The Day of the Scorpion (15 page)

‘Well, good night,’ Ahmed said. Bronowsky said nothing, until Ahmed was at the bottom of the verandah steps, putting on his bicycle clips.

‘Give my felicitations to Professor Nair,’ he called. ‘And be sure to mention the fact that you are going riding alone tomorrow with one of the Miss Laytons.’

‘Why?’

‘He will advise you more satisfactorily than I how to comport yourself, how to interpret accurately and safely her many little gestures and inflexions of voice which you might be in danger of misinterpreting. He will speak of such things as he speaks of all things – from the vast fund of his experience.’

Ahmed smiled, took his bicycle from the rack and prepared to mount.

‘Oh and one other thing,’ Bronowsky said, lowering his voice but enunciating carefully. ‘Find out what you can about his visitor.’

‘Has he got a visitor, then?’

‘Yes. Two. A woman not identified and an elderly scholar by name of Pandit Baba Sahib. He comes from Mayapore. The question is, for what purpose?’

‘Must there be a special one?’

‘Professor Nair’s visitors usually have a purpose, or if they don’t have one when they arrive they have one when they go home.’

‘Considering you only returned from Gopalakand today you’re well informed.’

‘I pay to be. And Pandit Baba is not unknown to us in Mirat. Have you had enough whisky to see you through an evening of fruit juice?’

‘I think I shall manage.’

‘Have a good time then, dear boy. And take care if you are tempted to come home by way of the Chandi Chowk.’

Ahmed waved, mounted and rode down the gravel drive of Bronowsky’s bungalow to the gate which the watchman – already muffled in a shawl and armed with a stick – held open for him. Outside, he turned right, pedalled along the metalled road towards the city. To his left stretched the expanse of open ground which separated the City from the palace. Soft warm airs blew across it. The moon whose first appearance had ushered in the month of Ramadan was nearly full. It hung above the city, not giving much light, the shape and colour of an orange. It would wax and wane and become invisible. Its slender reappearance would announce the îd. During this month more than 1,300 years ago it was said that the Koran had been revealed by Allah to his Prophet. A good Muslim was supposed to fast from sunrise to sunset. Ahmed, remembering the whisky, stopped pedalling, stood astride and felt in his pocket for the clove of garlic. He popped it into his mouth and crunched, resumed his journey. The road was unlit, his cycle lamp out of order, but the night was luminous and he liked cycling in the dark. It could be a risky business and he preferred activities that had an element of danger in them, so long as the activities themselves were of a commonplace kind and only dangerous by virtue of some extraneous circumstance. Riding a bicycle in the dark or a horse over rough country were one thing, deliberately courting danger was another. To Ahmed, the kind of danger that added spice to a situation was danger that came suddenly and unexpectedly; only so could it retain what he thought of as essential to it: spontaneity, or mystery, or both. He had once suggested to Professor Nair that his attitude to danger could be summed up by describing it as one that distinguished between the danger to a man who joined a riot and the danger to a man who found himself involved in one in the course of moving
peaceably between point a and point b. Ahmed had experienced both kinds of danger as a student. It was the unexpected riot he enjoyed. ‘One did not feel’ he told Nair, ‘that one had to take sides, one merely hit out in one’s own defence, and there wasn’t any moral problem to puzzle out either before or after. I was knocked off my bicycle by one faction and subjected to rescue by the other. I dished out bloody noses indiscriminately and felt fine, and nobody noticed or thought to wonder whose side I was on, so when I’d finished having my fun I just rode away and left them all to it.’

