by Paul Scott
‘Did you know any of the men who were arrested, Panditji?’
‘Yes. I knew. They were boys of some education.’
‘Did you know the one who was friendly with Miss Manners?’
After a moment Pandit Baba said, ‘You are speaking of Hari Kumar.’
‘I think that was his name. Did you know Kumar?’
Again a slight pause. ‘Once when he first returned from England his aunt sought my assistance to teach him Hindi. Of all these boys I knew him best. He also could only speak properly English. He was not at all a good student. He had no wish to speak his native language. He employed himself on a local newspaper that was published in English. Always he was attempting to forget that he was an Indian, because he had lived in England since earliest childhood. His father took him there when he was two years old only. He went to English public school and had English friends. He did not understand why he could not have such friends here. His father died, you see, and he had no relative but his aunt in Mayapore. She paid for his passage and gave him a roof and was kind to him, being a widow with no children. But to him, she was a foreigner. All of us were foreigners to Hari Kumar. He knew only English people and English ways. Only he wanted these people and these ways. In Mayapore he could not have them. He was a most unfortunate young man. His case should be taken to heart.’
‘But eventually he had one English friend, didn’t he? I mean Miss Manners.’
‘They were sometimes together. I do not know whether she was his friend.’
‘People said they were friends and more.’
‘I have no knowledge of this. I do not find it informative to take notice of idle gossip. They were sometimes together. This I can vouch for. People say she was unlike other English people. I do not know what they mean when they are saying that. English people are not mass-produced. They do not come off a factory line all looking, speaking, thinking, acting the same. Neither do we. But we are Indians and they are English. True intimacy is not possible. It is not even desirable. Only it is desirable that there should be peace between us, and this is not possible while the English retain possession of what belongs to us, because to get it back we must fight them. In fighting them we do not have to hate them. But also when we have got back from them what they have taken from us and are at peace with them this does not mean that we should love them. We can never be friends with the English, or they with us, but we need not be enemies. Men are not born equal, nor are they born brothers. The lion does not lie down with the tiger, or the crow nest with the swallow. The world is created in a diversity of phenomena and each phenomenon has its own diversity. Between mankind there may be common truth and justice and common wisdom to lead to amity. But between men there are divisions and love cannot be felt truly except by like and like. Between like and unlike there can only be tolerance, and absence of enmity – which is not at all the same thing as friendship. Perhaps the truth of this is most apparent to the Hindu who is born to understand and accept this concept of diversity.’
Ahmed waited a moment to make sure Pandit Baba had finished; then he said, ‘A little while ago you said the people demonstrated against the arrest of Kumar and the others for a crime they hadn’t committed, but how did they know they hadn’t committed it?’
Pandit Baba smiled again.
‘You are like your father in one way. You have perhaps some of his forensic skill. In a moment you plan to raise the question of riot again, you will say that it would be correct to describe the demonstrations as riots because the demonstrators had no means of knowing whether these boys were guilty or not at that time, and were only acting instinctively and therefore unlawfully, therefore riotously.’
‘Isn’t it a debatable point?’
‘All points are debatable. But there are two things that must be taken into consideration. The first is that the demonstrations in Mayapore and the attacks on government installations were no different in main respect from similar demonstrations and attacks in other parts of the country, demonstrations against the arrest of Congress leaders – men such as your father. In Mayapore, however, there was additional weight and temper arising out of the arrests of these boys. But you see not out of the arrests as arrests but out of what quickly became known, that some of these boys were tortured and defiled by the police on the same night of their arrest in order to get them to confess. This knowledge came from the police headquarters itself, as did the knowledge that in spite of torture no confession was obtained. Some of these boys were whipped and they were forced to eat beef. They were Hindus, boys of some education. One was Kumar. We did not think it possible that such boys could set upon and rape an English girl. Also it was believed that all they had been doing was drinking illicit liquor in a hut on the other side of the river from the Bibighar Gardens. It was in the hut that they were arrested. Kumar was not with them but they were known to the police to be acquaintances of Kumar. It was to find Kumar that the police went to the hut. The police went to find Kumar because of his association with the girl who was reported to have been raped. The head of the police in Mayapore, the English District Superintendent, he also was associated with the girl. It was the District Superintendent who personally conducted the interrogations, who ordered the boys to be beaten and forced to eat beef. All night he was there, in the police headquarters, asking them questions. Meanwhile, if there was rape, the real culprits, hooligans no doubt, made good their escape. But District Superintendent was not interested in them. Only he was interested in punishing these boys, especially Kumar, because of Kumar’s association with the white girl. District Superintendent was an evil man, Mr Kasim. His cruelty and perversions were known to his men and consequently to some of us. It was one of his own Muslim constables who next morning whispered the truth to people outside, because he was ashamed of what had been done. He spoke too of a bicycle which the police found in the Bibighar Gardens when they searched there at night. It belonged to the girl. He said that District Superintendent ordered the bicycle to be put in the police truck. Later when they had arrested the boys in the hut they drove to the house where Kumar was living. District Superintendent told them to take the bicycle out of the truck and leave it in the ditch outside this house. Then they went into the house and arrested Kumar, pretended to search the area and so ‘found’ the bicycle and said that Kumar had stolen it from the white girl after raping her. Some of the police were thinking this was a great joke. But the man who told of these things did not think it was funny. Later, people were saying he became frightened and denied what he had secretly told. Perhaps if there had been a trial for rape he would have been persuaded to tell the truth of these things. But there was in any case no trial. District Superintendent had been too clever. Even people like Judge Menen and the Deputy Commissioner became suspicious that the wrong boys had been arrested, and Judge Menen heard the rumours of torture and defilement. He had the boys questioned but they were too frightened to say anything, we understand. Except Kumar who was not saying anything at all to anybody, and did not even seem to want to save himself. But chiefly there was no trial because Miss Manners herself was saying the men arrested could not have had anything to do with it. So now District Superintendent produced evidence that all these boys were engaged in subversive activites and no doubt the English thought it was not possible to set them free in any event. So they were imprisoned without trial under Defence of India Rule, as your father and many others are imprisoned.’
