Chapter 5-

THE STRANDS OF THE NET

SUPERINTENDENT Bristow of the C.I.D. walked into the map room for what he referred to as his Friday morning prayer meeting, a lean greyhound of a man in khaki gabardine jacket and grey flannel trousers, smoking a pipe. With his close-cropped iron-grey hair, his short moustache and his iron-grey eyes, he typified the warm, easy-going colonial officer. And yet, under the casual exterior, he combined a knife-edge sharpness with bull-headed determination which made him the sort of man who would either die by the assassin's bullet or rise to be an Inspector General of Police and receive a knighthood at the hands of a grateful sovereign.

The others were already there, grouped around a table on which there was a map of the Northern Punjab province. The traditional little blue, red and green pins marked the incidence of terrorist activities, the blue ones marking the previous week's incidents.

Bristow gave a quick smile to acknowledge the greetings of his subordinates, and walked up to the map. For a minute or so, he studied it in silence. Humm, eight this week... no, nine,' he muttered. "We certainly are doing well, aren't we?'

The others grinned sheepishly at the implied rebuke. 'Six are only the usual tarring of milestones, sir, Manzoor, the Chief Inspector told him.

Oh, six... one less than last week. Not all in one place, I take it?"

'No, sir; well spread out, as usual.'

"And the other three?"

"The Air Force plane at Duriabad airstrip, the post-box burning at Kurandi village, and breaking up Queen Victoria's statue in the park at Jambori."

'Poor Vicky. what a lot of statues they used to put up in 

those days.' His eyes wandered over the map. 'What's the red one? That makes two in Duriabad.'

"Pearce was there, sir,' Manzoor said.

"That red one is the complaint from the Kerwad Construction Company... Sergeant Pearce began.

The one about missing sticks of dynamite ?"

"Yes, sir, and the box of fuses."

"Anything?

Pearce shook his head. Nothing, sir. The company uses a lot of explosives and fuses every day; they are building the Nashi bridge. It may only have been a mistake in accounting. This sort of thing happens all the time, and frankly some other people wouldn't even have thought of reporting it. It just happens that Dewan-bahadur Tekchand is very finicky so he told the Com- missioner that we weren't investigating his complaint with sufficient zeal...

"Oh, yes, I remember. Everything has to be just so, or I'll speak to the Commissioner."

"That's right, sir."

'Anything else?"

I also took a look at the Hanuman Physical Culture Club, since I happened to be there. You may remember that last week we decided to keep it under observation for a few days.' "That's right; one of those routine checks of institutions where young men gather together."

Yes, sir."

Bristow raised his eyebrows. 'Anything?"

"Well, nothing to speak of, sir,' Pearce said. "I kept a watch for three days, Wednesday to Friday. Nothing there. Just some boys doing weight-lifting and wrestling and that kind of thing.

I sneaked in once, after they had closed. Single-catch padlock.

Nothing but gymnasium equipment inside. Only only I thought I might just mention it, sir: the chest-expanders and bar-bells and things are all German-made. Bristow gave a short guffaw. That's because they are cheaper, and very well-made too. Even my son has acquired a pair of German-made spring dumb-bells." it. Pearce grinned sheepishly. I thought I might just mention  'And quite right too, well done. Who paid for it-the dumb- bells and things?

It is all done on donations, but the principal donor seems to be Dewan-bahadur Tekchand, sir. He gave them a thousand rupees for equipment."

Our own Dewan-bahadur-sahib, of the explosives ?

"Yes, sir.'

'Oh, then there can't be anything in it. We can't go suspecting someone like Tekchand of supporting a terrorist gang and then sending in a complaint about missing explosives! He gives just as generously to police welfare. A thousand, you said?

Sir.

'Rather a lot. What is his interest in the Hanuman Club?'

'His son is a member, Debi-dayal.'

"Ah, that explains it. Tell me about the son,' Bristow asked.

'College boy; very keen on Japanese wrestling.'

"Judo? Who takes them in it? Tomonaga ?"

Yes. Twice a week.'

"He is very good, Tomonaga. He gives classes at the university too." Bristow shook his head. "Tell me about the plane. How did they manage to set fire to it?"

