Barbara Batchelor was an old missionary who’d once lived at Rose Cottage as companion to Mabel Layton, Layton’s stepmother, now dead. Miss Batchelor was dead too. The book was among some things she’d left for Sarah.
When I was settled Rowan said, ‘Incidentally, it needn’t make any difference to you, but I’ve decided to go back to Ranpur tomorrow.’
I felt bewildered. ‘Whenever did you decide that?’
‘I suppose in the last half-hour or so.’
Recalling the tentative arrangement I’d overheard him making with Mrs Layton to play some tennis over the weekend I realized he was telling the truth. I didn’t press for an explanation.
‘I can’t very well stay here once you’ve gone,’ I said. ‘I’d better see the accommodation people tomorrow.’
‘That’ll only confuse them. They know you’re here. If I were you I’d hang on at least until an officer comes up to take Merrick’s place, or you get ordered back to Delhi. I’ve signed you in as my guest. I’ll mark it sine die, so all you’ll have to do is sign any chit the servant asks for and sign the steward’s register before you leave.’
‘Who pays? Government or you?’
‘Government. So long as you don’t dine the station or do anything the auditors might think odd, like drinking three bottles of whisky before breakfast. They’d apply to me in that case.’
‘You pay for the drinks anyway, don’t you?’
‘Don’t let it inhibit you. You can drink to my future if you like. I’m going back into the Political, HE warned me about it before I came up. That’s why I’ve been having these few days off. I rang him tonight before we left though and he told me the signal had come in. I fly to Delhi on Tuesday and then get told where I’m going.’
‘It’s only Thursday.’
‘Oh, well. Clearing things up, packing. Better to get on with it.’
‘Does Miss Layton know you’re going?’
‘She knows I’m expecting the posting.’
‘Didn’t you tell her it had come?’
‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘Somehow the atmosphere tonight didn’t seem right. I’m sorry it wasn’t all that successful an evening.’
I asked him what time he intended leaving. He said the private coach was still in Pankot. It was just a question of getting it coupled on to the mid-day train. Gopal had gone back by car, with Mohammed Ali Kasim. He said, ‘Perhaps there’ll be a signal for you tomorrow too, from your Aunt Charlotte. Then we could go back together.’
‘It’s a shade early for my signal.’
‘You were serious, though, about Bunbury?’
‘Deadly serious.’
‘What happens if it doesn’t work?’
‘A court-martial, I should think. Are you positive it’s hanging and not shooting?’
But this irritated him. He stopped looking at me. He seemed to find the dark beyond the verandah the most rewarding of anything within his range of vision. I waited. Presently he glanced back at me. He said, ‘Was it a surprise to see me the other night at Ranpur station?’
‘Totally unexpected.’
‘But you recognized me.’
‘Easily.’
‘Would you, if you hadn’t met Sarah in Bombay and she hadn’t mentioned I was in Ranpur, working as an aide to HE?’
‘Perhaps not so instantaneously.’
‘Even if we’d been contemporaries at school, same house, same year, and close friends. It wouldn’t necessarily follow would it that we’d recognize each other if we met years later in a public place?’
‘It could follow. Why do you ask?’
‘Do you remember a boy called Colin Lindsey?’
‘It rings a vague bell. Who was Colin Lindsey?’
‘Harry Coomer’s closest friend.’
‘Then I may. I once asked Coomer to tell me the difference between karma and dharma but he said he didn’t know. I suggested he might ask his father during the summer holiday but he said he probably wouldn’t see him because he was spending the holiday with – well – “Lindsay, here”?’
That was the picture: Coomer and ‘Lindsey, here’, standing together, the brown boy and the white boy, resisting an inquisitive prefect’s invasion of their solidarity and privacy.
Rowan said, ‘He saw more of the Lindseys than of anyone. His father encouraged it and kept himself in the background. He wanted Harry to grow up as much like an English boy as he could.’
