The Jewel In The Crown (The Raj quartet)

  These are not divisible, are they, these sights and people I’ve listed except, I suppose, in the minds of the people who encounter them and decide their meaning. Oh dear, I’m as bad as you, as any of us. Even when I’m not looking for a meaning one springs naturally to my mind. Do you think it is a disease?

  Have the other half and then we’ll bash off in and have dinner.

  *

  In the MacGregor House there is a room where the late Sir Nello Chatterjee deposited souvenirs of a life-time’s magpie habit of picking up whatever caught his eye that might be reckoned a curiosity. He obviously engaged in a love affair with cuckoo clocks and cheap brightly coloured leather-work, mostly orange, of the kind bought from bumboats at the Red Sea side of the Suez Canal. Perhaps the leatherwork celebrated a boyish delight not so much in the pouffes, purses and handbags, as in the lucky dip of baskets and ropes by which they were raised for inspection from the bobbing coracle-bazaars to the austere rock-firm height of the deck of an ironclad ocean-going steamer. He can seldom have resisted the temptation to possess the risen prize, or the obverse temptation to feel the feathery weight of the basket going down empty, weighted only by the coins or notes which were his response to and interpretation of the bargaining gestures of the fezzed nightgowned figure precariously astride below.

  The pouffes and purses are scattered round this room in the MacGregor House, curiously dry and lifeless, like seaweed taken from its element, but also capable of bringing to the nose of a knowledgeable traveller the recollected smell of oil and water, of the faint stagnation that seems to surround a big ship directly it stops moving. India also seems to be at anchor. The cuckoo clocks are silent, ornate artificial bowers gathering dust, harbouring behind their shutters a score or more of startled birds who are probably hysterical from long incarceration and imminent expectation of winding and release. In Sir Nello’s day the visitor to the room was entertained by the simultaneous cacophonous display of each bird’s jack-in-a-box emergence, a sight Lady Chatterjee says she remembers as putting her in mind of a fantasy she suffered after visiting the morgue in Paris with an amorous medical student. Normally kept embalmed in their own disuse by her orders even when Sir Nello was alive, they have remained so, permanently, since his death. The visitor is discouraged from asking a command performance; instead, invited to admire the stuffed tiger prowling in a nightmare of immobility on a wooden plinth, the glassed ivory replica of the Albert Memorial that plays ‘Home Sweet Home’ on a mechanical dulcimer, shells and stones from the Connecticut shore, a bronze miniature of the Eiffel Tower, little medallions from the kiosks in the Notre Dame Cathedral that are cold with the blessing of the commercial piety they evoke. There are paper lanterns that were carried away from a restaurant in Singapore in exchange for the payment of Sir Nello’s grasping admiration and substantial appetite, the mangy boots of some Mongolian merchant encountered in Darjeeling after a journey over the Himalaya and engaged in Sir Nello’s brand of thrusting acquisitive conversation. There are no weapons, no illuminated Moghul manuscripts or ancient jewellery, no Brobdingnagian trappings purloined from a flattered and impecunious prince’s elephant stables: nothing of value except in the terms one eccentric might use of another eccentric’s relics. There is, for instance, under glass, the old briar pipe that long ago was filled and tamped by the broad but increasingly shaky finger of Sir Henry Manners, one-time Governor of the province in which the town of Mayapore played, in 1942, its peculiar historic role, but Manners was gone ten years before that, carried temporarily away by retirement to Kashmir and then off permanently by the claret and the sunshine which he loved, and a disease which even now is curable only in Paris, Athens and Mexico and of which he knew nothing until it ate through the walls of his intestines and attacked his liver, which the doctors described as a cancerous invasion. And Sir Nello has been dead almost as many years, of a simple heart failure. They had been friends and their wives had been friends and, as widows, remained so right up until Lady Manners’s death in 1948.

  Of an admirable quartet – admirable because they overcame that little obstacle of the colour of the skin – only Lili Chatterjee survives to recall directly the placid as well as the desperate occasions. Of the other actors Reid has gone, and the girl, and young Kumar into oblivion, probably changing his name once more. The Whites and the Poulsons and young Ronald Merrick seem to be lost, temporarily at least, in the anonymity of time or other occupations. Miss Crane set fire to herself. They are the chance victims of the hazards of a colonial ambition. Museums, though, arrest history in its turbulent progress. So – the MacGregor House.