It was difficult to reconstruct, sir. Nothing left on the spot... all gutted. But it is pretty certain they piled a lot of cotton waste soaked in petrol under the belly of the plane. Then set a match to it and bolted.'

Just a match? It couldn't be a fuse?"

Can't say, sir.'

'How many of them?"

"Two sets of foot-prints."

Bristow perched himself on the table and began to light his pipe. 'What about the foot-prints?" he asked. Tennis shoes, soles quite smooth."

Humm, doesn't help much, does it?"

'No, sir.'

And yet it means that they must have had a pretty good idea of the lay-out... that there was no guard on the river side. They must have known that the plane would be there overnight. Who could have seen it land?""

'Hundreds of people, even though the strip's nearly ten miles from the town. Aeroplanes are quite rare in that part of the world.'

"So they had only a few hours to get a message sent to wherever they are located and bring down a burning squad. Seem to be a damn sight more efficient than we are. What was it?"

I beg your pardon, sir?"

" "The plane. What make was it?"

'A Wapity, of the Thirteenth Reconnaissance Squadron.'

"And no other clue ?"

Sergeant Pearce shuffled his feet and squirmed in his seat, sensing the displeasure in the Superintendent's voice. "Well, sir," he began. 'It may be just a red herring but... I questioned all the mess servants. Just a routine questioning because that was where the pilot had been put up-in the Greyforths' mess. And I thought I ought to check whether any of them had heard the pilot talking to the officers and then gone and broadcast it in the bazaar.' 'Much more likely that the officers themselves talked, after a couple of drinks at the club, Bristow commented, but there was a slight grin on his face as he said it.

Encouraged by the grin, Pearce went on. 'All the mess servants denied that they knew anything about the plane, of course. pretended that they did not understand English. Most of them do understand it a little."

'Of course they do,' Bristow said. 'But you'll never get them to admit it.'

'One of them looked a little familiar to me. For a time I could not think where I could have seen him, and then it suddenly came to me that two days earlier, I had seen him in a tea-house, with a young man called Ahmad Khan. I had just gone in for a cup of tea when these two walked in, quite matey." This Ahmad, have we got anything on him, Manzoor?" Bristow asked the Chief Inspector.

'No, sir, Manzoor said. There doesn't seem to be any use following that up." "That's why I was reluctant to mention all this,' Sergeant

Pearce explained. 'It just happens that Admad is a member of the Hanuman Club, and I had seen him going in." Bristow shook his head uncertainly. I am inclined to agree with you, Manzoor, and yet, I don't know; it might lead to something. What had you in mind, Pearce?"

"Well, sir, with your permission, I was going to remove this waiter to the thana, for a thorough questioning."

Superintendent Bristow grinned at the sergeant. "Yes, do that," he said. 'But mind you, don't overdo the. er, the questioning. The army officers don't realize the difficulties we are up against in this country or appreciate that these things are sometimes unavoidable. And if they find one of their servants showing up with bruises or anything, they are capable of creating no end of trouble. Some of them have a lot of pull too, right up to the Governor. But do go ahead. I can trust you not... not to overstep the mark."

Sergeant Pearce grinned. His bulldog face glowed with pride at the unaccustomed expression of confidence, his snub nose quivered. 'No, sir,' he assured Bristow. I will see that there is no cause for fuss...no bruises."

And you, Manzoor,' Bristow turned to the Chief Inspector. You had better arrange for the local chaps to keep a night and day guard on the Hanuman Physical Culture Club. Just in case something comes out of all this." 'Yes, sir,' Manzoor said. HAFIZ KHAN's letters had been quite explicit, and yet they had not prepared Shafi for the change that had come over him. Shafi had never really cared much for Hafiz as a man, but of course there was no question of showing his indifference openly. Hafiz had always been somewhat unbalanced; everyone knew that. During his last term of imprisonment, they had actually placed him in the psychopathic ward at Yerawada.

At the same time, he was one of the top men in the movement, one of those who had inaugurated the Freedom Fighters, and he was exceptionally touchy; it was important to give him no cause to take offence. Shafi invited him to attend their Saturday evening meeting and address his men, but Hafiz declined. It seemed he wanted to speak to Shafi alone.

