by Paul Scott
From the date Kumar was first questioned by Merrick he was under surveillance. Kumar never explained why he was drunk but the names of his drinking companions were obtained and there were cross-references to other files kept on these young men. The surveillance seemed to have been fairly casual, but Merrick had been thorough in recording what was known locally about this English public-school educated Indian reporter. He’d discovered that Kumar had once applied to an English firm, British-Indian Electric, for a post as a trainee but been turned down on the recommendation of the technical training manager who thought him not intelligent enough.
A young man whose place Kumar had taken on The Mayapore Gazette, one Vidyasagar, was also under surveillance. Vidyasagar was now working on a nationalist local, Mayapore Hindu. There were notes of several occasions when Kumar and Vidyasagar had been ‘seen together’, but these couldn’t strike a reader as very significant because the occasions were invariably those when they had simply been in the same place at the same time, as reporters (at District and Sessions Court, for example, and local functions on the maidan).
The most important items in Merrick’s notes were those concerning Kumar’s friendship with the English girl, Daphne Manners, who had come to Mayapore to stay with a Lady Chatterjee – a friend of Lady Manners in Rawalpindi. Miss Manners’s parents were dead. She had lost her brother in the war and had come out to India quite recently to stay with her surviving relative, her aunt, Lady Manners. Since coming to Mayapore she had been doing voluntary work at the Mayapore General Hospital.
The notes about her association with Kumar began with one dated in April 1942. ‘At the War Week exhibition on the maidan Miss M left her party to speak to K who was hovering in the vicinity.’ The next note suggested that Merrick had taken the trouble to find out how Miss M and K had previously met. ‘It seems K was invited to Lady Chatterjees’s place, The MacGregor House, where Miss M was staying, shortly after K was questioned in the matter of Moti Lal, probably through the suggestion of the lawyer Srinivasan who was sent to police headquarters to inquire why I’d had K taken to the kotwali for questioning. Srinivasan is Romesh C’s lawyer.’
There were several further notes giving dates when K and Miss M were seen in one another’s company, one of which – ‘Miss M dined with K and his aunt at their house in the Chillianwallah Bagh extension’ – Rowan found particularly distasteful since it indicated that Kumar could not even have someone to dinner without the fact being reported.
Finally, among the documents, there were two statements and a report from the Divisional Commissioner. The first statement, by Merrick, described how Kumar had first come to his notice and the opinion he had formed of him as a result of this, what was known locally about the characters of the young men in whose company he had been on the night he got drunk, how Merrick eventually thought it his duty to warn Miss Manners ‘that the young Indian with whom she had struck up a friendship, which few Europeans on station had failed to notice, was not the kind of man one could recommend her to take into her confidence’.
Merrick’s statements ended with an account of his own actions on the night when he had called on Lady Chatterjee and found her ‘alarmed’ at Miss Manners’s failure to arrive home, and of his second visit when he found Miss M arrived at last but ‘in a distressed condition as a result of having been attacked and criminally used by five or six men in the Bibighar Gardens’. He continued with a description of his discovery of the young men in the hut near by, of the state in which he found Kumar when calling again at the house in Chillianwallah Bagh and of the obstinate but suspicious behaviour of Kumar when taken into custody.
The second statement was a report made by three officers of the civil administration after a private interview with Miss Manners. According to this report, Miss Manners had not confirmed her earlier verbal statement that the men had come at her in the dark, covered her with her own raincape, dragged her off her bicycle and into the Bibighar, and that she had therefore not been able to identify them. She now stated that she had been in the Bibighar, alone, and that although it was dark, and the men came at her suddenly, and did cover her head with the raincape, she had had just sufficient glimpse and smell of them to swear on oath that they were all of the badmash or criminal type, not educated or westernized boys of the kind who had been arrested; that it would be ridiculous to bring such boys into court, that she could not fail to deny that they were the men involved, and that it would be just as reasonable to bring in a group of young British soldiers and accuse them of having blacked their faces in order to attack her.
The report from the Divisional Commissioner was simply to the effect that he had studied the files on the arrested men and all the statements and while agreeing that in view of Miss Manners’s attitude the evidence against them in the matter of criminal assault was insufficient on which to charge them and bring them to trial, he agreed with the opinion that quite apart from suspicion of criminal assault the evidence obtained over several months of their conduct and political affiliations warranted their detention under Rule 26 of the Defence of India Rules.
When Rowan had studied all this material he returned the file to Malcolm who asked him whether he thought Kumar wrongfully imprisoned. Rowan said he thought so, technically, but that suspicion of complicity in rape was strong enough to take the view that he may have got off extremely lightly. The Governor then asked him whether there was any doubt about this Kumar being the Kumar Rowan had known at school – and handed him a police photograph; full face and profile. He hadn’t seen Kumar since Kumar was about fifteen, but he thought the features were like those of the boy he remembered; apart from which everything on the file about Kumar’s history fitted what he had known of Kumar’s background. The Kumar he knew had spent all his life in England, was known as Harry Coomer. His accent had been as English as Colin Lindsey’s and Rowan’s own. You would only have to hear him speak to know whether they were one and the same man.
