The Jewel In The Crown (The Raj quartet)

  There was one other story. This too he told Colin. It seemed incredible to both of them; not because they couldn’t imagine it happening, but because neither of them could think of it as happening in Harry Coomer’s family.

  It went like this: that two weeks after Shalini’s ritual return to her parents’ home, and one week after her final departure to Mayapore with her husband, her father announced his intention to divest himself of all his worldly goods, to depart from his family and his responsibilities, and wander the countryside: become, eventually, sannyasi.

  ‘I have done my duty,’ he said. ‘It is necessary to recognise that it is finished. It is necessary not to become a burden. Now my duty is to God.’

  His family were shocked. Duleep pleaded with him but his resolve was unshaken. ‘When are you leaving us, then?’ Duleep asked.

  ‘I shall go in six months’ time. It will take until then to order my affairs. The inheritance will be divided equally among the four of you. The house will belong to your elder brother. Your mother must be allowed to live here for as long as she wishes, but your elder brother and his wife will become heads of the household. All will be done as it would be done if I were dead.’

  Duleep shouted, ‘You call this good? You call it holy? To leave our mother? To bury yourself alive in nothing?. To beg your bread when you are rich enough to feed a hundred starving beggars?’

  ‘Rich?’ his father asked. ‘What is rich? Today I have riches. With one stroke of a pen on a document I can rid myself of what you call my riches. But what stroke of a pen on what kind of document will ensure my release from the burden of another lifespan after this? Such a release can only be hoped for, only earned by renouncing all earthly bonds.’

  Duleep said, ‘Ah well, yes! How fine! In what way could you be ashamed now to find your son a little burra sahib? What difference could it make to you now, what I was or where I was? Is it for this that I gave in to you? Is it to see you shrug me off and walk away from me and my brothers and our mother that I obeyed you?’

  ‘While there is duty there must be obedience. My duty to you is over. Your obedience to me is no longer necessary. You have different obligations now. And I have a duty of still another kind.’

  ‘It is monstrous!’ Duleep shouted. ‘Monstrous and cruel and selfish! You have ruined my life. I have sacrificed myself for nothing.’

  As he had found earlier it was easier to blame anyone than to blame himself, but he regretted the attack. He suffered greatly at the recollection of it. He tried to speak about it to his mother, but these days she went about her daily tasks dumb and unapproachable. When the time drew near for his father to go he went to him and begged his forgiveness.

  ‘You were always my favourite son,’ old Kumar admitted. ‘That was a sin, to feel more warmly towards one than to the others. Better you should have had no ambition. Better you should have been like your brothers. I could not help but exert authority more strongly over the only son who ever seemed ready to defy it. And I was ashamed of my preference. My exertion of authority perhaps went beyond the bounds of reason. A father does not ask his son to forgive him. It is only open to him to bless him and to commit to this son’s care that good woman, your mother.’

  ‘No,’ Duleep said, weeping. ‘That duty is not for me. That is for your eldest son. Don’t burden me with that.’

  ‘A burden will fall upon the heart most ready to accept it,’ old Kumar said, and then knelt and touched his youngest son’s feet, to humble himself.

  Even in the business of becoming sannyasi old Kumar seemed determined upon the severest shock to his pride. He underwent no rituals. He did not put on the long gown. On the morning of his departure he appeared in the compound dressed only in a loin cloth, carrying a staff and a begging-bowl. Into the bowl his stony-faced wife placed a handful of rice. And then he walked through the gateway and into the road, away from the village.

  For a while they followed him, some distance behind. He did not look back. When Duleep and his brothers gave up following him their mother continued. They watched but said nothing to each other, waiting for their mother who, after a while, sat down on the roadside and stayed there until Duleep joined her, urged her to her feet and supported her back to the house.

  ‘You must not give in to sorrow,’ she told him later, lying on her bed in a darkened room from which she had ordered the servants to remove every article of comfort and luxury. ‘It is the will of God.’

