Zemindar

by Valerie Fitzgerald

  ‘That is mere hyperbole,’ I said coldly, ‘and allow me to say that you misjudge me and my motives. I regret that you find my character and my manner cold and unfriendly. Such was never my intention. But I am as I am. I cannot guess what else you would have me be!’

  The gelding now paced beside Pyari, and I glanced up to find Oliver’s golden eyes regarding me with a gaze that was both wry and rueful.

  ‘That’s only too obvious,’ he said, but sotto voce, so that I could not be sure of what I had heard. Then, surprisingly, he threw back his head and laughed in the golden sunlight so that the nervous Pyari danced in the track, flattened her ears and snorted in alarm.

  ‘Whoa! Whoa, girl!’ he chuckled, quieting the mare with a pat on the neck. ‘Very well then, Miss Hewitt, we shall call a truce. For the moment. Forgive my clumsy handling of a delicate matter. Intimacy—er, of the mind, of course—cannot be forced. You are right to resent my trying. But, at least, when I enter the library don’t grab the first book you see and withdraw. Fortunately I know that you do not read Latin, or I might have been shocked by seeing you depart in a hurry clutching a copy of the Saturnalia!’

  For a moment I was nonplussed. It was true that I generally made a rapid exit from the library if he was in it, but I did not realize I had been so obvious. Then the humour of the situation struck me … for my father had owned the Saturnalia in translation. I too threw back my head and laughed, and magically the tension that had arisen between us was dispelled.

  We rode on together then, very amicably, and my companion told me some of the legends of Krishna and stories from the Ramayana, and said we were approaching the village where his grandfather had begun his work of settlement sixty years before. The ride would be a long one this morning, so at about the time we usually breakfasted we dismounted in a grove and Ishmial produced from his saddlebag a neatly packed parcel of sandwiches and fruit and a flask of brandy and water. The latter I refused, promising myself a drink when we should reach the village. We were sitting silently in the shade on the tumbled remains of an old wall while Oliver smoked a cigar, when a little procession of children approached us, so gay, so charming, that I stood up in delight, eager to miss nothing of the picture they made. There were perhaps a score of them, none of them more than ten or twelve years of age, all dressed in yellow and carrying garlands and bouquets of the yellow basant flower. Two or three had small drums on strings around their necks, others played on bamboo flutes and the rest tapped short wooden staves together in time to the drums. They were singing and dancing as they came, and the swirling sari skirts and dhotis around dusty feet, the primitive instruments, and the joyous childish faces alight with laughter immediately put me in mind of Donatello’s cherubic choir. They took no notice of us, but, absorbed in their high nasal chant, swayed through the trees and disappeared from view, only the sound of their voices remaining to assure me I had not witnessed some brief faerie visitation.

  ‘Oh, what a pretty sight, Oliver! They looked so fresh and happy. What were they doing?’

  ‘They are going to visit the shrine of some favourite village deity here in the grove, and lay their flowers and other offerings at the foot of the peepul tree he inhabits. They couldn’t have timed it better, could they? That’s another little bit of the “real India” that I am glad you have seen. Those children are bred to dirt, disease and grinding poverty but, as you see, India has gifts for everyone who will take them. We like to consider their beliefs mere ignorant superstition, but those beliefs are enough to produce music, laughter and respite from the fields on a day like this, and what god can do more? This evening everyone will eat well, probably for the first time since the last festival. There will be more dancing and music, and perhaps storytelling and wrestling in the village square, and their fathers will get drunk and beget them brothers and sisters on wives for once not too tired to be more than acquiescent. They will make the most of their day, I promise you. Then tomorrow they will put away their yellow finery, sweep their courtyards clean of dead flowers and return again to the intractable fields and their pinched bellies. But they always have another holy day to look forward to!’

