Authors: Paul Scott
And not only money, Lindsey thought. The bitter seed had been sown. It was probably this as much as anything that finally dispelled whatever doubts he may have felt about the reasonableness of his rejection of his son Colin’s impossible story-book proposal that Harry should come to live with them permanently if it could possibly be arranged—this—even more than the shock to his well-bred system of learning that young Coomer’s father had put someone else’s name to a document—this: that young Coomer’s lonely situation had not been the result of neglect but of a deliberate policy that had a special and not particularly upright end in view—entrance into a society that stood beyond his father’s natural reach to gain for him wholly on his own resources.
Now Lindsey remembered—or rather allowed to make the journey from the back of his mind to the front of it—the comments passed by friends whose judgments he trusted except when they clashed with his liberal beliefs (which were perched, somewhat shakily, on the sturdy shoulders of his natural clannish instincts). He could not actually recall the words of these comments, but he certainly recalled the ideas which lay behind them: that in India, so long as you kept them occupied, the natives could be counted on very often to act in the common interest; that the real Indian, the man most to be trusted, was likely to be your servant, the man who earned the salt he ate under your roof, and next to him the simple peasant who hated the bloodsuckers of his own race, cared nothing for politics, but cared instead, like a sensible fellow, about the weather, the state of the crops, and fair play; respected impartiality, and represented the majority of this simple nation that was otherwise being spoiled by too close a contact with the sophisticated ideas of modern western society. The last man you could trust, these people said (and damn it all, they knew, because they had been there or were related to people who had been there) was the westernized Indian, because he was not really an Indian at all. The only exceptions to this
rule were to be found among the maharajahs, people like that, who had been born into the cosmopolitan ranks of those whose job was to exercise authority and were interested in preserving the old social
status quo.
There had been a time when his son Colin had thought Harry’s father was a maharajah, or rajah; or anyway, a rich landowner of the kind who stood next to maharajahs in importance. Over the years the impression had gradually been adjusted (sometimes by these same friends who said that Hari’s father was probably the son of a petty zamindar, whatever a zamindar was). But had the initial impression ever been adjusted to anything like the truth? Had the whole thing been a sham? Lindsey hated to think so. But thought so now, and returned home from his altruistic visit to the lawyers feeling that by and large he and his own son had been put upon, led by the nose into an unsavoury affair because they had been too willing to believe the best about people and discount the worst, ignored the warnings of those who had watched the Lindsey adoption of Harry Coomer with expressions sometimes too clearly indicative of their belief that no good could be expected to come of it.
At dinner that night, listening to his fair and good-looking son talking to black-haired, brown-faced Harry, he was surprised to find himself thinking: But how extraordinary! If you close your eyes and listen, you can’t tell the difference. And they seem to talk on exactly the same wavelength as well.
But his eyes were no longer to be closed. He took Harry on one side and said to him, “I’m sorry, old chap. There’s nothing I can do. The lawyers have convinced me of that.”
Harry nodded. He looked disappointed. But he said, “Well, thanks anyway. I mean for trying,” and smiled and then waited as if for the arm Lindsey was normally in the habit of laying fondly on the boy’s shoulders.
Tonight Lindsey found himself unable to make that affectionate gesture.
His sharpest memories were of piles of leaves, wet and chill to the touch, as if in early morning after a late October frost. To Hari, England was sweet cold and crisp clean pungent scent; air that moved, crowding hollows and sweeping hilltops; not stagnant, heavy, a conducting medium for stench. And England was the park and pasture land behind the house in Sidcot, the gables of the house, the leaded diamond-pane windows, and the benevolent wisteria.
