Chapter 50

The boy felt drawn towards the door of the house. He took advantage of the absence of the volunteers to go up and peer in. He could only see a long, polished flight of stairs, ascending up into the roof of the building. 'Go away!, Who are you?" one of the Cergres volunteers shouted as he returned to his post at the door. Munoo started, blushed a confession of guilt, and capered on his way. But two steps and he was riveted to the spot by the crack- ling noise of a long volley of shots in the direction of Bhendi Bazaar. He stared ahead; he could not see a soul. Then, suddenly, men came falling over cach other, shrieking and wounded. He felt no pity for anybody, nor for himself. Me could not imagine the men being mown down by mach- ine guns. His mind was a blank. A volley of shots followed behind him. Munoo turned on his feet and ran up a steep alley. He could see the palm trees waving on the crest of the Malabar Hill. He made for it, drawn as it were, by a mysterious faith in the safety of mountain tops, which seemed to be confirmed by the tranquility of the bungalows on its edges. The sound of firing had ccased by this time, but the weird noises of the riot followed him. When he reached the end of the road he sighted an uprise. This, his instincts told him, was the slope of his objective, for there the din of the shoot- ing seemed to have receded. The sun was blazing and there was very little shade on the way. Munoo sweated. He felt faint with fatigue and hunger. His body seemed no longer his own, because it lagged be- hind his will to go on. 'What has happened to me?' he asked himself. 'Where has my strength gone?" There was no answer and he felt stupid. 301 The he thought of the men whom he had seen falling dead behind him. They must have been shot dead by the police and the soldiers. Their friends and families would mourn for them. He, too, was sorry for them. He felt he knew the pain a man must feel when he was writhing in the agony of death. At least, he thought he had tasted that pain whenever he was hurt, and the memory of a goat moaning while she was being butchered by the Muhamr village on their Id festival came to his mind. Bu 302/350 on which he had felt or seen death was as fear as u Before, he had always been unconscious of suffering. Now, the feeling of pain seemed to tinge everything. For the first time in his life he realised the hardness of life. But he did not curse his destiny. Born to toil, the al dant energy of his body had so far overcome all his trou He had found that he was fairly happy when he had every day. He was in love with life and thrilled to all... raptures of the senses. And he still regarded the trappings of civilisation, black boots, watches, basket hats and clothes, with all the romantic admiration of the innocent child. As he walked along he looked for one of those moving stalls which sell roasted gram and cheap sweets to the ser-There was no one in sight. He continued tiredly through the long avenue of the palm trees with branches flattened by the wind. On his left was the sea, on his right the bungalows of the rich, standing like inviolable fortresses on the promontories of the Malabar Hill; above him were the hanging gardens; and below, the panorama of the island and harbour of Bombay. He stared across the drive of a square-fronted house which lay covered with close-clipped' ivy, beyond to the beds of a garden guarded by a double belt of trees. There was something frightening to Munoo's hurable mind in the self-conscious complacency of this building. So he with- drew his gaze and, standing right in the middle of the road, looked down to the island at his feet. He stood dazed, with the beauty of the scene. Through 302 the dim haze of a far, far horizon could be discerned forests of masts floating in the azure waters of the sea, and sails swelling with the breeze that seemed invisible. Nearer, the shapeless mass of city buildings rested under cocoanuts and palms, while the fern covered rocks bravely guarded the pearl-like bay in the shell of a transparent mist. The city, the bay, the sea, at his feet, had an unearthly beauty! The loud honk of a car, and, before he could jump aside, he was knocked down. He rolled down the hill, urged by an instinct to avoid hurt, but the front wheels of the vehicle passed on his chest before it came to a standstill. 'Oh! what an unlucky thing to happen to usl' exclaimed Mrs. Mainwaring. 'Right on the day of my arrival from "horne," too. First these riots and then this accident. I hope he isn't dead! Let me see!' She applied her hand to his heart and passed it over his head with the skill of the woman who had taken a first aid diploma at the Regent Street Polytechnic. 'His pulse is all right,' she continued, 'he is only stunned.' 'Oh, Mummy, what can we do?" cried little Circe Main- waring. 'Let us put him in the car,' said Mrs. Mainwaring. 'For if someone sees him they will stone us to death. You don't know what these hooligans arel Chauffeur, put him in the car. We will take him to Simla with us. I wanted The chauffeur, a Muhammadan, recognise 304/350 be a Hindu, and, excited bencath his apparen strong religious sentiments, he did not care if the boy died or what happened to him. If he had met him alone, he might have killed him deliberately. As it was, he thour' he had done so accidentally. He would have left him l there, but he was afraid of the memsahib. So he lifted heathen and deposited him in the car. 'Pick up the luggage at the Taj,' said Mrs. Mainwar. 