Bhowani Junction (9 page)

female, twenty-eight, Eurasian, unmarried; daughter of
Thomas Jones, driver, Delhi Deccan Railway

Before going back to Kartar Singh I dried my eyes and blew my nose, but I was not sad. There was nothing to be sad about. I had honestly tried to find in Patrick all the qualities I used to love, and none of them were there. In the old days he was always making jokes, and I was always laughing at them. We would dance together and drink a little and hold hands. I had seen nothing but the good things about him—his bravery, and the way he stuck to things, and the soft heart he was always trying to make out he hadn’t got. Then somehow being in the WAC (I) changed everything. I ought to have come back to Bhowani more often, but there’d always been something new and exciting to do instead. Now I had to come back, and all I could see in Patrick were the worst trade-marks of our people—inferiority feelings, resentment, perpetual readiness to be insulted, all the things I was determined to get rid of in myself.

So when I had forced myself to be rude enough to get through his thick skin, I thought. That is over.

There was the job Savage had given me. I pushed Patrick down to the bottom of my mind. The harder I worked, the sooner he would stop being an uncomfortable lump, a small pain, in me.

When I got back Kartar moved a little away from the wall of the signal box. The Indian signalman was leaning out of the end windows above us. The inside lights silhouetted him sharply, for it was dark then. Kartar said in a low voice, ‘I have warned all our people to be ready to strike. Those are the orders I have received, and they are secret. Tell the Collector and the colonel-sahib.’

He spoke with some agitation, and I whispered, ‘What’s the
matter? Are you afraid there will be real trouble?’

‘Yes. In the yards. It is very bad and difficult,’ he said. ‘We have a right to strike. We ought to strike. But there are men in this union, and outside it, who will use the strike to do things that are no good for any of us. If I am not their leader someone else will be. Let no word leak out that it was I who warned you. But you understand that it is not certain yet?’

I jerked my head up and back at the signalman, and Kartar said, ‘He may suspect I have talked to you about the strike, but he won’t
know
. Besides, he does not belong to the union. He will be a dirty blackleg.’ He raised his voice and said aggressively, ‘No, miss-sahiba, it’s no use trying to bribe me. I don’t know, and I would not tell you if I did. Tell the military that.’

I took him up quickly and answered as angrily, ‘Very well then! You will be responsible for any trouble.’ And I walked away from him.

Near the station I slowed down. I found myself thinking of Patrick, and I was crying again. He was
such
a fool, and I understood him so well. I thought of going to find him. He would be in the refreshment room, drinking beer, or perhaps in the Institute.

But I would not go. I bad finished that, for the good of both of us.

The news that Kartar had given me ought to be taken to Colonel Savage at once. I couldn’t use the telephone, because there would be other people in the Traffic Office. I bicycled up the Pike to cantonments.

Kabul Lines consists of scattered stone bungalow-barracks and offices, each surrounded by a verandah, the roofs held up by pillars round the outer edges of the verandahs. In the battalion office building a Gurkha orderly with a tommy-gun was standing at ease outside the door marked
COMMANDING OFFICER
. He glanced at my rank badges, told me that the colonel-sahib was in, and stood aside.

I went in, closed the door behind me, and stopped quickly. My heart missed a beat. It was a bare room with a desk and three or four chairs. A naked bulb hung low over the desk on a
long flex from the ceiling. There were maps on the walls, and the man looking at one of them was not Colonel Savage but his adjutant, Graham Macaulay.

He turned round, and I moved back half a step. He said in a low voice, ‘Sorry about last night. Don’t hold it against me.’

I said, ‘Where’s Colonel Savage?’

‘He’ll be back in a minute,’ he said. ‘My office is through there.’ There was a door in a partition to his right. ‘Yours is there.’ He nodded at the opposite wall; there was another door, open, and through it I saw a corner of a small dark room.

He said, ‘Am I forgiven? You’re so—damn it, you’re beautiful. I just forgot myself.’

I said, ‘I haven’t forgiven you, and I won’t forget.’

I looked at him, and he still gave me the creeps, but I didn’t hate him. In a kind of unpleasant way I was grateful to him, because he’d set me free. I have always admired the English and, like the rest of us, pretended to be more English than I am. When Macaulay tried to rape me he broke that chain. I was free. If I wanted to like Ranjit, I could. If I wanted to turn toward India, my home, I could.

