The door opened behind me and I turned to see Annie enter the room, wrapped in a pink silk dressing gown. She seemed surprised to see me, but, I thought, not altogether annoyed.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve caught them,’ she said incredulously.
‘Who?’
‘The vandals who smashed my window, of course. That is why you’re here at this hour, isn’t it?’
I confess I’d forgotten about her damn window. I considered spinning her a line – we’re almost there, following up every lead, et cetera – but then stopped myself. There was, I realised, no point in it.
‘We’re not going to catch them, Annie,’ I said. ‘With all that’s going on in the city, I’m afraid your broken window doesn’t really qualify as top priority.’
She smiled. ‘I didn’t think so. So what does bring you out here so early?’
Now was the time to tell her, but suddenly I’d lost the courage to do so. Instead I stalled.
‘I came to ask you if you’d reconsidered my advice about leaving the city for a while.’
‘Sam,’ she sighed, ‘we’ve been through this.’
‘You’ve seen what it’s like out there. The demonstrations are multiplying, things are getting worse. I’m not asking you to emigrate, just take a holiday. Go away for a few weeks till things calm down.’
A smile played across her lips.
‘As it happens, Stephen Schmidt has asked me to accompany him to London. He’s leaving next week. He has some business there apparently.’
‘I was thinking somewhere in the opposite direction might be better. Somewhere south. It’d be warmer.’
Abruptly the memory of our last conversation entered my mind. It had been on the steps of the town hall, just as Gurung and McGuire had set off their smoke bombs. At the time, I’d assumed they were mustard gas. I recalled the terror and the helplessness I’d felt at the thought that I’d been unable to protect her. I realised then that I could never forgive myself if she remained and something happened to her.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘That was petty of me. Schmidt isn’t such a bad egg. Lord knows he can’t be any worse than half the chinless wonders you seem to surround yourself with these days. You should take him up on his offer.’
She stared at me.
‘Was that an apology, Sam? Are you feeling all right? What’s more: a positive word for another man. I never thought I’d see the day.’
‘What can I say?’ I shrugged. ‘He must have won me over with that smile of his.’
She laughed, despite herself. ‘You really are trying to get rid of me, aren’t you, Sam?’
‘I’m thinking of your best interests,’ I said. And it was true. For too long I’d told myself that her best interests were whatever mine happened to be. The truth was nothing of the sort.
‘Well, Captain Wyndham,’ she said, ‘I’ll tell you what I told Mr Schmidt. Calcutta’s my home and I don’t plan on leaving it any time soon.’
Despite my fine words, I couldn’t help but feel my stomach leap.
‘Besides,’ she continued, ‘who in their right mind would want to go to London in January?’
It was a good question.
‘So you see, Captain, you better had catch whoever broke my windows because I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said. ‘About the investigation, though – there may be a slight hiatus. I’m going away for a few weeks.’
‘Really?’ she said. ‘You’re taking a holiday? Now I know there’s something wrong with you.’
I took a breath and steeled myself.
‘It’s not a holiday,’ I said. ‘I’m going to an ashram up in Assam somewhere. I’m going to get cleaned up …’
She seemed perplexed for a moment, but then the penny dropped. I waited for her reaction. Her reply, when it came, was a surprise. She smiled, then shook her head, and it felt as though a weight had been lifted from both our shoulders.
‘You know it won’t be easy, Sam,’ she said, walking over and taking my hand. ‘They say afeem is one of the hardest addictions to overcome.’
I could have told her I’d already figured that out for myself, but sometimes it pays to keep my mouth shut.
‘But rest assured,’ she continued, ‘I’ll still be here when you get back.’
We said our farewells and I left her there, framed by the twin statues of Lord Shiva.
Two hours later I was walking across the concourse of Sealdah station. My suitcase, containing a generous three-day supply of kerdū pulp, was on the head of a red-shirted porter whom Surrender-not had sent off ahead to scout out my platform.
The days since Das’s arrest had been difficult for the young sergeant. He was now, more than ever, an outcaste among his own kind, and as anger at the treatment of Basanti Das grew, so had Surrender-not’s doubts about continuing as an officer in His Majesty’s Imperial Police Force. I’d given him the same advice I’d given Annie: go away. Take a holiday from Calcutta. The difference was, he’d accepted it.
In two days he was off to Dacca, in East Bengal, to stay with an aunt. Dacca was far enough from the hothouse of Calcutta for him to have a chance of putting some perspective on things. And if a rapprochement with his family was to be engineered, the intercession of his father’s sister would be a good start.
‘You’re sure you have everything?’ he asked, sounding like a mother packing her child off to school.
