Train to Delhi

by Shiv Kumar Kumar

  Since all the English guests knew each other, Bob introduced them only to Berry, Mala still being busy in the dining room. Although they beamed their complacent smiles, most of them felt embarrassed to meet an Indian whose presence, they felt, would be a damper on the party. But, then, everybody knew that Bob was utterly un-English, being something of ‘an irregular’, who enjoyed hobnobbing with ‘the natives’.

  The loss of the Empire had already left them embittered; destiny, they realized, had pushed them out of their cushy jobs, and there wasn’t much to look forward to in England. Thousands of them had already gone, hardly any Englishman wanting to stay back on his job under the Nehru Government. They’d much rather face hardships back home than lend themselves to the indignity of working under their Indian counterparts, whom they had bossed over till the fifteenth of August.

  However, those who were attached to such commercial firms as Philips, Dunlop, Remington or Crompton, took the new situation as a great challenge. Some of these firms, particularly Philips, tempted their English officers to stay on in their jobs so that their Indian market might not slip into the hands of the American businessmen, who’d suddenly appeared in this part of the subcontinent as the most favoured foreigners.

  Then there was a small minority of Englishmen—professors and principals in state colleges and universities—most of whom had taken roots in India. To them England would be an alien land.

  ‘Would you all like to move up to the terrace for cocktails, please?’ Bob announced. ‘And then we’ll come down for supper.’

  The terrace had been brilliantly lit with Chinese lamps, and Crompton pedestal fans were whirring away at top speed to cool off the evening. Around a few potted crotons, with large spangled leaves, were arranged some chairs and tables in a semicircle. Near the parapet was a large table on which was arrayed a variety of Scotches—Dimple, Queen Anne, Black Dog, Jonnie Walker—along with Gordon Dry Gin, Hayward Brandy …

  Since Mala was still downstairs, Berry was the only ‘native’ to move among these Englishmen. ‘Transit passengers,’ he mumbled to himself.

  But as he looked at these white faces, glowing in the lights on the terrace, he couldn’t help feeling impressed with their poise, solemnity and grandeur—traits he found utterly lacking in the new crop of Indian civil servants. Berry was indeed happy at his country’s freedom—but at what price! Like his chief engineer, most Indian bureaucrats were vindictive, mean, conceited, tardy at work and irrepressibly corrupt. The Gandhi cap was now an ‘open sesame’ by which flew open all the portals of power.

  Carrying his glass of neat Dimple, Berry walked over to the major’s table, attracted by his young beautiful wife.

  ‘May I join you, please?’

  ‘Certainly,’ replied Major Foster. ‘Lovely weather—isn’t it? Not too oppressive.’

  There it was, an Englishman’s perennial obsession with weather, Berry thought.

  ‘Yes, it isn’t too sultry.’

  ‘We really don’t mind the Indian weather at all,’ the major said, as though speaking on behalf of his wife as well. ‘We’d prefer it to the vile British winter—blizzard, mist and smog.’

  ‘Yes, I guess.’

  A brief pause.

  ‘It’s a great pity we have to leave India,’ Foster resumed, rather wistfully, looking away at one of the Chinese lamps. ‘I came from England just two years ago. We got married at Agra and now …’

  Berry picked on Agra as a convenient point to keep the conversation running, while he threw a furtive glance at the major’s wife.

  ‘A beautiful city—Agra,’ said Berry. He used the adjective for Mrs Foster rather than for the city of Shahjehan.

  ‘The Taj by moonlight—fascinating, isn’t it?’ said the major.

  ‘Do you know the romantic story behind this peerless mausoleum?’ Berry asked.

  ‘Yes, we do,’ Mrs Foster joined in. ‘We got it from the Blue Guide. Emperor Shahjehan’s love for his beautiful wife, Mumtaz Mahal.’

  ‘Oh, you remember even the names—that’s great,’ Berry said effusively, as his eyes rested momentarily on her bosom.

  ‘That must be the Viceregal Lodge, I guess.’ Berry heard Colonel Lucas say to Mrs Griffith, at the next table.

  ‘Of course,’ responded Mrs Griffith.

  They all stood up and moved over to the northern edge of the terrace as if to get closer to the Lodge.

