Father, 1947

I

I have come here alone, to start with. Zarine was too nervous about the place—the usual Parsee nonsense about dubbing every moffusil town a gamda, a village. The only city in the Parsee imagination was that hyphenated conglomeration of seven islands that lay between Mahim creek, with its feral stink, and Colaba, with its smell of dry fish. Actually, parts of Colaba smelt of dry Bombay duck or sukka boomla, as our Parsee women in their embroidered garas and fisherwomen in their hitched-up saris alike called the dehydrated, stinking, skeletal remains of the juicy eel. Parsees fried the desiccated boomlas and you could hear the crackle as they bit into the crunchy slivers. Girls rinsed their mouths with Listerine thereafter, lest their boyfriends refused to kiss them. Parsee women even pickled the beastly things (not their boyfriends, but Bombay duck). But this is not a dissertation on sundried fish. I am speaking of my days in Junagadh, and the year is 1947.

I was brought from Rajkot in a special saloon of the JSR, which stood for the Junagadh State Railway. It wasn’t much of a saloon, with the berths covered with rexene, and a big concave mirror which successfully distorted my face. However, it had a carpet and a lovely ceramic wash basin in the saloon itself. Half a dozen flunkies greeted me at the railway station at Junagadh. It felt good. A green Ford V8 took me to a large house which would be mine now. It had a semi-circular veranda in front. The drain pipes had ceramic gargoyles affixed to them. Once, the cousin of the nawab sahib lived here, I was told. That must have been a while back for the house hadn’t been in use, I guessed. The interior had a clammy air about it, so I had all the windows thrown open. The bed was solid mahogany and a blood-red counterpane, with yellow tassels burgeoning at the ends, was thrown over it. In the stairwell was a huge mirror—concave again—that shortened me, turning my stomach into a cavity. I seemed to be doubling up with an intestinal spasm. Was it a sign? Don’t look for succour within yourself. All you’ll get is warped images bouncing back. Take your spyglass and look outwards. Don’t get bogged down in your petty dreams. The times are such that individuals and their angst would get dwarfed, overrun by events. In the second week of January 1947, I could already sense the advance of the bulldozer of history.

The lawns were weed-bitten and undulated towards the paddocks. I was told the very first day that I would have nothing to do with the paddocks. There was no hedge to mark the compound and so I never came to know where it ended and the paddocks began. A bridle path passed through what was now my land, running almost parallel to a storm-water drain, which skirted the paddocks. Even the driveway disintegrated after a while, and further up was an old, rusted truck, its tires sagging and the dust of all of 1946, if not the war years, coating its bonnet. A camouflage net was thrown over it carelessly, for what good I wouldn’t know. I thought of it as a deflated football. Remove it, I commanded, but nothing happened. The same could be said for the mirror in the stairwell. It stayed where it was, draped in shadow, mercifully. They wouldn’t remove it. Not just yet. Near the truck was a pond, which, by evening, was under siege from a frightful cordon of bullfrogs. One could see the membrane around their throats ticking away and vibrating. If they disturb you, we could sprinkle kerosene and light a fire around the pond, one of the servants with a sash across one shoulder suggested. No, burning toads alive was not one of my pastimes, I told him.

I had a wicker armchair, old and nut-brown in colour, pulled out and sat in the mild, amber wintry sunlight of a late afternoon. The light seemed to have a sound to it, the tinkle of stained glass. I soon grew to love the weather, the day sun-drenched, the evening cool, with just a little bite to it—a time for rumination. The meeting at Rajkot with the British Resident had gone off rather well. I was driven into his palace—every big house in the moffusil looks palatial if you are coming out of a poky flat in Bombay—and straightaway ushered into his study. He was bald and tall and had a military air about him, this Sir Alfred Jackson, KC something or the other. KC stood for Knight Commander, Mr Seervai had told me before I left, or rather, before I was temporarily eased out of his chambers. They were my chambers too, till this assignment came up and I was forced to accept it. ‘I am not sure if he is the Knight Commander of the Empire or of that rathole called Kathiawar. Really, it’s not a rathole, it is sylvan, bucolic, Arcadian, if you remember your literature. It’s the only thing that keeps me going, literature, I mean. Take your brief from Sir Alfred, but act exactly according to your conscience. Some of us attorneys keep that in a locker, don’t we?’ Don’t we what? Did he see doubt move across my face like the shadow of a passing cloud? If he did, he didn’t show it. Seervai never wasted time repeating himself.

Sir Alfred’s handshake was firm and he got down to business without the usual pleasantries. ‘These are tricky times, Mr Bharucha. Anything could happen, given the circumstances—the emotional fever pitch of Hindus and Muslims, Congress and League at loggerheads, Gandhi ignored by his own people. It’s a proper mess, if you ask me. And as for us, we aren’t certain when we leave.’

‘If you leave.’

‘We intend to, though many won’t believe it. We have made a commitment in the House of Commons, for heaven’s sake! We can’t renege. Then there are the poor forlorn princes—oh, the princes!’

He paused and let his bearded bearer pour coffee for us and serve the scones. ‘The princes are just hopeless, you know, by which I mean they are without hope. It is not always that a word conveys what it’s meant to.’ (He looked to me for approval and I dutifully nodded.) ‘They’re in an unreal world—just can’t understand what’s going on. They haven’t got it into their heads that when we quit, they’ll be on their own. They won’t be able to run to us like frightened chicks to mother hen.’

‘And what will my responsibilities involve, if I may ask?’

‘You’ve to get your prince, the Nawab Mahabat Khanji, out of dreamland and into the maw of reality, if you know what I mean. And you have to keep a sort of a hermetic lid on any excesses the nawab’s confidants may be dreaming up, the Abu Bhais and the Isu Muhammads. We need someone to talk of sectarian harmony. The previous Law Member, the mustachioed chap, was no good. Was good at twirling his moustaches, but that was about all.’

‘Law Member! Is that what I am going to be called?’ I was horrified.

‘I presume so. Any objections? You are the Law Member of the State Council. It’s your job to keep abreast of all that’s happening, not just in Delhi and Karachi and Lahore, but also in the House of Commons. I would keep my ear glued to the radio, if I were you. To get back to my narrative, His Highness had sent word to Jinnah’s secretary for replacing old moustaches. Jinnah was about to send a Muslim attorney from Sindh. That’s the time I stepped in and persuaded HH to get an expert from Bombay, someone neutral and unbiased and frank. You’ll have to be frank, regardless of how the nawab or his begums or that fat dewan of his think. I prevailed on His Highness—Residents have a way of prevailing upon their Highnesses.’ (There was a gleam in his eye and, for the first time, a half-smile alighted on his lips.)

‘How did Mr Seervai come into the scene?’

‘I had to talk to the greatest lawyer there is in the country. So, once the nawab showed the green flag, I got in touch with Seervai. Frankly, it was Abdul Kadir, the dewan, who vetoed the Sindhi attorney. I think there’s an intrigue on from Karachi and from Jinnah’s secretarial nest. You know the rest. Send me your man, I told Mr Seervai, someone you trust and who’s knowledgeable, someone who won’t panic or give wrong counsel.’

‘I am truly flattered.’

‘Junagadh is the only Muslim state in a sea of Hindu principalities. HH needs to tread warily—that is, if his advisers, the hangers-on, not the dewan, would let him. Kadir has a good head on his shoulders, incidentally. Fortunately, the begums don’t have a head. Nor have they the guts to talk politics with the nawab, or we’d really be in shit.’

‘Is the place seething with intrigue?’

‘No, surprisingly. They are in dreamland, the begums, floating on a magic rug, unaware when the carpet will be pulled from under their delicately hennaed feet. You’re going off to Junagadh today itself, aren’t you? Capital!’ He stood up and extended his hand. That was it. I was on my own now. I came away with the feeling that what one would need here was imagination. I should be able to sense the future, its contours, even as I embark on it.

My only acquaintance with Kathiawar was through Ranji, his Jubilee Book of Cricket and the legends I had heard about the man, his wizardry at the batting crease, his leg glances and late cuts. I had idolized the man, the way he behaved when some British friend shot him in the eye during a hunt … and all that.

The next day, I sent my request for an interview with the prime minister, or rather the dewan, Abdul Kadir. I also requested to see His Highness Mahabat Khanji, the rotund nawab of Junagadh. A fellow Parsee drew up in his car, the tutor and guardian to the prince; a short man with a hearty laugh and the trademark Parsee nose. He had a refined air about him, but nothing put-on or artificial. He asked what was holding me here. I didn’t understand. Come home for lunch, he said. I have asked for appointments with the dewan and His Highness, I answered. They could be summoning me any moment. He laughed. You won’t get to meet them in a week. Why? Because, Mr Saam Bharucha, that’s how they are! Their first job is to put you in your place. That Yasin Khan, who handles all the nawab’s papers, may not forward your request for a week. He happens to be the nawab’s son-in-law too. You are in a native state, my man. Their ways are hoary and desultory. (He made that rhyme.)

His house was excellent, the terrazzo in the verandas blinding, chipped marble, polished to a shimmer, stuck on the mosaic like an afterthought. They had a swimming pool. The prince, Ghulam Muhammad Khanji, was skating in the verandas. His shirt and pajamas were made of silk, thick as gabardine, and flapped like parchment in the wind as he skated. My Parsee friend took me into his study.

‘I think I’ll give you the lie of the land,’ he said. ‘The nawab seldom stirs out of the palace. He keeps to himself and his servants and a few officers—if that’s what you can call them—guys by the names of Yasin Khan and Isu Muhammad. You won’t find a Hindu anywhere in the palace or in the state hierarchy. They are, shall we say, conspicuous by their absence, as the cliché goes. But no one persecutes them either.’

‘Deprivation, especially of jobs, can’t be termed persecution, is it?’

‘Damn right. The hangers-on here have their snouts in the trough. Otherwise, there’s not much sleaze around; only apathy, palpable apathy.’

‘What exactly do you mean?’

‘If you meet the nawab, you’ll find his face expressionless. That’s what makes for apathy, doesn’t it? Perhaps he may be thinking that expressionlessness adds to dignity. You never know. Apart from eating and driving cars and an isolated shikar—what is it that they do volitionally? The nawab has never been to a meeting of the Chamber of Princes, as it is called, never been to Rajkot to meet the Resident. Take my word for it, they won’t last, these princes, and I am not talking only of Junagadh. I mean the whole jingbang lot with their flamboyant turbans, their gun salutes and their absurd titles—Farzand-i-Khas and Daulat-i-Inglishia—makes you laugh. Have you ever heard their sonorous titles, with liveried mace-carrying heralds, if not halberdiers, announcing their bombastic honorifics?’

He pulled out a huge tome. What’s that? I asked.

‘The Indian Who’s Who, 1938. Listen to this, Gwalior first: “His Highness Maharaja Mukhtar-ul-Mulk, Azim-ul-Iqtidar Rafi-ush-Shan, Wala Shikoh, Mohtasham-i-Dauran, Umdat-ul-Umra, Maharajadhiraja—Hisam-us-Sultanat George, Jiwaji Rao Scindia Allijah Bahadur, Shrinath-i-Mansur-i-Zaman, Fidwi-i-Hazrat-i-Malik-i-Mauzzam, Rafi-ud-Darja-i-Inglistan, Maharaja of Gwalior.” What do you say to that Mr Bharucha? If someone were to announce a visitor into my house this way, apri tho naga fati jaye, my posterior would be ripped apart! Notice the barbaric mixture of languages—Urdu, Hindi, Persian, Sanskrit.’

Interesting fellow, I thought, this tutor and guardian to the prince. He sneezed so loudly though, through the two barrels of that large Roman nose of his, that the panes rattled. That 1938 tome was covered in dust and couldn’t have been eased out of the shelf for years. A minute later, he used the word ‘debacular’ for the princely order.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Debacular, I said. It’s a word I have coined, from “debacle,” you know, the kind of things that happen when stumps start flying and there’s a batting collapse.’

‘Are you a keen cricketer?’

‘Of course. I played in the Ahmedabad Quadrangular. Would have played in Bombay too, but my father insisted I concentrate on studies. That’s how Dinoo Driver got into the Parsee team. Still regret it.’

‘My father played the Bombay Quadrangular. Pidr sultan bood.’

‘Thu chirrah,’ he retorted and laughed. The fellow knew his Persian.

(I need to clarify this in my chronicle. The next generation is bound to be more ignorant than mine. English can never match the terseness of either the Urdu or the Persian epigram, ‘Father was a Sultan’. And the answer comes in a flash, ‘Thu chirrah, what are you, you bum?’)

He resumed his narrative. ‘Even the instincts of self-preservation are missing among most of them. I wouldn’t like to be a prince of a native state in 1947.’

Were things so depressing for them? I wondered. But I didn’t want to press on with the subject. ‘I thought you would give me the lie of the land.’

‘We’ll start with the palace, shall we, and the five begums?’

‘Five?’

‘One divorced, the second one known as the Junagadh Begum. The first is the Bhopal Begum, brought from a larger and better-known state to lend glory to Junagadh. She is the senior begum, no doubt about it—very hot-tempered lady, I believe. She once hit her ADC on his face with a tennis racket. The weal showed—or was it a cut?—for days. Her son Dilawar Khanji, is the heir apparent, wali ahad, as he is called here. Handsome fellow, good cricketer—bowls really fast, and a gentleman; got married about two years back. I was there at the wedding. Saw all the Kathiawar princes in their brocade achkans and their turbans encrusted with gleaming solitaires. The nawab is so shy that the Jam Sahib, that’s Maharaja of Jamnagar in case you don’t know, almost officiated as the father of Dilawar at the ceremony, though HH did make an appearance. And I must tell you, the Jam Sahib had an emerald bigger than a dove’s egg scintillating from his turban.’

He was unwilling to speak more. I think the lunch had tired him out. Dhansak always does. I went back home and pulled out my Oxford dictionary. Halberdier? Man armed with halberd, spear and battle axe. Really? The fellow must be a professor of English. Everyone was making these princes out to be a sad lot. What will the buggers do once the dhotiwallahs come to power, as they will, and bloody should?

