by Damon Galgut
“I am very busy, my dear chap,” he said. “You see how my days are. Of course I would love to travel around with you, but I don’t know how it’s possible. Not at the moment. But the next time you come—certainly then, oh yes, we’ll tour about and I’ll show you everything. Oh, I look forward to that hugely.”
“The next time. When will that be?”
“I don’t know, Morgan, that’s up to you. But you’ll come back, of course you will. Now we’re not going to be depressed, are we, and spoil our happy days together? That would be too dreary.” And he went off, singing a ghazal, to shave before work.
In the end, Bankipore seemed to fall past him, so swiftly did his stay run out. And his memory of it afterwards was filled with Masood’s friends, rather than Masood himself. As the days converged on his departure, his anguish rose invisibly, not uncoloured by resentment. Why had he come here—to India—at all?
* * *
And then there were the caves.
“I have organised a little expedition for you,” Masood mumbled at him on one of his last mornings, as they took breakfast together on the roof. “Before you go to Gaya, I think you should see the Barabar caves. I am sending you with a friend, and you will have a picnic breakfast.”
“That is very kind of you,” Morgan said, “very kind,” but his teeth clinked painfully on the edge of his cup. “Are they wonderful, these caves?”
“Oh, yes. Famous caves.” After a moment he conceded, “Well, they are not so wonderful. But you should see them.” And after a further pause: “I have arranged an elephant.”
Morgan, staring down into the complicated trees, tried to be impressed by the elephant.
The last day was the worst. Time seemed to swell, becoming waterlogged with emotion. He thought he would get through it all right, but then in the middle of the night, when they’d said goodbye, his sadness had become too big and he’d gone back through to Masood’s room and done what he’d done. The attempted kiss, the pushing away, the tears: all of it had shamed him deeply, so that he couldn’t consider the memory too directly. And he had taken those feelings—of sadness and longing and shame—to the caves with him the next morning.
It was true: the caves were not so wonderful. They were small, with almost no ornamentation, no visible history. And they were spread out so far, in such a remote place, that he found himself retreating afterwards with a low, persistent headache and his deep melancholy unassuaged.
But despite their ordinariness, the caves lingered in him. He carried their hollowness inside, their negatively asserted shape. In Bodh Gaya, in the sunken garden where the Buddha had supposedly attained his enlightenment, he was less stirred by the prayer flags and the pilgrims than the memory of a glassy smoothness under his fingers, and that echo.
That echo. It played in his head at unexpected moments, repeating certain sounds and making nonsense of them. But could you remember an echo? Memory itself was like another kind of echo, everything duplicating endlessly, in shadow versions of itself.
Something had happened between Masood and himself, he felt, in the caves. Which was nonsense, because Masood hadn’t even been present. Though that was exactly the point. That was what everything between them had come down to: Masood still abed, while his friends, Agarwala and Mahmud, were at the station to see Morgan off. And wasn’t that always the way of it? Hadn’t his association with Masood, under the elaborate filigree of language, hadn’t it always been about this deferment, this selfishness, this veil drawn over the obvious truth, which was that Masood simply did not care enough? Morgan could not look at the possibility for long, but at least he could look at it, and over the coming days he took it out and hurt himself with it at particular moments when he was alone. He had always been slow to comprehend his own feelings, and it came only gradually to him how disappointed he was. He had hoped for a great deal in making this journey and none of it had come to pass. Now he was left with time and an immense amount of space, and nobody else to keep him company.
In the weeks that followed, Masood, bewildered or lazy or unable to help himself, continued in his apparent indifference. The promised letters did not arrive. Morgan wondered: would they ever see one another again? And would it matter if they didn’t? His mood, which seldom left him, was like being under the sea, in aquamarine light. However bright or loud your surroundings, you were somehow always alone.
