The Jewel In The Crown (The Raj quartet)

  He seemed to be satisfied with that, and later when the whole business of the bicycle and what had happened to it blew up in my face I realised what he’d been after. He was trying to establish at what stage ‘they’d’ found the bicycle. If I’d left the cape on the handlebars that would mean they’d known the bicycle was there before they attacked me, because they’d used the cape. If I hadn’t left it on the handlebars it could mean they didn’t find the bicycle until they were making off along the path. And this would suggest that they had gone along the path and not out through the broken wall at the back of the garden. There couldn’t have been any footprints though, because the paths were all gravel, and anyway with the rains and the police bashing about in the dark all that kind of evidence would lead nowhere. His next question was, ‘You say you were suddenly surrounded. Do you mean they closed in on you from all sides of the platform?’

  And again, the warning bell. If I said, Yes, from all sides, the next question wouldn’t be a question at all, but a statement impossible to refute: ‘So you never got an impression of the man or men who came at you from behind?’

  I realised it was going to be difficult to kill completely the idea of there having been at least one man I never saw, especially if he was a man who kept out of sight in case I recognised him. Hari, for instance. The pavilion is open on all sides. I could only minimise the danger. I said, ‘Well, no, not from all sides. Originally I was sitting on the edge of the platform, then I threw my cigarette away and turned round – as you would, to get to your feet. They were coming at me from behind. I don’t know – perhaps I’d heard a sound that made me decide to get out of the place. It was pretty creepy. When I turned round there were these two just standing upright after climbing on to the platform and the other three or four vaulting on to it.’

  Did I call out? No – I was too surprised to call out. Did any of them say anything? I think one of them giggled.

  Mr Poulson questioned the margin of error there might be in my statement about ‘the other three or four’. Was it three, or was it four? Was the total number of men five or six? I said I couldn’t remember. All I remembered was the awful sensation of being attacked swiftly by as many men as there were, five or six. Men of that kind, labourers, hooligans, stinking to high heaven. I said it was like being thrown into one of those disgusting third-class compartments on an Indian train. And that I didn’t want to talk about it any more.

  Anna came to life then. She turned round and said, ‘Yes, I think it is enough, Mr Poulson,’ in that very forthright German voice of hers. He got up at once, glad enough to be out of it, if only for a while. Anna saw him to the door. She came back for a moment to make sure I was all right, then left me alone. Lili brought up some fruit and curds for my lunch and after that I dozed until late afternoon. I woke and found Lili in the room and Raju just leaving it. He’d brought up tea.

  When I’d had a cup Lili said, ‘I think Mr Poulson should have told you. Some boys were arrested last night. One of them was Hari.’

  *

  My bicycle had been found in the ditch outside Hari’s house in the Chillianwallah Bagh. I didn’t believe it. It was such a monstrous fatal intervention. I said, ‘But he wasn’t there! It wasn’t Hari!’ She wanted to believe me. I tried not to panic. If some men had been arrested I thought they must be the ones responsible and that they would already have talked about the Indian who’d been making love to me there. I was going to have to deny this, deny it and go on denying it, and hope that Hari would keep his promise to say nothing, to know nothing. I felt that he had given me that promise when he let me go. I asked Lili when he’d been arrested and why, and who by. When I took it in that he’d been in custody ever since the night before and that Ronald was responsible, that Ronald had found the bicycle outside Hari’s house, I said, ‘He’s lying, isn’t he? He found the bicycle in the Bibighar and took it to Hari’s house and planted it in the ditch.’

