The Jewel In The Crown (The Raj quartet)

  ‘Then I’ll leave these papers with you,’ Kumar said, and put them on the desk. The young man picked them up and threw them into a wire basket.

  ‘They are marked urgent, by the way,’ Kumar pointed out.

  ‘Then why do you leave them with me? Why don’t you take them with you and look for Mr Nair in the station master’s office?’

  ‘Because that’s your job, not mine,’ Kumar said, and turned as if to walk out.

  ‘These documents are entrusted to you, not to me.’

  They stared at each other.

  Kumar said, ‘If you’re not competent to deal with them by all means let them lie in your little wire basket. I’m only a delivery boy.’

  When he was at the door the other man called, ‘I say, Coomer.’

  He turned, annoyed to have it proved that the other man did know who he was.

  ‘If your uncle wants to know whom you gave these papers to, tell him – Moti Lal.’

  It was a name he expected to forget but in fact had cause to remember.

  When he got outside the warehouse the rickshaw boy had turned nasty. He wanted to be paid off. Kumar climbed in and told him to go to the cantonment bazaar. He had worked out how to say it in Hindi. When the boy shook his head Kumar repeated the order but raised his voice. The boy took hold of the handlebars and wheeled the rickshaw around, ran with it for a few paces and jumped on to the saddle. Kumar had to shout at him again when he began to turn back along the way they had come. They had another argument. Kumar guessed the reason for the boy’s objections. He did not want to take an Indian passenger so far. An Indian passenger seldom paid more than the minimum fare.

  Eventually the boy submitted to his bad luck and turned towards the cantonment, and then Kumar found himself travelling along wide avenues of well-spaced bungalows. Here there was shade and a sense of mid-morning hush such as fell at home, between breakfast and lunch during the holidays at Didbury. The road was metalled but the pathways were kutcha. In the sudden quietness he could hear the rhythmic click of the pedals. He lit a cigarette because the odour of the leather cushions and the smell of the boy’s stale sweat were now more noticeable.

  The boy made a series of left and right hand turns and Kumar wondered whether he was being taken out of his way deliberately, but then – where the road they were now travelling on met another at a T-junction – he could see a section of arcaded shops, and one with a sign over it: Dr Gulab Singh Sahib (P) Ltd: Pharmacy. They had reached the Victoria road. He told the boy to turn left and indicated with a curt flick of the hand, whenever the boy looked over his shoulder to suggest that now was the time to stop, that the journey should continue. He wanted to see beyond the cantonment bazaar. He wanted to go as far as the place he knew was called the maidan.

  There were English women in the arcades of the Victoria road. How pale they looked. Their cars were parked in the shade along one side of the bazaar. There was this shade to be had because at ten-thirty in the morning the sun was casting shadows. There were also horse tongas. The tonga-carts were painted in gay colours, and the horses’ bridles were decorated with silver medallions and red and yellow plumes. Some of the English women were wearing slacks. Briefly he had an impression that these made them look ugly, but this was an impression that did not survive the warmth of the feeling he had that here at last he was again in the company of people he understood. He looked from one side of the road to the other: here was a shop called Darwaza Chand, Civil and Military Tailor; here the Imperial Bank of India; there the offices of the Mayapore Gazette which it interested him to see because Aunt Shalini had made a point of ordering the Gazette especially for him so that he could read the local news in English. The shops in the cantonment all advertised in the Gazette. The names were familiar to him. He wished that he had a lot of money so that he could tell the rickshaw boy to stop at the Imperial Bank, go in and cash a cheque, and then stroll across the road to Darwaza Chand and order some decent suits and shirts. He wished, as well, that he had the courage to go into the English Coffee House, drink a cup or two and smoke a cigarette and chat to the two pretty young white girls who were just now entering. And he would have liked to tap the rickshaw boy on his bony back, get out at the Mayapore Sports Emporium and test the weight and spring of the English willow cricket bats that were for sale there, at a price. The sight of the bats in the window made him long to open his shoulders and punish a loose ball. After he had selected a bat he would go across the road to the Yellow Dragon Chinese Restaurant and eat some decent food; and, in the evening, pay a visit to the Eros Cinema where at 7.30 and 10.30 that evening they were showing a film he had seen months ago with the Lindseys at the Carlton in the Haymarket. He would have liked the Lindseys to be here in Mayapore to see it with him again. Going past the cinema – a building with a white stuccoed facceade and a steel mesh concertina gate closing the dark cavern of the open foyer, and set well back in a sanded forecourt – he felt the pain of his exile more sharply than ever.

