The Day of the Scorpion

‘My being questioned by the police made certain people in Mayapore aware of my existence, yes.’

  ‘Please elucidate.’

  ‘I was arrested in a place called The Sanctuary—’

  ‘Arrested?’

  ‘I was dragged into a police truck, taken to the police station, held, questioned and then released. It seemed to me like being arrested.’

  ‘Very well. Continue—’

  ‘The Sanctuary was run as a private charity for the sick and dying by a woman known as Sister Ludmila. After I was arrested – taken away – she got word to Romesh Chand Gupta Sen. He sent for his lawyer, a man called Srinivasan. Srinivasan was a friend of Lady Chatterjee who lived in the MacGregor House. Miss Manners was staying with her there. Sister Ludmila also mentioned my arrest to a German woman who was in charge of the Purdah Hospital. Doctor Klaus. Doctor Klaus was also a friend of Lady Chatterjee. By the time Mr Srinivasan got to the police station to ask why I had been taken there I’d been released. But Lady Chatterjee heard of the incident from Dr Klaus and asked Mr Srinivasan about me. So she became interested in my case.’

  ‘Your case?’

  ‘My personal history.’

  ‘You mean she thought you sounded like a young man in need of some help?’

  ‘I don’t know. I assumed she was interested in what she was told about me by Srinivasan, otherwise she wouldn’t have invited me to the MacGregor House to one of her mixed parties of British and Indian guests.’

  ‘Lady Chatterjee has some influence in Mayapore?’

  ‘She was the widow of the man who founded and endowed the Mayapore Technical College. That’s what he was knighted for. She was a friend of Miss Manners’s aunt, Lady Manners, the widow of an ex-Governor of this province. In Mayapore the British always accorded her respect.’

  ‘To have her interested in you was an asset, would you say?’

  ‘I imagine it could be.’

  ‘When you accepted her invitation was it in your mind that Lady Chatterjee might help you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It was an opportunity for you, surely, to meet influential Indians and English people socially?’

  ‘It was an opportunity I was in two minds about grasping.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’d been in Mayapore for nearly four years. It struck me as significant that it needed my arrest to open the door to that kind of opportunity.’

  ‘Significant of what?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure. Perhaps it was to find the significance that I accepted and went along.’

  ‘And did you find this significance?’

  ‘Influential people are always anxious to exercise their influence. They enjoy helping lame dogs of the right kind. But they’re also always very busy. Only lame dogs who have tripped up ever come much to their notice. By then, from the lame dog’s point of view, it’s usually too late. Lady Chatterjee was about three years too late. I’m not criticizing. It was simply so. Having me at the party wasn’t a success.’

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  ‘Influential people like to be thanked. I didn’t thank her. And it worried her when Miss Manners was so friendly to me.’

  ‘There are two points there. What did you have to thank Lady Chatterjee for?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You mean nothing in your opinion. What in hers?’

  ‘She asked Judge Menen to inquire why a fellow called Hari Kumar had been dragged into a police truck and carted off to answer stupid questions. I don’t suppose it did me any good in Merrick’s book.’

  ‘District Superintendent Merrick of the Indian Police?’

  ‘Yes. That Merrick.’

  ‘And Miss Manners’s friendliness towards you. You think it worried Lady Chatterjee. Why?’

  ‘Miss Manners was in her care. She felt responsible for her to Lady Manners.’

  ‘I quite understand that. I don’t understand why Miss Manners’s friendliness to you should worry her. Surely it was to make you feel that you had friends that she invited you to the party?’

  ‘Miss Manners was a white girl. Her friendliness towards me was of a kind that embarrassed people to watch.’

  Rowan hesitated. From her air-conditioned place of observation she thought she detected, in Rowan, a certain stiffening of the neck and shoulders. She felt it in her own.

  ‘I’m not sure I understand,’ he said. ‘What are you suggesting?’ He hesitated, then abruptly, coldly said, ‘That Miss Manners threw herself at you?’

