The Siege of Krishnapur

by James Gordon Farrell

  Miriam was content, however. The drowsy scent of the poppy hung everywhere in the hot darkness of the warehouses and lulled her senses. She felt wonderfully at peace and was sorry when at last the tour came to an end and she was taken to watch the workmen making the finished opium into great balls, each as big as a man’s head, which would be packed forty to a chest and auctioned in Calcutta. Each of these head-sized balls, explained Mr Simmons quietly but with the air of someone speaking his words into a high wind, would fetch about seventy-six shillings, while to the ryot and his family the Government paid a mere four shillings a pound. As he talked he nervously scratched his peeling wrists and brow while Miriam, diverted, sleepily tried to think of a sensible question and watched the falling flakes of skin drift to the ground.

  When the Collector returned, Miriam smuggled a last yawn into her gloved hand, said goodbye to Mr Simmons and climbed back into the landau, which now had its hood raised against the sun. Mr Simmons blushed again and a few more flakes of skin drifted away. Miriam raised her gloved hand to wave and the yawn it was holding seemed to float away on the poppy-scented air. She would have liked to recommend a certain pomade to Mn Simmons but was afraid that in doing so she might crush him like a moth beneath her shoe. How sleepy she felt! If the Collector began to talk to her she would never be able to stay awake.

  Before they had properly emerged from the jungle of scrub on to the road an incident occurred to revive her. A naked man suddenly stepped out on to the track they were following. He was tall and well built; in one hand he carried the trident of the devotee of Siva, in the other a brass pot containing smouldening embers. His hair and beard hung in untidy yellowish ropes over his bronzed body, almost as far as his male pants. In a moment the landau had creaked and swayed past him; the path was deeply rutted and they kept rising and falling, as if in a small boat breasting a succession of unexpected waves. The Collector could not help turning to Miriam sternly, shocked on her behalf… but Miriam’s cheeks had only pinkened slightly and she said with a faint smile: “You must tell me why such men do not wear clothes, Mr Hopkins. In winter they must surely feel the cold.”

  “I believe that he must belong to a Hindu sect which has renounced the material world. Such men see their nakedness as a symbol of this renunciation and keep a fire constantly burning at their side to signify the burning up of earthly desires.” He added reluctantly: “One can’t help but admire the rigour with which they pursue their beliefs.”

  “Even though they follow an erroneous path?”

  “One has to admit, Mrs Lang, that few Christians follow the true one with as much zeal. Indeed, this renders the conversion of the native very difficult for beside this ascetic fervour he sees the Christian priest living in a comfortable house with a wife and family … and I fear he’s not impressed. Not only the clergyman but the whole Christian community must seem very dissolute to him, I’m afraid … What use is it if we bring the advantages of our civilization to India without also displaying a superior morality? I believe that we are all part of a society which by its communal efforts of faith and reason is gradually raising itself to a higher state … There are rules of morality to be followed if we are to advance, just as there are rules of scientific investigation … Mrs Lang, we are raising ourselves, however painfully, so that mankind may enjoy in the future a superior life which now we can hardly conceive! The foundations on which the new men will build their lives are Faith, Science, Respectability, Geology, Mechanical Invention, Ventilation and Rotation of Crops! …”

  The Collector talked on and on but Miriam, soothed by the heat and the poppy fumes, cradled by the worn leather upholstery of the landau, found that her eyelids kept creeping down in spite of herself. Even when the Collector began to shout, as he presently did, about the progress of mankind, about the ventilation of populous quarters of cities, about the conquest of ignorance and prejudice by the glistening sabre of man’s intelligence, she could not manage to keep her eyes properly open.

  And so, as the landau creaked away into the distance, dust pouring back from the chimneys of its wheels, the Collector’s shouts rang emptily over the Indian plain which stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction, and Miriam fell at last into a deep sleep.

  In the meantime, although Fleuny had not yet noticed it, Hari’s good humour had deserted him. He continued to point things out to Fleury … some embroidered rugs and parasols, and a collection of sea-shells, but he did so carelessly, as if it were of no importance to him whether on not Fleury found them of interest.

