AFTER the much finer things he had seen on his journey, the caves were a little disappointing. The approach was almost more dramatic, for you were carried towards the Barabar Hills on the heaving back of the elephant across a parched plain, while the shapes of the giant rocks emerged from the haze. The first was the most astonishing: what appeared to be a huge, stony thumb pointing straight up at the sky. Only as you drew closer and saw it from the side did it slowly reshape itself as a mountain with an extended spine, and the single perched boulder on top became a fanlike arrangement of numerous similar boulders.
“That is Kawa Dol,” Imdad Iman said, smiling.
“What does it mean?”
“It is the place where the crow …” He made a rocking motion with his hand.
“Swing, you mean? The crow’s swing?”
“Ah, yes,” the old man said. “Exactly.” But the rock, however precariously balanced, did not look like a swing, and what seemed understood could possibly be understood differently. Whatever its meaning, the name stayed almost elementally with Morgan, along with his first image of the stone tower. Kawa Dol: the sound of it was ominous and old, evoking a darkness out of the earth.
It was not their destination, however. They toiled slowly past its base and on towards a second scattering of hills. Made of the same globular grey stones, piled atop each other in unlikely formations, they evoked other, living forms. While he appeared to listen to Imdad Iman, who wrote poetry in Urdu and felt warmly about many things English, from poetry to playing polo, Morgan’s mind was elsewhere.
They were on an outing, which Masood had told him would be a wonderful experience. But he had said it without enthusiasm, and Morgan himself did not especially want to be here. This whole day had been planned, he knew, as a salve and consolation, because last night he had said goodbye to his friend for the final time on this journey. Although he was only halfway through his Indian sojourn, the rest of his wanderings would be completed without seeing Masood, and that knowledge pressed on him like a blue and suffocating weight.
When they drew abreast the second upthrusting of hills, the worn grey textures of their surface, unbroken except for greeny clumps of vegetation, distracted him from his melancholy. The place was so sudden, so violently improbable in the middle of the steaming flat plain, that it gave off an odd intensity. In a grove of trees at their foot were the tents of their advance party, with a line of smoke going up. But breakfast, which was supposed to be ready, wasn’t; and they were advised that it might be best to see the caves first.
Nawab Imdad Iman was Masood’s friend, and had been told to look after Morgan’s every need. He was displeased at the tardy preparations and said that he would stay behind to oversee the food, so his two nephews – who were loutish and unlovely – accompanied Morgan up the nearest hill. They walked along a path under trees. Almost immediately they came upon a shrine, a hollowed-out alcove in the rock with a graven idol in the centre of it, garlanded with dying flowers, but if there was a holy man in attendance there was no sign of him. The path began to climb, lifting into light and heat. The trees thinned out, bird calls giving way to a buzzing of insects. None of them spoke, and the only sound between them was a panting of breath.
It wasn’t a bad ascent. After only a few minutes they emerged onto a shoulder of the hill and the nephews steered him towards a long, rounded rock with a double-ridge on top, made of granite, looking something like a whale emerging from the deeps. The first cave was simply there, a rectangular doorway cut into the side. It was late in the morning already, and the night’s coolness had long since departed the few remaining shadows. But the inside of the cave, at least, provided some relief.
A single domed chamber, perhaps thirty feet long. The walls were polished and smooth. There was nothing whatever inside it; nothing to see, nothing to admire. But immediately the nephews were wanting something from him, plucking at his sleeve insistently, saying a word over and over. He didn’t understand; he said, “Yes, yes,” impatiently, only to shut them up. He could tell already that these caves were going to let him down. Then the little party was outside again, in the brightness, and they were taking him up a flight of stairs in the side of the rock, to two more caves on the other side.
They led him to the second entrance first. This was the only cave with anything like an ornate doorway, a stupa-shaped arch with elephants carved in procession along it, and a sprinkling of what he took to be Pali. But compared with some of the statues and temples he remembered, what was on offer here seemed curiously unfinished. Through a square-cut passage you went into an inner chamber with a vaulted roof, which took you, by way of another short passage, into yet another dome-shaped room within. But the surface was only half-carved and its roughness was off-putting.
As he stumbled back towards the third cave entrance, the middle one of the three, he struggled to remember what it was that Imdad Iman had said about them, as they rolled atop the elephant. Buddhist caves, two hundred and fifty BC …? It was the Emperor Ashoka who had ordered them to be made, he felt almost sure about that. But there was something else, something to do with the shape of the caves, that escaped him. Was it about meditation? He hadn’t been paying close attention, his mind had been preoccupied, and now their purpose remained a mystery – as it seemed so much in this country was destined to, at least for him.
This cave was by far the most impressive. Again there was the vaulted first chamber, but in this one the rock had been worked to a planed and polished surface, so highly refined that it might have been done with a modern machine. And again there was a doorway leading to an inner room, high and conical, shaped like a beehive. The darkness here was total, till one of the boys lit a candle. Then another flame seemed to well up from inside the granite itself, and the rock revealed its grain in a swirling of red and grey. The walls had been polished to the consistency of glass and the hard smoothness, under his trailing fingertips, was pleasing and beautiful.
The two unpleasant nephews, who had very little English, were still repeating their word over and over, which he still couldn’t make out. But the word – indeed, every word that was spoken in here – set off an overlapping mirror of itself, which hissed and rustled all around. Then at last he understood. The word was “echo”, and that was why the cave walls had been so highly polished: to help the echo along. The dome-shaped room was meant for chanting, and the chanting was meant to reverberate. But the effect, like the caves themselves, was less than remarkable, returning every sound in the form of an indistinct surf-like roaring.
Then one of the nephews said, “Breakfast”, and blew out his candle, and the expedition was apparently over.
