The Setting Sun (31 page)

He laughs. ‘By the way, I’ve been digging around again. Seems your father took a four-month leave from India in 1946.’

‘Oh yes?’ I wonder why.

‘And I came up with his final transfer papers. Made a copy for you. In February 1947 he was posted from Ahmedabad to Ratnagiri. He stayed there until he left India, the exact day of Independence.’

‘Heavens, Rajeev, how did you manage that?’

‘Contacts,’ he chuckles.

So Kiron Modak was right after all. I calculate rapidly. ‘Where’s Ratnagiri in relation to Kolhapur?’

‘A few hours north-west by bus. From there you can catch a train back to Mumbai.’

‘Let’s see if Poel gets back to you. Still haven’t found any of my father’s confidential weekly reports.’

‘You’ve got time, haven’t you? There’s one last place we can
look when you get back to Mumbai. I’ll push Poel as soon as I catch up with him. We go back a long way.’

Bill in full uniform at my parents’ wedding reception in London, December 1947

‘Can’t thank you enough, Rajeev. You’re amazing.’

‘By the way, this long leave Gilbert took on half-pay, ex-India, in 1946. Is that when he married your mother?’

‘No. I have their wedding certificate. It was in December 1947. They only met after he left India.’ A whirlwind romance.

‘Maybe a device to cover his transfer to Sindh?’

‘No, the Hur rebellion was over in 1943. Before he went to Satara.’

So what was he up to in those months? Every shaft of light thrown on Bill’s career in the subcontinent throws up another mystery. Like the Ramoshi in Bhosle’s thesis. What had he done that Bill felt compelled to shoot him?

CHAPTER 12

Respect Between Enemies

We head north the following morning, back up the Pune-Bangaluru highway towards Kundal. First stop is G.D. Lad, former ‘field marshal’ of the Parallel Government. It’s a beautiful first day of the year. Overnight it rained just enough to cleanse the air of dust, and it’s fresh enough that we don’t need air-con. Innumerable rooks tumble down the wall of rinsed pale-blue sky. Briha’s smartly dressed in a cream shirt and black trousers. He’s in expansive mood, head nodding slightly precariously on his neck.

‘It is my son’s birthday today.’

‘You should have told me. We could have gone another time.’

‘No matter. We’re having his party this evening. I hope you’ll come as our dear guest of honour?’

‘As long as I don’t have to make a speech,’ I laugh. ‘How old is he?’

‘Four years only.’

A children’s party in India will be another new experience. Briha tells me about the boy, the apartment he’s recently bought and his career plans. Once he has the MA, he wants to do a PhD, again on contemporary Dalit literature. Right now, he’s reading Mulk Raj Anand’s
Untouchable
as context. I ask him how he developed this interest. For a moment he’s hesitant. Then he explains that he’s a Dalit himself. His grandfather was of the leather-workers’ caste but managed to scrape together enough to buy a plot of land. His father added to it and saved sufficient to get Briha through school and into college. His degree completed, Briha spent several years
unsuccessfully seeking a teaching job, constantly knocked back because of his origins.

‘Shinde sahib gave me my chance,’ he says. ‘I’d written more than a hundred applications. I owe him everything.’

I warm a little to Bill’s accuser.

‘And you, what are you reading presently?’ he eventually asks.

‘About to start Amitav Ghosh’s
The Glass Palace.’

His eyes light up. ‘I know it. The first part’s set in Ratnagiri.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, it’s about the exiled king of Burma and his family.’

Is this an omen? ‘I was thinking of possibly heading down there.’

We chat about contemporary Indian fiction. I find it hard to answer his questions about why exactly its English-language varieties are so popular in the West, where they often win the major literary prizes. Is this a benign legacy of empire? Or a malignant form of exoticism? Hardly anyone I can think of reads African work in English these days. And I’m a little ashamed that I know so little about the authors he’s researching. Writers who stay put in India and who use Indian languages certainly get much less exposure back home, even when they do manage to get translated. Perhaps, they’re the equivalent of the over-looked local historians whose obscurity Avanish bemoaned during my visit to the university yesterday.