  Lili was shocked because she knew it could be true, but she refused to believe it. She couldn’t accept that an English official would stoop to that. But there are only three possible explanations for the bicycle and only one is likely. I left the bicycle by the path against a tree. It was very dark on the path. You’d easily miss seeing the bicycle if you didn’t know just where it was and if you had no lamp. I think when Hari carried me down the path we’d gone past the place before I said, ‘It’s here somewhere,’ and he put me down. He wasn’t interested in the bicycle. He was only concerned to carry me home. I suppose he had some dim idea that if the bicycle were there he could put me on it and wheel me home. But the bicycle was a bad joke, just at that moment, wasn’t it? He hardly bothered to look. I think the bicycle was still where I’d left it, and that when Ronald rushed to the Bibighar with his police patrol they found it almost at once and Ronald put it into the back of a truck and drove to Hari’s house and dumped it in the ditch. I think he was the sort of officer who let his men have a lot of elbow room and in return could get them to plant evidence like this for him and say nothing. Remember the incident of the sub-inspector hitting Hari and getting away with it? There was nothing to connect Hari with the assault in the Bibighar except his knowTn association with me and Ronald’s jealousy and suspicion and prejudice. What else made him go to Hari’s house? And why when he got there did he spend time searching for the bicycle? If it was in a ditch outside it would have had to be searched for, wouldn’t it?

  If the bicycle was in the ditch before Ronald got there I suppose it’s possible that one of his men found it during the course of whatever drill they go through when they go to a place to pick up a suspect. But the impression I got before the so-called inquiry was that according to Ronald they only went into the house because they found the bicycle outside it, and that it was only then that Ronald realised that the house was Hari’s. If this was the impression he gave people at first he can’t have been thinking very clearly because he wouldn’t have to give English people any reason for going to Hari’s house. Apparently he’d been there once that night already. He was probably not thinking clearly because Lili had repeated to him what I’d told her – that Hari wasn’t with me, that Hari wasn’t responsible. He wanted Hari to be responsible. I think he had to change the emphasis when it came to making a proper report, had to say that he’d gone to Hari’s house and then found the bicycle, not the other way round.

  I give Ronald this much benefit of the doubt, that after he left the MacGregor House, knowing what had happened to me, he went to his headquarters, collected a patrol, rushed to the Bibighar, found nothing, and then searched the area in the vicinity, arrested those boys who were drinking hooch in a hut on the other side of the river, and then headed straight for the house in the Chillianwallah Bagh, where he found Hari with cuts on his face and where his police found the bicycle. He went to the Chillianwallah Bagh because he thought I was lying, knew I was lying, and because the boys he arrested in the hut on the other side of the bridge were known to be acquaintances of Hari’s. But he went mainly because he hated Hari. He wanted to prove that Hari was guilty. And this leaves only the two other explanations for the bicycle. Either Hari went back for it after I’d left him, found it, rode it home, then realised the danger and shoved it into the ditch – which would mean he lost his head because if he saw the danger he wouldn’t leave the bicycle outside his own house. Or one of the men who attacked me knew Hari, knew where he lived, stole the bicycle and left it outside Hari’s house, guessing that the police would search near there – which means that whoever it was who knew Hari also knew that Hari and I were friends. And this leads, surely, to the proposition that such a man anticipated that we’d be in the Bibighar that night. But we didn’t even anticipate that ourselves. The coincidence of there being one man or several men in the Bibighar that night who recognised Hari in the dark and thought fast enough to steal the bicycle and leave it outside his house is too much to swallow, isn’t it? And who could such a man be? One of Lili’s servants? One of Mrs Gupta Sen’s
? One who might have been able to read my note, in English, asking Hari to meet me on the night of August the 9th, in the Sanctuary2. No, it won’t wash. It won’t even wash if you think – as I did for a while – of this unknown but very clever or very lucky man or boy being one of those stretcher-bearers Sister Ludmila used to hire, never for more than a few weeks because after that they got bored and ‘their thoughts turned to mischief. On the day I went to say goodbye to her I noticed that she had a new boy. She told me about the boys who wrote to her after they’d left, and how only one of them had ever come back to beg. And it did cross my mind that perhaps the one who came back to beg was the one who was with her and Mr de Souza the night they brought Hari in to the Sanctuary. Such a boy might have taken an interest in Hari, followed him around, got to know his movements, even watched us on those occasions we went to the Bibighar. But why? Such a boy, back in his village, might have talked about the Indian and the white girl, and led a gang of fellow hooligans into Mayapore, attracted by rumours of trouble and the idea of loot, and come to the Bibighar from the waste ground at the back to shelter for the night, and seen Hari there, and me, watched our love-making. The men who attacked us had been watching. That is certain. But the coincidence is too much to take. The men were hooligans. It was Ronald Merrick who planted the bicycle. I know it. I don’t think Hari had many friends, but I don’t think he had any enemies either, except for Ronald – none, anyway, who would go to the lengths that were gone to incriminate him.