I was about to say: How much like was that? But checked myself. Rowan was too delicately poised between confession and characteristic silence for me to take the risk of upsetting him with that kind of facile question. For a while neither of us said anything but he began to lose interest in the dark beyond the verandah, as if Kumar were no longer out there but had come in to shelter in our recollections of him. A third, empty, white cane chair might have been his. Well, not his, not Coomer’s; but Kumar’s, whatever Kumar was or had become; whatever he would look like now, sitting there, no longer interested in cricket, but rape. White women. It meant nothing to me. But I wondered how deep Rowan’s prejudice lay. Of the depth of Merrick’s I had no doubt.
He said, ‘I suppose we ought to take into consideration the distinct possibility of our not meeting again for at least as long as it’s been since we last did. What, ten years ago?’
‘Next time it won’t seem so long. I’m told the older you get the quicker time goes.’
Such cliché simplicity also seemed to irritate him. He asked me what it was that amused me. I told him that what amused me was the awful seriousness that seemed to overcome people who worked in India. He said he thought I’d only just stopped accusing him of not being serious enough. I said that wasn’t quite what I meant. There was a difference between taking a situation seriously and taking oneself seriously.
He became interested again in the dark beyond the verandah. I thought I had done it this time and that soon he would drink up and say goodnight. Instead he said, ‘Yes, but out here there are penalties for appearing not to. At least, that’s one’s earliest understanding. One is wrapped up in the cocoon of a corporate integrity. It’s a bit like being issued with a strait-jacket as well as a topee. It makes it difficult to act spontaneously and you become so used to wearing it that you find it difficult to do without it.’
‘They used to issue spinepads too.’
‘I know.’
‘But they went out. Like topees are doing.’
‘I don’t think the strait-jacket ever will.’ But he was smiling again. He said, ‘Sarah puts it well. She says that in India English people feel they are always on show. I think that’s true and on the whole that nothing worries us more.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Perhaps because we feel that fundamentally there’s so little to see?’
‘The raj with a superior manner hiding an inferiority complex? I can’t say I’ve come across much evidence of that.’
‘You could begin with me. I’ve very little real confidence. But it would be dangerous to give that impression. I expect I overcompensate. Most of us do. It’s probably what happened to Colin Lindsey.’
It was my cue but I didn’t take it up. I wanted him to tell me about Kumar and Merrick but I suspected that any further prompting would result in my getting a watered-down account and that I would only get a reasonably full one if I left the initiative to him. He hesitated again. But whatever it was that made him want to tell me finally won the struggle with whatever it was that made him reluctant to do so.
*
In May of the previous year (1944) on the day Rowan resumed his duties as ADC after one of several spells in hospital, the Governor called him into his study, said, ‘You’re an old Chillingburian, aren’t you?’ and asked him if he remembered a boy called Hari Kumar or Harry Coomer. Rowan said he did. The Governor handed him the confidential file on a man currently detained under the Defence of India Rules. This was Kumar. Rowan found it surprising that the boy he had known should have developed int
o a political activist. The real shock came when he read further and realized that Kumar had not been arrested on political grounds but on suspicion of leading a criminal assault by several Indians on an English girl called Daphne Manners in Mayapore in August 1942.
Rowan remembered the Bibighar Gardens case quite well. He had been in hospital in Shillong still recovering from illness contracted during the long march out of Burma with what remained of his regiment. The Bibighar Gardens affair was something out of the common rut among the reported incidents of rioting, arson and sabotage that followed the arrest of political leaders, because it involved what in spite of that cautious phrase ‘criminal assault’ had clearly been the rape of a white woman. Rowan also recollected the sense of anti-climax when nothing further happened. A report that the men arrested had not after all been charged but sent to prison as political detenus was taken up by the Calcutta Statesman. It seemed odd, the Statesman suggested, that all six men originally reported arrested with such promptness, while presumably turning out to be the wrong men (since no charges had been made) should also all turn out to be politically active in a way that caused the authorities such concern that detention orders had had to be issued.