  *

  ‘When I first saw Daphne,’ Lady Chatterjee said, referring to the girl, old Lady Manners’s niece, ‘she struck me as, well, good-natured but inept. She was big and rather clumsy. She was always dropping things.’

  The MacGregor House still echoes faintly to the tinkling of shattered glass that can’t be traced to present accident or blamed on any servant. Both Lili Chatterjee and her great-niece Parvati tread lightly and the servants go barefoot: so how account for the occasional sound of stoutly shod feet mounting the stairs or crossing the tiled floor of the main hall except by admitting Miss Manners’s continuing presence? Through the insistent weeping of the summer rains there would be, one imagines, a singing of songs other than the ragas, in a voice not Parvati’s, and the songs would be too recent to be attributable to Janet MacGregor. In any case Janet was a girl who can be imagined as given more to silence than sound, even at the end with the blood on her bodice and death approaching. Was the blood that of her baby or her husband? Perhaps it was her own. History doesn’t record the answer or even pose the question. Janet MacGregor is a private ghost, an invisible marginal note on the title deeds of the MacGregor House that passed from European to Indian ownership when Sir Nello bought it in the early nineteen-thirties to mark the occasion of his return to the province and district of his birth. Lili Chatterjee was his second wife, fifteen years his junior. He had no children from either, which accounted possibly for the cuckoo clocks. And Nello was Lili’s second husband. Her first was a Rajput prince who broke his neck at polo. She had no children by this athletic heir to a sedentary throne. And this, perhaps, followed by her similarly unproductive life with Nello accounts for her air of unencumbered wisdom, her capacity for free comment and advice. Widow first of a prince she was also the daughter of one. Her education began in Geneva and ended in Paris. For her second husband, reduced as she had been by academic training and worldly experience from a state of privilege to one of common-sense, she chose a man who had a talent for making money as well as for spending it. There were – perhaps still are although she does not mention them – blood relations who never spoke to her again for marrying out of the Rajput into the Vaisya caste. Sir Nello’s father had only been a pleader in the courts of law.

  And Nello’s grandfather (she says) and his grandfather’s fathers were only prosperous merchants and small land-owners. Nello used to have some old family property still, out near Tanpur, but it all went a long time ago. I think Nello gave some away to the peasants. He told me he had, but it may just have been a yarn, he may have got the idea from Tolstoy. He adored Resurrection. And he was very impressionable and eager to act out what he was impressed by. We Indians often are. Nello was a terrific mimic. He did Henry Manners at a party once and the Governor heard about it. So next time they met – Nello used to be called in quite often in an advisory capacity over questions of industrialisation in the province – next time they met Henry said, Well come on, Chatterjee, let’s see it. And the point about Nello is that he couldn’t resist doing the man right in front of him. He liked an audience that could judge him by the highest standards. That’s how they became friends and why Henry gave him that old briar pipe you’ve seen in the glass case. Henry said he thought Nello’s imitation would be even better if he had a real pipe in his mouth and not just an imaginary one. Of course, it wasn’t better, but Nello pretended it was, and that
’s very Indian too, to pretend rather than give offence. Nello didn’t even like the feel of the pipe in his mouth. He never smoked. Or drank. In fact on the quiet he was a bit of a glutton for self-denial, which is probably why he made a lot of money. And he was half-serious about religion. He said to me once, ‘Lili, what would you say if I became sannyasi?’ You know what that means? It means when a man chucks everything up, leaves his home and family and bashes off with a staff and a begging-bowl. So I said, ‘Well, Nello, I’d bash off with you.’ So that put paid to that.