  Kumar stared at Rowan. There was a muscular spasm low on one cheek.

  ‘I’m suggesting that even someone like Lady Chatterjee was incapable of accepting immediately that a white girl could treat an Indian like a man. I found it difficult to accept it myself. For a time I thought she was making fun of me. She talked so readily. Without any kind of artificiality – or so it seemed. Just as if we’d been back home. Lady Chatterjee very naturally treated me with caution after that.’

  ‘Why “very naturally”?’

  ‘She probably thought I might take advantage of Miss Manners. That’s the popular assumption, isn’t it? That an Indian will always take advantage of an English person who is friendly.’

  ‘It may be an assumption generally held among certain types of English who come into contact with certain types of Indian. I can’t think why Lady Chatterjee should think you’d take advantage of Miss Manners unless you gave her cause.’

  Kumar seemed lost momentarily in thought. He said, ‘I may have done for all I know. My behaviour at that time left a lot to be desired.’

  ‘In what direction?’

  ‘I’d forgotten how to act in that kind of company. Or if I’d not forgotten, trying to act as I remembered I should act seemed – artificial. I said very little. I was socially ill-at-ease. Miss Manners told me later that I stood and stared at her. I wanted to say things but the right words wouldn’t come. I was a bit suspicious. I wasn’t shy. Suspicious, and then astonished – to be treated as an equal by a white person. The comparison between this and what I’d just experienced was so extraordinary.’

  For a while none of the three men at the table spoke. Gopal suddenly opened his file again and said, ‘With regard to that recent experience I have a question—’

  ‘Is it in regard to what he calls his arrest?’ Rowan asked.

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘I should like to go back a bit further and come to that in its turn.’

  ‘By all means.’

  Gopal rested again.

  ‘You mentioned The Sanctuary,’ Rowan began. ‘You called it a place run as a private charity for the sick and the dying. I have a record here of the occasion when you were asked to go with the police to the kotwali after you’d refused to answer questions put to you by police officers who visited The Sanctuary and found you there. The record has a note to the effect that according to the person in charge of The Sanctuary – here called Mrs Ludmila Smith, not Sister Ludmila – you had been found the night before by her stretcher party, lying unconscious in some waste ground near the river. Imagining that you were ill or hurt they took you back to The Sanctuary – as was their habit whenever they found someone ill, starving or dying in the street. It turned out, however, that you were merely dead drunk. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was your habit to drink excessively?’

  ‘I had never been drunk before. I was never drunk again.’

  ‘When you were questioned by the police at the kotwali you were not at all co-operative. But you admitted you’d been drunk and that your main drinking companion of the night before had been Vidyasagar, and that the names of the others were Narayan Lal, Nirmal Bannerjee, Bapu Ram. You were uncertain about Puranmal Mehta – but said there was a fifth man there who might have been called Puranmal Mehta. Therefore three if not four of the men you got drunk with on that night in February were among the five other men who were arrested under suspicion of being implicated in the criminal assault on Mi
ss Manners. The question I must ask you is – for what purpose had you and these other men, including Vidyasagar, gathered together on the occasion you got drunk?’

  ‘There was no purpose behind the gathering together.’

  ‘‘It was simply your habit every so often to foregather with these men?’

  ‘No. It was the first time – and the last.’

  ‘But you said some while ago that you always remained friendly with Vidyasagar.’

  ‘I said he remained friendly with me.’

  ‘You met quite often.’

  ‘Our occupation brought us into frequent contact.’

  ‘You would meet – as reporters – at some function or, say, in the law courts. Then perhaps, when you’d done your jobs, you’d go off together – as acquaintances?’

  ‘No. We would meet as reporters. Once or twice he invited me to have coffee. I always refused.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I didn’t want to become involved.’

  ‘Involved how? Politically?’

