NINE

There was no reply to the two letters I wrote Trix, one from Lahore immediately on my return from Simla, and the other after a month, from Allahabad, where I was summoned to, after Wheeler returned from his long vacation in England and took up his old post as editor of the CMG. Both letters were written after much deliberation and underwent so many revisions that upon rereading I could see that my timidity and lack of spontaneity had sucked away any life they might have had in the first draft. I wrote to her that I had ‘strong feelings’ for her and ‘Dare I hope that some of my tender sentiments are also returned by you, as I had occasion to believe during our afternoon conversations in Simla, which I so much cherished then, and whose memory carries me through the tedium of my arid life in Allahabad.’ I then asked her permission to keep on writing to her, visit her soon in Lahore and ‘pay court with the most honourable of intentions’. I cringe even as I copy these lines from the smudged carbon copy of the letter I should have thrown away long ago.

In the absence of a reply from Trix and in my despair that dipped a notch lower each day after the postman delivered the office mail, I wrote to Ruddy laying out my feelings for Trix and asking whether he thought my case was hopeless, with the implied suggestion that he plead my suit with his sister. I cannot fault the promptness of Ruddy’s reply, an unpleasant epistle struggling to be courteous. Unofficially, he wrote, he felt sorry for me and could understand my feelings. Officially, as a brother, he shared the family’s outrage at my audacity. The child was barely eighteen and I was much, much older. Their mother was livid. ‘How dare he presume!’ she had said when Trix apprised the family of the content of my letters. ‘A middle-aged man without prospects! Does he realize the number of exceptional suitors after Trix’s hand? She has even spurned the attentions of the viceroy’s son!’

‘Even Pater, who is fond of you, is disappointed,’ Ruddy wrote. ‘The way you have behaved, I shall be afraid to ask any man of my acquaintance to dinner if they go off their heads at such slight provocation. Such shameless pursuing of the Maiden! If it had been anyone else I would have said to her, “Shoot the brute!”’

I was glad that I was not in Lahore to face the Kiplings as the man who wanted to smash the Family Square.

As I have always done, I buried myself in work, and the routine at office somewhat dulled the shame and despair that would come rushing back without warning and pulled me down with its weight if I allowed it to.

*

It was from the Pioneer office in Allahabad that I watched the unfolding of the drama that led to Ruddy leaving Lahore. It began with one of Ruddy’s humorous verses while he was still in Simla, which was published in September. Ordinarily, ‘A Job Lot’ would not have merited second thought. Ruddy now had a loyal Anglo-Indian following that looked forward to his writings, a readership that recognized itself and the tribulations, pleasures and concerns of their lives in India in his poems and short stories. And if his humorous verses took down the high and mighty a peg or two, then more power to the youngster’s pen! The problem was that this particular poem lampooned the second-most powerful man in British India, the commander-in-chief of British forces, Sir Fredrick Roberts. What Sir Roberts had done was what most people in power do as a matter of course, bestow patronage on someone who is close to them and would be grateful for it, rather than favour a stranger with no preexisting bond of friendship or loyalty. At any event, when a certain post fell vacant Sir Roberts filled it by the promotion of an officer who many thought was unsuitable. There was outraged muttering among those who believed they were more deserving, disapproval among some who were not personally involved but had serious concerns about the promoted man’s credentials. But the rancour was expressed under the breath; nothing was out in the open till Ruddy’s verse told the Anglo-Indian world that—jibing at Roberts’s small stature:

‘Even pocket Wellingtons

May carry it too far’

While the great man himself was asked to explain,

‘Why for the quadrilateral man,

Select the roundest hole?’

All the natives in India, but especially the Hindus, thrive in hierarchies; their deference for someone who is superior to them in this or that hierarchy is absolute, not for the person as much as for his position. With our own cherished belief in the hierarchical ordering of society as good and proper, we British have found the native view congenial to our own. It has played no small part in making our rule in this vast country, the ‘jewel in the crown’, easier. In fact, in India, we are much more conscious of hierarchy, of who is above and who is below, and have gone much further in enshrining the hierarchical principle in our social and official dealings than is the case in the home country.

Allen, our chief, who was perhaps more incensed by Ruddy’s presumption than Sir Roberts himself, thought fit to explain it to me, ‘Kay, you must think of the world of Simla, or Calcutta, as a court with an elaborate order of precedence. Everyone is standing on a stair in a staircase, acutely conscious of the stair below and the stair above him. If my importance and sense of who I am derives from my being number ten on the rank, I must suffer nothing that will diminish the importance of number nine. True, I may, by sarcasm and implication, question the suitability of the present occupant of that place, but number nine, qua number, is sacred. That young pup, who isn’t in the list of precedence at all, who is far away from even the bottom of the staircase, has picked on no less a dignitary than the number two. I have to recall him from Lahore to show that we newspaper people are not subverters of the rules that order the Empire. But the boy is a damned fine writer. Our readers love him. I am thinking of having him here in Allahabad where I can keep an eye on him. What do you think?’

I did not have a view.

‘Fine,’ Allen said, shifting his pipe from one side of the mouth to other. ‘Off you go to Lahore then. Wheeler is pretty sick and, I am afraid, will be returning to England for good. Take over from Wheeler when he leaves. You’ll be delivering the news of Kipling’s promotion. I am raising his screw by fifty pounds a month.’

*

Night was falling as the train slowed before entering Ambala, changing the feel of the air, drawing a low, even haze, like a gossamer veil of blue across the face of the land. A large, low moon was turning the tops of the plume grass to frosted silver. More than anything else, it was the keen and distinct smell of the countryside, of woodsmoke and cattle and the good scent of wheaten cakes cooked on ashes, that brought home to me how much I had missed Punjab. How, unbeknownst to me, I had come to regard Lahore as home.

