We walked in darkness. ‘Over there,’ I called to Mr de Souza, ‘flash your torch, there, in the ditch.’ My eyes were sharper than anyone’s in those days. I knew every inch of the way, where a hump should be, or a shadow, and where there should be neither. There are images that stay vividly in your mind, even after many years; images coupled with the feeling that at the same time came to you. Sometimes you can know that such an image has been selected to stay with you for ever out of the hundreds you every day encounter. Ah, you think, I shall remember this. But no. That is not quite correct. You do not think that. It is a sensation, not a thought, a sensation like a change in temperature for which there is no accounting and only some time afterwards, forgetting the sensation, do you think, I expect I shall always remember that. So it was, you see, that first night of young Kumar. In the light of the torch, his face; the two of us down in the ditch, kneeling. Above us, the stretcher boy with the rolled stretcher aslant his shoulder, a young giant, dark against the stars. I must have glanced up and asked him to get the stretcher ready. The smell of the river was very strong. On a still night, when the earth has cooled, the water continues warm and the smell near the banks is powerful. When there is a wind the smell reaches the Sanctuary. The river flows downstream from the temple past the place appointed for the out castes. In entering the river for any reason at this point the outcastes will not pollute the water the caste Hindus bathe in, but this is to reckon without the pollution from other towns upstream of Mayapore. In the waste ground where we knelt, in the ditch, the smell of the river mixes with the smell of night-soil. At dawn, here, the untouchables empty their bowels. Without the blessing of God upon you it is a terrible place to be. Poor Kumar. Lying there. Such a place of human degradation. India is a place where men died, still die, in the open, for want of succour, for want of shelter, for want of respect for the dignity of death.
Who is it, Mr de Souza? I asked. It was the standard question. He knew many people. It was the first step in the drill of identification. Sometimes he knew. Sometimes I knew. Sometimes the stretcher-boy knew. For instance, a man known to be starving or dying of a disease, a man who would not go to hospital or come voluntarily to the Sanctuary, a man whose family were dead or lost or scattered, who had no hope of the world but only of a happier reincarnation or of an eternity of oblivion. But we usually knew where such men were to be found – such women too – and there would come the night when they could be lifted on to the stretcher, beyond protest, beyond defeat, and carried to the Sanctuary. For a fee the Brahmin priests would see to it that after they were dead they were suitably disposed of. The Hindus took their dead from us, the Mohammedans theirs, the State theirs. The State’s dead were those we found dying, who were not identified. Such dead were taken to the morgue and if unclaimed after three days delivered to the students in the hospitals. Every morning at the Sanctuary there would be women whose husbands, sons, and sometimes I suppose lovers, had not come home the night before. And often, too, the police. But all this was none of my business. I left that side of things to Mr de Souza. My business was with the dying, not the dead. For the dead I could do nothing. For the dying, the little neither I nor the sisters had been able to do for my mother: a clean bed, a hand to hold, a word through layers of unconsciousness to reach and warm the cold diminishing centre of the departing soul.
‘Who is it?’ I asked Mr de Souza. He was a man of heart and a man of talent, a lapsed Catholic, who took nothing from the Sanctuary except his bed and board and clothing. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He turned young Kumar over then, to see if there were wounds on his back. We had found him lying partly on his side, which is not usually the position of a drunken man. Someone, you see, had been ahead of us, and had been through the pockets, whoever it was from the huts who must have seen him staggering along the river bank and had now returned home, possessing the wallet, turned out the lamps and feigned sleep. From the huts there was wakefulness, unnatural silence.
And we turned young Kumar back again, shining the torch on to his face again. And this is what I remember. This is the image. The face unchanged even after the body had been turned once, twice. The eyes shut, the black hair curling over the forehead which even in that state of his insensibility seemed to be furrowed by anger. Oh, such determination to reject! It was an expression you often saw on the faces of young Indians in those days. But in Kumar the expression had unusual strength. We got him on to the stretcher. I led the way back here to the Sanctuary. It was into this room where I lie and you sit that we brought him. It used to be Mr de Souza’s office. I had a room in the next building where the clinic used to be, which is now the children’s sick bay. And here in this room Mr de Souza, bending over young Kumar, suddenly laughed. This one is drunk, Sister!’ he said. ‘It is what I have been waiting for all the time I have worked for you. To find that only we have carried home the useless carcase of a drunken man.’
‘This one,’ I said, ‘is only a boy. To be so drunk he must also be unhappy. Let him lie.’
