Читать книгу The Last Candles of the Night - Ian Bedford - Страница 8

1

Now Philip was home for good, Jenny had to change. She was surprised by how little was needed. He prepared his own meals, but Jenny was always fully dressed when he rose, choosing a sari from the chest. In her forty-nine years in Australia, she had seldom left the house without one. But now she dressed for the house. He said nothing, appeared not to notice and no doubt she exploited the occasion, Philip’s re-emergence, for her own ends, and not to please him. Did Philip please her? She stood wondering. Wasn’t it forced, and strange, their indifference?

She stepped, one low step, over the cement runnel of the verandah into the yard, and followed the runnel to the drain with her pan. Nothing should be poured down the sink. For so long as she made sambar for the grand­children Nora would object to the splashed mess held up by the grate: fragments of dhal and onion, nothing to perturb her or, in this house, she would be the first to say so. It was her house. There was no man of the house.

But there were men in the house, sojourners, one bright grandson, one, not-so-bright, former husband but if he chose to live with her now, it was his business. She declined to make it her business and Nora, on her visits, was meant to take her cue from her mother though she blamed him, detested him, wholly on her mother’s account who – for her part – felt nothing. Let him stay. It was Philip’s grandparents’ house, his own house, or had been, until he relinquished it: made over the deeds to his Indian wife, which was gracious of him. Her eyes fell on the dog’s plate, half-hidden by the nasturtiums. She did not bend but slid it, with her foot, a little deeper into the nasturtiums. There was no longer a dog.

Where would he be now? With Jim. They’d be yarning, that men’s word. She’d yarn, too, with Jim, for as long as he liked. But Jim never invited her to yarn, though he roomed here as her guest. He thought she’d produced Philip out of the folds of her garment for his entertainment. She could swear he even thanked her for Philip. A true raconteur, he called him. Events, it seemed, had made Philip a raconteur, though he had nothing to tell when she knew him. So the world had been kind. A fund of good stories, to amuse a grandson, that’s what he got for cleaving for fifty-odd years to a few hard posts in a distant country, making what she called dead water, an uninhabited pond of his life.

2

Jim brought his girlfriend home. It was a Friday. But Nora – Jim’s mother, and Philip’s surviving daughter – chose that and every Friday as a time to visit her own mother.

Not even Jenny had met Rhondda before. But wasn’t Philip meeting them all? – the whole family? – as if anew? – every time? It was an ordeal for him. There he sat, on the long side of the table, braving Nora, his eyes fixed on Jenny, who offered no protection. Just the three of them – since Jim, forewarned by Jenny, arrived late, after the meal. But Nora had stayed. Her presence threatened to spoil things.

“I’ll go,” she said. “Jim, this is your house. You prefer to live with your grandmother, but your mail still comes to me. Two of these notices are for traffic offences. Nice to meet you, Rhondda. Perhaps, one of these days, I can entertain you.”

But she did not go. As if it were her sole pleasure in life and she would not be torn from it, she sat beadily eying Philip. She saw this redhead had been brought by her son for his grandfather, to grace him on his pedestal. She would say nothing, but, all the more eloquent for saying nothing, she would continue to tax him with the lasting and unforgivable dislocation he had brought on their household.

Jenny directed her former husband: “Take this pair to your room. They’ve brought wine, drink as much of it as you like but we won’t have it here. Try not to make a noise.”

Philip led them off, Jim scooping nectarines from the sideboard. An hour later, Nora took her leave. Jenny appeared, once, at the doorway to Philip’s room. “I’m glad you all came. Good night.”

She lingered in the passage, half-captivated – despite her self-banishment – by the booming of a voice of yore. Not that Philip boomed. The booming was all in her ears. The Nizam, is it? He’s dredged him from nowhere.

Jenny was as little interested these days in the Nizam of Hyderabad as in any other topic in buried India. She was surprised and entertained, all the same, by her eleventh-hour discovery of how smoothly Jim’s calculations had worked. He’d played this beautifully. All Jim had known to begin with – and not from her: even this datum he had prised from Philip! – was that fifty-odd years ago the youthful Army Reservist and BA Honours graduate from Sydney University had woken up headmaster – no less – of a three-teacher pilot school in an outlying district of the Nizam’s Dominions. That was all Jim had, to his purpose. For a grandson with his imagination, it was more than enough. Philip, of course, had not stopped with Hyderabad. He had never looked back. For the next forty-odd years he’d climbed rungs. He took all the prized posts in education, including a head-teacher stint at the world-famous Mayo College near Ajmer. By the mid-’60s he had founded a school of his own – with two more yet to be started up. An appointment to the Public Schools Commission, a paid trip to Ghana, a senior advisory role with the Government of India – abruptly terminated in the ’90s. That was Philip. He had taught school to poor tribal boys and girls, to the sons of Rajput chiefs and to a generation of trainee administrators and scholar-officials. Except for wrongs done to him, recent wrongs, these achievements of a foreigner in India were all he ever wanted to talk about – though, heaven forbid, not to Jenny. He bored people stiff. But now listen to him. Jim, and his redhead, had him tamely eating out of their hands, neglecting his grand achievements and fuddling on about nawabs and princes, ‘vanished supremacies’, Razakar diehard militias and his personal exposure to the squalor and violence of the last days of Hyderabad, as if youth would never end.

Jenny tiptoed from the passage. She left the stage to Philip. What she’d have overheard – had she stayed – was Philip’s account of the Nizam, based wholly on report, since he had never set eyes on the Nizam. “I once thought I had. It was the week I arrived. I was taken in a motorcar to the palace, for felicitations after my job interview. When I say the palace, the Nizam in fact was hidden away in King Kothi. Quite a plain building, King Kothi, but the palace I saw: I can’t remember it from the outside, but the rooms were magnificent. Polished wood tables, gilt mirrors to the ceilings, velvet roped curtains; there was an elephant who plodded in circles, so a lift could ascend one floor. I watched this elephant. I stared right into the lift, which was a wardrobe. Stiff tunics and pajamas on wood frames. People were everywhere, men with vast beards, mischievous-looking boys who had nothing to do but handle things and, I was told, Abyssinian slaves: they weren’t slaves, but they were black as night. Display cases without glass panes: you could reach right in. A room full of sabres. I waited a long time in an ante-room, crowded with bearers, slaves, regimental servants or whatever they were, in my grey wool suit from Lowes. I felt like a shopwalker at David Jones. Then a stout, formidable man entered the room. His step was so mountainous and alert, though a trifle slow, that it had to be him. Who else could it be? I was thoroughly prepared for the Nizam, I was braced for him; but, of course, this wasn’t the Nizam but a person with crossed ribbons over his tunic, sleeves with gold braid, a turban with a crest or a kind of stiff quill, like a hoopoe. His boots were tooled leather, like they once made in Queensland for Aboriginal rodeo-riders. There was no doubting the majesty of his appearance, but, as I say, it wasn’t him.”

“Who was it?”

“The Vicar al-Umra Bahadur. I bowed to him, but that wasn’t protocol.”

“Will you show how you bowed, how low you bowed?” said Jim, but Rhondda reproved him: “Other people know how to bow. You may not.”

“The Vicar al-Umra. A distinguished person, but so they all were. He had nothing to do with me.”

“Then why was he there?”

“Why was he there? You’re asking me why he was there? He belonged there. He walked those rooms. The Nizam had his court, all the great noblemen had their courts. His was one of them.”

“Did he speak to you?” said Rhondda. “You must have had dealings with someone.”

“Mainly Englishmen.”

Rhondda turned up her nose at Englishmen, but Jim was alert. “Who were those? Part of the reform team?”

“The reform team. Health, tribal welfare, education. I was education. A very low-level appointee, but they were glad to have me. There had to be appointees at all levels. They were honeycombing the State with schools and schoolteachers. They were running out of time.”

“What month was this?”

“The beginning of October. The good weather.”

“But already, in August …”

“You’re right, August ’47. The date of Indian independence. August was behind us. India had had her independence, but not all the states had signed up. Hyderabad was the grandest of them – and the last. That’s why I say, they were running out of time.”

“You saw what was coming.”

“I saw what was coming, but it was a new job.”

“Yes, I quite understand new job,” said Jim, who had not yet had a job: he was a final-year undergraduate in architecture at the same university as his grandfather so long ago. Rhondda, too, studied architecture. When they were not studying architecture, they studied each other.

When Jim studied Rhondda he sometimes saw the need for a lesson that would take her a little out of herself, help her along. He had proposed his grandfather to Rhondda as this kind of lesson. A twofold lesson: he proposed his grandfather both as a kick-start to the imagination and as a historical prototype of himself, though he was none too sure of the resemblance, of what, besides blood, united them. “Wasn’t it rather more than a job?” he said.

“What would you call it?”

“I don’t know what to call it. I want to know what you call it. Your school in the jungle, your magical observation-post at the heart of events – when all was new. When India was a new country.”

“An old country.”

“However old it may have been,” said Jim, “in 1947 India was a new country. It was brand-new to everyone, not just to you.”

“I was in Hyderabad. Hyderabad was an old country, and it was not going anywhere.”

“That’s what I mean. The perfect location. Inside and outside India at the same time. You stepped into India, and found yourself in Hyderabad. You stepped, as you thought, into a bold new Republic, and found yourself in a feudal state tottering on its last legs. You bowed to the Vicar al-Umra.”

“I thought I owed him that courtesy.”

“The last Mughal state,” enthused Jim. “Like the last unicorn – if it ever existed.” Jim laughed, believing he knew how to engage Philip. Have him with his back to the wall, defending something. Of course Hyderabad existed.

“So that’s what you think. I was poring over the last Mughal state?”

“No, the state fell apart. You stayed on. You survived that state.”

“I was employed there. Where else would I go? Where else in India would I go? The Nizam’s Government gave me the job. Nobody else was appointing headmasters my age.”

“You stayed on in Hyderabad for the sake of a job!”

This was what Philip had said, or appeared to have said, but Jim had sounded the wrong note. Philip was unsmiling. Something about staying on? About the job? It made him seem venal, perhaps? – a time-server? To correct that impression, and to entice Philip to tell more, Jim proceeded to fill in a scenario, the complete breakdown of civil society. “Peasant revolution, invasion by the Indian Army, lifts worked by elephants, always something to see and do up to the last moment – and beyond that moment … You must take us through everything that happened …”

“What’s this? Time travel?”

There was nothing indulgent about Philip’s retort, and Jim and Rhondda saw at once that by laying it on thick about something, whatever it was, the last Mughal state, they had overlooked a vital ingredient of this proxy journey of theirs into the past. They had neglected the character of the man before them and his stake in his own past. He was Jim’s grandfather. In the society of his family he would wonder – was entitled to wonder – what there was to be interested in besides him.

3

Philip was jarred – shaken – by their entwined assault, by the presence of the young woman. When they left, the house was profoundly quiet. Jenny kept to her room. A mantle clock somewhere – an heirloom he could not recall, but it may have been ticking away in the house since his childhood – made itself heard, stumbling eerily as if it were lost.

You stayed on in Hyderabad for the sake of a job!

I stayed because Anand was in trouble, as simple as that. I stayed because Ragini stayed.

I might have responded in a word to Jim, to Rhondda: I stayed on for friends. Friendship. They’d have had to concede. They’d have wanted to know more about these friends.

