A Good Soldier

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Nawab had known Shakuntala all her life until she ran away from the home of her dead husband’s parents. He remembered her as a pretty child when he was an adolescent and as a highly desirable pubescent girl when he was a young man. She had been, like other children of his father’s upper servants, a playmate of his own younger siblings by various of his father’s wives and concubines, a familiar figure about the palace and its grounds. Her beauty and character had made her conspicuous among her fellows and when her young husband died the Nawab had wanted her to enter his harem. With her reappearance in Nekshahr his desire had returned.

  For the time being he was absorbed in his gypsy girl, Sitabai, but when, as inevitably it must, his interest in her waned, he would summon Shakuntala to court and watch her dance for him. Anticipation was, for anyone as jaded as he, often the most enjoyable phase of any impending pleasure. He would savour it unhurriedly.

  Meanwhile he had troubles on his mind which were more pressing even than his lechery. He was awaiting Major Owthwaite’s return from the Karampur frontier.

  He feared that events were accelerating and could soon begin to move too fast for him to control. Intrigue and mistrust came easily to him and when he was not partly bemused by drink or drugs his mind roamed over a wide spectrum of doubts and suspicions. He had been alarmed by the Dasnamah swami and his brother the chief priest when they had vilified Ramsey as a British spy and agent provocateur. Then, when he had met Ramsey, his susceptibility had swung the opposite way and he had seen him as a greatly superior and preferable replacement for Owthwaite. Indeed, even if the Brahmins’ allegations were true, that made Ramsey an even more desirable Military Adviser: the appointment would deprive the British of their infiltrator.

  His greatest preoccupation during the past couple of days had been Ghulam Kasim, his nephew and frank pretender to the gaddi, the cushion that formed the royal seat of office and symbolised the throne. Perhaps it was because the Military Adviser had left the capital; and perhaps Ramsey’s arrival — if he really were a secret agent: but could one credit those damned scheming infidels of Brahmin? — had much to do with it also. Whatever the encouragement, Ghulam Kasim had given active support to one of the other taluqdar, Anwar Ali, who had resisted the demands of the Nawab’s revenue-farmer for his district. Ghulam Kasim’s encouragement of Anwar Ali had taken the form of a hundred armed retainers whom Ghulam Kasim had sent to reinforce Anwar Ali’s men. The chakledar’s armed force had laid siege to them and there was a stalemate. The Nawab did not want to commit his Army to drastic action and certain loss of life at a time when he feared war on the Karampur border. He had ordered his revenue-farmer to withdraw his siege force. This was a loss of face for him, an implicit victory for his cousin and a triumph for Anwar Ali’s opposition to the taxes levied on him. With the popular unrest caused by his consorting with the Brahmin, all these events, each separately manageable, could coalesce and quickly lead to open and widespread insurrection.

  The Nawab picked up the rifle and shotgun Ramsey had given him and toyed with them as he had kept doing every day. He wondered how many more Ramsey had brought. They could have a different use from the one originally intended, if there were enough of them.

  He had received word, from the Dewan, of Ramsey’s illness on its first morning. The Dewan had looked at him askance. Neither the chief priest nor the Sadhu had been near the palace. The Nawab began brooding about the two Brahmin and his thoughts soon turned to resentment and then to animosity. He was a prime example of galloping paranoia; if the word had been coined in 1824.

  His Hindu heredity often rose to the surface of his thoughts to influence his behaviour. The beliefs of the many Hindu women who had been, and were, in his zenana also worked on his mind and affected his conduct. His brain, when fuddled as it so often was, harboured superstitions; which the Hindu priests exploited. In his periods of sobriety and clear thinking the Nawab dwelt on his secret meetings with the high priest and the Sadhu with revulsion, even remorse for his lapses from the teachings of the Prophet. Despite penitence, he could not rid himself of fear: vestiges of it lingered, a legacy from his pagan forebears. As soon as he had heard of Ramsey’s illness he had suspected the Sadhu of casting a spell. The fact that he had received no message from the Sadhu or high priest confirmed his suspicion.

