The Day of the Scorpion Read online

‘You have permission to read newspapers.’

  ‘Good. But I have not been given any. That is my other complaint.’

  ‘I will speak to Lieutenant Moran Singh about it.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Lieutenant Moran Singh about it several times. I’ve given him a list of the newspapers I want. I’ve also written to my wife asking her to send newspapers. That letter and several other letters are still here. They are on your desk.’

  ‘I’ll read them as soon as possible. You understand that they must be read?’

  ‘I understand nothing of the sort. They will be read in Ranpur, either in the censorship office at the Secretariat or by a member of the Governor’s staff. Sometimes by both. I have not so far written personally to the Governor as he requested me, but I shall be doing so presently. I should like to be able to make some comments to him on whatever the current situation is.’

  Major Tippit glanced up – not, it seemed, recognizing a threat. He said, ‘Things have been very distressing, haven’t they?’

  ‘Major Tippit, how can I tell how things have been? I have no radio, no newspapers, my guards tell me nothing, Lieutenant Moran Singh tells me nothing and does not even post my letters. No letters have been given to me either. By now I should think there would be several.’

  ‘Such senseless violence. It is difficult to know where to apportion blame. And that poor girl, that unfortunate woman. It has incensed people. Looting, rioting, burning. Yes, yes. One expects. Deplores but expects. But these other things . . . I was delayed because the railways have been so uncertain. In Ranpur feeling is running high. In Mayapore the civil have handed over to the military. The whole country is seething. Will you have some tea?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘It is ten o’clock. I always have tea at ten o’clock. A regular régime. While I’m away things get out of hand. It is five past ten.’ He said this without looking at his watch. He made no effort to have tea brought in. Chapprassis were waiting on the bench outside, but he did not call one of them. He said, ‘But they will be better now that I am back. Lieutenant Moran Singh has conducted everything with precision and now that I am back to say the word everything will fall into place. I’m afraid I cannot change the arrangements for your accommodation. Have you any other requests?’

  ‘I should like further supplies of pen, paper and ink.’

  ‘I will tell Lieutenant Moran Singh. He will arrange it with one of the clerks.’

  ‘There are two habitable rooms in the zenana house, the one I have as a bedroom and the one I use as a study. I should like to share these rooms with one of your other prisoners.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Any one. I don’t know who you have got here.’

  ‘As I said, rank and file. I cannot allow it. It is against my principles. I am surprised that you wish it. You are a man who has been in a position of authority. Well, well, that is a lonely business. I too am living alone in this fortress, Mr Kasim. I am glad you are here. We can talk together sometimes. I am interested in Islamic art and literature as well as in history. The early eighteenth-century Urdu poet, Gaffur, was also of your ancient family, so I understand. I have translated some of his verses into English. You might like to have a look at them.’

  Kasim bowed his head.

  ‘In one or two cases I believe I have managed to convey something of the splendour and simplicity of the original. You are well acquainted with the poems of Gaffur, Mr Kasim?’

  ‘At one time, yes. As a boy. Since then other things have tended to occupy my mind. You said that the country is seething.’

  ‘Looting. Arson. Sabotage. Policemen have been murdered. Track has been torn up. Magistrates imprisoned in their own jails, Congress flags run up. Troops called out. Inevitable loss of life. Waste. Violence. Terrible violence. To no purpose. It’s being stamped out. It’s best forgotten. I should not talk about it.’

  ‘You said something about a girl.’

  ‘She was raped. Another woman was attacked. An elderly woman. The Indian who was driving her to safety was murdered.’

  ‘Were they Europeans?’

  ‘English. The woman was a mission school teacher. The girl who was raped was of good family. They have arrested the men.’

  ‘Was this in Ranpur?’

  ‘No. In Mayapore. The military have taken over. Your people have done terrible things. I do not understand you, Mr Kasim. Over this we are in opposite camps. We are enemies. But I am a humane man.’ Major Tippit paused. ‘I’m a historian, really. The present does not interest me. The future even less. Only through art and contemplation of the past can man live with man. I hope you will be content. Think upon the Fort as a refuge from life’s turmoils and disappointments.’