Why should it matter to them that I stayed? However did I allow them to pull me in? India is a world in itself – more than a world – but why talk about Hyderabad in the first place?

Was it because the boy was so keen? He pictured himself where I was, and he wanted to know more. He’d like to adventure, as every boy should, at his age … In my day, it was the army, the Second World War. I missed out on active service. Was it because the war ended? I can’t recall why. Young Jim would have liked to be me, or so he imagines, he’d have liked to set off. To hell with his studies, says he; but he won’t set off, because of the girl. She’ll keep him beside her, and I can see, at a glance, just what the temptation is. She’s gorgeous.

I was wrong to give in. I must have been addled, or bewitched, to talk about Hyderabad, even to think about Hyderabad, for the first time in God knows how long.

Jim’s questions had perturbed him.

In this room near the street, once Philip’s grandparents’, not even Jim, its last occupant, had improved by much on a layout a hundred years old. There was no longer a queen-size bed with a doll and ornaments in the centre of the room but the wallpaper, the pictures, if not those of Philip’s own childhood, were twice Jim’s age. What had stayed his hand? Could it have been the window-seat, with its oak carpentry and immovable ‘lid’? Or had Jim been one of those children who refrain from inhabiting their room but colonise the rest of the house? That would explain why Jenny, for all her ruthless house-piety, left an unsorted pile of gadgets, pennants and sporting equipment at one end of the verandah, none of them girls’ toys. Jim was born here; then he came to live here again, while his sister Vinta, nine years younger, kept to her mother’s house. Wasn’t that usual? Or was it unusual? Wasn’t it a tradition, in this family, to live with the grandparents? Or was that just boys? Philip had had no sister. There were too few children to test it out.

That night, Ragini appeared to him. He had fallen asleep planning his next day’s interview which was fixed with a curriculums expert from a church school enterprise, a person trying to get religion on the agenda.

He woke to the impression that someone was in the room, someone was prowling the room – yet not this room! – scanning its properties, the lie of the land, but without touching anything, concealing an interest. He knew as he stared that it was not this intruder who had wakened him but his shame or error in declining to speak of her, to the two who wanted to know everything. Declining to speak of her existence, and of another’s existence. He had done nothing wrong but the woe of the omission – like a tune he could not get out of his head – woke him at last in exasperation, not his exasperation but the exasperation of a woe, which had sent its personal messenger.

4

But about Ragini, there was nothing woeful in the least. She roved – still without addressing him – the empty schoolroom, empty of pupils and occupied solely by the teacher, who had mistaken a holiday for a working day.

Ugadi. The day was Ugadi. Amazed at his recall, Philip sat up. The light switch was at arm’s length. He flooded the room with light and the wraith vanished.

He again slept. But in less than an hour – perhaps at once – he awoke to the lit room: wine-glasses, tumblers, an ashtray for the nectarine stones, and his day clothes where he had left them, the pants neatly folded. The bachelor, widower or discarded husband entertains in his room.

He resembled all three, but least of all the second – for Jenny was alive. Had he been willing to move, he’d have tiptoed into the corridor to reassure himself of her presence, her snarled breathing. Jenny would be there.

He lay in the dark. For half a lifetime, he had not encountered that image. He had thought of Ragini, year in, year out, but always, so far as he could, in the abstract and he had never thought of that day, the event of that day, jubilant Ugadi, the first day of the Hindu New Year in Warangal District. The first calendar day of the year, of the impossibly hot month of Chaitra (March–April), a day when nobody went to school. But on this occasion the schoolteacher went to school.

The 76-year-old Philip had a long day ahead of him. He showered and changed, unrested. These assignations he kept were like job interviews. Yet surely job interviews were behind him! He had completed his life’s sequence of interviews, in India, twenty years ago, always with success. The would-be benefactor he now met in his home suburb of Rockdale was far more of a job applicant than Philip himself. His need was the greater, and Philip saw at once that the scheme he’d cooked up, to interest state schools in Comparative Religion with Philip as the Hindu – but why not a real Hindu? – was doomed to fail because its planner would strike the Education Department as he struck Philip, as far too eager, and – professionally speaking – as pert and small, not powerful enough. Now if it were Hillsong … But what would Hillsong want with a Hindu? – even a Caucasian Hindu who at sixteen years old had taught Christian catechism at the West Botany Street Methodist Church a mile down the road. Philip’s collaborator was a born-again, word-of-flame Protestant evangelical – though an unsuccessful one – who had lost audience, and was obliged to bring other people into his project. He was doing his best to sound ecumenical. “Now let me hear what you think.”

“What I think is that two are not enough. We need to involve more religions.”

“But that’s what they have now. More religions. In a secular programme – which is what they have now – all the religions under the sun are allotted one period a week for religious studies.”

“You want more than one period.”

“I want this in the Higher School Certificate. I want to make Comparative Religion into a core subject. Is that how you think of Hinduism, one forty-minute period a week?”

This strategist – Keith Ball was his name – was as disappointed in Philip as Philip was in him. But he refused to let him go. He detained him, bid fair to restrain him, he all but implored him – yet without respect. Philip regretted he had no watch. He must travel to Merrylands for his next appointment. He peered around Keith Ball’s head. There was the municipal clock on Bryant Street, another old timepiece, once as familiar to him as life itself.

Why had she come? There had been years, time and to spare, for her to come. Why now? He asked this of Ragini as if she were the agent, as if it were her doing. But Ragini was not the agent. The 23-year-old woman he had glimpsed in the early morning dark exploring blackboards and turning over equipment in a schoolroom of 1948 harboured no intentions and was not even a real person. If there was a summons, it was Philip who had summoned Ragini. If anyone was the agent, it was Philip himself – then which part of him? It was no conscious part. Philip, when all was said and done, did not believe in breaking himself into parts.

Keith Ball was recasting his entire project there and then. “I should take a back seat. I should let you draft the submission and, I’m sure you’re right, we do need other religions. You decide what they’ll be. I’m sure I can squeeze Christianity in there somewhere.”

Philip took in none of this, but he sensed an emergency. Keith Ball was in trouble.

Why step into Hyderabad after all those years?

He was conscious of furious paddling on his own part. He remembered that Warangal Ugadi, though not much of it. It was a day he’d outlived. He’d outlived that day; there were others, too, he had outlived, had contrived to forget, fifty years and more without loss. It would be no advantage now to remember them. It was possible still to avert his mind, and he set out, actively, to do so, as if safe distance, a horizon, could be attained once and for all. Then, suddenly, he gave in. He would abandon that tactic. Face it and let it go.

An hour later, Philip was advising a party of Indian undergraduate students in the distant suburb of Merrylands. They had no paid work and were neglecting their studies. He really believed he could be of use here.

5

A holiday. Philip should have known. He was wakened that morning, not by the pre-dawn prayer from the mosque amplifier, but by the Hindu supra­bhatam, projected at three times the volume of the Muslim prayer and (his watch showed) well before five. Just a bit quieter and he’d have lain peacefully and heard it out. But his peace had ended. He gathered his clothes but did not try to light the lantern in the pitch darkness.

There were people outdoors. The bazaar shutters were down, but a few bare globes dangled from wires in places. Had he had his wits about him Philip would have seen, by their light, what the street traders were selling, and noted the excitement of the children, infesting the street at this hour. But he did not look about him. He had only one goal: to trace the music to its source, and return to bed. When he did return – from as far as the Hanuman temple near the train station – his servant had arrived. Bashir had pumped up the lantern and was brewing tea – tea-dust, Philip called it, but he drank it. On the table, resting on crinkled paper, were two mangoes, glossy and plump, one gold, one red.

“Who are these from? From you?”

“Today spring.” The servant, a Muslim, acknowledged the festival with his gift. He did not proclaim it.

Spring, they call it. Already, as Philip rode out, the temperature was climbing. The season was outlandish. How could there be spring flowers in a month hotter than the Australian January? But spring flowers there were. They were mostly cut flowers, strung in garlands or braided in the hair of girls, who were unusually scented in India. Philip dismounted and walked his bike. Women were scouring the house steps and pouring chalk patterns between thumb and forefinger in the dust. A boy on a step had a clutch of chickens, all different colours: red, sky blue, orange. Holidayers everywhere were wearing new clothes.

To persons, including foreigners, who were used to putting two and two together, it should have been plain that today was no ordinary day. If Philip failed to reach that conclusion, it was perhaps because no day in India, to him, was an ordinary day. They were all like this. Every day bore its own sign. There were days of the ritual calendar, days known to history, and all those days when nothing was afoot but something profoundly new to him was bound to occur: he had not yet divined the mystery, nor did he try to, of that boundless succession of unusual days. In December, his third month in Warangal, the few Muslim Shi‘a had taken out their ‘Ashura procession with whip scourges, paper tombs and the sight of blood. On a day in February, when the news of Gandhi’s assassination reached Warangal, rival groups marched in procession and heads were broken. Weekday and Saturday, holiday or no holiday, the police set up roadblocks and pursued fleeing villagers. Philip was quick to empathise – and not with the police! – but he kept out of the way. He was choosing no sides. He had a school to administer, a task baffling in itself. Warangal claimed to be a town but all this long main road proved to be, as it stretched from Kazipet station, by way of the Thousand Pillar Temple, to the ruined, marvellous 13th-century fort with its stone geese, was a string of rustic hamlets, steel telegraph poles and ponds of standing water. This sequence held the town together. But it varied in character from place to place and so singularly from day to day that even the most tranquil days seemed subtly and wholly unique and at variance with all the others, so nothing could be learned from them. Never the same secret twice.

This might explain why Philip arrived at his schoolhouse without remarking on its unusual desertion, except as an index of the lateness of others. Yet this could not be. Lateness never happened. The pupils, it was true, were often late, those that turned up. And the two assistant teachers had never arrived! But the three kitchen staff – cook, bearer, and kitchen-hand – an accountant from time to time, the peon who sometimes arranged pens and inkstands, and an infinite number of visitors, spectators, local identities, concerned relatives and others who attached themselves to the school, were punctuality itself. They were always to be found in advance of him, perhaps not all of them but enough to make a conference of every schoolday. Philip let himself in with his own key. He threw open the one window in the blackened kitchen and stood relishing the cubicle without its smoke. Then, seated behind the great desk, he surveyed the three rows of desks and forms – without yet knowing himself at a loss.

“I knew I’d find you.” It was Ragini. She spoke from the door. She refrained from entering the schoolroom, not out of diffidence but in order to hold him in her sights, in the longest perspective for as long as possible.

“And I knew you’d come.”

“You knew I’d come. Why is that, now?”

“I knew you’d want to ask.”

“Ask? What about? About Anand? You’ve gone to him, then?”

“I haven’t ‘gone’ to him.” Philip left his desk to be nearer. “I did travel to Hyderabad at the weekend, and of course I saw Anand. In fact he ran me down – at Monty’s. He’d been combing the town. He had a lot to say.”

“Yes, the more he has to say, the less he has to say. I’ve heard it. Please don’t tell me about it.” She eluded his approach and stepped into the room, deep into his own territory. “Why was I so sure you’d be here? You haven’t asked why.”

“I’m always here.”

