There was a plan as you probably know to move English women and children into places like the club, Smith’s hotel and the DCs bungalow if the threatened uprising really got going, and finally into the old barracks if things got as bad as in the Mutiny which some of the Jonahs said they would. Robin had had to work the plan out with Brigadier Reid, but this was the first time I’d ever heard him talk seriously about it. He said, ‘No, not yet, but one or two of the women whose husbands are out of station have gone into the club.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s one place I can’t go, isn’t it, Robin?’ He told me afterwards he hadn’t quite known how to take that, he’d never heard me say anything bitter. But I didn’t mean it to sound bitter. It just slipped out. It was just a case of my automatically stating my position. He said, ‘Well, give me a ring, when Daphne gets back. Perhaps you’d ring in half an hour in any event?’ I said I would. When I came away from the phone Mr Merrick’s car was gone. It was nearly nine o’clock. Daphne had always rung if anything came up at the last moment that meant she couldn’t get back at her usual time. I thought, well perhaps she’s tried to ring, but simply hasn’t been able to get through. But I didn’t really believe it. I had only one clear picture in my mind and that was of Daphne and young Kumar, and of the place they used to call the Sanctuary. It was a place I had personally never been to, which was absurd of me. I had a horror of it, I suppose, in spite of what Anna Klaus used to say, and a horror of the woman who ran it, who called herself Sister Ludmila and collected people she found dying in the streets. Daphne was awfully impressed with Sister Ludmila. Anyway, I went round the back to see what the servants were up to, because I suddenly noticed none of them was about. They’d been very glum all day. There was no one in the kitchen, nobody attending to the dinner. I went to the kitchen door and shouted across the compound and after a bit Raju appeared. He said cook wasn’t feeling well. I said, ‘You mean he’s drunk. Tell him dinner at nine-thirty or you’ll all be looking for a job, including you. Your business is at the front of the house, Raju.’
I went back to the living-room and poured myself a peg, and then I heard Raju at the front. I thought: He’s drunk too and incapable, the stupid boy’s fallen flat on his face by the sound of it. So I went out to scold him. It wasn’t Raju. I couldn’t take it in at first. She was on her hands and knees. She’d fallen and hurt herself on the steps, but only fallen because she was already hurt and exhausted from running. She looked up and said, ‘Oh, Auntie.’ She was still in her khaki hospital uniform. It was torn and muddy and she had blood on her face. Even when she said, ‘Oh, Auntie,’ I couldn’t take it in that it was Daphne.
*
The lights are on in the garden of the MacGregor House, in honour of the stranger. The shrubs, artificially illuminated by the manipulation of a battery of switches on the wall of the verandah, looking strikingly theatrical. There is no breeze but the stillness of the leaves and branches is unnatural. As well as these areas of radiance the switches have turned on great inky pools of darkness. Sometimes the men and women you talk to, moving from group to group on the lawn, present themselves in silhouette; although the turn of a head may reveal a glint in a liquidly transparent eye and the movement of an arm the skeletal structure of a hand holding a glass that contains light and liquid in equal measure. In the darkness too, strangely static and as strangely suddenly galvanised, are the fireflies of the ends of cigarettes.
The people in the garden are the inheritors. Somewhere, farther away in time than in distance, the fire that consumed Edwina Crane spurts unnoticed, licks and catches hold. In this illuminated darkness one might notice this extra brilliance and hear, against the chat and buzz of casual night-party conversation, the ominous crackle of wood.
There was a shed in the compound behind Miss Crane’s bungalow. In true English fashion she kept gardening instruments there. How typical of her to choose (on a windless day when the first post-monsoon heats had dried the wood out and prepared it for a creaking season of contraction and pre-cool-weather warmth) a site where a conflagration would not threaten the bungalow itself. She locked herself in and soaked the walls with paraffin and set them alight and died, one hopes, in the few seconds it took for the violently heated air to scorch the breath out of her lungs.
The story goes that for this act of becoming suttee (which Lady Chatterjee describes as sannyasa without the travelling) she dressed for the first time in her life in a white saree, the saree for her adopted country, the whiteness for widowhood and mourning. And there is a tale that Joseph, returning empty-handed from some wild-goose errand she had sent him on, fell on his knees in the compound and cried to the smouldering pyre, ‘Oh, Madam, Madam,’ just as, several weeks before, Miss Manners, falling on her knees, had looked up and said, ‘Oh, Auntie.’
In such a fashion human beings call for explanations of the things that happen to them and in such a way scenes and characters are set for exploration, like toys set out by kneeling children intent on pursuing their grim but necessary games.