Even in the middle of the vastest tide of humanity he had ever seen in his life—at the Magha Mela, the Bathing Fair in Allahabad, which Rupert Smith had invited him to—he felt profoundly singular. He was in a tent again, pitched in the middle of a mango grove. Nearby, the crowd seethed. A million people, Smith said. It was like a small nation, in which certain details could suddenly become apparent. People praying to idols with frighteningly painted faces. A sadhu hanging over a fire, his head in a black bag, being pushed back and forth by another sadhu. Long lines of pilgrims, waiting to have their scalps shaved, except for the one lock by which they hoped to be pulled to heaven. Their shorn hair piling up, to be taken to the water.
For the most part he watched it from an observation platform, astounded at this epic display of faith. The scene was especially remarkable in the early evening, when the air was blurred with dust and smoke, and people became like tiny animals crawling on the bottom of the sea. The junction of the two rivers kept changing overnight, according to how the Ganges wandered in its bed. This must have been the reason that he and Mirza had been unable to locate the spot, yet other people now were finding their way.
His journey had lost some of its velocity by now, though its form continued to hold him. He went on to Lucknow, where the Residency, the site of the Mutiny siege, had been preserved as a museum, through which he stumbled by the light of a golden afternoon. It was very still and weirdly beautiful, the wide, garden-like spaces with their bougainvillea and bursts of orange creeper, shaded by tall banyan trees, and then the broken buildings, punched and pocked with the marks of cannon balls, looking like much older ruins already. In one place the besiegers were only the width of an alley from the residents, whose presence still trembled on the air, in the form of heat ripples rising from the ground.
He fled from them, back to Agra, Muttra, Aligarh. It was a measure of how much he’d seen that Aligarh, and the college, now seemed like a place where relations between the races were good, even kind. He went to call on Masood’s mother, who still would not see him in person. But Mirza had coached him in the right words to convey. Give my salaams to Begum Sahiba and say that I have been at Bankipore and that Masood is very well. All true, of course; but he began to wonder whether his entire Indian visit might not dwindle to those bare facts.
Injury had transformed slowly into anger, inseparable sometimes from the landscape he was travelling through. He had begun to voice this emotion in letters, in a way he’d never done before. You can now go to hell as far as I’m concerned . . . These words, to Masood! You didn’t work at law, you don’t write anyone letters, you can’t even stop yourself getting fat by taking proper exercise. Soon you’ll be too slack to trouble to keep your friends and will just drift about making casual acquaintances with the people you find handy. I do think that is beastly of you.
Such sentiments would have been inconceivable just a few weeks before—to say nothing of signing off without love, which he now pointedly did. Love was still there, of course, but to refrain from declaring it was a declaration in itself.
* * *
In the first half of his journey, everything had seemed to fall past him at dazzling speed; nothing was still or fixed. But now that Masood was behind him, the end of his stay had become visible in the distance. All of this would finish. The world that he was passing through was not so new or shiny any more; it had taken on solidity and weight.
He found himself noting little moments, or particular people, with an eye to using them later. He didn’t really know what he would do
with them; only that they were part of a fabric he’d begun to weave. His mind was especially receptive on a return visit to the Darlings in Lahore. He had enjoyed his previous stay, but it was only now that he fully appreciated how unusual the Darlings were in British India. Every week there were several gatherings involving a mix of Indians and Europeans, and at an evening party Morgan met an elderly gentleman, whose name made an impression. After the party ended Mr. Godbole strolled with him through the public gardens, discussing ragas. Different scales were applicable to different times of day, he told Morgan, and to illustrate the point Mr. Godbole sang to him a little in C major, which was appropriate for the evening.
The old gentleman was not, in the end, especially memorable, though his name did linger behind him. It was perhaps usable if bestowed on a minor character, a walk-on part that nobody would remember. But the trouble with Mr. Godbole, and all the other bits and pieces he was gathering, was that they remained loose strands—little pieces of talk, or momentary impressions gleaned in passing—with nothing to knot them together. In writing his previous novels, there had always been something at the middle of the narrative, a thickening into solidity, around or over or through which the story had to pass. Everything would lead up to it, and then everything would lead out of it again. Without that obstacle in his way, he couldn’t even begin. But although his mind had been preoccupied with his Indian book for quite some time, he still had no sense of what that central density might be.
