But the news from the Punjab was remorseless. In time rocks smashed through the windows. A Hindu mob broke in, demanding Suhrawardy be turned over. Gandhi offered himself, Sudhin noted, in place of their “execrable” chief minister. The police ejected them and used tear gas to disperse the crowds outside, but the next day the city erupted. Dozens were killed. Gandhi announced a fast unto death beginning at 8:15 p.m. September 1, 1947. The Times of India declared that the peace of all India was at stake. Shaheed and representatives of the Hindu right wing kept vigil on either side of his bed.
Seventy-three hours into the fast, envoys from both communities produced a signed undertaking attesting the city was quiet. They pledged their lives to maintaining the peace. The Mahatma took a little orange juice. In answer to the clamor for a statement, he wrote a sentence in Bengali on a slip of paper: Amar jibanee amar bannee, My life is my message.
Rabindranath Tagore had imagined himself as he imagined India, as a pivot point and bridge between Europe and Asia. Parichay and Sudhin’s adda embodied a similar project. But for Gandhi, India was always the center of the universe. The West had more to learn from India, he held, than India could learn from the West. Having lived through bombardment, famine, massacre, and partition, Sudhin now grasped the breadth and depth of this vision. This peculiar, half-naked little man’s dream of India would outlast them all, he wrote.
By the time Louis MacNeice arrived, Calcutta seemed leagues away from the horrors of the north. Sudhin Datta swiftly arranged for him to move into the guest bedroom of his rambling and airy flat on Russell Street, deep within a neighborhood formerly known as sahib para. With its wall-to-wall collection of Bengali paintings, Sudhin’s flat was infinitely more agreeable than the Great Eastern Hotel, where every time Louis turned around a white-gloved hand appeared for a tip.
Louis and Sudhin discovered an immediate kinship. For one thing, Sudhin had more books in more languages than Louis had yet seen in any Indian home. And he was very sprightly for forty-six, with a disarmingly silly and sophisticated sense of humor. The dishes from his kitchen were exquisite and, just when Louis imagined the meal over, another course would appear. John Auden’s sister-in-law, in town from Bombay with her husband, joined them one evening. She said she was the only Bonnerjee sister not to have married an Englishman. Though as her husband was a Parsee, she had come pretty near it, Louis thought.
Another point of sympathy was that Sudhin appeared to be the only intellectual in the city not in thrall to communism. Like Communists everywhere, Louis found Bengali ones magnificently impervious to reason. At a meeting with the Progressive Writers’ Association, he was obliged to field some unexpectedly sharp inquiries about Auden and Spender. One Communist’s eight-year-old daughter recited a poem dedicated to Winston Churchill. It concluded with the line, “You said you wouldn’t leave India. Well! What now?”
“Which gives you an idea of their political precocity,” Louis wrote his wife, Hedli.
It was true; India was now free of Winston Churchill. Yet though the English were finally leaving, they left their language behind. There was now an edge of restraint to the Bengali love for English letters; never again would English words and English writers be taken at face value. Bengalis would make the most of their independence. Stories would be told and histories written to unmask the lies, expose the trifling and breathtaking betrayals suffered at the hands of this language and those who ruled them with it. As Louis had foreseen, there was something to be learned from them. Exclaiming that India had conquered him, Louis left Calcutta with a painting by Jamini Roy, a saree for Hedli, and recordings of Indian classical music. Sudhin’s charming and soft-spoken young wife had taken him shopping.
The Set had been scandalized when Chhabi was sent back to her family so that Sudhin Datta might marry a much younger woman. Most shocking of all was that Rajeswari wasn’t even a Bengali but a Punjabi. She soon adapted herself to her husband’s interests, learning to speak and read French, Italian, and Bengali all the while carrying on her career as a professional singer of Tagore songs. Sudhin’s closest friends eventually drifted back, happy to discover that she had helped free him from the depression that had overtaken him in 1940.
Otherwise, freedom, both personal and political, hadn’t really changed Sudhin. Exasperation over his godforsaken city continued to be a staple of his conversation. Bedeviled by writer’s block, he remained unconvinced that the celebrated marriage of Bengal and England had been an altogether happy one. He still sparred with bhadralok Communists who took him to task for his lack of political engagement, still introduced visiting foreigners (Stephen Spender among them) to the work of young Bengali poets, painters, and intellectuals. And he still entertained all at his drink and stand-ups. Sudhin had once assured John Auden that age wouldn’t dull the fineness of his feelings but simply make them more intelligible. Perhaps his own raging heart had at last become intelligible.
Like all poets, Sudhin wondered if he would be read and remembered. He often caricatured himself as a faded and tattered relic of another age. And there were days when he seemed to be waiting for the moment when, like so much of the history he had witnessed, he joined the dust. But then a friend would drop by to sit on the veranda and the pure pleasure of talking for hours would revive and delight him.
Sudhin formed from his despair, it was said, a life that was itself a work of art.
