The Impressionist (23 page)

Finally the Picturewallah slows down, and ahead Pran hears the lowing of frightened calves. They have reached the place. Together they peer through the foliage into a clearing where three unfortunate animals are tethered, shuffling from side to side in agitation. Grabbing Pran’s collar, the Picturewallah points out the Major’s machan.

‘That one. Go. I will follow you in a few minutes.’

Pran has a thought. ‘What about the tigers? Have they released them yet?’

‘No. Of course not.’ He sounds unconvinced. ‘There have been no shots yet, have there?’

Cuffing Pran round the head, he propels him forward.

In subsequent months, various accounts will be given of what happens next. Some will be dictated to officials, others written or submitted as verbal depositions to Civil Service superiors. Most of these statements will differ wildly from one another about even the most basic facts, although by the bureaucratic alchemy of the India Office these differences will eventually be resolved and a unified narrative presented in the form of a two-page memorandum. This document, bearing eight signatures (including those of two cabinet ministers), will be marked Top Secret and henceforth viewed only by those sections of posterity in possession of the relevant British government security clearance. It will be seen as forming the final and definitive word on the Fatehpur Incident, and will, needless to say, be incorrect in almost every particular. The presence of armed insurgents in the forest, the politically motivated assassination attempt, the reckless and tragic gallantry of certain British serving officers – none of it is strictly true. The exception is the growl. All sources agree that the growling came first.

Pran hears it as he creeps towards the machan, and stops dead. The tigers, he thinks. They have let the tigers loose. This is destined to be his last coherent thought for some minutes, because the growling is swiftly followed by a volley of shots, screams, thumps, furious rustlings and a sudden whooshing sound. A trail of vapour shoots upwards from one of the trees, and the sky explodes in a ball of blinding light.

Many things are revealed.

First is the bombardier himself. Cornwell Birch knows there are no second takes in the blackmail business. Deciding to leave nothing to chance on such a complex night shoot, he has employed the radical but effective lighting technique of launching a military flare, as used by Uncle Sam’s Doughboys on the murky Western Front. From a neighbouring tree, he has a grandstand view of Major Privett-Clampe’s machan. Unfortunately the star of the show is not present. The platform is empty but for Jean-Loup, in full Major-seducing kit – a touch of rouge, tight shorts bulging artfully, khaki shirt unbuttoned to the waist. Jean-Loup stumbles, shading his eyes. His camera propped on an overhanging branch, Birch wobbles and swears – then (true professional) recovers his composure and turns his lens on the action at ground level.

This action is, to use a Hollywood term, sensational. The camera tracks the Nawab emerging from a bush, naked but for his topi. He is both tumescent and covered in blood, although most of this seems to belong to Minty, who, also naked, is running around him in circles clutching her wounded shoulder. Whether the Nawab is the source of the growl will never be entirely clear, because the larger of the two tigers is also trotting about the clearing. A swift pan to Prince Firoz, whimpering in fear, as he tugs at his soiled underwear and scrambles away from the huge, panting beast. A few shots thump into the ground around the Prince, answered by more gunfire that seems, bizarrely, to be aimed up at the machans. Then Major Privett-Clampe, the absent film-star, materializes wild-eyed from the trees, blasting to left and right like Tom Mix cornered by Injuns. From his wife’s machan comes an answering hail of fire. Minty and the Nawab take cover from another blast which appears, perhaps understandably, to come from the direction of Sir Wynd-ham. Someone yells out in pain. Imelda screams, runs for cover, and instantly knocks herself out cold on a tree trunk. All is terror. All is panic.