The sense of homecoming that had pervaded the journey ever since the train entered Punjab began to dissipate the next morning as we neared Lahore. What replaced it was trepidation at the thought of meeting the Kiplings. Ruddy’s letter had raised a wall between us. I feared that the strain of reclaiming our earlier informality would be too much for me. I was especially wary of the embarrassment of coming face to face with Trix. To my shame, I decided to be a coward. I would not mention the subject of my letters to Ruddy or Lockwood if they, too, chose to ignore my ‘unseemly lapse’, as I believed they would. And as for Trix, I would avoid any encounter where there was a chance that we would be alone.

There is nothing like a crisis at work to banish the anxieties around personal concerns. The Muharram riot took place before I had settled back in Lahore and had time to take delight in the familiar features of the city—the Mall and the museum with the Zamzamah standing next to it as a sentinel, Wazir Khan’s Mosque with its proud minarets reaching to the sky and the galis snaking from its square into warrens of the old city, the fort and the Shalimar rose gardens that would always be associated with the memory of the moonlight picnic when Trix had sat next to me, her faint perfume stealing through the overpowering scent of roses.

The very next morning, with Wheeler again indisposed, I was holding fort at the office while Ruddy went into the old city to file his report on the annual procession of the Shia Mohammedans mourning the martyrdom of Hussain Ali, the grandson of the Prophet, when replicas of Ali’s tomb are taken out on the main artery of the old city that runs from the Delhi Gate to the Golden Mosque. I could only marvel at his speed and the felicity with which Ruddy brought the procession to life

At the Golden Masjid, a little beyond the cloth-sellers’ shops, the first tazia, a gorgeous arrangement in tin and tinselry, was reeling and plunging like a ship in a heavy sea. In front was a sea of rugged-featured mourners, stripped to the waist. They seemed so desperately in earnest, as they rocked to and fro, and lamented. It is the proud privilege of all the little boys who can, by any means, lay hands upon them, to carry the torches of rolled rag dipped in oil. The boys were prancing and squealing with impatience, occasionally chasing each other across the road, and under the legs of the mounted policeman’s horse who was a patient beast and went to sleep when the drums were beating under his venerable nose. As the hour of the general move forward to the Shalmi Gate drew nearer, the din increased; tazia answering tazia and the galis holding the roll of the drums as the hills hold thunder.

A tazia advanced, swayed, shook, retreated, was driven back, dived forward and passed with a yell, a shout, the patter of hundreds of feet, a blaze of torches and a rain of lighted tow, to be succeeded by another tazia, another mob and occasionally a brass band of terrible quality.

The narrow streets allowed no room for scattering, and as the procession went on, new tazias joined it at each corner; further and more excruciating bands played wilder and more timeless tunes and recklessly waved flambeaux dropped hot oil on the men below. Every few minutes a tazia would stop, while the torch-bearers and the crowd lifted up their faces to the moon, and called on Allah and the Imams: ‘Ya Hussain! Ya Hassan! Ya Ali!’ till one marvelled how human lungs could stand the strain. At each halt, certain nearly nude youths, armed with hide bucklers, about the size of a cheese plate, and long single-sticks, hacked and hewed at each other to the immense delight of the populace. There had been no trouble; the City was quiet and another Muharram had been safely tided over. Beyond the city walls lay civilization in the shape of iced drinks and spacious roads.

While Ruddy was having his iced drinks at the club, news came in that the procession had been attacked by a group of sword-wielding Sunnis of the Wahabi sect, just as it was dispersing at Delhi Gate. Three men were killed and more than a score sustained injuries. Two of the attackers were apprehended by the police. I immediately dispatched Nikka Singh to the club to fetch Ruddy to give some background to this piece of news in the following day’s edition of the paper.

On his way back to the office, Ruddy dropped by the Lahore Central Jail, where he used his clout as a sahib and newspaperman to interview one of the Wahabi prisoners. It was almost ten when he began to write the story, checking with me a couple of times whether he needed to cut down on some of the details. The range of his knowledge was astonishing. He knew all about the Wahabis and the fundamentalist preacher Sayyid Ahmad, who in the 1820s introduced Saudi Arabian Wahabism to India and tried to raise the Sunni faithful in jihad against kafirs. The viceroy, Lord Mayo, had been assassinated by a suspected Wahabi in 1872, and in June this year there had been the third of four Wahabi-inspired uprisings in the Black Mountains of Hazara in the North-West Frontier, where a British punitive force had killed a number of Wahabi fanatics.

It was good to work closely with Ruddy again, share the excitement with which he was writing the story, dodge the spattering ink when he protested my suggestion that he describe the man he had interviewed in prison in more neutral and less sympathetic words.

‘The man is a killer, Ruddy. His movement does not have to be “stately to the clink of his chains”. However much you are impressed by the declarations of his austere faith, it is a cruel one, an enemy of the Empire and all others outside the Faith, even if it enables him to “aloofly salute his Fate and drink with equanimity the potion in store for him”. Keep your higher flights of fancy for your stories and verse. You need to put them aside in your reporting.’

Nowise abashed, Ruddy retorted, ‘I am not a hack even if I do hack work, Kay. I am a writer with a calling to tell the truth. The man was filthy, his beard matted with dust and blood, but the depth and certainty of his belief transformed his visage once he started speaking of his faith. It lent him a rare nobility, as if the words from his mouth were as slaves spreading carpets of glory.’

I have always held that although some of Ruddy’s writing is sublime, and up there with the best in English letters, at other times he needs to guard against the temptation of hyperbole. ‘Carpets of glory’, indeed!