Meanwhile the servants engaged my attention. There were all varieties here: a hamaal (porter), a pattawallah, Umar by name, who, for what reason I wouldn’t know, had a sash across one shoulder (that was the patta—made sense, the designation), his brother Ibrahim, a dog boy, whom I sent back for I didn’t have a dog—he couldn’t believe it, everyone who was anyone in Junagadh had a dog. The nawab was passionate about dogs—had three hundred of them. Umar always wore a fez cap. So did the hamaal. The fez was still in fashion.

A nightjar disturbed me at night with its tuk tuk tuk. The morning was bracing, saw a treepie dart away like an arrow, followed by its mate. They were lost in the tree. Saw a spider web glisten in the dew. Ibrahim, who laid the tea, told me I should walk barefoot on the dew—good for the eyes. I didn’t heed his advice—had heard Junagadh had plenty of snakes. The sawars were moving out with the horses, a dozen of them. They looked spirited enough as they whinnied and strained at the reins. Two hours later, they were back after their manoeuvres, the horses lathered in sweat and dust, the riders shouting away at them. I was surprised to see a lady riding a chestnut filly. She waved her riding crop at me and dismounted. A sawar took the mare away. I stood up as the lady walked towards me, her straw-coloured hair peeping from under her blue cap. She was slight of frame, with large grey eyes, her arms glistening with sweat. She wore blue britches and ankle boots instead of the knee-high riding boots the others wore.

‘You new to the place? Of course, you must be the new Law Member!’

Good god, I thought, one was already known without meeting a soul here. And the designation would stick. I had no trouble with Law, but definitely objected to the Member bit. Not that I could voice my thoughts to her.

‘I am Mrs Barnes, Claire Barnes.’

I bowed a wee bit involuntarily as I shook her hand—happens when you deal with white skin. In Bombay, I would have given her a half-hug and a sidelong kiss. I wasn’t sure of moffusil protocol. Good to be careful.

‘I am Saam Bharucha, yes, the new Law Member, as they call me here, not that I care for the designation.’ She laughed. I answered her queries: my wife, Zarine, and son would join me within a month, if not earlier.

‘A month! What will you do alone here? This can be a dreary place. My husband, Syd, is fed up with it already.’

‘What does Mr Sidney Barnes do?’

‘Not interested in what I do, is it? You’re turning into a Junagadhi already.’

I was a bit abashed, but put on a straight face. No point in being eternally apologetic. ‘If you are fed up with the workplace, you’re fed up with the place as such, the town. That’s how I asked.’

II

I soon come to know that the dewan has had a heart attack, and since the day he was stricken, his work had slackened—one doesn’t have to read tarot cards to tell you that. The nawab got an elevator installed in his house, the only one in Junagadh. Even HH doesn’t have one in his palace, I was told. The dewan also has a refrigerator, the servants informed me, a bit awed. It will be a while before he sees me. I go and see Gheewala, the chief secretary. It is more a courtesy call. No one has any opinion on how things will shape out. You can’t have any opinion when everything is so uncertain. Will the British leave at all? What’s going to happen to Jinnah and his Pakistan? Is he going to get his slice of the roast? Are we moving into a confederation of sorts? Or will there be two dominion states with one single viceroy lording it over from Delhi, where else? Or will there be three dominions—Hindu, Muslim and princely? There can be no fruitful discussion if no one knows the basic shape this landmass would be moulded into.

I need to take a closer look at the newspapers. I order the previous week’s papers too. That swine, Franco, in his four-minute message at midnight of the new year has the gall to say, ‘Christ’s equality, liberty and justice characterize our acts, and if for them, we merit the hate or rancour of the world, we are ready to face them.’ Not a shred of regret the fellow has. Gandhi starts his walking tour of Noakhali, arriving at Chandpur. He is given eight armed police escorts and disapproves of their presence. In Bombay, the Dharma Sewa Sangh gets 2,500 pandits to conduct a maha yagna, invoking goddess Shakti, to bring peace to India. Why Shakti? I try to think of a goddess of peace in that vast, over-populated Hindu pantheon, and fail.

The photographs are illuminating. Aung San in his great coat and baggy pants, with Nehru in sherwani and churidars. On another page, we have the dewan of Baroda, Sir Brojendra Lal Mitter, no less, in bowtie, his receding hairline prominent, elaborating on matters constitutional. He says that Nehru’s resolution in the Constituent Assembly declaring India a sovereign republic was ‘merely a statement of ideals and aspirations of the Indian people’. He does not rule out the possibility of ‘some units of the federation choosing a different Constitution.’ People seem to think there are various Constitutions on the shelf and you are free to pull out the one that suits you. Sir Mitter even adds that some ‘units may choose to retain the monarchical form.’ Really?

Abdul Qayyum Khan tours Hyderabad and talks of a Pakistan in the Deccan. Are we going to have more than one Pakistan? The thought troubles me. What some of these people need is a de-worming of fanciful notions.

The fourth week of January starts with Nehru shoveling mud on the divine right of kings. ‘We are the trustees of a great future even as we are the inheritors of a great past.’ He is good with words, this man. He also says that it is scandalous and intolerable that one man has any special divine dispensation to rule over other human beings. The Constituent Assembly okays the resolution.

I now expect the summons—and, sure enough, they come. Abdul Kadir wants to see me. His brat, Shafeeq, is playing outside, his knees bruised and face caked with mud—or is it chocolate? His sister, Laeeq, leads me to her father. The dewan looks overweight. He shakes me by the hand and says, ‘Welcome to Junagadh.’ I remind him, not very politely, that I had been close to three weeks here already. ‘That long?’ he asks with a benevolent smile. ‘I have not been too well, as you must have known.’

I make the necessary commiserating noises, clicking my tongue like an underfed gecko deprived of moth and mosquito for a week.

‘Well, what do you make of all this?

‘All what?’ I ask innocently, bland smile taped across my lips. But before he can react, I relent. ‘It’s the Constituent Assembly you are talking of, isn’t it?’

‘Precisely.’

‘It was only to be expected, sir. After all, they can’t root for a monarchy or a theocracy, can they? And they can’t have a Hindu state.’

‘Why not? Pakistan will be a Muslim country, after all. So why can’t they have a Hindu state here?’

‘The Congress has always been more inclusive, dewan sahib. (I am toying with the idea of ‘Prime Ministering’ the fellow, but can’t bring myself to do it.) They took the Muslims with them—Ghaffar Khan, Maulana Azad—and not just the leaders. They are not the Hindu Mahasabha.’

‘You think there’s a difference?’

‘Between the two?’

‘Between the two.’

‘Enormous, dewan sahib.’

‘Sovereign, democratic, republic, is it? So we get marginalized, pushed to the sidewalks; we sleep on the pavements.’

Does he mean Muslims or the princes? Best to keep quiet. ‘There are some encouraging statements though,’ continues the dewan.

‘You mean Sir B.L. Mitter’s? It can’t lie with the princes to choose how they’d be ruled. We have to look at the times, dewan sahib.’

Perhaps I get carried away and sound a wee bit ponderous. I actually want to add that the world had swivelled on its hinges during those six hellish years. I really want to go poetic (which is another name for bananas)—the shadows have moved across the sundial, dewan sahib, the world has swerved or somersaulted on the axle of history; I am tempted to say something full of colour and gas, but keep myself in check. He is persistent.

‘And what do you think of today’s news, Mr Bharucha?’

What is he hinting at? Walter Hammond had completed 50,000 runs with his 167th century against South Australia, the papers reported. I don’t think Wally Hammond is on his mind.

‘The big news today is that Luftwaffe’s files have revealed that the Mufti of Jerusalem requested the Nazis to bomb the holy city in 1943. Goering rejected the idea as dangerous from the propaganda point of view.’

‘I was thinking of something nearer home. A lot of princes would agree with Sir Mitter, don’t you think?’

‘Sir Mitter may say what he likes, but it is not going to have much effect. The sea of Indian politics at the moment is too wide and too deep for small fry to make a splash.’

‘You would consider the Dewan of Baroda small fry?’ His eyebrows climb a few millimetres. I have blundered.

‘He is a big man, alright sir, and Baroda is a big state. But with the Union Jack coming down and the Hindu-Muslim divide and the splitting up of the army, he may not count for much.’

‘I will be talking to the nawab sahib of Bhopal this evening.’ He stands up but doesn’t shake my hand. The interview is over.

There has been no news from Zarine for over ten days. I am worried. Resentments have been building up from her side. Resentments, in any case, are not hard to work on. I had put Rohinton, our son, in a boarding school at Lawrence College, Murree. Zarine had argued and fought. We need to make a man of him, I had insisted. ‘Why so far?’ Zarine shouted, ‘Why not at Panchmari?’ Murree brought visions of gun-slinging Pathans to her mind. Worse, she thought there was no Parsee around for miles to act as local guardian. I had disabused her of the notion. The breweries there were owned by Parsees.

When Rohinton had returned after his first year there, I was appalled. The boy said the school was full of the children of Tommies and he had to engage in over fifty fist fights. I couldn’t believe it, Zarine could. The fellow had been writing to her and she kept some of his letters from me—may have thought I would get too worked up. Next year, he was a bit happier. Less fights. But he was still there.

There were more recent grouses. I hoped it was not a carry-over of her resentment from our trip to Paris which was cut halfway. Sometimes women can be maddeningly insistent. A trip to Paris seemed to mean more to her than my job. She had dreamed of the city all her life and was not to be deterred, even though she knew I was on the verge of becoming a partner in Crawford and Hailey, my firm, but was encountering resistance, if not hostility, from within the office. Zarine had decided on October end. Fares will be cheap. I tried to put her off, but failed. (I had tried to reason with her—no one goes to Paris in winter. Wait six months, and we’d really live it up in the summer—Fontainebleau, Versailles, Louvre, boat ride on the Seine, the works. It didn’t work. ‘Soon kaklat karech?’ she said in Gujarati, What are you saying? ‘And don’t forget, Pappa is paying the fare.’ Yes, that was a cross one had to bear—her Old Man dishing out the dough.)

Eyebrows were raised at the office when I broached the subject, but the partners granted leave. Another solicitor, Deepak, cooling his heels like me to become a partner, asked me if I knew what I was doing. ‘This isn’t the time for long leave,’ he said. We both knew that one of the partners at Crawford and Hailey, the bewhiskered yet balding Mr Saklatwala, was particularly unhappy with me for handling a divorce matter. I had spent three months talking to the couple and convinced them to carry on with the marriage. I thought I had done a great job. Mr Saklatwala did not. He had let the whole office know what he thought of it. In fact, he was so garrulous that advocates had named him Mr Kaklatwala, meaning chatterbox. Advocates were third in the hierarchy, after partners and solicitors, as far as the firm went. The trouble was (and I came to know of it much later) that the father of the boy, a real moneybag, wanted a divorce for his son. Moneybags can promise law firms a lot of money, especially if they want an unwanted daughter-in-law out of the house. Moreover, unbeknown to me, he had offered Saklatwala’s brother a job in his chartered accountant’s firm. And unbeknown to Saklatwala, I had affected the patch-up—even induced the couple to kiss in the office with sundry attorneys and typists applauding. That moolah, of course, never came into the coffers of the firm. Then the Resident had called from Rajkot on the recommendation of Seervai. I was recalled from Paris, made to cool my heels, then sent here. The senior partner, a Scot, said in his usual staccato manner, ‘This is a big job, Sam. Your name will be in the papers. You are on home ground—constitutional law, your strong suit, the only suit you have—ha ha. Who knows, you may become an adviser to the Chamber of Princes.’

Just as well we returned early. Zarine’s father got a heart attack and died. That was a pretty traumatic period for her, though she took it bravely. My other worry was she had got interested in religion. An old swami had made an impact. His photograph was in our flat now, resting on a small table by itself, with a rudraksh mala under the snap. I had said nothing. The soul has its own whims; it leads you where it wants to go. Not my job to meddle.

A week later I received the royal summons, bulawa as they called it. Abdul Kadir was sitting with him. Nawab Mahabat Khanji of the sixteen gun salutes was middle-sized and rotund, his face lightly pocked. I could make out he was self-conscious and trying to look dignified. Nawab sahib did not believe in pleasantries.

‘The English seem to be in a hurry to leave. Is that your assessment?’

I explained as best as I could. They did mean to leave. The haste they seemed to be showing was not a smokescreen. The dewan nodded.

‘I agree with Bharucha. They intend to go. The police commissioner of Bombay, J.C. Wilson, has gone on two year’s leave. The editor of Illustrated Weekly, Stanley Jepson, has retired after twenty years. They’ve left the floundering ship. England can’t afford the Empire anymore.’

‘Bharucha, since the princes will be free and an independent country could be carved out of the princely states, what will be its shape? Who will head it? Will it be the Nizam of Hyderabad? Will we, as a block, get dominion status: a Hindu India, a Muslim India and a princely India of hereditary rulers? Are you understanding?’

I looked at the dewan, who kept a straight face. So that’s what HH was expecting?

‘Your Highness, we fully agree that rulers should have a say in governing their territories. Rajas and nawabs have looked after their subjects much better than these politicians in their ragged dhotis ever would. But facts have to be faced, ’Highness. At the moment, there is no thinking within the Congress or the League to give a constitutional position to the princes as a block.’

‘Even rulers with gun salutes?’

‘At the moment, they make no distinctions between rulers with gun salutes and the non-gun-salute wallahs.’ (What one could not say to him was that I could already see oblivion mirrored in their collective horoscopes. The only gun salutes they’d hear would be their own farts as they went about their sedentary lives.)