He said, ‘
Shhh!
Well, you must expect some male admiration, with those eyes. I just can’t help liking you, you know——’

Colonel Savage came in through Macaulay’s office. He glanced from Macaulay to me. Macaulay had come quite close to me while he talked. Honestly, I think he was sure that I would have let him do what he wanted to the night before, if only Ranjit had not interrupted him.

Colonel Savage said, ‘All right, Macaulay.’ Macaulay went back to his office. Colonel Savage said coldly to me, ‘
That
’
s
your office, Miss Jones. What did you find out?’

He thought that I had been encouraging Macaulay again. His nostrils were pinched with anger, but I didn’t care by then. I told him what Kartar Singh had said. When I had finished he said in the same hard voice, ‘Good. I’ll talk to the Collector. I’ll let you know if we decide to move any troops. We probably won’t just yet. Your father has been kind enough to ask me down to your house tomorrow evening. He is also
going to invite Mr Taylor. I am telling you in case you decide to be out at that time.’

He was making me angry in spite of myself. I said, ‘When did you see Pater—my father—sir? He’s not in to-day.’ It was a foolish thing to ask.

‘He takes Ninety-Eight Up through, doesn’t he?’ Colonel Savage said sarcastically. ‘I saw him on the platform—at sixteen-forty-four hours, if you want to know the exact time. And if you want to know what I was doing, I was just hanging idly around. And when I left the station I went straight to the Collector’s bungalow, where Taylor nearly ran over me, and you fell into my arms. You may go now. There is a lady’s bicycle waiting for you outside, complete with lamp, pump, and tool-bag.’

I saluted and went out, feeling that my face had been drained of blood and was sallow and pale brown and ugly. But there was still the undercurrent of thankfulness, of release. Macaulay had freed me; now Savage was pushing me farther away—from the English, from Patrick, from all the stagnation of the past.

At home, exasperated and tired and a little lightheaded, I was pleased to see that Rose Mary was not in. At that time of the evening Mater would usually be sitting in the back of a certain shop in the Little Bazaar, chewing betel nut and gossiping with the shopkeeper’s wife. She only went there when Pater was on a train. It was an open secret that she did go, though, and Pater was probably the only person in the Old Lines who didn’t know it. (The Railway Lines, where the bungalows of the railway people are, are called the Old Lines because they are built on the site of a military cantonment that was destroyed in the Mutiny.)

I ate a cold supper quickly and went into the parlour to read. But I could not read. On the page I saw faces instead of words. Inside myself I felt the lump that represented Patrick, and that made me think of all the people who seemed determined to drag me down. I brought their faces up, one by one, into my mind, and tried to see a single expression that was not set against me. I got up, switched off the tight, sat down again,
and closed my eyes.

Colonel Savage. He was hard, cruel, rude, self-willed. I did not really understand why he made himself so unpleasant to me. But he did, and it helped. I had noticed three small round patches, near the neck, in the bush shirt he’d been wearing that evening. The ugly white light in his office showed them up on the faded green of the material. And he had a puckered dead-white scar in his neck a little higher up, on the left—bullet wounds from a machine gun, I supposed. He was lucky to be alive.

Macaulay. It is difficult to describe how ‘bad’ he felt. Not that I do not like to be admired by men, but he was like a rubber lizard that came crawling through slime to get at me.

Rose Mary. We were sisters, but no more. She had always been man-crazy, and from the way she spoke to Patrick, and Patrick’s embarrassment, I was sure she’d slept with him while I was away. I didn’t blame Patrick, somehow, but it made everything Rose Mary did aggravate me even more than it used to. For instance, when the telegram came from G.H.Q. that monday morning, we were both still in bed. Our rooms were next to each other, and we shared the same bathroom. As soon as Nathoo had given me the telegram, Rose Mary came into my room. Her hak was in curl papers, and her face was wet with perspiration. When she’d read the telegram she was very anxious that I should somehow get out of the job. I knew she wanted to keep me away from working with Patrick. That was probably the main reason, foolish though it was, that I did not pretend to be sick.

I wondered where Rose Mary was. I think I knew, but to myself I pretended to be wondering.

