The Towers of Silence

  If they covered her head how could she see who they were? When did they cover her head? Only after she had a glimpse (as apparently she began to say), a good enough glimpse of them to be able to insist that they were dirty peasant-types not well-groomed European-style dressed boys of the kind arrested? And there had been some confusion about her bicycle. Had it been found by the police in the ditch outside the Indian boy’s house? At first this was what had been said but it had been denied later by the police officer himself. The most damning thing of all had not been denied though. When arrested the Indian boy had been bathing his face which was scratched and bruised. He would not say how; had never said, had refused utterly to talk. The others denied any complicity, any connection with his English girl friend, pretended they had spent the whole evening drinking hooch in a hut near the Bibighar Gardens where the attack had taken place. They had been arrested in the hut.

  Now they were disposed of, all of them, to gaol, without trial, as political detenus. And Miss Manners seemed to have won. But what had she won except disgrace among her own people? And her Indian boy-friend; what had he got away with?

  Barbie did not even know his name. She began to have dreams about him, but in these dreams he was the Indian Edwina had tried to save. In this dream his eyes were blinded by cataracts. He had a powerful muscular throat which was exposed because his head was lifted and his mouth wide open in a continuous soundless scream.

  VI

  It was the element of scornful rejection implicit in every violent challenge to authority which hurt most deeply and blighted the tendrils of affection which entwined and supported the crumbling pillars of the edifice. Upon faces already drawn from the strain of conveying self-confidence and from the slight but persistent malaise suffered by constitutions imperfectly designed to withstand the climate, there would fall – during these periods of pressure – shadows of brooding melancholy, even when the face was expressing scorn or indifference, amusement, wrath; whatever it was that was being felt or assumed. In the cries of shock and outrage with which news of victims was heard and passed on, in the calls for condign punishment of culprits, a plaintive note managed to be struck which corresponded to the melancholy shadow; a note of awareness that the victims must have been people in whom the impulse to show as well as feel affection in the performance of their duty had been stronger than was usual, even than was wise, so that the fates of these people were seen through all the tangle of misfortune and circumstance as sacrificial.

  But in the aftermath, as the status quo was re-established, these original victims were replaced by the figures of those who had tried to avenge them and become victims themselves; and then that melancholy shadow was burnt away by fires of irony which, lighting faces, gave them the glowing look of belonging to people who found themselves existing on a plane somewhere between that of the martyr and the bully.

  The irony lay in the fact that the new victims were sacrifices offered by one’s own side as a placatory measure in restoring order and regaining Indian confidence. It had happened before, it would happen again, but that did not make it any more palatable when it was happening now. As early as the beginning of September when the jails were crammed and the country and administration nearly back to normal it was said that Brigadier Reid, openly accused by the Indians of having used excessive force in putting down the riots, was not receiving the kind of support from above which he had the right to expect. At the end of the month he was reported posted to another command.

  Nicky Paynton said, ‘It seems to me Alec Reid did damned well. The civil always expect us to be on tap to pull their chestnuts out of the fire but when we do they start complaining that we’ve burnt their fingers.’ She was stating what was generally felt to be true. In Reid’s case community sympathy for him was strong because although he had used his British battalion in Mayapore he commanded as well a battalion of the Pankots (the 4/5th) and one of the Ranpurs. But this sympathy had been deepened by the news that at the height of the riots in Mayapore his wife died of cancer in Rawalpindi. It was also known that his only son had been captured by the Japanese in Burma earlier in the year, news which could hardly have made Meg Reid’s last months any easier for her or Alec Reid to bear. But, called by the civil power to give military aid, he had done so, so far as one could tell, resolutely and effectively. If a larger than average number of Indians was killed or wounded in Mayapore and Dibrapur that was because the riots in those two towns were worse than in any other town in the country and because the civil power had dithered, had been unwilling to call the army in until the situation had got completely out of hand.

  It was quite obvious to Army people that the civil authority in Mayapore lacked nous. Apart from the almost criminal negligence shown by the long postponement of a request for troops, the revolting affair of the rape of Miss Manners had been allowed to disintegrate in the most scandalous way. The only people who had come out well of the troubles in Mayapore, in Pankot opinion, were the brigade commander and the District Superintendent of Police who had arrested the suspects in the rape case within an hour or so of the assault. And now, like Brigadier Reid, this officer was said to be in bad official odour.

  What was needed of course was some first-hand information and for that one had to wait for people like the Pattersons to arrive from Mayapore. They had been interesting on the subject of Miss Manners but, being civilians, a poor source of intelligence in the matter of the alleged excessive use of force. The first man to arrive in Pankot from Mayapore, a junior officer of a British regiment fairly recently out from home, found himself much in demand. But his mind seemed to be on other things. In regard to the rape, for instance, he said, ‘Really, one began to suspect there hadn’t been one.’ He described the military action taken in aid of the civil power ‘like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan mixed up with the last act of Hamlet.’ The discovery that this young man had been an actor in civilian life and was in Pankot en route for a sinecure in welfare and entertainment in Delhi was made early enough to put his views into proper perspective. He was vulgarly handsome. Probably a chorus boy, Mrs Fosdick suggested.