  ‘Not politically. Socially.’ A pause. ‘In those days I was at pains to preserve everything about me that was English.’ A pause. ‘I lived a ridiculous life, really. But I didn’t see that. I thought of their life as ridiculous.’

  ‘Vidyasagar’s and his friends’?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You despised them? Because they hadn’t had your advantages?’

  ‘No. I didn’t despise them. But I thought them ludicrous, through no fault of their own.’

  Gopal interrupted. ‘In what way, ludicrous?’

  ‘They were always laughing at the English. They pretended to hate them. But everything about their way of life was an aping of the English manner. The way they dressed, the style of slang, the things they’d learned.’ A pause.’ “I say, Kumar old man, let’s dash in for a cup of coffee.” Perhaps it was exaggerated for my benefit. I was a bit of a joke to them. But it seemed ridiculous.’

  ‘You say “they”. You were – if only in a limited sense – acquainted with these other men as well as Vidyasagar?’

  ‘I came to Mayapore in 1938. I met Vidyasagar in 1939. Obviously I saw something of them between then and August 1942. I knew them by sight, whether they were with Vidyasagar or alone. After the night I got drunk I knew most of them by name.’

  ‘The night you got drunk was the beginning of a closer relationship?’

  ‘You don’t get drunk with men without establishing something more intimate in the way of relationship. But it was still distant. And shortly afterwards of course my life changed completely.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I became friends with Miss Manners.’

  ‘What hasn’t been dealt with yet is the reason for your sudden switch in attitude to Vidyasagar and his friends. Until a night in February 1942 you say you found them ridiculous – to the extent that you would even refuse to have a cup of coffee with them if one of them asked you when he met you in the street, or at some official function. But that night you join Vidyasagar and his friends not just for a cup of coffee but for a hard bout of drinking – which ended so far as you were concerned in waste ground near the river in a state of complete intoxication. What led to this sudden reversal of what we might call your policy in regard to men like Vidyasagar?’

  The realization that after all it was I who was ridiculous.’

  ‘Please elucidate.’

  ‘It is a private matter.’

  ‘You could say that practically everything we are discussing is a private matter. I suggest that this is no more, no less private. If you find it difficult to talk about, to know where to begin for instance, suppose we begin by discussing the events of that night. How, for example, did you find yourself in the company of Vidyasagar?’

  ‘We were both on the maidan.’

  ‘As reporters?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was taking place on the maidan?’

  ‘A cricket match.’

  ‘Between which teams?’

  ‘Teams from regiments stationed in the cantonment.’

  ‘You were watching cricket with Vidyasagar?’

  ‘No. We met as we were coming away.’

  ‘He invited you to come and have a coffee?’

  ‘He invited me to his home.’

  ‘And you accepted?’

  ‘Yes. I accepted.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There no longer seemed to be any point in refusing.’

  Rowan said nothing for a while. ‘Because your resistance was worn down at last or because something had happened to upset you?’

  ‘I suppose it was a combination of the two.’

  ‘Then what exactly was it that had happened to upset you?’

  Kumar stared at the table.

  ‘He was there.’

  ‘Who was there?’

  ‘Someone I used to know.’

  ‘Someone you had known in England?’

  Kumar nodded.

  ‘Colin?’

  Kumar nodded.

  ‘Your old school friend? The boy whose parents might have given you a home after your father died?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why was this upsetting?’

  No answer.

  ‘You met and talked, and thought that he was less friendly than you remembered? Or did you only see him from a distance?’

  ‘He was as close to me as I am to you.’

  ‘Are you saying that he was close to you but didn’t talk to you?’

  ‘We neither of us spoke.’

  ‘Are you sure it was this man, Colin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You knew he was in India?’

  ‘He wrote to me when he first came out, in 1941. He wrote several times, from different places. He talked about coming to Mayapore. Later he talked about how unlikely it would be that he could travel so far. Later he didn’t write at all.’

  Gopal said, ‘And what construction did you put on that?’

