The Jewel In The Crown (The Raj quartet)

  She came several times to the Sanctuary. With him. With Kumar. She had said to him one day (at least I suppose she had said to him): Do you know anything about this woman, this woman who calls herself Sister Ludmila? Echoing something Mr Merrick had said to her. Or Lady Chatterjee. And young Kumar probably smiled and told her that he did; even that once I had found him and taken him for dead and carried him back drunk on a stretcher to the Sanctuary. Unless he kept that quiet. I think he did. But they came. And looked at everything. Walking hand in hand. Which had become natural for her but not I think for him. I mean he seemed to be aware of the effect such a gesture might have on those who observed it. But she seemed unaware. She came also several times by herself. She brought fruit and her willing hands. She had it in mind to help. Once she offered money. Her mother had died the year before the war and her father and brother had both been killed in it. She had a small inheritance, but all her aunt’s money, Lady Manners’s money, was to come to her when the old lady died. I said, No, I have no need of money, unless it is stopped. If it is ever stopped, I said, then I will ask you. She said, Then how else can I help? And I asked her why she wanted to. Surely, I said, there are countless other good causes you could support? I remember how she looked at me then. When she was alone with me she often wore spectacles. I do not think he ever saw her wearing them. Not wearing them for him was a vanity. She said, ‘I have not been thinking in terms of good causes.’ I acknowledged with a smile, but did not fully understand. Later I understood. I think, yes, later I understood. She did not divide conduct into parts. She was attempting always a wholeness. When there is wholeness there are no causes. Only there is living. The contribution of the whole of one’s life, the whole of one’s resources, to the world at large. This, like the courage to leap, is a wholeness I never had.

  You know of course the image of the dancing Siva? He of the two legs and four arms, dancing, leaping within a circle of cosmic fire, with one foot raised and the other planted on the body of ignorance and evil to keep it in its place? You can see it there, behind you on my wall, carved in wood, my Siva dancing. The dance of creation, preservation and destruction. A complete cycle. A wholeness. It is a difficult concept. One must respond to it in the heart, not the intellect. She also looked at my little wooden Siva. Peering at it. Putting on her glasses. She was a big girl. Taller than I. With that northern bigness of bone. I would not call her pretty. But there was grace in her. And joy. In spite of a certain clumsiness. She was prone to minor accidents. She smashed once a box containing bottles of medicine. On several occasions they met here. She and young Kumar. She came from her work at the hospital and while she waited helped with the evening clinic. Once he was late. We left the clinic and waited in my room until he came. I felt that he had intended not to come but changed his mind. So I left them together. And on that other evening, the night of Bibighar, he did not come at all. When it was dusk she went away alone. I saw her to the gate. She took the road to the Bibighar bridge, going on her bicycle. I begged her to be careful. The town was still quiet, but the surrounding countryside was not. It was the day, you remember, the day of the first outbreaks in Dibrapur and Tanpur. In the hospital that day she had seen the woman from the mission who had been found holding the hand of the dead man. She came direct from seeing her, from the hospital to the Sanctuary, to meet young Kumar surely. But he never came. We sat in my room and she told me about the woman from the mission who was ill with pneumonia because she had sat out like that, in the roadway, in the rain, holding the dead man’s hand. Crane. Her name was Crane. Miss Crane. It was raining also while we sat and talked, waiting for Kumar who never arrived, but at sunset the rain stopped and the sun came out. I remember the light of it on Miss Manners’s face. She looked very tired. As the light began to go she said she must be getting home. And went on her bicycle. By way of Bibighar. The same bicycle. I mean the same that was found in the ditch in the Chillianwallah Bagh near the house of Mrs Gupta Sen, where Hari Kumar lived. By Merrick. Found by Merrick. So it was said. But if Hari was one of the men who raped her why would he steal her bicycle and leave it like that, close to his home, as evidence?

