The Splendor of Silence
Page 15
“Who was that man?” Sam asked.
“That’s the vicar’s house,” Mila said in response, and Sam followed her finger to his right. A watchman drowsed upright on his stool in front of the gate, his brown turban bobbing as his head moved in sleep. There were two glass-plated signs, painted writing on them, embedded into the concrete gateposts. One read 12 ALBERT AVENUE, the other THE SEXTONS. The gate itself was hung with a black metal letterbox with the words LAETITIA SEXTON painted on it.
“What an unfortunate name for a vicar,” Sam said, allowing himself to be diverted from his question.
Mila laughed. “It bothers Mrs. Sexton quite a bit. The vicar doesn’t seem to care; he has lived with this name all of his life. Laetitia acquired it only through marriage.”
They had passed the house now, and Sam got a small glimpse of stately white pillars, plush lawns, an empty garage shed, and pink geraniums in pots on the front porch.
“It’s a beautiful home,” he said. “Vicars live well in India.”
“Not all vicars,” Mila said. “Only the Rudrakot vicars. There are not enough British here in the civil area, so they’ll take anyone they can get, even vicars.”
“Why even vicars?”
“Mrs. Sexton’s father,” Mila said, “was a fishmonger in London; marrying the vicar has brought her up considerably. Under any other circumstances, she would not have been accepted in Rudrakot society. Perhaps she would not be accepted at home, in England, but here…the British cannot afford to be choosy.”
The road curved out of the trees and into the blazing sun. To their right was the lake, its waters blue bright in the light, mesmerizing in contrast to the brown and red hues of the desert. Sam shaded his eyes with his hand. Another jeep broke out from the trees ahead and onto the road, and as it passed them, the man driving raised his hand. Both Mila and Ashok nodded and Sam waved. Now, in his own clothes, in his own skin, in a jeep, by Mila’s side, he was no longer invisible—as he had been when he had walked here in the afternoon.
They drove out of the sun into the cantonment area.
“The home of the Rudrakot Rifles,” Sam said, and then wondered if he should have exhibited knowledge of this. But Mila and Ashok did not react.
“On the right,” Ashok said. “The Rifles are a British regiment. On the left are the Rudrakot Lancers. An Indian regiment.”
Sam looked right first and then left and it was like looking at images in a mirror—the two regimental headquarters looked alike, the same red-and-white-painted stones along the pathways, the same whitewashed facade of the barracks, flags hanging limply on the airless, treeless, sun-drenched maidan near the sentry houses. Sam now remembered stories from Mike’s letters of the pranks the officers of the Rifles regiment played on those of the Lancers—jackal carcasses strung on the barbed wire in the middle of the night, a cow let loose to deposit dung at the base of the flagpole, the stones along the drive upturned to their muddy sides. With an immense stroke of luck earlier in the afternoon, he had stumbled correctly around the living quarters of the Rifles, Mike’s regiment, and not the one right opposite it.
“The Rifles came here once the Lancers were brought into commission.”
“Why? It must be a great drain on resources.”
“Have you heard of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, Captain Hawthorne?” Mila asked.
Sam nodded. “A little. Mostly what I’ve read.”
“Well, since then, since the mutiny, as it was called, was started within—and was largely contained within—the ranks of the army, the British try to maintain a one-to-one ratio of British soldiers to Indian soldiers. It’s a show of force, a deterrent to further mutinies. It is called the Cardwell system, after the man who invented it.” She paused. “The presence of the army in Rudrakot is relatively new—Jai’s father, Raja Bhimsen, first raised the Lancers about twenty years ago; the government brought the Rifles here soon after.”
The road stretched before them, metallic black with clean edges, and the two regiments garrisoned on either side balanced each other’s might.
Mila said, “The Cardwell system is meant to station British soldiers only within India’s borders. At the borders, the northwest frontier, for example, there are fewer British soldiers for every Indian soldier. The threat comes from within, you see, not without.”
