To The Coral Strand

by John Masters

  The buildings of the mission were doing a cheerful fandango when I saw them, the bungalow on the left, chapel beyond, hospital on the right. ‘Stop!’ Her voice was sharp and full of panic.

  ‘Whatsa matter? Jackal can’t have escaped,’ I said reasonably.

  ‘Quick, behind the bungalow, please,’ she cried.

  ‘O.K., O.K.,’ I said, and turned off.

  Behind the bungalow she said, ‘Stop!’ and I stopped. ‘Quick,’ she grabbed me by the arm and dragged me up the back veranda steps, opened a door and jerked me inside.

  ‘Jackal in here?’ I asked in surprise. I knew she’d said the beast was in the hospital. But she had vanished. She came back with a pair of trousers and a shirt. ‘Put these on,’ she said. She’d got plenty of colour by now, and she wasn’t cold or sweating any more.

  Whims of women, I thought, and shrugged. I put on the clothes. They didn’t fit very well and I couldn’t get the trousers on because the leg hole had St Vitus’s Dance, and when I had finally done it, by sitting down and holding the damned hole so that it couldn’t escape, I got the other leg in the same hole. She was watching, and finally gave a sort of exasperated sigh and knelt down, dragged the trousers off me, and then with a couple of expert heaves and a wiggle, pulled them on properly.

  ‘You’d better let me take the rifle,’ she said.

  ‘There’s no need to be insulting,’ I said, and walked out to the jeep and got the rifle. Then I followed her across the road to the hospital. One of the patients, wrapped in a blanket, was standing at a back window, peering in. It was a woman and I was glad I had made myself presentable. I peered in through the same window, the woman respectfully making room for me. I was looking into the little room where she had bandaged Piroo’s shoulder. The jackal lay on the floor, slavering and panting deeply, obviously rabid. ‘He went in, moaning, about four o’clock,’ Margaret said. ‘I heard the patients screaming ... I ran over and shut the doors …

  I knocked out one pane of glass with the rifle butt, and, leaning in, shot the jackal through the head.

  ‘All right?’ I said.

  She nodded wordlessly. ‘One good turn deserves another,’ I said, and walked back to the jeep.

  ‘I’ll drive you back,’ she said. I frowned, and she added, ‘You’re as drunk as you were the first time we met.’

  I said, with dignity, ‘Madam, we have never met,’ got into the jeep and drove back to the Rest House. Carlos, wan but fully clothed, was setting the table for breakfast. Two leopards, one very respectable and one magnificent, lay on the lawn with a grinning Chadi, Ganesha, and others squatted beside them and Wilson taking photographs. The hunting camp was going to be a great success. I seemed to have found my niche at last.

  Three days later Blauvelt left for Chambalpur, the Wilsons for Agra, and John Clayton for Delhi. They were all very happy. Kunthi and Devi had installed themselves in one of the servants’ quarters and were obviously my property. Dot Wilson had been deliciously titillated, George man-to-man approving. By chance a wandering bhairagi came by the day after the saturnalia, and I offered him a tree, a leaf roof, and the devotion of Pattan if he would be our yogi. He agreed, and took up residence. I had a letter from a friend in Delhi telling me that everyone was talking about how I had smacked Lady Hillburn’s face and bodily thrown her out of the Rest House. My new suit of personality seemed to be settling into an excellent fit.

  In the afternoon of the 23rd I was sitting on the veranda, reading my Sanskrit grammar, when I heard the whir of a small car, and Ranjit Singh, the D.C., drove up. I went down to greet him.

  ‘What about some tea?’ I said. ‘The cook’s off, so Ratanbir will make it, and it will have pepper in it.’

  Ranjit grimaced, but did not smile. He looked worried, almost shamefaced, as much as a Sikh can look behind that imposing curled, black beard.

  We chatted about nothing in particular until Ratanbir served the tea and left us. I noticed his shirt was dirty, but what the hell, so was mine.

  After sipping his tea, with the pepper, and grimacing again, Ranjit abruptly set down his cup and looked at me. ‘I’ve got bad news, Savage. You’ve got to leave Pattan.’

