The Day of the Scorpion (14 page)

‘Is that what you believe?’

‘It’s what I am told. People are always warning us. It is well known. Fortunately, unlike my father I have never felt the urge to make friends with any Englishman, or Englishwoman. But it is interesting to observe them. It is interesting to come across one of the friendly ones, like the elder Miss Layton. It is like being a student of chemistry, knowing a formula, waiting to see it proved in a laboratory test.’

‘Your glass is empty. Help yourself.’

Ahmed got up to do so. Bronowsky held his own glass out as Ahmed was passing him. Ahmed took it, but for a moment the older man retained his own hold on it.

‘Have you kept your promise to me and written to your father?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘The same reason as always. I begin writing and stop, there isn’t anything to say, and even if there were every word would be read by someone else before the letter reached him. It is very off-putting. I write to my mother. She tells him what I am doing.’

‘It isn’t the same.’

Ahmed, in possession of Bronowsky’s glass, went to the drinks trolley and poured generous measures of White Horse: two fingers for himself, three for Bronowsky. He filled both glasses almost to the brim with soda-water and came back to the chair where Bronowsky sat looking up with his good eye half shut as if measuring an effect. Ahmed offered him the replenished glass, but Bronowsky did not take it immediately.

‘It isn’t the same,’ he repeated. ‘Is it?’

‘No, but he’s used to the idea that I’m a disappointing sort of son.’

Bronowsky now grasped the base of the tumbler and when Ahmed felt it held securely he let go.

‘You are more used to it than he is,’ Bronowsky said. ‘I think the idea that you’re a disappointment to him has become your basic security. You’d feel lost without it. You
know, dear boy, the most disturbing thing that happened to me when I was about your age was discovering that my father approved a particular step I proposed to take.’

‘What step was that?’

‘Marriage. The girl was my cousin, we weren’t in love, but she would probably have made me a good wife and we always got on well enough together. I decided on marriage because I thought my father particularly disliked her. I anticipated the most vigorous opposition. Instead he embraced me. He almost wept. Really very alarming. I cooled off the idea at once. I felt some regret, of course. Perhaps I loved her after all. But I felt better directly I told him I’d changed my mind. He turned away without a word, but with his old comforting look of utter disdain. I felt secure again and never again felt insecure until he died. Then I had to earn his posthumous disapproval in a variety of ways, doing things I felt he would despise me for. Making liberal gestures rather popular at the time among intellectual landowners. Not gestures I had my heart in, but then you don’t need your heart in good to do it. I did the right thing for the wrong reasons, which is what you are doing, efficiently carrying out the job you are paid for, even earning the approbation of the ungracious Mrs Grace. But you are carrying it out well because you think your father disapproved of your taking it and would be ashamed to know that a woman like Mrs Grace described you as a potentially first-rate hotel manager. You want him to be ashamed because his being ashamed of you is what you understand. You feel exactly the same about it as another boy might feel about his father being proud of him. Determined to keep it up. But the question you should ask yourself is whether he is ashamed. Has he ever been? Isn’t it truer to say you grew up in a household where clear views were held on a number of questions that concern India, that you expected to inherit this clarity as you might inherit a share of the household goods and chattels and were startled to find you didn’t. Startled is the wrong word. It was obviously a much slower process. But the upshot of it all was compensation for feelings of inadequacy, transference of your disappointment. You imagined the disappointment was your father’s. But perhaps the truth was that he observed your struggles to take
an interest with affection and compassion but didn’t know how to help you. You didn’t make things easier by withdrawing from him although what you were really doing was withdrawing from yourself. It’s because you are fond of him that you don’t write to him in prison.’

Ahmed smiled.

‘You shouldn’t be afraid of your emotions,’ Bronowsky continued. ‘In any case to be afraid of them is un-Indian. Now there’s a danger for you if you like. You young men ought to watch out for it – losing your Indian-ness. It’s a land of extremes, after all, it needs men with extremes of temperament. All this Western sophistication, plus the non-Western cult of non-violence, is utterly unnatural. One without the other might do but the combination of the two strikes me as disastrous. After all the sophistication of the West is only a veneer. Underneath it we are a violent people. But you Indians see no deeper than our surface. Add to that the non-violence cult and the result is emasculation.’

Ahmed grinned. Bronowsky said, ‘Fornication can be a refuge as well as an entertainment. Your visits to the Chandi Chowk are no proof of your masculinity, dear boy.’

