‘Yes, it is an allegory,’ she said.
‘It’s a nice old picture,’ Clancy said. ‘A very nice old picture. Things were different those days, weren’t they, Miss Crane?’
She asked him what he meant. He said, ‘Well, I mean, sort of simpler, sort of cut and dried.’
For a while Miss Crane considered this, then said, ‘More people thought they were. But they weren’t really. You could almost say things are simpler now. After all these years there can’t be any doubt. India must be independent. When the war’s over, we’ve got to give her up.’
‘Oh,’ Clancy said, looking at the picture still, and not at her. ‘I really meant about God and that, and people believing. I don’t know much about the other thing, except a bit what Congress is and old Gandhi says, and if you ask me, Miss Crane, he’s barmy.’
‘Barmy’s right,’ Barrett said dutifully.
Miss Crane smiled.
‘I used to have his picture up too. Over there. You can see where it was.’
They turned to look where she pointed: the upright oblong patch of paler distemper, all that was left to Miss Crane of the Mahatma’s spectacled, smiling image, the image of a man she had put her faith in which she had now transferred to Mr Nehru and Mr Rajagopalachari who obviously understood the different degrees of tyranny men could exercise and, if there had to be a preference, probably preferred to live a while longer with the imperial degree in order not only to avoid submitting to but to resist the totalitarian. Looking at Clancy and Barrett and imagining in their place a couple of indoctrinated storm-troopers or ancestor-worshippers whose hope of heaven lay in death in battle, she knew which she herself preferred. There was in this choice, she realised, a residual grain of that old instinct to stay within the harbour of the charmed circle, an understanding of the magic of kind safeguarding kind and of the reliance she could place in a boy, for instance, such as Clancy, should poor old Joseph suddenly go berserk and come into the room armed and mad and dangerous to pay her back for imaginary wrongs, or real wrongs she had not personally done him but had done representatively because she was of her race and of her colour, and he could not in his simple rage any longer distinguish between individual and crowd.
But there was as well in her choice, she believed, an intellectual as well as emotional weight tipping the scales in favour of lads like Clancy who, ignorant as they might be of the source and direction of its flow, were borne nevertheless on the surface of waters native to them, waters she had come to think of as constituting the moral drift of history; waters of a river that had to toss aside logs thrown into it by prejudice or carry them with it towards the still invisible because still far-distant sea of perfect harmony where the debris would become water-logged and rotten, finally disintegrate, or be lost, like a matchstick in a majestic ocean. Clancy, after all, was not simply Clancy or Clance, but the son of his father and of his father’s fathers, and so long as they stayed at home the English – for all their hypocrisy, or even because of it – had always done as much as any other European race to undam the flow; as much, perhaps a fraction more, because of their isolation, their unique position in the European landmass, a position that hampered their physical invasion but not the subtler invasion of their minds by the humane concepts of classical and Renaissance Europe that rose into the air and flew like migratory birds to wherever they were perennially welcome.
It was, Miss Crane believed, this ability of Clancy’s to hear the faint rumble, which was all that was audible to him of the combined thunder of centuries of flight, that enabled him to say, partly in sorrow, partly in pride – life patently being better for his own kind now than then – ‘Things were different those days, sort of simpler, sort of cut and dried.’ He felt, however unconsciously, the burden of the freedom to think, to act, worship or not worship, according to his beliefs; the weight left on the world by each act of liberation; and if in his relative innocence he read a religious instead of a social message into the picture that provoked his comment, well, Miss Crane told herself, it came to the same thing in the end. God, after all, was no more than a symbol, the supreme symbol of authority here on earth; and Clancy was beginning to understand that the exercise of authority was not an easy business, especially if those who exercised it no longer felt they had heaven on their side.
*
That year the rains were late. They reached Mayapore towards the end of June. The young soldiers suffered from the extreme heat that preceded them, welcomed the first downpours, but by the end of the second week of July were complaining about the damp and the humidity.
