The Way Things Were (26 page)

The Brigadier that night, as if acting out of some primal need for oral history, wanted to explain how he had come to occupy the patch of land on which he stood. In tracing the line back to his ancestor, M– Singh, and his terrible role in the Mutiny of 1857, the Brigadier seemed almost to prepare himself to face the justice of his present situation.

‘Bad business, Raja saab,’ he said, casting his mind back to the events of years ago. ‘A very bad business.’

‘1857?’ Toby said, as if picking up the thread of an earlier conversation.

The Brigadier nodded, but felt perhaps that Toby mocked him. Because he now took a different approach into the story of his ancestor’s collaboration with the British – those
services rendered!
– in the capture of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor of Delhi, and his sons, in 1857.

‘The thing I can’t get over, Toby saab,’ he said, ‘is that I, who am his descendant, have come to live on that very stretch of land where all that terrible history occurred. There’s no reason for it, you know. It was a wilderness, barren scrubby land, when old M– Singh crossed it. There would have been nothing here at all. I mean, M– Singh, on receiving intelligence that the princes were hiding in Humayun’s tomb, was coming from what is now the old city. The land in between was uninhabited virtually. But look at how things have come around: two points in a story, the old city and the tomb, with a stretch of a few miles of desolate land between them, and history has filled in the spaces that lie in between. And I, who descend from M– Singh, live – as a consequence of a separate upheaval – almost equidistant today from the two points in that 1857 story. Strange, no?’

‘But sir . . .’ Viski inserted, pouring his first drink at the Brigadier’s cabinet, which, with its mirrors and heavy crystal decanters, was a little nod to the style of the old days. ‘M– Singh didn’t actually kill the princes, did he? Not by his own hand?’

The Brigadier craned his neck to see his other son-in-law, dressed that night in a maroon turban which matched the maroon satin cuffs of his bandgala. Then, as if something in his appearance dissuaded him from answering the question directly, he performed a little sleight of conversation. He made it seem as if Toby had asked him a different question – ah, the deceptions of old people! – and then went on to answer it with redoubled energy.

‘It was September, you see, Toby saab. The mutiny in Delhi, at least, was over; the city had been recaptured, but it was still smoking from the siege. Brigadier Nicholson, I think, lay dying. Or had just died. I forget which. Now the day before, 20 September, they – Hodson Bahadur and his lot – had captured the Emperor of Delhi from Humayun’s Tomb. And they had granted old Zafar his life. So, perhaps, I don’t know, did my ancestor perhaps feel that the same terms would be granted the princes? Perhaps he did.’

He peered into Toby’s face, looking, if not for sympathy, then for, at least, a little understanding. Mistaking Toby’s attentiveness for something cold and unforgiving, he said, ‘They were very bitter, you know . . .
we
were very bitter, us Sikhs. Only ten years before there had been the Anglo-Sikh wars. M– Singh had fought in those wars. There was a terrible feeling of betrayal among the Sikhs, a feeling of having been betrayed not just by their own leadership, but also by the rest of India, especially by what is today U.P. In fact, it was the very same army, now in revolt, that had defeated the Sikhs ten years before at Ferozeshah. Strange line of thinking, no?’

‘What?’ Toby said. ‘That a British army made up of one’s own countrymen, albeit from a different region, defeats you in battle! Then, ten years later, that same army revolts against the British and you, in seeking revenge against the army, but not interestingly its officers, join the British in suppressing the revolt?’

‘But, Toby saab, this is what I’m saying: you have put your finger on it. This is India. This is our mentality. “Our great mutual distrust of one another.” Is that not your phrase? Why do you think we have been conquered again and again? Our suspicion of each other is so great we cannot help but be ruled by foreigners. We trust them more than we trust ourselves. Don’t you see? Why do you think we have these clowns now, the Nehrus and the Gandhis? Because they’re the closest thing we have to our own homemade foreigners: Scotch whisky bottled in India!’

‘I say!’ Viski said, and gave a loud laugh. He pulled at his moustache and drew his bow-shaped lips back into a grin. The Brigadier looked at him as if he were a madman.

‘But you were saying . . .’

