A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (87 page)

Interesting, this. Universally popular as the English are in India just now, among themselves there emerges this dissension. The old solidarity has gone because the need for it has gone.

*

‘But of course,’ Bronowsky said, ‘now we are all émigrés. Have some more champagne and a cigarette.’

Perron nodded. The servant came to his side and refilled his
glass. In the Dewani Bhavan there was the dry dusty scent of potpourri. The lighting was rose-coloured. It glowed on ormulu and gilt chair-arms. In this light Dmitri Bronowsky looked twenty years younger. His lame left leg rested on a gilt and plush footstool. The ebony cane and the black eye-patch accentuated the white of his tropical suit which was faintly tinged by the glow of the lights. He wore a tie of the same pink as the cigarettes.

*

The invitation to dinner had reached Perron at five o’clock. Leaving Rowan working on his written report to the Resident at Gopalakand, it had surprised him to find no other guests. By eight-thirty, after a number of interruptions by messengers and telephone calls, he realized that he and Dmitri were to spend the evening alone. He had hoped for Sarah. As if recognizing a source of disappointment, Bronowsky – leading him into a grand dining-room – said he asked Sarah but that she felt she couldn’t leave Susan alone on their last night in Mirat. ‘And failing Sarah, I felt we might dine alone. It is a little selfish of me to subject you to my unadulterated company, but not entirely so. If we had another guest or two then I could not tell you the things you have come to Mirat to learn about – how princes rule and live in this country. Anyway, I feel I deserve an evening off myself, with just one sympathetic listener.’

The table was long enough for twenty or thirty guests and the room was lit as if there were that number needing to see what they ate. Perron and Bronowsky sat at one end, where great bowls of flowers gave off heady scents. Bronowsky ate little, seemed to be content with a bite or two of each course and a glass of each of the wines that accompanied them. He talked with skill and good humour. The range of the old wazir’s knowledge and experience and the clarity of his memory were remarkable. It struck Perron, too, that he talked vividly because he knew that the opportunities to hold court, while he still had power, were becoming fewer. The last thing Dmitri Bronowsky would ever be was an old and tiresome man living on his memories and boring other people
with them. On the day he had to retire, he would probably retire quite happily into himself.

‘What is Mirat’s future, then?’ Perron asked, when the right moment came, between sips of the champagne with which, along with the pêche flambée, the meal was delightfully ending.

‘We shall be absorbed into the provincial administration of Ranpur. Our executive and our judiciary will be superseded by those of Ranpur. We shall be ruled from Ranpur and from Delhi. We shall have a deputy commissioner sent down to control us. Some of our younger men will be lucky and secure official appointments. Our revenues will go to Government and Government in turn will accept certain responsibilities for us. Also, and this is so interesting, we shall become a constituency or several constituencies and elect and send members to the legislative assembly. All this I have told and constantly tell Nawab Sahib. I remind him how years ago I foretold it. If either of his sons had political talent, ah then, that would have been one way of maintaining
izzat
under a new dispensation. For in a world where a ruling prince becomes redundant isn’t there an opportunity for one of his heirs, someone in his family, to sit not on the
gaddi
but in the assembly, or even in a ministerial chair at the Secretariat?’

‘And neither son has political talent?’

‘In confidence, my dear Mr Perron, neither talent nor wit. It did not take me long to see that this was and would be so. So. I cast around. And my eye lighted on another member of the house of Kasim. The Ranpur branch. The rebellious political branch.’

‘Ahmed?’

‘Many people have wondered what I am doing employing the son of Mohammed Ali Kasim who is, by nature, opposed to princes. Many people have wondered what Mr Mohammed Ali Kasim can have been thinking of to allow his younger son to take service in a feudal little state. I do not know what Mr Kasim had in mind. Perhaps he was just pessimistic about the boy in those days. I have always been optimistic. Scratch me a very little and you will find an eternal optimist. Scratch a little deeper and you will no doubt uncover a great intriguer, but I hope a well-intentioned one. Scratch deeper still, never
minding the blood, and perhaps you will find an old White Russian of liberal sympathies but intent even now on rescuing his Tsar from the cellar in Ekaterinburg, or failing his Tsar, the little Tsarevich. An English lady in the cantonment who had psychological perceptions once described me so. Your glass is empty, Mr Perron.’

