, you understand, is not Bombay, and consequently the Mayapore club was not like the Willingdon club which was founded by your Viceroy Lord Willingdon in a fit of rage because the Indian guests he invited—in ignorance—to a private banquet at the Royal Yacht club were turned away from the doors in their Rolls-Royces before he cottoned on to what was happening. Ah well, perhaps dear old Nello imagined in Mayapore a little Willingdon? But what happened? One by one the type of Indian who would have loved the club because it was the nearest he was then able to get to enjoying the fruits of what he had been educated up by your people to see as just one but an important aspect of civilized life—one by one this type of Indian stopped going to the Mayapore and with each abstention the feet of the bania were more firmly established under the table—or rather, upon the seat of his chair—

“I think they are ready in the dining room.”

“The point is, you see,” Mr. Srinivasan says, having apologized for the absence of beef, the omnipresence of mutton, “that these old men, my peers, my old companions in crime and adversity, those who aren’t dead, those who are still living in Mayapore, now find themselves somehow less conspicuous at the Mayapore club than at the Gymkhana. Just look at the young faces that surround us. So many of these boys are telling us that we cannot expect to dine out forever on stories of how we fought and got rid of the British, that some of us never dine out at all, except with each other, like old soldiers mulling over their long ago battles. And when it comes to spending a few hours at a club, most of us—although not I—choose the company of men who rest on laurels of a different kind, men with whom it is easier to identify than it is with the
members here because here everyone is go-ahead and critical of our past. I mean, for instance, that it is easier for us to identify with men like Mr. Romesh Chand Gupta Sen, now a venerable gentleman of nearly eighty years and still going every morning to his office above his warehouse in the Chillianwallah bazaar. To the chagrin of his sons and grandsons, I should add. And on one evening a week to the Mayapore club to discuss business prospects with men who were not interested in politics then, and now are interested neither in technical experts nor in theories of industrial expansion, but instead interested as they always were simply in making money and being good Hindus.”

There have been prawn cocktails. Now the curried mutton arrives. The chief steward comes to oversee its serving, but breaks off from this duty to walk over and greet a party of English, two of the men and two of the women who were in the lounge bar. The steward indicates the table he has reserved for them, but they ignore him and select another more to their liking. Both the men are still wearing shorts. Their legs are bare to the ankles. The women have plump, mottled arms, and wear sleeveless cotton shifts. Without the knitted cardigans you feel they would put on at home of an evening over these summer dresses they have a peeled, boiled look. They are young. They sit together—opposite their husbands—an act of involuntary segregation that by now is probably becoming familiar to the Indians as they get used to a new race of sahibs and memsahibs from Stevenage and Luton but may still puzzle them when they recollect how critical the old style British were of the Indian habit of keeping men and women so well separated that a mixed party was almost more than an English host and hostess could bear to contemplate.

The dining room, like the smoking room, has probably changed little since Daphne Manners’ time. It is a square room, with a black and white tiled floor, and walls paneled in oak to shoulder height, and whitewashed above. Three square pillars, similarly paneled to the same height, support the ceiling at apparently random but presumably strategic points. There are something like a score of tables, some round, some rectangular, each with its white starched cloth, its electro-plated cutlery and condiment tray, its mitred napkins, its slim chromium flower vase holding a couple of asters, its glass jug filled with water and protected by a weighted muslin cover. There is a large Tudor-style fireplace whose black cavity is partly hidden by a framed tapestry screen. Above the fireplace there is a portrait of Mr. Nehru looking serene in a
perplexed sort of way. One can assume that when Daphne Manners dined here the frame contained a coloured likeness of George VI wearing a similar expression. Four fans are suspended from the ceiling on slender tubes that whip unsteadily with the movement of the turning blades. There are two arched exits, one leading into the smoking room and the other into the main hall. There is also a third exit but that only leads into the kitchens. Against the wall, close to the kitchen exit, stands a monumental oak sideboard or dumbwaiter. On its top tier there are spare napkins, knives, forks and spoons, water jugs, and on the lower tier, baskets of bread, bowls of fruit, bottles of sauce and spare cruets. Light is provided by stubby candle-style wall brackets and a couple of wooden chandeliers with parchment shades, and during daytime by the windows that look onto the porticoed verandah at the front of the club, windows whose curtains are now pulled back and are open to let in the night air.

Well: it can be pictured all those years ago, especially on a Saturday evening, with a band thumping in the lounge bar from which the old wicker tables and chairs have been cleared, and the dining room rearranged to provide for a cold buffet supper. In the flagged yard at the back that fringes the tennis courts there are coloured lights slung in the trees, and couples used to sit out there to cool off between dances, waiting for the next foxtrot or quickstep. Some swam in the little floodlit pool that lies behind the changing and shower rooms, the pool which, tonight, is in darkness, in need of scraping (Mr. Srinivasan says as he conducts his guests on a tour of inspection after the ice cream that followed the curried mutton), and is seldom used because it is open to all and neither race seems particularly to fancy the idea of using it when it can’t be guaranteed that the person last using it was clean. There is a story that two or three years ago an Englishman emptied all the chamber pots from the ablution cubicles into it.