  *

  Thereafter his mother lived the life of a widow. She gave her household keys into the care of her eldest daughter-in-law and moved into a room at the back of the house that overlooked the servants’ quarters. She cooked her own food and ate it in solitude. She never left the compound. After a while her sons and daughters-in-law accepted the situation as inevitable. By such behaviour, they said, she was acquiring merit. They seemed content, then, to forget her. Alone, Duleep went every day to her room and sat with her for a while and watched while she spun khadi. To communicate at all he had to say things that needed no answer or ask simple questions which she could respond to with a nod or shake of the head.

  In this way he brought her news: of the end of England’s war with Germany, of business affairs he had begun to take an interest in, of his wife Kamala’s latest pregnancy, of the birth of yet another stillborn child, a girl. Once he brought news, a rumour, that his father had been recognised but not spoken to by one of the Lucknow Kumars who had been travelling in Bihar and had seen him on the platform of a railway station with his begging-bowl. His mother did not even pause in her spinning. In 1919 he told her something of the troubles in the Punjab, but did not mention the massacre of unarmed Indian civilians by British-commanded Gurkha troops in Amritsar. In this same year he brought the news that Kamala was again with child, and in 1920, a few weeks after the festival of Holi, the news that he had a son. By now the old lady had taken to muttering while she spun. He could not be sure that she ever heard what he said. She did not look at him when he told her about Hari, nor two days later when he told her that Kamala was dead; that now he had a strong healthy son but no wife. She did not look at him either when he began to laugh. He laughed because he could not weep; for Kamala, or for his son, or his father or old mad mother. ‘She made it, you see, Mother,’ he shouted at her hysterically in English. ‘She knew her duty all right. My God, yes! She knew her duty and did it in the end. It didn’t matter that it cost her her life. We all know our duty, don’t we? Just like I know mine. At last I’ve got a son and I have a duty to him, but I’ve also got you, and Father charged me with a duty to you as well.’

  It was a duty that took another eighteen months to discharge. One morning he went to his mother’s room and found the spinning-wheel abandoned and the old woman on her bed. When he spoke to her she opened her eyes and looked at him and said:

  ‘Your father is dead, Duleepji.’ Her voice was hoarse and cracked through long disuse. ‘I saw it in a dream. Is the fire kindled yet?’

  ‘The fire, Mother?’

  ‘Yes, son. The fire must be kindled.’

  She slept.

  In the evening she woke and asked him again, ‘Son, is the fire kindled?’

  ‘They are making it ready.’

  ‘Wake me when they have finished.’

  She slept again, until morning, and then opened her eyes and asked him, ‘Do the flames leap high, Duleepji?’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ he said. ‘The fire is kindling.’

  ‘Then it is time,’ she said. And smiled, and closed her eyes, and told him: ‘I am not afraid,’ and did not wake again.

  *

  It was in the October of 1921 that his mother died. A year later, when he had sold his property to his brothers and paid a visit to his sister Shalini, in Mayapore, he took his son to Bombay and there embarked for England. When he sailed he was comparatively well-off and during the course of the next sixteen years he managed from time to time to increase his capital and income with fortunate investments and l
ucky enterprises. Perhaps it was true that he had in him what he once referred to as a fatal flaw, although if there was a flaw like this it was not one that led to compromise, as he had thought. He had compromised, certainly, in his youth, but had stood by his duty in early manhood. The flaw was perhaps more likely to be found in the quality of his passion. There may have been impurities in it from the beginning, or the impurities may have entered with the frustrations that, in another man, could so easily have diluted the passion but in him roused and strengthened it to the point where the passion alone guided his thoughts and actions, and centred them all on Hari.

  A stranger could look at the life, times and character of Duleep Kumar – or Coomer as he became – and see a man and a career and a background which in themselves, separately or in combination, made no sense. The only sense they made lay in Hari: Hari’s health, Hari’s happiness, Hari’s prospects, power for Hari in a world where boys like Hari normally expected none; these were the notches on the rule Duleep used to measure his own success or failure: and these were what he looked for as the end results of any enterprise he embarked upon.

