Plays 5

by Tom Stoppard

  Durance The Indian National Congress is all very well, but to the Moslems, Congress means Gandhi … a Hindu party in all but name.

  Flora Will Gandhi be arrested?

  Durance No, no. The salt tax is a lot of nonsense actually.

  Flora Yes, it does seem hard in a country like this.

  Durance Not that sort of nonsense. It works out at about four annas a year. Most Indians didn’t even know there was a salt tax.

  Flora Well, they do now.

  Durance Yes. They do now.

  Flora Let me have a go.

  There is a solar topee on the second horse. She puts the topee on her head, and puts her foot in the stirrup. Durance, laughing, helps Flora to heave herself on board the second horse.

  Oh yes, nothing to it. Yes, I can see the point of it, what fun, polo and knives-and-forks. Is that all you need to govern India?

  Durance (laughs) Oh yes. There’s about twelve hundred ICS, that’s four of our chaps for every million Indians.

  Flora Why do the Indians let them?

  Durance Why not? They’re better at it.

  Flora Are they?

  Durance Ask them.

  Flora Who?

  Durance The natives. Ask them. We’ve pulled this country together. It’s taken a couple of hundred years with a hiccup or two but the place now works.

  Flora That’s what you love, then? What you created?

  Durance Oh no – it’s India I love. I’ll show you.

  The horses whinny. Flora’s horse lurches just enough to almost throw her. She squeals, quite happily.

  Durance Knees together!

  The scene becomes exterior. The actors remain astride the gym horses.

  Sunrise.

  Ground mist.

  The horses whinny, the riders shift and rebalance themselves, Flora whooping with alarm, and birds are crying out, distancing rapidly.

  Durance Sand grouse! Are you all right?

  Flora They startled me.

  Durance Time to trot – sun’s up.

  Flora Oops – David – I’ll have to tell you – stop! It’s my first time on a horse, you see.

  Durance Yes, I could tell.

  Flora (miffed) Could you? Even walking? I felt so proud when we were walking.

  Durance No, no good, I’m afraid.

  Flora Oh, damn you. I’m going to get off.

  Durance No, no, just sit. He’s a chair. Breathe in. India smells wonderful, doesn’t it?

  Flora Out here it does.

  Durance You should smell chapattis cooking on a camel-dung fire out in the Thar Desert. Perfume!

  Flora What were you doing out there?

  Durance Cooking chapattis on a camel-dung fire. (laughs) I’ll tell you where it all went wrong with us and India. It was the Suez Canal. It let the women in.

  Flora Oh!

  Durance Absolutely. When you had to sail round the Cape this was a man’s country and we mucked in with the natives. The memsahibs put a stop to that. The memsahib won’t muck in, won’t even be alone in a room with an Indian.

  Flora Oh …

  Durance Don’t point your toes out. May I ask you a personal question?

  Flora No.

  Durance All right.

  Flora I wanted to ask you something. How did the Resident know I came to India for my health?

  Durance It’s his business to know. Shoulders back. Reins too slack.

  Flora But I didn’t tell anybody.

  Durance Obviously you did.

  Flora Only Mr Das.

  Durance Oh well, there you are. Jolly friendly of you, of course, sharing a confidence, lemonade, all that, but they can’t help themselves bragging about it.

  Flora (furious) Rubbish!

  Durance Well … I stand corrected.

  Flora I’m sorry. I don’t believe you, though.

  Durance Righto.

  Flora I’m sorry. Pax.

  Durance Flora.

  Flora No.

  Durance Would you marry me?

  Flora No.

  Durance Would you think about it?

  Flora No. Thank you.

  Durance Love at first sight, you see. Forgive me.

  Flora Oh, David.

  Durance Knees together.

  Flora ’Fraid so.

  She laughs without malice but unrestrainedly.

  The horses trot.

  Mrs Swan and Anish are sitting in the garden with gin-and-tonic, and with the watercolour painting. The small painting has remained on the garden table.

