by Paul Scott
And it could occur to you, too, that Mr Srinivasan is not at ease in the lounge-bar, that if he had only managed to conduct his affairs in accordance with Indian Standard instead of Mayapore time he would have been waiting at the entrance when his second best car, the Ambassador, drove up and deposited its passengers, and would then have taken them into the old smoking-room, not had to leave them to the jovial Terry Grigson whose wife finds nothing to laugh about but with whom Mr Srinivasan and his guests are momentarily stuck, for politeness’ sake, at least until Terry comes back from the showers and changing-room—
—as he does, beaming and raw-faced, in a creased bush shirt and floppy creased grey trousers, but not before Mr Srinivasan with a thin, almost tubercular finger, has summoned a bearer and asked everybody what they are drinking and sent the bearer off to collect it, having been answered even by Mrs Grigson, and by her companion who taking her cue from Mrs Grigson also said, ‘Nothing for me, thank you.’ Terry comes back between the sending away of the bearer with the curtailed order and his return with a tray of three lonely gins and tonics, by which time Terry has also been asked by Mr Srinivasan what he will drink, thanked him, and said, ‘I’ll go a beer.’ When the gins and tonics arrive and Srinivasan says to the bearer, ‘And a beer for Mr Grigson,’ Mrs Grigson pushes her empty glass at Terry and says, ‘Order me another of these, Terry, will you?’ which he does, with a brief, almost private gesture at the bearer. The other woman, lacking Mrs Grigson’s nerve for studied insult, would go drinkless did Terry not say, while Srinivasan talks to Lili Chatterjee, ‘What about you, Betty?’ which enables her to shrug, grimace, and say, ‘Well, I suppose I might as well.’ Since no money passes and no bills are yet presented for signing, one wonders who in fact will pay for them, but trusts – because Grigson looks almost self-consciously trustworthy – that he will see to it afterwards that Mr Srinivasan’s bar account is not debited with a charge it seems his wife and her friend would rather die than have an Indian settle.
And now, perhaps abiding by yet another unwritten rule, perhaps having even received some secret, clan-gathering sign, a dumpy Englishwoman at an adjacent table leans across and asks Mrs Grigson a question which causes Mrs Grigson to incline her angular body by a degree or two and with this inclination fractionally shift the position of her chair, so that by a narrow but perceptible margin she succeeds in dissociating herself from those with whom she actually shares a table. It is difficult to hear what it is that so arouses her interest, because Lili Chatterjee, Mr Srinivasan and (to his lone, team-captain’s credit) Mr Grigson are also talking with animation, and the stranger can only observe and make possibly erroneous deductions: possibly erroneous but not probably. There is nothing so inwardly clear as social rebuff – a rebuff which in this case is also directed at the stranger because he has arrived with one Indian as the guest of another.
And in the momentary hiatus of not knowing exactly what it is that anyone is talking about, one may observe Terry Grigson’s off-handsome face and see that old familiar expression of strain, of deep-seated reservation that qualifies the smile and points up the diplomatic purpose; a purpose which, given a bit more time, may not prevail against the persistence of his sulky segregationist wife. And this, perhaps, is a pity, considering all the chat that goes on at home about the importance of trade and exports and of making a good impression abroad.
‘Well no,’ Terry Grigson says, in answer to Mr Srinivasan’s for-form’s-sake inquiry whether he and his wife will join the trio of Srinivasan, Lili Chatterjee and her house-guest for dinner at the club, ‘It’s very kind of you, but we’re going on to Roger’s farewell and have to get back and change.’
The Roger referred to is, one gathers, the retiring managing director of British–Indian Electrical. Almost every month one more member of this transient European population ups stakes, retires, returns to England or moves on to another station. For each farewell, however, there is a housewarming, or a party to mark the occasion of a wife’s arrival to join her husband in the place where for the next year or two he will earn his living. Whatever that living actually is – with the British–Indian Electrical, with one of the other industrial developments, or teaching something abstruse at the Mayapore Technical College, it will be earned by someone considered superiorly equipped to manage, guide, execute or instruct. He will be a member of that new race of Sahibs. He will be, in whatsoever field; an Expert.
