Arctic Summer (16 page)

The old gentleman was not, in the end, especially memorable, though his name did linger behind him. It was perhaps usable if bestowed on a minor character, a walk-on part that nobody would remember. But the trouble with Mr. Godbole, and all the other bits and pieces he was gathering, was that they remained loose strands—little pieces of talk, or momentary impressions gleaned in passing—with nothing to knot them together. In writing his previous novels, there had always been something at the middle of the narrative, a thickening into solidity, around or over or through which the story had to pass. Everything would lead up to it, and then everything would lead out of it again. Without that obstacle in his way, he couldn't even begin. But although his mind had been preoccupied with his Indian book for quite some time, he still had no sense of what that central density might be.

Well, it would come or it would not come; that was all. If the Big Event didn't show itself to him, there could be no book, nor did he think the world would be much poorer for it.

In the meanwhile he remained a traveller, and India continued to strew events and places in his path. In Delhi, Malcolm had arranged another meeting with Bapu Sahib for him. Morgan was very keen to see His Highness again, who had begun to loom in his mind as the Indian he knew and liked best after Masood. No sooner had he located the royal party than Bapu Sahib ran up behind him and put his hands over Morgan's eyes; this happy greeting set the tone for the two days of his stay.

His Highness was there—with the Rani and their child, his brother, the Prime Minister and sixty-five attendants, all of them staying in the same hotel—to attend a Chiefs' conference. On his last day in the city Morgan accompanied him while he made official calls. When his duties were done, Bapu Sahib became boyish and boisterous, bouncing delightedly on the cushions. The royal carriage took them into the city, where they chanced to meet his brother and other members of the court who had been shopping. The squabbling, noisy, happy party—ten of them—pushed into the carriage too, along with their mound of purchases. Morgan found himself between His Highness, who was adorned with a large pale-yellow turban, and his brother with a purple one, the doctor in a red Maratha head-dress opposite, while nearby lolled a secretary who appeared to be wearing an orange cup and saucer, next to the court buffoon, who held a wheezing elderly pug on his lap. Outside the carriage hung the coachman, an attendant, a footman and a groom. As far as Morgan could tell, nobody in the street paid them the slightest bit of attention.

This ride put him in a good humour again, and it lasted all the way through Jaipur, which he disliked, and Jodhpur, which he did not. Mount Abu cheered him further, with its valleys and trees and temples, and it was in almost victorious mood that he arrived in Hyderabad, far to the south. After a few days, when he moved on to Aurangabad, he was nearing the end of his time in India; he could feel it all closing on a final, finite point.

Morgan had scarcely arrived at the dak bungalow when Saeed, Ahmed Mirza's younger brother, swept up in a flurry to take him off and he was settled instead into quite the loveliest quarters he had seen in this country: a large hall divided into two by exquisite blue arches, its side open to a garden of trees whose presence crowded into the house. The air was heavy with the smell of flowers. Before he slept each night he went out to look at the house from the other side of a rectangular tank, full of fish, and the sight reminded him of the Loggia de' Lanzi in Florence.

Saeed and his housemates—a Municipal Inspector and yet another barrister—lived in an ugly dwelling in the yard, and on his second night they all ate together, and afterwards shared a hookah and conversation. They recited poetry to one another in Persian, Urdu, Arabic and Greek, and talked about astrology and the shortcomings of Englishmen. It was a clear, calm evening and for a moment Morgan had the impression that he had been carried back in time, to one of his early visits to Masood in Oxford, when everything was still new between them.

He had known Saeed a little from London, but this young man had grown very dashing since then. He was a Munsif, a Junior Magistrate, and Morgan visited the courts with him on various days. In the sub-judge's room, he observed a civil surgeon giving evidence in a case of murder, while a punkah-wallah, a superb, bare-chested, sculpted youth, in whom graven idol and flesh became one, fanned them rhythmically, pulling his rope impassively as Atropos.