Pran watches, open-mouthed. Behind him the Picturewallah catches his breath, then inexplicably starts forward, perhaps thinking to take a photograph. Instantly he is felled by a stray shot, collapsing into the undergrowth in a quivering tweedy pile. Birch sends another flare into the night sky, in the process losing his balance and (an occurrence he will regret for the rest of his life) falling out of the tree and smashing his camera. Somebody calls out for a doctor. Other figures, Indian and European, flit among the trees in varying states of undress. Pran watches with a strange sense of disconnection. This is nothing to do with him. Fatehpur has breathed him in, and now it is exhaling. He takes a single, dream-like pace backwards. No reaction. No one will notice. No one will care. He turns, takes another, then another. Slowly, steadily he begins to walk away through the forest.

A crashing sound behind him. He whirls round. It is the Major, haggard and spectral in the phosphorescent light. He is bleeding from a wound to the head, and clutching his rifle in both hands, his knuckles white on the barrel.

‘My boy –’ he says, his voice small and strained.

‘I’m not your boy,’ Pran answers. The Major’s eyes widen, as if in surprise, and he sinks to his knees, the rifle sliding out of his grip. Then, in a movement of infinite slowness, he collapses backwards to the floor.

Pran stands, looking at the lifeless bulk of his body, white knees and stomach pointed up at the night sky. Then he carries on walking. After a while he realizes he is not alone. Four reflective eyes. A rumble of hot breath. The tigers have also had enough. They are leaving too. Together they walk on, heading towards the border with British India.

White Boy

The Amritsar road seems quiet to Jiwan Singh. He makes a sucking noise against his teeth and points this out to his brother. Abhay, a head shorter and a year younger, nods warily. The road is quiet. The day is hot. The two boys dangle their legs and squint into the sun and suck their teeth, the splayed yellow mouthfuls that are their most obvious inheritance from their father. The cart grumbles its way through the dust, its freight of clay pots clinking with each bump and rut in the road. The Singh family’s nameless buffalo pulls in the shafts and uses its tail to switch flies off its scrawny haunches.

The village women say that the potter Bishen Singh is not a clever man. All he is good for is getting sons. Six of them, and only two dead. This is no mean feat, but all the sons have Bishen Singh’s slow wits and bad teeth, which spoils it. Truly Bishen Singh’s wits are very slow. Only he would send his sons to market in Amritsar with the countryside in such a state. Only Bishen Singh’s sons would be incurious enough to give a lift to the stranger dozing beside them in the cart, and not ask a single question.

The cart rolls towards Amritsar. The sahib who does not speak like a sahib wakes up and scratches himself.

‘How far?’ he asks.

‘One more hour, sahib,’ says Jiwan Singh. The strange young man nods and tweaks at his sweat-soaked khaki shirt, wafting air to his glistening chest. Then he goes back to sleep. He has been asleep all morning. Had he been awake, he might have noticed the nervous faces of the guards by the railway bridge, or the rubble in the last village they passed, where the sahib aeroplanes had thrown down bombs as a punishment. Or the ominous quality of the silence. All morning the little cart has been travelling into it, curd-thick and fearful.

A silence like this takes time to form. It has been churned little by little out of the terrible things that have happened here during the past months. The Punjab is the breadbasket of the British Raj, and also its army recruitment ground. This landscape of flat fields crossed by irrigation channels and low mud banks means everything to the sahibs, and lately they have felt it slipping from their grasp. First there were rumours. Indians talking secretly to Russians and Germans, of Bolshevism, sedition – the inevitable fruits, said the hardliners, of educating natives. Handbills were pasted in public places.
Prepare yourself to kill and die.
Then, soon afterwards, small omens. A Hindu procession joined by Muslims. Shouts of
Mahatma-Gandhi ki-jai.
Street dancing and drum rhythms. Religious enemies seen drinking from the same cup. The sahibs began to count their guns, and say to each other that the time for talking was over. There were not enough of them. So many troops sick with the influenza. So few white faces in such a sea of brown. Throughout the Punjab, club smoking rooms filled with talk of firm government, of hitting first, and hard.

