The Impressionist (7 page)

The members of the club have many things in common. The women share a liking for cotton floral-print dresses which, though perhaps not of the best quality, are always clean and pressed, even in the hot weather. These are not the kind of dresses some women order out of the Army & Navy catalogue that arrives from Home once a season. Not the kind of dresses that are eagerly awaited, that take two, even three months to come, and when they arrive will be wrapped in tissue paper that falls open with the musty smell of a storeroom somewhere in Victoria. These dresses are made up at home, from cloth bought in the bazaar. They are worn, sometimes, with a single glass bangle. A discreet bangle, but a bangle none the less. Indian jewellery, not jewellery from Home.

The women wear hats. So do the men. Even when it is cloudy. Even (some people joke) indoors. The Artillery Colonel’s wife has seen it done. The wife of the Political Resident in Bharatpur swears she once saw a party of them (them, meaning members of the Agra Post and Telegraph Club) playing a hand of bridge in their hats. Indoors.
After dark.
The sun had gone quite down, and still they sat there, solar topis balanced on their heads, as if they were out riding on a summer’s morning. The Resident’s wife likes to tell this story. Her friends enjoy hearing it. What a chee-chee thing to do, to wear one’s hat at night! It never fails to get a laugh. But despite the jokes, the men and women of the Telegraph Club wear their hats at every opportunity: extravagant, expansive, wide-brimmed hats which ensure their faces are always always shaded from the sun. The sun is definitely a Bad Thing.

For the members of the Agra Post and Telegraph Club, rather a lot of life comes into the category of Bad Things. This, at least, is the opinion of the Resident’s wife and her friends. They find them chippy. It is almost impossible to talk to them without causing offence in one way or another. Not that one wishes to talk to them, unless like Ronnie and Clive and Peter and some of the other husbands, one has them on one’s staff. If one is something on the railways, or of course the post and telegraph, they are rather unavoidable. What with (the ladies remind each other, sipping tea in the better-smelling and more exclusive Civil Service Club) their awful accents, and their awful chippiness, and the absurd way they talk of Home all the time, they really are rather a pain.

Home home home! Everyone knows none of them has been anywhere near England. One supposes it is sweet, in a way. But ultimately they are rather disgusting, those people. Chewing betel on the sly, their girls chasing after the Other Ranks, squatting rather than sitting when they think no one can see. You can always tell if someone is an eight-anna. Blood always shows in the end.

Ugh, those horrid, horrid blackie-whites.

In the Agra Post and Telegraph Club, the horrid blackie-whites gather together to swap their own stories of disgustingness, the disgustingness of natives, the foul Indian-ness of native ways and the firm manner in which they, the husbands, put down their employees, and they, the wives, chastise their servants, if they have them. The natives are devious, untrustworthy and prone to crime. Their lasciviousness is proverbial. What a contrast to Home, to the Northern rectitude of English ways and manners. They, the Anglo-Indian community, know where their loyalties lie. They know which side of themselves they favour. They wear their hats and read all they can of Home and avoid the sun like the plague, feeling pain with every production of melanin in their skin. Of course they do not call it that. They have other names. Dirt, grubbiness. She has such grubby skin, dear. No one will ever go near her. And her nose. So flat and broad. Not like yours.

Inside the club they can be themselves. They can dance and play housie-housie without having to endure the hostile eyes of the natives and the whispered gibes of the junior officers as they make their way to the Civil Service Club, which will never admit an Anglo-Indian through its doors. For a while they can stop their ears to the jokes and the rhymes.

There once was a young lady called Starkie

Who had an affair with a darkie

The result of her sins

Was an eightsome of twins

Two black and two white and four khaki

How often has Harry Begg heard that?

It is so unfair. His shade, his precise shade, is etched in Harry Begg’s mind like a serial number. Harry has skin the colour of a manila envelope. Or a little darker. Not a bad hand really, compared to some. He does all right with the girls, though of course most of the ones he walks out with would drop him like a shot if some junior boxwallah or English private showed an interest. One or two have done. It is so bloody unfair. It isn’t as though things weren’t different once. Skinner, the Skinner who founded the Bengal Lancers, was one of Harry’s type. So was Lord Roberts, who commanded during the Boer War. Even Lord Liverpool, yes the Liverpool who was PM – he was one. His grandmother on his mother’s side was a Calcutta woman. It is down in the history books, there to be looked up. Once upon a time you could say intermarriage was almost the done thing; back in the Company days, before all those biologists and evangelists made everyone scared of black blood.

When the urchin accosts him, Harry, who stoops slightly as if weighed down by his manila skin, is just leaving the club. The lights are twinkling and he is off to meet Jennifer Cash, who has fine features and a complexion the colour of parchment. This evening he might just feel like a decent human being. As long as they go nowhere there might be other men – other,
whiter
men. Jennifer could so easily be taken away from him. A single stripe. A salary in pounds, not rupees. It is all so fragile. Yet tonight he feels full of hope.

And then the little bastard ruins it all.

The urchin reaches out and grabs his sleeve as if it is the most natural thing in the world.

‘Hello,’ it says, in treacle-thick bazaar English. ‘I am blackie-white like you. I am hungry. Do you have some food?’

The urchin is probably paler than Harry, though it is hard to tell through the dirt. He has an English face, a face one might even say was fine, in another place, in other circumstances. Its very good-looks and whiteness make Harry furious. All his twenty-three years of chippiness and hat-wearing, twenty-three years of trying to raise himself up out of the clinging swamp of blackness, comes rushing up in his throat. It makes him gag, the insolence of that face and the smugly pleading look it wears.

‘Get your filthy paws off me, you little sod!’