Closer in to the city the road became overhung on one side by the trees in the grounds of the Hindu Boys’ College, an institution which like the Council of State owed its existence to Count Bronowsky. Numerically in a minority, a mere twenty per cent of the population, the Muslims of Mirat had maintained a firm grip on the administration since the days of the Moghuls. Until Bronowsky’s day few Hindus had held any public post of any importance. There were more mosques than temples, not because the rich Hindus of Mirat were unready to build temples but because permission to build was more often refused than granted. The same restrictions had been placed on the building and endowment of schools for Hindu boys and girls, who were generally thought to be too clever by half. For the Muslim children an Academy of Higher Education had been established in the late nineteenth century, but its record was poor; there was a saying that a boy left there with no qualifications except for reciting passages from the Koran, but that this alone was enough to pass him into the service of an official – particularly of a tax-collector. Until the foundation of the Hindu Boys’ College in 1924, non-Muslims whose parents wanted them educated above middle-school standards had to compete for places in colleges outside Mirat, and having left Mirat the tendency was not to return but to seek employment in the service of the Government of India. Muslims, jealous guardians of their own entrenched position in the administration of the State, saw no harm in this draining of potential talent among the Hindus whose job, in their opinion, was trading and moneylending. But Bronowsky saw
harm and persuaded the Nawab to see harm too, and to allocate a modest annual sum from the State’s revenue for a college that would be open to the sons of rich or poor Hindus. The rest of the money was provided by prominent Hindu businessmen. The building that was erected reflected the combination of civic pride and sense of communal and personal grandiosity with which the money was contributed: red brick with white facings, Gothic windows and Gothic arches. Coconut palms were planted in the forecourt. From the beginning it had been a success.

‘Is that you, Ahmed?’ Professor Nair called as Ahmed – having passed the watchman at the gate of the college and walked his bicycle off the drive that led to the main building and on to a narrow path – came in sight of the Principal’s bungalow. Nair stood at the head of the steps, silhouetted by the light from the open door. He was dressed in his white pyjamas.

‘Yes, professor,’ Ahmed called back. ‘Am I late?’

‘Oh no. At least only by a few minutes.’

‘Count Sahib is back from Gopalakand. I had to call in. He sent his regards by the way.’

Ahmed put his cycle in the rack, climbed the steps and let his hands be taken in both of Nair’s. The professor stood about a foot shorter than Ahmed.

‘I have an important visitor,’ he whispered. ‘Do you mind taking off your shoes and socks? He’s an awful stickler for orthodoxies. I’m afraid he won’t eat with us.’

‘Who is he?’ Ahmed asked, bending to untie his shoe-laces.

‘Pandit Baba Sahib of Mayapore. He is writing a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. I don’t mean right now. I mean it is his principal occupation. Please don’t offer to shake hands, and don’t sit where your shadow will fall on him. It’s all rather nerve-racking. Frankly I came out to relax. I am longing for a cigarette but daren’t smoke one in case he smells it. At times like this one’s bad habits come home to roost. Had Count Sahib any interesting news?’

‘None that he shared with me. May I keep my socks?’

‘Oh by all means. The floors get so dirty. Come. Meet Panditji. Like me he is a great admirer of your father.’

The house smelt of incense, which was unusual. Pandit Baba Sahib had probably been in Mrs Nair’s puja room. That was one of the rooms in Professor Nair’s house that Ahmed had never entered. In fact he had only seen two rooms, the room where they sat and talked, which was entered from the right of the square hallway, and the room where they ate, which was entered from the left. An open door at the far end of the hall gave on to a courtyard, where Mrs Nair kept a tethered goat. Ahmed gathered that other rooms, such as the bedroom, bathroom and puja room were entered from this courtyard.

When he came into the living-room – Nair stepping aside and graciously waving him on – he saw that the chairs had been removed and cushions and rugs put down in their place. Pandit Baba Sahib was seated cross-legged on one cushion, resting his left elbow on a pile of three or four. He too was dressed in pyjamas. He had a grey beard and a grey turban. A pair of steel-rimmed spectacles with circular lenses were lodged half-way down his rather stubby nose.

‘This is our young visitor,’ Nair said. ‘Son of our illustrious M A K. A young gentleman of many talents but currently Social Secretary to the Nawab Sahib.’

Panditji stared at Ahmed above the rims of his glasses. The whites of his eyes were yellow. He did not smile, he made no gesture of greeting. He simply stared. There was a certain kind of Hindu who inspired in Ahmed involuntary little twitches of distaste, the relics no doubt of the racial and religious animosity his own forbears had felt towards the forbears of men like Pandit Baba Sahib. It was no hardship to him to keep his distance or to stand where even his shadow could not reach the figure on the cushions who had made no attempt to acknowledge Nair’s introduction and continued to stare up with an expression Ahmed would have thought genuinely disapproving had he not guessed it as probably an expression that Pandit Baba assumed automaticaly when meeting strangers, especially if the stranger was young. Ahmed gazed back, with Nair at his side still holding him by the elbow.

Presently Pandit Baba spoke. He had a high light voice. He spoke in Hindi.

