The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) (7 page)

How often, people wondered, did old Mabel Layton come to the rescue? How many times were bills (which Sarah had helpfully taken it upon her shoulders to see settled before they became an embarrassment) paid with cheques supported at the bank by money Mildred had off her absent husband’s step-mother? A half-colonel’s pay did not support the style of life to which Mildred was accustomed and which she kept up rather better than anyone else. It was not expected to in peace time. It was ironic to think that so much of the
raj’s
elegance which provoked the Indian temper had always been supported by private incomes. From the Viceroy down the difference between his pay and allowances and necessary expenses meant that a man was usually out of pocket administering or defending the empire. One was used to debt, to cutting down, to the sense of imminent shabbiness in approaching retirement. After a year or two of war the shabbiness was rather closer than that. It seemed to settle like a layer of dust, clouding certain issues, such as the reason for being in India at all. Anything that proved durable and resistant to the dust and retained the bright gleam of a stubbornly clear conviction was precious because it stood out, a challenge to dark and perhaps superior forces, and this meant that if you went down you would be pretty sure what it was you went down defending.

Mildred stood out. Almost disdainfully. The virtue that attached to her as Colonel Layton’s wife was crystallized by the other virtues of her family connection with the station. One had (as Barbie had done) only to wander in the churchyard of St John’s and see the names Layton and Muir on headstones to realize that in those lichened-over advertisements for souls there was an explanation of Mildred, even a reference to the habit she had acquired in the slightly drunken tilt which age and subsidence had given them but not yet given her.

Nor would they. She would not rest there, one felt, would not want to. Her languor was not that of someone superiorly regretting the passing of the golden age. The illumination of Mildred Layton made by the stones aslant in the hummocky grass was one of contrast; contrast in deductions and expectations from identical premises and identical investment. Mildred’s enemy was history not an early death in exile, but neither end was the kind that could have been or could be assumed, and the evidence of cessation which a clear look into the future might reveal did not countermand her duty to the existing order of things if she continued to believe in it.

And there in the picture one might have had of her going to her not-so-secret hoard (the bottle in the almirah to save her the boredom of sending Mahmoud to the drinks cupboard, the flask in her handbag to guard against the tedium of finding herself held up in a dry corner at the wrong hour) the question of her belief was posed and perhaps only ambiguously answered; but the picture is much the same as the one presented by Barbie on her knees in the hailstorm (the sole kind of tempest that the devotional machine now seemed capable of conjuring). If Mildred had been a religious woman she might have prayed for John, for the remnants of his battalion, for the wives and widows among whom she had graciously gone offering the solace no woman could give to others or herself. At the turn of the year (1941-1942) she could have prayed for the bodies and souls of those who faced, were to fall before or extricate themselves from the destructive tide of the extraordinary and beastly little Japanese: among them, quite unknown to her, her future son-in-law Teddie Bingham who in the early months of 1942 enters the page as it were in the margin, a dim figure limping at the head of a decimated company of the Muzzafirabad Guides across the grain of the hills of upper Burma towards India, temporary safety, Susan’s arms, a moment of truth and fiery oblivion. Depressing as Teddie’s contribution sounds one can be sure he would have had a generally cheerful idea about it.

But Mildred was not a praying woman; and the drink suggests that had she been she would have prayed like Barbie not for particular favours but for a general one; the favour of being disabused of a growing and irritating belief (which drink soothed) that she had been abandoned to cope alone with the problems of a way of life which was under attack from every quarter but in which she had no honourable course but to continue.

IV

In the old days both the military and civil authorities of the province had spent half the year in Ranpur and half in Pankot which meant that between April and October the hill station had enjoyed the formality of an official season, with the Governor and his wife at the summer residence and the general officer commanding and his wife at Flagstaff House.

The last full official season had been that of summer 1939. It ended on the 1st of October when the Governor went back down to Ranpur preceded or followed by his staff, clerks, files, lorry and train loads of baggage; one day before Barbie arrived by the opposite route with her own encumbrances.