“Where are your boys, then?” Ragini was inspecting the wall chart. “Today is Ugadi. It’s a public holiday.” With a fingernail, unlacquered and a little torn, she tapped the chart. “Since you’re teaching them English, why is the alphabet in Urdu?”

“The alphabet is in two languages.”

“English and Urdu. There is no need for Urdu. These children speak Telugu. Why are you teaching them two alphabets – neither of which they’ll need?”

“I’m teaching them one alphabet. ‘A is for apple.’ Apple in Urdu is different. It starts with an S, I think,” said Philip, who had barely noticed the small Urdu letters in the bottom of every frame.

“Why do you even know that?”

Philip decided to instruct his tormentor in some of the realities of his own position. He had gathered by now that he’d come to school on the wrong day. But the way with Ragini was to counter-attack. “I don’t choose the equipment, you know. This chart is professional work, it’s in three colours. It’s published by the Dar ul-Uloom. They write the text-books, which are in Urdu, and I work up the curriculum. If you want Telugu, you can teach Telugu.”

“How can I?”

“Because you have so much spare time, and you drop by so often … Some revolutionary! Always in the vicinity …”

“You’d like me to teach in your school.”

“Please do. If you want them to read and write Telugu” – there, he had her.

Ragini would have to think hard. “If your offer is sincere …” she began. She had mounted the stair to his desk and he took her in: a beautiful woman, erect and lithe in her marine-blue sari, her delicate features clouded by effort as she turned her thoughts to outwitting him. It was no part of Ragini’s condescension to decline a challenge. “If your offer is sincere, I will teach.”

“On Fridays. You’ll teach every Friday.”

“I’ll teach when I can. Those children will learn some Telugu, reading and writing. Don’t pay me. I’ll do this for love, the way I do everything for love.”

“You do, do you?”

“Yes, for love. Why, what do you think, Philip? Why do I do what I do?”

Instead of overturning her bluster, Philip viewed her with a kind of awe.

Was it bluster? To Anand, no part of it was bluster: he accepted, or swallowed, all of Ragini, her comings and goings, her insurrectionary boldness, her magical self-image. It was why she gave him no peace. Challenge her self-image – which Anand must have done, without knowing – and you opened a breach which he despaired of closing. To Philip was entrusted the work of repair; but he had no idea how to go about it on his friend’s behalf.

“There is a word ‘love’,” he said, “and I know what I mean by it. Do I know what you mean by it?”

So little concerned was Ragini with what Philip meant by love, or with what he thought she meant by the same word – she had moved on – that she left him beached, pondering her depths. And this was a man who had earned, at the very beginning of their acquaintance, the right, the licence to make fun of all Ragini held dear: a style friendship takes in Australia, which, coming from him, and no other, pleased her very well. He, and no other, could tax her with her sublime indolence as a revolutionary.

Stationed by his desk, she was facing the street door. She glimpsed the distraction before he did. A group of small boys, noting that even on Ugadi there were people inside, had ventured into the schoolroom. The instant Philip turned, they vanished. But soon there were more of them. They clustered undispersed, marking the presentation of something, a gift for the occasion: two dishes of payasam from the bazaar.

The head and only teacher was disregarded. She who presided at the desk was approached first. Tugged by three fingers to the doorway and out into the bright sunlight, Ragini exclaimed, “See how your pupils look after you.”

“These are not my pupils.”

“We’ll begin with them. In Telugu. I’ll hold my first lesson.”

The belt of the road where the school was – a cracked cement building, mystified and dignified by its purpose alone – was a precinct devoted not to schoolbooks and learning, but to cycle and auto machinery in small booths. One shop, in defiance of size, housed a lorry. These were hammering places. The only substantial building was being pulled down. For all the variety of notices in three languages – Brake Linings, Engine Repair, Motor Lubricants – the entire quarter was given over, so far as Philip had observed, to bashing and soldering and fender bending. But today this activity was at pause. It might even have been possible to hold a school lesson without percussion and backfire. The shop grilles – stouter by far than the shop masonry – were sunk by spikes in the earth and padlocked for good measure, a token of holiday intentions. Holiday structures had been wheeled into place: flower stalls, toy stalls, food stalls, an itinerant pile of chairs carried by human legs. From the pile two chairs were subtracted for Philip and Ragini. Ragini was as good as her word. She was about to teach.

How this situation was reversed – how they found themselves, once more, in the dark of the schoolroom – Philip was unable to establish. No one calamity forced their retreat, but a host of small events. As Ragini was addressing the children, a loftier audience – adult men and women – edged nearer. “Schoolteacher!” Philip looked up. All these were wellwishers. They had nothing to do with the school but respected its function and were delighted to interfere in its workings. He could handle Sri Sudhakar Venakataiah – who was always in the street – and, left to himself, he would have seen off an officious woman, unknown to him, who addressed Ragini in English as “Madam” and began to interrogate her, in good old unrivalled fashion which Ragini should have known was harmless. Instead, Ragini fired up. She answered question with question: “You are asking me what? For what purpose? You are a headmistress? At which institution?” The woman replied, “I am not a headmistress. I am not a schoolteacher. I am not a student. I am a person from Warangal, not a person from Bezwada or Madras Presidency. Hear me out. What is your business here? Why are you here? You are studying at which college?” Ragini responded with a flood of Telugu: her victory, or her mistake. While the two sorted things out, making them worse, the class of boys Ragini had assembled heard music in the distance. They were off. A band was playing. The pitch of the instruments – brass and woodwind, by the sound of it – wavered enticingly with the band’s approach. This might be the effect either of distance, of an unfamiliar musical scale, or of erratic timing. Philip rose in his chair to have a view of the uniforms. But before he could glimpse them Ragini had seized him by the arm and abruptly steered him back into the shadow and seclusion of his own school.

Once inside, she closed the door. Not the thing, in India, to close doors on onlookers.

“Won’t they object?” Philip was conscious, too conscious, of sexual mores.

“Object?” echoed Ragini, on whom this concern was lost. “The infernal woman, she thinks she knows everything about me. Where did she learn that from? – Madras Presidency! Do I look like a foreigner?”

“What did you say to her?”

“Nothing I hadn’t heard from you. What’s the phrase? I learned it from you. I told her, in English, to pull her head in.”

“That’s good, you need enemies, all you can get,” said Philip. “The kotwal, the jagirdars, the Nizam’s troops, the forest contractors and the Razakars are not enough for you. You bawl out onlookers on the street. They’ll come looking for you.”

“They’ve forgotten me already.”

Ragini spoke with a confidence Philip found absurd – and compelling. The woman in the street had known too much. She was right on the ball. Ragini, to be sure, did not hail from Bezwada, a town across the border, in now-independent India. Ragini was a local, raised in this district. But for two years, she had studied medicine at a Madras college. Why she had travelled to Bezwada, Philip could not say – but she had, if only to stay a month. And had abandoned her medical studies. Such was his impression. Something to do with the Andhra Mahasabha. Philip took stock of all he knew, all he’d been told by Ragini of her life. The woman in the street knew too much, though not so much as Philip. She knew nothing of Ragini’s sister, of Ragini’s village, Narayanaguda, of her home, called Tirumalai, of the illness of her father, and perhaps she believed – wrongly – that the Andhra Mahasabha was a Communist organisation. It was plain she knew nothing about the person herself.

Philip had never before shared a space with Ragini with the door closed, and no-one else in sight. He should pinch himself. He’d be mad not to savour the moment. But what he said was, “You should leave now. At once.”

“Please don’t know what’s best for me, Philip.”

“I’m aware you’re a will-o’-the-wisp. You can shimmy through roadblocks. But I saw the look on that woman.”

“You want me to leave.”

“How could I want you to leave?”

Ragini threw the door open. Not to depart, but to allay the intolerable heat in the room. The street noises moved in. She drifted along the walls of the room, to the alphabet chart which had claimed her attention in the first place. “A is for apple,” she intoned vaguely.

“You can’t teach school here, any time. They’d pick you up in no time.”

“I had had the idea,” she continued with her back to him, in a citation voice, as if she were reading it off the charts, “of taking you somewhere for Ugadi, to a place you’d like. That’s the Kavi Sammelan, where the poets gather. They read out their verse; it’s all in Telugu but what will you care, you’ll understand. Poetry is poetry in any language. Will I call for you? – oh, no, I’d forgotten. I’m not to show my face.”

“I’ll come.”

“Shall I arrange someone else for you?”

“No. I’ll come with you.”

She assented, a motion of the head. Dipping it sideways, in Warangal fashion, the opposite of a nod. It meant a nod. Glorying in his reprieve – he had dismissed her, but she refused to go – Philip returned the favour by addressing her wants, abruptly contriving her release from her ordeal of expectancy. “I did meet with Anand. Just as you hoped.”

“Still upset, was he?”

“He takes the blame. He’s hard on himself. You know what he’s like. He makes no excuses, he accepts his share of the blame, even when …”

“Even when someone else is to blame.”

“Did I say that? It’s the last thing on Anand’s mind, who’s to blame. Who’s to blame, who said the worst things. He wishes he could unsay his. I don’t say yours were the worst things.”

“So, your friend caught up with you. At Monty’s. I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“What does that mean?”

“Monty’s in Secunderabad. Isn’t that where you two forgather? Isn’t it an alehouse? – where the British get drunk? Let’s not talk about him.”

“Of course we’ll talk about him.” Philip was vexed, by the way she pretended to close down the subject – when Anand could talk of nothing else. “He was looking for me. I’m the one who drinks in an alehouse. I’m the one who hangs out with British cantonment officers.”

“They’re your people.”

“They’re not my people. But I do like a beer.”

“How many of them are there? The Britishers. Aren’t they all gone?”

“Who cares?”

“Of course there is Mr P. Hardcastle, the Director of Public Instruction. Your boss. He likes a drink too. It’s all right, I approve of Hardcastle.”

“You approve of Hardcastle!”

“You’re all trying to help, but at the last moment. All these good people were appointed to help, but at the last moment, to clean up the act – you too.”

Philip offered no defence.

But his conjecture was sound. It was Ragini who abandoned the topic of drink and returned to Anand. “If he thinks I insulted his Swami, I’m not interested in his precious Swami. His Swami is in gaol. So why isn’t Anand in gaol? It’s not hard for a Congress Party worker to find himself in gaol. All these Gandhian tactics are ridiculously easy. All you have to do is appear in public, you offer satyagraha as they call it, and the Nizam’s police will throw you in gaol. If Anand so believes in his Swami, why isn’t he in gaol in Gulbarga along with the rest of them?”

“They can’t all be there. Somebody has to stay out of gaol.”

“And that somebody is Anand.”

“They’re chosen. All the satyagrahis are chosen. Don’t you understand party discipline?”

“Anand runs away. He bolts to Sholapur in India when his fright becomes too much for him. In and out of Hyderabad,” said Ragini, who appeared to be enjoying herself; she must have been: for none of this was true. “That’s some brave Maratha. He says he’s a Maratha, but his hero Shivaji would be ashamed of him.”

“Anand’s hero is not Shivaji. Anand’s hero is Gandhi, who has been assassinated. Anand belongs to a party with inspiring leaders, but with very few rank-and-file workers in Hyderabad. He has always pointed this out – to you too. He’s not a leader. He’s valued for his time and his work. Anand is not important enough to go to gaol.”

“You’re so right about ‘important’.”