They descended the hill again in silence, leaving the rocks and the darkness behind. But the caves were not what Morgan had supposed. They were not Buddhist, and the language inscribed around that third entrance wasn’t Pali, though it was equally old and equally dead. The caves had been inhabited by a different sect, people who followed an ascetic path more extreme than most. Indeed, they had been avoided by those who followed gentler faiths, for their custom of abandoning their old and their sick, out in the open, to die. What exactly they believed, and their way of believing, was lost now. But some of their presence, perhaps, had remained behind, a kind of ghost, or another reflection in the stone, to brush against the visitor whose skin was receptive to it.
Breakfast was still not ready. The Nawab sighed and tugged at his beard in rumination and spoke fiercely to his nephews. Then, more kindly, he said to Morgan, “You go and see the other caves. After, we eat.”
More caves! There had been nothing sufficiently inspiring in the ones he’d already seen to make him excited. But he plodded behind the nephews, who were sulking and hitting at weeds by the roadside with sticks, for a mile or two along the bottom of the hills. The sun was fierce by now, and the temperature seemed to match an emptiness he felt inside.
Nor did the other caves help. There were three of them, also carved out of boulders, and harder to find. They were similar to the ones he’d already seen, all variations on the same theme, with polished walls and geometric outlines, though none of them had the dark inner chamber where no light could reach. The last required a climb, up stairs cut into the stone. But when he got there, perspiring and weak in the knees, because he was really very hungry by now, he couldn’t summon up the necessary enthusiasm. The inside of one rock was much the same as another and the echoes were all alike too.
By the time they made their way back to the encampment, breakfast was still not ready. The Nawab looked wretched. One of the nephews said angrily to Morgan, “You come.” There was one last cave, apparently, part of the first group, which they had somehow overlooked. With his hunger very insistent now, and the start of a headache, he returned to where he’d begun.
The cave was off to the side, past a sullen pond of green water, over some slippery rocks. It really wasn’t worth the effort; it was much rougher than the others, hardly more than a hole crudely hewn out of the hillside. But he lingered in it for a while, half-crouched over under the low roof, to keep out of the sun. He became fascinated by a wasp that was clinging to the wall, trailing its yellow back legs behind it and, by the time he came to himself again, he realised that the nephew had departed, leaving him alone.
Wandering slowly back to the path, he decided to return to the middle cave in the first group, the one that had impressed him the most. It would be good to have a few minutes unaccompanied, sequestered in the rock. Looking out from the first arched room through the entranceway, he had the sense of the sunlit world beyond as a remote dream, which he was looking at through a window. Then he retreated deeper, into the second chamber. Instantly, he felt sunken profoundly into the world, or into himself. He spoke his own name aloud; the cave repeated it endlessly. He said Masood’s name too, and then the word “love” – all of it rumbled back at him.
For the first time today, he allowed himself to experience his feelings. He had spent the last two and a half weeks with Masood in Bankipore, which was a small, ugly town on the outskirts of Patna. Masood had his legal practice there and Morgan felt a little like an intruder. But it was a benign intrusion, and they had managed to have a companionable, pleasant time together. The knowledge of his coming departure, however, had made him heavy for the past week already, and the previous day in particular had been long and slow and sad, culminating in their peculiar farewell in the middle of the night.
Morgan was making an early start in the morning, and had told Masood not to wake up. Although he’d said it firmly, he had wanted his friend to overrule him; he had wanted him to insist on waking and seeing him off on his journey. But Masood had yawned and agreed that he was very tired and that there was no point in getting up early. It was a sensible solution. So they had said goodbye just before going to sleep, in a stiff, incomplete way, both feeling shy, and then retreated. But almost immediately after, as he’d started to undress, Morgan had felt himself speared on the point of sharp emotion. He had gone back through to Masood’s room and sat on the edge of his bed and taken hold, very tightly, of his hand. Cold anguish made certain details stand out, the white hanging shroud of the mosquito net, the shadows in its folds. Even if he’d been able to speak, he could not have said what he wanted. But the yearning had made him lean towards Masood, trying to kiss him. In the fizzing white burn of the lamp-light, his friend’s face had been at first astonished, and then shocked. His hand had come up sharply, to push Morgan away, and that little movement had felt enormous, a force that could move a boulder. Morgan had accepted the refusal, because he’d known in advance it would come, and sat hunched miserably over his kernel of loneliness. By then Masood was merely irritated. He had rubbed Morgan’s shoulder and patted him on the back, in a way that was both reassuring and dismissive. Neither of them spoke, but both of them understood. He did not feel as Morgan did; that was all. There was nothing else to say.
So in the end one had to make the journey back to one’s own bed more alone even than before, the step down between the two rooms like the threshold between two worlds.
In the darkness afterwards, he experienced again what he’d just done with a fresh wave of shame. Aie-aie-aie! It was terrible, terrible – to have wanted so badly, to have been pushed so firmly away. The night and the land seemed to spread away around him, emphasising his smallness. He had cut himself open and showed the innermost part; it had been rash and unconsidered and regrettable. Now he had to close himself up again, to seal the carapace, and he began to do what was necessary. It was part of a willed cheerfulness he had learned, back in his childhood already, as protection against disappointment. The only defence against raw, naked feeling was reason. Understanding made sadness easier to bear.
So the thoughts that he followed, one by one, were like stairs ascending out of his misery, each of them valid and genuine, leading on from the one before. They went something like this: Masood cares for me more than for any other man, I have known that for a long time. That is comforting. And much that has passed between us on this visit has made me very happy. That is good. To have a little, even a very little, can be enough to go on with; indeed, it’s all I have. Better to hold to that than to yearn continually for what isn’t possible.
In the end, you had to return to your own life – which he did now with an effort, by swimming out, blinking and half-blind, into the vertical light, to let the normal day reclaim him. It was like emerging from the tomb. He hurried back down the hill faster than he needed to, as if he were being pursued, to the tents and the smouldering fire and the elephant, ponderously browsing.
