The Day of the Scorpion (72 page)

‘Then I had better go back and continue in that relatively comfortable state of personal inconvenience.’

‘You can’t go back, Father. They won’t let you. I know Mother talks about hoping you’ll agree, but she’s got into the habit of thinking you have a choice, and knows you’d choose what you see as the honourable way. But the plain fact is they’re chucking you out of the Fort. They pretend it’s a compassionate release and men like the Governor may actually feel sorry for you. He obviously knew you well enough to guess you’d feel disgraced, and not proud, about Sayed. But if he knows you as well as that, the kindest thing would have been to keep you in prison, because being in prison is your one current public badge of honour, isn’t it?’

‘You have never thought so!’ the old man cried. ‘You have always been ashamed. Why? Do you think I have not been ashamed too? You think it is a matter of pride to look out of a window and know that this is as much as you will be allowed to see of the world? No! It is not a badge of honour, it is one of humiliation. But there are circumstances in which you weigh one humiliation against another, and choose. I have chosen many times before and I can choose again.’

Kasim sat. He took the white cap off and placed it on the table.

‘No, Father. You can’t choose. At least I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t think so. We’ll see. Let them take me forcibly to Mirat. But then let them stop me returning to Ranpur.’

‘To do what? Something that will force them to arrest you again? What sort of thing will that be? They only arrested you last time because of your loyalty to the Congress. Wouldn’t most of your time be spent persuading your friends and the wives of your colleagues who are still in prison that your release isn’t a reward for making a deal with the Governor, or with Jinnah? When a man comes out of political detention and there’s no amnesty to explain it his friends want to know why.’

‘There is always the truth.’

‘About Sayed? What will you do? Talk to your Congress friends as you’ve talked to me? Call Sayed a traitor? You might just as well write your letter of resignation now, and apply to Jinnah for membership of the League. Not that Jinnah would touch you with a barge-pole if you took that line with him. He’ll have to call Sayed a patriot too, if he values his career as a future minister.’

Kasim looked up from contemplation of the cap. The sunken eyes glittered. ‘To whom have you been talking? Obviously not your mother. To these representatives of Government? To my feeble-minded kinsman, the Nawab? To that European paederast, that
émigré
Wazir?’

‘I’ve talked to all of them, but not about this.’

‘No?’

Kasim looked again at the cap. ‘Then I must apologize for having underestimated you. I had assumed your dissociation from the kind of affairs that have been the central concern of my life was a mask for your failure to understand them. But your assessment of my present position is shrewd, and I am indebted to you for bothering to open my eyes to it. Since one of my sons turns out to be a deserter and a traitor, it is some compensation to realize that the other one is not stupid, as I thought.’

Ahmed glanced down at the floor. He supposed he had invited it. It was only fair that his father should hurt him too.
But when he looked up again he found his father’s eyes closed and head bent forward. For a long time neither of them spoke. It was his father who broke the silence.

‘I am sorry. You did not deserve that. Forgive me. And you have come all this way to meet me. In prison you forget that time doesn’t stand still, that circumstances change and that without your knowing it you yourself are carried forward with them. It is a shock to come out and discover it. It is difficult to adjust. I must thank you for perhaps having saved me from too hastily making impractical or anachronistic gestures.’

He put his hands on the table, folded, attempting an illusion of unimpaired competence and capacity. But Ahmed guessed that the hands clasped one another to disguise evidence of a sudden and frightening lack of confidence.

‘Presently,’ the ex-chief minister said, ‘you must call in these patient English officials, but there are a few points I wish to be clear on first. Was it the Governor or the Nawab who suggested I should be released from the Fort and sent to Mirat?’

‘The Governor, through his representative. Mother asked me to find out if the Nawab would agree.’

‘Then we need not concern ourselves with the Nawab’s or his Wazir’s motives, but only bear in mind what future political advantage they may see accruing from their generosity. Secondly. What reasons did the Governor give for making the suggestion?’

‘None. At least, not in so many words, but the connection was clear enough, I suppose. The representative told Mother the news about Sayed and then said that the Governor had taken advice—’

‘Advice?’

