The Siege of Krishnapur

by James Gordon Farrell

  But still those chapatis lodged in his mind, undissolved. In this room it was even harder to believe in trouble than it had been in the hall, indeed, it was hard to believe that one was in India at all, except for the punkahs. His eyes roamed with satisfaction over the walls, thickly anmoured with paintings in oil and water-colour, with mirrors and glass cases containing stuffed birds and other wonders, over chairs and sofas upholstered in plum cretonne, over showcases of minerals and a cobra floating in a bottle of bluish alcohol, oven occasional tables draped to the floor with heavy tablecloths on which stood statuettes in electro-metal of great men of literature, of Dr Johnson, of Moliere, Keats, Voltaire and, of course, Shakespeare … but now he was obliged to return his attention to the proceedings.

  Miss Carpenter had begun to read a poem in praise of the Great Exhibition; the Collector groaned inwardly, not because he found the subject unsuitable, but because it had so evidently been chosen as homage to himself; poems about the Exhibition recurred every few weeks and seldom failed to excite the Magistrate’s most cutting remarks. This was undoubtedly because his own interest in the Exhibition was as well-known to the Magistrate as to the ladies; indeed, it was more than an interest for he had been a prominent member of the selection committee for the Bengal Presidency and, having taken his furlough in 1851, had attended the Exhibition in an official capacity. It was generally held in the cantonment that the Magistrate resented the fact that the Collector should be in with all the “big dogs” in the Company simply because he was in the habit of collecting artistic and scientific bric a brac.

  “Power, like the trunk of Afric’s wondrous brute,

  Had, on that stage, its double triumph found,

  To lift the forest monarch by the root,

  Or pick a quivering needle from the ground.”

  Although it was usually considered unwise to offer explanations to the Magistrate as you went along, Miss Carpenter was unable to prevent herself explaining that this image of the Exhibition was a reference to the versatile talent of Edmund Burke. But as the air of interrogation among her fellow poetesses only deepened as a result of this explanation she was obliged to add an explanation to her explanation, to the effect that this talent of Burke’s had been compared to an elephant’s trunk, which could uproot an oak or pick up a needle. The ladies shifted their terrified eyes to the Magistrate to see how he was responding; his face remained ominously impassive, however, beneath its ginger growth. Miss Carpenter bravely proceeded:

  “Whilst they, the Royal Founders of the scene,

  Through ranks of gazing myriads calmly move,

  And Britons throng to proffer to their Queen

  The willing dues of loyalty and love.”

  “Really, this is not at all bad,” thought the Collector in spite of his alarm on her behalf; he was fond of Miss Carpenter, who was serious and pretty, and anxious to please.

  “Pebbles and shells which little children find

  Of rainbow-tinted hues, on ocean’s shore;

  Though full of learning to the thoughtful mind,

  Themselves how vain, how shortly seen no more!”

  “How excellent, how serious! The girl has a remarkable gift.” The Collector was surprised to find himself responding to a poem composed by one of the ladies; hitherto he had considered the poems of value only for their therapeutic properties. Alas, Miss Carpenter had been unable to resist appending yet another explanation: that this last verse was a reference to Newton’s description of himself as “only a child picking up pebbles on the shore of the great ocean of truth”. This was altogether too much for the Magistrate. “Half of this poem appears to have been copied from books, Miss Carpenter, and the other half is plainly rubbish. It’s entirely beyond my understanding why you should feel you have to say ‘Afric’s wondrous brute’ instead of ‘elephant’ like everyone else, and ‘forest monarch’ instead of ‘tree’. Nobody in his right mind goes about calling trees ‘forest monarchs’ … I’ve really never heard such nonsense!”

  The ladies gasped at this frontal attack, not just on poor Miss Carpenter, but on poetry itself. If you can’t call an elephant “Afric’s wondrous brute” what can you call it? Why write poetry at all? Miss Carpenter’s eyes filled with tears.

  “Look here, Tom, that’s very extreme,” grumbled the Collector, displeased. “I found it a very fine poem indeed. One of the best we’ve heard, I should think. Mind you,” he added as his confidence once more deserted him, “the subject of the Exhibition, as you know, is one that holds a particular interest for me.”

  Miss Carpenter coloured prettily at this speech and appeared not to hear the Magistrate’s derisive: “Ha!” “The fellow is quite impossible!” mused the Collector crossly.

  Not everyone, the Collector was aware, is improved by the job he does in life; some people are visibly disimproved. The Magistrate had performed his duties for the Company conscientiously but they had not had a good effect on him: they had made him cynical, fatalistic, and too enamoured of the rational. His interest in phrenology, too, had had a bad effect; it had reinforced the determinism which had sapped his ideals, for he evidently believed that all one’s acts were limited by the shape of one’s skull. Given the swelling above and behind the ear on each side of his skull (he had once insinuated) there was not very much the Collector could do to remedy his inability to make rapid decisions … Though, of course, one could not be “absolutely sure” without making exact measurements. He had also begun to say something about a bump on each side of the Collector’s crown which signified “love of approbation”, but noticing, at last, how badly the Collector was responding to this opportunity for self-knowledge he had desisted with a sigh.