Where by now breakfast was finally ready: after all the delay, a paltry smear of omelette with a cold chapatti and a mug of tea. But it was enough to restore his spirits and, as he sat in the shade chatting to Imdad Iman, he felt again the promise reviving in the vast landscape, with its blond, bleached colours, its scrubby bushes and old, tormented rocks. He knew already that this parting would eventually become a painful detail in a much larger event, one which was still unfolding before him.
Over the past three months, India had already violently rearranged his life, but it wasn’t done with him yet; not by a long way.
* * *
His journey had begun in Aligarh. He had come all the way around the world for one reason only. And although his travels had barely begun, in another sense they felt already complete as he stood on a railway station platform at two-thirty in the morning, embracing Masood.
“At last, you are here,” his friend told him.
“I believe I am.”
“How do I look? Am I older?”
He had thickened in the middle, and some stray hairs had turned white, but Morgan said, “You look no different.”
“Nor you. I have thought of nothing except this moment for the past ten years.”
“You have only known me for six.”
“Have I? Well, I speak metaphorically. My great love for you makes time seem much bigger.” But Masood was already yawning as he swept out of the station and towards the waiting tonga.
When Morgan had woken up the next morning, it was into rather than out of a dream: the window showed an acre of garden, filled with loud, brilliant and exotic birds. Weird lizards scuttled across the walls and unusual insects hovered in the air. Masood had given up his bedroom to him and was sleeping in the sitting room close by; Morgan knew where he was, and yet he wasn’t quite sure of anything. Here was an inversion of the world that had held them in England, where the view had always been known and tame, and it was only Masood who had been out of place. Now it was the Englishman’s turn to be the stranger, the visitor. The idea of it pleased him greatly, and took him some way into another world – yet that world refused entirely to open for him.
When Masood woke an hour or two later and came lazily through to his room, almost his first question was what Morgan wanted to do that day.
“Honestly, the most important undertaking, as far as I can see, is to meet your mother. I would like to thank her for giving birth to you. Or else to punish her for it, I can’t make up my mind.”
He had been wanting to greet Mahmoud Begum for a long time already, and he had brought some small gifts for her from England. But the suggestion was answered with a solemn headshake.
“You can’t do that, I’m afraid. My mother keeps strict purdah. She sends you her blessings, but she cannot show herself before you.”
“But this is her house.”
“Even so.”
It took a moment for the smile to fade from Morgan’s face; it had seemed like a joke at first. He was in India now, and he would have to do as the Indians did. His gifts were despatched via Masood, and thanks returned to him the same way. In this house – and in some others he would stop in – the closest he would come to a female presence was the sound of soft voices in a neighbouring room.
He hadn’t expected this, but then nothing was the way he’d thought it would be. When Masood took him that first morning to see the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College which his grandfather had founded, Morgan was taken aback. In England, Masood had spoken of it rapturously as a centre of scientific excellence, where the finest of Western thought could be taught in an Islamic atmosphere; it represented, he’d insisted, the most modern approach to education. Yet when Morgan saw it, there was nothing very modern or inspiring about the disorderly scattering of reddish, ugly buildings, none of which seemed to have a single telephone in it, so that messages had to be carried around great distances by hand.
And there were other oddities, which for some reason had never featured in what he’d imagined. For one thing, though all the students were Mohammedans, wearing beards and fezzes, half of the teachers were foreigners. They seemed so stranded and out of place here, with their alien customs and their improbable accents, though they tried to pretend it was home. There were a lot of them, not only teaching at the college. At one moment he was rubbing up against a Kingsman, who was headmaster of the local school, or chatting to a German professor of Oriental languages; and at the next dining with a barrister called Khan, or discussing politics with a Persian professor of Arabic.
The atmosphere at the college, he would come to realise, was highly charged. There was a great gulf between the Indian staff and students on one hand, and the Europeans on the other. The two groups seemed to mix compatibly together, but when he found himself alone with one or the other, the conversation changed. The English staff in particular lamented that they weren’t trusted here and seemed to live in fear that the Mohammedans would turn them out; the Mohammedans wrung their hands and declared that the Balkan War was the death-battle of Islam and asked why Sir Edward Grey should have been the very first to recognise Italian rule in Tripoli.
In these conversations, Morgan was never exactly sure where his loyalties lay; he experienced a complicated inner conflict which pulled him one way or the other.
“How do you manage it?” he asked Masood, on one of those early days. For his friend had always been adept, he saw now, at crossing the social frontier between East and West. For all his nationalist rhetoric, he was very much at ease in European company, yet he could drop all his Occidental ways in a moment, as if they were a piece of clothing.
“It is a skill,” Masood told him. “Think of it as camouflage, in order to survive in hostile territory.”
“What nonsense you speak. There are thousands of Indians who lack this skill, yet they survive perfectly well.”
“Yes, but they do not flourish. They are always nervous, always anxious. They don’t mix well with the paler types, can you not see it? Some strategy is needed.”
“I am a paler type,” Morgan told him stiffly, “as you may have noticed. You have never needed strategy to survive me.”
“Can you be so sure?”
“Don’t joke, Masood.”
His friend smiled – still rakish and handsome, despite a faint fatigue that made his face puffy. He took Morgan’s hand and instantly the bond between them was renewed. “My dear fellow,” he said, “you must put all of it into your book.”
“My book?”
He was genuinely nonplussed for a second.
“The one you came here to write.”
“Yes, yes, my book. Of course.”
He had almost forgotten his book. Although he had gone so far as to mention it to his publishers, it had ceased to matter as a reason for being here. His true reason was the one in front of him, still holding his hand, and telling him that an outing had been arranged.
“An outing? To where?”
Masood waved vaguely, looking bored. “Some villages,” he said, “you will see. You will get material.”
