The Day of the Scorpion

by Paul Scott

  ‘Why do you answer me, and at such length, in a foreign language?’

  ‘Because I speak Hindi rather badly.’

  ‘You wish us to converse in Urdu?’ Panditji asked, switching to it.

  ‘I should prefer English, Pandit Sahib. It’s the language we always speak at home. My mother is a Punjabi you see, and English was the only language she had in common with my father. Even in Urdu I express myself poorly.’

  ‘Do you not feel shame to speak always in the language of a foreign power, the language of your father’s jailers?’ Pandit Baba asked – reverting to Hindi. At any moment Ahmed expected a bit of Bengali, a sentence or two in Tamil, perhaps a passage in Sanskrit. The Pandit was obviously proud of his facility. His refusal so far to speak in English did not mean he spoke it badly or was not proud of understanding and being able to speak it; but it was fashionable among Hindus of Baba’s kind to decry it, to declare that once the British had been got rid of their language must go with them; although what would be put in its place it was difficult to tell. Even Pandit Baba Sahib would fare badly if he went out into some of the villages around Mirat and tried to understand what was said to him. He would need an interpreter, as most officials did. And the odds were the interpreter would interpret the local dialect in the language and idiom of the British.

  ‘No,’ Ahmed said. ‘I’m not ashamed.’

  ‘Baitho,’ Professor Nair interrupted, and squatted on a cushion, motioning Ahmed to follow suit, which he did. His trousers made it an uncomfortable operation. Pandit Baba scrutinized him, this time through the lenses of his spectacles. The Pandit – Ahmed now saw – was sitting on a double thickness of cushions. His was a commanding position.

  ‘I do not know your father in person, only I am admiring him from the distance,’ he said suddenly, in English, ‘and familiarizing myself to his photographs. It is a face after all much known in newspapers.’

  Ahmed nodded. Pandit Baba, having spoken, subjected Ahmed to further scrunity. It was extraordinary, Ahmed thought, how men distinguished in one field – and he assumed that Pandit Baba Sahib was distinguished – seemed to claim for themselves wisdom in all spheres of human activity; wisdom and the right to make pronouncements which they expected you to listen to and learn from. The most amusing thing was to see a group of distinguished men together, with no one but each other to make pronouncements to. They were as suspicious of each other, then, as children. He had seen such gatherings in his father’s house while – outside the compound walls – crowds waited in patient homage, or simple curiosity, for a sight of these extraordinary, benign and powerful faces, and he had observed the change that came over those faces when they parted company with each other and went out to meet the crowds. He thought that if Pandit Baba smiled now he would look like them, as they came from the house to the veranda, their games, sulks, quarrels temporarily suspended, and their suspicions making way for the feelings of relief and pleasure at re-entering a familiar world whose plaudits reaffirmed the huge capacity they believed they had, individually and collectively, to solve its problems, its mysteries and its injustices. Perhaps (Ahmed thought, still meeting Pandit Baba’s apparently unwinking gaze) it was his early experience of distinguished men that had led him to feel that there was distance between himself and other people and their ideas. Gandhi had once given him an orange, Pandit Nehru had patted his head, and Maulana Azad had taken him on to his knee; but oranges, head-pats and knee-rides – as he realized even at the time – were not the objects of those visitations, and the visitations themselves although promising excitement always left the excitement on the other side of the wall where the crowds waited. ‘Why do they wait?’ he had asked his elder brother Sayed. ‘Because they know we are saving India,’ came the steady reply. As a boy Sayed had been a bit of a bore. ‘Saving India from what?’ Ahmed said. ‘Well, from the British of course.’ But in the morning, as he went to school, he noticed that the British were still there and looking quite unperturbed. When he got to school he found there weren’t to be any lessons because the teachers and the older boys were on strike to protest the arrest the previous night of people who had been carried away with enthusiasm at the sight of the Mahatma visiting Ahmed’s father, and – after seeing the Mahatma off at the station – had got out of hand and thrown brickbats at the police who were jostling them, hitting them with lathis and treading them under horse-hoof. Two days later his father was arrested too – for making the speech the Mahatma had asked him to make – and was in prison – that time – for six months.

