To The Coral Strand

by John Masters

‘Why?’

  ‘It would be wrong. How could you then be a friend of India?’

  ‘Perhaps not a friend of your government, or of Mr Patel’s plans.’

  ‘An enemy of ours is an enemy of India,’ Roy said.

  I began to feel that peculiar throbbing behind the temples, with a tightening of the chest, which my ancestors must have experienced when they first came to grips with the Brahmin mentality: the calm arrogance; the cold contempt for anyone else’s opinions; the belief that the Brahmin is in direct communion with God, is in fact a part of God, and can do no wrong. It is fortunate that in those early meetings the Brahmins came across perhaps the only other people in the world with the same colossal self- conceit and set in much the same terms. Of course Roy was not technically a Brahmin - but that did not matter. The attitude had been inherited by the new rulers of India.

  I controlled myself, and said, ‘That is a matter of opinion.’

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ he said. ‘There can be no matter of opinion about it. The so-called princely states are a part of India - like Goa and the Portuguese colonies - and we are going to have them.’

  ‘Regardless of what the people concerned say or feel?’

  ‘They are ignorant,’ he said. ‘Some have been oppressed, some misled, all exploited... I believe Dip Rao, Rajah of Kishanpur, is a friend of yours?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I imagine that your new employers, if you are misguided enough to go to them, will use you to try to influence the Rajah’s future course of action. I should advise you, if you really are a friend of his, that we will treat any collusion between him and Chambal as treason on his part and will punish him accordingly.’

  ‘Treason!’ I burst out. ‘How can a sovereign ruler commit treason? Until 1947 Dip and all the other rajahs acknowledged England as the Paramount Power and surrendered to it all rights in foreign affairs and defence. But we - England - abrogated paramountcy when we left, and told the states they were free to work out their own relationships with the new Government of India - as sovereign entities.’

  ‘We shall regard it as treason if any ruler acts against the best interests of his people - and that means any action which does not guide the people back to the arms of free, independent Mother India.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I snapped. ‘You think that Hari Singh did the right thing then, in handing over to India a people 90 per cent Muslim, who would certainly have wanted to join Pakistan - and still would - if you allowed a free vote?’

  ‘Certainly. Besides, he was a sovereign ruler and had the constitutional right to do as he wished. We merely accepted his decision.’

  ‘But the Maharajah of Junagadh wasn’t a sovereign ruler when he tried to join Pakistan and you sent the army in? And the Nizam of Hyderabad wasn’t when he wanted to be independent?’

  ‘They were wrong, and wicked,’ Roy said. ‘They were enemies of India.’

  ‘How’s your non-violence going these days?’ I asked.

  ‘We shall never resort to violence to resolve our problems,’ he said. ‘It is the sacred teaching of the Mahatma, often repeated by Panditji.’

  ‘Kashmir and Hyderabad were fought with feather dusters, then?’

  ‘They were in the wrong. They were the aggressors.’

  ‘You mean, your bottomless patience was exhausted?’

  ‘Yes - precisely.’

  ‘I wonder where I’ve heard that phrase before? ... You don’t agree, perhaps, that aggression might be a matter of opinion, subject even to evidence, factual evidence?’

  He waved his hand. ‘That’s a waste of time. We are a peaceful state, therefore how can we commit aggression?’

  I longed to possess, for just half an hour, the power my ancestors had used to solve just such impasses as this ... There was the Brahmin found with the dead body in his courtyard and a knife in his hand. Yes, I killed him. That’s murder, then. Oh, no, because, you see, I am a Brahmin; murder is wrong, but Brahmins can do no wrong, therefore I cannot commit murder, and if I cannot, obviously I have not. Then how did this man here die? It was the course of events. I see; well, I’ll tell you, the course of events now is that you’re going to die, too ... And in marches a squad of soldiers, the gallows are set up, and amid anguished wails and howls and the thunderstruck disbelief of the populace, the Brahmin is hanged.

  But I did not possess the power. The attitude with which I was now faced, the strong belief in its own total virtue, was the attitude of the new India, and it - not I - had that power.