‘Surely it would be difficult to produce evidence of subversive activities, Panditji, unless it was actually there?’
‘Not so difficult, Mr Kasim. But no doubt in all but one case these boys had done and said things that patriotic young Indians say and do, boys of some education, and of certain temperaments. The police had files on them as they had files on many such boys. In the other case, in Kumar’s case, also they had a file because once he was taken into custody for refusing to answer questions and for making difficulties about giving his proper name. Unfortunately the
police officer whose questions he refused to answer was this same Englishman, the District Superintendent. If Kumar had answered District Superintendent properly, if he had said “sir” and looked frightened and done some grovelling, District Superintendent would not have taken notice of him. But this was not Hari Kumar’s way, who hated India, and wanted to be treated like an English boy, and spoke English and only English, and with what is called I understand Public School accent, and so was annoyed to be asked questions by District Superintendent who did not have such good education but expected to be treated all the time like a Sahib because of his white face. But to think of Hari Kumar engaged in subversive activities with other young Indians is to those of us who know him, Mr Kasim, only laughable. He did not like India. He did not like Indians. Only he liked England and his memories of being in England and having English friends. He was not a boy who would plot with other young Indians to get rid of the English.’
‘Is he still in prison?’
‘They are all still in prison, but I think not together. He is in the Kandipat jail in Ranpur, a long way from Mayapore. For many months his aunt did not know which prison they had sent him to. Now at last she is permitted to write and to send him some food and some books. He thanks her for them but she cannot be sure that he is allowed to eat the food or read the books. I know these things because I am in her confidence. Poor lady. Her sufferings are most sad to see. She was very fond of her English nephew as she called him.’
Suddenly Pandit Baba looked at Professor Nair.
‘You say nothing, my friend.’
‘Oh, but I am listening with a great deal of interest. I did not know you were so closely concerned with this very interesting case.’
‘Yes,’ Pandit Baba said. ‘It is interesting. You find this also? It is the kind of case – by which I mean the case of the arrest and punishment of six boys – the kind of case our young friend’s father here would have loved to take charge of in the days when he was so illustriously practising the law and defending countrymen of his who were wrongfully accused.’ He looked again at Ahmed. ‘Unfortunately it is a case that can never be subjected to the searching eyes of the law. But this does not mean it should be forgotten. And it is not only in the courts that justice is done. You look hungry, Mr Kasim. Let me not keep you and Professor Nair any longer from your supper. I shall have retired before you finish, for I have some work to do, so allow me to say good night.’
Nair rose, and Ahmed – somewhat stiffly – followed suit, bowed to Panditji and followed Professor Nair out of the room and across the hall and into the dining-room. A servant who had been squatting in the doorway that led out to the compound got up, went out and shouted orders to the cook. Nair set the fan going and they sat at opposite ends of the table which was dressed Western-style.
‘Do you mind vegetarian?’ Professor Nair whispered. ‘It’s the smell of cooking you see. One has to think of everything.’
II
The horses had been behaving badly. Sarah wondered whether young Mr Kasim had deliberately chosen them for their iron mouths and vicious natures or whether it had been a question of taking the best of a bad bunch from the palace stables. Her own mount, for instance, had shied twice at its early morning shadow, missed its footing on some shale and having reached the promising openness of the comparatively flat turf in the middle of the waste ground separating the palace from the city, resolutely come to a halt, stretched its neck and cropped grass. Mr Kasim, who seemed to be having difficulty restraining his own mount from surging forward in a gallop for the city gates, grew nearly level but some feet away and held it there by what looked like main force. She noted the ridged muscle on his bare forearms. The brim of his topee darkened his face and hid his expression.
