Round the Bend (30 page)

I glanced them over. “Okay,” I said to her. “You can get off now. No need to wait.”

She hesitated. “I wanted to see you, Mr. Cutter. I’ve been talking to my brother.”

“Sit down, then.” I dropped into my chair myself. “He’s told you about everything?”

“I think so. He’s told me that he’s got to go to Bali.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m sorry about that, but it’s the only thing to do. You’d like to go with him, I expect, wouldn’t you?”

She shook her head. “I’ll stay here while you’ve got a job for me.”

“I thought the only reason you came out here was to be with him.”

“I know it. And now he’s got to move on, when I’ve only been here a month. But all the same, I think I’d rather stay here, for a time, at any rate. If you’ll have me.”

I smiled at her. “I’ll have you all right. But are you sure you wouldn’t rather be with your brother?”

She shook her head. “I’ve got a job to do here, and I’m getting interested in it. In Bali I’d have nothing to do at all. It’s not as if I shall be out of touch with Connie, either. There’ll be machines going and coming to Bali all the time from now on, won’t there?”

“Oh—yes,” I said. “Once a fortnight certainly, and probably more often.”

“If he got ill or anything, could I go to him on one of the trips?”

“Of course. You can get on one of the machines and go and see him any time you like. The weight won’t make any odds.”

She smiled. “In that case, I’ll stay here.”

A point that had been worrying me all through the day while I was flying came back to my mind. “When your brother goes, where are you going to live?”

“I’ll go on where I am,” she said.

“Will that be all right?” I asked uneasily. I suppose after all that time I still had something of an Englishman’s dislike and fear of the native quarter of an Eastern town.

“Surely,” she said gently. “I live in a house owned by a very respectable old man, Mutluq bin Aamir; he’s a silk merchant. He’s a great devotee of Connie and he knew my father. And Gujar Singh lives only just across the way.”

“You’ll be all right there, living alone, after your brother’s gone?”

“Of course,” she said, smiling a little. “I should never come to any harm down there.”

If she was happy about going on there alone I didn’t see that I could raise any objection; moreover, I didn’t know of anywhere else where she could live any better. I asked her, “How are you for Arabic? Can you get along without your brother?”

She nodded. “I’m learning it. I can ask for all the ordinary things now, and anyway, lots of the people know a little English. Really, I shall be quite all right. You don’t have to worry about me.”

I couldn’t press it any more. “Well, of course, I’ll be very glad if you can stay,” I said. I sat in silence for a minute. “It’s going to be a big loss when your brother goes,” I said quietly. “Things have gone very smoothly under him.”

“And under you,” she said.

“I mean, in the hangar. I’ve had nothing much to do with the ground engineers since he came.”

“I know,” she said. “But under you, he has been able to teach people in his own way. When Connie started talking his religion over the fifty hour schedules and the daily inspections, not everybody would have allowed it to go on. You must have been very puzzled sometimes.”

“Yes,” I said. “I was.”

“Because you saw virtue in his way of teaching engineers to do their work you let him go on in his own way, although it was not an English or an American way. If the results are good, a share in it is yours.” She paused. “His way has spread a long, long way from here, and may spread further. Engineers worship in the hangar in his way in Rangoon and Bangkok, in Karachi and in Abadan.” She paused again, and then repeated, “And it may go further.”

There was a long silence. “What is this thing. Nadezna?” I asked at last. “Is it a new religion?”

“What is a religion?”

I was silent. I couldn’t answer that one.

“As I see it,” she said thoughtfully, “it’s a way of life that brings men to worship through their work, who wouldn’t worship in the old-fashioned way. If that’s what a religion is, I suppose this is one. But does it matter what we call it?”

I shook my head. “The only thing is to accept it, and just see what happens. After all, there isn’t any harm in it.”

“No harm at all,” she said. “Only a lot of good.”

There was a tension in Bahrein in those last days before we left for Bali. I wrote a note to Major Hereward telling him what I proposed to do, and I got a short and not unfriendly reply in acknowledgment. I did not see him again before we left, nor did Connie. On the Friday Connie asked for a Proctor to go over to the Sheikh of Khulal at Baraka, and Gujar flew him over; nothing seemed to happen as a result of that. Years later Gujar Singh told me that the visit had averted a major clash between the Sheikh and the Resident, and Johnson of the Arabia-Sumatran once hinted at the same thing. But at the time I knew nothing of all that.

