‘Ai, ai!’ Sohan Singh crowed. ‘
I
would have to wrap a twenty-rupee note round it before a woman would lay her hand to it.’ Dayal’s rapid Hindi continued. ‘For a time I couldn’t believe what was happening. A peer’s daughter. A noblewoman. An Englishwoman ... But by then my prick was as stiff as a pole and she undid the buttons and then crawled on to me. She was pulling at her skirts and petticoats. They wear more than our women do, prince--you know--but nothing delays them getting their slit bared when they want to ... She lowered herself greedily on to me and I thrust up into her. She was as hot and wet as a Basohli whore in Holi. I was so excited I came at once. Then we stayed quite a time and I made love twice more ... And every day of my leave. And she introduced me to two other young ladies, and they, too, both came to me ... Englishwomen are--pfft! ‘--he made a gesture of dismissal--’no different from whores.’
‘Not all,’ Krishna said, a touch of stiffness in his voice.
Hanuman was setting up a hookah on the floor. He handed the mouthpiece to Krishna as the adjutant said, ‘By God, English men know how to make themselves comfortable, but they can’t satisfy their women. Perhaps they don’t try. I think I’m going to live in London after this ... if I survive.’
Krishna drew on the hookah pipe. Hanuman put more charcoal in the bowl. Yes, Krishna thought, one side of London would attract Dayal Ram, and vice versa ... with his unearthly good looks, and no coward behind it. The class of women he had met--the ones seeking sensation in a specially European way--would seize him as harpies seized sailors, or as the gods took what they needed from earth. He happened to be rich, but women like Lady Harriet would keep him anyway, either directly, or by having their fathers or husbands give him jobs. And now he had enjoyed the sexual favours of European women. Why should he be alone in that position?
He turned to the quartermaster and said, ‘Very well, Sohan. You may proceed with your plan.’
‘Thank you, lord. I am sure Your Highness is making a wise decision.’
The quartermaster began to talk about accounts, and Krishna Ram thought, all that he tells me will be the truth, for I am a prince of the blood; but it will not be the whole truth. He will do what he says he will do, for the regiment, but there will be an extra hundred or so rupees a week for himself; and with that he will start a business buying grain at Amiens and selling it to the government or the dealers for twice what he paid for it, and the profits will go to London to buy shares in arms companies, steel works, banks...
The two left, as they had come, and a few minutes later Hanuman announced Captain Pahlwan Ram and Lieutenant Puran Lall. Krishna took another drink of brandy. He had eaten a number of parathas and sweetmeats, and now would eat some more with the new visitors. There would be no formal dinner in the mess tonight, as there was when Warren Bateman was present. This was how they used to live in Basohli before they were embodied into the Sirkar’s army, and it came more easily to them. But it did not allow for horseplay and games in the mess.
He looked down at Puran Lall, squatting beside the bed, and said, ‘Are you going to eat in mess tonight?’
The young man shook his head, ‘No, highness. I am having some food sent to my billet.’
Krishna said, ‘You should go out more. It is unhealthy for a young man like you to sit in your room like an old hermit on the mountain.’
‘There is nothing to live for, now that Ishar is gone,’ he said.
‘Not even to kill Germans?’ Krishna Ram said.
‘A little, highness. I tried at St. Rambert to hate ... like the Scottish sergeant told us ... but it was not the Germans that I hated.’
‘The English?’ Pahlwan Ram suggested softly.
‘A little ... not Bateman-sahib, of course ... some of the sort one meets in the base areas, yes. But there is something else wrong with me, too, and I do not know what. Perhaps it is myself that I hate, because I am alive and Ishar dead.’
He sat, his face closed, neither eating nor drinking, occasionally taking a puff at the hookah for another fifteen minutes--then he left.
Krishna Ram looked at his watch, to indicate to Pahlwan Ram that he was outstaying his welcome. But the brutish lieutenant said, ‘When will Bateman-sahib be well again?’
‘I don’t know,’ Krishna Ram said. ‘I had a letter from him in hospital two days ago. He was making a good recovery and said he’d be going to Shrewford Pennel, that’s his home, in a week or so, and hoped to rejoin in another month after that.’
Pahlwan said, ‘And he will come back to us ... or to a regular regiment?’