It was becoming clearer to Morgan that his novel might turn on an incident of some kind, which would play itself out in a courtroom. The idea was connected to his experiences in India generally. Most of the educated class of Indians he'd met—Masood and his friends—were barristers. On the other hand, many of his English acquaintances worked for the Indian Civil Service and had been employed as magistrates. He had found himself very exercised in Allahabad when he'd gone to watch Rupert Smith presiding over a court in session. Smith himself had already been marked in Morgan's mind as the embodiment of a certain type, but now the setting had taken hold of him too. It had become more and more troubling to Morgan, in a personal, discomfiting way, that these two classes—the finest minds that each side could offer—seemed to regard each other with suspicion and contempt. The Indians felt that they were abused and mistreated; the English officials said that the educated Indian was a drop in the ocean and meant nothing. Even justice, it seemed, was cracked down the middle.

This crack, this deep divide, would run through his book. Two nations, two distinct ways of doing things, were in endless friction with each other. And it was everywhere obvious. The conflict was in him and around him, and wanted to be worked out on the page.

 

* * *

 

Home was beginning to loom ahead now, not only as an idea but as a fast-approaching reality. In just one week he would be boarding the ship at Bombay. Because it was on his mind, he mentioned England more than usual in conversation, and it sparked an outburst from Saeed.

He and Morgan were riding on horseback to see a nearby Maratha village. It was evening, and Morgan had an upset stomach from a banquet he'd been treated to the previous night. He'd fallen off this same horse a day or two before, but thankfully the animal played no tricks today. Instead it was Saeed who was fretful and skittish.

“What do you English imagine?” he cried. “That you will rule us for ever? Do you not know that already your days here are ending? Clear out, you fellows! The Raj and you will be defeated. It may be fifty or five hundred years, but we shall turn you out.”

His face became quite distorted with fury. It was a sharp-edged, nasty little moment, which Morgan was glad to leave behind. As they rode on and a happier conversation resumed, he thought:
he hates us. He hates us far more than his brother does
.

Their friendship had become fraught, as every one of his Indian friendships seemed to in the end. Even so, by the next day the difficult talk was forgotten as Saeed accompanied Morgan to visit the caves nearby at Ellora. On the way they stopped in Daulatabad to visit the hill-fort. This unlovely creation had the power of impregnability: one entered across a bridge that spanned an excavated moat, and then ascended a spiral tunnel through the hill. From the very summit, above all the guns and fortifications, the Deccan plateau simmered bleakly in the heat.

Saeed flung a stone over the edge as they went back. He said, “When I look down on walls I thought big below, I despise them.”

For his part, Morgan thought,
what should I do with such a kingdom
? The temptation to power had no purchase here, not for him. People like Saeed wanted to rule, but they didn't seem to know what that involved. It was a great labour and a great burden, he had glimpsed that in the last weeks. Power both amplified and diminished those who wielded it.

After lunch they walked around the outside of the moat, stepping carefully through a rocky landscape that baked and shivered in the sun. The heat and immobility and silence were preparation for what awaited him at Ellora in the evening. He had been to so many forts and temples and shrines and tombs over the past six months that he didn't believe he had any reserves of awe left. But the Kailasa cave, seen in the last bloody rays of the sun, amazed and astonished him.

Cut out of a single vast rock, it was a temple complex with many levels and galleries and courtyards, covered in sculptures and friezes of an arresting intensity. The shrine at its heart, built around a gigantic lingam, made impression enough, but what stayed with Morgan afterwards were some of the animal images, charged with spiritual hostility, and the terrifying blank indifference of a goddess while she casually inflicted cruelty. He returned alone at sunset, and again the next morning. By now he had made up his mind that the inspiration behind the Kailasa wasn't godly, but diabolical. Many, many hands and years had made this place; it gave expression to three different kinds of religious thinking. Nevertheless, whether Buddhist or Hindu or Jain, the caves did not exude a good feeling. They weren't beautiful, and their grandiosity was of a frightening kind. They had been carved as shrines to an ancient and primitive fear in people; they had certainly touched that place in him.