The Statesman’s interest in the case provoked no official comment; and when the riots were over, the Bibighar Gardens affair like so many others that had marked that period of violent confrontation between the raj and the population, simply passed into history together with the rumours that had added colour to it, the chief of which was that the girl herself had scotched the charges by denying that the arrested men were those who had attacked her and threatening to say such extraordinary things about colonial justice and colonial prejudices, if a trial were held, that it was decided there would be no point in attempting to hold one.
Rowan had heard these rumours, the accompanying explanation that one of the men arrested had been her lover and that she was so besotted or terrified that she had willingly perjured herself to save him, in fact had only admitted to being attacked because she couldn’t disguise the awful state she came home in. She’d cooked up a story about the men being of the badmash or criminal type, not young educated boys like the ones in custody. He also heard the story that later she returned pregnant to her aunt in Rawalpindi and in the March of 1943 he had seen the notice in the Times of India of her death in Kashmir and of the birth of a child on the same day. The child, a girl, had been given an Indian name, and the notice had been inserted by her aunt, Lady Manners, the widow of Sir Henry Manners, one-time Governor of the province of Ranpur. At this time Rowan was again in hospital, in Calcutta. From there he went back to his regimental depot. Later he was in Delhi for a while. Early in 1944 he was appointed to Malcolm’s staff at Government House, where Sir Henry and Lady Manners had lived during the late ’twenties and early ’thirties. But when Malcolm gave him the file on Hari Kumar he had not thought of the Manners case for months.
The next point of interest to emerge from the file was that Kumar was the man Daphne Manners was supposed to have been infatuated with. The longer Rowan studied the file the stronger the evidence seemed to him to be that Kumar, having formed an association with Miss Manners, had then plotted with several Indian friends of his to attack and rape her. In custody after the rape he had virtually given the game away according to the police report by mentioning Miss Manners’s name before her name had been mentioned by the police. Moreover when arrested at the house where he lived with his aunt he had been bathing scratches and bruises on his face such as might have been given by a girl fighting her attackers in the dark; and the clothes out of which he had just changed were mud-stained. Throughout his interrogation he stated repeatedly, mechanically, that he had not seen Miss Manners since a night some weeks before when they visited a temple. (Miss Manners had used virtually the same words.) But he refused to account for his movements on the night of the rape or for the state of his clothes and the marks on his face. His almost invariable answer to questions was: I have nothing to say.
The one document in the file that caused Rowan uneasiness was one relating to the alleged discovery by a junior police officer of Miss Manners’s bicycle in a ditch outside Kumar’s house, and an accompanying document, attested by the District Superintendent of Police, stating that this curious piece of evidence (with its ridiculous implication that Kumar had cockily ridden Miss Manners’s bicycle home from the Bibighar and then left it outside his own home) had been the result of a misunderstanding. The bicycle had actually been found by the superintendent in the Bibighar Gardens when the site was searched after the assault had been reported. It had been put into a police truck. The truck had then been driven to Kumar’s house – to Kumar’s house because of the known association between Kumar and Miss Manners and because the District Superintendent had called there earlier in the evening after Miss Manners had been reported missing by a Lady Chatterjee, at whose house Miss Manners was staying, and found Kumar not at home, and his aunt unable to say where he was. On the way to Kumar’s house this second time (with the cycle in the back of the truck) the police’s attention had been attracted by a lighted hut in some waste ground not far from the Bibighar. Inside the hut they had found five young men, all of them ‘known to the police’ for ‘political affiliations’ and several of them ‘known to the police as friends of Kumar’. These men were ‘fairly intoxicated’ and were drinking home-made liquor, itself an offence that warranted arrest, but also in the District Superintendent’s opinion certainly deserving investigation on a night when the authorities were on the alert for demonstrations against the government for its imprisonment of Congress leaders and when a European woman had been assaulted by five or six Indians. In arresting these young men, in putting them into one truck, in the continuation of the journey to Kumar’s house, in the ‘change of police personnel’ from one truck to the other and the despatch of the five arrested men back to the police headquarters, ‘a misunderstanding’ had ‘assumed that this was where the bicycle inspector finding the bicycle on the road outside Kumar’s house’ where ‘it must have been temporarily placed, again as a result of a misunderstanding’ had ‘assumed that this was where the bicycle was found’ and had accordingly put in a report which, even if that was not his intention, might certainly have led to ‘this erroneous conclusion’.