‘I don’t know. To us, I hope.’ As he said it he wondered whether he meant it. Pahlwan Ram detected the doubt and said, ‘The regiment would wish that he did not return...’ He went on quickly, before Krishna Ram could tell him to be quiet: ‘He is English, lord, and though he shares our tongue he does not share our hearts. You are our lord and prince ... All trust Bateman-sahib with their money, their food, their clothes--but what do these matter to a Rajput? They would trust you with their souls ... This war is going to destroy us, highness.’
‘You take good care it won’t destroy you, I notice,’ Krishna said. He recognized that his own voice was blurred.
‘This war is nothing to do with us,’ the lieutenant insisted. ‘It is turning the sowars into Christians with brown skins, instead of what they would be, Hindus, servants of the Sun. It is only you who can save us, and Bateman-sahib knows it. He will kill you, highness ... if you don’t see that he dies first.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Krishna snapped. ‘He does not want to kill me.’
‘Not you, as prince, but what you mean, what you are ... for until that is killed, or conquered, he will never...’
Krishna said, ‘Enough! I wish to be alone.’
Pahlwan Ram rose quickly. ‘As the prince pleases.’ He bowed out.
Krishna sat moodily, cross-legged, on the bed. The CO had been gone barely three weeks, and the regiment was already full of intrigue, backbiting, slander, defalcations of money, cheating with accounts. Yet ... yet ... He poured another drink, recognizing in the blurred outline of the door and the swing and dip of the lights that he was quite drunk. What was the evil in Warren Bateman, then? There was something but he could not see exactly what through the pleasant fumes of the brandy.
I thrust up into her. She was as hot and wet as a Basohli whore in Holi.
He swayed forward, Dayal Ram’s words slithering lasciviously through his mind. His penis began to stiffen. By God, he wanted a woman. An image of a woman with white skin kept trying to form in his mind, but before the face took shape he dismissed it with violent shakes of his head and a physical gesture with his hand, as though brushing something away and out of the room. Images of woman, unfaced now, returned more strongly, the triangle between the legs, two swelling breasts, the velvet feel of the skin on the thighs. His loins hurt with a piercing pain.
He called thickly, ‘Hanuman! ‘
‘Huzoor?’
‘Tell the Captain Sohan Singh to bring me a woman here. At once. And more brandy.’
‘Jee-han, huzoor.’
The orderly withdrew and Krishna leaned back against the wall at the head of the bed and closed his eyes, waiting, thinking.
He thought he must have been asleep when the knock came on the door. He half heard it, then waited, dozing, refusing to open his eyes until it came again. When it did he raised his head off the pillow and saw that the door was open, a woman standing in the opening, Hanuman’s face visible over her shoulder. It was Hanuman’s hand knocking at the door.
‘Ane do. Darwaza band karo,’
he said thickly. Hanuman pushed the woman into the room and closed the door behind her. The key had long since disappeared, but Krishna knew his orderly would be squatted down outside, blocking all entrance.
The woman was short and sturdy, with an open face lined by work in the fields and browned by the sun. Her eyes were blue and set wide apart, her hair thick, brown, and straight. She must be about thirty or perhaps thirty-five, he thought. She waited against the door, her hands folded in front of her plain dark blue skirt. She wore a thick grey cotton blouse, with a wool kerchief thrown over her shoulders, cotton stockings and bedroom slippers. All the local people wore bedroom slippers, and then slipped their feet into wooden clogs to work in the fields, or to go down the street if it was muddy.
She said timidly, ‘You sending me, monsieur?’
He said, ‘Yes ... Take off your clothes.’
‘Ees ten shillin’,’ she said, ‘for visit. Five shillin’ my ‘ouse but ten shillin’ visit.’
He swung his legs off the bed, felt in the pocket of his tunic, found his wallet and held out a ten-shilling note to her. She took it with a murmured
‘Merci, monsieur,’
and tucked it away into a pocket hidden in her skirt.
Then she began to slip out of the white cotton drawers that extended to just above her knees. The drawers off and neatly folded over the back of the chair by the fire, she sat down on the bed and made to lift her legs up on to it. Krishna Ram said, ‘All clothes off! ‘
She opened her mouth to speak but he was already holding out another ten-shilling note. After she had tucked that away with the first she began to undress fully. Krishna sat on the edge of the bed, watching, his lust slowly fading. She had thick tufts of brown hair, darker than the hair of her head, sticking out under her armpits. Indian women shaved or plucked such hair. He wondered suddenly if Diana Bateman shaved or plucked, and if not, what colour the hair would be. He thrust the thought from him.
