by Amitav Ghosh
In the past, she had been dismissive of Mahatma Gandhi’s political thinking: non-violence, she had thought, was a philosophy of wish-fulfilment. She saw now that the Mahatma had been decades ahead of her in his thinking. It was rather the romantic ideas of rebellion that she had nurtured in New York that were pipe dreams. She remembered the words of the Mahatma, which she had often read and always disregarded: that the movement against colonialism was an uprising of unarmed Indians against those who bore arms—both Indians and British—and that its chosen instruments were the weapons of the weaponless, its very weakness its source of strength.
Once she had made up her mind, she was quick to act. She wrote to the Mahatma offering her services, and he, in return, invited her to his ashram at Wardha.
twenty-one
Even when they were very young, Uma’s nephew and older niece, the twins, were celebrated for their good looks. Manju and Arjun shared a feature that gave them an unusual charm: a dimple that appeared when they smiled, but only on one cheek, the left for Manju and the right for Arjun. When they were together it was as though a circuit had been completed, a symmetry restored.
The attention that her looks brought her made Manju self-conscious about her appearance from an early age. She grew up with a keen awareness of the impression she made on people. In this one regard Arjun was her opposite: he was easy-going to the point of slovenliness and liked nothing better than to lounge around the house in a threadbare vest, with a longyi knotted around his waist.
Arjun was the kind of boy of whom teachers complain that their performance is incorrigibly below their potential. Everybody knew that he had the intelligence and ability to do well in school but his interests appeared to be directed only towards ogling girls and reading novels. At mealtimes, long after everyone else was done, he would linger lazily over his plate, chewing on fish bones and sucking the last bits of dal-sodden rice from his fingers. As he grew older, Arjun became a cause of increasing concern to everyone in the family. People began to shake their heads, saying, ‘Is that boy ever going to make anything of himself?’
Then one hot April day, Lankasuka’s afternoon torpor was shattered by the sound of Arjun’s voice uttering wild whoops and cries. Everyone in the house went running to the back balcony to look down into the courtyard.
‘Arjun, what do you think you’re doing?’ his mother said.
‘I’ve got in! I’ve got in!’ Arjun was dancing around the courtyard, dressed in his usual dirty vest and torn longyi, waving a letter in one hand.
‘Got into what?’
‘The Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun.’
‘Idiot boy. What are you talking about?’
‘Yes; it’s true.’ Arjun came running up the stairs, his face flushed, his hair falling over his eyes. ‘They’ve accepted me as an officer cadet.’
‘But how could this happen? How did they even know who you are?’
‘I sat for an examination, Ma. I went with—’ he named a school-friend—‘and I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think I’d get in.’
‘But it’s impossible.’
‘Look.’
They passed the letter from hand to hand, marvelling at the fine stiff notepaper and the embossed emblem in the top right-hand corner. They could not have been more astonished if he’d announced that he’d sprouted wings or grown a tail. In Calcutta at that time, to join the army was almost unheard of. For generations, recruitment into the British Indian army had been ruled by racial policies that excluded most men in the country, including those from Bengal. Nor was it possible, until quite recently, for Indians to enter the army as commissioned officers. The founding of the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun dated back only five years and the fact that some of its seats were open to public examination had gone largely unnoticed.
‘How could you do this, Arjun? And without saying anything to us?’
‘I’m telling you, I never thought I’d get in. Besides, everyone’s always saying that I’ll never amount to anything—so I thought all right, let’s see.’
‘You wait till your father gets home.’
But Arjun’s father was not at all displeased by the news: on the contrary, he was so glad that he immediately organised an expedition of thanksgiving to the temple at Kalighat.
‘The boy’s settled now and there’s nothing more for us to worry about . . .’ Relief was plainly visible on his face. ‘This is a ready-made career: whether he does well or not he’ll be pushed up the ladder. At the end, there’ll be an excellent pension. So long as he makes it through the academy, he’s taken care of for the rest of his life.’
‘But he’s just a boy, and what if he gets injured? Or worse still?’
‘Nonsense. The chances are very slight. It’s just a job like any other. Besides, think of the status, the prestige . . .’
Uma’s response came as even more of a surprise. Since the time when she’d visited Mahatma Gandhi, at his ashram in Wardha, she had changed her political affiliations. She had joined the Congress Party and had started working with the women’s wing. Arjun had expected that she would try to argue him out of signing up. But what she said instead was: ‘The Mahatma thinks that the country can only benefit from having men of conscience in the army. India needs soldiers who won’t blindly obey their superiors . . .’
Manju’s career took a very different turn from her twin’s. At the age of twenty-one she came to the attention of a prominent film personality—a director whose niece happened to be her classmate in college. A man of formidable reputation, the director was then engaged in a very public search for a lead actress. The story of his hunt had caused huge excitement in Calcutta.
Manju was spotted, unbeknownst to herself, while at college: the first she knew of it was when she was handed an invitation to a screen test. Manju’s instinct was to refuse: she knew herself to be shy and self-conscious and it was hard for her to imagine that she could ever enjoy acting. But when she returned to Lankasuka that afternoon, she found that the invitation was not quite so easily disposed of as she had imagined. She began to have doubts.
