A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (38 page)

He beckoned me to come closer.

‘By the way, sergeant. I’m leaving Suleiman in your care. At least for a day or two. He’ll continue to be quartered with the servants at Flagstaff House but I’ve told him to report to you here every morning. He has his month’s wages and his return travel warrant. The officer who comes up to replace me may want to borrow him. If not I’ll send word and then I rely on you
to get him on to a train and send him back to Delhi. Meanwhile, make whatever use of him you think fit. He knows his way round Pankot pretty well now.’

It was Merrick’s parting gift to me, the only one he had available that he calculated would cast a blight on my day of liberation. But in this case he had miscalculated. The Red Shadow was still grinning at me. I grinned back at the Red Shadow, making calculations of my own. If the grin surprised the Red Shadow he gave no sign of it, but I think it surprised Merrick. Puzzled him? Interested him? Suggested to him a new line of attack for future dealings with me? It was difficult to say. When I turned from the Red Shadow to Merrick and snapped out, ‘Right, sir,’ there was a look on the looking side of his face that I can only describe as one of triumph and no-triumph, of contempt and no-contempt. And the scarred side was immobile and expressionless as if it had long since grown tired of living with its enigmatic counterpart.

*

Merrick left Pankot on the morning of
VJ
day. I had my midday meal with vcos at the depot, and spent the evening at the Chinese restaurant and the cinema. Apart from breakfasts in my room, an evening bath and a night’s sleep, I kept clear of the hospital set-up and could have done so more or less indefinitely. But Rowan came to the rescue. I’m fairly sure that he did so on Thursday, August 16.

He turned up at the Pankot Rifles depot, inquiring for me. He knew that Merrick had gone. He had finished his own job in Pankot but was staying on for a while. The Indian civilian who had come up with him, Gopal, had gone back to Ranpur. Nigel was alone at the guest house. He suggested I should join him. I said I’d be glad to. So it was arranged that I should transfer my stuff up there in the evening. He offered to send a car but I told him not to bother. He said he’d inform the billeting officer at area headquarters.

One reason for choosing Thursday as the day I moved in with Rowan is my recollection of the timing of certain events concerning the Red Shadow. Merrick left on the Wednesday, having told me that the Pathan would report to me every
morning at the depot. I was prepared to find these instructions disobeyed so I was surprised when he turned up on – as it must have been – the first morning of Merrick’s absence. He was waiting at the stick-guard post that controlled entry to the administrative block when I got there at 10 a.m. The first thing he asked for was a pass so that he could come and go freely on any errands I sent him on. I said I would think about it but not today because I had no errands for him to run. It would be enough for me if he reported again the following morning.

Seeing that I was about to pass through the gate he plucked my sleeve and held on and began to murmur at me confidentially. Presently it became apparent to me that he was offering to perform a particular service, that of procuring, and was anxious to hear what my special preferences were.

I put on a puzzled look and said, ‘What do you mean?’ and at the same time pulled my arm free of the grip. His kohl-rimmed eyes glittered and a sort of redness emanated from them – a rush of blood, but not I think of anger at my brushing him off so much as of irrepressible delight at the prospect now before us. He began to rehearse the range of Pankot’s sex-life. The astonishing range. The impact on my imaginative sense and the smell of garlic which came in waves from behind his gleaming tombstone teeth combined to translate me momentarily from the prosaicness of white pole, sentry-box and wire fence (the charm and orderliness of the military lines of an old-established British hill station: monument to imperial rectitude and proper conduct) to a vantage point from which I had a sneaky glimpse in to the world within a world, hermetically sealed and composed entirely of a nest of boxes (Kama Sutra rather than Chinese), each offering successively its revelation of the inventive means by which one might secure release from the pressure of the biological urge. Could all that be available here? In Pankot? By comparison the Bombay massage parlour positively glinted as with a clinical aseptic light.

When the Red Shadow had exhausted either the list or his own imagination and fell expectantly silent, I said, ‘Anything else?’ Logic indicated that there could not
be
anything else but he took the question as seriously as I had seemed to ask it
and looked put out, even alarmed at the thought that there might be avenues of delectable exploration which he had never heard or dreamt of.

