Bhowani Junction

by John Masters

  Suddenly Victoria screamed, There’s K. P. Roy!’ But no one heard her except me.

  I shouted, ‘Where?’ She came up beside me and pointed and began to say something. Looking where she pointed, I saw a fellow in the mêlée swing a police lathi up and round. Then I was unsighted, and I could not swear whether he or another man did it, but the lathi caught Surabhai a real smash on the side of the head. Surabhai fell, the people milled about, and again I saw the lathi swing up—and down. There were no police within fifteen feet of Surabhai. I didn’t have to ask which was Roy then, but I couldn’t see him any more. I dived into the ruck, but someone shouted, ‘Flee! Run!’ and everyone took it up, including Govindaswami, and in ten seconds the moonlight was speckled with the shadows of people running like mad in all directions. In ten more seconds they’d vanished among the scattered houses and hedges.

  I ran to Govindaswami and told him Victoria had recognized Roy in the crowd. Sammy said, ‘Not much use, but we’ll try.’ He turned on the panting police and rattled off orders that sent them running every which way. Some climbed into the bus, and that lumbered off down the Pike. The sentry opened the gate. Sammy ran into his office and began telephoning the police barracks. Soon more constables were hurrying out on bicycles and on foot to patrol the level crossings and road junctions and river fords within a mile of the Kutcherry.

  Victoria was sitting there in his office with us, pale but contained. We gave her a drink of water and a cigarette. She hadn’t been hurt physically.

  At last the excitement was over and everything had been done that could be done. Then we relaxed, and I asked Sammy how he had managed to put on such a fine Campbellsare-coming act. He said sourly, ‘Private information.’

  We talked some more, and then I asked if he’d drive Victoria and me down to the Old Lines and bring me back with him. He nodded, and we went out to get into his Austin.

  Partly it was the moonlight making everything white round there, partly it was the excitement and each one of us having had other things to think about—me of Victoria, Victoria perhaps of me, Govindaswami of his job and Roy—but we’d none of us noticed the body lying on its face near the off front wheel of the Austin, the body in a white dhoti and scarlet suspenders, yellow socks, and co-respondent shoes, with a little blood round the head and a Gandhi cap lying stained with blood beside a police lathi five feet off.

  Victoria stopped and swayed like a tree in a high wind, but she wasn’t going to faint. She whispered to herself as I put out my arm to hold her. She knelt down. Neither Sammy nor I did, because we knew—partly by the way the body lay, partly by the broken hole in the skull, partly because it was so inevitable.

  The darling lifted up his head in her arms and tried to wipe away the blood. She wasn’t disgusted by mere violence any more, as she used to be, just because the results were messy. She saw a man badly hurt. That was no time to think about the real mess violence causes and is caused by, which is not so easily visible. She was full of compassion. She laid his head down at last and said, ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  Sammy said bitterly, ‘Yes, they murdered him all right. They even managed to get a policeman to do it for them.’

  I said, ‘No. It wasn’t a policeman.’

  Victoria said, ‘I saw too. I’m almost sure it was Roy.’

  Sammy asked me if I was sure. When I told him yes, he looked hard at me and said, ‘Did anyone else see?’

  I didn’t think so. Sammy said. ‘It doesn’t matter. Here’s the lathi. We’ll never be able to make anyone believe it, whatever we say, however much we exonerate the police in an inquiry.’ I thought of suggesting we burn the lathi, but I know the right cries well enough, and I kept my mouth shut. Anyway, the sentry would have seen us.

  Victoria said angrily. ‘Are you going to leave him lying here while you work out who is to blame?’

  Sammy took her arm and said gently, ‘No, Miss Jones. But if we don’t consider now what is the right thing to do, there will be more blood shed here, and elsewhere in India, because of this.’

  She thought a minute and said suddenly, ‘Please take me in your car to get Mrs Surabhai and Ranjit.’

  ‘Ranjit?’ Sammy said, surprised. But she knew what she was doing, and all at once I did. That was the hell of a woman, and becoming bigger every hour.

  As they were leaving I said, ‘Do you want me to carry him in?’

  Sammy said, ‘Please. And will you get your doctor? The civil surgeon’s gone to Kishanpur with Lanson. And do you know what for?’