I looked at Abdul Kadir and he winked and shook his head a millimetre to indicate I should be more politic. When he saw that light had not dawned on me, he took off. ‘Your Highness,’ said Kadir, ‘let us remind Bharucha of the resolution passed by the Chamber of Princes only on January 29th. It clearly made out that the princely order was an entity to be reckoned with. They would retain all powers other than those ceded by them. When the crown’s paramountcy terminates, the rights surrendered by the states to the crown will revert to them. How will this upstart Union grab these rights?’

I was not sure how to deal with this charade. I looked into the passive eyes of the passive nawab. ‘Your Highness, the Congress has been saying for years that power will vest with the people.’

HH spoke up. ‘Did you see the Agha Khan’s portrait in the papers yesterday? It was done by a Persian painter, said the paper, chap by the name of Van Dongen. Can a Persian have such a name Bharucha?’

I couldn’t believe it, this sudden switch. His attention span had snapped. Fifteen solid minutes on statecraft and his own future was perhaps too heavy a burden on a sixteen-gun-salute nawab’s mind. The dewan seemed engrossed in the Agha Khan, his turban and his protruding belly. It would be tough surviving here. I made polite noises. I had seen the portrait in the papers, and yes, as HH had so observantly observed (my English was going for a six, I observed), he was wearing a turban. Yes, and the Persian names I knew were all culled from the Shahnama—names like Godurz and Gaeve and Rustam and Bizan. Persians had not heard of a Van Dongen, to the best of my poor knowledge of Iran. He may be Dutch, ’Highness. I couldn’t exit on that dithering negative note. So I added, even as Kadir laughed, ‘And no one has heard of a Van Dongen fighting against Afrasiab, Your Highness.’

III

The superintendent of police called. I received him at the porch itself, as he got down from his jeep. He saluted in full view of the servants and I must have gone up in their reverence scales. I had at least twice salaamed traffic constables in Mumbai just as they were about to hand me a ticket. It had worked each time.

‘Myself Salimuddin Khan, sir.’ I shook hands and took him into the living room. I noticed he didn’t have a swagger, though he did sport a brief Hitlerite stub on his upper lip. I made him comfortable and then asked him to what I owed this visit.

‘Social call, sir, just social—wanting to get acquaint, you see. You important member of State Council, and so I am dutybound.’ He looked down and shook his head.

‘You must be having a tough time, SP Sahib. The times are not favourable to good law and order, I guess.’

‘They never are, sir, never are. By Allah’s grace, things are quiet here so far. But air is bad and who can prevent bad air current from arriving? Good may delay but bad arrive before time, sir.’

He smiled a bit evilly, his gums showed as he parted his lips.

‘Are you from Junagadh?’

‘I am not, sir. I am imported item, if I may say so.’

He smiled again and his gums showed again, and this time I noticed nothing evil in the smile. Perceptions change moment to moment, smile to smile, I thought.

‘So am I, an imported commodity myself, and of much less use than you, SP Sahib.’

‘You are from Bombay, we all know. I am from Ahmedabad—joined the force about twenty years ago.’

I was hoping he wouldn’t unburden his life story on me. But he did.

‘One incident can change one’s life. I was taken in as an Inspector, but after a few years, the Patiala thing happened and I grabbed my chance.’

Now how was I to know what the ‘Patiala thing’ was? Did the fellow expect the whole world to know?

‘You couldn’t have heard of it, sir. But in Junagadh, case is famous. Important cases here are so few, that it is difficult to mark.’

‘You mean to make a mark?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me about it.’

He made an evasive gesture out of modesty, though modesty can often be sham. I have taken recourse to it often myself, and truth to tell, never felt a cad after dissembling.

‘We had a big man from the nobility here—name of Iftikhar Husain. House in Junagadh, house in Veraval! Member of Junagadh Club; had studied in Aligarh Muslim University. AMU always famous for its black sherwani. Iftikhar Mian always dressed in sherwani, good sherwani. People wondering all time where he got money from. He said he had ships. To own ships you have to be very big. He was big, but not so big. And if you are moneyed, people want to know where money come from? You understand?’ I nodded to indicate I bloody well understood. ‘I was a mere Inspector and he never noticed me when we passed each other. He would be in Buick, I on my motorcycle. Not good not to notice Inspector whether he be on cycle or motorcycle or on foot. No one loses anything in salaam dua or hello, isn’t it, sahib?’

‘Very well said, SP Sahib.’

‘Well, actually, I hardly had much to “work out”, as we say in this case. Patiala worked it out for me!’ He laughed rather loudly. This time not just the gums, but the palate showed. ‘This was in the thirties, early thirties. Three burly men came from Patiala and they entered Iftikhar Mian’s house early in morning when there was just one servant in the house. His family away in Veraval. “Oiye,” they said, “Where is your antique shop, Mister?” Iftikhar Mian didn’t know what to say. Totally no-plussed, as you people say in courts.’

‘Nonplussed,’ I ventured.

‘Nonplussed. Iftikhar Mian very dignified banda. Not one wrinkle on face could be disturbed easily. Wrinkle as dignified as Iftikhar Mian himself. Good, fleshy face he had, almost handsome. What personality! Iftikhar Husain didn’t know what to answer. “Oiye,” they said once again, “Where is your antique shop?” “What antique shop?” asks Iftikhar Mian of well-ironed sherwani, though it was early morning. “Where you keep your chandelier-vandelier and old China-Shina?” asked one of them. “Ming dynasty,” added another, laughing loudly. “What is all this about? Who are you? Get out of my house!” shouted Iftikhar Husain, erstwhile of Aligarh Muslim University.’

Salimuddin Mian took a sip of tea. ‘The burly three wouldn’t move. “Oiye,” they said, “You must be in antique business. You send thirty-five-year-old woman for Maharaj! You think you are running antique shop, seventeenth century sofa, eighteenth century four-poster bed, nineteenth century woman?” They beat him and his servant up. Iftikhar Mian’s face started looking antique and his black eye only thing undignified on dignified face. Iftikhar lodged report to the police. His second big mistake. First mistake, old supply. He should have managed younger lot for old Patiala nobility. Never report to police if you have something in your giraiban—or, to translate, if you have something naughty in your underclothes. I raided his house in Veraval. Second time, Iftikhar Mian nonplussed. I seized documents. He turned out big smuggler. He got opium from North, from Swat and Hunza. And he supply not just Patiala but others. He traded with Mir of Hunza, Akhund of Swat, Khan of Kalat—if not big Khan himself, then some smaller Khans. How we know? Our nawab sahib gets dogs from Makhad and hounds from Hunza. This fellow get opium from Hunza, supply woman to Patiala. I took matter to His Highness. HH kind man, as you know. He said let the three men from Patiala go. I released them. And he gave one week to Iftikhar Mian to leave Junagadh, bag and baggage, as you say. I got promoted.’

I stood up and shook the SP’s hand. He was most gratified at the gesture. Then his face turned serious. ‘Just a simple query, Bharucha Sahib. Has someone slipped in a pamphlet in your house?’

‘Pamphlet? Slipped in, did you say? No, not that I know of.’

‘Would you mind if I also enquire from servants?’

‘By all means, go ahead.’

He went ahead, asked Ibrahim, Umar Pattawallah, the hamaal. Then he came up to me. ‘A very bad pamphlet circulating. Hasn’t been printed in Junagadh—printer would have been in great trouble. Circulatory pamphlet mean bad news should travel. Pamphlet full of treason. But we will find him, the fellow who wrote. The printer may escape, for this is the work of a press outside Kathiawar.’

Since I had no idea what he was talking about, I made no comments. Obviously, it had something scurrilous against the dewan or the palace. The dewan, more likely, I thought. People were jealous of his elevator and that he was still at his job, despite his ill health. People get impatient after someone’s heart attack. Time for you to quit buddy, that’s what your body tells you. Listen to it, man, and let me wriggle onto your chair.

IV

Syd Barnes barely got up to shake hands with me. I thought he could have lifted his arse at least six inches further up to appear minimally polite. You invite a chap home and don’t even make a pretence of standing up to shake him by the hand. Actually, it was Claire who had asked me over to tea. ‘One should know you better,’ she had said, to no purpose, I thought. After the return to the paddocks, she had made it a habit of stopping by and chatting for a few minutes before she left. Now and then, she’d consent to a cup of tea. One could be a bit hard up for company in this place.

The house, by British standards, was modest. The crystal on display was probably from one of the chain stores on Oxford Street, certainly not from Bohemia. The sofa set was cane, thickly-cushioned. The tables and the sideboard were carved, the kind you found in Gujarati and Parsee homes. A large Bokhara rug caught the eye. There was no effort at ostentation. The driveway was a twist of stone and gravel. The garden, small as it was, looked British, the lawn perfectly manicured, flowerbeds neatly segmented, and the flowers already burgeoning. The delphiniums were spearing upwards and there was a row of pansies. The hydrangeas will be out later, she said, and they’ll be pink. I have made the soil in their beds alkaline. They change colour, did you know? Claire asked. I shook my head.

Syd was bigger than he looked, an inch or two short of six feet, though for some reason, his height didn’t show on him. He was pale and hollow-cheeked and looked under the weather. He coughed repeatedly, long enough to get embarrassing. He was balding fast, with a bandana of brown hair going around his temples and encircling his skull. Must have married late, I thought. His steel grey eyes were cold. I defined him right there—stony of eye, languid of limb.

Claire was wearing a short white top and a turquoise skirt reaching down to her ankles almost. Between the two was that sun-burnt band around the midriff. What would be there above and below that sash of light walnut colour, I wondered. She looked very striking, the face not running with sweat, the hair not bedraggled, as after her morning rides. She looked almost beautiful, the eyes grey and long-lashed, the cheekbones high and not a freckle on her smooth face. To begin with, Claire looked a bit uncomfortable, not as chirpy as she was in the mornings after her horse rides. I noticed she sat on the edge of her armchair, always a sign of some disquiet.

‘Your wife rides very well.’

‘Regrettably, I don’t. In fact, whatever she does well, I don’t, and whatever I do well, she doesn’t.’

‘What do you do—do well, I mean, Mr Barnes?’ My wife, Zarine, has told me often that I can be bloody abrupt sometimes. Syd was, for a moment, to recycle the word which had troubled the SP, nonplussed.

‘I am not sure I do anything well,’ he said deprecatingly, with a wan smile.

‘Like most of us. But you are being unduly modest, I am sure.’

The bearer came in with tea. The china was blue, almost translucent, and so delicate that I knew I would have to be careful handling that tea cup. The cotton wrapping around the sandwiches was wet and embroidered. Hunger suddenly knocked at the door of my stomach, but I chose the egg sandwich rather than the chutney one, which I really craved. Musn’t show my desi tastes.

‘And what do you make of all this?’

‘Of what?’

‘You surely know what I mean. Though to tell the truth, I am morose not so much about what’s happening here, but the British retreat, if I may use that word, from India. It’s not Dunkirk, I know. No Stukas and Messerschmitts bombing the hell out of us. But look at it this way. It’s a two-hundred-year-old way of life changing for numerous families.’ His head cocked at an angle, he spoke rancorously. ‘We are moving camp, man, and after two hundred years, one ninety after Plassey, if you want to bring me down to detail.’

I shook my head. I wasn’t getting into all this. He rolled a cigarette with great concentration, as if he was solving a tough mathematical problem. It was his third since I had come and I thought he shouldn’t be smoking at all. The operation was interrupted by a coughing fit. A spell of wheezing followed.

‘Rice and curry, koi hai, the abdar at the club, khansama in the kitchen, syce in the stables, risaldar and his risala in the paddocks, pankhawala in the rest house—all left behind. Also the shabashes on the back, chasing the badmashes in the badlands, pig sticking, tiger hunts, O, the drums and the din and the hankas—everything over; as if history was just waiting for the Germans to fuck it all up for us, pardon my language.’

I didn’t say anything. I noticed Claire feeling uncomfortable.

‘Sorry for that. Went overboard. But to repeat, what do you make of all this, things that are happening between you all now?’

Yes, it had to come to that, didn’t it? One couldn’t avoid it. ‘There is a lot of bitterness and blood here, Mr Barnes. The Muslims are terrified of becoming a minority in a democratic country. Simple—they think they’ll be out-voted all the time. Muslims want a confederation when they are in a minority and a unitary Islamic state when they have a majority. And the Hindus are worried that Bharat Mata will be carved up in two. Both are emotionally upset. So you have this mess.’

‘Mr Bharucha, what I am asking is what happens when we leave? Do you guys keep slaughtering each other? And when will this rioting end?’

‘That’s unfair, darling. If freedom had come to them in the thirties instead of that Government of India Act, there may not have been any riots. If blame has to be apportioned, I don’t know, for one, where it will all end,’ Claire had spoken at last.

‘I have a feeling we are leaving too early.’

‘In the context of the riots, you are right,’ I said. ‘The larger picture is different though. Freedom in the thirties would have seen a united India. Of course, you’d have had much greater trouble in the war.’

‘What exactly do you mean?’

‘Well, to put it succinctly, the Japs would have overrun a lot of the east but for Indian troops. And Indian troops went right up into Italy—I lost a friend there, Dadi Patel.’ I had shut him up and rather mildly, I thought.

‘Will you have a drink, Mr Bharucha, a sundowner?’ The fellow was becoming almost affable. We clinked glasses, just prior to one of his coughing fits. Good whiskey was rare, especially here in Junagadh. Claire still couldn’t steer the conversation away from politics.

‘Have you been a student of history, Mr Bharucha?’

‘Yes, my favourite subject, besides law, of course. And history has a lot to do with our troubles. Everything here is mottled with history. And it is playing a pretty dirty role, if you ask me. One side thinks they have had enough of the other—they can’t forget a thousand-year-old yoke or servitude, call it what you will. The Muslims can’t forget they were conquerors of sorts. Each side thinks the other is the devil. The world here is turning Manichean almost.’

This was suddenly greeted with almost a cheer by both husband and wife. I must have looked slightly dumbfounded.

‘Claire has a thesis on Manichaeism.’

‘I was at Trinity—Philosophy, you know. How wonderful you should have mentioned Mani or Manes, as a lot of his followers knew him.’