  If it wasn’t Ronald, then it must have been Hari himself who took the bicycle, then panicked and left it outside his house. I don’t think Hari panicked.

  But I did. I told Lili to leave me alone. I wanted to think. It became quite clear. Ronald searched the Bibighar, found the bicycle, put it in the truck, then drove across the bridge, towards Chillianwallah Bagh, questioned the level-crossing keeper, found the boys who were ‘friends’ of Hari’s, arrested them, drove on to Hari’s house, planted the bike and then stormed into the house. And when Hari was arrested they probably searched his room. Had he destroyed my note asking him to meet me in the Sanctuary? The note was never mentioned so he must have done. This may have been the only thing he had time to do, if he hadn’t thrown it away before. The photograph I gave him was mentioned. Ronald took it away, as ‘evidence’ – a copy of the same photograph that I sent you and which Hari helped me to choose from the proofs that day at Subhas Chand’s. At the informal inquiry at the MacGregor House Mr Poulson said, ‘Mr Kumar had your photograph in his bedroom. Was it one you gave him?’ – you know – as if trying to establish that Hari was obsessed with me and had stolen the photograph to stare at at night, and as if giving me the opportunity to recant, to go on to their side, to get rid of my silly notions of loyalty and break down and admit that I’d been infatuated, that Hari had worked on my emotions in the most callous and calculating way, that it was a relief to tell the truth at last, that I had come to my senses and was no longer afraid of him, let alone infatuated, that he’d attacked and brutalised me and then submitted me to the base indignity of being raped by friends of his, and that then he’d tried to terrorise me with threats to my life if I gave him away, threats which he said would be all too easy to carry out because the British were about to be given the bum’s rush. Oh, I know what was in their minds – perhaps against their personal judgment – but in their minds as the story they ought to believe because of what might be at stake. Of the trio who made up the board of private inquiry, or whatever it was officially called – Mr Poulson, a startled and embarrassed young English sub-divisional officer whose name I forget, and Judge Menen – only Judge Menen, who presided, maintained an air of utter detachment. It was a detachment that struck me as that of fatigue, fatigue amounting to hopelessness. But the fact that he was there heartened me, not only because he was an Indian but because I was sure he wouldn’t have been there if there was any likelihood of the accused men coming in front of him in the District Court. I suppose if the inquiry had led to what the board by now had no hope of but the English community still wanted, the case would have gone up for trial in the Provincial High Court.

  But I’ve gone a step too far ahead. I must go back for a moment to the evening of the 10th – when I sent Lili out of the room to give myself time to think because I was panicky about what might have been found that could incriminate Hari, and about who the other arrested men were, and what they might have said. Then I was overwhelmed by the typically blunt thoughtless English way I’d assumed everything would be all right for Hari if /said he was innocent. I’d run away from Hari, believing that just by putting distance between us I was helping him. But I saw him now standing where I’d left him, at the gate of the Bibighar. Auntie, what did he do? Go back to look for the bicycle, and remove it, thinking he was helping me? Or begin his journey home on foot? There was blood on my neck and face when I got back – so Anna told me. It must have come from Hari’s face when we clung to each other. In the dark I didn’t see how badly or how little those men had hurt him. I never asked. I never thought. He was bathing his face, apparently, when Ronald burst into his room. Of course they tried to prove he’d been hurt by me fighting back. But all I can think of now is the callous way I left him, to face up to everything alone, to say nothing, deny everything, because I’d told him to, but having to say nothing and deny everything with those scratches or abrasions on his face that he couldn’t account for. When it came out at the inquiry that his face was cut I said, ‘Why ask me about them? Ask Mr Kumar. I don’t know. He wasn’t there.’ Mr Poulson said, ‘He was asked. He wouldn’t say,’ and then changed the subject. Ronald was giving evidence at the time. I stared at him, but he refused to look at me. I said, ‘Perhaps he had a scrap with the police. It wouldn’t be the first time he was hit by a police officer.’ It did no good. It was the wrong thing to say at that time in that place. It made them sympathise with Ronald rather than me. I didn’t mind, though, because in any case I was beginning to hate myself. I hated myself because I realised Hari had taken me at my word and said nothing – quite literally nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Said nothing in spite of evidence against him, which I hadn’t reckoned with when I ran off and left him.