The outing was lovely – almost two full days, careering around the flat countryside in a tikka ghari, being fed and entertained by lowly Indian officials. But however much he enjoyed himself, it didn’t provide material for anything except distraction.
He knew that his friend was fobbing him off. They had been speaking for years, in a feverish way, about being in India together and everything they would do there, but now that the happy day had arrived, Masood wasn’t much interested. Morgan could see that he was preoccupied and morose. But when he tried to find out what the matter was, he was deflected with generalities:
“The future, the future … I have to make decisions.”
“Decisions concerning what?”
“As I told you, the future. Don’t cross-examine me, Morgan, I have enough of that in court. Would you like a mango?”
Even more distressing was the realisation that they wouldn’t be spending much time together. Plans had been left blurry and undefined, but Morgan had hoped that Masood might join him as he travelled around. He quickly learned that it wasn’t to be.
“I have to go back to Bankipore for work. I am not a free man here, you see, no, not at all. But I will go with you to Delhi next week and we will have a fine time together.”
“And after that?”
“And after that you will travel. Oh, you will see many things, especially the Moghul splendour I have often mentioned. All of it will go into your book!”
“But when will we see each other again?” He tried to ask it casually, but his voice shot up into a higher pitch, giving him away.
“You will come to Bankipore to visit. I am returning there very soon. It is an awful place, I don’t think you’ll like it.”
“You will be there, Masood. That is the point.”
“Yes, of course, that is the point.” But even now – or perhaps especially at this moment – his friend was looking out of the window, his eyes anxious and unsettled.
“And will we travel together then?”
“Perhaps so. Yes, perhaps by then it will be possible.” His voice became fuller and more confident. “My life is simply too big for me at the moment, you must forgive me, my dear, it does not detract one tiny bit from my devotion to you, you know that.”
When they moved on to Delhi a week later, things didn’t greatly improve. They were staying with a friend of Masood’s, Dr Ansari, whose wife was also invisible, though she sent continual little gifts of betel nut and scent. The house was very small, and Morgan and Masood shared a room. Not only with each other: a constant stream of visitors passed through, perching and squatting everywhere, while a cat and three dogs roamed about, and a shrieking cockatoo defecated on the mosquito net. Masood had recently had a cholera inoculation and spent most of his time in bed, worrying that he was sick, or that he wasn’t sick enough. Now and then he reflected aloud that he was dying.
“But don’t languish here with me, Morgan, my dear chap. I have organised a car to take you on some sightseeing expeditions. History awaits you.”
“Won’t you come?”
“I am too ill, my dear, truly. But you must go. I beg you, no, I order you, and if you don’t I shall never, never speak to you again.”
So Morgan went to old Delhi alone. He went to the Jama Masjid, and visited the Red Fort, where the spaces between the scattered buildings suddenly seemed very big and cold, overshadowed by the looming ugliness of the military barracks. He saw the great stone elephants, and the parapet where the English King and Queen had showed themselves to the crowd, but all the while unhappiness scratched at him inside. He had a headache, there was nobody to talk to, the grand sights left him disappointed.
Only on the very first morning did his friend accompany him, because they were visiting the Qutb Minar. The ruined remnants of Moghul times elicited Masood’s highest flights of rhetoric, but it was hard not to feel the tension between these crumbling remnants of the past and the throbbing, smelly motor car that had brought them there. This same tension was especially evident at Humayun’s Tomb, where a view out over a plain of broken forts and old mosques was undercut by modern Delhi in the distance, and the Marconi radio apparatus that was used for signalling at the 1911 Durbar.
At this Durbar, Morgan knew, George V had announced sweeping changes to the political system in India. The capital was to move from Calcutta to Delhi; the hated partition of Bengal had been reversed and the province reunited. The breeze of democracy had picked up a little, dispersing some of the noxious fumes that still swirled heavily after the Mutiny, nearly half a century ago.
Politics, back in England, had a leaden, immovable weight, as if history could not be altered very much. That wasn’t the case here. In India, when people talked politics they were talking about the future – and it mattered a great deal. When Morgan spoke to Masood’s friends about it, their voices took on a tense, knotted quality; their eyes became hooded. It was clear that they spent a lot of time thinking about their freedom, not as an abstract concept, but as a concrete and achievable goal. There was no little corner of life that seemed untouched by it, either in hope or despair.
Masood, too, could become excited on this topic. Back in England, his political musings had always had a theatrical quality, as if he were performing his beliefs rather than feeling them, but on a few occasions here the temperature of his blood did momentarily rise. One such moment came on Morgan’s last night in Delhi, when Dr Ansari insisted on treating him to a nautch, a party with dancing girls. This couldn’t be held in his own house, because his neighbour, an Englishwoman, wouldn’t approve, so it was arranged in the home of a friend of his in the old city. But next door were the offices of The Comrade, a political journal run by the Ali brothers, who were friends of Masood’s. Morgan had already looked through its pages in Aligarh and had been unnerved by what he found inside. It didn’t seem untruthful to him, but it was so very angry, with an anger leavened only slightly by jokes and doggerel.
When they called in at the offices of The Comrade now, Mohammed Ali was in an agitated state, and greeted them by announcing that he was about to commit suicide.
“What is it?” Masood said. “What has happened?”
“Oh, I am absolutely miserable. It is too terrible to think about. The Bulgarian army is within twenty-five miles of Constantinople.” On the verge of tears, he swept into the next room, from which his voice carried out ringingly. “Let no quarter be asked, and none given now. This is the end!”
The emotion of this drama touched Morgan, though the history did not. He had already been exposed to these feelings among Masood’s friends in Aligarh. It was clear that some sort of international Islamic sentiment was stirring Mohammedans in India. The fortunes of Turkey, which was facing defeat in the Balkan War, left Morgan indifferent, but it was hard to be unmoved when Masood became roused, as he did now. “This is the turning point of my career,” he cried out dramatically. “We shall give the Turks all the money we have collected for the university!”
