A Rising Man

by Abir Mukherjee

  ‘Christ we don’t even let facts get in the way if it might harm the image we want to maintain. Take a look at any Indian primary school atlas. They put Britain and India next to one another, each takin’ up a full page. We don’t even show them to scale, lest little brown children realise how tiny Britain is compared to India!

  ‘The problem, Captain, is that over the last two hundred years, we’ve come to swallow our own propaganda. We do feel we’re superior to the bastards we rule. An’ anything that threatens that fiction is a threat to the whole edifice. That’s why MacAuley’s murder has caused such a stink. It’s an attack on two levels. First it shows us that some Indians at least no longer think themselves inferior, so much so that they can successfully pull off the murder of such a high-profile member of the ruling class, and secondly because it shatters our own fiction of superiority.’

  He finished the last dregs of wine.

  ‘You don’t believe in the superiority of the white man, then?’ I asked.

  ‘In over fifteen years here, I’ve yet to see any proof of it. Look, I’m an Irishman, Captain. There are enough of your own people back in London who would think me a stupid Paddy. Sure if I don’t accept that, what would give me the right to claim superiority over another race? And times are changin’, Captain. The old order is collapsing. You only need to take a look at the map of Europe to see that. Poland, Czechoslovakia, all the other newly independent nations. If we believe in their right to self-determination, sure why should it be different in the case of India?’

  I lit a cigarette as he finished the last of the wine.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s gettin’ late. I best be off to bed.’

  He rose and bade me goodnight.

  ‘I guess I should bid you farewell,’ I said. ‘You’re off to Assam tomorrow, aren’t you? To the tea gardens?’

  ‘Oh, right so.’ He smiled. ‘No. Change of plans, I’m afraid. I’m stuck in town for a few more days.’

  I said goodnight and sat alone, smoking. Byrne had certainly made an interesting point. I could have assured him, though, that any notions I may have once held about British superiority had died back in Flanders alongside my friends. Not that it changed anything. Neither self-determination nor moral superiority was my concern. A man had been murdered and it was my job to find his killers. I’d leave the politics to others.

  FIFTEEN

  THE ELECTRIC FAN creaked slowly round on the ceiling and made not a jot of difference to the temperature in the room. It had been several days since I’d realised its presence was more decorative than functional, but I’d switched it on anyway, more in hope than expectation.

  Another torrid Bengal night. The humidity was suffocating. You could taste it in the air. Perspiration dripped off my body and drenched the bed. I’d opened the window in an attempt to encourage some sort of breeze to circulate, but all it did was allow free access to the mosquitoes Mrs Tebbit insisted didn’t exist.

  I checked my watch. It read twelve forty. I shook it and held it up to my ear. It was still ticking, though somewhat irregularly and I guessed the correct time was probably closer to two. I turned over, trying to make myself comfortable on the damp mattress, but the battle was already lost. Sleep wasn’t going to come tonight.

  The urge to pay another visit to my new friends in Tiretta Bazaar was growing and the lure of oblivion was hard to ignore. But the O was my servant, not my mistress, and it was best to keep it that way. She could be insidious, and it was essential to respect her or she’d turn the tables on you. Others didn’t realise that, and she took them. Completely. Discipline was key. It was like crossing a river on the back of a crocodile: people might consider it foolhardy, but if you knew what you were doing, it’d get you where you wanted to go. The trick, obviously, was to not get eaten, and to do that you had to stay in control. And, I told myself, I was in control. So I stayed in the room, and lay on the bed, and watched the fan turn monotonously on the ceiling.

  I leaned over and reached for the bottle of whisky on the floor, but it wasn’t there. I cursed, panicking that the bloody maid had thrown it out, but that was unlikely. After a lifetime in the service of Mrs Tebbit, independent action of that magnitude was frankly beyond her. I sat up and scoured the room. The bottle was sat on a corner of the desk, its label glinting in the moonlight.

