The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (14 page)

‘Was that his name?’

‘There were six names but I think Kumar was the lad in question. Hari Kumar.’

‘Harry?’

‘H,a,r,i. He was brought up in England. He went to school at Chillingborough.’

‘Good God.’

‘Quite so. Interesting, isn’t it?’

‘Well what the hell was he doing working in a place like Mayapore on a local rag?’

‘They tell me his father died bankrupt in England before the war and he came back penniless to the only relative he had, an aunt who lived in Mayapore. She was a widow and lived on the charity of her dead husband’s orthodox Hindu family. Young Kumar must have had a tough time adjusting himself to
that.
It could be he failed to adjust himself. The police had an eye on him. He was politically suspect. That’s the other red herring.’

‘Red herring?’

‘It introduces complications. It makes it hard to concentrate on the proposition that he and Miss Manners were in love.’

‘What’s the other red herring?’

‘The friends. The police had files on them too. I think you have to forget the politics, the friends, even the rape, and concentrate on this one proposition. They were in love.’

‘What do you mean, forget the rape?’

Mackay’s glass was empty. He put it on the counter. A man in the group ordered refills.

‘I mean forget it because it’s irrelevant.’

The word irrelevant came out slightly blurred and Major Mackay lost something of his grip on his audience. But with his next sentence he regained and hardened it.

‘She’s pregnant, you know. She’s gone back to R’l’Pindi pregnant. People say she’ll get an abortion. Myself, I doubt it. I concentrate on the proposition that she and Kumar were in love, still are, he in clink and she pregnant in R’l’Pindi. Having what she thinks is his child. Thinks, hopes or knows. You can’t tell. Perhaps she can’t either in the way women think they can. The old intuition.’

A man with a red face and sparse hair, a civilian asked, ‘What’s your theory, Major Mackay?’

‘Well yes I have a theory. Glad you asked. My theory’s this. If you love and marriage isn’t on or isn’t easy sooner or later you get round to poking, to put it crudely. My theory is Miss Manners and this Kumar fellow poked in the Bibighar either that night for the first time or that night for the umpteenth but that that night whatever teenth time it was these so-called friends of his who’d not only guessed he was poking her but had found out where, were all lined up waiting for the show to begin and when it was over jumped on him, sat on him and then–’

Major Mackay made an arm.

‘Then why didn’t Miss Manners say so?’

‘Say what? That she and Mr Kumar had been making love at night in a derelict garden doing no harm to anyone when up come these friends of his and say, Okay Hari, move over?’

‘Why not? From all accounts she’s not the easily embarrassed type. And if what you suggest is true and she and this journalist fellow had made a clean breast of it that part of it might have been kept dark and the other fellows just charged and sentenced.’

‘And do you think any of them would have let Kumar get away with that? They’d have implicated him like a shot. They’d have said it was Kumar’s idea, to share her.’

‘Well wasn’t it? The police thought so.’

‘Which is where you come back to my proposition. If it had been like that I don’t care what kind of act he put up she’d have known and she’d have stopped being in love with him. If you stick to my proposition that they were in love, are in love, everything’s as clear as daylight. These so-called friends of his jumped him and beat him up. She may not have seen who they were. If not he told her afterwards and told her what they’d threatened, that they’d accuse him of arranging it if there was any trouble. Well, she wasn’t a bloody fool. Everybody in Mayapore knew she’d been going out with him. Neither of them was popular as a result. He wouldn’t have stood a chance however much she swore his innocence. So they cooked up a story that they hadn’t seen each other for days and they damned well stuck to it, right through. What she hadn’t reckoned with was finding when she got home that Lady Chatterjee had already reported her missing to the
DSP
. It was the night the balloon was expected to go up and she hadn’t come home at the usual time. She wasn’t at the club or at any of old Lady C’s friends and the woman was pretty worried. And when she got home there wasn’t any disguising what had happened. Her clothes were torn and she was in a state. Lady C had a woman doctor from the Purdah hospital up to the house in a brace of shakes. Maybe Miss Manners panicked. But she said she’d been assaulted by a gang of men and that was the situation the
DSP
found when he called at the house. He had no time for Hari Kumar. He’d had his eye on him. He’d warned Miss Manners about associating with a fellow like that. So young Kumar’s the first chap the
DSP
thinks of. He hares off to the Bibighar, finds Kumar’s pals drinking in a hut not far away, arrests them and hares off to Kumar’s house and finds him bathing cuts and bruises on his face, the sort a fellow might get if he attacked a girl who fought back. What other evidence did he need? He jumped to the conclusion most people would. And he was right in my opinion except in this one case, the case of Mr Kumar who never did explain how his face got like that and just went on insisting as she did that they hadn’t seen each other since the night they visited a temple.’

