I slowed down. A cornered man is a dangerous man, and I wanted to be ready, should he try to double back or fancy his chances with his fists. The street descended once more into darkness but I could still hear him running. Thin soles slapping on wet cobblestones. Then, suddenly, he stopped.
‘Give it up!’ I called. ‘There’s nowhere to go.’
I walked forward, senses heightened, until finally I saw him. A thin man in a cloth cap, holding his right arm with his left. God knows how he’d managed, but he’d heaved himself up and onto the wall separating the street from the drop to the railway tracks.
He turned round and peered down into the void. I cursed, and once more broke into a run, hoping to stop him before he did something foolish.
‘Don’t try it! You’ll break your neck!’
He hesitated. I was only yards away now. He glanced over his shoulder, smiled at me, then swivelled round once more and in an almost balletic movement, jumped.
I heard the thump of him hitting the ground and for a moment I stood there, frozen. Then gathering my wits, I sprinted over to the wall and pulled myself up. Peering down, I steeled myself against the sight of his broken body on the tracks. Instead, I saw half a dozen freight bogies parked directly below, and the man clambering down the side of one and running off up the tracks to Shoreditch.
I jumped down, landing heavily on the curved roof of the freight car. The rain had left it slick and the soles of my boots offered as much grip as a greased pig on a frozen lake. Before I knew it, I was on my arse, scrabbling for a handhold and hurtling off the top of the wagon. As I reached the edge, I grabbed at the metal guttering that ran along the car’s length. Momentum carried me over and I cursed as a streak of pain speared up my right arm. But my grip held. I cursed again, this time in relief, then let go and dropped onto the wet earth. Stumbling backwards, I tripped on a rail, then fell onto the tracks behind.
A whistle screamed, far louder than Whitelaw’s. I looked up, and in a matter of seconds, aged ten years as a juggernaut of a locomotive rumbled angrily towards me.
With the fear of God suddenly and violently instilled into every fibre of my being, I pulled myself up and rolled off the tracks with an alacrity that would have impressed the wing-heeled god, Mercury. The thing hurtled past moments later, and I lay there, face down, my heart hammering against my ribs.
I turned and sat up. A wave of nausea swelled in my stomach. I scanned the vista, searching frantically for sight of my quarry. Then in the distance came the crunch of footsteps sprinting on gravel. I struggled to my feet and ran after them: along the track towards Shoreditch station, past the rain-lashed hulks of freight trains idling in their sidings. The station stood out in the darkness, lit up like a Christmas tree. A few late-night travellers stood sheltering under a rusting Victorian awning, looking out onto the tracks in hope of a train which, like the man I was chasing, was nowhere to be seen. I ran on, further down the tracks, before turning the corner into the Shoreditch goods depot and straight into a chapter from the book of Exodus. A gang of men, their heads bowed, were busy unloading hessian sacks from a goods wagon. A line of them, like Israelites in bondage in the land of Egypt, stood soaking silently in the rain, each man awaiting his turn for two others to hoist a pregnant sack onto his shoulders. Then, swaying under his burden, he walked slowly off towards a nearby warehouse, making way for the next in line.
I ran up to the foreman.
‘Did you see anyone pass here?’
He struggled to hear me over the noise of the yard.
Up close, he looked older than I’d expected, grizzled, in his fifties. But work like this aged a man, and it was possible he was a decade or more younger.
I repeated the question.
He shook his head. ‘Who’d be mad enough to be out on a night like this?’
I scoured the compound but there was no sign of the fugitive. Desperately I sprinted back out to the tracks and peered into the black. In the distance a figure was climbing onto the platform at Shoreditch.
I started running, but it was already too late. The distance was too great, and once out of the station, he would disappear into the warren of streets and I would never see him again. Nevertheless I ran, reaching the platform just as the Liverpool Street train pulled up. I scanned the tired faces of the few passengers, but there was no sign of him.
Forlornly, I walked out of the station, stood under the awning as the rain pelted down. Bruised and sodden, I contemplated what I’d have to say to Sergeant Whitelaw. Across the road, the lights burned in a public house and served only to compound my misery. I began the long walk back towards Grey Eagle Street, past a group of destitute wretches taking shelter under the railway arches.