It was refilled.

‘It was my intention to arrange, if it could be done without undue pressure, an alliance between the princely Kasims of Mirat and the political Kasims of Ranpur. I had hoped that Ahmed and Shiraz would fall in love one day. They say that when a man falls in love, with a woman, he becomes aware of all his worldly responsibilities. If there is one thing I do most sincerely wish just now it is that Ahmed and Shiraz were man and wife and that marriage had awakened in him all those political instincts he must have inherited from his father, no matter what he says to the contrary. I wish this because just now when Nawab Sahib is in the doldrums, when he summons me at midnight or early in the morning because he cannot sleep or hasn’t slept, and stares at me, it would be so nice to say: What are you bothered about? I have always warned you that there may be nothing for your sons to inherit except the remnants of a purely formal dignity, but here is your daughter Shiraz and here is your son-in-law Ahmed, son of a famous and respected Indian politician who still has great influence behind the scenes. When you begged me to come back to India with you because of the little service I had done for you, you said, “I must be a modern state. Make me modern.” So, admit it, I have made you modern in every way I can. Moreover you have a son with business interests in Delhi and who has a wife who builds swimming pools and has money in Zurich. You have another son in the air force. Above all you have a son-in-law who may one day represent Mirat in the provincial assembly and, who knows, end as a minister of central government, perhaps even as Prime Minister. Isn’t that modern enough for you? Unfortunately, I cannot tell him this because he has no son-in-law. Man can only propose. But given another year or two’s grace and perhaps God would have disposed, as I so devoutly wished. For my prince’s benefit, you understand, Mr Perron. For my
prince. Perhaps a little for myself. As it is I have to go and sit with him, late at night or early morning, and try to prepare him just to face the moment when the States Department people will descend on us again, this time with their scales and abacuses and weights and measures and arithmetical tables, their meticulously devised formula for separating what belongs to the people and what belongs to Nawab Sahib, what is a proper charge on Government and what is a charge on Nawab’s personal household, asking how many palaces have you, then, and what are they used for, and who pays for all
this
–’

Bronowsky indicated the room, the table, the silver and the glass and the patient silent servants.

‘Who pays, the people or the occupier? And who is Dmitri Bronowsky? Who pays him? How much is he paid? How much pension does he expect from you? How much pension can the people of India afford to pay you so that you can go on paying all these pensions to which you say you are already committed? And I know what Nawab Sahib will say, because he has already begun saying it. He will say, “Dmitri, what have I to do with these people or they with me? What are all these facts and figures and percentages and bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo? If you load my head with all this, how can I hold it up?” Come, let us have coffee.’

As they went Perron said, ‘As Mrs Grace said this morning, now we’ve all got to get used to living like carpet-sellers in Cairo.’

‘But of course!’ Bronowsky said, delighted. ‘Now we are
all
émigrés. Have some more champagne and a cigarette.’

*

The servant came to his side and refilled his glass, offered the open silver box. Dmitri settled his left foot on the stool. He told the servant to leave the champagne in the ice-bucket, to bring in the brandy and then to leave them.

‘The thing that holds the members of an emigration together is only their recollection of a mutually shared past, Mr Perron, but they are divided by a deep distrust of one another’s present intentions. So there is no creative
coherence. And individually they feel guilty of desertion. An emigration is possibly the loneliest experience a man can suffer. In a way it is not a country he has lost but a home, or even just a part of a home, a room perhaps, or something in that room that he has had to leave behind, and which haunts him. I remember a window-seat I used to sit in as a youth, reading Pushkin and teaching myself to smoke scented cigarettes. That window is one I am always knocking at, asking to be let in.’

A steward brought a note. To read it Bronowsky took out a gold rimmed monocle. ‘Forgive me, I must leave you for just a moment to attend to this.’

