by Paul Scott
‘They are going shopping again. But in the morning before breakfast Miss Layton wants to ride.’
‘Which Miss Layton?’
‘The inquisitive one. Miss Sarah.’
‘Alone?’
‘I’m expected to ride with her I think.’ Ahmed sipped his whisky. ‘I shall keep a respectful few paces behind, naturally.’
‘Do you think she has her mother’s permission, or that of this Captain Bingham?’
‘I didn’t ask. I exist to carry out orders.’
‘Don’t be upset if you find you’ve got up early and had horses saddled for nothing. Her mother or Captain Bingham might veto her little jaunt if she’s arranged it without mentioning it and they find out about it.’
‘Oh, I shan’t be upset.’
‘Who else is there in the wedding party?’
‘A Major Grace is arriving on Friday. He is the bride’s uncle. Captain Bingham’s friend sometimes visits – a Captain Merrick. He will be best man.’
‘Merrick?’
‘Yes. Do you know him?’
‘I don’t think so. Merrick. A vaguely familiar name. But in some other connection—? Well, you’d better be off if you’re dining with Nair.’
Ahmed drained his glass and returned it to the trolley. ‘Thanks for the drink,’ he said, and stood for a moment looking down at Bronowsky, who never shook hands or exchanged formal greetings or farewells with people he looked upon as intimates. For a man of nearly seventy, Ahmed thought, he had worn very well. His face was unlined, his complexion pink. In the early years of his administration as chief minister in Mirat the anti-Bronowsky faction – said to have been headed by the late Begum – had nearly succeeded in poisoning him. His rows with the Nawab were almost legendary. They still occurred. But his influence over the Nawab was now thought to be complete.
Ahmed himself owed his position at the court to Bronowsky although it had taken some time for this to become clear to him. Originally he had thought it was the Nawab who had the notion of taking under his wing the unsatisfactory younger son of a distant but distinguished kinsman, a boy who had failed abysmally at college and showed no aptitude for any career of the kind open to a Kasim of the Ranpur branch: law, politics, the civil service. True, it was Bronowsky who had written the letters and even visited Ranpur but he appeared to do so in the capacity of agent, not principal, and gave no impression of himself caring one way or the other about the outcome of the Nawab’s invitation. To Ahmed that invitation looked like one founded on charity rather than on interest and he believed it looked like that to his father, with whom discussion had been brief. His father was then still head of the provincial ministry, a busy man, and a worried man, almost entirely wrapped in the business of protesting the Viceroy’s declaration of war on Germany without prior consultation with Indian leaders. By the time Ahmed reached Mirat his father, following Congress instructions, had resigned.
But, ‘Well, you are safe,’ the Nawab had said to Ahmed when they had news of M A K’s arrest in 1942. ‘You are under our protection. For this you must thank Count Bronowsky.’ Why Bronowsky? Ahmed asked; and learned that it was the wazir’s idea, not the Nawab’s, that he should come to Mirat to learn something about the administration of a Native State. ‘While you have been here,’ the Nawab continued, ‘you will have heard many adverse things about Bronowsky Sahib. It is not unknown for me to think and say adverse things about him myself. What you should know about him, however, is that his loyalty to the House of Kasim is without parallel even among Kasims, and that it is the future of the House he always thinks of.’
It was a loyalty Ahmed had not got the measure of, and he did not understand where he fitted in with whatever Bronowsky saw as the pattern of a scheme to promote the interests of Kasims. In the past year he had been aware of Bronowsky’s appraisal; before that Bronowsky had scarcely taken any notice of him. His duties had been of an almost menial clerical kind, those of dogsbody to one official’s secretary after another. The officials had grandiloquent titles. Ahmed had worked under the secretary to the Minister for Finance, under the secretary to the Minister for Education, under the secretary to the Minister for Public Works, under the secretary to the Minister for Health, under the chief clerk to the Attorney-General. Most of these ministers were related to the Nawab, two bore the name of Kasim. All were nominated by the Nawab and served as members of his Council of State.