  When Colin Lindsey’s father kept his promise to see the lawyers, to try and make some sense out of the apparently absurd report that Duleep Kumar had died a bankrupt, the senior partner of that firm said to him:

  ‘In his own country, Coomer would probably have made a fortune and kept it. He told me once that as a boy he’d only wanted to be a civil servant or a lawyer, and had never once thought of becoming a businessman. The curious thing is that he really had a flair for financial manipulation. I mean a flair in the European sense. It was the most English thing about him when you boiled it down. In his own country he might have knocked spots off the average businessman out there. He saw things in a broad light, not a narrow one. At least, I should say he always began every enterprise seeing it that way, but then narrowed it all down to a question of making money as fast as possible for that son of his so that he could become something he isn’t. What a pity! In the last year or two when his affairs began to go down hill, I was always warning him, trying to head him off from foolish speculation. And I suppose this is where – well, blood, background, that sort of thing, finally begin to tell. He got frightened. In the end he went right off his head, to judge from the mess he’s left behind. And of course couldn’t face it. I don’t think he committed suicide because he couldn’t face the consequences but because he couldn’t face what he knew those consequences would mean for that boy of his. Back home to India, in other words, with his tail between his legs. Coomer, you know, might have found himself in pretty serious trouble. I’ve said nothing to the son on that score. It’s probably best that he shouldn’t get to know. But there’s one aspect of the business that the bank says looks like a clear case of forgery.’

  Mr Lindsey was shocked.

  The lawyer, seeing his expression, said, ‘You can be thankful you haven’t invested in any of Coomer’s businesses.’

  ‘I never had that sort of money,’ Lindsey replied. ‘And actually I scarcely knew him. We were sorry for the boy, that’s all. As a matter of fact, it’s a surprise to me to hear you say his father was so devoted to him. So far as we could see the opposite was true. I suppose we’re a pretty soft-hearted family. My own son included. He asked Harry to spend a summer holiday with us some years ago when he found out that he was going to be on his own. It’s been like that ever since.’

  The lawyer said, ‘But you see, Mr Lindsey, keeping himself out of Harry’s light was Coomer’s way of devoting himself to his son’s best interests. I don’t mean that he deliberately tried to give people the impression his son was neglected so that they’d invite him to their homes and he’d grow up knowing what English people were really like. He kept out of Harry’s way because he knew that if Harry grew up as he wanted him to there’d come a time when Harry would be ashamed of him. For instance, there was the question of Coomer’s accent. It seemed pretty good to me, but of course it was an Indian accent. He certainly didn’t want Harry to learn anything from it. He didn’t want Harry to learn anything from him at all. He told me so. He said he looked forward to the day when he’d see Harry didn’t care much for his company. He didn’t want the boy to be ashamed of him but too dutiful to show it. All he wanted for Harry was the best English education and background that money could buy.’

  And not only money, Lindsey thought. The bitter seed had been sown. It was probably this as much as anything that finally dispelled whatever doubts he may have felt about the reasonableness of his rejection of his son Colin’s impossible story-book proposal that Harry should come to live with them permanently if it could possibly be arranged – this – even more than the shock to his well-bred system of learning that young Coomer’s father had put someone else’s name to a document – this: that young Coomer’s lonely situation had not been the result of neglect but of a deliberate policy that had a special and not particularly upright end in view – entrance into a society that stood beyond his father’s natural reach to gain for him wholly on his own resources.

  Now Lindsey remembered – or rather allowed to make the journey from the back of his mind to the front of it – the comments passed by friends whose judgments he trusted except when they clashed with his liberal beliefs (which were perched, somewhat shakily, on the sturdy shoulders of his natural clannish instincts). He could not actually recall the words of these comments, but he certainly recalled the ideas which lay behind them: that in India, so long as you kept them occupied, the natives could be counted on very often to act in the common interest; that the real Indian, the man most to be trusted, was likely to be your servant, the man who earned the salt he ate under your roof, and next to him the simple peasant who hated the bloodsuckers of his own race, cared nothing for politics, but cared instead, like a sensible fellow, about the weather, the state of the crops, and fair play; respected impartiality, and represented the majority of this simple nation that was otherwise being spoiled by too close a contact with the sophisticated ideas of modern western society. The last man you could trust, these people said (and damn it all, they knew, because they had been there or were related to people who had been there) was the westernised Indian, because he was not really an Indian at all. The only exceptions to this rule were to be found among the maharajahs, people like that, who had been born into the cosmopolitan ranks of those whose job was to exercise authority and were interested in preserving the old social status quo.

