An Area of Darkness

  Mrs Mahindra sighed. I felt she had taken a lot already and I thought I would release her. I tried to get the old man to talk of his past to me. He had no adventures to relate; he just had a list of places he had lived in or worked in. I asked precise questions; I made him describe landscapes. But Mrs Mahindra, not understanding my purpose, not accepting – or perhaps by duty not able to accept – the release I offered, sat and suffered. In the end it was the old man whom I drove away. He went and sat by himself in the small front garden.

  ‘Naughty, naughty,’ Mrs Mahindra said, giving me a smile of pure exhaustion.

  ‘Summer is here,’ the old man said after dinner. ‘I have been sleeping out in the open for a fortnight. I always find that I begin to sleep out in the open a few weeks before other people.’

  ‘Will you be sleeping out in the open tonight?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  He slept just outside the door. We could see him, and no doubt he could see us. At four – so it was reasonable to assume – we heard him rise and get ready for his walk: lavatory chain, gargling, clattering, doors. We heard him return. And when we got up we found him reading the Gita.

  ‘I always read a few pages of the Gita after I come back from my walk,’ he said.

  After that he idled about the house. He had nothing to do. It was difficult to ignore him; he required to be spoken to. He talked, but I began to feel that he also monitored.

  We returned in the afternoon to a painful scene: the interviewing of another applicant for the ground floor. The applicant was uneasy; the old man, who was putting the questions, was polite but reproving; and the object of his reproof, I felt, was Mrs Mahindra, whose face was almost hidden in the top end of her sari.

  We lost some of Mrs Mahindra’s attentions. In no time at all she had dwindled into the Indian daughter-in-law. We heard little now of her craze for foreign. We had become liabilities. And when, attending to her father-in-law’s conversation, she caught our eyes, her smile was tired. It held no conspiracy, only dutiful withdrawal. We had found her, on that first day, in a brief moment of sparkle.

  We had to go to the country that week-end, and it was with a feeling almost of betrayal that we told her we were going to leave her alone with her father-in-law for a few days. She brightened at the news; she became active. We must just go, she said, and not worry about a thing. We didn’t have to pack everything away; she would look after our room. She helped us to get ready. She gave us a meal and stood in the irregularly pointed stone gateway and waved while the Bihari chauffeur, duffer as we remembered, drove us off. Plump, saddened, wide-eyed Mrs Mahindra!

  A week-end in the country! The words suggest cool clumps of trees, green fields, streams. Our thoughts were all of water as we left Delhi. But there was no water and little shade. The road was a narrow metal strip between two lanes of pure dust. Dust powdered the roadside trees and the fields. Once we drove for miles over a flat brown wasteland. At the end of the journey lay a town, and a communal killing. The Muslim murderer had fled; the dead Hindu had to be mourned and cremated in swift secrecy before daybreak; and afterwards troublemakers of both sides had to be watched. This occupied our host for almost all the week-end. We remained in the inspection house, grateful for the high ceiling, below the spinning fan. On one wall there was a framed typewritten digest of rules and regulations. Set into another wall was a fireplace. The winters it promised seemed so unlikely now; and it was as though one was forever doomed to be in places at the wrong time, as though one was forever feeling one’s way through places where every label was false: the confectionery machine on the railway platform that hadn’t worked for years, the advertisement for something that was no longer made, the timetable which was out of date. Above the mantelpiece there was a photograph of a tree standing on eroded earth beside a meagre stream; and in that photograph, in its message of exhaustion and persistence, there was something which already we could recognize as of India.

  We returned to Delhi by train below a darkening sky. We waited for the storm to break. But what looked like raincloud was only dust. The tea-boy cheated us (and on this run several months later that same boy was to cheat us again); a passenger complained of corruption; one story excited another. And the wind blew and the dust penetrated everywhere, dust which, the engineers tell us, can get in where water can’t. We longed for the town, for hot baths and air-conditioning and shuttered rooms.

  The lower floor of the Mahindras’ house was in darkness. The door was locked. We had no key. We rang, and rang. After some minutes a whispering, tiptoeing servant let us in as though we were his private friends. Everything in our room was as we had left it. The bed was unmade; the suitcases hadn’t been moved; letters and leaflets and full ashtrays were on the bedside table; dust had settled on the static disarray. We were aware of muted activity upstairs, in the room with the Indian brass dish-warmer.