  The village, when we reached it, was also en fête, the yellow basant burgeoning on every lintel and arch, while women in buttercup saris squatted at their doors readying the celebration meal and men slept luxuriously late on string cots in the sunshine or wandered in groups towards the grog shop. We were now at the edge of a tongue of heavy forest that to the south merged into the terai, but the morning was very warm and still and a dusty haze hid the foothills. I foun d myself thirsty and rather tired, which, perhaps, was why I was not much impressed by the first fruits of Old Adam’s labours. Here, said Oliver, was where he had made his first camp, living in a tent while he directed the clearing of the jungle, the cutting of tracks and waterways, and the building of the first huts. Whatever his pioneer plans for it, the village now was the usual collection of flat-roofed mud huts, intersected by unpaved alleys—crowded, dirty and smelly. Only the ephemeral gilding of the bright spring flower lent the place a brief beauty.

  We rode slowly through the village, stopped often by the inhabitants, who grasped this opportunity to lay a complaint or ask a favour of the sirkar, or who, perhaps, were merely curious to look at the unaccustomed white woman with him. Oliver bore himself with a sort of good-humoured assurance, bandying words with passers-by, attentive to supplicants, reassuring to an aged crone who held his horse by the bridle while she poured out her story, but on the whole unmoved—(as was apparent from the resigned disappointment of the faces we left)—by these extemporary pleas for preference. Our objective was a temple tank which Oliver was sure would interest me but, as we rode through the untidy outskirts, I averted my eyes hurriedly from a lean-to thatch shelter built on to one of the huts, where I had seen a bundle of filthy rags stir at the unfamiliar sound of horses’ hooves. It was a leper, put out to die by his family in a crude shelter less weathertight than their cow-byre. There he would lie in all weathers, shunned by all comfort, slowly putrefying to a merciful death. Once a day scraps of food would be placed a little distance from him, not to be approached until the bearer was safely out of sight. I had seen other such bundles of rags in other villages, but the sight was not less harrowing on familiarity.

  India, Oliver had said, has gifts for all who will take them. Would this end be the gift singled out for one of those happy, singing children in the grove? I shuddered at the thought, and so reflecting on the monstrous and too manifest injustices of fate, the small octagonal pool with its shallow steps leading down into the water failed to move me to much appreciation. Certainly it was very lovely with its white onion-domed temple and a clump of palms beside it. But the water was green with scum, and the resident holy man had long locks matted with ashes and surveyed us with an avaricious eye as we walked past.

  ‘Sitting there praying and raking in the people’s food and their poor annas when you should be up and out doing some good!’ I thought to myself. The bundle of rags, as a leper, was denied even the help of the holy man’s prayers.

  Oliver had not noticed my preoccupation. He was speaking: ‘… and much predates the village of course, probably by hundreds of years. No one now can remember the people who built the pool or the ruined fort back there in the forest. It is the last vestige of some old, old jungle culture, or perhaps the culture was here even before the jungle.’

  Then, as having circled the pool I stood ready to mount Pyari again, he said with some annoyance, ‘Well, and what has gone wrong now? Is it not worthy of your pencil after all? I have kept it in mind to bring you here for weeks and now you turn away as though such things can be seen every day!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I shook my head and tried to look apologetic. ‘I am not in the mood to draw now. But the pool is beautiful, really it is, and I am very grateful that you brought me here. But… but it was that poor leper. I cannot think of my silly sketching when I remember him and what he must be going through.
He is a human being!’

  The annoyance faded from his face. ‘Yes, well, that too is India, I am afraid, Laura. The inescapable India. There are a score of lepers in every village, hundreds in the bazaars. There’s no cure, and the natives have long realized that isolating them is the only way to protect themselves from contagion.’

  ‘But it’s so cruel … so barbarous!’

  ‘Undoubtedly. But some things one must accept.’

  ‘Not without protest, without some effort to rectify things, surely?’

  ‘What would you have me do; take him back to Hassanganj and house him with the servants? At least here he is with his own. And they care for him, in their fashion. Come now, it’s getting late. Perhaps we can return here another day, if you wish to.’