“Anand has never turned his back on anyone. He’s the most courageous person I know.”

“Do you have many courageous people, in Australia?”

“Anand is fighting the Nizam, just as you are.”

Anand this, Anand that. In doing his best for Anand, Philip believed he might even be falling into a trap. She was laughing at him. Seeing how far he’d go for Anand. He was about to enlist in the joke, when she placed that interpretation of his firmly out of court. She passed beyond bounds. “I think he’s a disdainful person.”

“Disdainful? I haven’t found him disdainful.”

“And why would you? What would he find to say about you? It’s me he despises.”

“Oh, I hardly think so.”

“Let’s not talk about him. If I’m an enemy of India, let me remain so and Anand can do battle for India. ‘To right social wrongs’. And what are these wrongs? So proud he’s in Congress. Did you know his Swami met Patel in Delhi? There’s the man to right social wrongs. There are all kinds in Congress. I believe it was their own people who got rid of Gandhi.”

“It was Hindu communalists. It was Godse.”

“And do you believe there are no Hindu communalists in the Congress? Anand doesn’t think so, but they’ll do for him too – and for his Swami.”

“He speaks well of you,” said Philip. That sounded so mild – but it was true. Ragini should listen.

“So he does. Do you know what he says? That we’re comrades, and we should sleep together. I don’t mind sleeping together – that’s with a comrade. He’s heard me say this. But Anand and I are not comrades. You do not say of a comrade that she poses as a friend to her nation but she’s really the enemy. That she’s working for Moscow – just because he hears me say ‘the people’. I should say ‘India, India’ more often. It would make no difference to what I do. That’s what he wants of me, this comrade, to mend my tongue.”

Philip listened in wonder. He was exercised by ‘sleeping together’, but there was more to trouble him. “What Anand said to me was …”

“He says I’m marvellous. I know, he says it to me too. He has all these birds for me, good and bad. When he’s not calling me a peacock – the bird with the tail: not a peahen – when he’s not telling me I strut and show off and glory in a poverty not my own … that’s what he says … when he’s not telling me I’m a spy and instructing me to leave his country and claim exile in Moscow, I’m Anand’s forest kili – his parrot. You’ve seen those green parrots? – not the tame ones. I’m Anand’s vanakili. What does he want with a vanakili?”

“His ‘wild bird’. He calls you this. And he’s right.”

“Oh, you think so? He’s right about one thing. Our compact is off. Whatever he thought was ‘on’ between us.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“You haven’t heard him, Philip. He says I’m the daughter of a landlord. Well, so I am. Does this mean I’m working for the landlords? According to Anand, I must be. That’s his logic. He tells me it’s Marxist logic. I suppose he thinks: ‘isn’t she the one who’s a Marxist? Here’s sauce for the goose’. I am not a Marxist. I’ve never read a word of Marx. I’m a poor forest kili. Anand himself would not take one step into the thick of the forest, not where I go.”

And Ragini lost herself in the wall-charts – for her, the only distraction in the entire room.

Philip, having stood stock-still, now found himself wandering. He corrected the angles of all the chairs behind the boys’ desks and surveyed the teacher’s desk, on its dais, from the floor. That dais reached the wall and was Ragini’s proud eminence, as she scanned the charts – stalling, she must be! He gave her time.

She did not use the time. She stepped down abruptly and crossed, without warning, to the open door. There she turned. Stranded among his pupils’ desks, Philip called helplessly – it was all that came to him, “You don’t ‘strut’. He’s wrong.”

“Who says I strut? Oh, Anand.”

“How can he have got you so wrong?”

She was on her way out, but she lingered. She had sensed nothing odd, though Philip, artless in his admiration, was distinctly aware that he had put his foot in it. What was more, he was unable to stop. “I think you alarm people.”

“I what? I alarm people?”

“They misunderstand you.”

In the silence that followed, Philip improved on this insight. “People are afraid. Not of you, but for you. They can’t live up to you. And they can’t save you. Anand is typical. He knows you’re the daughter of a landlord but he sees you vanish into those dark forests, and he asks what it’s for. I don’t say I understand you. I’ve heard you explain. Injustice. Murder. What’s done to village women by the forest contractors. I’ve seen you armed. That day you stepped into the clearing and you were carrying something heavy, a bolt-action rifle. But the police have Bren guns.”

“I was not carrying a rifle.”

“We don’t know how to call you back.”

Even as he spoke, Philip was visited by the notion that he was so far out of his world, and out of his depth, that his grandparents, cousins, classmates and his former girlfriend would not have recognised him. If words of his were somehow to be recorded, and circulated among them, they’d bawl with one voice: this grandchild, apple of our eye, prize student and disloyal lover, is raving. What police, what forests and what Amazons with rifles? Is there such a country? Some woman has swept him off his feet.

Ragini had her question. “Who is this ‘we’?”

“Did I say ‘we’?”

“ ‘We don’t know how to call you back.’ Who is this ‘we’? You and Anand?”

“Leave Anand out of it.”

“The ‘we’ is you then. And why would you call me back? What business of yours is it? Why detain me?”

“I didn’t mean to detain you. As if I’d detain you. I think I meant …” Philip lurched on, “I think I meant to accompany you.”

Ragini rubbed her eyes. She touched her forehead. “This heat is bothering me. You’d suppose I’d be used to it, but I’m not.”

“You heard me. I said what I said.”

“And what was that?”

Philip considered repeating his words over. He was unable.

“If you mean to accompany me, Philip, accompany me to the bus station. I’ve clipped my cycle to the rack at the bus station. Will that be enough? Or do you mean to accompany me further?”

“Further,” croaked Philip.

“ ‘Into the valley of death’, I suppose you mean.”

He was in a fix. And had placed Ragini in a fix. Yet the fix he was in was the fix he deserved, whereas in her case, her fix surprised her. It had come out of nowhere, and was evanescent.

“Is there something you believe you can do? Do for me?” she said gently.

“Not really,” said Philip humbly. “Just be with you.”

“Be? How?”

With her next words, Ragini’s tone changed. It held, now, an acid note, a mocking note, which did not seem to be meant for him personally but to outsoar him, leaving him neglected. “Shouldn’t you have asked for more?”

6

Asked for more! But he had not asked for more. He had stuck by Anand, stood up for Anand. She had nothing to reproach him with.

Why had she come? After fifty years, why had she come?

Philip lay where he was thrown – at the bottom of a well. He did not flinch or stir. In the house at Gibbes Street, Rockdale, there was no more he could do. At this point his memory – event-perfect, like a recitation – knew its limits and evaporated.

As the slow pieces, the lumbering furniture of the room emerged into view – the bed, the window-seat and the armchair, which had caught fire from a radiator when he was nine and had had to be re-upholstered (he recalled its former pattern) – the schoolroom at Warangal could not have been further away. Yet the past of this room was more distant than the past of the schoolroom. Nothing, to Philip, was more inevitable than this room. It was his grandparents’ room. Now Ragini had appeared in this room! He stirred at last, and busied himself. He ransacked the kitchen for the tea-canister and made tea at the stove.

He clung to this safe activity. He warmed the pot. He fetishised the brew. He avoided, and tried to discount, what he had remembered. He was surprised at the fluency of that memory, how surely and easily it had unfolded, haunted by foreknowledge, but withholding its rebuke till the end. Asked for more: but he had not asked for more. If that was her rebuke, it was a light one. Was her rebuke all there was? Or would memory plough on? Would the past return, or strive to return? Even if it did not return, would he seek it out? Would he seek to learn more? Was to seek more simple prudence, or an act of defiance, defiance of some power? What power? He did not know what power. There was a kind of foreboding. Nothing too bad, he hoped! Nothing that could not be forgotten – as it had been, for most of a lifetime.

You defer a pain, you might not submit to a memory for a lifetime – but its vigour is intact.

If that were true, there was pain you would never come to know. You would die hoarding it. You would hoard and deny this pain, put it off: you would die happy.

7

Why had she come?

When names aren’t asked for – and Jim hadn’t asked for names – there can be no denial in refusing to give them. Jim had spotted no denial. But why refuse? Why disown Anand and Ragini? Something in memory would explain this omission. But why should he have to search, to belabour memory? Shouldn’t he just know? There was a kind of looming awareness – as if of a betrayal. But Philip had betrayed nobody. He had nothing to repent of and what dismayed him in that schoolroom episode – on the surface, at least – was no misdeed of his but the revelation of his insignificance, his absolute insignificance in their lives, in the life of India, and perhaps, definitively, in his own life – though he clung to his life.

His want of importance, his thistledown unimportance and want of stake. The moment this secret was out, the life-force in Philip rallied to disprove it. Ask anyone in India, they’d have shown you a life teeming with accomplishment. It was only as he stood on the brink of a new beginning, a new and perilous beginning in his native country, that the fear of his inconsequence was borne in on him. It was this that brought Ragini: the emergency of the hour, his present crisis. He did not like to think of it as a crisis.

As for the schoolroom, the event was over. Why, then, was it not over? What of other events?

The image came to him of a road in the Warangal district. By that road Philip was voyaging, from Warangal to Hyderabad, for the first time since his appointment to his new job. It was December 1947 – long before March ’48, the event of the schoolroom. A bus, without driver or conductor, stood pulled over on the roadside. He, Anand and the rest of the passengers had been forced off the bus. The midday sun blazed.

Philip and Anand were bareheaded. They stood with the others listening to an endless harangue – in Telugu, foreign to them both. Anand, though born and bred in the Nizam’s Dominions, hailed from the districts where Marathi was spoken. But he stood as if weighing every word.

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.

Now the passengers were freed to disperse. They were not permitted to rejoin the bus, which was boarded one after another by members of the dalam, who may have wished to see for themselves what the interior of a state transport vehicle was like. Rather than move to the shade, the passengers, and the bus-crew as well, entirely to Philip’s surprise, trailed along the road. They reached the bend of the road and rounded the bend. They were not prevented. Philip and Anand joined the trek. One of the gang swung from the boarding-step of the bus and followed at a distance, keeping them in sight.

“Why are they letting us go?”

“They’re not letting us go. Where would we go?”

Anand knew no more about it than Philip did. Once round the bend they saw, not far away, the booths of a market-village, which appeared to be thriving. “There’ll be a grain store,” Anand now decided, “and a telegraph office. They are taking a risk.”

“Will you phone the police?”

“Phone the police? The Nizam’s police? I’d as soon phone the Razakars.”

“They’re harmless, to us, I think,” said Philip, referring to the gang, and not to the police or the Razakars.

They walked on. Thin jungle, on both sides of the road, was cleared in places and in one of these clearings a small boy sat alone by a pile of flat stones which could only have been dumped from a lorry. He was beating stone on stone, without much dinting them but with the effect of an intricate rhythm to which he sang – in a formed voice, no infant treble. A kingfisher, a gorgeous green, light-green at the throat and with a bit of russet at the head, darted from a thorn-bush. There must be paddy-fields somewhere, to account for the bird. “They’re harmless to us. The only real harm they do is to themselves,” said Anand, declaring his opinion at last.

“What are they? Communists?”

“If they’re Communists, we’ll see at the mandi. There’ll be a hammer-and-sickle on every building. I think they’re Communists. The reason they’ve let us come so far is that they own the village.”

“Own the village?”