Waking in the middle of the night on the narrow string-bed in his room at Number 12 Chillianwallah Bagh he beat at the mosquitoes, fisted his ears against the sawing of the frogs and the chopping squawk of the lizards in heat on the walls and ceiling. He entered the mornings from tossing dreams of home and slipped at once into the waking nightmare, his repugnance for everything the alien country offered; the screeching crows outside and the fat amber-coloured cockroaches that lumbered heavy-backed but light-headed with waving feathery antennae from the bedroom to an adjoining bathroom where there was no bath—instead, a tap, a bucket, a copper scoop, a cemented floor to stand on and a slimy runnel for taking the dirty water out through a hole in the wall from which it fell and spattered the caked mud of the compound; draining him layer by layer of his Englishness, draining him too of his hope of discovering that he had imagined everything from the day when the letter came from his father asking him to meet him in Sidcot to talk about the future. This future? There had never been such a meeting so perhaps there wasn’t this future. His father had never arrived, never left Edinburgh, but died in his hotel bedroom.
Sometimes when a letter reached him from Colin Lindsey he looked at the writing on the envelope as if to confirm to some inner, more foolishly expectant and hopeful spirit than his own that the letter was not one from his father telling him that everything was a mistake. He longed for letters from England, but when they arrived and he tore them open and read them through, first quickly and then a second time slowly, he found that the day had darkened in a way that set him brooding upon some act of violence that was motiveless; aimless, except to the extent that it was calculated to transport him miraculously back to his native air, his native heath, and people whose behaviour did not revolt him. In such moods he never replied to a letter. He waited until the acutest pain of receiving it was over, and, in a day or two, made a first attempt at an answer that would not expose him as a coward; for that would never do; it would be foreign to the scale of values he knew he must hang on to if he were to see the nightmare through to its unimaginable, unforeseeable, but presumably logical end.
In this way Colin Lindsey never had the opportunity of guessing the weight of the burden of exile his friend struggled under. In one letter, he wrote to Harry: “I’m glad you seem to be settling down. I’m reading quite a lot about India to try and get a clearer picture of you in it.
Sounds terrific. Wish I could come out. Have you stuck any good pig lately? If you do, don’t leave the carcass in front of a mosque, or the devotees of the Prophet will have you by the knackers. Advice from an old hand! We drew the match with Wardens last Saturday. We miss that Coomer touch—those elegant sweeps to his noble leg and those slow snazzy off-breaks. Funny to think that your cricket will be starting just about the time the school here begins its football season. Not that I shall be seeing the football this year. Has it been decided yet what you are going to do? I’m definitely leaving at the end of this summer term. Dad says he’ll stump up for a crammer if I want to matriculate (some hopes) but I’ve decided to accept my uncle’s offer to go into the London office of that petroleum company he’s something to do with.”
To this, after several days, Hari replied, “The idea always was, you remember, that I’d swot for the ICS exams after leaving Chillingborough and sit for them in London, then come out here and learn the ropes. These days you can sit for the exams over here as well, but I don’t think I’ll be doing that. My aunt’s old brother-in-law runs some kind of business in Mayapore and I gather the idea is that I should go into it. But first I’m supposed to learn the language. Although my uncle-in-law thinks my own language could be useful he says it’s not much good to him if I can’t understand a word of what 90 per cent of the people I’d be dealing with were talking about. It’s raining cats and dogs here these days. Sometimes it gives over and the sun comes out and the whole place steams. But the rain goes on, I’m told, until September, and then it begins to cool down, but only for a few weeks. It starts getting hot again pretty soon in the new year, and by April and May I gather you can’t even sweat. I’m down with gippy-tum, and can only face eating fruit, although I wake up thinking of bacon and eggs. Please give my love to your mother and father, and remember me to Connolly and Jarvis, and of course to old Toad-in-the-hole.”
Sealing such a letter once he was tempted to tear it up and write another that would give Colin some idea of what it had meant to find himself living on the wrong side of the river in a town like Mayapore. Then he would have said: “There is nothing that isn’t ugly. Houses, town, river, landscape. All of them are reduced to sordid uniform squalor by the people who live in them. If there’s an exception to this, you’d no doubt find it on the other side of the river, in what are called the civil lines. And perhaps you’d eventually get used to it, even enjoy it, because the civil lines are where
you
‘d be; that would be
your
retreat.
