Clearing his throat and speaking gently, Humphry turned to the youth who felt in his bones his bosses were exploiting him.
“Do you also feel in your bones you are exploiting the servants in your home?”
A desperate look crossed the young man’s face.
“There are times,” he acknowledged solemnly, “when I realize this may be true.”
“Class struggle cannot take place in a country where the caste system is so strong,” Mallik-da suggested, tentative on this new ground and nervously reaching for a samosa.
“The driver of my car and I may belong to the same caste but I cannot imagine sitting and eating at the same table with him,” Sudhin observed sagely, suggesting caste and class might work at cross-purposes.
Hesitantly but with a hint of daring, a young Communist volunteered that he had once shared a meal with his brother’s driver. After a long moment of stunned silence, the adda broke up and they all made their way home.
Writers’ Building, Dalhousie Square, Calcutta,
late October 1936
One of Michael John Carritt’s first responsibilities as a special officer in Calcutta was to encode and decode messages arriving from London and Delhi for His Excellency the Governor. To this end he was given a small black box made out of steel and secured with a padlock. The box, which contained cipher codes and secret files, went with him everywhere. One of his orderlies liked to carry it on his head. The other liked to carry it in gloved hands, like a butler carrying a tea tray. Carritt relished being called away from a posh dinner table by the delivery of a top-secret telegram. This would oblige him to retire to a study to decipher its contents, sipping slowly from a large whiskey thoughtfully provided by his host.
Carritt was often disappointed to discover that more than half of the files marked “Highly Secret” had more to do with the sender’s sense of self-importance than anything remotely sensitive. Another twenty-five percent were designated “Secret” to keep them from being circulated to Indian members of the General Assembly. That left only about a quarter of files marked secret on the grounds of law and order. Naturally, these proved the most valuable. He alerted his contacts when the police had intercepted letters at “suspect” addresses. Weekly police reports and encrypted correspondence from London were cheerfully passed along.
Apart from Reverend Scott, John Auden and Humphry House were the only ones who knew of Carritt’s secret life. When John was in Calcutta, the four of them would meet at John’s flat. Though John’s voice was uncannily similar to Wystan’s, Carritt found him to be cut from a different cloth. When they first met, John hadn’t yet begun to question British rule; his conversation was more about his Himalayan work than politics. It took a few pegs of whiskey before he was freed of his nearly Old World reserve. Only then did his sardonic humor and dry sense of the absurd come to light. As time passed, he became even more forthcoming, as if he hadn’t had anyone to share his thoughts with before.
Humphry, in contrast, was more of an anarchist; his outrageous (and often drunken) behavior at the most formal official durbars left Carritt gasping with terror and exaltation. Reverend Scott, alas, was rarely the life of the party; he was unable to fully appreciate the ridiculousness of their position. He saw nothing funny in having been asked to conduct Sunday services over an altar draped with a Union Jack. Regrettably, too, alcohol disagreed with his sensitive stomach.
They had an easier time of it on Sundays, when the reverend was otherwise occupied. Carritt would ride off to the Tolly, sending his boy ahead with a change of clothes and his groom to bring back his horse and kit. Just as he took great pleasure in the rituals of his office, brushing down his dress uniform and admiring the knifelike crease in his trousers, Carritt luxuriated in this immaculately kept club, far from the crowds, noise, and dirt of the city. Amid pleasantly vacuous talk over tables of mah-jongg, with the smell of jasmine mixing with that of scented talcum powder, Carritt felt perfectly at ease. When the three of them sat with cold mugs of beer, the laughter of unmarried maidens playing lawn tennis coming down the causeway, it summoned the England of their childhoods, before the war. On such mornings Carritt was nearly convinced the Raj would endure forever.
But then he would down his beer and excuse himself, off to meet an organizer in some distant bustee, ferrying a message from a labor leader on the lam in need of money or a safe house. Or he would meet the young reverend, still in his Sunday robes, and hand over the briefs he’d worked up, drawn from articles in the New Statesman or Labour Monthly, on the worldwide struggle against fascism. There were also impenetrable Marxist tracts from London to pass along to Indian comrades. Lord only knew what they made of them.