  It’s the fourth stage, you know, sannyasa, the fourth and last, on earth anyway. I mean in the Hindu code of how you should live your life. The first stage is training and discipline and celibacy, the next is raising a family and establishing a household. In the third stage – I suppose you’d call it middle-age, what you English call a man’s prime, but really a time when your children are beginning to find you a bit of a bore and think their ideas best – in the third stage you prepare to loosen the bonds. You make sure your children are married off and provided for, and you bless your grandchildren and try not to stand in anybody’s way. Then you reach the fourth. You bash off into the forest before you become a doddering old burden, and try to make up for lost time in the business of earning religious merit, which of course you can earn all your life but earn best near the end when you give up your worldly possessions, reject the world’s claims and try to forget Self. Of course, the English are always aghast at the idea of sannyasa. They think it’s awful, opting out of your responsibilities like that and then expecting to live off the charity of strangers. I always point out to them that they have their sannyasis too: all those poor old people nobody wants who get sent to Twilight Homes. You must admit the Hindus are practical. You needn’t bother your head about the religious side. It’s like the cow in that respect. The cow became holy and beef unclean to stop the peasants eating it when they were hungry. If they ate their cows there’d be no milk, no bullocks to pull the carts to take stuff to the market or to help plough the fields or draw the water or turn the grindstone. Well, everybody knows that. But it’s the same with sannyasa. We persuade old people to bash off and make one less mouth to feed by making them think it’s a way of acquiring merit. And we make sure they’re fed and not left to starve by persuading people who can afford it to believe they acquire merit too every time they give a wandering sannyasi a copper or a few grains of rice. We do have our own special brand of social security, you see. And we’ve had it far longer than anyone else. And nobody pays taxes for it.

  Women can also become sannyasi. Shall I, do you think? Is the MacGregor House becoming my ashram? These days I’m much alone as you can guess from my talking your head off like this. But I was really thinking of Miss Crane. You say her name was Edwina. That’s something I didn’t know. I find it rather difficult to get used to. I should have thought of her more as Mildred. Anyway, to me she has always been Crane, Miss Crane. A bird with long legs and elongated neck trying to flap its way out of danger, too slowly, you know, like in slow motion at the movies. On one of those three or four occasions I went to see her after the trouble, when people were saying she was already round the bend, I tried to get her to tell me why she’d resigned from the mission. There weren’t any pictures on the walls. But there were these two blank spaces where you could see pictures had been. Well, I knew about one blank space, but not the other. I said, ‘I see you’re beginning to pack.’ Mr Gandhi had gone, as I knew, but I was curious to know what the other picture had been. A picture of Mr Nehru? The founder of the mission? The Light of the World?

  But all she said was, ‘No, I shan’t need to pack,’ so I guessed the mission johnnies had given her permission to stay on in the bungalow. You must visit it. It’s still there. I went past it the other day on my way to the Purdah Hospital. I’m still on the committee, still making a nuisance of myself. Look out they say, here comes old Chatters. I bash off there the second Tuesday of every month and usually go the Bibighar bridge way but they’re resurfacing the road and you get stuck for ages in the traffic, so this time we went by the Mandir Gate bridge, and Shaft took the wrong turning, stupid fellow. So there we were, not going past the old mission church but Miss Crane’s bungalow. I haven’t been down that road for years. It seems to be full of banias who’ve moved in from the bazaar. There was this big gross fellow on Miss Crane’s little verandah picking his toes and listening to his transistor, and I think there were a couple of goats eating what there was of the grass and half a dozen children playing tag. She had such a pretty garden, too. Horticulture was the only subject we seemed to have in common. I told her she must come and see the garden here when she felt up to it, but she never did. The garden here at the MacGregor House is the same as it was then, so you can imagine it in those days. Bhalu grows the same flowers in the same beds year after year. He’s always been an orderly type of man. Daphne used to pick the marigolds for the table, but she did tend to trample the edges of the beds and she’d only been with me a few days before Bhalu came and begged me to stop young memsahib trying to help him. Because he grew the flowers he thought he should be allowed to cut them. I told him the young memsahib liked flowers and wanted to help and although she was always smiling had had a lot of unhappiness and had lost all her family except her Auntie Ethel, so we had to be patient, but perhaps try to get her interested in ferns and evergreens which always grow wild in the shrubbery and made much chic-er decorations than marigolds. Now it’s Parvati who picks the marigolds. But she’s as light as a feather and old Bhalu’s only too glad to have extra time to snooze and dream he’s back in the army, looking after Colonel James Sahib’s garden. I haven’t the faintest idea who Colonel James was, but as Bhalu gets older the colonel gets more and more VIP in his imagination, and now it seems the colonel can’t have been anything less than personal aide to the Viceroy. It used to be a status symbol for an Indian family to hire a servant who’d worked for the old-style British. It still is, but that kind of servant is getting so old now, and useless, that it’s better to get someone from the bazaar and train them up. Bhalu used to refer to Nello as the Chota Sahib. Indians were always called that by servants who’d worked for your people, to distinguish them from British burra Sahibs. Burra means big, and chota means small. But you must know that too. Nello always laughed, but I think it hurt him a bit, knowing his head gardener called him a chota sahib.

