‘Is that your name: Kumar?’ Merrick asked, and Kumar replied ‘No, but it will do,’ And Merrick, smiling again, said, ‘I see. And your address?’
And Kumar stared from Merrick to me, still pretending surprise, and said, ‘What is all this? Can anyone just barge in, then?’
‘Come,’ I said. ‘To the office. And don’t be silly.’
‘I think,’ Mr Merrick said to me, ‘we won’t waste any more of your time. Thank you for your co-operation.’ And signed to Rajendra Singh who stepped forward and made to take the boy by the arm but was brushed aside. Not with a violent motion, more with a shrug away to avoid distasteful contact. At this moment perhaps Merrick could have stopped it. But did not. Rajendra Singh was not a man to be shrugged off if Mr Merrick was there to back him up. And he was bigger than Kumar. He hit him across the cheek with the back of his hand. A soft, glancing blow, done to insult as much as to sting. I was angry. I shouted, ‘That will be enough of that.’ It stopped them. It saved Kumar from the fatal act of retaliation. I said, ‘This is my property. In it I will not tolerate such behaviour.’ That sub-inspector – he was a coward. Now he was afraid that he had gone too far. When he struck Kumar he had also taken hold of his arm, but let it go. ‘And you,’ I said to Kumar, ’stop being silly. They are the police. Answer their questions. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. Come,’ and again I made as if to lead them to the office. But Merrick, no, he was not going to take the smooth way out. He had already chosen the twisted, tragic way. He said, ‘We seem to have got beyond the stage when a talk in your office would have been a satisfactory preliminary. I am taking him into custody.’
‘On what charge?’ Kumar said.
‘On no charge. My truck’s waiting. Now, collect your baggage.’
‘But I have a charge,’ Kumar said.
‘Then make it at the kotwali.’
‘A charge of assault by this fellow with the beard.’
‘Obstructing or resisting the police is also an offence,’ Mr Merrick said and turned to me. ‘Sister Ludmila. Has this man any possessions to be returned to him?’ I looked at Kumar. His hand went to his hip pocket. Only now had he thought to look for his wallet. I said to him, ‘We found nothing. We turn out pockets, you understand, for the purpose of identification.’ Kumar stayed silent. Perhaps, I thought, he thinks it is we who have robbed him. Not until his hand went like that to his hip pocket was I certain that he had been robbed as he lay drunk the night before, out there in the fields, near the river bank. But in any case a lesser man would have cried out, ‘My wallet!’ or ‘It’s gone! My money! Everything!’ drawing, attempting to draw a red herring. Ah, a lesser man would have cried out like that, if not to create a diversion, then in the little agony of sudden loss that always, to an Indian, in those days anyway, looked like the end of his constricted little world. And Kumar was an Indian. But had not cried out. Instead, let his hand fall away, and said to Merrick, ‘No, I have nothing. Except one thing.’
‘And that?’ Merrick inquired, still smiling as if already knowing.
‘A statement. I come with you under protest.’
And all the time in those accents so much more English even than Merrick’s. And in Merrick’s book, this counted against him. For in Merrick’s voice there was a different tone, a tone regulated by care and ambition rather than by upbringing. It was an enigma! Fascinating! Especially to me, a foreigner who had known an Englishman more of Merrick’s type than Kumar’s, and had heard this Englishman often rail against the sharp clipped-spoken accents of privilege and power. And here, in spite of the reversal implied by the colours of the skin, the old resentments were still at work, still further complicating the conflict. Kumar walked of his own accord towards the gateway and the waiting truck. But Merrick showed no sign of concern because he had the sub-inspector to trot after the prisoner. Another Indian. In this way mating black with black, and, again, touching his cap with the tip of his cane and thanking me for my services, keeping me talking, while I watched, at increasing distance, the affair between Kumar and the sub-inspector which was one of catching up, then push, and pull, and finally of what looked from where I stood like a violent meeting between Rajendra Singh, Kumar, a constable and the back of the truck with Kumar pushed, shoved, perhaps punched into the back of it, so that he fell inside rather than climbed. And the constable going in after him. And then the sub-inspector waiting, for Merrick. ‘Why do you let them treat him like that?’ I asked. I was not surprised. Only pained. For these were violent, difficult times. But Merrick had already turned and was on his way to the truck and pretended not to hear. When he reached the truck he talked to the sub-inspector and then the sub-inspector got into the back too. Well, so it went. Such things happened every day. And at this time, you understand, I had no way of telling what Kumar was suspected of, let alone of judging what he might have been guilty of. Only I had seen the darkness in him, and the darkness in the white man, in Merrick. Two such darknesses in opposition can create a blinding light. Against such a light ordinary mortals must hide their eyes.