‘There is actually a most interesting but undoubtedly apocryphal story about the status of English experts in India nowadays,’ Mr Srinivasan says in his rather high-pitched but melodious lawyer’s voice when the party in the lounge bar has been broken up by the quick-downing by Terry Grigson of his beer and by the ladies of their gin-fizzes, and their departure to change into clothes that will be more suitable for the purpose of bidding Roger God-speed. Upon that departure Mr Srinivasan has led Lady Chatterjee and the stranger across the lounge, through the pillared passage and the open doors into the comfortable old smoking-room that has club chairs, potted palms, fly-blown hunting prints and – in spite of the spicy curry-smells wafted in from the adjacent dining-room by the action of the leisurely turning ceiling fans – an air somehow evocative of warmed-up gravy and cold mutton. In here, only one Englishman now remains. He glances at Mr Srinivasan’s party – but retains the pale mask of his anonymity, a mask that he seems to wear as a defence against the young, presumably inexpert Indians who form the group of which he is the restrained, withheld, interrogated, talked-at centre. It is because one asks Mr Srinivasan who this white man is, and because Mr Srinivasan says he does not know but supposes he is a ‘visiting expert’ that the interesting but perhaps apocryphal story is told.
‘There was,’ Mr Srinivasan says, ‘this Englishman who was due to go home. An ordinary tourist actually. He fell into conversation with a Hindu businessman who for months had been trying to get a loan from Government in order to expand his factory. A friend had told the businessman, “But it is impossible for you to get a loan from Government because you are not employing any English technical adviser.” So the businessman asked himself: “Where can I get such an adviser and how much will it cost me seeing that he would expect two or three years’ guaranteed contract at minimum?” Then he met this English tourist who had no rupees left. And the Hindu gentleman said, “Sir, I think you are interested in earning rupees five thousand?” The English tourist agreed straight away. “Then all you will do, sir,” the Hindu gentleman said, “is to postpone departure for two weeks while I write to certain people in New Delhi.” Then he telegraphed Government saying, “What about loan? Here already I am at the expense of employing technical expert from England and there is no answer coming from you.” To which at once he received a telegraph reply to the effect that his factory would be inspected by representatives of Government on such and such a day. So he went back to the English tourist and gave him five thousand rupees and said, “Please be at my factory on Monday, are you by any chance knowing anything about radio components?” To which the English tourist replied, “No, unfortunately, only I am knowing about ancient monuments.” “No matter,” the Hindu gentleman said, “on Monday whenever I jog your elbow simply be saying – ‘This is how it is done in Birmingham.’” So on Monday there was this most impressive meeting in the executive suite of the factory between the Hindu businessman who knew all about radio component manufacture, the English tourist who knew nothing and the representatives of Government who also knew nothing. Before lunch they went round the premises and sometimes one of the officials of Government asked the Englishman, “What is happening here?” and the Hindu gentleman jogged the Englishman’s elbow, and the Englishman who was a man of honour, a man to be depended upon to keep his word said, “This is how we do it in Birmingham.” And after a convivial lunch the Government representatives flew back to Delhi and the English tourist booked his flight home first class by BOAC and within a week the Hindu businessman was in receipt of a substantial Government loan with a messa
ge of goodwill from Prime Minister Nehru himself.’
And one notes, marginally, that the new wave of satire has also broken on the Indian shore and sent minor flood-streams into the interior, as far as Mayapore.
*
Mr Srinivasan is the oldest man in the smoking-room.
‘Yes, of course,’ he says, speaking of the younger men – the Indians, ‘they are all businessmen. No sensible young man in India today goes into civil administration or into politics. These fellows are all budding executives.’