  Kasim waited, then when he saw that for the moment Tippit had no more to say, he rose, thanked his jailer for the interview and said, ‘I have your permission to return to my quarters?’

  *

  He walked alone across the space that separated the Fort commander’s office and the zenana house, under the eyes of the chapprassis and the armed sentries who patrolled the colonnaded veranda of the old barracks. In the centre of the courtyard a neem tree provided some shade. Puddles in the red earth reflected the blue of the sky. Puffs of cloud too light to cast shadows moved quickly, driven by the prevailing south-west wind. By midday it would probably rain.

  The courtyard was enclosed to the east by the barracks, to the north, west and south by high crenellated red brick walls with bastions built into the angles. In the west and south wall there were gateways closed by studded wooden doors. Close to the southern wall was the square pavilion where Major Tippit lived. Abutting on to the northern wall was the old zenana house, a two-storey construction of stone and brick with fretted wooden arches shading the upper and lower verandas. A wooden stairway gave access to the first floor. The rooms below were in use as storehouses. The dry smell of grain and sacking pervaded the place. Above, the veranda gave on to rooms all but two of which were ruinous. The farthest of these were boarded in. The two which were habitable were closest to the wooden staircase. Inside, they were lit by the open doors and by windows in the outer walls. These windows were blocked by fretted stone screens that gave the occupant views, through any one of their many apertures, of the outer courtyard and the inner and outer walls of the Fort. The courtyard where the zenana house stood had obviously been the women’s. The barracks must have been servants’ quarters. He could not see what lay behind the southern wall, other than the dome of the mosque, but from the outer windows of his rooms in the zenana he could see beyond the farther walls to the plain.

  The walls of his two rooms were whitewashed. In one room there were a bed, a chair and a wardrobe; in the other a table, a chair and a calendar. The calendar was Kasim’s own. He did not mark off the days. There seemed no point in doing so when the period of his imprisonment was not determined. ‘I rise at six as usual, waking by habit,’ he wrote now to his wife. ‘They give me breakfast at eight. The two hours are spent bathing and dressing and reading. After breakfast I walk round the compound, unless it is raining, then write in my journal, and letters, until lunch. After lunch I doze for a while, then read until four, when they bring me some tea. After tea I walk again. After that I bathe. Then read. Then supper. Time of course hangs heavily. Today I expect letters at last. Please give my love to the children when you write to them. I am told there has been some unrest. I hope you are safe and unharmed by it. There must be a great deal for you to attend to. Do not write more often than you can well afford to. One thing I dislike is not being allowed to shave myself. They have taken my things away and send a barber every other day. Today is a bristly morning. I suppose they are afraid I might hurt myself with the razor. Even my little mirror is gone. I shall forget what I look like, no doubt. They have let me keep your and the children’s photographs, because they are only covered with mica. I have the portraits on my desk. Pray remember every morning and night Ahmed Gaffur Ali Rashid. Our noble
but eccentric ancestor! Looking at the photographs has reminded me of him.’

  There was no such person as Ahmed Gaffur Ali Rashid. His wife would therefore see at once that this particular sentence contained the simple code message – an anagram – they had agreed upon to tell her where he was being held. He hoped the censors would not see it first. They would look for such codes in his first few letters to her. This was his fourth. He ran his hand over the stubble on his chin and then over his cheeks, wondering whether prison fare had made his face thinner.

  *

  So: Kasim’s face. There was history in it; the history of Islam’s holy wars and imperial expansions. He traced his genealogy back to a warrior-adventurer called Mir Ali who came from Turkey in the heyday of the Muslims’ Indian empire just as years later young Britons came out in the heyday of their own. Mir Ali married a Hindu princess and they both adopted the new religion the great Moghul Akbar had devised in an attempt to establish a cornerstone on which to build the fabric of a dream, an India undivided by conflicting notions of God and the ways to worship God. Akbar wished his fellow-Muslims and the conquered Hindus to feel equal in one respect at least. But in the reign of Aurangzeb the Kasims re-embraced Islam. The empire was already running down but the Muslims still held the keys of the kingdom and under Aurangzeb the old proselytizing faith in Allah and his prophet was re-established as a buttress for the crumbling walls of state. A new wave of conversions, even among the proud Rajputs, showed that when belief is at odds with worldly ambition the former is the more likely to bow its head.