And so he lay. Before I went to sleep I prayed for him. Each night into sleep I took with me the memory of the face of one of the rescued and it almost pleased me that for once it was the face of a young man who was neither dying nor suffering from injury. We went, you know, into places where the police did not care to because they were afraid of being attacked, which is why sometimes we brought home hurt and wounded. When we did this we sent the police a message. Sometimes they came here on their own initiative, as they did on the morning after we brought young Kumar back. But never before had the District Superintendent come himself. If he had come the day before, the day after, there might never have been Bibighar. You might then have been able to say Bibighar to me now and I would have nothing stronger than an impression of ruins and a garden. But he came that day, Merrick, in short sleeves showing his red arms and with a clarity in his blue eyes, a determination to miss nothing, a madness, an intention to find evidence. Ah, but of what? ‘I want to see,’ he said, ‘the woman who calls herself Sister Ludmila.’
And Mr de Souza replied, ‘It is we who call her that.’ Mr de Souza was afraid of nobody. I was through there, in the little room next door where now they hoard the clothing for the children, the books and stationery and games and rubber balls and cricket bats, but where in those days we kept special medicines from Dr Gulab Singh Sahib’s, under lock and key, and the safe for the money I collected each week from the Mayapore branch of the Imperial Bank, a safe for which Mr de Souza also had a key. He slept here, where I am lying, with his desk there, where you are sitting, and the table there by the window the children stand at, under the light-bulb that at night no longer glares at me. That was where we put the stretcher when we came in. Sometimes we made more than one journey. He was standing there, Merrick, early on this Wednesday morning. I was opening the safe to get out the bag and the cheque book, and through the open doorway I heard him say this: ‘I want to see the woman who calls herself Sister Ludmila.’
‘It is we who call her that,’ Mr de Souza said. ‘Right now she is busy. Can I be of help?’ And Merrick said, ‘Who are you?’ And de Souza smiled, I could hear the smile in his voice. ‘I am nobody. Hardly worthy of your consideration.’ In what they call a police transcript those words might look servile. To me they sounded defiant. So I came out and said, ‘It is all right, Mr de Souza,’ and saw Merrick there, carrying a little cane, dressed in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, and a Sam Browne belt with a holster and a pistol in the holster, and his china blue eyes taking us all in. ‘Mrs Ludmila Smith?’ he said. I bowed. He said, ‘My name is Merrick. I am the District Superintendent of Police.’ Which already I knew, having seen him on horseback commanding the police who were controlling the crowds at the times of festivals, and driving in his truck over the Mandir Gate bridge. He had with him Rajendra Singh, the local sub-inspector who took bribes and stole watches from the men he arrested. Rajendra Singh had such a wrist-watch on. It was a finer watch than the one on Mr Merrick’s wris
t, but less serviceable perhaps. The Indians always had a tendency towards the tawdry, the English towards the apparently straightforward, the workable. But there was nothing straightforward about Mr Merrick. He worked the wrong way, like a watch that wound up backwards, so that at midday, for those who knew, he showed midnight. Perhaps no one could have cheated destiny by so arranging things that Kumar and Merrick never met. But I am sorry that it was here, although that was probably destined too, written on the walls when I first came here and saw the tumble-down buildings and recognised that they would serve my purpose.
‘In what way can I assist you?’ I asked him, and with a gesture I dismissed Mr de Souza, because I knew this would please Merrick. But also it confirmed that it was I who was in command. In my white cap, my garments of modesty. To match Merrick’s uniform. One does not live in the world of affairs for nothing. One learns the rules, the unwritten laws, the little by-ways of the labyrinth of protocol. I offered Mr Merrick Mr de Souza’s chair, but he preferred to remain standing. He said he wished to conduct a search. Again, with a gesture, I gave assent or at least indicated awareness that to resist such a thing was not worth the trouble, indeed that the search itself was the only troublesome thing, that it was he, Merrick, who was putting himself out, using up his time. I did not even ask him what or whom the search was for. There are so many things that one could say in such circumstances. With less experience of official interference I might have said all of them. And he was sharp. He looked at me and showed me with his eyes alone that he had instinctively divined the reasons for my unprotesting acquiescence. He guessed that I had nothing to hide that I knew of, but also guessed that I was a woman whose luck had often been better than her judgment but might not always be.
