The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (41 page)

Once Hari had decided to apply for a job with the
Mayapore Gazette
he spent several days copying out particularly bad examples of syntax and idiom from old issues, and then rewriting them. When he was satisfied that he could do the work he had in mind to persuade the editor to give him, he wrote and asked for an interview. He drafted the letter several times until he was satisfied that he had stripped it to its essentials. According to the headings at the top of the leader column on the middle page of the
Gazette
the editor’s name was B. V. Laxminarayan. He told Mr. Laxminarayan that he was looking for a job. He told him his age, and gave brief details of his education. He said that to save him the trouble of replying he would ring Mr. Laxminarayan in two or three days to find out whether he could see him. He hesitated, but in the end decided, to add that Mr. Knight of the British-Indian Electrical Company would probably be prepared to pass on the reference that had been obtained from the headmaster of Chillingborough. He signed the letter “Hari Kumar” and marked the envelope “Personal” to reduce the odds on its being opened and destroyed by some employee who was concerned for the safety of his own position. He had not worked in the offices of his uncle for nothing. He doubted that Mr. Laxminarayan would know Knight, or know him well enough to ring him, or—if he was wrong in either of these two suppositions—that Knight would have the nerve to tell an Indian any story other than that there had been several interviews but no vacancy. Also he relied on Knight’s conception of what it was gentlemanly to say as one prospective employer to another about a young man who had played cricket against his old school.

Hari was right in the second of his suppositions. Laxminarayan knew Knight, but not well enough to ring him unless he wanted confirmation of a story about the British-Indian Electrical Company’s activities. In any case he would not have rung him about Kumar’s letter. Laxminarayan did not like Mr. Knight, whom he described to himself as a two-faced professional charmer whose liberal inclinations had long ago been suffocated by his mortal fear of the social consequences of sticking his neck out. “Knight,” he told Hari later, “can now only be thought of as a pawn.” He had these harsh things to say about Knight in order not to have to think them about himself.

Laxminarayan was interested in the letter signed by Hari Kumar, but
when he replied, “By all means ring, although I have no immediate vacancy,” he had no intention of employing him. In fact he had been told by the absentee proprietor, Madhu Lal who lived in Calcutta, to reduce the overheads and produce a more rational percentage of net profit to total investment. His own private view was that the
Gazette’s
circulation would be increased if the paper could be seen to commit itself to the cause of Indian nationalism. He knew that the
Gazette
was anathema to the members of the local Congress subcommittee, and that it was a bit of a joke to the English. He believed that he could sell it even more widely among the English if he could get up their blood pressure. The bulk of its present readership—self-consciously westernized Indians and snob English—would not be lost, because they were sheep by definition. But he reckoned that over a twelve-month period he could add five or ten thousand copies to the weekly circulation if Madhu Lal ever allowed him to make the paper a repository of informed and controversial local and national opinion—non-Hindu, non-Muslim, non-British, but Indian in the best sense.

Laxminarayan conscientiously believed in his paper. Believing in it was a way of continuing to believe in himself and frank criticism of its shortcomings was a more rewarding occupation than criticism of his own. He had found a way of substituting positive thought for negative action; which perhaps was just as well. He was too deeply committed to the compromise of early middle age to be able to rekindle—in a practical, sensible way—the rebellious spark of his youth. Certainly it was just as well from Hari’s point of view. When Laxminarayan first met him it took no more than a few minutes of conversation for the smothered demon in the older man to kick out, to attempt—impotently—to take control of his judgment. The demon disliked Kumar: the manner, the voice, the way the fellow sat, with his head up, his legs crossed, one black hand resting on the other side of the desk—an embryo black sahib, talking with a sahib’s assurance, the kind of assurance that conveyed itself as superiority subtly restrained in the interests of the immediate protocol. The demon only stopped kicking because Laxminarayan’s internal flanks were inured to the pain of the demon’s spurs and because he saw, in Kumar, a potential asset, an asset in terms of the type of periodical Mr. Madhu Lal wanted the
Gazette
to be. And when Kumar handed him some papers, written proof of his talents as a subeditor—paragraphs and columns that he recognized as extracts from old issues now transformed into the simple, clear, standard English that in
times of stress even eluded the overworked editor—he knew that he would offer Kumar a job and probably get rid of one of the boys who worried him but for whom he cared most, one of the boys who had little talent but a lot of heart and would in all likelihood turn out eventually to be an embarrassment.