“They occupy the village. Not all the time, but they depend on these villagers. But they’re too near the road. The police will come. They’re taking one hell of a chance,” said Anand as if he, a rival in politics, would take no such chances. “I’ve seen them like this outside Warangal: standing around, unconcerned, in broad daylight, as if they were immortal – I don’t understand it. I don’t understand this way of fighting.”

“So your people don’t just stand around, they offer satyagraha. The gaols are full of them. How many Congress workers are in gaol as we speak?”

“Swamiji may call it off. He’s beginning to think it’s the wrong tactic.”

“And where is Swamiji? Isn’t he in gaol?”

For a newcomer and outsider, who knew nothing about right and wrong tactics, and least of all in Hyderabad, where both the Congress and the Communists were banned, Philip – in Anand’s company – found much to say. He expressed his views, poked fun and made light of matters. And this was encouraged in him, for the sake of friendship! Philip had discovered a friend like his friends in Australia: one rather better informed, entrusted with weightier responsibilities for his tender years, but alike! – and at times perplexingly different. The marvel of it all was that Anand, from their first chance meeting, had gravitated to Philip like a snake to an anthill. They entered the market square. At one stall the bus passengers had gathered and at another were the driver, the conductor, and the driver’s companion, a fixture on these buses. Companions were a part of the scene in India, whoever you went looking for and whoever helped you look. The doorman, the mechanic, the doctor, even the cycle-rickshaw driver had his companion. For every incumbency, its shadow. Both Anand and Philip would have liked to confer with the bus crew about what they thought was going on – but they did not have the Telugu language. Anand tried in Urdu and was met with a single word: badmash.

“If they’re badmash, then why aren’t we dead? All those words wasted,” said Anand. “That speaker of theirs poured his heart out, but to the conductor they’re still badmash.”

“They’re badmash to me.”

“The passengers were the real audience. I wonder what they think.”

The fare at these stalls, to Philip, was not very appetising. Wherever something looked appetising – a basket of moist dates – the flies buzzed. But he did like the square, the bare earth pounded by generations of bare feet, the procession of trees with shaped leaves, like the trees in watercolour miniatures at the old British Residency in Hyderabad – he must learn trees’ names. A handful of people, not enough in the market at this hour of the day for real haggling. Sun-dazed, the entire spectacle. But there, parked under the trees at the very margin of the scene – beyond the whitewashed storehouses, all inscribed with the hammer-and-sickle and with messages in two scripts, Urdu and Telugu – was a vehicle, a bus like their own, the sight of which, before he knew why, lured him. Anand placed a hand on his arm. “Not there. Don’t go there. Aren’t you thirsty?” – and Philip was thirsty, thirsty enough to accept and drain a soft-drink, unrefrigerated, from a dubious bottle. And then another. Wasn’t that an all-woman bus?

Philip disregarded the warning and approached the bus. How cheering, the cluster of rural women surrounding the bus in their bright cholis, red, green, matched with the subdued colours of the saris draped over their shoulders, their brown midriffs bare, legs swathed to the ankles, arms stacked to the elbow with coloured bangles, the flash of jewelled nose-rings and toe-rings, the beauty of their features which were all of a kind, that aquiline beauty he had inspected in the miniatures from Golconda in the Residency collection. Telengana women. They were happy to greet him – what was Anand’s warning about? Then he saw. At the open windows of the bus, not at one window but at successive windows, like a frieze of nodding flowers, heavenly enticements, a sight appalling in its majesty and beauty: he turned away. A vision no man should contemplate – except in his imagination. Anand consoled Philip on his return. “Don’t be put out. You’re an Englishman. I don’t mean Englishman, you know what I mean. A kind of blundering fool. You can get away with it.”

“We call that ‘peeping tom’.”

“What a good word for it.” As Anand hustled him still further away, a lorry, its carrier space filled to bursting with sashed and turbanned figures bristling with weaponry, bounced at speed along the unevenly tarred road that bordered the square and vanished in the Warangal direction, rounding the bend. Anand affected to take no notice. “Where there are women, there are babies,” he said. “They all need feeding, or they set up a wail. Don’t be ashamed. That was mortifying, but we need people like you. Let me tell you why we need such people.”

But Philip had ceased to listen. “Who was that? Police, or …”

“Or Razakars? That was the police. The Razakars have much better uniforms.”

Philip was blinded by an after-image, not of the police lorry, but of the windows of the all-woman bus: a confusion of naked breasts, of gaping or feeding infants. With their placid, silent dream-countenances, these mothers were nothing like the mothers he knew. The mothers he knew did not chew betel or expose their breasts. He felt that it was somehow his duty to reappear at those windows and explain something, explain himself, to this universe of women.

“Expensive, too,” said Anand, still referring to the Razakar uniforms. “We don’t know who pays for them. Perhaps, where you’re situated, you can find out.”

“Where I’m situated? At the school?”

“Let me tell you why we need people like you. We need the kind of foreigners in India,” said Anand, “who won’t be put off, people who butt in and out wherever they like out of sheer ignorance. People who will always be forgiven.”

“Who needs such people?”

“They’re needed by the nationalist movement. They’re needed for their access to government.”

Was he speaking in jest or earnest? Philip could not be sure. “Who pays for the Razakar uniforms, is that the question? You want me to find out in Hyderabad. You want me to spy for you!”

“I don’t mean spy on the Nizam, the Nizam is nothing. The Nizam is too stingy to pay for uniforms, even his own. I mean Laiq Ali, or his Cabinet, or a Cabinet Secretary. You must know someone.”

“I know Englishmen. I don’t know any Cabinet Secretary.”

“Englishmen! We’re back where we started!” But just as Philip was sure that his leg was being pulled, that this was not a serious request, Anand changed his mind for him. “We do have very poor intelligence where government is concerned. We don’t know what they’ll do next. We were sure the Nizam would sign the Standstill Agreement. But he took weeks. What were the obstacles? What happened? They’re unpredictable. But they know all about us! Congress decision-making in Delhi is splashed all over the Urdu newspapers.”

“I’ll hear what I’ll hear. I won’t go looking for it. You’ve heard my objections.”

“Objections? It’s a cruel and murderous administration. Do you think of that?”

“It’s not all cruel and murderous.”

Anand gave up for now. He bowed faintly over his matched hands, to show he despaired of Philip. A shallow explosion, a burst tyre or motor exhaust noise, reached them from a distance. Then came a second; then two more. His few weeks in India had made Philip all but impervious to auto sounds. But Anand was alert. “Those were shots.”

Already the square was shaken up. The stall-keepers and stall patrons stood their ground, but the bus passengers were scurrying on the spot like disturbed ants. The crew, alarmed for their vehicle, had taken off in the direction of the shots. “We’ll all go. Or shall we stay here?” Philip darted a swift glance at the women’s bus. The same still faces. The mid-afternoon stillness reigned as before, with one difference: a puny gramophone, whose turntable had been revolving unnoticed in a stall, was now audible. Someone had had the patience to rig a loudspeaker.

“You go.” Anand mimed his own fixity, his face and hands motionless, his feet planted. Philip inferred that neither Anand, nor anybody in his right mind in this part of the world, would go where police were. Unless, of course, they had a bus to retrieve. It might have been sensible for Philip, too, to remain where he was, yet, for reasons unclear, to set out in the wake of the bus crew seemed right to him. It was somehow a test of him. He might do some good.

8

Anand let him go. With Philip occupied, he retrieved full authority over his person. He slipped the leash of Philip’s imagination, and thought and acted as himself.

Philip would come to no harm. No-one would shoot Philip, not because he was an Englishman (he was not) but simply by the law of averages. Anand watched him to the bend of the road. The moment he vanished, Anand sought the company of his male fellow passengers and began to speak with them, not in their native Telugu but in the language, Urdu, of which even villagers in the Nizam’s Dominions had a smattering, Anand less than most. He often corrected Philip’s Urdu, so had not wanted to expose his weak skills to Philip. Yet he was desperate to converse, to learn something.

He had barely got started when Philip reappeared. He arrived at the double, with an out-of-breath, badly shaken colleague whom Anand identified as a fourth member of the bus crew, who had stayed with the bus. Philip did not approach, but waved. The two vanished into a shop on the near side of the square and emerged soon after carrying a not-so-light object, a charpoy, kept aloft over their heads by arm-muscle power. This load had already descended on the head of the exhausted messenger.

They started back the way they had come. “A man is dead,” suggested one of the passengers, but Anand heard himself correcting him. “Perhaps he’s alive. Perhaps he is only hurt. Leave it to the bus-crew. We have no reason to stir from this place.”

“If it is a baghi,” said another passenger, speaking in Urdu for Anand’s benefit, “they will let us go. We will reach Hyderabad by evening. If it is police …”

“Better a baghi shot than the police,” said Anand, profaning his own opinion. These men were not sure. Not knowing who Anand was, they would not show their hand. So it had been for him through the whole of Telengana.

“At least we will soon have India,” he said. His statement was received in perfect silence.

But these people were Hindus. They couldn’t want the Nizam. Was it the baghi they wanted? Anand’s gaze slid along the walls, from slogan to slogan. He read, in Urdu, jumhuriyat, ‘democracy’. What did the word mean, to them? The word was accompanied, everywhere, by the hammer-and-sickle. It could not mean what his mentor, Swami Ramananda Tirtha, or the Congress high command thought of as democracy. Who would want this jumhuriyat? A few commissars. This answer, which might do for Russia, was perhaps not adequate for the Communist Party in Telengana. Anand was out of his zone. There were few, or no, Communists in the Marathi-speaking districts, from which he came. But all over Telengana the villagers scrawled, or allowed to be scrawled, fierce messages on their walls. These dirt-poor villagers looked forward, or appeared to look forward, to their jumhuriyat, and perhaps they knew, better than he did, what they would make of it.

When Anand, at his party’s request, visited the badlands, he dropped by Philip’s school. He had met Philip, not in Warangal, but in Hyderabad. Because Philip was an absolute stranger to India he had accepted a job, out of sheer ignorance, which he would never have been offered in his own country. He did not know the half of it. Not knowing the half of it, his role, as Philip saw his role, was a benign one. It was amazing to find such a school, in such a place, run by such a person. Who went to it? Who sent their sons (there were no daughters) to Philip’s school? Philip of course had no idea. The question had not occurred to him. Anand looked in at the school and sat down on a form. He did so as Philip’s guest. But if Philip came to Marathwada, would Anand receive him as a guest? He would not. Not because his family was poor, and not because Anand, the only son, was a graduate and his mother doted on him, and Anand lapped it up. Friends were one thing, family quite another. He did not want Philip to meet his father and had not the least intention of introducing him to his unmarried sisters.

The afternoon wore on. Those male passengers who had straggled were reabsorbed, by a collapse of will, into their bunched family groups. Anand toured the stalls, gulping soda-water out of bottles, all with a curious glass-marble stopper, and relieved himself under a distant tamarind where a goat was tied. In this market were carpentered booths and brick grain-storehouses, but no ‘shops’. He could not find where paints were sold. The idea had crossed his mind – though it would be folly – to replace some of the wall messages. So great was his frustration, and a kind of dejection, that he’d have started a bonfire if he thought the blaze would bring India any closer. Far loftier to be thrown in gaol, as a satyagrahi, than to tour these alien districts as a Congress ‘observer’ – only to court criminal arrest with a paint-brush in his hand.

