Before the book is closed, though, a flick through the pages relating to 1942 reveals familiar names. The rule of the club has always been that a member signs his name on his first visit and then again on those occasions when he brings a guest. Brigadier Reid’s almost illegible signature appears on a date in April; Robin White’s on one or two occasions as host to men Mr Srinivasan identifies variously as members of the Secretariat, Revenue Settlement Officers, the Divisional Commissioner, and – once – the Governor and his lady. And there too on several occasions is a curiously rounded and childlike signature easily read as that of Mr Ronald Merrick, the District Superintendent of Police, and, in the same hand, the name of his guest, Miss Daphne Manners.
And on a date in February 1942 a Captain Colin Lindsey signed in, presumably on his first appearance as a temporary privileged member of the Gymkhana Club of Mayapore. Captain Lindsey’s signature is steady and sober, unlike the signature that does not actually accompany it, but which one can see, by its side, in the imagination: the signature of his old friend Harry Coomer who round about this time was found drunk by Sister Ludmila in the waste ground where the city’s untouchables lived in poverty and squalor.
*
At night the old cantonment area, the area north of the river, still conveys an idea of space that has only just begun to succumb to the invasion of brick and mortar, the civilising theories of necessary but discreet colonial urbanisation. From the now dark and deserted maidan, across which the uninterrupted currents of warm – even voluptuous – air build up an impetus that comes upon the cheek as a faintly perceptible breath of enervating rather than refreshing wind, there issues a darkness of the soul, a certain heaviness that enters the heart and brings to life a sadness such as might grow in, weigh down (year by year until the burden becomes at once intolerable and dear) the body of someone who has become accustomed to but has never quite accepted the purpose or conditions of his exile, and who sees, in the existence of this otherwise meaningless space so curiously and yet so poetically named maidan, the evidence of the care and thought of those who preceded him, of their concern for what they remembered as somehow typical of home; the silence and darkness that blessed an enduring acre of unenclosed common which, if nothing else, at least illustrated of its own accord the changing temper of the seasons. With here a house. And there a steeple. And everywhere the sky. Bland blue. Or on the march with armoured clouds. Or grey, to match the grey stone of a Norman church. Or dark: an upturned black steel receptacle for scattered magnetic sparks of light or, depending on the extroverted or introverted mood, an amazing cyclorama lit only by the twinkling nocturnal points of a precise but incalculable geometry.
And there is, at night, a strengthening of that special smell: a dry, nostril-smarting mixture of dust from the ground and of smoke from dung-fires: a smell that takes some getting used to but which, given time, will become inseparably part of whatever notion the traveller, the exile, the old hand, may have of India as a land of primitive, perhaps even tragic beauty. It is a smell which seems to have no visible source. It is not only the smell of habitation. It is the smell, perhaps, of centuries of the land’s experience of its people. It is to be smelt out there on the broad plains as well as here in the town. And because it is also the smell of the plains, to smell it – perhaps a degree or two stronger – as the car turns a corner and passes a roadside stall lighted by a naphtha lamp, only deepens the sense of pervasiveness, of ubiquity, of vastness, of immensity, of endless, endless acres of earth and stone lying beyond the area of the lamp’s light.
This is the bigger car, the Studebaker. This is the long way home: northwards along the western boundary of the maidan, with the old Smith’s Hotel on the left, built in the Swiss chalet style and dimly lit as befits an institution that has years behind it but isn’t finished yet. This is Church road. It leads to St Mary’s and to the military lines. It is the road that old Miss Crane cycled along, every Sunday, rain or shine, and it cannot have changed much, although the banyan trees that shade it during the day and clasp branches overhead to make a theatrically lit green tunnel at night, must have sunk a few more roots during the last twenty years. Church road is an extension of the Mandir Gate Bridge road and at this hour the car is slowed by the plodding processions of carts drawn by white humped oxen lumbering homeward, back to the villages on the plains to the north of Mayapore. The bells on their necks can be heard through the open windows of the Studebaker – dulled by but insistent on the hot wind created by mechanical movement. The carts return empty of produce. The produce has been sold in the Chillianwallah bazaar. Now they are more lightly loaded with private purchases and the farmers’ children, most of whom lie huddled, asleep, although a few sit upright staring with the fixity of waking dreams into the headlights.