‘Oh well, what am I to do? Raise an army to release the prisoners in the Fort at Premanagar?’

‘You could do worse. In fact I can think of nothing more splendid. It interests me that it’s the first thing that occurs to you. Such a passionate idea. How could the world fail to respond to it? It’s what sons are for, to lead armies to deliver their fathers from fortresses. The British would lock you up for ever. They would laugh as well, of course, because projects obviously doomed to failure have their comical side, but they would laugh unmaliciously. They would respect you. On the other hand if you announced your intention to fast unto death if they didn’t release your father they’d let you get on with it. They’d feed you forcibly. They’d be furious with you for attempting moral blackmail. I must say I’d sympathize with them. Non-violence is ridiculous. I’m not in favour of it. Can you stay to dinner?’

‘No, I had a sudden invitation from Professor Nair.’

‘What is he up to?’

‘Nothing he tells me about.’

‘Perhaps you don’t listen hard enough. He’s always up to something. Nawab Sahib expects to be kept informed. He will be back on Friday, incidentally.’

‘Did you enjoy your visit to Gopalakand?’

‘It was amusing. I left Nawab Sahib to enjoy himself a few days longer. He will be pleased with poems of Gaffur. Which of them thought of it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Have they been into the palace?’

‘I took them over the public rooms this morning. Will Nawab Sahib be going to the reception?’

‘He will if I say so. I think I shall say so. What is arranged for tomorrow?’

‘They are going shopping again. But in the morning before breakfast Miss Layton wants to ride.’

‘Which Miss Layton?’

‘The inquisitive one. Miss Sarah.’

‘Alone?’

‘I’m expected to ride with her I think.’ Ahmed sipped his whisky. ‘I shall keep a respectful few paces behind, naturally.’

‘Do you think she has her mother’s permission, or that of this Captain Bingham?’

‘I didn’t ask. I exist to carry out orders.’

‘Don’t be upset if you find you’ve got up early and had horses saddled for nothing. Her mother or Captain Bingham might veto her little jaunt if she’s arranged it without mentioning it and they find out about it.’

‘Oh, I shan’t be upset.’

‘Who else is there in the wedding party?’

‘A Major Grace is arriving on Friday. He is the bride’s uncle. Captain Bingham’s friend sometimes visits – a Captain Merrick. He will be best man.’

‘Merrick?’

‘Yes. Do you know him?’

‘I don’t think so. Merrick. A vaguely familiar name. But in some other connection—? Well, you’d better be off if you’re dining with Nair.’

Ahmed drained his glass and returned it to the trolley. ‘Thanks for the drink,’ he said, and stood for a moment
looking down at Bronowsky, who never shook hands or exchanged formal greetings or farewells with people he looked upon as intimates. For a man of nearly seventy, Ahmed thought, he had worn very well. His face was unlined, his complexion pink. In the early years of his administration as chief minister in Mirat the anti-Bronowsky faction – said to have been headed by the late Begum – had nearly succeeded in poisoning him. His rows with the Nawab were almost legendary. They still occurred. But his influence over the Nawab was now thought to be complete.

Ahmed himself owed his position at the court to Bronowsky although it had taken some time for this to become clear to him. Originally he had thought it was the Nawab who had the notion of taking under his wing the unsatisfactory younger son of a distant but distinguished kinsman, a boy who had failed abysmally at college and showed no aptitude for any career of the kind open to a Kasim of the Ranpur branch: law, politics, the civil service. True, it was Bronowsky who had written the letters and even visited Ranpur but he appeared to do so in the capacity of agent, not principal, and gave no impression of himself caring one way or the other about the outcome of the Nawab’s invitation. To Ahmed that invitation looked like one founded on charity rather than on interest and he believed it looked like that to his father, with whom discussion had been brief. His father was then still head of the provincial ministry, a busy man, and a worried man, almost entirely wrapped in the business of protesting the Viceroy’s declaration of war on Germany without prior consultation with Indian leaders. By the time Ahmed reached Mirat his father, following Congress instructions, had resigned.