Several of the budding executives wear bush shirts, but the shirts are beautifully laundered. Their watch-straps are of gold-plated expanding metal. One of them comes over and asks Lady Chatterjee how she is. He declines Srinivasan’s invitation to have a drink and says he must be dashing off to keep a date. He is a bold, vigorous-looking boy. His name is Surendranath. When he has gone Mr Srinivasan says, ‘There is a case in point. His father is old ICS on the judicial side. But young Surendranath is an electrical engineer, or rather a boy with a degree in electrical engineering who is working as personal assistant to the Indian assistant sales director of British–Indian Electrical. He took his degree in Calcutta and studied sales techniques in England, which is a reversal of the old order when the degree would have been taken in London and the sales technique either ignored or left to be picked up as one went blundering along from one shaky stage of prestige and influence to another. He is commercially astute and a very advanced young man in everything except his private life, that is to say his forthcoming marriage, which he has been quite happy to leave his parents to arrange, because he trusts to their judgment in such relatively minor matters.
‘The thin, studious-looking boy is also a case in point. His name is Desai. His father was interned with me in 1942 because we were both leading members of the local Congress party sub-committee. His father told me last year when we chanced to meet in New Delhi that young Desai said to him once, “Just because you were in jail you think this entitles you to believe you know everything?” They were quarrelling about Mr Nehru whom this mild-looking young man had called a megalomaniac who had already outlived his usefulness by 1948 but gone on living disastrously in the past and dragging India back to conditions worse than in the days of the British because he knew nothing of world economic structure and pressures. My old friend Desai was secretary to the minister for education and social services in the provincial Congress Ministry that took office in 1937, and resigned in 1939. Before becoming secretary to the Minister he was in the uncovenanted provincial civil service and a lawyer like myself. But his son, this young man over there, is a potential expert on centrifugal pumps and says that people like us are to blame for India’s industrial and agricultural backwardness because instead of learning everything we could about really important things we spent our time playing at politics with an imperial power any fool could have told us would beat us at that particular game with both hands tied. Such accusations are a salutary experience to old men like me who at the time thought they were doing rather well.
‘Also you will have noticed, I think, that there are no old men in this room except for myself. Where are my old companions in political crime? Lili, please do not put on your inscrutable Rajput princess face. You know the answer. Dead, gone, retired, or hidden in our burrows grinding the mills of the administration exceeding slow but not always exceeding fine. You might find one or two of us at the other club. Didn’t you know about the other club? Oh well, that is an interesting story. We sit with the lady whose husband was one of the founder members.’
‘Nello put up money but rarely went,’ Lady Chatterjee says.
‘Also he chose the name, isn’t it?’
Sometimes one could suspect Mr Srinivasan of deliberate self-parody.
Lady Chatterjee explains, ‘They wanted to call it the MHC. All Nello did was get them to drop the H.’
‘So MHC became MC, which stands simply for Mayapore Club. The H would have made it the Mayapore Hindu Club. No matter. An English wag anyway dubbed it the Indian Club which I believe is an instrument for body-building. Also it was known among Indian wits as the Mayapore Chatterjee Club, or MCC for short. But whatever you called it it was always the wrong club. Of course it was originally meant to be an English-type club for Indians who were clubbable, but it was not for nothing that the H for Hindu was suggested. It became a place where the word Hindu was actually more important than the word Club. And Hindu did not mean Congress. No, no. Please be aware of the distinction. In this case Hindu meant Hindu Mahasabha. Hindu nationalism. Hindu narrowness. It meant rich banias with little education, landowners who spoke worse English than the youngest English sub-divisional officer his eager but halting Hindi. It meant sitting without shoes and with your feet curled up on the chair, eating only horrible vegetarian dishes and drinking disgusting fruit juice. Mayapore, you understand, is not Bombay, and consequently the Mayapore club was not like the Willingdon club which was founded by your viceroy Lord Willingdon in a fit of rage because the Indian guests he invited – in ignorance – to a private banquet at the Royal Yacht Club were turned away from the doors in their Rolls-Royces before he cottoned on to what was happening. Ah well, perhaps dear old Nello imagined in Mayapore a little Willingdon? But what happened? One by one the type of Indian who would have loved the club because it was the nearest he was then able to get to enjoying the fruits of what he had been educated up by your people to see as just one but an important aspect of civilised life – one by one this type of Indian stopped going to the Mayapore and with each abstention the feet of the bania were more firmly established under the table – or rather, upon the seat of his chair –
‘I think they are ready in the dining-room.’
