The Day of the Scorpion (10 page)

‘You are young,’ Sir Ahmed Akbar told his son. ‘Your heart is stronger than your head. When you are as old as I am you will not be so confused by these emotional issues. You think Jallianwallah was a new experience? You are wrong. You think the Indian Congress can ensure that it will be the last episode of this kind? You will be wrong again. You think Jallianwallah proves that the British are lying, talking freedom but acting tyrannically and dealing destruction? Again you are wrong. Jallianwallah could never have happened if the British who talk freedom were not sincere. It happened because they are sincere. They have frightened their opponents with their sincerity. I do not mean us. We are not their opponents. Their opponents, the ones who matter but who will matter less and less, are also British. They are men like General Dyer. Why do you call that man a monster? He believed God had charged him with a duty to save the empire. He believed this sincerely, just as he believed sincerely that in Amritsar there was to be found an invidious threat to that empire. Why do you repeat parrot-fashion that the English are hypocrites? With this you can never charge them. You can only charge them with sincerity and of being divided among themselves about what it is right to be sincere about. It is only an insincere people that can be accused of hyprocrisy. Sometimes I think we are the hypocrites because
we have lived too long as a subject people to remember what sincerity means, or to know from one day to the next what we believe in.

‘Look’ (the old man said, and showed Mohammed Ali a slip of paper), ‘do you know what this is? It is a cheque for the rupee equivalent of one hundred pounds made out in my name by an Englishwoman. In exchange for it I am charged to send my own draft to the fund for the Jallianwallah widows and orphans, and not to reveal the name of the donor. Perhaps you think this smells a bit of hypocrisy. To me it smells only of sincerity. It is a straw in the wind which proves to me that for a long time I have been correct in my forecast of which way the wind would blow.

‘You look at the English people you meet. Some of them you like. Some you hate. Many you are indifferent to. But even the ones you like do not matter. The ones who matter you will never see – they are tucked away in England – and they are indifferent to us as individuals. You think these officials over here rule us? These viceroys, these governors, these commissioners and commanders-in-chief and brigadier-generals? Then you are wrong. We are ruled by people who do not even know where Ranpur is. But now they know where Jallianwallah Bagh is and what it is, and many of them do not like what they know. Those of them who
do
like what they know are the ones you hear about and hear from. Like the General at Amritsar they are frightened people and frightened people shriek the loudest and fire at random.

‘Ah, well, they were Indians who actually died at Amritsar, but the Jallianwallah Bagh was also the scene of a suicide. There will be other such scenes. It takes a long time for a new nation to be born, and a long time for an old nation to die by its own hand. You will hasten nothing by failing to distinguish between the English who really rule us and the English who interpret and administer that rule. Haven’t you yet understood that we are part and parcel of the Englishmen’s own continual state of social and political evolvement and that to share the fruits we must share the labour and abide by the rules they abide by?’

‘You mean,’ Mohammed Ali said, ‘submit to being shot down for protesting the freedom to speak our minds?’

‘For this they have shot down their own people, and not so long ago. Out here we shall always be a step behind whatever progress the English make at home.’

Mohammed Ali smiled. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we shall be several steps ahead.’

For a while the old man was silent, not because his son had stumped him. He was merely considering the violent landscape so casually mapped.

‘Perhaps I am too old,’ he said eventually. ‘I can’t see small print without my spectacles and even then I get a headache. I think the lady who donated this money also finds it difficult to read the small print. She is anyway only concerning herself with the capital letters of an ancient contract. In
your
contract is
everything
writ large, or is it that your eyesight is superhuman?’

John Layton was in his twenty-sixth year when he came back to India in 1919. In the last year of his service abroad he was acting adjutant of the battalion. On returning to Ranpur he relinquished the appointment to an officer of the 2nd Battalion who was senior to him. Temporarily he was without regimental employment. He was the natural choice for the role of Recruiting Officer Sahib. He went up to Pankot in May, with Mabel. They lived in the bungalow near the golf course that he had shared with the senior subaltern in the October and November of 1913.