Laxminarayan. These days he lives in a bungalow that once belonged to a Eurasian family who left Mayapore in 1947—a bungalow in the Curzon road. He is now an old man. He is writing a history of the origins of Indian nationalism that will probably never be finished, let alone published: his apologia for many years of personal compromise. He recognizes that the policy of Madhu Lal paid off because the
Mayapore Gazette
has enjoyed an uninterrupted existence. Left to him, to Laxminarayan, it might have been done to death in 1942, in which year the
Mayapore Hindu
was suppressed for the third or fourth time. But he is amused, now, at the
Gazette
‘s Hindu-National bias—its air of having always supported the causes it has become locally popular to promote. Its new owner is a Brahmin refugee from Pakistan. Its new editor is the owner’s cousin. With regard to politics at the centre it gives most space to the speeches and activities of Mr. Morarji Desai. It plans, next year, to publish itself in a simultaneous Hindi edition, as a first step towards dispensing entirely with English. This, more than anything, saddens Mr. Laxminarayan who throughout his life has had what he calls a love-hate relationship with the English language. It is the language in which he learned to think his revolutionary thoughts, and the language which so readily lent itself to the business of making the cautious middleway he took look and sound like commonsense instead of like a case of cold feet.

“What am I now?” (he would ask you, if you went to see him at his home where he is surrounded by grandchildren whose high-pitched voices seem to come from every room and from the sunlit garden which—as the English would say—has been let go). “Well, I will tell you. I am an old man who has lived through one of the greatest upheavals of modern history—the first, and I think the most passionate, of a whole series of upheavals, rebellions against the rule of the white man which have now become so commonplace they are almost boring. And I came through it without a scratch. A veritable Vicar of Bray, you understand. Retired now on pension. Honorary life member of the Mayapore club where good Hindus forgather. Young journalists come to see me when
they hear that I steered the
Gazette
through those stormy pre-independence waters and say, ‘Sir, please tell us what it was really like in the days of the British.’ Just like your own young people may occasionally say, What was it really like during Hitler and Mussolini? The old colonial British have become a myth, you see. Our young men meet the new Englishmen and say to themselves, ‘What was all the fuss about? These fellows don’t look like monsters and they seem only to be interested in the things we are interested in. They are not interested in the past and neither are we except to the extent that we wonder what the fuss was about and aren’t sure that our own government is doing any better, or even that it is a government that represents us. It seems more to be the government of an uneasy marriage between old orthodoxy and old revolutionaries, and such people have nothing to say to us that we want to hear.’

“I gave Kumar a job and later got rid of a fellow called Vidyasagar who was arrested in 1942 with several other members of the staff of the
Mayapore Hindu,
and was then put in prison. I was asked to take some steps in that disagreeable business young Kumar was involved in at the time of Bibighar. I’m afraid I refused. No one asked me to use my good offices in the cause of poor Vidyasagar who was given fifteen strokes for an infringement of prison regulations. Not that there was anything I could have done for either of them. But it stuck in my throat that when both of these boys were arrested, for different reasons, only Kumar had people to speak for him, people to ring me up and say, ‘Can’t you get Hari out of jail? You were his employer. Can’t you do something for him? Can’t
you
prove he was nowhere in the vicinity of the Bibighar?’ People like Lady Chatterjee. And that fellow Knight at the British-Indian Electrical whose conscience probably bothered him. Even the assistant commissioner, Mr. Poulson, sent for me and asked me questions about what Hari Kumar’s political affiliations really were. I said, ‘Mr. Poulson, he is like myself. He has none. He is a lickspittle of the raj.’ I was angry. I did not see why I should raise a finger to help him. If the British couldn’t see for themselves that he was innocent, who was I to intervene? He was more British than they were.”