The Governor said Rowan would have an opportunity to confirm this. He was to arrange and lead a private examination of the prisoner at the Kandipat jail, in a room known as Room O. He would have a shorthand writer and an official from the Department of Home and Law to assist him. There would also be a fourth person, a woman, who would watch and listen to the interview from a specially equipped adjoining room. The Governor had had many pleas from Kumar’s aunt, Shalini Gupta Sen, to review the case against her nephew, and the poor woman had in fact come to Ranpur to be near by in case some steps were taken. But the request for this examination and the request to be present were from Lady Manners. Her visit was to be kept secret. Of the members of the examining board only Rowan was to know of her presence. The examination would not be made under oath and the entire affair was to be conducted in as discreet and confidential manner as possible.
*
With this Rowan had to be content. For the moment Malcolm would discuss it no further. Rowan made the arrangements at the Kandipat and on the day he met Lady Manners at Government House he was already hating the whole business. Kumar had been in jail for more than eighteen months and Rowan had decided that the only explanation for Lady Manners’s sudden emergence from the obscurity in which she had lived since the tragedy of the assault and the tragedy of her niece’s death in childbirth was that she had been biding her time, perhaps obtaining further evidence against Kumar and now wanted vengeance.
The impression did not survive his first short meeting with her the day before the examination; and on the day itself driving with her to the Kandipat, observing her physical frailty, noting her gentleness of manner, it struck him rather forcibly that here was a woman who felt that her life was coming to an end and that there were dispositions to make. He knew from Malcolm that she was staying under an assumed name at an hotel in Ranpur and that the child and its ayah were with her. To minimize the risk of being recognized by old servants at Government House she wore a deep veil over an old-fashioned sola topee, which she only raised in the car to lo
ok at the photograph of Kumar, whom she had never in her life seen.
But – Rowan wondered – if the object of the examination was to secure the release of a man she felt, or knew, to be wrongfully imprisoned, why had she waited so long? Or was it so long? More than eighteen months since the assault, but only half that time since her niece died. As they drew near Kandipat, Rowan began to pull down the blinds of the car. They entered the jail precincts in semi-darkness.
*
The deeply subjective feelings, like joy, fear, love, are the most difficult to convey. One has to make do, more often than not, with the crutch of the words themselves. Very occasionally if an experience has been vivid enough, the quality of it comes through without there being much conscious attempt to communicate it. This was the way Rowan conveyed to me what the examination in the Kandipat jail had been like, for him. It had been a claustrophobic experience. I have thought of Rowan’s experience of the Kandipat often, tried to shed light on it, as a scene, but the light coming out from the scene always seems stronger. One ends up a bit dazzled by it. The eyes hurt. You glance away, to rest them, and then momentarily there’s the illusion of blindness, blankness. You feel shut in. I hit on the word claustrophobic while Rowan was describing it to me. Directly I hit on it I knew I had also hit on a description of the effect Merrick had on me.
That light I mentioned, the one coming out from the scene, was actually a real light: a light bright enough to interrogate by, but nothing crude; subtly balanced, tilted, as if haphazardly, but in fact shining on the examinee at an angle that would only worry him if he chanced to look up above the level of Rowan’s head and wonder about the grille in the wall behind. But had he done so he would have assumed that it was part of the air-conditioning plant.
Another thing Rowan managed to communicate to me without putting it into so many words was the shock of this initiation into one of the raj’s obscurer rites, the kind conducted in a windowless room with artificial light and air, an early form of bugging system and spy-system, and making an uncompromising statement about itself as the ominously still centre of the world of moral and political power which hitherto he had known as one revolving openly in the alternating light of good intentions and the dark of doubts and errors. The room in the Kandipat emitted nothing but its own steady glare. It illuminated nothing except the consequences of an action already performed and a decision taken long ago. These could never be undone or retracted. In the world outside new action could be taken and new decisions made. But the light of what had been performed would glow on unblinkingly, like radium in a closed and undiscovered mine.
*
When the prisoner entered Rowan thought: No, that’s not the man, the whole thing is a ludicrous mistake. The man is an impostor. It was not even the man in the police photographs. He had expected some change but not such a devastating one. This man looked middle-aged. He seemed not to understand English. Rowan asked him to sit down but it wasn’t until the assistant examiner from the Home and Law Department, an Indian, said ‘Baitho’ that he did so; and then the contours of the chair seemed to puzzle him, as if he lacked physical coordination. Rowan asked him whether he wished to have the examination conducted in English or in Hindi. He asked him this question in Hindi. The prisoner answered in Hindi, using the single word Angrezi, meaning ‘in English’. As he answered he looked directly at Rowan for the first time and the conviction that the man was the wrong man weakened.
The eyes, Rowan said, were those ‘of one man looking out of the eye-sockets of another’ and the man looking out could have been Kumar; his answers to the routine opening questions whose object was identification all added up to an admission that he was, but still the answers came in Hindi – the abbreviated word hãn, repeated tonelessly. Hãn. Hãn.