  There had been a time when his son Colin had thought Harry’s father was a maharajah, or rajah; or anyway, a rich landowner of the kind who stood next to maharajahs in importance. Over the years the impression had gradually been adjusted (sometimes by these same friends who said that Hari’s father was probably the son of a petty zamindar, whatever a zamindar was). But had the initial impression ever been adjusted to anything like the truth? Had the whole thing been a sham? Lindsey hated to think so. But thought so now, and returned home from his altruistic visit to the lawyers feeling that by and large he and his own son had been put upon, led by the nose into an unsavoury affair because they had been too willing to believe the best about people and discount the worst, ignored the warnings of those who had watched the Lindsey adoption of Harry Coomer with expressions sometimes too clearly indicative of their belief that no good could be expected to come of it.

  At dinner that night, listening to his fair and good-looking son talking to black-haired, brown-faced Harry, he was surprised to find himself thinking: ‘But how extraordinary! If you close your eyes and listen, you can’t tell the difference. And they seem to talk on exactly the same wave-length as well.’

  But his eyes were no longer to be closed. He took Harry on one side and said to him, ‘I’m sorry, old chap. There’s nothing I can do. The lawyers have convinced me of that.’

  Harry nodded. He looked disappointed. But he said, ‘Well, thanks anyway. I mean for trying,’ and smiled and then waited as if for the arm Lindsey was normally in the habit of
laying fondly on the boy’s shoulders.

  Tonight Lindsey found himself unable to make that affectionate gesture.

  *

  His sharpest memories were of piles of leaves, wet and chill to the touch, as if in early morning after a late October frost. To Hari, England was sweet cold and crisp clean pungent scent; air that moved, crowding hollows and sweeping hilltops; not stagnant, heavy, a conducting medium for stench. And England was the park and pasture-land behind the house in Sidcot, the gables of the house, the leaded diamond-pane windows, and the benevolent wistaria.

  Waking in the middle of the night on the narrow string-bed in his room at Number 12 Chillianwallah Bagh he beat at the mosquitoes, fisted his ears against the sawing of the frogs and the chopping squawk of the lizards in heat on the walls and ceiling. He entered the mornings from tossing dreams of home and slipped at once into the waking nightmare, his repugnance for everything the alien country offered: the screeching crows outside and the fat amber-coloured cockroaches that lumbered heavy-backed but light-headed with waving feathery antennae from the bedroom to an adjoining bathroom where there was no bath – instead, a tap, a bucket, a copper scoop, a cemented floor to stand on and a slimy runnel for taking the dirty water out through a hole in the wall from which it fell and spattered the caked mud of the compound; draining him layer by layer of his Englishness, draining him too of his hope of discovering that he had imagined everything from the day when the letter came from his father asking him to meet him in Sidcot to talk about the future. This future? There had never been such a meeting so perhaps there wasn’t this future. His father had never arrived, never left Edinburgh, but died in his hotel bedroom.

  Sometimes when a letter reached him from Colin Lindsey he looked at the writing on the envelope as if to confirm to some inner, more foolishly expectant and hopeful spirit than his own that the letter was not one from his father telling him that everything was a mistake. He longed for letters from England, but when they arrived and he tore them open and read them through, first quickly and then a second time slowly, he found that the day had darkened in a way that set him brooding upon some act of violence that was motiveless; aimless, except to the extent that it was calculated to transport him miraculously back to his native air, his native heath, and people whose behaviour did not revolt him. In such moods he never replied to a letter. He waited until the acutest pain of receiving it was over, and, in a day or two, made a first attempt at an answer that would not expose him as a coward; for that would never do; it would be foreign to the scale of values he knew he must hang on to if he were to see the nightmare through to its unimaginable, unforeseeable, but presumably logical end.