‘A king cobra?’
‘The king yes,’ said Deo. ‘Very long, much poisonous.’
The kid, dancing in the dust a hundred yards off, was laughing fit to bust. The king cobra was in a hole in the ground in a patch of grass a hundred yards from the red house. It wanted to hide, you could tell that, but it couldn’t hide because it was too long to fit into the hole, and its back end stuck out. As the kid laughed and pointed, the snake kept wriggling to try and fit a little deeper in. It turned out that one of the snake men – not the governor – had some English because, indicating the snake, he said, ‘He is great rascal!’ but it seemed to me the snake was perfectly blameless so far. As for the top man, he was crouching down and rubbing his hands in the ash. I realised I had seen something similar done before . . . prior to a performance . . . the strongman at the circus as he prepared to lift the heaviest dumbbell. The top snake man approached the snake, and his English-speaking comrade stood behind, holding a stick that I now saw was forked. He saw me eyeing it. ‘Hold neck,’ he said, grinning and gesturing with the stick. He seemed confident that things would go according to plan.
The snake man was bending down over the twitching tail of the king cobra. Then he began pulling, hauling it in like a bloody sailor on a hawser, and with six feet of snake out of the hole, he was still hauling. At twelve feet he was still hauling, and I had dropped back from the snake gang, so that I was standing twenty yards away from them and contemplating a dash to safety. The English-speaking one, with stick poised, turned to me and called, ‘You are afraid of the worm of the earth?’
‘Yes,’ I called back, and then the head came out, and he leaped at it with his stick.
The boy was jumping about, shouting ‘Wah-wah!’ The snake’s mouth was wide open, showing the pink interior that looked like I don’t know what. Behind the trapped base of the head, the hood swelled out and shrank back repeatedly, like a pair of bellows. The snake was growling like a bloody dog. The snake man had grabbed its neck, and was bending low over its head, speaking to it. The one who spoke English said, ‘He will soon be our friend.’
The governor had lifted the snake by its neck, and the others got hold of the rest of it, and they carried it at shoulder height, like men carrying a roll of carpet, towards the trainlighting office. I followed at a distance. Deo Rana, who liked snakes, was walking by the side of the governor, and they were talking about the beast in their own language. As we reached the red house, Deo, indicating the snake, said, ‘He destroy a man in thirty . . . forty seconds.’
Indicating the governor, I said, ‘Will he kill it?’ and the English-speaking one said, ‘Nay, huzoor, we do love it.’
The governor continued speaking to Deo as we entered the trainlighting office. Deo turned to me, saying, ‘It is against his dharm to kill snake.’ I think I knew what that meant. The universe would be put out of balance, and he would lose points, lose merit.
The trainlighting office was dark and smelt of piss. I saw a wooden crate stamped ‘Burn & Co.’ and there was wire mesh nailed over the top. It held living rats. Alongside it against the wall stood a row of baskets of various sizes, all in the shape of urns. All had lids, and one of the lids was roped down. Also in the gloom I saw a snake charmer’s pipe, firewood, a canteen of water, a shotgun, and a tea caddy decorated with a picture of a fox hunt going through pretty English countryside. The governor knocked the lid off the endmost basket, and with a co-ordinated heave, the men tossed the king cobra inside. The boy then clamped the lid down and sat on top of it. The governor had picked up the tea caddy. He was again speaking to Deo Rana, who said to me, ‘They have another snake. Same.’
‘Oh Christ.’
‘They show you,’ said Deo, and he was pointing, of course, to the roped-down basket.
But the governor was brandishing the tea caddy.
Deo asked, ‘You take one tea?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I mean thanks. And then will they tell me about the train snakes?’
The English-speaking one had heard.
‘That we know,’ he said, ‘we say.’
III
This time the tea had condensed milk in it, and a spice of some kind. There were chapattis as well, brought over from the Black Town by the boy, and filled with soft cheese. We ate and drank sitting on the platform. Again, the snake men offered their black tobacco for hand-rolled cigarettes, and I was starting to think I might be getting my money’s worth as a sort of excursionist even if I had not so far uncovered any new data touching on the snake attacks. But then Deo Rana, who had been speaking to the governor, turned to me, saying, ‘Baksheesh, sahib.’