  One’s instinct is to repeat inanely some word or phrase that has shocked you. I try to resist it, and this time, after a pause, said reasonably, ‘Don’t be silly. I’ve only just come. I have a long lease.’

  He flushed. ‘It’s been cancelled.’

  I thought suddenly of Margaret Wood. She had sworn she would get rid of me, and now I had given her just the evidence she wanted. The Government of India, like the rest, exercises a fierce selectivity about its own past. You get a pat on the back for bringing the glory of Indian art to the world’s attention. You get an expulsion order for re-creating the guiltless sensuality which made that art possible. ‘The bitch!’ I said aloud. ‘Look, Ranjit, it’s in the air here, in the people’s minds, in their history and folklore.’

  The D.C. stared at me with his best inscrutable I.C.S. face. I became desperate, and yet, at the edge of my mind, had a sharp realisation that Ranjit and I were playing, in reverse, a scene that had been enacted how many million times in the past century and a half - the alien consul trying to decide between two quarrelling natives - which is truth, which is invention to work off a grudge?

  ‘She’s furious because her converts and nurses leave,’ I said, ‘but it’s nothing to do with me.’

  Ranjit stroked his beard.

  ‘She saw what she saw,’ I pleaded. ‘I’m not trying to deny it. I’m not trying to deny that you have to take a serious view of it. The Pandit would have a fit if it got out into world publicity. I know that. I’m only saying that it’s not vice, here, but something else - tradition, love, something... Why are you taking sides with a damned mission, trying to convert your own people away from your own religion, against me, who’s trying to bring tourists into India and gain a lot of foreign exchange for you?’

  Ranjit drank tea while I paused to gather breath. He said, ‘You had better tell me just what did happen.’

  The wily bugger. Well, I told him. I poured out the whole story of the hunting camp from beginning to end, including some sharp comments on the government’s neglect of the near-famine situation in Pattan, which had driven me to poach game to feed them; and our illegal methods of killing fish for the same purpose; and my alliance with the Gonds; the tensions of the camp; Lady Hillburn; my state of mind; Blauvelt; the choice of sinking right into Pattan, or staying alone and lonely, yearning for something I couldn’t have -I told him all.

  I ended: ‘So you see, it’s not just a simple case of Satan debauching innocent villagers.

  Without a word he handed me a long envelope. It was not sealed. The letter inside was addressed to me, and signed by the Governor of the province, Sir Chandragupta Chenur, another I.C.S. man. He informed me that under the provisions of section something or other of the Defence of India Act my lease of certain lands and buildings lying in the Pattan Reserved Forest (this meant the Rest House) was hereby terminated, as were my shooting leases over Blocks 3, 6, 7, 9, and 11. I was required to vacate the area by midnight on March 23 - three days hence.

  I slammed the paper on the table. ‘Christ, Ranjit, I’ve just been explaining!’

  ‘Look again,’ he said.

  I looked again. The message said nothing new to me. But this time I noticed the date of the Governor’s signature. It was March 19, the day of the leopard hunt - that is, before the affair at the temples.

  Ranjit said, ‘I am not required to give you any reason for the action, under the Act. You know that. And I have been specifically ordered - not by the Governor, by high political figures - not to say anything at all. But--’ he fingered his tie, the same Free Foresters tie he had been wearing when I first met him - ‘between gentlemen there are certain decencies ... You are too close to the frontier with Chambal. The Nawab’s recent speech decided the government to remove all possible sources of danger. You have had contacts w
ith the Chambal authorities ... ’

  ‘About the shooting!’ I shouted. ‘I’ve got to be able to cross the line when the game does. Look, the frontier’s just over there.’ I pointed across the Shakkar stream at the rise of rock on the far side of the valley, a mile away.

  ‘I’m sure they would wish they had waited a few days,’ Ranjit said, ‘if they were ever to hear of this other business. That would have given them a much better case. But I suppose they never would have heard of it - nor I for that matter. You see, Savage, the real truth of the matter is that you have enemies, and the present tension allows them to act against you.’