  After the theatrical lieutenant had gone there arrived as many as a dozen men and women who had been in Mayapore at the time of the riots. They said that the number of dead in Mayapore, considered uncomfortably high by the authorities, was accounted for chiefly by people drowned in the river when scattering in panic at the sound of rifle fire and the sight of troops on both sides of the Mandir Gate bridge. In Dibrapur it had been a different matter. There the rebels had used home-made bombs and landmines. They got what they asked for. Brigadier Reid nearly lost a whole rifle company when it was cut off by a blown bridge; and when you thought of that, and that the company was part of a brigade he was trying to get ready to fight the Japanese and stop them invading India, you had to agree it was inhuman to start crucifying him for showing a bit of sand. In Reid there was obviously more sand than the desk-wallahs thought it right for a British officer to show these days. They were getting ready to dish him. The command of the brigade was Alec Reid’s first real job of soldiering for more than ten years. If it hadn’t been for the débâcle in Malaya and Burma he’d probably have ended his career fretting at a desk. He’d now been given command of a brigade that was almost ready to go back into the field but it was rumoured that GHQ thought it better to promote him to a job he’d quickly prove he couldn’t do than send him meekly back to a staff appointment because the civil in Mayapore had kicked up a stink about him.

  There was a rather sordid little joke going round among Mayapore Indians that if you spelt Reid backwards it came out sounding like Dyer who shot down all those unarmed people in the Jallianwallah Bagh in Amritsar in 1919. It never took long for people to home in like vultures on the reputation of a perfectly decent and competent officer. The only comfort to be had from the business was that if Reid did prove himself just too old to command a brigade of more seasoned troops his fate would be better than old Dyer’s. He’d like
ly get a general’s hat and even if there was nowhere else to hang it except on a peg in an air-conditioned office the pay while it lasted and the pension when it ended would be some compensation.

  The first of the officers who gained Pankot’s full attention was the adjutant of the battalion of the British regiment that had been brigaded for training with a battalion of the Ranpurs and the Mayapore Battalion of the Pankots under Reid. This officer was on short local leave. His knowledge of India was infinitesimal but he was a regular soldier and gave a fascinating account of the action in aid of the civil power in Mayapore in the Mandir Gate bridge, following which an unfortunately large number of women and children had died in the river. He knew the departed theatrical lieutenant, of course, but surprised everybody by describing him as a first-rate platoon commander who had won the MM as a lance-corporal at Dunkirk. He claimed to be the originator of the famous comment about that retreat: The noise! The people! To men the adjutant confided that he thought young X was probably as queer as a coot but that if so he had the courage of an Amazon. He was among those who had led a detachment of British soldiers in aid of the civil. He had behaved well but perhaps the experience of firing on unarmed civilians had ‘turned him’. The adjutant remembered finding him vomiting in his quarters when going to ask why he hadn’t reported to the daftar on his return from aid duty in the city. ‘My dear fellow,’ the actor-soldier had said, ‘I’m being sick because in a properly organized production the extras never actually get killed. The little thing today was wildly under-rehearsed.’

  The next arrival was an even more promising source of information. This was Ewart Mackay, the brigade major whom Reid’s successor had replaced with a man of his own choice. Mackay was in Pankot for a couple of days. He had broken his journey to his regimental depot in Muzzafirabad in the North West Frontier province, where he anticipated being offered the command of the battalion of the Muzzafirabad Guides that was now being brought back up to strength after limping out of Burma.

  Initially he seemed more interested in standing drinking at the men’s bar in the club than in answering questions about Mayapore which he deflected with frosty blasts of his Carew’s gin and ice-chunk-cooled breath and chilling stares of a keen blue eye. His sandy pranged moustache was kept airborne by constant manipulation of his restless fingers.

  But after he had put down what one member swore were twelve burra pegs in the course of two hours he became brisker, informative, and introduced a speculative element into the hitherto clear-cut argument that Reid had been badly treated.

  Apparently Ewart Mackay had quite a good opinion of White, the Deputy Commissioner in Mayapore. He said, ‘We all knew the Brig’s son was a P.O.W. with the Japs and we knew his wife was in hospital up in ‘Pindi. But I was the only one who knew she was dying of cancer and I didn’t know that until quite late in the day. I think if the DC had known he and the Brig would have got on better because he would have made allowances. As it was I often had to pour oil especially during the time the Brig was pressing him to call the troops out and the DC was digging his heels in and saying the civil police could cope. It’s nonsense to say excessive force was used but it could be that if we’d used troops say a day earlier the result wouldn’t have been so bad. I think the DC would have called for troops the day before if the Brig had given him more confidence about how they’d be used. Old Alec Reid’s a bit of a fire-eater you know. And nowadays the civil distrust us if we look anxious to have a crack. I suppose if your wife is dying and you’re stuck in a place like Mayapore with all hell let loose you’d want to get stuck in, but it’s never a good thing for the man at the top to be under an emotional strain. All the same old Alec Reid’s had a shabby deal. Giving him that other brigade was only a face-saver for him and the army. He won’t be keeping it. I know the man who’s been told he’ll be getting it. Reid will be back in Delhi by Christmas.’