But ten minutes later, typically, all this high feeling had left Masood again. It became important to him that Mohammed Ali join them for the nautch. But Ali didn’t want to go; he was steeped in his morose hysteria. “Nonsense, nonsense,” Masood told him imperiously, “we can be serious again tomorrow,” and he picked him up bodily and carried him out of the office.
The nautch was full of its own dramatic intensity. There was a small crowd of onlookers, all male, all – except for him – charged with glandular anticipation. He tried to be attracted to the dancers, even in a theoretical way, because he supposed it was expected. There was a fat girl with a ring through her nose, and a thinner one with a weak but charming face; both in truth frightened him, and though he tried to enter the spectacle through its noise and harsh emotion, he remained outside its ritualised exterior. There were moments when he almost glimpsed what this display might mean to an Indian, but in the end he was exhausted by it and the screaming did violence to his head. Alarmingly, it threatened to continue for ever, until he understood that only his leaving would end it. Dr Ansari tried to make him kiss the singers, but he slipped away with a quick hand-squeeze of the older, thinner lady. He was possibly not the only one relieved.
And then he was being seen off at the station at one o’clock in the morning and the first part of his Indian visit was over.
* * *
He knew he would see Masood again in a few weeks. But it was hard not to feel a sort of low-grade anguish, which was with him even in his better moments. He had hoped for more than he’d got, and the future might not deliver anything better.
Certainly there was some comfort at his next stop, which was Lahore, with the Darlings. It wasn’t thinkable that he could come to India and not see them, though he wasn’t yet entirely at ease with Josie, or her Tory politics. Still, here she was, and their little boy John Jermyn too, giving him hospitality and kindness, showing him around the vast, soulless distances of the city, introducing him to their friends. Very soon any underlying anxiety had been dispelled and he felt relaxed in their company. Malcolm had always been all right; he was good-hearted and filled with idealistic principles, which accounted for his exile to these parts, in a minor post in the Punjab. In truth, Morgan found him a little too earnest, but in certain quarters Malcolm was considered a dangerous radical and his efforts to befriend Indians had made him genuinely unpopular. There was a lot to admire about Malcolm.
In Lahore he was also reunited with Bob Trevy and Goldie, who had meanwhile been to Ellora. Goldie’s presence in particular was a consolation, with his familiar dry intelligence shot through with flashes of nonsensical humour. Goldie knew Masood, of course, and had some idea of Morgan’s expectations. So when he asked how Aligarh had been, and Morgan answered that it had been lovely, a deeper understanding passed between them, which didn’t need to be spoken.
“And Masood is well?”
“He seems to be, yes. A little preoccupied, perhaps. He is thinking about his future.”
“Ah,” Goldie said, and nodded sagely. He had wasted years of his own life on a fruitless love with a German man, who had given him a lot of torment.
And Goldie too seemed unsettled. When Morgan asked him about Ellora, he merely said, “Oh, it was fascinating. Yes, fascinating.” But his face tensed up, and when he added in an undertone a moment later, “though it isn’t England,” Morgan understood that something about the place had troubled him.
With Goldie and Bob, he went on to Peshawar for their reunion with Searight. Morgan hadn’t forgotten his shipboard acquaintance or their remarkable conversations, though there was no trace here of his other, secret identity. No, in this place Searight was the very model of an English officer, aside from one sly wink soon after their arrival. He was heartily pleased to see them and hadn’t forgotten his promise that he would show them the edge of the Empire.
A day or two later, he took them a little way into the Khyber Pass. They sat on a patch of grass at the bottom of a ravine and watched tumultuous caravans passing in both directions, donkeys and camels and horses and dogs and goats and chickens among their human minders, the gait and attire regal, the faces fierce and inscrutable, emblematic of unknowable lives. All of it raised a brown screen of dust through which the stately pandemonium seemed to pass, at a great remove of time and distance, for a full hour and a half. The way was only open twice a week, under armed guard, and each caravan was followed by an escort of the Khyber Rifles. In the early afternoon the pass was cleared again, and left to barbarism and bandits until the next caravan day. To the north and west, marked by impregnable peaks, stretched a no-man’s land of hostile tribes; beyond was Afghanistan; and beyond that was Russia, with its secret imperial designs. At their backs was English civilisation, and one felt it nowhere so keenly as here, where it ceased. Nothing had ever seemed quite so homelike as the white veranda posts outside the Mess when they returned there in the afternoon.
That evening, Morgan managed to lose his collar stud and was ten minutes late for dinner. He imagined that everything would have continued without him, but only when he arrived did the band strike up “The Roast Beef of Old England” and the evening properly begin. It was a good hour or two before he shed his embarrassment on Searight’s account, but nobody else seemed to mind very much. Most of the soldiers were young and rosy-cheeked – still almost boys – but even the older ones seemed full of a kindly forbearance that forgave all differences. After dinner, while the band played on, they danced pas seuls up and down the veranda in their scarlet coats. Searight, almost unrecognisably glorious in his full regalia, carried Bob Trevy on his back and then seized hold of Morgan and whirled him around in a drunken foxtrot. The cheerful comradeship that surrounded them was like a balm that cleaned away every bad impression he’d ever formed of the English abroad, and for the first time he understood a little of how Searight had made a life for himself in unlikely outposts such as these, where women were intruders and the only real love was between men. A couple of days later, when they said goodbye again, they promised each other they would meet many times in the future, and some letters did pass back and forth over the years, but in fact they would never be true friends.
He was parting again here from Goldie and Bob, who were travelling on to Delhi, while he was going to Simla. They would meet once more in Agra in a few days, but meanwhile Morgan was on his own. He had wandered alone in Europe, and found it unsettling, but India had called something forth in him that Italy and Greece never did. A peculiar second nature seemed to have showed itself in him; a capable other Morgan, who traversed great distances and made decisive choices, often in the face of resistance. And as he moved about, it was hard to keep his mind from slipping sideways, off Masood and onto the landscape that contained him.
