A Rising Man

by Abir Mukherjee

  ‘Have there been any gatherings in the neighbourhood that may have been of a seditious nature?’ I asked.

  She looked at me like I was a particularly slow child. ‘Quite possibly, Captain. This is Calcutta, after all. A city of a million Bengalis with nothing better to do than talk revolution. Isn’t that why you moved the capital to Delhi? Better to roast up there in a desert backwater surrounded by pliant Punjabis than put up with such dangerous Bengali rabble rousers. Not that they actually do much other than talk. But to answer your question, no, I am not aware of any gatherings of a seditious nature. Nothing that would contravene the articles of your precious Rowlatt Acts.’

  The Rowlatt Acts. They’d been passed the previous month and allowed us to lock up anyone we suspected of terrorism or revolutionary activities. We could hold them for up to two years without trial. From a copper’s perspective, it made things nice and simple. The Indians, of course, had reacted with fury, and I can’t say I blamed them. After all, we’d just fought a war in the name of liberty, and yet here we were, arresting people without warrants, and locking them up for anything we considered seditious, from gathering without a permit to staring at an Englishman the wrong way.

  Mrs Bose rose. ‘I’m sorry, gentlemen, I really can’t help you.’

  It was time to try a different approach.

  ‘You might wish to reconsider, Mrs Bose,’ I said. ‘The sergeant here has voiced a suspicion as to exactly what sort of an establishment you may be running here. Obviously I think he’s mistaken, but I can have a team of ten officers from the vice division down here in less than thirty minutes to find out which of us is right. I expect they’d tear this place apart and maybe haul you over to Lal Bazar for questioning. They might even suggest you spend a night or two in the cells, at the Viceroy’s pleasure, so to speak… Or you could afford us some cooperation.’

  She looked at me and smiled. She didn’t seem intimidated, which was surprising. However, she chose her next words carefully. ‘Captain Wyndham, I think there has been some… misunderstanding. I am perfectly happy to help you in any way I can. But I honestly didn’t see or hear anything untoward last night.’

  ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘you won’t mind us questioning anyone else who was in the house at the time?’

  The door opened and the maid entered with a silver tray upon which sat all the paraphernalia associated with middle-class tea making. She set it down on a small mahogany table beside her mistress and left the room.

  Mrs Bose lifted the teapot and an elegant silver tea strainer and poured the tea into three cups. ‘Of course, Captain,’ she said finally, ‘you may speak to whomever you wish.’

  Once more she pressed the brass button on the wall and the maid returned. Foreign words were exchanged and she disappeared again.

  Mrs Bose turned to me. ‘So tell me, Captain, you’re clearly new to India. How long have you been here?’

  ‘I hadn’t realised it was quite that obvious.’

  Mrs Bose smiled. ‘Oh, but it is. Firstly, your face is that interesting shade of pink, which suggests you haven’t yet learned that most important lesson of life here: that you should stay indoors between the hours of noon and four. Secondly, you haven’t yet acquired the swagger that your kinsmen tend to display in this country when dealing with Indians.’

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you,’ I said

  ‘Don’t be,’ she replied casually. ‘I am sure it is only a matter of time.’

  Before I could respond, the door opened and four slim young girls entered the room, followed by the maid and the old man who had shown us in. The girls looked dishevelled, as though they’d been roused from sleep. In contrast to Mrs Bose, none of them wore make-up, but all possessed a natural beauty. Each wore a simple cotton sari, in various pastel colours.

  ‘Captain Wyndham,’ said Mrs Bose, ‘allow me to introduce my household to you.’ She gestured towards the old man. ‘Ratan, you have already met. And of course Meena, my maid. These others are Saraswati, Lakshmi, Devi and Sita.’ At the mention of her name, each girl steepled her hands together in greeting. They appeared nervous. That was to be expected. Most young prostitutes in London were also nervous when questioned by an officer of the law. Most, but by no means all.

  ‘Not everyone in my household speaks English,’ Mrs Bose continued. ‘You don’t mind if I translate your questions into Hindi?’

  ‘Why Hindi and not Bengali?’ I asked.