  The reward for one of those Kasims who re-embraced Islam – the eldest grandson of Mir Ali – was the vice-regal appointment over a territory that stretched from Ranpur to Mirat. He was murdered by his son who had been one of his deputies. Internecine war, war against rebellious Hindu rulers and chieftains, war against the invaders from the west – the Mahrattas – marked the final years of the dying Moghul dynasty. The deputies of the great Moghul were carving out principalities and scrambling for power in the gathering darkness, unwittingly opening the gates that would let in the flood that was to swamp them: the flood of ubiquitous, restless foreign merchants whom they thought at first easy sources of income and personal riches, French, British, Portuguese merchants who came to trade but stayed on to secure their trade by taking possession of the source of wealth, the very land itself. The merchants fought each other too, and there is no honour among thieves. A self-appointed prince, leaning on one of the foreigners to help him subjugate a neighbouring pocket-kingdom, too often found he was subjugated himself, imprisoned, then released by the forces of a different foreigner, set up as their puppet and in the end manipulated out of existence. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, of all those principalities that had been carved out of the territory administered by Mir Ali’s eldest grandson, only one remained, and this was the tiny state of Mirat whose ruler, also a Kasim, had by wit and good fortune failed to arouse the acquisitive instincts of the British, had helped them at the right time rather than for the right reasons, secured his jagir and their recognition of his claim to be called Nawab. And since there was now no princely neighbour near enough for the British to look upon the Nawab of Mirat as a threat to their own peaceful mercantile and administrative pursuits he was allowed to continue, to blossom as it were like a small and insignificant rose in the desert of dead Moghul ambitions.

  All this was in Kasim’s face: a face of the kind that could be celebrated in profile on a coin – a forehead sloping to a balding crown, a fleshy but handsomely proportioned nose which stood on guard with an equally fleshy but handsome chin over a mouth whose lips were by no means thin, but were firm-set, determined, not unsensual. Full-face there was a broadness of cheek and jowl and neck, suggestive of a thyroid condition. The black hair that fringed his temples and the back of his head was flecked with grey. These, the thickness and the baldness, conveyed a different idea of Kasim; of a Kasim bearing the marks not of proconsular dignity and autocratic power but instead the marks of centuries of experience of duller but not unworthy occupations. This was a middle-class Kasim, a Kasim – as indeed Mohammed Ali was – of the branch that traced its connection to Mir Ali through the younger son of that Turkish warrior and his Hindu bride, and this was a branch that had rooted itself more modestly but more deeply in the adopted country. It boasted no viceroy, no Nawab, no captain of armies. It had prospered in other ways, in trade and in the professions. It might be called the Ranpur branch, and it had provided India with merchants, imams, scholars, lawyers, officials, philosophers, mathematicians, doctors, and a poet – Gaffur Mohammed whose verses Major Tippit admired. It had provided her more recently with a member of the provincial Governor’s council, Mohammed Ali Kasim’s father whose portrait an arresting officer took a moment off from duty to study, and with the first chief minister of the province, Mohammed Ali himself, a man in whom perhaps could be detected yet another inheritance, Akbar’s old dream of a united sub-continent. For this he had come to prison. For this he had incurred the displeasure of Mr Jinnah whose name was also Mohammed Ali, who now had visions of a separate Muslim state but whose forbears were converts from Hinduism and had not come from Turkey.

  One month after his incarceration in the Fort at Premanagar Mohammed Ali Kasim (known to the newspapers usually as M.A.K. and to free and easy English as Mac) sought and obtained Major Tippit’s permission to make a little garden in front of the zenana house. He also wrote his first letter to the Governor.

