by Paul Scott
Edward shouted, ‘Why is she hiding? I don’t want to play hide and seek. It’s a silly girl’s game.’
‘No, it isn’t silly,’ Ahmed insisted. ‘Come on, help hide ayah. Pretend bad men are looking for her.’
‘Look here, Kasim,’ Peabody began – but just then there was a long drawn-out wail, rising in pitch, from up ahead. There was a grumble of voices from the adjacent compartment, then a shout, and the sound of windows and shutters being closed. The wailing continued as an accompaniment now to sudden screams.
They remained, as if transfixed. From under the bench came a low moan from the little ayah. The boy bent down. ‘What’s wrong, ayah?’ he asked. Ahmed got hold of him and said, ‘Okay, it’s only a game. Ayah’s pretending to hide from bad people. Major Peabody, please come to this side and take ayah’s seat so that no one can see her.’
Peabody hesitated, then began to clamber over the luggage. As he did so something hit the compartment, something soft. And again. The sound of a hand slapping the side of the carriage. Behind it all the continuing sound of wailing and screaming.
‘Take the boy,’ Ahmed said, and lifted him over into Sarah’s arms. Peabody was still straddled across the luggage.
‘Reggie, what are you doing?’ his wife asked him. He looked at her as if he thought her a perfect fool but said, ‘God knows what anyone’s doing, it must be some kind of damned silly demonstration,’ and completed the movement of stepping over the luggage, lost his footing and fell against Mrs Grace and Susan. ‘Oh, damn it,’ he said and just then people outside began to pound heavily on the door and the side of the compartment and then there was a little crack and an explosion of broken glass and Susan shrieked. Another explosion; another shattering of glass. She shrieked again. As if by old instinct, Peabody remained ducked down, forgetting that the glass couldn’t fly in through the lowered shutters. It was dark in the compartment. Little wires of light lay along the edges of the wooden louvres. The occupants of the seats were ducked down too, including Ahmed. Mrs Grace had her arm round Susan. Sarah held the boy. This was the tableau Perron saw when after a sudden silence had lasted a few seconds he looked up and round.
There was a bang on the door. Then a hammering that went on for some while. When it stopped a man’s voice came quite clearly: ‘Come on, Kasim Sahib.’ More bangs on the door. Susan gasped. Mrs Peabody cried out, ‘What are they doing, what are they doing?’ Then the voice from outside could be heard again. ‘Come on out. Kasim? Kasim Sahib? Come on. Or do we have to break in and annoy all the sirs and ladies? Kasim? Kasim Sahib?’ When the voice stopped the hammering on the door began again.
Silence suddenly. Then another shattered window. This time Edward began to cry. Sarah cradled him. Perron got up – to do what he didn’t know: climb over to the door, open the shutter and shout that there was no Kasim there?
But Ahmed had got up too. Because of the noise of Edward crying and Susan shrieking Perron did not clearly hear what Ahmed said, but it sounded like, ‘It seems to be me they want.’ It could have been, ‘Be ready to re-lock the door.’ But he smiled, shrugged, and had suddenly unlocked it. As he did so Peabody lunged forward, as if to stop him. But he was too late. Ahmed opened the door and went.
A turbanned head appeared. Peabody must have seen the head at eye-level. Perron saw it from above. The head rose. The man must have been getting purchase on steps and handgrip. It looked as if he was coming in. He got one hand on the door-handle. In his other was something that looked like a sword but surely couldn’t have been. He said, ‘Sorry to have disturbed you, sirs and ladies. On to Ranpur, isn’t it?’ and then let himself fall away, dragging the door shut. Peabody lunged forward again and locked it.
A feeling of terrible relief swept over Perron. At the time it was just relief. It was terrible subsequently; when it sank in that it had been the relief a man feels when his self-protective instinct tells him he has personally survived a passing danger. Perhaps Peabody felt the same relief. And perhaps it was this that presently made him push up the shutter and look out.
Then he lowered it quickly, stood for a moment, staring at the shutter, checked the lock on the door, and turned round and sat on the bench in the place Ahmed had vacated without saying a word.