*
It is good of you to come again so soon. Have you yet seen Bibighar? The ruins of the house, and the garden gone wild in the way most Indians like gardens to be? They tell me it has not changed, that sometimes even now Indian families have picnics there, and children play. The Europeans seldom went, except to look and sneer and be reminded of that other Bibighar in Cawnpore. And at night it was always deserted. People said it was haunted and not a good place then, even for lovers. It was built by a prince and destroyed by an Englishman. I’m sorry. You are right to correct me. A Scotsman. Forgive me for momentarily forgetting. Such nice distinctions.
Bibighar. It means the house of women. There he kept his courtesans. The prince I mean. You have seen the Purdah Hospital here in the town, in the old black town as it used to be called? Beyond Chillianwallah? Surrounded now by houses? And changed. But it was a palace in the days when Mayapore was the seat of a native ruler and the only foothold the English had was one cut out by trade, need, avarice, a concern to open the world God had given them, like an oyster suspected of a pearl. Here all the pearls were black. Rare. Oh, infinitely desirable. But it must have taken courage as well as greed to harvest them. Go into the old palace now, the Purdah Hospital, and look at what remains of the old building, the narrow gallery of tiny airless rooms, the kind of room these English merchants had to enter to strike bargains, and there is an impression – from the size of the rooms – of cruelty, of something pitiless. And it must have been like this in the Bibighar. We cannot know for sure because only the foundations are left and there never was an artist’s impression of the place as it was before the Scotsman destroyed it. The Bibighar bridge was a later construction, and so to visit his women the prince must have gone either by the Mandir Gate bridge or by palanquin and boat, and so must his father in order to visit the singer in the house that he also had built on that side of the river, the house the Scotsman rebuilt and renamed after himself. Indeed yes, the house where you are staying. Before the Scotsman rebuilt and renamed it, was the MacGregor House also a warren of tiny rooms and low, dark galleries? Or was the singer given unaccustomed space, room for her voice to spread, her soul to expand?
Go to the Purdah Hospital. Lady Chatterjee will take you. Ask to go to the room at the top of the old tower. From there you can see over the roofs of the black town across the river and make out the roof of the MacGregor House. I wonder how often the prince who loved the singer climbed the steps of the tower to look at it? And I wonder whether his son also climbed the tower to look across the river at the Bibighar? From the Bibighar also it must have been possible in those days to see the house of the singer. They are only one mile distant. Not far, but far enough for a girl running at night.
In those days, when Mayapore was a kingdom, on that side of the river there were no other buildings, and so those two houses were marks on the landscape, monuments to love, the love of the father for the
singer and the love of the son for the courtesans, the son who despised his father for an attachment which, so the story goes, was never consummated. Day by day I think the son climbed the tower of the palace or to the highest room in the Bibighar to survey that other house, the singer’s house, to glory in its decay, and said to himself, Such is the fate of love never made manifest And night after night caroused in the Bibighar, his private brothel, aware of the ruin that grew stone by mouldering stone one mile distant. Now it is the Bibighar that is nothing and the singer’s house that still stands, the one destroyed and the other rebuilt, in each case by this man, this MacGregor.
Let me explain something. In 1942, the year of Bibighar, I am in Mayapore more than seven years and knew little of Bibighar, little of MacGregor. This was the case with most people. Bibighar. MacGregor. These were just names to us. Take the road, we might say, over the Bibighar bridge, past the Bibighar gardens, and then turn into the MacGregor road and follow it along until you reach the MacGregor House which stands at the junction of MacGregor and Curzon roads, and Curzon road will lead you straight to the Victoria road and the cantonment bazaar.
This would have been the quickest way to the bank – it is only a short distance from here to the Bibighar bridge. But usually I went the other way, through the Chillianwallah Bazaar and past the Tirupati temple. The real life of Mayapore is on the Mandir Gate bridge side. I would go over the bridge and past the church of the mission and the girls’ school, through the Eurasian quarter, Station road, Railway cuttings, Hastings avenue, and into Victoria road from that side.