‘But he’s already had his bloody baksheesh.’
Deo Rana put this point to the governor, who at first said nothing, staring straight ahead towards the heat-dazed train movements of the Howrah goods yard. Then he spoke, and Deo Rana transalated: ‘That was morning baksheesh. Now afternoon.’
I said, ‘I have no more money.’
‘You have ten rupees,’ said the English-speaker. This was true; I did have ten rupees in my pocket book. I eyed Deo Rana. He shook his head, so he was telling me to give it over. I handed the ten rupees to the governor.
‘Now I need information,’ I said.
Deo Rana spoke to the governor, and the response came back, ‘Soon informations. Music first.’
The boy was coming out of the trainlighting office holding the charmer’s flute and one of the smaller baskets. The basket was placed in front of the governor, who squatted in the dust and began to play. His flute had a bulge in it, as though someone once blown so hard that it had inflated. The governor took one hand away from the pipe, swiped off the top of the basket and the snake was there, standing up and swooping with the movements of the pipe. It was another cobra – I could tell by the hood – but not a king. It was so much smaller than the king that I felt confident about moving a little closer to the basket. The English-speaker, who stood with arms folded behind the governor, looked up and said, ‘You are not safe, you know that.’
So I moved back again.
The snake continued to dance. I said, ‘It likes the music,’ and the English-speaker shook his head.
‘Snake deaf,’ he said. ‘All snakes deaf.’
‘Really?’
He threw up his arms as if to say he was amazed I didn’t know.
‘Where ears?’ he said, laughing. ‘Only . . . feel shaking. On ground.’ He stomped his bare foot.
‘Vibration,’ I said. ‘They feel vibration.’
‘Yes, huzoor.’
The music had stopped, and the snake fell back into its basket. If they couldn’t hear the sound, the snakes must be interested in the motion of the pipe; it also struck me they liked being cooped up. I put that to Deo Rana, and he put it to the governor as the boy carted the basket away. The reply came back: ‘Snake feel safe in small place,’ and it seemed wrong that the snake should be the one to worry about feeling safe.
The boy was now coming out of the trainlighting office carrying the largest of the baskets. It was about as big as he was, and the ropes were off. The snake men and Deo Rana were all now squatting or standing near the edge of the disused platform, and I was standing opposite them, about twenty yards from the platform. There was a strong mood of afternoon. The crows circled more lazily over the Black Town, the cloud of smoke and dust from the mill had turned a deeper orange, and the noise from the Howrah goods yard had become a continuous and distant drone. I was exhausted from my day in the heat. I wanted to be back at the hotel in my iced bath with my Beck’s beer.
I watched the boy, marvelling at his energy in the heat of the day. He commenced climbing down from the platform edge while holding the basket, but the basket was too big for him. One of the snake men called out just as the kid fell and the lid rolled away, and the bloody thing came racing out. It moved like an arrow towards me; everyone else was behind the snake; only I was in front of it. I turned and ran but I would not beat the snake; I turned to se
e how close it was and I fell as the snake – six feet away from me – began rising into the air. The snake was swaying over me, it was like the fucking Indian rope trick . . . and then it was being rapidly withdrawn over the dusty ground. The governor was pulling its tail, and then the English-speaker stepped in with his cleft stick. The snake was trapped again. Everything stopped, and I was able to think. Something had not happened that should have. The snake, now being returned to its basket, had remained dust-coloured all along its length. In spite of the accident, the egg had not cracked. The snake had not opened its mouth. The English-speaker was now shouting at the boy, and chasing him about the platform in a half-serious way. A third snake man – one who had so far kept in the background – was on the platform, and holding up a darning needle in one hand, and a roll of fishing line in the other. As I sat in the dust, he waved them at me.
Whilst I could now think, I could not speak for the beating of my heart. When I could speak, I said, ‘They stitched up the mouth.’ Deo Rana was walking towards me. ‘How will it eat?’ I said.