And as he did so the train began to glide forward – slowly, silkily, smoothly; as if getting stealthily away from a dangerous and incomprehensible situation. Except for Peabody, who had looked out, none of the people in the compartment could quite visualize the scene of this second departure. Later they must all have done so. In Perron’s mind it remains so vivid that it sometimes seems to him that he raised a shutter himself and watched as the train drifted away along this stretch of line, on whose embankment bodies lay; some close, some farther off as though they had tried to run away and then been caught and struck down – men, women, youths, young girls, babies; in death looking all the same, like dummies stuffed for some kind of strange fertility festival.
*
It took three-quarters of an hour to get to Premanagar. At first it seemed as if they would cover the entire distance in the semi-darkness of lowered shutters and in total silence apart from the rhythmic clack of wheels hastily putting distance between the living travellers and the abandoned dead; but after five minutes or so Mrs Peabody said, ‘Reggie, do you think we might have some light and air? I think otherwise I might be going to faint.’
‘Only on your side,’ Mrs Grace said. ‘Here we have a great deal of trapped broken glass.’
‘It was my side I was thinking of. Perhaps you’d help me, Mr Perron, since you’re here.’
Perron lent a hand.
‘I didn’t like that game, Auntie Sarah,’ Edward said. ‘Is it finished?’
The child’s tear-stained face was revealed as the shutters went up. He climbed off Sarah’s lap and then up and over the piled luggage. ‘You can come out now, ayah,’ he shouted. ‘We’ve stopped playing that game. Where’s Ahmed? Has he gone to pee again? I want to pee too.’ He had to say it several times and then staggered towards the door of the w.c. His unsteadiness suddenly impressed itself on Major Peabody’s eye.
‘Come on, old chap, then. I’ll take you.’
‘What’s your name?’ Edward asked as he was taken in.
‘Never mind my name,’ Peabody said; and shut the door on them both.
Sarah was now leaning forward, both elbows clasped in her hands, her head bowed. Ayah had got up and was standing against the luggage. When the door of the lavatory opened and Edward came out alone she took charge of him and sat with him in the place that had been Ahmed’s and then Peabody’s and was now anybody’s or nobody’s. Peabody was in the cubicle for nearly ten minutes. Perhaps he was being sick. He looked very pale when he came out. Finding his new place gone he clambered over the luggage and sat once more in the far corner opposite Susan who still cradled the basket and was still cradled in Mrs Grace’s arms.
‘Is mummy crying again?’ Edward asked.
Nobody answered. But then Sarah said, ‘We just let him go. We all of us sat here and let him go.’ After that none of them spoke. In this way they came into Premanagar.
*
Before the train actually stopped Peabody got up. Perron got up too. At the door Peabody said in a whisper, ‘Keep them in here, Perron. They mustn’t come out on to the platform.’
‘But I must.’
Peabody said, ‘I think not.’
‘I’m sorry, Peabody. But I’ve got to go back to where Ahmed got out.’
Peabody frowned. Perhaps at the use of his surname. ‘There’s nothing to go back for. He was hacked to pieces.’
Perron didn’t really take this in. He said, ‘I must get to a phone and ring the palace. We can’t just leave it like that. Someone’s got to go back.’
From outside, suddenly, as the train came to a halt, came the renewed sound of wailing and shouting. Peabody’s breath smelt acid. He said, ‘They might turn on us when they take it in. They might decide it’s our fault.
You’d be better advised to stay here and look after the women. I’m going to find out what’s happening.’
‘It’s all right, Major Peabody,’ Sarah called. ‘Mr Perron knows what he must do. I’ll stand by the door if that’s what you want.’ She clambered over. Reluctantly Peabody opened the door. An English voice outside exclaimed, ‘My God.’ Peabody and Perron went down. ‘Lock it,’ Peabody told Sarah. She said, ‘There’s no need to lock it now.’
Other English passengers had come down from the adjacent compartments – two of them women. Two Indian officers ran through asking them to make way. Automatically they stood back, as if accepting that this was an Indian affair, not theirs. They stood pale-faced, shocked.