There were more worshippers than ever at the sunset prayers outside of the hangar in those last few days. Each evening more bus loads of men arrived from the souk and the surrounding district; on the last evening before we took off for Bali there must have been nearly five hundred people there, including the Imam, who led the
Rakats
. I know I counted eleven buses parked by the roadside, and some of them had made more than one journey. Many of these people were what in Bahrein would pass as intellectuals, grave, white-bearded old men in flowing Arab clothes. But with them there were men who had to do with things mechanical; every taxi driver and every truck driver in the district must have been there, and men from the waterworks and from the refineries, and from the electrical power station. We had a failure of the power supply that night.

There was no demonstration, and no sign of any emotion. They came and lined up for their prayers outside the hangar with the
Imam leading in the motions of the
Rakats
. They went through it all as I had seen them do so many times before, only now there were far more of them. None of them seemed to pay any attention to Connie and the other non-Moslems kneeling apart, and after it was over they went back to their buses and got into them; the engines started up and the old vehicles moved off. There were no speeches, no farewells, no protests or debate. Watching this from a distance, I was vaguely uneasy. It seemed unnatural that if they loved him well enough to come out of the town to pray with him, that they should go so quietly. It didn’t seem right to me, but then, I reflected, I knew nothing really about the East.

We loaded up the Tramp before dawn next day. There were eleven great metal rods that I was told were drills, each about six inches in diameter and nine feet long, swathed in sacking; these weighed together about four tons. There were five passengers from the Arabia-Sumatran, one of whom was getting off in Central Burma and two at Diento; the other two were going through to the East Alligator River with the drills. Then there was Arjan Singh as pilot and myself as co-pilot, and Connie and Phinit travelling with us to Bali. All told, we had a pretty full load, even for a Tramp.

We took off for Karachi with the first light, and I left everything to Arjan Singh, only flying the machine myself while he was at the navigator’s table. The route eastwards was becoming a well-worn track to me by that time, but my pilots had flown it less frequently, and I was anxious for them to get in the maximum experience. We went up to about ten thousand feet in dusty air conditions, so that it was difficult to see the ground or sea except immediately below, and navigated by radio; we got fixes from Bahrein and Sharjah till we were well past Bandar Abbas, and soon after that we picked up the broadcasting station at Karachi and began to home on that, getting a few cross bearings from Jiwani as we passed.

We began to lose height when we were half an hour out from Karachi. The dust haze was quite thick and Arjan had to be on the job of piloting the whole time. To help him I relieved him of the radio work, and picked up the microphone and called the
airport to announce our arrival in their zone. “Karachi Tower, this is George Able Nan How Victor, from Bahrein. E.T.A. one one five zero, Zebra. Over.”

A high-pitched, Pakistani voice speaking clipped English acknowledged the call and cleared us into the zone. I laid the microphone down and told Arjan; I kept the headphones on and the set going, on a listening watch. And a couple of minutes later they came through again.

“George Able Nan How Victor, this is Karachi Tower,” said the Control officer. His English was not very easy to understand. “Is … on board your aircraft? Over.”

I could not get the missing words, and asked him to repeat. This time he spoke more clearly and distinctly. “Is Mr. Shak Lin on board your aircraft?”

“Karachi Tower,” I said, “Roger. Shak Lin is on board.”

“How Victor, Roger. Thank you. Out.”

One cannot ask questions about non-essential matters on the radio, and it was difficult to understand the Control officer on any but the standard routine calls. I sat wondering, uneasy, for a few minutes; then I passed the microphone to Arjan and got out of my seat, and went down the ladder to the cabin and to Connie, seated behind the load. “Karachi Tower have just asked if you were on board,” I said. “Are they expecting you?”

He shook his head. “Not that I know of.”

“Well,” I observed, “they are.”

“Somebody must have got on the blower from Bahrein,” he said. He meant the radio telephone that connects the aerodromes all down the eastern route; the operators are talking to each other all the time.