  ‘I thought that he had gone on active service. I thought he was having a bad war. First Dunkirk, now perhaps the Middle East. But he came to Mayapore. I guessed he had come to Mayapore when I saw soldiers in the cantonment wearing the regimental flash.’

  ‘The flash of the regiment you knew Colin was serving in?’

  ‘Yes. When I started seeing the soldiers with the flashes I began to expect him any day. I mean expecting him to turn up at my house. Then I realized that probably wasn’t possible, because my side of the river was out of bounds to soldiers stationed in the cantonment. So then I began expecting a letter asking where we could meet. There was never such a letter. So then I thought Colin hadn’t come to Mayapore with his regiment.’

  ‘Are you still sure that he did?’

  ‘He was there, on the maidan, watching the cricket. I went up to him, to make sure. It was Colin. You don’t forget the face of a man you grew up with.’

  ‘Why didn’t you speak to him?’

  ‘He turned and looked at me.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He didn’t seem to recognize me. In India, you see, all Indians look alike to English people. It was the kindest construction I could put on it. Either that, or that he had been in India long enough now to understand that it would be hopeless for a British officer to have an Indian friend who lived on the wrong side of the river and had no official standing. But whichever it was the effect was the same. To Colin I was invisible.’

  ‘I see. And that is why when you met Vidyasagar and he invited you home you accepted?’

  ‘Yes. For all his faults – what I thought of as his faults – I realized he had a gift.’

  ‘What sort of gift?’

  ‘A gift for forgiveness.’ Kumar looked up at Rowan. ‘They still all laughed at my ridiculous English manner – at the absurdity of it in someone born an Indian, and still an Indian, incapable of being anything in India except an Indian – but their laughing at me was meant with kindness. That’s why I got drunk. They used to get hold
of home-made hooch. One of them sometimes distilled it himself. That’s the sort of stuff we drank that night. They were used to it, but I wasn’t. I don’t remember much after they’d helped me burn my topee—’

  ‘Burn your topee?’

  ‘The topee was a joke to them too. They said only Anglo-Indians and Government toadies and old-fashioned sahibs wore topees. So we burned mine. Then I suppose I passed out. When I met Vidyasagar later he told me they’d taken me all the way home to my house in Chillianwallah Bagh, so that I wouldn’t get picked up by the police. But after they’d left me in the compound I must have wandered out again, on to that waste ground where Sister Ludmila found me.’

  Rowan nodded. He now turned to Gopal.

  ‘You have a point or two about Kumar’s questioning by the police after he was found at The Sanctuary.’

  ‘I think perhaps it has been taken care of. I had intended to question the examinee about his apparent reluctance to answer questions when he was taken to the kotwali. The reason for that reluctance now seems quite clear. Please continue the examination along whatever lines you decide.’

  ‘Well, let’s deal with that reluctance, nevertheless. When you were questioned at the kotwali you were not at all co-operative, according to the report on this file. You admitted that your main drinking companion of the night before had been Vidyasagar, though. Is that correct?’

  ‘Admit is the wrong word. It suggests I’d felt I had something to hide and then changed my mind.’

  ‘How would you describe your attitude to the police at the kotwali, then?’

  ‘As that of someone responding quite naturally to a situation that involved him in unpleasantness without any explanation.’

  ‘It was not clear to you why you were asked to accompany the police to the kotwali?’

  ‘It wasn’t clear to me why the District Superintendent had me forcibly taken from The Sanctuary, thrown into a truck, driven to the kotwali and then pushed into a room there.’

  ‘Was he aware that force was used?’

  ‘He watched it.’

  ‘Isn’t it true to say, though, that you brought it on yourself by being truculent when asked to identify yourself in The Sanctuary?’

  ‘Perhaps. It wasn’t easy that morning for me to identify myself.’

  ‘What were you doing when first approached by the police officers who visited The Sanctuary?’