  “By the way, Tom,” said the Collector as the meeting broke up, “I found something odd on my desk in the office just now. Four chapatis, to be exact. And yesterday I found some in a despatch box. What d’you make of it?”

  “That’s strange. I found some too.” The two men looked at each other, surprised.

  Presently they heard that chapatis were turning up all over Krishnapur. The Padre had found some on the steps of the Church and had assumed that they were some sort of superstitious offering. Mr Barlow, who worked in the Salt Agency, had been brought some by his watchman. Mr Rayne who, in addition to his official duties at the opium factory, was the Honorary Secretary of the Krishnapur Mutton Club and of the Ice Club, was shown chapatis by the watchmen employed in the protection of both these institutions. It soon became clear that it was chiefly among the watchmen that the chapatis were circulating; they had been given them by watchmen from other districts, without apparently knowing for what purpose, and told to bake more and then pass them on again to watchmen of yet other districts. The Collector discovered by questioning his own watchman that it was he who had left the chapatis on the desk in his office. Although he had baked twelve more chapatis and passed them on, as he had been instructed, he had felt it his duty to inform the Collector Sahib and so had left them on his desk. He denied any knowledge of those in the despatch box and on the portico. Where these came from the Collector never discovered.

  In due course an even more curious fact emerged. The chapatis were appearing not just in Krishnapur but in stations all over northern India. Not only the Collector found this disturbing; for a while no one in Krishnapur could talk of anything else. Again and again the watchmen were interrogated, but they seemed genuinely to have no idea what the purpose of it had been. Some said they had passed on the chapatis because they believed it to be the order of the Government, that the purpose had been to see how quickly messages could be passed on.

  In Calcutta the Government held an enquiry, but no reason for the phenomenon came to light and the excitement it caused died down within a few days. It was suggested that it might be a superstitious attempt to avert an epidemic of cholera. Only the Collector remained convinced that trouble was coming. He half remembered having heard of a similar distribution of chapatis on some other occasion. Surely there
had been something of the kind before the mutiny at Vellore? He asked everyone he met whether they had heard of it, but no one had.

  Before leaving Krishnapur to escort his wife to Calcutta, where she was to embark for England, the Collector took a strange decision. He ordered the digging of a deep trench combined with a thick wall of earth “for drainage during the monsoon” all the way round the perimeter of the Residency compound.

  “The Collector’s weakness appears to have found him,” observed the Magistrate lightly to Mr Ford, one of the railway engineers, as they smilingly surveyed the progress of this work.

  2

  It was during this winter that George Fleury arrived in Calcutta with his sister and first set eyes on Louise Dunstaple. It was hoped that something might come of this meeting for Fleury was not married and Louise, though not quite his social equal, was considered to be at the very height of her beauty … indeed, she was being talked of everywhere in Calcutta as the beauty of the cold season. She was very fair and pale and a little remote; one or two people thought her “insipid”, which is a danger blonde people sometimes run. She was remote, at least, in Fleury’s presence, but once he glimpsed her at the racecourse, flirting chastely with some young officers.

  Dr Dunstaple in those days was the civil surgeon at Krishnapur. But somehow he had managed to get himself and his family to Calcutta for the cold season, leaving the Krishnapur civilians to the tender mercies of Dr McNab, who had taken over as regimental surgeon and who was known to be in favour of some of the most alarmingly direct methods known to civilized medicine.

  The Doctor had left his son Harry behind in Krishnapur, however. Thanks to the help of a friend in Fort William young Harry had been posted as an ensign to one of the native infantry regiments stationed at Krishnapur (or rather at Captainganj, five miles away) where his parents could keep an eye on him and see that he did not get into debt. Harry, who by now was a lieutenant, was quite content to be left behind when his family, which included little Fanny, aged twelve, went away to enjoy themselves in Calcutta; being “military” he tended these days to look with condescension upon civilians, and Calcutta was undoubtedly riddled with the fellows.

  Nor was Mrs Dunstaple displeased that her son should stay in Krishnapur, though this meant that he would be away from her side. Harry was at a vulnerable age and Calcutta swarmed with ambitious mammas anxious to expose young officers like Harry to the charms of their daughters. Alas, Mrs Dunstaple well knew that India was full of young lieutenants who had ruined their careers at the outset by disastrous marriages. All the same, this consideration, as applied to Harry, did not prevent her from hoping to be able to show off the charms of Louise before suitable young men. In the East the roses in a girl’s cheeks fly away so quickly, so very quickly (though, strictly speaking, this did not apply to Louise whose beauty was of the pale sort).