  He told the boy to go in the direction of the maidan. The cinema was the last building in the cantonment bazaar – or the first, depending which way you came. Beyond it there was a section of tree-shaded road with low walls on either side and, on the other side of the walls, the huts and godowns of the Public Works Department. The rickshaw boy got up some speed on this stretch, negotiated the crossroads formed by the Victoria and Grand Trunk roads and rode on past the Court house, the Police barracks, the District Headquarters, the chummery, the District Superintendent’s bungalow and the bungalow which the Poulsons were to take over in 1939.

  In this way Hari Kumar reached the maidan. He told the rickshaw boy to stop. The vast space was almost empty. There were two riders – white children mounted on ponies. Their syces ran behind. The crows were wheeling and croaking, but to Hari they no longer looked predatory. There was peace. And Hari thought: Yes, it is beautiful. In the distance, on the other side of the maidan, he could see the spire of St Mary’s. He got down from the rickshaw and stood in the shade of the trees and watched and listened. Half-closing his eyes he could almost imagine himself on the common near Didbury. The rains had left their green mark on the turf, but he did not know this because he had never seen the maidan before; he had never seen it in May when the grass was burnt to ochre.

  He wanted to mount and ride and feel the air moving against his face. Could one hire a pony from somewhere? He turned to the rickshaw boy. It was impossible to ask. He did not know the right words. Perhaps he did not need to know, or need to ask because he could guess the answer. The maidan was the preserve of the sahiblog. But he felt, all the same, that he would only have to speak to one of them to be recognised, to be admitted. He got back into the rickshaw and told the boy to go back to the cantonment bazaar. He would buy a few things at Dr Gulab Singh’s pharmacy; some Odol toothpaste and some Pears’ soap. Surreptitiously, he felt in his wallet. He had a five-rupee note and four one-rupee notes. About fifteen shillings. The rickshaw boy would ask for three but really be content with two.

  On the return journey he became aware that there were very few cycle rickshaws on the road. There were cars, cycles and horse-tongas. In the cycle-rickshaws the passengers were always Indians. In one rickshaw the passenger had his sandalled feet up on a wooden crate of live chickens. He felt the shame that rubbed off on to him because he travelled by rickshaw, so marking himself as out of his own black-town element because the cycle-rickshaws all came from the other side of the river.

  When they reached Gulab Singh’s he told the boy to stop, and got down, mounted the double kerb and entered the shadowy arcade. In Gulab Singh’s window there were brand goods so familiar, so Anglo-Saxon, he felt like shouting for joy. Or in despair. He could not tell which. He entered. The shop was dark and cool, set out with long rectangular glass cases on table-legs, as in a museum. It smelt faintly of pepper and richly of unguents. At one end there was a counter. There were several English women walking round, each attended by an Indian assistant. There
was a man as well, who looked a bit like Mr Lindsey. The Englishman’s clothes showed his own up for what they were. Babu clothes. Bazaar stuff. The English were talking to each other. He could hear every word they said if he paid attention. The man who looked like Mr Lindsey was saying: ‘Why hasn’t it come? You said Tuesday and today is Tuesday. I might just as well have ordered it myself. Well, give me the other thing and send the rest up jolly sharp.’

  Kumar stood at the counter and waited for the assistant to finish serving the Englishman. The Englishman glanced at him and then turned his attention back to what the assistant was doing: wrapping an unidentifiable cardboard carton.

  ‘Right,’ the Englishman said, taking the package. ‘I’ll expect the other things by six this evening.’

  When the Englishman had gone Kumar said, ‘Have you got some Pears’ soap?’

  The assistant, a man several years older than himself, waggled his head from side to side, and went away. Kumar could not be sure that he had understood. Another assistant came through the doorway marked Dispensary, but he was carrying a package which he took over to a woman who was studying the articles for sale in one of the glass cases. At the other side of the shop there was a photographic booth. Kumar waited. When he next saw his own assistant the man was opening another of the glass cases for a group of white women.

