Arctic Summer

by Damon Galgut

  His Highness pretended indifference for a while, but couldn’t sustain it for long. He leaned towards Morgan and asked, “You met my wife?”

  “Yes, we did. She is very beautiful.”

  He nodded to himself, in agreement or approval. “I am glad she sent for you,” he said at last. “I wish to make her modern, but she longs to remain wild. She is the daughter of the Maharajah of Kolhapur, you know, and the marriage was a good alliance. But I love her too.” Then he shook his head, and his love for her was evident in his tiny, happy-sad face. Morgan liked him very much in that moment.

  * * *

  For a little time, while he was in Chhatarpur and Dewas, Morgan had left the poisonous atmosphere of colonial rule behind. The princely states were like tiny enclaves, apart from the rest of India; although the British maintained control, their government was nominally Indian and the atmosphere that prevailed was unnatural. The English were loved and revered there, and Indian nationalism was an affront. It was a tender illusion, and for a while it had almost seemed real. But he was awoken rudely from the dream when he arrived in Allahabad.

  Almost as soon as he got there, word reached him through Baldeo that Rupert Smith was on the far side of town, staying with the Collector. Morgan immediately went to see him, and was invited to stay on to dinner. Smith was by now a Junior Magistrate, not a post he was likely to hold in London. Brittle and oversensitive, he managed to seem both more and less at home in India than he did in England. Not unnaturally, they talked about Baldeo. Had he been a satisfactory servant? He had been excellent, Morgan replied; he’d given full satisfaction.

  In truth, his relationship with Baldeo had become a wordless complexity at the heart of his travels. On the one hand, the servant was a great help, a companion who knew all the cryptic codes of India. On the other hand, he cheated Morgan continually, small amounts of money that mattered very little in themselves, but which required ritualistic scenes of confrontation and remorse. And he tortured Morgan with tiny requests that verged on being demands, pricking his conscience expertly. In Bhopal, for example, Baldeo had wanted a bolt of cloth with which to make a new jacket, having admired Morgan’s. This he had received, but then he wanted more cloth for a pair of trousers. Morgan had refused, because he liked Baldeo to wear a dhoti; it was simple and genuine, and he wanted him to keep it. But Baldeo had seen Goldie’s servant in trousers and had set his heart on them. The subtle, intense wrangling that had gone on over these trousers had been exhausting, and though Morgan had won, he felt somehow that he’d lost.

  Though Morgan said none of this, Smith smiled knowingly at him, one eyebrow lifted, and smirked. “Beginning to understand how things work out here, eh?”

  This line of conversation had continued at dinner. The Collector’s wife, Mrs. Spencer, did not try to disguise her contempt for anything Indian. Purdah parties she disliked especially, but then she seemed to dislike everything on principle. Mr. Spencer tried to blunt her edge at first, saying, “Oh, it’s not that bad, is it, my dear,” but then he lapsed into the frank admission that he despised the native from the bottom of his heart.

  After a moment’s silence, Rupert Smith—perhaps aware of Morgan’s internal sigh—murmured, “I haven’t quite got that far yet.”

  But Smith, Morgan thought, had got that far. So had almost every English official he’d met. It was awful. From practically his first conversation on board ship, he’d been aware of his own discomfort, which turned at certain moments into torment. So this particular evening became part of a general impression, a series of interactions with the English in India, in which his hosts and their friends were never less than generous and kind and welcoming to him, and yet he felt removed from them, watching from a great distance.

  He could never live here, he thought. Not as these people did. Even if political affairs were never discussed, he experienced his remoteness from his white kin as almost a physical difference. This was a vigorous, outdoor world, full of sports and guns. If you didn’t join the club or play polo or shoot tigers or subdue barbarous tribes on the borders, you were immediately an unsound quantity; the more so if, like Morgan, you lived in your mind a great deal and wrote books. Of what earthly use were novels? How did they help anybody? No one had actually put the questions to him, but they had let him know, in their tone and their turn of phrase, that they found him not quite pukka.

  What made it worse was that, although his sympathies were usually with the Indians, he couldn’t always like them more than he did his countrymen. Whatever he did, he was always to some extent a Sahib, and the room for antipathy was vast. On those scattered occasions when a true understanding was reached, he always felt disproportionately grateful.

  Allahabad offered him one such moment. He had already joined up the previous morning with one of Masood’s friends called Ahmed Mirza. He had met Mirza in London, where he had studied engineering, and they had liked each other in a tentative, careful way. Now, however, on the other side of the world, a curious closeness sprang up between them. They drew together with a strange, magnetic attraction, not entirely comfortable.

  They arranged to meet again, and while they toured around the depressing fort, Morgan mentioned the Bathing Fair, which he was planning to come back to see. Mirza immediately suggested that they go out on the water. “We can bicycle down to the Jumna and take a boat,” he said. “We can row out to the Sangam. That is the holy joining place, where the Ganges and the Jumna meet. Then you will see the place without the millions of bathers, before you come back next time.”