Well, it would come or it would not come; that was all. If the Big Event didn’t show itself to him, there could be no book, nor did he think the world would be much poorer for it.
In the meanwhile he remained a traveller, and India continued to strew events and places in his path. In Delhi, Malcolm had arranged another meeting with Bapu Sahib for him. Morgan was very keen to see His Highness again, who had begun to loom in his mind as the Indian he knew and liked best after Masood. No sooner had he located the royal party than Bapu Sahib ran up behind him and put his hands over Morgan’s eyes; this happy greeting set the tone for the two days of his stay.
His Highness was there—with the Rani and their child, his brother, the Prime Minister and sixty-five attendants, all of them staying in the same hotel—to attend a Chiefs’ conference. On his last day in the city Morgan accompanied him while he made official calls. When his duties were done, Bapu Sahib became boyish and boisterous, bouncing delightedly on the cushions. The royal carriage took them into the city, where they chanced to meet his brother and other members of the court who had been shopping. The squabbling, noisy, happy party—ten of them—pushed into the carriage too, along with their mound of purchases. Morgan found himself between His Highness, who was adorned with a large pale-yellow turban, and his brother with a purple one, the doctor in a red Maratha head-dress opposite, while nearby lolled a secretary who appeared to be wearing an orange cup and saucer, next to the court buffoon, who held a wheezing elderly pug on his lap. Outside the carriage hung the coachman, an attendant, a footman and a groom. As far as Morgan could tell, nobody in the street paid them the slightest bit of attention.
This ride put him in a good humour again, and it lasted all the way through Jaipur, which he disliked, and Jodhpur, which he did not. Mount Abu cheered him further, with its valleys and trees and temples, and it was in almost victorious mood that he arrived in Hyderabad, far to the south. After a few days, when he moved on to Aurangabad, he was nearing the end of his time in India; he could feel it all closing on a final, finite point.
Morgan had scarcely arrived at the dak bungalow when Saeed, Ahmed Mirza’s younger brother, swept up in a flurry to take him off and he was settled instead into quite the loveliest quarters he had seen in this country: a large hall divided into two by exquisite blue arches, its side open to a garden of trees whose presence crowded into the house. The air was heavy with the smell of flowers. Before he slept each night he went out to look at the house from the other side of a rectangular tank, full of fish, and the sight reminded him of the Loggia de’ Lanzi in Florence.
Saeed and his housemates—a Municipal Inspector and yet another barrister—lived in an ugly dwelling in the yard, and on his second night they all ate together, and afterwards shared a hookah and conversation. They recited poetry to one another in Persian, Urdu, Arabic and Greek, and talked about astrology and the shortcomings of Englishmen. It was a clear, calm evening and for a moment Morgan had the impression that he had been carried back in time, to one of his early visits to Masood in Oxford, when everything was still new between them.
He had known Saeed a little from London, but this young man had grown very dashing since then. He was a Munsif, a Junior Magistrate, and Morgan visited the courts with him on various days. In the sub-judge’s room, he observed a civil surgeon giving evidence in a case of murder, while a punkah-wallah, a superb, bare-chested, sculpted youth, in whom graven idol and flesh became one, fanned them rhythmically, pulling his rope impassively as Atropos.
It was becoming clearer to Morgan that his novel might turn on an incident of some kind, which would play itself out in a courtroom. The idea was connected to his experiences in India generally. Most of the educated class of Indians he’d met—Masood and his friends—were barristers. On the other hand, many of his English acquaintances worked for the Indian Civil Service and had been employed as magistrates. He had found himself very exercised in Allahabad when he’d gone to watch Rupert Smith presiding over a court in session. Smith himself had already been marked in Morgan’s mind as the embodiment of a certain type, but now the setting had taken hold of him too. It had become more and more troubling to Morgan, in a personal, discomfiting way, that these two classes—the finest minds that each side could offer—seemed to regard each other with suspicion and contempt. The Indians felt that they were abused and mistreated; the English officials said that the educated Indian was a drop in the ocean and meant nothing. Even justice, it seemed, was cracked down the middle.