And what do you think of the politics of this prejudice, Sam wanted to ask. Mila had recited the facts like a history lesson, with little change in her demeanor, little expression of disdain. She had shown no rancor. Here is the British regiment, Captain Hawthorne, and here is the Indian regiment. One is meant to keep the other in order. British. Indian. Mila was Indian, living in her own country, ruled by a foreign hand. For the first time, Sam began to think of what this must mean.
“How do you know all of this?”
She gave him a fleeting smile. “We know a lot because of Jai.”
“Who’s Jai?”
Ashok and Mila began to speak together, went silent together, started to laugh together. “Poor Jai,” Mila said finally. “Here is someone in his kingdom who does not know who he is. He will be crushed, devastated. We must not tell him.”
“Jai is the prince of Rudrakot,” Sam said, smiling too when he realized what he had just said. It was akin to blasphemy, to not acknowledge the presence of a sovereign in his own kingdom.
“Jai commands the Rudrakot Lancers, Captain Hawthorne,” Ashok said from behind. “So he is the only one who can go into the Rifles’ mess halls and their club. The main club, the Victoria Club, is another matter, though. A whole other bomb just begging to be detonated.”
“Why?” Sam asked. Mila had stopped talking, but she was angry; he could sense that. She listened, driving slowly now.
“The Rifles, before they came here, were not used to sharing their club with an Indian regiment. They insisted on separate tables at first, separate sections of the club for their use…but they forgot that they were the second occupants of the club. This is why Jai goes over to the Rifles regiment to dine with the officers and the men. He wants them to see him often, to realize that Rudrakot is the Rudrakot Lancers.”
“Jai is Indian too, isn’t he?”
“So he is,” Ashok said with a grin. “The men don’t forget this. Jai is dark as the heavens in a thunderstorm, Captain Hawthorne. But he is royalty. Every drop of his blood has more value than the whole of the Rifles put together. It is an undeniable fact. It is an unpleasant conundrum for the noncommissioned British army man, the Tommy. He will not take orders from a blackie, but damn if that blackie could not buy him and his county out from under his feet.”
It was an astonishingly lucid thought for a sixteen-year-old, and Sam felt an admiration for Ashok. In Seattle, Sam had heard on the radio of the conditions in India and of the freedom struggle. But it was not until he had come to the Indian subcontinent and seen this discrimination at work that he had begun to fathom the real cause of the ferment. The British had so long held themselves aloof from Indians, built up so much animosity, that there was no middle ground for compromise for the Indian nationalists. The British were not welcome in India anymore—there were no circumstances under which they could stay on or share India.
Ashok said, “Did you see the washrooms at the railway station?”
Damn, Sam thought, knowing what was coming. It was something he had heard for the last few months from almost every Englishman and woman in India the moment he had opened his mouth and his accent had placed him as an American. And he had heard this in some form or another everywhere—at clubs, in shops, on railway station platforms, within the barracks in Assam. You talk of equality and civil rights, Captain Hawthorne; tell me, are all people equal in America?
The Indians he had spoken with had only made it a little easier. To them, he had been representative of FDR and openness and generosity, swung and placed at the other end of the pendulum, much, in some senses, as Raman had seen him earlier this morning. Sam was uncomfortable in both roles, of being fr
om a dominating race in his own country and of being considered so impartial—neither was true.
Ashok repeated his question. “Did you happen to notice the washrooms at the railway stations, Captain Hawthorne?”
Sam nodded.
“They must have been marked ‘Europeans Only’ and ‘Indians Only.’” Ashok paused and leaned forward. “Tell me, Captain Hawthorne, was that distinction not much like home to you?”
“The land of the free,” Mila sang, “and the not-quite free.”