At this point Rowan reminded the prisoner that he had elected to have the examination conducted in English. Questions had been put in English. So far he had answered in Hindi. Did this mean that he had changed his mind and would prefer the questions to be put in Hindi too? He hoped that the answer would come again, hãn; then the onus of putting questions would fall on his colleague, and for him the whole thing would become a semantic exercise. For Lady Manners in the adjoining room it would become an exercise in patience. He doubted that her Hindi was even as good as his. But that didn’t matter. He would prefer to take a back seat. He didn’t want this gaunt shambling creature to be Hari Kumar; certainly not Coomer, whom he remembered Laura Elliott describing as ‘that good-looking boy who caught you before you even scored’. Old Boys versus School. Rowan had approached him after stumps, congratulated him; asked him what he intended doing. The boy had said, ‘Try for the ICS, I suppose, sir.’ And gone out of Rowan’s life.
To emerge here? It wasn’t possible. The physical evidence was against such a transmigration. The eyes could have been Coomer’s; they showed no recognition of Rowan but Rowan wouldn’t have expected it. But he had expected something far more telling. A manner.
Rowan waited for the prisoner to respond. He seemed not to have understood the question and Rowan wondered whether he should repeat it in Hindi. He was about to do so when the man spoke. He said he was sorry, answering the questions in Hindi had been a slip; he seldom had the chance of speaking English, except to himself.
Rowan described the effect of this casual statement in straightforward English as electrifying. It was as though there were two men in the chair, the one you could see and the one you could hear. The one you could hear was undoubtedly Coomer and once you were aware that he was Coomer the unfavourable impression made by the shambling body and hollow-cheeked face began to fade. The English voice, released from its inner prison, seemed to have taken control of the face and limbs, to be infusing them with something of its own firmness and authority.
‘I felt,’ Rowan said, ‘that quite unexpectedly our rôles were reversed or at least levelled up and that it wasn’t Coomer who was being examined so much as a system that had ostensibly given us equal opportunities but had ended like this with me on the comfortable side of a green baize-covered table and him on the unpleasant one. And one of the interesting questions was, where precisely did this leave my Indian colleague and co-examiner?’
The Indian colleague was the same Mr Gopal who had accompanied Rowan up to Pankot and just gone back to Ranpur with Mr Kasim. Before Kumar’s examination Rowan and Gopal were no more than casual acquaintances and one of the ironies of that examination, Rowan had always felt, was that whereas he himself had a common bond of sympathy with Kumar but could not absolve him from suspicion of some kind of connection with the attack on Daphne Manners, Gopal – as became obvious – believed him innocent on every count, believed that he had been victimized by the Mayapore authorities because he was an Indian, but at the same time disliked him for being the kind of Indian he actually was. Quite early in the questioning Gopal elicited from Kumar the fact that Kumar’s father had admired the British and the British form of administration in India and that he had deliberately brought Kumar up in a way that should have enabled him to enter the administration with the same qualities and advantages an English boy had. At the same time, Gopal’s form of questioning made it clear he believed this could only have been done at the cost of Kumar senior turning his back on his own people – which in fact had been the case and a major cause of the ensuing tragedy.
Kumar senior had been exposed as a man with an obsession that had cost his son dearly. One of Gopal’s objectives in this line of questioning about Kumar’s background was of course to establish that with an upbringing such as he’d had the very idea of his ever becoming a danger to the British was nonsensical. To Gopal, Kumar/Coomer was British. During the recess when Kumar had been taken outside for a while, Rowan admitted that he and Kumar had been at the same school but that Kumar didn’t realize this, didn’t recognize him. Gopal then described Kumar as ‘an English boy with a brown skin’ and said, ‘the combination is hopeless’.
Rowan called the recess because he’d f
elt the examination was getting out of hand. He had tried unsuccessfully to keep it strictly to the question of Kumar’s political affiliations. These, he believed, had been virtually non-existent and had now been shown to be non-existent. The only occasion when Kumar had consorted with any of the young Indians who were found drinking in the derelict hut on the night of the rape was that other night, six months before, when he got drunk himself and was picked up by Sister Ludmila’s stretcher-bearers. Until then and after then he had kept fairly clear of them. He felt no animosity towards them but they weren’t young men whose interests he could share, whose experiences he had shared, or whose aspirations he could regard with anything except a detached kind of understanding. They were all young nationalists but, he said, why shouldn’t they be? In examination he made no bones about that, but no bones either about his view of the limited form their nationalism ordinarily took. They were young, therefore inconsistent, laughing at the British, talking against them, but fond of wearing western-style clothes and with a tendency to copy British manners. They were friendly, at times deeply depressed, at times euphoric. They were educated to a standard a peg or so above the level on which society determined they could live.
The truth which Coomer had had to face was that this was a level on which he now had to live too: that of one young Indian among countless others who could never expect to achieve any kind of position of authority; young men doomed, it seemed, to spend their lives as members of a literate but obscure and powerless middle-class, thankful for jobs as ill-paid clerks in shops and offices and banks – a life infinitely poorer than the one he would have led if he had grown up in his father’s ancestral village, or if Kumar senior’s obsession about the value of an English upbringing had not been so deeply felt and so uncompromisingly followed that he had sacrificed his own security and – with that single exception of his young widowed sister – the regard of his family.