A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (46 page)

*

With this Rowan had to be content. For the moment Malcolm would discuss it no further. Rowan made the arrangements at the Kandipat and on the day he met Lady Manners at Government House he was already hating the whole business. Kumar had been in jail for more than eighteen months and Rowan had decided that the only explanation for Lady Manners’s sudden emergence from the obscurity in which she had lived since the tragedy of the assault and the tragedy of her niece’s death in childbirth was that she had been biding her time, perhaps obtaining further evidence against Kumar and now wanted vengeance.

The impression did not survive his first short meeting with her the day before the examination; and on the day itself driving with her to the Kandipat, observing her physical frailty, noting her gentleness of manner, it struck him rather forcibly that here was a woman who felt that her life was coming to an end and that there were dispositions to make. He knew from Malcolm that she was staying under an assumed name at an hotel in Ranpur and that the child and its ayah were with her. To minimize the risk of being recognized by old servants at Government House she wore a deep veil over an old-fashioned sola topee, which she only raised in the car to look at the photograph of Kumar, whom she had never in her life seen.

But – Rowan wondered – if the object of the examination
was to secure the release of a man she felt, or knew, to be wrongfully imprisoned, why had she waited so long? Or was it so long? More than eighteen months since the assault, but only half that time since her niece died. As they drew near Kandipat, Rowan began to pull down the blinds of the car. They entered the jail precincts in semi-darkness.

*

The deeply subjective feelings, like joy, fear, love, are the most difficult to convey. One has to make do, more often than not, with the crutch of the words themselves. Very occasionally if an experience has been vivid enough, the quality of it comes through without there being much conscious attempt to communicate it. This was the way Rowan conveyed to me what the examination in the Kandipat jail had been like, for him. It had been a claustrophobic experience. I have thought of Rowan’s experience of the Kandipat often, tried to shed light on it, as a scene, but the light coming out from the scene always seems stronger. One ends up a bit dazzled by it. The eyes hurt. You glance away, to rest them, and then momentarily there’s the illusion of blindness, blankness. You feel shut in. I hit on the word claustrophobic while Rowan was describing it to me. Directly I hit on it I knew I had also hit on a description of the effect Merrick had on me.

That light I mentioned, the one coming out from the scene, was actually a real light: a light bright enough to interrogate by, but nothing crude; subtly balanced, tilted, as if haphazardly, but in fact shining on the examinee at an angle that would only worry him if he chanced to look up above the level of Rowan’s head and wonder about the grille in the wall behind. But had he done so he would have assumed that it was part of the air-conditioning plant.

Another thing Rowan managed to communicate to me without putting it into so many words was the shock of this initiation into one of the
raj’s
obscurer rites, the kind conducted in a windowless room with artificial light and air, an early form of bugging system and spy-system, and making an uncompromising statement about itself as the ominously
still centre of the world of moral and political power which hitherto he had known as one revolving openly in the alternating light of good intentions and the dark of doubts and errors. The room in the Kandipat emitted nothing but its own steady glare. It illuminated nothing except the consequences of an action already performed and a decision taken long ago. These could never be undone or retracted. In the world outside new action could be taken and new decisions made. But the light of what had been performed would glow on unblinkingly, like radium in a closed and undiscovered mine.

*

When the prisoner entered Rowan thought: No, that’s not the man, the whole thing is a ludicrous mistake. The man is an impostor. It was not even the man in the police photographs. He had expected some change but not such a devastating one. This man looked middle-aged. He seemed not to understand English. Rowan asked him to sit down but it wasn’t until the assistant examiner from the Home and Law Department, an Indian, said ‘
Baitho
’ that he did so; and then the contours of the chair seemed to puzzle him, as if he lacked physical coordination. Rowan asked him whether he wished to have the examination conducted in English or in Hindi. He asked him this question in Hindi. The prisoner answered in Hindi, using the single word
Angrezi
, meaning ‘in English’. As he answered he looked directly at Rowan for the first time and the conviction that the man was the wrong man weakened.