  The Season had been unusually successful, and not only for Louise (who had shown herself hard to please, however, in the matter of proposals). There had been many splendid balls and an unusual number of weddings and other entertainments. Moreover, the Turf, which had fallen into a decline in recent years had revived wonderfully. Of course, you would be likely to see the same mounts in the Planters’ Handicap as in the Merchants’ Plate or the Bengal Club Cup but it was a season of remarkable horses, for this was the era of Legerdemain, Mercury, and of the great mare, Beeswing. But the cold season was nearing its end by the time Fleury and his sister, Miriam, arrived and new faces like theirs were longed for in Calcutta drawing-rooms; (by this time all the old faces were so familiar that they could hardly be looked at any more). Besides, it was known that their father was a Director, with all the social standing which that implied in the Company’s India. It was also rumoured that young Fleury had scarcely been half an hour in India before Lord Canning had offered him a cigar. No wonder the news of his arrival caused some excitement in the Dunstaples’ house in Alipore.

  In spite of the very different ranks they now occupied in society Dr Dunstaple and Fleury’s father had been at school together forty years earlier and still, after all this time, exchanged a gruff little letter on sporting matters once or twice a year, as between schoolboys. The Doctor had reason to be glad of this friendship for it was thanks to Sir Herbert Fleury that young Harry had been awarded a cadetship at Addiscombe, the Company’s military college; these cadetships were in the gift of Directors.

  In the course of their correspondence the elder Fleury had often mentioned his own son, George, in amongst the grouse, the pheasants and the foxes … George was going to Oxford and perhaps in due course would come out to India. But the years had gone by without any sign of young Fleury. Nor was he mentioned in his father’s letters any more. Divining some domestic tragedy the Doctor had tactfully confined his own letters to pig-sticking and ortolans. Another two or three years had gone by and now, suddenly, when the Doctor was no longer expecting it, young Fleury had popped up again among the foxes. It seemed that he was coming to India to visit his mother’s grave (twenty years earlier when Sir Herbert himself had been in India his young wife had died, leaving him with two small children); at the same time he had been commissioned by the Court of Directors to compose a small volume describing the advances that civilization had made in India under the Company rule. But those were only the ostensible reasons for his visit … the real reason that young Fleury was coming was the need to divert his recently widowed sister, Miriam, whose husband, Captain Lang, had been killed before Sebastopol.

  Now George Fleury and his sister had arrived in Calcutta and Mrs Dunstaple had heard that he was making quite an impression. Even his clothes, said to be the last word in fashion, had become the talk of the city. It seemed that Fleury had been seen wearing what was positively the first “Tweedside” lounging jacket to make its appearance in the Bengal Presidency; this garment, daringly unwaisted, hung as straight as a sack of potatoes and was arousing the envy of every beau on the Chowringhee. At his wife’s behest the Doctor sat down immediately and penned a warm invitation to Fleury and Miriam to join the Dunstaples on a family picnic they were planning to take in the Botanical Gardens. But even as he sealed his letter he could not help wondering whether Fleury would turn out to be quite what his wife expected. The fact was that Harry, while at Addiscombe, had once spent a few days with the Fleurys in the country and had later told his father about it. He had seen very little of George during his stay but one night, as he was going to bed, pleasantly tired after a day spent hunting with the elder Fleury, he had opened his window to the whirring, moonlit night and heard, very faintly, the strains of a violin. He was certain that it must have been George. Next morning he had come upon this violin, some leaves of music damp with dew on a music-stand, and a tall medieval candelabrum… all this was in a “ruined” pagoda at the end of the rose garden.

  To the Doctor it seemed like evidence of the domestic tragedy he had feared for his friend. Perhaps George was insane? It certainly seemed disturbing that he had not gone hunting with Harry. And then, playing a violin to the owls that swooped across the starlit heavens, well, that did not seem very normal either.

  The ladies were discreetly watching from an upstairs window the following morning when a rather grimy gharry stopped in front of the Dunstaples’ house in Alipore. Even Louise was watching, though she denied being in the least interested in the sort of creature that might emerge. If she happened to be standing at the window it was simply because Fanny was standing there too and she was trying to comb Fanny’s hair.

  “Oh dear, you mustn’t let him see you or whatever will he think!” moaned Mrs Dunstaple. “Do be careful.” But she herself was peering out more eagerly than anyone.

  “Here he is!” cried Fanny as a rather rumpled looking young man scrambled out of the gharry and looked around in a dazed fashion. “Look how fat he is!”

  “Fanny!” scolded Mrs Dunstaple, but in a halfhearted way for it was perfectly true, he did look rather fat; but his sister looked beautiful and
made the ladies gasp by the simple elegance of her clothing.

  If the ladies were a little disappointed by their first glimpse of Fleury, the Doctor was definitely cheered. His misgivings had increased overnight so that when Fleury turned out to be a relatively normal young man, the doctor prepared himself to take a cautiously optimistic view of his friend’s son. But in no time caution gave way to outright satisfaction, and so pleased and confident did he become, so grateful that Fleury was not the effeminate individual he had been expecting, that he even began to hint to Fleury about the manly pleasures he might find in Calcutta … Young men have wild oats to sow, as he very well knew from having sown a few himself in his day … and he began to count off the pleasures of the city: the racecourse, the balls, the pretty women, the dinner parties and good fellowship and other entertainments. He himself, he hinted, forgetting that Fleury’s sister was a widow, as a younger man, had spent many a happy hour in the company of vivacious young widows and suchlike.