by Brian Aldiss
She laughed. 'You often come face to face with yourself, Tancred, but you will not acknowledge it.'
'Tell me, then! Give me a piece of your wisdom, the immemorial wisdom of the East! What does go on inside that brain of yours, anyway, sex apart?'
She began to light a cigar, and only then looked at him through the smoke.
'I will tell you! I will tell you something to keep stored among the funny voices in your head. Perhaps you will strike me, but I don't care! I don't think you often get the luxury of hearing the real truth about yourself, do you? You have come to Chandanagar and the famine because it represents a state of Mutti Mutti I didn't mean it really I didn't mean it don't cry mind to you from your childhood. I don't know what. And there you have come to me to torment me because I also represent to you something other than what I. really am. You see, you cannot understand famine as famine, because it is a thing alien to your part of the world, and so for you it can be believed only as a famine of love. That you can experience! It is the common experience of Europe and America, the famine of love. Your lands are deserts in that sense. Your famine of love is your big neurosis that drives you to live among machinery.'
'You're joking, of course!' He laughed harshly.
She arched her superb eyebrows and did not smile.
'And you suffer the malnutrition of the soul, which brings all kinds of shadow-diseases to you. You have been pushed to seek comfort in my bosom because you have to respond in that way to the hunger all round you, as the psychic forces of Chandana-gar bear down on you. But even to my bosom you have to bring your deeper discontents from other times. Even my bosom you make your battleground! Your dirty common adulterous battleground! You are slowly dying, even as the people in the UNFAW enclosure.'
He had not expected to hear it, rattling in the truck with death's landscape leaden under the storm clouds. Her words were a terrible torment for him; no precognition prepared him for her judgement. It took away his defences of anger, so that their relationship was at an end, that she had killed it as deliberately as one chops off a snake's head. He wished he could have wept.
She spoke again as the vehicle turned away from the river.
'My wisdom comes mostly not from me, but from Kisari Mafatlal. He understands about all the matters people do not you try to hide that you are unsure of your own psychological care to reveal. I believe he knows what you are really like underneath.'
'Do you have to discuss me with him?'
'Don't sound so much like an old beaten dog! When we spoke of you, we hoped only that we could help find yourself.'
'Very good of you to put yourself out on my account!' The withering sarcasm withered and died. Mafatlal, that windbag, talking seriously with, sharing confidences with, Sushila! It might be wondered what else they shared! These Indians, they were so treacherous.... Even a girl educated in England.... the tulips were over by the end of the last week in April with You never knew.
The long afternoon was tiring visibly .over the immense bowl of plain when they sighted the camp. Neither spoke to the other as the truck bumped forward over the last mile. Again the monsoon clouds were gigantic in the sky although not a drop of moisture spilled from their purple lips.
She said, 'The gate's shut already!'
He peered ahead, instinctively accelerating the truck.
The gate was indeed closed. Flipping off the automatics, he steered the truck until its nose was thrust hard against the wire-shielded pole now barring the gateway. He jumped out, shouting in Hindi as he did so for the guards to lift the barrier.
Two men ran forward, very black and in filthy clothes. Frazer had never seen them before. Both were armed. They fired at him. As he flung himself down, he heard the windshield shatter behind him and a bullet go screaming into space. Diving behind the truck, he climbed up and fumbled in the tool box for a weapon. There was not enough time: the men were on him. Frazer flung himself at one of them, but the man whippd up his rifle, so that Frazer ran against it. The other man clamped his weapon round Frazer's throat.
'Don't make struggle, sahib !'
He had little chance of struggling. They had him tight. Neither looked the kind who would mind killing him. Another man ran up, shouting. He hauled Sushila out of the front of the truck; she stood unconcernedly brushing shattered glass off her sari. As she and Frazer were led past the guard house, he saw the guards lined up against a wall inside, their palms to the wall and their trousers down, as a bandit with a rifle stood over them. The camp had undergone a change of ownership, it seemed.