Part Three
SISTER LUDMILA
Her origins were obscure. Some said she was related to the Romanovs; others that she had been a Hungarian peasant, a Russian spy, a German adventuress, a run-away French novice. But all this was conjecture. What was clear, at least to the Mayapore Europeans, was that saintly as she might now appear she had no business calling herself Sister. The Catholic and Protestant churches withheld their recognition, but accepted her existence because she had long ago won the battle of the Habit by declaring to the irate Roman priest who turned up to cast out this particular abomination that the clothes she wore were of her own design, that although a genuine religious had superior status and a larger stake in life eternal, she could not possibly have any exclusive claim to modesty or special vulnerability to heatstroke: hence the long light gown of thin grey cotton (unadorned either by cross or penitential cord, and tied at the waist by an ordinary leather belt obtainable in any bazaar) and the wide winged cap of white starched linen that sheltered her neck and shoulders from the sun and could be seen on the darkest night.
‘But you call yourself Sister Ludmila,’ the priest said.
‘No. It is the Indians who call me that. If you object take your objections to them. There is anyway a saying, God is not mocked.’
In those days (in 1942), on every Wednesday morning, Sister Ludmila set out on foot from the cluster of old buildings where she fed the hungry, ministered to the sick, and cleansed and comforted those who for want of her nightly scavenging would have died in the street.
She carried a locked leather bag that was attached to her belt by a chain. Behind her walked a stalwart Indian youth armed with a stick. It was seldom the same boy for more than a month or two. Mr Govindas, the manager of the Mayapore branch of the Imperial Bank of India in the cantonment, which was the place she was bound for on these Wednesday outings, said to her once, ‘Sister Ludmila, where does that boy come from?’ ‘From heaven, I suppose.’ ‘And the boy who accompanied you last month? From heaven also?’ ‘No,’ Sister Ludmila said, ‘he came from jail and has recently gone back in.’ ‘It is what I am warning you of,’ Mr Govindas pointed out, ‘the danger of trusting a boy simply because he looks strong enough to protect you.’
Sister Ludmila merely smiled and handed over her cheque made out to cash.
Week by week she came to Mr Govindas for two hundred rupees. The cheques were drawn upon the Imperial Bank of India in Bombay. The Imperial Bank has long since become the State Bank and Mr Govindas long since retired. His memory remains sharp, though. Since she never paid money in and was known by Mr Govindas to pay all her trade accounts by cheque as well, he could only assume that either her fortune was large or her account credited regularly from elsewhere. The long-standing instruction from the Bombay branch authorising the cashing facilities at Mayapore described her as Mrs Ludmila Smith and the cheques were signed accordingly. By pumping a friend in Bombay, Mr Govindas eventually discovered that the money came from
the treasury of a small princely state and might be reckoned as some sort of pension because Mrs Ludmila Smith’s husband, said to be an engineer, had died while on the ruler’s pay-roll. She took the two hundred rupees as follows: fifty rupees in notes of Rs. 5 denomination, one hundred rupees in notes of Rs. 1, and fifty rupees in small change. Mr Govidas estimated that most of the small change and a fair proportion of the one-rupee notes were distributed to the poor and that the rest went on wages for her assistants and casual purchases in the market. He knew that her meat, grain and vegetables were supplied on monthly account by local contractors, and that medicines were bought from Dr Gulab Singh Sahib’s pharmacy at a trade discount of 121/2% plus 5% for monthly settlement. He knew that Sister Ludmila drank only one glass of orange juice a day and ate one meal of rice or pulses in the evening, with curds to follow, except on Fridays when she had a modest curry of vegetables and, on Christian festivals, fish. The rest of the food was consumed by her assistants and in meals for the hungry. He knew many such things about her. He sometimes thought that if he were to write down all the things he knew or heard about her he would fill up several pages of the bank’s foolscap. But knowing all this he still believed that he knew nothing of importance. In this belief, in Mayapore, in 1942, Mr Govindas was not alone.
Her age, for instance. Well – how old was she? Under the nunnish pleats and folds and fly-away wings of starched linen her face described by some as inscrutable lived perpetually in an aseptic, reverent light. Her hands were those of a women who had always directed the work of others. Time had barely touched them. A single ring, a gold band, adorned her wedding finger. Her throat was protected by a high-necked starched white linen bib that also covered her breast and shoulders. Her eyes were dark and deep set, and there was an impression of prominent cheekbones – proof perhaps of Magyar blood. Her voice, also dark and deep, matched the eyes. She spoke fluent but rather staccato English and a vile bazaar Hindi. Mr Govindas had heard English people say that her English accent was Germanic. It was also said that she possessed a French as well as a British passport. At a guess, it was assumed she was about fifty years old, give or take five years.