THREE
February 1922
Assam
The last leg of the journey, from the town of Lumding to the ashram, would need to wait until the morning. For the present, I was in no real state to travel anywhere. Instead I checked into the nearest hotel and paid for a meal, preferably without spice, to be brought to my room.
I’d begun to shiver by the time a young girl in pigtails and bare feet came to deliver it. I tipped her a few annas, and then a few more, and handed her my last kerdū gourd, asking her to get it mashed and to bring back a glass of the pulp as soon as possible.
After a glacial fifteen minutes, she returned, and I drank half of the pulp, saving the rest for the morning. My appetite somewhat revived, I felt able to face the food, opening the package to discover rice, dal and some curried mutton. I ate slowly, then placed the detritus outside my door and collapsed into bed.
The next morning, having finished the rest of the pulp, I set about searching for a vehicle to take me the last seventy miles to the ashram. It was located near an outpost called Jatinga, so small that it didn’t appear on my map, but which, Dr Chatterjee had assured me, most definitely did exist. An hour later, with the help of a local shipping agent, I managed to negotiate passage on a logging truck heading south to Silchar. The driver, a bearded, dust-blown Sikh with a row of beads round his grey neck and a picture of his sainted guru in his cab, spoke no English but was happy enough to accept a donation and drop me off en route.
Six hours later, and with precious few words uttered in the interim, he deposited me at the top of a hillside, beside a walled compound at the end of a dirt track. If this truly was the ashram of Devraha Swami, my goal for the last three days and nights, there was precious little to see: just a pair of iron gates set in a high stone wall and, somewhere beyond, the summit of a dome peeking over the top. There was the view down the mountain though: the light was fading and the valley below was shrouded in the bluish mist of an alpine evening. Not that I was in much of a position to appreciate it, seeing as I was out of kerdū. The landscape could have come straight out of a Claude Monet canvas and I wouldn’t have given it a second look. Opium, alas, has a way of reordering one’s priorities.
At a push, the gates shrieked open in complaint and, with a breath, I girded my loins and nervously entered a courtyard at the end of which stood a squat, ochre building. To one side a group of saffron-clad, shaven-headed monks stood talking.
One of them, a short man with Nepalese features, walked over. I felt my chest tighten and a mild panic come over me. My words failed.
‘May I help you?’
He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
My tongue cleft to the top of my palate. ‘Wyndham,’ I stammered. ‘My name is Wyndham … I …’
The monk smiled. ‘You are expected. Please do come with me.’
I followed him in silence, through the courtyard, up a set of stone steps and into a candlelit corridor. Somewhere nearby a bell began to toll. The monk stopped outside a door, and taking a wick, lit it from the flame of the nearest candle.
‘Please come.’
The dim glow of the flame illuminated a small, windowless room that smelled of the ages and cast shadows over a wooden table and two chairs. The monk held the wick
to a candle in a holder on the far wall, and then to another on the wall to its left.
He gestured to one of the chairs. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Take few minutes’ rest. I will inform Brother Shankar of your arrival.’
Before I had a chance to ask questions, he’d turned and left, closing the door soundlessly behind him. So once more I did as asked, dropping my valise onto the floor and flopping down onto one of the chairs for a ‘few minutes’ rest’.
The room was empty save for the table and chairs, the walls bare, except for a calendar hanging on a nail on the one facing me, one of those religious calendars so popular among the Hindus: a picture of a divinity – in this case the goddess Kali, above the individual months of the year, which could be ripped off, one by one. That was my first surprise. For some reason I’d expected this to be a Buddhist monastery, but the calendar was clearly Hindu, and also out of date.
No one, it seemed, was too concerned that it still read June 1920. Maybe the passage of time mattered less here. Or maybe they just liked the picture.
I stared at the portrait of Kali, the goddess of destruction, standing upon the prone body of her consort, Lord Shiva, a sword held aloft in one hand and a severed head in another. The blood-red tongue distended over jet-black skin. The garland of skulls and the kilt fashioned from severed limbs.