He received him in his room high up in the first lane behind Peshawar Gate, a pigeon-loft of a room with a view of the backyards of the bazaar, and there Hafiz and he talked earnestly for nearly two hours. The night was breathless with the oppres- sive, pre-monsoon heat. The kerosene lamp in the window was dark with soot, but neither of them had cared to lower its flame. The food that Shafi had offered, specially cooked in pure ghee because of his guest's finicky appetite, still lay under the covering plates on the window sill, exuding odours of spices, but the bottle of Dewar's whisky was nearly empty.

Now they were not talking. Hafiz, a little runt of a man, his face narrowing to a pointed mouth, his ears sticking out of his head, leaned forward and watched Shafi anxiously as he read the cuttings from the Dawn and Trident and the Awaz and the Sulah and the Subah which he had brought with him, all heavily underlined and boxed in red and blue pencil. For a long time, there was silence in the room, silence except for the papers rustling in Shafi's hands. The scowl on Shafi's face deepened as he read. It was only after he had put away the last clipping that

Hafiz spoke. 'Now do you agree with me?"

Shafi shifted his eyes from the other's face. 'I don't know,' he said. 'All that is hardly conclusive.' He pointed at the stack of paper clippings that had been shown to him. "Everything twisted to suit a line of thought...

I am surprised at you!' Hafiz said with passion, his beady, tormented eyes looking straight into Shafi's. "We who once ruled this country as conquerors shall be living here as inferior citizens, as the slaves of Hindus! Unless we heed the warnings and stand up for ourselves."

Whose warnings? Jinnah's? Have you become a Leaguer?"

'I am not a Leaguer only because the League does not believe in our methods. But there is no denying that Jinnah is a great man. He has pointed out the way. We must now turn our back on the Hindus, otherwise we shall become their slaves!' His fists were clenched; his nose quivered with passion; drops of spittle flew out of his mouth.

This was bad, very bad. Shafi's eyes were bloodshot; his frown betrayed his annoyance. 'I still don't see it as you do,' he pro- tested. 'It means putting the clock back, undoing all we have done!"

Hai-hail" his visitor exclaimed. 'You have been living in the past-in the Jallianwala days; concentrating on your own work. You don't know what's happening in the rest of the country. The time has come to take a second look-to reorientate ourselves. The enemies of the moment are not the British; they are the Hindus. That's what we must recognize!'

Shafi shook his head. 'It goes against the grain. The whole movement, what we have striven hard to build in the past, becomes meaningless. It was your teaching-you and the others- the pioneers. We worked under your guidance, your inspiration. You were equally ardent...

And you have done excellent work,' Hafiz interrupted. 'But we must move with the times. If new dangers threaten, we must
change our stance to meet them. In our hatred of the British, we had altogether lost sight of a far greater menace: the Hindus! His voice crackled with emotion.

"The Hindus can never constitute a danger to the Muslims not here in the Punjab. Never! Only fanatics can believe such nonsense."

Hafiz sprang up. Angular and bony, his narrow face close to the other's he stood over Shafi's chair like a hungry hawk eyeing its prey. He pointed a finger at Shafi and the finger shook as though electrified. 'Fanatics! We have to turn fanatic in sheer self-defence. You talk of the Punjab, but even the Punjab will not escape the fate of Bombay and Madras, where already we are second-rate citizens, working ants in a society of ants."

"But even there they have taken one or two Muslims into the government,' Shafi pointed out.

'One or two! Are we to be satisfied with crumbs? We who ruled the whole country? Have we now become dogs? And who are the one or two? Who I ask you? Stooges their own men. Muslims who are members of the Congress, renegades. Don't you know that the Congress will not have any one who is not a member? That is what will happen here too. You will find a Congress ministry-a Hindu ministry with a couple of Muslims who are obedient servants of the Congress. Even today, there are Congress administrations in eight of the eleven provinces. What is happening? They will not take any Muslim who will not join them. Jinnah has exposed them: "The Hindus have shown that Hindustan is for the Hindus'. Now we Muslims have to look after ourselves. Organize ourselves before it's too late. Carve out our own country. 'A new country? Apart from India?"

Yes, a new nation. Not apart from India, but a part carved out of India that will be wholly Muslim; pure, uncontaminated."

'But how are we to drive out the British? Are not we forgetting that? You can never achieve freedom by driving a wedge between the two communities!"