  I wish Daphne had known Nello, but of course he died several years before she came to stay with me. They had the same sense of fun. In a big girl that kind of thing is more noticeable, isn’t it? Or do I mean that big girls are jollier than ordinary size ones? But tiny girls are often jolly too, aren’t they? I mean tiny English girls. Indian girls are mostly tiny. Look at Parvati now. If they’re big they’re awfully earnest and sometimes violent. They seem to act as if they have a special position to keep up. If they’re taller than their husbands the situation becomes fraught. I was an inch shorter than Nello and five inches shorter than my first husband Ranji.

  I’m trying to remember how tall Miss Crane was. Taller than I of course, but medium English height probably. The neck and the legs and the nose are all I vividly remember. I mostly saw her sitting down or sitting up. Dinner at Connie White’s, and then when I visited her at the British General Hospital and at her bungalow after she’d been discharged but still wasn’t well enough to get up. She received me the first time I went to her bungalow lying on a charpoy on the verandah. It was difficult seeing her in the British hospital. The English friends I had who were ill usually went to the Greenlawns nursing home and had private rooms they couldn’t afford. If I wanted to visit there I could always fix it with Doctor Mayhew. And if anyone was in the general hospital they always seemed to have a room in the private wing and all I had to do then was ring Ian Macintosh who was the Civil Surgeon and ask him to tell someone to warn the sister-in-charge. But Miss Crane was in the public wing in a ward with three or four other beds and Ian was out of station the day I decid
ed to go. I’d never been in at the main reception before. The girl there – she was Anglo-Indian, but as white as a European – said I couldn’t see Miss Crane, and when I insisted she kept me waiting in the hall and only pretended to have sent a message to the ward sister. What she had done was send a warning up to her. It was rather silly because Daphne had been doing voluntary work at the hospital and she lived with me, but because I was an Indian I wasn’t really allowed in, anyway, not welcome. There wasn’t actually a rule about it, just an unwritten one. I could have gone to the military wing because there were Indian King’s commissioned officers on the station. That meant I could have visited say Lieutenant Shashardri or his wife, but the civil wing was sacrosanct. When Mrs Menen who was the wife of the District and Sessions Judge was ill she had a room in the nursing home, which Ian Macintosh always insisted should be multi-racial, provided people could pay for a room there. Although even then there was an unwritten rule that an Indian patient had to be of a certain type to get a bed. It didn’t matter much and never caused any trouble because if an Indian was rich enough to afford it but not the right type his wife anyway was almost bound to be the kind of woman who wouldn’t dream of going anywhere but the Purdah Hospital.