  ‘I have friends, too,’ I said furiously. ‘One word and I could have you torn in pieces, Ranjit. I could put the clock back here and in Bhilghat a long way, back to the time they killed your policeman down there! I could destroy your career, and the Governor’s. I’ve only got to raise my finger and you’ll have a thousand men in rebellion in these hills.’

  He said sadly, ‘You’re right, I’m afraid. Which is why this order, instigated by malice though it is, is perhaps right, for India.’ I stood up. I wanted to pick up the table and smash the D.C.’s car to pulp with it. I didn’t want to hit Ranjit. He was an impersonal servant, a disembodied force, pushing and shoving at me. ‘I had it all settled,’ I said, stammering with rage, ‘I got out of your damned way. I left you to run the bloody country as best you could, and even then you had to send for me when you came across something you didn’t understand. Now you’re after me again, dragging me out of my hole in the ground. I didn’t give a damn about Chambal. Force it in, let it join Pakistan, let it be independent, I didn’t care. It wasn’t my business any more. And now you, you ... ’

  Ranjit stood up, too: ‘I’m really sorry, Savage, and I’m deeply ashamed that it was I who had to deliver that order. But I had to, and I have ... If there’s anything I can do, now or afterwards, to help you, please tell me. I mean it.’

  I did not answer. After a while, he was standing there with his hand out and I ignoring it; he turned away and got into his Austin and drove off.

  I slumped back in my chair. For a time I just hated - nothing in particular, everything. But I do not have the sort of temperament that can for long scrabble and batter at an irrevocably closed door. Now where? Back farther into the jungles? There were more remote places than this, deeper jungles, bigger and less penetrable hills, peoples still farther removed from the complex meanness of the century. There were Todas in high secret valleys of the Nilgiris; tribes in the back of Orissa whom only a dozen outsiders had ever heard of; Nagas, Abors, and Mishmis of the Assamese frontier - they were hard men, too, and they would fight harder to preserve their own ways. There would be other trails to walk, other girls like Kunthi and Devi, other fires in the night, other arrack, other dancing. And even as I thought of those places and those people I saw Ranjit, wearing the impeccable Western dress and the Free Foresters tie, advancing steadily, holding a pamphlet on planned economy in one hand and a pair of trousers in the other; and behind him, the Indian Army, and behind them, the dedicated faces of Jawaharlal Nehru, and L. P. Roy, and the ranked Gandhi caps, and the whey-cheeked teetotallers, the city planners, the vote getters, the speechmakers, the engineers with slide rules, the lawyers pleading habeas corpus, the university students carrying dingy banners - every one of them sprung from my mind, my work, my wounds. There was no denying that the creation of these people, this India, was the object, acknowledged or not, of my ancestors - but the wheel had turned full circle, the clock again reached twelve. They were forcing me back to the coral strand where old Jason Savage must have landed, if he ever existed - but where were the magnificent kings who had then walked the sands of Coromandel under golden umbrellas? Where were the Rajput knights who had put on their wedding silks - the same finery I had seen in one of those near-visions, beside the lake - and ridden out to die in hopeless battle against such as my ancestors? Where were their wives, who lit the pyres and leaped in, children in their arms? Where were the Madrassi sepoys who gave Clive the rice at Arcot and took only the water themselves, and yet had no knowledge of inferiority? Where now did I hear a man say, ‘I have eaten your salt’? Where was the Rani of Kishanpur, splendid in steel armour, hating England and loving my great-grandfather? And the men in the stands of sugar cane along the bank of the Ravi, who gave you gur and milk to drink, and sat talking with you in dignity and pride and poverty at the corner of the house, in the shade? Where were the gentle lovers of Khajuraho and Pattan, and proud women who walked unveiled? Where was the splendour of India’s soul, that met Jason Savage on that shore three centuries ago?

  What had I done?

  God damn them all. God damn them all.

  Chapter 7

  ‘Margaret Donoghue, you lazy thing, you, will you get out of bed now?’

  Her mother’s Londonderry brogue was strong, the voice laughing under the pretended sharpness. But Margaret couldn’t get up. Her legs and arms lay like lead prolongations of a central core which had only just the strength to realise, and to hear, none to stir or lift. That’s what it used to be like. Then strength would come very, very slowly as her mother clumped up the stairs and sat on the edge of the bed, and bent down to kiss her. Then the strength used to flow in, starting at the tips of her toes and the ends of her fingers.