Hafiz threw up his arms in a gesture of despair and turned away. He picked up his glass and drained it. Then he flung himself in his chair, limp and exhausted. When he spoke again, his voice sounded tired, like the rustle of paper on tin. 

"That is outmoded thinking. We don't want freedom if it means our living here as slaves of the Hindus. If we succeed in driving out the British, it is the Hindus who will inherit power. Then what happens to us? We are heading for a slavery far more degrading... struggling for it. That's what Jinnah is worried about. That's what all of us are worried about."

'It doesn't bear thinking about,' Shafi said. "To break up with one's own hands what we have striven so hard to build up: communal solidarity." 'It has to be done. We have to organize ourselves-Muslims against the rest of India, if we are to survive. Organize, not so much to win freedom, but to protect ourselves from being swamped by the Hindus; emasculated, to become a race of serfs in a country ruled by idolators."

But this is just playing into the hands of the British. They want to keep the Hindus and the Muslims divided, so that they can go on ruling. Our only salvation lies in solidarity-that is the only way to oust the British."

Hafiz shook his head and clucked his tongue. 'I am surprised,' he said, 'surprised and sad that someone with your background should not heed the signs.' He shook his head again and a strand of silver hair fell on his forehead. 'Don't you realize we must change our tactics to suit the nature of the danger?' His voice rose and quivered with passion. The Congress has contested elections and won them. And in their triumph what did they do? They made it clear that there is no place for anyone in this country except on their terms. For them the great Muslim League does not exist; according to them, they alone represent India-all of us, the Muslims and the Christians and the Parsees. In short, either you accept Hindu overlordship, or you have no place in this country. Who wants a freedom like that? Would you notrather have the British ?"

'Never! Shafi exclaimed with passion. 'Never so long as I remember Jallianwala l'

'Yes, you only remember Jallianwala-something that happened twenty years ago. Do you know what happened in Bombay three months ago, in the Dassara riots? The police actually sided with the Hindus. I saw policemen shooting down Muslims, picking them out. At least they did not do that at 

Jallianwala. That is what is happening everywhere today, and you harp on Jallianwala!

"What you are telling us is to stop all activities, in short, to dissolve the Freedom Fighters. Is that what you have done in Bombay?"

Hafiz shook his head in slow-motion. His eyes were narrowed, his nostrils flared, his lips were retracted. He looks more like an angry rat than ever, Shafi thought contemptuously. "The Fighters must go on,' Hafiz pronounced. "Go on with ever greater vigour- but only as a purely Muslim organization. The Hindu element must be eliminated. Our methods remain as they are; only our targets have changed. We have to be ready to use the same methods against the Hindus... I don't understand what you are saying,' Shafi confessed. "Then the Hindus too will use terrorist methods against us-the Muslims. It would mean-it can only mean-civil war.'

The other laughed. It was an arrogant, assured, laugh. "That is exactly what we have to prepare ourselves for: a civil war. We have to think ahead, a year, two years from now, to a time when the British will leave this country, leaving our fate in the hands of the Hindus. Are we to sit back and take whatever indignities they have in store for us? We must hit back ten-fold. It is to that end that we must all work, must all recognize the new enemies: the Hindus!"

I don't like it,' Shafi said weakly. I don't like it at all that we, who have always striven for communal solidarity, should now prepare for civil war. Our only solution was to keep together so as to fight the British. In fact, if Gandhi's movement had not been so irreconcilable with my own thinking-all that nonsense about non-violence-that is the movement I would join-not a communal organization."

"That is what has brought us to this pass,' Hafiz said, rising to his feet again. "We who ruled this country and had enslaved the Hindus, are now being enslaved in our turn. The Hindus are winning. They have laid traps for us. As soon as the British are made to leave-made to leave with our fullest co-operation, mind you-the Hindus will take over. They are clever, cleverer than ourselves in their trickery. Take Gandhi's own words: "In the midst of darkness, light persists; in the midst of death, life
persists." Is it nonsense? No, it is not. It is the peculiar escapism of Hinduism; the utter meaninglessness of words. Light in darkness, life in death; why not violence in the midst of non- violence? That is what I say. In the midst of Gandhi's non- violence, violence persists. Violence such as no one has ever seen. That is what awaits this country; the violence bottled up in those who pay lip-service to non-violence. The Hindus are preparing for it-to kill us, to swamp us."