  *

  It took a little while (he wrote) for newspapers and letters to reach me, but presently I was inundated. Having caught up in quite a short while (since there was little else to occupy me) with the events (as reported) that followed the news of the nation-wide arrests, my immediate desire was to address you on the matter, because the newspapers invariably sought to establish that the rioting and disturbance only just now coming to an end were planned by Congress and indeed led by Congress in the shape of mysterious underground leaders people such as myself are thought to have chosen and briefed to carry out the job if we were arrested and couldn’t carry it out ourselves. I recalled what I said during our interview about mobs that rouse themselves and, needing leaders, encourage the emergence of all kinds of undesirable elements. By and large I should say this is exactly what happened, although some of the incidents (in Dibrapur for example) show evidence of forethought. Those undesirable elements I mentioned do not of course come into existence overnight, but they are not underground elements of Congress. Neither can they be Communist-inspired, because the Indian Communists have become pro-war minded ever since Hitler invaded Russia, and would hardly do anything to disrupt the war effort against Fascism. They are inspired surely only by themselves, and are a danger to all of us.

  There seems to be a general belief, however, that Congress had the wind taken out of its sails by the sudden arrest of so many of its leaders. The point is made that Mr Gandhi probably expected the Quit India resolution as it is now called to lead not to prison but to serious talks with the Viceroy. I am in agreement. (My own act of packing my bags directly I heard the resolution had been endorsed was the result of purely personal logic, and I confess I hoped it was an act I would look back on with that affectionate self-mockery we reserve for those of our fears which subsequent events show to have been groundless.) What I cannot see is how the two views can be reconciled. If the arrests came as a surprise (as I’m sure they did to most of us) surely the men who were arrested and surprised were not men who had planned for rebellion in their absence? Gandhi, you know, never said how the country was to be organized to withdraw from the war effort. As you know he has never been much of a chap for detail, and even those closest to him have often been puzzled to know exactly what it is he has in mind. People on your side who don’t like him accuse him of deviousness and of course the general impression now is that his latest and most devious scheme has backfired. You yourself used the word blackmail, and the British in general have met the r
ecent threats to their security in precisely the frame of mind of chosen victims of blackmail who refuse to be victimized. I hope that on reconsideration you will reject, if you haven’t already done so, the blackmail theory. It’s a theory that works two ways in any case. We could accuse the British of trying to blackmail us into putting everything into the war effort with false promises of independence when the war is won. You would answer that by saying they are not false, although you cannot prove that to us, and Churchill has made it clear that the rights and freedoms embodied in the Atlantic Charter do not apply to India so far as he is concerned. We, for our part, would answer your charge of blackmail by pointing out that the war is irrelevant to the situation because we are demanding nothing that we have not been demanding for years. The war perhaps has made us demand it with greater insistence and has strengthened your hand in not granting it yet, but it has not changed the nature of the demand, nor the nature of the resistance. It has merely added a different emotional factor and a new set of practical considerations; and on these our natures and our views widen our differences. What I hope you will be in agreement with me over is my belief that had we been allowed to continue at liberty the violent events of the past few weeks simply would not have occurred. You would have been faced with the far more onerous task of seeking a way round the deadlock created by a coordinated, peaceful, passive end to the co-operation of the Indian people in the war effort. This would have been the type of ‘sabotage’ Congress leaders, and Congress leaders only, could have directed. Perhaps it is Machiavellian of me to glimpse in Government’s prompt arrests of leaders a Machiavellian intention: the intention of turning the onerous task into the simpler one of strong-arm tactics. It is easier to fire on rioters led by undesirable elements than to force resisting workers back into an arms factory, dockers back to the docks and engine-drivers back to the controls of their locomotives. And Government must have realized that the people of India would be incensed by the wholesale arrests and imprisonment of their leaders: incensed, at a loss, anxious to perform what their leaders wanted them to perform, but prey to anger, fear, and all the passions that lead to violence. I find it not at all difficult to accuse Government of deliberate provocation of the people of India: either that or of holding the insulting belief that the people of India are so spineless and apathetic that the disappearance from their midst of the men who have risen to positions of responsibility to them would at once leave them as malleable and directable as dull and unimportant clay.