He found himself thinking now about those other caves, in the Barabar Hills far to the north. He had returned to them often in his imagination, like a hard hollowness at the centre of his journey. They were nothing like Ellora or the Kailasa, of course; they were vacant and smooth, without idols. Nevertheless, they had become larger and more numerous in his mind, more perfect in their emptiness.

They could be made significant, he thought, even if the reality had been disappointing. Those caves could be touched, he saw now, with some of the dread and darkness he'd felt in Ellora. He didn't need the busy, alarming carvings, nor the scenery or the scale. No, absence and silence were his material . . . broken only by that echo.

He had it now, he thought. What he had been searching for till now: the heart of it, the central, engendering event. Something happened in the caves. He knew that much, at least. A terrible incident, a crime of some kind. But when he tried to focus on what it was, it became unclear, all of it retreated from him. It had been too dark to see properly; the echoes had been confusing . . .

 

* * *

 

Saeed was wholly his friend again when he came to the station to see him off. The Station Manager had to delay the train by ten minutes while they went through their farewells. Hung ceremonially around the neck with three garlands of jasmine and marigolds, Morgan was abashed, honoured and inadequate all at once. “But I have no gift for you,” he murmured. “And you have been so kind . . . ”

“The accounts of friends are written in the heart,” Saeed told him, smiling, as he stepped back to watch the train depart. It was a line Masood might have spoken in one of his more insincerely lyrical moments. But Morgan liked Saeed, and really had wanted to thank him properly. In any case, he would be able to buy some confectionery for him in Bombay.

Though, as it happened, he couldn't. India was to finish for him in confusion. The boat, he discovered, was leaving twelve hours earlier than he'd been told, and there was no time for anything that he'd planned—to visit Elephanta Island, or eat mangoes, or buy cakes for Saeed. He couldn't even repack his luggage properly. It was all he could do to make the ship, and he wasn't sufficiently collected even to feel the loss as the shoreline receded behind him.

In the end, after everything that had happened and all the people that he'd met, it was only Baldeo who stood at the quayside to watch him go—ageless, inscrutable Baldeo, whom he did not hate after all; no, not in the slightest. They waved to each other just once, without apparent emotion, and then the intervening distance grew greater and their futures cleanly diverged.

H
e had brought gifts for his mother, mostly bolts of expensive and gorgeous cloth, which on his first morning he laid out in the dining room amidst burning sticks of incense. When he called in Lily and the maids to look, they cooed and cried out in delight, and for a brief instant he saw through their eyes the spectacle of strewn silk. It was all there: the smell, the colour, the awakened glimpse of a far-off place. And then it was put away, the cloths folded and stowed in packing-cases, and never brought out again.

He felt lost for a while. The old rituals and habits were insufficient. Nothing was quite bright or beautiful enough; everything was too known. He thought constantly, obsessively, of India—but there was nobody in his circle who shared his interest, which made it worse. He returned there continually in his mind, often to quite arbitrary impressions and textures. In his more fanciful moments he imagined that he had fallen in love with each and every one of its millions of inhabitants.

In fact, only one of them truly mattered. He missed Masood dreadfully, and wished he could see him again. But his anger hadn't abated. Time and distance had softened its sharpness, but Masood kept forgiveness at bay by writing only every few months, and with no real news. He was aware of Morgan's feelings, which hadn't been subtly expressed, but it seemed he couldn't help himself. Silence or empty posturing were all he offered in response.

But in one of his letters soon after Morgan's return—and perhaps only out of guilt—he did yield up a genuine revelation. He approached it in a roundabout way, not quite saying what he was saying, though his meaning was clear enough. His father, he thought, had been a minorite.

Oddly, this didn't come as a complete surprise. Something in the way Masood had talked about his father, and the tales of distressing behaviour that he'd recounted, had planted the idea in Morgan's mind. There had always been some great unhappiness there, some knot of unspoken torment, suppressed through drink. But now that the words had been set down on paper, they loosened a flurry of emotions in Morgan, which tolled like a bell through his life, back to his beginnings.