Sinclair Bungalow, 17 Aurangzeb Road, New Delhi,
November 17, 1947
While Sheila and the girls traveled to the cottage in the Lake District, where Dr. Auden spent his summers, John went to London to explore whether he should remain with the GSI in Calcutta or join its sibling in Pakistan. Large as London was, John was always running into Erica Spender. When Sheila and the girls joined him there they met up with Elinor Sinclair and her children, as well as Nancy with hers. It was Nancy who had found them a flat for their stay. She was teaching art at a private school to support herself. Nancy and Sheila talked painting.
It wasn’t until the Audens returned to Calcutta and learned of the butchery in the Punjab that the idea of relocating to Pakistan was abandoned. Sudhin and Minnie, meanwhile, could talk of little but Louis MacNeice. His visit had been a “crashing success,” John reported to Nancy. Arriving in Delhi five days after Louis returned to London, John learned Louis had been a hit there, too. Even his bathwater was still standing, John wrote from the Sinclairs’ guest bedroom.
Was it Sinbad’s whiskey, he wondered, or the dithyrambs of Louis’s verses echoing off the walls that charged his sleep that night with memories of 1938?
Who has left a scent on my life and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow,
Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls
And all of London littered with remembered kisses.
Geological Survey of India, 27 Chowringhee, Calcutta,
May 29, 1953
In 1950, when Nepal’s borders were finally opened, Bill Tilman invited John Auden on a mountain-climbing expedition. He declined. Just as India no longer offered a ready stage for Englishmen to perform their superior Englishness, so John’s aspiration to climb Everest had been replaced in his mind with another, even more daunting, ambition.
He wanted to become a better man.
In March 1951 John traveled to a small hill station near Darjeeling to see a Jesuit and mountaineer named Anderson Bakewell. Father Bakewell had recently accompanied Tilman on an expedition to Solo Khumbu, the home of the Darjeeling Sherpas of the Himalayan expeditions of the 1930s. On the same trip Bakewell and Tilman did a quick reconnaissance of Everest from the south. Bakewell’s 16 mm panoramic footage seemed to show a possible route to the summit from a valley south of the neighboring peaks of Makalu and Lhotse. Though it remained unclear whether this offered a path to the summit, the route they explored would be useful to Shipton when he returned for a more thorough reconnaissance in 1952. Under Father Bakewell’s counsel, John Auden became a Catholic.
Sheila had also hoped for better results. While her husband was in Rome, she asked Wystan whether John had been unfaithful to her. Incapable of dissembling, Wystan dutifully confirmed her suspicions by providing chapter and verse. As India’s freedom and independence unfolded four years before, John had renewed his affair with Nancy. Since then he had been secretly sending her letters and gifts. Confronting John on his return from Rome, Sheila gave him an ultimatum: he must choose between his family and Nancy Spender. John vowed never to see or correspond with Nancy ever again. He traveled to England, settled his wife and daughters into their new lives, and returned to India without seeing her.
Back in Calcutta John reported on everything from well yields, irrigation, and the hydrogeology of the Indo-Gangetic Plain to hydro-power. All kinds of engineering schemes were in the works; “Dams are to be built 100 feet higher than Boulder and in half the time for nothing is impossible to resurgent nationalism,” John wrote his brother in exasperation. Industrial development, on an epic scale, was under way. Gandhi would have been appalled had an assassin’s bullet in 1948 not found him first. His pastoral vision of India, one of small-scale cottage industries, a vision not that far from the Romantic poet’s Lake District idyll, died with him. Sudhin had been so shattered by his death that for the first time in his life he contemplated leaving India.
“Apart from Nehru, Rajagopalachari and Sarojini Naidu, the country is being run by half-educated sycophants and time-servers,” John complained. As the last Englishman standing at the GSI his position grew precarious. He watched hypocrites lecteurs dispatch the last director, another Englishman, while on leave. When he questioned the wisdom of building high dams in tectonically active areas of the Himalaya with heavy debris flows, there were insinuations about his true loyalties. Word had come back about his having considered pursuing a post in Pakistan; the English who ended up there were considered quislings. When John refused to take the directorship of the GSI without a salary increase, the central ministry threatened to withhold the release of his pension.
Without Sheila, John began to slip back into doom and gloom. In 1940 he had resigned from the Saturday and the Tollygunj Clubs, knowing Sheila wouldn’t be welcomed. Now he couldn’t afford membership. He gave up smoking and whiskey to save money. He railed, too, about Minnie’s housekeeping, her rapacious cook, the loo that wouldn’t flush, and the dog that relieved itself by the side of his bed where his foot would find it in the morning. But for Sudhin, he had scarcely any friends left to call on and when he did he feared he was making a nuisance of himself. Shahid Suhrawardy was in Pakistan. Susobhan Sarkar was busy teaching and working on behalf of the Communist Party. Minnie and Lindsay were out every night; he wasn’t invited anywhere. He felt like a man out of his time, a fossil embedded in a catafalque of stone, never to be seen on earth again. He drove himself to exhaustion.
Toward the end of John’s GSI tenure, Jawaharlal Nehru inquired about his departure. Men like Auden were needed in India, the prime minister said to the new GSI director, a man who had done his best to make John’s life impossible. Indeed, John Auden’s fieldwork would fuel countless World Bank projects in the decades to come. In his final weeks in Calcutta he was besieged by an eruption of boils and carbuncles brought on by stress and the worst hot season he could remember. On Hastings Street he saw a miserable-looking Sikh taxi driver wiping his brow and when the man saw him looking he raised his shirt to show the rash of prickly heat emblazoned on his chest. John raised his shirt to show him his.