  ‘Because, Captain, while Calcutta is the capital of Bengal, a great many people here are not Bengali. Sita here is from Orissa and Lakshmi is from Bihar. Hindi is, shall we say, the lingua franca.’ She smiled, amused by her own turn of phrase, and gestured towards Banerjee. ‘I take it your sergeant here speaks Hindi?’

  I looked at him.

  ‘My Hindi is fairly rusty, sir,’ he replied, ‘but passable.’

  ‘Very well then, Mrs Bose,’ I said, ‘please ask them if they saw or heard any disturbance in the alley last night.’

  Mrs Bose put the question to them. The old man appeared not to hear and so she repeated her words more loudly. I looked at Banerjee. He was staring fixedly at Devi.

  One by one, each of them replied ‘Nahin’.

  I wasn’t convinced. ‘Seven people in the house last night and none of you saw or heard anything?’

  ‘Apparently not,’ said Mrs Bose.

  I considered them in turn. Ratan, the old man, was probably too deaf to have heard a thing. The maid, Meena, might have, but her body language didn’t suggest she was hiding anything. Mrs Bose was too smart to let anything slip. A woman in her line of work quickly learns how to deal with inconvenient enquiries from the police. The four girls, though. They would have been up most of the night with clients. One of them may have seen something. If so, they’d probably be less adept than Mrs Bose at concealing it from me.

  I turned to Banerjee. ‘Sergeant, please repeat the question to each of the four girls in turn.’

  He did as I asked. I watched the girls as they replied. Saraswati and Lakshmi both answered ‘Nahin’. Devi hesitated for a second, averted her gaze, but then also answered ‘Nahin’. The hesitation was all I needed.

  Banerjee proceeded to ask the final girl the same question. She gave the same reply, but I detected no signs of subterfuge. Devi was the one we needed to talk to. But not now, and not here. We’d have to speak to her alone.

  ‘Unfortunately, it seems we cannot help you, Captain,’ said Mrs Bose.

  ‘It would appear so,’ I replied, rising from the sofa. Banerjee followed my lead. If Mrs Bose was relieved, she hid it well. Calm as a lotus on a lake. I made a final attempt to unsettle her. ‘Just one last question, if I may?’

  ‘Of course, Captain.’

  ‘Where is Mr Bose?’

  She smiled playfully. ‘Come now, Captain. You must realise that in my profession it is sometimes necessary to cultivate a certain image of respectability. I find that having a husband, though he is never present, helps to smooth out some of life’s little problems.’

  We left the house and returned to the blazing heat. The body was still there, covered by a dirty tarpaulin. It should have been moved by now. I searched for Digby but couldn’t see him.

  The alley was a furnace, not that it had much effect on the crowd, which if anything had grown larger. They packed themselves together, tight under large black umbrellas. Everyone in Calcutta seems to carry an umbrella, though more for shade than shelter. I made a mental note to follow Mrs Bose’s advice and be indoors by noon.

  From a distance came the sound of a horn and through the narrow, crowded street an olive-green ambulance truck threaded its way towards us. In front of it, a constable on a bicycle was shouting for the crowd to clear the way. On reaching the cordon, he dismounted, leaned his bicycle against a wall and briskly made his way over to me.

  He saluted. ‘Captain Wyndham, sir?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I have a message for you, sir. Your presence is requested imme
diately by Commissioner Taggart.’

  Lord Charles Taggart, Commissioner of Police. He was the reason I was in Bengal.

  I thanked the constable, who headed back towards his bicycle. By now, the ambulance had stopped at the cordon and two Indian orderlies had got out. They spoke to Banerjee, then lifted the body onto a stretcher and loaded it into the ambulance.

  I again searched for Digby but couldn’t see him anywhere, so instead I asked Banerjee to join me as I headed back to the car parked at the entrance to the alley. The driver, a large turbaned Sikh, saluted, then opened the rear door.

  We negotiated the narrow, congested streets of Black Town, the driver leaning on his horn and shouting threats at the pedestrians, rickshaws and bullock carts in our path. I turned to Banerjee. ‘How’d you know that house was a brothel, Sergeant?’