Both Mabel and his father had talked of retiring to Pankot when the time came. They had had their eye on a place called Rose Cottage, inconveniently placed on the other side of the main hill dominated by the Governor’s Summer Residence but to them the most attractive of the few privately owned houses and bungalows: attractive because of its garden, its views, and the fact that it was owned by an elderly widower who had been in tea in Assam and couldn’t be expected to live much longer.

Layton’s father had not been a rich man. What little he left Mabel inherited, but she had money of her own and money from her first husband who had died well-breeched in spite of
having lived extravagantly. Since Mabel was childless he would eventually inherit everything. It would be useful. In peace-time an officer found it virtually impossible to live on his pay – he was not expected to – few attempted to however simple their tastes – he found it quite impossible to save. To serve the empire he needed money of his own. For the moment Layton had no worries on this score. Until his death his civilian father had paid sums of money into his account whenever he could afford them; and Layton suspected – surprised at the amount standing to his credit – that Mabel had contributed regular sums herself. Furthermore she declared her intention of handing over to him in full the principal she had inherited from his father, and the accumulated interest, directly he got married. Such funds together with what he had been able to save while on active service represented the kind of basic security without which a man of his kind would feel at a disadvantage when it came to thinking of the future in terms of fatherhood and of a proper education for his children.

When his Surrey grandfather died – and the old boy surely couldn’t go on much longer – he imagined he would inherit the Surrey property into the bargain. His own children might spend part of their childhood there, with their mother (whoever she might be) or their grandmother Mabel, or some relation of their mother’s. The long-term plan looked sound. In his twenty-sixth year he felt it was time to be thinking of marriage.

III

The GOC Ranpur, Lieut-General Muir, had three daughters, Lydia, Mildred and Fenella. They were known as Lyddy, Millie and Fenny. 1919 was their first Indian season – the war had postponed it. It was Mildred to whom Layton was most attracted. Fenny was boisterous and silly. Lydia had been engaged to a naval officer at home who was lost in the Atlantic. She bore her loss rather bitterly and Layton distrusted the element of sympathy that would initially enter any relationship a man could have with her. With
Millie he felt at ease, even when they were alone and ran out of things to say to one another.

Mrs Muir was an expert chaperone. Opportunities to be alone with any one of her daughters were neither too few nor too many. It was said that she kept a list of eligible men and that a sign of being on it was the sudden myopia that afflicted that regal eye when you danced out of the ballroom on to the terrace of Flagstaff House and sat one of her daughters down in a place where the artificial light from the crystal chandeliers just failed to illumine the stone flags and the balustrade, but (ideally) lit her eyes and caught some of the facets of the jewellery she was wearing.

He decided after several such meetings that he was in love with Mildred Muir and – which was more important – that she was attracted to him. Eventually he declared his love, proposed to her and having got her acceptance asked the general for an interview, addressed himself to the older man with painstaking old-fashioned formality which (Mildred later told her daughter Sarah) swept the old boy off his feet.

The engagement was announced in September. The May of 1920 was chosen as the ideal time for the marriage. Layton would then have finished his twelve-month tour as Recruiting Officer, and he would be due for long leave. He and Mildred would honeymoon in Kashmir and then take a trip home to England to visit his grandfather in Surrey.

Of these plans his stepmother Mabel seemed to approve although he could not actually get her to talk for long about them. In November he took her back to Ranpur. On his return from the war he had found her living at Smith’s Hotel and to this place she returned now, refusing an invitation from General and Mrs Muir to stay at Flagstaff House. After a weekend with the Muirs Layton went back to Pankot alone and this time found that solitude came easier to him. He rode and spent weekends walking in the hills. News of his progress on such occasions passed from village to village and wherever he went he found himself pressed to accept hospitality and knew that it would not do to refuse it. He was the only son of Layton Sahib and also the sahib who knew best how to tell the story of Subahdar Muzzafir Khan Bahadur’s gallantry. Old and young men gathered round him
in the evenings – and beyond the light cast by the flickering oil-lamps he was often aware of the veiled presence of listening women, and afterwards would sleep the sound sleep of satisfied appetite for food and drink and human correspondence that left in his mind an impression of the hill people’s grave simplicity and cheerful dignity so that he thought ‘Well, home is here,’ and knew that for English people in India there was no home in the sense of brick and mortar, orchard and pasture, but that it was lodged mysteriously in the heart.

