The Pledge (4 page)

Talking while they rode, Majumdar summed up the contents of his newspaper. “Our lead story, Mr. Bacon —”

“Hold on. Right there. If we're going to spend this day together, I'm Bruce and you're —”

“Jumdar. That's what they call me. Jumdar.”

“OK. Jumdar. Bruce. None of this sahib shit and no Mr. Bacon. It's the fucken subservience here —”

“Which is the mark of oppression!” Majumdar said sharply. “Don't you understand one damned thing?”

Silence for fifty yards or so, and then Bruce said, “Thank you for getting angry. No, I don't know much or understand very much. War makes you used to death. It doesn't make you smart.”

Majumdar nodded and was silent for a long moment. Then returned to the paper. “Our lead story is, of course, the famine. I interviewed Mohamout Arfet. He is one of the Congress leaders in our struggle for independence, and he feels, as I do, that somehow the blame for the famine must not rest only on the shoulders of the rice dealers. Most of them are Muslims, and God knows there is enough bitter feeling between the Hindus and the Muslims here in Bengal. The Congress people understand that we are very close to the peasants. The deep, original force behind the famine is the British, and the people must understand that. Then we have a story about a large landholder who has ground down his tenants so hard that sixty percent of them are dead of malaria and malnutrition.”

“You blame the landlord for the malaria?”

“When you are weakened, starving, when your resistance is very low, malaria can be fatal. I live with malaria. A starving man dies with it. Another story — you would call it a sidebar — points to the British lack of concern for the mosquitoes breeding in the swamplands. Then, of course, we have the Party program, a list of the things we propose. Right now, we have a united front with the Congress. The British must leave India. The time has come, and we will wait no longer. The day of the Empire is over. Programmatically, that is number one.”

“And where do you fit in?” Bruce demanded. “Where does the Party fit in — the Communist Party, I mean? The British say you are tools of the Soviets, just waiting for the day the British leave and you can hand the country over to them.”

Majumdar burst into laughter. “Don't, don't. I can't laugh and ride a bicycle at the same time. Bruce, do you really see me handing this subcontinent, With its four hundred million people, over to the Russians? I have never spoken to a Russian. They have enough to do for a hundred years, just putting together what Hitler has destroyed. Later we talk about this.”

They had come to a tiny hamlet, about three or four miles from what Bruce considered the city line. Majumdar dismounted, as did Bruce, and they walked their bikes into the center of the hamlet, where there was a well, a watering trough, twenty-three people by count, babies, women, and children included, and a cluster of poor wattle shacks. The men and women and children, like most men and women and children in the vicinity of Calcutta, were thin, their clothes patched and worn, some of them in rags. They welcomed Majumdar warmly, and then looked down shyly when they were introduced to Bruce.

Apparently, they had been waiting for Majumdar, for they settled down in front of the well, sitting cross-legged in the dust, while Majumdar unrolled his newspaper and began to read. Bruce listened intently, although he could not understand a word of the Bengali, but watching the faces of the illiterate village folk, he found responses that illuminated the brief summary that Majumdar had given him. When the reading was over, which took twelve minutes by Bruce's watch, there were a few questions which Majumdar answered. Then he opened his pouch, holding his bike steady, while each one of the villagers, excepting the small children, dropped a single grain of rice into it. Then Majumdar closed the pouch, said a few words more to the group, led Bruce across the road, and mounted his bike.

“Next village,” Majumdar said. “About a mile from here. Much larger. We'll have at least fifty people.”

“Aren't any of them literate?”

“Would they stay there if they were?”

“And the rice — what did that mean? Is it a symbolic gesture?”

“Symbolic? I should say not. The rice is my pay. I try to cover at least twenty villages — sometimes less, sometimes only eight or ten if we have hot discussion. At the end of the day, I have a small bag of rice. For a few pice, a vegetable to cook in the rice. I remain well fed and healthy, more than most in this hellish famine.”

“This heat is impossible. I'm thirsty.”