  ‘Speak what is in your mind,’ Pandit Baba commanded. What insolence, Ahmed thought. There are two categories of things in my mind, he should say, the stuff people like you have fed into it and my own reactions to that stuff. The result is cancellation, so I have nothing in my mind.

  ‘I was thinking of my father in prison,’ he said. After a moment or two the miracle happened. The Pandit’s lips lifted at the corners. He was bestowing a smile of sympathy and of elderly approval of a young man’s filial regard. Ahmed considered its quality; it struck him as no less dishonest than the expression of disapproval. How could Pandit Baba be moved to feel either approval or disapproval when the person who was the object of it was a complete stranger to him? Well, it is this that puts me off (Ahmed told himself), this ease with which people feel emotions, or pretend to feel them.

  ‘I meant,’ he continued, ‘the first time, when I was quite young, a schoolboy still.’

  The smile did not disappear. A man like Panditji could mesmerize you into submission, hypnotize you into regarding him as a source of spiritual comfort. It was undoubtedly his intention to try, and when you knew a man’s intentions you were even more in danger of being subjected to them because to be aware of an intention somehow increased its force. I shall destroy you, one man might say to another; and at once he would have a confederate, the man himself. Ideas seemed to have a life, a power of their own. Men became slaves to them. To challenge an idea as an alternative to accepting it was to be no less a slave to it. Neither to accept nor challenge it was the most difficult thing of all; perhaps impossible. The idea of Pandit Baba as a personification of wisdom, a fount of knowledge and self-knowledge, which was presumably the idea the Pandit had of himself and worked hard at conveying, was not to be got rid of by privately or even publicly asserting that the man was probably a self-opinionated and pompous fool who relied on his venerable age and appearance to command what respect his behaviour and ideas in themselves could not.

  ‘Do not think of it as prison,’ Pandit Baba said, going back to Hindi. ‘It is those who call themselves jailers who are in prison, and perhaps all of us who are outside the walls. For what is outside in one sense is inside in another. In time we must break the walls down. This duty to break them down is our sentence of imprisonment. To break them down will be to free ourselves and our jailers. And we cannot sit back and wait for the orders of release. We must write the orders ourselves.’ In English he added, in case Ahmed had misunderstood, ‘I speak metaphorically.’

  Ahmed nodded. In India nearly everybody spoke metaphorically except the English who spoke bluntly and could make their most transparent lies look honest as a consequence; whereas any truth contained in these metaphorical rigmaroles was so deviously presented that it looked devious itself.

  ‘You had a pleasant journey from Mayapore, Panditji?’ he asked, to see how Pandit Baba would react to such a barefaced attempt to change the subject. The Pandit reacted, after a few seconds, with a vague gesture of the arm that rested on the cushions and then opened his mouth as if to continue his parable.

  Ahmed said hastily, ‘And is this your first visit to Mirat?’

  Professor Nair answered for Panditji. ‘Oh no, not his first visit. Panditji was at one time living in Mirat.’

  Ahmed glanced at Nair and noticed the minuscule gems of sweat encrusted on his bald domed head. It was quite cool in the room. A table-fan, set on the floor in one corner, moved its round whirring wi
re cage from side to side like a spectator at a slow-motion tennis match – more interested, Ahmed felt, in the conversation than he was.

  ‘But for the last few years,’ Nair was saying, but looking all the time at Pandit Baba as if the Pandit had become a museum-piece suddenly and Nair his curator, ‘he has been in Mayapore.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ Ahmed said, looking again at the Pandit – and the eyes, slightly enlarged by the spectacle lenses, that were still gazing at him. ‘Then you were in Mayapore during the riots.’

  ‘Which riots are you meaning?’

  ‘The riots in August last year.’

  Again Ahmed had to wait for a reply. Pandit Baba Sahib’s sympathy had gone and his disapproval was undergoing a change. He now looked at Ahmed as if he felt he had been threatened with violence.