If Carritt couldn’t take his underground work as seriously as Reverend Scott, it was no less important to him. Equally dear was the conspiracy of sentiment he shared with John Auden and Humphry House. They made up their own united front against the casual arrogance on display beneath the Tolly Club’s high green canopy of mango and neem.
The Viceroy’s Residency, New Delhi,
April 12, 1937
By the end of Linlithgow’s first year as viceroy, a face-to-face meeting with Gandhi had become unavoidable. Regional elections had been held, and Congress had secured absolute majorities in eight out of the eleven provincial ministries. In the remaining three it had received the largest block of votes. The Muslim League had not even achieved majorities in the two Muslim-majority states, the Punjab and Bengal. In the wake of the landslide, Nehru had changed his mind. Congress candidates would take office after all, provided the viceroy could assure him the British governors would not interfere with their mandate by veto or the invocation of special powers. When assurances were not forthcoming, Gandhi began to call for a judicial tribunal to rule on the matter. Though he had resigned from Congress office in 1934 and described his role as a humble adviser and moral influence, Gandhi made it clear to Viceroy Linlithgow he was not going away.
First, however, there were those devilish questions of protocol to be settled. Would Gandhi sign the guest book? Would his visit be mentioned in the Court Circular? Could the viceroy insist upon decent dress? And what would his ADCs wear? The scarlet-and-gold uniform was generally reserved for royal birthdays but might strike just the right note of unassailable dignity. Otherwise, yes, the dark frock coats with gold buttons.
Clearly Gandhi could not be received in the throne room. The throne room of Buckingham Palace was modest by comparison with the viceroy’s, the largest in the world. His private study was more modest; only the size of two Oval Offices.
Gandhi of course would have to make the first move. A formal application for an interview would be required. And the veiled prophet wouldn’t reply right off. It would not do to make it easy.
CHAPTER 10
The Moscow Agent
38 Upper Park Road, Belsize Park, London,
January 7, 1937
In the wake of Bill Tilman’s triumphant ascent of Nanda Devi, Wystan Auden bestirred himself to undertake an expedition himself. In the fall of 1936 he and his poet friend from Oxford, Louis MacNeice, set out to explore Iceland. Under contract to write a travel book, they shared a pup tent missing one of its tent poles. A pack of schoolboys and their schoolmaster filled out the expedition roster. “When roughing it in this way it is always a good thing to think of the discomforts of the people climbing Everest,” the schoolmaster would chide his young charges when they complained of the cold and rain. Wystan quipped he was far happier in the cold and rain than dining at the Ritz. While writing The Ascent of F6, Wystan had begun to think he needed to leave England altogether.
Stephen Spender had been quick to publish his critical assessment of Wystan and Christopher’s play. Stephen had recently become a Communist and this provided him a clarifying view both of his brother Michael and the mountaineer hero at the center of the geopolitical drama. The most interesting thing about the hero, he explained, more important than his nascent fascism, was that he was a sel
f-righteous prig. The play’s climax had the mountaineer hero reaching the summit before his colonial rivals only to fall to his death after a hallucinatory encounter with the summit’s resident demon. Yet Stephen felt the consequences of being a fascist and a prig were insufficiently dramatized.
John, to whom the play was dedicated, found the hero silly. Wystan pointed out it wasn’t meant to be a realistic portrayal but more in the way of a pantomime. But he agreed revisions were needed. He hadn’t wanted his hero to come across as a prig; he wanted him to be, much like Michael Spender, an autodidact, appealingly eccentric and isolated. The Mother character, too, needed development. Wystan wanted her Oedipal hold over the hero to be explicitly political. Just as the Nuremberg throngs had spawned Hitler, he explained, so her demand that her son climb F6 had created a monster, feeding an itch to conquer that could never be quenched. Set against the all-consuming roar of the crowds was the abbot’s offer: a complete retreat from the public sphere into a monastery.
