The Jewel In The Crown (The Raj quartet)

  *

  It’s funny how in spite of what you know about the rains before you come to India you think of it as endlessly dry and scorched, one vast Moghul desert, with walled, scattered towns where all the buildings are shaped like mosques, with arches of fretted stone. Occasionally from the window of a train – the one I went up to Pindi on when I first came out – there are glimpses of the country you’ve imagined. I’m glad I came before and not in the middle of the rains. It’s best to undergo the exhaustion of that heat, the heat of April and May that brings out the scarlet flowers of the gol mohurs, the ‘flames of the forest’ (such a dead, dry, lifeless-looking tree before the blossoms burst) the better to know the joy of the wild storms and lashing rains of the first downpours that turn everything green. That is my India. The India of the rains.

  *

  There’s another name besides Hari’s that we never mention. Bibighar. So although you were in Mayapore once, and may have visited the gardens, I don’t know whether you have a picture of them in your mind or not. There it is all greenness. Even in the hottest months, before the rains, there is a feeling of greenness, a bit faded and tired, but still green – wild and overgrown, a walled enclosure of trees and undergrowth, with pathways and sudden open spaces where a hundred years ago there were probably formal gardens and fountains. You can still see the foundations of the old house, the Bibighar itself. In one part of them there is a mosaic floor with steps up to it as if it was once the entrance. They’ve built pillars round the mosaic since and roofed it over, to make it into a sort of shelter or pavilion. Men from the Public Works come once or twice a year and cut back the shrubbery and creepers. At the back of the grounds the wall is crumbled and broken and gives on to waste ground. At the front of the garden there is an open archway on to the road but no gate. So the garden is never closed. But few people go in. Children think it is haunted. Brave boys and girls play there in the morning, and in the dry weather well-off Indians sometimes picnic. But mostly it’s deserted. The house was built by a prince, so Lili told me, and destroyed by that man MacGregor, whose house is named after him, and whose wife Janet is supposed to haunt the verandah, nursing her dead baby. It was Lili who first took me into the Bibighar. Hari had heard something about it, but had never seen it, or realised that the long wall on the Bibighar Bridge road was the wall surrounding it, and had never been in it until I took him there one day. There were children playing the first time I visited it with Lili but they ran off when they saw us. I expect they thought we were daylight Bibighar ghosts. And afterwards I never saw anyone there at all.

  *

  Hari and I got into the habit of going to the Bibighar, and sitting there in the pavilion, because it was the one place in Mayapore where we could be together and be utterly natural with each other. And even then there was the feeling that we were having to hide ourselves away from the inquisitive, the amused, and the disapproving. Going in there, through the archway, or standing up and getting ready to go back into the cantonment – those were the moments when this feeling of being about to hide or about to come out of hiding to face things was strongest. And even while we were there, there was often a feeling of preparedness, in case someone came in and saw us together, even though we were doing nothing but sitting side by side on the edge of the mosaic ‘platform’ with our feet dangling, like two kids sitting on a wall. But at least we could be pretty sure no white man or woman would come into the gardens. They never did. The gardens always seemed to have a purely Indian connection, just as the maidan really had a purely English one.

  Perhaps you say: But if you wanted to be with Hari, and he wanted to be with you, that was no crime, surely, and there were tons of places you could have gone and been happy together? Well, but where? The MacGregor House? His house in the Chillianwallah Bagh? Yes. But where else? Auntie, where else? Where else that people wouldn’t have stared and made us self-conscious, armed us in preparation to withstand an insult or a vulgar scene? The club was out. There was the other club, what they call the Indian Club, but Hari wouldn’t take me there because there I would have been stared at by what he called the banias with their feet on the chairs. The English coffee shop was out. The Chinese Restaurant was out – after one visit when he was stopped from following me upstairs. I’d been there before with an English officer – and automatically, without thinking, began to go up. So we had to sit downstairs while I was subjected to the stage whisper comments of the people going to the room above, and the curious, uncomfortable stares of the British non-commissioned soldiers who shared the downstairs room with us. Even the poor little fleapit cinema in the cantonment was out because I wouldn’t have had the nerve to try to take Hari into the sacrosanct little ‘balcony’ and he wouldn’t have made me sit on a wooden form in the pit. Neither would he take me to the Indian cinema opposite the Tirupati temple, although I asked him to. He said, ‘What, and sit through four hours of the Ramayana, holding our noses, getting fleas and sweating our guts out?’