Over the two days of his journey up from Bombay to Aligarh, the strangeness, the distant otherness of India, had already marked itself on his mind. Even the light had seemed different, till he’d realised that the windows of the train had a darkened cast to them. Somehow, though, that bluish colouring still overlaid what also seemed familiar: certain pastoral vistas resembled Surrey, though particular details (the shocking brightness of a woman’s sari, a cow blissfully chewing the cud on a station platform) tilted the world off its axis. Not even the Indian moon, with its power to evoke deep yellows and purples from the surrounding sky, seemed to match its English equivalent. And the sky itself had a hugeness, a blankness untextured by cloud, that could annul the whole earth beneath it.
The people themselves were a different sort of landscape and they claimed his attention too. Searight had not been lying about the legs, which were universally visible – the vigorous, toned, muscular legs of the lower classes, and their feet. Flesh, as Searight had said, was everywhere on display, usually toiling, and often on his own behalf. The figures he saw in passing seemed to move with a deliberateness, a distinctness, that made him notice them afresh. The Indians were inside their bodies, he decided, in a way that the British were not. His own flesh impeded his spirit. He was terribly excited, in the daytime, by the way young Indian men strolled about, hand in hand, or hung onto each other like vines; and at night he was stirred by erotic dreams of a sort that hadn’t troubled him since childhood.
He had started to notice, too, the rigid hierarchy of the society around him. Among the Indians, the first division was between Mohammedan and Hindu. Beyond that, everything was stratified by caste: the Untouchables and the Brahmins were in adjacent, contiguous worlds. But the British, too, had succumbed to caste – or at any rate, as they usually did, to class. At the bottom of the heap were the Eurasians, those of mixed-race. Then came the non-official Europeans – professional men, railway employees, tea-planters and the like. Then came the army officers, followed by the smug government servants and the political players and finally, at the very top, floating in the high ethereal zone, were the Viceroy and his circle. Each was conscious of their place, and guarded it against incursions from below; yet they mixed socially at the club, of which every town had one, and where for the most part Indians were not allowed – though in some establishments the rules had relaxed enough to let the occasional Maharajah slip through.
From one level to the next, up and down the bewildering social staircase, Morgan passed. He was an outsider; he settled nowhere long enough to take a place. Yet he himself wasn’t free, either of his skin or the designation it bestowed on him. And he had a shadow in tow, to remind him of the depths underfoot.
On board a ship in Greece years before, he had met an Oxford undergraduate by the name of Rupert Smith. They were very different types in temperament and in outlook, but they had maintained a touchy, long-distance friendship ever since. Smith was part of the Indian Civil Service, stationed in Allahabad, and he had organised a servant for Morgan, who had come to meet him off the ship. So Baldeo, in fact, had been the first person Morgan spoke to on Indian soil.
But Morgan was used to English housekeepers and maids and gardeners, removed from him only by class. A great deal more than that intervened between him and Baldeo: race and language and custom thickened the air, so that they couldn’t see each other clearly, and therefore they had begun with a farce. After meeting him, Morgan had instantly forgotten Baldeo’s face, and did not recognise him the next morning, sleeping outside his hotel room door. Instead he had searched everywhere for him, and sent messages, and suspected Goldie’s servant of hiding him away, and all the while he had resisted the attentions of the strange, wizened, persistent man who followed him around, waiting for instructions. By the time he knew him again, he had humiliated himself and his folly hung over their subsequent relations like a debt that had not yet been paid.
Misunderstanding continued to dog them. Morgan found Baldeo’s pocketbook, with all his credentials, laid on top of his clothes in his big travelling trunk. He was irritated, thinking it cheeky that this had been done without permission, but said nothing. Fortunately so, because he discovered some days later that as Baldeo’s employer he was entitled to these papers. His servant had merely done the necessary, being ahead of him on every question.
He had come to realise that he could not manage without Baldeo. Like a familiar spirit, he was always with Morgan or, more accurately, just in front of him, going ahead to stations with the luggage, securing seats on the train, finding porters and tonga-wallahs, running errands, readying clothing and bringing hot water when it was required, cooking for him. Without Baldeo, India would have fallen in on Morgan, burying him in confusion.
Though it was true that much of what he did see confused him nevertheless. When he had first met Masood, his only knowledge of this country was a vague mix-up: elephants and holy men and hookahs and temples swirled around in a gauzy idea of a place. He had done a lot since then to educate himself and, once his visit was certain, he had read a great deal in preparation. Now all of that seemed useless. The reality he was passing through displaced many of his previous notions, and his notion of a novel too.
Insofar as he’d considered it at all, the book he’d imagined he might write would repeat his previous novels, where the chilly reserve of his English characters had broken down in the warmth and abandonment of Italy. Whatever their differences, surely Indians and their British rulers had their humanity in common, and he might place that at the forefront of his story. But how could these literary aspirations withstand what he was experiencing now? Every day served up a scene, a conversation, that was like two sharp edges grinding against each other. It was the meeting of the two worldviews, one way of life imposed upon another, which brought out the worst in both. In Simla, for example, he lived through the following, which was his first genuinely miserable vision of India’s future.
He had been on several enforced jaunts already on his journey. There had been the outing in Aligarh, and in Lahore there had been a spiritless garden tea, featuring a cast of educated Indians making small talk. Such “bridge parties” had become fashionable in recent times, in an attempt to stem the rising tide of Indian nationalism. And it was in the same spirit, perhaps, that Morgan was taken now as a guest to what had been described, optimistically, as an “advanced” Mohammedan wedding.
