Arctic Summer (31 page)

Though Morgan studied, he struggled to remember. It was so unbelievably complicated. “There are four categories,” the Maharajah told him, while he wrote. “There is first the Royal Family. Then there are the great Maratha nobles, followed by the secondary nobles. Then there are the rest, the lesser nobles, whom we call Mankari.” He looked sadly at Morgan. “In this last lot, you will be the first.”

He went back to the subject of the Ruling Family. There were his brother and his son, his wife, his brother's wife and his aunt. Each had their own names and titles and had to be salaamed with two hands, using the whole hand in each case. A similar courtesy was to be extended to the Dewan, meaning the Prime Minister, the Agent to the Governor General and the Political Agent.

“The last two, as you know, are British representatives, but when dealing with them you are to consider yourself an Indian. Now let us discuss the Council of State.”

“I'm a little lost.”

“Wait a minute!” He went on ruthlessly, enumerating countless officials of descending importance.

“I shall never get this right.”

“Yes, you will. Besides, it doesn't matter in the least, except in the case of Brother and those others whom I have specially mentioned.”

Among the Ruling Family, Morgan's task was made slightly easier by the absence of the Maharajah's son, who was in the hills, and his wife, who had left him, or been banished—the question was disputed—five years before. Nevertheless, other royal personages swarmed, trailing their glory and their titles. It was all very frightening.

And made worse, he was soon to discover, by the appalling disrepair that surrounded him. Everything was confusion and mess. When he'd last been here, eight years before, the New Palace was under construction—but it was still under construction now, and what had previously been built seemed to be falling down. Under his window six almost-naked men did work that one man could do, handing a tiny basket of earth between them to no apparent purpose. The same futility was evident across a much wider area, where half-dug holes pitted the ground between sheets of abandoned marble.

And further afield, a similar chaos held sway. Roads had been started that petered out into grass; beautiful fruit trees were dying in the heat. A thousand pounds' worth of electric batteries stood decaying, with no use for them until the Electric House could be enlarged. Numberless servants underpinned this enterprise, all of them seemingly idle and incompetent.

It was just as bad indoors. Everything had warped and buckled in the heat. An assortment of new musical instruments—a harmonium, a dulciphone and two pianos, one of them a grand—could not be played, because their frames were cracked and peeling. Taps dripped continually and could not be turned off. An unused suite of dining-room chairs was vomiting forth its innards. When he opened a cupboard in the bathroom, he found it stacked, inexplicably, with teapots. He asked for a bookcase and it collapsed instantly under his hands. A large rodent of some kind was gnawing a hole in the canvas ceiling on his veranda. Nor did it help that the two Indian officials Morgan relied on to assist him in his duties could speak very little English.

When he told all this, as diplomatically as he could, to Bapu Sahib, the response was delight. The Maharajah clapped his hands and giggled like a girl.

“Do not fear, Morgan!” he cried. “All will be well!”

The same kind of gaiety ran through the court. Nothing appeared to matter very much. When Morgan had first arrived in Bombay the festival of Holi was still in progress; the two courtiers who had escorted him were streaked with bright paint. The same colours stained everybody in Dewas, and there had been the raucous party at the Cavalry barracks on his first night. Then April Fool's Day came, and he was offered trick cigarettes and whisky laced with salt, and an attempt was made to send him on a pointless errand to a remote shed in the garden. It was all games and foolery, a sort of childish bawdiness that made even the driest officials fall about in laughter. Indeed, Morgan joined in, and his first ominous mood soon faded away.

 

* * *

 

Not long after his arrival, he was taken on an outing to visit a local village. Walking along the banks of a river, where nature was still unspoiled, the train of villagers that followed their party became most excited at what they emphatically said was a rearing snake. To Morgan's eyes, the snake appeared to be a small, dead tree, but common opinion declared him wrong: it was certainly a snake, they told him, of a vicious and poisonous kind. It was on the other side of the water, too far away to harm them, but it was necessary anyway to throw stones at it. One of these stones, hitting it full-on, revealed that it
was
a small, dead tree. Much hilarity ensued, which turned to consternation when it was decided that the Sahib was disappointed, and very much wanted to see a real snake, which was nowhere close to hand.