  And you see, when she left, wheeling her bicycle from the gate, turning to wave and then mounting and going into the twilight, I felt that she was going beyond my help, and remembered young Kumar driven only a few months before in the back of Merrick’s truck, going alone to a place where he also would be beyond reach of help. On that day when Merrick had driven away, taking young Kumar to be questioned, I said to Mr de Souza, Kumar? Kumar? The nephew of Romesh Chand Gupta Sen? This is what you think? And then went with him back to the office to finish the business Mr Merrick had interrupted me in, getting ready, it being a Wednesday, to go to the bank, saying a prayer to God that on my arrival Mr Govindas would not look embarrassed and take me on one side and say: ‘Sister Ludmila, this week there is no money, we have heard from Bombay cancelling your facilities.’

  But when I got to the bank, leaving the boy to wait outside, Mr Govindas came out of his inner room and smiled as usual and took me in, to sit and talk, while they cashed my cheque for two hundred rupees. ‘Sister Ludmila,’ he said, ‘that boy outside. Where did he come from?’ It was a joke between us. So I said, ‘Why, from heaven I suppose.’ ‘And the previous boy? Also he came from heaven?’ ‘Well no,’ I said, ‘he came from jail and has recently gone back in.’ ‘It is what I am warning you against. Not to trust a boy simply because he looks strong enough to protect you.’

  But of course I knew this. I knew that after a week or two such a boy would become bored and that when this happened his mind would turn to mischief. The boy on that particular day, already he was bored. When I got back outside with the two hundred rupees and the locked bag chained to my waist he was gossiping with people who had nothing better to do and was reluctant to leave them. But. He followed. He knew his duty. And so back we went, through the Eurasian quarter, past the church of the mission, and over the Mandir Gate bridge to the Tirupati temple. I have never been into the temple. The god of the temple is Lord Venkataswara who is a manifestation of Vishnu. And in the courtyard of the temple there is a shrine and an image of Vishnu asleep. It was of the image of the sleeping Vishnu that we talked, Miss Manners and I, that evening of Bibighar. Kumar had taken her there about two or three weeks before. Although he believed in nothing like that. But she wished to see the temple. His uncle had arranged it with the Brahmin priest. And so they had gone together and now she talked of it, to me who had never been. The rain stopped and the sun came out. It lighted her face, her tiredness, her own wish to sleep. I was able to visualise what she told me because of her tired face and because I had seen an image of the sleeping Vishnu in the temple at a place called Mahabalipuram, a temple by the sea, in the south, not far from Madras. Also there is in the south, you know, a very famous temple called Tirupati. High on a hill. The temple here in Mayapore takes its name from it. It is said that originally the people of Mayapore came from the south, that a Maharajah of Mayapore married a South Indian girl and built the temple to honour her and to honour the god she worshipped. Since then there has been so much assimilation it is impossible to divide and detect.

  But in Mayapore there is the Tirupati temple. Mandir means temple. It is a word from the north. And so you have the meeting of south and north. The Tirupati temple, the Mandir Gate. In ancient days the town was walled. At night the gates were closed. The Mandir Gate then opened on the Mandir Gate steps. Coming from the north you would have had to cross the river by boat and climb the steps to the Mandir Gate. Later they built the Mandir Gate bridge. The steps remained but became simply the steps you see that lead up to the Tirupati temple. There were other gates to the south. There was never a Bibighar gate. The wall had gone, I think, before the Bibighar was built. The Bibighar bridge was built after MacGregor’s day. What a mixture! MacGregor, Bibighar, Mandir and Tirupati.

  Leaving the bank that day with the boy following, armed with his stick, I passed thro
ugh the Eurasian quarters, and went past the church of the mission where the Eurasians worshipped. A little Church of England in miniature. And waited at the level crossing because it was closed to allow a train to pass. And eventually moved, going with the crowd over the Mandir Gate bridge, and paused on the other side, to distribute some money to the beggars and to the leper who always sat there, with his limbs cut back like those of a bush that had to be pruned in order to ensure the bloom. And then, taking the left fork from the holy tree, past the open shop-fronts, turning a deaf ear to the offers of pan, cloth, soda water, melons and jasmine, and through by the open archway in the wall surrounding the Chillianwallah Bazaar, stopping to buy chillis which Mr de Souza had a liking for, and going then to the other side of the market square, past the loud meat and the stinking fish and the hunched figures of the market women with their scales lying idle like sleeping metal reptiles and up the stairway to the offices of Romesh Chand Gupta Sen, whose dead brother’s widow, Mrs Gupta Sen, lived in one of those concrete houses built on the Chillianwallah reclamation, in the Chillianwallah Bagh.