  Mrs Swan I was a shandy drinker until I went out. G-and-T takes me right back to Rawalpindi. The bottles used to say Indian tonic water. I was quite surprised to discover when Eric got home leave that it was Indian everywhere, and always had been. Quinine, you see. Very good for staving off malaria, though interestingly quite useless, it seemed, without the gin. Eric swore by it, the gin part, he pointed out how it got dozens of our friends through malaria until their livers gave out. Then he had a stroke on the cricket field, silly goose, umpiring without a hat. What happened to your father?

  Anish I was in England when my father died. It was Christmas Day. My first Christmas in London, in a house of student bedsits in Ladbroke Grove. An unhappy day. All the other students had gone home to their families, naturally. I was the only one left. No one had invited me.

  Mrs Swan Well, having a Hindu for Christmas can be tricky. Eric would invite his Assistant for Christmas Day lunch. It quite spoiled the business of the paper hats.

  Anish The telephone rang all day.

  Mrs Swan The mistletoe was another problem.

  Anish It would stop and then start again. I ignored it. The phone was never for me. But finally I went up and answered it, and it was my uncle calling from Jummapur to say my father was dead.

  Mrs Swan Oh, and at Christmas!

  Anish I went home. It was still ‘home’. But to my shame I found the rituals of mourning distasteful. I wanted to return to England, to my new friends. And I did. I was in England when I learned that my father had left me his tin trunk which had always stood at the foot of his bed. It arrived finally and it was locked. So I broke the hasp. There was nothing of value in the trunk that I could see. It was full of paper, letters, certificates, school report cards … There was a newspaper cutting, however – a report of a trial of three men accused of conspiring to cause a disturbance at the Empire Day celebrations in Jummapur in 1930. My father’s name was there. Nirad Das, aged thirty-four. That is how I know the year. His birthday was in April and Empire Day was in May.

  Mrs Swan May the 24th, Queen Victoria’s birthday.

  Anish This is how I found out. My father never told me.

  Mrs Swan And this painting?

  Anish Yes. Underneath everything was this painting. A portrait of a woman, nude, but in a composition in the old Rajasthani style. Even more amazing, a European woman. I couldn’t imagine who she was or what it meant. I kept it, of course, all these years. Then, a week ago, in the shop window … It was like seeing a ghost. Not her ghost; his. It was my father’s hand, his work, I had grown up watching him work. I had seen a hundred original Nirad Dases, and here was his work, not once but repeated twenty times over, a special display. The Collected Letters of Flora Crewe, and I saw that it was the same woman.

  Mrs Swan Yes. Oh yes, it’s Flora. It’s as particular as an English miniature. A watercolour, isn’t it?

  Anish Watercolour and gouache.

  Mrs Swan He hasn’t made her Indian.

  Anish Well, she was not Indian.

  Mrs Swan Yes, I know, I’m not gaga, I’m only old. I mean he hasn’t painted her flat. Everything else looks Indian, like enamel … the moon and stars done with a pastry cutter. The birds singing in the border … and the tree in bloom, so bright. Is it day or night? And everything on different scales. You can’t tell if the painter is in the house or outside looking in.

  Anish She is in a house within a house. The Mughals brought miniature painting from Persia
, but Muslim and Hindu art are different. The Muslim artists were realists. But to us Hindus, everything is to be interpreted in the language of symbols.

  Mrs Swan And an open book on the bed, that’s Flora.

  Anish Yes. That is her. Look where this flowering vine sheds its leaves and petals, they are falling to the ground. I think my father knew your sister was dying.

  Mrs Swan Oh …

  Anish She is not posing, you see, but resting. The vine embraces the dark trunk of the tree.

  Mrs Swan Now really, Mr Das, sometimes a vine is only a vine. Whether she posed for him or whether it’s a work of the imagination …

  Anish Oh, but the symbolism –

  Mrs Swan Codswallop! Your ‘house within a house’, as anyone can see, is a mosquito net. And the book is Emily Eden, it was in her suitcase. Green with a brown spine. You should read the footnotes!

  Pike enters.

  Pike The book was Up the Country (1866). Miss Eden was accompanying her brother, the Governor-General Lord Auckland, on an official progress up country. The tour, supported by a caravan of ten thousand people, including Auckland’s French chef, lasted thirty months, and Emily wrote hundreds of letters to sisters and friends at home, happily unaware that the expedition’s diplomatic and strategic accomplishment was to set the stage for the greatest military disaster ever to befall the British under arms, the destruction of the army in Afghanistan.

