The Sleeping Dictionary (45 page)

I remained silent, thinking. Even if he did fall in love, how could a rich Calcutta boy marry someone like me?

A devil’s voice whispered,
Nobody in Calcutta knows who you were.
Pom, Sarah, and Pamela were as good as dead. And I wasn’t really a Hindu Sudra anymore: at Lockwood, I’d been converted to Christianity. In Kharagpur, I’d undergone a different conversion: learning how to dress, how to speak confidently to men, and how to live comfortably inside an upper-class Anglo-Indian home. Everything that had happened to me—good and bad—had contributed to the making of Kamala Mukherjee. How different I was from the little girl who had desperately clung to a tree with floodwater rising beneath! I steered my own boat. I could build a life rich with ideas, family, and friends—just like the Sens and Bandopadhyays and other members of the educated Bhadralok class.

Take care of him,
Bidushi had said on her deathbed.

I resolved that I would.

CHAPTER

28

PROPAGANDA:
 . . .
2. Any association, systematic scheme, or concerted movement for the propagation of a particular doctrine or practice.

—
Oxford English Dictionary
, Vol. 8, 1933

A
s I’d suspected, the hostilities between Germany and Britain did not cease. In the spring of 1940, the Nazis invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Neville Chamberlain was relieved of his duties as prime minister and replaced by the tougher Winston Churchill, who ordered the British to begin rationing food, cloth, and other materials that would be needed for a long war.

The English newspapers made it seem as if the Nazis would be defeated any day, but this was clearly not the case. And India, so distant from the war theater, suddenly appeared like a safe haven to British families. Into our crowded, apprehensive city, people came. First were the soldiers: brown ones from India and the other colonies, and white ones from England, Scotland, and Ireland. Also arriving were
the children of the Raj, those who’d been born in India but sent off to study in England.

That spring, Kabita turned two. She was still much too young to study, but I hoped Hafeeza and Abbas would plan for it. Since coming to Calcutta, I had saved enough to be able to send some money and cloth for dresses. This year I sent paper and pens and the small dictionary I’d once given Mr. Lewes. He had been so unappreciative, and I was sure he would never think to use it. Better for my own girl to have it, for I was sure Abbas would do his best to help her with English.

On the book’s packaging wrap, I had, for the first time, written down the Middleton Street address. Since I’d learned of the ruby’s recovery, I wasn’t fearful of the police. I wanted Abbas and Hafeeza to know my new name and address in the hopes that they would write and let me know about Kabita’s well-being. For them to have a way to reach me, if crisis ever came to India.

In our neighborhood, emergency planning was precise. Mr. Withers, the elderly Civil Service retiree living in the next building, became Middleton Mansions’ air-raid warden, ensuring all households were supplied with bandages and petroleum jelly. Following his orders, I sadly oversaw the covering-up of our windows with thick brown paper; the loss of light and green views was disturbing. Mr. Lewes secured gas masks for every resident and servant of the entire Middleton Mansions building. I was horrified at the sight of Jatin when he tried his on: it seemed that he was no longer human; that none of us with them were. I did not want to touch the gas masks but I knew that in the Black Town, few residents had such protection, nor were any antiaircraft guns set up to protect them from air raids.

Mr. Lewes was back and forth between Calcutta, New Delhi, and Bombay, involved with others like himself in a vast campaign to ferret out German spies and sympathizers in India. In the library, Mr. Lewes no longer pored over his old books and handwrote the drafts of essays in his elegant longhand. Instead, he set up a machine called
a wire recorder. It played back programs the government had given him to study: recordings of German propaganda in which ladies with silky voices coaxed British troops to lay down their arms. There was also counter-propaganda with English ladies speaking German, telling the German soldiers that Hitler was immoral and they would lose their country’s freedom forever if they fought. Mr. Lewes wrote similar scripts for the Indian population to hear, as well as pieces encouraging Indian men to join the army, navy, and air forces. The awful man from the cocktail party, Mr. Weatherington, had begun calling on Mr. Lewes some evenings, in order to listen to the overseas recordings and talk about their own propaganda strategies.

“I’ll never trust Indian soldiers to fight for us. Remember the mutiny?” Mr. Weatherington, who had passed under my ceiling viewing hole, slapped his hand on the desk, right in front of where Mr. Lewes was sitting. “We must concentrate our efforts on tracing the Fifth Column and locking them up.”

“And now that the Germans are imprisoned; who are these supposed Fifth Columnists?” Mr. Lewes countered. “You can’t lock up innocent people just because they feel differently about politics. Remember what happened in the Andamans? We wound up letting them go.”

“A situation I hold you responsible for, after the so-called human rights reports you made.” Mr. Weatherington made a snorting sound. “Don’t sulk, Simon. You got an ICE for it: you, the governor’s fair-haired boy.”

Mr. Lewes was not blond; he was dark. But I knew what the English slang expression meant. It was that he was favored by authority.

And ICE meant companion of the Indian Empire, and was granted by the king each year to a select group of administrators in the ICS and military. I was stunned that the British government would have given out an honor relating to shutting down the Andamans prison—and could Mr. Lewes really have helped? That conversation gave me the impression that Mr. Lewes was not wholly against
Indian independence. But I wondered about the freedom-fighting group called the Fifth Column.