  Handling the two modern firearms, his mind lucid after a night’s sleep and abstention from liquor and narcotics, he told himself that these objects, good concrete products of the physical world, were more convincing instruments of power than any supernatural agency. It was with guns that he would recover the territory lost half a century ago, not with incantations and tribute paid to pagan deities. He would buy Ramsey’s entire stock of guns and rifles and ammunition, and when Major Owthwaite returned he would order him to equip his best troops with them. And he would order more from Ramsey, enough to arm his whole infantry force.

  It was disgraceful to succumb to the sorcery of the Brahmin. Ramsey had fallen ill because Allah had decreed it, not from Brahminical witchcraft. He resolved to consult the chief mullah of the Great Mosque about vengeance on Karampur for the wrong of fifty years before. The Imam would surely not oppose an act of justice against the Sikhs. When that was done, he would turn his attention to the newly troublesome Anwar Ali, lately returned from Calcutta and always truculent about paying his taxes. Then he would deal, once and for all, with his defiant nephew Ghulam Kasim whose ambition to mount the gaddi was a constant threat. By that time he would be ready to replace the gypsy dancer with the peerless Shakuntala.

  The Nawab pursued his inventive train of thought with a feeling of virtue made all the stronger by his abstinence from drink and narcotics, planning the just government of his people. He planned the defeat of Ghulam Kasim and the subjugation of the rebellious landowners, and possession of Zafarala’s most desirable woman of her generation.

  Confident of the rewards from Allah for the justice and benevolence of his future role, he awaited the arrival of the Dewan and the Imam.

  The solid feel of the rifle in his hands gave him as much confidence for the future as all his reflections.

  *

  Sri Murtaza Reza Khan Brajindra, the Nawabzada, bore little facial resemblance to his father and gave no sign, at the age of nearly 18, that he might degenerate into the same corpulence. A trifle taller than the Nawab, he was slim and ferret-faced, fine-boned like his mother. Both his parents regarded him with more than the normal pride in an eldest son and mistook his innate cunning for intellect. Although they flattered the quality of his brain their satisfaction in it was not misplaced: for, to anyone in Murtaza’s circumstances, craft was a greater asset than cleverness if he were to survive the many threats to the life of an Heir Apparent or ruler.

  The Imam of the great mosque was his religious tutor. Miss Simpson, the Nawab Sahiba’s old governess and needlework teacher, and Mr. O’Hara, tutor to the Nawab’s children, had embarked the Nawabzada on his study of English. Mr. Evans, the Eurasian Chief Writer at the court, a sort of principal secretary whose main use was in official correspondence with the Resident and with British officials in Calcutta, carried on Murtaza’s instruction in the language. As Evans was himself the son of another country-born half-caste, begotten by a private soldier who had never learned the alphabet, he had done well to rise to his present post but was hardly an exemplar to emulate. The Resident had been christened Algernon, which Evans pronounced Awl-ger-non. There was a framed certificate for 20 years’ faithful service to the state on the wall of Evans’s parlour. He called it his sutti-fik-it. These peculiarities of pronunciation, common to Evans and O’Hara, allied to a general diction as bizarre as Mukerji’s, imposed on Miss Simpson’s cockney, had given the Nawabzada an accent which made successive British Residents shudder and adopt the vernacular in conversation with him. They were arrogantly unaware that their own Hindustani grated even more on his ears than his English did on theirs.

  While the Nawab
was admiring his two new weapons and looking forward to Owthwaite’s return, the Nawabzada, in his apartments in the north-east corner of the palace, was also handling his new rifle and shotgun.

  Ramsey had taken a prominent place in Murtaza’s thoughts. He had accompanied Murtaza to the palace shooting range to demonstrate the new guns to him, and praised his shooting.

  Murtaza was not thinking about war or recalcitrant landowners who would not pay their taxes and offered armed resistance to the revenue-farmers. With weapons like these he could surpass the slaughter his father and grandfather had achieved among birds and beasts. It would give him distinction in his own right. It would give him a sense of personally-won authority. It would arouse admiration. He had been accustomed to flattery all his seventeen years. It was not obsequiousness he sought, but respect. From the age of fifteen his father had ensured that he was supplied with girls. If he could display his courage and marksmanship his favourites would be impressed. He did not need to impress anybody, least of all women: but there were people whom he wanted to impress.