Far in the distance, a train whistled. Shafi got up and poured the remaining whisky into their glasses. For a few moments, they waited, looking at each other, like spent wrestlers in an arena, reluctant to go on with the bout. 'Here's to our movement,' Hafiz said. "To our survival, to our victory!'

Both men drank in silence, not aware that anything had been decided, agreed upon. Hafiz put down his glass with a bang and said:

I am leaving the papers here. It will do you a lot of good to read them at your lesiure, it'll open your eyes. Remember that in the Muharram riots, seven people were injured in the rioting itself, eighteen men died by police fire-all Muslims! The police killed more than the rioters doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"What does it mean?

They shoot to kill-they pick out the Muslims and shoot to kill.

Long after Hafiz Khan had gone, Shafi sat slumped in his chair, looking vacantly at the lamp which was now thickly layered with soot. He was still fully dressed, still staring vacantly at the lamp, nearly an hour later, when there was a faint knock on the door. He sat up with a sudden catlike motion and listened. Then he got up and opened the door.

A man stood in the darkness outside, a tall man in a Pathan turban. Shafi's heart began to pound as he recognized Manzoor, the Chief Inspector from the Criminal Department. He crept close to his visitor, walking on tiptoe.

"It is bad news I bring, Manzoor whispered. "They are going to carry out a raid today: the Hanuman Club first, and then arrest the others in their houses." 

'Hai-tobal' Shafi exclaimed. His body was suddenly bathed in a cold sweat, as though at the end of a fever. "When?' he asked. About seven, this evening, but the place is being watched even now. You had better clear right out of town. Lie low for a time." "Thanks,' Shafi mumbled. 'How did they find out? We had been so careful.'

The missing explosives. Tekchand complained to us. That haram-zada Pearce was on it. That led to other things."

Shafi cursed under his breath.

Pearce happened to be in Duriabad, looking into the complaint, when the plane was burned."

So that was how things ended. A timid, pernickety man reporting the loss of some sticks of dynamite, a police sergeant stumbling on some incongruity, and all that preparation, all that care, went up in smoke. His knees felt weak.

And don't warn too many people, Manzoor cautioned. 'Otherwise they'll suspect you've been tipped off; who knows, they might even suspect me, that Bristow is as cunning as they come. Those who habitually go there should be there...

when it happens. "All right, Shafi promised.

When he came back into the room, the feeling of heachache and nausea had already left him, and he no longer felt weak. There was work to do. He had to think, make up his mind about whom to save, whom to sacrifice.

For a time, he sat staring vacantly at the heap of papers left behind by Hafiz. Then he picked them up and began to read, peering at the lines in the smoky light. When he finished reading, the cocks in the streets below had already started crowing. He put out the lamp and walked out of the room without a single glance behind.

It was later that morning, as he sat in a crowded third-class compartment of the Sind Mail that Shafi had time to think of the events of the past twelve hours. He was satisfied with what he had been able to accomplish. He had warned as many of the Freedom Fighters as he could. The others would have to be sacrificed. Seven of his best men... no, eight. But that could not be helped. 

And then he suddenly realized that all those who would be in the club at the time of the raid would be Hindus, there would not be a single Muslim among them. It was the sort of coincidence that worried Shafi for a long time, but even to himself, he refused to admit that it had anything to do with the visit of Hafiz, or with the clippings he had left behind him. 

THE CANOE SONG

Na-jane kidhar aaj meri nao chali-re, Sundari was humming to herself as she sat, embroidering Debi's initials on his handkerchief in black silk.

The Canoe Song fitted her mood. "Today I know not where my canoe is headed for', was what the song said; nor did she. Her mother had told her that a young man to whom they had offered

her hand in marriage was coming to tea in the afternoon. Chali-re, chali-re meri nao chali-re, she went on repeating the chorus, picturing herself in a canoe on a wide, sunlit river,

drifting, not knowing where she was going. The young man who was coming to see her was Gopal Chandidar. She had, of course, heard of the Chandidar family; her parents had often talked about them. The Chandidars be- longed to one of the thirty-seven premier families, and Gopal was the nephew of the Maharani of Begwad. He was said to have been educated in England and had a well-paid job with a British firm.