  The sahib, the servant said, had returned from the jungle. And the sahib had quarrelled with the memsahib. ‘He say, “You take paying guests? You take money?” ’

  We understood. We were Mrs Mahindra’s first and last paying guests. We had been part of her idleness, perhaps like those men who had called to lease the ground floor. Perhaps Mrs M. Mehta, secretary of the Women’s League, leased her ground floor; perhaps Mrs M. Mehta had a dazzling succession of foreign paying guests.

  Dear Mrs Mahindra! She enjoyed her money and no doubt in her excitement had wished to make a little more. But her attentions had been touched with the genuine Indian warmth. We never saw her again; we never saw her sons again; we never saw her husband. Her father-in-law we only heard as, lurking in our room, we waited for him to settle down for the night. We heard him rise in the morning; we heard him leave for his walk. We gave him a few minutes. Then we crept out with our suitcases and roused one of the sleeping taxi-drivers in the taxi-rank not far off. Through a friend we later sent the money we owed.

  *

  The days in Delhi had been a blur of heat. The moments that stayed were those of retreat: darkened bedrooms, lunches, shuttered clubs, a dawn drive to the ruins of Tughlakabad, a vision of the Flame of the Forest. Sightseeing was not easy. Bare feet were required in too many places. The entrances to temples were wet and muddy and the courtyards of mosques were more scorching than tropical beaches in mid-afternoon. At every mosque and temple there were idlers waiting to pounce on those who did not take off their shoes. Their delight and their idleness infuriated me. So did one notice: ‘If you think it is beneath your dignity to take off your shoes, slippers are provided.’ At Rajghat, faced with an unnecessarily long walk over hot sand to the site of Gandhi’s cremation, I refused to follow the Tourist Department’s guide and sat, a fully shod heretic, in the shade. Blue-shirted schoolboys waited for the Americans among the tourists. The boys were well fed and well shod and carried their schoolbooks like emblems of their worthiness. They ran to the old ladies. The ladies, informed of India’s poverty, stopped, opened their purses and smilingly distributed coins and notes, while from the road the professional beggars, denied entrance, watched enviously. The heat was unhinging me. I advanced towards the schoolboys, simple murder in my heart. They ran away, nimble in the heat. The Americans looked assessingly at me: the proud young Indian nationalist. Well, it would do. I walked back to the coach, converting exhaustion into anger and shame.

  So it had been in Delhi. I was shouting now almost as soon as I entered government offices. At times the sight of rows of young men sitting at long tables, buried among sheaves of paper, young men checking slips of one sort or another, young men counting banknotes and tying them into bundles of a hundred, all India’s human futility, was more than I could bear. ‘Don’t complain to me. Make your complaint through proper channel.’ ‘Through proper channel! Proper channel!’ But it was hopeless; irony, mockery, was impossible in India. And: ‘Don’t complain to me. Complain to my officer.’ ‘Which is your bloody officer?’ All this with a liberating sense that my violent mood was inviting violence
. Yet so often it was met only with a cold, puncturing courtesy; and I was reduced to stillness, shame and exhaustion.

  In Lutyens’s city I required privacy and protection. Only then was I released from the delirium of seeing certain aspects of myself magnified out of recognition. I could sense the elegance of the city, in those colonnades hidden by signboards and straw blinds, in those vistas: the new tower at one end of the tree-lined avenue, the old dome at the other. I could sense the ‘studious’ atmosphere of which people had spoken in Bombay. I could sense its excitement as a new capital city, in the gatherings at the Gymkhana Club on a Sunday morning, the proconsular talk about the abominations of the Congo from former United Nations officials, in the announcements in the newspapers of ‘cultural’ entertainments provided by the embassies of competing governments: a city to which importance had newly come, and all the new toys of the ‘diplomatic’. But to me it was a city in which I could only escape from one darkened room to another, separate from the reality of out of doors, of dust and light and low-caste women in gorgeous saris – gorgeousness in saris being emblematic of lowness – working on building sites. A city doubly unreal, rising suddenly out of the plain: acres of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ruins, then the ultra-contemporary exhibition buildings; a city whose emblematic grandeur spoke of a rich and settled hinterland and not of the poor, parched land through which we had been travelling for twenty-four hours.

