Authors: Paul Scott
“Young Hari Kumar, you know, was typical of the kind of boy Nello had in mind when he financed and founded the Mayapore club. But by Hari’s time it was already choc-a-bloc with the banias looking like squatting Buddhas contemplating the mysteries of profit and loss. And of course there were no women. It wasn’t intended to be a club for men only but that is what it had become and has remained. Which is one of the reasons why I am the exception to the rule, a staunch Gymkhana supporter! The lady over there is the wife of Colonel Varma. She is delightful. You must meet her. General and Mrs. Mukerji aren’t here tonight, but that is because no doubt they are invited to Roger’s number one farewell. Next Saturday will be number two farewell and even I am invited to that.”
“So am I,” Lady Chatterjee says. “I was supposed to go to number one with the other governors of the Technical Coll, but said I couldn’t, so I’m at number two as well.”
“Then we will go together? Good. Meanwhile you, my dear fellow, have noticed, I expect, that all the English have now left the club?”
“To go to Roger’s?”
“Oh, no. Of your fellow-countrymen who were here this evening only Mr. and Mrs. Grigson and the lady who was with Mrs. Grigson will be at number one party. The Grigsons are senior. The other English you saw were junior. They will go to number two. Roger refers to them as foremen. In fact Roger has been known to call the Gymkhana the Foreman’s club. It was one of the gentlemen of the type Roger refers to as foremen who emptied the chamber pots into the swimming pool.
After he had emptied them one of his friends had the idea of making a little Diwali, a parody of our festival of lights. So they got hold of some candles and stuck them into the pots and lighted them and set them afloat. A few of our Indian members who were present complained to the secretary, and one of our youngest and strongest members even complained directly to the gentlemen who were having such an enjoyable time at our expense. But they threatened to throw him into the pool, and used language that I cannot repeat. As an innocent bystander I found the whole situation most interesting. It was an example of the kind of club horseplay we had heard of at second or third hand and a person like myself couldn’t help but remember student rags from his college days. This particular demonstration was hardly a student rag, however. Of course they were drunk, but
in vino veritas.
They were acting without inhibition. Forgive me, Lili, you find the subject disagreeable. Let us have Colonel Varma and his wife to join us.”
The colonel is a tall wiry man and his wife a neat wiry woman who seems to wear traditional Indian costume more for its theatrical effect than for comfort or from conviction. The tough little shell of skin-thin masculinity that used to harden the outward appearance of the British military wives also encloses Mrs. Varma. What terror she must strike in the tender heart of every newly commissioned subaltern! Her wit is sharp, probably as capable of wounding as her husband’s ceremonial sword. Tonight he is in mufti. They are going to the pictures, the ten o’clock performance; the English pictures at the Eros, not the Indian pictures at the Majestic. For a while the talk is of Paris, because the film is about Paris—the film itself is said to be rotten but the photography interesting—and then the Varmas say good-bye; Mr. Srinivasan’s party breaks up and Lili goes to powder her nose.
“While we wait for Lili,” he says, “let me show you something—” and leads the way into the black and white tiled hall where between two mounted buffalo heads there is a closed mahogany door with brass fingerplates and a brass knob. The mounted heads and the door all bear inscriptions: the latter on enamel and the former on ivory. The first buffalo was presented by Major W. A. Tyrell-Smith in 1915, and the second by Mr. Brian Lloyd in 1925. The enamel plate on the door bears the single word: Secretary.
Mr. Srinivasan knocks and getting no answer opens the door and switches on the light and so reveals a small office with an old roll-top desk and an air of desuetude. “As the first Indian secretary of the
Gymkhana, from 1947 to 1950 actually, I have a certain right of entry,” he says, and goes to a bookcase in which a few musty volumes mark the stages of the club’s administrative history. Among them are books bound like ledgers and blocked on the spine in gilt with the words “Members’ Book,” and in black with the numerals denoting the years covered.
“You would be interested in this,” he says, and takes down the book imprinted “1939–1945.”