Ten
My father was among the few black members of the Delhi Gymkhana Club. This was only for show; Indians who had been knighted were regarded as wogs acceptable to the British. But the Gymkhana Club and other clubs which started taking Indians made conditions very difficult. You had to be interviewed. Your wife had to be there with you. Now my mother couldn’t speak a word of English.
Whites-only places like the Delhi Club remained a symbolic reminder of the alien and humiliating side of foreign rule. The last of them, the Breach Candy Swimming Pool in Bombay, excluded Indians till the 1960s and continues to operate discriminatory entry rules for visitors.
—Zareer Masani, Indian Tales of the Raj, 1987
Jai was not solely responsible for the Rudrakot Lancers being permitted in the Victoria Club, as Ashok had said. It was actually very much an institution of the British part of the Raj, and Indians themselves, no matter what social status they occupied, had been anathema at one time. Ashok would not have known this, neither would have Mila, for they were both very young when Indian officers from the Lancers were admitted into the sacred hallways of the club. The story they told Sam accorded very well with their sensitivities though, and made the Lancers seem quite heroic. What they did not know was that their admiration could have found its home closer to their hearts, in their father.
The club was born for the amusement of the British resident in Rudrakot, sometime after Victoria became queen-empress of India, and hence its name. At the very beginning, only the British were members, and only British men, really. Even the ruling princes of Rudrakot had to wait outside in their limousines when they came by to pick up a government agent who had come to visit them. It was not a tenable state of affairs. The club admitted the vicar, the owner of Pitman’s Dry Goods, the clerks in the British resident’s office, the publisher of the Rudrakot Daily News and two of his senior reporters, the railway stationmaster, and selectively, the resident’s chauffer (before 6 P.M.). Even the local boxwallahs—young, opportunistic Englishmen who worked in the indigenous industries at Rudrakot, like the block-printing mill and the cement factory—had entry.
In larger cantonments and cities and towns, the boxwallahs were banished from the main clubs, seen for what they were, the bottom dregs of society, certainly not on a par with officers of the army, or with the civilians of the ICS who were considered heaven born. The term boxwallahs came from the local traveling merchants who carried their wares in boxes from house to house—knife sharpeners, cloth wallahs, vessel wallahs. How could these boxwallahs then even dare to breathe the same social air as the civil servants, how could the ICS wives and daughters be exposed to the ill manners of these lower classes who worked for a living, with profit in mind? The thinking went thus in the greater towns of the Raj. At Rudrakot, however, the boxwallahs were welcomed; there was a dearth of familiar-hued faces.
So the club invited all of these men, but not the prince of Rudrakot.
Raja Bhimsen’s father, Jai’s grandfather, had strolled into the club one morning, sat down to breakfast, and, to start, ordered a cup of coffee. The Indian bearers had dithered, so frightened that the coffee hiccupped its way out of the pot’s spout, and a few drops bloomed around the saucer’s rim, marring the virginal beauty of the white linen tablecloth. The club secretary, a Mr. Ryder, hovered around this table in acute distress, actually wringing his hands. He had not the gall or the courage to ask a raja to leave the premises. How would he say this? “Your Highness, the club rules state…” “Your Highness, I have been informed…” “I respectfully beg…”
Mr. Ryder had come all the way to India to work at the Victoria Club, and had washed the dust of his common origins off his shoes just east of the Suez, to transform himself into a pukka sahib. A tall, thin man with a carefully cultivated pallor that contrasted nicely with his black suits, Mr. Ryder had had no compunction before in banishing miscreants from the club. But damn, it was bloody hard to kick out someone who had to be addressed as being higher than he was in rank. And a prince to boot—a black prince to be sure, but still…Mr. Ryder’s father hauled coal in London and when he washed the soot off his face at the end of each day, his skin did shine the pearly pink of a pig’s backside, but prick him and his blood was nothing special. That morning as he stood there, Mr. Ryder was uncomfortably aware that he had no pretensions to royalty. So Jai’s grandfather had finished his breakfast, wiped his mouth with a white linen napkin embroidered with an entwined VC in gold thread, called for his cigarettes and another cup of coffee, and said to Mr. Ryder, “Write out a chit for this, will you?”