  ‘Arrested!’ he said. The uncle-by-marriage. Romesh Chand. ‘That boy,’ he said, ‘that boy will be the death of me. Who does he think he is? Why cannot he learn the ways of honour and obedience, the ways befitting a young Indian?’ And called, ringing a little brass bell as though the office were a temple, so that I understood better young Kumar’s disobedience, remembering from that morning the voice, the Englishness, and those northern sinews, that handsomeness. Do you understand? How it was alien, this background, this warren of little dirty rooms above the warehouses of the contractor? To him. Alien to him, to Kumar? Who spoke English with what you call a public school accent? Who had been taken to England by his father when he was too young to remember the place he was born in, and lived there, lived in England, until he was eighteen years old? But whose uncle back in India was a bania, sitting at a desk wearing the achkan, the highnecked coat, and with clerks under him, squatting in little partitioned cells, among grubby papers, one even holding paper money in his toes? For a time, after his father’s death and his return to India, young Kumar was made to work there. But had rebelled and now did some work for the Mayapore Gazette. So much I gathered. I did not ask questions. Simply I went there to tell the uncle of Mr Merrick’s action. So that steps could be taken. What steps I did not know. But he rang the little bell for his head clerk and sent him away with a chit, a note to a lawyer to come at once. There was no telephone in that place. One could tell that Romesh Chand was a man who did not believe in telephones, in the necessity for telephones, or in acting in any way that could be counted ‘modern’ or foreign. But who believed in his own power, his own importance. He asked how it was that his nephew came to be at the Sanctuary. I did not tell the whole truth. I said only that he had stayed the night there, that in the morning the police had come looking for a man they wanted and had taken Kumar away for questioning because he was the only stranger there. ‘It is kind of you to take trouble to inform me,’ he said. I said it was no trouble and came away. But all day I did not get young Kumar out of my mind. That afternoon I sent Mr de Souza into the bazaar to find out what he could and went myself to the purdah hospital to speak to Anna Klaus, the doctor from Berlin who came to India to escape from Hitler and who was my good friend. After she had heard my opinion of the kind of boy young Kumar was, she telephoned Lady Chatterjee who was on the hospital committee. And said after she had tele-phoned, ‘Well, that is all I can do. Lady Chatterjee will speak to Judge Menen or the Deputy Commissioner. Perhaps. And your Mr Merrick will find himself asked questions. Which is all right as far as it goes. But it depends, doesn’t it, depends on your young Mr Kumar, on what he has done? Or on what he is suspected of having done? If it is anything remotely subversive they can lock him up without a by-your-leave.’ Which I knew. And came back here, and found Mr de Souza ahead of me. ‘It is all right,’ he said, ‘the police only kept him a couple of hours. When the lawyer sent by Romesh Chand arrived at the police station they had already let him go.’ I asked de Souza how he knew this. He said he had spoken to Romesh Chand’s head clerk who was not supposed to have known what was going on but had found out by gossiping to the lawyer’s clerk. So, Mr de Souza said, it is all right, and we can forget Mr Kumar. Yes, I said. It is all right. Dr Klaus, also she came that evening. And I told her. She said, ‘Well, that’s all right then. That’s all over.’ And again I said yes. But did not think so. When we went out that night with the stretcher I could not get it out of my mind that it was not all right and not all over. I asked myself, Did I then do wrong? To warn Romesh Chand? To get Dr Klaus to arrange it that important people would ask questions? Young Kumar was questioned and then allowed to go. And after he had gone his uncle’s lawyer arrived. Merrick probably knew this but took no notice. An Indian lawyer was nothing. But later that day, when perhaps so far as Merrick was concerned the case of young Kumar had been settled and forgotten, he would have been rung by the Judge or Deputy Commissioner, or by someone ringing on the Deputy Commissioner’s or the Judge’s instructions and asked: Who is this boy Kumar you’ve got at one of the kotwalis for questioning? And Merrick would have said, He’s not there any longer, why do you ask? And whoever it was who was ringing would say, Well, that’s probably a good thing. We have been asked what’s happening. Your young suspect seems to have a lot of influential friends.

