The Impressionist (24 page)

The Deputy Superintendent of Police stood beside the General and watched. You are teaching these people a lesson, he said. They will not forget it in a hurry. The General nodded. His troops fired 1,650 rounds.

Like the Deputy Superintendent of Police, the General thought of his bullets in pedagogical terms. Ethically, the dark-skinned races are like children, and the General was fulfilling the primary duty of the white man in Asia, which is to say that he was laying down a clear line. His bullets were reminders of the meaning of law. Repeat after me.

After ten minutes or so the General gave the order to withdraw. As he returned for dinner, the kites and vultures were already circling overhead. Corpses were piled in drifts around the walls of the Jallianwala Bagh. The well in the corner was choked with them. As darkness fell, relatives looking for their dead were attacked by jackals and feral dogs. Under martial law there was an eight o’clock curfew. Most of the townspeople were now too scared to break it, so the wounded remained where they lay until morning. The Jubilee Hospital was run by Europeans. Not one person applied there for treatment.

The next day bodies were burnt five to a pyre. People made haste to hide the evidence that their relatives were at the gathering. No one knew how many were dead. The Europeans held a meeting, where the Civil Surgeon tried to canvass support for bombing the city. He would finish the job, if only it were his decision. In the afternoon the General summoned Indian leaders to the Kotwal. I am a soldier, he told them in clipped parade-ground Urdu. For me the battlefields of France and Amritsar are the same. Speak up if you want war. If you want peace, open your shops at once. You will inform me of the badmashes. I will shoot them. Obey my orders.

Pran hurries on past. A week of martial law has left a stink in Amritsar. Charred wood. Uncollected refuse. The sweetness of cremated flesh and the sharpness of burnt sari silk, powdered and used to staunch bleeding. He catches a glimpse of gold and water at the end of a street, the Temple in the middle of its huge tank. A tailor sits outside his shop, blank and impassive. A few people pass by on the narrow street. They are on foot, as the General has requisitioned all the tongas and bicycles for military use.

Turning a corner, Pran is confronted by an unusual sight. Three English soldiers, big brick-coloured Somerset men, stand over a Sikh labourer. They are following him as he crawls on his belly down the lane.

‘Jaldi! Jaldi, you brown bastard!’ barks the Sergeant. The crawling man complains that he lives here, and why will they not let him walk? The white men give no impression of understanding.

‘Get on down there and shut up. Chalo!’

But he has no other way to go. How can he do this each time? His wife does not dare to leave the house. God the merciful knows this cannot be right. Above the lane faces peer from high windows, then disappear again. The young ones, the two privates, follow on either side, occasionally poking the man with their rifles. His white kurta is already smeared with filth. He tries to avoid another pile of dung, but the Sergeant’s boot comes down on the small of his back, pressing him hard into it. He crawls on, in silence.

Pran has stumbled on another lesson, this one occasioned by the General’s belief in the sacredness of women. It is a point of faith with him, as in his opinion it ought to be with any man. Unfortunately it is not universally held. During the rioting a woman was violated on this street. The missionary, Miss Sherwood, was riding her bicycle (typical bloody missionary, trying to live among her flock’, look where it got her) when she was attacked by the mob. The General has been to see her in the Jubilee Hospital, and his visit made him very angry. An Englishwoman, weak, soiled, mummified in bandages, hovering between life and death. He paced up and down in the antiseptic-smelling corridor, racking his brain for a suitable punishment. Something exemplary. Something to fit the crime. So, in preparation for a round of public floggings, he has had a whipping triangle set up halfway down the street and decreed that any native wishing to pass along it must do so on all fours. If they will behave like animals, they shall be treated as such. The order has been in force for two days. The watercarriers and the clearers of nightsoil are avoiding the area. No one but the trapped residents will brave the soldiers. The gutters are clogged with rubbish and excrement, steaming in the summer heat.

‘Bloody hell,’ says one of the privates. ‘What are you doing out here?’