‘Are you a Sunni or a Shiah, Mr Kasim?’ Because of the distance between them she had raised her voice. She thought she sounded like a games mistress.
‘A Shiah,’ Ahmed said, and wrenched his horse’s head to the left to stop it closing in on Sarah’s.
‘Is there a great deal of difference?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Much difference?’
Pandering to his horse to make it feel it had got its way he led it round in a tight circle and brought it to stand again in its original position.
‘Not really. The Shiahs dispute the rights of the three Khalifs who succeeded Mohammed. You could say it’s a political division.’
‘Who are the Shiahs for?’
‘What?’
‘Who do they say should have succeeded Mohammed?’
‘Oh. A man called Ali. He was Mohammed’s son-in-law. We mourn his death at the beginning of Muharram. The Mohammedan new year. But then the Sunnis often join in the mourning too.’
‘Is the Nawab a Shiah Muslim?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are there any Sunnis in Mirat?’
‘Yes, a few.’
‘I think if you rode on a bit this damned thing would stop eating grass and at least pretend to do what I want it to.’
For answer Ahmed set his horse towards her and when he was near enough reached over, took the reins from her and jerked. The horse brought its head up.
‘Keep him like that,’ Ahmed suggested, holding the reins in short, so that the horse’s neck looked painfully arched. She slid her left hand along the reins until her fist touched Ahmed’s. She could smell the garlic on his breath. Perhaps he meant her to because he had heard what her Aunty Fenny said.
‘Thanks.’
She set the horse at a walk. It jerked its head continually, trying to force her to lengthen the rein. Ahmed resumed his position, a few paces behind her on her left. Obviously he had no intention of making conversation; but was it shyness, dislike or indifference? At least, she felt, you could rely on him. He’d make no bones about disciplining the horse for her and, no longer dressed in a lounge suit but instead in short-sleeved shirt and jodhpurs, he looked like a man her future brother-in-law Teddie Bingham would describe as being ‘useful in a scrap’, than which for Teddie there was probably no higher praise of his own sex. Muslim men, after all, did have this quality. Sarah corrected herself: not Muslim men, but Indians who were descended like Mr Kasim from Middle Eastern stock: Arabs, Persians and Turks. They had retained the sturdiness of races whom extremes of heat and cold (she was thinking of deserts) had toughened.
England’s climate had also toughened her people. Years ago Sarah had written an essay with the rather grandiloquent title: The Effect of Climate and Topography upon the Human Character. The idea, she remembered, had first come to her in the summer holiday of the year great-grandpa died and she had walked across Mr Birtwhistle’s field encouraging Aunt Mabel not to be put off by the cows and then stood by the brook thinking how much like Pankot in miniature her surroundings were; the year when she was struck by the difference between her Indian family and her English family. ‘England,’ she had written when she was a couple of years older, ‘although temperate climatically speaking, combines within a very limited geographical area a diversity of weather and natural features. Such conditions react upon the inhabitants to make them strong, active, energetic and self-sufficient. It is these qualities which they take abroad with them into their tropical and subtropical colonies, lands whose native populations are inclined because of things like heat and humidity to be less strong, less active, less energetic and more willing to be led, a fact which has enabled European races in general but the English in particular to gain and keep control of such territories. Upon the return of our colonial exiles to the land of their birth they are struck by the smallness of everything and by the fact that the self-sufficiency of their race, thus re-encountered, is really the result of the self-satisfaction of a people who have had comparatively little to contend with in the human struggle against nature.’ She remembered the opening paragraph almost word for word and also remembered the red-pencil comment of the headmistress in the margin, ‘An interesting essay and well developed so far as the quest
ion of climatic influences is concerned. I do not fully understand your reference to topography as an influence, however, and perhaps you fail to understand it yourself, as witness your failure to develop that aspect of your argument.’
‘But I do understand it,’ Sarah had assured herself, ‘and it’s all there, she just hasn’t read it.’ Reading it again, though, she thought that perhaps a bit of clarification would do no harm, then that it would be a definite improvement; finally that the headmistress was right and that clarification was essential, but in her mind first and only then on paper; and in her mind the clarification obstinately refused to come. She was stuck with that single recollection of a notion that had reached her out of the blue, that the place near the brook in the spinney beyond Mr Birtwhistle’s fields was like Pankot in miniature and that this somehow explained why her Indian family were not like her English family.
Over to the right of the waste ground there were a few trees and a road and facing the road a substantial bungalow behind grey stucco walls. ‘Who lives there?’ she asked Ahmed, holding the reins tight in one hand and pointing.
‘That’s Count Bronowsky’s house.’
‘Is he really a count?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Dare we gallop?’
‘If you’d like to.’
‘Where to? To the city gates?’
‘There’s a nullah. We’ll have to bear left and join the city gate road.’