Reprieve at last. The bus appeared, two figures leaning from the pole at the boarding-steps. One was the boarding-team assistant and the other was Philip. The families climbed aboard. Philip now vanished down the bus, saving a seat for Anand. His rushed forays into the aisle, his lively expression, his impatient bodily attitudes were enough to convince Anand, boarding slowly behind a family redistributing its luggage, that he had a tale to tell. Unlike an infant, Philip did not bawl it all out at once. He crafted his story. He led Anand through the chain of events, his return visit to the market to snatch a bed, his pounding his way – unable to communicate with his fellow Samaritan – back to that hold-up point in the road. Philip had anticipated a body, but the scene was all chaos and action, the police with their service rifles diving into the bush and emerging without a prisoner or trophy of any kind unless, thought Philip, they had someone in the cabin of their lorry. He tried to peer in, but his companion took fright and prevented him. The bus crew reclaimed their bus. The police posse was called in from the bush. They sped off in the direction of Warangal. It was only then that Philip thought he spied blood on the ground. “Either they wounded somebody – and he got away, or he did not get away …”

“We’ll suppose he did,” said Anand, to put an end to the matter.

The bus was in motion. Philip would not be hushed. He implored Anand to inquire of the bus crew, but what good would that do? The crew, too, had been late on the scene. Their only witness, the assistant who had run for the charpoy, spoke nothing but Telugu and had slumped over a luggage rack in exhaustion.

“I know I saw blood. I do hope they escaped, but who were they? Pulling over a bus in broad daylight. I call that foolhardy.”

A voice chimed in. “Listen who’s talking!”

A woman’s voice. Philip whirled round. He could see nobody.

Anand located the speaker, seated so plainly on the seat behind them.

She was a young Hindu woman, a little bedraggled in her green cotton sari but so absurdly beautiful that Anand forgot to draw breath.

“Philip, you’re surprised it’s me.”

“Ragini. You’re here. How did you join the bus?”

“I was always on the bus.”

This could not be true. The bus had been emptied out by the dalam. But Philip – who had looked the wrong way, who was still gaping in mid-air, as if she flitted there – did not correct her. It was not where she had sprung from, nor when, but the fact of her being there that so impressed him, that impressed both of them.

Anand was the next to speak. “You’re Ragini.”

It was not for such a magnificent creature to own to herself. Philip rose to the occasion. “Anand, this is Ragini. You two have to meet each other. She comes to the school.”

Ragini, hearing Anand’s name, did not seek to confirm it of him. “But why aren’t you at the school?” she asked Philip. “You should be. It’s term-time.”

“Term-time or not, I’ve shut down till next week. I have to make my report.”

“Your report, to whom?”

Philip knew this to be a dangerous question. “The usual people. The same people as usual,” he said vaguely.

“And those are?”

Heartened and entertained by this line of questioning, Anand again found his voice. “You try talking him out of it,” he said. “The Nizam’s people. He shouldn’t be teaching school, not for them.”

“But he’s a born teacher.”

Philip, the object of dispute, looked from one to the other.

“I’ve sat in on one of his lessons,” Ragini declared.

“Do you really think these lessons will continue,” said Anand, like a batter returning the shuttlecock, “once the Nizam’s Government is out of the way?”

“The Nizam’s Government. You hope it will fall.”

“I’m working to that end.”

“Anand is working to that end for the cause of India,” said Philip, so completing the introduction on both sides. “But he’s found it hard going in certain districts. I don’t believe too many people are listening to him.”

“I’ll listen to him. What’s this about India?”

“India is the name of our country. India is our nation,” said Anand, thrilled by his new audience though none too pleased with Philip’s brief digest of his adversities. “In places where this truth isn’t known – there are still a few places; Hyderabad is one of the biggest …”

“The biggest,” said Ragini.

“I’m a Congress worker. I tour the districts for the Indian National Congress.” Anand broke off. He had not meant to come to the point quite so soon. As in cricket, for a demon bowler, a short wind-up was necessary. But what most wrong-footed Anand – and Ragini, who perceived it – was a change in the motion of the bus. It was slowing down. After barely two miles, they were being pulled over yet again.

“More police,” said Philip. This time no lorry. But a van, uniforms. A senior officer, judging by his braid, and his constable climbed aboard. They spoke not a word, not even to the driver. They glanced without close inspection at the row of seats, and left morosely and abruptly, like men deceived. The journey was resumed.

Enduring this interval, Philip observed a detail in Ragini. Not just her agitation, as a lone Hindu woman, which she did well to disguise, but a surprising detail. “Have I seen you wear jewellery before?”

Ragini pointed to her nose-stud. That she always wore.

“No, no. Are those your best clothes?” He thought not. “Then why the jewellery? It makes you look …”

Anand would dearly have loved to supply the missing epithet. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the clothes, with the choli and sari, which were colour-matched: well-worn, but, of course, she’d been travelling. Nor could he object to the earrings. These dangled, resplendent, like something from a trousseau. Anand wondered, a trifle anxiously, if Ragini was married. She wore the pottu, the dot on her forehead, like all Hindu women except for widows. He was shocked by Philip, who acted as if he divined something. How did he come to be so free with her?

“Now you must admire these.” Ragini, to Philip, held out her wrists and forearms. “Normally it’s just two bangles, the chunky ones. Now see how many.”

“I like them.”

“They’re not for you to like or dislike. They’re not for anyone.”

“For the police, perhaps?”

“They’re to fool the police. You’re right. The earrings to show I’m a respectable person. The bangles to show I’m an authentic person. You do see why.”

“I can guess.”

Ragini switched her attention to Anand. “Because I’m a woman, I’m dangerous to the police. All women are dangerous, but not all women have to appear dangerous. You see these ammalu, on the bus, with their families. All these women are wearing jewellery.”

“The worse for them,” said Philip, “if the Razakars come.”

She ignored him. Her rebuff was intended. Ragini was afraid of his speaking out of turn. She did not want Anand to know the first thing about her.

Philip saw this, and held his tongue. Yet even if he blabbed, there was little enough he could tell. From the day Ragini appeared in his classroom (he had first thought – heaven help him – as his teaching assistant!) she had had the air of knowing him only too well. They could speak, directly, of whatever popped into their heads. But except for father and sister, and despite her infrequent tales of the medical college at Madras and of the two nursing hospitals, in Madras and Warangal – one outside and one inside the Nizam’s Dominions – he had learned nothing confidential, since she rarely confided. She belonged to the Andhra Mahasabha, a revolutionary organisation. She rode a green bicycle, she told lively stories of her forest rides, she came and went. He sensed her relief on her visits, an abatement of watchfulness – as if she assigned to Philip a recreational value.

Ragini, “always on the bus”, had not been on the bus at Warangal and had not been on the bus when it was intercepted. This left one place where she could have climbed on the bus.

“Are you a student?” she asked Anand.

“Do I look like a student?”

“No, answer me. Are you a student?”

“I am a graduate,” said Anand shortly.

“Graduate already. So you must be high up in the Congress Party.”

“I am not high up.” And it was not as a graduate that he meant to appear. Anand felt the initiative had been taken from him. For Ragini he described his posts, of which Warangal district was only one. In the Kannada-speaking districts, he watched Bidar airfield, from time to time, on the trail of the Cotton brothers. Anand’s account of himself was more halting than usual. He was all but tongue-tied. And yet he was feted for his eloquence in a number of places. His mother and sisters thought of him as a marvel, but they were not all. As a follower of the Swami, he was credited, in Hyderabad Congress circles, with a silver tongue. Two silver tongues – one speaking English, and one Marathi. Yet far from moving Ragini with his pro-India, pro-Congress oratory, he seemed only to awaken her skepticism, and – could it be? – her boredom, though she plied him with questions. The listener with whom he struck a chord was Philip. Philip was amazed to hear that the Cotton brothers – two of them? three of them? – sometimes landing at Bidar airfield, and widely supposed to be flying in arms and supplies for the Nizam’s besieged government, were Australians. “Don’t you go near them,” warned Anand.

“Go near them? I’d never heard of them. No-one has seen them. Have you seen them?”

“No.”

“Have you seen their plane?”

“Hobnob with the Nizam all you like,” said Anand, knowing full well that Philip was as far from the Nizam as he, on his airfield vigils, was from the Cotton brothers. His voice held a stoniness, a displeasure, which was as little lost on Ragini as on Philip. Yet neither attributed it to its true source. Ragini’s ease with Philip, her reluctance to accord to Anand even a fragment of the esteem he owed to himself, as a Congress worker, was enough to deprive Anand of his dexterity as a social being. It was he – not Philip – who was made to look a foreigner in the land of his birth. ‘Student’ in India should be a thrilling word. Instead she treated him like a minor. Anand talked too much and risked making a bad impression on Ragini: while she, who spoke little, sublime in her silence, made on this freedom fighter an enormous and ever-growing impression.

9

A further police roadblock emptied the bus. One of the passengers, exasperated now beyond measure, quarrelled with a scared-looking constable in ragged uniform. All these police looked scared. Such an intimidated-looking corpus of armed men was rarely to be found and the three companions relished the sight, one with irony, one with his usual bafflement, and the third (Anand) with contempt. These were policemen? The dissident passenger, released from questioning and allowed to rejoin his family, relayed in a loud voice all he had been told, or had managed to infer.

Towering over them was a granite monolith, ghost-pale in the advancing twilight. The rock of Bhongir. “How can they be looking for Razakars?” said Anand. “No Razakar would dare to show his face in this ashram. Not even the police have the courage. I’m surprised they’re here!”

“Only by day,” said Ragini.

As if to confirm her view, the police were dismantling their dusk roadblock in extreme haste. They threw trestles and markers in the back of their lorry – which was, at least, freshly painted, with a legend in Urdu – and sped away. But a new setback followed. A bus tyre had to be replaced.

Philip knew of Bhongir. On his outward journey, from Hyderabad to Warangal along this road – in a sedan car carrying four English-speaking appointees of the Nizam’s Government – the mystique of the place had been impressed on his imagination. The town of Bhongir was only an hour’s drive from Hyderabad and was patrolled by armed police in the daylight hours. But at night they fled. ‘Fled’ was the word used to Philip without reflection by a Deputy Officer of the Advanced Education Unit and, as Philip now saw for himself, it could not be bettered. A prominent landholder of this region had distributed his lands to his tenants and dependent smallholders, in the Communist cause. Now these tenants, too, were Communists, without ceasing to work their lands. They were faithful till death. Not even firepower could dislodge them.

“Their arsenal should be around here,” said Anand, approaching the rock on foot, as the bus was made roadworthy. “The police raid houses, but it would take them a year to comb all the crevices of the rock. It’s not even defended.”

The approach was littered with boulders. A dense thicket was cleared in one place, allowing an easy climb. Stairs were cut in the rock, leading to a fort which, said Anand, the patrols occupied till dusk, and to no avail.

“Do the peasants keep guns?”

“Rifles. Like hidden treasure. But only they can find them.”

It seemed to Philip that Anand exaggerated the resourcefulness of the peasants, who could hardly be supposed to hide guns in an acropolis trampled by the police from dawn to dusk. Anand might well mock the abilities of the armed bands – the Communists – but he seemed to revere peasants. Was it because they kept to one place, tilling the soil and so constituting ‘the people’? But ‘the people’ was Communist propaganda. “Were there peasants in your family?”