‘What about the others?’

‘Oh they played dumb too. They pretended they’d spent the whole evening drinking in the hut. They never changed their story but if Hari Kumar had split on them they’d have taken him with them. There was a pretty odd thing happened about her bicycle. The one she was supposed to be dragged off. First the police said it was found outside Kumar’s house and then the
DSP
said no that was wrong it had been in the Bibighar Gardens near the scene of the rape and put in the police truck that went to get Kumar, and a sub-inspector who came on the scene late thought one of the constables had found it in the ditch outside the house and put that down in a report. Indians said the
DSP
planted the bike himself and then realized it looked too bloody obvious. My own theory is that these other five took the bike from the Gardens and stuck it outside Kumar’s place and that the
DSP
didn’t find Kumar’s or any of their fingerprints on it because they’d wiped it clean, and guessed they’d been trying to incriminate him alone. It’s just the sort of crazy thing boys like that would do, forgetting that if Kumar was incriminated they wouldn’t stand a chance themselves.’

‘But that would mean this police chap withheld vital evidence.’

‘Messy evidence. Rigged evidence. Without Kumar’s prints on the handlebars or the saddle the sort of evidence he didn’t want. He wanted Kumar. A jury would have been very wary about the girl’s bike being found outside Kumar’s house even if wiped clean of fingerprints. I don’t think he was very interested in the other fellows. Whenever people talked to him about the case Kumar’s was the only name he ever mentioned. I think he disliked the chap because of the kind of boy he is. First-rate British public-school education, but black as your hat and going out with an English girl, and politically unreliable.’

‘Was he politically unreliable?’

‘A young educated Indian? It’s likely, isn’t it? On the other hand the paper he worked for was Indian-owned but pro-British. Not that that means anything. The police must have had enough on all six for the civil to decide to lock them up without trial as political detenus when the rape charge couldn’t be got to stick, but everyone knows that locking them up like that was nothing more than a face-saver. She wasn’t able to stop that. But by God she stopped the charges and she stopped the trial. The assistant commissioner was scared stiff about what she might come out with. They hadn’t a hope in hell of bringing the beggars into court with Miss Manners as the only witness for the prosecution ready to swear blind that the fellows who raped her were peasants, and saying God knows what else. You have to admire her. Well. You do if you accept my proposition that Kumar had her but didn’t rape her and that they’re both bloody well in love.’

‘Did the
DSP
know her well?’

‘In a place like that everybody knows everybody as likely as not. If you mean was he sweet on her himself I can’t answer. He wasn’t married and plain as they say she was she’d have been a good catch for a man like him, but he struck me as a pretty cold fish. Thought of nothing but his job, I’d say. Not a sociable character. Abstemious. Never heard him make a joke. Old Reid liked him though, but then Reid always admired a man for his guts first. Anything else came a poor second. Well, there it is. That’s my theory. Who else is thirsty?’

No one was. The theory was peculiarly unacceptable. An hour later when the bar had been closed for some time Major Mackay was lifted off his stool by three servants and carried through to the room he occupied, undressed and tucked into bed. He smiled in his sleep. With that, the troubles could be said to have come to a happy end.