‘What’s your name?’ he said.
‘Marthe, monsieur,’ she said, when her head emerged from the blouse she had been pulling over her head. Her breasts were full, round, and heavy. The nipples stood up dark and strong out of big dark areolas. Then she stepped out of her petticoat and stood a moment, naked but for the stockings and bedroom slippers, looking at him. Her belly was well rounded, curving down to a big strong bush of curly brown hair set between the round white thighs. Again, Indian women pluck that off, he thought. It must be very insanitary in hot weather ... but of course they didn’t have hot weather in Europe. But it must be insanitary at any time, really, since they poured urine and sweat into that crotch where the hair would retain it. It would not be so odd if Europeans were not always lifting their noses at the insanitariness of Indians ... they, who bathed in still water, so that they wallowed in their own dirt, and allowed women to enter public swimming baths on every day of the month!
His flagging penis stiffened convulsively as she crossed her legs and began to unroll the stockings. The tuft of her bush stuck out dense and rough from under her crossed thighs. He began to undo his fly buttons. When he had got his trousers off she was not quite ready and he took a swig of the brandy, direct from the bottle.
At last she gave him a half smile, lay back on the bed, and held out her arms with a little gesture--’Come.’
She was all that he had read or been told or imagined of the European peasant of the middle ages, something that had once existed here, but had never been seen in India. She was plump and round and strong. The hands still held up to him were rough and chapped, the soles of her feet thickened and split, her skin dead white to her neck, brown and red above that. She opened her legs and pink lips gaped in the depths of the brown thicket. His penis again lost its errant stiffness and he threw himself on top of her with an exclamation of anger. She wrapped her arms about his neck, murmured in French, raised her legs and locked her feet over his back. But his erection was going faster than he could thrust it at the slippery gulf felt and seen in the depths of the bush. For a moment he pushed despairingly at her, but it was no good ... it was gone ... gone ... He stood up, tense as a bowstring about to snap. Her white skin mocked the wrinkled brown of his penis, of the malehood which a minute before had stood like a staff ready to enter the fleshy arch in triumph. She was murmuring, ‘ ‘Ees all righ’, ‘ees all righ’,’ and trying to pull him down on her again. She reached out her hand and began to fondle his limpness.
He seized his swagger stick and struck out at her. ‘Wait!’ she cried, and turned over, thrusting her big buttocks up into the air. He struck out, again and again, slashing the cane across and across. She groaned and moaned and shrieked, but not loudly. Red weals began to spring up across the white flesh, and as they appeared the power returned to Krishna Ram’s penis. It rose in jerks and spasms and in a minute thrust up proud, the knob dark and bulging. He dropped the swagger stick, seized the woman by the waist where she half lay, half knelt on the bed and pushed his phallus between her thighs into the depths of the protruding bush. The hairs parted and before he could begin to thrust, he was into her. She was whimpering, ‘You ‘urt too much...’ but he pulled her buttocks viciously back against his belly and rammed harder into the wet depths below. In a few seconds he felt the ecstasy rising, and screamed aloud, ‘Bitch, white English bitch! ‘ Then he was coming, squirting, sobbing, doubled over her bare back, his head on her shoulders, his face in her streaming hair.
After a time he let her go, and sank on to the bed.
‘‘Urting too much,’ she said reproachfully, sitting on the bed beside him. ‘
Aussi
, ‘ees ten shillin’ more for beat.’
He motioned to his wallet on the table. ‘Take what you want ... I am sorry.’
She took out a note, held it up for him to see, and put it away in her skirt over the chair. Then she sat down again and said, ‘Ees all right. Many mans no come up wizout beat.’
‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why it was ... this time. I’ve been drinking.’
She said, ‘Too moch whisky make soft cock, eh? But I teenk no one beat drunk unless ‘ee want beat sober, no?’ The blue eyes on him were shrewd and, as Krishna realized for the first time, sympathetic. ‘
‘Ees first time fucking white woman?’
He nodded.
‘And you major? But servant of English ... no?’
‘Yes. No,’ he said. ‘I am heir to the Rajah of Ravi.’ He saw the puzzled look on her face and said, ‘I am a prince of India.’