Miss Crane had become used to ignoring the weather. In the dry she wore wide-brimmed hats, cotton or woollen dresses and sensible shoes; in the wet, blouses and gaberdine skirts, gumboots when necessary, with a lightweight burberry cape and an oilskin-covered sola topee. For transport in and around Mayapore she rode a ramshackle-looking but sturdy Raleigh bicycle; the car – a ten-year old Ford – was kept for longer runs. In the past the Ford had taken her as far as Calcutta, but she no longer trusted it for that. On the few occasions – once or twice a year – that she needed to go to Calcutta she now went by train, and she went alone because Joseph, aged fifty in a land whose native expectation of life was still less than forty years, felt too old to accompany her. He fretted if away from Mayapore, and pretended that he did not trust the chaukidar to guard the bungalow from thieves. Joseph shopped, did the cooking, looked after the stores and supervised the sweeper, a twelve-year-old girl from the bazaar. In the hot weather he slept on the verandah; in the cold and in the wet, on a camp-bed in the storeroom. He still went regularly to church, on Sunday evenings, and borrowed her bicycle for that purpose. The church – that of the mission, not the church of St Mary in the civil lines – was situated not far from Miss Crane’s bungalow, close to the Mandir Gate bridge, one of the two bridges that spanned the river-bed that divided the civil lines from the native town.
On the native town side of the Mandir Gate bridge was to be found the Tirupati temple within whose precincts was a shrine that sheltered the recumbent figure of the sleeping Vishnu. Between the Mandir Gate bridge, on the civil lines side, and the second bridge, the Bibighar bridge, lived the Eurasian community, close at hand to the depots, godowns and offices of the railway station. The railway followed the course of the river-bed. The tracks crossed the roads that led to the bridges. At the bridgeheads on the civil lines side, consequently, there were level-crossings whose gates, when closed to let railway traffic through, sealed both bridges off, making a barrier between the European and the native populations. When the gates of the level-crossings were shut, road traffic coming from the town to the civil lines became congested on the bridges. Miss Crane, returning on her bicycle from the native town, was sometimes held up in such congestions, hemmed in by other cyclists and by pedestrians, clerks going back to work at District Headquarters after lunch in their homes, servants returning to the civil bungalows after shopping in the bazaar for vegetables; tailors on their way to measure a sahib or a sahib’s lady who preferred the work and the prices of the bazaar tailors to those of the cantonment tailor, Darwaza Chand; pedlars with boxes on their heads, farmers driving their buffalo carts back to villages in the plains north of the cantonment, women and children going begging or scavenging; and, occasionally, car-borne Europeans, a bank official or businessman, the District Superintendent of Police, the Station Commander, English and Indian Army officers in yellow-painted fifteen-hundredweight trucks. Sometimes on these journeys she would see and nod to, but never speak to, the white woman – said to be mad – who dressed like a nun, kept a refuge for the sick and the dying and was called Sister Ludmila by the Indians.
Miss Crane used the Mandir Gate bridge into the native town in order to go from her bungalow to the Chillianwallah Bazaar school, a journey that took her past the church of the mission and the principal mission school, over the bridge, past the Tirupati temple, through narrow dirty streets of open shop fronts, past the gateway o
f the Chillianwallah bazaar itself where fish, meat and vegetables were sold, and into an even narrower street, a dark alleyway between old, crumbling houses, down whose centre ran an open water-duct. The alley was a cul-de-sac. At its closed-in head were the high wall and arched gateway of the bazaar school. The gateway opened into a narrow mud compound where the children played. Stunted banana trees gave a little shade in the early mornings and late afternoons. The mud was reddish brown, baked hard by the sun and pressed flat by the pupils’ bare feet. Even in the wet monsoon an afternoon’s sunshine would dry and harden it to its old concrete consistency.