  ‘No,’ I said, obviously.

  Sammy said, ‘Because Brigadier ffoulkes-Jones thinks his Alsatian chef is trying to poison him. The foie gras tasted funny last night, he reported.’

  They drove off. Surabhai certainly had a knack for wringing good honest comedy out of the most unlikely situations. I carried him in, and by the time Sammy and Victoria came back Chaney had examined him and pronounced him dead of a fractured skull. We had also washed his face, closed his eyes, arranged his clothes, and laid him out on Lanson’s table with a handkerchief over his face.

  Victoria supported Mrs Surabhai as she came in. She was a battle-axe of a woman, and Sammy had told me she used to give Surabhai hell because he wasn’t a mixture of Rockefeller and Bismarck. Perhaps she loved him. You couldn’t tell, because by custom she had to start keening and yelling and tearing her clothes to pieces. I wished to God that Manbir’s old wife were there to help Victoria look after her. Finally some friends arrived in a tonga, and Govindaswami gave them permission to take the body away.

  Then we were left—Victoria, Sammy, Ranjit, and I. Victoria had taken charge, and Sammy waited quietly. She held Ranjit’s hand for a minute and made him sit down. The rest of us stood. She said gently, ‘Ranjit, dear, you are a secret Congress man, aren’t you?’

  He nodded. He seemed a lot tougher than he used to be—not chest-beating tough or gangster-tough, but as if a lot of willow had been taken out of him and steel put in instead. I was not surprised. The Sikh religion is strong meat to take on an empty stomach.

  Victoria said, ‘And you don’t really like working on the railway, do you?’

  He shook his head. He was looking at her and weighing her to see where she was going next, what she was trying to make him do. A week ago she could have twisted him round her little finger, I knew, but not now. He didn’t dislike her—if anything, he loved her more than he ever had—and I knew he’d been in love with her from the same moment I was, perhaps earlier.

  She said, ‘Both Colonel Savage and I saw this lathi’—it was in the corner, complete with blood and hair—‘kill Mr Surabhai. But it was not a policeman who did it.’

  ‘Who was it?’ he said.

  ‘K. P. Roy,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she corrected me. ‘We didn’t actually see Roy do it This is what we saw.’ She explained clearly and finished up, ‘So it was either Roy or another man in the crowd. Roy was the nearest. It was not a policeman. And the rescue only turned into a riot when first your mother told them to climb the wall and after that the young fellow—the one with a pale face——’

  ‘Mehta,’ Ranjit said.

  She said, ‘When Mehta told the people to charge the police I am almost certain K. P. Roy wasn’t with them when they crossed the Pike and caught us, because I was looking for him. He must have been hanging about on the outskirts, waiting for his opportunity.’

  ‘His opportunity to do what?’ Ranjit said quietly. As I say, he wasn’t antagonistic. This new Ranjit, you had to show him.

  ‘To start on his campaign to break India from within,’ Sammy said. ‘What’s holding you politicians together now except hatred of the British? Who will succeed Surabhai as local chairman here?’

  ‘Mehta could,’ Ranjit said, ‘Mehta was getting ready to take over when we were all sure you were going to keep Surabhai in jail—after the fishplate was found.’

  I’d always wondered why Roy put the fishplate there. Now I knew.

  Vic
toria said, ‘Mehta could succeed—but so could you, if you left the railway service and came into the open.’

  Ranjit sat there a long time, quite still. Finally he looked at me and said, ‘Do you give me your word that it was not a policeman who killed V. K.?’

  I said, ‘Yes.’

  He got up then and said, ‘Very well. I will think it over. I could out-vote Mehta if I tried. I have never thought of trying before.’

  ‘Even if you win, you will have a hard fight to get the actual control out of the hands of Mehta and his friends,’ Sammy said. ‘They’ll try to make you into a figurehead.’ He was a cunning bastard, and, of course, an Indian.

  Ranjit said, ‘I do not think I will be afraid of that. But you must not imagine that the local Congress, under my leadership, will be any less hostile to you and what you stand for. Or that the struggle for a free, united India will be allowed to the or weaken in Bhowani.’

  Sammy said, ‘And I don’t want you to imagine that anything you care to do now will give you the smallest privilege against the law.’