Morgan thought of this moment as typically Indian, and somehow revealing, because of the lack of certainty that enclosed it. One ended by being unsure whether the branch might not have been a snake after all. This doubt would not have lasted back home in England, but here, under the strong, enormous sky, no answer was ever quite enough. There was a mystery at the heart of things, he felt, which might derive from the gap in language and religion—but which might, just as plausibly, derive from the landscape or the weather.

The same sense of mystery—a tiny blurred place at the edge of perception—carried into all his dealings here. There was hardly a conversation or a custom that didn't leave him perplexed in some way. It wasn't that things weren't explained: Masood had always tried, and so had Bapu Sahib, and there were whole tomes written on the subject of India. But even the plainest explanation seemed to throw up more questions; an opacity remained, impervious to language.

This applied also to his work. Not his smallest confusion related to the doings of the court, which he was supposed in part to oversee. But never could he fully understand the logic of even the simplest arrangement. Why were scores of rupees spent on festivals and pageantry, for example, when the palace itself was falling down?

The Maharajah's intimate life was another area of mystery. His wife, the Maharani, had come from Kolhapur, and thence had she fled again. Kolhapur was a powerful state, far more powerful than Dewas, and Bapu Sahib appeared to have created a frightening enemy through this personal rupture. Strangers would appear in the court from time to time, who were said to be Kolhapur spies. But whether his wife would return, whether or not they were divorced, and what the reasons were for the split: none of this was ever made clear to Morgan.

He remembered the Maharani from his first visit, and knew that the glimpse had been a privileged one. But Bapu Sahib had since taken another companion, Bai Saheba, who didn't feel the need to keep invisible. She lived in a ramshackle house near the entrance to the city, where she lolled about on carpets in a courtyard, surrounded by attendants. She would frequently visit the palace, or Bapu Sahib would go to her, and on each occasion the journey would involve a loud spectacle of horses and soldiers and finery, drawing great attention to itself. But although His Highness referred to her as his Maharani, and she had borne him three daughters already and was again pregnant at this moment, it didn't seem that they were properly married, which was confusing. Why was there a great need for modesty and circumspection in one case, but not in the other?

Morgan knew that there were concubines of different ranks in Hindu society, and thought perhaps she was one of these. But when he very delicately tried to bring up the topic with Bapu Sahib, talking of golden concubines and silver ones, His Highness laughed uproariously. “She is my
diamond
concubine,” he said, which only muddied the matter further.

 

* * *

 

Masood's absence at the docks had been worrisome, but it turned out that he'd been visiting educational establishments in the jungle and had received none of the messages. Now that he knew Morgan was here, he hastened up from Hyderabad for a visit.

Both of them were edgy, because of the royal surroundings. “Well, it isn't much of a palace,” Masood observed. “More like a big, ugly house. Mine is much better.”

“For God's sake, don't say that when you meet him. Decorum must be maintained.”

“Your salary, you mean. And your good standing. You're as rotten as the rest of them.”

But they were smiling as they embraced. Time had made everything easier.

Masood had brought three attendants with him—a Parsi clerk and two servants—who followed behind, carrying luggage and files. Much of this was for show, Morgan realised, because he couldn't stand to be overshadowed by a mere Maratha king. And once inside, he immediately began to bully the Mayor of the palace, Malarao Sahib.

“The Nizam of Hyderabad, for whom I work, is entitled to a twenty-one gun salute,” he told him. “I forget what Dewas Senior merits . . . ?”

“Fifteen,” Morgan said quickly, noticing Malarao's unhappiness.

“Hmm. How wonderful. But we have twenty-one.” And he ran a fingertip distastefully across a dusty surface.

By now Morgan feared the worst. But when the time came for him to meet the Maharajah, Masood was the soul of politeness. He was more pompous than usual, but in a deferential, self-demeaning way. Even when he questioned His Highness about the constitution—which was being drawn up eight years ago and was still being drawn up now—he did it with enormous, elaborate respect. It was as though the ritualised humility that he'd parodied in his early letters had suddenly come true.