  ‘And is that one of the Lodi Tombs?’ Mrs Green asked her husband, pointing in another direction.

  ‘Don’t be silly, darling,’ he replied, in his gruff, magisterial voice. ‘The Lodi Tombs are miles away from here, right there in the western sector,’ he added, pointing towards another part of the city.

  Mr Green’s face, after his third double Scotch, was deeply flushed, and his voice now wobbled. As for his wife, her immediate concern was to locate the western sector.

  All other eyes were now focussed on the Viceregal Lodge, resplendent with neon lights. Every three minutes, a revolving searchlight grazed its dome, as though inviting attention to this erstwhile seat of imperial glory.

  ‘I wonder how Lord Mountbatten is taking it …’ said Dr Taylor. ‘He certainly looked a trifle jaded in a press photograph I saw the other day.’ He spoke authoritatively as if he’d personally examined the first governor-general and found him rather anaemic.

  ‘He seems to be doing jolly well,’ Colonel Lucas said, now gone quite tipsy. ‘But doesn’t he owe his new position to Edwina and Nehru? You know what I mean.’ But the others let this pass.

  Suddenly, they heard the sound of a siren on the road; then a flagged car zoomed into Bob’s bungalow, followed by a jeep.

  ‘Oh, the police commissioner!’ exclaimed the colonel.

  Excitedly, Berry looked forward to meeting William Thornton.

  ‘My apologies for being late,’ the commissioner said, as he appeared on the terrace. ‘Oh, this blasted job! Not a moment’s rest.’

  Berry watched him intently. He was a handsome man, in his early forties—tall and wiry, his curved brown moustache adding an awesome dignity to his face, which wasn’t all white. Had it been a little toned down by the dullish pigmentation of his Kashmiri mother? Obviously, the two shades hadn’t quite interblended. But his hair was golden brown, and his eyes had the bluish tint of the British Channel.

  ‘It must be distressingly nerve-racking, Bill, to be on the run all the time,’ said the major. ‘I mean your daily dose of arson, rape and killing.’

  ‘Nightmarish!’ Bill exclaimed, the word ringing loud in the air. Bob whisked him away to the bar.

  ‘What’s your poison, Bill?’

  ‘Gin with tonic’ he said. ‘Yes, I need lots of tonic. All kinds too.’

  Since the commissioner knew everybody else, Bob took him over to Berry.

  ‘Meet Berry—Birendra Dhawan—a very dear friend.’

  ‘Very pleased to meet you,’ said Bill.

  ‘You came quite close to my locality,’ said Berry, ‘when you controlled the mob fury in Pahar Ganj, about ten days ago.’

  ‘Oh, that terrible fire!’ said the commissioner. ‘It was a rotten affairn … Do you know, Mr Dhawan, who started it?’

  ‘A Muslim from a nearby mosque,’ Berry replied. ‘That’s what the papers said the next morning.’

  ‘Not at all!’ said the commissioner. ‘It was a Hindu who did it. It’s always a Hindu who throws a cow’s carcass into a temple, and a Muslim who dumps a pig’s head into a mosque … Diabolic ingenuity, isn’t it? The idea is to keep the battle raging.’

  ‘Very intriguing,’ said Berry.

  ‘Let me tell you another thing, Mr Dhawan,’ the commissioner resumed. With a double gin, his tongue had loosened up. ‘My control room has just picked up a message from Allahabad. It seems that some Hindu pilgrim was killed right on the bank of the Ganges, and his body thrown into the river. Now I’m absolutely certain that it is a Hindu’s doing, and soon you’ll have another round of communal violence there. An
d, well, there may be a retaliation in the capital.’

  ‘How interesting,’ Berry said. ‘But there is an area in Delhi where both Hindus and Muslims operate in close partnership.’

  ‘I don’t quite get you.’

  ‘I’ve heard,’ Berry said, ‘about a brothel behind Neel Kamal, in one of those bylanes shooting of Faiz Bazaar, where they keep abducted girls, mostly Muslim, from all over the country. I got it from a waiter at the restaurant, a couple of days ago. And to cap it all, they operate in collusion with the police.’

  ‘Shocking!’ the commissioner burst out, as he helped himself to another gin. ‘Can you give me some idea about the location of this place, please?’