But, ‘Well,
you
are safe,’ the Nawab had said to Ahmed when they had news of M A K’s arrest in 1942. ‘You are under our protection. For this you must thank Count Bronowsky.’ Why Bronowsky? Ahmed asked; and learned that it was the wazir’s idea, not the Nawab’s, that he should come to Mirat to learn something about the administration of a Native State. ‘While you have been here,’ the Nawab continued, ‘you will have heard many adverse things about Bronowsky Sahib. It is not unknown for me to think and say adverse
things about him myself. What you should know about him, however, is that his loyalty to the House of Kasim is without parallel even among Kasims, and that it is the future of the House he always thinks of.’

It was a loyalty Ahmed had not got the measure of, and he did not understand where he fitted in with whatever Bronowsky saw as the pattern of a scheme to promote the interests of Kasims. In the past year he had been aware of Bronowsky’s appraisal; before that Bronowsky had scarcely taken any notice of him. His duties had been of an almost menial clerical kind, those of dogsbody to one official’s secretary after another. The officials had grandiloquent titles. Ahmed had worked under the secretary to the Minister for Finance, under the secretary to the Minister for Education, under the secretary to the Minister for Public Works, under the secretary to the Minister for Health, under the chief clerk to the Attorney-General. Most of these ministers were related to the Nawab, two bore the name of Kasim. All were nominated by the Nawab and served as members of his Council of State.

The Council of State was Bronowsky’s brain-child. In the twenty years of his administration he had transformed Mirat from a feudal autocracy where Ruler met ruled only at periodical durbars into a miniature semi-democratic state where the durbars still took place but where the machinery of government was brought out of the dark recesses of rooms and passages in the palace into, comparatively, the light of day.

He had separated the judiciary from the executive, reframed the criminal and civil legal codes, created the position of Chief Justice and during his chief ministership so far always succeeded in appointing to it a man from outside Mirat whose impartiality could be counted on – in one case an Englishman just retired from the bench of a provincial High Court of British India. Bronowsky had done all these things with a minimum of overt opposition because it was to do them that the Nawab brought him back from Monte Carlo in 1921. ‘I must be a modern state,’ the Nawab was reported saying. ‘Make me modern.’ What Bronowsky did by way of making the Nawab of Mirat modern was also the means by
which he gradually cut the ground from under the feet of British officials of the Political Department who objected to the appointment of a ‘bloody
émigré
Russian’ as chief minister of a state with which, small it was, they had always had what they felt to be a special relationship. For all they knew Bronowsky was a red, a spy, a man who would cause trouble and feather his nest at the same time.

The Resident at Gopalakand who advised the Nawab of Mirat as well as the Maharajah of Gopalakand had protested the appointment of Bronowsky and the sacking of the Nawab’s brother to make room for him. Before the present Nawab succeeded as Ruler the British had thought badly of him, had favoured the brother who struck them as altogether more amiable, a more malleable, more temperate man – not given as the heir apparent was given to wild and extravagant behaviour with money and women. The ruler in those days, the present Nawab’s father, was anxious for nothing so much as to live in peace with the representatives of the paramount power. He listened attentively to their stern warnings about his elder son’s sowing of wild oats, reacted as they intended he should react to hints that if the boy didn’t mend his ways he would never be thought fit to rule Mirat – whereas the old Nawab’s second son was a model of a young prince. Such a model son, succeeding, would certainly be confirmed by the King-Emperor’s agents. In his case there would be no danger of an interregnum, no danger of Mirat’s affairs coming under the direct control of the political department. The old man began to manœuvre for a position from which he could effectively disinherit his elder son in favour of the younger. The elder got wind of the plot, but it was luck that came to his rescue, luck in the shape of a proposal for marriage with the daughter of the ruler of a less ancient but far more powerful state with whom the British had an even closer relationship. The old Nawab was flattered. He attempted to arrange the alliance, but through the marriage of the girl to his younger son. The girl would have none of it. She had seen the man she wanted, through the zenana screen at a wedding celebration. The marriage took place as she wished. The old Nawab – and the British too – hoped that perhaps the
marriage would see the end of the elder son’s extravagances. It did not. He had only married the girl to secure his inheritance. The British, he knew, would never dare depose him now because to do so would outrage and insult the powerful father-in-law he had so fortunately acquired. When his father died he was confirmed in the succession. His Begum, headstrong as an unmarried girl became intolerable as his wife. He hated her. He hated the brother who had tried to steal his inheritance and who now, following the tradition, had become his chief minister – and a lickspittle of the British. The Nawab took mistresses, eventually a white woman. The scandal had begun. Out of the scandal Bronowsky emerged.