Bhowani Junction (6 page)

The engine stopped, hissing. The carriages stopped. One man jumped down from each carriage, ran across the tracks, and knelt down, looking outward, his rifle ready in his hands.

Victoria jumped forward, calling, ‘Look out!’ because one
of the Gurkhas had settled in the path of a moving fly-shunted wagon. Savage snapped, ‘Mind your own business, Miss Jones. He is supposed to look after himself.’ The Gurkha moved aside before the wagon reached him, and Victoria muttered, ‘Sorry, sir.’

The other Gurkhas poured out of the carriages, man after man after man in an endless single file from each door. British officers appeared, and Lieutenant Macaulay went over to speak to one of them.

The Gurkhas were dirty and quiet and of course small. They weren’t like the sepoys of the Indian garrison battalion that had been here before, nor like the soldiers I’d seen walking about in clean, starched uniforms in Agra. They all formed up close by us, and they smelled of the train and ammonia and the cardamom seeds a lot of them were chewing. A few were thickset older men, but mostly they were young chaps, almost children. Their faces were round and unlined under the dust and the streaky sweat. They moved with a sort of unhurried bad temper, and almost without noise. In less than ten minutes the first batch crunched away, turned on to the Deccan Pike, and marched north toward cantonments. They had come from the war, lots of wars, but it seemed to me that they had brought their wars with them.

Ten or twelve Gurkhas under the old subadar-major came over to the tea urn. It looked to me as if those men had been ordered that minute to be ‘sick’, but Mrs Williams didn’t notice anything. I was drinking some tea myself when Savage came up to me. He had a short rifle in his hand, and he was buckling his equipment on. He said, ‘Ready? Miss Jones, we’re going now.’

‘Very good, sir,’ she said again, looking him in the eye.

He was swinging away from her. He stopped, whipped round, and said, ‘All right, Miss Jones. Mind you see the chamber pots are clean by the time I come back.’

She was so angry she could not speak, but it was really her fault for goading him. She knew he hated that phrase. He waited a moment, then turned away. A ganger brought the trolley down, and we got on and started off.

On the trolley were Colonel Savage, me, a sergeant (they call them havildars in the Indian Army), and five sepoys—called riflemen in Gurkha regiments. One of the riflemen was Savage’s orderly, a thin Gurkha of about eighteen called Birkhe.

It had been still and hot all afternoon, but when we began to move the wind scorched our faces. The trolley seemed to be running all the time through the open door of a furnace, and we had to screw up our eyes against the hot wind and the dust. I soon put on my dark glasses.

The Gurkhas lost their bad temper when we began to move. They pushed each other and joked, and Savage made jokes with them which I couldn’t understand because he spoke very quickly in Gurkhali, the Gurkhas’ language. We were packed on there like sardines, and I asked him to tell the Gurkhas not to play the fool or someone would fall off.

Dabgaon is twenty-four miles from Bhowani Junction, and we got there in about an hour and a half. Savage got out his map and showed me a pencil mark on it. ‘This is the map reference the Wimpy gave,’ he said, ‘where it spotted those men.’ The place he pointed to was near the Cheetah bridge about half-way between Dabgaon and Malra. So we went there and hauled the trolley off the line.

The line curved there and ran in a cutting. At the north end of the cutting it ran out on to an embankment, and then on to the bridge approach. We began to search the line. A gang from Malra was already on the job, and after an hour they reported to us that nothing was wrong with the line and rails. They thought the bridge was all right too, though it would have been much easier to hide something there.

Savage had been standing on the top of the cutting, looking all round through his binoculars. To the west the country was thick, dry jungle; to the east it was mostly fields. He checked against his map the positions of two villages we could see in the fields. Then he pointed into the jungle to the west and said that another village, which his map said was less than a mile away, must be in there. The Gurkhas were searching in the fields and along the edge of the jungle.

The sun went down. The railway gang walked back together, singing, toward Malra. The Gurkhas trotted in, and we all gathered round the trolley. The Gurkhas began to eat chupattis and drink a little out of their water-bottles. I got hungry, and I wanted to go back to Bhowani. We couldn’t do anything more out there.

But Savage pointed to his map and said, ‘We’ll go to these three villages in turn and ask the headmen if any strangers have been seen since midday. It’s quite possible that the people the Wimpy saw might be hiding in one of the villages.’