Syd talked of the war, Claire of Manes—conversation sagged. Claire saw me to the car as I left. ‘He shouldn’t be smoking,’ I said, as I drove off.

V

I got up early and looked under the door phalange, the place where someone would slip in a pamphlet. There was nothing. I felt relieved. The post, or the tapaal as we called it here, could be quirky.

In the afternoon, the Bombay Chronicle called from Baroda. The correspondent didn’t give me his name. You may like to know, sir, that the dewan has just held a press conference. Sir Mitter, the dewan of Baroda, said that in Delhi he had quashed a conspiracy among some princes to boycott the Constituent Assembly. Did he use the word ‘conspiracy’, I asked. No, sir, but he said that he ‘broke the spell they were under’. Sir Mitter added that as for ‘attached states’ joining Baroda for entry into the Constituent Assembly, Sardar Patel had asked him to leave them alone. That meant he had a line on the great Sardar.

I was not sure what this was leading to. I thought—it was a hunch —that Sardar Patel was wary of the Maharaja of Baroda becoming a big leader of Gujarat. I am concerned with Junagadh, I answered. Baroda is as good as out of bounds for me.

A week passed and then on the twentieth (we were into February), the wireless crackled the whole bally afternoon and I sat glued to my Murphy radio. Britain would leave India by June ’48. A scheme for the transfer of power was to be devised, if there was no agreement between the Muslim League and the Congress. And ‘paramountcy’ (as ugly and pompous a word as any) was to end before the final changeover. Prime Minister Clement Atlee had made the announcement in the House of Commons. He also announced the sacking of Viceroy Lord Wavell. A rear admiral was to replace him. My Murphy was giving trouble, the static ear-splitting. Then the name came through—Mountbatten. The man from Burma, that’s it! But just a rear admiral!

The papers next day were full of it. Churchill had stood up and asked why Lord Wavell had been dismissed. He hadn’t been appointed for a fixed term, Atlee answered, and he added, ‘It is not the intention to hand over India to chaos.’ There was widespread astonishment at Churchill’s question on Wavell’s dismissal and Atlee’s tacit acceptance of his description. (No summons from the HH yet. If he doesn’t call me today, when on earth is he going to? What am I doing here? It is not funny being a consultant without being consulted.) Their duels continued for a fortnight. On 6 March, Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons, wanted the ‘problem of India’ to be handed over to the UN, as was done in the case of Palestine. He added that a government headed by Jawaharlal Nehru was ‘a complete disaster’. And he called him a leader of caste Hindus.

Atlee praised Nehru. And he said of Churchill that ‘his practical acquaintance with India ended some fifty years ago’. He had formed some prejudices then. ‘They have remained with him ever since and I think I agree that it is a remarkable example of constancy.’ (Laughter from the Labour benches and thumping of tables.)

The dogs were sent back to their kennels, the begums were shunted off to their palaces along with their serving maids, betel preparers and supari cutters. And I, Saam Bharucha, was summoned again by His Highness, Mahabat Khanji KCSI, Nawab of Junagadh, ruler of the largest state in Kathiawar, recipient of sixteen canon salutes. (Sorry for dramatizing that damp squib of a meeting.) The news was depressing—as it would be for any native ruler. All this was staring the princes in their faces, but stark reality hit the nawab only now. Within a year you wouldn’t be dealing with Political Agents in their tweed coats and neck-ties and haw-haw accents and talk of cricket, Hutton and Washbrook, and blighty before explaining why instead of the ten per cent of the state’s revenue you were allowed to spend on family, harem and kennels, you splurged eighteen per cent. You’d now be dealing with Gujarati-speaking, paan-chewing politicians in dhotis and chappals who would be curt and demanding. While you gazed at their hairy shins, they would take your pants off; and the tick-off would be in some native tongue, not in understated, soft-toned Anglo-Saxon! Unbearable thought.

It was not Atlee’s announcement of quitting India by June ’48 that had the nawab in doldrums. It was Churchill being snubbed. What hope now? Kadir still pumped in some hope with bellows, the way a tinker does. He quoted sundry resolutions passed by the Chamber of Princes. The princely order constituted an entity! When the Crown’s paramountcy ends, powers surrendered by the states to the Crown would revert to them, blah blah blah.

‘What do you think, Bharucha?’

It was as direct a question as could be put to an attorney-at-law. HH needed a direct answer, no fudging.

‘Your Highness, states have to deal with the Indian government, which will take charge of all aspects of administration. There can’t be five hundred smaller countries in the belly of one large country. That would be a legal and constitutional farce, and unworkable at that. The world would laugh at India.’

Not a word was said after that. The meeting ended. I left wondering whether I would ever be summoned again to the quasi-royal presence of the nawab.

VI

It arrived by post, nice sparkling white envelope, with OBE typed against my name. My esteem seemed to be in ascendance. I spotted it with sundry dak in the afternoon. This must be it, I thought, judging by the size. I closed my bedroom door, switched on my electric kettle, applied some steam to the envelope and gently opened it. The pamphlet sat inside. Shoddy paper, bad type, yes, this was it, smelled like one. It was titled ‘House of Babi’. Couldn’t be an exercise in historiography, I thought, but could well be high on the defamation stakes. I switched on my bedside table lamp, rested my back on the bedstead, and read.

At the age of seven, Mahabat Khanji of the Babi dynasty was sent to England for studies. When he returned, he was put under an English tutor, H.A.W. Bladen, who taught him little, but inculcated in him a love for dogs. One Mohammadbhai was his companion. For six months after he acceded to the throne, he was OK; rose early and went out riding. Then he became slothful, kept a number of dogs and made them chase monkeys, rabbits, donkeys, stags and sometimes heifers. A troop of Vaghri shikaris was maintained to catch and supply pigs, hares, foxes and jackals to the nawab’s camp so that they could be torn apart by his hounds.

According to the pamphlet, HH initially had diamond-studded collars specially crafted for some dogs and once celebrated a canine wedding. In order to satisfy his curiosity, he would administer chloroform to a bitch about to deliver pups and have her abdomen opened, just to see how the pups were positioned. Quite a few bitches died this way, said the pamphlet. This pamphleteer must be having a pornographic imagination, I thought. The nawab had tombs built for favourite dogs. Dismal reading, this.

His mother Asha Bibi got addicted to cocaine, supplied by one Gokaldas. She got her son’s first marriage fixed with Manharjaan, from a noble family in Bhopal, known later as the Bhopal Begum. His second marriage was with a ‘female attendant’ of his mother. The nikah was performed in Veraval (probably without the mother’s knowledge). She became known as the Junagadh Begum. When the mother of HH died, one Bim Khala of the Khokhar family became very powerful. The nawab married two of her daughters, known as the Kutiyana Begum (since she came from Kutiyana) and Rani Sahiba respectively.

The litany about the wives was long—ending in his marriage to the Hazur Begum. Hazur Begum’s first husband was one Mohammad Khan Sarwani, son of Kalubhai Sarwani. He was forced to divorce her so that the nawab could marry her. With four wives already, HH also had to divorce one and the choice fell on the poor Junagadh Begum, the second wife. In between there were also a short-term marriage or two, one with a dancing girl. The pamphlet said he was unable to satisfy his queens and, to shore up his virility, took a lot of Unani medicine, which was very ‘heaty’. So, to keep cool, he had to sleep with four table fans directed towards his head and four towards his feet, with one ceiling fan overhead. A wretched hakim advised him a diet of the tongues of sparrows—again, to add to his virility. So a lot of them were killed or netted by birdcatchers, much to the annoyance of his Hindu subjects. Yet, none of them had the guts to speak up, except one Tansukh Ram of village Khorasa under Malla Mahal. How many birds would have to die for a meal of sparrow tongues, I kept wondering. Were sparrows halaal? Could someone invent all this from a lurid imagination?

I didn’t envy the pamphleteer, if caught. His hide would be flayed. More likely, dogs would be set on him, the Afghan hounds from Makhad and Hunza.

The nawab is very shy, couldn’t speak a word in public and, till 1932, was hardly ever seen by his subjects. He was always surrounded by hangers-on, known as hazurias. To be fair, good people also figured in the pamphlet, people about whom I had heard nothing but praise—Mr and Mrs Tatlock, who had taught the heir apparent, Dilawar Khanji, Eric Marks, Major Burhan Mohammad, who had beaten Joseph Plada in a tennis tournament. Dilawar Khanji, known as Achu Bapu, and Ghulam Mohammad Khanji came in for high praise. Captain Harvey Jones, an important member of the State Council, was not considered capable by the pamphleteer.

There were many other details, most of them scurrilous—harem affairs, voyeurism, sodomy. One begum was born of a Koli woman, later converted to Islam. The Bhopal Begum was so hot-tempered, she had shot a fellow. But it was not wholly one-sided. The nawab also came in for praise—he never touched alcohol; in fact, hated drunks, never smoked. He hated debauchery, said the pamphlet, and ‘if he had a fancy for a girl, he would marry her instead of keeping her as a mistress.’ In the beginning, he was generous and gave alms to the people, but after 1935, he became a miser. It also said that he is very stubborn and ‘if he takes a fancy to do a thing, he will do it at the cost of his life’.

That rang alarm bells. I hoped he would listen to sane advice (meaning mine!) and not go haring after some absurd scheme which ‘takes his fancy’.

Where would all this lead us? What happens if Pakistan comes into being? Would the council ever advise him sanely? What was I to do? These questions bothered me. I wish Zarine were here. At least, I could talk to someone and use her as a sounding board.

The pamphleteer had also praised the heir apparent, or wali ahd, as he was known here. Dilawar was supposed to be a fine gentleman, good cricketer, large-hearted, but paid no heed to state affairs. When his mother remonstrated, he is said to have told her, ‘Bapu (meaning his father) never went to office. So why should I?’ I had found out by now that all the princes were some Bapu or the other—Achu Bapu (Dilawar Khan), Chota Bapu (Himmat Khanji, the eldest son of the divorced Junagadh Begum) and Bapu Sahib, the prince in the care of ‘NCD’, the tutor and guardian. Pages were devoted to the power wielded from time to time by Abu Bhai and Ismail Khokhar, once the controller, replaced later by Yasin Khan, the nawab’s son-in-law.

What was more worrisome was the passage about one Abdullah Julaha, a ‘Dressing Boy’. I had heard of Dog Boys, but never a Dressing Boy. The pamphlet said, ‘Most confidential letters which the nawab used to get from the Imperial Government are read by the dewan, Abdul Kadir, through the agency of this Julaha boy and thus Abdul Kadir holds sway over the nawab.’ What! Does the dewan not get to officially see correspondence with the Government of India? Does he have to resort to such subterfuges?

Next morning, I put the pamphlet in the envelope, pasted the flap back and phoned the SP. Yes, I said, I notice something suspicious in the post. I had deliberately not opened yesterday’s tapaal. Promptly, the SP turned up, examined the envelope and opened it. You couldn’t have read it, he did ask. I shook my head. He saw yesterday’s post lying unopened. That seemed to have convinced him.

‘All lies, Mr Bharucha, all lies in this pamphlet. There is a word for it in English.’

‘Scurrilous,’ I suggested.

‘Exactly. These Englishmen have a word for everything.’

‘Is someone blackmailing the palace?’ I asked, with as much innocence as I could muster.

‘Nothing happen in palace that could be blackmailed, sir. This good place, no drink, no gambling, what more you want?’

I nodded. ‘We will catch the man, sir. We have suspicions. After all, how many people are disgruntled here? How many know the palace or names of begums? Just handful, sir, you can count them on fingers. We know who done it, but he is out of Junagadh. As English say, arm of law is long. We will kick him hard. Leg of law is also long and the boot hard.’ His sardonic laugh somehow brought Mani back to my mind, Melech Kheshokha, the Manichean word for Ahriman. I breathed freely when he left. But this I knew. It wasn’t going to be easy staying here. There was this dilemma. You owed some loyalty to the state and the nawab, but what about loyalty to sanity, to your own calling, to the country and to the people of Junagadh? And how do you make an irrational set of people see reason?

VII

She came on 23 March, just two days after Jamshedi Navroz. She couldn’t think of spending the vernal equinox with me—and we Parsees make such a big deal out of the festival. But it was the day when Lord and Lady Mountbatten were received at the Durbar Hall by Viceroy Wavell. Mountbatten saluted the Wavells smartly at the top of the steps leading to the viceroy’s palace and Lady Mountbatten curtsied to the two. The next day the rear admiral was sworn in—Viscount Mountbatten of Burma KG, GCIE, GCVO, KCB, DSO, and the very next day, he invited Gandhi and Jinnah to Delhi.

Zarine looked good—she’d have looked great to me even if she had high fever; I was seeing her after a while. Have you thought anything about the garden was one of her first questions. Sorry, my mind was not on nasturtiums and azaleas. I was in no-man’s land, batting on a bad wicket, with fast bowlers aiming for my midriff, and she was talking of flowers! The Hazaras had invaded Murree, Afridis and Shinwaris were about to hold a jirga and ask for Khyber to be returned to the tribes once the Brits left, and the papers talked of riots and blood. And we were talking nasturtiums!

I am exaggerating. In Junagadh, over the last two-and-a-half months, the air was so salubrious, so bucolic, one could have written pastorals if one had the ability. Cricket was in full swing at the Jafar Maidan. A turf pitch had been laid at a cost of sixty thousand rupees. For the Hancock tournament, Junagadh had put in four teams, A, B, C and D. Dilawar Khan himself captained the A team. They had Gutoor and Chippa in the team, both Ranji Trophy players. And there was Ibrahim ‘Chakda’, named thus because his run-up resembled a ramshackle truck skidding away. The Jamnagar team had come along with Vinoo Mankad to play against the D team. Mankad was given out LBW by the Junagadh umpire. Then to add incest to injury, Tekchand Khanna, a big, burly college boy, hit him for a six.