  To be asked after by people in authority could undo all the good Kumar might have done for himself by answering questions properly once he got to the police station, would count against him in Merrick’s book – in Merrick’s books, where Kumar had already gone down as a boy who spoke better English than he, and would now go down as a boy who had friends who were able to speak to Judge Menen or the Deputy Commissioner, just as if he were a white boy, and not a black boy. And had stared arrogantly and said, Didn’t this fellow understand it’s no good talking Indian to me?

  And later, yes, later, walked in public, here in the Sanctuary in view of anyone who cared to watch, hand in hand with the white girl, Miss Manners. And perhaps walked like that elsewhere, where Merrick would hear about it, or see it. I did not know until too late that Merrick also knew Miss Manners. All Europeans all knew each other, but theirs, Merrick’s and Miss Manners’s, was a special way of knowing, it seemed. And that night of Bibighar I understood that it was this special way. Merrick came when it was dark. In his truck. Alone. He said, ‘I believe you know a girl called Daphne Manners? I have just come from the MacGregor House. She isn’t home yet. Have you seen her?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She was here. But left just before it got dark.’ I did not think there was any personal interest in his inquiry. There was trouble in the district. And he was a policeman. I thought only of the girl. Of what could have happened to her. I assumed, you see, that Lady Chatterjee had rung the police because Miss Manners had not reached home.

  He said, ‘Why was she here?’ I told him she sometimes came to help at the clinic. He seemed surprised and said, ‘I didn’t know that. I knew she came here once because she talked about it. How often does she come?’ ‘Very rarely,’ I said. For suddenly I was cautious. And then he asked, did she come alone, had she been alone tonight, did I know where she had planned to go when she left at dusk? Yes, alone, I said, alone tonight, and home so far as I knew, back to the MacGregor House. By which route? ‘Well, from here,’ I said, ‘it’s quicker by the Bibighar. Didn’t you come that way from the MacGregor House?’ It seemed that he hadn’t, that from the MacGregor House he had driven first to the kotwali on the Mandir Gate bridge side, and then remembered she had once talked to him of a visit to the Sanctuary and drove here from that direction. ‘So you probably missed her,’ I said, and Merrick replied, ‘But you say she left at dusk. I was at the MacGregor House more than an hour after dusk and until nearly nine o’clock and she hadn’t got back.’

  And then because I was worried for her and momentarily forgot about Merrick and Kumar, I said what I had not intended
to say, said what could not help putting the name Kumar into his mind. I said, ‘Perhaps she called at Mrs Gupta Sen’s.’ Seeing his face I wished that I had not said it. It was as if in mentioning Mrs Gupta Sen I had actually pronounced the name Kumar. He said, ‘I see.’ Behind his eyes there was a smile. And everything fitted into place, fitted back into that dangerous geometrical position I had had warning of, with Merrick and Kumar as two points of a triangle, with the third point made this time not by Rajendra Singh but by Miss Manners. I had that sensation which sometimes comes to us all, of returning to a situation that had already been resolved on some previous occasion, of being again committed to a tragic course of action, having learned nothing from the other time or those other times when Merrick and I may have stood like this, here in this room where I am bedridden and you ask your questions, with the name Kumar in our minds and the name of a girl who was missing and who had to be found. The revelation that Merrick was concerned as more than a policeman and my own betrayal of the boy, of Kumar, through talking of the house in Chillianwallah Bagh, talking of Mrs Gupta Sen’s – these were the springs that had to be touched each time our lives completed one revolution and again reached the point where Merrick and I stood in the room. And each time the springs were touched, touched as surely as night follows day, touched before they could be recognised for what they were. I should have known that Merrick knew the girl. It was stupid of me. It was the price I paid for devoting myself to the interests of the dying instead of the living. I should not have assumed that just because she was a friend of Hari Kumar she could not also be a friend of Mr Merrick. If I had not been stupid then we might have escaped from the cycle of inevitability and Merrick would not have left, as he did, already convinced that Kumar alone could solve the mystery of the girl’s disappearance.