But I am here in the Chillianwallah Bagh. It’s what they call modern. You’re somebody by their standards if you live in one of these stifling concrete monstrosities. The whole place stinks of drains, though. In my room—if you can call it a room: with unglazed barred windows it looks more like a cell—there’s a bed (a wooden frame with a string mesh), a chair, a table which Aunt Shalini has covered with a ghastly piece of purple cloth embroidered in silver thread, a wardrobe called an almirah with a door that doesn’t work. My trunk and suitcases are mildewed. There’s a fan in the middle of the ceiling. More often than not it stops working during the night and you wake up suffocating. My aunt and I live alone. We have four servants. They live in the compound at the back. They speak no English. When I’m in a room downstairs they watch me from doorways and through windows because I’m the nephew from ‘Bilaiti.’ My aunt, I suppose, is a good woman. She’s not forty yet, but looks more than fifty. We don’t understand each other. She tries to understand me harder than I can bother to try to understand her. But at least she is bearable. I detest the others. From their point of view I’m unclean. They want me to drink cow-piss to purify myself of the stain of living abroad, crossing the forbidden water. Purify! I have seen men and women defecate in the open, in some wasteland near the river. At night the smell of the river comes into my bedroom. In my bathroom, in one corner, there is a hole in the floor and two sole-shaped ledges to put your feet on before you squat. There are always flies in the bathroom. And cockroaches. You get used to them, but only by debasing your own civilized instincts. At first they fill you with horror. Even terror. It is purgatory, at first, to empty the bowels.
“But the house is a haven of peace and cleanliness compared with what’s outside and what goes on out there. We get our milk straight from a cow. Aunt Shalini boils it, thank God. The milkman comes in the morning and milks his cow outside the house, near a telegraph pole. To this pole he ties a dead, stuffed calf which the cow nuzzles. This keeps her in milk. The calf was starved to death because the cow’s milk was taken by the milkman to sell to good Hindus. Since I knew that, I take only lemon or lime in my tea when Aunt Shalini can get them from the bazaar. I’ve only been to the bazaar once. That was during the first week I was here, towards the end of May. The temperature was 110 degrees. I hadn’t yet taken in what was happening to me. I went to the bazaar with Aunt Shalini because I wanted to be decent to her and she seemed keen for me to go. What was it? Some kind of nightmare? The leper, for
instance, who hung about at the entrance to the bazaar and whom nobody seemed to take any special notice of. Was he real? Yes, he was real enough. What was left of his hand came close to my sleeve. Aunt Shalini put a coin into his bowl. She knows about lepers. They are part of her daily experience. And when she put the coin into his bowl I remembered that story my father told me, which I told you, and neither of us quite believed—about the way my grandfather was said to have left his home and gone begging to acquire merit and become part of the Absolute. Well—did he end up as a leper too? Or did he just find himself communing with God?
“All those stories that my father told me; at the time they seemed to be simply stories. A bit romantic even. To get the full flavour of them you have to imagine them taking place here, or somewhere like it, somewhere even more primitive. I look at Aunt Shalini and try to see her as that young kid who was married off at all that cost to the fellow who died of syphilis or something. Died in a brothel, anyway. I wish Father hadn’t told me about that. I find myself watching her at table, hoping she won’t touch anything but the outer rim of the plate. Poor Aunt Shalini! She asks me questions about England, the kind of question you can’t answer because at home it never gets asked.
“Home. It still slips out. But this is home, isn’t it, Colin? I mean I shan’t wake up tomorrow at Chillingborough or Sidcot, or in what we always called ‘my’ room at Didbury? I shall wake up here, and the first thing I’ll be conscious of will be the sound of the crows. I shall wake up at seven and the household will have been up and about for at least an hour. There’ll be a smell from the compound of something being cooked in ghi. My stomach will turn over at the thought of breakfast. I’ll hear the servants shouting at each other. In India everybody shouts. There’ll be a pedlar or beggar at the gate out front. And he’ll be shouting. Or there may be the man who screams. When I first heard him I thought he was a madman who’d got loose. But he is a madman who has never been locked up. His madness is thought of as a sign that God has personally noticed him. He is therefore holier than any of the so-called sane people. Perhaps underneath this idea that he’s holy is the other idea that insane is the only sensible thing for an Indian to be, and what they all wish they were.