14
WHEN I RETURNED to the Ganges Guest House after visiting the European cemetery in Patna, I asked the desk clerk if he knew of any other places thereabouts where an Englishman might have been buried.
He frowned.
I had not found the gravestone I was seeking?
I told him that everyone interred there had died in 1763, long before the man I was looking for was born.
Not only that, I added, but they had all died in the same month, October.
That was odd, he said.
He wondered why that would be.
There were famines in the old days, but of course not among the English.
Cholera, perhaps, though that tended not to kill everyone in short order; such epidemics might last years.
He couldn’t think of any rebellions, either.
Not that far back.
The Mutiny was more recent.
“Eighteen-fifties.”
I nodded. For once I felt knowledgeable about Indian history. Rasheed, the Pashtun who befriended me at Margalla Pass, had mentioned that John Nicholson was killed at Delhi, leading a charge against the mutineers.
Well, said the desk clerk, it only stood to reason that there must be another cemetery. Unfortunately, he had no idea where it might be. He suggested that I inquire at the British Council library, located on Bank Road.
In Gulzarbagh.
Quite near the cemetery I had just visited.
There was no concealing my dismay. He gave me a knowing look.
“You will like it,” he said. “It is air-conditioned.”
India is full of surprises. The air conditioning at the British Council library in Gulzarbagh turned out to be functional. The tables were filled with neatly dressed Indians poring over recent numbers of The Economist, Nature, and New Scientist. A bulletin board promoted an impressive schedule of English Learning Programmes. Everything was very clean. Slinking up to the help desk in my sweat-stained bush shirt, I felt like an intruder.
A pleasant young woman in a patterned silk sari welcomed me and listened sympathetically as I recounted my fruitless search of the graveyard by the Catholic church. She said that it was the oldest local Christian cemetery, but by no means the largest. That would be the burial ground at Danapur Cantonment, a few miles to the west. She had not visited it herself, but Danapur had been the second cantonment established by the British in India, after Barrackpore, and she was sure there were hundreds of officers interred there, if not a thousand or more.
I asked if it was limited to army officers. She said she believed so. I told her what my mother had told me: that Nigel had worked for the government. I hadn’t yet learned that he was actually employed by the East India Company.
She said that someone who died while in the civil service was likely to be buried in the churchyard where he worshiped. Such a grave could be difficult to find, because most of the churches from that era had lost their congregations when the British left India. There would be a caretaker, but without knowing the location of the church itself . . .
“He quit his job before he died,” I said. “He probably stopped going to church. He was supposed to have gone native. He lost touch with his family.”
In that case, she said, there would be no grave to find.
He would have been cremated. That was the custom, if he had truly gone native and was living among Hindus.
That he was, I said to myself. At the time of his death, he was living in Nepal, where the king himself was revered as an incarnation of Lord Vishnu.
To the woman at the library desk I said, “Oh.”
I said I guessed that Nigel’s family had never thought things through.
Then I added that I was grateful to be spared the swelter of an outing to Danapur.
She smiled. She called it a “challenging” time of year. She asked if there was anything else.
I told her that I couldn’t help wondering about the cemetery that morning. How was it that those fifty-odd Christians had all died at the same time?
“They were the victims of a massacre,” she said. “Would you like to read about it?”
She said nothing more as she steered me to the history shelf. I found myself admiring her tact even as I regretted my own gaucherie. I imagined another kind of “Indian” in another part of the world, asked by the descendant of a cavalryman how General Custer and his men had come to meet their maker.
Then I opened the account of the Patna Massacre. Its perpetrator was a European, a German butcher’s son named Walter Reinhardt, who “dressed in Moghul dress, kept a zenana”—a harem—“and had gone native.” After serving with the East India Company’s army in the 1750s, he attached himself to the cause of Mir Quasim, the nawab of Bengal, and led the assault in Patna that resulted in the deaths of the Englishmen buried together at Gulzarbagh. He then ordered the dismemberment of their bodies, and had the parts thrown in a well.
India is full of surprises.