Anand did not answer. The rock glimmered, suspended by the long twilight in the sky near at hand, almost in touching distance. Stately birds – the size of quail – waddled briskly and efficiently to cover under their very noses. They heard the crying, clicking and whirring without being able to detect which bird was responsible for which sound.

“We’ll go back.” Anand led the way.

The bus motor started up. “Where is she?” he exclaimed, as they stood in the headlamps.

“Climb on. She’ll be there.”

They had cut it fine. The bus tyre had been swiftly changed. The crew were in a hurry, and would have left without them.

“Someone is in our old seats.” Instead of dropping into an available seat and allowing Ragini to find them, as she’d done in the first place, Anand pushed his way down the corridor, stumbling over baskets and legs and peering into faces.

He appealed to a family to lend him its battery-torch. He shone it round the interior, and even – forlornly – on the side of the road.

He slumped beside his friend. Philip’s thoughts were beginning to run on the encounters in store for him. He was not sure where he’d spend the night: he was depending on people to meet the bus, but it would arrive late. Hardcastle would be there, but the quarters Hardcastle had at last found for him on his earliest visit were at Rock-Hill Palace, that is, at a distant outpost in a stony hinterland at three in the morning, with the doors locked and no-one about but a rabid dog on a chain. Hardcastle had seemed so sure of this place, where, he said, he knew the nawab. But there was no nawab. He had installed Philip on a chair on the verandah, patting down an already limp cushion as a token of comfort, and had welcomed him to Hyderabad with the gift of a half-bottle of Pondicherry brandy which he seemed disposed to investigate there and then. Philip recoiled in his seat at the memory of that awful night vigil which – never mind Hardcastle, whom his driver at last whisked away – was at that point only beginning.

Anand was meek and quiet. Philip made no bid to console him. In the dark, the bus lost speed. Again! The co-driver was fumbling at a loop of rope, which was all that held the door closed: but even he could not stave off the inevitable. Now the vehicle was quite still. Voices rang out. Could this be happening again? Someone boarded. Might it be a single, female passenger? No such luck. Dark shapes crowded into the aisle, rasping in hoarse voices, in Urdu. These men meant business. The foremost snatched the torch from Anand’s lap. He had failed to return it to its owner, or to switch it off. The intruders moved down the aisle which cleared for them at once.

Every face was scrutinised – so intently, thought Philip, as to make of it not so much a face as an artifact, a portrait. These men could distinguish a Rembrandt from a fake Rembrandt. They felt women’s ears, for gems or gold. But they issued no challenge. They left the bus: Razakars. Muslim vigilantes, banded like fugitives for the showdown. That showdown was yet some way off. When the Indian Army came – as it must – the Razakars would fight. In the meantime, they terrorised the districts. Their links with government were obscure, but certain. The passengers – a bus full of Hindus – had been lucky to escape them.

Anand’s silence was truly unnerving. It was he who had said even the Razakars would steer clear of Bhongir. They were two miles from Bhongir! Instead of apologising for his doomed insights, he was scribbling in a notebook, with the aid of the pocket-torch, which had been restored to him. Philip saw two possibilities. He could ask Anand what he was writing or, alternatively, he could remind him that the torch had been borrowed. He refrained from both.

The jolting of the bus on a bad road was not conducive to writing. But Anand persevered. “I wonder who those goondas were looking for?” said Philip, after a time, striving for philosophic distance.

“Well – she got away.”

To the mind of Anand, it appeared that he and the Razakars – shining their torches on the faces in the bus – had an errand in common. Both sought their Ragini, their all-in-all.

Here and there, as the bus travelled, unpredicted lights – lanterns in kitchens and workplaces, or on desolate hills – further mystified the darkness. Up front one of the crew, the assistant’s assistant, the poorest and most negligible person on the bus – but it was he who had run for the charpoy – broke for some reason into an arcane melody, in a voice as limpid and beautiful as Philip had ever heard. This lad was cheering them up, after all the inconveniences they had suffered.

“What does the song say, Anand?”

Anand broke off to listen. “Something about God.”

He resumed writing. He had filled the first couple of pages of a brand-new exercise book bought in Warangal to be a journal of record. Philip, who had found him the stationery shop and approved the binding, was surprised when Anand tore out the pages in a single swoop and handed them to him.

“What are these for?”

“Promise you won’t read them.”

“I won’t read them. What are they for? They’re for Ragini, is that it?”

“You know where to find her.”

“You’re wrong. I don’t know where to find her. She finds me.”

“Then the next time she finds you,” said Anand – he was far from reconciled to his friend’s privileged access to Ragini, though he quite believed in it. He did not bother to finish the sentence. Philip accepted the pages. Poor Anand. He did not know his idol. She eluded them, of course she eluded them. She was elusive. She was not one to wait around on a bus for Razakars. She left as she chose. Philip could cite half a dozen of her disappearances but, beyond those instances, he had little more to reveal to Anand.

10

Where Ragini went when she vanished, by the rock of Bhongir – that, to Philip, was unimportant. He would meet her again.

But where, in all Hyderabad, did Anand go? Philip knew of one place. He knew there was a curious ‘hostel’ in the Old City, somewhere in Lal Darwaza. A place glimpsed by night. There Anand went from the bus station. The bus arrived late …

And Philip? Where did he go? Lying, now, fully awake in his bed in Gibbes Street, Philip knew no more of that night. The night had served its purpose, brought a man and a woman together. Nothing depended on where he went.

So many of his memories of Hyderabad, the ones he retrieved, were like that. Not that they were obscure, night-obscure. Some were flooded with light. But they were non-successive. No one thing led to another. He would find himself where he was, but with no idea, no idea in memory, of how he got there. Except for the night he arrived, at that terrible ‘palace’ with the mad dog, he could remember now no place in Hyderabad – and there had been many – where he laid down his head to sleep.

This practice of remembering was so novel to Philip that at first he had expected whole scenarios to unfurl around him, for as long as he stayed on deck. Sometimes this happened. More often, the past, like dough, like the surface of the waters, would close, leaving no sign it had ever been troubled.

Now he was remembering in earnest, the gaps daunted him. It seemed he had plunged, as swimmer, into Black Lagoon. A kind of peril lurked just out of his mind’s reach.

The night’s journey was over. He was walking, it appeared, by the river – but in broad daylight. Had he curled up all night at the bus station? Was this some different occasion? Gazing at the south bank of the Musi – as anyone must, who walked the north side – over the emerald-green flats to the battlemented walls of the Nizam’s city, he refrained from crossing the bridge. Like a wise child at Christmas, who reserves the best present for last, Philip in those early days had resolved not to set foot in the Old City, south of the bridges. He would do so in his own good time: when he was invited. For Philip was not a tourist. He was an office-holder in the Nizam’s administration. The Nizam, it was true, did not observe this capital distinction between the north and south sides. He resided on the north side, at King Kothi.

The Musi was prone to flood. But when it was not in flood, its bed afforded a tract of prime land, the most bountiful for yield in all the districts. Who owned this land? Whoever the owners were, they were nowhere in sight. An army of labourers, with huts and byres and animals, swarmed for miles along the ribbon of bright green – rice paddy, or lucerne – until the waters swept down on them without warning. As he turned away from the river, towards Sultan Bazaar, Philip heard a dull roar – not a wall of water but a primal force, all the same, or so it appeared at a distance. A few steps nearer and the roar began to disintegrate into ragged particulars, yells, clashes of metal, what sounded like gunshots as someone fired, presumably into thin air.

A Razakar rally. Dispersed voices blended into one rhythmic shout of a few syllables, repeated over and over.

Philip stood aside. Even as he did, the scene in memory changed into something else. Monsoon cloud filled the south and east. The streets now were patchily lit against the dusk. Every depression on the ground glittered with a month’s accumulation of rainwater. Advancing on him from the direction of the British Residency, a new procession took up the width of the street to Rain Bazaar. The procession showed in the twilight as if it were beamed from somewhere, a level shaft of uniform black heads and white garments. Policemen in their diagonally-belted tunics and diagonally-striped, paper-boat turbans strove to clear a way for traffic. The marchers, weirdly inoffensive and gawky, banners aloft, trudged beside their bicycles. No menace lurked in this procession. These marchers would burn nothing down. Could it be a Congress rally? Were these timid processionists, hustled by their cheerleaders – one with a stumpy leg – Anand’s constituency?

Fifty-three years had passed. Philip could not tell who the marchers had been. The Congress then was banned. Were they trade-unionists? Had the Nizam’s Railway – a not-for-profit institution (as it ought to be) – fallen behind in payments to its workers? Philip was baffled by the procession. It should have been easy, for him – it was a ‘modern’ procession. The ‘modern’ speaks for itself, even – or especially – among the sights and sounds of the decay of the old order. The ‘modern’ is most intelligible when it predicts ruin. But nothing, in Hyderabad, was intelligible in the usual sense. Hyderabad was a folly. It was, of course, destined for ruin. This did not make it more intelligible. All swept away now. How could it count, to anyone, if he were to recover those meanings, which no longer ‘meant’? What was the purpose of all those undisputed errands and unblinking procedures, the bazaars, the obscure crafts, the bewildering pageantry of holidays that arrived out of nowhere, the Abyssinian guard, the troupes of musicians in livery, the female armed warriors whom he had watched, in all their regalia but never on parade, lounging like ordinary shoppers on the stone benches of the Moazzam Jahi vegetable market? Why was a quarter of the population in triumphal dress? Was this the deceit of memory? How, if it was, could he correct a mistaken impression? And why should he care? History had pronounced its verdict on the Nizam. Wasted effort. An unjust social order. That order had vanished, like water-vapour, and nobody in India regretted it for one moment.

11

Philip, the Nizam’s office-holder, and world record headmaster for youth – he was twenty-three! – had others to report to, senior officiators whose jobs were no more secure than his own. They assembled in various places. Philip would appear at the most recent address – a pavilion, say, in the Residency gardens – to find that the venue had shifted. This time – this time? the time he returned on the bus with Anand? – he was directed to Osmania University, on rocky ground several miles to the north-east. Osmania University had been founded twenty-five years ago by the present Nizam, and was famed throughout India – so Philip had been told, and this was true – for its choice of language of instruction. Throughout India, university classes were held in English. But here, they were in Urdu. The textbooks were all translated. To some, this enterprise was quixotic, but in Philip’s small circle, everyone approved. Lessons were taught here in the mother tongue. Well, in a mother tongue. Osmania University, moreover, knew scholarship and, even in the estimate of the English, had housed famous persons. Besides local persons, a cast of international investigators had been enlisted by the new-leaf Nizam for his social reforms. Osmania had made a home a while back for the anthropology Professor C.H. von Furer-Haimendorf of London University. What a precursor.

The reform educationists took to these temporary lodgings with mixed feelings. They were far from the centres of intrigue. But they relished the place. They were housed now in the Arabic department. The Arabist scholars had been drafted en masse, it appeared, to duties of state elsewhere. Philip had never entered such a fine building. All was grey granite: high, elegant windows carved out of granite, granite staircases, a granite floor so fastidiously levelled and polished with hand-tools that you could see your face in it. You could read your expression. You could at least infer your expression. The melody of rote learning from the classrooms was a distraction: so too was the smell from the toilets, which was wind-borne, as there was sometimes a wind and the toilet doors stood open. But the work party were content.