In the photograph which her mother had shown her, he looked handsome, in a somewhat big-boned, heavy-jowled, wavy- haired way, but that, she told herself, was because she was used to associating good looks in men only with the sensitive, eager, sharply chiselled face of her brother."

"They are a very old family,' said her mother. Established. The old Maharaja of Begwad is said to have given twenty lakhs of rupees when one of the daughters married his son... that is the present Maharani; she is a Chandidar girl. And of course, Gopal will come into quite a bit of money even though he is the third son. You are a lucky girl. He's already turned down dozens of offers... some from the most prominent families too. Even the Yadav girl was offered to him." 

"The Yadav girl was born under Mars,' Sundari said. 'Everyone knows that. She had been turned down by at least three other families."

"Who worries about horoscopes these days? her mother scoffed. "You'd better put on one of my pearl necklaces. What sari will you be wearing?" I don't know, Sundari had told her.

She still did not know which sari she would wear. All she knew was that she was said to be a lucky girl. She felt light and gay, almost weightless. It was difficult to think coherently, to concentrate. She ached to talk to someone about it, someone close to her. She never thought it odd that her parents should be arranging her marriage. At school and college, they had often talked of love-marriages'. But these were only for the most daring. For the rest of them, there was only the conventional kind of marriage, arranged by parents. Was it going to be a success? Would she ever come to love her husband?

She had to talk to someone. She almost felt angry with Debi- dayal for not being in the house. He hardly ever was in the house these days, Sundari reflected. He seemed to spend all his spare time at that ridiculous gymnasium. And even at home, he was for ever doing exercises and practising judo holds before a mirror. And how often she had seen him, sitting on the balcony reading a book, and at the same time banging the edge of his right hand against the sill.

At the thought of Debi's efforts to harden his hands, Sundari had experienced a pang of sisterly affection. To her, even now he looked so small and in need of help, the baby with spaniel eyes and soft, chubby hands. He had grown much taller than herself, now, and his hands were hard as teak planks. The thin-limbed body now rippled with muscles, and the round, wide-eyed face had become sharp, insolent and yet somehow eager-like that of a Spanish film star, she had always thought, or a bullfighter's; his movements were no longer gawky but graceful, even the way he walked was oddly like a panther prowling.

Thinking of Debi like that, Sundari felt a little disloyal to the man whose photograph her mother had shown her. He was handsome too, she conceded, but in a different way; darker and more earthy, somehow more virile and sensuous. She finished the last handkerchief and bit off the thread. That would be a nice surprise for Debi, to find six new handkerchiefs, all neatly initialled in black silk. Now she had nothing to do except dream; dream of the young man who was coming to see her. How prosaic it sounded, someone just coming to see one; but of course they never went to see a girl unless they had already made up their minds.

Marriage? What did it mean? Did it invariably mean happiness -did it always lead to romance-to love? How could one tell? The thought momentarily darkened her mind.

But her Hindu upbringing reasserted itself. A girl had to trust her parents blindly, realising that they alone knew what was good for her, they alone could find the right young man for her.

She felt too excited just to go on sitting in her room, doing nothing. To go and offer to help her mother with the arrangements for the evening would have seemed too forward. She picked up the stack of handkerchiefs and got up. Spindle, Debi's dachshund who had been lying, fast asleep, at the foot of the bed, suddenly came to life, knowing that she was going out. Sundari walked across to Debi's room, at the other end of the house, past the slim, bronze posturing figures standing at intervals on pedestals on both sides, Spindle scampering ahead of her. She deposited the handkerchiefs on Debi's dressing table, just in front of the mirror where he could not help noticing them. Then she turned, as she always did, to take a look at the room.

Both windows were wide open. She knew that they were open day and night, and that sometimes at night, Debi slipped out by dropping from the window down on to the badminton court. It was extraordinary that no one had found out about this, and she herself knew only because Debi himself had told her. Now sunlight came flooding through the windows and fell in long parallelograms on the grey cotton carpet, somehow accentuating the unrelieved masculinity of this room with its black-and-white striped handloom curtains, heavy chairs of unpolished rose- wood, an enormous leather club-chair on the balcony, a bronze head-and-shoulders statue of Shivaji and pictures on the walls of athletes, wrestlers and judoists. There was not a single picture of a woman in the room, Sundari reflected, except, of course the snapshot of herself and their mother on the dressing table. It was odd, but even their father's picture was not there.

