Authors: Paul Scott
They reach the car and surround it, accompanying it, half-running, half-walking. When it stops their hands come through the open windows. It is necessary, in the end, for Mr. Srinivasan to threaten them with the police. They retreat, but only far enough to allow the passengers to alight. The driver stays with the car and he is left in peace, but the party that now makes its way back towards the temple is followed by the most persistent of the women. Sometimes, making a way through the crowd, you think they have given up. A hand lightly touching your sleeve and then tugging it proves otherwise. To look straight
into her eyes would be fatal. In India the head too often has to be turned away. “You must not give them anything,” Mr. Srinivasan says. An observer of the scene would notice that since leaving the car the beggar women have concentrated on the most vulnerable flank of the trio walking towards the temple: the white man. The observer would perhaps notice too that the woman who makes her dumb appeal through that gesture, that brief contact with the white man’s sleeve, and who now keeps her voice down to a whisper and limits her vocabulary of begging to one urgently repeated, “Sahib, Sahib,” is the last to admit defeat, walking with the visitors almost to the entrance of the temple.
“I’m afraid,” Mr. Srinivasan says, “that you will have to take off your shoes. If you like you could keep your socks on.”
Socks? Ah, well, risk all!
The open gateway is fairly narrow, but it is deep because the gate is at the base of the tall stone tower that mounts in diminishing tiers of sculpted figures, the details of which cannot be seen at night. Inside the passage through the tower a temple servant squats by an oil lamp, surrounded by chappals and shoes. With chalk he makes a mark on the soles and gives Mr. Srinivasan a slip of paper. The stone floor of the passage is warm to the bare feet and rather gritty. The descent in to the main courtyard of the temple is by a shallow flight of four steps. The feet come into contact with sand. There are people walking, people praying and people sitting on the ground who seem to be gossiping. The illumination is dim. In the centre of the courtyard is the square building of the inner sanctuary, with steps leading up, and carved pillars supporting an ornamental roof. Around the walls of the courtyard there are other sanctuaries. Some are in darkness; others are lit to show that the god or goddess is awake. The figures, often no bigger than dolls, are painted and garlanded. A bell is rung in the main sanctuary: by a devotee of the Lord Venkataswara warning the god that he seeks admittance. Slowly the trio of visitors walks round the courtyard until the entrance into Lord Venkataswara’s sanctuary is revealed. A man with a shaved head, bare chest, and the string of the sacred thread looped over his light brown shoulder stands near a pillar. He is one of the priests of the temple. The black-skinned, loin-clothed devotee stands at the open doors of the sanctuary in an attitude of prayer—both arms raised above his head, the palms together. The short length of rope attached to the tongue of the iron bell that is suspended from the roof still moves. It is possible to get only a glimpse of the inner sanctum: a gleam of gold,
silver and ebony, in the heart of the stone. There is a bitter-sweet smell in the air. The sand beneath the feet varies from grit to velvet softness. Through the river entrance comes the smell of the water.
There are trees in the courtyard. In the day they afford some shade. Behind the main sanctuary is the sanctuary of the sleeping Vishnu. The stone of the sanctuary floor is rubbed black and shiny. Inside, in the dim light of the oil lamps set in the walls the carved recumbent god sleeps through an eternity of what look like pleasant dreams. He is longer than a lying man would be. He is part of his own stone pallet, carved into it, out of it, inseparable from it. He is smooth and naked, with square shoulders and full lips that curve at the corners into a smile. The eyelids are shut but seem always to be on the point of fluttering voluptuously open. Once this imminent awakening has made its impression, the stiff limbs begin to suggest a hidden flexibility as though, at least, the god may be expected to ease the cramp of long sleep out of them. The delicately carved but powerful hand would then drop from the stone pillow and fall aslant the breast. And then perhaps the full lips would part and he would speak one word, speaking it softly, as in a dream, but revealing a secret that would enable whatever mortal man or woman happened to be there to learn the secret of power on earth and peace beyond it.
“I am sorry we cannot take you into the holy of holies,” Mr. Srinivasan says, “although I might swing it if I can convince the priest that you are a Buddhist. But perhaps some other time. Lili is looking tired.”