Patrick. I tried not to think about him, but he came up. He had a loud voice. Sometimes he acted like a bully, sometimes like a soft-hearted old woman. He thought he was a good driver, but he just held that precious Norton on the road by sheer strength, which I know is not right. He wore his topi all day and most of the night, to show he was not an Indian.

And then I thought, he loves me, and I’ve known him since I was a little girl. I know him best of anyone in the world.

Quickly I thought of Ranjit—Ranjit Singh Kasel. Ranjit was sure the Congress had had nothing to do with the derailment at Pathoda. Why was he sure? Was he secretly a Congress man himself? I was beginning to sympathize with anyone who was against the British, and Congress was certainly against the British. Ranjit wasn’t angry with Savage or the soldiers. He had said, that night after Macaulay had gone, that Colonel Savage was only a representative of the system—imperialistic capitalism. He talked earnestly, and all the time he quoted his mother. He knew about our troubles over St Thomas’s School. He looked at me with his large solemn eyes, and I thought he was weighing me up. Would I snap at him if he gave his honest opinions? Was I interested enough to listen? He must have taken confidence, because what he said then about our situation, the position of the Anglo-Indians, was exactly what I’d come to believe myself since my return to Bhowani.

He was upset when I asked him why he didn’t wear the Sikh bangle, why he’d cut his hair, why he was an atheist. Atheists are very rare in India. He didn’t really explain; he only defended his mother’s point of view. He was a very sweet-tempered, kind man. If he kissed a girl, I thought, the girl would feel sweet and dedicated, but I did not think she would be excited. I wondered.

Sitting in the darkened parlour, I tried to imagine that the light was on and Ranjit was sitting there with me. What would we talk about? Dancing? He couldn’t dance, not our way. Music? His music was so different that it sounded to us like cats fighting. Food? Houses? Clothes? Drinks? There would be nothing for us to talk about, at that time, except serious things like politics and strikes and the future of mankind.

But now I couldn’t talk to the English or to my own people about anything except clothes and drinks and dancing.

I opened my eyes slowly. The front-door latch clicked with a tiny noise. Through the wall I heard fast, light breathing in the passage. I sat still, my hands gripping the arms of the chair. I heard Rose Mary’s whisper. ‘She’s not in. I’ve looked.’

But hadn’t they seen my bicycle? No. I’d put it away at the
back, and they hadn’t enough sense left to look for it there. They were thinking of other things. Patrick gasped ‘Quick, oh, quick!’

The words and the gasping were like a trigger. Johnny Tallent had said that to me, the same way, the same voice, in another dark passage as we struggled to another dark bedroom. I had had even less excuse. I had not been drinking, while Rose Mary and Patrick had. But the trigger clicked in me, and I stood up, my legs stiff and trembling, my eyes dry, and my hands like claws, the nails piercing into the palms.

I heard them shuffling along the passage and thought, Why do I care? I heard Rose Mary’s door squeak, and I thought, Why won’t Patrick disappear from inside me? I heard the bed creak to welcome them on to it.

I stood, shaking, in the middle of the room and searched round in the darkness for something—a knife, a club. There was nothing. And yet I could still reason. I thought, I can make this another break, another horror like Macaulay’s, which will free me from another set of chains. And yet truly I was helpless. What I did I had to do.

I slipped out into the passage, making no sound, and went silently to Rose Mary’s door. They wouldn’t have heard me then if I’d fired a pistol. I waited, listening, shaking, writhing, until the worst moment, the best; then I smashed the door open and switched on the light and ran in, screaming at them.

In that moment I had gone back where we came from, which was the Indian loose women of a hundred years ago, and I had taken Rose Mary and Patrick with me. I heard the words pouring out of my mouth, out of my heart—a flood of Hindustani and our cheechee English, thick with language that I
have tried all my life to believe I never knew. I saw those two locked together like animals, going red and white by turns, and I knew that I, no less than they and the whole incident, was disgusting and degraded. It was the worst side, not of our blood but of our circumstances, and I knew I had not reached any freedom or broken any chains by wallowing in that filth.