As he was packing up his office, much of his life in India was thrown back in his face. He scarcely recognized himself as the author of such papers as “The Structure of the Himalaya in the Garhwal.” Unable to sleep the night before he left Calcutta for the last time, he reread all Sheila’s letters from Simla, Darjeeling, and London. Sheila had resumed the peripatetic existence she had known during the war, living in a boardinghouse during term and spending school holidays with Dr. Auden and the girls. Though John’s affectionate letters appeared regularly, it was a lonely life.
When morning came, John sat down to acknowledge all she had endured in their thirteen-year marriage. All those cold nights in small rooms, telescoped into one, showed him once more how much he had failed her as a husband. To provide her a place to call her own was sufficient reason to leave India without regrets. In a separate message to his daughters he mentioned the new queen, but passed over the news that had been held back to coincide with her coronation. The summit of Everest had at last been reached.
Both Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were a far cry from Arthur Hinks’s template of the ideal Englishman. Hillary was a New Zealander and Norgay, who had accompanied Michael Spender to Everest in 1935, a Nepal-born Tibetan and a citizen of India. Not that maps and their borders defined him: Tenzing reached the summit, not as a Tibetan, Indian, Nepali, or Darjeeling Sherpa, but as a mountaineer.
On his first leave home from a new position in Khartoum, John saw Nancy on a bus traveling between Harrods and St. James’s Place. He did not speak to her.
“I am your wife,” Sheila wrote John, five months after Minnie’s early death left her devastated. “I should try and comfort you and boost your morale—and not taunt you. I should remember that it is good not to be alone and that in sickness and sorrow you would look after me just as I would look after you.” By then Sheila knew; her husband had broken the vow he had made to her in Ischia in 1951. Working for Burmah Shell in London, John had once more resumed his affair with Nancy. There were years of lunchtime assignations at the Barbican Hotel, whispered telephone conversations, and back-channel notes and gifts. A look from Sheila was all it took for his face to flush. When she wept, he remained dry eyed, astonished and appalled by his shallowness of feeling.
For a time Sheila became, in her words, a nasty person with a bad temper and a cruel tongue. It wasn’t so much the years of physical frustration, she told him, but his ceaseless lies and protestations of innocence. That he would lie to her to “protect” her she found deeply insulting. Schooled in the talk of the “sacred trust” between England and India, of viceroys claiming to have India’s best interests at heart, she heard only the familiar humbug. She told him his lies made it impossible to know what was true and what was a fraud about their lives, indeed about anything at all.
In this way a marriage John had once portrayed as “an island against the bitterness” that lay between India and England became, instead, a vessel of its long acrimony.
Highfield Residential Home,
Marlborough, Wiltshire, 1999
Nancy never remarried. She kept her love letters like neatly folded maps of territories, once conquered and now lost. After the war she embarked on a long career as an art teacher, achieving the independence she had long sought. At the nursing home where she spent her last days, her unease among the other residents made her rude, particularly if she felt she was being given the cold shoulder. A few of the men showed interest but she soon quarreled with them. So she occupied herself painting a housecat that had come with her from London. When the cat was poisoned she behaved as if a lover had been murdered.
She once hoped she would discover serenity in her old age. She hadn’t.
“You are one I always shall remember,” Louis had written of her. Nancy thought his letters had been lost, forgotten in a desk Bill had taken with him when he l
eft her just before the war. Or was it during the war? She couldn’t remember.
After Michael, Louis was the first to go, then Wystan, Bill, and finally John. Except when biographers or the BBC showed up, a bottle of champagne in hand to loosen her tongue, this was not the past Nancy dwelled on. Her childhood memories prevailed. Her doctor had started her down this road before the war, but she had made it her own since, applying herself with a doggedness generally associated with criminal inquiries. These memories were the last to fade and long before they did she wrote them down.
What are the conditions for healing a tear in the known world? Can a sense of loss ever be redeemed? While some are content to let go of the past, there will always be those left staring into the distance, haunted by the fragments that survive and struggling to see how they fit together. Even the humblest relics—a scrap of parchment or a faded Georgette sari, an empty cigarette tin or a map of a country that no longer exists—can hold a full measure of pain and perplexity. A young man might be the one digging around in boxes, looking for the father he never knew in books about the war and the years leading up to it. A daughter might date the family photographs or order the letters written during long separations, in search of that moment when her mother first disappeared behind stylish dark glasses. A scholar will sift through old land records in search of an ancestral home known only from a grandmother’s stories. Another will work to place a number on a famine, lacking faces, names, or any souvenir beyond bones and old censuses to commemorate an absence.
Finally, there is that distinguished-looking gentleman sitting at a desk in a city where he will never feel at home. He will work and rework a frayed chapter of his life so as to better grasp the hold a city or a country, a woman or a mountain once had over him.
The Last Englishmen Page 34