Some of the dead were already being brought out of the third-class carriages. The nearest of these was a purdah-coach and out of this white and black bundles of veiled women were being lowered. Most lay motionless when put down, one or two seemed to be trying to crawl back in. Among the dead from the purdah-coach were the bodies of small children. And beyond the purdah-coach the platform was becoming littered with blood-stained bundles of white cloth, with black limbs sticking out of the cloth. One body lay on the roof of the coach. No one seemed to have noticed it. From some of the windows of the coaches heads and arms hung down. Blood slowly made shapes on the dirty grey concrete of the platform. Ahead, the locomotive suddenly let off steam, as if about to haul the train out again. People began to shout. A wave of panic swept along the platform and then because the train didn’t move died away and left only the wailing of those searching among the rows of dead and dying passengers.
*
‘I’m sorry,’ the MCO said, ‘I cannot allow private calls of any nature. I am trying to raise Mirat. The lines may be down. Please go away.’
The MCO was a Sikh. Sikhs, people were saying, had been among the gang that stopped the train and slashed Muslim passengers to death with swords. But if he feared for his own life he didn’t show it. He had moved freely up and down the platform. Perron had waylaid him on one of his brief visits to the office where a havildar-clerk was constantly on the telephone.
‘If you get Mirat, would you please tell them that Ahmed Kasim, the son of Mohammed Ali Kasim may have to be presumed dead and that the Nawab of Mirat’s Chief Minister should be informed?’
‘Ahmed Kasim? Ahmed Kasim? Who is Ahmed Kasim?’
‘He was travelling with us.’
‘Then why is he presumed dead? You are first-class, surely. Please go away. What is one man among so many?’
‘Mirat, sir,’ the clerk shouted, and handed the phone over.
The MCO grabbed the receiver, at the same time saying, ‘Please all of you go away.’ He began talking rapidly in a mixture of English and Hindi. Perron was not the only unauthorized visitor. There were about six crowded into the tiny office. But all of them were English – people who were anxious to contact friends left behind in Mirat or waiting for them in Ranpur, friends who some time during the day might hear what had happened and start worrying.
‘Let’s try the stationmaster,’ one of them said.
‘He’s worse than this chap.’
They had absorbed the shock. The old reactions were already setting back in, but the impulse to take charge had gone. It was the kind of situation that had always been bubbling under the surface trying to break out, the kind that the raj had had to try to control. Now the worst had happened.
‘God knows how they’re going to cope in this place,’ one of the officers told Perron as they went back on to the platform. ‘Premanagar’s always been a dead-alive hole. No proper troops and no pukka hospital.’
The MCO’S office was next to the first-class restaurant. The trains always drew up so that the first-class compartments were opposite the places that first-class passengers needed. In this area, then, the platform was an isolated little island, bordered on both sides by the horrors. Perron noticed that armed police had turned up. It was twenty minutes since the train’s arrival. He went to the compartment. The door was open. Inside there were only the two Peabodys – he kneeling by an open bag, she lying full length on the bench, hand over her eyes.
‘Where are the others?’ Perron asked.
‘Women’s rest room.’
From the bag Peabody was taking a webbing belt and holster. The holster had a revolver in it. Perron got down again and went to the women’s rest room. It was crowded. There were several men among the women, looking pale, dignified and protective. At one end of the room he saw Mrs Grace, ayah and Edward, and Susan. He made his way to them, passing from under one area of fanned air to another. ‘Where’s Sarah?’ he asked Mrs Grace.
‘She’s gone to see what she can do to help. I let her. It’s what she wanted.’
Perron pushed his way out again. ‘Savages,’ a woman was saying. And a man, ‘What do you expect? It’s only the beginning. Once we’ve gone they’ll all cut each other’s bloody throats. Non-violence. Makes you laugh, doesn’t it?’ But it didn’t make Perron laugh. Once out on the platform he forced his way through a little cordon of armed police into the place where the kind of help Sarah had to offer might be needed. He couldn’t see her, so went back again, passing through the area of safety and certainty, out to the other side, through another cordon of police, to another place of horror. Here he saw two Indian nurses, and a stretcher-bearer. A nun. Two nuns. However unpukka the nearest hospital was it had begun to operate. And there were two white women, one elderly, one quite young. A middle-aged Indian in European clothes stopped him. ‘Are you a doctor?’ ‘No,’ Perron said. ‘I wish to God I were.’ And passed on. The two white women were nursing children. The nuns, both Indians, were binding wounds, staunching the flow of blood from terrible looking cuts which revealed the whiteness of the bone, the redness of the flesh under the brown skin. Another middle-aged man, an Englishman this time, looked up and said, ‘Are you the doctor?’ ‘No,’ Perron said. The man said, ‘Never mind. Water’s the problem. Could you help with that? But it’s got to come from the tap down there. Not the one for caste-Hindus. But a lot of these wretches are dying of thirst if nothing else.’