  He would like to have the good opinion of the Dewan, whose austere face and uncompromising gaze made him feel inadequate. He craved the merited praise of his father. Love and flattery did not satisfy him. He and his father were cronies. They shared a taste for sadistic pleasures, both were advanced voluptuaries, he enjoyed alcohol and the effects of bhang, although he was not yet a drunkard or a drug addict like his father. Despite all these indulgences and the sycophancy which surrounded him, he was dissatisfied. Everything had come to him by birthright and he had done nothing to show that he deserved any of it.

  He would like to make a good impression on Ramsey. No Englishman had ever made him feel that before. The Resident was cold and patronising; just as his predecessors had been. Thorn made no secret of his contempt: he liked only the company of very dark-skinned women, and wrestlers against whom to assert his muscular strength. Unwin was friendly and agreeably dissolute, but his tastes were not Murtaza’s.

  Ramsey he liked and admired; not only for the fine present but also because he expressed himself in such supple and flawless Urdu and with such friendliness. Ramsey’s way of looking at him had much the same effect as the Dewan’s; but, perhaps because Ramsey was so much nearer his own age, he found it stimulating rather than withering. He hoped Ramsey would not die. His father’s traffic with the Hindu priest and the Sadhu disturbed him. He hoped they had had nothing to do with Ramsey’s sickness. What was it that made him want so much to earn Ramsey’s approbation? He was only a young Englishman who had been a very junior officer in the Army of the nation which was all too quickly spreading its dominion over India. Surely he ought to resent him?

  If Ramsey recovered from his illness he would ask his father to invite him to a tiger hunt. In the meanwhile he would practise with his new rifle at the butts which Major Owthwaite had had made for the Army.

  The Major Sahib had had the targets painted in circles of red and white with a solid black one in the centre. He wished that instead the hadaf ka bich, the bullseye, bore a portrait of his cousin Ghulam Kasim, the Pretender, whom he feared and hated. He would shoot with even greater concentration at him than at any ordinary bullseye. It worried him that his father’s stealthy consultations with the Brahmins would antagonise the Imam and weaken or destroy his own chances of succession; might even lead to his father being deposed or murdered.

  He did not understand why, but in some way his admiration for Ramsey was an appeal for his help. He recognised this even though he could not explain or define it.

  He muttered the 35th and 36th verses of the Sixth Sura to himself.

  “God truly knoweth the hidden things both of the Heavens and of the Earth: for He knoweth the very secrets of the breast.”

  “He hath appointed you his viceregents in the earth... “

  It would not take much more of his father’s dalliance with the Brahmins to cause the Imam to sanction, perhaps even encourage, the transference of the viceregency represented by the ruler of Zafarala to Ghulam Kasim, who was devout and undeviating.

  Murtaza, the Heir Apparent, shouted and servants came running.

  “Send a message to the butts that I am coming. Have a horse saddled. Bring my new rifle.”

  Even so, he could not entirely banish the anxieties that daily came to the forefront of his mind.

  Physical action would stifle them at least; and this physical action had a practical purpose: to succeed in winning Ramsey’s favour and aid. Murtaza was young enough to believe that success and happiness were synonymous: and too young to know that even if they were, people had different ideas of success; and indeed of happiness.

  *

  It was cool on the veranda at dusk. Ramsey lay back in a deep chair. Dr. Bond tucked his watch away, released Ramsey’s wrist and nodded approvingly.

  “I have never known anyone emerge from a coma so quickly or a fever to cease so abruptly.”

  Ruth, in a chair on one side of Ramsey, glanced across at her parents on the other.

  “Thanks to your wonderful medicines, Doctor,” she said.

  “And the devoted nursing of you ladies.”

  Shakuntala, squatting with her back against one of the veranda pillars, facing them, caught Ramsey’s eye.

  “What are they saying?”

  “That the Doctor Sahib’s medicines...”

  “Had nothing to do with it! If they chose to speak the truth.”