  He smiled shyly. ‘I asked a few of the locals in the crowd about the surrounding buildings. One woman was more than happy to tell me about the goings-on at number 47.’

  ‘And our Mrs Bose? What did you make of her?’

  ‘Interesting, sir. She’s certainly no admirer of the British.’

  He was right. But that didn’t mean she was involved. She was a businesswoman, after all, and in my experience people like her had little time for politics. Unless it boosted profits, of course.

  ‘And the woman you saw at the window?’

  ‘It was the one she called Devi.’

  ‘You don’t think it was her real name?’

  ‘It’s possible sir, but Devi means goddess, and the other three all had the names of Hindu goddesses. I think that’s too much of a coincidence. And I understand it’s not unusual for such girls to work under aliases.’

  ‘True enough, Sergeant,’ I said, adding drily, ‘I congratulate you on your knowledge of whores.’

  The young man’s ears reddened.

  ‘So,’ I continued, ‘do you think she saw something?’

  ‘She denied it, sir.’

  ‘Yes, but what do you think?’

  ‘I think she’s lying and, if I may venture an opinion, sir, I think you do too. What I don’t understand is why you didn’t question her further?’

  ‘Patience, Sergeant,’ I said. ‘There’s a time and a place for everything.’

  By now we were on the Chitpore road, on the outskirts of White Town. Wide avenues bordered by imposing mansions: the homes of merchant princes made rich from trade in everything from cotton to opium.

  ‘Unusual name, “Surrender-not”,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not actually my name, sir,’ replied Banerjee. ‘My real name is “Surendranath”. It’s one of the names of Lord Indra, the king of the gods. Unfortunately Sub-inspector Digby found the pronunciation beyond him, so he christened me “Surrender-not”.’

  ‘And what do you think of that, Sergeant?’

  Banerjee fidgeted in his seat. ‘I’ve been called worse things, sir. Given the natural inability of many of your countrymen to pronounce any foreign name with more than one syllable, “Surrender-not” isn’t too bad.’

  We travelled in silence for a while, but that soon became uncomfortable. Besides, I wanted to get to know this young man better, as, other than servants and petty officials, he was pretty much the first real Indian I’d met since arriving here. So I asked him about himself.

  ‘I spent my childhood in Shyambazar,’ he told me. ‘Then boarding school and university in England.’

  His father was a Calcutta barrister who’d sent each of his three sons to England to be educated: Harrow, then Oxbridge. Banerjee was the youngest. Of his elder brothers, one had followed his father into the law and been called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn. The other was a physician of some renown. As for Banerjee, his father had wanted him to pursue a career in the Indian Civil Service, the legendary ICS, but despite the prestige, the young man didn’t fancy spending his days as a pen-pusher. He decided to join the police force instead.

  ‘What did your father make of that?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s not too happy about it,’ he replied. ‘He’s a supporter of the struggle for Home Rule. He thinks by joining the Imperial Police Force, I’m assisting the British in the abasement of my own people.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  Banerjee reflected for a moment before replying. ‘I think, sir, that one day we may indeed have Home Rule. Or the British may leave completely. Either way, I’m quite sure that such an event won’t herald the outbreak of universal peace and goodwill among my countrymen, despite what Mr Gandhi may think. There will still be murders in India. If and when you depart, sir, we Indians will need the skills to manage the posts you’ll be vacating. That goes for law enforcement as much as anything else.’

  It wasn’t exactly the ringing endorsement of empire I’d expected from a policeman. As an Englishman, one rather assumes that the natives are either for you or against you, and that the ones employed by the Imperial Police Force must be amongst the most loyal. After all, they uphold the system. That at least one of them might be somewhat ambivalent came as a shock.

  I confess, my first week in Calcutta had brought with it more than a degree of unease. I’d met Indians before, I’d even fought alongside some of them during the war. I remembered Ypres in 1915, the suicidal counter-attack ordered by our generals at some lamentable little village called Langemarck. The sepoys of the 3rd Lahore Division, Sikhs and Pathans mainly, had charged on without hope of success and were mown down before ever catching sight of the Boche positions. They’d died bravely. Now, here in Calcutta, it was disturbing to see the way we treated their kinsfolk in their own land.