The pages are feint-ruled horizontally in blue and vertically in red to provide columns for the date, the member’s name and the name of his guest.
“If you look through the pages you will see the signatures of one or two Indian members. But they were of course all officers who held the King-Emperor’s commission. By and large such gentlemen found it only comfortable to play tennis here and then go back to their quarters. The committee were in rather a quandary when King’s commissioned Indian officers first began to turn up in Mayapore. It was always accepted that any officer on the station should automatically become a member. Indeed it was compulsory for him to pay his subscription whether he ever entered the place or not. And you could not keep him out if he was an Indian because that would have been to insult the King’s uniform. There was talk in the thirties of founding another club and reserving the Gymkhana for senior officers, which would have made it unlikely that any Indian officer on station would have been eligible. But the money simply wasn’t available. In any case the Indian officers more or less solved the problem themselves by limiting their visits to appearances on the tennis courts. One was never known to swim in the pool, seldom to enter the bar, never to dine. There were plenty of face-saving excuses that both sides could make. The Indian could pretend to be teetotal and to be reluctant to come to the club and not share fully in its real life. The English would accept this as a polite, really very gentlemanly way of not directly referring to the fact that his pay was lower than that of his white fellow-officer and that therefore he could not afford to stand what I believe is still called his whack. If he was married the situation was easier still. The English always assumed that Indian women found it distasteful to be publicly in mixed company and so there was a tacit understanding that a married Indian officer would appear even less frequently than his bachelor colleagues, because he preferred to stay in quarters with his wife.
“And really there was remarkably little bad feeling about all this kind of thing on either side. An Indian who sought and obtained a commission knew what problems he was likely to encounter. Usually it was enough for him to know that he couldn’t actually be blackballed at the Gymkhana merely because he was Indian, and enough for the English members to know that he was unlikely to put in any prolonged or embarrassing appearance. And of course British commanding officers could always be relied upon to iron out any difficulties that arose in individual cases. It wasn’t until the war began and the station began to fill up not only with a larger number of Indian King’s commissioned officers but also with English officers holding emergency commissions that the committee actually had to meet and pass a
rule.
But then happily, you see, a realistic analysis of the situation provided its own solution. In the first place the influx of officers into the station obviously meant a severe strain on the club’s facilities. In the second place the new officers were not only holders of temporary commissions but tended to be temporary in themselves, I mean liable to posting at almost any time. And of course among them there were likely to be men called up from all walks of civilian life, men of the type who, well, wouldn’t be at home in the atmosphere of the club. And so for once the committee found themselves thinking of ways of keeping out some of their own countrymen as well as Indians. We, who were not eligible, watched all this from the sidelines with great interest. The rule the committee passed was a splendid English compromise. It was to the effect that for the duration of the war special arrangements would need to be made to extend club hospitality to as many officers on station as possible. To do this the compulsory subscription was waived in the case of all but regular officers and two new types of membership were introduced. Officers with temporary or emergency commissions could enjoy either what was called Special Membership, which involved paying the subscription and was meant of course to attract well-brought-up officers who could be assumed to know how to behave, or Privileged Temporary Membership which entitled the privileged temporary member to use the club’s facilities on certain specific days of the week but which could be withdrawn without notice. Outwardly the no notice provision was meant to advertise the committee’s thoughtful recognition of the temporary nature of wartime postings to the station. What it really meant was that an emergency officer who misbehaved once could be barred from entry thenceforth. The privileged temporary member had to pay his bills on the spot.
He also had to pay a cover charge if he used the dining room and what was called a Club Maintenance Subscription if he used the pool or the tennis courts. He was allowed to bring only one ‘approved’ guest at any one time, for whom he paid an extra cover charge. Approved was officially held to mean approved by the committee but it also meant approved by the man’s commanding officer who no doubt made it clear to these young innocents who were in uniform for a specific and limited purpose what kind of guest would be admitted. Officially it was said to be an insurance against a young man bringing the wrong sort of
woman.