In the marquee there was fun, good food and lots of leg-pulling. Sandal Mian, the maternal uncle of Dilawar Khanji, with betel-sepia smeared over his thick lips, was in the forefront. Since NCD was fond of ending his sentences with etcetera etcetera, he was ragged. If he was bowling, Sandal Mian would cry out, ‘Sixer etc. etc.’ He was not the most sensitive of people. A stinging shot by Shankar, who belonged to the washerman caste, was greeted derisively. ‘Arre Bapu, kapde nichod nichod ke iske bazoo bade thagde ho gae hain. (By wringing laundry, his forearms have become very strong.)’ He told NCD, who was a slow bowler, ‘you should bowl when there’s a hurricane on.’

Zarine was restless, couldn’t sleep a wink at night. She had no idea what was wrong. I dreamt of mobs, an indistinct din somewhere in the background, footsteps thudding away in the streets. Sometimes the dreams lit up suddenly and I guessed, in the morning, that those momentary flashes were perhaps fires. One night, Zarine started sobbing; yet, in the morning, she was talking about Rudolf Hess. I had seen the papers. The Times of India described him as ‘Commander of Auschwitz’, which is nonsense, I tell her. It also says he has been awarded death sentence. Wrong again.

‘Have you seen the papers properly, Saam?’

‘What do you mean, properly? I’ve read the ToI and the news items.’

‘You haven’t. You’re too involved with your Chamber of Princes and the Muslim League. You can’t focus on anything else.’

‘Look, I don’t wish to get involved with Hess. There are a hundred silly stories surrounding the mad fellow.’

‘Such as?’

I noticed she was smiling indulgently, almost condescendingly, at me.

‘Such as the solo flight to Scotland and parachuting down near Glasgow. Could he fly over Germany and not be intercepted by the Luftwaffe? There are also stories that the Luftwaffe killed him and placed his double in the aircraft. And there are stories that the English did the same, and the man in Spandau is a double’s double. Furthermore, some say he wanted to meet the Duke of Hamilton, others that it was the Marquess of Clydesdale.’

‘They must be the same, Saam, though I am not into titles and heraldry. But read the paper again. It is Rudolph Höss they are talking about, also spelled as Hoess. Absolute swine. He was the commander of Auschwitz, was ordered by Himmler and Eichmann to do what he did. I think they gassed Russians before they got on to the Jews. He went to Treblinka to learn how they did it. They’ve sentenced him in Warsaw not Nuremberg.’

By the end of the month, riots broke out in Bombay and the police opened fire at nineteen places. Yet, this was nothing compared to Punjab. I panicked. How was Rohinton going to travel back? I wanted to go to Murree, but the dewan wouldn’t hear of it. Junagadh’s fate could be decided any day, Bharucha. HH needs you. Don’t even mention leave. I tried to phone the Muree Brewery people, but it was impossible to get through.

Then Rohinton came in. It was Gheewala who phoned up. He had got a call from Rajkot. Rohinton was on the train. We rushed to the station, waited an hour till the train arrived, and found him. Zarine was hysterical with relief and fell down on the platform.

Rohinton wouldn’t talk about his journey or what happened in the school in the last days. He just clammed up whenever we broached the subject. Slowly, life returned to its humdrum normality. He was curious about what was happening in the country, wanted to hear about the begums and the dogs. I had no idea all this was common knowledge all over the country. He wanted to go to the movies. I had no idea what the theatres here were like. He was used to Metro and Regal in Bombay. I had heard odd stories about the theatre from Eric Marks. He said the nawab’s so-called ‘secret service’ guys would come in and when they would be checked, they would thrust out their chests and say, ‘Don’t you know we are the nawab’s CID?’ And they’d walk in without spending their eight annas.

We took Rohinton to a movie. I found that small towns are given a totally different set of films. They don’t get Suraiya and Noor Jehan. (Suraiya was already being advertised for her role in the forthcoming movie, Do Dil.) Junagadhis and Jamnagaris and Bhavnagaris get the Indian Charlie, known as Noor Mohammad Charlie. Of course, they get his songs as well:

I I I I am sorry, I I I I am sorry

Galay pe phir gayee gam ki lorry lorry lorry lorry

I I I I am sorry

M.A., B.A. sab hai jhagda

hum ko muft mein kyon hai ragda.

The crowds loved it—so did my son, I was appalled to discover. Zarine was utterly scandalized. The lorry of sorrow going over your neck!!!

I thought we needed to move out. We went by car to Chorvad and we couldn’t believe it, the palace overlooking a sea blue as a sapphire. A night halt, and we drove to Veraval. It was Sunday and lunch was at Banker’s, a Parsee who lived there. Other Parsees were invited too and it was a rollicking affair. There was Alpaiwala, who sang. Hilarious guy. He sang Hindi songs translated into his own English!

Fixing eyes on me dear

And rousing in your heart fear

Walking you don’t go away

Oh dear, oh walking you don’t go away.

Some of the others would sing the genuine version of Ankhiyan mila ke, jiya barma ke, chale nahin jana. My son couldn’t believe it. His eyes watered as he laughed.

Then the cry went up for another song of his which everyone seemed to know. And Alpaiwala was in his element.

I am an educated Sethia

Still I like macha kolmi cha patia.

It couldn’t end there, for the moment he said ‘Sethia,’ the others shouted, ‘Tantia! Tantia!’

We went to the Somnath temple, or the temple ruin. A visit there, and recalling history and Mahmud Ghazni, how the blood must have flowed here and the plunder at the end of it, all the levity of the lunch was well neigh knocked out. For miles we saw graves, inches high, leading to the temple. Whose, we asked? Ghazni’s soldiers who fell, we were told blandly by the driver. The awesomeness of history doesn’t seem to shake some people. We were given a big lecture by the pujari of Somnath on how the shivling flew and dropped into the sea, the moment Mahmud Ghazni stepped into the temple. Next morning, we drove back to Junagadh.

My attempts at briefing Zarine were not very detailed. I told her that in the official circles no one spoke Gujarati; it had to be Urdu or English. Kathiawari differed slightly from Gujarati, was possibly a rougher version. A coconut was called a thropha here and not a nariyel. A slap was a bhoosut and not a larfo. I also warned her not to refer to Jinnah in her usual way as Mr Jinn. This was a Muslim state. Speak of him with respect.

After almost a week of excursions and meaningless natter, Zarine finally asked me, ‘How do you find things here?’ (I was determined not to ask her about the ashram and the swami though, not that we were sparring.) My answer was odd, I admit.

‘If you are being interrogated by a torturer, would you call it torture or an interrogation?’

‘Don’t be enigmatic with me, Saam, I’ve told you a hundred times. No riddles!’

‘Darling, they ask me things like, “In how many pieces will India be carved up?” (I was aware I was exaggerating.) Who will head princely India, His Exalted Highness of Hyderabad or Hari Singh of Kashmir or some Gaekwad of Baroda? How do I answer? Each question is a torture.’

‘You are giving straight answers, of course?’

‘Yes.’

‘I would be ashamed if you didn’t.’

‘Not that you don’t feel ashamed of me even otherwise.’

On which happy note, we went to bed.

VIII

‘This was on your writing desk,’ said Zarine, as she flung some papers at me next morning.

‘Not on the desk.’

‘Right, in the drawer. I was looking there for your set of keys to the house. I didn’t know you were writing a journal about our trip to Paris.’

I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t showed it to her.

‘When did you start writing it? And may I add, where the hell did you write it, certainly not at home?’

Tough questions, no answers—that’s my lot these days. It is difficult to explain to her that Crawford and Hailey had decided to get a partner from another firm. They actually wanted to ease me out, the buggers. The English partners were leaving, or we Indians had sensed they were about to leave, booking their seats on liners. Some of them could have been on jetty and gangplank already, damn it, the way our Kerawalas and Ghuslekars and Waslekars were scrambling to get at the partnership finishing line and ‘chesting’ the tape, if I may twist a metaphor. I had no work for a month in Bombay. I wrote the journal.

‘And you couldn’t show it to me, Saam.’

‘I thought you wouldn’t be keen on reading it. You have other interests now—ashrams and things.’

‘You’ll not bring the ashram thing up! That has been the understanding, isn’t it?’

‘I am sorry, slipped out.’

She eyed me darkly. ‘What beats me is you’ve started dissembling—in your writing, I mean. I pray it’s only restricted to writing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You say you’ve forgotten the names of the hotels we stayed in.’

‘But that’s just a way of putting it. I don’t want the attention to be focused on a particular hotel.’

‘But you jolly well remember the names. So what you are writing is a lie.’

‘Truth and hotel names have very little to do with each other. You’ve been quoted copiously in the journal. I hope you found that authentic.’

Something is happening to my memory. I can’t easily recollect the names of the two hotels we stayed in. The first one was central, on Rue de Passy. Its builders were not good at geometry. None of the rooms or passages would have fitted in a rectangle, square or circle. We got a thin, oblong room, which mercifully overlooked the street. A skewed, distorted sort of passage led to a thin, oblong bathroom, shared with owners of another suite. The hotel served no meals. The eating houses and the fromageries, not forgetting the bars, were next door, but expensive. Though we enjoyed jostling with the Parisian crowd, the rent was steep and the room not where one could relax. The next hotel was in the suburbs. I don’t remember the name here either but I can recall the trees around it—maple and elm, black-barked and near-leafless, casting their wintry bare-bone shadows on the patio and porch. We joked about them; the shadows made me think of dark etchings by perhaps a divorced artist in the blackest of moods. Zarine said, why not a painter feeling guilty for running away with his model—some hobo artist from Montmartre caught caressing her nude thigh—the model’s, not the wife’s? Wife beats up femme fatale and throws her out. Painting remains unfinished, he had gone head down and had hardly drawn the thigh (the one he had caressed), when wife caught him. He gets rid of the memory with fierce slashes of charcoal.

Paris wasn’t dilapidated as Zarine thought—despite my telling her earlier a hundred times that the city was unscarred. France would never have allowed the Teutons in without a fight for safeguarding their beautiful city on the Seine. You don’t believe what you don’t want to believe and sometimes you believe only what your fancies have conjured up. You could say for the French that they had no idea what the brown shirts, with that twisted swastika branded on their sleeves, were really like. No one had much of an idea. The French may have lost, but Paris won. The soot of bombed-out craters and the crumble of wall and sidewalk weren’t strewn around. No war cemetery either, when in Stalingrad over one million lay dead.

We just had a few sunny days, when a sealed circular skylight would let a blade of granulated light enter our bedroom in the morning and would not let the early winter pall get us down. A Turkish pasha by the name of Suleyman Yelmaz and his wife had been staying at the hotel for a month before we intruded. Though she wore her black outfit, her face was never veiled, and she smoked ceaselessly. His flat was under extensive repairs, he said. The man was interesting, fond of both wine and whisky. He was a bit hungry for company as well. He had spent quite some time in Punjab and the Frontier a year back. That sounded very strange. He missed his kebabs, but was otherwise happy here. I got the impression that he had fallen out with people who matter in his own land and was cooling his heels. However calm he may try to appear, a fugitive’s face is always a giveaway. Zarine asked him one evening point-blank if he had read Grey Wolf, the biography of Kemal Ataturk. Rather impolitic of her, I thought. But the Turk said he had read it and agreed with most of it. He had himself become unwelcome in Turkey because of his views. ‘And what are your views?’ asked Zarine.

‘I am not for whatever has happened in my country. My father was the one who broke away. “If you abolish the Caliphate, you abolish Islam!” he had said in a memorable speech. That was in the twenties. Our family left Turkey after that.’

Later, over drinks on some of the evenings, he opened up further, talked about the Izmir plot to kill Ataturk. ‘Ismail Canbulat, Ahmet Sukru and others were hanged for some fake conspiracy to kill Ataturk. There was some suspicion against our relatives too. We couldn’t stay in the country and left for Egypt. I may be wrong, my father may have been eased out, forced to quit. The abolition of the veil, the Turkish alphabet, merely a variant of the Latin alphabet, which was thrust on us—we were against all that. Things are different now and the past is forgotten. We visited Turkia this summer.’

We were a bit amazed, this man in western suits, his boot-tops always shining, drinking wine by the bottle, whisky by the half-bottle and yet strident in his views. How does whisky gel with religion, I asked him one evening. ‘Religion has its own passion. You Indians would call it “nasha,” “saroor”. Right?’

Right, I answered. ‘And whisky has its own passion?’ I asked.

‘Withouth doubth,’ he said and we both laughed and clinked glasses.

It was not his politics I wanted to talk about. It was the poetry in the man. He had spent time on the Black Sea. His consonants were soft as his stories. ‘I have seen the fugitive quail migrating over the eastern coast of the Black Sea in August. They head south in droves as August ends. The air gets scissored with their cries and wingbeats as they descend on the coastal flats. They know the flats and the flats know them, but the birds are tired and their cries sound like mini-gasps. Some are so exhausted they can’t even give voice to their fatigue. Clouds of quail and other small birds move in as winter in the north proclaims its first signs of arrival, though the grass has hardly turned white yet. Bird shadows darken the ground, their wingflaps hiss. Pairs get separated, the male does not know where its mate is. They are just too exhausted to bother. Night will cover them like a shroud and it’s only after dawn that they will look for seed and worm and refresh their instinctive collective annual memory.

They have escaped mist and cold, brittle as crushed ice, the landscape white with frost, air dark with snow. They have escaped winter.

But not the winter of the hawks.

For it is also the migrating season for falcons—cold is democratic and so hawks have also to move south. These are the strong-winged sparrow hawks, the ones who can change course suddenly in mid-career, dart to the left and despite the momentum, claw to the right. They do not come in great numbers; they hunt in pairs. Even their shadows are a study in solitude as they skim the earth for mice and rabbits.

The hawks are not a cloud but they are enough to cause a rain of small dead birds on the coast. The female is bigger and it is the male who forages the sky and earth for food. He has this gold band round his neck, as if some bird god had given him a necklace of sorts. The hawk wheels like spun gold, before he plummets like a black bolt. How does he change colour between the slow wide-winged wheel and the precipitous dive?