‘Then where shall we begin?’ he said. I told him wherever he wished. When we got outside I saw his truck at the gate of the compound and a constable posted there, and then, after he had been through the first two buildings and we were walking towards the third building, I remember the sight of young Kumar, without his shirt, bending his head under the pump. He straightened up. We were a hundred yards away from him. He looked round. And Merrick stood still. And gazed at him. ‘And who is that?’ he asked, ‘also one of your helpers?’ Over this distance he stared at Kumar. I called Mr de Souza who was following us. ‘He spent the night with us,’ I told Mr Merrick. ‘Mr de Souza perhaps knows his name.’ You understand, at this point I had not yet spoken to Kumar, but that morning had been told by de Souza only that the boy was all right but suffering from hangover and uncommunicative and not especially grateful for being brought to the Sanctuary, and had so far withheld his name. I thought that perhaps while Mr Merrick was conducting his search de Souza might have gone to the boy and said, Look, the police are here, who are you? and been told.
‘Mr de Souza,’ I said, ‘the boy who spent the night with us –?’ And de Souza said casually, ‘As you see he is all right now and making ready to go.’ ‘I’m afraid no one can go until I say so,’ Merrick said, not to me but to the sub-inspector, avoiding cleverly, you see, a direct engagement. ‘Are we then all under arrest?’ I asked, but laughed, and indicated that arrested or not I wished to conduct him to the third building. He smiled and said that they were looking for someone, as no doubt I had guessed, and then walked on with me and Mr de Souza, leaving the sub-inspector behind. Some sign from Merrick had made the sub-inspector stay put, to keep an eye on Kumar. When we reached the third building Merrick stopped on the verandah steps and turned round. I did so too. The boy had resumed his washing under the pump. The sub-inspector stood where we had left him, his legs apart and hands behind his back. I looked at Merrick. He also was watching the boy. They formed a triangle, Merrick, Kumar, Rajendra Singh – each equidistant apart. There was this kind of pattern, this kind of dangerous geometrical arrangement of personalities. ‘This building where we are now,’ he said, but not looking at me, still looking at Kumar, ‘is what is known as the death house?’ I laughed. I said I believed that sometimes people who had never been to the Sanctuary called it that. ‘Are there any dead this morning?’ he asked. ‘No, not this morning. Not for several days.’ ‘Homeless?’ ‘No, I do not house the homeless.’ ‘The hungry?’ ‘Those who are hungry know the days when there is rice. Today is not such a day.’ ‘The sick?’ ‘The clinic receives only in the evening. Only people who cannot afford to lose a morning or a day’s work come to our clinic’ ‘And your medical qualifications? ’ ‘Mr de Souza is in charge of the clinic. He gave up paid work as a lay practitioner to work with me for nothing. The health authorities of the municipal board sometimes come to see us. They approve of what they find. As District Superintendent of Police you must know most of these things.’ ‘And the dying?’ ‘We have the voluntary services of Dr Krishnamurti, and also of Dr Anna Klaus of the Purdah Hospital. You can of course also inspect my title to the land and buildings.’
‘It is a curious arrangement,’ Mr Merrick said.
It is a curious country.’
We went on into the third building. We had six beds in one room and four in another. In the year of the famine they were always occupied. Similarly in the year of the cholera. Now there was no widespread famine, no present outbreak of cholera. But scarcely a week went by that two or three of the beds were not in use. On this morning, however, they were all empty. The white sheets gleamed. He said nothing but seemed astonished. Such cleanliness. Such comfort. What? For the dying? The starved unwashed dying? Such a waste! Go into the bazaar and look around and in a few hours you would find occupants for each of the beds – occupants who would benefit, get well. The world has a vested interest in those capable of being made well. At one moment he turned as if to say something, but thought better. The Sanctuary was outside his comprehension. He had not yet worked it out that in this so efficiently organised civilisation there was only one service left that was open to me to give, the service that in a country like India there was no official time or energy left over for. The service that a woman such as myself could supply out of unwanted, unearned, undeserved rupees. For in this life, living, there is no dignity except perhaps in laughter. At least when the world has done its worst for a man, and a man his worst for the world, let him savour dignity then. Let him go out in cleanliness and such peace as cleanliness and comfort can give him. Which is little enough.