“I enjoy that buzz, that hum,” said Hardcastle. “It shows they’re working at their lessons. No more flag business.”

Smart saw it differently. “The ones who hum are not the ones who ran up the flag.”

“Did anyone look up this morning?” All eyes were on Philip, the last to arrive. “Was the flag aloft?”

“The flag?”

“The flag of India.”

“The flag of the Union: white, orange and green,” said Smart in a mock-Irish accent, “except for the chakra in the middle. What’s that for? Can anyone suggest to me what the chakra is doing? In India, it’s true, they may have spun their way to freedom. But now they’ll need Five-Year Plans.” He mistook the imperial chakra for the Gandhian charka or spinning-wheel.

Philip was intrigued. “The students ran up the Indian flag?”

“To the top of the building. They ran it up on Wednesday. Laiq Ali came over in person, to see it brought down. We had students from everywhere: five thousand in the grounds surrounding the entrance, including four busloads from Nizam College. The police hung back, Government brought in reinforcements. Whoever put up that flag must have scaled a sheer wall, like a gecko. I don’t know how it was done.”

“There are footholds,” Middleton suggested.

“You show me the footholds. No-one can climb that wall. The crack engineers, the team from the Irrigation Department, couldn’t bring it down. They lost face. They had to shoot it down – with ropes and arrows. There are still a few rags fluttering.”

“Were there arrests?” said Philip.

“None. All for show. The gaols are full.” That was Smart’s opinion, but Middleton corrected him: “The gaols are empty. Laiq Ali has just released all the satyagrahis. It’s whistle-as-you-work, pretend-it’s-a-natural-calamity, offend-nobody. A few lathi-beatings, that was the worst of it.”

“You see, where we are,” said Hardcastle gravely, to Philip, “we’re transcendent observers. We watched the whole tamasha from the Arts College portico. And what do we know? Nothing. We know nothing and we’re entitled to know nothing. So let’s get on with the job.”

The job that morning consisted of reports on schools. No official from the Nizam’s Government was present. Before the signing of the Standstill Agreement in November (Philip was told) the Education Office had kept a close watch on proceedings and, up till August 15, the date of the calamity of Indian independence, the Nizam himself had been interested in schools. Now all but the core functions of government had fallen away. The core functions no longer included education. New schools had opened, thanks to earlier decisions, and budgets were approved for these; but some had no teachers, and there was no consolidated record of the enrolment of pupils. “We’re the only ones counting,” Hardcastle said.

“There’s a teacher problem. Old, bearded moulvis are putting up their hands wherever we look, but they’re not what we want. We can’t get Hindus to apply.”

“Why would they apply?” said Smart.

“They’d apply for the money. Double pay, we’re offering, in some districts,” said Middleton, but Hardcastle shook his head. “We’ve ruled that out.”

“If we’ve ruled it out, I don’t see how we can manage.”

“We’ll manage till the heavens do fall. When the heavens do fall,” said Hardcastle, “we’ll have Muslim and Hindu teachers staffing the best English-language schools in the subcontinent. We won’t offer double pay. Double pay is for foreigners.”

“Meaning me,” said Philip.

“Son, you’re a headmaster. You’re on triple pay.”

Philip was mortified. This was news to him. He’d been quoted a salary in Australia, but – triple pay! in local terms, a fortune – and unmerited!

“We’ll find you an assistant to train. We’ll find you a Hindu. That should be possible, Sukku, don’t you think? – in a town like Warangal?”

All eyes were on Sukku – “Doctor”, as they sometimes called him, a Ph.D. in History from Madras University. Dr Sukhanandam was never absent, but seldom entirely present at these scheduled meetings. As Philip had explained to Rhondda, his associates in the reform project were mostly Englishmen. This fact had not lessened their commitment to primary education in the schools of Hyderabad. While the Nizam’s state faltered, they alone had the time for it.

“What do you say, Doctor?”

Sukhanandam did not appear to be listening. Yet his very abstractedness conferred on him a kind of mystique. He had not yet been known to fail a question, or to ask for its substance to be repeated. His voice was faint, yet his answer rang as clear as a bell. “No Hindu will teach.”

Hardcastle and the others repaired to the Secunderabad club. But Philip took Sukku to Monty’s. His guest, a teetotaller, accepted the gift of a vegetable samosa on a plate and surveyed, without energy – he was not energetic – but with tolerant curiosity, the threadbare appointments of this unusual place. Montgomery’s Club had no bar, two or three bearers and a kitchen. A screen at one end of the room blocked a few select tables, and the lights were dimmed. There were no posters, mirrors, paintings of gods or framed messages from the Qur’an, or indeed ornaments of any kind but for a wall clock of the kind you would find on a railway platform. The polished-wood, square tables, each with four upright chairs (lounging was not encouraged), aptly communicated the sober business ethos at Monty’s. Yet this was not a sober place.

In all Secunderabad and Hyderabad, Monty’s was the one establishment where Philip felt at home. Yet even here he glanced round him with precaution before selecting a table. Others besides him felt a similar affection for the place. On his very first visit to Monty’s, Philip had encountered a desperately out-of-pocket Australian who, finding himself in India, had wandered off the beaten track. He did not want to team up with such another.

The clock showed seven minutes past three, as it always did. Philip ordered, for himself, his first bottle of beer in a month, and plain water for Dr Sukhanandam. The bearers at Monty’s did not mind whether you drank big or small. You could stick to your post all day, for the little they cared. Round the room, table by solitary table, sat red-eyed garage mechanics and rickshaw drivers who had acquired the habit of drinking brandy at Monty’s rather than arrack in low-beamed, lantern-lit dens with their boisterous peers. So glad was Philip to have a glass in his hand that his spirit embraced theirs with emotion. “Anand should be here.”

Dr Sukhanandam was surprised. “Does Anand take alcohol?”

“Not much. But he’d sit here beside me, just as you do. We’ve had some of our best talks here.”

Sukku took this in. Though not himself a participant in ‘best talks’, it was he who had led Philip to Anand. Philip’s nocturnal glimpse of the outside of Anand’s hostel had been in his company. By a means all his own, without ever appearing to be at the centre of anything (or even to be paying attention) Sukku contrived a sort of access to widely dissimilar cliques and individuals, ranging from a priest at the Jain temple to Congress plotters and planners, as well as a nawab or two. He was neither an enthusiast nor a teacher: what then was his function in the reform group? He put people in touch with people.

“I have seen very little of Anand,” he said. “He is always touring.”

“He came to Warangal.”

“What kind of a bold spirit!” muttered Sukku, disturbed by the thought. To Philip he said, “You are another such person. You venture everywhere.”

“I don’t venture anywhere. I did venture to Bastar, when I first arrived. I go where I’m sent.”

“Always to villages.”

“Warangal is not a village.”

Sukku passed over this distinction. “I would not leave Hyderabad. I am called a socialist and a humanitarian, but the illiterate people of our villages, they are disturbing to me. I cannot go among them. Your British and Danish missionaries associate with such people – but no educated Hindu can do it. We are unlike Muslims and Christians, we have nothing that binds us together. You can’t conceive of the strength of our pollution feelings: it is not just uncleanness, but the disdain we feel!” – his temperate features were distorted by a sudden horror. “Sick. We become sick. We should not be so, but there is nothing in our culture to prepare us to confront these people. Some European scholars come, and they say, ‘This is India, just India. There is no reason to be ashamed of caste.’ Do you believe this? There is no reason to be ashamed of caste?”

“How can I be ashamed of caste?” said Philip, taking the question personally. Sukku’s expression in return showed him the insufficiency of this answer. But what could he say? How could he presume? A key was missing, and he strove to supply it. “I am not a Hindu, so I have no stake.”

“You accept caste?”

“No, of course I don’t accept it.”

“But you are not ashamed of it?”

“How can I be ashamed of it?”

Sukku had difficulty in fathoming this outlook. He paused for further explanation. When none was offered, he struck out on another path. “In India we are rich in variety. We are rich in variety, in this one thing. So many castes we have in India, so many faiths, so many languages, so many gods and goddesses, so many crafts, so many ways of life. So this is how I should regard my country? As a full-to-bursting museum? I have nothing in common with such people. They simply distress me. I like to associate only with educated people. But, what is the good of these?”

Philip was lost. “The good of educated people ... ?”

“What is the good of all these castes?”

“There is no good. There is no good,” said Philip, a trifle impatiently, having to exceed limits to declare himself.

“We should do away with caste. I myself believe,” said Sukku, with dangerous irony, but the irony was all in Philip’s head, “that we should do away with caste. I am a bit educated. This is not the common opinion. But the poor Hindu, the villager, he must live in the dust through necessity. He has no chance to form an opinion.”

“I’m sure he has one.”

“He has no chance to communicate an opinion.”

It was a time of afternoon when the angle of the sun’s rays caught the tinted-glass windows high over the capstone of the arched entry portal at Monty’s, briefly inflaming the room. You would think the kotwal would close this place down. Perhaps the authorities kept it on, allowed it to thrive, as an admonition to Hindu and Muslim alike, a kind of hell. Yet it struck Philip as a desirable place. The patrons of Monty’s caused no trouble. Comparing it with Sydney, with the pubs of Sydney, it was an improvement, at least pictorially. Only Sukku, with his tumbler of water, betrayed a discomfiture he owed to his thoughts, not to his surroundings. Philip resolved to cure him of it. “Think of the poor Khan Bahadur,” he said, “who must live in his palace through necessity – with its forty rooms. Isn’t a haveli a palace?”

“That haveli is a palace. The Khan Bahadur, why are you interested in him?”

“Can you guess?”

“You would like to meet him. Meet his wife.”

“As a fellow Australian … What did you say her name was?”

“You will find she is not so Australian,” said Sukku, withholding the name. “She has lived in Hyderabad too long.”

“But she’s young, isn’t she?”

“Young. She is young. She is junior. A second wife.”

“ ‘Junior’ does not sound young, it sounds infantile.”

“You are making a request. This may take time. I have many friends among the Kayasthas. They can bring you to the Khan Bahadur. But to ask him to dispose of his wife …”

“Dispose of her?” exclaimed Philip. He searched in vain for a hint of devilry in his friend’s features. All he intended was to meet the woman.

Just drop the matter. If Sukku would help, he would help. He had done so in the past. He had produced Anand, though with no thought of doing Philip a favour. He knew people, and to make this known he would produce people – where the case was relevant. This thought set Philip wondering about his own relevance. There were, in India, two people, Ragini and Anand, for whom he cared a lot. And he mattered to them. Philip could not have said why, but he did. But should these two matter to one another: or should one come to matter to the other, since one was enough … what would become of Philip? A go-between! There and then, he renounced all sociable designs on the nawab’s wife, and relieved Sukku of his obligation. Even so, to make sure it was there, he groped for Anand’s missive to Ragini, in his back pocket. Philip, a moral person, with strengths where you least expected them, would not read the letter. He would deliver the letter … It was gone. He had lost it, that wretched scrap of paper, and without even meaning to. All was saved. His spirits soared, until he remembered the other pocket.