It was past eleven when the story was finally finished to our satisfaction and we went across to the press room to supervise the printing of the paper. It has been more than twenty years, but given the baffling way memory works, this particular one has chosen to stick around, while far more important ones have taken their leave and disappeared without a trace. Perhaps because this was the last time Ruddy and I were together in the press room. Lit by flickering dips with a hurricane lamp here and there, the press room has the familiar and oddly comforting smell of printers’ ink, baled paper, deodar wood and the sweat of half-naked men who turn the big presses and are now lolling against the black walls. The men are half asleep, waiting for their call once the tick-tick-tick of the type being set at the far end of the room has stopped. Ruddy and I have settled down at an unclean table. The office pi-dog, who followed us from our office across the compound, has gone to sleep at our feet. I need to wake up the native foreman who is nodding at his desk, the end of his turban trailing dangerously near the flame of the candle.

Once the printing was done we went back to my room. I was staying at the club, without a servant who would be waiting up for me, and Ruddy in any case was an insomniac. I brought out an almost-full bottle of Ballantine whisky from the cupboard where I kept my few books and personal papers. It was a good feeling to sit in my room with its smell of old paper and cheroots. We put up our feet on the desk, smoked and drank warm whisky, and it seemed as if we were back in my first days at the CMG, when our friendship was in its first bloom and my admiration for him was unsullied by reservations.

Relaxed, with the feeling of accomplishment after a job well done, it seemed the proper time to tell Ruddy of Allen’s decision, supported, if not driven, by James Walker who feared repercussions for his business interests after the Roberts’s affair, to transfer Ruddy to Allahabad as the Pioneer’s roving correspondent. Ruddy took the news with surprising equanimity.

‘It will be temporary, in any case. I have been thinking for a while that it is time to move to London. Take a job on Fleet Street and try to become a full-time writer.’

‘Fame and fortune await you in London!’ I declaimed, a little tipsy, but I meant it.

‘Even if I cannot put aside what you call my higher flights, any more than I or you can put aside the occasional woman who is good for one’s health and the softening of one’s ferocious manners?’ he teased.

I was aware of the rumours of Ruddy being observed by policemen entering one of the city’s brothels during his nocturnal wanderings, but this was the first time he openly alluded to his sexual life in Lahore, perhaps because it was about to come to an end. What I discovered later from the Superintendent of Police who had sniffed about Ruddy ‘going for a mucker with the harlotries in the native city’ was that the brothels he frequented were not establishments at the upper end of the scale, catering to rich native merchants and the landowning aristocracy. The harlots he lay with were not refined courtesans of the kind he writes about in one of the sheets Kadir Baksh brought me:, where, in

A glare of light on the stair-head, a clink of innumerable bangles, a rustle of much fine gauze, and she stands revealed, blazing—literally blazing—with jewellery from head to foot. Take one of the fairest miniatures that the Delhi painters draw, and multiply it by ten, and you will still fall short of the merits of that perfect face! Each hand carries five jewelled rings, which are connected by golden chains to a great jewelled boss of gold in the centre of the back of the hand. Ear-rings weighted with emeralds and pearls, diamond nose rings, and how many other hundred articles make up the list of adornments. She sings of love as understood by the Oriental—the love that dries the heart and consumes the liver.

The prostitutes Ruddy favoured were poor Hindu girls from villages, most of them child widows who could not remarry because of the religious proscription on widow remarriage and were a burden on their families. They were illiterate, and for many selling their bodies in the city was the only way to survive. In the brothels, as soon as they caught a venereal infection, which was soon enough, they were promptly replaced by others. These brothels, tucked in the maze of narrow galis where the air is thick and heavy with a faint, sour stench, were no more than ill-lit dens housing two or three prostitutes and frequented by men who expected neither song nor erotic blandishments but quick relief on smelly, stained mattresses. Yet, for Ruddy, such a brothel sparkled with desire!

God knows, I was far from being a chaste monk. Before marriage, during the hot months, I had had a couple of discreet liaisons in Lahore with attractive Eurasian girls from the Railway Colony who were known to be ‘fast’ and who were on the lookout for an English husband so that they could escape India and their in-between fate of being neither native nor English. But to deliberately seek out, as Ruddy did, the lowest of native prostitutes in the most squalid of settings for the satisfaction of his sexual needs was beyond my comprehension. Forget the dirt, what about disease? Not only the big ones, syphilis and gonorrhoea, but was he not afraid of catching the embarrassing and painful ones—genital warts, herpes, or scabies? The only one he could reasonably be sure about was being free of an infestation with crabs since native women shave their pudenda. One evening at the club, deep in his cups, the civil surgeon Dr Young as much as admitted to me that a couple of times he had checked Ruddy for venereal disease when he had come to the doctor complaining of an itch in the groin in the first instance and of a purulent offensive urethral discharge in the second.

For a long time I failed to understand how Ruddy, whose favourite words seemed to be ‘unclean’, ‘unkempt’, ‘filthy’, ‘loathsome’, ‘pestilential’, whenever he wrote about native quarters, who never missed an opportunity to turn in stories on the problems of sewage disposal and the diseases that lurked everywhere, could expose himself so intimately to what he otherwise loathed. I could never understand how what disgusted him during the day could hold such an irresistible attraction at night. I have seen this mix of fear and fascination in many of his writings on India. Even as I write, what comes to my mind is a report in the Pioneer of his visit to the deserted fortress of Chittor in Rajputana, which is in my Kipling File. Here he describes descending slimy stone steps to the Gau-Mukh, a pool fed by water trickling through the cut face of the hill, on to a Shiva lingam:

Almost under the little trickle of water was the loathsome Emblem of Creation . . . Water was oozing between the edges of the steps and welling up between the stone slabs of the terrace . . . it seemed as though the descent had led the Englishman, firstly, 2000 years away from his own century, and secondly into a trap, and that he would fall off the polished stones into the stinking tank, or that the Gau-Mukh would continue to pour water until the tank rose up and swamped him . . .

In a state of panic, the memory of which is still disturbing enough days later to make Ruddy write the report in the third person, the Englishman flees.