  Yet that evening, lying in my bunk in the aluminium coach of the Srinagar Express and waiting for the train to leave, I found that I had begun to take a perverse delight in the violence of it all: delight at the thought of the twenty-four-hour journey that had brought me to Delhi, the thirty-six-hour journey still farther north that awaited me, through all the flatness of the Punjab to the mightiest mountain range in the world; delight at the physical area of luxury I had managed to reserve for myself, the separation from the unpleasant which I was yet, through the easily operated rubber-beaded windows, able to see: the red-turbanned porters, the trolleys of books and magazines, the hawkers, the frenzied fans hanging low so that from my bunk the platform appeared to be ceilinged by spinning blades: once hated symbols of discomfort, now answering all my urgency and exaltation which, fraudulent though I knew it to be, I was already fearing to lose, for with a twenty-degree drop in temperature all would subside to ordinariness.

  The Punjab, intermittently glanced at during the night, was silent and featureless except for the moving oblongs of light from our train. A still hut, blacker against the flat black fields awaiting the day-long sun: what more had I expected? In the morning we were at Pathankot, the railhead – and how strange again and again to hear this solitary English word, to me so technical, industrial and dramatic, in a whole sentence of Hindustani – the railhead for Kashmir. It was cool at the station in the early morning; there was a hint of bush and, deceptive though it was, of mountains close at hand. And our passengers appeared in woollen shirts, sporty hats, jackets, cardigans, pullovers and even gloves, the woollen garments of the Indian summer holidays, not yet strictly needed, but an anticipation of the holiday that had almost begun.

  At first it was only the army of whose presence we were aware on this flat scrub near the Pakistan border: signposted camps, all whitewash and straight lines, the rows of lorries and jeeps, the occasional manoeuvres of light tanks. These men in olive-green battledress and bush-hats might have belonged to another country. They walked differently; they were handsome. We stopped at Jammu for lunch. Thereafter we climbed, entering Kashmir by the road built by the Indian army in 1947 at the time of the Pakistan invasion. It grew cooler; there were hills and gorges and a broken view, hill beyond hill, receding planes of diminishing colour. We drove beside the Chenab River which, as we climbed, fell beneath us into a gorge, littered with logs.

  ‘And where do you come from?’

  It was the Indian question. I had been answering it five times a day. And now again I went through the explanations.

  He was sitting across the aisle from me. He was respectably dressed in a suit. He was bald, with a sharp Gujerati nose, and he looked bitter.

  ‘And what do you think of our great country?’

  It was another Indian question; and the sarcasm had to be dismissed.

  ‘Be frank. Tell me exactly what you think.’

  ‘It’s all right. It’s very interesting.’

  ‘Interesting. You are lucky. You should live here. We are trapped here, you know. That’s what we are. Trapped.’

  Beside him sat his plump, fulfilled wife. She was less interested in our conversation than in me. She studied me whenever I looked away.

  ‘Corruption and nepotism everywhere,’ he said. ‘Everybody wanting to get out to United Nations jobs. Doctors going abroad. Scientists going to America. The future is totally black. How much, for instance, do you earn in your country?’

  ‘About five thousand rupees a month.’

  It was unfair to strike so hard. But he took it well.

  ‘And what do you do for this?’ he asked.

  ‘I teach.’

  ‘What do you teach?’

  ‘History.’

  He was unimpressed.

  I added, ‘And a little chemistry.’

  ‘Strange combination. I’m a chemistry teacher myself.’

  It happens to every romancer.

  I said, ‘I teach in a comprehensive school. You have to do a little of everything.’

  ‘I see.’ Annoyance was peeping out of his puzzlement; his nose seemed to twitch. ‘Strange combination. Chemistry.’

  I was worried. Several hours of our journey together still remained. I pretended to be annoyed by a crying child. This couldn’t go on. But relief soon came. We stopped among pines in a lay-by above a green wooded valley. We got out to stretch our legs. It was cool. The plains had become like an illness whose exact sensations it is impossible, after recovery, to recall. The woollens were now of service. The holiday had begun to fulfil itself. And when we got back into the bus I found that the chemistry teacher had changed seats with his wife, so that he would not have to continue talking to me.