‘Whatever Sahib desires,’ he said at last and then smiled, popeyed, as if stunned by the elegance and ingenuity of his reply.

In the many barrack-rooms and sergeants’ messes I’d lived in since getting into uniform – I might say in all of them – the one thing I’d be willing to admit had always distinguished me from my companions was my failure to acquire a
habit
of bad language. I don’t mean that the soldier’s words weren’t in my vocabulary, they were; but they were reserved for special occasions. Like this one.

‘What the Sahib desires,’ I said, smiling generously, ‘is that you should * * * * * * *.’ [I use asterisks because it always seems to me that written and printed the dignity of such phrases is lost and the pure metal of offensive
speech
debased.]

I did not wait to study the final effect of my remark. The immediate effect was sufficient – that is to say I was satisfied that his knowledge of the English language hadn’t been put under any kind of strain and that what I said might even have had, for him, a ring of familiarity. Showing my own pass to the stick-guard (a very young but intelligent looking lad) I indicated the Red Shadow (now some ten yards away, staring, wagging his head at me) and explained that he was a notorious thief, currently on parole, but not to be trusted and under no circumstances allowed into the lines unless accompanied by myself. Any credentials he offered could be assumed to be forged or stolen and in any case better not touched by hand because he was suffering from a venereal disease now in an advanced, irreversible and highly infectious stage, a situation which made him reckless of his own life and the lives of others, especially the lives of young people (of either sex) under the age of twenty. I said twenty because the stick-guard looked like a raw recruit aged eighteen. A lot of what I said probably passed over his head, his military Urdu not yet being up to scratch and my knowledge of the local dialect being nil. But I think he got the general drift.

Thus, I had got rid of the Red Shadow for another twenty-four hours; but not, I admit, got rid of some of the impressions
he had left me with of the arcane aspects of life in Pankot. Images tended to obtrude. Sometimes an odalisque appeared, scattering rose-petals for one to walk over in one’s ammunition boots. Coley, languidly using a fly-swatter, appeared to me occasionally to be a eunuch dispensing attar from a silver shaker. A female sweeper, bent over her gently swishing broom, might have been performing a more delicate task; excitation of the dust the last thing in her mind, or in mine. The tea tasted odd. Goat’s milk or bromide? And which, I wondered, of these men behind the blanket-covered tables, were sitting there satiated, just about getting through the day after a night’s sampling of one or several of Pankot’s erotic specialities? Coley? Yes, Coley perhaps. Not a eunuch after all. He had that remote washed-out look of a man whose secret life absorbed nine-tenths of his energy.

Having lunched with the
VCOS
the day before, today I lunched with the havildars, and in the afternoon Nigel Rowan turned up and invited me to move into the Summer Residence guest house. As a consequence I spent the rest of the afternoon with a clearer and more practical focus for my wandering thoughts. The odalisque took on more and more the outward appearance of Sarah Layton whose part of Pankot I was about to enter, disguised in my fleece, shepherded by Rowan. By 4.30 or so when the second interview of the day petered out in cosy military reminiscences of the questioned man’s experiences in North Africa, the transformation of the odalisque into colonel’s daughter was virtually complete; the room, the hut, the whole precise military complex had reasserted itself and when I walked out past the stick-guard post the perfumed midnight garden of secret Pankot seemed as far away as the memory of the Red Shadow importuning that morning. I climbed into a tonga and felt the blessing of the ramshackle motion, the pine scent of the hills and the ancient smell of dung and wood smoke that hung in the invigorating air and mellow light. It had been my intention to keep the tonga waiting while I crammed into the kit-bag the few things I’d taken out, but as we got near the hospital I remembered I owed some money in the mess and would have to find someone competent to accept it. Realizing that this might take a bit of time my inclination became to bathe and
change, postpone my arrival at the guest house and extract from the hospital the last ounce of the pleasure I would have in leaving it.