But he had to cross the smooth, worn rocks, and he felt their sliminess through his boot soles. It was as though he was treading on the soft, oiled skin of a Hindu. As soon as the steps gave refuge, he floundered up them, and so came out of the Gau-Mukh, bedewed with that perspiration which follows alike on honest toil or—childish fear.

On the same night, a moonlit one, Ruddy feels compelled to return to the site of his fear, scrambling up the hillside from the opposite or brushwood side to reach ‘Oh, horror! in that unspeakable Gau-mukh’ and ‘the chuckle of the water, which, by night, was peculiarly malevolent’.

It was Ruddy himself who provided the semblance of an answer to what had puzzled me. Or, more precisely, the clue lay in two crumpled sheets smoothened out by Kadir Baksh in the trove he brought me long after Ruddy had left India.

It seems that Ruddy had not just admired the bejewelled courtesan in the establishment catering to the wealthy traders and landlords, the girl with the perfect face who had sung of love ‘as understood by the Oriental’, but had also proceeded to sample the singer. Ruddy wrote of the encounter in the third person.

He recalled the time that he had gone to one of the high-class brothels, where the women, all of them fair Mohammedan with a wheat-coloured complexion much admired by the natives, were perfumed and glowed with all the gold they wore, where there was singing and dancing and the rooms were turned out with grand furniture. He had not been able to take his eyes off that one singer, no more than eighteen, whose beauty was beyond representation, even eluding the cunning hand of India’s finest miniature painter. The girl must have been given a discreet signal by the madam off the establishment, because after her singing ended, she came up to him and took him by the hand to lead him inside to one of the rooms. She was slender but buxom, and moved with steps that made her buttocks roll and her heavy breasts bounce. He was enchanted but to his surprise, not aroused. Perhaps great beauty has that effect? Even when she had taken off her clothes and stood in front of him, proudly displaying a flawless body, smelling of rosewater perfume that was still delicate despite all the activity of the evening, he remained limp. Perhaps she thought he was shy because she began to undress him, her hips thrust against him, practised hands unbuttoning, but the familiar stirring of blood rushing to his loins remained elusive. She knelt down on the floor and cupped him in one hand, lightly running her fingernails up and down the length of his flaccid sex. The skin’s response was involuntary but without desire. He dearly wished that desire follow the skin’s lead. She looked up at him, her eyes unwavering, her lips curled in a smile and said, ‘You are the master, Sahib. Do whatever you like with me. Your wishes are my wants.’ He didn’t know why that had thrown cold water on a budding ardour. Perhaps because in the face of such beauty, what he wanted was to be a slave in bed, not Sahib and master. He had walked out, throwing money on the bed; he never went back.

The text on the second page was longer.

It was a one-room brothel in Amir Nath’s gali deep in the heart of the City. At the head of the gali is a big cow byre, and walls on either side of the gali are without windows, for it is not permitted for the womenfolk to look out on the world. The brothel was the only house with a grated window that looked out into the narrow dark gali where the sun never came and the buffaloes wallowed in blue slime. He had found the brothel on an aimless wandering early in the morning after an opium-smoking night. The tattered curtain made from jute bags pushed aside, the woman stood in the doorway, stretching her arms, yawning. She was short, plump and dark, very dark, and he wondered how she could attract a customer in a city where fair skin was the ground of a woman’s beauty. In the absence of a fair complexion, all other riches of face and form were worthless.

She must have been in her early twenties, a child widow cast out of the family home and eking out a living, and life, in the only way she knew how. She looked older though, aged by the trials of her profession. Yet she seemed merry enough, her eyes crinkling in a genuine smile that exposed her paan-stained teeth and a silver molar as she asked him frankly in Hindustani whether the Sahib would like a fuck, for only one rupee. The price was exorbitant but he followed her into the room anyway.

The small room was bare except for a cot, a coloured print of the god Ganesha on one wall and a rickety wooden table leaning against the other. A kerosene lantern, its still burning wick glowering through the smoky glass, stood on the table. The hard mud floor was littered with bidi butts and what looked like scattered remnants of a snack of roasted chickpeas.

Once they had taken off their clothes, the woman was a revelation in bed. So amusingly playful, so anxious to oblige and please, intuiting his wish to be cradled and to burrow his head against her shaved pudenda. But it was the smells that made a beeline for his loins. As she lowered herself on his straining cock, he inhaled the aroma of stale coconut oil in her hair and when she opened her mouth, he got whiffs of raw onions and tobacco. Her crumpled sari on the bed next to his head emitted a strong odour of female sweat and ground spices. Anywhere else, he would find these smells odious, gag on them, he knew that. But here, on the cheap bed, in this squalid room, with this woman, they fuelled his sexual exertions and hardened his cock as never before.

When he was done and hastening to put on his trousers, the recoil came with such an intensity that he stumbled and almost fell on the floor. Perhaps it was the sight of white sperm oozing out of her cunt on to her coal-black thighs as she lay on her side, watching him dress. Disgust welled up in his throat and throwing a silver rupee on the table he rushed out into the deserted gali. Only then did he remove his hand that covered his mouth while he gulped in the morning air. On the way home through the streets of the awakening city, the memory of his Latin master in school came unbidden. The master is writing Aristotle’s ‘inter urinas et faeces nascimur’, in St Augustine’s translation, on the black board. He is the first one to raise his hand and gives the English translation—‘We are born between urine and faeces.’ The master, a dour Scot, nods and says, ‘As St Augustine incessantly reminds us, the cute, downy little head of every newborn, with its still unclosed fontanelle, passes through a corridor situated between the twin sewer-pipes of urethra and anus.’ He has no idea why his mind retrieved this particular memory. He knows he will go to Amir Nath’s gali again once the tide of disgust recedes.