  Auntie, in Mayapore there wasn’t anywhere we could be alone together in public that didn’t involve some kind of special forethought or preparation. We spent a few evenings at the MacGregor House while Auntie Lili was out playing bridge, and a couple of evenings with his sweet little Aunt Shalini, but a friendship between two human beings can’t be limited in this way, can it? You can’t not be affected by the fact that it’s a friendship you’re both having to work hard at.

  *

  And of course it was a friendship I began in a conscious frame of mind. Naturally, as I’d known he wouldn’t, he never just dropped in to open house. I told Lili I’d met him on the maidan and invited him to come any time. In retrospect her reaction strikes me as that of someone who was subconsciously pleased, but afraid of the consequences for me, or, if not afraid, full of reservations. She told me more about him. Perhaps she was trying to warn me, but she only succeeded in adding fuel to my reforming zeal. She must have told me about his having been to Chillingborough before I met him on the maidan, because I’m sure he never mentioned Chillingborough at the party. But otherwise I’ve forgotten exactly how and when I fitted him together in my mind. All I know, what I admit to, is this – that I was conscious at the meeting on the maidan of doing a good deed. The thought revolts me now. I can’t bear to remember that I ever condescended, even unintentionally, to the man I fell in love with.

  When a couple of weeks had gone by and he still hadn’t dropped in I wrote him a note. I got his address from Aunt Lili who had it in her book. As you know I’ve always been hopeless at bridge, and Lili was going round to the Whites to make up a four with Judge Menen whose wife was in the Greenlawns Nursing Home. Which left me alone on a Saturday evening. After the flag-wagging of War Week I didn’t want to go to the club. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I thought of Hari. I’d been thinking of him a lot. It was Saturday morning. I wrote him a note and sent it by one of the servants to the Chillianwallah Bagh. The servant came back and said that Kumar Sahib hadn’t been in but that he’d left the note. So I didn’t know whether Hari would come that evening or not, which made Lili’s silent criticism worse, and my determination to have everything ready stronger. I told cook to prepare dinner for two, chicken pulao, with piles and piles of saffron rice and onion pickles and mounds of lovely hot chappattis, and lots of iced beer, and what I called Mango-Melba to follow. I checked the cocktail cabinet and sent the boy to the liquor store for more Carew’s gin. Then I went down to the cantonment myself, to the Sports Emporium, and bought a batch of records that had just come in, and a box of needles because Lili wasn’t very good about changing them and used the same ones over and over and mixed the old ones with the new. We had a Decca portable she’d bought the last time she was in Cal. And when I got back I sent Bhalu crazy the way I bashed round the garden gathering armfuls of flowers! I felt a bit like Cho Cho San getting ready for Pinkerton! Lili went off to the Whites about six-thirty while I was still in the bath. She came into the bedroom and called out, ‘Daphne
, I’m bashing off now and will be back about midnight, I expect. Have a good time.’ I cried out, ‘Oh, I will. Give my love all round.’ And then she said, ‘I hope he has the good manners to turn up,’ so I shouted back, ‘Of course he will. He’d have sent a note by now if he hadn’t been going to.’ Poor Lili. She really thought he wasn’t going to. So did I. I dressed in that awful electric blue dress that turns muddy green in the artificial light, but I felt I didn’t care what I looked like. I knew I could never look anything but myself. And there was joy in not caring for once, but just being myself.