The eyes, Rowan said, were those ‘of one man looking out of the eye-sockets of another’ and the man looking out could have been Kumar; his answers to the routine opening questions whose object was identification all added up to an admission that he was, but still the answers came in Hindi – the abbreviated word
hãn
, repeated tonelessly. Hãn. Hãn.

At this point Rowan reminded the prisoner that he had elected to have the examination conducted in English. Questions had been put in English. So far he had answered in Hindi. Did this mean that he had changed his mind and would prefer the questions to be put in Hindi too? He hoped that the answer would come again, hãn; then the onus of putting
questions would fall on his colleague, and for him the whole thing would become a semantic exercise. For Lady Manners in the adjoining room it would become an exercise in patience. He doubted that her Hindi was even as good as his. But that didn’t matter. He would prefer to take a back seat. He didn’t want this gaunt shambling creature to be Hari Kumar; certainly not Coomer, whom he remembered Laura Elliott describing as ‘that good-looking boy who caught you before you even scored’. Old Boys versus School. Rowan had approached him after stumps, congratulated him; asked him what he intended doing. The boy had said, ‘Try for the
ICS,
I suppose, sir.’ And gone out of Rowan’s life.

To emerge here? It wasn’t possible. The physical evidence was against such a transmigration. The eyes could have been Coomer’s; they showed no recognition of Rowan but Rowan wouldn’t have expected it. But he had expected something far more telling. A manner.

Rowan waited for the prisoner to respond. He seemed not to have understood the question and Rowan wondered whether he should repeat it in Hindi. He was about to do so when the man spoke. He said he was sorry, answering the questions in Hindi had been a slip; he seldom had the chance of speaking English, except to himself.

Rowan described the effect of this casual statement in straightforward English as electrifying. It was as though there were two men in the chair, the one you could see and the one you could hear. The one you could hear was undoubtedly Coomer and once you were aware that he was Coomer the unfavourable impression made by the shambling body and hollow-cheeked face began to fade. The English voice, released from its inner prison, seemed to have taken control of the face and limbs, to be infusing them with something of its own firmness and authority.

‘I felt,’ Rowan said, ‘that quite unexpectedly our rôles were reversed or at least levelled up and that it wasn’t Coomer who was being examined so much as a system that had ostensibly given us equal opportunities but had ended like this with me on the comfortable side of a green baize-covered table and him on the unpleasant one. And one of the interesting questions
was, where precisely did this leave my Indian colleague and co-examiner?’

The Indian colleague was the same Mr Gopal who had accompanied Rowan up to Pankot and just gone back to Ranpur with Mr Kasim. Before Kumar’s examination Rowan and Gopal were no more than casual acquaintances and one of the ironies of that examination, Rowan had always felt, was that whereas he himself had a common bond of sympathy with Kumar but could not absolve him from suspicion of some kind of connection with the attack on Daphne Manners, Gopal – as became obvious – believed him innocent on every count, believed that he had been victimized by the Mayapore authorities because he was an Indian, but at the same time disliked him for being the kind of Indian he actually was. Quite early in the questioning Gopal elicited from Kumar the fact that Kumar’s father had admired the British and the British form of administration in India and that he had deliberately brought Kumar up in a way that should have enabled him to enter the administration with the same qualities and advantages an English boy had. At the same time, Gopal’s form of questioning made it clear he believed this could only have been done at the cost of Kumar senior turning his back on his own people – which in fact had been the case and a major cause of the ensuing tragedy.

Kumar senior had been exposed as a man with an obsession that had cost his son dearly. One of Gopal’s objectives in this line of questioning about Kumar’s background was of course to establish that with an upbringing such as he’d had the very idea of his ever becoming a danger to the British was nonsensical. To Gopal, Kumar/Coomer
was
British. During the recess when Kumar had been taken outside for a while, Rowan admitted that he and Kumar had been at the same school but that Kumar didn’t realize this, didn’t recognize him. Gopal then described Kumar as ‘an English boy with a brown skin’ and said, ‘the combination is hopeless’.

