The Day of the Scorpion Read online

  That they are neither spineless nor apathetic has been proved all too well. I have read the accounts of the riots, burnings, lootings, acts of sabotage, acts of murder, the accounts of crowds of men, women and children attempting to oppose unarmed the will and strength of Government, and accounts of the firing upon these crowds by the police and the military, of deaths on both sides, of attempts to seize jails, derail trains, blow bridges, seize installations; accounts of what amounts to a full-scale but spontaneous insurrection – but with what a sad difference – for most of it has been conducted with the bare hands or with what the bare hands could pick up. There are Indians, I do not doubt, especially among those of us in prison (and our numbers have been considerably swelled since the morning of August 9th) who are proud of what the nation attempted. I cannot be one of them, for my chief reactions are anger and sorrow, and an emotion that I can’t easily describe but which is probably due to a special sense of impotence, of powerlessness to do anything that will help to alter things in any way.

  The reactions of sorrow and anger are by no means partisan. I feel them for and on behalf of people quite unknown to me, the young men for instance who are out here as soldiers, young Englishmen who as we all know have absolutely no idea about India except that it is a long way from home and full of strange, dark-skinned people. In many case soldiers like this have found themselves acting as you call it in aid of the civil power. Their principal feeling must have been one of bewilderment that changed swiftly to deep and burning resentment, because all they would understand was that the country they have come all this way to defend apparently didn’t want them and was bent on getting rid of them. There was the terrible affair of the two Canadian Air Force officers who were literally torn to pieces by people from a village that had been bombed and who thought these men had flown the aeroplanes in question. Even if they were, the situation as I see and feel it is not changed. It is one that involves us all, as does the bombing, the entire scene and history of this lamentable business. In our own province I have been especially distressed by the two incidents involving English women, the attack on the Mission School Superintendent near Tanpur, and the rape of Miss Manners in the Bibighar Gardens in Mayapore. In this latter case I do indeed feel a personal involvement over and above any other. I knew, of course, Miss Manners’s uncle, Sir Henry Manners, from the time in the early thirties when he governed the province and I sat by his invitation on several of the committees he set up in an attempt to break down some of the barriers between Government and people.

  Manners was a Governor of great skill – tolerant, sympathetic, admirable in every way. His term of office in Government House was one of hope for us, a bright spot on a rather gloomy horizon. What enemies he made were reactionary English and extremist Indians. Perhaps without the opportunity he gave me, to make whatever mark I did make on those committees, my own party would not have given me the greater opportunity that led to office. You will understand then the weight of my personal distress at the news of the criminal assault on the niece of a man like that. It is an incident that seems all too understandably to have added fuel to the fires of violence in Mayapore, and perhaps in the rest of the province. The first reports I read, which did not disclose Miss Manners’s name – referring to her merely as a young Englishwoman, victim of sexual assault by six Indian youths who had all been promptly arrested – struck me possibly as exaggerations because the reports were hysterical in pitch, and of course I hoped that they were not true. But it seems they were, at least in regard to the fact that the girl was attacked, and criminally used; and the eventual disclosure of her name and her connection with the late Sir Henry Manners came as a considerable personal shock.

  I have since, however, become puzzled and vaguely disturbed by what I can gather of the consequences of this affair, and the piece in the Statesman yesterday, referring to the rape of Miss Manners (although mercifully omitting her name again – a first step towards some sort of privacy for the poor creature) does bear out my own feelings that some quite extraordinary veil has been drawn over the whole unfortunate business, but a veil that does not satisfy the lawyer in me. I had been reading the papers daily in expectation of further news about the six men who according to the early reports were arrested. Now, according to the Statesman, it seems that these six men were not charged with rape. The Statesman refers to a very brief paragraph in the Mayapore Gazette of one week ago which gave the names of two or three men recently imprisoned under the Defence of India rules, without trial of course. According to the Statesman, these men were among the six originally arrested as suspects in the rape. Again, according to the Statesman, which has been ferreting about, all six have been imprisoned under the rule. Quite justifiably, the Statesman asks whether the original reports that ‘the suspected culprits have been arrested, thanks to the prompt action of the local police under their District Superintendent, were the result of wishful thinking or confusion on the part of the reporter, or whether subsequent investigation showed them to be innocent. If they were innocent, then as the Statesman again properly asks, is it not curious that six men suspected of rape should all turn out to be men whose political activities earned them imprisonment as detenus? Clearly now, there is unlikely to be any arrest or trial in connection with the rape itself and one must assume the real culprits have gone free. The question raised by the Statesman comes to this: Have six men been arrested for rape, found to be innocent either because they are or for lack of evidence that would hold up in a court of law, but have been put away under this convenient act because someone still believes them to be guilty, or is determined to punish them for some reason or other? I doubt that anyone will provide the answer the Statesman seeks and presently – although the affair itself will be a long time fading from memory – the legal aspects will quickly be forgotten; as will the curious side issues that stay in my own mind from my reading of the reports and collection of casual data: for instance the apparent fact that one of the arrested men, a man called Kumar, was a friend of Miss Manners; and the fact that Miss Manners (if the Statesman has interpreted correctly) declined, according to gossip, to give evidence because the men arrested were not the kind she remembered as the type who attacked her.