There you have it—a bird drift of quail, a fall of falcons.’

One can’t really list this as a quarrel, but it is the kind of thing that happens between fatigued husband and spirited wife. There’s nothing Zarine didn’t want to see in this city, which she called the greatest in the world. I told her that had good old Marshal Petain not got weak in the knees and sued for a peace of sorts, Louvre would have looked like a bombed-out warren of bunkers. I get bored after an hour in museums and art galleries, what if the place is Paris. The dispute arose out of a silent film she wanted to see. It was The Passion of Joan of Arc, vintage 1929 or was it ’28? Zarine had had a bad attack of stomach cramps lasting two days and was feeling low. Don’t see a film on Jean d’Arc, I said. It will depress you. This one is about her trial. Any film on her is going to end on the stake, sur le boucher, as the French, who did her in, call it.

If the film is only about the trial and a rustic lady shorn of her hair and her voice confronting hard-nosed ecclesiasts, it depresses further. You don’t see her storming ramparts and thrashing the English, which is a pity, not that she thrashed them but that you can’t see her thrashing them.

My arguments wouldn’t wash. The stake differs from film to film, I said, but does it matter if she fries in piles of sizzling reed and faggot or among smouldering logs? All you are left with is viewing camera angles, smoke billowing up and then the flame lighting up her face. You’ll see her face sweat, her head drop. Then the camera will move away to glee or horror etched on the faces of the bystanders, depending on the crowd.

‘Just stop it, will you! Just stop it!’

‘Zarine, I am just telling you what it is going to be like—any film on St Joan. I mentioned glee only because I don’t know what crowd the director has in mind. If he is thinking of one that views her as a heretic then there’ll be glee. If you are showing the clergy which condemned her, you’re going to show sadistic glee on their pinched, Mephistophelian visages. But soon the faces of the peasantry around the stake will turn to horror and they’ll weep, realizing she’s a saint. Then a long shot of flame and smoke and the concourse, and lastly, the credits moving up, as the smoke did from reed and log.’

We went to the movie, all the same. One of the ecclesiasts on the screen had two protuberances on his head (looking very much like the horns of the devil). And there was glee on the faces of the tribunal as she burnt.

Zarine didn’t talk to me for two days after that.

As I went over my journal, I found I never bothered to hint at my lecture at Sorbonne on ‘Colonies and Democracy’. Nor had I talked of the book I had written.

IX

Everyone seems to be on his way to England. Nawaz Jung Bahadur, Agent General of Hyderabad, is in London. What’s he doing there? Who is he carrying on discussions with? Or is he carrying on with some female? His Exalted Highness may not have much to exult over shortly, though. The Jam Sahib left for Karachi en route to London on 8 April on his own plane. From there he travels by BOAC. Why did the Yuvraj and Yuvrani of Porbandar have to accompany him till Karachi? It is up to British India to be fair to us, he declared. ‘If they (British India) are fair, we two together will quickly frame the Constitution of India.’

We two? Jam Sahib and Clement Atlee? Or will he achieve that in tandem with the glorified rear admiral? Meanwhile, Jinnah has said over a week back (27 March, to be precise), ‘It is better to divide India and flourish than to fight for a united India and destroy everything.’ Destruction must be on his mind. Freudian slip? The alternative to a divided India is destruction of ‘everything’.

In the evening at the Junagadh Club, where I’ve started going for a spot of billiards, one Magan Lal accosts me. We are waiting for Janak Rai to finish his game with someone I don’t know. ‘Can we have a sandwich and a cup of tea after you finish?’ he asks.

Magan has his own views on what’s happening. Freedom, with partition of the country, is a much bigger curse than slavery, he says. After all, we have been slaves for a thousand years now. I don’t mind being a slave for another ten years or twenty or forty. Freedom has to come, it can’t be denied forever. But if the country is cut up once, it will stay halved forever. You cut an apple, it can’t be joined again, can it, Mr Bharucha? If you cut a worm in half … I interrupted him saying I didn’t think much of analogies—they are the bane of logic.

But he came to the point. The rajas and the princelings of Kathiawar were ganging up. There was a move to forge a confederation. The Jam Sahib was leading the movement at present. Could Junagadh be roped in?

‘What are you going to call this confederation?’

‘The Union of Kathiawar.’

‘That sounds a bit like the Indian Union,’ I said. He laughed.

‘Is Baroda in with you?’ I asked, even though I knew the answer.

‘No, no, no. Baroda will put a spanner in the works. Baroda has other fish to fry. He is aiming big. He is in with Sardar Patel, sir. His dewan is also with the Sardar.’

I feigned innocence. ‘Sir Mitter has a line to the Sardar?’

He nodded.

‘Why me?’ I asked in the end. He didn’t understand. ‘Why have you come to me? What influence do I have here? Why not approach the dewan?’

‘Who else can we talk to, Mr Bharucha?’

A sense of déjà vu overtook me. Lately, this seemed the standard response I was getting.

I met Maganbhai, as he was called (in Gujarat everyone is a bhai, brother), later again at the club. The Political Agent at Rajkot, Major Hailey, was not averse to the ‘Union of Kathiawar’, he whispered. In fact, Hailey was totally with it. I was glad he didn’t mention Sir Alfred Jackson, the British Resident whom I had met, as a part of the intrigue.

I just couldn’t understand what the Brits were up to. During these countrywide riots they called in British troops only once, in Amritsar on 23 February, to help the police in containing rowdy demonstrations by the Muslim League. At the Mall Road, police had opened ‘revolver fire’, according to the papers. The Brits would be neutral. Both communities would welcome their presence. Had they given up on India? Their attitude now was: ‘This is not our war. Ours ended in bombed-out Berlin and Hitler’s bunker. The Pandies (as the mutineers in 1857 were called after Mangal Pandey) and the Khans can stew in their cow fat or pig lard.’

Ambedkar is on his own trip; doesn’t seem to mention India and Pakistan. If Hindus want Partition, he wanted some answers. What protection were Hindus prepared to offer the untouchables as against the Muslim League in the new Constitution? Secondly, where would the boundary be drawn between the countries? Thirdly, will there be a provision for the exchange of population? Lastly, what provisions are the ‘Hindus’ prepared to make for the economic rehabilitation of the scheduled castes, who will be left with the ‘Muslim’ zone and those who will have to be brought to the ‘Hindu’ zone?

X

Zarine’s interaction with two of the begums was not very fruitful. She inadvertently used the expression Mr Jinn for Jinnah, despite my expressly forbidding her. She took our son along also and the begum made him sit on the floor. He’s not going to forget that in a hurry. A bit of a mess, I thought. Nothing excites her very much here, Veraval and Chorvad perhaps, but we are in Junagadh. Can we climb Girnar? I asked her. She declined. The Upparkot fort held no charm for her either. She wanted to go back to her Bombay, I sensed. She was happy to meet Claire, though. They seemed to hit it off well. The hydrangeas had flowered pink, as Claire had expected. But Syd’s asthma was getting worse. What does he do? Zarine had asked as we drove over to their place. I had explained he was into shipping and had done pretty well. He owned houses in Junagadh and Veraval. He had two cars, was on social terms with the Political Agent Major Hailey, though normally the British bureaucracy looked down on English traders in India. I was not sure if he was on social terms with Sir Alfred Jackson, the Resident.

Claire and I would meet from time to time for a few minutes after her ride. She was worried about Syd. That asthma was troubling him further and his coughing fits wouldn’t subside. ‘He just can’t give up smoking. It will be the death of him.’ He had not even made an attempt, and his lungs were decidedly weak. I felt embarrassed hearing all this. Can’t you put some sense in his head? I asked. She shook her head. It was not often that I found her disconsolate.

Syd had a disastrous trip to Veraval, was caught in a pre-monsoon gale that resulted in a death of a cold. He was hospitalized and Claire rushed there. Zarine got a call from her. I wasn’t home. We can’t shift him, Claire had said, and we need oxygen cylinders. The Veraval hospital was an apology for a hospital. Claire sounded desperate. You better go, said Zarine. I reached Veraval with a doctor and an oxygen cylinder. I sat with her and Syd through the night. By noon next day, all was over with Syd, and Claire was heart-broken.

Zarine came by train to be by Claire’s side. Syd was taken to Junagadh and buried in the cemetery. Miss Bolton and Miss Morenes from the Dilawar Khanji Girls’ School, Mr and Mrs Tatlock, and some others were there at the funeral. Harvey Jones was not. That raised eyebrows, but not Claire’s, for she told me later that British officials did keep a distance from the boxwallahs. It was obviously a very trying period for Claire. After the condolence calls, the stream of visitors dried up slowly, always does. There was Syd’s business and the details to be gone into. There was the question of succession—Syd had left a will but she couldn’t find it. It took a month to unearth it from a drawer. I was asked to help out. Succession is a tough thing to handle anywhere. Here you’d have to make queries about Syd’s parents, if they were living, did he have siblings, and what have you. I urged her to tackle her business interests before Syd’s staff swindled her. Best to keep occupied, I told her. Nothing could be worse than being idle during mourning.

Zarine, on the verge of leaving for Bombay, kept egging me on to spend more time with her. ‘Helping hand, aap,’ she’d say. I had frankly nothing much to say to her—when someone is grieving, you tend to repeat your clichés. I kept my distance. Yet, after Zarine left for Bombay, I found myself more and more with her. She would phone and ask whether I had some important appointment or meeting which was keeping me occupied that evening. I would take that as an invitation to visit her.

She stayed mostly indoors now—no deckchairs in the garden. The garden itself looked a bit unkempt. She was quick to tears, the face damp and mussed, and I noticed dark sacks under her eyes. She was especially unhappy that the English were not turning up anymore to the house—the anti-boxwallah snobbery, she repeated. You can’t let that get to you, I told her. Then, Syd was not the friendliest of people, but I couldn’t tell her that.

‘Sam, you’ve no idea what I am going through. His family was not overfond of me. They thought I was too young for him and that he had got hooked just because of my looks—sorry to bring that in. Now this! It’s all my bloody fault. If I were with him, this wouldn’t have happened. The weather was close to cyclonic, something like what we had last year, and he swam in the sea and walked on the beach! You think I’d have allowed it? That’s where he got his pneumonia.’

I could imagine where he swam and his shuffle along the beach later, hair damp, towel athwart shoulder and the trunks dripping. There was a pool beside the beach. Sharp spikes jutted out of the pool floor. The only time I took a swim there during our overnight stay, people had advised me to swim with my tennis shoes on!

‘His smoking did him in.’ One had to say something, after all.

‘We both smoked Sam,’ she answered almost compassionately. ‘I should have stopped, then he may have followed suit.’ We were in her study. It was the last room to the west of the house and jutted out awkwardly, like an afterthought. The windowpanes had turned amber because of the twilight. It was the only room in the house which had wallpaper with a muted floral design. A green pedestal fan was so effective, one needed a dozen paperweights to keep a semblance of order on her writing desk, littered with invoices, bills of lading and ledgers rather than her thesis on Manichaeism. Then, unaccountably, she broke down and I put my arms around her, as she sobbed uncontrollably, burying her face in my chest. I kept saying ‘there, there’ and when she lifted her face, our lips met. I kissed her passionately—neck, eyes, earlobes, wherever lips could land. She was not slow in responding. It was as if both of us knew that it had to be this. There’s no knowing how emotion turns physical suddenly, as if fired by an electrical charge. We groped around each other’s bodies, she with my shirt buttons, I with the clasp at the back of her bra. I was clumsy there, as I am even with Zarine during our bi-annual sexual frenzies. As we moved to the couch, I at last got to see what was below and above the browned midriff. Why, I don’t know, but I thought of the phrase ‘virgin whiteness’. I was no horseman, but we galloped on the couch.

This I can’t live with. A lie is a lie and a Zoroastrian doesn’t lie. I had to tell Zarine. For this didn’t end in Claire’s study room. It moved further. I called Zarine, hand cranking the telephone, telling the trunks operator, now and then requesting him and, at times, letting Umar Pattawallah tell the operator what an important dignitary I was. I told Zarine—didn’t want to put it in writing, not something she could show to my mother’s sister, the only one of the older generation alive. She didn’t understand earlier on—we seemed to be speaking on different planes. Then it dawned on her. Things dawn late at times, but reality does eventually have a stained, mottled sunrise of its own—mostly.

XI

Mountbatten has brought Jinnah to his side. Candidus, the pseudonymous Times of India commentator, says clearly that partition is now inevitable and preparations for the division are on. Jinnah’s statement, ‘As a result of my talk I feel that the Viceroy is determined to play fair,’ steals the thunder. What could Mountbatten have told him? ‘Don’t worry Mr Jinnah, the Crown will never let Muslims down,’ something to that effect. ‘We’ve almost the same scriptures—Abraham and Ibrahim, Moses and Musa. Richard and Saladin were almost blood brothers, Mr Jinnah!’ The fate of the country is sealed. So are the fates of those about to be slaughtered, never mind what the Herald Tribune says: ‘The separation of India into Hindu and Muslim states would be almost as foolish as the division of New York City into separate Protestant, Catholic and Jewish municipalities.’

Meanwhile, the governor of Punjab does me proud. He fines the Muslims of Rawalpindi thirty lakhs for rioting. Who’s going to fine Patiala? Moot point. It’s a ‘native state’. The Brits will shy away, I am certain. Sardar Patel lashes out and asks for a transfer of power to the central ministry immediately. ‘There will be peace within a week,’ he declares. It is May 1947 and Patel still has no real power, can’t ask the army in, can’t tell the police to shoot.

On 12 May, Jinnah says, ‘If the British decide India must be divided, then the central government should be dissolved and all power transferred to the two constituent assemblies representing Pakistan and Hindustan.’