The mixture began to thicken. At public meetings, Congress babus called strikes. A crowd at a cricket match poured on to the pitch, ripping up the matting wicket and waving stolen stumps in the air. Then night-time arrests, nationalist leaders transported outside state borders. Another crowd, milling about in Aitchison Park, angry, aimless, uncomfortably close to sensitive places like the railway station and the telegraph exchange. A stone’s throw across the tracks were the Civil Lines, neat rows of bungalows sheltering neat angelic wives and neatly dressed cherubic children. Of course the soldiers opened fire. Soon bodies were strewn over the parched brown grass. That was how it started.

Gradually the city walls materialize through the heat haze. The sahib wakes up as the cart passes through the Ghi Mandi Gate, watched open-mouthed by the English Tommy guards. One of them walks forward, rifle levelled, but does not flag them down. Jiwan and Abhay and the sahib drive into the charred, silent city.

‘I will walk now,’ says Pran. ‘Thank you.’

The boys nod and suck their farewells. Pran is left standing by a charred heap of rubble, the ruined shell of the Alliance Bank.

Terrible things happened here. Horrors. The place bears its memories near the surface, memories of heavy wooden bank furniture dragged out on to the street and doused in kerosene. The image of Mr Thompson, the manager, his screaming face blackening in the flames as he is cremated by the chanting mob.

As Pran walks down the street, people stop and glare at him. For almost two weeks now the sahibs have only entered the city in military patrols. Their women and children are in the Gobind Garh Fort. Why is this boy strolling about, looking at the damage like a tourist? The gleaming dome of the Golden Temple peeps over the soot-blackened roofs. Oblivious to the reaction he is causing, Pran heads towards it.

All around the city, memories. Burning and looting. After the banks, the post office. The police station. The English shops in the Hall bazaar. White men beaten to death. Mrs Easdon, the zenana hospital doctor, splashing her face with a bottle of black ink, struggling into a sari while downstairs bottles were smashed in the dispensary and the Anglo-Indian nurses raped. Elsewhere, in the quiet town of Jalandhar, the General’s dinner party is interrupted by a telegram. Yes, he says to the nervous messenger. I have been expecting this. There is a big show coming. His guests carry their drinks on to the porch of Flagstaff House to wave him off.

Pran does not walk down the side-alley into the Jallianwala Bagh. He feels the weight of absence hanging over the place and hurries past. The only motion is in the air, a pair of kites, still hovering hopefully, even though it all happened a week ago. The entrance is tiny, and beyond it is the thing Pran does not know about but still does not want to see. A large open space with high walls all around, perfect for public meetings.

A week ago. The afternoon shadows lengthened while as many as fifty thousand people listened to a speech, a speech made in defiance of the General’s newly proclaimed martial law. The entrance was so narrow that the General could not get the armoured cars in, which irritated him since he had hoped to use their large-calibre machine guns. It was fiendishly hot and he, as usual, was in secret pain. The General’s pain was constant and severe, as it had been for years. Though his sclerotic twice-shattered legs were sending streams of tiny daggers up his back to his head, he was the Officer Commanding, and considered it a matter of honour not to display frailty in front of subordinates. So he did not complain, but went in with fifty rifles, Sikhs and Gurkha hillmen, and deployed them in a line.

The editor Durgas Das was standing on the platform, looking up at the spotter plane circling overhead. He had stopped speaking. The noise of its rotors was too loud for him to be heard. As the soldiers doubled in to the Jallianwala Bagh, he looked over the crowd and raised a newsprint-blackened hand to his forehead. People turned to face the disturbance. The soldiers knelt and for the briefest moment, like a premonition, there was silence.

Then, without warning, they started to fire.

Das saw the first wave of bodies fall, a breath of wind rustling a cornfield. Then he was caught up and pulled away. The only exit to the Jallianwala Bagh was behind the line of soldiers. Panicking people trod on top of each other, trying to scale the walls. The General directed his troops to aim where the crowd was thickest. The men fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded, and every so often, between volleys, there was another gulp of silence as they changed magazines.