In London Wystan feared he was becoming something of a monster himself. His last play had been a critical and commercial success and he was now a sought-after voice on the burning issues of the day, leaving him consumed with fears of becoming a fraud, or eager-to-please court poet. But Wystan wasn’t retreating to a monastery. Following two of the four Carritt brothers, he was heading for the civil war in Spain. The fight against fascism was now the struggle. Wystan would either join the International Brigades or drive an ambulance. He hoped the latter as he didn’t think he would be a very good soldier, discounting the fact that he was a terrible driver. There remained, however, one loose end to tie up before he left.
If London was a parlor filled with madly flirting sherry drinkers oblivious to anything but their own wit and ironclad sense of self-importance, Louis MacNeice, Wystan’s tentmate from Iceland, would be found standing to one side, smoking in the semidarkness to watch from a safe remove. Originally from the coast of Northern Ireland, Louis had long felt like a rustic interloper among the London highbrows. So just before the holidays, Wystan brought him to Upper Park Road for dinner. Ever the matchmaker, Wystan whispered to Nancy:
“Isn’t he handsome?”
Nancy regarded Louis’s long, equine face with a painter’s eye.
“No, he looks like a horse who might shy but not kick.”
When Wystan left for Madrid in early January 1937, Louis and Nancy saw him off at Victoria.
Later, Louis would say that until he’d met Nancy, he’d been color blind. He praised her still lifes and took her out for expensive meals. He paid her to accompany him to the Hebrides to illustrate a travel book on the islands. In the Hebrides Louis hardly registered the appalling weather and scarcely took in the landscape; he had eyes only for Nancy. On their return to London she rang Bill from the station call box and announced she was leaving him. She was taking the girls and moving in with Louis. When Bill tried to respond, his childhood stutter resurfaced and she knew at once she couldn’t go through with it.
Louis returned to the Hebrides alone, shattered. Humphry House’s book on Hopkins became his lone bedtime companion. He was meant to review it but no sooner did he open it than he would fall into a troubled sleep.
GSI Camp, Somewhere in the Tehri Garhwal,
March 1937
“He simply mustn’t risk himself,” Humphry House had insisted in a letter to John, as if John, sitting in a tent in the Siwaliks, could stop Wystan from going to Spain. It was the first John had heard of his brother’s plans. Humphry had the news from Carritt, who had it from his brother Gabriel. Carritt had said that going off to fight was bourgeois romanticism; Wystan’s job as a poet was to think and write. Humphry agreed. Sudhin Datta had yet to comment.
It was only on meeting Humphry House and, through him, Susobhan Sarkar, Shahid Suhrawardy, and most of all Sudhin Datta that John had finally realized how isolated he had become in India. Apart from a handful of Indian GSI colleagues, he rarely even spoke to Indians. But the quality of Sudhin’s intellect and the grace of his manners were a revelation to him. And it was through his conversations with Sudhin that he began to see India and its aspirations in a new light. This naturally forced him to reflect on what part he would be called upon to play once British rule came to an end.
Calcutta might appear unchanged, John wrote Sudhin from the Garhwal, but elsewhere in India it was a different story. In every village he passed through, porters now refused to carry his kit and equipment boxes no matter how much he offered. It now dawned on him that he represented those who had repeatedly imprisoned their political leaders. He blamed himself for this impasse. He’d been too wrapped up in himself to reach out to Indians. Whereas Carritt’s “hobby” enabled him to make up for the years he spent carrying water for the Raj, John had no such defense. Beyond its rocks and tectonics, he knew nothing about India. Ten years simply wasted.
Of course he was happy the empire was coming to an end. True friendship was possible only now that the balance of power had shifted. The tide of history was all on Sudhin’s side. Yet with independence inevitable if not imminent he was left uncertain about his future. The prospect of returning to England galled him. England’s objection to Nazi Germany had nothing to do with that country’s treatment of Jews, John explained to Sudhin, though it now suited their book to make a fuss. England’s real fear was that Germany’s hegemony would usurp its own. How could he go back to that?