Alone, Perron went out on to the terrace. The garden was flood-lit. At its centre was a fountain whose jets sprayed inward from the rim. In a moment Bronowsky was back. ‘There are other illuminations at the front, it seems, not of my devising.’

*

From the front compound they could see the glow of the fires in the city. ‘They are burning each other’s shops,’ Bronowsky said. ‘In the past eight months, whenever I saw a sight like this, I was comforted by the thought that Colonel Merrick was coping with it. Tonight I miss him. So perhaps will the police. All I can do is to ensure that what should be done is being done and what shouldn’t be isn’t. The cost is counted in the morning. Meanwhile one feels a bit like Nero, in need of a fiddle. Perhaps I should send for the court-musicians. But let us go back and finish the champagne.’

They strolled up and down the terrace. The fountain kept changing colour. Perron was struck by the irony of the situation. Here, luxury, elegance. A mile away, everything a man possessed in the world was perhaps going up in smoke.

‘Until the war,’ Bronowsky was saying, ‘there was almost no civil disturbance in Mirat. Such communal dissatisfaction as there was arose from the feeling the educated Hindus had that in spite of all my efforts they were still at a disadvantage, and from the counter-feeling high-ranking Muslims had that Hindus had been encouraged to compete too well. But by and
large there was peace, particularly in the rural districts where the things that mattered to people were to enjoy prosperity when it was there to be enjoyed and to feel they could trust their Nawab to look after them when it wasn’t. Before the war, Mr Perron, I could tour the state and talk to a Mirati farmer out there in the
mofussil
, a Hindu or a Muslim, and he would prove to have but the vaguest idea of who Gandhi was, or who Jinnah was. For him the world began and ended in his fields, and with his landlord, and with the tax-collectors, and with Nawab Sahib who sat here in Mirat, Lord of the world, Giver of Grain. Out there it is not so very different now but in our towns and in our city they have become affected by what Congress is saying, what the Muslim League is saying, up there in Delhi, in Calcutta and Bombay. This began during the war. Mirat was also affected by the realization that the British
raj
had proved far from invincible in Burma and Malaya and in Europe. On top of that we had all these people who fell foul of the British and scurried to places like this where it was not so easy for your police to get hold of them. It was left to our own. Well, you can pick a man up and send him back where he came from, but you cannot send ideas back, especially if there is an element of truth and justice in them.’

‘What led to your applying for help from the States Police?’

‘A virtual breakdown in our own police department and a danger of mutiny in our State Armed Force, which consists of one regiment only, the Mirat Artillery. That was last November – but the trouble began earlier when men of the regiment who had been prisoners of the Japanese returned home and it became generally known that some of their comrades had joined the
INA
and were now prisoners of the
raj.
No one knew at the time quite what to make of this. The prisoners who had stayed loyal came back to a heroes’ welcome, naturally. Men of the Nawab’s artillery have served in both world wars, in France in ‘fourteen-’ eighteen. In Malaya this time. The artillery is a Mirati tradition. In the old days they used to make some of those huge old cannon you’ll know about from your study of eighteenth-century Indian history and the men from this region have always been adept at gunnery. So. It has always been a proud regiment, too. Unfortunately by the time the men came back, to their heroes’ welcome, Congress and
the League had already taken the cudgels up on behalf of the
INA.
Our gunners found themselves in bad odour when they said what they thought of Bose. Some of the most outspoken were beaten up one night in the bazaar, probably by the same people who beat poor Ahmed up when it became known that his father wasn’t going to defend Sayed. Perhaps that was a blessing in disguise because it stopped him going into the bazaar to visit what in my youth were called ladies of easy virtue. For a long time afterwards he was faithful only to Mumtaz. But the worst situation arose in the spring of last year, when the officers and men of the Mirat Artillery who had been in the
INA
came back, the officers cashiered and the men released –’

‘At Holi.’

‘Ah, yes, at Holi. Almost as stupid a decision as the decision to try the Sikh, the Muslim and the Hindu at the Red Fort.’

‘Did the
INA
men get a heroes’ welcome too?’