Duleep slept late, got up and broke his fast and inspected the dowry that was on show on trestle tables under awnings, in case a miserable, unexpected rain ruined the proceedings. There were clothes for himself and the bride, jewellery, small coffers of silver coins and one hundred rupee notes, family ceremonial costume, plate, household utensils, and, in a box, title deeds to land. He went to bed early, astonished by so much personal wealth, the cost to a girl’s father of a husband for her, and in the morning was dressed again in his king’s raiment, encumbered by his velvet sheathed sword and mounted on the caparisoned horse to lead the doolie procession to the railway station. The small figure of his still-veiled wife, dressed in scarlet, heavily jewelled, was supported by her father and mother out to the palanquin. He fancied that the moment before she entered she faltered and wept and was only persuaded to enter by some comforting, courage-giving words of her mother.
When the doolie curtains were closed the bearers took up the weight, and the women who followed the palanquin began to sing the song of the bride, the morning raga, the song of the young girl who leaves her childhood home for the home of her husband.
Dooliya la a
re mor babul ke kaharwa.
Chalihoon sajan ba ke des.
*
On the outskirts of their own village which they reached in procession from the railway station towards evening, they were met by what looked like the whole population. The married women approached the doolie (a doolie provided by the Kumars to replace the doolie left behind with the Prasads at Delali) opened the curtains and inspected the bride. From the way they looked at him afterwards he assumed that they had found no major fault. Of the family only Shalini had been left behind. She ran from the compound and clung to the bridle of his horse which, like the new doolie, had been waiting at the station.
‘Duleep, Duleep,’ she cried, ‘oh, how beautiful you are. Why did you marry her? Why didn’t you wait for me?’ And walked proudly, possessively, leading the horse into the compound. But came later, long after she should have been in bed, to the room in which he prepared himself and said, ‘I am sorry, Duleep.’
‘Why sorry?’ he asked, taking her on to his knee. She encircled her arms around his neck.
‘Because.’ she said, ‘because I have seen her.’
‘Then why should you be sorry?’ he asked, his heart beating so loudly he could hardly bear the pain and uncertainty of it.
‘Because she is like a princess,’ Shalini told him. ‘Did you fight for her? Did you slay evil spirits and rescue her? Did you, Duleepji? Did you? Did you?’
‘I suppose I did,’ he said, and kissed her, and sent her away, and then waited in the room into which Kamala would presently be led by his mother and given into his care.
*
The trouble was, he told Hari years later, that when he unveiled Kamala, and saw her, he fell in love with her. Perhaps this was true and accounted for the fact that his career in England reading for the law was a failure from the start. His final return, defeated, was hard to bear because no word of reproach was spoken by his father for the wasted years, the wasted money. Returning to India, he laboured under the weight of many burdens: the burden of knowing that his mind was incapable of adjusting itself to the pace set by better men, and the burden of knowing that time and again, in England, allowances had been made for him because he was an Indian who had travelled a long way, at considerable cost, and had so obviously set his heart on lifting himself by his bootstraps from the state of underprivilege into which he had been born. And then there was the burden of knowing that he could not blame his parents for the fact that in England he had often been cold, miserable and shy, and not infrequently dismayed by the dirt, squalor and poverty, the sight of barefoot children, ragged beggars, drunken women, and evidence of cruelty to animals and humans: sins which in India only Indians were supposed to be capable of committing or guilty of allowing. He could blame his parents for forcing him into a premature marriage that disrupted the involved pattern of his scholarly pretensions, but he could not blame them for this dismay, nor could he blame them for the constant proof he had that among the English, at home with them, he was a foreigner. He was invariably treated with kindness, even with respect, but always with reserve; the kind of reserve that went hand in hand with best – and therefore uneasy – behaviour. He found himself longing for the rough and tumble of life at home. To learn the secret of the Englishness of the English he realised that you had to grow up among them. For him, it was too late. But it was not too late for his son. He never anticipated successors in the plural. One son was enough. One son would succeed where he had failed, so long as he had advantages Duleep himself had never enjoyed.
The trouble was, Duleep thought, that India had made its mark on him and no subsequent experience would ever erase it. Beneath the thin layers of anglicisation was a thickness of Indianness that the arranged marriage had only confirmed and strengthened. ‘And for an Indian Indian,’ he told Hari, ‘there simply isn’t any future in an Anglo-Indian world.’ Of one thing Duleep was certain: the English, for all their protestations to the contrary, were going to hold on to their Empire well beyond his own lifetime and far into if not beyond Hari’s as well. If he had a theory at all about the eventual departure of the English it was that they were waiting for Indian boys who would be as English, if not more English, than they were themselves, so that handing over the reins of power they would feel no wrench greater than a man might feel when giving into the care of an adopted son a business built up from nothing over a period of alternating fortune and disaster.