It was a memory that wrung his heart anew each time he returned to it in his mind. The rationalist elements of the wedding seemed to have been put on for the benefit of the watching Europeans; certainly the Mohammedans were uneasy, muttering about how it was all contrary to Islamic law. The bride was unveiled, sitting with the groom on a sofa on a dais. The Moulvi who married them read from the Koran in a desultory way, before a local poet recited overwrought poetry about Conscience singing like a bulbul in some metaphorical garden. But the saddest moment was an involuntary one: a gramophone at one end of the garden blared out “I’d rather be busy with my little Lizzie”, while on a terrace at the other side a gathering of devout Muslim men performed their evening prayer.
The opened hands, the kneeling, the forehead pressed to the ground: he had seen Masood go through these ritualistic motions many times, and found them moving, perhaps because of what they meant to his friend; but it was impossible to feel anything except horror today. It was because of the whole straitened, strained gathering, and the awful song on the gramophone – which by chance came to its end at the exact moment the prayer did. To Morgan’s eyes, the only loveliness in the proceedings belonged to those devout figures, now returning without a fuss to the milling crowd.
The wedding, rather desperately, was termed a success. The bridegroom’s brother visited the next morning to thank everybody for coming and to tell them, emphatically, that all those who had objected yesterday had been pacified by the Moulvi’s speech. But Morgan was more convinced by an Englishwoman, a Miss Masters, with whom he took an afternoon stroll later that day around one of the hills of Simla. She didn’t mention the wedding, and perhaps hadn’t even attended, but she launched without any preamble into a confession of how much she disliked Indians.
“I didn’t used to,” she told him. “I came out here with no feeling against them. But now I can’t endure them. It is their own fault, really. Have you a bad feeling against Indians, Mr Forster?”
Morgan murmured that he did not.
“Oh, it will come, believe me, in time. The change came slowly in my case. Even the Indians expect it. They say all the English, but especially the women, change inside six months. And I think they are not wrong.”
Morgan didn’t answer. Simla was built on a ridge, so that views opened on both sides, and he kept his attention on a vista of mountains, rippling away.
“But one has to have servants, of course,” she added quickly. “I myself have many. Have you any servants, Mr Forster?”
He admitted that he did have one.
“You will hate him in due course,” she said.
* * *
There had scarcely been a moment since he’d arrived in this country when he’d been alone, and he wanted to think about everything he’d seen. To escape from the humans for a while, he headed into the mountains. Baldeo was sent in advance with two coolies, carrying bedding on their heads, to the dak bungalow on the Tibet road.
He left Simla at noon with his lunch in a pack on his back, and walked for four hours to Fagu, with the wild road twisting through a wilder landscape, and the horizon splintered into a thousand jagged lines. He thought about his mother as he tramped. Time and distance had softened her outlines, so that he longed for her without ambivalence. Their alliance was occasionally sisterly, pinned together with cackling and gossip, and these moments had strengthened with her absence. Despite their difficulties, she had always been a good travelling companion and he imagined her beside him now, keeping pace in a rickshaw. Though he was very aware of his solitude too, through which the mountains pressed upon his mind.
He was still in the foothills; the Himalayas proper were seventy miles away, but the massive snowy peaks seemed to hang overhead. The air was icy and clear, and that night the stars burned with a close, cold fire. But their clarity was like a knife that cut too deep: Morgan woke in the small hours into a disturbing knowledge about Masood.
He saw his time in Aligarh properly at last, and understood what it meant. Masood had been affectionate and loving, as always; he had been happy to see Morgan and had made him feel welcome. But his distraction wasn’t a temporary state, which would pass of its own accord. Indeed, it had always been the deepest aspect of his nature. Masood was slipping away from him; might, in fact, already have slipped. Now that he was back in India, his own country, where he belonged in a way that he never could in England, another kind of life had taken hold of him. He didn’t need Latin lessons from Morgan any more; in truth, he didn’t need anything. Morgan would see him again, of course, and they would probably have an enjoyable time together – and then Morgan would leave.
In the morning when he woke up, the mountains seemed somehow smaller than yesterday. Nevertheless, he might have travelled into them further, along the road to Tibet, if he had not arranged to meet Goldie and Bob in the other direction. Agra was the first place where local hospitality ran out and at last they had to check into a hotel. Bob was fretful and restless by now, not liking India, wanting to get on to China and then back home, and they hurried on to Gwalior.
The Morisons had given him an introduction to a Mr Sultan Ahmed Khan, who had booked rooms for them at the hotel, met them at the station when they arrived, and then asked them to tea the following day. When they requested directions to his house he said, “Oh, no matter, I will send my servant to bring you. Simply wait.” They simply waited, and no servant came. In the evening Khan appeared, with his English wife, and asked what had happened to them. “I invited a few of my friends and we have been expecting you, but you did not come.”
“But you told us you would send your servant for us.”
“Yes, yes, so I did, but as everybody knows where my house is, I decided the servant wasn’t necessary.”
Morgan was so charmed by the illogicality that he forgot to stay cross. Where else could this have happened but India? It struck him as revealing, though of what exactly he couldn’t explain.
There was a great deal by now that he didn’t understand, though mostly this amused him, rather than causing anguish. Goldie, however, was suffering. Morgan rode with the older man atop a painted elephant to see some Buddhist temples sprouting from a giant rock, after which they went down the other side to look at statues of naked Jain saints. These were very wonderful, in the sides of a deep chasm full of churning water and trees. In a certain light, if you came upon them unexpectedly, they might have been alive, something the earth itself had thrown up; and possibly it was this thought which caused Goldie to flinch and crouch, his face sealed against them.
In a general way, Morgan could see, Goldie wasn’t happy. He had come to India in a spirit of enquiry and enthusiasm, and had thrown himself vigorously into the continent. Along the way he had delivered lectures and engaged in debates and tried to absorb what he saw. Goldie was a believer in the imperial project, which is to say, in the civilising power of social progress. But his visit to Ellora had left him troubled, and some of his unease came pouring forth now.