“It will be worse as the day wears on,” Majumdar warned him. “Try not to drink until ten. You know, you can still go back. It's mostly straight road.”

“And leave you to face the tigers alone? By the way, where do you keep them?”

“Not around here, no tigers, no maharajahs on elephants, nothing but very poor people and heat and sorrow.”

Majumdar had underestimated the size of the crowd at the next village, a place somewhat larger than the first one, a trifle more prosperous, some women weaving, and cows being milked. Three of the men engaged Majumdar in rapid conversation while the others pressed around to listen. It appeared, as he explained to Bruce later, that there were four families of Assamese here, who had come down from the hills, where they were starving, and the village could no longer take care of them and wished them to go off and find a way to live in the streets of Calcutta. But the people from Assam knew that no one lived on the streets of Calcutta; it was a place to die, not to live.

Bruce seated himself under a huge baobab tree, which the village was fortunate enough to possess, selling its leaves to the pharmacists in Calcutta — although only to the old-fashioned ones — yet sufficient leaves remained to give him a degree of shade, and there he rested, listening to the frantic discussion in a language of which he understood not a single word. The small children of the village gathered around him, and he was reminded of Hal Legerman's story of filling his pockets with pice. He had only a handful of coins in his pocket, and he distributed these among the children, who first stared at the coins with awe and disbelief and then tried to give them back. When Bruce refused to take them, the children chattered rapidly and then raced away. Now half of the men and women in the group were shouting at each other, with Majumdar trying to quiet them and impose some order. It took almost a half hour before Majumdar could unroll his newspaper and read the news, and after that, there was more discussion. When they rolled out of there on their bicycles, Majumdar explained the problem to Bruce.

“What decision did they come to? Or was the decision up to you? They seemed to trust you.”

“I hope so. The decision was theirs, but I pushed them a little. I said that if the survival of the village depended on sending the families into Calcutta, then it might be considered just and proper. On the other hand, they could not send the children of these hill people to death without great agony and terrible karma, terrible karma. Maybe it was the thought of the karma. Possibly, the thought of separating the children from their parents. They will allow the hill folk to remain.”

“And the karma? Do you believe in karma — you, a communist?”

Majumdar smiled. “Does communism change the universe? Shall I not be accountable for my actions? Shall I be released from my karma?”

“No one gave you rice there,” Bruce said.

“Quite true. They sacrificed. I must sacrifice.”

Bruce wrestled with this as Majumdar went through his rite of reading the news at the next village. As before, the children gathered around him. He went through his pockets, but he had no more change and he felt uneasy about giving them paper money. His guilt — which he decided was totally unreasonable but nevertheless present and provocative — set him to brooding over the matter of karma. As well as he could remember, karma was the name given to the sum of a person's actions during the successive phases of existence, and this storehouse of karma, measured in some strange way by compassion, determined a person's destiny. Since Bruce, as a proper twentieth-century man, rejected any notion so preposterous as successive phases of existence, the problem of Majumdar, a man of obviously keen intelligence, believing in it, puzzled him — but no more than everything else in this strange land. The fact that he, Bruce Bacon, raised in the most proper middle-class circumstances in New York City, graduate of Williams College and postgraduate at the Columbia School of Journalism, was sitting in the shade of a wickerwork fence, a bony cow lying beside him chewing her cud and indifferent to his presence, his uniform soaked with sweat, listening to a communist organizer reading a newspaper in a language he did not understand, underlined that.

At the next village, Bruce finished the first of the three water bottles. Majumdar drank the village water wherever they were, so thirst was not his problem. “As far as food is concerned,” Bruce told him, “I can't eat any of their food.”

“You will not be offered food,” Majumdar assured him. “We'll feel better in this heat if we don't eat until this evening.”

“When you will be my guest for dinner.”

Majumdar demurred, but Bruce insisted. “Ah, I shall have to find a clean dhoti.” Majumdar sighed.

“I didn't mean I wouldn't eat their food,” Bruce added hastily. “I mean, I'm not afraid to eat it. I mean the guilt — oh, hell, how can you eat in this heat?”