The District Superintendent was Merrick. This was the first time Rowan came across his name. Someone, either in the Inspector-General’s department or the Secretariat had minuted in the margin of this disclaimer about the bicycle, ‘Pity about this’; an ambiguous phrase which did little to subdue Rowan’s uneasiness; but initially the disclaimer gave him a favourable impression, not of the Mayapore police, but of the superintendent as a man who had not hesitated to sort out a muddle which would have been helpful in bringing Kumar to trial if left as it was. Subsequently, he was uneasy for a different reason. He could not help wondering whether the evidence of the bicycle had been planted by Merrick or with Merrick’s blind-eye approval and then refuted by Merrick when he saw that it was too dangerous a piece of falsification.
Two other points of interest arose in the account of the actual arrest. In Kumar’s room there were found (a) a photograph of Miss Manners and (b) a letter from England signed ‘Colin’ which referred to a letter Kumar had written to him but which he’d been unable to read because his father had opened and then destroyed it as one unsuitable for his officer son to receive – a letter, so it seemed, of a political and anti-British nature. The letter from Colin dated back to the post-Dunkirk era.
*
But, Rowan said, apart from this hearsay evidence of anti-Britishness, and unless the assault on Miss Manners could be interpreted as political, the evidence on the file of Kumar’s political commitment was thin to the point of non-existence. He had – just once – been taken in for questioning because his attitude to a police officer had been unsatisfactory and arrogant.
The officer was Merrick. This incident occurred some six months prior to the rape. Searching a
n area of the native town for an escaped political prisoner called Moti Lal, Merrick had visited a place known as The Sanctuary, a clinic and feeding centre for the homeless and destitute run by a Mrs Ludmila Smith. Mrs Smith (also known as Sister Ludmila) went out every night with stretcher-bearers, searching for men and women who had come into Mayapore to beg, or to die. On the night before Merrick arrived looking for the escaped Moti Lal, she had picked up a young man found lying unconscious near the banks of the river.
This was Kumar, and all that was wrong with him was that he was dead drunk. When Merrick arrived in the morning he asked Kumar who he was, where he lived, what he had been doing. Kumar had a hangover. The interview went badly. Merrick decided to continue it at the nearest police station.
At this point in the file, Rowan said, there was a brief summary of Kumar’s background. Kumar (according to Merrick) had not been frank about his identity but had ‘finally admitted’ that his name was Kumar, that he knew Moti Lal because Moti Lal had once been employed by Romesh Chand Gupta Sen, a contractor. Kumar had himself been employed by Romesh Chand who was in fact Kumar’s aunt’s brother-in-law. Romesh Chand had sacked Moti Lal because he didn’t like his clerks to concern themselves with anything except the business, and that included not concerning themselves with politics. Kumar had left Romesh Chand later, when offered a job as a sub-editor and occasional reporter on the Indian-owned English language newspaper, The Mayapore Gazette.
There was then a statement that ‘the man Kumar claimed to have been brought up in England by his father, Duleep Kumar, since deceased, and to have been educated at a public school which he named as Chillingborough College’.
Subsequent notes suggested that Merrick had investigated Kumar’s claim and had got further information; that Kumar was born in the UP, that his mother died while he was still an infant and that aged two he had been taken to England by his father, who had sold his land to his brothers and now set up in business, anglicizing the name to Coomer. But in 1938 Duleep Kumar’s businesses failed. He committed suicide. Hari was penniless. At the age of eighteen, through arrangements made between lawyers in London and his Aunt Shalini, widowed sister-in-law of Romesh Chand, and his own father’s sister, Hari came out to India.