*

On the night of Muharram, though, the last time we were alone together, I refused the confidence he was offering about his sexual life, apprehensive of the direction the conversation might take and my feelings for Trix be again unrolled and exposed to ridicule. I asked him instead of the places he planned to visit as the Pioneer’s roving correspondent. Benares and Calcutta were high on his list as also some of the princely states of Rajputana. He was also clear that he would not stay in India any longer than another year.

‘I am eager to bring the tyranny of India to an end, for I am practically fifteen years older than my age—broken down, bitter. It has taken the bulk of my top hair off and I am as bald as a coot, or I shall be soon, and the grey hair have begun to come on my temples whence I pluck them in disgust.

‘I’ve had a good time, Kay. I have tasted success and the beauty of money. I’ve mixed with fighters and statesmen, administrators and women, and much have I seen, cities and men. It was vivid and lively, and gloomy and savage. I’ve tried to know folk from the barrack room and the brothel, to the ballroom and the Viceroy’s Council. And now I am done.’

Even if the ease and unquestioned trust had seeped out of our friendship, I missed Ruddy when he left for Allahabad. I missed his mercurial moods that had lent an edgy life to the office, an unpredictability that was a sworn enemy of boredom. With him around there was always a feeling that a surprise—pleasant or highly unwelcome—was waiting just around the corner. I missed our after-office drinks at the club, with Ruddy repeating the latest gossip about other men who dropped in for their before-going-home-to-mem tipple, while I struggled to control my guilty enjoyment of his malicious tongue.

Ruddy’s occasional letters from Allahabad were unusually cheerful. He had persuaded Allen that his talents would be best used as a roving correspondent, writing stories about his travels in India. In addition, he offered to save the Pioneer money by providing stories to the weekly paper the owners had just started, stories they otherwise bought from authors in England and the United States, people such as the American Bret Harte. I don’t believe Allen needed much persuasion. He had come to admire Ruddy’s talent but was also aware that Ruddy lacked commitment to the daily grind of newspaper journalism. From bitter experience, he was also mindful that if Ruddy worked on the daily paper, sooner or later his flippant tone and irreverent attitude towards authority was sure to offend some official or the other. As a journalist, Ruddy would be safer on the road than in his office chair.

Ruddy’s first travelogue was a series of pieces he wrote on his one-month-long journey through the princedoms of Rajputana.

He wrote to me after his return to Allahabad:

Ah, Kay, was there anything like that dissolute tramp through some of the loveliest and oldest places upon the face of the earth! I railed and rode and drove and tramped and slept in Kings’ palaces or under the stars themselves and saw panthers killed and heard tigers roar in the hills, and for six days had no white face with me, and explored dead cities desolate these three hundred years, and came to stately residences where I feasted on fine linen and came to desolate wayside stations where I slept with natives upon cotton bales and clean forgot that there was a newspapery telegraphic world without. Oh, it was a good and clean life and I saw and heard all sorts of conditions of men and they told me the stories of their lives, black and brown and white alike, and I filled three notebooks . . . and knew what it was to endure hunger and thirst.

Back in Allahabad, Allen has cut me adrift afresh, bidding me to choose my own grounds for exploration. I have taken the 19th century and the Railway Colonies in India, and the opium factories and the out-of-the-way life of Calcutta and Benares, and a relic of the Mutiny for my subjects and will soon set out again.

I did not go to Bikaner House again—and here I suspect Alice’s agency—since I was no longer a welcome guest invited to join the family for a meal. My meetings with the Kipling women at the club dances and other festivities during the winter season were uncomfortable, chiefly because after the initial exchange of awkward pleasantries I was always in a hurry to make my getaway. I think I disappointed Trix by my craven behaviour and, after our first three or four encounters, her smile of pleasure at seeing me no longer reached her eyes, nor did their pupils light up in welcome at my hesitant approach. Although I avoided Trix, I remained exquisitely aware of her presence whenever she was on the club’s premises, whether she was sitting out on the veranda with her parents or whirling in a waltz on the crowded dance floor during the Bachelors’ Ball. Oddly enough, as my distance from the Kipling women increased, I came closer to Lockwood. We had always enjoyed each other’s company, sensing a bond of mutual sympathy between us. We began meeting twice a week at the club for an evening drink—gin–tonic in his case, whisky–soda in mine. He found an interested listener in me for his other passion apart from Indian crafts: Indian animals and wildlife. And he returned the compliment by encouraging me to give vent to my ardour for another part of nature: plants and trees.

I would be lying if I said I did not eagerly snatch at any scrap of news about Trix that Lockwood threw my way. Once the Christmas festivities were over and the new year began, I saw even less of her than in the months after her return from Simla. Together with her mother, she was away in Calcutta for a fortnight in January. Once back in Lahore, she seemed to have become a recluse for most of the following spring. Lockwood was sufficiently alarmed to confide in me that Trix had a serious suitor, a Captain Fleming, who was seconded to the Surveyor’s Office in Calcutta. He had come to Simla after I left. Fleming had courted her intensely for a month, Lockwood said, and Trix seemed to have settled her affections on him. But now, barely three months later, she has broken off the relationship on the ground of incompatibility of temper.

‘The girl feels wretched. Mopes around the house, waiting for his letters, since out of misplaced pity she has allowed him to write to her. Each time a letter comes she comes crying to my room, “I have been bad, Papa. I will be punished for this. I will never find anyone else.”

‘I have nothing but full sympathy for my little daughter’s suffering,’ Lockwood added, judicious as ever, ‘but my faith in the excellence of her judgement is shaken.’

I was devastated. I thought I had come to terms with Trix’s rejection of me as a potential mate but I had erred. Unbeknown to myself, I had continued to harbour the illusion that once she had freed herself from the family’s disapproval, she would take full cognizance of how much I loved her, thus sparking a fire of her own.