It was at the tap ‘down there’ that he found Sarah. She was on her knees, in the filth and the muck, her skirt wet through, handing up little brass vessels to the man controlling the tap, reaching out for empty ones without looking, placing the filled vessels on the other side. The vessels, mugs, glasses were being brought and taken away by men and women and youths. He knelt by her. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let me take over.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m all right doing this. I can’t do the other thing. But if you can, please do.’
So Perron picked up one of the brass jugs and turned and went among the dying. Or the dead. It wasn’t always easy to tell. He knelt first by an old grey-beard who seemed to be smiling up at him gratefully, joyfully, but who did not respond when he put his hand under the man’s neck to try to raise him. The eyes were glazed and the smile was merely a death-smile.
*
The train had been the 10 a.m. express to Ranpur, its only scheduled stop Premanagar, normally reached at 11.15. The ambush had been laid at a point on the line some miles from the last of three wayside halts, all of which were reached and passed by the express within half an hour of leaving Mirat, and beyond which there was no habitation, nothing but desert, until you reached Premanagar.
As the train came out of a curve on to a straight level embankment, the driver had indeed seen a cow, apparently ruminating. He did not remember seeing more than two or three men asleep on the embankment, but at this point there were a few shade trees growing in the dips on either side, and when he brought the train to a stop he realized there were very many more men. They came up on both sides. Two – armed with swords – climbed on to the footplate. The others began running down the track and climbing into the carriages.
Some passengers said that the attackers were joined by men who had travelled on the train from Mirat and who now produced knives
and cudgels and joined the raiders. It must have been one of these men who had noted the compartment Ahmed Kasim got into. Opinions varied about the length of time the train was halted while the men went through it, dragging Muslims out or killing them on the spot. Some said only five minutes, others remembered the slaughter continuing for perhaps half-an-hour. The truth was that it lasted no more than ten or fifteen minutes. At the end of that time, getting a signal, one man released the cow (which had been tethered) and slapped it away to find its own salvation. The two intruders on the footplate ordered the driver to resume his journey and then jumped off. He needed no persuasion. He believed himself lucky to get away with his life and that of his young apprentice. He didn’t look back until the locomotive had got up speed. Then he saw men scattering across the rough rocky ground towards a huddle of ruined huts. He saw no vehicles, got no indication of how the men had congregated in this place, or how they hoped to get away. But there probably were vehicles, an old carrier-truck, perhaps, an ancient bus. It was forty-five minutes before the train reached Premanagar; perhaps another fifteen before the Premanagar authorities had contacted Mirat; perhaps another half-hour before troops, police and medical units from Mirat arrived at the scene of the ambush, having dropped search parties off at the villages served by the wayside halts. At the scene itself there was only the terrible evidence: the dead and the dying. By then, the attackers had had nearly two hours in which to scatter.
By road, the journey from Mirat to Premanagar could be accomplished in one and a half hours, only fifteen minutes longer than the journey by rail. The first contingent of troops and medical staff and armed police from Mirat arrived at about one-thirty in the afternoon, fifteen minutes later than the scheduled time of the express train’s normally delayed departure for Ranpur, after a leisurely stop for early first-class restaurant lunches. By then, the deputy commissioner and the district superintendent of police had been on the scene since mid-day. The transfer of dead and wounded to an emergency casualty station set up in the goods-yard area was nearly complete. Some kind of order had been restored. The carriages and the platform were being washed down. The rumour was that the train would leave for Ranpur at about 3 p.m., this time under armed guard, and mightn’t be more than an hour or so late reaching its destination that evening. About a dozen of the first-class passengers went into the restaurant. The bar had been in use for some time.