“Of course,” Majumdar said.

Where their path crossed a larger road, they paused and stood with their bikes to watch a troop of British soldiers marching by. The soldiers wore chalk-white sun helmets over brown faces.

“They're Gurkhas,” Majumdar whispered in contempt. “Stupid savages who kill for hire. Always one against the others with the British — Hindus against Muslims, Ghurkas against Bengalis — always one against another.”

“I don't know that it makes a hell of a lot of difference,” Bruce said tiredly. “For two years I've watched men slaughter each other. Killing is what we do best.”

Majumdar nodded. The Ghurkas marched past.

Back at the palace, Majumdar took Bruce's bicycle, and they agreed to meet at nine o'clock at the same restaurant that Legerman had taken Bruce to. Bruce was utterly exhausted, soaked with sweat, his thighs and calves aching from the first bike ride he had taken in years. He had drunk and finished the three bottles of water they carried with them, and now his mind brimmed hopefully over a vision of a tall glass of beer, British or otherwise. It was after four, so the bar was open, and as he shuffled in, wiping his glasses and trying to adjust to the cool darkness, a man by the name of Peterson, accredited to the area through a Missouri newspaper, said to Bruce, “I see you been touristing with that tall nigger of yours. What are you on to?”

“Fuck off, you shithead!” Bruce shouted, drawing the attention of everyone at the bar.

“Easy,” Peterson said, spreading his hands. “Easy. Maybe I said something out of place —”

“Oh, go to hell,” Bruce muttered, walking to the end of the bar, past the curious and none too friendly glances of the other correspondents. He downed his beer quickly, reflecting that it was his fault. He had fallen into the trap of looking down at correspondents who had seen no action but sat out their assignments rewriting the army handouts, and he had gone out of his way to make no friends at the palace where he was quartered. He was suffering the painful response of a calm and reflective man who discovers that he is as capable of losing control as any hotheaded bully. His sudden disgust with himself displaced his vague notion of what his actions and discoveries of the past few weeks might lead to. He had done his part in this war; he had seen enough hell and horror and had committed enough of it to paper to establish a proper track record, and now why did he persist in remaining in this steaming charnel house called Calcutta? Why not take his typewriter and Valpack and find the quickest way home.

In his room, he stripped off his sweat-soaked uniform, and, naked, fell onto his cot. In a few minutes, he was asleep, and when he awakened it was dark outside. He switched on the light. Had he slept through his appointment with Majumdar? It was not yet eight o'clock. After a cold shower and with clean clothes, he felt human again. Downstairs, Johnson was waiting for him with a jeep, and a few minutes after nine, he was dropped off at the Jewish restaurant.

This time, at a small table for two, Majumdar ordered a dinner of Indian food. “You enjoy fish?” Majumdar asked him. “We will have some fish and vegetables and good bread. The waiter tells me they make fine tali machi here. Bits of fish coated with a chickpea batter and fried, and with it beans kari. Yes? That would please you?”

“Do you remember,” Bruce said, “that after those Ghurkas had marched past us, we walked the bikes through that incredible field of golden mustard plants? And then, back at my quarters just now, I dropped down on my bed and slept for over three hours and I had this dream of the golden field covering the naked bodies of the starving children — oh, Christ, I'm making no sense, and then you talk about this food. What in hell are we doing here?”

“Eating, talking,” Majumdar said gently. “For me, it is a great treat, because without feeling like a beggar — I despise begging — I am going to eat fine food that I have not tasted for many years. We return to the original proposition, my friend. Shall I deny myself? Another will eat the food, and who will it help? You are full of Christianity, as the British are. I am a Buddhist.”

“And a communist. I thought you were a Hindu?”

“Ah, we are endlessly confusing you. I was born in Kashmir, a Hindu family, but in college I became a Buddhist, and then out of that I became a communist. I am still a Buddhist and a Hindu, but something in my karma, some awful presence there took me from Kashmir, which is heaven on earth, to this place called Calcutta, which before the monsoon is close to what you Christians call hell.”