Much is happening. Mountbatten dashes off to London. Gandhi tours riot-hit Calcutta. The Brits are worried over the division of the army between Hindu and Muslim India. The US army and navy have experimented with a new atomic weapon—a radioactive cloud which could be released from an aircraft by non-explosive atomic shells, says GlenMartin, an aircraft manufacturer. A radioactive cloud! It must have made his mouth water. Yummy prospect, pal.

Two days later, on 20 May, Dewan Khan Bahadur Abdul Kadir Muhammad Hussein goes on long leave. The citizens hold a meeting in his honour. HH will not let any man starve, he says. HH is keen on the formation of a self-contained group of Kathiawar states and assures princes that Junagadh has no territorial ambitions on other states. How meaningless can you sound!

Who eased him out and who replaces him? It is Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto of Larkana, with the fungus moustache and diehard views and miles and miles of land in Sindh. I register my presence with him on telephone and am summoned in three hours flat. No waiting-shaiting for fortnight-shortnight, as my Punjabi friends at Crawford and Hailey would have put it.

He exhaled an air of aristocracy. There was class about Sir Shah Nawaz, the classic suit (a bit too warm for summer though), his accent, the way he stood up and shook my hand. He dripped gentility. Yet, incongruently, his physical appearance was nothing to write about. His heavy eyelids seemed weighed down with care or lack of sleep. His moustache looked mildewed.

‘Mr Bharucha, I had heard about you even before I came here. An eminent judge in Karachi talked about your book. He said, except for the title, everything in the book was spot on.’

I smiled wryly. ‘It is called Ideal Constitutions and Ramshackle Reality.’

‘Hmmm, rather ramshackle, the title, but I like “ramshackle reality”. You read a paper at the LSE on Asia and democracy, I believe.’

‘At the Sorbonne; probably that’s how I got shunted here.’

‘What was the paper about?’

‘The paper said Asia had got rid of its shackles, but was a novice on the potholed road to democracy.’

‘Well put, Sam, uh may I call you that?’

‘Of course, Sir Shah Nawaz.’

‘So, in your view, what we have to guard against is India and Pakistan turning into ramshackle democracies.’

‘So you are postulating two entities, sir, India and Pakistan.’

‘Have you any doubts, Sam? I took you for a realist. Pakistan has been underwritten by the Crown. A fine country it will be, compact and powerful, people with one religion, one language, following one book, one prophet. And we have the finest brains in Islam. I met Mr Jinnah. He said the same thing— Pakistanis with their common identity have a great future. Everyone will turn westwards for prayers, and each one will do wuzu—no jumping into dirty rivers from sundry ghats to cleanse yourself.’

Meanwhile, the newspapers are rife with stories about British plans to divide India. Bengal and Punjab are in for plebiscites. Mountbatten is to propose a separate Muslim League Constituent Assembly. 3 June: the most momentous day in the history of India. The country is cut up in half. The British plan for the transfer of power is announced. Immediate dominion status granted. ‘It is clear that any Constitution framed by this [Constituent] Assembly cannot apply to those parts of the country which are unwilling to accept it.’ The legislative assemblies of Bengal and Punjab would be asked to meet—members from Muslim-majority districts to meet separately. And each section of these assemblies would be empowered to decide which side they wanted to go. ‘Forgive and forget’ appeals come through radio broadcasts by Nehru, Jinnah and Baldev Singh. Jinnah says: ‘The viceroy has battled against various forces very bravely … He was actuated by a high sense of fairness and impartiality.’

Our fate beamed in from another planet—that’s how I looked at it.

This news you can’t digest. You have to talk to someone. One can’t discuss with clerks in the office. I phone Zarine. Even as she hears my voice, she says, ‘I knew you’d be worked up over the news. Before you say anything, I have good news. My swami has given me a mantra. Isn’t that something?’ Of course, it is, I am happy for her, I tell her.

‘What we were dreading has come to pass. It’s like listening to a cyclone warning. Yet, when the thing is upon you, the shock is not really mitigated. We’ll be two countries and the process of halving, it will need many knives. Imagine the screaming pain as tendon and cartilage and flesh will be severed.’

‘You are talking like a butcher,’ she says. I shake my head. Is that all she has to say? People can’t stomach strong imagery—it’s a revelation to me. She does make some soothing noises, but before putting down the phone she says, ‘I think next time you get worked up over some event, like if Junagadh joins Pakistan, you should phone Claire up, don’t you think?’

I have seen it coming, haven’t I, all these years? From 1942 onwards we knew the British would always favour the Muslim League. The league had hardly ever protested against the Crown. Jinnah never went to jail or a police lock-up for a night, where Nehru had spent ten years. Jinnah’s was the cleverest policy you could think of. Sit on your arse and watch the Congress fill the jails. When it comes to the crunch, claim a share of the pie. England thought their war effort against Hitler, the Manichean dark, had been stabbed in the back by our antics in 1942. Maganbhai came to the club again. I was playing Janak Rai, the best billiards cueist around here. He was also good at cricket once and Eric Marks had related an incident. They were playing against Ramji, Amar Singh’s brother, along with Nissar, the fastest bowler India had produced. Janak Rai kept telling Eric, batting on the other side, ‘Duck, you fool, duck!’ When Janak faced Ramji, he ducked. Alack a day, the ball didn’t bounce, and got him square on his sola hat, felling both hat and Janak.

‘Dangerous man, this Magan,’ laughed Janak Rai, as we put aside our cues after a hundred up. Once alone, I asked, ‘Which side are you on, Magan?’

‘That’s what people ask about you, sir. I am on the side of India.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Minor interests have to give way before national interests. These Kathiawari princes are ganging up. Jam Sahib heads the group and they want to inveigle the nawab into it. Sardar Patel knows.’ How did he know that the Sardar knew? He handed me a typed letter, explaining it was a copy of a letter dated 17 June, sent to Patel by Sir B.L. Mitter, the dewan of Baroda, member of the viceroy’s executive council, federal advocate general, acting governor of West Bengal. He wrote from Narendra Niwas, Mount Abu.

The first few lines of the letter read:

My dear Sardar Sahib,

Jatashankar Pathak came today from Rajkot to Abu. He gave me the following information … There was a gathering of Rulers of Kathiawar with the Jamsaheb as leader. The Resident and Political Agent are out to Balkanize India and advised the Rulers accordingly. If Travancore can declare independence, Kathiawar States, being maritime States, can do likewise. They can develop their ports and need not depend on India for anything.

A secret meeting was held under the presidency of the Resident. It was decided that a ‘Union of Kathiawar’ should be formed covering the whole peninsula and that it would declare sovereign independence, subject to the right of Junagadh to declare separate independence or to join Pakistan. In case Junagadh separated, it would enter into an offensive and defensive treaty with the union of Kathiawar and they would resist Baroda’s claim to tribute. The Jamsaheb would be the President of the Union …

Maganbhai had changed stance. He was now against the Kathiawar Union. Sir Mitter of Baroda of receding hairline and bow-tie was not talking any longer of some ‘units’ of India ‘choosing to retain the monarchical form’. The Jam Sahib and the Political Agent were upto their tricks—a pretty kettle of fish.

XII

Early June can be murder anywhere in the country. I am told every year the palace would move to Veraval. A special train of the JSR would be laid out and Dilawar Khanji would drive the engine. Not so, this year. There is tension in the air. On 6 June, Patel appears by the side of Mountbatten on the front pages as the viceroy explains the plan. The Chamber of Princes is wound up—Patiala, now Chairman since Bhopal has resigned, makes the recommendations. The nawab of Bhopal, the dewan of Travancore, Sir C.P. Ramaswamy Aiyar, make known their intentions to declare independence. Mysore, Hyderabad, Kashmir may follow. On 10 June, the Muslim League formally accepts HMG’s plan. Gandhi says he cannot coerce people to accept his views. Bhutto tells me, ‘We have to manoeuvre for independence, and if we fail, we still have to manoeuvre.’

On 4 July comes another bombshell. The twin dominion states will come into existence on 15 August 1947; as also boundary commissions for Bengal and Punjab, with Cyril Radcliffe heading them. A referendum is to be held in Sylhet on 6 and 7 August. A few days later, we get to know that Jinnah will be governor-general of Pakistan. Sylhet decides to join Pakistan with 2,39,619 votes as against 1,84,041 wanting to remain in Assam.

Rain is coming down in sheets now and the damp crawls out of the corners of the house onto the walls and the floor. I love the sound of the rain hammering on the tiles, and if the clouds disappear for a while, the sunsets burn on the just-washed skies. I keep the windows open, if there’s no rain, and the damp seems to blow in. This is what we call chaumasa here, the four months when you can smell rain even when there’s none.

Guilt is more insidious than sin. You sin and immediately it becomes a part of the past. Guilt is an overhang that squats on all the tenses. It nags you before you go to sleep, then confronts you in your dreams, by which time it has got hold of form and symbol and is playing cat-and-mouse with you. Guilt is the cat. Never forget that. I feel bad. After fifteen years of marriage—suddenly, you cross the line. How do such things come about? How does a false paradise inveigle you in the suddenness of the moment?

There were moments when Claire seemed to be speaking almost to herself, half-heedless of my presence. The words would flow out as if of their own volition. ‘He was a difficult man, Syd, and difficult husband; tough to please and equally tough to displease. The last trait can be more aggravating. Even when he was happy with what I had done, a fine party or the garden coming into bloom, it was never easy to guess his reaction. If he was angry, it wouldn’t show except in a snide remark here and there. He could snap suddenly though, but only at me, no one else. He was generally gentle with me, but then he was gentle with everybody, including people who swindled him … he cared, but I was never sure if he loved me. Why should I hold that against him? I was never sure if I loved him; at least loved him enough. Sad confession, isn’t it?’ She took a cigarette to her mouth—she was smoking incessantly these days, the cigarette dangling from her long nicotine-stained fingers, the fingers of a pianist. She waited for a light—I wasn’t good with the match … unpractised non-smoker that I was. She had to light her fag herself.

‘He was too quiet, not outgoing enough, though he was on fairly even terms with others of our ilk. It is not easy to get on with the Brit bureaucrats in Rajkot—noses-in-the-air syndrome. Even the ones connected to royalty here are aloof. I nurse my own contempt for them, all the while at their compacts, powdering their tanned faces, their numerous servants coming and going in like a dark blur. Spinal columns bending to white skin are far too many—they give me a queasy feeling. Do you notice I hardly allow a servant to come into the house? That’s how we kept our privacy, Syd’s and mine. Another thing I can’t stand is all this kissing and dearing and darlinging while the servants gawk. Can’t you realize what the other fellow feels about you? I am a bit Indianized that way. The way they show off, “Well dear, when at the Savoy, I ordered grouse—I didn’t like it! It was overdone!” I wanted to tell the bitch that grouse is always overdone—by the time it lands in their kitchen it is three-days-old—a stable boy here wouldn’t eat it if you paid him. And then they keep jawing about Dorchester and Waldorf. I have had it up till here with them.’

One evening she hands me two hand-written pages. ‘I’ve scribbled something and would like you to read them—but when you go home.’

‘Why when I go home? I’ll read it right here.’ And I sat down and read:

One should never put one’s faith in certainties—that’s what Syd’s death teaches me. That’s what God wants, I think, and He is quite imperious and unpredictable. You can’t be imperious without being unpredictable. Where’s the fun in power if others can guess what your next step will be? Like the Fates, God and His will provide the motor power to uncertainties. The fact of His existence is certain. Here I get uncertain. Is that ironic or tragic or both in small doses?

Doubt is the blacker, Manichean half of certitudes. One can’t get away from Manes, isn’t it, not for long.

The blind are certain about their dark wall. Their dregs of hope have dribbled away. The ones who can see are certain. It’s only the half-blind who are uncertain and can rise to the Valhalla of uncertainty—forgive the literary flourish. All humanity, or thinking humanity, is half-blind. Yet it doesn’t know it. Same question, is that ironic or tragic?

She tried to snatch the second page. ‘Don’t read that. Go home and look at it.’ I was determined.

She’ll always be there along the labyrinth of your memory—Zarine. I hope you never consciously try to erase her from there, not that you’ll succeed. I was shocked the other day—though I didn’t show it—when you told me that your divorce papers were underway. Is this chasm unbridgeable as a man moves from one woman to another? I think of your guilt with concern. What about mine? If guilt could pray, it would pray for oblivion.

I am torn between flesh and spirit, though I don’t wish to make a big thing of it. But I refuse to believe that flesh is the Devil. There’s some grace in the ecstasy of flesh as well. Manes can be both right and wrong.

I kept a gap of two or three days between my visits. ‘To get a grip over the business, I must shift to Veraval, be present where the action is—yardarm and steamboat,’ said Claire, one late evening. ‘Trouble is, I can’t.’

‘Why can’t you?’

She walked away without answering. ‘Can I pour you a drink?’ I declined. But she went ahead and poured a gin and lime for each of us. I thought she had downed one or two before I came in.

‘It’s too early to ask, but tell me, are you feeling any better?’

‘Just been two months, Sam. So I should be ashamed saying things are better. But that’s the truth. I do feel a wee bit better, and you may have had something to do with it.’

I felt very grateful for this acknowledgement. People can be so kind. She was walking around, glass in hand, her platform shoes going clot-clot on the stone floor. I kissed her on the cheek. She looked up and forced my head down till our lips met. The gin splashed on my shirt and we laughed.

I asked again, ‘Why can’t you?’

‘Why can’t I what?’

‘Move to Veraval.’

‘Because of you, silly.’

This was overpowering. I took her in my arms, lifted her, she’d become lighter of late, and proceeded towards the bed. She seemed equally eager. She would strip, but never the panties. Even now she just lifted her bottom a few inches, as I slipped them down. Then we fell to it and she moaned louder than usual as we rose to the climax.

At the end of it all, apropos nothing, she said, ‘The bed is a bad witness.’

XIII

‘Salam alaikum, sir, myself Salimuddin Khan.’

‘Walaikum assalam, SP Sahib.’

‘I wish to come and pay my respects, sir.’

‘You’ll honour me.’