‘The inference was that there had been a discussion with the Viceroy. The Governor said he’d be prepared to release you into the protection of anyone acceptable to both sides, and suggested the Nawab. He promised Mother that if she got the Nawab’s approval the release would be arranged immediately.’

‘But—?’

‘There weren’t any buts. Except for the condition of
secrecy until the release had taken place. The Government will then report it as due to a concern for your health.’

‘
My
health?’

‘From their point of view it must be more acceptable that way round. I imagine they don’t want an epidemic of Congress wives with fatal illnesses certified as authentic by Congress-minded doctors.’

‘You miss the point that the Governor imagines it is also more acceptable from my point of view. He offers me an alibi that might stand me in good stead later on when my less fortunate colleagues are released.’

‘No, Father. I hadn’t missed that point.’ He hesitated. ‘There’s one other thing, the Governor said that arrangements could be made for you to talk to Sayed.’

They stared at one another.

‘And this is all?’ Kasim asked suddenly, ignoring Ahmed’s last remark. ‘Nothing is said about the expected duration of my illness, nor about the conditions in which I am to live?’

‘You’ll have a private suite of rooms in the summer palace in Nanoora. We’ll drive first to Mirat. The Nawab’s private train will be waiting there for us. Mother is on it. So is Bronowsky. The Nawab’s at the summer palace.’

‘Which of course is heavily guarded.’

‘Not heavily.’

‘But where nevertheless I shall be incommunicado. I hope Bronowsky understands that Nanoora will suffer from a slight increase in the population in the form of inquisitive newspapermen anxious for every scrap of information they can pick up or invent about my state of health and mind?’

‘He’s going to issue bulletins. You won’t be pestered.’

‘You mean I shan’t be allowed to be pestered. Well – my kinsman the Nawab of Mirat will be a more considerate jailer than Government, and in this matter you are right, I have no choice. But I am still their prisoner and this time your mother joins me. It is a sacrifice she will willingly make, but it is one I would have spared her. Do you understand that, Ahmed?’

‘Yes, I think so.’ He waited, but his father seemed to have no more to say. He was staring at the white cap again. ‘Shall I go and tell them you’re ready?’ The old man nodded, but
when Ahmed was about to open the door he was stopped by the sound of the voice continuing.

‘What have you been trying to tell me?’

Ahmed turned round.

‘That I should bow to the inevitable as I bow to this new humiliation? That I should prepare myself to play along with the crowd and so ensure my political future? Or that I should acknowledge defeat and retire from politics and grow onions to ward off the chills of old age? Have you ever tasted onions that flourish in the dry weather on mugs of shaving water begged from the prison barber on every second day? It is an interesting flavour. Perhaps it is only in the imagination that one tastes soap. But then the imagination of an ageing man is severely limited and prey to all kinds of quaint illusions and expectations.’

Kasim looked up. ‘Unfortunately,’ the old man said, ‘we have only one life to live and we are granted only one notion of what makes it worth living. It isn’t easy to write that notion off as mistaken or the life we live in pursuit of it as wasted.’

‘I know.’

‘Do you? You will. But not yet. You’re young and your life is all before you.’

Yes, but what kind of life? Ahmed wondered. The life he lived now wasn’t his own because he lived it in the dense shadows of his father’s life and of the lives of men like him. He longed to grope his way out and cast a shadow of his own. The longing was so intense that his blood stirred. It was as if a voice inside him cried out: Rebel! Rebel!

But Rebel against what? In India only one kind of rebellion was possible, and that kind had become an old man’s game. They had played it a long time and it wasn’t over yet. The game and the men had grown old together and India had grown old with them.

‘Well?’ Kasim asked. ‘What are you waiting for? Go and fetch them, or are you going to explain what you’ve been trying to tell me? Which of the two alternatives you think I should choose?’

