Belonging (19 page)

I waited for him to go on.

‘I knew your mother liked him. He had taught her Hindustani and used to ride with her when I was recuperating from an attack of malaria. He was one of the few native officers whom Wheeler allowed to remain in the entrenchment. After I was wounded, he protected and cared for her. When Wheeler surrendered the entrenchment he was captured by Nana Saheb and sentenced to have his hands cut off, but the sentence was never carried out. Afterwards he was brought
before a temporary magistrate – some boxwallah who had been appointed to judge the natives’ guilt or innocence. To most of them – and he was no exception – the only evidence of guilt required was a brown face. Ram Buksh told him that I would vouch for his loyalty, so the magistrate reluctantly brought him to me. At that time I was still weak from my wounds and half-crazed with grief.’

I noticed his scar had tightened and his right eye was twitching. ‘Henry, I can’t begin to explain the frame of mind I was in. I was beside myself with grief and anger – anger with myself and with him for failing to save her. And I was jealous. We’d had our problems, and he was young and strong and handsome – in the letters she left behind she’d talked of being closer to him than anyone else on earth. It was all perfectly innocent, of course – I knew that later, when I reread her account and realised that nothing had really happened – but that was later.’ He was silent, absent, his eyes haunted.

At last I said, ‘Father, what is it that you blame yourself for?’

He sighed. ‘When they brought him before me he wept with joy to see me alive and tried to touch my feet. And I… I pushed him away and demanded to know what he had done with her. He must have thought I meant he hadn’t done enough to save her, because he wept and begged me to forgive him, and of course that confirmed my suspicions. The magistrate, an impatient man with no brief for natives, asked me whether I would vouch for him or no, and I said – ’ he closed his eyes ‘ – I said that I could not vouch for his actions after I left the entrenchment, as I had no knowledge of them.’ He paused and cleared his throat. ‘When he heard me say that, his face changed. He got to his feet and did not look at me again. I told the magistrate to speak to Lt. Thomson, who
had been in the entrenchment for the whole time and would know more than I.’

His eyes met mine over the rim of the glass. ‘Henry, I swear I thought Thomson would bear out Ram Buksh’s story and that they would release him. But Thomson was supervising the building of the new fortifications outside Cawnpore and was not available. I was told later that the magistrate asked if Ram Buksh wanted an adjournment so they could call Thomson as a witness. He replied that if his senior officer, under whom he had served for eighteen years, would not vouch for his loyalty, he had no further defence to offer. I should have remembered how proud he was. The officiating officer told me he was taken to the bibighar first, to carry out Neill’s penance… but when he saw the room he wept so bitterly that the officer excused him the punishment. He was hanged that same afternoon.’

He paused, as though waiting for me to say something, but I could think of nothing. The memory came back to me of that night after the chaplain’s dinner – Father standing on his verandah, crucified against the moonlight, crying ‘Ram! Ram!’ into the darkness.

His shoulders dropped and suddenly he looked old.

‘But that wasn’t all. When Wheeler refused to let my sepoys enter the entrenchment I had given them each a letter vouching for their loyalty. After Ram Buksh was hanged, a group of them, including my subhedar-major, a man called Durga Prasad – the best and most loyal officer who could be imagined – were summoned before the court. They produced the letters and their cases were dismissed, but as they left the court a group of English soldiers standing at the gate bayoneted them all.’

‘That, at least, wasn’t your fault, Father.’

‘I should have been there, Henry. They had given up everything for me and I owed it to them. If I had been there I might have stopped it. But the truth is I was too caught up in my own grief to care. I suppose if I’m honest I wanted revenge too… I’ll never forget the sight of James, cradling poor dead little Freddie in his arms…’

I looked away as he struggled for composure. ‘I don’t understand why you stayed on. I’d have thought you’d have wanted to get away, go home.’

He laughed. ‘I have no home, Henry. I’ve lived in India since I was twenty. My parents died when I was a child. James and his family were my last remaining relatives. I stopped believing in our mission here long ago, but the army and my sepoys are the closest thing I’ve had to a family. And you, of course.’

I wished that I could say something to comfort him, but there is nothing. I understand now why he never wanted to speak of the past.

Today I asked Father something that has been puzzling me since he told me the story of my mother’s death, namely how it is that I am not famous as the sole survivor of the bibighar.

He explained that in all the hysteria that surrounded the discovery there was a lot of confusion, and rumour was rife. ‘Soldiers made up stories to feed their desire for revenge and justify our own atrocities – stories of women being paraded naked in front of Nana Saheb’s troops, of rape, of babies’ bodies found hanging on hooks – as if the truth wasn’t bad enough! There were so many rumours that contradicted each other that no one really knew what to believe.

‘Afterwards I avoided any mention of it and no one dared to raise the subject with me. They talked, of course – no one could stop that – but that was just speculation. No, the only time I was concerned was when I learnt that Lt. Thomson was writing a book about the events at Cawnpore. As soon as I heard of it I wrote to him and asked him not to mention you – you were still a child and I didn’t want that notoriety for you. And he was kind enough to agree.’

It is humbling to realise that the mystification about my birth that I have resented all these years was devised in order to protect me.