The next morning, I wrote to Pankaj requesting a meeting to discuss these new developments. I placed the note under the paper lining in a box of candy and asked Kantu the newsboy to take it to 27 Lower Circular Road. In the afternoon, Kantu returned with a different package from Pankaj. Hidden under the box’s lining was a request asking me to come to the Minerva Theatre for the following day’s first matinee showing.

I dressed carefully the next day in a lovely green-and-gold sari and went to the cinema, buying a single seat in the upstairs balcony. After the first half hour of
Achhut Kanya
, I slipped out to the hallway where Pankaj was already standing in a dark recess. How my pulse raced to see him waiting there; waiting for me.

“I have some governors’ reports for you to read,” I said, handing him what I’d translated into Bengali. “But first, I must tell you what I overheard him talking about with his ICS colleague Wilbur Weatherington. They were speaking about the Fifth Column. Do you know of this freedom-fighting group?”

Pankaj grimaced, and I realized I should not have said the name Weatherington aloud but instead used W. “They are talking about Nazi sympathizers who are waiting here, ready to help. Did they speak any names of people they suspect? They could face automatic imprisonment under the war rules.”

“I have not heard any specific names. The conversation became an argument in which L said to W that he wished Churchill hadn’t spoken against Indian freedom; he thought that it would hurt military recruitment. And W then accused L of ensuring the Andamans prisoners’ release. You were in the Andamans when the hunger strikers were released. Do you know anything about why the release came?”

“I was in solitary confinement; if L was there, I didn’t know it. But I wouldn’t believe that he did anything to change the situation. The ICE is given for service to the empire.”

I wanted to know more about the Fifth Column, but I couldn’t continue speaking because a second couple came out to the lobby.

Shooting a look at them and then at me, Pankaj murmured, “We should go back to our seats.”

“You do that,” I said, feeling self-conscious. “I can leave the theater now.”

“If you did so, the ticket agents would notice. Take your seat again, and I’ll take mine.”

I found a different empty seat, and he came in a bit later and sat three rows ahead. Under the straight, white beam that shot from the back of the theater, I could still see him.

In the darkened cinema, the brilliant screen showed the Bengali actress Devika Rani captivating her handsome costar, Ashok Kumar. But I had no eyes for them. All I could do was look at the fine, intelligent head of Pankaj, the Calcutta gentleman who had gone to prison for his ideals and now was making his career defending Indians arrested for sedition. Dearest Pankaj, who had been charmed by my letters and treated me like a gentlewoman! Every meeting we had made me feel closer to him. I was becoming the kind of romantic Supriya Sen would laugh at; not at all the way a female freedom fighter should be.

I’D BELIEVED MR. Lewes was too busy looking for Fifth Columnists and Germans to be paying much attention to Netaji and the Forward Bloc. We no longer spent long hours talking about the local news, or even as much time together at all. This change made me uneasy, as if perhaps the feelings he had for me had vanished, or new suspicions had arisen.

It was up to me to improve our connection. One evening, I overheard him speak the name Bose on the telephone. I imagined he was conversing with Mr. Weatherington, who would never use the
admiring Hindi word
Netaji
, just as neither of them used Mahatma or Gandhiji when speaking of Mohandas Gandhi.

I went to my room, brushed my hair, and lightly made up my eyes and mouth, the way I had for the cocktail party. Thus fortified, I came back down and asked if he had time for a drink in the garden.

“Yes, that’s just what I need!” he said, his eyes warming as he looked at me. “I’ve had quite a day.”

“Good or bad?” I asked as we stepped down from the veranda together into the garden.

“That depends on your perspective,” he said with an odd half smile. “Subhas Bose is in prison.”

It was all I could do to keep from gasping. Netaji in prison? It would paralyze India’s independence movement. I sank down on to one of the teak chairs and asked how the arrest had happened.

“He and his friends were caught on the way to tear down the Holwell Monument in Dalhousie Square. They had all manner of irons and lathis with them.” His voice was neutral, as if he had no idea how this news upset me.

The Holwell Monument was not anything Indians treasured. The government had erected the fifty-foot obelisk after the Black Hole incident of 1756 to commemorate a short-lived revolt of the nawab of Bengal’s men against the East India Company. The violence resulted in an unknown number of British captives dying of heat exhaustion in a prison cell before the nawab was defeated. The monument was a visible reminder to Indians that sedition was unforgivable.

“You said that Mr. Bose was on his way to Holwell,” I repeated, because something about the account struck me as odd. “How did the police know
where
he was going if he hadn’t arrived there yet?”

Mr. Lewes hesitated, as if my question had surprised him. “He was quite nearby. And he and his men had lathis and some other tools with them.”

“But they had not even touched the monument.” I seized on the point he was ignoring. “Could the criminal accusation have been created by the police as an excuse for arrest?”

At my words, Mr. Lewes pressed his lips together. “The police didn’t put the tools in his hands; he did that himself. But the city’s safer with Bose unable to raise public sentiment against the war. Imagine if the Germans or Japanese invaded and he made a call for everyone to support them!”

He was very good at twisting arguments. I longed to put better ideas in his mind in order to sway his colleagues in the government. Remembering that he had spoken several times as if he believed Indian freedom was sure to come, I said, “Have you ever thought that if India was immediately granted independence, all these internal security risks would evaporate? There would be only goodwill from Indians toward the British.”