  Pulling myself off the bed, I staggered to the table and poured out a double measure, then added a dash of water from the sink. As I did so, I recalled Mrs Tebbit’s warnings about drinking water straight from the tap. I cursed once again and looked at the tooth glass, then took a sip and walked back to the bed. I’d take my chances with cholera before I threw out good single malt.

  I sat back on the bed and, not for the first time, questioned what I was doing out here, in this country where the natives despised you and the climate drove you mad and the water could kill you. And not just the water, pretty much everything out here seemed designed to kill an Englishman: the food, the insects, the weather. It was as though India itself were reacting to our presence as one’s immune defences react to invasion by a foreign body. Indeed, it was a wonder men like MacAuley survived as long as they did before succumbing. And it was as true to say he’d been killed by India as it was to say he’d been murdered by a native in an alley. They both amounted to the same thing.

  And yet, here we were and here we stayed, noble Englishmen and women standing resolute in the face of implacable hostility from both nature and native. We told ourselves we’d tamed this savage land with railroads and breach-loading rifles and, it seemed, we’d be damned if we were going to leave any time soon, whatever the cost to us in dead civil servants and gin-soaked memsahibs. We were doing the Lord’s work, after all. Bringing the word of God and the glories of the free market to these poor souls. And if we made a profit in the process, surely that was God’s will too.

  I felt a great heaviness. India was depressing me, as it appeared to depress pretty much everyone. No one seemed very happy. The British weren’t happy. Not Digby, or Buchan or Mrs Tebbit or Peters. They all seemed angry or scared or despondent, sometimes all at once. The Indians – the educated ones, at least – appeared no more content, be it Mrs Bose and her sullen acceptance of our hegemony over her country, or Surrender-not with his earnest, melancholy, hang-dog face.

  Then, of course, there was Annie. She fell into neither camp, but she didn’t seem happy either. There was a certain sadness to her. She tried to hide it under a cloak of forced good humour and that beguiling smile of hers, but every now and again, as happened outside the Red Elephant, the mask would slip and the sadness would surface. She was like a bird trapped in a rusting cage.

  If there was such a thing as happiness in India, it was probably to be found among the poor, illiterate classes who had little to do with either the British or the Indian elite. People like Salman the rickshaw wallah. For him, happiness meant a full belly and a bidi before bed and it mattered not a jot whether it was sahibs in suits or babus in dhotis who sat in Writers’ Building and ran the country.

  My thoughts wandered. At some point they turned to Sarah, as they always do. In the months since her death, I’d realised I hardly knew her. In three years of marriage, we’d spent a total of five weeks together. Five weeks. Too short a time for anything other than her memory to be indelibly scratched into my mind. The bile rose in my stomach. Fate had cheated me of her. Fate. Not God. For I no longer believed in the Almighty. In truth, I’d begun to doubt his existence while in the trenches – it’s hard not to ask where he is when your comrades are being blown to pieces – but I still prayed to him in the hope he’d see me through to the other side, as though my prayers mattered more than those of the millions who weren’t so lucky. But it was Sarah’s death that finally shattered my faith. It’s funny how one can believe in the existence of a deity until you lose the one closest to you.

  Before daybreak my thoughts turned to Byrne. He was a funny old fish. Most of the time he seemed an amiable buffoon, driv
elling on about textiles and tea gardens, but when you got him on his own, like tonight, he came across as clever and surprisingly insightful. I reflected on what he’d said about Bengali revolutionaries, their ridiculous notions of noble struggle and their general haplessness. He was right. Men like that had no idea what war meant. Real war was blood and slaughter and the screams of the dying. It had no place for ideals. Real war was hell, and spared neither friend nor foe.

  The thought triggered something. The attack on the Darjeeling Mail. Suddenly, and only for an instant, there was a terrible clarity. I jumped to my feet and in a daze threw on my uniform. It was still dark outside but I needed to get to the office. I knew why the passengers on the train hadn’t been robbed. I also had a theory for why the mail sacks hadn’t been taken, and if I was right, we had a much bigger problem than the death of a railway guard to deal with.