  It was night, clear and cold, when we stopped at Banihal. The rest-house was in darkness; the electric lights had gone. The attendants fussed around with candles; they prepared meals. In the moonlight the terraced rice fields were like leaded panes of old glass. In the morning their character had changed. They were green and muddy. After the Banihal tunnel we began to go down and down, past fairy-tale villages set in willow groves, watered by rivulets with grassy banks, into the Vale of Kashmir.

  *

  Kashmir was coolness and colour: the yellow mustard fields, the mountains, snow-capped, the milky blue sky in which we rediscovered the drama of clouds. It was men wrapped in brown blankets against the morning mist, and barefooted shepherd boys with caps and covered ears on steep wet rocky slopes. At Qazigund, where we stopped, it was also dust in sunlight, the disorder of a bazaar, a waiting crowd, and a smell in the cold air of charcoal, tobacco, cooking oil, months-old dirt and human excrement. Grass grew on the mud-packed roofs of cottages – and at last it was clear why, in that story I had read as a child in the West Indian Reader, the foolish widow had made her cow climb up to the roof. Buses packed with men with red-dyed beards were going in the direction from which we had come. Another bus came in, halted. The crowd broke, ran forward and pressed in frenzy around a window through which a man with tired eyes held out his thin hand in benediction. He, like the others, was going to Mecca; and among these imprisoning mountains how far away Jeddah seemed, that Arabian pilgrim port dangerous with reefs over which the blue water grows turquoise. In smoky kitchen shacks Sikhs with ferocious beards and light eyes, warriors and rulers of an age not long past, sat and cooked. Each foodstall carried an attractive signboard. The heavy white cups were chipped; the tables, out in the open, were covered with oil-cloth in checked patterns; below them the ground had been softened to mud.

  The mountains receded. The
valley widened into soft, well-watered fields. The road was lined with poplars and willows drooped on the banks of clear rivulets. Abruptly, at Awantipur, out of a fairy-tale village of sagging wood-framed cottages there rose ruins of grey stone, whose heavy trabeate construction – solid square pillars on a portico, steep stone pediments on a colonnade around a central shrine, massive and clumsy in ruin – caused the mind to go back centuries to ancient worship. They were Hindu ruins, of the eighth century, as we discovered later. But none of the passengers exclaimed, none pointed. They lived among ruins; the Indian earth was rich with ancient sculpture. At Pandrethan, on the outskirts of Srinagar, the army camp was set about a smaller temple in a similar style. The soldiers were exercising. Army lorries and huts lay in neat rows; on the roadside there were army boards and divisional emblems.

  We stopped at the octroi post, quaint medievalism, in a jam of Tata-Mercedes-Benz lorries, their tailboards decorated with flowered designs and Horn Please in fanciful lettering on a ground of ochre or pink. On the raised floors of shops blanket-wrapped men smoked hookahs. Skirting the town, we came to an avenue lined with giant chenar trees, whose sweet shade the Kashmiris believe to be medicinal, and turned into the yard of the Tourist Reception Centre, a new building in pale red brick. Across the road a large hoarding carried a picture of Mr Nehru, with his urging that the foreign visitor should be treated as a friend. Directly below the hoardings the Kashmiris were shouting already, with pure hostility it seemed, barely restrained by the swagger sticks of elegant turbanned policemen.

  Among the shouters were the owners of houseboats or the servants of owners. It seemed scarcely conceivable that they owned anything or had anything worthwhile to offer. But the houseboats existed. They lay on the lake in a white row against floating green islands, answering the snow on the surrounding mountains. At intervals concrete steps led down from the lake boulevard to the crystal water. On the steps men sat and squatted and smoked hookahs; their shikara boats were a cluster of red and orange awnings and cushions; and in shikaras we were ferried over to the houseboats, where, mooring, and going up dainty steps, we found interiors beyond anything we had imagined: carpets and brassware and framed pictures, china and panelling and polished furniture of another age. And at once Awantipur and the rest disappeared. For here was English India. Here, offered for our inspection, were the chits, the faded recommendations of scores of years. Here were invitations to the weddings of English army officers, now perhaps grandfathers. And the houseboat man, so negligible at the Tourist Centre, so negligible as he pedalled behind our tonga, pleading with tears that we should visit his boat, himself altered: kicking off his shoes, dropping to his knees on the carpet, his manners became as delicate as the china – so rare now in India – in which he offered us tea. Here were more photographs, of his father and his father’s guests; here were more recommendations; here were tales of enormous English meals.