After a lifetime in India, Philip returns to Australia, to his estranged wife Jenny, whom he had brought from India fifty years earlier. Philip seeks to establish links with his ex-wife and his grandson amidst the 2001 'Tampa' crisis. Displaced and disappointed in his hopes of resuming a career in his own country, Philip is visited by a ghost: Ragini, the young revolutionary he fell in love with in 1948. Philip is troubled by his unsorted memories of those times. In 1948 India has achieved its independence but the princely state of Hyderabad – the Nizam's Dominions – with its feudal splendours and deep pockets of rural poverty and injustice, totters alone, unwilling to accede to India, fighting Communist insurrection within. Philip, 'the world's youngest headmaster', has been appointed from Australia to a one-teacher school in the distant town of Warangal, a post no Hindu will take. He meets Anand, a Congress Party member working to bring Hyderabad into the Indian Union, and Ragini, the daughter of a landlord and a Communist, who has given away the family lands. A love triangle develops as events sweep them up – events that will return to life and take their toll half a century later. "The Last Candles of the Night" is a lyrical and moving tale of the pitfalls of memory and the costs of deep allegiance.
Оглавление
Ian Bedford. The Last Candles of the Night
The Last Candles of the Night
Contents
Map of the Nizam’s Dominions, 1947
Chapter One. Incident on the Road
Chapter Two. The Fort at Warangal
Chapter Three. A Nawab’s Palace
Chapter Four. The Last Candles of the Night
Chapter Five. The Blackstone Dancers
Glossary of Indian Names
Glossary of Indian Words
Author’s Note on Places, People and Events
About the Author
Publishing Information
Отрывок из книги
Ian Bedford
Part One: Philip
.....
Philip, too, weighed every word. He weighed every pause, every gesture, for signs of a resumption of journey. Had he and Anand moved, inched their way, to the shade which was visible as an outline, a pattern of leaves on the bare ground, they’d have set off some fruitless commotion, endangering the passengers as well as themselves. All their fellow passengers were villagers. None were townsmen. And the party of ambush were villagers, or appeared to be. Philip wondered all the same at the remarkable difference in being, like a difference in human kind, between the two sets of villagers who otherwise resembled each other in every respect: poor, dark, scabby-legged. One party knew what they were up to, and the other did not. The gulf between them seemed all the wider because the gang or dalam, who had emerged in ambush from the bushes lining the road, were at such pains to close it. The orator and his free-strolling companions, like the bunched audience, endured the full heat of the sun. They did not seek the shade.
“What’s he saying?” Philip contrived to whisper. One of the gang – there were only five – had noticed his tailored pants, his shirt with long sleeves rolled up and, above all, the boots, and was staring at him. Philip did not stare at this individual. The dalam appeared to be weaponless, and were far outnumbered; but there could be no thought of taking them on.
