The Day of the Scorpion

by Paul Scott

  Kumar had slowly transferred his gaze from Gopal to Rowan. He said, ‘He asked me if I was enjoying it.’

  ‘Enjoying it?’

  ‘He said, “Aren’t you enjoying it? Surely a randy fellow like you can do better than this?”’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘He said, “Aren’t you enjoying it? Surely a randy fellow like you can do better than this? Surely a healthy fellow like you doesn’t exhaust himself just by having it once?”’ A pause. ‘He had his hand between my legs at the time.’

  Gopal seemed to recoil. Rowan spoke sharply to the clerk. ‘Strike that from the record. Delete anything that followed the detenu’s statement “I think we were alone”. When you’ve done that leave your notebook on this desk and wait outside until I recall you.’

  When the clerk had obeyed and closed the door behind him Gopal moved as if to protest, but Rowan said to Kumar:

  ‘Why are you making allegations of this kind?’

  ‘I’m answering your questions.’

  ‘Are you? Or are you lying?’

  ‘I’m not lying.’

  ‘I put it to you that you are, that you are telling a pack of lies, very carefully rehearsed over the past year or so for just such an occasion as this, or to cause trouble on your release. If such outrageous things were done to you – really done to you – you would have said so when examined by the magistrate specially appointed to question you on just this kind of point. I put it to you that you did not say so because they had not happened. I put it to you that you are basing this story on tales and rumours you’ve heard since being imprisoned, rumours that were investigated at the time and totally unsubstantiated. I put it to you that you have made these things up in the belief that they may protect you from the danger you’d still be in if the charge of rape were made even at this late stage. I put it to you that your entire testimony this morning has been compounded of omission, exaggeration and downright falsehood and that your detention is no more than you richly deserve. You have now an opportunity to retract. I advise you to think most carefully whether you should or should not take that opportunity.’

  ‘I’ve nothing I wish to retract. I’m sorry. I seem to have misunderstood.’

  ‘What do you mean, misunderstood? Misunderstood the questions?’

  ‘Not the questions. The reason for asking them.’

  ‘The reason was made clear at the beginning.’

  ‘No, the form the questions would take was made clear. The reason for asking them was left for me to guess at. I made the wrong guess. Something has happened to her, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Do you mean to Miss Manners?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why do you ask that?’

  ‘Because the guess I made was that perhaps she’d finally managed to persuade someone I’d done nothing to deserve being kept locked up. But this examination increasingly smells of uneasy consciences. Something’s happened to her and I’m the loose end someone thought it would be a relief to tie neatly off. I’m sorry. When we began you were so fair-minded it would have hurt if I’d still been capable of feeling hurt. And it would have been nice if I’d been able to answer your questions truthfully without it becoming clear that I can’t be neatly tied off and that nobody’s conscience can be soothed down. But I answer them truthfully, as truthfully as I can, and you begin to see that I’m the least important factor and that without intending to you’re asking questions about what I call the situation. That’s why you’re annoyed and accuse me of lying, because the situation threatens to be more than any conscience can cope with. What’s happened to her? Is she dead?’ A pause. ‘I’ve sometimes felt it but never let myself think it. If she is, you should have said so. You should have said—’

  ‘We assumed that you knew. You’re not cut off completely from the outside world. You exchange letters with your aunt. You have newspapers, surely? You talk to fellow-prisoners – new arrivals, for instance.’

  ‘My aunt’s letters are heavily censored. In any case she would never refer to Miss Manners. She’s never forgiven her. I think she found it easier to blame Miss Manners than anything or anyone else for what happened to me. And I’m in the special security block here. We’re allowed books, but not newspapers. Once a week they circulate a foolscap page of war news, full of victories and pious platitudes. How and when did she die?’

  ‘She died of peritonitis. About a year ago.’

  ‘A year ago? Peritonitis?’ A pause.’ – That’s blood-poisoning, isn’t it? Burst appendix, that sort of thing?’

  ‘I gather the peritonitis was the result of a Caesarean operation undergone in far from ideal conditions.’

  ‘A Caesarean? Yes. I see.’ A pause. ‘She married?’

  ‘No. She didn’t marry.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you still have nothing to retract?’

  ‘Nothing.’ A pause. ‘Nothing.’