  Mother wasn’t here. Rats scrabbled at the ceiling cloth. Or bats, or flying foxes, or horrible long centipedes, or scorpions, or shrews, or some of the small animals that had flitted across her path in the earliest dawn as she walked to the Rest House the night the jackal came. How long ago was that? A week. The rats would gnaw through the cloth and fall on her, helpless in the bed. She stared at the ceiling. It was a dim blur. Hard to know whether it was day or night outside. The ceiling swam into focus - no movement, no bulging and heaving, like sea waves, across from one end to the other, as the rats ran across, no squeak or gibber. The creaking continued.

  She moaned, and turned her head. Wind, hot-weather wind. The window across the room was open and in the twilight she saw trees thrashing behind the empty servants’ quarters. A spasm gripped her belly, she held on to herself with all her strength, leaned out of bed, fell to the floor, and crawled across the patched blue durrie on hands and knees to the bathroom. She grabbed the edge of the wooden toilet box, tried to pull herself up but could not, and relieved the agony where she knelt. Afterwards she hung dizzy and blind for a time to the commode seat, then crawled back into the bedroom, clutched the sheet, tried to pull herself up, failed, and fell back to the floor. Floor and ceiling, heat and smell, receded on slow painful waves.

  She was cold, shivering in a sleet-laden wind that slashed through her clothes and the flesh under them and the bones supporting the flesh and the marrow in the bones. She hung against a tree and screamed and screamed, alone in the forest with the swinging corpse of herself, hanged from the bough of a tree. The corpse’s face - her own - was a flat white with no expression. Rain dripped from its face and chin and lay in shining oily drops in its hair. Now she recalled with perfect clarity that there had been no rain, and the corpse was not real.

  It was worse than that. It was a straw-filled effigy of herself, wearing short skirt and blouse, the cardboard face painted white and wisps of reddish horse hair representing her own, the effigy dangling on a rope from the nearest tree to the chapel, on the side of the graveyard.

  It was worse than that. The instant she saw the horrible thing she knew that she did not want to continue the work of the mission. She did not have the faith it needed. She had known that for a long time, but this show of hate had broken through the facade. When had she seen the effigy? In the dusk, when her bones already ached, but she was hoping the fever would pass, and had taken quinine and gone out for a breath of fresh air. How many days ago? Two, three, four?

  Without faith, or purpose, why did she stay? Because she had promised Henry that she would. Not in so many words, but in her acceptance of marriage, in her comfortings during hi
s last illness, which had said as plain as words, I will stay until another comes to replace me, however long that may be. But Henry had now become a vague figure whose face and eyes she could not recall, whose voice had vanished; and from England no other was coming, ever. They wrote, and hoped, but she knew.

  She had felt totally empty, like a lake that has been steadily drained over a long period, until at last the water is gone; and after that the sun has worked on the damp earth and dried it, and there is finally neither water nor memory of water. There had been a crisis like this, in England, after the war, just before Henry came. Twenty-eight years of age passed; the war passed; two of the inevitable nurses’ affairs with handsome young doctors behind her; gone also three successive suitors in whom she had seen nothing, hard as she tried, except that they were men …. and then the crisis of emptiness. Henry arrived in the middle of it, obviously in search of a trained nurse to be his wife - not the other way round. Yet as soon as he had approached her she accepted him - and at once the lake began to refill, and she knew again a sense of purpose, of fullness, of fulfilment.

  She realised that she still lay on the floor. Rested now, with a great effort she pulled herself on to the bed, and lay there panting feebly. It was night, perhaps, but not late. The fourth night. She ought to be over it soon, one way or another. The darkness slowly, firmly closed in upon her. In an infinity of weariness she surrendered to it, in silence.

  It was cool again, not cold. The coolness moved in waves, as all feeling had for a long time, down from her head, through her neck, across her breasts and belly, between her legs, under her buttocks. He head ached with a hollow pain. The hollowness kept her sane, for it enclosed the pain and made it come to her as from an immense distance, through a vacuum.