  ‘And you, sir?’ asked Banerjee. ‘What brings you to Calcutta?’

  I was silent.

  What could I tell him?

  That I’d survived a war that had killed my brother and my friends? That I’d been wounded and shipped home, only to find that as I recuperated in hospital, my wife had died of influenza? That I was tired of an England I no longer believed in? It would be considered bad form to tell a native any of that. So I told him what I told everyone.

  ‘I grew sick of the rain, Sergeant.’

  TWO

  I WAS SIX when my mother died. My father was headmaster of the local school, a man of some importance in the parish and of absolutely none outside it. He soon remarried and I, being considered surplus to requirements, was packed off to Haderley, an unremarkable little boarding school in a forgotten part of the West Country, as far from anywhere of any consequence as it’s possible to be in England.

  Haderley was no different from the myriad of other minor public schools that dot the shires. Provincial in location and parochial in attitude, it provided a passable education, a veneer of respectability and, most importantly, a convenient holding pen for middle-class children who, for one reason or another, required to be dumped somewhere unobtrusive. That was fine with me. I was happy at Haderley, happier than I’d been at home, at any rate. If anything I’d have stayed longer if I could. I envied the boys who were forced to remain there during holidays on account of their parents being posted to some far-flung corner of the globe, bearing the white man’s burden and supporting the enterprise of empire.

  The empire – it truly was a middle-class enterprise, built squarely on the shoulders of schools like Haderley. They were the institutions that churned out the fresh-faced, diligent young men who were the grease that kept the wheels of empire spinning; the boys who became its civil servants and its policemen, its clerics and its tax collectors. In turn, those boys would marry and have children of their own, children they would send back to England to receive the same education they themselves had received. To the same schools, to be moulded into the next generation of colonial administrators. And so the wheel turned full circle.

  I left Haderley at seventeen when the money ran out. My father had taken ill the year before, and in light of his straitened financial circumstances, the school fees became an unaffordable luxury. I didn’t bear him any ill will because
of it. It was just one of those things. Nevertheless, it did present me with a problem, which was what to do with myself. University, if ever I had entertained hopes of going, was out of the question now. Instead, I did what energetic young men short on prospects and even shorter on resources have done for centuries. I set off for London.

  I was lucky. I’d an uncle who lived in the East End, just off the Mile End Road. A local magistrate with some connections, it was he who first suggested I consider the police force. It seemed a good idea, especially as I had nothing else lined up. So I applied and was offered a position as a constable in the Metropolitan Police’s H Division, headquartered in Stepney. People think the Met is the oldest police force in the world. It’s not. It’s true we had the Bow Street runners, but Paris was the first city with a real police force. The Met’s not even the oldest in Britain. That particular honour goes to Glasgow, which had a police force a good thirty-odd years before Robert Peel suggested one for London. Still, if there was one city that needed police more than London, it was probably Glasgow.

  That’s not to say London was safe. Stepney and the East End certainly weren’t, and we saw more than our fair share of murders, though the victims were never found wearing black tie. It just wasn’t that sort of place. Still, the boys of H Division were thankful for our trusty old Bulldog revolvers, though I never needed to use mine in anger, the act of aiming it at a miscreant generally having the desired effect.

  My break came two years later, at the scene of a particularly nasty double murder on the Westferry Road. The bodies of a shopkeeper called Furlow and his wife were discovered early one morning by their assistant, a girl named Rosie, who, confronted by a scene straight out of a penny dreadful, did the sensible thing and screamed her head off. By chance I was on my beat, and hearing her cries, was the first constable on the scene. There were no signs of a break-in. In fact, there was little sign of anything untoward, except of course for the two bodies in the flat above the shop, dressed in their night clothes and with their throats cut. Other officers soon arrived and the place was cordoned off. A search was conducted and a cash box found, open and empty, under the Furlows’ bed.