*
Perron’s trousers and shirt were spattered with blood. He had lost sight of Sarah. He made his way from the goods-yard back to the platform and the compartment.
Mrs Peabody was still stretched out on the bench. Peabody was bending over the tiffin-box, pouring a drink from a thermos. The carriage was otherwise empty. The garlands which had been presented to the Peabodys in Mirat lay on the floor.
‘Have you seen Miss Layton?’
Peabody nodded at the lavatory cubicle. ‘She’s in there, changing. The others are still in the women’s room I suppose. You’d better change too. Will you have some malted milk? It’s very fortifying.’
‘No thank you.’
‘There’s a spare sandwich or two here. Or have you got your own tuck?’
‘I don’t want anything to eat, thank you.’
‘You ought to eat. Especially if you’re going back. I’ve just been having a word with Bob Blake. He’ll take you if you still want to.’
‘Who’s Bob Blake?’
‘He’s OC the refugee protection force in the cantonment. They got here a little while ago. I told him what happened to Kasim. He’s ringing the station commander in Mirat. There can’t be anything you can do but you seemed keen, so I told Bob. He knew Kasim slightly. He’ll be here to have a word presently, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Sarah came out of the cubicle. She carried a hold-all. The dress she had on was creased but unstained. And dry. She glanced at his shirt and trousers. She said:
‘Have you had a drink yet?’
Peabody said, ‘I offered him one but he didn’t want it.’
‘I meant a real drink.’
Perron shook his head. ‘I don’t want a real drink, either.’ He felt now as if he was going to be sick. He went down on to the platform. Sarah came down too. She said, ‘Sorry to scrounge. Have you a cigarette?’
He got out his case. He found it difficult to open. She tried to steady his hand while he helped her light up, but they were both trembling.
She said, ‘Are you really going back?’
‘Are you asking me not to? Do you want help in Ranpur?’
‘No. No, thank you. I want to go back too. But I can’t. I can’t let Aunt Fenny cope alone. But they’ll soon know at the palace what happened to Ahmed. Someone ought to go back and try to say how it did.’
‘Mr Perron?’
Perron turned. A stout, rather red-faced middle-aged English officer had come up. Sarah said, ‘Guy, this is Major Blake.’ They shook hands. Blake said, ‘I’m going back in about fifteen minutes. If you want to come with me can you be ready by then?’
‘Yes, I’ve only got to change.’
‘I’m leaving my subaltern in charge of the train, Miss Layton,’ Blake explained. ‘You’ll be quite safe for the rest of the journey. I’m putting on a whole platoon.’
He took Perron’s arm, guided him a few steps away and said, ‘I’ve been on to the station commander in Mirat. He told me Count Bronowsky’s already phoned him. The news got round fairly fast. I’m afraid the station commander told him that only Muslims in third-class compartments were killed, but that’s what he assumed. He’s going now to the place where the bodies are being brought in. Is there any possibility that Kasim wasn’t killed?’
‘I don’t think so. He just opened the door and went, Peabody saw the rest.’
‘The station commander said that if young Kasim is dead he’d be very grateful if you do come back. Where were you going, Mr Perron, Pankot?’
‘Just to Ranpur, then on to Delhi.’
‘Any urgency?’
‘None.’
‘All the same, I’ll help you in any way I can to get you away again. Did you see the chalk-mark on the door?’
‘Chalk-mark?’
‘Miss Layton noticed it a little while ago. Someone had chalked a moon low on the door of your compartment. It must have been done in Mirat by whoever was watching which part of the train Kasim got into. Yours was the only first-class compartment attacked. All they had to do was look for the chalk-mark. Well. I’ll send a chap to help you sort out your bags and bring them over.’
Blake went back to Sarah. They spoke for a few moments. Then he touched his cap and went. From the bar there came a sudden roar of laughter. Perron went back into the carriage to get his bags down and change. As he did so he noticed a fresh smear low down on the door, where the chalk-mark had been wiped off.