  Kumar moved away from the unattended counter and took up a position from which he judged he would be able to catch the assistant’s eye. He was right. He did. But the assistant’s expression was that of someone who did not remember ever having been spoken to about Pears’ soap. Kumar wished that the assistant’s new customers had been men. He could have interrupted their conversation, then, without putting himself in the wrong. Instead, he found himself in the ignominious role of watcher on the sidelines, in a situation another man was taking advantage of: hiding, as Kumar put it to himself, behind the skirts of a group of women. He looked around and saw the man who had come from the dispensary going back there. He said to him, ‘I asked someone if you had any Pears’ soap.’

  The man stopped: perhaps because Kumar’s voice automatically arrested him with its sahib-inflections. Momentarily he seemed to be at a loss, assessing the evidence of his eyes and the evidence of his ears. ‘Pears’?’ he said at last. ‘Oh yes, we have Pears’. Who is it for?’

  It was a question Kumar had not expected, and one he did not immediately understand. But then did. Who did this fellow think he was? Some babu shopping for his master?

  ‘Well, it’s for me, naturally,’ he said.

  ‘One dozen or two dozen?’

  Kumar’s mouth was dry.

  ‘One bar,’ he said, trying to be dignified about it.

  ‘We only sell it by the dozen,’ the man explained, ‘but you could get it in the bazaar, I expect,’ and then added something in Hindi, which Kumar did not understand.

  He said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t speak Hindi. What are you trying to say?’

  And was conscious, now, that because he was annoyed he had raised his voice, and other people in the shop were watching and listening. He caught the eye of one of the Englishwomen. Slowly she turned away with a smile he could only attach two words to: bitter, contemptuous.

  ‘I was saying,’ the man replied, ‘that if you are only wanting one bar of Pears’ soap you will find it cheaper in the Chillianwallah Bazaar because there they are taking no notice of regulated retail prices.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Kumar said, ‘you have been most helpful,’ and walked out.

  *

  The room in the Chillianwallah Bazaar office where Kumar worked was larger than the rest. He shared it with other English-speaking clerks. They were afraid of him because of his manner and his family connection with their employer. Proud of their own fluency in what passed among them for English – a language not generally in use at Romesh Chand’s warehouse – they resented his intrusion but in a perverse way were flattered by the sense of further elevation his presence gave them. They were boys who, if they could help it, never spoke their mother tongue, and so looked down on the men in the small, airless partitioned cells, old clerks who conducted their business and correspondence in the vernacular. By arriving in their own midst Kumar had confirmed their superiority but threatened their security. In front of him they no longer dared to criticise Romesh Chand, or the head clerks, in case one of Kumar’s jobs was to act as a family spy. And even when they felt reassured that it was not they could not help wondering which of them might lose his job to the Anglicised boy who knew nothing about the business but had the manner of a burra sahib. Their conduct towards him was a compound of suspicion, awe, envy and servility.

  They sickened him. He thought them spineless, worse than a bunch of girls, giggling one day and sulking the next. He found it difficult to follow what they were saying. They ran all their words one into the other. They sang their sentences. Their pronunciation was peculiar. At first he tried to understand them, but then saw the danger of trying too hard. He wondered how long a man could work among them and not fall into the same habits of speech, not acquire the alien habits of thought that controlled the speech. At night, alone in his bedroom, he sometimes talked aloud to himself, trying to detect changes of tone, accent and resonance in order to correct them. To maintain the Englishness of his voice and habits became increasingly important to him. Even after the disastrous visit to Gulab Singh’s pharmacy it remained important. He remembered what his father had said: ‘If you answer the telephone people think it is an Englishman speaking.’ There were no telephones at his uncle’s office. There was no telephone at Number 12 Chillianwallah Bagh. Even if there had been telephones there would have been no Englishman to ring or to be rung by. But this absence of Englishness in his exterior public life he saw as a logical projection of the fantasy that informed his private inner one.