Deo Rana replied, ‘Snakes not need food for long time. Many weeks, not need. Soon, they will open mouth, get poison part and cut, cut.’
Then they would sell it to a charmer, I supposed. You could cut a dash with a king cobra. All the ones I’d seen so far had used the standard sized ones. I wondered why they needed to stitch the mouth in the first place. To weaken the snake perhaps, demoralise it.
It was time for some hard facts.
I said to Deo Rana, ‘Do they know about the snake attacks?’
He talked to the snake men, and came back with: ‘Sahibs come. Buy snakes.’
‘Who?’
‘Not know names.’
‘They speak to these buyers; they sell them snakes. But they don’t know their names?’
‘They not sell. Their brother sell.’ He corrected himself. ‘Not brother . . . uncle . . . very bad man.’
‘Their uncle is a very bad man?’
‘Terrible man.’
More talk between the snake men and Deo Rana, who said, ‘Uncle is deaf.’
‘So the snakes are deaf, and the uncle who sells them is deaf?’
‘Yes, huzoor. Both deaf.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said.
A wind was getting up, bringing the dust cloud from the jute mill closer, and making the sleepy rattling of the goods yard seem further away. I felt myself to be a very small and unimportant part of India as I asked, ‘Does the uncle live anywhere?’
From what I could make out, he did not. Even so, he was ‘away’. This much I gleaned from the English-speaker, who then went into the trainlighting office, and came out saying, ‘We have photograph.’
He showed me a picture of an elderly Indian wrapped in snakes like Harry Houdini wrapped in chains. If he was not quite as wild and ragged as a sadhu, he was getting on that way.
‘When is he coming back?’
He would be back soon, and they would say where he could be found – in return, no doubt, for another twenty-five rupees. I was tired of the snake men; I was even tired of Deo Rana, who had promised more than he had delivered. Perhaps the snake men had heard of the Commission of Enquiry, and feared that a clean sweep was to be made of the railway lands. They would then be ejected from the railway lands. But not if they had something to offer the police. As we all stood in a semicircle in the hot, dusty wind, I gave Deo Rana one last question to translate: ‘Do they think their uncle’s customers include the man who puts the snakes on the trains?’
Deo Rana put the question, and turned back to me with the answer. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They think it.’
Chapter Four
I
As the sun descended towards the railway lands, I headed for the Railway Institute. I walked alone, Deo Rana having returned to Fairlie Place. The ‘Insty’ was the club for the Anglo-Indians, their home-from-home, but there was nothing official about that; any railwayman might drop in (except for the pure Indians, who had their own Insty). It happened to be the nearest source of cold beer to the house of the snake men. I also wanted a glimpse of the world John Young had inhabited.
The Insty stood within its own grounds, beautifully kept, with big flowers that looked wrong-coloured, as though painted by an over-imaginative child. A gardener, or mali, was weeding the beds. Two peacocks paced the garden. They did not bother to do their display for me, but the gardener salaamed, and I tried to do likewise back. I was not good at salaaming. I ascended the steps of the Institute.
The lobby was like an English church hall, with bunting in the rafters. Not only were there photographs of the King-Emperor around the walls, but other members of his family too. And there were pictures of trains, jumbled up with notice-boards on which advertisements were pinned: ‘Shalimar Paint and Varnish’, ‘Detachable Boiler Insulation’, ‘Thornycroft: Service Counts’, ‘Carbon Means Expense’. There were bookshelves, holding the Locomotive Journal, Railway Carriage & Wagon Review, the Railway Gazette; but also the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and stories like Robin Hood and King Arthur in Bumper Books – these to keep the Anglo-Indian boys on the straight and narrow.
Beyond the lobby was a long wooden corridor with more bunting, more photographs. I gave my hat to a butler and entered the corridor. The rooms off were indicated by little signs sticking out of the corridor, like railway signals. I could hear the sound of table tennis being played, and played well. It was one of the games the Anglos liked, along with darts, badminton, and housey-housey, which was their bingo – village hall sorts of games. The children liked to play hopscotch, or perhaps their parents made them play it, as being the right sort of game: un-Indian.