  ‘I will tell you in a day or two,’ Ranjit said. He turned to Victoria and said, in front of us, ‘You were right to leave the gurdwara, and me, when you did, Victoria. Thank you.’ He took her hand and kissed it gently in a very European gesture—perhaps his last.

  Sammy said, ‘Do you want to see your mother for a minute?’

  Ranjit thought and said, ‘Yes, please. Alone, please.’

  I borrowed Sammy’s Austin and took Victoria home. It was about midnight, and I was thinking of Surabhai and wishing he could have been killed more gloriously—say with Probyn’s at Meiktila. I was betting myself a thousand to one in pounds that even then his last words would have been something as immortally incongruous as ‘Oh botheration!’ when Patrick passed us on his Norton, doing about seventy. He must have come back on 599 Down, the slow train from Bombay to Delhi, which reaches Bhowani Junction at 2329.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The following Sunday we were at the Collector’s again. It was about half past eleven in the morning, and Sammy was signing papers at his desk. A coppersmith bird donged with maddening persistence among the bushes in the garden. I went over to the windows and peered out between the horizontal slats of the venetian blind. The garden was shimmering with dry heat.

  Victoria sat quietly with her hands in her lap and watched me. She had a steady look that finally began to disconcert me, so I said, ‘Do you mind if I go out and shoot that bloody bird, Collector? Or do you keep it as a pet?’

  Perhaps Victoria was estimating me as a father. Perhaps she thought I’d eat my young if they whimpered out of whimpering hours.

  The tenor bell started ringing in the cantonment church. The coppersmith resented the competition and doubled his rate of donging.

  Sammy said, ‘Please don’t shoot it, Savage. It will certainly be sacred to someone, somewhere in this godforsaken country. Don’t you ever go to church?’ The bell tolled, and an ashtray on Sammy’s desk buzzed in its reverberations.

  I said, ‘No. I am a decent chap, and my memorial shall be a thousand lost golf balls. Except that I don’t play golf.’

  Victoria was fairly well educated and very intelligent, and she had educated herself a lot more since she left school—but as far as general background of culture went, she was a lightweight. Sammy was a light-heavy, and I am a smart welter. My chance remark caused a small look of vacancy to pass across Victoria’s expressive eyes. She rearranged her hands and waited for us to get on to some subject she could undertand. Meanwhile she probably mulled over things, such as the qualities of fatherhood, which she was quietly satisfied that I couldn’t understand.

  I looked at the thermometer hanging in the shade of the verandah outside. I said, ‘A hundred and nine, and it’s what? Half past eleven? This can’t go on much longer.’

  ‘A week, more or less,’ Sammy said. He scribbled his long signature on another document, blotted it, and turned round. ‘Now——’

  I sat down, brought out a handkerchief, and tied it loosely, as a neckerchief, round my neck. Sammy’s white suit was immaculate, but his collar hung in wet folds. He ran his finger round it and said, ‘My third to-day. I expect to get through five or six more before bedtime. I put on the second in honour of an early visitor.’

  He waited. He liked his little touches of drama.

  I said, ‘All right!’ I put the tips of my fingers together and said, ‘I confess that I am baffled, Govindaswami, as to the identity of your early visitor.’

  ‘Ranjit,’ he said.

  ‘I am unbaffled,’ I said.

  He said, ‘He came here to tell me what he knows aboutK. P. Roy. It isn’t much more than we know already. Roy got a tooth or two knocked out on Friday night. Otherwise he’s in good trim and working hard.’

  I asked if Ranjit had seen him (Roy) since the fight at the jail.

  Sammy said, ‘He says not. Mehta told him the news—before he told Mehta that he was a candidate for the local Congress chairmanship.’

  ‘He’s doing it, then?’ I said, ‘Leaving the railway and all?’

  Sammy nodded, and I said, ‘We ought to give Victoria a medal or something.’

  Victoria said, ‘Not me. The Guru Panth.’

  Sammy nodded and went on. ‘Well, Ranjit thinks he will be elected at a meeting to-morrow. He is already out of the railway. His mother wouldn’t tell him anything about Roy, but from what Mehta let slip Ranjit thinks that Roy is still hiding in Bhowani.’ I asked Sammy what, if anything, he wanted me to do about it.