The Council of State was Bronowsky’s brain-child. In the twenty years of his administration he had transformed Mirat from a feudal autocracy where Ruler met ruled only at periodical durbars into a miniature semi-democratic state where the durbars still took place but where the machinery of government was brought out of the dark recesses of rooms and passages in the palace into, comparatively, the light of day.
He had separated the judiciary from the executive, reframed the criminal and civil legal codes, created the position of Chief Justice and during his chief ministership so far always succeeded in appointing to it a man from outside Mirat whose impartiality could be counted on – in one case an Englishman just retired from the bench of a provincial High Court of British India. Bronowsky had done all these things with a minimum of overt opposition because it was to do them that the Nawab brought him back from Monte Carlo in 1921. ‘I must be a modern state,’ the Nawab was reported saying. ‘Make me modern.’ What Bronowsky did by way of making the Nawab of Mirat modern was also the means by which he gradually cut the ground from under the feet of British officials of the Political Department who objected to the appointment of a ‘bloody émigré Russian’ as chief minister of a state with which, small it was, they had always had what they felt to be a special relationship. For all they knew Bronowsky was a red, a spy, a man who would cause trouble and feather his nest at the same time.
The Resident at Gopalakand who advised the Nawab of Mirat as well as the Maharajah of Gopalakand had protested the appointment of Bronowsky and the sacking of the Nawab’s brother to make room for him. Before the present Nawab succeeded as Ruler the British had thought badly of him, had favoured the brother who struck them as altogether more amiable, a more malleable, more temperate man – not given as the heir apparent was given to wild and extravagant behaviour with money and women. The ruler in those days, the present Nawab’s father, was anxious for nothing so much as to live in peace with the representatives of the paramount power. He listened attentively to their stern warnings about his elder son’s sowing of wild oats, reacted as they intended he should react to hints that if the boy didn’t mend his ways he would never be thought fit to rule Mirat – whereas the old Nawab’s second son was a model of a young prince. Such a model son, succeeding, would certainly be confirmed by the King-Emperor’s agents. In his case there would be no danger of an interregnum, no danger of Mirat’s affairs coming under the direct control of the political department. The old man began to manœuvre for a position from which he could effectively disinherit his elder son in favour of the younger. The elder got wind of the plot, but it was luck that came to his rescue, luck in the shape of a proposal for marriage with the daughter of the ruler of a less ancient but far more powerful state with whom the British had an even closer relationship. The old Nawab was flattered. He attempted to arrange the alliance, but through the marriage of the girl to his younger son. The girl would have none of it. She had seen the man she wanted, through the zenana screen at a wedding celebration. The marriage took place as she wished. The old Nawab – and the British too – hoped that perhaps the marriage would see the end of the elder son’s extravagances. It did not. He had only married the girl to secure his inheritance. The British, he knew, would never dare depose him now because to do so would outrage and insult the powerful father-in-law he had so fortunately acquired. When his father died he was confirmed in the succession. His Begum, headstrong as an unmarried girl became intolerable as his wife. He hated her. He hated the brother who had tried to steal his inheritance and who now, following the tradition, had become his chief mini
ster – and a lickspittle of the British. The Nawab took mistresses, eventually a white woman. The scandal had begun. Out of the scandal Bronowsky emerged.
‘Well, good night,’ Ahmed said. Bronowsky said nothing, until Ahmed was at the bottom of the verandah steps, putting on his bicycle clips.
‘Give my felicitations to Professor Nair,’ he called. ‘And be sure to mention the fact that you are going riding alone tomorrow with one of the Miss Laytons.’
‘Why?’
‘He will advise you more satisfactorily than I how to comport yourself, how to interpret accurately and safely her many little gestures and inflexions of voice which you might be in danger of misinterpreting. He will speak of such things as he speaks of all things – from the vast fund of his experience.’
Ahmed smiled, took his bicycle from the rack and prepared to mount.
‘Oh and one other thing,’ Bronowsky said, lowering his voice but enunciating carefully. ‘Find out what you can about his visitor.’