Pran realizes with a rush of fear that the man is speaking to him. The Sergeant and the other private look round, identical expressions of surprise on their faces. Any moment now they will attack him, arrest him, make him crawl and grovel like the man at their feet. He cannot force his mouth to form words. He should run.

‘Are you mad?’ asks the Sergeant. ‘You should be back at the station, or wherever you’ve been billeted. Where did you come from?’

Pran understands. They think he is one of them. Despite the sweat, the dirt of five days’ travelling in the same clothes, the way he holds his head and hands, the terrified expression on his face, they think he is one of them.

‘Are you all right, boy? Where are your parents?’

Pran cannot speak. As soon as he speaks they will know. They will flog him on the whipping post. How can they be so blind? How can they not tell?

‘Look at me, boy,’ says the Sergeant, the note of gentleness in his voice chiming weirdly with the filthy man prone at his feet. ‘Are you all right? Can you tell me your name?’

Pran shakes his head mutely. He has to say something. He can feel colour streaming off him like sweat. He wills his pores to close. Skin to statue. White marble. Impenetrable. He stands as still as he can. One move will betray him. But he must move. Otherwise they will take him away.

He points down the street, towards the Civil Lines. He tries to hold Privett-Clampe’s voice inside his mouth.

‘I am going,’ he says. ‘I am very well.’

The soldiers stand, looking at him. The man on the floor scrabbles in the dust with his calloused heels.

‘I am very well. I am going. Forthwith.’

Pran starts to walk. The Sergeant calls after him, ‘Look after yourself.’

Pran turns and nods, trying not to run until he is round the corner. As soon as the men are out of sight, he cannot hold it back. His feet barely touch the ground. His heart hammers in his chest. The people of Amritsar watch as he tears past, an insane grin on his face. He is filled with exhilaration. He hardly thinks of the man on the floor, and each running stride seems to take him further away from him, another yard of clean starched space.

Now all he has to do is get out. He left Fatehpur without a plan, without really believing that he would make it. For five days he has been out in the wide world, and it has sucked him towards this dead city like a hair towards a plughole in an Englishman’s porcelain bathroom. But he cannot stay here. He will be killed. He stops and asks a startled woman the way to the railway station. Wordlessly she points it out. He carries on in the direction she indicates, jogging slower and slower until the mazy streets end abruptly in the dead brown lawns of Aitchison Park. On the other side is the station and the regimented rows of bungalows in the Civil Lines.

Walking into whiteness. In spite of his luck with the soldiers it takes all his courage. As he approaches he sees that the station windows have been blocked with sandbags, and English soldiers are manning a gun emplacement at the entrance. He falters for a moment. How can he go in there? But there is no choice. No one questions him as he passes by.

The place is packed with people waiting to be evacuated. A stench of sweat hits him like a fist. Frightened people jammed together on the platform, in the waiting rooms, the canteen, the ticket office. Jammed black-hole tight. The stink of their bodies, suddenly isolated from all the other stinks of India, is shocking. One attar note smelt raw on a perfumer’s glass rod, nasty and unblended. Pran has been taught the rhyme. Fee-fi-fo-fum. Be he alive or be he dead. This is the smell of Englishmen, an incitement to the mob, the ogre, to attack. They are mostly women and young children, and they must have been camping here for days. Each family group has demarcated its little patch of floor, sometimes using improvised screens of rugs and bedlinen to separate them from their neighbours. As if propelled by instinct, by the European’s animal drive to segment the world, to grid and order space. Every family’s own little pink territory, drawn on the map of Amritsar Railway Station.

They look haggard and wretched. The children hang limply about their tight-lipped mothers, whose grimy faces seem at first sight to be masks of defeat and worry, the grinding effect of hours and days of dehydration and poor sanitation and constant fear of death. But seen closer the women’s eyes are bright. Underneath the dirt something in these memsahibs has been elevated by their plight. It connects them to history, to their grandmothers of the Mutiny, to the symbolic destiny of the Englishwoman in tropical climes, which is to make do, to endure. They are becoming the angels their husbands imagine them. Sacred. Worth spilling blood for.