And Bapu Sahib matched it. Was Masood quite comfortable, were the furnishings and the food to his liking? He was an Indian brother, his name had been mentioned so often, and nothing would be too much to ask, he had only to request it. There was a great deal of solemn nodding, and it seemed for a while as if two kings were in the room, discussing matters of state.

But when they were alone together, Masood became himself again. He swaggered and twirled the ends of his moustache, in which a strand or two of silver was showing. At night it was too hot to sleep indoors, so they retreated to the roof. Morgan had been making his bed up there since he'd arrived, but—Masood told him now—it was on the wrong side.

“No, no, no, only an Englishman and a fool would sleep over there. You simply have no idea . . . you must face the town. Yes, here, much better. Can you not feel the breeze? Call the servants and have the beds moved.”

The beds were moved from one end of the roof to the other. And when the lamps were doused he felt intensely happy to be lying near his old friend, talking softly back and forth in the warm dark.

Over the next few days, the Maharajah treated them to fine food and entertainment and outings. He even sent them to the top of the mountain of Devi on an elephant. But despite all the finery and expensive fare, Masood never lost his disapproval of Dewas. He didn't show it to their host, but when he was alone with Morgan he muttered in a haughty way about all the incompetence surrounding them. The heaps of rubble and masonry were a visible reminder of everything, in his opinion, that was wrong with the princely states.

“True independence will correct all this,” he said, as he sipped tea from a china cup on the veranda. “It isn't really India, it's a grotesque caricature that has been bred by the intermarriage of your Empire and our silliness.”

“We didn't invent the Princes,” Morgan said mildly. “They were here already.”

“Not in this form. Look at the waste, the excess. Do you know there is a squirrel nesting in one of the pianos?”

“Yes, I saw it.” Morgan couldn't suppress a giggle.

“Oh, and look at this. It's too much. While we are drinking tea!”

He was referring to a line of servants who trooped past just then, each carrying a commode. As they marched away, trailing a faint, unpleasant odour behind them, he sighed and raised his eyebrows.

Morgan giggled again; it was funny and sad. If the English left, as they no doubt would one day, what would the Indians set up in their stead? Would it be less ridiculous than the Raj?

The same question touched them both a day or two later when he and Masood drove over to Ujjain. It was a holy city and Morgan thought his friend might enjoy the spectacle of the ghats along the river, with their hectic displays of worship. It was never less than entertaining. In Benares, on his first visit, Morgan felt he had come closest to something essentially Indian. With the bodies being burned on the riverbank, and the ribald pandemonium of boats and temples and shrines, a vision was evoked of how this country might have functioned if no white man had ever come here.

But although Ujjain's river was a paler imitation of that scene, it stirred up horror in Masood. There were hundreds of sadhus going about their business, washing themselves or chatting or praying, some almost naked, many painted brightly or smeared with ash, a few even sitting on beds of spikes. Masood stared at a group who were drinking tea, his face seeming to broaden with the emotion that filled it, and then rounded on Morgan, as if he were responsible. “My dear chap,” he cried in indignation, “I
ask
you!”

What he asked wasn't said. But there was no answer in any case.

 

* * *

 

It was too hot to work in the middle hours of the day. He attended to his duties in the early part of the morning and sometimes read to His Highness in the late afternoon. From noon to four he was mostly in his rooms. Though they were spacious—a bedroom, sitting room, anteroom and bathroom, all attractively done in the European style—they could not contain him. Indolence and heat were a bad combination, and his thoughts tended towards carnality, despite his best efforts to stop them.

He remembered the dead cow at the roadside, and the resolution he'd made. But he'd been struggling with himself ever since. It was the first time he fully understood Searight's meaning. The midday light was white and blinding, impaling the dry earth vertically with its rays. Indoors, one perspired and imagined—there was little else to do. And it was hard to keep one's thoughts from finding an object.