'and let us be on the way as quickly as possible. Avoid the city and skirt round to the Colaba Road and let us be in time for tiffin at Baroda.' for 'tiffin,' he was up and doing. And, during the leisurely, luxurious two-days journey up to Kalka, the boy recruited his health somewhat. But really, he was mentally and physically broken. And, as he thought of the conditions under which he had lived, of the intensity of the struggle, and the futility of the waves of revolt falling upon the hard rock of privilege and pos- session, as he thought of Ratan and Hari and Lakshami, and the riots, he felt sad and bitter and defeated, like an old man. To Mrs. Mainwaring, however, he was not the old nan he felt himself to be, otherwise she would have had no use for hin, and would have left him where she had found him. He was not old to Mrs. Mainwaring, nor even middle-aged nor even a brute of a young man. He was to her a young boy with a lithe, supple body, with a small, delicate face, and with a pair of sensitive poet's eyes. 'What is your age, boy?' she had asked him. Fifteen, Memsahib,' he had answered. And she had looked into his dark eyes for a moment with her own dark brown ones, pinched him on the arm with a playful flourish of her long, thin hands, patted him on the forehead, and, drawing her olive-ivory, Modgli- ani face backwards till it compressed her thin lips into a voluptuous pout, smiled at him and giggled. For a boy of fifteen was just what she wanted. And, however old Munoo felt inside him, she neither cared to know nor had the capacity, to know. He was just the boy for her, just the 304 right servant. She would be good to him, which was easy, because she was good-hearted. Mrs. Mainwaring was descended from an old Anglo- Indian family of four brothers, who had served as soldiers of fortune in the pay of the East India Company during the English wars of conquest in India. Her grandfather, the only survivor, had fought by the side of John Nicholson during the mutiny, and begot her father, William Smith, through a Musulman washer-woman. William Smith be- came a sergeant in the Monroe infantry, a privately-owned regiment of Eurasians. On the reorganisation of the Indian army by the British Government in the nineties, this irregu- lar force was disbanded and the soldier-adventurer in Sergeant Smith sought the prizes of service in a feudatory native state. Knowing that it was easy for a white man to get a higher rank, even if less pay, in the Nawab of Zalim- par's army than he would get in the British-Indian army to which he was being transferred from the Monroe infantrv Le had gone and secured a direct Colonelcy in Zalim Here he had married the daughter of an English eng driver. May was the only child of the union, for Colonel's wife left him a year after May's birth because was expecting another child by someone else. May was looked after in her early childhood by the wife "of a Catholic missionary and then sent to the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Simla. As she grew up in the hill station among the children of English officials, who were continu- ally talking of 'home,' May developed a tremendous in-she was English only at fourth remove, and that there was Indian blood in her from her grandmother's side, but she had to pretend to be 'pukka' in order to cope with the snob- bery of the other children. She built up a fairy tale picture of her family's estates in Western Ireland and sought to dis- guise her dusky hue under thick coats of powder and the camouflage of a Celtic origin. Since, however, this did not convince the smarter among the other girls. of her purely white pedigree, she was miserable at school and ultimately مل 305 ran away from it to Zalimpar, obsessed with the ambition of going to England to whitewash her colour if possible. Her father, of course, could not afford to send her to the Cheltenham Ladies College where she wanted to go, and there was an awful scene between the two of them. But May's ambition to become 'pukka white,' which was at the back of her desire to go to Europe, was satisfied more easily. A young German photographer, Heinrich Ulmer, who did splendid business in Zalimpar by flattering the vanity of the princes and courtiers with large, life-size portraits, fell in love with the very dusky hue which was causing her all this trouble. May persuaded herself that an alliance with a thoroughbred German was as easy a way of legitimising her pukkahood' as going to Cheltenham. And, though her early training under the care of the parson's wife and her schooling in the Convent of the Sacred Heart had instilled into her mind a horror of sex, she married Heinrich Ulmer. Unfortunately, however, the war broke out two years after May's marriage and the German was interned in a concentration camp. May already had a daughter by Heinrich Ulmer, romantically named Penelope, and a son was born to her soon after the outbreak of the war. For a time she mourned the loss of her husband. But she had never really gone out to him in mind and body, she had never really given herself to him. For although when once he broke her physical virginity, she had outdone him in her display of physical passion, she had really remained a virgin at heart, as if pulled back always by the fear of sin which had sunk deep into her sub-consciousness through her early Christian training. Her warmth, her ardour, her intense capacity for desire, must have been due to the blood of her pagan Indian grandmother in her; her curious cold- ness of mind, the frigidity which had once made her jump into a bath of ice water in order to quell the passion in her body, was conditioned by the European-Christian doctrine of sin. The fundamental contradiction of these two opposed things in her nature resulted in perversity. She indulged in a strange, furtive, surreptitious promiscuity.