And the books on their tall, unvarnished shelves. It was almost queer, the sort of books Debi read. She walked across to one of the shelves: lives of Garibaldi, Terence MacSwiney, Tippu Sultan, Shivaji, Savarkar, Napoleon, Washington, Lincoln and Booth. The next lot of books seemed even worse, for they were all on physical culture: The Four-minute Mile, The Art of Judo, Gung-ho by Ishikawa, Zybsco on wrestling and Muller on unarmed combat... it was quite puzzling, all this dull reading and preoccupation with masculinity in anyone as handsome as Debi.

Idly, she looked for something to take to her room to read, passing her eyes over the books she had seen before: Nomad, Selous, Leveson, Sanderson, Dunbar-brander and other books on big-game hunting. Then there was a life of Alfred Nobel and beside it a stack of hunting yearbooks and catalogues of guns and rifles and pistols.

Then she saw something familiar: a copy of Gone with the Wind.

She had already read it, but it was the sort of book she would not mind reading again. She pulled out the volume, thinking that it was the ideal book for her present mood. In the empty space behind where Gone with the Wind had been, she could see a flat, square box with a shining blue label. Contraceptives? she thought at once, with a sudden vicarious feeling of guilt, behind all that façade of clean living? And yet, why not? He was a man, after all, virile and good-looking; he had to learn sometime. Or were they erotic photographs? some kind of potency pills? Her mind probed all the possibilities. And yet; sex and Debi?-women? It did not fit in.

The dog watched her movements, cocking his head, adding to her feeling of guilt. But she had to take a second look, knowing that it was wrong to pry into her brother's secrets; knowing how angry she herself would have been if he had come rummaging in her room in her absence and seen the letters from a boy at college which had made her angry when she received them but which she had kept, and read.

She took out the box. The label just said 'Nobel'. It meant nothing to her. She opened the box. Inside were little tubes of white metal, slightly thinner than cigarettes, each about two inches long, with one end open. She looked at the lid again. Under the word 'Nobel' was written in smaller print: "Thistle Brand Detonators'.

And suddenly it hit her. Her hand shook, her knees felt weak, and her face was hot. She deposited the box on the floor, very gently, and pulled out the other books where Gone with the Wind had been. She found two thick yellow cartridges of waxed paper, each about eight inches long and as thick as her wrist. Submarine Blasting Gelatine' read the inscription on the label.

'Strength 90% Sundari sat limply on Debi's hard, bachelor bed. She had heard her father complaining about detonators and gelatine disappearing from the store. So this was where they were: Debi had been helping himself to them. She kept thinking of her father's anguished words. 'I'm only worried because this material may find its way into the hands of terrorists those people who go about blowing up bridges and railway tracks.' Was that what he had got himself mixed up with? Debi, her little brother with the once-soft hands and the eager, trusting look? Was that what he was up to when he slipped out of his room at night?

They had always been so close to each other, and yet he had guarded his secret well. This was something he had done on his own, without consulting her. When they were young, it had always been she who led; he had followed uncomplainingly, looking up to her for guidance. He used to creep into her bed complaining that he had seen strange figures in the shadows at night. She had bandaged his finger when he had cut it and had nearly fainted at the sight of blood. He had made a scene when Mr. Muller was going to drown a puppy and had shrunk from breaking up the white-ant hill that had sprung up on the badminton court overnight.

And now he was playing about with detonators and explosives and blowing up bridges!

Below the stairs, the clock in the hall chimed the hour. It was ten o'clock. Sundari put the sticks of gelatine and the detonators back where she had found them and carefully replaced the books in their original positions.

She picked up the handkerchiefs and slunk out of the room; now she did not want him to find out that she had been there at all. She had even forgotten what she had been thinking about when she came into Debi's room. Gopal Chandidar, of course, the young man who was going to be her husband. It seemed of so little importance now. She must find out in what her brother had got himself involved. She had a right to know, after taking the blame for so many of his childhood misdemeanours. Could she still help him and shield him from the blame?

She was not singing as she came out, nor did she care what sari she would wear for the afternoon.