*

During the spring of 1888 my mood alternated between self-flagellation, wherein I chastised myself for not being as persistent a suitor for Trix’s hand as Captain Fleming, and jealous rage. When I looked for someone else to blame, I settled on Ruddy as the villain of my sorry saga. Captain Fleming’s attraction, I told myself, lay in Ruddy’s admiration, nay idealization, of the British army officer, together with Trix’s adoration of her brother that had made her unthinkingly adopt as her own his cherished beliefs—and prejudices. Captain Fleming, as tall as Ruddy and Lockwood were short, could march into the Family Square and the resistance Ruddy put up to his advance would be minimal. He might grumble a bit in the manner of older brothers, ask Trix if she was sure she was making the right choice, but there had been no question here of his saying ‘Shoot the brute!’

And why had I trusted Ruddy’s report on how Trix had reacted to my letters, I asked myself. Couldn’t he have been grossly biased or downright deceptive in his desire to have his sister to himself for as long as possible, to keep the Family Square, a going concern?

At the beginning of the summer I caught a bout of malaria that led to some complications, requiring supervised convalescence in a hospital for a month. Instead of the hospital in Lahore, I chose to leave for the one in Amritsar, less than 35 miles away. I was running away. Ruddy had been sent to run the CMG during my absence and I dreaded his bedside visits that would force me to be cheerful and dissemble. I did not return to Lahore till the Kipling family had left for Simla. Both Ruddy and Lockwood wrote friendly letters asking me to join them in Simla for at least a part of the summer holidays. I politely declined, citing a previous commitment to my own family to be with them in our house in Mussoorie. I still did not trust myself not to enter into an angry confrontation with Ruddy, if we came face to face, on the despicable way he had behaved in the Trix affair.

As if telepathically aware of my animus and its cause, Ruddy’s next letter from Simla read:

Fleming has been staying at the club where he couldn’t see Trix and she was making pathetic little attempts to be cheerful and moping because she wouldn’t see him because I had disapproved of their meetings. Under these circumstances I shook her gently but firmly, and demanded explanations. When I got ’em my heart smote me, for it seemed that I was keeping two loving souls apart, and who was I to do that? ‘Only let him see me,’ said the Maiden, ‘and try not to hate him so, and then if there is another quarrel between us it will be all over, indeed it will.’ The Mother said, ‘Let them see each other and get to understand each other and perhaps they won’t care so much.’ ‘Great Heavens!’ I said. ‘Have I been unconsciously acting the stern Parent all this while!’ So I trotted out and caught him and explained that while I hated him just as much as ever, I liked my sister’s peace of mind more, and consequently he wasn’t to stay at the club making a gibbering baboon of himself but to come down to see the Maiden now and again with the assurance that I would not regard him as a burglar and as an assassin. He was awfully grateful and I shook hands with him and felt that if ever anyone had secured his own happiness by this concession, I was that man. You see, the Maiden is very dear to me, and after all, the poor innocents only wanted to know each other better for three months—there was to be no engagement, oh no—only could they meet? As the Mother explained the situation to me, I gasped and then as I have said, I climbed down. Maybe under other circumstances I should have been more hard-hearted and backed up my father. Isn’t the heart of a maid a curious thing?

I always thought that the Maiden was so wise and sensible. But she said to me, ‘In these things I’m no wiser than anyone else, and I care for him so much.’ I give up. I have now done my best to smooth things for her and my conscience is clear. I never had to deal with one of the Maiden’s many suitors before, in that way, and it was a quaint experience, don’t you think so?

When are you coming here? Pater was asking about your plans the other day. He has become very fond of you.

I regarded this letter as an apology, Ruddy conveying that his behaviour towards me as a suitor for Trix had nothing personal against me. It had been dictated solely by the welfare of his sister, which was and would always remain his paramount concern. I guess a part of me clung fast to our friendship, wanted to rescue it from the other part of me that had become indifferent to its fate. Given Ruddy’s blithe unconcern—I was not even sure he was aware of the injury he had caused me—and my own desire not to totally junk a friendship that had meant so much to me, this was the nearest to a frank conversation that we were going to have on the sorry affair.

In his next letter, Ruddy appraised me of his plan to move in with the Hills—Edmonia and Alexander—as a paying guest in their Allahabad home. He had consulted his mother, he wrote, and she had approved. He went on to give a good imitation of Alice talking to her son:

‘Well,’ said the Mother judicially, ‘it would be good for you because you’d have to be moderately genial and interested in things. I don’t know what the Hills are like but I don’t think they’ll tolerate your moods and blue-devils and falling into clouds. Yes, you’ll have to be civil.’

‘All right,’ said I. ‘Proceed, mon amie.’

And the Mother, warming to her subject, laid down the advantages of the arrangement.

‘In the first place you’ll get your meals prettily served,’ said she, ‘and then you won’t be alone. I believe that living alone has made you so old and uninterested this year. Then, the great thing is that you can see as much or as little of the people in the house as you want to. Don’t be dependent upon them for amusements and don’t hang round the lady of the house at odd hours or she’ll hate you.’

‘That’s wisdom,’ thinks I to myself. ‘Seems easy to carry out too.’

Ruddy had met Edmonia Hill shortly after his arrival in Allahabad, a city he instantly disliked. It was too Hindu in contrast to the Moslem Lahore he much preferred. Allahabad was even a holy city for the Hindus, a confluence of three sacred rivers comprising the Ganges, the Jamuna and the mythical Saraswati that flowed underground. Ruddy’s disgust of Hindu holy cities after his visit to Benares was visceral.

Ruddy and Edmonia became close friends and Ruddy attached himself to her in the same way he had done to Mrs Burton in Simla. Edmonia became his confidante. He deferred to her judgement, consulted her on his work and shared with her his plans and hopes for the future. I had known the Hills in Allahabad; Professor Alexander Hill taught physical sciences at the university, was the principal of Muir College and a close friend of my brother, Philip. Edmonia was a free-spirited American woman in her early thirties, a matron who was not maternal, in the sense that she was very fond of Ruddy but did not mother him. As with Mrs Burton, his need for her was greater than hers for him.