The next evening I saw their half-naked bodies still in my mind, though actually they were fully dressed and sitting together on the sofa opposite Colonel Savage. Mater was to my right, perched on the edge of the small hard chair. Pater stood in front of the firescreen. They were all, except me, dressed in their best. I had deliberately not changed out of uniform. Pater’s blue serge suit shone because it was old, and his face shone because the night was hot. It was eight o’clock, and a couple of heavy showers had cooled the air but made it more humid.

Colonel Savage had just arrived. I saw with annoyance that he had changed into his pre-war khaki drill trousers and tunic, with which he wore a shirt, collar, and tie. I had expected him to think that any old clothes were good enough for an engine-driver’s house.

Pater gave him a foaming glass of warm beer and at once began to ask him about his medals. The first one was the M.C. with two bars. I know you can get the M.C. only for bravery in actual fighting against the enemy. It is not like the D.S.O., which your soldiers can win for you. Colonel Savage told Pater what the medals were, but when Pater asked how he had got them he said, ‘Fighting, Mr Jones. Look, I don’t know about you, but I’m hot as hell. Would you and your wife mind if I took off my coat and tie?’ He mopped his brow with a big khaki handkerchief and smiled at Mater. She smiled back, like a wooden image, but said nothing.

Pater said, ‘My, of course not, Colonel. Take off your coat. I think I will join you.’

Colonel Savage praised the beer. Then he raised his glass and pointed at the big picture of my great-grandfather and said to Pater, ‘Is that your grandfather?’ So Pater talked hap
pily about the Sergeant, as we usually called the man in the picture.

Mater sat quiet, apparently seeing nothing, but after a few minutes, she said, ‘Father, you are sweating through your best shirt.’ Pater interrupted himself and looked at her with disgust, and then tried to continue what he had been saying about the Sergeant. But he could not. I could see very clearly then that really he was disgusted with himself for marrying her and sleeping with her. He was three-quarters English; she was one-quarter.

Colonel Savage said, ‘Do you mind if I smoke one of these?’ He pulled out his cigar-case. ‘Perhaps you don’t care for the smell, Miss Jones. They are radier strong.’ He glanced at Rose Mary, but not at me.

Rose Mary said, ‘Oh, no, Colonel Savage, I
love
the smell of cigars. It is so rich.’

‘Trichinopolies. About eight annas each, Miss Jones, that’s all, I’m afraid.’ He offered the case to Patrick and Pater, who both accepted. When his cheroot was drawing well he nodded at the picture of the Sergeant again and said, ‘He must have been a fine man. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if he and my great-grandfather hadn’t met in these very parts.’

‘What a surprise!’ Pater said. ‘When could that have been?’

‘The Mutiny,’ Colonel Savage said. I could not honestly make out whether he was being nice to them as a sort of joke, something he could describe and laugh at when he got back to the mess, or whether he was really pleased to be there with them. He made no attempt to be nice to me.

Pater said, ‘Ah, the Mutiny was a bad time. We learned our lesson then, Colonel, didn’t we? You can never trust the niggers.’ Pater shook his head and puffed deeply at the cigar. He was very happy.

Some words are like goads. In the old days it hurt me to hear such words as ‘cheechee’ or ‘blacky-white’. In the last year, and particularly in the last week, it had become increasingly painful to me to hear ‘Wog’ or ‘nigger’ or even ‘native’.

Colonel Savage said, ‘In some ways the present situation is radier like eighteen fifty-seven.’

Pater said, ‘You mean there is going to be another mutiny, Colonel? Don’t say it—my God, no, don’t say that!’

‘There won’t be another mutiny,’ Colonel Savage said confidently. ‘But change is in the air. People are restive.’

Here was another goad—for Patrick this time. Even before Savage had finished speaking I turned toward Patrick, hoping he wouldn’t make a fool of himself, but knowing he would burst out with something.

Patrick said, ‘Everyone is always saying that. But nothing happens. Nothing will ever happen.’ I think that he had already drunk a lot of beer to give himself the courage to face me.

Colonel Savage said politely, ‘In many ways I hope you’re right. I’m not sure that I want any change, and I certainly don’t want it to be the cause of fighting, or to be caused by fighting. I don’t want to fight any more just yet.’

The light shone full on his long row of medal ribbons. Rose Mary asked him whether he liked fighting. Rose Mary had a trick, which she thought attracted men, of sometimes speaking very hesitantly and coyly, as though she was a little girl of eight.