‘Yes,’ I said, taking my case from the porter.
‘Well … good luck, Sam,’ he said and stretched out a hand.
‘And to you, too,’ I said, shaking it. ‘And Suren—’
‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘I shall consider my options most carefully.’
‘I was going to tell you not to talk to any of the working girls in the flat downstairs,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want them taking advantage of you tonight. Without me there to protect you, goodness knows what they’ll have you doing.’
‘Yes, Sam.’
‘Well, get going, young man,’ I said. ‘You know I can’t stand long goodbyes. Get back and make sure Sandesh isn’t loafing about.’
With that I left him and boarded in search of my compartment.
The train pulled out of the station only forty minutes late, which, I felt, constituted another triumph for the British Empire, and as we headed north through the Bengal countryside and I began to doze, my thoughts returned to Annie, standing there between the twin statues of Lord Shiva dancing his celestial dance. The destroyer and the creator. Destruction and rebirth.
Maybe there was something to Hindu mysticism after all.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
While fictionalised, many of the events and characters in the book are grounded in real history.
Gandhi did call for non-violent, non-cooperation with the aim of independence by the end of 1921, and amid the turmoil, the British government really did send Prince Edward, later King Edward VIII, who married Mrs Wallis Simpson and then abdicated, on a goodwill tour. Chitta Ranjan Das was indeed Gandhi’s chief lieutenant in Bengal, and Subhash Bose, a man who would later go on to be a nationalist hero, had recently returned from England and become Das’s deputy.
Das’s wife, Basanti Devi, did speak to a rally in place of her husband and was duly arrested by the authorities, thereby re-energising the flagging non-cooperation movement.
Porton Down has, for over a hundred years, been the home of the UK Ministry of Defence’s science and technology laboratory. Their scientists, as they were later to do with British and Australian troops, did carry out biological tests, including mustard gas experiments, on unsuspecting Indian troops, though these experiments took place mostly during the 1930s rather than during the First World War. The clandestine tests were carried out at a facility in the city of Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan. Anyone interested in reading more on the subject could do no better than to start by tracking down a copy of Gassed: British Chemical Warfare Experiments on Humans at Porton Down by the journalist Rob Evans.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are so many people without whom this novel wouldn’t have seen the light of day, and I thank them all for their contributions, both large and small.
I’m indebted, in particular, to the fantastic team at Harvill Secker: to my editor, Jade Chandler, for helping turn a shed into a greenhouse; to Anna Redman for her tireless work over almost four years; to Sophie Painter for her fantastic marketing campaigns and to Kris Potter for his wonderful artwork. I must also thank Katherine Fry for her eagle eyes. I’m also grateful to Jane Kirby, Monique Corless, Sam Coates and Penny Liechti in the rights team for helping Sam and Surrender-not travel across continents. Thanks too, to Liz Foley, Rachel Cugnoni, Richard Cable, Bethan Jones, Alex Russell, Tom Drake-Lee and the wider team at Vintage for all their support, and to my agent, Sam Copeland, and the team at Rogers, Coleridge and White for all their hard work.
A special thank you is due to Christina Ellicott at Vintage and to all the staff at Waterstones for being such great supporters of the books and giving the first in the series, A Rising Man, such a wonderful start.
A debt of gratitude is owed to Vaseem Khan, Ayisha Malik, Alex Caan, AA Dhand and Imran Mahmood, all fantastic authors and known collectively as Team Dishoom, for their support and for the esoteric Twitter conversations.
Thanks of course, to all those good friends who let me borrow their names without worrying about what I’d do with them: to Darren Callaghan, Scott Lamont, Mathilde Rouvel, Alastair Dunlop and Iain McGuire.
Thanks too, to Darren Sharma for all the free lunches and the half a dozen emails which appear without fail in my inbox each morning; to the staff at the Idea Store Canary Wharf for offering me sanctuary; and to my partners at Houghton Street Capital, Hash, Alok and Neeraj, for putting up with my diva-esque tendencies and questionable work ethic. These are unlikely to change any time soon.
Thank you to Jonny Flint for bringing some sort of order to the chaos that is the Mukherjee house; to my boys, Milan and Aran, the source of so much of that chaos; and finally of course, thank you to my wife, Sonal, who puts up with so much and asks for so little. I’m blessed to be with you.
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Copyright © Abir Mukherjee 2018
Cover photographs © Getty Images Abir Mukherjee has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This novel is a work of fiction. In some cases true life figures appear but their actions and conversations are entirely fictitious. All other characters, and all names of places and descriptions of events, are the products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons or places is entirely coincidental.
First published by Harvill Secker in 2018
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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