  Roy said, ‘You interest me. Tell me, why do you wish to serve the Nawab of Chambal, who, as you must know, is a bigoted and suspicious despot?’

  Just so must old William, my great-great-grandfather, have sent for the other Brahmins, after he’d shown he could hang one of them just as easily as the next man, and said, ‘Tell me now, what makes you tick?’ And just so, after days and years and centuries, would there stand an opaque wall between true understandings, however clear the paintings each of us put on the surface of the wall, in an attempt to communicate.

  I said, ‘These states are in many ways anachronisms. I do not think that any one man ought to have the powers and privileges of the rajahs, unless they have been freely voted to him. It is wrong that the people should have no say in their own government--’

  ‘You were not saying that very loudly a few years ago, here,’ Roy interrupted.

  ‘Who’s sitting behind that desk - you or I? ... It is also wrong that in a huge country like this, with so many different ways of thought, so many religions, so many backgrounds, so many manners of living, that one party, one group, one viewpoint, should impose itself on the rest by force. The Nawab of Chambal, for all his faults, wants to make a country which is anti-socialist, more individual, more closely linked with the past, with tradition, than you believe in. I believe he has the right to do so, and I’m going to help all I can ... because I believe in that sort of India, too.’

  Roy’s face grew suddenly red with anger. ‘You wish to preserve your economic stranglehold!’ he shouted. ‘Economic imperialism! You wish to preserve an India subject to your exploitation. You will sell Chambal anything - guns, aeroplanes, whisky, big American cars, stupid luxuries ...’

  ‘And are those, any of them, un-Indian?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he shouted. ‘They are wrong, wicked. Gross materialism ... exploitation of baser nature ... ’

  I let him rave on. Like several other prominent Indian politicians, he was a fanatic. When any of them climbed on to his pet hobby horse, whatever it happened to be - whisky, spinning wheels, the wonder of the Hindi language, economic exploitation - it was impossible to talk to them - as impossible as to talk to the sort of Englishman who claimed that the course of history showed God’s guiding hand over England’s destiny; or, more accurately, the sort of German who yelled that all his country’s troubles were due to the Treaty of Versailles.

  When he ran out of breath I stood up and said, ‘If that will be all, sahib, perhaps you will permit me to take my leave.’

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ he said. He did not make any apology for his outburst. How could he? He was in the right. He sat very still at his desk, looking at me out of his hot, black eyes. He had a great capacity for stillness. He began to speak, slowly. ‘I am sorry for you, Savage ... You are ready to fight for your ideals. But it is not human beings that you will be fighting against. It is a great river called History. This river sweeps away all who struggle against it. Nor can anyone stand aside, in neutrality, and hope to let it pass undisturbed, because it undermines the foundations and causes the silent collapse of the place on which he stands. By its existence it changes the climate of the time, causing orchards to grow where there was desert, putting a blight on groves where there used to be palaces.’

  ‘True,’ I said softly, for I felt close to Roy at that moment, ‘but it is not necessary for those riding the crest of the river, downstream, to don garments of unctuous virtue, still less necessary for them t
o crow over the flood’s senseless destruction of much that is beautiful and valuable.’

  ‘It is!’ Roy said. ‘Cast your mind back a couple of centuries. Did your ancestors, when they overthrew the old India, wail and beat their breasts? Did they not proclaim, rather, the merit and rightness, even invoking God’s will, of what they were doing?’

  I nodded. It was a good point. I said, ‘You are probably right... But you agree, then, that at that time you were the ones trying to fight against the river?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did that knowledge stop you from fighting?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Ah. Perhaps those people did not recognise the course of history. They were, after all, ignorant of the world outside India. You are in a different position... Do you know how I would look for the course of history, these days? I would think of you, someone like you. You have been floating down on the current, now I notice that you are swimming upstream. Your ideals have not changed, nor has the course of events changed, yet their relation to each other has changed. This is very strange, and only your Einstein or our mystical sages can explain it. Yet one thing is sure, and I feel it in my bones - that you are doomed, like the Flying Dutchman, to swim and sail against overpowering headwinds and currents. So - I can be sure my course is correct if I merely go in the opposite direction from you, eh?’