  “You know also how to make daguerrotype, I suppose.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Not? Ah? But I thought all advance people …” Hari raised his eyebrows in surprise.

  “Hari,” said Fleuny presently, and from his tone it was hard to tell whether he was breathless with excitement or was simply having trouble keeping up with his host, who was now bounding along a dim inner corridor at the greatest speed. “I say, I hope you don’t mind me calling you Hari, but I feel that we understand each other so well …”

  The speed and gloom which attended their progress prevented Fleury from seeing Hari’s frostily raised eyebrow.

  “Would you mind if we went a little slower? It’s fearfully hot.” But Hari appeared not to hear this request.

  “Do we understand each other? Sit here, please.”

  They had entered a whitewashed room giving on to the courtyard Fleuny had seen earlier from above. No sooner had he stepped over the threshold than he was seized by a fit of coughing, for the air in here was laden with mercury vapour and a variety of other fumes no less toxic, emanating from crystals and solutions of chlorine, bromine, iodine, and potassium cyanide. On a table there was a mercury bath, a metal container in the shape of an invented pyramid with a spirit lamp already burning beneath it. A camera box had been placed on an ornate metal stand, pointing at a chair by the window. Still coughing, Fleury was steered towards the chair and made to sit down; it had a nod at the back surmounted by an iron crescent for keeping the sitter’s head still. Fleuny’s head was forced firmly back into it and some adjustments were made behind him, tightening two thin metal clamps which nestled in his hair above each ear.

  “Of course we do, Hari,” said Fleury warmly, though rather stiffly because of the immobility of his head. “I can see you feel the same about all those not very useful things you have just been showing me as I feel about the sort of junk the Collector has in the Residency. What you and I object to is the emptiness of the life behind all these objects, their materialism in other words. Objects are useless by themselves. How pathetic they are compared with noble feelings! What a poor and limited world they reveal beside the world of the eternal soul!” Fleury paused, guiltily aware that he was indulging “feelings” once more. “As you were walking along just now pointing out how uninteresting everything was, I suddenly realized that it makes no difference that I was born in England and that you were born in India … Your ancestors have been taking an interest in just the same sort of irrelevant rubbish as mine have. D’you see what I mean?”

  It was hard to tell whether Hari saw what he meant on not, for he merely grunted and fished in the pocket of his waistcoat for his watch; this was a gold watch, as it happened, but one would not have thought so, because Hari had spent so much time in the mercury-laden atmosphere of this room that both watch and chain had become coated with a white amalgam. He was frowning now as he picked up a copper plate coated with silver and began to polish it with soft leather and pumice, using slow, deliberate strokes parallel to the edges of the plate, first in one direction, then in the other.

  “A spear that shoots someone as well as stabbing him? Ludicrous! And all these other things you have shown me, collections of this and that, sea-shells and carved ivory, disgraceful pictures, chairs made of antlers and astronomical clocks, d’you know what they remind me of?”

  “No,” said Hari sullenly. He was now looking pale as well as angry, perhaps from his
exertions or because he had inhaled too much mercury vapour … He was still polishing the silvered copper plate but had exchanged the leather for a pad of silk.

  “They remind me of the Great Exhibition!”

  “They had disgraceful pictures in Great Exhibition, I did not know?” said Hari, curious in spite of himself and slightly mollified by this comparison.

  “No, of course not. But what I mean is that the Great Exhibition was not, as everyone said it was, a landmark of civilization; it was for the most part a collection of irrelevant rubbish such as your ancestors might well have collected.”

  Hari winced at this reference to his ancestors and turned paler than ever; his polishing of the plate intensified. But Fleury did not notice. He was seething with excitement and would have sprung to his feet, gesticulating, had not his head been firmly wedged in the iron ring.