Unofficially it meant bringing no Anglo-Indian or Indian woman, and no Anglo-Indian or Indian man unless that man was himself a King’s commissioned officer. In any case, the expense of an evening at the club was usually reckoned to have been raised to the level that no wartime temporary officer would be able to afford more than once a month unless he was well-off. This was the period during which Smith’s Hotel really flourished. So did the station restaurant, and of course the Mayapore Indian club enjoyed unaccustomed affluence. The Chinese Restaurant in the cantonment bazaar made a fortune and you had to book a seat at the Eros Cinema two or three days in advance. As for the old Gymkhana club, well, it had its unhappy experiences, but by and large managed to maintain its air of all-white social superiority.
“The curious anomaly was, though, that even in those expansive days which the die-hards used to refer to as the thin end of the wedge, Indian officers of the civil service, even of the covenanted civil service, were not admitted as guests let alone as members. Which meant that the District and Sessions Judge, dear old Menen, such a distinguished fellow, couldn’t enter, even if brought by the Deputy Commissioner. There was no written rule about it. It was simply an unwritten rule rigorously applied by the committee and if you take Menen as a leading example, never challenged by those who were excluded.
“Here in this book, though, you will see that as far back as May the twenty-second, 1939, the Deputy Commissioner, Mr. Robin White, had the temerity to bring
to
and the luck to succeed in bringing
in
no less than three Indians who did not hold the King-Emperor’s commission—the provincial Minister for Education and Social Services, the Minister’s secretary—my old friend Desai—and myself. That is Mr. White’s own handwriting, of course. Perhaps you can judge character from handwriting? Well, but all this is a long story. We must leave it for tonight. Lili will be looking for us.”
Before the book is closed, though, a flick through the pages relating to 1942 reveals familiar names. The rule of the club has always been that a member signs his name on his first visit and then again on those occasions when he brings a guest. Brigadier Reid’s almost illegible signature appears on a date in April; Robin White’s on one or two occasions as host to men Mr. Srinivasan identifies variously as members of the Secretariat, Revenue Settlement Officers, the Divisional Commissioner, and—once, the Governor and his Lady. And there too on several occasions is a curiously rounded and childlike signature easily read as that of Mr. Ronald Merrick, the District Superintendent of Police, and, in the same hand, the name of his guest, Miss Daphne Manners.
And on a date in February 1942 a Captain Colin Lindsey signed in, presumably on his first appearance as a temporary privileged member of the Gymkhana club of Mayapore. Captain Lindsey’s signature is steady and sober, unlike the signature that does not actually accompany it, but which one can see, by its side, in the imagination: the signature of his old friend Harry Coomer who round about this time was found drunk by Sister Ludmila in the waste ground where the city’s untouchables lived in poverty and squalor.
At night the old cantonment area, the area north of the river, still conveys an idea of space that has only just begun to succumb to the invasion of brick and mortar, the civilizing theories of necessary but discreet colonial urbanization. From the now dark and deserted maidan, across which the uninterrupted currents of warm—even voluptuous—air build up an impetus that comes upon the cheek as a faintly perceptible breath of enervating rather than refreshing wind, there issues a darkness of the soul, a certain heaviness that enters the heart and brings to life a sadness such as might grow in, weigh down (year by year until the burden becomes at once intolerable and dear) the body of someone who has become accustomed to but has never quite accepted the purpose or conditions of his exile, and who sees, in the existence of this otherwise meaningless space so curiously and yet so poetically named maidan, the evidence of the care and thought of those who preceded him, of their concern for what they remembered as somehow typical of home; the silence and darkness that blessed an enduring acre of unenclosed common which, if nothing else, at least illustrated of its own accord the changing temper of the seasons. With here a house. And there a steeple. And everywhere the sky. Bland blue. Or on the march with armoured clouds.
Or grey, to match the grey stone of a Norman church. Or dark: an upturned black steel receptacle for scattered magnetic sparks of light or, depending on the extroverted or introverted mood, an amazing cyclorama lit only by the twinkling nocturnal points of a precise but incalculable geometry.