'This is all your fault, Frazer!' Sushila said.
Two strange trucks were inside the camp. One stood outside the new store, one was further down, covering the hospital.
He knew what the raiders were after, of course. The grain! The store was full of rice, plus large quantities of wheat and flour, as well as canned goods. Plundering would start any moment.
The bandits marched him and Sushila roughly down the road. They stopped by the store, the doors of which were closed, and one of them shouted something, evidently to a superior inside. The store door opened and a ferocious face peered out. It belonged to a large Indian with a thatch of lank hair. He was the very glow of summer is on thy dimpled cheek cold and eating. In an angry-sounding exchange, he gestured to the office block next door, and threw Frazer's captor a key.
Frazer and Sushila were then dragged to the offices. The door was unlocked, and their captors told them to stay inside and we always keep all the shutters closed when we're away to keep quiet, adding that they were lucky to escape so lightly. They were pushed in and the door slammed and locked on them.
'Oh God, they are robbing the store!' Frazer said.
Sushila strolled over to a swivel chair and sat down, resting her delicate wrists on the desk.
'They will make sure they get a good feed first! The bosses sit in the store having a feast while the underlings keep watch outside! They will have cut all communications with the outside world. There is nothing we can do! They are desperate! They will take everything!'
To his surprise, she began to wail with her face in her hands. Frazer began pacing about.
'What a fool I was to leave camp! ... But even if the bandits have rounded up the doctors at the hospital, won't the refugees do something to save the food stocks?'
'What can those poor people do? When can they do? They will do nothing.'
Of course it was true. It was the history of India. Some of the refugees had even been standing about outside, waiting in the cool used air ejected from this building, as if nothing was happening that could possibly concern them.
A frightened clerk appeared on the stairs. The bandits had shut the clerks in the office block too, under pain of instant death if they attempted to get out.
Frazer followed him back upstairs, suddenly hopeful.
'We'll barge the door down! How many of you are there? We can rush the bandits while the pigs are still eating.'
There were ten clerks upstairs. Shame-faced, they revealed why they would not venture out of the building: the bandits had a napalm gun. They were threatening the hospital with it at the moment, but they would turn it on anyone who made any trouble.
Frazer went downstairs again and explained to the girl about the napalm gun. She stared ahead, saying nothing.
'That's why they are so confident! Sushila, we must do some-you had your orders Frazer you had no business deserting the thing! I'm not just going to wait here while they fill their stom achs!'
Furious and frustrated, he ran into the room he used as a bedroom. Kisari Mafatlal lay on his camp bed, a clerk tending him and bathing his forehead. The plump little doctor had been badly beaten about the face; he peered at Frazer out of an enormously puffed eye. The latter called Sushila in.
Through painful lips, Mafatlal told Frazer and Sushila how the bandits had arrived at the gate in their two trucks, claiming to be bringing stores from Allahabad. The gate guard, not expecting s
tores, had been suspicious and called Mafatlal. Mafatlal had been wary enough to ring through to UNFAW HQ and warn them that, if he did not phone again in five minutes, it would mean trouble at the camp. Then he had gone bravely to the gate, asked to see the stores that the bandits claimed they were bringing, and had been clobbered.
'How long ago was this?'
'It only just happened, as you can see. I was thrown in here to die!'
"Thank God the HQ police will soon be along!'
'It will take them one hour at the earliest to arrive here. Then these pigs will all be escaped across the maidan. You had your orders Frazer and I hold you entirely responsible.’
'There must be something we can do! Sushila, look after Kisari; I'm going to scout round.'
He needed - he did not know what. He unlocked the door into the basement and hurried down the crude concrete steps, seeking a weapon. The self-powered air-conditioning plant was here, labouring away, its semi-audible note creating a pain in your deeper discontents from other times even my bosom you the teeth, as always. Apart from the plant, the cellar was bare, shadow-diseases even my bosom by the first week of April He skirted it, prepared to go, stopped.