But then, after that day in August nineteen forty-two, the names Bibighar and MacGregor became special ones. They passed into our language with new meanings. What is this Bibighar? we asked. Who was MacGregor? we wanted to know. And then there seemed to be no scarcity of people able to tell us. Take MacGregor. It was said of him that he feared God, favoured mosques and Muslims and was afraid of temples, and burnt the Bibighar because it was an abomination, burnt it and then knocked down what was left, leaving only the foundations, the gardens and the surrounding wall. It was also said that he did this following the poisoning of an Englishman at the prince’s court, an event which was used as an excuse for the annexation of the state by the British government, the old East India Company. But MacGregor did not burn the Bibighar so soon. The first record of MacGregor in Mayapore was in 1853, just four years before the Mutiny, but nearly thirty years after the annexation. In 1853 Mayapore was not the headquarters of the district. MacGregor was not an official. He was a private merchant, of the kind who began to flourish after the old East India Company ceased to trade but continued to govern. He made his money out of spices, grain, cloth and bribes. His old factory and warehouse stood where the railway depot now stands and there is still a siding there that bears his name, the MacGregor siding. The railway did not come to Mayapore until ten years after he died, so obviously his influence was still felt, his memory fresh. You can picture his laden wagons setting off along the road that became the Grand Trunk road, and picture Mayapore at that time, before the railway. Still on that side of the river there were not many buildings, no barracks, no civil lines. There was, I think, a chapel where St Mary’s is, and a Circuit House where the Court house stands. The District Officer lived in Dibrapur then. He would have stayed in the Circuit house when he came to Mayapore to hear petitions, settle cases, collect revenues. I wonder how many times he had to listen to subtle complaints which when he boiled them down he was able to see as complaints about MacGregor? I think of MacGregor as red-faced, his cheeks devasted by ruptured veins, virtual ruler of Mayapore, snapping his fingers at authority, terrorising clerks, merchants, landowners, district officers and junior civilians alike; corrupt, violent – and yet in a few years lifting Mayapore out of the apathy it sank into after the annexation that should have transformed it from an old feudal backwater into a flourishing modern community, safe and happy under the rule of the Raj. I think he was the kind of man the merchants and landowners he dealt with would understand. It is said that he spoke the language of the greased palm, and this language is international. I think they would always know where they stood with MacGregor. But not with the austere, incorruptible, so perfect, so English District Officer.
You see how these facts about MacGregor do not fit the story that he burned the Bibighar because it was an abomination? But then this was the European version of the tale. Perhaps, also, it is the story he told his wife, whom he married and brought to Mayapore only after he had established his fortune and rebuilt the singer’s house and called it by his own name. By that time he had already burned Bibighar, not, according to the Indian version, because it was an abomination in his eye and the eye of the Lord, an abomination even twenty or thirty years after its last occupation, but because he fell in love with an Indian girl and lost her to a boy whose skin was the same colour as her own. There are two versions of the Indian account of the burning of Bibighar. The first is that he discovered the girl and her lover met in the Bibighar, and that he then destroyed it in a fit of jealous rage. The second is that he told the girl she would have to leave the MacGregor House and live in the Bibighar. He took her there and showed her the repairs he had made to it and the furnishings and clothes he had bought for her comfort and enjoyment. When she asked him why she must leave the MacGregor House he said: Because I am going to Calcutta to bring back an English wife. So that night she stole away with her true lover. When he found that she had gone he ordered the Bibighar to be burned to the ground, and then utterly obliterated.
And these stories ring truer, don’t they? Truer than the tale that he burned Bibighar because it was an abomination. Poor MacGregor! I think of him only as a man of violent passions, and of emotions lacking any subtlety. If he had not burned the Bibighar like a child destroying a toy it had been told it mustn’t play with, I wonder – would he have survived the Mutiny? The rebellious sepoys murdered their officers in Dibrapur and then roamed the countryside, eventually setting out for Mayapore with some idea of reaching Delhi, or of joining up with larger detachments of mutineers. It doesn’t seem to be known where MacGregor was killed, perhaps on the steps of his house or with the Muslim servant Akbar Hossain whose body was found at the gate. History was left the impression that nothing could have saved MacGregor because the sepoys knew he had burned the Bibighar and it was rumoured that his Indian mistress and her lover died in the fire. One wonders – did Janet know these tales? Was she happy with MacGregor or was her life in Mayapore a constant torment? Is it only for her dead child that her ghost comes looking? Or to warn people with white skins that the MacGregor House is not a good place for them to be?
It is curious. But there has always been this special connection between the house of the singer and the house of the courtesans. Between the MacGregor House and the Bibighar. It is as though across the mile that separates them there have flowed the dark currents of a human conflict, even after Bibighar was destroyed, a current whose direction might be traced by following the route taken by the girl running in darkness from one to the other. A current. The flow of an invisible river. No bridge was ever thrown across it and stood. You understand what I am telling you? That MacGregor and Bibighar are the place of the white and the place of the black? To get from one to the other you could not cross by a bridge but had to take your courage in your hands and enter the flood and let yourself be taken with it, lead where it may. This is a courage Miss Manners had.
I think at first she was not in love with Kumar. Physically attracted, yes, and that is always a powerful compulsion. But I saw other white women, the way they looked at him. Well, they found it easy enough to resist temptation because they saw him as if he stood on the wrong side of water in which even to dabble their fingers would have filled them with horror. Perhaps there were times when the girl felt the horror of it too, but resisted such a feeling because she knew it to be contradictory of what she first felt when she saw him. And then she rejected the notion of horror e
ntirely, realising that it was no good waiting for a bridge to be built, but a question of entering the flood, and meeting there, letting the current take them both. It is as if she said to herself: Well, life is not just a business of standing on dry land and occasionally getting your feet wet. It is merely an illusion that some of us stand on one bank and some on the opposite. So long as we stand like that we are not living at all, but dreaming. So jump, jump in, and let the shock wake us up. Even if we drown, at least for a moment or two before we die we shall be awake and alive.