To Duleep, Indian independence was as simple as that, a question of evolution rather than of politics, of which he knew nothing. He believed in the intellectual superiority of the English. Manifestly it was not with physical strength that they ruled an empire. They ruled it because they were armed with weapons of civil intelligence that made the comparable Indian armoury look primitive by comparison. As witness to that was the example of the pale-skinned boy who sat on the verandah of the sub-divisional officer’s bungalow. And no one had ever made him marry a sixteen-year-old girl. It did not matter to this boy, fundamentally, whether he went to the grave with male or female issue or without. He had never been distracted from his duty or ambition by the overwhelming physical sensation of finding, in front of him, a girl who had been thrust into the room by his own mother, a girl who when unveiled had filled him with the simple impulse to possess, to forget, to cast out the spirits of discipline and learning and celibacy, and enter, in full vigour, into the second stage of life which was attended by spirits of an altogether different nature.
‘The fact that I fell in love with your mother,’ he told Hari, ‘proved one thing, which in itself proved many others. It proved my Indianness. It wasn’t just a case of there being here opportunity for a young man to satisfy his sexuality in the terms you would understand it. What young man anyway could resist that excitement, of removing the veil and not being disappointed in what he saw, and of knowing that the girl who stood so meekly in front of him was his to do as he liked with? No, it wasn’t as simple as that. At that moment, you see, I automatically entered the second stage of life according to the Hindu code. I became husband and householder. In my heart, then, my ambitions were all for my family, my as yet non-existent family of sons and daughters. Do you see that? Do you understand this strong psychological undertow? Oh, well, yes, naturally I would have pleasure, physical pleasure. But where else should this pleasure lead except to happiness and fulfilment for my own flesh and blood? Certainly it should not have been followed by another long period of celibacy, of learning and education. I was now, in an instant, already past that stage. In the Hindu code I was no longer a student but a man, with a man’s responsibilities, a man’s sources of delight, which are not the same as a boy’s and not the same as a student’s. And yet, in the eyes of the western world, which I took passage to, I was still a boy, still a student. In that old lower middle-class English
saying: I was living a lie. Isn’t it?’
In such a way Duleep Kumar excused his failure, if failure it was in fact, but tortured himself with it because he was not reproached by his father or mother. Perhaps he was reproached by his wife, Kamala, who had also entered the second stage, having herself been entered, torn open, and then abandoned and left with recollections of her extraordinary and painful translation from child to woman, living at some seasons of the year with her own parents, at other seasons with Duleep’s;and greeting him on his return with a humility that had gone a bit sour, so that Duleep felt it, and decided that if you looked at the situation squarely he had managed to get for himself the worst of both worlds. After all, he brought back no crock of gold, no princely raiment, no means to free her from the tyranny of a matriarchal household which his absence in England had probably given her expectations of. If she had no proper notion of the ambition that attended his departure she had, certainly, an understanding of the failure that attended his return.
‘I went away,’ Duleep said, ‘a feared but adored Hindu husband. I returned as a half-man – unclean by traditional Hindu standards and custom because I had crossed the black water. But I had crossed it to no obvious advantage. To purify myself I was persuaded to consume the five products of the cow. Which includes the cow’s dung and urine. Although not, of course, its flesh.’
In England he had never admitted to people that he was married. He was ashamed to. For a month or so he had anticipated and feared news of Kamala’s pregnancy. His relief was relative to his disappointment. He could not have borne the distraction of knowing he was to be a father, but only with a sense of the reflection on his virility was he able to enjoy the freedom of finding he was not. He longed to receive letters, but their arrival filled him with frustration, even despair. His father wrote in Hindi, and addressed the envelopes in English in block capitals such as you would find figured by children in a kindergarten. Each letter was a sermon, a formal communication from father to son. The few letters he received from Kamala were as naïve as those of a child, the result of hours of labour and instruction. He knew that his own letters had to be read aloud to her. Only his letters to and from Shalini were pleasurable.
Restored to his wife, still unqualified even for the career he had not set his heart on, he set about the business of instructing her in lettering. She submitted ungraciously. She did not want to learn more than she already knew. She thought it a waste of time, an affront to her status as a married woman. Her sisters-in-law poked fun at her if they saw her with books. ‘It is only because Shalini is cleverer than you that you act in this stupid way,’ he said, when she pretended to have forgotten the lesson he had taught her the day before.
The old rambling house was a hive of inactivity. The women quarrelled among themselves. His mother’s voice, raised above all in pitch and authority, brought only a brooding truce. His father spent hours alone in meditation. His brothers idled the days away, gambling and cock-fighting. For a time Duleep himself fell into a similar state of inertia. He need never lift a finger. He need do no work. He played with Shalini, now aged nearly twelve. We are waiting, he told himself, for our father to die. And then we shall have the pleasure of squabbling among ourselves over the inheritance. We shall squabble for three or four years and by then my brother’s children will be old enough to marry and the money so carefully hoarded will begin to be squandered, land will be sold and divided and my prophecy will come true.