For a moment, as the Studebaker half-circles the roundabout and takes the right-hand road along the northern edge of the maidan, the spire of St Mary’s may carry the stranger into a waking dream of his own; so English it is. So perfect. It must, surely, be very like the church in a district of the Punjab which Miss Crane entered all those years ago, looking for an image of herself that would not diminish her. The same grey stone. The same safe comfortable look of housing the spirit of England’s personal protector. But few English now attend the services. This has become the church of the Anglo-Indian community. The minister is the Reverend A. M. Ghosh. Is there, perhaps, a congregational joke about his holiness?
Close by St Mary’s and its churchyard is the minister’s house. Like the church it is, tonight, in darkness. A few bungalows lie back on the left, continuing the line of building from St Mary’s corner to the beginning of the military lines opposite the maidan. From the air, by day, these are revealed as a geometrical complex of roads and clusters of old and new buildings: the red, tree-shaded Victorian barracks lying closest to the road the Studebaker travels on; the newer low concrete blocks farther back. But from the road, at night, the impression is of space, infrequent habitation marked by lonely points of light. It is not until farther on that the large palladian-style mansion of the old artillery mess comes into view, and the first jawans are seen: two soldiers on guard duty at a white pole barrier that denies free entry by a left-hand turn into the dark. The old artillery mess is now the area headquarters. In 1942 it was the headquarters of the brigade commanded by Brigadier Reid. Once past it, the sense of space diminishes. Tree-backed stucco walls, and side-roads lit by infrequent street-lamps, mark the neat suburban area of the senior officers’ bungalows. And then, ahead, is the main block of the ocean-liner-lit Mayapore General Hospital. The Studebaker turns right, into Hospital road, the road that runs along the eastern edge of the maidan and leads back to the T-junction of Hospital road, Club road and Mahatma Gandhi road – once Victoria road – the principal highway of the civil lines.
‘Let us,’ Mr Srinivasan says, ‘extend the tour a little more. It is not very late,’ and directs the driver to go on down past the chummery, the Court house, and the police barracks, into the cantonment bazaar and then to turn right again following the route that Sister Ludmila used to take, to and from the Imperial (now the State) Bank of India, through the narrower roads where the Eurasians lived in small bungalows backing on to the installations of the railway and out again, with a left turn, into the Mandir Gate Bridge road, past the main mission school and the church of the mission (both of which still flourish) to the level crossing where the car is halted to wait for the mail train that comes from the west and is due at any moment.
Beyond the level crossing lies the bridge and beyond the bridge the black town, still well-lit and lively. The steps leading up from the river to the Tirupati temple are floodlit by a neon standard. There are men walking up and down them, coming from, going into the temple precincts by the river gate. From here the river smell lying upon the warm air enters the open windows of the stationary car.
‘They always close the level crossing gates,’ Mr Srinivasan complains, ‘at the precise moment the train i
s officially scheduled, even if they know jolly well it is half an hour late. Let me fill in the time by telling you the story of how Robin White took the Minister for Education and me and my old friend Desai to the club in May 1939.