A few weeks later like governors of other provinces in which the Congress Party had taken office after the elections of 1937 he was accepting the resignations of every member of the ministry, headed by Mr Mohammed Ali Kasim, a prominent Muslim of the Congress Party which many English people suspected of being the party of the Hindus in spite of its claim to represent the whole of India.

After accepting these resignations, unconstitutionally forced on the provincial ministers by a party whose leaders had no central duty to the limited Indian electorate and an apparent antipathy towards assisting the British to preserve democracy and show Hitler what was what, the Governor assumed governor’s control, as he was entitled to do under the safeguard clause in the Act of 1935 by which attempts had been made to go some way to meet the Indians’ insistent demands for self-government; and thereafter ruled the province directly, in the old pre-reform style, from Government House in Ranpur.

In Pankot in 1940 there was half a season. Flagstaff House was open, indeed had never been shut because on the declaration of war the general officer commanding in Ranpur, then situated in Pankot for the summer, elected to stay put, but the Governor and his wife did not manage to come up until May, and in June they had to return suddenly to Ranpur. One of the effects of the Congress ministry’s term of office from 1937 to 1939 had been to reduce the scale of the annual removal of the majority of the secretariat to the hills, and although on reassuming autocratic control the Governor would have liked to reinstate this traditional move in full he would have found it difficult to house more than a skeleton of his civil service because by now the army had infiltrated into the complex of buildings where the civil departments once enjoyed the cooler air for six months of the year.

Frustrated in his attempt to direct from Pankot a secretariat largely left behind down in Ranpur and denied his simple need to lead a peaceful life by new viceregal attempts to come to terms with unco-operative Indian leaders after the fall of France, the Governor, choleric and savage, stormed back to Ranpur en route for Simla and, as he put it, further fruitless talks with the Viceroy who would have further fruitless talks with bloody Gandhi and bloody Jinnah in a further fruitless pursuit of the bloody Pax Brittanica, when all that was needed to scare the Indians into toeing the line and getting on with the war was a regiment or two of British infantry and a Brigadier as spunky as old Brigadier-General Dyer who had mown down hundreds of bloody browns in Amritsar in 1919. No one cared to remind him that the Lt. Governor of the Punjab who had stood by Dyer both at the time and in the years of Dyer’s subsequent disgrace had only this year been shot dead in London by an Indian in delayed retribution, in Caxton Hall of all places. It was felt in any case that the Governor did not need reminding. He was a man of the old school – actually a bit of an embarrassment – the kind who if he could not have peace preferred a row and might even welcome being shot at now or twenty years later. His lady followed him, as pale as he was scarlet, and as talkative as he was taciturn between outbursts of bad temper, leaving Pankot bereft of the two people who most graced its official public occasions.

In 1941 when the choleric Governor’s term of office ended and he was succeeded by a new Governor, Sir George Malcolm, there was scarcely a season in Pankot at all (other than the tentative one provided by the energetic new
GOC
’
S
wife, Isobel Rankin, at Flagstaff House). The Rankins made their presence felt, but in the right sort of way. Malcolm, it was said, was an example of the rather alarming kind of person whom the war was throwing up, people with an immense and exhausting capacity for work and an impatience with any tradition which, like the annual movement of an entire administration from Ranpur to Pankot and back again, put the slightest strain on an overworked executive.

‘Sir George will settle down,’ people said; and there were hopes of a full season in 1942; but at the turn of the year the war that had seemed so far off was suddenly on India’s doorstep. Malaya went first, to the Japanese, then Singapore. Burma followed. With these stunning losses the hope of anything ever being quite the same again faded quietly away into the background. And as if things weren’t bad enough with the enemy at the gate there was an increasingly troublesome enemy inside it: Indian leaders who screamed that defeat in Malaya and Burma was a forerunner to defeat in India, that the British had shown themselves incompetent to defend what it was their duty to defend but which wouldn’t need defending at all if they weren’t there, inciting the Japanese who had no quarrel with the Indians themselves.