I’m glad of the distraction. The butterflies in my stomach aren’t as bad as before Chafal. Nonetheless, I’m uncertain how I’ll be received. Doubtless there’ll be further damaging accusations against Bill.

‘We’re now in old Aundh princely state,’ Briha says as another junction approaches.

‘So Kundal was in Aundh?’

‘Just on the border.’

I wonder whether Lad cocked snooks at Bill from his sanctuary here. It’s flatter than around Chafal, but the land looks
just as rich. Once again, the main cash crop’s sugar and we dodge intermittently round bullock carts heaped alarmingly high with canes.

Kundal’s larger than Chafal, however, more of a town, with many stone buildings and tarmac roads. In the distance looms a chimney, belching smoke, which our driver says is the local sugar refinery. We’re dropped at a modest school building, where the long classroom doubles up as a dormitory. I’m surprised to find it occupied, but Briha explains that these are boarders, some from so far away that they’ve spent the holidays here. A few sit cross-legged on tin trunks, glancing up from schoolbooks. A small group’s gathered to fix a long-tailed kite in one corner, too absorbed to register our presence. We’re shown through into an office and invited to sit. Several men are already there, associates and disciples of Lad, Briha informs me. Soon a vehicle pulls up outside and more people enter. Among them’s a slight man in his eighties, very dark, thick white hair, alert eyes, and an unsmiling, even grim, expression, to whom everyone defers. My heart rather sinks. Briha gives Lad my card, which he glances at and passes to an assistant.

Over a scalding glass of tea, I begin my interview, asking the ‘field marshal’ how he became involved in the Parallel Government. Lad sighs, as if it’s too complex a story to summarise easily. To start with, he speaks in English. But I can’t understand his accent, nor he mine. We’re soon communicating through Briha.

‘When I was in fifth standard here, I began reading Lokmanya Tilak.’

The man who split the Indian National Congress in 1907 by advocating direct action against British rule. Opponents labelled his faction as ‘Extremists’, while describing themselves as ‘Moderates’.

‘He travelled a lot between Pune and his home in Ratnagiri. Once I heard him speak in Satara, when I was a boy.’

I hadn’t realised Tilak came from Ratnagiri. Another sign that I should go there?

‘When I went to Pune to study Ayurvedic medicine, I became more involved in politics. I was in Bombay for Gandhi’s “Quit India” speech in 1942, and when he was arrested, I knew where my duty lay.’

‘So you returned here?’

‘Yes, nine groups were founded in different parts of Satara district and on the first of June, 1943, we raised the Indian flag in Kameri and sang the
Vande Mataram.’

Kameri. Where Bill shot the Ramoshi.

‘But things didn’t come to a head until the atrocities at Vaduj in September of that year.’

The incident Bhosle referred to in his PhD thesis as a turning point in events.

‘DSP Yates fired on a crowd of demonstrators, killing several and wounding many. It was followed by shootings in Islampur. After that we took up arms ourselves.’

‘Did you ever attack the British directly?’ The rural areas I’ve visited must have offered ample opportunities for ambushes.

‘Yes. For example, Satara police station was raided on Christmas Day, 1944. We got away with several rifles.’

What? Bill bearded in his own den? Revenge for the raid on Chafal three weeks earlier?

‘Did you know other policemen, apart from Yates?’

‘There was Gilbert, who was brought in especially to lead the anti-insurgency. An Indian, too.’

‘E.S. Modak?’

‘Yes, Modak. And another called Pradhan. Accomplices of Gilbert.’

Was it partly to counter such perceptions that Modak wrote his memoir? Suddenly, the possibility occurs to me that Lad doesn’t know who I am. Otherwise, wouldn’t he say ‘your father’ rather than ‘Gilbert’, the name some people have used on this trip? Surely Shinde’s son explained when he phoned
to make the appointment? But Briha, following his principal’s lead, addresses me as ‘Professor Bart’ and perhaps these people also think that’s my name. Lad only glanced cursorily at my card. Maybe he doesn’t associate ‘Moore-Gilbert’ with ‘Gilbert’. Should I spell it out? But he might clam up, or sanitise what he wants to say. Exquisitely uncomfortable, I decide to let it slide.