*
‘We were all at the DC’s bungalow and at six in the evening after three hard hours of conference, Robbie said to us, “How about a drink at the club?” Naturally we thought he meant the Mayapore, but then he said, “The Gymkhana.” We were astonished. The Minister begged to be excused. Perhaps he thought it was a joke. But Mr White would not hear of it. He said, “It is all arranged, the car is outside. Just come for an hour.” So off we went. It was the first time I had entered, the first time any Indian civilian had entered. Also it was the last because Mr White was stopped by the committee from repeating his social indiscretion. But on the night when we arrived, you should have seen the porter’s face when he opened the car door and saw us! Robbie said to the porter, “Hossain, tell the secretary I am here with the Minister for Education, and his party.” It was quite a moment! We walked, Desai and I, slowly in the wake of Mr White and the Minister, slowly because Robbie was obviously giving the porter time to run in and find the secretary. On the verandah we all stopped and although it was nearly dark Robbie made great play of standing there and pointing out the amenities of the club’s grounds, in fact he kept us there until he judged that the secretary had been found and warned. By now, you understand, it was clear to me that the visit had not been arranged at all, only considered as a possibility. The Deputy Commissioner had waited with typical British restraint to see what kind of a man the Minister for Education was before committing himself to the risky enterprise of taking him to the club. But it was all right. The Minister had turned out to be Wellington and Balliol, and to share with Mr Deputy Commissioner a love of Shakespeare, Mr Dryden and the novelist Henry James, as well as a concern for the Government Higher School and the schools run by the District Boards. Also they enjoyed a disagreement about Mr Rudyard Kipling whom Mr White thought poorly of but the Minister, anticipating Mr T. S. Eliot, thought well of. It is always necessary to have a mutual irritant, it’s the best way of testing the toughness of individual fibre.
‘And so the secretary came out. A man called Taylor, an ex-ranker of the Cavalry who had achieved gentleman’s status by being commissioned Lieutenant Quartermaster and official club status because what he didn’t know about organising the annual gymkhana could have been written on the face of a threepenny bit. I saw him coming from his office into the hall. Robbie White had a great talent for seeing through the back of his head. He turned round and called out, ‘Oh, hello, Taylor, we have the honour of entertaining representatives of our provincial government. Allow me, Minister, to introduce you to our most important member, the Secretary, Lieutenant Taylor.’ Which left poor Taylor in an impossible position, because although he hated Indians he adored Deputy Commissioners and being thought important. Which Robbie knew. Robbie was a senior member of the committee but he had been clever enough to hold his fire for months, until the proper opportunity arose. I mean the opportunity to bring as guests men whom it was not socially inadmissible to describe as honourable. Even a provincial minister of state, after all, is a minister of state, and however much the run-of-the-mill English colonial might object to his colour, it couldn’t be denied that the Minister had been appointed as the result of a democratic election, an election held with the full approval and authority of the King-Emperor’s Governor-General. And all in accordance with the official English policy to promote their Indian Empire by easy stages to self-governing dominion status.
‘All the same, Robbie White was sticking his neck out. A club was a club, a private institution no outsider could enter, even as a guest of the Deputy Commissioner unless a club official allowed it. Remember Lord Willingdon and the Royal Yacht Club fiasco in Bombay! But Robin knew his man. The secretary looked sick, but he was afraid to make a scene. He tried to lead us into the little ante-room along the corridor from here, but Robbie knew he had got us in now, so he stalked straight into the smoking-room and totally ignored the silence that fell like a stone.
‘My dear fellow, shall I ever forget my embarrassment? The more acute, you know, because it was an embarrassment aggravated by a pride I cannot properly describe. There was I, a just-on-middle-aged man who had thought never to enter this sacred edifice. Do you know what struck me most about it? Its old-fashioned shabbiness. I can’t think what I had expected. But it was a shock. Let me qualify that. By shock I mean the sort of shock you describe as one of recognition. I suppose that by keeping us out the English had led us too easily to imagine the club as a place where their worst side would be reflected in some awful insidious way. But the opposite was the case. And the opposite was what one recognised and what one saw at once one should have really expected. Perhaps you will understand this better if I describe Robin White to you as I remember him. He was quite a young man, still in his thirties, very tall, and with one of those narrow English faces which used to appal us when we saw them for the first time because they seemed to be incapable of expressing any emotion. And we wondered: Is it that this man is very clever and potentially well-disposed, or is it that he is a fool? If he is a fool is he a useful fool or a dangerous fool? How much does he know? What on earth is he thinking? When he smiles is he smiling at one of our jokes or at a joke of his own? Is it distaste for us that makes him put up his chilly little barrier, or is it shyness? Almost it was more comfortable to deal with the other type of English face, the extrovert face, even though we knew that the chances of it remaining open and friendly for more than six months were remote. At least in that sort of face there was no mystery to solve. The stages of its transformation were not only clear to see but also predictable. But with this narrow, introverted face, it took a long time to feel at ease. Often a man with a face like this would appear and disappear without our ever knowing the truth about him. Sometimes we heard no more of him. At other times we heard he had succeeded to some important position, and then at least we realised that he had been no fool, although his subsequent reputation might also prove that he had been no friend either.