*
‘The point is, you see,’ Mr Srinivasan says, having apologised for the absence of beef, the omnipresence of mutton, ‘that these old men, my peers, my old companions in crime and adversity, those who aren’t dead, those who are still living in Mayapore, now find themselves somehow less conspicuous at the Mayapore club than at the Gymkhana. Just look at the young faces that surround us. So many of these boys are telling us that we cannot expect to dine out for ever on stories of how we fought and got rid of the British, that some of us never dine out at all, except with each other, like old soldiers mulling over their long-ago battles. And when it comes to spending a few hours at a club, most of us – although not I – choose the company of men who rest on laurels of a different kind, men with whom it is easier to identify than it is with the members here because here everyone is go-ahead and critical of our past. I mean, for instance, that it is easier for us to identify with men like Mr Romesh Chand Gupta Sen, now a venerable gentleman of nearly eighty years and still going every morning to his office above his warehouse in the Chillianwallah Bazaar. To the chagrin of his sons and grandsons, I should add. And on one evening a week to the Mayapore club to discuss business prospects with men who were not interested in politics then, and now are interested neither in technical experts nor in theories of industrial expansion, but instead interested as they always were simply in making money and being good Hindus.’
*
There have been prawn cocktails. Now the curried mutton arrives. The chief steward comes to oversee its serving, but breaks off from this duty to walk over and greet a party of English, two of the men and two of the women who were in the lounge-bar. The steward indicates the table he has reserved for them, but they ignore him and select another more to their liking. Both the men are still wearing shorts. Their legs are bare to the ankles. The women have plump, mottled arms, and wear sleeveless cotton shifts. Without the knitted cardigans you feel they would put on at home of an evening over these summer dresses they have a peeled, boiled look. They are young. They sit together – opposite their husbands – an act of involuntary segregation that by now is probably becoming familiar to the Indians as they get used to a new race of sahibs and memsahibs from Stevenage and Luton but may still puzzle them when they recol
lect how critical the old-style British were of the Indian habit of keeping men and women so well separated that a mixed party was almost more than an English host and hostess could bear to contemplate.
The dining-room, like the smoking-room, has probably changed little since Daphne Manners’s time. It is a square room, with a black and white tiled floor, and walls panelled in oak to shoulder height, and whitewashed above. Three square pillars, similarly panelled to the same height, support the ceiling at apparently random but presumably strategic points. There are something like a score of tables, some round, some rectangular, each with its white starched cloth, its electro-plated cutlery and condiment tray, its mitred napkins, its slim chromium flower vase holding a couple of asters, its glass jug filled with water and protected by a weighted muslin cover. There is a large Tudor-style fireplace whose black cavity is partly hidden by a framed tapestry screen. Above the fireplace there is a portrait of Mr Nehru looking serene in a perplexed sort of way. One can assume that when Daphne Manners dined here the frame contained a coloured likeness of George VI wearing a similar expression. Four fans are suspended from the ceiling on slender tubes that whip unsteadily with the movement of the turning blades. There are two arched exits, one leading into the smoking-room and the other into the main hall. There is also a third exit but that only leads into the kitchens. Against the wall, close to the kitchen exit, stands a monumental oak sideboard or dumb-waiter. On its top tier there are spare napkins, knives, forks and spoons, water-jugs, and on the lower tier, baskets of bread, bowls of fruit, bottles of sauce and spare cruets. Light is provided by stubby candle-style wall-brackets and a couple of wooden chandeliers with parchment shades, and during daytime by the windows that look on to the porticoed verandah at the front of the club, windows whose curtains are now pulled back and are open to let in the night air.