  ‘You must be speaking of something that has escaped my notice,’ he said at last. His heart had resumed the business of pumping cold blood. An old man like me, his expression now said, should not be put in danger of losing his temper. ‘I am not remembering any riots in Mayapore in August last year.’ He paused, continued. ‘A riot – and since you are knowing English somewhat better than me, perhaps you will correct me or corroborate – a riot I believe according to English dictionary refers to the violent unlawful actions of unlawful assembly of people. In Mayapore and India in general only I remember spontaneous demonstrations of innocent and law-abiding people to protest against the unlawful imprisonment without trial of men such as your father, and in Mayapore, particularly, demonstrations against the unlawful arrest of innocent men accused of a crime none of them committed. If this what you are mistakenly calling riots, then – yes – I was in Mayapore at this time, when many people suffered the consequence of resisting unlawful acts by those supposed to be in lawful authority.’

  Ahmed inclined his head, a movement he had found useful in the last few years, a movement suggestive of submission without verbal acknowledgement of it. He had discovered that this combination often forced people to move from attack to defence. They felt compelled to justify the victory which had just been ambigiously conceded to them.

  ‘It is necessary all the time to have the truth of things clearly in the mind, you see,’ Pandit Baba said, ‘and to speak of them in truthful terms. Loose speech leads to loose thinking. When you speak of riots you are speaking as the English speak. You must speak like an Indian, and think like an Indian.’ The corners of his lips lifted again. ‘I know it is not always easy. But to take only easy ways is often to end up with difficulties.’

  Ahmed nodded and wondered what reason Nair had for asking him at short notice on an evening when there was another guest, a guest Nair had failed to mention in the note of invitation sent round that morning but whose presence had not escaped the notice of Bronowsky, that was to say – of Bronowsky’s spies. He wondered whether he would catch a glimpse of the woman Baba had brought with him, but doubted it. It was an all-male evening. He wouldn’t even see Mrs Nair.

  ‘Professor Nair tells me you are writing a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. Does the work go well, Panditji?’

  Again the gesture of the arm that rested on the cushion. Interpreting this, now, as a cue for Professor Nair to interrupt, Ahmed looked at their host. The sweat still shone on Nair’s head. He still gazed at Pandit Baba. His smile had become fixed. He said nothing. He smiled, stared and perspired. Ahmed had the feeling that if Panditji got up and left the room it would take Nair several minutes to regain his normal composure – or lack of composure: he was a restless man, usually. Surely Panditji’s presence in itself wasn’t as nerve-racking as Nair’s almost catatonic reaction to it seemed to suggest? Ahmed looked back at Panditji and found himself still under scrutiny.

  ‘Your father, I believe, is in the Fort at Premanagar,’ Pandit Baba said.

  ‘So people say.’

  ‘You have no comfirmation of this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You think he may be elsewhere?’

  ‘Officially I have no information, Pandit Sahib. Unofficially it seems to be understood by people that he is, or was, in Premanagar.’

  ‘But you are able to communicate. You write letters to him, and he writes back to you.’

  ‘I usually communicate through my mother.’

  ‘And the letters of course are directed through the prison authorities.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And censored.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘But occasionally you manage a more private kind of correspondence.’

  For a while Ahmed did not answer. Eventually he said, ‘I can’t say whether my mother sometimes manages that. For myself the answer is no.’

  ‘But before he went to jail, some kind of simple code was arranged, so that even a letter going through the authorities and the censor might contain some private or intimate information?’

  Ahmed laughed, shook his head. Panditji raised his eyebrows.

  ‘No such code was arranged?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I am not an agent provocateur,’ Panditji announced, and frowned. ‘But let us talk of something else. Your father is in good health, I trust?’

  ‘Yes, I believe so.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘She is well, too.’

  ‘Presumably she is not hopeful of being permitted to visit him.’

  ‘No. She’s resigned to everything. His being absent in prison is all a part of her experience of marriage.’

  ‘You speak sadly or bitterly of that?’

  Ahmed smiled. ‘No. It is just the truth.’

  Pandit Baba nodded. He said, ‘It is perhaps more difficult for her – being of the Mohammedan faith – more difficult than for some other Congressmen’s wives. Her family in the Punjab – they are perhaps more sympathetic to the policies of Mr Jinnah and the Muslim League than to those of the Congress?’