Not only tired but, oddly, out of place.
“These days,” Srinivasan explains, as shoes are found, socks retrieved from pockets and a coin given to the shoe-minder, “the temples are all controlled by Government. In fact you could really say the priests have become civil servants. They are paid salaries, and collect fees according to official scales. It cuts down a lot on all that extortion that used to go on. This is one of the things we old congressmen insisted on . . . that India should be a secular democratic state, not a priest-ridden autocracy.”
Before the car is reached, the same beggar women encroach. Settled and safe in the Studebaker, Srinivasan says, “Well, we are holy now, I suppose. It is in order to be charitable,” and throws some coins out of the window. The women scrabble for them in the dust, and the car, free of them, moves forward, taking the left fork from the square, where Sister Ludmila walked with her leather handbag chained to her waist.
The lane is narrow, and harshly lit, and crowded. The hood of the Studebaker is like the prow of a boat, ploughing through a busy waterway. The chauffeur drives on the clutch and the horn. At the end of the lane, where it opens onto the walled square of the Chillianwallah bazaar market, the town is suddenly dark and dead. The market is closed. The houses are shuttered. Only a few lights show. The headlamps create dense angular shadows. The smell off the river comes through the narrow openings between deserted buildings.
Turning a corner there is a glimpse of the old palace, the purdah hospital: a high wall, an iron gateway in it, foliage inside the grounds, a light showing behind the leaves. A dog with white and yellow markings crosses the road in front of the car. The sky ahead expands, displaying its stars in counter-attraction to the goods that were for sale in the shops. Somewhere, to the left, is the place once known as the Sanctuary and to the right the Chillianwallah Bagh reclamation.
“She died years ago, they say,” Mr. Srinivasan explains, speaking of Mrs. Gupta Sen who had been Shalini Kumar before her marriage. The car enters an area of well laid out but unmetaled, badly lit roads, along which the sun-trap houses of the rich merchants cluster in walled compounds, a few showing lights behind barred windows. Here there are the black, feathery silhouettes of coconut palms, leaning tall and drunken between the gaps in the houses. The car turns twice. But each road, each collection of dwellings, looks the same. Number twelve is an anonymous dark bulk. A grandson of Romesh Chand lives there for a few months in the year in the cold weather. The car, on Srinivasan’s order, stops outside the iron, padlocked gate. There is nothing to feel except the night warmth and nothing to see except the shadows in the compound, and the culvert that leads from the road to the gate across the monsoon ditch in the bordering grass where the bicycle was found.
And young Kumar? Where is he now? Srinivasan shrugs. Dead perhaps. Upon Kumar’s arrest after the rape in the Bibighar Romesh Chand disowned him. Perhaps, also, young Kumar disowned his family. Well, it is a vast country. Easy to get lost in. And again the sense of immensity (of weight and flatness, and absence of orientating features) blankets the mind with an idea of scope so limitless that it is deadening. Here, on the ground, nothing is likely, everything possible. Only from the air can one trace what looks like a pattern, a design, an abortive, human intention. The Studebaker noses forward, lost, at bay, but committed to automatic progression, out on to the Chillianwallah Bagh
Extension road, which to the south leads to the now nonexistent southern gate of the old walled town, and to the north to the Bibighar bridge.
The bridge has a low, stone parapet and is arched, as if perpetually tensed against the ache of rheumatism from having its supports so long in water. And so, down, to its northerly head, having led the traveler back across the invisible water (which in these less well-lit reaches does not glitter) to the second grade-crossing: having led across the eternal back to the transitory, from the waters that have their source in the snows of far-off mountain ranges to the parallel lines of steel that carry the trains eastward to the unimaginable coast.
And here is the hut of the grade-crossing keeper lit these days by a neon standard. The well-sprung car bounces luxuriously over the uneven surface of the wooden boards that have been set between the rails. It is not difficult to imagine the sensation of cycling over the crossing, with the light system showing green and, coming from the left, the smoky metallic railway smell that is the same anywhere in the world, and was certainly no different twenty-two years ago, so that it is possible to breathe in sharply and think: This is what she smelled as she cycled back from Sister Ludmila’s Sanctuary.