  I said, ‘I see. You remind me of a story - by Somerset Maugham, I think - about a naval officer who gets into desperate financial trouble and goes to Monte Carlo, to an old man whose life he had once saved. This old man was always amazingly successful at the gaming tables and the officer begged him to tell him his system. The old man offered to give him whatever he needed, but the officer’s pride wouldn’t accept that, he only asked for the system so that he would win for himself. The old man said the system would do him no good, but the officer kept pressing and pleading, until finally the old man said. “My system is simple. I bet against those who must win. They never do.” ‘

  Roy stood up. ‘I am the old man, Savage. I am offering you the equivalent of the money. Do not let your pride refuse it.’

  I was standing, too. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t agree that history has a course of its own. I think it is influenced by men who are not afraid of it. I don’t believe in systems, either. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose - but you’ve got to play.’

  Roy’s voice became hard. ‘Very well. Do not expect any preferential treatment when the time comes to settle the Chambal affair. You will pay the full price for whatever you have staked.’

  I said, ‘That will be the lot, sahib. The whole lot.’

  Chapter 9

  Three months to the day after I reached Chambalpur I was sitting in my office one morning, wondering what to do next. Wondering is too serene a word, since it gives a picture of a man sitting back in calm debate with himself. It was never like that in Chambal. I had no one job but was involved in everything. I had been imported to bring to Chambal the sahib’s direct approach, executive efficiency, the sense of what is to be done and then the going out and doing it. But the affairs of Chambal were run on the system of the Arabian Nights, with one grand wazir receiving one set of orders, and another another, and both knowing that they were really supposed to do something else entirely. Above all, the ruling principle of government in Chambal was not justice, or right, or even autocracy - it was suspicion. Everyone was suspicious of everyone else, and, usually, with good reason.

  There was excessive secrecy. The atmosphere was heavy with mistrust and intrigue. Whispered rumours flew around: ‘X is in secret touch with India.’

  ‘Y is ready to turn his private troops against the Nawab.’

  ‘Z is sending money out to Swiss banks under an assumed name.’ Everyone was an amateur spy - except when they were professional. I was trusted, but not therefore liked or followed. There were intrigues against me by officers who suspected that I was responsible for having them removed from important posts. There were financiers who wanted to nullify my influence in the awarding of military contracts, so that they could deal more amicably with someone else. I was permanently in a bad temper, curt and ruder than I needed to be, because I felt that the air was tainted by noxious gases.

  So when I said that I sat wondering, what I mean is that I sat and glared at the wall map, while angry thoughts crowded for preference in my mind. If A didn’t report soon that he had paid the guerrillas now being trained in the north, I would go and shoot him. But it was more urgent to see that the mechanical engineers were actually installing the new machine tools in the tank repair shops and not selling them to factories in the city. But it was more urgent still to see that B was fired at once from command of his brigade as he was a hopeless alcoholic; but to achieve that I would have to put him into a position where he would insult either the corps commander or the commander-in-chief - or, of course, the Nawab. They already knew he was inefficient, but that was not enough, not in Chambal. It had to be an insult, and B was too easygoing to become rude, even when boiled as an owl.

  I had expected to be employed in negotiations with Kishanpur, but so far that had not been mentioned and after the first week or two I understood why. They did not trust me yet. My office was in Army Headquarters and a wooden plate on the door announced in gold-leaf letters, in English and Urdu, that I was Brigadier R. Savage, Assistant Military Secretary to His Highness the Nawab. I had a babu clerk, a telephone, a typewriter, and a water chatty in the corner. A few doors down the passage was the office of the commander-in-chief, General Prince Afif Khan Bokhari, a cousin of the Nawab. He was a dear old boy, seventy-eight years old.