  SIXTEEN

  Friday, 11 April 1919

  I LEFT THE guest house and ran towards the rickshaw stand on the corner. Salman was sprawled on a mat under his rickshaw. At the sound of my footsteps he opened his eyes and hauled himself to his feet. He gave a hacking cough and spat into the roadside gutter.

  ‘Office, sahib?’

  I nodded and climbed aboard the rickshaw. With one finger of his right hand, Salman rang a battered little tin bell that hung from a string tied around his wrist. It tinkled like a child’s toy. Then we were off.

  The roads were busy despite the early hour. The morning was humid and still and the sky was already turning from pinks and oranges to the hazy blue that brought with it the portent of another broiling day.

  There was a note from Daniels waiting on my desk, imploring me to call him, at my earliest convenience, to arrange a time to brief the Commissioner. That was fine by me. I was more than happy to do so, now that I actually had something to tell him.

  I telephoned Daniels’ office but no one answered. It was only six o’clock and the man was probably still in his bed and I took a perverse pleasure in writing him an angry note, telling him I’d tried to contact him several times as I needed to brief the Commissioner urgently on developments. I called in a peon from the corridor outside and dispatched him to Daniels’ office with the note.

  Once confident he was headed in the right direction, I telephoned the pit and asked the duty officer to take a message for Surrender-not. The sergeant was already at his desk, so I asked him to join me, bringing with him all the files we had on Benoy Sen and the terrorist group Jugantor.

  Ten minutes later he knocked and entered the office, carrying a pile of fat buff-coloured folders. He let out a sigh as he dropped the lot onto the desk. ‘Here you are, sir,’ he said. ‘The thick ones are on Jugantor. They go back about ten years. The thin one is on Sen himself.’

  ‘Good work, Sergeant,’ I said. ‘Any news on that missing baggage manifest for the Darjeeling Mail?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir. I’ll keep pushing.’

  I dismissed him and began reading through the Jugantor files. They told the classic tale of an outfit which, from innocuous beginnings, had developed into a major terrorist threat. The early files comprised mainly scene-of-crime reports, detailing petty theft and thuggery. The later files showed a graduation to gun attacks and much more sophisticated felonies. They’d started out robbing taxi cabs and ended up robbing banks. The proceeds of these raids were used to pay for guns and parts for bombs. As for assassinations, they were mainly of policemen, most of them natives, and a few minor British government officials. What was interesting, though, was the number of failed assassination attempts recorded in the file. On many occasions the terrorists hadn’t even come close to achieving their objectives, either through laughably poor execution or faulty weaponry or because they’d been infiltrated by security service informants.

  Alongside the scene-of-crime reports were a small number of intelligence reports. These speculated on the hierarchy and operating structure of the organisation, together with what was known about the group’s regional cells throughout Bengal, and their contacts with terrorist factions in other parts of India. The group’s leader had been a Bengali named Jatindranath Mukherjee, whom the natives referred to as ‘Bagha Jatin’ – ‘the Tiger’.

  There was a significant increase in Jugantor’s activities during the war, with several of the later files devoted solely to a period between 1914 and 1917. The Tiger seemed to have looked on the war as a golden opportunity to try to force the British out of India and there were several reports on a raid that he and his men had carried out on the warehouses of a company called Rodda & Co, which held one of the biggest arms stores in Calcutta. They’d managed to escape with ten cases of arms and ammunition, including fifty Mauser pistols and forty-six thousand rounds of ammunition.

  Most of the files, though, focused on what they termed ‘the German Conspiracy’, detailing a plot to acquire weapons from the Kaiser, seize Calcutta and foment insurrection of the native regiments of the Indian army throughout India. They described the group’s links to seditious Indian organisations as far afield as Berlin and San Francisco, detailing how funds were channelled through these organisations to pay for arms shipments. In the end, the group had been fatally compromised by a number of spies acting for Section H, and the insurrections in Bengal and the Punjab were strangled at birth. Mukherjee and five of his comrades had gone into hiding and were discovered near Balasore, betrayed by locals. Section H moved in and Mukherjee and two others were mortally wounded. Two more were captured. Only one man escaped. Benoy Sen.