  ‘That’s all I know, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I must get there somehow,’ the commissioner said, with a ring of determination in his voice. ‘That place needs cleaning up.’

  ‘How much can you clean up, Bill?’ interjected Mr Griffith, the former deputy defence secretary.

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ replied the commissioner. ‘It’s an awful mess, no doubt.’

  ‘Well, we must now leave it all to you and Lord Mountbatten,’ said Mr Griffith. ‘We’ll be gone next week.’

  By now everybody had gathered around the bar to listen to the commissioner’s account of crime in the capital.

  ‘What I can’t understand is how all this is happening in the land of Buddha and Gandhi,’ said Mrs Taylor.

  There was a sting in her voice as though she were accusing the entire subcontinent for its lapse into barbarism—in spite of its professed cultural heritage.

  ‘But haven’t we had our own wars of religion?’ intervened Bob. ‘What about our Chambers of Horrors, heretics burnt at the stake? Human nature is prone to violence everywhere, East or West.’

  ‘The Original Sin?’ muttered Mrs Green.

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ replied Bob, ‘but there it is, the stark reality.’

  The conversation froze when Mala appeared on the terrace, dressed in a crimson silk sari, her hair cascading down her shoulders. So she had her special wardrobe in Bob’s house, Berry wondered—saris during day, and perhaps negligees at night.

  Although Bob’s English friends had heard about his liaison with ‘a native woman’, nobody had seen her before. So when Mala came up to announce supper, they were all surprised to see a lady of great elegance and charm. Mrs Foster, the major’s young wife, felt a stab of jealousy to see all eyes now turned towards the Indian lady.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Bob, ‘if you wish to propose a vote of thanks in advance, here’s Mala. She’s done it all … I’m just a guest like anybody else here.’ He smiled.

  ‘I haven’t done much, really,’ she mumbled, blushing.

  As the guests started to move down to the dining room, Mrs Foster whispered into Mrs Green’s ears: ‘Is he going to marry that dark thing?’

  ‘Don’t you know he’s somewhat touched in the head,’ replied Mrs Green. ‘He’s capable of doing anything crazy. Look at his letting loose this native amongst us—this Cherry or Berry …’ Both sniggered.

  Hardly had they started the first course when the phone rang.

  ‘It’s for you, Bill,’ Bob said, holding the receiver in his right hand.

  ‘Some problem, I’m sure,’ Bill said, rushing to the phone.

  As he finished talking to his control room, he turned around and said: ‘I knew they’d do this to me. I couldn’t be so lucky as to have an evening off … It’s blasted arson this time. A cinema hall gutted near Asaf Ali Road.’

  ‘What savagery!’ said Mrs Taylor.

  ‘It seems they were showing some Hindu movie,’ Bill said, ‘one of those religious fantasies … But I know who must have done it. A Hindu!’

  As he was about to walk out, Mala said: ‘Mr Thornton, you must have a bite before you go. Just a little something. Won’t you have some meat biriyani, please?’

  And, instantly, she started filling up a plate with roasted chicken, fried rice and kebab.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the commissioner. ‘But I don’t think I should delay. This could lead to a serious riot. Anything.’

  And in a few minutes, he drove out of the bungalow.

  ‘Poor man!’ exclaimed Mrs Griffith. ‘No peace for him.’

  The party continued late into the night as the guests started drinking again after the supper. Then Bob played some of his favourite songs on the piano. As he finished, Mrs Foster said: ‘Let’s all sing “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”,’ and everyone broke into the chorus.

  18

  Sitting in a cane chair, on the balcony of his room on the sixth floor of his hotel, The Rainbow, Gautam let his eyes rove about, listlessly. Down there, some distance away, a huge buffalo lay in a dirty pond. Then a crow flapped down from a nearby tree, perched on the animal’s back and dipped its beak into the water to drink up. Gautam almost winced as if he felt the crow’s spiked claws on his own back. So he felt relieved when the animal turned on its side and swished its tail to whisk the bird away.

  To his left, far away near the horizon, Gautam recognized the central tower of the fort he’d briefly seen the other day, in the course of his boat ride with Haseena. Near its base shimmered the holy waters under the tropical sky of early September. To his right flowed the traffic, along a winding road—tongas, pushcarts, rickshaws and taxis.