  Dilip enters and joins Pike. They are in the garden/courtyard of the Jummapur Palace Hotel, which was formerly the Palace of the Rajah of Jummapur. They are brought drinks – reassuringly American cola – served by a waiter decked out in the authentic livery of the old regime. Thus, the servants operate freely between the two periods.

  Pike I started off shoving rupees … you know … through the window … But it gets impossible. You can’t … there’s more of them than you can ever … I mean there’s nothing to be in between, you have to be St Francis or some rich bastard who ignores them, there’s nothing between that can touch it, the problem. Not St Francis, I didn’t mean any disrespect, they’re not birds – but Mother Teresa, some kind of saint. I lock the doors now. That’s the truth. First thing I do now when the taxi hits a red light, I check the doors, wind up the window. But this one, she had this baby at the breast, I mean she looked sixty, and – well, this is the thing, she had a stump, you see, she had no hand, just this stump, up against the glass, and it was … raw … so when the light changed, the stump left this … smear …

  Dilip You have to understand that begging is a profession. Like dentistry. Like shining shoes. It’s a service. Every so often, you need to get a tooth filled, or your shoes shined, or to give alms. So when a beggar presents himself to you, you have to ask yourself – do I need a beggar today? If you do, give him alms. If you don’t, don’t. You have beggars in America.

  Pike We have bums, winos, people down on their luck … it’s not a service, for God’s sake.

  Dilip Ah well, we are in a higher stage of development.

  Pike Is that Hinduism, Dilip?

  Dilip (kindly) It was a witticism, Eldon.

  Pike Oh … right. What are you, actually?

  Dilip I am a book critic, Eldon, but I have many fish to fry before I depart this vale of tears.

  Pike laughs experimentally.

  Oh, but I do.

  Pike Sorry. When you’re in India a lot of things sound … you know, Indian.

  Dilip Now you see why the Theosophical Society transplanted itself from America. (with his drink) Let’s drink to Madame Blavatsky.

  Pike Who’s she?

  Dilip What? Don’t you know ‘Bagpipe Music’?

  Pike Oh … (yeah).

  Dilip ‘It’s no go the yogi man, it’s no go Blavatsky …’

  Pike MacNeice, right.

  Dilip Madame Blavatsky was a famous name in India, she was the Theosophical Society. Of course, she was long dead by 1930, and now long forgotten, except in my favourite poem in the Oxford Book of English Verse.

  Pike Why are you so crazy about English, Dilip?

  Dilip I’m not!

  Pike You love it!

  Dilip Yes, I do. I love it.

  Pike Yes. You do.

  Dilip (cheerfully) Yes, it’s a disaster for us! Fifty years of Independence and we are still hypnotized! Jackets and ties must be worn! English-model public schools for the children of the elite, and the voice of Bush House is heard in the land. Gandhi would fast again, I think. Only, this time he’d die. It was not for this India, I think, that your Nirad Das and his friends held up their home-made banner at the Empire Day gymkhana. It was not for this that he threw his mango at the Resident’s car. What a pity, though, that all his revolutionary spirit went into his life and none into his art.

  Pike Do you think he had a relationship with Flora Crewe?

  Dilip But of course – a portrait is a relationship.

  Pike No, a relationship.

  Dilip I don’t understand you.

  Pike He painted her nude.

  Dilip I don’t think so.

  Pike Somebody did.

  Dilip In 1930, an Englishwoman, an Indian painter… it is out of the question.

  Pike Not if they had a relationship.

  Dilip Oh … a relationship? Is that what you say? (amused) A relationship!

  Pike This is serious.

  Dilip (laughing) Oh, it’s very serious. What do you say for – well, for ‘relationship’?

  Pike Buddies.

  Dilip almost falls off his chair with merriment.

  Please, Dilip …

  Dilip (recovering) Well, we will never know. You are constructing an edifice of speculation on a smudge of paint on paper, which no longer exists.

  Pike It must exist – look how far I’ve come to find it.

  Dilip Oh, very Indian! Well, if so, there are two ways to proceed. First, you can go around Jummapur looking at every piece of paper you come to. Second, you can stand in one place and look at every piece of paper that comes to you.