I’d grown used to her depiction. In Bengal, she was ubiquitous, and along with Durga, the mother goddess, her countenance graced almost every street in the native parts of Calcutta. Indeed, some said the city even took its name from her – Calcutta, the city of Kali – but there was no proof of that. Nevertheless, sitting in that small room, I felt something I hadn’t before. Maybe it was the effects of opium withdrawal, or maybe it was the first time that I’d really spent time looking at her, but there was something in those wide bloodshot eyes – an expression of wild ecstasy – that caused a shiver to run down my spine.
The door creaked open and in stepped another saffron-robed monk, this one a full head taller than the first one, who stood a few paces behind him. He was different in other ways too, older, chubbier and whiter. He acknowledged my surprise with a smile, the crow’s feet around his eyes creasing behind round, steel-rimmed spectacles.
‘Captain Wyndham,’ he said, pressing his palms together in pranam, ‘it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Brother Shankar. I can’t imagine you expected to find someone like me here.’
That much was true.
‘I can’t imagine many people expect to find an Englishman dressed as a Hindu monk out here in the middle of nowhere,’ I said. ‘Or, for that matter, anywhere. Especially one with a Home Counties accent.’
He let out a laugh that echoed off the walls. ‘I’m not sure that my accent makes much of a difference, Captain.’
He was right of course. There was no logical reason why a Hindu monk who spoke like he hailed from Sandhurst should be any more surprising than one who sounded like he was from Swansea, or Sunderland, but to me it seemed subtly worse. After all, Celts and Northerners could be peculiar, but one expected better of a man who spoke the King’s English.
As an opium fiend, though, I realised I was hardly in a position to judge him. Yet when it came down to it, I wondered if, in at least some politer Surrey circles, the tag opium fiend might in fact be preferable to Hindu convert.
‘I suppose not,’ I said.
The Nepalese-looking monk who’d led me in handed him a sheet of paper, which the Englishman scanned over the top of his spectacles.
‘So,’ he said, reading from the sheet, ‘I understand you’re here upon the recommendation of your physician, Dr Chatterjee.’
‘I wouldn’t go as far as to call him my physician, exactly.’
Brother Shankar looked up. ‘Yes, well, let’s not get into technicalities. Suffice it to say, this Dr Chatterjee –’ he waved the sheet at me – ‘is the party who suggested you come to us to deal with your addiction to …’ he scanned the paper once more, like an exotically attired civil servant.
‘Opium,’ I said.
‘Yes, of course. Opium.’
A few minutes later, I found myself accompanying him, further into the compound. We walked out into a larger courtyard bordered by a number of single-storey stone buildings on one side, and on the other by what I assumed was a temple of sorts, and from which emanated a rhythmic chanting.
‘Evening prayers,’ said the monk.
I was still coming to terms with it all. This place was alien to me. It was still India, but different from my India, the India of the plains and the jungle and cities that I’d begrudgingly learned not to hate over the last four years. This was a Hindu ashram, but unlike the clanging chaos of the Calcutta temples. And this was a Hindu monk, who was also an Englishman.
‘How did you end up with a name like Shankar?’ I asked.
‘You mean, how does an Englishman find himself living as a monk in the middle of Assam? That’s a long story, Captain, and one that can wait for now. As for the name, Devraha Swami chose it for me. Before that I was called Stephen.’
‘Like the apostle,’ I said.
The comment seemed to take him by surprise.
‘Well, yes,’ he said affably, ‘I suppose so.’
‘The Church’s first martyr. Stoned to death, wasn’t he?’
‘Maybe that’s why I prefer Shankar,’ he smiled. ‘It means the one who brings joy.’
He led the way onwards towards one of four wooden buildings which looked a lot like barracks huts.
‘You’ll be staying in the European men’s dormitory.’
‘You mean there are more Europeans here?’
It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be any other non-Indians here seeking a cure.