From that day onward, there was no stopping the rajas of Rudrakot from availing themselves of the club’s facilities. The British resident at Rudrakot, of course, had an automatic membership in the club. And so when Raman came to stay as the political agent, he too could enter its premises when he wished.
When the Fourth Rudrakot Rifles took up residence on the other side of the road from the Rudrakot Lancers, its officers were, as a matter of course, admitted to the Victoria Club. Raman insisted that the officers of the Lancers, hitherto not given access because they were Indian, had equal rights.
It took a minor hartal, a strike, to achieve this. Jai, who was then only thirteen, but prince of Rudrakot nonetheless and so a member of the Victoria, and Raman, sat cross-legged on the concrete steps of the club for two days in protest of this unfair policy. They held up placards that read ADMIT THE LANCERS. It was a huge embarrassment for the civil servants of Rudrakot and the Rifles regiment.
The British resident himself took the senior officers of the Rudrakot Lancers to the club on the evening of the second day, and gave them dinner at his table, along with a victorious Raman and a delighted Jai.
This story Mila and Ashok did not know, for Raman never talked about it, and Jai had long forgotten the thrill from his first attempt at civil disobedience.
Once thus invaded, the no-longer-sacrosanct and weakened Victoria Club began admitting women also. They were only allowed in certain rooms, not in the smoking room, not in the billiard rooms, only in the bridge rooms and the main dining hall. An additional wing was built behind the club and dubbed their special province, with its powder rooms and salons, as the blasted murgikhana—the henhouse.
Mila struck the gear into fourth and drove the jeep into the gateway of the Victoria Club. The watchmen’s loose beards flew in the wind raised by the whizzing past of the jeep, and they had barely raised their hands to their foreheads in a salute before it disappeared in a whirl of dust and flying gravel. Once inside, she shifted down abruptly, and banged on the brakes. A long, waist-high hedge lined the enormous drive down to the clubhouse. Beyond the hedge was also club land, and most of it was bare, dotted with trees, skirted by desiccated attempts at sprouting a lawn in the hard ground. The lake was to the right, and the driveway, after going straight down the line of hedge for half a mile, curved around the huge white building, lakeside, to end under a pillared portico. The blinding sun harassed them all the way to the clubhouse, undulating in waves of heat across the building until the green of the hedges, the browns and reds of the earth, the white of the clubhouse all melded into a haze.
They arrived in the welcome shade of the cool portico, and a bearer came running down the stairs to take care of the jeep. Mila gave him the key and said to Sam, “The mela is set up on the lawns, Captain Hawthorne. I have to go find Mrs. Sexton, but Ashok can show you around.”
“No, thank you,” Sam said. “
I’ll find my way.”
“We will leave in two hours,” Mila said, though it was not necessary to remind him of that; they would see each other. But she thought that their guest, being American and unused to India, would not realize that they would not be able to converse much with each other at the mela.
“Thank you. I’ll look for you before then.” Sam turned and began to walk toward the lawns, and then he paused and seemed to ponder something. When he turned back, his face was disturbed. “Mila, what does the phrase ‘four annas to the rupee’ mean?”
Mila and Ashok were struck into stillness at first, their expressions similarly stunned for a moment. They cast a sudden, synchronized glance at each other, but for the sake of politeness, it was over even before it had begun and they were again facing Sam, their expressions stoic.
“A rupee has sixteen annas, Captain Hawthorne,” Mila said carefully. “Has someone been cheating you of your money? I would have thought you would be conversant with our currency by now.”
“I am,” Sam said. “But I did not understand that phrase.”
“Where did you hear it?” Ashok asked. When Sam did not reply, he held up his hand, palm forward. “It doesn’t matter, but it sounds very much like something quite a few people here would use.”