  It was at this period, after the visit to the pharmacy, that the notion of having become invisible to white people first entered his head, although it took some time for the notion to be formulated quite in this way. When he had become used to crossing the river from the bazaar to the railway warehouse and used to the way English people seemed to look right through him if their eyes chanced to meet his own, the concept of invisibility fell readily enough into its place, but still more time was needed for that concept to produce its natural corollary in his mind: that his father had succeeded in making him nothing, nothing in the black town, nothing in the cantonment, nothing even in England because in England he was now no more than a memory, a familiar but possibly unreal signature at the end of meaningless letters to Colin Lindsey; meaningless because, as the months went by, the letters deviated further and further from the truth. The letters became, in fact, exercises by young Kumar to keep his Englishness in trim. He knew this. He knew his letters were unsatisfactory. He recognised the signs of growing-away that could be read in Colin’s replies. But the association with Colin continued to be precious to him. Colin’s signature at the bottom of a letter was the proof he needed that his English experience had not been imagined.

  *

  Where does one draw the line under the story of Hari Kumar, Harry Coomer: the story of him prior to Bibighar?

  Sister Ludmila said that for her Bibighar began on the morning Merrick took Kumar away in his police truck; so at least Kumar has to be brought to that point, brought anyway to the moment when, in the dark, his body was turned over by Mr de Souza and his face lit by the torch. Such darkness, Sister Ludmila said; the kind of expression which was familiar to her on the faces of young Indians, but was, in Hari’s case, especially significant.

  And where does one go for the evidence of the story of Kumar prior to Bibighar? Well, there is the lawyer Srinivasan. There is Sister Ludmila. There is no longer Shalini Gupta Sen; no Gupta Sen who knows, or will admit to knowing. There are other witnesses: and, specifically, there is that certain signature in the Members’ Book of the Mayapore Gymkhana Club. There is also the signature of Harry Coomer in the Members’ B
ook for 1939 of the Mayapore Indian Club. The Mayapore Chatterjee Club. The MCC. The other club. The wrong one. And this is to be found in a ledger somewhat similar to those used at the right club, under a date in May 1939, which oddly enough roughly coincides with the day the Deputy Commissioner challenged a tradition and made a forced entry at the Gymkhana.

  ‘I put young Kumar up for the Indian Club’ (Srinivasan said) ‘because it was something I felt he needed. We only met a few times. I’m afraid he didn’t like me. He distrusted me because I was his uncle Romesh’s lawyer. Apart from that English manner of his which I found overbearing I quite liked him as a person, if not as a type. If we’d got on better, if he’d trusted me, perhaps I should have been able to do something for him, taken him to Lili Chatterjee’s for instance and got him into a few mixed English and Indian parties. But by the time he got into what used to be called the MacGregor House set it was too late. He’d already got on the wrong side of the policeman, Merrick, and been taken in for questioning. The evening in 1939 I took him to the Indian Club wasn’t a success. The banias were there, with their feet on the chairs. He hated it. I don’t think he ever went again, and a few weeks later he left his uncle’s office. He’d got wind of the marriage the Gupta Sens were thinking of arranging for him, and he’d given up hope of getting his uncle to agree to his going to the Technical College. I can tell you this, that if it hadn’t been for his Aunt Shalini he’d have been in a bad way when he walked out of Romesh Chand’s office. The old man was ready to wash his hands of him. I remember how she begged and pleaded with Romesh to continue the allowance he paid her. Well, he kept it going but cut it down. She pinched and scraped and went without things herself to give Hari something for his pocket; and of course she fed and housed and clothed him. I told her that as long as she did that she was stopping him from standing on his own feet. He was already nineteen. A man by our standards. But she wouldn’t hear any criticism of him. And don’t get the wrong impression. He didn’t just sit back. I remember for instance that he applied for a job at the British–Indian Electrical. He had two or three interviews and for a time it looked as if he’d got in. Naturally they were interested. His English public school education didn’t count for nothing. It didn’t matter to them that he had no qualifications. They could have taught him what he needed to know, and trained him up on the administrative side. But he fell foul of one of the Englishmen there, so Shalini Gupta Sen told me. It wasn’t difficult to guess why. In those days, you know, the commercial people were always looked down upon as the lowest form of Anglo-Indian life. Even schoolmasters ranked higher in the colonial social scale. The man Hari fell foul of probably spoke English with a Midlands accent, and resented the fact that an Indian spoke it like a managing director.