Manju’s bedroom had a large window: it was usually while sitting on the sill that she and Arjun had talked in the past. She’d never before had to decide on anything entirely on her own; she had always had Arjun to confer with. But Arjun was now many hundreds of miles away, at his battalion headquarters in Saharanpur, in northern India.
She sat on the sill alone, braiding and unbraiding her hair and watching the afternoon’s bathers splashing in the nearby lake. Presently she rose and went to fetch the Huntley and Palmer’s biscuit tin in which she kept Arjun’s letters. The earliest ones dated back to his days as a ‘gentleman-cadet’ and the notepaper was embossed with the emblem of the Indian Military Academy. The pages crackled between her fingers. How well he wrote—in proper sentences and paragraphs. When they were together they always spoke Bengali, but the letters were in English—an unfamiliar, idiomatic English, with words of slang that she didn’t recognise and couldn’t find in the dictionary. He’d gone to a restaurant ‘in town’ with another cadet, Hardayal Singh—known as ‘Hardy’ to his friends—and they’d eaten ‘lashings’ of sandwiches and drunk ‘oodles’ of beer.
His latest letter had arrived just a few days ago. The notepaper was different now and it bore the insignia of his new regiment, the 1st Jat Light Infantry.
It’s quiet here, because we’re at our home station in Saharanpur. You probably think we spend all our time marching about in the sun. But it’s nothing like that. The only difficult thing is getting up early to go to the parade ground for P.T. with the men. After that it’s pretty quiet; we stroll around taking salutes and watching the NCOs as they put the men through their drills and their weapons training. But this takes only a couple of hours, and then we change for breakfast, which is at nine (stacks of eggs, bacon and ham). Then some of us go off to wait in the orderly room just in case any of the men are brought in. Once in a while the signals officers take
us through the latest field codes, or else we get lessons in map-reading or double-entry book-keeping—that kind of thing. Then there’s lunch—and beer and gin if you want it (but no whisky!)—and after that you’re free to go off to your room. Later there’s usually time for a game of football with the men. At about 7.30 we drift off towards the mess lawn for a few whiskies before dinner. We call the mess the Nursery, as a joke, because potted plants die the moment they’re brought in—no one knows why. Some of the chaps say it’s because of the Dust of Colonels Past. We laugh about the Nursery but I tell you, sometimes halfway through dinner, or when we’re drinking a toast, I look around and even now, after all these months here, I just can’t believe my luck . . .
The last time Manju had had a long talk with Arjun was on this very windowsill. It was a little more than a year ago, just after he graduated from the academy. She’d kept wanting to call him Second Lieutenant Arjun—partly to tease him, but also because she’d liked the sound of the words. She’d been disappointed that he didn’t wear his uniform more but he’d laughed at her when she told him this.
‘Why can’t you show me off to your friends as I am?’
The truth was that most of her friends at college were in love with him already. They’d badger her for news of him, and when they were over at the house they’d go to amazing lengths to ingratiate themselves with the family—hoping, of course, that someone would remember them when it came time to find a bride for Arjun.
Before he left for the academy, she’d never quite understood why her friends thought him so good-looking: to her he was just Arjun, his face a brother’s. Then he came back for that visit and it was as though she were seeing him for the first time. She’d had to admit that he’d made quite an impression, with his moustache coming along nicely and his hair cut short. She’d been jealous, afraid that he wouldn’t want to spend time with her. But he’d been quick to put her fears at rest. He’d sat on the sill every day, dressed in his usual vest and scruffy old longyi. They’d chatted for hours and she’d peeled him oranges or mangoes or lychees—he was just as hungry as he’d ever been.
He’d talked endlessly about the 1st Jat Light Infantry. He’d applied to half a dozen other regiments but right from the start there was only one that he really wanted—and that was the 1st Jats. Part of the reason was that his friend Hardy had applied to the 1st Jats too, and was almost certain to get in. He came from an old army family and his father and grandfather had both served in the regiment. But, of course, it was different for Arjun—he had no army connections—and he had prepared himself for a disappointment. As a result he was overjoyed when he heard that the regiment had accepted him:
The night when I was formally dined into the regiment was probably the happiest of my life. Even as I’m writing this, I realize that this will probably seem strange to you, Manju. But the thing of it is that it’s true: you have to remember that the regiment is going to be my home for the next fifteen to twenty years—perhaps even more, if things don’t go too well with my career and I never get a staff appointment (God forbid!).
What I’m really chuffed about, though, is my battalion. This’ll probably surprise you, for civilians always think that the regiment is the most important thing about the army. But actually, in the Indian army, a regiment is just a collection of symbols—colours, flags, and so on. We’re proud of our regiments of course, but they’re not operational units and just about the only time when all the battalions of a regiment get together is when there’s a Changing of the Colours—and it takes donkey’s years for that to happen.