‘For instance, with Stead, Robin White’s predecessor, we all knew what we were up against. There were members of the local Congress sub-committee who preferred Stead’s regime because Stead was almost a caricature of the traditional choleric Collector. We always said that he punished the district to avenge himself for what he considered unfair treatment by his own superiors in the service. If he had not been approaching retiring age in 1937 our first provincial minister for internal affairs would have tried to get him promoted to the relatively harmless position of Divisional Commissioner and pressed the claims of an Indian to succeed him. In which case we should not have had Robin White. We could have done worse, but not, I think, any better. This was my personal view. It was not shared by us all. Some of us, as I said, preferred Stead because he gave our committee so many reasons to complain to Congress in Delhi where questions would be asked in the so-called central legislative assembly, and so many reasons for the District and Municipal Boards to complain to the provincial ministry. There were too many of us who preferred gnawing at the bone of short-term contention to pursuing a long-term policy that could lead from cooperation to autonomy.
‘Stead, you know, was a Muslim lover, if lover is the right word to describe a man who basically thought all Indians inferior. He made no secret of his preference, and this only added fuel to that ridiculous communal fire. Two of his sub-divisional officers were Muslims. When the Congress Ministry came into power he transferred one of these Muslims from an outside area to Mayapore itself, which meant that this man was really acting as assistant commissioner and joint magistrate in the town. Unfortunately this Muslim Syed Ahmed was of the militant kind. All Muslim offenders either got off lightly in his court or were acquitted. Hindus were dealt with very severely. In retaliation the Hindu-dominated District Board decided that in the village schools all
the Muslim children had to sing Congress songs and salute the Congress flag. Communal differences have always tended to snowball. There were riots in Tanpur, which was in the jurisdiction of the second of Stead’s Muslim sub-divisional officers, a man called Mohammed Khan. Our committee complained to the ministry that Mohammed Khan and Syed Ahmed were both inciting the Muslim community to create disorders. The ministries had no jurisdiction over the civil service but in certain circumstances pressure could be brought to bear, especially if you could make out a good case. Stead was eventually directed by the Divisional Commissioner to transfer Syed Ahmed to Tanpur. Mohammed Khan was posted to another district and Stead found himself with a young English assistant commissioner called Tupton, who was posted here from another district. It didn’t make much difference because this fellow Tupton also thought Muslims manlier than Hindus, so Stead was laughing up his sleeve – until he was retired and we got Robin White. And it didn’t take Robin long to cross swords with Tupton and arrange for him to be replaced by a man of his own choice, young John Poulson.
‘In fact, I can tell you, it was the way he got rid of Tupton and brought in Poulson that first made us see that behind that not unfriendly but curiously expressionless face there was more than met the eye. To begin with, his getting rid of Tupton made it clear that there was an understanding of what constituted an unneccessary irritant. When it became clear also that he was not moving in a reverse direction, away from the Muslims towards the Hindus, but making a point of showing friendliness to both, we saw that he was strictly the fair-minded type. There was also a statesmanlike air about him. He requested, in the most diplomatic terms, that the District and Municipal Boards should reconsider the rule they had laid down about the compulsory salutation of the Congress flag in the primary schools. I recall the words in one part of his letter. “The Congress, I appreciate, inspires the allegiance not only of a majority of Hindus but of quite a large number of Muslims. I submit however that although Congress is fundamentally an Indian national party and that it is correct to lead Indian children towards a patriotic sense of national duty by ritual observances, it is perhaps unwise to leave an impression on their minds of the kind of exclusion the Congress itself is rightly at pains to eradicate.”