Rowan called the recess because he’d felt the examination was getting out of hand. He had tried unsuccessfully to keep it strictly to the question of Kumar’s political affiliations. These, he believed, had been virtually non-existent and had now been shown to be non-existent. The only occasion when
Kumar had consorted with any of the young Indians who were found drinking in the derelict hut on the night of the rape was that other night, six months before, when he got drunk himself and was picked up by Sister Ludmila’s stretcher-bearers. Until then and after then he had kept fairly clear of them. He felt no animosity towards them but they weren’t young men whose interests he could share, whose experiences he had shared, or whose aspirations he could regard with anything except a detached kind of understanding. They were all young nationalists but, he said, why shouldn’t they be? In examination he made no bones about that, but no bones either about his view of the limited form their nationalism ordinarily took. They were young, therefore inconsistent, laughing at the British, talking against them, but fond of wearing western-style clothes and with a tendency to copy British manners. They were friendly, at times deeply depressed, at times euphoric. They were educated to a standard a peg or so above the level on which society determined they could live.

The truth which Coomer had had to face was that this was a level on which he now had to live too: that of one young Indian among countless others who could never expect to achieve any kind of position of authority; young men doomed, it seemed, to spend their lives as members of a literate but obscure and powerless middle-class, thankful for jobs as ill-paid clerks in shops and offices and banks – a life infinitely poorer than the one he would have led if he had grown up in his father’s ancestral village, or if Kumar senior’s obsession about the value of an English upbringing had not been so deeply felt and so uncompromisingly followed that he had sacrificed his own security and – with that single exception of his young widowed sister – the regard of his family.

Hari never knew much about his father’s business affairs in England but for many years these must have prospered. Hari’s childhood was spent in security and considerable comfort. There had been housekeepers, governesses, tutors, a private school and then Chillingborough. In the Spring of 1938 he had been looking forward to his last term, the prospect of university and of preparation for the
ICS
examinations. Qualified, he would eventually have come out to India on
terms of parity with young Englishmen entering the covenanted civil service and so fulfilled his father’s ambitions. Duleep Kumar’s death would not in itself have altered these prospects but pennilessness did. Probably it was the elder Kumar’s realization of what his complete financial failure would mean to his son that led him to take his own life. As a boy himself Duleep Kumar had had to wear down his own father’s opposition before getting himself a college education in India and wear it down again as a young man before going to England to study law. When he returned, unqualified, an academic failure, he had had no alternative but to settle down with the child-wife to whom he’d agreed to be betrothed before leaving England. The Kumars were well-to-do landowners, orthodox, rigidly opposed to any change in
status quo.
Their power and authority flowed from their wealth and possessions. With this they were content. The men were semi-literate, the women quite illiterate. The sole exception was Shalini, Duleep Kumar’s youngest sister, whom he taught to read and write in both Hindi and English. India could hold more for an Indian than this, he knew. If he could not get it for himself then he would do so for the son his wife presently bore. She made it easier for him by dying. But still he wasn’t free. His father, having divided the inheritance among the sons, left his family to earn merit by relinquishing his earthly ties and become
sannyasi.
Commending their mother to the sons’ care he departed, with staff and begging-bowl. They never saw him again. The mother, living the life of a widow in the family house, survived two years. Shalini had gone to Mayapore as the child bride of one Prakash Gupta Sen. After his mother’s death there was nothing to keep Duleep Kumar in India. He sold his interest to his brothers and departed, presumably quite well-off, and took Hari to England. Probably he still had friends and acquaintances in England from his law-student days, and such connections would have been helpful, but he must also have been enterprising and skilful. Just what eventually went wrong, Hari Kumar did not know.