  And he came, bang on the dot of 7.30, in a horse tonga. To get a horse tonga he must have gone to the station, because on the other side of the river you can usually only get cycle tongas. Or perhaps he had come from the cantonment bazaar, from Darwaza Chand’s shop, and had waited there while they finished making the new shirt that made him smell of fresh, unlaundered cotton.

  *

  I’d cheated a bit in my note by not making it really clear I’d be alone. For all I knew he was the sort of Indian boy who’d think it wrong to dine alone with a woman, or if he didn’t mind, that his aunt would refuse to let him come if she knew Lili was going to be out. I could see he was on tenterhooks at first, waiting for Lili to appear. We were on the verandah, and Raju was serving the drinks. It must have been on this occasion that he refused a cigarette and admitted he’d given it up. Not smoking made him more on tenterhooks, and suddenly I was on them too because I saw what a trap I’d laid for myself. He’d probably think Lili had gone out to avoid him because she disapproved of the idea of his coming to a meal, or, just as bad, that I’d asked him round secretly on a night she was going out because I knew she would disapprove. So before the situation got out of hand I told him the truth, that Saturday was one of Lili’s bridge nights, and I hated bridge and had wanted a quiet dinner with someone I could talk to about home, but had cheated when writing my note in case he or his aunt thought it odd for a girl to invite a boy round on an evening when she was going to be by herself.

  He seemed puzzled at first. It must have been about four years since an English person had spoken to him in the way that in England he’d have been used to and thought nothing of. I hated even being conscious of this fact, but I was, so there’s no use in pretending otherwise.

  Even on that first evening we were having to work at a basis for ordinary human exchange, although it was probably the only evening we met without feeling an immediate sense of pressure and disapproval from outside. Within a minute or two of realising Lili was out I could see him beginning to relax, beginning to forget himself and start looking at and considering me. We had about three gin fizzes and then went in and ate, sitting close together at one end of the table. I’d worked it out before that although it would have been nice for me if I could have just told Raju to bring the food in and leave me to serve it, it would be better for Hari’s morale if we were both waited on hand and foot. Raju of course tried to cut Hari down to size a bit by addressing him in Hindi, but soon gave up when he realised Hari spoke it really no better than I did! And I was glad to see how he also relaxed at the table, once we’d made a joke about his inability to speak the language, and tackled the grub! Like me. We both waded in like a couple of kids. At Lili’s parties I’d noticed how the Indian men sort of held back, as if it was faintly indelicate to eat hearty in mixed company. I kept sending Raju out to bring more hot chappattis which Hari ended up by scoffing without noticing how many he’d had. Later, when I had a similar dinner at his Aunt Shalini’s I realised that there was a difference between our food and theirs, and understood better why Hari ate as if he’d not had a square meal for weeks. I’ve never been able to stand anything cooked in ghi, which affects my bileduct immediately and there was ghi in some of the dishes Mrs Gupta Sen gave us.

  But that is going on too far ahead. After we’d done right by the grub, we sort of collapsed in the drawing-room and then Raju brought in the brandy and coffee, and Hari did the honours at the gramophone. All through dinner we’d talked and talked about ‘home’. We were almost exactly the same age, so remembered the same things in relation to the same phases of our lives, I mean like seeing the R 101blundering overhead. Aeroplanes and Jim Mollison and Amy Johnson, Amelia Earhart lost in the Timor Sea; films like Rain and Mata Hari. And things like cricket and Jack Hobbs, Wimbledon and Bunny Austin and Betty Nuttall, motor racing and Sir Malcolm Campbell, Arsenal and Alec James, the proms at the poor old bombed Queen’s Hall – although Hari had never been there because he had no real taste for music apart from jazz and swing.