  I was unconvinced, but mounted and followed him dejectedly as we left the village. I was displeased with myself for my own lack of enthusiasm about the pool. Had he not said he had kept it in mind for me for weeks? Was this not another of those overtures to friendship which he had made and I had—to his mind—rejected? It was strange, but his clumsy, even abortive, efforts to break through what seemed to him to be my reserve, had done much to warm my mind towards him. Perhaps because for the first time he had shown a little weakness, a chink in the armour of assurance which repelled me. Now, I found I was unhappy at having disappointed him. For the very first time I discovered myself wishing to please him. But I had lost the opportunity.

  The track narrowed as we entered the forest. We were not returning the way we had come, so I hoped we were taking a short cut home since, having forgotten to beg a drink in the village, I was now very thirsty and not a little fatigued. It was nearly noon and, though by no means hot, the temperature here at the edge of the steamy terai was warm enough to have stilled the sounds of birds and the chattering of the monkeys. All that could be heard was the dull clop of our hooves in the thick, sun-dappled dust, and an occasional stir in the dry undergrowth as jungle fowl made for cover.

  All three of us must have heard the chant simultaneously: low, rhythmic, somehow oppressive in its half-heard insistence.

  ‘Jai Ramji Jai! Jai Ramji Jai! Jai Ramji Jai!’

  Oliver, leading as usual, held up his hand to halt us.

  ‘A moment,’ he said in English, and then spoke in Hindustani to Ishmial. Ishmial paused before replying, listening to the chant grow slowly louder, and when he spoke his voice was emphatic. What he said escaped me, but Oliver nodded his head in agreement.

  ‘It’s a funeral procession,’ he explained. ‘They must be taking the body down to a ghat on the river. We must leave the track clear for them, there is probably quite a crowd.’

  As he spoke he wheeled his horse off the track through some undergrowth, holding back the boughs for us to pass, and we found ourselves in a small clearing large enough for all and at the same time almost invisible from the track. He swung down from the saddle and stood with his arm across the gelding’s neck.

  ‘Would they make trouble if they found us in their way?’ I asked.

  ‘They would disregard us entirely—behave as though we didn’t exist.’

  ‘Then why this concealment?’

  ‘Merely a question of manners. The track is narrow, and people usually prefer to pursue their burial rites with some dignity. Also I have to think of Ishmial; at times like this, well, religious differences can be exacerbated and lead to insult. Not likely, but possible.’ He was matter-of-fact.

  ‘But would we …’ I began, but Oliver held his finger to his lips for silence.

  The chant, that strangely disquieting yet unexcited repetition of four small syllables, was very near.

  I had not dismounted, and found I had a reasonable view of the track through the foliage, and therefore of the procession as it began to pass. A party of men came into view, walking in twos and threes, all chanting—grunting, under compulsion to mouth the words, and beating their breasts with clenched fists in time to the chant. The body, wrapped in red cotton, was borne past on a string bed, pathetic but anonymous. Then more men, a score or more, shoulders touching, fists thumping, feet scuffling, faces set, and at the very last a girl, hardly more than a child, was half led, half carried across my range of vision. The poor young wife, I thought. For a second she seemed to look straight at me through the bushes, her head being thrown back as she was pulled along, her veil dragging in the dust. Her eyes held no expression—mere nothingness. Perhaps, I told myself, she was dazed with shock and grief.

  As the girl passed, Oliver drew himself up quickly and took a step forward. I realized that he too must have seen her, and before I could analyse the strange expression on his face, he had pushed through the underbrush to watch the tail of the funeral disappear down the track, which forked in two a little further on. The chanting had died to an ominous drone before he came back, and I saw his face was white under the honey-coloured tan.

  ‘They have not gone to the river, they have turned into the forest!’ he said grimly as he mounted. Ishmial, aloft on his horse, seemed to understand, although Oliver had spoken in English. He uttered an imprecation and spat vehemently into the dust.

  ‘Suttee,’ he hissed, his eyes on Oliver’s.

  ‘What?’ I felt the colour drain from my face as the word entered my comprehension. ‘But it can’t be; it’s been illegal for years.’