Late in the August of 1920, newly returned with his bride from England, he found Mabel still lodging at Smith’s. They stayed with her there for a week before going on up to Pankot to join General and Mrs Muir and Fenny. Lydia had gone back to England with them after the Kashmir honeymoon and had stayed there, declaring that she would never go to India again. She never did. She took a job as secretary to a Bayswater physician, and later married him.

In October Mildred returned to the plains with her husband. Her first baby was due in the second half of March. By then it would be hot and she expressed a wish for the baby to be born in Pankot. There was a nursing home there, part of the hospital and convalescent home that was the Pankot extension of the general hospital in Ranpur. Still without regular regimental employment, Layton acted variously as his father-in-law’s aide and as adjutant of the 1st Pankots, filling a leave vacancy. He sat on courts of inquiry and went on courses. In February 1921 he took Mildred up to Pankot. Mrs Muir accompanied them and so did Fenny. They stayed in the GOC’s summer residence, a section of which was opened up for this unseasonable occupation. Five weeks later, on March 27th, Sarah was born.

Layton was only momentarily disappointed that his first child was a girl. She was a delicate rosy-cheeked image of Mildred and himself with none of that red ancient wrinkled look of the new-born baby. All that lacked to complete his happiness was a home of his own to bring her and her mother
back to when they came out of the Pankot Nursing Home. They stayed throughout that summer in Flagstaff House. He wrote to Mabel asking her to join them, but she seemed to have no liking for the hills now and stayed in Ranpur. She did not see her stepson’s first child until late in the following October, when the Laytons went down to Ranpur. They now had for the first time what could pass as a permanent home – permanent in the transient, military sense. The adjutant of the 1st Pankots had gone to the staff college in Quetta and Layton succeeded to the appointment. He moved his family into the bungalow that was to be their home for the next few years, No. 3 Kabul road, Ranpur: a stuccoed colonnaded structure, well shaded by trees in a large compound with adequate stabling and servants’ quarters, and a lawn where Sarah and Susan (born in Pankot, in 1922) played – mainly under the eye of Dost Mohammed the head
mali
who knew the ways of snakes and scorpions so well that neither child ever saw a live snake and only one living scorpion in the moment when, encircled by a ring of fire created by Dost Mohammed, it arched its tail over its body and (so he said) stung itself to death.

Sarah remembered the scorpion (she watched what Dost Mohammed called its suicide with the detached curiosity of a child) and the garden at No. 3 Kabul road – the shadowy veranda, a dark retreat from the intensity of sunlight; the high-ceilinged bedroom which she shared with Susan, twin child-size beds under twin mosquito nets, and slatted doors which Mumtez, their old ayah, closed at night and guarded, making her bed up against them, sleeping across the threshold. Sarah remembered being woken in the early mornings by the hoarse screeching of the crows. She confused these memories of the old bungalow in Ranpur with other more clearly sustained memories of Pankot; but neither Ranpur nor Pankot struck her when she came back to them, a young woman, as having survived the years of her growing up in England in the way she herself survived them: to her eighteen-year-old eye, in the summer of 1939, their reality
was only a marginally accurate reflection of the mind picture she had of them. There was too much space between the particular places she remembered – places which were strongholds of her childhood recollections – and the strongholds themselves had a prosaicness of brick and mortar that did not match the magical, misty but more vivid impression they had left on her when young, so that returning to them, Pankot and Ranpur – Ranpur particularly – seemed to have spread themselves too thin and yet too thick on the ground for comfort.