Colonel Savage laughed quite naturally. He said, ‘On the whole I do like fighting. But not this week.’

‘Oooh, you
like
it!’ Rose Mary squealed. ‘You like killing people? I think you must be a very dangerous man, Colonel.’

Pater smiled fondly at her and at me, to see us both here talking freely with an English lieutenant-colonel. Patrick poured himself more beer, spilling some on the bearskin. Colonel Savage said, ‘It’s too difficult to explain unless you’ve been to the wars, and heaven knows I——’

Patrick said loudly, ‘Everybody couldn’t go to the wars.’

Colonel Savage said, ‘Of course not. I was only——’

‘The railways had to run!’ Patrick said. I think it had been a long time since anyone had interrupted Colonel Savage like that while he was speaking. Patrick got louder and more excited. He said, ‘It was essential work. Four times I tried to enlist, but they would not take me. They said——’

Then Pater interrupted him by saying, ‘They would not
make you a captain like you deserve, you mean!’ Pater meant to be unpleasant. He did not really like Patrick.

‘That’s not the point, Mr Jones,’ Patrick shouted. ‘They said I was essential! I had to stay and run the railway. There were no medals for that, though there was danger too. There were strikes and derailments sometimes, and men burned alive on the footplate in forty-two. There was plenty of danger on the railways, Colonel Savage, I tell you, but there were no medals.’

Colonel Savage kept calm, but Patrick’s shouting and excitement had infected Pater, so that now he was yelling. ‘Did they derail your desk, then, man?’ he yelled. ‘
I
was on the bloody footplate in forty-two, not you. You were making out your bloody graphs!’

I couldn’t stand it. I said, ‘There is no need to shout, Pater.’ I tried hard to speak softly, but I know that I was shouting.

Patrick took no notice of my warning. I had tried to tell him, to tell all of them, that we were behaving just the way Anglo-Indians are supposed to behave in the worst stories against us; but he blundered on. He shouted, ‘There was danger everywhere. I say the colonel does not know what it is like to be in danger
all
the time from people all round you, not knowing whether the police even would come in and cut our throats in bed, and having no guns to look after ourselves with. Nothing! I bet the Gurkhas would not like that, eh, Colonel?’

It was strange, since I understood Colonel Savage so little, and cared less, that I knew immediately that he would retaliate when Patrick mentioned the Gurkhas. His mouth relaxed, he leaned back more comfortably in his chair, and he said lazily, ‘Oh, the Army had that kind of danger too, you know. I hear that a good many chaps were evacuated with shellshock after three weeks in Calcutta—taxis backfiring on Chowringhee, Dakotas buzzing the Great Eastern, military policemen with dirty great guns in their holsters—
loaded
guns—American Pfcs with ten-ton lorries and six rows of gongs. I tell you, it was really terrifying.’

The telephone began to ring. I had not spoken to Patrick since the night before, but now I saw a chance to stop this
unpleasant argument, and I said quickly, ‘Go and answer it, Patrick.’

He stood up, swaying a little and glowering at Colonel Savage. He muttered something under his breath, but he went out. he came back in a minute and said, ‘Mr Jones. For you. Someone wants to know where that fellow Wayali is.’

‘The cleaner?’ Pater said, shuffling to the door. ‘I don’t know.’ Soon he came back, shaking his head.

Colonel Savage said cheerfully, ‘Mr Jones, I’d very much like to have a ride with you on the footplate one day. Do you think that would be difficult to arrange?’

‘You would really like that, Colonel?’ Pater said, so pleased and surprised, though why he should have been I don’t know. I’ve never met a man who didn’t want to ride on the footplate. Pater said, ‘It is very dirty. On the branch line, now, it would be easy to arrange. The traffic officers never go to see what is happening there.’

‘Oh, yes, we do,’ Patrick muttered sullenly.

Pater said, ‘But on the main line it is more strict. It has to be, you understand. And I only run on the main line. I am a mail and express driver. I am on Bhowani Number One Roster.’

‘What does that mean?’ Colonel Savage asked. He got it in before Patrick had time to open his mouth to start the old argument.