The corridor photographs showed mainly Anglo-Indians presenting each other with prizes at social occasions. Sometimes Europeans were involved, but not often. Indianness fluctuated amongst the Anglo-Indians just as the levels of drink fluctuated in the glasses they held. The young women were always beautiful – the older ones too, come to that. Their beauty detained me on my way to the bar, thirsty though I was. A young Tommy would come out to India, and get himself an Anglo-Indian girl. She was a prize to him because she was so beautiful; he was a prize to her because he was white. He would then enter the Anglo-Indian world, or he would if she had anything to do with it. Therefore she was like a siren luring him . . . But that would suggest there was something wrong with being in the Anglo-Indian world, and I did not believe there was anything wrong with it, except that the European snobs would look down on you, and try to keep you out of the top jobs, and imitate your ‘chi-chi’ accent behind your back.
I was aiming for the sign reading ‘Bar’. Before it was a sign reading ‘Function Room’. In there, I saw half a roast chicken, the remains of a trifle, cheese and biscuits on a long, decorated table. Anglo-Indians avoided curry, I believed. It was the end of an afternoon party, half a dozen guests lingering. I heard, ‘You’d come off the regulator by the banyan tree’ – a driver speaking to a fireman perhaps.
I walked on to the bar, where a smartly dressed Indian sold me a cold Beck’s beer, whereas the Anglos drank wine and water for preference, called it ‘grog’. I took a belt on my beer. Yes, I did fear the worm of the earth, and I knew that nightmares awaited me as a result of my encounter with the king cobra. I looked at the notices beside the bar: ‘Steamship tickets to Europe’, ‘Oxygen gas of high purity’. I read, ‘Have you considered white spirit’s advantage over vegetable oil and turpentine as a solvent and thinner of paints and varnishes?’ I had not. And there was a poster showing a steel wheel on a short length of rail. ‘Macpherson Trading’, I read. ‘Wheels, Tyres, Axles, Fish Plates and Permanent Way Rails. We at Macpherson’s specialise in making these products, at our large steel works, which possesses advantages conducive to rapid and economical production.’ As I had learnt at Jamalpur, this outfit was the principal supplier of wheels to the E.I.R.
The overhead fans in the bar rocked as they revolved. There were more fans than drinkers. Be
sides myself, there were two other men; they sat in the corner. One was pure British and big, the other Anglo-Indian and small. The British fellow was at least twenty years older than the Anglo – probably in the late fifties. He had a gravelly voice of the kind you heard in the burra clubs, so what was he doing in the Insty? He talked the talk of the burra clubs as well.
‘. . . heads the list each year for the numbers of tigers killed,’ he was saying. ‘I know of no place where you are more certain of getting tiger. During a single fortnight, Colonel Marsh got . . .’
I had two hours until my appointment with Detective Inspector Khan of the C.I.D. What did he have in store? No doubt another snake would come slithering out of another basket. The big sahib in the corner had moved on from Colonel Marsh to himself. It was impossible not to hear him.
‘I tell you, Freddie, I thought it was a cloud shadow that moved across the short grass to my left, but I realised, as he stepped into the dusty path, that the big cat had arrived. His flanks were swinging gently, his tongue lolling, his tail was carried high with a dinky little upward curve at the top. The big paws came down without a sound. The powerful brute within thirty yards of me might have been walking on air. He froze into a perfect statue.’
‘Gosh,’ said Freddie, or something like that, and more out of politeness than astonishment.
A boy had come into the bar. I had seen this boy somewhere before. He came up to me directly – too directly, the kid was drunk – saying, ‘Who are you, and what are you doing round here?’ He was John Young’s son, Anthony, and I had seen his photograph. I told him who I was, and I offered to buy him a drink.
‘You were the one talking to my dad?’ he said. (He would have been given a rough outline of the murder of his father by one of Superintendent Bennett’s men.) ‘So you were the fellow with the gun. Listen, did you shoot my dad?’
Night Train to Jamalpur Page 9