‘During that time your critics accuse you of atrocities, of being terrorists.’

Lad shakes his head vigorously before launching into a long defence of the Parallel Government. What he adds to D.Y. Patil’s account is the claim that deeds of violence committed by ordinary criminals were regularly blamed on the movement.

‘It suited the police and criminals alike.’

Murkier and murkier. Further, he insists that the group was first and foremost interested in social reform. In order to carry out its programme, it needed political capital.

‘And so we attacked government buildings, the postal system and railways.’

I nod.

‘We wanted to bring down the pyramid of oppression by undermining the base it rested on. We weren’t terrorists, we were freedom fighters.’

There’s silence as I continue writing notes.

‘Gilbert was the terrorist in that campaign, not us,’ says Lad suddenly.

My father was a terrorist? I’m winded for a moment by Lad’s bald judgement. Is it one I should have arrived at myself, in the light of the debate at Briha’s college and my tour of the ‘Mutiny’ sites in Kolhapur? I can’t think of any response for the moment.

‘Mind, he wasn’t as bad as the others.’

The qualification is only partly gratifying. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Like Yates, firing on unarmed demonstrators.’

I nod. ‘Did you ever encounter Gilbert?’

Lad looks at me keenly. I can’t decide if he knows who I am or not.

‘Only one time I met him face to face. At my marriage. He came here to Kundal on my wedding day.’

I’m bewildered. ‘You invited him?’

For the first time, Lad cracks something like a smile. ‘No, he was an unexpected guest.’

‘What happened?’

‘Word must have got to Satara I was getting married. It was the very beginning of May, 1945.’

This raid was probably Bill’s last hurrah in the district. According to his service record, he was transferred on the third.

‘But just as the British had their informers, so did we. Inside Satara police station. Even among the armed constabulary.’

Did Bill have any idea?

‘Anyway,’ Lad goes on, confirming D.Y., ‘Gilbert had to get permission from the Aundh authorities to come here. So we knew he was on his way.’

‘But you went ahead?’

‘We, er, increased the number of guests. By the time the police buses arrived outside Kundal, nearly twelve thousand were waiting. The enemy lined up, four or five hundred of them. I was flattered to see so many. Gilbert walked in front and stopped about ten yards from the front of the crowd. I could see him clearly. He was such a big man, his face was visible above everyone’s heads. He demanded I surrender. I shouted back that I wasn’t going to disappoint my guests. There was cheering.’

‘And then?’

‘He ordered the first platoons to advance. Their rifles were at the ready. He made his demand a second time. The crowd began shouting, but no one budged. They were ten deep between him and me. I was just then ready to give myself up because I was convinced he’d give the order to fire.’

My heart’s racing. ‘Did he?’

‘No. We stared at each other over my supporters’s heads. I could see he was beginning to waver. It was something in his eyes. He was too weak or too good to fire on a wedding crowd. After a minute or two, he ordered his men to pull back. The police all got in their buses and reversed down the road. It was a great moment.’

I can’t stop a sigh of relief. ‘The ceremony went ahead as planned?’

Lad grimaces. ‘Not quite.’

‘What happened?’

‘In Hindu marriages, the bridegroom must put
khum-khum
between the bride’s eyebrows.’

‘A red powder,’ Briha explains, ‘for luck.’

‘I carried a dagger on my person at all times then,’ Lad goes on. ‘I took it from under my marriage gown. Everyone gasped and my bride looked frightened. I cut my thumb and when the blood ran, I pressed it to her brow. It was a token of the sacrifice we were prepared to make.’

I’m somewhat chilled by his tone. But desperately relieved that Bill preferred the humiliation of retreat to a bloody bid for glory. Why did he back off? Perhaps because he was leaving Satara imminently and it was no longer his quarrel. Or he understood the reaction that attacking a wedding would provoke. But I hope it was less laziness or political calculation than simple humanity.