This crack, this deep divide, would run through his book. Two nations, two distinct ways of doing things, were in endless friction with each other. And it was everywhere obvious. The conflict was in him and around him, and wanted to be worked out on the page.
* * *
Home was beginning to loom ahead now, not only as an idea but as a fast-approaching reality. In just one week he would be boarding the ship at Bombay. Because it was on his mind, he mentioned England more than usual in conversation, and it sparked an outburst from Saeed.
He and Morgan were riding on horseback to see a nearby Maratha village. It was evening, and Morgan had an upset stomach from a banquet he’d been treated to the previous night. He’d fallen off this same horse a day or two before, but thankfully the animal played no tricks today. Instead it was Saeed who was fretful and skittish.
“What do you English imagine?” he cried. “That you will rule us for ever? Do you not know that already your days here are ending? Clear out, you fellows! The Raj and you will be defeated. It may be fifty or five hundred years, but we shall turn you out.”
His face became quite distorted with fury. It was a sharp-edged, nasty little moment, which Morgan was glad to leave behind. As they rode on and a happier conversation resumed, he thought: he hates us. He hates us far more than his brother does.
Their friendship had become fraught, as every one of his Indian friendships seemed to in the end. Even so, by the next day the difficult talk was forgotten as Saeed accompanied Morgan to visit the caves nearby at Ellora. On the way they stopped in Daulatabad to visit the hill-fort. This unlovely creation had the power of impregnability: one entered across a bridge that spanned an excavated moat, and then ascended a spiral tunnel through the hill. From the very summit, above all the guns and fortifications, the Deccan plateau simmered bleakly in the heat.
Saeed flung a stone over the edge as they went back. He said, “When I look down on walls I thought big below, I despise them.”
For his part, Morgan thought, what should I do with such a kingdom? The temptation to power had no purchase here, not for him. People like Saeed wanted to rule, but they didn’t seem to know what that involved. It was a great labour and a great burden, he had glimpsed that in the last weeks. Power both amplified and diminished those who wielded it.
After lunch they walked around the outside of the moat, stepping carefully through a rocky landscape that baked and shivered in the sun. The heat and immobility and silence were preparation for what awaited him at Ellora in the evening. He had been to so many forts and temples and shrines and tombs over the past six months that he didn’t believe he had any reserves of awe left. But the Kailasa cave, seen in the last bloody rays of the sun, amazed and astonished him.
Cut out of a single vast rock, it was a temple complex with many levels and galleries and courtyards, covered in sculptures and friezes of an arresting intensity. The shrine at its heart, built around a gigantic lingam, made impression enough, but what stayed with Morgan afterwards were some of the animal images, charged with spiritual hostility, and the terrifying blank indifference of a goddess while she casually inflicted cruelty. He returned alone at sunset, and again the next morning. By now he had made up his mind that the inspiration behind the Kailasa wasn’t godly, but diabolical. Many, many hands and years had made this place; it gave expression to three different kinds of religious thinking. Nevertheless, whether Buddhist or Hindu or Jain, the caves did not exude a good feeling. They weren’t beautiful, and their grandiosity was of a frightening kind. They had been carved as shrines to an ancient and primitive fear in people; they had certainly touched that place in him.
He found himself thinking now about those other caves, in the Barabar Hills far to the north. He had returned to them often in his imagination, like a hard hollowness at the centre of his journey. They were nothing like Ellora or the Kailasa, of course; they were vacant and smooth, without idols. Nevertheless, they had become larger and more numerous in his mind, more perfect in their emptiness.