‘I was saying that just the day before – 20 September 1857 – the Emperor of Delhi had been granted clemency. So M– Singh must have felt the same would be done with the princes. How was he to know that his superior officer, old Hodson Bahadur, had other plans? How was he to know of his nefarious agenda? Tell me: how was he to know? And I’ve read – it is unconfirmed, an oral tradition, but recorded nonetheless – that M– Singh did what he could for the little buggers. Once he knew they were going to be killed like dogs in the street, he warned a couple of them. During the siege of the Tomb, I think, he saw two princes hanging about and he said, “Why are you standing here?” They said – terribly innocent, young fellows, you know! – “Hodson Bahadur has told us to.” M– Singh glared at them and said, “Have mercy on your lives. When he returns he will kill you; run in whichever direction you can. And khabardar: dum na lena!”’

The Brigadier, though he was fully aware of Toby’s deep knowledge of Sanskrit, always paused to explain its vernacular to him. ‘“Mind you: do not stop even to take a breath!” That is what he told them. Then he turned his face away, and let the little buggers escape. When Hodson came back a moment later and found them gone, he was furious. “Where have they gone?” “Who?” “Who?! The princes who were standing here.”
“
Princes? What princes?” “You know perfectly well what princes.” “I haven’t seen any princes.” That kind of thing,’ the Brigadier chuckled, drawing out this one redemptive detail in an otherwise bad story.

Deep, who had been listening at a distance, but pretending not to, now sabotaged her husband’s story. ‘But later there was no sign of all this mercy/shercy. When they were being stripped naked at Khooni Darwaza, and shot dead in the street, the descendants of Taimur and Genghis Khan, murdered before a mob on the outskirts of Delhi, then he didn’t seem in the least bit bothered, your M–Singh. He took the ring and ran,’ she said, and let out a clear peal of laughter.

The Brigadier listened with anguish to his wife spoil his story, then winced painfully.

‘What ring?’ Toby asked.

‘Oh, it’s nothing!’

‘What nothing?’ Deep said. ‘Treasured heirloom. The one bloody thing you lot managed to hang on to, even when you lost everything else. Nothing, my foot. The signet ring of the Mughal princes. Ask him, it is in their family.’

Toby turned to the Brigadier who gave a sad acquiescent nod.

‘I say, sir,’ Viski thundered, ‘nothing to be ashamed of.’

‘No, no. It was a bad business. Very bad.’

Deep, seeing him cast down, and recalling perhaps the heavier events of the day, said, ‘Come on, now. Come outside. They’ve come. The girls’ guests. Mrs – pfffff! – Arjun Singh. Ishi and Mishi think she might be able to help with . . .’

Her voice trailed off; she didn’t know what she was meant to help with. Because she didn’t know what had happened to her son and could not bear to imagine. Toby, seeing that the storytelling had helped the mood in Fatehkot House – for what else do old families do when they’re in trouble but sit upon the ground and tell stories – tried to return the Brigadier to the story of his ancestor. ‘Finish what you were saying, sir . . .’ But the Brigadier didn’t want to now.

They refilled their drinks and went outside.

A fire had been lit in the garden. A furtive slow-burning fire that crept along the reddening bellies of the large logs in the grate, and whose orange glow pressed darkly into the pleats of the women’s saris. The fire, its light reaching no higher than their waists, gave the women a large and stooped quality. They stood around it like a line of caryatids in a temple warming their hands. Occasionally the fire would swell, and then, in the expanded circle of its light, a ring would flash, lips and teeth would gleam.

Mrs Arjun Singh’s voice, clear, newsy, full of a singsong authority, dominated the conversation. She was a handsome statuesque woman whose forbidding appearance and sternly cropped hair belied her true nature which was gossipy and lascivious. Her husband, Arjun Singh, though a dour-faced fool, repressed and serious, was a close school friend of the PM’s son, part of the change of heir in Delhi that had occurred a few years before, after Mrs Gandhi’s younger son was killed in a flying accident.

An age of influence had begun in the capital, for the new heir and his mother had very different leadership styles. Mrs Gandhi – it was true – had at times been a paranoid vindictive despot; she had broken treaty with the princes, she had invaded defenceless Himalayan kingdoms; she had introduced crime and sycophancy into the soul of politics in Delhi. It was hard to imagine a more destructive ruler. But she had been an adult throughout. And, in her own mad way, she had known what she was doing. Her son’s rule, even in its regency, was something apart. He was to prove that, if there was anything more destructive than the knowing harm his mother did India, it was the unknowing harm he and his public school friends would do the country.