The Chillianwallah Bazaar schoolhouse was a two-storey building with steps up to a verandah with shuttered balconied windows above the verandah roof. At least seventy years old, the house had been the property of Mr Chillianwallah, a Parsee who left Bombay and made a fortune in Mayapore out of government building contracts in the 1890s. Mr Chillianwallah had built the barracks in the civil lines, the church of St Mary, the bungalow presently lived in by the Deputy Commissioner, and – in a philanthropic fit – the bazaar in the native town. Still in the throes of that fit he presented the house in the alley to the church of St Mary, and until the mission built a more substantial schoolhouse in the civil lines, opposite the mission church, the house in the alley had been its only foothold on the shaky ladder of conversion. For several years after the building of the larger mission school in the civil lines in 1906, the Chillianwallah house and compound had been used by the mission as a place of refuge for the old and sick and dying but as the civil lines school became filled to overflowing with the children of Eurasians, and the numbers of Indian children attending fell away, the mission reopened the house in the alley for lessons in the hope of regaining the foothold they had virtually lost, and the old and sick and dying had some thirty years to wait for the coming of Sister Ludmila.
The Chillianwallah Bazaar school was now the second of Miss Crane’s responsibilities in Mayapore District. Her third was in Dibrapur, near the coalmines; her first the larger school in the civil lines, opposite the mission church, where in co-operation with a succession of English teachers whose qualifications to teach were more apparent than her own and whose religious convictions put hers to shame, she supervised the work of the Anglo-Indian class mistresses and taught mathematics and English to the older Eurasian and Indian Christian girls. From this school most of the pupils passed into the Government Higher School whose foundation in 1920 had done much to undermine the mission’s influence.
The teacher at the Chillianwallah Bazaar school, whose pupils were all Indian, was a middle-aged, tall, thin, dark-skinned Madrassi Christian, Mr F. Narayan: the F for Francis, after St Francis of Assisi. In his spare time, of which he had a great deal, and to augment his income, of which he had little, Mr Narayan wrote what he called Topics for the local English language weekly newspaper, The Mayapore Gazette. In addition, his services were available as a letter-writer, and these were services used by both his Hindu and Muslim neighbours. He could converse fluently in Urdu and Hindi and the local vernacular, and wrote an excellent Urdu and Hindi script, as well as his native Tamil and acquired Roman-English. In Europe, Miss Crane thought, a man of his accomplishments might have gone a long way – in the commercial rather than the pedagogic field. She suspected him, because Joseph had hinted at it, of selling contraceptives to Christian and progressive Hindu families. She did not disapprove, but was amused because Mr Narayan himself had an ever-pregnant wife, and a large, noisy, undisciplined family of boys and girls.
His wife Mary Narayan, as dark-skinned as himself, was a girl he brought back one year from leave in Madras. He said she was a Christian too, but Miss Crane doubted it, never having seen her go to church but instead, on more than one occasion, entering and leaving the Tirupati temple. He said she was now twenty-five, which Miss Crane doubted as well. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Mrs Narayan had only been thirteen or fourteen at the time Francis Narayan married her.
Mr and Mrs Narayan lived in the upstairs rooms of the Chillianwallah Bazaar school. Their children, three girls and two boys to date (apart from the one still suckling whose sex she had somehow never made a note of) sat on the front benches in the schoolroom and were, Miss Crane had begun to notice, virtually the only regular attendants. On Sunday mornings, Mr Narayan and his two eldest children – one boy, John Krishna, and a girl, Kamala Magdalene – left the house in the Chillianwallah Bazaar in a cycle-tonga driven by a convert called Peter Paul Akbar Hossain, precariously negotiated the water-duct down the cul-de-sac, crossed the Mandir Gate bridge, and attended the service at the mission church where Mr Narayan also assisted with the collection. His wife, he said, had to stay at home to look after the younger children. Miss Crane took this information, too, with a pinch of salt. She wondered whether it might be interesting to stand outside the Tirupati temple on a Sunday morning to see whether Mrs Narayan’s absence from the mission church was due to the stronger call of Lord Venka-taswara, the god of the temple whose image was taken from the sanctuary once a year and carried down to the banks of the river to bless all those from whom he received the prescribed sacrifice.