*
Mrs Grace and Susan, Edward and ayah, were still in the rest room. He didn’t want to intrude on them. He said goodbye to Peabody. Mrs Peabody was still prostrate. There was only Sarah to see him off. One coolie had his suitcase, another his hold-all. A lance-naik sent by Blake was in charge of them, waiting to take Perron to the truck, whatever kind of vehicle it was he and Blake would travel in.
‘Are these yours, old man?’ Peabody called, offering something from the open carriage door: a little package and a canvas bag.
The package was certainly his. Dmitri’s gift. Unopened. A book, presumably. Perhaps a translation of the poetry of Pushkin. The canvas bag, for a moment, was unrecognizable. Then was. He came away from the door holding both. Sarah looked away from the bag.
‘Shall I see you again?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know.’ She was still shivering. ‘What is there to see?’
He touched her shoulder. ‘A great deal,’ he said. Then leant down and kissed her. He let her go. She turned and climbed back into the carriage. He smiled at her, then followed the naik. At the exit he looked back; she was at the carriage door, holding her elbows in that way; watching him. Briefly she released one hand and raised it. And then went in.
*
I’m sure (Sarah has written) that he did say, ‘It seems to be me they want.’ It’s what Guy heard, what I heard, what we heard at the time, and it made sense. And the fact that he smiled encouraged me to think that if he went out to the people who called out to him everything would be all right. This is what it was like at the time. I can’t justify it now except by saying that there were so many conflicting claims; how to stop Edward crying, how to stop Susan shrieking, how to explain even to myself just why ayah was hiding under the bench. When he first looked out of the window when the train stopped he must have seen them dragging Muslims out. If we’d been travelling only a week or two later we’d have been prepared for it, because by then the business of stopping trains and slaughtering people had become part of life. No English were ever harmed. And it became quite the ordinary thing to hide Indians, friends and servants, under the seats – Hindus if it was the Muslims who were attacking, Muslims if it was Hindus. And if people hammered on the doors you just told them to go away. But we didn’t know that. We weren’t prepared for it. I suppose Ahmed was, or saw at once how things were. And whoever wanted to kill him knew he was travelling that day. The massacre itself must have been a retaliation for the killings and burnings the night before in Mirat when Muslims attacked Hindus because Mirat was going under Congress rule. I suppose Ahmed was marked out as a victim not just because he was a Muslim but because the people who killed him didn’t want Muslims in the Congress, or didn’t trust Muslims in Congress and his father was still in Congress. And perhaps because they knew his brother was a rabid Pakistani and perhaps because on top of that they hadn’t forgotten that Ahmed’s father hadn’t stood by the INA, which made it senseless anyway because Sayed had been INA. But it was all so senseless. Such a damned bloody senseless mess. The kind which Ahmed tried to shut himself off from, the mess the raj had never been able to sort out. The only difference between Ahmed and me was that he didn’t take the mess seriously and I did. I felt it was our responsibility, our fault that after a hundred years or more it still existed.
Ahmed and I weren’t in love. But we loved one another. We recognized in each other the compulsion to break away from what I can only call a received life. When I knelt at the tap, filling up those somehow meaningless little brass jugs and lotas and pots, wha
tever there was, it was driven home to me that what I was doing was just as useless as what he’d just done. I’ve never hated myself so much as I did then. I felt like throwing the jugs down and saying, Well, get on with it. And I hated Ahmed for not keeping the door locked and telling us he damned well wasn’t going to die unless they smashed right through the windows and climbed in with their swords and slaughtered the lot of us, or started a fire under the compartment to smoke us out, so that they could cut us down one by one. All those possibilities must have been in his mind. But when it came to it he didn’t let any of it even begin to happen to us. And I couldn’t stop filling the bloody jars, going through my brave little memsahib act.