  Dr. Bond knitted his brows and shook his head with a pretence of being more sorry than angry.

  Ruth’s look expressed plain anger. “I understood that and she’s talking nonsense.” She turned her angry look on Shakuntala and spoke in her slow, precise Hindustani. She spoke it better already than many of the British who had spent a decade in the country. Since Mukerji’s departure the family’s lessons had been continued by a local teacher who came daily to the bungalow. “You are ignorant... an idolator... the Doctor is a wise man of great knowledge...”

  “She is my friend and my guest.” Ramsey interrupted forcefully. His voice had not recovered all its strength but his annoyance was clear. He said it in the vernacular so that Shakuntala would understand.

  The faint smile that irritated Ruth curved Shakuntala’s lips as she gave Ruth the mocking look which quickly stirred her temper. “There is a knowledge and a power greater than humans’.”

  “Yes! And our prayers helped Hugh’s... Ramsey Sahib’s recovery.”

  “Mine too. And my priest’s. I do not insult your God. Why do you blaspheme mine?”

  Ruth made an exasperated gesture. “I think it’s time we went home.”

  As though she had understood, Shakuntala stood up, made her bow with joined hands and moved towards the veranda steps.

  Ramsey called after her. “Stay, loyal friend.” He wondered whether Ruth had yet learned the word “piyara” and added “Beloved friend.”

  Shakuntala paused and looked back. “I came uninvited.”

  “I invite you now.”

  “I cannot stay.”

  “Then come tomorrow.”

  “I will wait for you to come to my house when you wish. If you wish.”

  They watched her in silence as she disappeared in the dusk. Whittaker was the first to speak. “That’s a fine young woman.”

  Ruth had a different opinion. “Daddy! Don’t you know what she is?”

  “I just said what she is: a fine person. A devoted friend. Gratitude is a rare commodity.”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean. She’s not... she’s not... respectable.”

  “She has my respect.”

  Constance looked reproving. “Now, Ruth, I don’t find it very courteous that you speak so of a friend of Hugh’s: and in his house, too.”

  “Miss Whittaker merely made a justifiable observation, I think.” There was no lack of approval in the way Dr. Bond regarded Ruth. “The young woman is ignorant and she is an idolator. As Christians...”

  “You shoul
d show compassion and charity. Don’t think me ungrateful, Doctor. And of course I know my recovery owes nothing to Hindu incantations any more than my illness was caused by some form of sorcery. But Henry is right: gratitude is not found everywhere.” Ramsey turned his charming smile on the two ladies. “And I am grateful for all you’ve done for me. You have been just as loyal as poor Shakuntala, and on a much briefer friendship.”

  “Stuff and nonsense.” Constance was brisk. “Mrs. Bond and her daughters did at least as much as we did.”

  “You do yourself and your daughter an injustice, Mrs. Whittaker.” The doctor smiled at them. “I shall know where to come if ever I need to call on help at the hospital: if we ever have a hospital.”

  “If funds are any problem,” Whittaker said, “I would gladly make a personal contribution.”

  “That is most kind of you, Whittaker, but finance is the least of our obstacles. As Ramsey can tell you, it is the dark minds of these people which obstruct the most obviously necessary good works.”

  “Like I said: ignorant idolators,” Ruth muttered.

  Ramsey began to laugh. When she gave him a cross look he stopped. “I have a reputation for a certain intractability, but it seems that I’ve met my equal.”

  Constance cast a wry glance at her daughter, then at her husband and finally at Ramsey. “Back home, Hugh, we have another word for it: headstrong.” And Heaven help him, she thought to herself. I’ve seen her have enough crushes in the last few years, but this is the first time I’ve seen the signs of anything deeper. She’s crazy about him, but a lot of sparks are going to fly before she admits it to herself. I wonder if he knows yet? And, though I don’t blame him for the way he feels about that gorgeous Indian gal, I think it’s time that was put a stop to: if he’s going to be serious about my daughter.

  Henry Whittaker said drily “If you both mean ‘stubborn’, I wish you’d say so. And on that score, I think Ruth could give you points, Hugh.”