  For a while after that he did not speak. He sat staring at Rowan. At first she did not detect it – there was no sound of it, no sign of it – except (and now she saw it) this curious unemotional expulsion from the deep-set eyes of rivulets that coursed down his cheeks: opaque in the glaring light like phosphorescent trails, a substance that released itself without disturbing the other mechanisms of his body. She shut her own eyes. She had had a sudden, astonishingly strong compulsion to touch him. No one had ever cried for Daphne, except herself; and this one person beside herself she could not reach. Between them there was a panel of thick glass and downwardly directed slats of wood or metal. The barrier that separated them was impenetrable. It was as if Hari Kumar were buried alive in a grave she could see down into but could not reach into or even speak to, establish a connection with of any kind.

  She opened her eyes again. The twin rivulets gleamed on his prison cheeks, and then the image became blurred and she felt a corresponding wetness on her own – tears for Daphne that were also tears for him; for lovers who could never be described as star-crossed because they had had no stars. For them heaven had drawn an implacable band of dark across its constellations and the dark was lit by nothing except the trust they had had in each other not to tell the truth because the truth had seemed too dangerous to tell.

  In her mind was the image of Suleiman with the box held to his breast in the manner of someone holding a reliquary. The truth was in the reliquary and in the mind that held the image of Suleiman and in the mind of the man in the room behind the glass panel: the truth and memory of their having been in the Bibighar that night, as lovers, moving to the motion of the joy of union; and of the terror of their separation and of how, afterwards, she had crawled on hands and knees across the floor of the pavilion and untied the strips of cotton cloth the spoilers had torn from their own ragged clothing and bound him with. For a while they held each other like children afraid of the dark, and then he picked her up and began to carry her away from the pavilion.

  I look for similes (she had written – secretly, in the last stages of her pregnancy, her insurance against permanent silence) for something that explains it more clearly, but find nothing, because there is nothing. It is itself; an Indian carrying an English girl he has made love to and been forced to watch being assaulted – carrying her back to where she would be safe. It is its own simile. It says all that needs to be said, doesn’t it? If you extend it – if you think of him carrying me all the way to the MacGregor House, giving me into Aunt Lili’s care, ringing for the doctor, ringing for the police, answering questions, and being treated as a man who’d rescued me, the absurdity, the implausibility became almost unbearable. Directly you get to the point where Hari, taken on one side by Ronald Merrick for instance, has to say, ‘Yes, we were making love,’ the nod of understanding that must come from Ronald won’t, unless you blanch Hari’s skin, blanch it until it looks not just like that of a white man but like that of a white man too shaken for another white man not to feel sorry for, however much he may reproach him.

  The image sharpened. She un
derstood it in an exact depth and dimension as if she were Daphne and the man sitting in the chair down there were actually standing, waiting to pick her up again after a brief rest. He tried to take hold of my arm. I moved away from him. I said, ‘No. Let me go. You’ve not been near me. You don’t know anything. You know nothing. Say nothing.’ He wouldn’t listen to me. He caught me, tried to hold me close, but I struggled. I was in a panic, thinking of what they’d do to him. No one would believe me. He said, ‘I’ve got to be with you. I love you. Please let me be with you.’ I beat at him, not to escape myself but to make him escape. I was trying to beat sense and reason and cunning into him. I kept saying, ‘We’ve not seen each other. You’ve been at home. You say nothing. You know nothing. Promise me.’ I was free and began to run without waiting to hear him promise. At the gate he caught me and tried to hold me back. Again I asked him to let me go, please to let me go, to say nothing, to know nothing for my sake if that was the only way he could say nothing and know nothing for his own. For an instant I held him close – it was the last time I touched him – and then I broke free again and was out of the gateway, and running; running into and out of the light of the street lamp opposite, running into the dark and grateful for the dark, going without any understanding of direction. I stopped and leaned against a wall. I wanted to turn back. I wanted to admit that I couldn’t face it alone. And I wanted him to know that I thought I’d done it all wrong. He wouldn’t know what I felt, what I meant. I was in pain. I was exhausted. And frightened. Too frightened to turn back. I said, ‘There’s nothing I can do, nothing, nothing,’ and wondered where I’d heard those words before, and began to run again, through those awful ill-lit deserted roads that should have been leading me home but were leading me nowhere I recognized; into safety that wasn’t safety because beyond it there were the plains and the openness that made it seem that if I ran long enough I would run clear off the rim of the world.