I’m sure he smiled just before he went, and I’m sure he said, ‘It seems to be me they want.’ Major Peabody said he thought he said, ‘Make sure you lock it after me.’ But I think that’s what Major Peabody wanted to hear. Perhaps we all heard only what we wanted to hear. Perhaps there was nothing to hear because he said nothing, but just smiled and went, in which case I suppose that meant he knew there was nothing to say because there wasn’t any alternative, because everyone else in the carriage automatically knew what he had to do. It was part of the bloody code. The moment he got into the carriage he sub-consciously knew that sub-consciously we had cast lots even before there was any question of lots having to be cast to see who would survive and who wouldn’t.
No. I don’t know what was in the canvas bag. And Guy never looked. A bottle of whisky, perhaps, and a clove or two of garlic.
Coda
Ranagunj airfield (Ranpur). Saturday August 9, 1947.
The tannoy system crackled. An Indian voice speaking in English told the few people sitting on the hard benches of the little airfield lounge that the plane from Mayapore was now landing and that departure for Delhi would be in twenty minutes.
The English officer sitting next to Perron closed The Reader’s Digest and said, ‘How civilized we make it sound. Do you know an extraordinary thing? As far back as December in nineteen forty-five when I flew from Singapore to Rangoon and on to Calcutta on an RAF plane and we landed for fuel in the middle of Burma, the door opened and an erk in white dungarees looked in and said, “You’ve now landed in Meiktila.” ’
‘Meiktila?’
‘Yes. I’d lost quite a lot of good men there scarcely more than six months before in the battle for the airstrip. But here we were, practising for the courteous world of civil aviation. I thought, How quickly the grass grows.’
*
The plane was delayed, delayed by storms. It was nearly midnight. It had rained throughout most of the day. The old Dakota was parked about a hundred yards from the airfield buildings. An immense puddle had to be negotiated by the six or seven people who having taken leave of friends walked ahead of or behind Perron towards the steps leading to the open port. Inside, bucket seats, thinly cushioned, had replaced the old port and starboard benches. About ten passengers were already seated. Passengers from Mayapore. Officers. Officers’ wives. A blue-rinsed grey-haired woman who was probably Red Cross. Two beefy-looking fellows in shorts and shirts who might have been Australians but turned out to be English: technicians, perhaps, from the British-Indian Electric Company. Their shirts were black with sweat. They were drinking beer from the bottle.
Perron found a single seat on the port side. He stowed his hand luggage. Sat. Closed his eyes.
Mayapore, Ranpur, Delhi. He wondered how many of the passengers from Mayapore had been in the town in nineteen forty-two; at the time of the Bibighar. Perhaps none. The raj had always led a nomadic existence. And these little airfields, relics of the war, now merely hastened their movements from place to place. Some of them were moving out for the last time.
He opened his eyes and stared out of the window at what remained for him of Ranpur: an illuminated puddle. The airfield building. A petrol tanker, now hauling away. Beyond this darkness and this light – after these absurd little marks and portents of human occupation – the adventure. The port engine fired, exploding the silence. The port airscrew began to spin. Little ripples showed on the surface of the puddle, as though the fishermen on the Izzat Bagh lake had cast a net. Another small explosion, on the starboard side. He shut his eyes again. Whenever he travelled by air he prayed just before take-off and just before landing. These were nowadays his only offerings to God. It was inconceivable to him that the prayers could be heard because he felt that if there were a God, God would be praying too, watching these extraordinary machines shudder and flutter their frail way along the tarmac towards the lit runway.
And there was always that moment as the aeroplane squared up and seemed to pause; the moment of dying intention, and then the moment when defiance set in again and the paper-tiger roared and vibrated. It was like being drawn back and then shot in slow motion from a bow, so slowly that sometimes you felt that the pilot’s inspiration had run out and left him with nothing but a grinding determination to prove against all evidence that the thing could be done.
The sensation of being no longer ground-borne always came as a shock. The extraordinary thing had again been achieved. Following which, even at night, when there was no visible horizon, there was this sense of exultation.
*
He opened Bronowsky’s gift, the book, not of Pushkin poems but Bronowsky’s own translations of Gaffur (privately printed, in Bombay, dedicated to the Nawab). From its leaves he took out and read what he had begun writing to Sarah in the airport lounge.