I remain baffled by the intensity of attachment Ruddy repeatedly developed for older married women, as if seeking in them a lost part of himself. I do not claim to know, nor even begin to speculate, what that part was, and when and where he had lost it.

*

On 1 January 1889, the Pioneer published Ruddy’s last piece on India as a journalist, a report on the fourth annual conference of the Indian National Congress held in Allahabad at the end of December that was attended by 1200 delegates. ‘A Study of the Congress by an Eye-Witness’ was unsigned but everyone in both our Allahabad and Lahore offices (and many others outside the newspapers) knew that it was written by Ruddy. Mocking in tone, its scorn not leavened but on the contrary sharpened by humour, it bore Ruddy’s inimitable signature in its tone and language.

The Indian National Congress was a movement initiated by liberal Englishmen, such as Alexander Octavian Hume, the retired Bengal Civil Service officer and the president of the organization, demanding greater participation by the natives in the administration of their own affairs, for instance, through a representation in the legislative council that advised the viceroy. My own family was sympathetic with the aims of the Congress but was of the opinion, as were Philip and I, that it would take the natives generations of preparation before they could participate in any meaningful way in British rule. The Raj was the only bulwark against the anarchy and chaos the country would sink into if we got the timing of the political reforms wrong. Needless to add, these views were completely at odds with the overwhelming Anglo-Indian opinion that was violently opposed to any participation of the natives in ruling their country. In the Punjab and Allahabad clubs there was a unanimity of opinion that saw the Congress as a party dominated by Hindus who had neither the strength of character, nor moral convictions, nor education, nor a tradition of ruling India. We British were the only protectors of the Hindu masses—the peasants, the artisans, the coolies in the tea plantations, and of the Muslims, from these uppity Hindus clamouring for the political power they were unfit to wield.

Even Lockwood, much less dismissive of Hindus than his son, and even an admirer of Hindu painters and craftsmen, was at one with his son in questioning Hindu ability to govern the country. Talking about Ruddy’s piece during one of our evening meetings at the club, Lockwood said, ‘Respect for facts is the most important quality required for governance. There are many lies in history, but Hindu writers are remarkable for having deliberately and of set principle ignored all the facts of life. All is done, however, with such conviction and pious purpose that we must use Dr Johnson’s kindly discrimination and say they are not inexcusable, but consecrated liars.’

Ruddy wrote on the Allahabad session of the Congress in the Pioneer:

The thirty years of peace wherein England had striven to breathe into the hearts of men some power that should enable them to stand alone had not bred one engineer, artist, mechanician, novelist, poet, or historian . . . Of all the disabilities under which the land lay not one had been lifted by its own endeavours . . . Their right to consideration was the fidelity with which they hunted old trails; the accuracy of the phonograph in repeating what has been breathed into its mouth, the right of unbalanced fluency of diction; and the polyglot facility of a Levantine Dragoman. They had come to clamour for equality because their own record betrayed their inferiority; and for further privileges because they had made no use of privileges bestowed in the past.

Ruddy’s special scorn was reserved for the Bengali babu, the generation of natives in Bengal that had been among the first to access English education and now comprised a major part of the lower bureaucracy in public offices and courts. And the worst of this lot was the vakil, the lawyer, whose presence was ubiquitous throughout the conference.

The little black caps were everywhere; and so were the long hybrid coats of Bengal. They stalked in and out among the Madras turbans, the horned head-dresses of Bombay; they glided into the Lowther Castle; they shivered in the sunlight of the open, and they talked eternally. The Congress may exhibit specimens from all the Provinces of India, but one man out of three is a Bengali—a Bengali with a rainbow-hued comforter round his neck, or a Bengali with an enormous stomach and a bulging forehead, or a lean Bengali with a cloth round his head and meek—such men as the public offices disgorge at the close of the day—neither better nor worse.

Ruddy mocks Bengali loquaciousness, cruelly mimics a Bengali delegate’s English, ‘Where is your tent, saar? I will come over and speak. I am much enjoying this meeting.’ He is dismissive about the natives participating in the conference ‘in a language which they could not handle and wrestled with principles beyond their comprehension’.

And if there was a semblance of order, then it was due to the small number of Englishmen who sat in front around a green baize table and conducted the proceedings in the hall.

It must never be forgotten for a moment that these people claim all the privileges without any of the penalties of the lot of white men; and even while they were arranging plans of governance, it was only the influence of the white or whitey-brown men who led, that kept them from splitting into a hundred congeries and cliques. The orderliness of the show was due only to the repressive influence of the Englishmen who headed it. They resembled nothing so much as a flock of sheep ready to break away in any direction, but hemmed in and forced to present a close front by half a dozen black-and-tan collies.

In March 1889, Ruddy sailed with the Hills for England, taking a leisurely route via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States. His visit to Lahore to meet his family before he left India for good was brief. We had our own farewell drink at the club, this time sitting at the bar rather than at our usual place at one end of the veranda, from where we could see everyone entering the club. There was no nostalgic revisiting of our days at the CMG. He was much too excited about his forthcoming travel with Edmonia Hill and perhaps prescient on what awaited him in England: instant success as a writer.

Trix married Jack Fleming in June of the same year and went off to live with her husband in Calcutta. Lockwood had given me ample warning that in spite of their frequent quarrels, a marriage was very much on the cards. I was as prepared as anyone can be who has loved and has now lost. I could even listen calmly to Lockwood’s concern about Trix without dwelling on my own unhappiness.

‘I can only hope with all my heart that the child is right and that she will not one day, when it is too late, find her Fleming but a thin pasture, and sigh for other fields.

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Lockwood added, ‘he is in the Survey and his record is good—a model young man: Scot and possessing all the virtues, but to me somewhat austere, not caring for books nor for many things for which our Trix cares intensely.’