‘Has he got a visitor, then?’
‘Yes. Two. A woman not identified and an elderly scholar by name of Pandit Baba Sahib. He comes from Mayapore. The question is, for what purpose?’
‘Must there be a special one?’
‘Professor Nair’s visitors usually have a purpose, or if they don’t have one when they arrive they have one when they go home.’
‘Considering you only returned from Gopalakand today you’re well informed.’
‘I pay to be. And Pandit Baba is not unknown to us in Mirat. Have you had enough whisky to see you through an evening of fruit juice?’
‘I think I shall manage.’
‘Have a good time then, dear boy. And take care if you are tempted to come home by way of the Chandi Chowk.’
Ahmed waved, mounted and rode down the gravel drive of Bronowsky’s bungalow to the gate which the watchman – already muffled in a shawl and armed with a stick – held open for him. Outside, he turned right, pedalled along the metalled road towards the city. To his left stretched the expanse of open ground which separated the City from the palace. Soft warm airs blew across it. The moon whose first appearance had ushered in the month of Ramadan was nearly full. It hung above the city, not giving much light, the shape and colour of an orange. It would wax and wane and become invisible. Its slender reappearance would announce the îd. During this month more than 1,300 years ago it was said that the Koran had been revealed by Allah to his Prophet. A good Muslim was supposed to fast from sunrise to sunset. Ahmed, remembering the whisky, stopped pedalling, stood astride and felt in his pocket for the clove of garlic. He popped it into his mouth and crunched, resumed his journey. The road was unlit, his cycle lamp out of order, but the night was luminous and he liked cycling in the dark. It could be a risky business and he preferred activities that had an element of danger in them, so long as the activities themselves were of a commonplace kind and only dangerous by virtue of some extraneous circumstance. Riding a bicycle in the dark or a horse over rough country were one thing, deliberately courting danger was another. To Ahmed, the kind of danger that added spice to a situation was danger that came suddenly and unexpectedly; only so could it retain what he thought of as essential to it: spontaneity, or mystery, or both. He had once suggested to Professor Nair that his attitude to danger could be summed up by describing it as one that distinguished between the danger to a man who joined a riot and the danger to a man who found himself involved in one in the course of moving peaceably between point a and point b. Ahmed had experienced both kinds of danger as a student. It was the unexpected riot he enjoyed. ‘One did not feel’ he told Nair, ‘that one had to take sides, one merely hit out in one’s own defence, and there wasn’t any moral problem to puzzle out either before or after. I was knocked off my bicycle by one faction and subjected to rescue by the other. I dished out bloody noses indiscriminately and felt fine, and nobody noticed or thought to wonder whose side I was on, so when I’d finished having my fun I just rode away and left them all to it.’
Closer in to the city the road became overhung on one side by the trees in the grounds of the Hindu Boys’ College, an institution which like the Council of State owed its existence to Count Bronowsky. Numerically in a minority, a mere twenty per cent of the population, the Muslims of Mirat had maintained a firm grip on the administration since the days of the Moghuls. Until Bronowsky’s day few Hindus had held any public post of any importance. There were more mosques than temples, not because the rich Hindus of Mirat were unready to build temples but because permission to build was more often refused than granted. The same restrictions had been placed on the building and endowment of schools for Hindu boys and girls, who were generally thought to be too clever by half. For the Muslim children an Academy of Higher Education had been established in the late nineteenth century, but its record was poor; there was a saying that a boy left there with no qualifications except for reciting passages from the Koran, but that this alone was enough to pass him into the service of an official – particularly of a tax-collector. Until the foundation of the Hindu Boys’ College in 1924, non-Muslims whose parents wanted them educated above middle-school standards had to compete for places in colleges outside Mirat, and having left Mirat the tendency was not to return but to seek employment in the service of the Government of India. Muslims, jealous guardians of their own entrenched position in the administration of the State, saw no harm in this draining of potential talent among the Hindus whose job, in their opinion, was trading and moneylending. But Bronowsky saw harm and persuaded the Nawab to see harm too, and to allocate a modest annual sum from the State’s revenue for a college that would be open to the sons of rich or poor Hindus. The rest of the money was provided by prominent Hindu businessmen. The building that was erected reflected the combination of civic pride and sense of communal and personal grandiosity with which the money was contributed: red brick with white facings, Gothic windows and Gothic arches. Coconut palms were planted in the forecourt. From the beginning it had been a success.