So I paid the man off at the gates and walked through the leafy grounds to the mess and to the hut where I had my quarters. It would have been about 5 p.m. The only men around were the servants. The room allotted to me was one of four or five under a single roof and sharing the same verandah, with its own bath-house and w.c. cubicle at the back, overlooking a courtyard or compound. At this time, apart from one sergeant (of whom I’d only seen the back view as he left in the morning for duty: it wasn’t Potter) I was the only occupant of this particular block but there seemed to be plenty of bearers and bhishtis about. I never had any trouble getting what I wanted. The servants probably also looked after other huts and I was fortunate to be close to where they lived.

I had a key to padlock the front door from outside and the back door from inside. The drill was, once you were inside, to unlock the back door in the bath-house and then shout for the bearer or the bhishti. Actually to shout was seldom necessary. Directly you opened the back door bodies tended to converge and enter, the sweeper to sweep out (even if he had swept out in the morning), the bearer either to make your bed or to get it ready for the night, and the bhishti with the kerosene tins of hot water for bathing. If you waited for anyone it was usually the bhishti.

I told the bearer I was leaving, hustled the sweeper-boy out (giving him his bhaksheesh) and ordered a bath. Having unpadlocked my kit-bag I settled down to enjoy a Scotch and wait for the hot water to arrive. I decided to wear civvies and set them out on the bed with a change of underwear. The hot water came while I was undressing. I took the bottle of Scotch, my glass and another bottle of soda into the bathhouse and settled in the tub for a leisurely soak.

The dénouement, after such careful scene-setting, is I suppose as obvious to you as it became to me before it actually occurred. Do you believe in a sixth sense? I don’t think I heard a sound other than the noise the servants were making in the compound, shouting at one another, and the sound I was
making myself, gently splashing water and humming a popular tune called ‘Do I Worry?’ But at one moment I was listening to the servants shouting and my own humming and at the next continuing to listen but, as it were, against a background of a soundless presence, a vibrating sense of intrusion.

Someone was in my bedroom and it needed no special gift of intuition to conclude that it was the Red Shadow. I went on humming and splashing, and kept my eyes well away from the door which, although closed, probably gave a man with an eye close to one of the hair-line gaps between door and frame, a view. I had little doubt – so strong was the sensation of being observed – that the Red Shadow was at the moment applying one kohl-rimmed eye to this gap, reassuring himself that I was doing what it sounded as if I was doing. I waited for the sensation of being watched to go away. When after yet another verse of ‘Do I Worry?’ it still hadn’t I felt a powerful urge to grab the towel and hold it up like a purdah screen. I hadn’t so far associated the Red Shadow with voyeurism, at least not when the observed object was a grown man long since past the peach-bloom of youth. Just, though, as embarrassment was giving way to simple outrage the eye stopped looking through the crack and its owner tiptoed towards the real objectives: my discarded uniform (wallet) and my kit-bag (bottles). This, you understand, was what my sixth sense told me. At the same time this sixth sense took control of my physical actions. It brought me, still humming, still scooping water, very slowly from the squatting to the crouching position. It kept me in the latter to minimize the change of level from which the hum was coming. Then it picked one of my feet slowly out of the tin tub on to the duck-board and then the other. It kept the water-scooping hand and arm going.

It then ceased to be inventive. There I was, stark naked, crouched and scooping and humming. The door was within leaping distance. But could one, should one, emerge, however furious, however vengeful, in a state of such wretched nakedness? Particularly after that voyeuristic interlude? The towel near by was not the kind one could wrap round with much confidence in its staying put during the energetic
demonstration I had in mind. It was now that I noticed my discarded underpants. Still scooping, still humming, I hooked them with a toe and gathered them in and pulled them on. I leapt for the door, grabbed the handle and opened it.

The wallet was going back into the breast-pocket of my jacket. A ten rupee note from it had stuck to his fingers and (how dextrous he was) was disappearing into his belt at the same time that the wallet was disappearing back where it had come from. But both movements were now frozen at the point of completion and his head (looking stuck on his neck at a not quite convincing angle) was twisted round and presenting to me an O-shaped mouth.