Ahmed hesitated. The game had gone wrong but his father had always played it honourably. No doubt he would do so to
the end. What was sad was the fact that his father was not looking for a country for himself but for his sons, and they could never inhabit it because a country was a state of mind and a man could properly exist only in his own. In his father’s India, the India his father
was
, Ahmed felt himself an exile; but an exile from where he didn’t know. His mind was not clear enough to penetrate the shadows of other men’s beliefs which lay across it; and before these beliefs – so sure and positive, so vigorously upheld by words of challenge and acts of sacrifice – he felt stupidly unformed and incoherent. Perhaps it was a beginning of coherence for him to have understood the nature of his father’s problem, and to have spoken out. But farther than that he could not go. Could not? Should not, rather. The problem was his father’s, not his; and the hands the problem was in were safe enough. The old man would never compromise. Neither would he give up the fight. The sight of him sitting there, waiting to confront three men he thought of as his country’s oppressors, moved Ahmed to despair and melancholy pride. The bizarre notion struck him that if only there were a mirror in the room he would take it down from the wall and put it on the table and say: ‘There’s the India you’re eating out your heart looking for.’ In the shape of his father’s prison-diminished body, he felt for such an India an undemanding, a boundless love, and for an instant in his own heart and bones he understood his father’s youthful longing and commitment and how it had never truly been fulfilled, and had never been corrupted, so that even in an old man’s body it shone like something new and untried and full of promise.

But there was something missing; and knowing what it was and how he could cover up his silence and indecision and at the same time convey to his father something of what he felt he went to the table, picked up the white Congress cap and offered it.

‘You’ve forgotten this,’ he said. ‘They pretend to laugh at it, but of course they’re afraid of it really. If they see it on the table they might come to the wrong conclusion.’

His father stared at the cap, then bent his head. Ahmed put the cap on for him, gave it a jaunty tilt. His father’s hands touched his, seeking to impose an adjustment. ‘No, straight,’
he said. ‘And firm,’ and muttered something which Ahmed only partly caught.

But outside, on the veranda, he caught the whole of it. The sky was lighter and the Fort stood immense and dark and implacable; mercilessly near. ‘Straight and firm,’ his father had said – ‘like a crown of thorns.’

EPILOGUE

And after all it seemed that Susan had held somewhere in the back of her mind a memory of the day she once told Sarah she had forgotten: the day Dost Mohammed made a little circle of kerosene-soaked cotton-waste, set light to it and then opened a circular tin, shook it, and dropped the small black scorpion into the centre of the ring of fire. Poised, belligerent, the armoured insect moved stiffly, quickly – stabbing its arched tail, once, twice, three times. Sarah felt the heat on her face and drew back. When the flames died down the scorpion was still. Dost Mohammed touched it gingerly with a twig and then, getting no response, scooped the body into the tin.

‘Is it whole?’ Susan asked. For a while she had this strange idea that it couldn’t be because it had been born nearly a month too soon. She received the child in her arms reluctantly, fearing that even at this stage one of them might destroy the other; or, failing this, that she would find some vestigial trace or growth which a few more weeks’ gestation would have taken care of. What will you call him? people asked. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘A name is so important. How can I choose an important thing like that entirely on my own?’

Susan had had a bad time. ‘But,’ Mrs Layton said, ‘she was a brick.’ And so it was generally agreed. A brick. Like her mother. Among those who knew the Laytons only one person withheld praise of the way in which Mildred Layton had coped in Sarah’s absence and this was Barbie who maintained a tight-lipped, red-eyed silence, and made preparations for departure from a place of refuge that had not proved permanent. Perhaps it was to Mr Maybrick that she
spoke confidentially and through Mr Maybrick that a story gained subterranean currency that Mildred Layton had ridden roughshod over her suggestion that Mabel had wanted to be buried in St Luke’s cemetery in Ranpur, next to her second husband, and not in the cemetery of St John’s. Had Mabel ever expressed such a preference? Perhaps she had, but only to Barbie, and there was nothing in the Will to confirm it. Even if there had been, who could blame Mildred for the hasty arrangements made to inter her stepmother-in-law’s body in Pankot within twenty-four hours of the old woman’s sudden death? What else could she have done, with Susan in labour brought on by the shock of witnessing that death, alone, on the veranda of Rose Cottage? The expense, the inconvenience (the sheer horror, if you liked) of packing the old woman with ice and transporting her to Ranpur would have been intolerable, and it was more important to help a new life into the world than to be certain that the remains of a spent one were buried in a place one had only an old maid’s word had been the place desired by the departed.