  Morgan said that he would like that very much.

  “Perhaps you haven’t heard this,” Mirza went on. “But there is a third river also. At least, the Hindus like to believe it. At the Sangam, they say another river comes up from the centre of the earth.”

  “Have you seen it?” Morgan asked, intrigued.

  “No,” Mirza said sadly, then added, “it is not a real river, I think. It is invisible, unless you believe in it.”

  Morgan was sensitive to metaphors and this idea took hold of him. As they were rowed across the sluggish green surface of the Jumna, hacking their way through thick weeds, it came to him that certain human relationships were like two rivers meeting, causing a third river to spring up. He had glimpsed it himself at exceptional moments.

  But today, in the real world, they were having difficulties finding even a second river. An old man and a boy were rowing them, though they seemed too weak to contend with the oars. When Mirza challenged them, the man said crossly that it was a long way to the Ganges.

  “Well, we want to go there,” Mirza said, but in English, so it wasn’t understood. To Morgan, he went on, “I am so miserable, living here. I don’t have a single friend of my own age. I grew up in Hyderabad, and then I lived those years in England, and now I struggle to find myself.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “It is the lodgings, you see. I can’t live with Hindus, because they won’t let me eat meat. I have tried to live with the Eurasians, but I hate them, and they hate me too. I am very much alone.” Suddenly wretched, he spoke harshly to the old man, who spoke back at length, gesturing over the water.

  “What does he say?”

  “That we are in the Ganges already.” He stared out fiercely towards the bank. “But we aren’t, he is lying, we are in the same river.”

  To soothe him, Morgan started to share some of his own feelings. He too felt alone in India, he said; he found it hard to speak, truly speak, to either Indian or English. The latter especially, and the women in particular. There had been moments since his arrival, he said, where he had felt utterly unmoored from the world around him, as if he might drift off and float away.

  “Yes, you have said it exactly,” Mirza said. “That is how my country makes me feel.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, united in sympathy. Then Mirza became embarrassed, and spoke r
apidly to the old man again.

  Afterwards he told Morgan, “He says the Ganges is too strong, it would carry us away. And that it is too late now, we should turn back. He is a liar, we should not pay him any money.”

  But the fight had gone out of him; they were already turning on the water. They moved without speaking through the twilight, mist half-obscuring the Ganges bridge, ducks honking mournfully overhead.

  The next day, Morgan visited Mirza’s lodgings: two bare rooms, not quite a bungalow, miles away from his work. A sad kind of home. But although he understood his new friend, no third river sprang up between them. For that, understanding isn’t necessary; only deep affection is required.

  * * *

  He would be seeing Masood again in ten days. He was supposed to feel excited at the prospect, but his stay in Benares was unhappy. It was the most thoroughly Indian city he had visited, yet somehow he didn’t see it properly. The sadhus, the broken-down ghats, the burning bodies and the devotees at the river—all of it felt remote from him. His attention was elsewhere and nowhere, and his anxiety grew as the date of his departure drew nearer, though he wasn’t even sure what he was anxious about. He only knew that he wanted to be happy, but wasn’t.

  At Moghulsarai station, on the way to Bankipore, he saw the following message inscribed on marble blocks:

  Right is Might. Might is right. Time is money. God si love.

  The words of the last statement lingered with him, losing their charm and taking on an unexpected significance. The reversed letters made you see the original idea differently. It meant nothing, really, being love. Love was felt, love was acted upon, or it meant nothing. That was the heart of the matter, and it was what his friend had never understood.

  Masood came to meet him at the station. They greeted each other with unfeigned delight, and for a short while it was as if his Indian travels had only just begun. In the carriage on the way to his house Morgan spoke, a little overexcitedly, about everything he’d seen since they’d last parted—but he could tell that his friend wasn’t listening and he fell silent. The silence continued while they both stared out at the endlessly passing hovels at the edge of the road.

  “I’m sorry,” Masood said at last. “I really was paying attention to you, my dear fellow.”

  “I’m speaking too much. I haven’t had anybody to talk to in quite a few weeks.”

  “I’m very tired. You must forgive me. I have been working hard.”

  “That means business must be going well, at least.”

  “I have a lot of clients, yes. But . . . ” He gestured out of the window, at the low shape of the town. His face was twisted into an expression of despair.

  In just a day or two, Morgan would begin to understand that expression better, and to have some sympathy for it. The view from the carriage was everything. That was it: Bankipore consisted of that road, fourteen miles long, with its fringe of dirty dwellings. Nothing else to it and no way out. Morgan borrowed Masood’s bicycle on one of his first mornings and tried, but there were rice paddies on one side and on the other, out of sight, the Ganges. It was like a huge hand taking hold of him when he did eventually find a way down to the bank: standing on black, smelly mud, staring out over the roiling expanse of water.