A week after Hari got his job on the
Mayapore Gazette
he received a letter from Colin Lindsey. It was dated towards the end of July 1939. Colin apologized for not having written for so long. “A few months ago I joined the Territorial Army and your own last letter reached me in training camp,” he explained. “We were pretty busy. If there’s a
war—and the odds are there will be—I shall put in for a commission; otherwise I get a kick out of just being an acting unpaid lance-corporal. (They made me up in camp, this summer.) I expect you’ll be thinking of the army too, won’t you, Harry? I mean if anything happens. I’m told the Indian army is quite an outfit, and no longer officered only by the British. Maybe we’ll meet up in some dugout or other, like
Journey’s End!
Sorry you had such an unpleasant experience at that factory or whatever it was. I can’t understand why your aunt’s in-laws wouldn’t stump up to see you through the ICS. Dad tells me a friend of his says Indians can become High Court Judges even, so the ICS seems to be the thing. That or the Army. I recommend the latter. It’s a great life. And honestly, Harry, you’d make a first rate platoon commander—which is what I want to be if the war ever gets going. Then you could waggle a couple of fingers at that fellow Stubbs who was obviously Other Rank material only. Like me, at the moment! I’ve got a feeling that by the time you get this I shall be in France. Why the hell does it always have to be France? The feeling in my own unit is that the Jerrys ought to come straight over here. Then we could really show them a thing or two. Major Crowe, our CO, reckons that with all that guns and butter stuff the poor blighters are half-starved anyway and haven’t got the strength to shoulder a rifle, let alone manhandle their artillery. Dear old Harry! Wish you were here. Then we could be in it together. For my money it’s the only thing to be in, these days. The fond parents send their love.”

“One time he spoke to me of a letter from that boy Lindsey” (Sister Ludmila said). “Why did he treat me as a mother-confessor? This I never earned. He spoke in that way he had, of believing in nothing, which was not natural to him, but was what he had acquired. ‘Sister,’ he said, ‘what would you have done if you had received a letter from an old friend that showed you suddenly you were speaking different languages?’ I do not remember what I replied. Unless I said, ‘There is only God’s language.’ Meaning, you understand, the truth—that this language matters and no other. He did not hold himself entirely free of blame for what happened because when he wrote he did not tell Lindsey what was in his heart. Perhaps he did not tell him because he could not. Did not tell him because he did not know himself.”

From the
Mayapore Gazette
Hari received sixty rupees a month, the equivalent of just over four pounds. He gave half to his Aunt Shalini
because Uncle Romesh Chand reduced her allowance on the day Hari began work for Mr. Laxminarayan. The sixty rupees were paid to Hari as a subeditor. If Laxminarayan published any of Hari’s original reports he was to pay him at the rate of one anna a line. For sixteen lines, then, Hari would earn a rupee.

All this he told Colin when he replied to young Lindsey’s letter. He was looking, perhaps, for a way of showing Lindsey that in Mayapore the threat of German ambitions seemed very far away, and Lindsey’s curiously pre-1914 heroics strikingly out of tune with what Hari felt about his own immediate obligations and clearly recollected as the contempt for war which he and Colin had shared, or at least professed to share. Something had happened to Colin. It puzzled Hari to know what. There had been a time when they agreed that it might be necessary to pursue a line of conscientious objection to what they called compulsory physical violence in the interests of a nation’s political and economic aims. Now, here was Colin talking nostalgically about
Journey’s End.
Did the wearing of a uniform so corrupt a man? And what, anyway, in Colin’s case had led him voluntarily to put one on? Colin had once said that patriotism, like religious fervour, was a perversion of the human instinct for survival. Chillingborough was a forcing house of administrators, not of soldiers. To an administrator a soldier represented the last ditch defense of a policy: one to which, on the whole, it was shameful to retreat.

“I’m glad,” Hari wrote, “that you’re finding life in the TA not too wearing—”

That English subtlety! It struck him even as he wrote the words that they could be read either as manly understatement or bitchy criticism.