The urchin recoils. Harry looks at him, goggling. The worst of it is, they are probably of the same blood. If anything Harry is somewhat luckier than him, knowing proper English and having some semblance of good manners. But the same blood, nevertheless. Harry and the street urchin, topped up to more or less the same degree, like two glasses of chai. This is the last thing he wanted to experience on his way to meet Jenny Cash, on a fine evening when he feels so noble and white, white as snow, white as a tennis shoe, white as a little golden angel in fluffy bloody heaven. Damn the little bastard to hell.

In his left hand Harry carries a badminton racket, clamped in a wooden press. He swings it once in his hand, feeling the weight. Without thinking again he brings the racket crunching down on the boy’s head, crumpling him to the ground. He whacks the prone body a few more times, kicking it, lashing at it with all the hate he possesses. Dimly he becomes aware that he is shouting,
damn you damn you damn you,
and looks around to see a few of his people gathered at a safe distance, watching him with a tell-tale mixture of horror and pity in their eyes. Some natives make as if to approach him and he brandishes the racket like a sabre, telling them to keep the hell away and mind their business.

As Harry deals with the natives, the dazed urchin takes the opportunity to flee, stumbling away down the street as fast as he can manage. He looks back once, a ghost-face of shock and hurt disappearing in the crowd. Harry lowers the racket, and mops the sweat from his brow with a dirty handkerchief. His evening is ruined already, before it has begun.

Desolately Pran batters on the mansion’s scuffed blue door. The chowkidar opens it, and behind him Pran catches a brief glimpse of the moonlit courtyard. Then he slams it shut again.

The beggar howls with laughter as he watches Pran staggering towards him. It is an animal sound and his mouth opens wide as he makes it, displaying an improbably red throat, more of a wound than a mouth.
Pretty little prince,
he sings, in a nautch girl falsetto.
See how beautiful are his clothes! See how his dagger shines as he rides by!

Pran’s face is tear-stained and bloody. His clothes are torn and stinking. His body aches all over. Hearing the beggar’s mocking song, his anger boils over and he rushes up and kicks his bowl, scattering its few tiny coins into the dirt.

‘Did they not feed you?’ the beggar asks, ducking Pran’s blows.

‘You bastard!’ he snarls, sobbing.

‘Such is my fate,’ admits the beggar. ‘Yours too, if I remember correctly.’

‘I’m hungry!’ Pran half shouts.

‘Maybe you should try somewhere else?’ the beggar suggests, adopting a theatrical sort of look meant to suggest avuncular concern. Pran glares. The beggar recites, very slowly, an address in the jewellers’ bazaar.

‘Go there, do what they ask of you, and they will feed you,’ he advises.

‘Why should I trust you?’

‘Take it or leave it,’ says the beggar, shrugging. ‘Frankly, you should be grateful I’m talking to you at all.’

There is no arguing with that. Pran sinks to the ground dejectedly.

‘But you’re lying. Something bad will happen to me.’

The beggar considers that for a minute. ‘Yes,’ he says eventually. ‘You’re right. I was lying.’

‘See!’ Pran is triumphant.

‘On the other hand,’ he ruminates, ‘I might be lying now.’ ‘What?’

‘Oh nothing. A little philosophy.’ The beggar grins, displaying a charnel-house of decayed teeth. Though he shouts and wheedles, Pran can get nothing more out of him. The beggar scratches his scabs. He picks lice out of his matted hair. He shouts random obscenities at the food-vendors who are clearing away their wares. One of them thumbs his teeth back.

‘God the all-powerful!’ shouts the beggar suddenly, apropos of nothing. ‘You are indeed just!’

Pran shoots him a withering look.

‘You should thank God,’ he suggests. ‘He’s giving you a great opportunity.’

He rolls his eyes and hawks expansively into the dust. Then, in one sinuous movement, he slides his withered legs back to the foul-smelling drain which runs along the edge of the street, squats over it and releases an elongated turd. The operation completed, he lies down on the floor and falls asleep, the muscles of his hideous mouth relaxing themselves into a startling smoothness, a calm which might even be described as noble.

The ache in his belly keeps Pran awake. He presses and prods it, hoping to persuade the space to fill up. After a while he gets up and looks around for the coins which fell out of the beggar’s bowl, but he cannot find them. As a last resort he scavenges by the shut-up stalls, but finds nothing that has not already been eaten by other hungry children, or by the crafty pariah dogs who slink around looking for a snack. Dejected, he lies down next to the beggar, who is snoring thickly.

He tries not to think about what has happened to him. His father is dead. And he was not his father, anyway. His father was the Englishman in the photograph, and he is dead too. Does this make him an Englishman? He does not feel like an Englishman. He is an Indian, a Kashmiri Pandit. He knows what he is. He feels it.

Hungry and worn out, he tries to parse the problem. You are what you feel. Or if not, you should feel like what you are. But if you are something you don’t know yourself to be, what are the signs? What is the feeling of not being who you think you are? If his mother was his mother and his father was the strange Englishman in the picture, then logically he is a half-and-half, a blackie-white. But he feels nothing in common with those people. They hate Indians. They hate him, that is for certain. He remembers the rise and fall of the badminton racket, the man’s face as he kicked and swore. He is not the same as those people. He does not think of England as his home. Home is here, on the other side of the blue door.

He begins to cry, and eventually falls into a troubled, shivery sleep.

The city carries on around him. The pariah dogs carry on snuffling about in rubbish heaps and gutters. Policemen, thieves, revellers, carriers of nightsoil, tongawallahs, station porters and other darkside people go about their business through streets which in places are almost as busy as by day.