  Suddenly, an image crystallized before his mind’s eye—Haseena’s face, young, beautiful and innocent. An indeterminate emotion now welled up in his heart. How he wished he’d actually kissed her on the Kotla terrace! But it would have been an act done under the pimp’s uncanny surveillance. And then the long talk about the living and the dead, throughout the train journey. How the body wilts away under some mental pressure.

  For the past few days, he’d started to entertain serious misgivings about his potency. Could he really make love any more? Hadn’t something dried up within him? Sarita’s betrayal and her ceaseless nagging had done it to him, surely. So, maybe, that was the reason why he’d given in to Berry, to try it out with a call-girl. But the fates had willed otherwise …

  Engrossed in these thoughts, Gautam dozed off in the chair.

  Suddenly, he felt some dark pressure on his lips. As he opened his eyes, there she was—Haseena! She was kissing him.

  ‘You?’ he almost cried out, as he sat up in his chair, his eyes dilated in utter amazement. ‘How did you get in?’

  ‘Your door wasn’t bolted.’

  ‘Oh, I must have left it that way,’ he said. ‘How did you find my room?’

  ‘From the Reception, of course.’

  ‘But I’d advised you not to stir out of your house for at least three days …’

  ‘I couldn’t stay away from you.’ She smiled. Then, after a pause, she said: ‘Won’t you come into the room? It’s rather warm out here.’

  Gautam now moved into the room and sat on the sofa. She nestled up to him, and rested her head on his left shoulder.

  ‘How did your mother let you come, Haseena?’

  ‘She knows I have to help you with your assignment.’

  ‘My assignment?’ He laughed, now folding her in his arms and kissing her impetuously—her mouth, her cheeks, her earlobes. ‘This is it!’

  Haseena’s fingers now began to work on the top button of his shirt, which didn’t come undone so easily.

  ‘Oh, these nuts and bolts!’ She beamed. ‘Maybe I should rip off this obstinate thing.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  They now moved over to the bed, near the sofa.

  As she flicked off the button, it went rolling across the carpet, like a white bead. Then a vibrant hand started rippling up and down his chest, creating ripples in his bloodstream. His temples and his earlobes began to throb. He felt he could almost hear his heart leaping, like a dolphin out of some bottomless sea.

  A man’s passion is whetted hundredfold when he feels that he is intensely desired by the woman he loves, that her passion is mo
re overwhelming than his own, that in the act of love she scores over her male partner.

  As Gautam’s chest came bare, showing a tenuous wisp of hair round his nipples, she started kissing him all over, from his throat down to the groin, till he felt he couldn’t hold himself together any longer.

  ‘How about you?’ he murmured, his heart pounding fast. ‘Still bundled up in layers within layers of your sari?’

  It was now Gautam’s turn to discover her body almost for the first time; not the one she’d offered him at the Bridge Hotel.

  Like a young apprentice in love who has promptly learnt his lessons, Gautam began to taste the flavour of her body, drinking off at every fountainhead. The two bodies now sparked off each other, caught in a frenzied rhythm of love—the ebb and flow of wanton breathing, of touch and go.

  As they lay halcyoned in each other’s arms, light as rose petals, Gautam thought about the genesis of love—how Adam might have savoured Eve’s body for the first time, after she’d tasted the forbidden fruit. It must have happened one evening, casually, as the first humans lay alongside each other on a bed of myrrh and myrtle in the Garden. Then it was perhaps Adam’s hand that inadvertently touched Eve’s breasts, arousing her to some blind inner fury.

  A wave of exultation rose within Gautam; then he felt as though his body was winding down, and he was coming down a giant magic wheel that had carried him up midair. A delicious languor now crept into his brain. He dozed off.

  When he awoke, Haseena was gone. There was no trace of her anywhere.

  Then his eyes fell upon a letter on his desk, clipped in a hairpin.

  Dearest Gautam,

  Since you’ve gone into a benign slumber, I wouldn’t even dare kiss you goodbye. That would be a sort of sacrilege. There you lie on the bed, breathing heavily, naked and defenceless, like a babe.