‘I’m waiting for a plane that should have come in an hour ago but is delayed by storms. My watch says 1045 so by now you’ll be back and have had the message from your father that I rang. I hope Susan will be better soon. Please give her my best wishes. Your father said you’d all be staying at Commandant House for a few weeks because the new Indian commandant’s wife isn’t joining him yet and he’s making other temporary arrangements. But after that? I didn’t ask all the questions I wanted to, questions like where are you going when the few weeks are up? Back home? How absurd it is that suddenly there is this question of a roof over one’s head. I gathered Susan was only suffering reaction and shock and should be out of hospital in a day or two.
‘A false alarm. Someone said the plane had landed. It hadn’t. But I shall have to finish this letter in Delhi. I gave your father my address there. I don’t know whether I shall go down to Gopalakand as Nigel suggested. Wire me if you want me to come back to Ranpur, or up to Pankot. Your father said you’d had Nigel’s telegram, the one he sent from Mirat on Thursday night, finally confirming what was never really in doubt. I tried to ring you that night, and yesterday, but the lines were hopeless. I came up to Ranpur on the night train and got in about 8 a.m. this morning and tried to ring you again from the air force mess where Major Blake arranged for me to put up during the day. He’s arranged this flight for me, too. I left Mirat because there was nothing more for me to do there. Ahmed’s father arrived there yesterday morning. I met him for a few moments. An impressive man. Hiding his grief.
‘When I got back to Mirat from Premanagar last Thursday, and to the place where all the bodies had been taken, Dmitri and Nigel were already there, and had identified and made some of the necessary arrangements. Nigel told me – and perhaps I should tell you – that the only person Dmitri blames is himself for letting Ahmed go on that particular day and for not anticipating that something like that might happen. Before I left last night Dmitri asked me to give you his love, then made us sit down for a moment on a couch and say nothing. It was like a Tchekov play. But shall I ever return to Mirat?’
The letter ended there.
But I thought (he said silently to Sarah, putting the letter away as the lights of Ranpur performed geometrical movements as if they were man-made constellations) I thought – today in Ranpur – of solving once and for all the mystery of Hari, if he is a mystery. Before I came to the airport I went with that little piece of paper on which Nigel had written words and numbers which established an idea of an
address, a place where Hari might be found, where he might actually live, exist, eat, perform duties, make love perhaps, follow a life through, be content, be happy, or at least survive and be contacted by strangers, visitors, people carrying messages, and words from Rome. I found the place but it wasn’t easy. The taxidriver demanded more money when he reached the street he said led to Hari’s. He wanted to go no further. Taxis, he said, did not go into such places. So I paid him off and went on foot. Immediately, I was appalled, and then frightened. I had to remind myself that this was where Hari lived, where he had survived. Three or four small beggar boys accompanied me, demanding money. The street was very narrow. Perhaps no Englishman had ever walked down it. To the beggar boys were added a beggar-man and three beggar-women. Other people called out to me from dirty-looking open shops. The smell of animal and human ordure and human sweat was overpowering. I almost turned back. But in the midst of all this squalor a boy of twelve or fourteen confronted me. He was so clean, neat shorts and neat white shirt, anxious to be of service, anxious to speak English to the Englishman. I trusted him. I stopped being frightened. I showed him the piece of paper. He walked ahead, saying: Come, sir, this way, sir. Within a hundred yards or so he turned into a narrow stairway. It led up between two shop fronts to a kind of tenement. The walls of the stairway were stained and greasy. The boy stopped at the second landing. But by now other people were crowding the stairs.
The door the boy and I stood at was bolted outside and padlocked. But there was a card pinned to the jamb on which was typed the name. H. Kumar. The people on the stairs were shouting to the boy. I thought perhaps they were warning him not to disclose anything. I couldn’t translate the bazaar dialect. But then the boy said the people were saying that Kumar Sahib was out, visiting a pupil. His aunt was out at the market in the Koti bazaar. She would be back soon. Kumar Sahib would be back later. The boy added: ‘Please sir, meanwhile come and have coffee, clean shop. Brahmin shop.’