  A waiter brings a note to Pike, and leaves.

  Pike (reading the note) He’s coming down. I thought maybe he’d ask us upstairs.

  Dilip Don’t be offended.

  Pike I’m not offended.

  Dilip He is not the Rajah now, he is an ordinary politician. He has your letter. I hope he can help you. In any case, it is better if I leave you so he does not need to wear two hats.

  Pike What do I call him?

  Dilip Your Highness. He will correct you.

  Dilip leaves.

  Flora enters, dressed for tiffin with his Highness the Rajah of Jummapur.

  Flora ‘Interrupted – by a Rolls Royce, darling, so now it’s tomorrow so to speak, and yesterday I got several days’ worth of India all in one, dawn to dawn, starting off on horseback with my suitor, lunch, to say the least of it, with a Rajah, and – oh dear, guess what. You won’t approve. Quite right. I think it’s time to go. Love ’em and leave ’em.’

  Pike The man was probably the Junior Political Agent at the Residency, Captain David Arthur Durance, who took FC dancing and horse riding. He was killed at Kohima in March 1944 when British and Indian troops halted the advance of the Japanese forces.

  Flora ‘I feel tons better, though. The juices are starting to flow again, see enclosed.’

  Pike ‘Pearl’, included in Indian Ink (1932).

  Flora ‘I’ll send you fair copies of anything I finish in case I get carried away by monsoons or tigers, and if you get a pound for them put it in the Sasha Fund.’

  Pike The reference is obscure.

  Flora ‘I was let off church parade, being a suspected Bolshie, and I was writing the last bit on my verandah after my early-morning ride when what should turn up but a Rolls circa 1912 but brand new, as it were, with a note from his Highness the Rajah of Jummapur going on about my spiritual beauty and inviting me to tiffin.’

  Rajah (entering) The spiritual beauty of Jummapur has been increased a thousandfold by
your presence, Miss Crewe! I understand you are a connoisseur of the automobile.

  Flora ‘Well, what is a poor girl to do? Hop into the back of the Rolls, that’s what.’

  The Rajah is not very formally dressed – mostly in white, a long tight-fitting coat and leggings. He shakes hands with Flora who has stood up.

  Rajah How delightful that you were able to come!

  Flora Oh, how sweet of you to ask me … your Highness.

  Rajah Unfortunately I cannot show them all at once because I have many more motor cars than mechanics, of course. But we can sit and chat between the scenes.

  Flora I would be happy to walk around them, your Highness.

  Rajah Oh, but that would deny them their essential being! They would not be automobiles, if we did the moving and they did the sitting.

  A stately concours d’elegance of motor cars, as distinguished as they are invisible, begins to pass in front of them.

  Flora Oh –! What a beauty! A Duesenberg! And what’s that? – Oh, my goodness, it’s a Type 41 Bugatti! I’ve never seen one! And a … is it an Isotta-Fraschini?

  Rajah Possibly. I acquired it by way of settlement of a gambling debt at Bendor Westminster’s. Do you know him?

  Flora I don’t know any dukes.

  Rajah He’s my neighbour in the South of France. I go to the South of France every year, you see, for my health. (He laughs.) But you have come to India for your health!

  Flora (not pleased) Well … yes, Your Highness. Everybody seems to know everything about me.

  Rajah Mr Churchill was in the house party. He paints. Do you know Mr Churchill?

  Flora Not very well.

  Rajah I was at school with him, apparently. I can’t remember him at all, but I read Mr Churchill’s speeches with great interest, and …

  Flora Oh – look at that!

  Rajah (looking) Ah yes, I couldn’t resist the headlamps. So enormous, like the eggs of a chromium bird.

  Flora Yes – a Brancusi!

  Rajah You know them all, Miss Crewe! … Yes, Mr Churchill is perfectly right, don’t you agree, Miss Crewe?

  Flora About what exactly, Your Highness?

  Rajah In his own words, the loss of India would reduce Britain to a minor power.

  Flora That may be, but one must consider India’s interests, too.

  Rajah I must consider Jummapur’s interests.

  Flora Yes, of course, but aren’t they the same thing?