The rest of the time you live and work with your battalion and that’s what really matters: your life can be hell if you find yourself thrown in with the wrong sort of crowd. But once again I’ve been hellishly lucky— Hardy pulled a couple of his ‘fauji’ strings and made sure we were both in the same battalion—the First. Officially, we’re the 1/1 Jat Light Infantry, but everyone just calls us the 1/1 Jats—except that every now and again you’ll come across some ancient Colonel Walrus who’ll still use our old name, which was ‘the Royal’. The story is that the battalion fought so well in the Mahratta Wars that when Lord Lake reached the coast, he honoured us with a special title: The Royal Battalion. Yesterday Hardy and I were looking at the battalion’s battle honours, and I swear to you, Manju, the list was as long as my arm. During the Mutiny our troops stayed loyal—one of our companies was in the column that captured the old Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, at his hidy-hole at Humayun’s tomb. I noticed something that I bet would interest Dinu and Neel—the Royal was in Burma during General Prendergast’s advance on Mandalay and it fought so well that it came to be known as ‘Jamail-sahib ki dyni haat hi paltan’—the general’s right-hand battalion.
To tell you the truth, Manju, it’s just a little overwhelming even to think of all this. You should see the list of our medals: a Victoria Cross from the Somme; two Military Crosses for putting down the Arab rebellion in Mesopotamia in ’18; a half-dozen DSOs and OBEs from when we fought the Boxer rebels in China. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I still find it hard to believe that I really belong with these men. It makes one so proud, but also humble, to think that one has all this to live up to. What makes me prouder still is the thought that Hardy and I are going to be the first Indian officers in the 1/1 Jats: it seems like such a huge responsibility—as though we’re representing the whole of the country!
To top it all, we have an absolutely spiffing CO— Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland—whom everybody calls Bucky. To look at you’d think he’s not a soldier at all, more like a professor. He came to lecture at the academy a couple of times: he was so good that he even managed to make Military History interesting. He’s also an operations wizard and the men love him. His family’s been with the 1/1 Jats since the time when we were called the Royal Battalion, and I don’t think there’s a man on the base whose name he doesn’t know. And it’s not just their names either—he knows which village they’re from and who’s married to whose daughter and how much dowry they paid. Of course, I’m so junior I can’t be sure he even knows I exist.
It’s Guest Night at the Nursery tonight, so I’d better go. My new batman is busy ironing my cummerbund, and I can tell from the way he’s looking at me that it’s time to get into my dinner jacket. His name is Kishan Singh and I just got him a few weeks ago. He’s a weedy, earnest-looking fellow and at first I didn’t think he’d do, but he’s turned out quite well. Do you remember that book Uma-pishi sent me—the O. Henry stories? You’ll never believe it, but I’d left it by my bed and one night I walked in and found him with his nose stuck in it. He had a puzzled frown on his face, like a bear clawing at a wireless set. He was scared half out of his mind at being found looking into my book—just stood there like a statue. So I told him the story about the lost necklace. You should have seen him, standing there as though he were at a court-martial, staring at the wall, while I went through the pages, translating into Hindustani. At the end of it, I barked at him, in my best parade-ground voice: ‘Kishan Singh! What do you think of this kahani?’
And he said: ‘Sahib, it’s a very sad story . . .’ I could have sworn there were tears in his eyes. They’re very sentimental, these faujis, despite their moustaches and bloodshot eyes. It’s true what the Britishers say: at heart they’re very unspoilt; the salt of the earth—you can depend on them to be faithful. Just the kind of men you’d want by your side in a tight spot.
It was Arjun’s letter that made Manju reconsider the idea of a screen test. There was her twin, hundreds of miles away, drinking whisky, eating at the officers’ mess and getting his batman to iron his dinner jacket. And here she was in Calcutta, in the same room she’d been in all her life, braiding her hair into pigtails as she’d done since she was seven. The awful thing was that he hadn’t even made a pretence of missing home.
She was on her own now, and she would have to think about what she was going to do with herself. So far as her mother was concerned, Manju knew, her
future had already been decided: she would leave the house as someone’s wife and not a day sooner. The mothers of two prospective grooms had already come calling to ‘see’ Manju. One of them had given her hair a discreet tug to make sure she wasn’t wearing a wig; the other had made her bare her teeth as though she were a horse, pushing apart her lips with her fingers, and making faint clucking sounds. Her mother had been apologetic afterwards, but she’d made it clear that it wasn’t in her power to ensure that these incidents would not be repeated: this was a part of the process. Manju knew that many more such ordeals probably lay ahead.
Manju looked again at the director’s invitation. The studio was in Tollygunge, at the end of the number 4 tram line, which she took to college every day. All she’d have to do was head in the other direction. It wouldn’t take long to get there. She decided to go—just to see what it was like.
But now a host of practical problems came suddenly to the surface. What was she to wear, for instance? Her ‘good’ Benarasi silk, the sari she wore to weddings, was locked in her mother’s almirah. If she were to ask for it her mother would wring the truth out of her in a matter of minutes and that would be the end of the screen test. Besides, what would people say if she stepped out of the house bedecked in a crimson and gold Benarasi at eleven in the morning? Even if she succeeded in slipping past her mother, the whole neighbourhood would be in an uproar before she got to the end of the street.