  ‘That is correct,’ Ahmed admitted.

  ‘Since a long time, or since the political turncoating in the Punjab of Sir Sikander Hyat-Khan in 1937?’

  ‘Perhaps, yes, since then.’

  ‘This will no doubt be a sorrow to her, to have her husband imprisoned, to have no family member to turn to without feeling disloyal to that husband.’

  ‘Actually I think my mother is angry sooner than sad.’

  ‘What makes her angry?’

  ‘Oh, quite a lot of things. For instance she loses her temper when she hears people describe father as a show-case Muslim.’

  ‘Show-case? What is this?’ I have not heard this expression.’

  ‘It means Muslims whom the Congress chose for positions of power in order to prove to everybody that they’re not a Hindu-riddled organization.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. I see. Show-case. And so Muslims who follow Mr Jinnah and his Muslim League say that Mohammed Ali Kasim, a Congress man, is a show-case Muslim?’

  ‘They do I suppose, but members of Congress say it as well. Members who are jealous and think such Muslims have unfair advantages because of their propaganda value.’ Ahmed hesitated. ‘There is of course some truth in that.’

  ‘Truth is not divisible, Mr Kasim. There cannot be such a thing as some truth. You are meaning to say that in some cases it is true that a Muslim had unfair advantages over a Hindu in the Congress because the high command chose him for his propaganda value first and his talents second. This may or may not be true. But it cannot be a matter in which there is some truth.’

  Ahmed again inclined his head.

  ‘You are staying in Mirat for a week or two, Panditji?’

  Pandit Baba smiled, the smile of a man willing to be sidetracked because for him all paths led eventually in the direction he intended to go. ‘It will not be so long. I shall return quite soon to Mayapore, I believe.’

  ‘Only a short holiday, then.’

  ‘I am not taking holiday.’

  ‘There are texts in the college library that Panditji wants to have a look at,’ Professor Nair explained. He was still
smiling, but in the last few seconds had wiped the sweat off his head with a folded handkerchief, had come out of the catatonic trance. ‘It is to inspect these texts Panditji is honouring us with a stay,’ he added, quite unnecessarily; and then, more informatively, ‘but before he leaves I hope to persuade him to address our students.’

  Pandit Baba closed his eyes, inclined his head modestly to the right and then to the left.

  Ahmed said, ‘If you live in Mayapore, Panditji, perhaps you knew that English girl, Miss Manners? One gathers her circle of friends in Mayapore wasn’t exclusively English.’

  ‘No, I did not know her personally.’

  ‘She’s dead now. She had a child. There was a notice in the newspapers.’

  ‘It did not escape our attention, Mr Kasim.’ Pandit Baba paused. ‘You have some personal interest in this matter?’

  ‘No, but it was talked about a lot at the time, and when anyone mentions Mayapore these days you automatically think of Miss Manners – and the rape in the Bibighar Gardens.’

  ‘It is not established that there was rape. Only that there were arrests, and imprisonment without trial of suspects, imprisonment not for rape but for so-called political activities.’

  ‘So-called?’

  ‘So-called. How can one say definitely when nothing is made public, when there is such a convenient regulation as Defence of India Rule?’

  ‘Do you mean that the whole affair was invented, never took place at all?’

  ‘I did not mean this. Simply I was speaking of evidence. Clearly it was thought that rape had occurred.’

  ‘I expect the girl thought so herself,’ Ahmed could not resist saying.

  ‘I agree that it is not an experience the victim could be in doubt about.’

  ‘You think that perhaps she made it up?’

  ‘I do not think anything, Mr Kasim. Only I am saying that to speak of the rape of Miss Manners in the Bibighar Gardens is to speak of an affair as if it had happened when it is not legally established as having happened. If you say there was rape I would not agree or disagree. Also I would not agree or disagree if you said no, there was no rape, the girl was hallucinated or lying and making up stories for one reason or another. Only I can agree if you state simply that it was generally accepted through reports and rumour that there was rape, that certain men were arrested as suspects, that presently the British attempted to hush everything up, that no case was ever brought to court, that it was said the girl herself refused to identify those arrested, that in the end there was officially no rape and no punishment for rape.’