These women frighten Pran almost as much as the soldiers guarding them. He is a trespasser, a black cuckoo in the nest. He tries to make himself as inconspicuous as possible, acutely aware that there are no other boys of his age present. The real English boys are all away in boarding schools at Home. Some of the women start to watch him, visibly sifting through their memories, trying to place his face. Each time he spots someone fixing on him, he moves, takes up position elsewhere. For a long time he stands beneath a peeling poster.
Visit Bombay. The Gateway of India.

Just when he thinks he is about to be approached, the sound of a steam whistle pierces the fug. Pran steps out on to the platform to see a train puffing into the station. At once there is bustle and action. Soldiers stretch and climb down from a goods wagon, which has been converted to house machine guns. Food and supplies are unloaded by Sikh soldiers, closely monitored by their English officers whenever their work takes them close to women or children. In the midst of the confusion Pran slips on board. Soon he is watching fields slide by, heading south.

Pretty Bobby

A little courtyard opens out behind high Bombay tenement walls like a thumb pot opened out of a lump of clay. On the far side lies all the afternoon noise and chaos of Falkland Road. On this side, a youth is sweeping the floor. He does it in a desultory way, flicking the broom away from his long legs in a petulant motion designed to keep the dust off his new European-cut trousers. This is not his job. It is the sweeper-woman’s job.

After a few minutes the youth considers his task done. He throws the broom aside and straightens up, lighting a cigarette. He holds it elegantly, instantly transformed from servant to cocktail-party guest. To complete the picture he leans on the wall beside him, crossing one leg over the other. A fashion plate. A man of leisure.

The wall is unsightly and poorly built. It rises more or less to the eye-level of an adult man, and divides the courtyard, already cramped, into two unequal sections. On the smaller side, against which the youth is leaning, the wall bows alarmingly in the middle. Crumbling mortar seeps between the bricks, which have been laid haphazardly on top of each other, with little care or craftsmanship. The poor quality of the wall appears incongruous, given that the buildings on either side of it are sturdy, although in need of plaster and lime.

As the youth takes another languorous drag on his cigarette, he is startled by the appearance of a bearded white face on the other side of the wall.

‘Robert?’ says the beard. ‘Have I not told you? Have I not said it often enough? Tobacco is a lever which the devil uses to wrench open your heart!’

‘Yes,’ replies Robert, sulkily stubbing out the cigarette with a sandalled foot.

‘Yes, what?’

‘Yes, sir, Reverend Macfarlane.’ Though the two look nothing alike, the youth’s accent is strikingly like the beard’s, with all the prim inflections of an educated Lowland Scot. Reverend Macfarlane raises one bushy eyebrow, a movement like a small hairy animal breaking free of its herd. Grimacing, Robert stoops to slip the crushed butt into his trouser pocket.

‘I’m very disappointed in you, Robert,’ continues Reverend Macfarlane. He is bobbing up and down on the other side of the wall, standing on tiptoe to deliver his homily. ‘I know that you cannot be expected to rise beyond a certain level. You mustn’t think I don’t make allowances. However, you’re a bright boy. You stand a good chance of transcending the affliction God has, in his wisdom, seen fit to bestow upon you. But it will only happen if you struggle. You must fight it, Robert! Fight!’

Reverend Macfarlane’s tone and volume rise, until by the time of his exhortation to fight, his voice is ringing out through the courtyard with a force honed by many years of street preaching. The sound attracts a woman, who appears in the doorway on Robert’s side of the wall. Though European, she is dressed in a sari. Younger than the Reverend, whose explosion of wiry grey attests to perhaps sixty years of combat, her own straw-coloured hair is drawn back from her face in a severe bun.