  Well – she had gone. Yes, eventually, she had gone clear off the rim of the world – then or later; keeping faith with a promise that was as well an imprisonment. For him it would have been then that she had gone. He must have watched her, perhaps he followed, perhaps followed her nearly all the way to the house and then felt for himself something of the terror she had felt for him, so that he too ran home and in the privacy of his room began to bathe his face because it was cut and bruised by the men who had come at them out of the dark; the unknown watchers, the unknown spoilers, the men for whom a taboo had been broken by watching Hari love her. He had said nothing, explained nothing. ‘Say nothing,’ she had begged. He had kept faith with that. They had both kept faith. She wondered whether he would see her death as releasing him from a promise made and almost absurdly kept. The promise had betrayed and imprisoned them both. Considering this she felt soiled as from an invasion of territory she had no title to.

  ‘Do you want a few moments to compose yourself?’ Rowan asked.

  ‘I am composed. But you should have told me. You should have made it clear.’

  ‘Are you saying that if you’d known Miss Manners was no longer alive your answers to some of our questions might have been different?’

  ‘I answered the questions because I thought the examination was the result of some effort of hers. I answered the questions because I thought she wanted you to ask them. If I’d known she had nothing to do with it, and that it was only a case of bad consciences I wouldn’t have answered the questions at all.’

  ‘There was one important question you didn’t answer.’

  ‘I shall never answer it.’

  ‘Did it strike you at the time that your refusal to answer questions was unhelpful not only to you but to those five other men who were suspected?’

  ‘Yes, I had to consider that. It was part of the situation.’

  ‘Do you know what happened to them?’

  ‘I was told they were sent to detention.’

  ‘Did you think that justified?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You believed them innocent of anything, except perhaps illicit distilling and drinking?’

  ‘On that night I’m sure they were innocent of anything else. I don’t know how or why they were arrested but I know none of us would have been arrested if it hadn’t been for the assault. We were all punished for the assault, when it came to it. There was nothing I could do about that. Whether they deserved detention for political crimes, more or less than I do, I can’t say. I wasn’t able to let that enter into it.’

  ‘Would it be in your power at all to remove the last shred of suspicion that they were implicated in the assault? It is accepted by this board that those suspicions were unavoidably part of the atmosphere in which your cases had to be examined when the question of detention under the Defence of India Rules came up. If you were being absolutely frank with us – for instance about your activities and movements on the night of the assault – would that frankness be helpful to those five men?’

  ‘Are they still in prison?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are their cases also being reviewed?’

  ‘That might depend a great deal on the result of the review of yours.’

  ‘No,’ Kumar said. ‘You can’t get rid of responsibility so easily. I think that is part of the situation too.’

  The notion that Kumar could help five men who had never enjoyed Kumar’s advantages seemed to interest Gopal.

  ‘You are trying to cover everything with all this clever talk of a situation, but you are saying nothing about this situation. Time and again you leave an answer apparently complete but in fact it is only half-finished because of this so-called situation to which you relate it, and which you seem to want to mystify us with. What in fact was this situation?’

  The rivulets were still visible. He did not seem to be aware of them and they now appeared to be motionless. She had an impression that they had ossified, that Rowan could have reached over and picked them away from Kumar’s cheeks with his finger-nails, a piece at a time, and that each piece would fall with the light gyrating motion of something fragile, like an insect’s wing.

  ‘It was a situation of enactment.’

  Gopal was impatient. ‘Most situations are.’

  ‘According to Merrick most situations are the consequence of one set of actions and the prelude to the next but negative in themselves.’

  ‘These ideas of what you call the situation were DSP’s not you own?’

  ‘Yes. He wanted them to be clear to me. In fact from his point of view it was essential that they should be. Otherwise the enactment was incomplete.’

  ‘And he made them clear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Gopal suggested, ‘you would be good enough to make them clear also to this board.’