  I turned to Sen’s file. There were few hard facts and no photographs or sketches of the man. Most of it was just speculation about his involvement in raids in the movement’s early days. Later there were rumours of him having a role in the group’s strategic planning, but nothing concrete. Section H, with their greater resources and spies within Jugantor, would probably have a better picture of the man. I’d make sure to ask them for access to their files on him. It would be interesting to see whether their commitment to provide ‘any and all assistance’ would stretch that far. Somehow I doubted it.

  The telephone began to ring. I picked up the receiver. On the other end, Daniels was breathing heavily. The Commissioner would see me in his office in ten minutes.

  I sat facing Lord Taggart’s empty chair, listening to the clock in his office tick slowly by. Lord Taggart was running late and Daniels had offered no explanation as to why. So I sat there as the sublime countenance of the King Emperor George V gazed down on me from his exalted position on the wall. The doors opened and Lord Taggart strode in, the silver buttons on his freshly pressed uniform glinting in the sunlight.

  ‘My apologies, Sam,’ he said, gesturing for me to sit and dropping down into his leather chair. ‘Now, what have you got for me?’

  I told him of the meeting with Digby’s informant and that we now had a prime suspect in the form of Benoy Sen.

  His ears pricked up at the mention of Sen.

  ‘So the old fox has finally come home,’ he said, more to himself than to me. ‘That’s good work, Sam,’ he continued. ‘You have my permission to call on whatever resources you need to track him down. Do whatever you have to. I’ve waited a long time for this and I don’t want him slipping through our fingers again. In the meantime, I’ll inform the L-G of your progress.’

  ‘It may be better to wait until we have Sen in custody,’ I ventured.

  Taggart shook his head. ‘No. That might seem like the prudent thing to do, Sam, but it would be a severely career-limiting move for all of us if the L-G found out we’d been keeping information from him. Besides, his other sources might be able to help find Sen.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ I said. ‘I think Sen might be linked to the attack on the Darjeeling Mail.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Taggart calmly, as though what I’d suggested was the most natural thing in the world.

  ‘I suspect the attack was carried out by terrorists rather than mere dacoits. It’s the only explanatio
n that makes sense. The attackers were searching for something specific, something they expected to find in the safes on board. Fortunately those safes were empty. Dacoits wouldn’t have left empty handed. They’d at least have robbed the passengers of their valuables. Terrorists, though, wouldn’t be interested in petty theft. From what I’m told, it would probably offend their sensibilities.’

  ‘So what were they looking for, Sam?’ said the Commissioner. It felt as though he was leading me to an answer he already knew.

  ‘My guess is they were looking for cash. And a lot of it. They were expecting to find it in the safes.’

  ‘Then why not take the mail sacks?’

  ‘Time.’ I said. ‘Monetising the valuables in the mail would take time.’

  ‘That would imply their need for the cash is urgent,’ said Taggart. ‘What does that suggest to you?’

  The answer was obvious. ‘They’re looking to conclude an arms deal. If this man Sen’s suddenly come back to Calcutta, and he is behind the attack, that suggests MacAuley’s assassination is just the first shot in a much larger, bloodier campaign.’

  ‘You need to share your concerns with Section H,’ said Taggart. ‘If you’re right, we’re facing something far more dangerous than I’d anticipated. Sen and his cohorts must be stopped before they get the chance to launch a real terror campaign. Get to it, Captain.’

  I rose and walked towards the door, but stopped halfway and turned.

  ‘You knew, didn’t you, sir?’ I said.

  Taggart looked up from his desk. ‘Knew what, Sam?’

  ‘The attack on the Darjeeling Mail, that it wasn’t just a botched robbery by some dacoits.’

  ‘I suspected, Sam. I didn’t know. For that matter, I still don’t.’

  ‘Why didn’t you voice your suspicions before?’

  ‘I trusted your judgement. Besides, one whiff of suspicion that this might have been the work of terrorists and the case would have been handed to Section H. You wouldn’t have got a sniff of it, and, by extension, neither would I.’