I said, ‘But Colonel——’ and he looked at me, his eyes gleaming in the twilight, and I shut my mouth. What the hell good was it for me, the District Superintendent of Traffic, to go crashing round in the dark through the jungles and across the fields, when my job was in the office in Bhowani?

Savage said, ‘Haven’t you got anything to eat?’

I said, ‘No.’

He said, ‘You are a bloody fool. I warned you. Here.’ He gave me some of his. He had a tin of bully beef and a few cold chupattis that looked as if they’d been floating round in his haversack for several days, or perhaps in Birkhe’s. They were gritty and dusty and tasted of tobacco; he didn’t seem to notice but ate them quickly. While we were eating he said, ‘I understand the Collector has told you why my battalion has been sent here in such a hurry.’

I said, ‘Yes. Because of K. P. Roy.’ I had Roy on my mind whenever I thought of the railway.

Savage said, ‘Partly him. Would you know him by sight if we happened to see him in one of these villages?’

I said, ‘No.’

All of a sudden it came over me what we were really up to. I
had
thought that the men the plane had seen on the line might be K. P. Roy and his followers trying to do something bad. But I had never thought we would go chasing them, and perhaps finish up facing K. P. Roy in a dark corner of a smelly village in the middle of the night. K. P. Roy would fight for his life with everything he had, and he would shoot first.

When it was quite dark we set off. Savage used his compass.
There was about half a moon, and the leaves crackled under our feet. It was like some of my shooting expeditions, only we were after a man instead of an animal, and the trees seemed alive and frightening. Dogs began to bark before we got to the first village, and Savage sent two Gurkhas slipping round through the trees to get behind the village before we walked up to it.

We saw the lights, and then, when we went forward, a gun exploded with a tremendous roar. I dropped to my stomach, and slugs of lead and old bits of glass and nails whistled through the branches above us. It was the village watchman, wide awake and very nervous. Savage shouted, ‘Don’t shoot. We’re soldiers.’

We went into the village. No one had gone to sleep there yet, and I could see they were all ill at ease. Savage was suspicious and cross-examined the headman for some time. But if they had seen any strangers they weren’t going to tell us, and we hadn’t got the time or the authority to search every house.

We left there about ten and marched back through the jungle, across the railway, and across the empty fields to the second village. It was the same procedure, only the watchman didn’t shoot at us. I insisted on walking in front that time, because I thought Savage was thinking I was a coward for falling on my face when they fired at us. I had never been fired at before, though I had been in the Auxiliary Force, India, of course, ever since I joined the railway.

I am used to the jungles, but of course I had to trip up two or three times while I was leading the way, just because Savage was expecting me to, and finally he told me to get back and let a Gurkha lead. He was terribly impatient. My shoes were ordinary thin shoes, and my feet hurt, and by then I was hot, thirsty, and tired.

The moon was dull orange when we set out for the last village. It was a clear night, but near the earth in the hot weather there is a layer of hot wavy air packed with dust, and the moon, shining through it, looks orange-coloured. The dogs in that village could hear the dogs barking in the one we were leaving, across a mile and a half of fields. Savage stopped to
listen and think, and instead of going the direct way he swung us off to one side. We came up to the last village from the left, where I remembered seeing a low rocky hill.

While we were moving across that hill, going very quietly, I got a tickle in my throat and had to cough. At once something went
pad-pad
a little in front. Savage said in Hindustani, ‘Standstill, or I fire!’

The shuffling noise went on among the thin thorn bushes and the rocks, where I suppose the villagers usually grazed their goats. I saw a shape moving. It might have been a man running, it might have been a deer or a jackal or a pig. It looked like nothing but a change of light between the bushes. Besides me Savage pulled his carbine into his shoulder and fired four times very quickly—
bang-bang-bang-bang!

The shape had gone, or the movement had stopped, I don’t know which. I had forgotten how much my feet hurt. The thing might be K. P. Roy with a gun, but what frightened me more was that I was with these people who simply shot at anything that didn’t do at once what they told it to. These people had brought the war to Bhowani, as I said.