‘You do not look like your father.’

‘Oh, you know him,’ Ahmed said, but in English. ‘Most people would agree with you. They say I take after my mother. Personally I never see any resemblance in myself to any member of my family.’

Pandit Baba frowned.

‘Why do you answer me, and at such length, in a foreign language?’

‘Because I speak Hindi rather badly.’

‘You wish us to converse in Urdu?’ Panditji asked, switching to it.

‘I should prefer English, Pandit Sahib. It’s the language we always speak at home. My mother is a Punjabi you see, and English was the only language she had in common with my father. Even in Urdu I express myself poorly.’

‘Do you not feel shame to speak always in the language of a foreign power, the language of your father’s jailers?’ Pandit Baba asked – reverting to Hindi. At any moment Ahmed expected a bit of Bengali, a sentence or two in Tamil, perhaps a passage in Sanskrit. The Pandit was obviously proud of his facility. His refusal so far to speak in English did not mean he spoke it badly or was not proud of understanding and being able to speak it; but it was fashionable among Hindus of Baba’s kind to decry it, to declare that once the British had been got rid of their language must go with them; although what would be put in its place it was difficult to tell. Even Pandit Baba Sahib would fare badly if he went out into some of the villages around Mirat and tried to understand what was said to him. He would need an interpreter, as most officials did. And the odds were the interpreter would interpret the local dialect in the language and idiom of the British.

‘No,’ Ahmed said. ‘I’m not ashamed.’

‘
Baitho
,’ Professor Nair interrupted, and squatted on a cushion, motioning Ahmed to follow suit, which he did. His trousers made it an uncomfortable operation. Pandit Baba scrutinized him, this time through the lenses of his spectacles. The Pandit – Ahmed now saw – was sitting on a double thickness of cushions. His was a commanding position.

‘I do not know your father in person, only I am admiring him from the distance,’ he said suddenly, in English, ‘and familiarizing myself to his photographs. It is a face after all much known in newspapers.’

Ahmed nodded. Pandit Baba, having spoken, subjected Ahmed to further scrunity. It was extraordinary, Ahmed thought, how men distinguished in one field – and he assumed that Pandit Baba Sahib was distinguished – seemed to claim for themselves wisdom in all spheres of human activity; wisdom and the right to make pronouncements which they expected you to listen to and learn from. The most amusing thing was to see a group of distinguished men together, with no one but each other to make pronouncements to. They were as suspicious of each other, then, as children. He had seen such gatherings in his father’s house while – outside the compound walls – crowds waited in patient homage, or simple curiosity, for a sight of these extraordinary, benign and powerful faces, and he had observed the change that came over those faces when they parted company with each other and went out to meet the crowds. He thought that if Pandit Baba smiled now he would look like them, as they came from the house to the veranda, their games, sulks, quarrels temporarily suspended, and their suspicions making way for the feelings of relief and pleasure at re-entering a familiar world whose plaudits reaffirmed the huge capacity they believed they had, individually and collectively, to solve its problems, its mysteries and its injustices. Perhaps (Ahmed thought, still meeting Pandit Baba’s apparently unwinking gaze) it was his early experience of distinguished men that had led him to feel that there was distance between himself and other people and their ideas. Gandhi had once given him an orange, Pandit Nehru had patted his head, and Maulana Azad had taken him on to his knee; but oranges, head-pats and knee-rides – as he realized even at the time – were not the objects of those visitations, and the visitations themselves although promising excitement always left the excitement on the other side of the wall where the crowds waited. ‘Why do they wait?’ he had asked his elder brother Sayed. ‘Because they know we are saving India,’ came the steady reply. As a boy Sayed had been
a bit of a bore. ‘Saving India from what?’ Ahmed said. ‘Well, from the British of course.’ But in the morning, as he went to school, he noticed that the British were still there and looking quite unperturbed. When he got to school he found there weren’t to be any lessons because the teachers and the older boys were on strike to protest the arrest the previous night of people who had been carried away with enthusiasm at the sight of the Mahatma visiting Ahmed’s father, and – after seeing the Mahatma off at the station – had got out of hand and thrown brickbats at the police who were jostling them, hitting them with lathis and treading them under horse-hoof. Two days later his father was arrested too – for making the speech the Mahatma had asked him to make – and was in prison – that time – for six months.