  Masood’s house was bare and big and pleasant, and at first he hardly left it. The back windows showed a prospect of open space, though it didn’t extend far. That illusion could be reproduced from the roof, where you seemed to look down into green gardens on either side. Curiously, Masood had never been onto his own roof before Morgan found a way up, nor did he know that the turning beside his house led down to the water. Something in him had been blunted, or frightened, by his life here, so that he didn’t look too closely at anything.

  “And the worst of it,” he declared, “is there’s no tennis. Except at the club, where they won’t let me in.”

  He said it with a smile, but he may not have been joking. A memory came back to Morgan, from a visit to Oxford, of Masood prancing about in his tennis whites, performing for his admirers. He had always been a showman, at his best in front of an audience. Perhaps there were simply not enough onlookers here.

  In just a few days, Morgan himself would be beset by boredom. Bankipore was horrible, and offered almost no distraction. He was here for only two and a half weeks, which felt both too short and too long. What would ever happen in this place? There was nothing to do, and very little to think about. The only open space was the Maidan, some distance down the road; between it and Masood’s house were the Library and the Law Courts. These buildings weren’t much better than the hovels that surrounded them, and on the dusty ground between them squatted litigants waiting for lawyers, while inside the courts, lawyers waited for litigants. That was the sole entertainment.

  He was in touch with one Englishman he had known from King’s, but he preferred spending time with Masood’s friends. Two in particular became his escorts and companions. In the morning, while the rest of the household was still asleep, he would bicycle over to the house of one or the other, and they would accompany him for a few turns about the Maidan. Then he would return home for breakfast with Masood before he left for the courts or consulted with clients in his office. There were many hours spent alone in the middle part of the day, until evening and more conviviality came along.

  One afternoon, while Masood was out, three young men came to call on him and were treated instead to Morgan’s company. He found himself holding forth to the visitors on politics: he spoke about English foreign policy and the complicated, contradictory interests of the Empire, emphasising that much of what Britain did was based on fear of Germany rather than hatred of Islam. The youths listened eagerly and when they left one of them delivered an effusive speech about their good luck in meeting him and how the Empire could go on for ever if it produced wonderful gentlemen like him.

  It was only afterwards that Morgan reflected, with amusement, that everything he’d said had sounded credible only because he happened to know a little more than the young men did. And yet there was something about the exchange that reassured and pleased him. If people could only sit down together and speak—or perhaps more importantly, listen—then many intractable problems might disappear. Everything of significance in his own life had come about through the simple act of open-hearted conversation.

  Yet that could be the most difficult thing in the world. Sometimes the better you knew somebody, the more impossible any real talk became. That, at least, was how it felt to him. Here he was, in the home of the man he loved, on the other side of the world from his own constricting life, and what truths could be spoken between them? They talked about food, or the weather, or problems of justice, but they didn’t speak about anything that mattered. Everything was jest, or chatter, or deflection, and all the while the days were passing.

  Of course, some important things were said, though more by accident than design. There was the moment, for example, when Masood mentioned that he thought he’d made a mistake by going into law and that he was considering a change.

  “But to what?” Morgan asked.

  “I am thinking of education. It is a very necessary field.”

  “Of course, but you’ve spent years, studying in England . . . ”

  “Yes, yes, but the time wasn’t wasted, whatever happens. I have met you, apart from anything else. Just look—here we are, six years later, sitting together in India.”

  Morgan couldn’t help himself; he was overcome with pleasure at the words. It did seem miraculous that an appointment to teach Latin in Weybridge could have carried him such a distance. The talk about Masood’s career became forgotten.

  But it was followed by another conversation, possibly the very next night, when Masood mentioned casually, as if it didn’t matter, that he thought he might marry soon.

  “Oh?” Morgan said. A bolt of pain fell cleanly through him, then vanished in
to the floor. “Do you have somebody in mind?”

  There had been no women evident, not even in their idle chatter.

  “Yes, yes,” Masood said impatiently. “You remember in Aligarh, you met my friend Aftab Ahmed Khan, we had dinner together . . . ”

  “Yes,” Morgan said vaguely. There had been so many dinners, so many meetings . . .

  “I am considering marrying his daughter.” As if there had been some objection, he added, “These things are arranged here in India. We do not pretend to follow the English example. Our tradition is different.”

  “By this time, I should hope I know that.” And both of them laughed and put the subject away hurriedly, as if it were somehow shameful. But the thought of it kept Morgan awake that night and it was the first thing in his mind when he woke the next morning.

  Masood getting married; a door closing deep inside somewhere. He could be miserable if he thought about it too much. Though it wasn’t as if it came as a surprise. Marriage was inevitable here, far more so than in England; he’d known it would happen one day.

  Still, he struggled to contain a sensation of rising dismay. He was at the midpoint of his time in India: three months behind him and three in front. Nor did his friend seem troubled by that fact. There had been no mention of seeing one another again. And when Morgan brought it up, Masood waved the matter away.