  “Take the Indian Court in the Crystal Palace, it was full of useless objects. There were spears, a life-sized elephant with a double howdah, swords, umbrellas, jewels, and rich cloths … the very things you have just been showing me. In fact, the whole Exhibition was composed merely of collections of this and that, utterly without significance… There was an Observatory Hive … ah, the tedious comparisons that were made between mankind and the hive’s ‘quietly-employed inhabitants, those living emblems of industry and order.’!”

  Hari, whose face remained stony and expressionless, had finished polishing; the plate no longer had a silver appearance but seemed black. He now had to focus the lens of the camera on Fleury.

  “Take your hands off chest, Fleury,” he ordered, for Fleury was gripping his lapels and the movement of his breathing would undoubtedly blur the image.

  “I’m afraid I’m not making myself very clear,” Fleury groaned; he had become carried away with his denunciation of materialism and was dizzy, moreover, with the heat and the fumes of chemicals and the pressure of the clamps on his skull. “What I mean is that collections of objects, whether weapons or sea-shells or a life-sized stuffed elephant, are nothing but distractions for people who have been unable to make a real spiritual advance.”

  “And Science? Were there not many wonderful machines?”

  “It’s true that the Agricultural Court was often full of bushy-whiskered farmers staring at strange engines … But reflect, these engines were merely improved methods for doing the wrong thing.”

  “The wrong thing! I am sad, Fleury, that you should be so very backwards. These machines make more food, more money, save very much labour,” said Hari coldly and vanished under a tent of dark muslin hung oven a frame in one corner of the room. An instant later his head reappeared from beneath the draped muslin, black eyes glittering in his pale, flabby face. “And this that I am doing to you at the moment, perhaps this is not progress also!” he demanded angrily. His head vanished again.

  Fleury gazed at the muslin tent bewildered. He could hear Hari muttering angrily to himself as he made the metal plate sensitive to light by passing it through his two wooden coating boxes, which between them were largely responsible for the toxic fumes which Fleury could feel assailing his powers of reason. Each box contained a blue-green glass jar: in one jar there was a small amount of iodine crystals, in the other, a mysterious substance called “quickstuff” which contained bromine and chlorine compounds and served to increase the sensitivity of the plate. By holding the plate over the evaporating iodine crystals for less than a minute Hari allowed a thin layer of light-sensitive iodide of silver to form oven it; when it had turned orange-yellow he held it oven the “quickstuff” until it turned deep pink, then back oven the iodine for a few seconds. Then, grinding his teeth with rage, he slipped the sensitized plate into a wooden frame to protect it from light while it was not in the camera, and emerged trembling from his dark muslin tent.

  “Perhaps this is not progress also?” he repeated, waving the boxed plate in front of Fleuny’s pinioned head in a threatening manner. “To make metal sensitive to light.”

  “Yes, it is progress, of course … but, well, only in the art of making pictures. Mind you, that is no doubt wonderful in its way. But the only real progress would be to make a man’s heart sensitive to love, to Nature, to his fellow men, to the world of spiritual joy. My dean Hari, Plato did more for the human race than Monsieur Daguerre.”

  Hari put the plate in the camera and pulled out the protective slide. “I beg you not to insult any more my ancestors nor this very worthy gentleman, Mr Daguenre.”

  “Please don’t think I mean to insult them,” cried Fleury. “That’s the very last thing I want to do. It’s just that we must change the direction of our society before it’s too late and we all become like these engines which will soon be galloping across India on railway lines. An engine has no heart!”

  “Keep still!” Hari, watch in hand, snatched the cap off the lens and by the look on his face he might have been wishing it was the muzzle of a cannon that was pointing at Fleury.

  “Oh dear!” thought Fleury, “I seem to have offended him somehow.”

  Hari counted off two minutes, replaced the lens cap, snatched out the plate and slipped it over the heated mercury bath. Fleury goggled at him, dismayed.

  “I am very sad,” declared Hari with frosty dignity, “that you, Fleury, should reveal yourself so frightfully backward.”

  He shook his head over the mercury bath with lofty distress. “This will be portrait of very backward man indeed, I am very much regretting to say.”