‘Oh yes,’ he replied nonchalantly. ‘We have six others at the moment: two more Englishmen, though one is leaving us tomorrow, an American, a German and couple of Frenchmen … actually one of them is Belgian. Then there are the Asiatics: the Chinese of course, the Burmese, and a smattering of Nepalese. They share dormitories with the Indians. We’ve a few women here too, but you won’t see them. They’re in a separate section of the ashram.’
‘Your very own League of Nations,’ I said. ‘Maybe when we’re all cured you could host the Post-Opium Olympics.’
‘Not all of our guests are opium addicts,’ he said. ‘Some are here because of addiction to alcohol, or heroin, or a number of other substances. Opium addicts though make up the largest group, and,’ he sighed, ‘I must say, tend to have the toughest time of it. You’ve some painful nights in store, I’m afraid.’
‘I thought you were supposed to be the harbinger of joy?’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘There’ll be joy enough thereafter. Now let’s get you settled in.’
The dormitory was little more than a wooden box lit by a couple of hurricane lamps, with twelve beds, six along either side of a central passage, each separated from the next by three feet and a small, rough-hewn, wooden cabinet. It was also empty.
‘The others are undergoing cleansing,’ said Brother Shankar, displaying a disconcerting ability to read my thoughts. ‘Unfortunately you’ve arrived a little late to start your treatment tonight.’
Some of the beds were unmade, their sheets askew, knotted and trailing onto the floor. I guessed that stood to reason. This wasn’t an army barracks and men going cold turkey generally had more pressing concerns than the neatness of their beds.
Brother Shankar led me to a cot at the far end with fresh, folded sheets.
‘Make yourself at home, Captain.’ He pointed to the cabinet beside the bed. ‘You’ll find a set of clothes in there. Should you wish to wash, there’s a shower block just behind the dormitory. As for the latrines, they’re beside the shower block, and they’re Eastern-style so you’ll have to squat.’
He uttered the last comment without a hint of disparagement, which, in my experience, was a rare thing for an Englishman discussing Indian toilets.
‘The others shoul
d be back soon,’ he continued, ‘after which there’s dinner in the dining hall, for those who are up to it. I’d offer to come and fetch you, but I’m sure your bunk-mates will show you the way. Now if you’ll excuse me …’
With a nod he turned and walked back out into the dusk, leaving me standing in the empty dorm. Wearily, I dropped my bag to the floor, flopped down on the bed’s thin mattress and placed my hands over my face.
The room settled into a silence, perforated only by the distant sound of chanting. I lay there for several minutes, listening to the rhythmic cantillation, my head emptying of thoughts, until a drum sounded, wrenching me from my reverie. Remembering that Brother Shankar – Stephen – had instructed me to change into the vestments provided, I rose to my feet, opened the bedside cabinet and took out the contents: a pair of worn brown sandals, a coarse grey cotton shirt with two buttons and a pair of loose drawstring trousers. It was the uniform of a convict. Or a penitent.
Beneath the clothes was a thin Indian towel known as a gamcha. At least that’s what it was called in Calcutta. I’d no idea what they called it here. Whatever its name, the item was comprehensively useless: as suited to the task of mopping up moisture as a sou’wester; yet they were cheap and therefore ubiquitous. Stripping down to my shorts, I picked it up and headed for the showers.
The block was cold and missing a roof, its walls the greenish-grey of old concrete ingrained with algae, and its floor slick with moss. Against the far wall stood several stalls, and above each stall, a bucket from which hung a rope. In the half-light, the room felt treacherous: one false step could lead to a slip, a fall and a crack of the skull. Placing the towel and my clothes on a dry ledge, I picked up the small, hard shard of cracked soap that sat there and stepped carefully into the nearest stall. I braced myself and pulled the rope. With an ancient creak, the bucket turned on a hinge and a deluge of ice-cold water fell over my head. I gasped, steeling myself against it, then quickly began lathering my body. As my teeth chattered, I heard the sounds of trickling water as the bucket began to refill. I waited a few seconds, took a deep breath, then pulled the chain again. The shock wasn’t so bad the second time. Rinsing soap-scum from my body, I reached for the gamcha and began the Sisyphean task of towelling myself down.
Death in the East Page 2