  When he first started putting the records on you could see how much pleasure they gave him, but also how they suddenly brought back his uncertainty. After he’d played two and put on a third, a Victor Sylvester, he got his courage up and said, ‘I’ve almost forgotten how and was never much good anyway, but would you like to dance?’ I said I was once described as an elephant with clogs on myself, but perhaps together we’d sort each other out, so we stood up and held hands and backs. At first he held me too far away for it to work properly, and we were both watching each other’s feet all the time and apologising and taking it awfully seriously, and when the record ended I think he expected me to sit down or suggest going on to the verandah, not only because it hadn’t worked but because he thought I might have agreed to dance with him in order not to make it look too obvious that I felt it would be distasteful to be held by an Indian. But I asked him to find a particular record ‘In the Mood’, which, as you probably don’t know, is quick and easy, an absolute natural, and waited for him, forced him to dance again, and this time we looked over each other’s shoulders and not at our feet, and danced closer, and felt each other slipping into a sort of natural rhythm.

  *

  If you ever read this I shan’t be around to feel diminished by your criticism. I can kid myself that I’m reliving it for no one except the one person who knows how far short of perfect re-enactment an account like this must fall. Perhaps as well as being an insurance against permanent silence it is a consolation prize to me, to give me a chance to have him with me again in a way that is more solid than unfettered recollection, but still insubstantial. But second best is better than third – the third best of random thoughts un-pinned down. Oh, I could conjure him now, just with this scratchy old pen, in a form that might satisfy you better, but do more or less than justice to what he actually was. I could do this if I ignored the uncertainty I felt, the clumsiness we both shared; do it if I pretended that from the moment we held each other we felt the uncomplicated magic of straightforward physical attraction. But it was never uncomplicated. Unless you could say that the opposing complications cancelled each other out – on his side the complication of realising that the possession of a white girl could be a way of bolstering his ego, and on mine the complication of the curious almost titillating fear of his colour. How else account for the fact that in dancing the second time we stared (I think fixedly) over each other’s shoulders, as if afraid to look directly into each other’s eyes?

  We didn’t dance a third time, but in sitting out now there was no sense of physical rebuff as there would have been if I’d refused to dance at all or sat down after that first awkward impersonal shuffle. Our separation, our sitting, he in his chair and I in mine, was a mutual drawing-back from dangerous ground – a drawing-back from the danger to ourselves but also from the danger to the other, because neither of us could be certain that the other fully saw the danger or understood the part that might be played by the attraction to danger in what we felt for each other.

  And that is how Lili found us when she got back, sitting companionably at the end of an evening we had both obviously enjoyed because we were still talking easily, with our tensions so well concealed we couldn’t even be certain that it was tension the other one shared.

  He stayed for no more than ten minutes after she got back; and yet during that time, while she talked to him, I could see his armour going back on layer by layer,
and Lili change from faintly frosty to friendly back to frosty again – as if at one moment before he was fully re-armed she had seen the kind of vulnerable spot in him she was afraid of and so put up her own shutters, not to lock him out but to try – by putting them up – to lock me in, to keep us apart for everybody’s sake.

  One is not sensitive usually to the effect people have on one another unless one of them happens to be someone you love. In this case, I suppose, already I loved them both.

  *

  War Week was towards the end of April, so the evening Hari came to dinner at the MacGregor House must have been in the early part of May. One or two of the girls from the hospital went up that month to places like Darjeeling for a spot of leave. It was terribly hot in Mayapore. The moon was that curious lopsided shape which I think you told me is caused by dust particles in the atmosphere. There wasn’t much leave going because of all the political crises that kept boiling up, simmering down and boiling up again. Matron said I could have a couple of weeks off and I think Lili would have liked to get away into the hills for a bit, but we were pretty short-staffed at the hospital and I didn’t feel I was entitled to leave so soon after starting work. I suggested to Lili that she should go by herself and leave me to cope, but she wouldn’t hear of it. So we sweated it out, as practically everybody else from the Deputy Commissioner downwards was doing. It became too hot, really, to have parties – a few times out to dinner, and a few times having people in to dinner, that was about the sum total.