Lockwood and Alice stayed another year in Lahore before they, too, packed their bags for England. They had received disturbing news about their son’s deteriorating mental condition. Trix, who was visiting England together with her husband at the time, wrote to her parents that she was shocked at the deterioration in her brother’s physical and mental state. The initial euphoria of being feted and lionized had passed. There was no shelter from depression on fame’s bleak and barren heights. ‘What does fame consist of except being invited to parties by society hostesses and shown off to other guests?’ he had complained to Trix. If he was not the fashion of the moment—to be treated like a purple monkey on a yellow stick for just as long as he amused them, all those who now fawned over him would let him die of want on their doorsteps.

The Kiplings decided to sail for England when Lockwood received this cryptic message from Ruddy: Genesis 45:9. Opening the Bible as directed, he read, ‘Haste ye, and go up to my father, and say unto him, Thus saith thy son Joseph, God hath made me lord of all Egypt: come down unto me, tarry not.’ Alice was happy to leave India, a country she had always disliked and considered as an exile imposed by an unkind Providence.

‘She was six weeks pregnant with Ruddy when we first arrived in Bombay,’ Lockwood had confided in me. ‘She could not stand the hot weather. And when the rains came it was even worse. Our house was under construction and we were living in a shed in the compound of the art school. The mud floors were wet all the time and the garden had turned into a swamp. I could not blame her when she began shouting at me in front of the servants that it was all my fault in bringing her to such a dreadful country where toadstools grew in her bonnet and cockroaches nested in her newest hat, as she had discovered that morning. By the afternoon, she had calmed down and was at her cutting best.

‘“This is what my dreary day is like, over and over again. Dull in the morning, dull in the evening and dull at night when I go from my mildewed couch to my mouldy bed. And the highlight of the month is to wake up one morning and find a crop of mushrooms under my reeking pillow!”’

Although aware of her son’s tendency towards ‘blue devils’, Alice nevertheless denied the seriousness of Ruddy’s breakdown and downplayed his urgent need for the support of the Family Square. On our last evening together, Lockwood let me know in no uncertain terms that he was appalled by his wife’s capacity for self-deception.

‘Alice is spirited but not at all bright. In an attractive woman, people often confuse the former for the latter.’

This is the only time I saw Lockwood’s judicious manner and balanced facade crumble under the onslaught of conflicting emotions: worry for his beloved son that pushed him to leave for London as soon he could on the one hand, and the pull to stay back exerted by his love for his work and his Indian students, on the other. And although in England the four sides of the Family Square often found themselves at the same place in the Wiltshires, Alice and Lockwood’s new home, when Trix visited from Calcutta, they could somehow never reassemble themselves into a square again; the magic glue had been left back in Lahore.

*

The last time I met Ruddy was at the new premises of the CMG office when he visited Lahore three years later, now as a celebrated author in London. A stream of horse dealers, clerks, carpenters, coach builders and a whole horde of office peons and low folk turned up on the veranda to pay their respects. Our meeting was cordial but reserved, from my side. The two letters he had written me from London in three years had been full of himself and yet completely impersonal. I could feel that though our friendship had survived the body blow it had received over the Trix affair, it had lost much of its spontaneity. Happy to be back in Lahore, I doubt if Ruddy even noticed the extent of the rift between us.

As a newspaperman, I did my duty and wrote a piece in the CMG on the literary fame that had come the way of our former colleague. Barrack-Room Ballads and his Indian stories were published on both sides of the Atlantic, and The Times had written a leading article on Ruddy’s work, comparing his stories to those of Guy de Maupassant. His verses, such as ‘Mandalay’, in which a returned soldier laments for his lost ‘Burma girl’, and says:

If you’ve ’eard the East a-callin’, you won’t never ’eed naught else.

No! you won’t ’eed nothin’ else

But them spicy garlic smells,

An’ the sunshine an’ the palm-trees an’ the tinkly temple-bells;

On the road to Mandalay . . .

became immensely popular. As a critic wrote, the verses ‘soon escaped from the literary salons and spread like a bushfire into the wide world, into the public houses and the “halls”, where they were set to music and sung at “smoking concerts” . . . [and] were recited, quoted, copied, anthologized, translated.’

Fame had smoothened his memories of India and Lahore, and wiped off his earlier ambivalence, so that they shine forth in a series of glowing images.

‘The beautiful smell was there,’ he wrote, ‘the brown, slow-moving crowds were there (white is rather a leprous tint when you come to think of it, and it doesn’t match backgrounds), the crumbling sun-dried brick walls and the deep-bowed bungalows were all waiting there.’

As compared to Lahore, there is neither colour nor light nor air in London. Murmurs of that ‘little city’ fade into insignificance when in Lahore he looks at:

[The] sunlit river of people whose daily passage has oil-polished the wooden posts of the shop boards, smoothed the angles of the brickwork, as a glacier polishes a rock. As if its own beauty were not enough, the dyers have spread filmy muslins of palest blue and pink across the street, and you look upon the old witchery of the old life through the pearl-tinted mists of dawn. It is noon and past, and high overhead, a boy’s paper kite is sawing and jigging into the restful blue like a big sulphur butterfly. Below there is the hurry and the shouting, the broken waves of colour, the deep shadows that heighten colour as velvet displays the diamond, and above all, and apart from all, as a prayer from a tortured heart, the mosque of Wazir Khan flings up its four minars to heaven. What need to cry five times a day that God is Great?

Ruddy’s stay in Lahore was cut short when he had to rush back to London, booking the first passage out of Bombay, on receiving the news of death of his new best friend and agent, Wolcott Balestier. A week after his arrival, Ruddy married Wolcott’s sister, Caroline. Although Carrie, as she was called, possessed individual features of her own, she did not break the mould of the older woman who had always enthralled Ruddy, the woman who is not particularly attractive but decidedly clever and forceful . . . and often stern.