But how could he remain in India?
And of course the news that Wystan was heading for Spain unsettled him; the last headline he’d seen before he left suggested Madrid was about to fall to the Fascists. John had once shared with his brother his abstract concern at being complicit in British rule. It was indeed wicked to keep the ship going, Wystan had lectured. Yet Wystan also thought he made too much of himself and his difficulties, telling him that if he threw his life in India away, he was a coward. What Wystan didn’t understand was how little he had to offer India, and the little he did have was of dubious value. What was the point of his geological surveys? Would he ever collect his speculations about the structure of the Himalaya? To whom would it matter if he did? And however much bile there was now, it would be nothing next to what would arise once British rule was finished and Indians were left to contemplate all those statues of men on horseback. And the railways and canals; the English wouldn’t fail to remind them of those. There would be hell to pay, and those who stayed behind would pay it. Sudhin was far more understanding of his fears and uncertainties than Wystan.
Sudhin had long been schooled to think Bengalis were too emotional. They affected flippancy or flowery language as a means of disguising their most passionate feelings. He knew that if he wanted to be taken seriously by an Englishman, he had to subdue his natural exuberance and affect a frigid manner and halting speech. With John Auden he’d been too lazy to bother. From the moment they first met, John had spoken to him like a man released from solitary, bursting with things he needed to get off his chest. And now the poor man was alone in some godforsaken wilderness writing him about his overwhelming sense of doom.
Sudhin knew Englishmen were often overcome by sentiment when it came to India. Only a handful went as far as John did in extending their affection to Indians. Yet he risked overstepping if he presumed to offer him advice and had begun several letters before abandoning them. Weary of his bleak bombast, he also worried about how it would sound to a person living in solitary seclusion, seemingly near the end of his tether. In the end he prayed John would not be shocked when he told him just how much he missed him and how much he hated he was so far away. Seeking to reassure him as to the value of his work, however, Sudhin confused geology with geography. “You have only to look at China to realize where a celestial contempt for Geography will land you.”
Sudhin had begun to see the Bengali in John Auden. “We live in a curiously perverse age which is not only morbidly self-conscious but at the same time is absurdly afraid of feelings. This results in a sort of inverted s
entimentality that, by cramping our outward expression excessively makes our inner turmoil the more turbulent.” Sudhin was on intimate terms with such turmoil, though he was far more reluctant than John to speak of it. Even those closest to him heard nothing of his loveless marriage and loneliness. To John he admitted only that he had stopped writing. That he hadn’t written a poem or felt a fresh emotion in four years. Humphry’s book on Hopkins was the first thing he’d read in a long time that excited him, but when he tried to put his thoughts on paper, his writing seemed intolerable. So he could readily identify with John’s thwarted creative ambitions.
Sadly, the sufferings of others were rarely as compelling to John as his own. More to the point, in the same post as Sudhin’s thoughtful and affectionate letter was a telegram from Michael Spender inviting him to join him on a survey expedition with Bill Tilman and Eric Shipton. It wasn’t the long-awaited invitation to Everest but rather an opportunity to explore the remote glacial wilds of the Karakoram.
During the return march across Tibet after the failed 1936 Everest expedition, Shipton had begun thinking about the Karakoram. A sister range of the Himalaya, it was located west of the Main Himalayan Range, separated from it by the north-south Indus River. It was distinguished by its remoteness, its spiraling towers of granite, and a great number of colossal glaciers. The Karakoram also held four of the fourteen peaks in the world over 8,000 meters, including K2, the second-highest mountain in the world.
Before settling on this region, Shipton had consulted the maps. While the southern Karakoram watershed had been surveyed, as the map got closer to the range’s major peaks and glaciers, the ridges and valleys became increasingly chaotic before suddenly ending in a blank space near K2 identified by one word: “Unexplored.” By the time Shipton arrived in Calcutta he had a plan. The plan was not to climb K2 with an invading army of signal officers, armed guards, porters, and pack animals. The plan was to map K2 and the blank space surrounding it.
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