He had toyed with the idea of continuing his studies in India, and then with the notion that he could apply for a post in the uncovenanted provincial civil service. He had also thought to take his wife away and set up house on his own, but he did not want to leave Shalini behind. Her parents would not let her go to school. He tried to get hold of a teacher from the Zenana Mission, an organisation that sent teachers into orthodox Indian homes to instruct the women privately, but the Mission lost interest when it was learned that only one young girl would attend the lessons. For a couple of years or more, he realised, Shalini’s education would be his own responsibility. And by now Kamala was pregnant and he began to make plans for his son’s future: a future which at times seemed very unlikely to take the shape he wanted it to. He could not imagine Kamala being persuaded to cross the black water. He could not imagine her living in England. In any case, he knew he would be ashamed of her. In England she would be a laughing-stock. Here it was he who was the laughing-stock. The problem looked insoluble. His son would grow up with precisely the same disadvantages he suffered from himself. He could have blamed himself for marrying such a girl. Or he could have blamed his parents for forcing him to marry her. He could have blamed India, and the Hindu tradition. It was easier to blame Kamala. Already she had become shrill and demanding. They quarrelled frequently. He was no longer in love with her. Occasionally he felt sorry for her.
Their first child, a daughter, survived two days. A year later, in 1914, in the first year of England’s war with Germany, there was a second daughter; and she survived for a year. A third child, another daughter, was stillborn in 1916. Poor Kamala seemed to be incapable of bearing a healthy baby, let alone a son. Deprived in this way too, their quarrels became bitter. He discovered that she blamed him for her failure. To bear a strong son was her duty. She was determined to do it. ‘But how can I do my duty alone?’ she asked. ‘It is you. All your years studying books have sapped your manhood.’ Furious, he left the house, taking some money, intending never to return. He had a vague idea that he would join the army; but remembered Shalini and went home when the last of his money had been spent. He returned penniless and disgraced. In the month that he had been away Shalini had become betrothed to one Prakash Gupta Sen. The Gupta Sens were previously connected by marriage with the Luck-now branch of the Kumar family.
Shalini complained to him – not about her betrothal but about his absence during the ceremonial formalities. ‘Why did you stay away, Duleepji?’ she wanted to know. ‘If you had been here you could have gone with my father and my brothers to Mayapore. And if you had gone you could have told me truly what kind of boy this Prakash is. They say he is intelligent and good-looking. Why cannot I know what you think? I could have believed you.’
‘Is that all you can say? Is that all it means to you? What he looks like?’
But already she had become a woman.
‘What else can it mean, Duleepji? Besides, I am fifteen. One cannot stay a child for ever.’
Shalini’s marriage took place almost a year later – in 1917. Again the house was full. Duleep was astonished at the calm way she accepted the situation and even blossomed in the warmth of the formal flattery always accorded to a bride. When he saw young Prakash Gupta Sen he was horrified. Fat, vain, pompous, lecherous. In a few years this would be proved. Duleep avoided Shalini. ‘My nerve has gone,’ he told himself. ‘Why don’t I make a scene? Why do I let this terrible thing go forward?’ And knew the answer. ‘Because already I am defeated. The future holds nothing for me. I am only half anglicised. The stronger half is still Indian. It pleases me to think the future holds nothing for anyone else either.’
On the night of Shalini’s wedding he slept with his wife again. She wept. They both wept. And exchanged undertakings that in future they would be kind, forgiving and understanding. On the morning of Shalini’s ritual departure he watched from the gateway. She entered the palanquin without hesitation.
And Duleep saw one thing at last: that in helping her to open her mind and broaden her horizons he had taught her the lesson he himself had never learned: the value of moral as well as physical courage. He only saw her on two subsequent occasions: the first during the week she spent after her marriage in her parental home, with Prakash, and the second five years later when on the eve of his departure for England with his two-year-old son Hari, he visited her in Mayapore during the festival of Rakhi-Bandan, bringing her gifts of clothing and receiving from her a bracelet made of elephant hair: the festival during which brothers and sisters
reaffirm the bond between them and exchange vows of duty and affection. By this time his wife Kamala had been dead for two years and poor Shalini was still childless. Her husband, Duleep knew, spent most of his time with prostitutes. He died some years later of a seizure in the house of his favourite.
‘Imagine,’ Shalini wrote to her brother at that time, ‘Prakash’s sisters actually suggested I should become suttee to honour such a man and acquire merit for myself!’
And Duleep replied from Sidcot, ‘Leave Mayapore, and come to us in England.’
‘No, ’ she wrote back. ‘My duty – such as it is – is here. I feel, Duleepji, that we shall never see each other again. Don’t you feel the same? We Indians are very fatalistic! Thank you for sending me books. They are my greatest pleasure. Also for the photograph of Hari. What a handsome boy he is! I think of him as my English nephew. Perhaps one day, if ever he comes to India, I shall meet him if he can bear to visit his old Indian aunt. Think of it – I shan’t see thirty again! Duleepji – I am so pleased for you. In the picture of Hari I see again my kind brother on whose knee I used to sit. Well. Enough of this nonsense.’
*
These were all stories that Duleep eventually told to Hari. In turn, when Hari’s father was dead, in the few weeks of English boyhood that were left to him, Hari told them to Colin Lindsey. He thought of them as stories which had no bearing on his own life – even then, with his passage to India booked, and paid for by the aunt with the peculiar name, Shalini.