But ahead, there is a change. The road is being resurfaced. One remembers Lili Chatterjee having mentioned it. There are now warning lamps and mounds of chipped stone and x-shaped trestle ends that support long barricading poles: a familiar manifestation of public works in progress. The work in progress sends the car over to the right-hand side of the road, a few feet closer to the wall of the Bibighar gardens.
An ordinary wall, such as you would find anywhere in India, a little higher than a man, stuccoed, greying, peeling. Old. With trees behind it screening an interior. As the car goes by nothing is said, but the silence is commentary enough.
Bibighar.
After a time even the most tragic name acquires a kind of beauty.
From here the car follows the route taken by the girl who ran in the darkness. Yes. This is what she must have felt: beyond the darkness of the buildings and the habitation, the space, the limitless territory. Through such ordinary ways, such unspectacular unlit avenues. And all the time the curious smell—not of the railway now, but of the land—which perhaps she had learned to accept or not to notice, if not to love, to need.
PART FIVE
YOUNG KUMAR
When Hari Kumar’s father died of an overdose of sleeping pills in Edinburgh and the lawyers told him that there wasn’t even enough money to pay in full what was owed to Mr. and Mrs. Carter who ran the house in Berkshire he rang the Lindseys and asked them what they thought he should do. Although the lawyers insisted that he could put the notion right out of his head he had an old-fashioned idea that he was responsible for his father’s debts, if in fact there were debts. The Lindseys found it as difficult to believe the lawyers’ tale of bankruptcy as he did himself. They said he must come over to Didbury right away and stay with them. He was not to worry, because Mr. Lindsey would see the lawyers and get proper sense out of them.
His father’s death occurred in the middle of the Easter holidays of 1938, a few weeks before Hari’s eighteenth birthday. The Lindseys were in Paris when it happened. If they had been at home Hari would probably have been with them and certainly have had their support at the funeral. He spent most of his vacations with the Lindseys. Their son Colin was his oldest friend. He had been with them up until the day before they were due to entrain for Paris. If his father had not written from Edinburgh and warned him that he was coming down to Sidcot and wanted to discuss plans for the future, he would have gone to Paris too, relying as usual on his father’s agreement
in absentia.
Instead the letter had come and he had gone home and found his father not arrived and the housekeeper and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Carter, in a disagreeable mood. He hadn’t been expected and the Carters said they knew nothing of his father’s plans to leave Edinburgh. He did not care very much for the Carters. In Sidcot the staff seldom stayed long. The Carters had been in residence for a couple of years, which was something of a record. He could not remember how many different housekeepers and handyman-gardeners his father had employed. In the old days, before he went to prep school and then on to Chillingborough, there had been a succession of disagreeable governesses and tutors as well as of domestic servants, some of whom made it plain that they preferred to work for white gentlemen. The house had never been to him what, since he had got to know the Lindseys, he had learned to think of as a home. He saw his father three of four times a year and seldom for longer than a week at a time. He did not remember his mother. He understood that she had died in India when he was born. He did not remember India either.
The reason he found it difficult to believe what the lawyers told him was because there had always seemed to be plenty of money. When he
was old enough to appreciate the difference in degrees of affluence he realized that the house in Sidcot was substantial, bigger and more expensively furnished than the Lindseys’; and as well as the house in Sidcot there was a succession of flats in London which his father moved into and out of, in accordance with some principle Hari did not understand and took no interest in beyond what was necessary to record accurately the change of address and telephone number, so that his letters should not go astray and he could be sure of going to the right place if his father rang the school and suggested lunch in town on Hari’s way home at the end of term. On such occasions he usually took Colin with him. And Colin once said, looking round the sumptuous but unwelcoming flat, “Your father must be stinking rich.” And Hari shrugged and replied, “I suppose he is.”
This was probably the moment when he began consciously to be critical of his father who spoke English with that appalling sing-song accent, spelled the family name Coomer, and told people to call him David because Duleep was such a mouthful. Duleep had chosen the name Hari for his only surviving child and only son (the son for whom he had prayed and longed and whose life had now been planned down to the last detail) because Hari was so easily pronounced and was really only distinguishable in the spelling from the diminutive of Saxon Harold, who had been King of the English before the Normans came.