I put down the phone. Where did we Indians pick up this phrase, ‘pay respects’? Couldn’t the following have happened somewhere? A rich tradesman throws the phrase at a corrupt dewan or an income tax officer or a sales tax officer and gets the answer, ‘Why respects, Tijori Lalji? If you have to pay, let it be something more substantial.’

I got over my ruminations, as the jeep rolled in.

‘The billi is out of the jhola, sir,’ he said in Urdu. I shook my head to indicate I hadn’t understood. ‘The cat is out of the bag, sir. Pakistan is being made.’ I thought of brick and mortar. Also, it occurred to me, why people should translate English into an Indian language.

‘Times are bad, sir.’ He shook his head gravely.

‘Why, SP Sahib? You just said Pakistan is being made.’

‘Is that good thing, sir?’ I didn’t want to fall into any trap.

‘Good thing; will keep the two communities from killing each other. How are things in Junagadh?’

‘Much coming and going, amad-o-raft.’ That I understood. Persian I had studied in school. ‘All sorts people, Hyderabadi, Kashmiri.’

Why was he telling me this? I was on my guard.

‘Very interesting, sir.’ He shook his head. ‘I have to find why they come. Coming and going is never for no reason.’ I agreed with this philosophic statement. He sipped his tea, took my permission to smoke and continued. ‘But a Turkish gentleman wants to meet you, sir. Suited-booted, highly cultured—speak good English!’

So fluency in English becomes the hallmark of culture? Hmm. ‘His name?’

‘Suleyman.’

‘Suleyman Yelmaz?’

‘Yes, sir, that is the name.’ He seemed surprised. I told him about our brief sojourn in Paris. ‘What does he want, this Turk?’

‘He is related to the Nizam in a very distant way—Princess Niloufer, you remember, sir?’

‘An emissary, is he?’ He didn’t seem to understand and I let that pass. ‘And the fellow from Kashmir? Who or why or what is he?’

‘He is not from Kashmir, sir. I think he is from Gilgit, if not the NWFP. I don’t know those areas well, was never lucky enough to buy nawab sahib’s dogs from Makhad and Hunza.’

‘You count those who went to buy dogs lucky?’

‘One dog for five thousand rupees, sir, sometimes ten, fifteen.’

He was actually telling me in his own way that much of the money was siphoned off.

‘What does the Kashmiri or Gilgity want?’

‘Trouble.’

‘What trouble?’

‘The Hyderabadi, sorry Turk, talks of Razakars, the Gilgity talks of Shinwari and Afridi. And he wants to assassinate the Maharaja of Kashmir.’

‘Why does he have to come to Junagadh to kill Hari Singh? You should tell him he’d better have a look at the map.’

I reminded him that Gilgit was a part of Kashmir. Then I added, ‘Why are you telling me all this, SP Sahib? Don’t you think you should be telling Sir Shah Nawaz these details?’

‘There is no point.’

‘No point in what?’

‘In telling the dewan. He will smile and give no answer.’

‘And what did you expect from me?’

‘You are my insurance, sir.’ I told him I didn’t understand. ‘When government falls, and Indians come in and the Abu Bhais and the Abu Mians and Shakir Muhammads run, and they will run, I expect you to stand up for me.’ As he was leaving, I foolishly told him, ‘I wouldn’t mind meeting Suleyman Yelmaz.’

Right enough, the Turk was at my door that evening. He came in with someone called Amjad Ali—short, stocky fellow, pockmarked, wearing a black karakul cap. We, meaning Suleyman and I, hugged like old friends.

‘Can’t offer you wine, Pasha, but I have some Indian whiskey.’ He didn’t seem to mind. I made the drink, sat down and asked point blank, ‘Why are you in India, Suleyman Yelmaz? What is it to you, this business about Partition?’

‘Frankly asked, and my reply will be equally frank. We want trouble here.’

‘Who is we?’

‘Those fighting for Islam against imperialism.’

‘Imperialists are off—please read the papers. They don’t have the balls to hang on here, don’t you realize? So, why are you here?’ He smiled enigmatically and kept quiet.

The Amjad Ali fellow spoke up. He had a thick accent and at times his words slurred over each other. ‘These times won’t come back again. If anyone has to strike, he has to strike now.’

‘What he means is,’added Suleyman Yelmaz, ‘History is pirouetting like a ballet dancer at the moment. If we have to do something, we must do it now. History is fluid this moment and fast moving. After a few months, it will get calcified again.’

‘Has it anything to do with your own personal history, your father jailed and the Khilafat kicked out, and that too by a homosexual?’

His face turned dark. ‘Yes, we are the anti-Ataturkists, if you want to know. From Morocco to Karachi, we will be one nation, you will see! The sea will live up to its name—the Arabian Sea!’ His voice had risen an octave. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t the Turkish Sea, so what was he crowing about, but kept quiet.

‘We all dislike the imperialists, Pasha, but we merely dislike them, that’s it.’

‘We thirst for their blood.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they broke the Ottoman Empire, as they called it, the Sultanate which was existing for five hundred years.’

‘Pasha, you are a very sensitive person. I still remember the parable you told me about the falcons and the quail migrating to the Black Sea. How come now you are into all this?’

‘You misunderstood me then. I was with the falcons!’

Fortunately, on this high note, he left. Within minutes I rang up Salimuddin. ‘Get rid of him, see him off the borders fast; no time to lose. The Turk is deep trouble, half-mad.’

Next day Salim rolled in.

‘Sir, best advice I ever got.’

I tried probing. ‘What is this about, Salim Mian?’

‘The Turki is with the Razakars. He wants only trouble. The Gilgity also bad. You know what Yelmaz wanted?’ I shook my head. Salim looked around to see if any of the servants was in earshot. ‘He wanted a fake attack on the royal family!’ He was speaking in whispers. ‘Offered me a thousand dollars.’

I just couldn’t believe it, and told him so.

‘The attack would be fake, then it would get published in papers in Turkey and Arabia, and Turkish volunteers would come in, Baluchi soldiers would come and take over Junagadh. He want dead bodies, sir. I told, are you mad? What dead bodies? He reply, “Any. We will dress them up as Muslims and take photo, publish in Arab and Turkish newspapers. Then Razakar, Turk and Baluchi will storm Junagadh.”’

‘Does dewan sahib know?’

Salimuddin folded his hands. ‘Please, sir, keep this to yourself. If this known, my head will be chopped off.’

As he left, I thought of Manicheus; not that Salim was light, but certainly that Suleyman Yelmaz and his companion were dark.

It was not an easy time; it never is if you are serving one master and your heart is elsewhere. Things were wrong on the homefront too. Friends warned me that if I continued to be ‘stubborn’, I could lose my job. My standard answer was that I could earn more practicing law. I was giving my views as politely as I could, but I noticed that each time I spoke, other members of the State Council, including Harvey Jones, started looking down in embarrassment.

Things were coming to a head and on 14 August, they did. I got a call in the evening that the dewan wanted me urgently. I drove to his residence. He was forthright, for once.

‘Bharucha, I know your views and am certain that this will be distasteful to you. But you are the right man to do it, and in times like these, we can’t be too concerned about individual feelings. That way we could never get things done.’ I kept quiet, waiting for the gambit.

‘His Highness has decided that Junagadh accedes to Pakistan. I want a draft of the accession declaration. It will be a historic document and you are the best person to draft it. I can’t trust the others. Firstly, they could leak it. Secondly, it would be so badly written that a dog would hesitate to wipe its arse with the paper it was written on.’

‘I have a question, Sir Shah Nawaz. How was the decision reached? It was never placed before the State Council, as you would know. Was it the personal decision of His Highness? Lastly, was it you or was it those scullions (I had suddenly gone fond of the word) Isu Muhammad, Abu Bhai and their ilk, who plumped for Pakistan?’

‘I am under no compulsion to answer these questions, but I will. Sovereignty rests in the person of His Highness and not with the State Council. It was the personal decision of His Highness.’

I foolishly argued. We were encircled by Indian territory. Geographical contiguity was something I had been hammering on at every meeting. All goods came from the surrounding states. Trade, communications, transport, everything was connected with India. Pakistan looked like a mirage. And the population was overwhelmingly Hindu.

‘That is not your area of concern, Sam. That’s our lookout. We’ll become a maritime power. You just stick to your charter and at the moment it boils down to drafting the accession letter.’

At such times, it is best to be short and blunt. ‘I am sorry, there’s no way I can do this. After all, I have to live with myself. Politically and economically, we are headed towards disaster. So is His Highness.’ Before parting, I relented slightly. The instrument should be so worded that it appears the state has acceded, or the people have, not just the nawab. Bhutto nodded. I saw both disappointment and respect in his eyes. I had hardly walked out of his room when I heard a crash—the knighted nawabzada of Larkana had sent something crashing at something. I phoned him up next morning apologizing for disappointing him and telling him that I was awaiting my marching orders. There was silence at the other end.

My advice was followed in the state gazette, the Dastur al Amal Sarkar Junagadh. It talked of the ‘main preoccupation of the state’ being ‘to make the largest contribution to the permanent welfare of the people of Junagadh’, the government of the state ‘after anxious consideration and careful balancing of all factors …has decided to accede to Pakistan’. But the lingo of the instrument of accession was a disappointment. It read, ‘I, Mahabat Khan, in exercise of my sovereignty in and over my said state, do hereby execute this, my instrument of accession.’ It sounded as if he had personally ‘acceded’. Jinnah had countersigned, accepting the accession. That put paid to the rumours that Jinnah didn’t want this additional headache of Junagadh—he had problems enough of his own and that it was Liaquat Ali Khan who was behind the entire intrigue.

At home, which means good old worn-out J. Gadh, people were waking up. Salim, to cut his name short, informed me that the police armoury was being ‘overhauled’—not sure what he meant. Oiled ‘pull throughs’ were being pulled through the barrels of rusted .410 muskets and the few rifles that they had. ‘It is just an oiled string, sir, pulled through the dusty barrel. Bullet should explode on enemy face not in gun barrel, don’t Your Excellency see?’ My Excellency saw—I was surprised to be elevated so abruptly.

‘Whom do you expect to fight?’

‘You should ask that of the dewan sahib.’

‘The Indian Union and its army?’ No response. I tried to test the rogue. ‘Now that HH has acceded?’ He interrupted me. ‘You mean, Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto has acceded.’ So that was the buzz.

‘As I was saying, now that Junagadh has acceded, where is the question of war? It is a fait accompli, Pakistan possesses us. In law, we say possession is half the battle.’

‘You may say what you like in document, but Junagadh hasn’t moved. It is in Kathiawar still, not in NWFP or Swat or Hunza. What benefit such document?’

‘Your frequent visits to me, SP Sahib, must be reported to the dewan, perhaps HH himself. How do you explain these?’

‘Simple, sir. I say them I am keeping an eye on you.’ He laughed.

‘It appears, you are not bound for Pakistan, Salimuddin Khan.’

‘I, sir? I have lands here. Ahmedabad is my home. Where will I go? Shakirs and Abu Bhais and Isu Muhammads will go—and the Sandal Mians. Salim will stay here.’

Junagadh is getting to be claustrophobic with tension, rumour, gossip—and infinitely worse, silence from people you know. I decide to go to Veraval, steal a visit would be more to the point. When the servants ask me whether reservations have been made at Veraval, I nod and mutter something incomprehensible even to myself. Why couldn’t I just say I’ll be staying with Claire memsahib?

It is great to see her again—not that it’s been that long—to see that moist patch between the nose-bridge and the cheekbone and her long hair tucked into a bun. The last time I was here, Syd was dead. I had no time to look at the house. It looks better than her Junagadh one. The bedrooms are on the upper floor. I notice for the first time the French windows, the leather-bound books with gold-lettered spines, a dining table of Burmese ebony, chandeliers, the glass glowing, but the iron fixtures rusting because of the sea air. The sea and the smell of the sea are everywhere. Even the evening light is aqueous. The beach, which we go to in the evening, is littered with shells, and though the sea is monsoon-brown, there’s an edge of silver to the surf.

It’s been hardly three months, and the frenzy has dipped a bit in our lovemaking, though, here during this weekend in Veraval, we are at it twice, afternoon and night. But there’s a certain calm and restfulness about it. The pleasure lingers longer than before and the aftermath is more affectionate. Lying by her side at night while she has gone to sleep, I remember what she said once. ‘Sex moves me to deep slumber.’ Thoughts crowd me. I can hear the roar of the high tide which keeps me awake. A ceiling fan whirrs overhead, sending a little damp breeze through the mosquito netting into which we are tucked. She’s getting more uninhibited.

Whence this resurgence of the flesh, she had said, I feel happy, not just excited, taking my clothes off in front of you. I told her I thought English women were cold. ‘Probably in England, but not in the tropics, certainly not in the tropics,’ and she had laughed as her hand passed over my abdomen and her lips sought mine. It’s a selfish thought, but it does occur—where will all this lead to? What am I up to? She is frail, vulnerable—I should be thinking of her reputation. Word would travel to England by boat, if not by telegraph. There is no place on the planet where one can hide anymore. Why hide? Why not be frank with the world, and let the world whisper and cavil and bitch behind your back, instead of us trying to do things behind the world’s back? I feel thirsty and go down to drink water. Which is better, I wonder, groping your way down dark stairs or groping your way up? And in matters of feeling, why should one be lucid? Do feelings and clarity go together? What happens to people caught in a maze of events they are not happy with? Can falling in love be called an event? Have I fallen in love—or is this just a sunburst of sexual energy lying latent too long?

Why are you living this life within the mind? If one is well and healthy, one doesn’t have to live exclusively in the mind. The mind is not an attic. Move out when thought itself turns claustrophobic. And for god’s sake, don’t make peace with hatred, with contempt, with treason, even love, if you are not in love, with spirituality, if you are not spiritual, with purity, if you are not pure—I am dozing off … but make peace with flesh, if you are enjoying it … and at the moment maaaake peeeace with sleeeeep …