  I imagine that the details of this distressing affair – which has exacerbated racial feeling throughout the country – have had something of your personal attention, more particularly in view of the victim’s family connections in India. I presume she is the daughter of a brother of Henry Manners. One of the reports gave her address in Mayapore as The MacGregor House, which I remember as the home of Sir Nello and Lady Chatterjee who were friends of Sir Henry and Lady Manners. I take it Miss Manners was staying with Lady Chatterjee but that otherwise she normally lives with her aunt whom I knew fairly well and who, I believe, still lives in Rawalpindi. I have written a brief letter to Lady Manners, which I enclose. I should be most grateful if you would forward it. I have left it unsealed so that you can quickly assure yourself that I have written nothing to her apart from words of sympathy and regret for the terrible thing that happened to her niece. I cannot, I realize, expect any particular comment from you on the points I have raised in this letter. I offer them as someone whose enforced position as a mere spectator has in no way diminished his sense of involvement, curiosity, and concern with justice.

  *

  ‘His Excellency thanks you for your letter’ (one of Sir George’s secretaries wrote a month later), ‘and wishes me also to convey to you Lady Manners’s thanks for your personal message which his Excellency communicated to her.’

  Kasim looked up, Lieutenant Moran Singh who had brought the letter over to the zenana house still stood in the doorway, smiling.

  ‘Such influential people you are knowing,’ Moran Singh said. ‘Letters from Government House and such-like.’ He turned and went out. Presently Kasim heard him shouting at one of the sentries. Moran Singh had relatives in Ranpur. He had offered to convey private messages to Mrs Kasim through those relativ
es, for a consideration. He took bribes, he sold Government stores. He had said to Kasim, ‘Major Tippit is mad,’ and had hinted that – again for a consideration – he could persuade Tippit to allow Kasim to be visited regularly by selected fellow-prisoners. Moran Singh represented everything in India that Kasim loathed. He had declined these offers.

  Kasim wrote in his journal: ‘A reply from Government House, which makes it clear that the Governor’s request that I write to him occasionally wasn’t really the friendly gesture I believed it to be. It is apparently to be a one-sided correspondence. He wanted me to commit my thoughts to paper but won’t commit his own. He wants to keep track of me. I am a specimen under observation. They must be his orders that keep me isolated from other prisoners. He thinks isolation will give me time and opportunity to re-assess my position. Underneath that liberal man to man exterior is the indomitable public servant. Perhaps he is waiting for me to crack under the strain. I could be out of Premanagar by Christmas if I wrote to him and said I’d changed my mind and was willing to resign from Congress and accept nomination to his executive council. And God knows I might do useful work. But I must not be hard on him. They are only spiritual hardships I suffer here, and his policy in regard to me is dictated by good intentions and the determination to do everything he can to govern the province successfully and ease the condition of the people. The Governor buries himself neither in past nor future but in the present. It is an English trait. They will only see that there is no future for them in India when India no longer fits into the picture they have of themselves and of their current obligations. When that time comes they won’t particularly care what happens to us. Sooner or later the Governor will find that I don’t fit in to whatever picture he has of the current problems of this province. Perhaps I am already beginning to fade out of it. He would have written, I expect, if he had seen an immediate way in which I could be useful to him. One can’t help admiring this barefaced attitude. We might learn something from it. There is too much emotion in our own public life. The English could never be accused of that. They lock us up, release us and lock us up again according to what suits them at the time, with a bland detachment that, fortunately or unfortunately, is matched by an equally bland acceptance on our part. They act collectively, and so can afford detachment. We react individually, which weakens us. We haven’t yet acquired the collective instinct. The English send Kasim to prison. But it is Kasim who goes to prison. The prisoner in the zenana house is a man. But who is his jailer? The jailer is an idea. But in the prisoner the idea is embodied in a man. From his solitude the man reaches out to others. He writes to Sir George Malcolm. He writes to old Lady Manners. But he cannot reach them as people. They are protected from him by the collective instinct of their race. A reply comes, but it is not from them. It is from someone speaking for them. It has not been expedient for either of them to write. I understand in both cases why this should be. But to understand does not warm the heart.’

  *

  Several months later, the May of the following year, the prisoner in the zenana house saw two notices in the same issue of the Times of India. Under Births there was this entry: Manners. On May 7th, at Srinagar. To Daphne, a daughter, Parvati. And under Deaths, this: Manners. On May 7th, at Srinagar; Daphne, daughter of the late Mr & Mrs George Manners, beloved niece of Ethel and the late Sir Henry Manners.