There were other differences too. Mrs Gandhi had waged war on the Delhi drawing room. Its frequenters lived in constant fear of raids, of alcohol and foreign currency restrictions; they had hardly been able to travel. And, though many things could be said about the government Mrs Gandhi ran, few could say it was comprised of the drawing room set. Her son, owing no doubt to the deep disdain for India that had taken root among his generation, made it clear from the very start that the drawing room, with its ethnistas, deracinees and Oxbridge Lefties, would not just play a more important role in government; it would be the laboratory of government. From this pool of pseudo-intellectuals and dinner party celebrities, the future prime minister of India would draw his most trusted advisers and cabinet ministers. Each of whom, even before he was PM, were informed that their presence was required in Delhi, and obeying the call of their country – as Arjun Singh had done – they left their jobs at private firms and came to his side. Their wives, society ladies, whose only talk until then had been of holidays and dutyfree goods, peppered with the odd gentility, were put to work too. Little cultural committees were created for them to head; offices and government buildings found for them to decorate, dying rivers and soon-to-be-extinct weaving traditions for them to save. These women made it known to those less influential than themselves that, if their husbands had the future PM’s ear, they had his wife’s. Of these ladies, none was more influential than Mrs Arjun Singh. She was by far, and without a rival, the most intimate friend of the soon-to-be prime minister’s wife. And it was for this reason that Kitten Singh brought her to Fatehkot House that Diwali.

Her presence there, on that night of festival, inspired something of the wonder of a visiting deity mixed in with the real and practical utility of a doctor paying an emergency call. Her nearness to power, expressed now through a small and revealing detail, reluctantly disclosed – ‘Arjun cannot join us, unfortunately; he had to go to Safdarjung Road’ – now through that closed and slightly beatific expression that people in power acquire, reassured the Fatehkotia women. They no longer felt so exposed as they had all day; their brother’s situation, though yet unknown, no longer seemed so desperate. It was now for the first time openly conjectured that he might, in these bad times, have been picked up for being a Sikh. The conjecture was not aired with anything resembling outrage; Mrs Arjun Singh expressed it with that mixture of regret and inevitability with which we speak of the weather or a flat tyre. ‘The climate,’ she said, ‘is now very bad. But if anything
untoward
had happened to I.P., I will do everything in her power to make sure they knew that he was not one of those Sikhs.’

‘Those Sikhs?’ the Brigadier asked with genuine curiosity.

‘You know, sir, the bad ones, terrorist-types.’

In the silence that fell over the garden, Isha looked sternly at Viski. But he did not say a thing. Of late, almost as if he had been brought into line with the way people now spoke of the Sikhs, he had come to dislike the sound of his dissenting voice. It made him feel like a bore and an activist; and, like many people who try to fight an emerging status quo, no matter how ugly it is, he felt himself subdued, not by arguments, but by its casual tyranny. It is easier to fight the knowing bigot than it is to fight prejudice in the mouth of a child or the throwaway remark of a society lady. And Mrs Arjun Singh, who had expressed a distinction that was now everyday more commonplace – the distinction between good Sikhs, our Sikh friends, and the bad ones – hardly even noticed the discomfort she caused in that Sikh household. In her view, and many would agree, she could not have said anything more innocuous.

Everyone stared at the fire, which now hissed. The flames had left deep red welts on the logs and the ash formed a precarious jigsaw pattern. As everyone’s gaze was fixed on the fire, a drop splashed. Then another, flattening the ash. And yet another.

‘Oho!’ a cry went up.

‘Let’s go inside.’

‘Rain on Diwali? Never heard of such a thing.’

‘Pundit ji,’ Viski said, ‘is it inauspicious for it to rain on Diwali?’

Toby smiled. ‘I haven’t the slightest . . .’

Mrs Arjun Singh, who had come to please, seemed particularly upset, like a goddess no longer in her element.

‘I should go,’ she whispered.

‘No, no,’ Kitten Singh whispered back. ‘It’ll look bad. Stay for one drink, then we’ll both go.’

In a land where there is no such thing as neutral rain, but always only good or bad rain, everyone, once they were safely inside, judged this particular shower severely.