  They hurt him, didn’t they? Tortured him in some way? But he said nothing, nothing. When they arrested him he must have stood there – with the cuts on his face, my photograph in his room, my bicycle in the ditch outside, and said nothing. At one time during those days of question and answer Lili told me, ‘He won’t account for his movements. He denies having been in the Bibighar. He says he hasn’t seen you since the night you both went to the temple. But he won’t say where he was or what he was doing between leaving the office and getting home, some time after nine. He must have reached home about the time you did, Daphne.’

  And of course these were the other things I hadn’t reckoned with or known about: Ronald’s first visit to the house in the Chillianwallah Bagh, his visit to the MacGregor House, his visit to the Sanctuary. When I left Hari at the Bibighar I suppose I assumed that all he had to do was to pretend to have been at home all evening, to persuade Aunt Shalini to swear he had been at home, if the question ever arose, or to make up another story, whatever he thought best, whatever he thought would work. But for Hari, no story worked. I never gave him a chance to calm me down and say-as I would have let an Englishman say-‘ Look, for Pete’s sake, if I haven’t been here in the Bibighar, where in hell have I been? How do I account for this swollen lip, or black eye, or scratched cheek,’ whatever it was.

  I never gave him the chance because even in my panic there was this assumption of superiority, of privilege, of believing I knew what was best for both of us, because the colour of my skin automatically put me on the side of those who never told a lie. But we’ve got far beyond that stage of colonial simplicity. We’ve created a blundering judicial robot. We can’t stop it working. It works for us even when we least want it to. We created it to prove how fair, how civilised we are. But it is a white
robot and it can’t distinguish between love and rape. It only understands physical connection and only understands it as a crime because it only exists to punish crime. It would have punished Hari for this, and if physical connection between the races is a crime he’s been punished justly. One day someone may come along, cross a wire by mistake, or fix in a special circuit with the object of making it impartial and colour-blind, and then it will probably explode.

  *

  After Lili had told me about Hari’s arrest and I’d thought for a bit I rang for Raju and told him I wanted Poulson Sahib sent for. I’d got over my panic. I was angry, even angry with Lili. I felt she’d let me down by allowing them to hold Hari in custody without doing a thing to stop it. She was very patient with me, but we were shut off from each other as we’d never been before. She said that if I really wanted to see Mr Poulson she’d ring him. I think she believed I was going to confess. She knew I’d been lying. But for her the truth would be as bad as the lies. She had brought Hari into the house, and he was an Indian. A fellow-countryman. For a day or two after the Bibighar, I felt like an interloper, one of her harpies who’d inexplicably become involved with the life of an Indian family, and had taken to sitting in her bedroom the better to keep what was left of her racial integrity intact.

  Mr Poulson came after dinner. Lili brought him up. She asked whether I wanted her to stay. I said it might be better if Mr Poulson and I were alone. Directly she’d gone I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me they arrested Hari Kumar last night?’ Normally I liked him. Tonight I despised him, but then I was ready to despise everybody. He looked as if he wanted to fall through the floor. He said Hari had been arrested because the evidence seemed to add up that way, in spite of my ‘belief ’ that he hadn’t been involved. I said, ‘What evidence? What evidence that can possibly contradict my evidence. You must all be mad if you think you can pin anything on Hari.’