Rose Mary said eagerly, ‘It means that he is one of the very senior drivers, Colonel. A roster is what we call, on the Delhi Deccan Railway, four or five drivers who drive certain trains. Bhowani Number One Roster takes the top trains—one man to-day, another tomorrow, the third the next day, and then the day after that the first man again. It is quite simple.’

Pater said, ‘She has made it as clear as mud, eh, Colonel?’ He pinched Rose Mary happily on the cheek. He went on. ‘It is like this, Colonel…’

If Colonel Savage understood what Pater then told him, he was a very clever man. Pater rattled off numbers and figures and mileages and times like a machine gun. He was just beginning to give Colonel Savage a
viva voce
examination—‘What
time did I get in to-day? then, Colonel, and where from and on what train?’—when the telephone bell began to ring again.

Pater said crossly, ‘I don’t know what is the matter with that thing tonight!’ He went out. We sat in silence until he came back. He said, ‘This time it is the sheds, looking for my fireman. He is probably drunk in the bazaar. You see, Colonel, he is a Number-One-Roster fireman and does all my trains with me. My trains—the mails and expresses—are taken by XB or XC locomotives. They are——’

Rose Mary was getting impatient. She never liked to stick to one thing for long. Besides, Pater had taken the limelight away from her. She interrupted. ‘Pater, I have just thought of a
wonderful
idea! All-India Radio is broadcasting a concert of hot jazz music. Why can’t we dance! I
love
to dance. Do you like to dance, Colonel?’

‘I’m very fond of dancing,’ Colonel Savage said.

‘In here?’ Pater said. He wasn’t sure about it, but he was pleased that Rose Mary should be so modern and go-ahead.

Rose Mary said, ‘Of course, Pater. We can push the chairs back. Patrick, help me with the rug.’

She turned up the wireless and pirouetted once or twice in the middle of the floor. Colonel Savage put his cigar carefully in the ashtray on the mantelpiece and bowed in front of her. He said, ‘May I have the honour of this dance, Miss Jones?’

I got up quickly to go out. Colonel Savage was making fools of us because he was that kind of man. We were making fools of ourselves because we had to. Before I reached the door Pater called to me, ‘Hey, Victoria, where are you going?’

‘The bathroom,’ I said, and went out.

I didn’t go to the bathroom. I sat in the chair in front of my dressing-table, feeling unhappy. The loud, jerky music shook the whole house. Patrick and Rose Mary had been on her bed just through the wall I was staring at. And who was to blame for that? Not Rose Mary. She was only a silly, scheming, promiscuous cheechee. Not Patrick—no, not him. That left only myself.

BLAH blah blah,
I said angrily to myself, like the trumpet on the radio. It was the American, Louis Prima—a wild, hic
cuping, screaming noise. Johnny Tallent used to play that record to me. But how could anyone dance to it? I went back to the parlour before Pater could send Mater to come and fetch me.

Rose Mary and Colonel Savage were still dancing together. They jigged like mad people on the little square of clear floor. How foolish, how ridiculous Colonel Savage looked! Rose Mary’s behind bounced, her thin legs jerked, her breasts bounced, her high beels tapped. It was nice to think how unattractive they looked.

Pater shouted to me, ‘You dance with Patrick, Victoria.’

‘I don’t feel like dancing,’ I said, and Patrick said the same thing at the same time.

‘What is the matter with you tonight, girl?’ Pater asked me crossly. I saw that Colonel Savage and Rose Mary had heard what I said. Rose Mary was smiling. Pater said to me, ‘You have been behaving very badly.’

The telephone bell began to ring. I said quickly, ‘I’ll go.’

Macaulay was on the line. He said, ‘Miss Jones? Miss Victoria Jones? Could I speak to the colonel, please? He’s with you, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. I’ll get him,’ I said.

‘Is he behaving himself? Don’t get taken in by that crown and pip, Victoria, he’s——’

I put the phone down on the table, went back to the parlour, and told Colonel Savage. He excused himself and went out. When he had gone, Pater whispered irritably, ‘Turn that thing down, Rose Mary. How can the colonel hear himself speak?’ Rose Mary shrugged and turned it down. We all sat for a few minutes. Pater stared from Rose Mary to me and back again, and then at Patrick. He muttered, ‘What is the matter with all of you tonight? Please behave better in front of my guest.’ No one answered him. We could hear the murmur of Colonel Savage’s voice.