Having collected the two hundred rupees and deposited them in the leather bag that was chained to her waist, Sister Ludmila bade Mr Govindas good-day, thanked him for escorting her personally from his inner sanctum to the door, and set out on the journey home, attended by her young man of the moment who had spent the ten minutes or so that it took her to cash her cheque sitting on his hunkers in the street outside, gossiping with anyone who also happened to be waiting or idling his time away. Such talk as went on between the bodyguard and his chance companions was usually vulgar. The other men would want to know whether the crazy white woman had yet invited him to share her bed or when exactly it was that he planned to run off with the cash she hired him to protect. The ribaldry was good-natured, but behind it there might always have been detected a note of black uncertainty. To a man in health, her business seemed too closely connected with death for comfort.
*
From the Mayapore branch of the Imperial Bank which was situated in the arcaded Victoria road, the main shopping centre of the European cantonment, Sister Ludmila’s journey back to the sanctuary took her through the Eurasian quarter, past the church of the mission, over the level crossing for which, like Miss Crane – to whom she had nodded but never spoken – she sometimes had to wait to be opened before she could continue across the crowded Mandir Gate bridge. Once over the river, outside the Tirupati temple, she paused and distributed money to the beggars and to the leper who sat cross-legged, displaying the pink patches of a diseased trunk and holding up lopped tree-branch arms. On this side of the river the sun seemed to strike more fiercely and indiscriminately as though the smells of poverty and dirt would be wasted in shade. Colour was robbed of the advantage of its singularity, its surprise. At ground level, the spectrum contracted into ranges of exhausted greys and yellows. Even the scarlet flower in a woman’s braided hair, lacking its temperate complementary green, was scorched to an insipid brown. Here, the white starched cap of Sister Ludmila looked like some prehistoric bird miraculously risen, floating, bobbing and bucking, visible from afar.
Beyond the temple the road forks into two narrower roads. At the apex a holy tree shelters a shrine, ruminant cows, old men, and women with their fingers held to their nostrils. At the head of the road that forks to the right towards the jail the Majestic Cinema announces an epic from the Ramayana (now, as then). The left-hand fork is narrower, darker, and leads past open-fronted shops to the Chillianwallah Bazaar. Down this road Sister Ludmila, all that time ago, proceeded with the boy behind her and a dozen children running by her side and to her front, each hopeful of an anna. She walked upright, the locked bag in her folded arms, and ignored the cries of the shopkeepers inviting her to buy pan, cloth, soda-water, melons or jasmine. At the end of the lane she turned left and entered the Chillianwallah Bazaar through the open archway in the high concrete wall that surrounds it.
In the middle of the walled area there are fish and meat markets – large open-sided godowns floored in concrete and roofed with sloping sheets of corrugated iron supported by concrete pillars. In the open, ranged along the enclosing walls, women have set out their rainbow vegetables and spices on mats, and sit among them holding their idle scales like so many huddled figures of unblindfolded and so sharp-eyed mercantile justice. From one of them Sister Ludmila bought green chillis and then marched on until she reached the exit on the other side of the walled square. Here, before passing through the exit, she turned aside and mounted a flight of rickety wooden steps to an open doorway on the upper floor of a building – a warehouse, obviously – whose side, at this point, forms part of the bazaar wall. Across the face of the building a sign in blue characters on a faded white background announces ‘Romesh Chand Gupa Sen, Contractors’. Her bodyguard waited at the foot of the steps and smoked a bidi, squatting on his hunkers again, impatient of this unaccustomed interruption in the journey home. After ten minutes Sister Ludmila came out of the doorway and down the steps and led the way out of the bazaar, through another complex of lanes and alleys of old Muslim houses with shuttered windows above and closed doors at street level; until, abruptly, the houses gave way to open ground that was (still is) scattered with the huts and shacks of the untouchables. Beyond the huts there is a stagnant water-tank on whose farther bank are laid out to dry the long coloured sarees and murky rags belonging to the black-skinned, braceleted, bare-legged women who stand thigh-high in the water, washing themselves and their clothes. There are three trees but otherwise the land looks waste and desolate. Crows screech, flap and wheel aloft making for the river which is not visible from where Sister Ludmila walked, but can be smelt, and sensed – for behind a rise in the ground the land seems to fall away, then reappear more distantly. On the opposite bank are the godowns and installations belonging to the railway. The lane Sister Ludmila took lies roughly parallel to the winding course of the river and leads to a gateless opening in a broken-down wall that surrounds a compound. Within the compound there are three squat single-storey buildings, relics of the early nineteenth century, once derelict but patched up, distempered white, calm, silent, stark, functional, and accompanied (these days) by a fourth building of modern design. This was the Sanctuary, since re-named.