  There were times, Mr Kasim told himself, when he thought he would never understand the English. What curious brand of arrogance and insensitivity could lead an old lady to announce to the world the birth of an obviously half-caste child to the unmarried niece who, nine months before, had been raped by Indians in the Bibighar Gardens? ‘It is as if,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘old Lady Manners were flinging an accusation into our faces, to make sure we know that this is an incident that cannot be forgotten and is one we have a continuing responsibility for. I do not remember her as the sort of woman who would make this kind of gesture; but of course the girl has died, presumably in childbirth. I suppose she is telling us that she will never forgive us for what a handful of our men did on that particular night. Or do these announcements mean that she has forgiven us now and taken the child, so tragically and violently conceived, to her heart, for India’s sake? One cannot tell. The English have a saying, “He wears his heart on his sleeve,” but this is something they never reveal except very occasionally to each other.’

  Part Two

  A HISTORY

  I

  ‘So it was with Henry, and so now with poor Daphne,’ Lady Manners murmured. And handed her niece’s diary to Suleiman to lock up in the black tin box as he had locked up some of her husband’s private papers, years before, with an air of reverence or anyway forbearance; but he took Daphne’s book as if it were nothing special, put it in the box – whose lid was open – and stood, waiting, not catching her eye, still wearing the old astrakhan cap he had complained of months before in ‘Pindi and had had money off her to renew.

  Well, he is jealous, she thought, and still resents being sent for, travelling alone and uncomfortably on the bus all that way from Pindi to Srinagar, just to order the household for the journey back in the same direction, a beast-of-burden who has no burden worthy of the years, the centuries, the everlastingness of his service. He is an old man. His hair has gone grey, like mine. Why has he never grown a beard? If he grows a beard I must watch for signs of it and be prepared for the morning he will come to me and say, Memsahib, let me go, I am an old man. Before I die I must see Mecca, and having seen it dye my beard red, come back and live out my remaining years in peace and honourable retirement with the blessing of Allah the Merciful.

  So, too, I would go, but not to Mecca. Where then? And how? I do not know how or where. Nor who has mercy to spare.

  And she looked out of the window on to the placid waters of the lake, and heard the crying of the child. She made a gesture and said a word, both meaning the same thing. Khatam. Finished. Suleiman closed the lid of the box, turned the key and handed it to her. His old brown fingers were still supple from a lifetime of manipulative care of her property, and Henry’s property, which were his gods, his ikons, but to care for Daphne’s was nothing to him. It was all gone. But what? Well it has gone, she thought, whatever it was. And took the key from him, and put it in her handbag, aware of the finality of the gesture without understanding why she should think of it as final. You were handsome once, she told Suleiman without speaking. You had one wife we knew about and two concubines you pretended were your wife’s sisters. And were a rogue and a rake, and had children, God knows how many, by whom, nor where scattered. Now you are alone and I am alone, and we cannot speak of it even yet as a man and a woman might speak who share recollections. But if you were to die I should weep. And if I were to die you would cover your head and speak to no one for days. But here in the world where both of us live – poised between entrance and exit, or exit and entrance – we will maintain the relationship of mistress and servant, although we have grown far beyond it and use it simply as a shorthand to get through the day without trouble to one another.

  Suleiman took hold of the box and carried it through into the passage that ran along the side of the houseboat – the side adjacent to the bank of the island to which the boat was moored – from her bedroom, with its single bed, past the empty guest bedroom with its two beds, and into the dining-room, up the two steps into the living-room beyond which was the veranda with its view on to the water and the opposite bank where the tongas waited, ready to transport the passengers from the shikaras to the square where the buses and motor-cars halted.

  In the water immediately below the verandah there was a cluster of shikaras – one for the luggage, one for the passengers, and upwards of half a dozen laden with Kashmiri art: woodwork, shawls, carpets, flowers; and even a fortune teller – although it was only 7.30 in the September morning, and the mist through which a future might be seen to have substance had not yet cleared. But in the last half-hour before a departure there
was always the possibility of a sale. From her room, Lady Manners heard the cries of the vendors offering inducements, bribes, to persuade Suleiman to go back in and bring her out to be tempted.

  And today, she thought, I am going to be tempted. And followed Suleiman through to the veranda where he was standing, a thin, frail, stoop-shouldered man, in a moth-eaten fez and floppy pyjamas, with Henry’s old Harris tweed jacket hanging on him to keep out the early morning September chill, showing his shirt-tail, blue against the baggy white trousers: and holding the box to his breast, like a reliquary, saying nothing, but watching the opposite shore, standing on guard over the piled luggage. Aware she had come, he spoke to the khansamar, ordered him to have the luggage stowed, and the khansamar beckoned to the man below who came scrambling. The vendors, seeing that departure was imminent, set up a new cry, making their appeal directly to her, holding up whatever it was they most wished her to be tempted by. She beckoned to the man who had sold her a shawl three years before, and had ever since been hopeful. She beckoned to him because of this, not because his shikara was closest (although it was, having been paddled into position early). He clambered, laden, across her own empty shikara and the luggage shikara, elbowing the men who were dealing with the luggage, reached the houseboat verandah and laid his bundle down, salaamed, untied the knot, opened and released a cascade of fine woven wool, with gold, silver and coloured embroidery. The khansamar had brought out a chair. She sat on it and watched the man – his skull-cap, and his touchingly dishonest eyes whenever he looked up to emphasize the truth of the lies he was telling her.