*

Barbie got up from the rush mat, buttoned the high-necked nightgown and shivered. It was cold enough now to have the electric fire on in the bedroom but she had begun to explore the by-ways of self-mortification and had asked Aziz not to switch it on as he did Mabel’s an hour before bedtime. She climbed chilled into bed, turned the lamp off and lay for a while blowing dandelion clocks, each one as useless as the last. The grey-white tufts wafted away almost before her breath reached them, leaving her to hold a limp sappy stalk. And tonight the alternative, smelling roses, didn’t work either. They were of a scentless variety and on the turn, bulbous seedboxes with a few overblown petals so precariously attached she hardly dared to touch them. She counted sheep but they were stubborn and the gate too high.

She counted children. They submitted to her calculations with expressions of ill-concealed dislike of such regimentation. She called the roll and crossed names out with a blue crayon. When all the names were crossed out one child remained uncalled: the little Indian girl to whom the blue crayon had belonged. She could not remember the little girl’s name. The little girl couldn’t remember it either and accused her silently of depriving her both of name and crayon. The little girl would not go away until her name was called. It was an impasse. We are stuck with each other, Barbie said, which is absurd because you have Krishna and I have Jesus. We are separately catered for. Let’s shake hands and call it a day. But the little girl had her hands behind her back and kept them there.

Hold it higher, her mother said, so she held the porcupine higher and counted pins going into the place where the neck and shoulders had to be altered. Altared. Her mother was sticking the pins in too deep. Little beads of blood appeared like drops of red sweat on the white satin. The bride continued to smile like the Spartan boy with the stolen fox under his shirt. Observe, her mother said, the advantages of a strict upbringing in a family of rank.

Her father was singing one of his funny songs. I’ve seen a deal of gaiety throughout my noisy life. Barbie sang it to her mother. Stop that vulgarity, her mother said. So she sang alone under her breath but found she had forgotten everything except the first line. The stairs were always dark and smelt of damp and gas jets and old linoleum. The paper on the walls was brown and patchy. She sang the first line of the vulgar song over and over going up the stairs but still under her breath because the stairs frightened her. She counted the stairs but there had only ever been twenty of them including the landing floor. Twenty stairs were not enough to send her to sleep.

She switched on the lamp. Slowly she was in India again and as she returned to India she became homesick, ridiculously, unaccountably, inexpressibly homesick. The old chaukidar would be asleep on the front porch huddled in his blanket like a tired shepherd. She felt disturbed and then, hearing the weird calling of the jackal packs, lost in an immense area of experience, the whole area that separated her from childhood and young womanhood. She thought of it as an area because the separation seemed to be in space, not in time.

She sat up wrapped in her own arms. The light from the bedside lamp did not reach the farther walls but the glass that protected the picture gleamed faintly. Behind the glass there was nothing. The picture had gone out.

She thought: I have gone out, Thou hast gone out, He she or it has gone out.

She reached for Emerson who had not gone out but had been renewed and renewed to Mrs Stewart’s perplexity.

‘Each new law and political movement has meaning for you,’ Barbie read and was convinced that this might be so because Emerson told her. ‘Stand before each of its tablets and say, “Here is one of my coverings. Under this fantastic, or odious, or graceful mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.” This remedies the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves.’

She put Emerson aside and picked up her pocket dictionary. Proteus. Changing or inconstant person or thing. Amoeba. Kinds of bacteria. She laid aside the dictionary and recovered Emerson from the bed-cover. She had lost the place but with Emerson that never seemed to matter.

‘The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society, or mode of action in history, to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Everything tends in a most wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person. He must sit at home with might and main, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the governments of the world  . . . ’

Suddenly she was aware of the intense stillness of Rose Cottage. Intense stillness and a faint odour as of something singed. She put Emerson away, got out of bed, put on her slippers and her long blue dressing-gown. She wondered whether Mabel had remembered to turn her fire off, whether something was in danger of scorching or bursting into flames.