  Just as I had decided to take a trip to Digra and have a look at the port defences, an agitated chuprassy in full dress gold and green dashed in. ‘Sahib,’ he said breathlessly, ‘His Highness is waiting.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Outside, in the car.’

  I hurried down the stairs, in and out of courtyards full of dozing servants and sweeper women. I had a telephone, and His Highness could have indicated his intentions well in advance; but that wasn’t the way things were done in Chambal.

  Sir Mohammed Akbar Bokhari, G.C.B., G.C.S.I., G.C.I.E., etc., Nawab of Chambal, was sitting bolt upright in the back seat of one of the twelve State Rolls-Royces, a vast Phantom III drophead coupe with gold fittings, the top down, and a liveried chauffeur at the wheel. I got in. His Highness was sixty-five, clean shaven, gaunt, pale brown. Still, after four hundred years you could detect a faint trace of the Mongolian fold in the corners of his eyes. His family had come from Bokhara in Central Asia with Baber, the first Mogul emperor, hence the family name, Bokhari.

  He wore pince-nez and was a simple man, in that he knew what he wanted: he wanted to keep all real power in his own hands. He was wearing, as usual, tight trousers, slippers with turned-up toes, a plain black achkhan reaching down to his knees and buttoned up to a high collar, with two jewelled stars on the left breast, the Order of the Bath and the Order of Chambal.

  We drove off without a word. Chambalpur was a complete epitome of India, in romance, in fable, and in actuality. The old city stood around a mile-square lake. The Nawab’s rose-red palace soared sheer from the water on one side, hanging like a vivid dream against the blue sky and the sharply etched backdrop of sand-coloured hills. Other palaces and mansions surrounded the lake - among them Army Headquarters, which was mid-Victorian icing cake. On the other side of the lake an inordinately ugly factory belched foul-smelling smoke from three tall tin chimneys. In the city there were narrow alleys where time seemed to have stood still for ten centuries, and others, nearby, where the squalor was not patriarchal but modern. And there were real slums, and tin cans piled in the offal dumps, and chemicals running down the open sewers from hidden shops and factories.

  We passed under one of the immense city gates, with hardly room to squeeze through; and on among the jumble of shacks that had long since spread outside the walls. Near the point where
the shacks finally died away and the empty semi-desert spread out in front of us, the Nawab spoke a single word to the driver. The Rolls stopped. The Nawab pointed. ‘What is your opinion of that?’

  About fifty yards in front of us a deep ditch crossed the road. Concrete anti-tank pillars made a line a hundred yards broad in front of the ditch. An immense amount of work had gone into it.

  I said, ‘The concrete is up to specification, I know. I have checked it myself.’

  He said, ‘So have I.’

  I had a brief vision of the second richest man in India, perhaps in the world, banging away with a hammer in the dead of night, taking the chip back, bending over a test tube ...

  The anti-tank defences, taken by themselves, were fine, but they were in the wrong place by about eighty miles. They should have been put in the Lapri Gorge or just where it debouched on to the plain; and Lapri was eighty-five miles east.

  On the other hand, I had to work with General Gokal Singh, who had chosen the site.

  I said, ‘The defences look very good, Your Highness. But I know that General Gokal Singh is planning to supplement them by another system nearer the border - at Lapri or Sakti.’

  The Nawab grunted. ‘Drive on.’

  We drove to the main airfield. It was one of the only three all-weather fields in Chambal capable of taking the heaviest planes - and it lay forward of the anti-tank defences. Someone must have seen the Nawab coming, for we were greeted by an Air Force guard, and by the air marshal himself. I followed the Nawab, and said little. This felt much better. There were about fifty P-47 Thunderbolts dispersed around the field, and the Air Marshal - a Chambali prince and ex-playboy - knew his stuff and seemed to have an excellent relationship with the motley crowd of Australians, Austrians, Americans, and Italians who were flying the planes. Also, he had accumulated large stocks of high-octane petrol, and spare parts for the planes. India had already cut off all supply through her ports.

  My heart missed a beat when the Nawab said, ‘You have been spending a great deal of money on petrol, Air Marshal. Are you sure you need that much?’