*
‘Is that you, Ahmed?’ Professor Nair called as Ahmed – having passed the watchman at the gate of the college and walked his bicycle off the drive that led to the main building and on to a narrow path – came in sight of the Principal’s bungalow. Nair stood at the head of the steps, silhouetted by the light from the open door. He was dressed in his white pyjamas.
‘Yes, professor,’ Ahmed called back. ‘Am I late?’
‘Oh no. At least only by a few minutes.’
‘Count Sahib is back from Gopalakand. I had to call in. He sent his regards by the way.’
Ahmed put his cycle in the rack, climbed the steps and let his hands be taken in both of Nair’s. The professor stood about a foot shorter than Ahmed.
‘I have an important visitor,’ he whispered. ‘Do you mind taking off your shoes and socks? He’s an awful stickler for orthodoxies. I’m afraid he won’t eat with us.’
‘Who is he?’ Ahmed asked, bending to untie his shoe-laces.
‘Pandit Baba Sahib of Mayapore. He is writing a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. I don’t mean right now. I mean it is his principal occupation. Please don’t offer to shake hands, and don’t sit where your shadow will fall on him. It’s all rather nerve-racking. Frankly I came out to relax. I am longing for a cigarette but daren’t smoke one in case he smells it. At times like this one’s bad habits come home to roost. Had Count Sahib any interesting news?’
‘None that he shared with me. May I keep my socks?’
‘Oh by all means. The floors get so dirty. Come. Meet Panditji. Like me he is a great admirer of your father.’
The house smelt of incense, which was unusual. Pandit Baba Sahib had probably been in Mrs Nair’s puja room. That was one of the rooms in Professor Nair’s house that Ahmed had never entered. In fact he had only seen two rooms, the room where they sat and talked, which was entered from the right of the square hallway, and the room where they ate, which was entered from the left. An open do
or at the far end of the hall gave on to a courtyard, where Mrs Nair kept a tethered goat. Ahmed gathered that other rooms, such as the bedroom, bathroom and puja room were entered from this courtyard.
When he came into the living-room – Nair stepping aside and graciously waving him on – he saw that the chairs had been removed and cushions and rugs put down in their place. Pandit Baba Sahib was seated cross-legged on one cushion, resting his left elbow on a pile of three or four. He too was dressed in pyjamas. He had a grey beard and a grey turban. A pair of steel-rimmed spectacles with circular lenses were lodged half-way down his rather stubby nose.
‘This is our young visitor,’ Nair said. ‘Son of our illustrious M A K. A young gentleman of many talents but currently Social Secretary to the Nawab Sahib.’
Panditji stared at Ahmed above the rims of his glasses. The whites of his eyes were yellow. He did not smile, he made no gesture of greeting. He simply stared. There was a certain kind of Hindu who inspired in Ahmed involuntary little twitches of distaste, the relics no doubt of the racial and religious animosity his own forbears had felt towards the forbears of men like Pandit Baba Sahib. It was no hardship to him to keep his distance or to stand where even his shadow could not reach the figure on the cushions who had made no attempt to acknowledge Nair’s introduction and continued to stare up with an expression Ahmed would have thought genuinely disapproving had he not guessed it as probably an expression that Pandit Baba assumed automaticaly when meeting strangers, especially if the stranger was young. Ahmed gazed back, with Nair at his side still holding him by the elbow.
Presently Pandit Baba spoke. He had a high light voice. He spoke in Hindi.
‘You do not look like your father.’
‘Oh, you know him,’ Ahmed said, but in English. ‘Most people would agree with you. They say I take after my mother. Personally I never see any resemblance in myself to any member of my family.’