Stuffing his handkerchief into his mouth to hinder the vibrations, he roiled an empty oil drum over to one wall, rammed it there with a brick, and climbed on to it. The voices in his head tormented him.
By pushing aside the clumsy metal ventilator that spewed out used air, he could look through the grill on to the store where to stare again out through the window at the blackness of the the bandits were feasting. The wooden scaffolding was in place, will the little ones remember me their mother an old withered although the women labouring to repair the wall had been sent no milk but dust and in my bowl only these broken grains of away. Even the new wall showed cracks. The wall round the tender mouths tender mouths you are slowly dying tender ventilator grill against which Frazer stood was also a maze of cracks.
'All that vibration...' he muttered. He was trembling, almost all that vibration April is the cruellest month bringing Christ delirious.
As he checked over the unwieldy machine, throbbing to itself, memories stirred in him. The plant was a primitive machine, with the legend 'Made in Bombay' and a patent number and the date '1979' proudly displayed on its flank. Over twenty years old! But of course, it wasn't the vibration as such.
Hastily, he followed the circuit through the refrigeration plant, saw the air ducts snake out through the cavity walling. It would be possible to switch off most of the circuit, and concentrate the output of the machine through the one grill
Suddenly, he knew what he wanted, and was running back upstairs to Sushila.
'Sushila, help me lift Kisari enough to get the blankets from under him. I need the blankets. Then ... that's it! ... then, I want to borrow your sari....'
Before she could flare up, he explained his plan. As he spoke, she watched his mouth with suspicion and contempt.
In the end, she shrugged and unwound the flaring material from her body until she stood there in brassiere and panties. Gratefully, he passed her a clean shirt from his trunk. With her help, he swathed himself in the blankets, and she bound them to him and over his head with the sari. She did then smile at him, and he grinned back.
When he was completely muffled from head to foot, he fumbled his way downstairs again.
He switched off power, then went round ripping out connections. Soon, the giant ventilator would concentrate all its output through the one ventilator overlooking the new store.
Gritting his teeth, Frazer switched on again.
He could hear very little now. But he could feel the waves of sound. He knew he was right, even as he felt his stomach quivering. This was infrasound. The plant was emitting slow air vibrations at less than ten hertz - the human ear could only register sound from sixteen hertz up. The compressions were radiating outwards, mostly in one direction only, like a primitive death-ray. Even the voices in his head were silenced.
Peering through the fringes of his blankets, and through the fine silk of the sari, Frazer looked anxiously towards the ventilator. He could hear secondary vibrations setting up in the steel grill, a low moan rising and falling, almost like the monsoon wind coming in over the plains. How long should he give it? He could not see out —
A curiously pulsating roar reached his ears. It could only be.... He dashed forward and switched off his deadly machine. The roar took on a steadier note and became identifiable as masonry falling. Panting, Frazer dragged the sari and blankets from his head, feeling as sick as a dog. Staggering over to the wall, he knocked the vent aside and looked out. Nothing could be seen for a great billowing cloud of red dust!
Calling, shouting incoherently, he made his way upstairs.
'Help me get this padding off, Sushila, and we'll go outside!' As she unwrapped him, he thought that, although the blankets had saved him from some of the vibrations, the infrasound had given his body a thorough shake-up. He was feeling brittle and cold right inside his bones; a continuous whine seemed to have set up in the coils of his intestines.
With Sushila following, dressed in his shirt and a pair of his shorts, and looking mouth-wateringly seductive, Frazer marched into the front office and hurled himself at the door. On his third charge, one of the wooden panels broke; he pushed it --you're just a spoiler spoil this spoil that spoil everything don't-- away and climbed outside, helping the girl out after him.
'How did you do it?' she asked. The awe in her voice thrilled him. She grasped his hand, staring at the great reddish cloud of dust now clearing.
Through the cloud, they could see that the near wall of the store had collapsed, carrying the plastic roofing with it. The store was otherwise still more or less standing, although cracks marked the whole facade of it. The contents should not have suffered too much damage.