We spread out and went forward, searching everywhere. There was no sign of anything or anyone. Finally Savage took us to the village. They’d heard the shooting, and again the watchman fired at us. The headman said there bad been strangers there early in the day. Some of them had left before dusk, and one had just gone. No one knew who he was, but the headman described him, and Savage made a note.

At last we walked back to the railway line. By then my feet were bleeding, but I didn’t complain to Savage. When we reached the trolley he said, ‘If you hadn’t coughed you could have saved us a lot of trouble—and yourself, I expect.’

I said I was sorry, but that I couldn’t help it. He said, ‘Imagine a cough will get you a bullet in the liver. You’ll find you can help it. Come on, hurry up.’ After wasting hours out there in the middle of the night, he was suddenly in a hell of a hurry to get back.

We got on the trolley and headed south. It was two o’clock before we got to Bhowani, and I realized that Savage had kept
Victoria all that time in my office with Kasel. Macaulay had probably been there most of the time too.

We looked a sight as we walked in—Savage, the Gurkha orderly Birkhe, and me. We were covered with dust, my clothes were torn and my shoes cracked. I limped to the chatti in the corner and poured about half of it down my throat. Until I’d done that I couldn’t even notice who was in the room.

I saw that there were a couple of empty beer bottles in the wastepaper basket by Victoria’s table, and crumbs of bread and a chicken bone on the floor. I thought, Victoria must have had supper in here with Macaulay. There was no one else who would be likely to bring beer up there, except me. Savage saw the bottles and crumbs too and glanced quickly at Victoria, almost nervously. I thought he was going to ask her about them, but he didn’t. Macaulay wasn’t there—only Kasel and Victoria and us. Victoria was pale, and her eyes looked large and dry. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought she was shaking a bit.

‘Now can we all go to bed?’ I asked Savage.

‘Who’s on night duty here?’ he asked.

‘There is no night duty. The Assistant Stationmaster looks after the Traffic Office at night,’ I said.

I thought for a minute Savage was going to order Kasel and me to take turns sitting up there all night like military sentries. By God, I would have given him a piece of my mind. But he didn’t. He took no notice at all. He stretched his legs comfortably and said to Kasel, ‘What’s your real name? I can’t stand calling you Kasel.’

‘Ranjit Singh,’ Kasel said.

Savage began to light a cheroot and said, ‘Do most of the Kasel clan still live round Amritsar?’

Damn it, it was a quarter past two then. I looked at the clock.

Kasel said, ‘Yes, Colonel—there and Jullundur and Hoshiarpur.’ He was pleased as punch that Savage knew about his clan, and he could not hide it. He had a very expressive face. I had never heard of the Kasel clan.

Savage picked up a field telephone that was on Victoria’s table. The Gurkhas must have put it in during the night. The wires went out through the window. Savage spoke on it to his people in cantonments. When he had finished, Victoria stood up and said, ‘May I go now, sir?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The Collector’s out of Bhowani and won’t be back until lunchtime. I’m going to see him at five o’clock. Meet me then at his bungalow. Taylor, you’d better come too. Bring a pad and pencil, Miss Jones. You know shorthand?’

‘Yes, sir. Very good, sir.’

He looked at her with a frown but said nothing and went out, with Birkhe following in his footsteps as he always did.

I got up and sat down again at once, my feet hurt so badly. At last I forced myself to walk because I wanted to take Victoria home. Before we left I told Kasel to close the office.

I followed Victoria very slowly down the stairs, along the platform, and on to the footpath beside the line. I was limping terribly. I said, ‘Go slowly, Victoria. If you knew how my feet hurt. It was all a damned waste of time. It was exciting, though. I got shot at!’

Victoria said, ‘Oh,’ and her voice was sharp. I began to tell her all about it. That made me forget my feet, and soon I was walking faster. Was it K. P. Roy that Savage had shot at? Had he hit him? Or had he fired at a peaceful traveller? What were K. P. Roy and the Congress wallahs going to do, anyway? I talked about all this.

Victoria said nothing all the while, but by the time we came to the signal I felt fine. The last time we had been there was after the Sir Meredith Sullivan evening, when I had felt sad because I wanted to help her and we were drifting apart. Now it was quite different, I don’t know why. Perhaps it was seeing the Gurkhas with their rifles and tommy-guns, and even working closely with Savage, who was so beastly sure of himself.