  Anyway, there I was, the day I went to visit Miss Crane, sat down in the hall, hoping I looked as if I hadn’t the slightest idea that anything was wrong, and after a bit all these lumpy QAs and harpy VADs started popping into reception on some excuse or other but actually to see if the rumour were true, that an Indian woman had had the brass to present herself at the desk and expect to be allowed up into the wards. I felt like something in a zoo, but then we often did in those days. I would probably have been sitting there still if Bruce Mayhew who had a consultant appointment there hadn’t come whirling in and stopped dead and said, ‘Hello, Lili, what on earth are you doing sitting there?’ I told him I’d come to visit Miss Crane and that the girl at reception was trying to get hold of the ward-sister for me. I didn’t want to get the receptionist into trouble, but of course Bruce knew what was happening. He said there was no need to bother the ward-sister and that he was going up there himself and would take me. When we got into the room where Miss Crane was he stayed with us long enough to make it clear to the other English women in the ward that I was somebody. Not that it made any difference. When Bruce went out one of them rang the bell. Ordinarily a nurse would have answered it, but the ward-sister came in herself. I know Bruce spoke to her on his way out because he told me so afterwards. He went specially to her cubby-hole and apologised for taking a visitor in to see Miss Crane without her permission. He didn’t say who I was because he knew it wasn’t necessary. I mean he knew she had been told an Indian woman had been trying to get in, and that she had intentionally locked herself in her cubby-hole so that she couldn’t be ‘found’. Anyway, in she stalked a few minutes after Bruce had gone and only a few seconds after this woman had rung the bell. She stopped in her tracks as if amazed to see anyone there. She said, ‘What are you doing here, don’t you know visitors aren’t allowed at this time of day?’ I told her Doctor Mayhew had given me permission because no one had been able to find her. Oh, I am in charge of this ward, not Doctor Mayhew, she said, please leave at once. Was it you who rang the bell, Miss Crane? As if Miss Crane had rung to get me thrown out. And before Miss Crane could say anything, this woman who’d actually rung piped up, No, it was me who rang, my rest is being disturbed. She sounded like the wife of a foreman from the British-Indian Electrical. Cockney, overlaid with a year or two of listening to how the wives of the directors spoke. I’m sorry. That’s awfully snob of me, isn’t it, but I was upset and angry not only because of what was happening, but also because I saw I’d probably put myself in the wrong over the question of official visiting hours. But Daphne had always said nobody took any notice of them and just wandered about at almost any old time. And there were other people going in to visit patients. It was my bad luck that there was nobody visiting any of these other women in Miss Crane’s ward just then. And what was so awfully unfair was the fact that poor old Miss Crane had only had two visitors the whole time she’d been there – the chaplain and Mr Poulson who really only saw her officially. The poor man didn’t have time for more than that. It was he who rescued her, you remember. After she’d come through the pneumonia he had to ask her a lot of questions about the men who had killed Mr Chaudhuri. He didn’t have to do that, it was really Ronald Merrick’s job, but Mr Poulson and Mr White knew Miss Crane had to be treated gently and they knew Merrick wasn’t a gentle sort of man. And Miss Crane hadn’t been helpful with her answers. She wasn’t popular any longer in the hospital. People thought she was holding something back so that an Indian killer would go free. When I visited her she’d been in the hospital three weeks and had only just been taken out of a side ward into this room with the lumps and harpies. Bruce Mayhew had told me on the way up that he appreciated my coming to see her. She had almost no white friends. For a day or two at the beginning she’d been thought a lot of in the hospital because she’d come through a bad time in the first riots. They would have liked her to be a heroine of the kind that breathed fire and got a few rioters swinging on the end of a rope. But she didn’t breathe fire, and although in the end they got some of the men who’d led the mob and killed Mr Chaudhuri, that was due to the tenacity of the sub-inspector in Tanpur, and people thought justice would have been done quicker if Miss Crane had helped with proper descriptions. I suppose it didn’t help her, my going to see her, and certainly didn’t help me, my going to see her, although there was nothing much that would have helped me in the circumstances. The few white friends she had were the kind who hadn’t the time to go and see her, and her Indian friends weren’t the kind who’d have dared even to try. Some of the soldiers from the barracks clubbed together and sent her flowers and there were a few gifts from poor Indians like Mr Narayan who taught at the Chillianwallah school. Probably more gifts of that kind than ever reached her. The hospital staff wouldn’t even have to look at the card to tell whether flowers came from an Indian or a European. I expect a lot were thrown away, so that she never had the chance of knowing how much the Indians liked her, not just for not giving evidence that wasn’t absolutely in line with what she remembered, but for herself. I know Connie White and Mavis Poulson always meant to go and see her in hospital, but things were in such a frightful state, almost a state of siege, they never had the proper opportunity. It must have made her feel loved by no one. And about my own visit, you must bear in mind that Indians were hardly popular among the whites just then, and then of course, there was the other business, too. They all knew I was the woman in whose house Daphne was staying. It’s what I told myself when I’d got over the anger and annoyance of being thrown out by that harpy sister.