I nodded. “Thought you’d like to know.”

“Thanks.”

I went back to the cockpit and slipped into my seat again. Arjan knew the Karachi district very well and found the airship hangar without difficulty in the thick haze, and we got cleared for landing as we passed down wind, and put down on the one long runway, and taxied to the Control tower. As we swung round into wind and stopped the engines, I saw brown men in overalls
running towards us down the tarmac from the hangars. I pointed them out to Arjan Singh.

He nodded. “I think they know that Shak Lin is with us.”

I slipped down into the cabin and went first to the door. When I opened it, the first man I saw was Salim, the Pakistani ground engineer who had been with us at Bahrein, and who had left to take a job with Sind Airways here in Karachi. I said, “Hullo, Salim. How goes it?”

“I am very well, Mr. Cutter, thank you,” he replied. “Mr. Cutter, is Shak Lin with you?”

“He’s here,” I said. “Do you want to see him?”

“Oh, yes. Many, many people here want to see him.”

I got out of the machine. “Don’t keep him too long, Salim,” I said. “We’ve got to go on as soon as we’ve refuelled. I’m going through to Ahmedabad today.”

“May we have one hour?” he said. There was a considerable crowd behind him now, brown men in oil-stained overalls, and more were coming up. “It is important to us, Mr. Cutter. Just one hour.”

It would take us most of that time to get refuelled and get the necessary clearances from the Control. I glanced at my watch. “All right.” My watch was all wrong of course, and I glanced at the airport clock. And then there was a low murmur from the crowd, and several of the men touched their foreheads. I turned, and Connie was standing behind me in the door. I said, “Connie, I want to take off in about an hour. Let’s say three o’clock, local time by that clock. Salim here wants you.”

He nodded. “Okay. I shall be ready.”

He got out of the aircraft and went away towards the hangars with Salim and the crowd, and from the airport building officials in blue uniforms, customs officers perhaps, or bus drivers, came out and went with them, making a small stream of people down the tarmac in the brilliant sun.

The Shell refuelling truck arrived and Arjan Singh gave them the instructions, and we left Phinit in charge and went up to the Control office with the documents and log books. I knew the Controller slightly from previous visits; he was a lean, brown Pakistani who had been in the Royal Indian Air Force in the war.
His name was Khalil. He smiled when he saw me and I offered him a cigarette, and we smoked together while Arjan got on with the job with one of his assistants.

He asked, “You are taking off again at once?”

“In an hour. My chief engineer is with me, Mr. Shak Lin, and they want to see him in the hangar. Was I speaking to you about him on the R/T?”

“Not to me personally,” he said, “but I passed the message. The men down there, especially those working for Sind Airways, wanted to know very much if he was coming.”

“They know about him here, do they?”

He smiled. “Oh, yes, they know about him. We call his method here the New Maintenance. It seems to be a system which maintains an aeroplane according to ethical principles, so far as I can understand it. Is that right?”

“I’m blowed if I know,” I said. “My men have all been very devout since Shak Lin came to work for me, and the maintenance has been first class. I’ve let it go at that.”

“That is what the managing director of Sind Airways tells me, that the men have become devout and the work has greatly improved.” He hesitated. “Some of my staff go down sometimes to the hangar for the sunset prayers,” and though he would not admit it to an infidel like me, I knew that he was telling me that he was in the habit of going himself. “I think it is a very good thing.”

“I think it is,” I said. I left Arjan Singh to get the met, report and clearances for Ahmedabad, and went down to the restaurant for a quick meal. There was a chap there called Harrison who had been a pilot in Alamaza during the war; he was working for a small charter company operating from Bombay now; I knew him slightly, and went over to talk to him.

“My word, Cutter,” he said, “your G.E.’s have started something, haven’t they?”

“I don’t interfere with what they do,” I said. “If Asiatics like to say their prayers, it’s not for us to try and stop it.”

“All going round the bend, if you ask me,” he said. “You can’t get a thing done up here until they’ve said a prayer or two, and now it’s starting in Bombay. I came in yesterday in a Commuter,
and she was missing a bit on the front bank, so I took her in to Sind Airways for a plug change. It was like being in a bloody church.”