The political situation sizzled dangerously from the March of 1942 throughout the summer and finally exploded in August with a violence that set people talking about a new mutiny.

Foreseeable as it had been to anyone with an ounce of common sense and regrettable as it was it was not actually unwelcome. It cleared the air. The policy of placating the Indians and getting on with the war at the same time had failed as it was bound to. Now the question of further Indian advances to self-government could be firmly shelved for the duration. It was felt to be a pity that it had not been shelved at the beginning when Indian politicians proved that there was hardly a man with statesman-like qualities among them.

After the absurd
débâcle
of 1939 when the Indian Congress Party threw away all the political advantages it had won, by resigning provincial responsibility on points of principle (failure of the Viceroy to consult it before declaring His Majesty’s Indian empire at war with Germany, refusal to co-operate in a war whose aims it pretended to be in sympathy with but said should have included immediate freedom to Indians to do as they liked) the more troublesome firebrands (that man Subhas Chandra Bose for instance) were popped neatly into clink under the Defence of India rules, but it was felt that the Viceroy should have made a broader sweep.

The Viceroy in question was Linlithgow; described in Pankot as an odd chap, sound but tactless and as usual not quite the thing because he didn’t know enough about the country. Viceroys seldom did and few had the panache of Curzon who had tried to make not knowing a virtue in itself. The Congress-wallahs had put one over on Linlithgow by adopting this policy of official approval of the war against Hitler but disapproval of the means by which they were to be allowed to co-operate in it; and only those who stood up in the market place and opened their mouths too wide found themselves silenced by imprisonment.

If the Congress-wallahs had had any political cunning as well as political stubbornness they would have stayed in office in the provinces as the few Muslim League ministries had done, co-operated so far as was necessary in the war effort, expanded their political experience and power and, simultaneously, their grip on the administration, so that when the war was over their claim to speak and act for the majority of Indians and their right to advance steadily to self-government inside the commonwealth would have been difficult to refute.

But they had thrown their opportunity away and one began to wonder whether in doing so they hadn’t set their cause back to a point where independence would seem as far away on a post-war horizon as it had been on a pre-war one. There were sensible men among them, the ex-chief minister in Ranpur, M. A. Kasim (known popularly as
MAK
) was an example, but they were all either under Gandhi’s saintly spell or too weak-kneed to exorcize it, and the saintly spell of Mr Gandhi had finally been exposed for what it was: a cover for the political machinations of an ambitious but naïve Indian lawyer whose successes had gone to his head.

His demand now that the British should quit India, should leave her to ‘God or to anarchy’ sounded fine, courageous, desperate and inspired, but it meant that they should leave India to the Japanese who were already on the Chindwin but with whom Gandhi obviously expected to make a political bargain. Unless you were stupid you did not make bargains with the Japanese but war. Even the liberal American Jew, Roosevelt, had been forced to understand this and it was entirely to placate Roosevelt that Churchill (who knew a thing or two, including the fact that the Americans’ only interest in India was that the sub-continent should remain a stable threat in the rear to Japanese ambitions in the Pacific) had sent out that Fabian old maid, Stafford Cripps, to do what Churchill knew couldn’t be done: put pepper into Indian civilians and politicians by offering them what they’d been offered before, but which a pinko-red like Cripps, unused to office, would see as new, generous, advantageous, a Left-Wing invention. The farce of this particular confrontation between an English pinko-red and grasping Indian leaders had not been lost on the English community. Its total and inevitable failure had been a smack in the eye to Cripps who went home eating crow as well as his bloody vegetables. Given a chance to show that a modern British socialist could achieve what the old-fashioned Right had never achieved, unity among Indians and political co-operation between Indians and English, he had also been hoist with the responsibility of office; a responsibility which meant, quite simply, having to make things work.