But on Sunday mornings Miss Crane was otherwise engaged. She went to the service at St Mary’s, cycling there rain or shine along the tidy, tree-lined, geometrically laid out roads of the cantonment, holding an umbrella up if the weather was inclement. Miss Crane’s umbrella was a cantonment joke. In the rains, reaching the side door, parking the Raleigh, she worked the canopy vigorously up and down to shake the drops from it. This flapping bat-wing noise was audible to those in the pews closest to the door, the pews on the lectern side of the church, whose English occupants smiled at the unmistakable sounds of Miss Crane’s arrival, much as years before other people in another church had smiled when Mr Grant offered up his prayers.
The other congregational joke about Miss Crane was over her tendency to fall asleep during the sermon, which she did with great discretion, maintaining a ramrod back and squared shoulders, so that only her closed eyes gave the game away, and even her closed eyes seemed, initially, no more than a likely sign of her preoccupation with images conjured by the chaplain’s words which, for a moment, she thought of having a closer personal look at. Her eyes closed, then opened; presently closed again, only to open again. The third time that the lids snapped shut – abruptly, never slowly or heavily – they usually stayed shut; and Miss Crane was then away; and only a slight backward jerk of her head when the chaplain said Now God the Father God the Son and the congregation exhaled a corporate sigh of relief, proved that she hadn’t heard a word and that the eyes she now just as abruptly opened had been closed in sleep.
Her violent shaking of the umbrella – not unlike the sound of alighting angry angels – and her firm fast sleep during the service, her reputation for outspokenness, her seeming imperviousness to the little drops of condescension falling from those who, in the way these things were reckoned, were above her in social station – all these had contributed to the idea the Mayapore English had of her as a woman whose work for the missionaries had broadened rather than narrowed her. There was certainly nothing sanctimonious about Edwina Crane. The somewhat grudging personal regard she was held in was increased by her refusal to be browbeaten on the women’s committees she sat on. Since the war began the English ladies of Mayapore had not been slow to recognise the need and answer the call for committees: knitting-bee committees, troops entertainment committees, social welfare committees, Guides recruitment committees, War Week committees, committees to direct the voluntary work done in the hospital and the Greenlawns nursing home and by the ladies who had in mind the welfare of the children of Indian mothers working on the road extension and proposed airstrip out at Banyaganj and in the British-Indian Electrical factory. Called in originally to help with the Guides recruitment by Mrs White, the wife of the Deputy Commissioner, she was now a member of the social welfare, the voluntary hospital workers and the Indian mothers committees and if amo
ng themselves the ladies spoke of her in tones that would have suggested to a stranger that Miss Crane was only a mission school teacher and as many rungs below them as it was socially possible to be and still be recognised, they themselves collectively understood that actual denigration was not intended, and individually respected her even if they thought her ‘cranky about the natives’.
It was the wife of the Deputy Commissioner who was responsible for creating an image of Miss Crane which the ladies of Mayapore had now come to regard as definitive of her. ‘Edwina Crane,’ Mrs White said, ‘has obviously missed her vocation. Instead of wasting her time in the missions and thumping the old tub about the iniquities of the British Raj and the intolerable burdens borne by what her church calls our dark brethren, she should have been headmistress of a good school for girls, back in the old home counties.’
Until the war Miss Crane had not gone out much in European society. Occasional dinners with the chaplain and his wife (it was the chaplain who was responsible for calling the station’s attention to Miss Crane’s tendency to sleep during his sermons), an annual invitation to the Deputy Commissioner’s garden party and once a year to his bungalow during the cold months when his wife ‘dined the station’ – these had been the main events on her white social calendar, indeed still were, but her work on the committees had widened the circle of English women who were ready to stop and talk to her in the cantonment bazaar or invite her to coffee or tea, and the particular dinner at the Deputy Commissioner’s to which Miss Crane now went was the one to which higher ranking English were invited, and eminent Indians such as Lady Chatterjee, widow of Sir Nello Chatterjee who had founded the Mayapore Technical College.