  A discouraged silence fell between the two young men as they waited for the fine mercury globules to settle on the pants of the plate which had been affected by light. When this process had been accomplished Hari picked the plate up with a pair of pliers and poured over it a solution of hyposuiphite of soda to wash off the unchanged iodide and make the image permanent; then, still holding it with pliers he washed it with a solution of gold chloride to increase the brilliance of the image. All that now remained to be done was to wash the plate in water, dry it over the spirit lamp, and put it into a frame behind glass for the image was as delicate as the wing of a butterfly and as easily harmed. This done, Hari sighed and took it over to show Fleury, whose head was still clamped in the ring. Hari’s anger had given way to sadness and disapproval.

  “It looks as if it has been drawn by the brush of the fairy queen Mab,” said Fleury, hoping that this conceit would soothe Hari’s wounded feelings.

  “It is the portrait of a very backward man indeed,” replied Hari severely. And with that he turned and trudged out of the room with heavy steps, leaving Fleury to free himself from the clamps as best he could.

  6

  The river which flowed, when there was any water in it, past the Maharajah’s palace to wander here and there on the vast and empty plain passed alongside the cantonment and the now yellow lawns of the Residency, beneath the iron bridge, along the native town (which had been built, unlike the cantonment mainly on the western bank so that the devout would be facing the rising sun as they stood on the steps of the bathing ghat), past the burning ghat, and out on to the plain again, reaching at long last, some eight miles from Krishnapur, a stretch of half a mile where it ran between embankments. At this point the plain ceased to be quite flat. There was a slight depression in it of four or five miles in circumference, made by the footprint of one of the giant gods who had strode back and forth across India in prehistoric times settling their disputes and hurling pieces of the continent at one another. The land was particularly fertile here, either because it had been blessed by the footprint, as the Hindus believed, on, as the British believed, because it was regularly flooded and coated with a nourishing silt.

  This flooding, though, was a nuisance and it grew worse every year because of the attrition of the embankments. Cattle were drowned and crops lost. To stop the flooding by reinforcing the embankments was the great ambition of both the Collector and the Magistrate. While the Collector had been visiting the opium factory the Magistrate, accompanied by his bearer, Abd
allah, had ridden out of Krishnapur to visit the embankments and consult the landowners whose coolies would be needed for the work of reinforcement. Why go to so much trouble when the river could be persuaded not to flood by the sacrifice of a black goat on its banks, the landowners had wanted to know.

  “But that doesn’t work. You’ve tried it before. Every year the floods are worse.”

  The landowners remained silent out of polite amazement that anybody could be so stupid as to doubt the efficacy of a sacrifice when properly performed by Brahmins. They were torn between amusement and distress at such obtuseness.

  “The Sircar will make you supply labour,” declared the Magistrate at last, but he knew that the Government could do no such thing in the present state of the country, and the landowners knew that he knew. The hollowness of this threat embarrassed them. To spare the Magistrate’s feelings they feigned expressions of sorrow, alarm, of despair at the prospect of this coercion … but when the Magistrate had at last ridden away, though not before he was out of earshot, they shouted with laughter, held their sides, and even rolled in the dust in undignified glee. Their glee redoubled when soon after the Magistrate’s departure they heard that there had been a massacre of the feringhees at Captainganj. Then an argument broke out which began playfully but soon became serious, involving prestige. The argument was this: would the Magistrate get back to Krishnapun alive or would he be killed on the way?

  The Magistrate and Abdallah (who, although he enjoyed seeing Mr Willoughby discomfited, was saddened that it should be Hindus who gained an advantage over him) rode slowly back to the cantonment. The Magistrate ignored the heat of the sun which beat down on his pith helmet and touched off his blazing ginger whiskers. How he hated stupidity and ignorance! He hoped that the river, when it broke its banks again this year, would drown the stupid men he had just been talking to … but he knew that this was not likely: when disasters occur it is only the poor who suffer. Abdallah wanted to cheer up the Magistrate by telling him a Mohammedan joke against the Hindus.