Perhaps in his bones, in his soul, Merrick was conscious of the meaning of the room he stood in, in his shorts and short-sleeved shirt and belt and holster. He looked at the polished floor and then with a sort of childish rudeness at my hands. Yes, they have always been soft and white. ‘Who does the work?’ he asked. ‘Anyone,’ I said, ‘who needs to earn a few rupees.’ Why should I do the work myself when I had unearned undeserved rupees that would help fill the cooking pot of one of the untouchable women you saw on your way here, washing in the stagnant tank? ‘Where are these helpers today?’ he said. I led him out into the compound behind the building where the helpers’ quarters were. Perhaps there he saw it too, the distinction between the place of the living and the place of the dead: the smoky cookhouse, the mud and thatch and the men and women who earned rupees and lived in what among the living passed as cleanliness but in comparison with the rooms for the dying was dirt. He made them come out of their quarters, and stand in the compound, and then entered those hovels, going alone and coming out empty-handed, having found no one in hiding.
He pointed at the people with his cane. ‘These are your regular helpers?’ he asked, and I told him that in the Sanctuary nobody was regular, that I hired and fired without compunction, wishing to spread whatever benefit it was in my power to give. ‘Is Mr de Souza also irregular?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘because the Sanctuary is as much his as mine. He sees the point of it. These people are only interested in the rupees.’
‘In life,’ he said, ‘rupees are a great consideration,’ and continued to smile. But the smile of a man wearing a belt and holster is always a special smile. It was in the great wa
r when I first noticed that an armed man smiles in a way that keeps you out of his thoughts. And this is how it was with Merrick. When he had satisfied himself that the death house had no secrets he said, ‘Then there is just your night visitor,’ and went back to the front verandah, to that dangerous geometrical situation, pausing at the head of the steps, glancing to where the sub-inspector still stood, and then at Kumar who was still standing by the pump, buttoning up his shirt. Smiling, Mr Merrick I mean, smiling and standing there. He said, ‘Thank you, Sister Ludmila. I need take up no more of your time,’ and saluted me by bringing the tip of his cane into touch with the peak of his cap, and ignored Mr de Souza who was waiting behind us, and walked down the steps. And when he began to walk the sub-inspector was also set in motion. And they converged, in this way, on young Kumar who also continued, standing, buttoning his shirt, doing up the cuffs. Waiting. Having seen, but making no attempt to avoid. Without moving I spoke quietly to Mr de Souza. ‘Who is the boy?’ ‘His name is Coomer.’ ‘Coomer?’ ‘In fact, Kumar. A nephew by marriage, I believe, of Romesh Chand Gupta Sen.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, and remembered having heard something. But where? When? ‘Why Coomer?’ I asked. ‘Ah, why?’ Mr de Souza said. ‘It would be interesting, if not best, to go down.’ So we went down, following a few yards behind Mr Merrick, so that we heard the first words, the first words in the affair that led to Bibighar. As we approached. Merrick. A clear voice. As if speaking to a servant. That tone. That language. The Englishman’s Urdu. Tumara nam kya hai? What’s your name? Using the familiar turn instead of the polite form. And Kumar. Looking surprised. Pretending a surprise not felt but giving himself up to its demands. Because it was a public place.
‘What?’ he said. And spoke for the first time in my hearing. In perfect English. Better accented than Merrick’s. ‘I’m afraid I don’t speak Indian.’ That face. Dark. And handsome. Even in the western way, handsome, far handsomer than Merrick. And then Sub-Inspector Rajendra Singh began to shout in Hindi, telling him not to be insolent, that the Sahib asking him questions was the District Superintendent of Police and he had better jump to it and answer properly when spoken to. When he had finished Kumar looked back at Merrick and asked, ‘Didn’t this man understand? It’s no use talking Indian at me.’ ‘Sister Ludmila,’ Merrick said, but still staring at young Kumar, ‘is there a room where we can question this man?’ ‘Question? Why question?’ Kumar asked. ‘Mr Kumar,’ I said, ‘these are the police. They are looking for someone. It is their duty to question anyone they find here for whom I cannot vouch. We brought you here last night because we found you lying in a ditch and thought you were ill or hurt, but you were only drunk. Now, what is so terrible in that? Except hangover.’ I was trying to smooth over, you see, to make laughter or at least smiling of a different kind than Mr Merrick’s. ‘Come,’ I said, ‘come to the office,’ and made to lead the way but already the Bibighar affair had gone too far. In those few seconds it had begun and could not be stopped because of what Mr Merrick was and what young Kumar was. Oh, if they had never met! If young Kumar had never been drunk, or been brought back; if there had never been that night-procession – the four of us, myself leading with the torch, Mr de Souza and the boy bearing the stretcher, and Kumar on it, but now recovered, standing there by the pump in the compound, facing Merrick.