  ‘In a way that’s impossible. The ideas, without the enactment, lose their significance. He said that if people would enact a situation they would understand its significance. He said history was a sum of situations whose significance was never seen until long afterwards because people had been afraid to act them out. They couldn’t face up to their responsibility for them. They preferred to think of the situations they found themselves in as part of a general drift of events they had no control over, which meant that they never really understood those situations, and so in a curious way the situations did become part of a general drift of events. He didn’t think he could go so far as to say you could change the course of events by acting out situations you found yourself in, but that at least you’d understand better what that situation was and take what steps you could to stop things drifting in the wrong direction, or an unreal direction.’

  ‘An interesting theory,’ Rowan said. ‘But is it relevant to the events you’ve been alleging took place?’

  ‘You ask the question the wrong way round. You should ask how relevant the events were to the theory. The theory was exemplified in the enactment of the situation. The rape, the interrogation about the rape, were side issues. The real issue
was the relationship between us.’

  ‘What exactly does that mean?’ Rowan asked.

  ‘He said that up until then our relationship had only been symbolic. It had to become real.’

  ‘What in fact did he mean by symbolic?’

  ‘It was how he described it. He said for the moment we were mere symbols. He said we’d never understand each other if we were going to be content with that. It wasn’t enough to say he was English and I was Indian, that he was a ruler and I was one of the ruled. We had to find out what that meant. He said people talked of an ideal relationship between his kind and my kind. They called it comradeship. But they never said anything about the contempt on his side and the fear on mine that was basic, and came before any comradely feeling. He said we had to find out about that too, we had to enact the situation as it really was, and in a way that would mean neither of us ever forgetting it or being tempted to pretend it didn’t exist, or was something else.’ A pause. ‘All this was part of what he talked about before he put me through what he called the second phase of my degradation. Before he had me strapped to the trestle. The first phase was being kept standing without any clothes on. The third phase was his offer of charity. He gave me water. He bathed the lacerations. I couldn’t refuse the water. I was grateful to him when he gave me the water. I remember thinking what a relief it was, having him treat me kindly, how nice it would be if I could earn his approval. It would have been nice to confess. I nearly did, because the confession he wanted was a confession of my dependence on him, my inferiority to him. He said the true corruption of the English is their pretence that they have no contempt for us, and our real degradation is our pretence of equality. He said if we could understand the truth there might be a chance for us. There might be some sense then in talking about his kind’s obligations to my kind. The last phase could show the possibilities. He said I could forget the girl. What had happened to her was unimportant. So long as I understood how responsible I was for it. “That’s what you’ve got to admit,” he kept saying, “your responsibility for that girl getting rammed. If you were a hundred miles away you’d still be responsible.” What happened in the Bibighar Gardens he saw as symbolic too, symptomatic of what he called the liberal corruption of both his kind and my kind. He accepted a share of responsibility for what happened, even though there was no common ground between himself and the kind of Englishman really responsible. The kind really responsible was the one who sat at home and kidded himself there was such a thing as the brotherhood of man or came out here and went on pretending there was. The permutations of English corruption in India were endless – affection for servants, for peasants, for soldiers, pretence at understanding the Indian intellectual or at sympathizing with nationalist aspirations, but all this affection and understanding was a corruption of what he called the calm purity of their contempt. It was a striking phrase, wasn’t it? He accepted a share of responsibility for the rape in the Bibighar because even the English people who admitted to themselves that they had this contempt pretended among themselves that they didn’t. They would always find some little niche to fit themselves into to prove they were part of the great liberal Christian display, even if it was only by repeating ad nauseam to each other that there wasn’t a better fellow in the world than the blue-eyed Pathan, or the Punjabi farmer, or the fellow who blacks your boots. He called the English admiration for the martial and faithful servant class a mixture of perverted sexuality and feudal arrogance. What they were stirred or flattered by was an idea, an idea of bravery or loyalty exercised on their behalf. The man exercising bravery and loyalty was an inferior being and even when you congratulated him you had contempt for him. And at the other end of the scale when you thought about the kind of Englishmen who pretended to admire Indian intellectuals, pretended to sympathize with their national aspirations, if you were honest you had to admit that all they were admiring or sympathizing with was the black reflection of their own white ideals. Underneath the admiration and sympathy there was the contempt a people feel for a people who have learned things from them. The liberal intellectual Englishman was just as contemptuous of the Westernized educated Indian as the arrogant upper-class reactionary Englishman was of the fellow who blacks his boots and earns his praise.’