But I told him I hadn’t time. I began to get out a card to give to the boy to give to Hari. But when I looked at the card it seemed like a cruel intrusion. I remembered saying to Hari: What is the difference between karma and dharma? He didn’t know. I had learned the answer long ago. So had Hari. He was living it.
I went down the stairs, passing through that crowd of inquisitive people. Some of them followed us out. The boy eventually gave up pressing his invitation to drink coffee with him and said he would take me to the place where I could find a taxi. We went back through the narrow street, still followed by several youths and men and women. But now that I was out in the open I believed they were only people who wished Hari well, people who merely hoped to keep me there until he got back, so that they could offer me to him as a gift.
But it would have been a cruel gift, wouldn’t it? Everything about my presence was cruel. My leaving without a word to him was cruel. When we got to the place where taxis were to be had the boy hailed one. I got out a card again and a pencil, but then wrote nothing on it. I gave the card to the boy. I offered him money. He took the card but refused the money. I told the taxi-driver to take me to the cantonment.
I don’t know whether I’m glad that I did what I did or whether I bitterly regret it. In the taxi back I consoled myself with the thought that if ever he needed help he had the card, a little rectangle of pasteboard. I got my wallet out and looked at another of them, imagined him receiving one like it from the boy, in an hour or two, only half-listening to the description the boy would give of the man who had come to visit, the man who had left it, the visitor from another world. I didn’t know, I don’t know, what harm or good I’d done. Have done. The other thing I had in my wallet was the little essay by Philoctetes which I’d cut out with Nigel’s scissors. I’d intended to show it to him, intended to say, You wrote this, didn’t you, Hari? I have by heart the passage that comes at the end.
‘I walk home, thinking of another place, of seemingly long endless summers and the shade of different kinds of trees, and then of winters when the branches of the trees were so bare, that recalling them now, it seems inconceivable to me that I looked at them and did not think of the summer just gone, and the spring soon to come, as illusions; as dreams, never fulfilled, never to be fulfilled.’
*
Perron replaced the unfinished letter between the pages of the book Dmitri had given him. He stared out of the port. Far below, dim isolated points of light marked the villages of India – the India his countrymen were leaving, the India that was being given up. Along with what else?
He returned his attention to the book, to the poem at the end which was said to be the last Gaffur had ever written; dictated rather. But by now he had this by heart too. So he closed the book, shut his eyes, rested his head against the back of the bucket seat.
*
Everything means something to you; dying flowers,
The different times of year.
The new clothes you wear at the end of Ramadan.
A prince’s trust. The way that water flows,
Too impetuous to pause, breaking over
Stones, rushing towards distant objects,
Places you can’t see but which you also flow
Outward to.
Today you slept long. When you woke your old blood stirred.
This too meant something. The girl who woke you
Touched your brow.
She called you Lord. You smiled,
Put up a trembling hand. But she had gone,
As seasons go, as a night-flower closes in the day,
As a hawk flies into the sun or as the cheetah runs; as
The deer pauses, sun-dappled in long grass,
But does not stay.
Fleeting moments: these are held a long time in the eye,
The blind eye of the ageing poet,
So that even you, Gaffur, can imagine
In this darkening landscape
The bowman lovingly choosing his arrow,
The hawk outpacing the cheetah,
(The fountain splashing lazily in the courtyard),
The girl running with the deer.
* * *
fn1 Royal Yacht Club – traditionally the most exclusive in India – was actually closed down after independence.
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
A Division of the Spoils is the last in a sequence of four novels about the closing years of British rule in India. The characters were imaginary. So were the events. The framework was as historically accurate as I could make it. Three return visits to India during the time the sequence has taken to write have left me indebted to many people there for information, for help, for hospitality; and I gratefully acknowledge that debt. I am indebted, too, to the Arts Council for an award in 1969.
Above all, I am indebted to seven people who must be named because without their combined encouragement and practical help I doubt that the enterprise could have been brought to a conclusion. Each novel in the sequence has already been dedicated, for reasons that they know, to someone who seemed to be particularly connected with it. I dedicate the sequence as a whole, if I may, to (in New York) Dorothy Olding, John Willey, Larry Hughes and Ivan von Auw, and (in London) David Higham, Roland Gant and Charles Pick.
Facta non verba.
P.S.
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Epub ISBN: 9781409037705
Version 1.0
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Published by Arrow Books in 2005
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Copyright © Paul Scott 1975
The right of Paul Scott to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
First published in the United Kingdom in 1975 by William Heinemann
Reprinted by Mandarin
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780749322366
Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils
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