Yesterday, on an impulse, on my way back to Bhagalpur, I alighted from the train at Cawnpore and went to look at the site where the entrenchment had been. Nothing, of course, remains. The buildings have all collapsed, their materials scattered, the mud walls washed away long ago, and it has reverted to the patch of barren waste ground, populated by scavenging pariah dogs, that it must have been before it was selected for that most hopeless of defences.

In the evening I went to visit the memorial gardens that have been planted where the bibighar once stood. There is a British soldier stationed at the gate to prevent Indians from entering. An octagonal pierced marble screen conceals the well, now filled in and covered over. I stood for some time looking at the guardian of the well – a marble Angel of the Resurrection with cast-down eyes and a sombre, brooding expression. Crossed palm leaves fan out above his folded hands.

The bibighar – my birthplace – in the gardens of which the well stood, was originally built in the grounds of his house
by an Englishman for his bibis. It was demolished soon after the Mutiny and the memorial was raised some years later, paid for by public subscription in England and fines levied on the citizens of Cawnpore.

The inscription reads:

The white purity of the monument conveys nothing of the terrible event it memorialises.

I waited there for some time until the tomb glowed pink in the short but spectacular sunset, hoping for some flicker of memory, some buried instinct to stir, but I felt nothing.

A few weeks after Jagjit arrived in India I had a letter from him.

Although he sounded unhappy, this was the first letter I’d had from him in which he shared his thoughts with me as openly as I had done with him. I thought about what he had said about me. Was it true that I went my own way, or was that just a reaction too? Had I not learnt that from Father, who, like Akela, always walked alone and whose only friends – with the exception of Uncle Gavin and Uncle Roland – were the Indians he worked with?

I, too, felt more comfortable with Indians, but by then I was no longer working at the Indian Hospital. Shortly after Jagjit’s departure all the English nurses had been removed, all visitors banned and patients were no longer allowed to leave the premises. The fences were heightened and barbed wire put along the top. Despite protests that the patients felt imprisoned, and appeals that it was bad for their morale, the military authorities stood firm. It was felt that the Indian soldiers were becoming too friendly with the local women, and that this familiarity might negatively influence their behaviour towards Englishwomen when they were back in India. By the end of 1915 the Indian hospitals were closed down and the treatment of Indians shifted to France. Over the same period, most of the Indian troops were withdrawn from the Western Front.

According to Mr. Beauchamp, the M.P.s who had argued against the use of Indian soldiers felt vindicated by the
difficulty they seemed to have had in adjusting to trench life, attributing it to a lack of moral fibre. It was decided that the troops withdrawn from the Western Front should be sent to Palestine, Egypt and Mesopotamia, where conditions were closer to those they were accustomed to, and where they would be fighting other brown-skinned races.

In the autumn of that year, Jagjit was sent to the Mesopotamian Front, or – as it would later be referred to by soldiers on the Western Front – ‘the Mesopotamian Picnic’. At around the same time, Aunt Mina’s house was requisitioned by the Army as a convalescent home for wounded officers and I was offered a job and a room there. Aunt Mina moved in with the Beauchamps for the duration of the war.

The last uncensored letter I received from Jagjit was written soon after his arrival in Mesopotamia.

I received a few short letters from him after he joined his regiment but they were constantly on the march and had little time to write, and once again letters were being censored, this time by an official censor based in France, which meant they sometimes took months to arrive. But through the newspapers
and Mr. Beauchamp’s offices I received regular news of General Townshend’s rapid progress towards Baghdad as he defeated the Turks in battle after battle.

News of his triumphs helped to alleviate the terrible news that continued to come in from the Western Front, until November, when his forces were defeated at Ctesiphon with enormous casualties. Weeks of uncertainty followed as families waited to learn the names of those killed or missing in action; for me it was even longer because Indian names did not appear in the casualty lists. My only hope of news was through Jagjit’s family, but it was weeks before I could expect a reply to my enquiries. When it came it was to say they had heard nothing.

News came at last that Townshend had been driven back to Kut-el-Amara, a small shanty town lying in a fold of the River Tigris. Kut was completely surrounded by the Turks: no letters went in or came out, and attempts to drop supplies and mail by plane were abandoned. For five months there was no further word. Those months were the darkest of my life as I struggled to keep hope alive, knowing that everyone thought I was deluding myself. Only the fact that I had patients to care for kept me going; while I was working I had no time to think, and my own anxiety and grief opened my mind to their suffering.

Kut finally fell at the end of April 1916, and the whole garrison became prisoners of the Turks. Once again there was hope that we might find Jagjit’s name in the records of those taken prisoner, but prisoners’ names had been phonetically transcribed by Turkish guards in their own script, and records were chaotic.

Over the months that followed we learnt something of the conditions at Kut. Thousands had died of disease and towards the end the garrison had been starving. As news from
the Red Cross became available, we learnt that prisoners had been marched many hundreds of miles into the desert and some of the prison camps were so far into the interior, where there were no roads or railways, that the Red Cross had been unable to trace them.

Finally, after nearly two years of hearing nothing, in August 1917 I received a letter from the War Office.

A bundle of my letters to Jagjit was enclosed. He had never received any of them.