  And Miss Manners? No, he had not had the pleasure of meeting Miss Manners. He pronounced her name in mock Scottish as it were with a deliberate skirl of the pipes and a whirl of the kilt. Since that unfortunate affair he had of course learned quite a bit about her. No, she wasn’t particularly attractive according to reports. Big and gawky he understood. She was staying in one of the oldest houses in Mayapore, a place called the Macgregor House built by a Scottish nabob in the early nineteenth century but now the property of an Indian woman, Lady Chatterjee, one of the Indians with whom the DC and his wife played bridge. Miss Manners was quite new to India. Although born in the country she had been taken home by her parents while still an infant. She lost both parents before the war and her brother had been killed. She’d driven ambulances throughout the blitz in London but been invalided out. Her closest surviving relative, her aunt, old Lady Manners, widow of ex-Governor Sir Henry, arranged for her to join her in Rawalpindi. There she met Lady Chatterjee. Sir Henry Manners and Sir Nello Chatterjee, a Bengali industrialist, had been old friends and after their deaths their widows had kept the friendship up. Lady Chatterjee was a Rajput, Chatterjee being her second husband. Her first was a prince who broke his neck playing polo. Chatterjee was knighted for founding and financing the Mayapore technical college which produced young Indian engineers, not unemployable arts graduates. Lady Chatterjee was considered okay.

  Major Mackay had met Lady Chatterjee once in the course of his social duties. Miss Manners may have been at the same function but he didn’t recall seeing her. The fact was she was probably otherwise occupied. After coming to stay with Lady Chatterjee and doing voluntary work at the general hospital she had become friendly with this Indian journalist fellow who was among the six young men the District Superintendent of Police arrested for raping her.

  Mackay was offered another drink. He accepted and said nothing more until it reached him. After a couple of swallows he reflighted his moustache and said, ‘Curious business altogether. And it made life extra difficult because it gave the troublemakers something special to shout about. I expect you heard the tales that got around that the police tortured the boys and defiled them by making them eat beef to get them to confess, which they never did. A lot of our own people felt that if the tales were true they only got what they deserved. I don’t expect they were handled any too gently. Some of these Indian inspectors and sub-inspectors can be pretty ruthless but the rabble were accusing the DSP himself. It got so bad the DC ordered an Indian magistrate to question each one of them but none of them complained of ill-treatment. They might have been scared to. Anyway it made no difference. The crowds were still screaming blue murder. I never cared much for the DSP, he wasn’t my kind of chap, but the Brig liked him and considering the crowds were out to get him if they could he acted pretty coolly. I saw him once in the thick of it on horseback rallying a squad of police that looked as if it had had enough. If there’d been one rioter with a shotgun he’d have been a dead man. As it was a bloody great stone missed him by inches. Still, guts don’t count if you fail in another direction. He never made the rape charges stick and I don’t suppose his department will let him forget it. But that’s life. Bring home the bacon and you’re forgiven a lot. Don’t, and you’re sunk.’

  One of the other men said, ‘From what we hear that wasn’t his fault but the girl’s. She sounds round the bend to me.’

  Mackay glanced at the man, emptied his glass, put it on the counter and ordered another round.

  ‘You think so?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I just think she was in love. Not round the bend. Not infatuated. Not intimidated. In love.’

  ‘With the journalist fellow?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Even after he and his friends raped her?’

  ‘Forget the friends. The trouble about this case is that nobody’s ever been able to forget the friends or start from the simple proposition that Miss Manners was in love and still is with the Kumar chap. And that the Kumar chap was and still is in love with her.’

  ‘Was that his name?’
>
  ‘There were six names but I think Kumar was the lad in question. Hari Kumar.’

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘H,a,r,i. He was brought up in England. He went to school at Chillingborough.’

  ‘Good God.’

  ‘Quite so. Interesting, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well what the hell was he doing working in a place like Mayapore on a local rag?’

  ‘They tell me his father died bankrupt in England before the war and he came back penniless to the only relative he had, an aunt who lived in Mayapore. She was a widow and lived on the charity of her dead husband’s orthodox Hindu family. Young Kumar must have had a tough time adjusting himself to that. It could be he failed to adjust himself. The police had an eye on him. He was politically suspect. That’s the other red herring.’

  ‘Red herring?’

  ‘It introduces complications. It makes it hard to concentrate on the proposition that he and Miss Manners were in love.’

  ‘What’s the other red herring?’

  ‘The friends. The police had files on them too. I think you have to forget the politics, the friends, even the rape, and concentrate on this one proposition. They were in love.’

  ‘What do you mean, forget the rape?’

  Mackay’s glass was empty. He put it on the counter. A man in the group ordered refills.

  ‘I mean forget it because it’s irrelevant.’

  The word irrelevant came out slightly blurred and Major Mackay lost something of his grip on his audience. But with his next sentence he regained and hardened it.