“But I was telling you earlier on,” Mr. Srinivasan says, leading the way back through the now deserted lounge bar to the smoking room—which has filled up and even sports a few ladies in sarees who are, one gathers, military wives—“I was telling you about the kind of man whom old fellows like myself who were reared on briefs and files and nurtured on politics now find it easier to fit in with than we find it here at the Gymkhana.”

Mr. Srinivasan raises his finger and a bearer appears and takes an order for coffee and brandy.

“And I mentioned Romesh Chand Gupta Sen,” he continues. “He is a case in point. With Romesh Chand it has always been a question of business first and politics last. Well, not even last. Nowhere. He has made three fortunes, the first during the old peacetime days, the second during the war and the third since independence. None of his sons was allowed to continue education beyond Government Higher School. I asked him why this was. He said, ‘To succeed in life it is necessary to read a little, to write less, to be able to calculate a simple multiplication and to develop a sharp eye for the main chance.’ He married a girl who could not even write her name. She could not run a household either, but his mother trained her up to that, which is what Hindu mothers are for. When his younger brother married a girl called Shalini Kumar Romesh prophesied no good coming of the union, because she came of a family who allowed education even if they did not wholly believe in it, and as a result Shalini’s brother went to live in England and Shalini herself could write beautifully in English. She was widowed at an early age. You may find this difficult to believe, but on her husband’s death the women of Romesh Chand’s family did their best to persuade her to defy the law and become suttee. Of course she refused. What woman in her right mind wants to burn alive on her husband’s funeral pyre? Also she refused to leave her dead husband’s house in Chillianwallah Bagh. I tell you this because it is perhaps relevant to your interest?

“It was Romesh Chand who insisted that that anglicized nephew of hers, Hari Kumar, should be brought back from England when her brother, Hari’s father, died and left him homeless and penniless. Actually we suspected Hari’s father of committing suicide when he realized he’d come to the end of a series of foolish speculations. Be that as it may, when Mrs. Gupta Sen heard the news of her brother’s death she went to Romesh and asked him for money that would enable Hari to stay in Berkshire to finish at his public school and go on to a university. This would be, what? 1938. She had almost no means of her own. She lived as a widow, alone in the house in Chillianwallah Bagh, mainly on her brother-in-law Romesh’s charity. It was because she had always wanted a son, a child of her own, that she fell in with Romesh’s counterproposal that Hari should be brought home to live with her and learn how to be a good Hindu. To bring about this satisfactory state of affairs Romesh said he would even be willing to pay Hari’s passage and
increase Mrs. Gupta Sen’s monthly allowance. She had lived a long time alone, you know, seldom leaving the house. Almost she had become a good Hindu herself.

“She lived with great simplicity. Young Hari must have had a shock. From the outside the house in Chillianwallah Bagh looked modern. I suppose it still does. What I believe you used to call sun-trap. All the houses on the Chillianwallah Bagh reclamation and development were put up in the late twenties. It was waste ground before then, and was called Chillianwallah Bagh because the land belonged to the estate of a Parsee called Chillianwallah. The Parsees have also always concentrated on business but they are much more westernized, hardly Indians at all. The land was bought from the Chillianwallah heirs by a syndicate of Mayapore businessmen headed by old Romesh Chand, who would never have lived in the sort of modern European-style house that was to be put up there, but saw nothing new-fangled in the anticipated profits. In fact it was to make sure of the amenities for development, such as lighting and water and drainage, and a Government grant-in-aid, that he saw to it his otherwise unsatisfactory younger brother—the one who married Shalini Kumar—got a seat on the Municipal Board. So, in time, up went these concrete sun-trap-style monstrosities—sun-trap only in the style because with so much sun about it is necessary to keep it out, not trap it, to have very small windows, you see, unless you have wide old-fashioned verandahs. And into one of them, into number twelve, Romesh’s brother moved with his wife Shalini, the same house young Hari came to live in nearly ten years later and must have been shocked by, because inside they are dark and airless, with small rooms and steep stairs and no interior plan and Indian-style bathroom. And in number twelve there was almost no furniture because although Mrs. Gupta Sen’s husband had bought a lot to go with the house, Romesh paid for it with a loan, and had since sold most of it to pay himself back. The house itself also belonged to him on mortgage. I know these things because I was what in England you would call the family lawyer.

“Yes, you are right. Lili bet me you’d cotton on. Indeed yes. It was I. I was the lawyer Romesh Chand sent for that morning Sister Ludmila went to his office and told him Hari Kumar had been taken away by the police. They thought he was arrested. This, of course, was about six months before my own arrest. It never bothered Romesh that I was politically committed. He understood the uses of politics in the same way that he understood the law of diminishing returns. After I had gone
to the police station and found that Hari was already released I went back to my office, sent my clerk with a message to Romesh, and then went on to the house in Chillianwallah Bagh, to find out what it had all been about.

“Hari would not come down from his room to see me. But Mrs. Gupta Sen and I were good friends. We always spoke in English. With Romesh I had to talk in Hindi. She said, ‘Tell Romesh everything was a mistake. There is nothing for him to go to botheration over.’ I asked her whether it was true, what the police had told me, that Hari had been drunk and taken by that mad woman to what she called her sanctuary. I had not known him ever to drink heavily. He was a great worry to his family but he had always seemed to be sober in his habits. She did not know whether he had been drunk. She said, ‘But I know that his life here, and therefore mine, is becoming unbearable.’