  He said, ‘Nothing, I hope. The police are at work. This evening I will get some plain-clothes men from Agra and Cawnpore. I have good hopes of catching Roy this time.’

  ‘It will be the hell of a trial if you do,’ I said sourly, ‘Worse than that I.N.A. farce at the Red Fort. Think, is your trial really necessary?’

  Sammy said, ‘A trial will be better in the long run than a mysteriously dead Roy. I am a servant of the Government of India, not of Mr Djugashvili or of the late Mr Schicklgruber.’ He stood up, delicately mopping his brow with a huge white linen handkerchief. He said, ‘All I want you to do is stand by at an hour’s notice. But remember, please, if I am forced to employ you—no mysterious deaths.’

  ‘You and your bloody Old Cheltonian tie,’ I said. I stood up and started slowly for the door. He was a strong man, Sammy, and one of the few who really don’t prefer to use their strength against other people. I asked him what they used to call him at Cheltenham.

  He said, ‘Nigger, at first. Later, Sammy.’

  I asked him if he’d enjoyed it there.

  He said, ‘Yes. God knows why. I got my Fifteen cap as scrum half. The other sides used to complain that they couldn’t see me on muddy days.’

  I laughed and held the door open for Victoria. The jeep was waiting under the shade of the trees, with Birkhe curled up comfortably in the back seat. We braced ourselves for the hot dry shampoo of air. Victoria put on her dark glasses. Sammy said, ‘We must end the run of Roy’s melodrama with all speed. There’s a famine starting in parts of Madras.’

  We spent the day together, in the mess and at my bungalow. A good deal happened, both what was obvious and what could not be seen. When she left me she bent down and kissed the inside of my wrist. Her lips were cool and wet, and the queer forlorn passion of her movement leaped up my arm so that I could not take my hand away. It wouldn’t move, and my knees went weak from love. The tonga driver watched interestedly from below. When she loosed my hand she stumbled down the steps and climbed into the tonga and jolted away. I stood on the verandah till she had gone, and long after that.

  She didn’t get the chance to tell me until some time later what happened then, but as her story is complete and mine only joined it half-way through, it is her story that I will tell here.

  She found Number 4 Collett Road empty, airless, and like an oven. It smelled different to her—stranger even than when she first came back from the Army. It s
melled of meals eaten long ago, of the tang of betel nut from her mother’s secret vice, of Rose Mary’s powerful scent and her father’s pipe.

  She wandered about, opening windows to let in the air. The sun was down, and she saw blue wood-smoke and grey coal-smoke dimming the horizons, and heard the squeak of a bullock cart.

  With luck, she thought, her family would stay out until she could get into bed and pretend to be asleep. She sat down in her father’s chair in the parlour, kicked off her sandals, and closed her eyes. She meant to rest for only a minute before going to bed. She wanted to think about herself and me—just as I, up in cantonments, wanted to. But I couldn’t. I was worrying about Roy by then, and wondering what I could do to help Sammy.

  Victoria decided that during the day she bad been near something final and right—but when, exactly? When was it that she had heard the whisper of a knowledge beyond her own knowledge?

  (The circumstances in which she told me of this time were such that she wanted to explain all her thoughts to me. It was another day, another climate, and we will come to it.)

  Was it when we had talked, in the mess, of Ledru-Rollin, and she didn’t know what we were talking about? When we played Bartók and told her it was Korngold? When I took ber to the cemetery to see the grave of my great-grandmother? When she had agreed to come out and spend a week-end in camp in the jungle with me? When Patrick came to tell us that he bad failed in Bombay, and we both realized that he had come at that time hoping to find us in bed, to hear us perhaps, and so suffer the last pains of love? In my bitter politeness to Rose Mary, when she and Howland came to the bungalow to get permission to take out a truck—which I refused?

  She reached no conclusion, sitting there in her father’s parlour except that she was wildly happy and steadily unhappy. She could place the happiness with great exactitude—it lived in, or grew from, the wide and slippery gulfs of my bed. The unhappiness she could not isolate. The last thing she heard before falling asleep in the chair was an engine whistling for the level-crossing a mile up the line.