  Oliver merely regarded me with something like distaste.

  ‘Suttee hai! Sahib, suttee hai!’ Ishmial reiterated with excitement, as though he, like me, felt Oliver had missed the point. Oliver sat still in the saddle, his eyes narrowed, gazing into nothing.

  ‘Blast!’ he said. ‘God damn and blast ’em all!’

  ‘You must do something!’ I said frantically. ‘Oliver, you must stop them! You can’t just sit there and let it happen. At least speak to them, reason with them, threaten them with the law! She was only a child!’

  ‘Threaten them!’ His features were twisted with derision as he looked at me. ‘There were more than half a hundred men in that procession. To have been in it at all they were half a hundred fanatics. Moreover, they were well primed with bhang. They appeared quiet—far too quiet—but one word from me, or anyone not connected with them, would rouse them to a drug-induced fury which would have the lot of us torn limb from limb in seconds!’

  ‘But how can you know? Surely you are going to make some attempt …’

  ‘I know! I know too damned well! So does Ishmial there; ask him if you don’t believe me!’

  ‘Yes, Mem-sahib!’ said Ishmial, nodding in agreement and speaking in Hindustani for all that he seemed to comprehend so much in English. ‘It is very bad, very bad men, but we alone can do nothing—nothing! Very bad!’

  ‘What I cannot understand,’ Oliver mused more to himself than to me, ‘is their boldness in having the woman with them in broad daylight. It’s generally done at night and in secrecy.’

  ‘You mean it happens often; they burn the widows even though it’s been against the law so long?’

  ‘Not often, but it happens all right. These forest people are a law unto themselves more often than not. Still, I don’t like the open contempt of the authorities. It can only mean that for some reason they feel safe in doing now what they would never have attempted before.’

  ‘And so they are, if you really intend to do nothing!’

  ‘No, I’m doing nothing! You must suit yourself!’ He spurred the gelding through the bushes and was some way up the track by the time we emerged from the clearing.

  It was a horrible ride back to Hassanganj in the full afternoon heat.

  Among a multitude of conflicting sensations, my predominant feelings were of horror and aversion—a total aversion to the people among whom I found myself, their customs, their beliefs, and to the country itself. The contrasts of India were too brutal: its hidden aspects, when at length discovered, too repugnant; the ideas behind its acts too cruel. I could not attempt to reconcile the many facets of its existence, and no doubt I was sill
y to try. Contrasts exist everywhere, wealth and poverty, labour and idleness, squalor and beauty, but in India the conjunction was too extreme, too unexpected and … too apparent. Here no decent veils of convention were pulled across the open sores of life. I felt, overwhelmingly, a sickening hatred of India.

  Jogging along, head bowed, eyes down, hands clasped on the pommel, regardless of where Pyari took me, I tried to exorcize the pain in my mind by reliving that little moment in time when the girl had appeared to look into my eyes. I strove to recall how she had been dressed. Had her head been covered, her clothes clean, her face pretty? But my memory brought forward only an impression of youth, and the lifeless gaze of dark eyes in a dark face. Had she known what lay before her? Had she acquiesced to it? Was it possible that she had gloried in it, as, it is said, the women of Chitor gloried in their terrible death? My imagination dragged me with the girl to her end: the heaped pyre by some small tributary stream, the leaping flames in the forest dusk, the two forms—one dead and inert, one alive and struggling—consumed equally but in what dreadful inequality of suffering.

  At last the shade of the portico told me we had reached the house, and Oliver, dismounted, was waiting for me.

  ‘It would be better not to mention what we have seen to Emily,’ he said in a low voice as I drew up and he came forward to help me dismount. I nodded silently, not looking at him and not surprised to find that he too was now a part of my revulsion against India. As his hands touched mine to free the reins, an insistent ringing in my ears reached a crescendo. I thrust his hand away and practically tumbled to the ground.

  ‘Don’t!’ I cried with my hands to my ears. ‘Don’t! Don’t! Oh, don’t.’ And then I fainted.