'I'm just a spoiler,' Frazer said. 'I spoil everything - but in this case, you might add that the spoiling had been going on for a long while. That's why they always had trouble with the wall. Our air-conditioning was permanently beaming low-power infrasound at it; all I did was step up the power.'
'I don't understand at all. You did this with sound?'
"Yes, infrasound. Sound you can't hear: slow air vibration, in fact.' He had to hold on to her shoulder to stand steady. 'It creates a sort of pendulum action, which can quickly build up a dead reverberation in solid objects or in human beings. Can't you feel your stomach and heart vibrating?'
'I feel sick, yes. It's just excitement, I think.'
'It's infrasound. Maybe infrasound is a source of emotional excitement. Maybe I owe the voices I hear in my head to the faulty air-conditioner. Ever since I've been here, I've had a low-hunger all round you as the psychic forces of Chandanagar powered death ray turned on me all the time. What you said you have been pushed to seek comfort in my bosom because was right - I was slowly dying. Literally slowly dying.'
'But you switched the machine off now?'
He nodded. 'Perhaps I shan't be such a bastard now.'
They looked at each other cautiously. To cover all that he was feeling, Frazer said, 'Let's go and see what's happened to the bandits.'
'Will they be dead?'
'I hope not.' He started shouting to the guards in the gatehouse. The bandits who had been keeping the guards quiet were now standing by the front of the ruined store. With the initiative taken out of their hands, they made no attempt to stop Frazer as he went up and opened the store door.
Dust swirled out of the interior. He stepped back, choking. In a minute or two, the bandits emerged, sorry and sick, all but one crawling on hands and knees. Frazer had an idea of what they would be feeling; their invisible injuries would include an intense irritation internally, as if their various organs had been set rubbing against each other by the low-pitched sound. They would have recovered by tomorrow. And, by then, they would be in the lock-up in Allahabad. The doctors down at the hospital were already rounding up
the bandits with the napalm weapon; the calamity to their leaders had robbed them of the will to fight.
Still the monsoon did not break, still the reinforcements from UNFAW HQ which Mafatlal had alerted did not arrive; perhaps the very pleasant man operating the switchboard had forgotten all about the detachment and its problems. It was a very Indian situation.
Mafatlal's wounds had been treated and he was resting in his own room. Sushila and Frazer sat by him, drinking. She wore silver sandals on her feet. Although Frazer was the hero of the hour, Mafatlal was the invalid of the hour and enjoying the situation to the full.
'You see, Tancred, passion and violence are a very integral part of the Indian scene. But they come and then they are gone, he understands about all matters people do not care to reveal as also applies to humanity. But the things they represent are always a permanency, which we must tolerate in the most philosophical way.' His gestures were exquisite. He was moved by his own words. 'The flower shall die and the seed and some flowers shall never ever die, as Krishna says, stating the paradox of life. It is, you will agree, somewhat of a rather Indian situation from your point of view, perhaps....'
Frazer doubted if Sushila was listening. At the present moment, the characters of the three of them were in equipoise; but that would not last. The dynamic of the girl's life was unfolding - even in these stagnant surroundings - inevitably to work what is beauty saith my sufferings then? Divine Zenocrate, if against any stability. The remoteness of the expression on her beautiful face contradicted any sociability expressed in her clutched gin-glass.
And he.... He wondered if it might be possible to resume those happy intimacies with her. Nothing was final - in Uttar Pradesh, even finality wore a temporary aspect. Both she and you have been pushed to seek comfort in my bosom just be-Mafatlal were slightly in awe of him at the moment, since he had played so actively his role of the westerner, the spoiler; so the time might be propitious for him to try his luck with her again. Or should he wait till Young returned, face the trouble of that encounter, and then inaugurate his return to England and Kathie? He would do what he would do; what others said or thought about him could make no difference to him, could it? Right now, he would listen to Mafatlal, gaze on Sushila, and have another drink.