“We are from a Greek tradition,” he told Morgan. “And that has nothing to do with India. Look at it! This mixture of religions, all in one place – what do we have in common with any of them?”
They were in the gorge, near a great stone figure blackened by dripping water, its face turned towards a tree. It wasn’t unlike a Greek carving, Morgan thought, only perhaps on a different scale, but he thought it best not to say so. Instead, he pointed out:
“Religion isn’t everything.”
“But here it does seem to be. Have you attempted any rational conversations lately? Religion is always part of it, there’s no escape. But not the sort of religion we understand. No, this is superstition and cruelty, and it can’t be reformed. And let’s not talk of the dirt and disorder! There is no closing the gap, whatever we do.”
Morgan murmured, “Oh, come. I have seen many instances of whites and Indians getting on famously.”
“Where have you seen it?”
The examples that came to mind didn’t inspire, so he said, “Well, there is me and Masood.”
Goldie stared gloomily at him. At last he said, “The unhappy fact is that the English are bored by the Indians. It gives me no pleasure to say so, but it’s true.”
Morgan was silenced by this idea, and the conversation tailed off. But it continued to flicker in the corners of his mind for days afterwards. He had always thought of Goldie as having the gift of midwifery, the ability to build bridges between different people and their worldviews, and this was the first time he’d seen it fail.
It was depressing for Morgan to be at such variance with the older man, when their accord was usually harmonious. He couldn’t see India except through Masood’s eyes, which made him understand things differently. It wasn’t the Indians that had upset him so much as his own countrymen; he didn’t like what the British had done, nor what they had become while doing it. Nevertheless, he had also had some conversations and encounters with Englishmen that he found surprisingly enlightened.
And unlike Goldie, Morgan found himself unexpectedly stirred by temples and mosques and roadside shrines. His reasons for rejecting Christianity didn’t seem to apply here. He knew a little about Islam through Masood, and he had some feeling for it, but Hinduism remained an opacity and a mystery. He had read up on it before he came, but he soon discovered that the explanations had no purchase. Fire and water and smoke and incense and chanting and bells and butter and blood: this was a language whose syllables were translated into physical terms; a language of the elements. It was a language that he hoped might speak to him one day.
Meanwhile, he did his best to understand. He was soon to have an opportunity to observe the subject closely, when they moved on to stay with the Maharajah of Chhatarpur, to whom the Morisons had given him an introduction – for this man’s every obsessive, fretful thought seemed to be about Krishna. Politics and the matter of running his state were relegated to the background.
The guest house where he put them up was outside the town, on a narrow ridge, and the view from the front veranda, looking out over forest and temples to barer hills behind, was soothing. Even Bob was pacified, and not so eager to move on. And for nearly a fortnight, the days unfolded with a certain regularity and routine. In the mornings the Maharajah’s doctor (a fat Hindu) and his Personal Secretary (a fat Mohammedan) would come to take them on an outing somewhere. And every afternoon the Maharajah sent his carriage to fetch them. In this little decrepit landau, overloaded with ragged menials and stinking of grease, they were driven through the town, while everybody bowed. The palace wasn’t overly large, but had been whitewashed into newness. After due protocol had been followed, they were escorted to a courtyard, where His Highness was waiting for them under a billowing umbrella.
The Morisons had described the Maharajah as an absurd creature. But he wasn’t so – or not entirely; for there was certainly something foppishly ridiculous about the tiny, overdressed figure, living in the jungle with his retinue for company. An astonishingly ugly little man, his tongue stained bright red with betel-juice, wearing a dark frock coat, white embroidered knickers and socks, as well as earrings and a smear of yellow paint at the base of his nose, he could not receive them inside the palace, or even eat with them, for fear of contamination.
He was harmlessly eccentric, and his kingdom was too small to signify very much. In any event, he did not like the idea of ruling, and did so with scant enthusiasm. Accordingly, the minders sent to look after him were somewhat ludicrous too. There was a chaplain from the military cantonment, a foolish bounder who bullied the Maharajah tirelessly, shouting at him that he should be eating beef, that it would do him good. Whenever he left, the Personal Secretary would murmur to them that, “The Padre Sahib is a very nice man, he has no interest in religion, and that is very suitable for a clergyman.” The politics were looked after by the Political Agent, a more sinister fellow who was nevertheless genial. A retired army officer and a Theosophist, he also liked to lecture the Maharajah in a nonsensical way. One afternoon, apropos of nothing, he suddenly declared that, “You must get rid of the Self and not expect a reward,” and on another occasion that, “We should imitate the Infinite. If only we would, there wouldn’t be this sinful outcry in England about conscription.”
When Morgan and his friends were visiting, most of the talk was on spiritual themes too. The Maharajah decided early on that Goldie should be his main interlocutor. He lived for Philosophy and Love, and wanted to make them one: “Tell me, Mr Dickinson, where is God? Can Herbert Spencer lead me to him, or should I prefer George Henry Lewes? Oh, when will Krishna come and be my friend? Oh, Mr Dickinson!”
Goldie, whose stomach was in a terrible state, nevertheless brought his coolest Platonism to bear. Under the huge umbrella, the two men were gentle seekers together after truth. In these moments, perhaps, India drew almost within Goldie’s grasp, human and tactile. Then the Maharajah would bring the meeting to an end by suddenly declaring, “But I will not tire you longer,” and they would leave. Or else he would suggest a motor-drive. Then they would chug off peacefully somewhere, the three of them packed onto the back seat with His Highness, while next to the chauffeur in the front rode a silent “poor cousin”, a wretched-looking man who carried with him his opera glasses, cigarettes, betel nut, umbrella, stick and State Sword, as well as a little bag of what Morgan suspected was food, although nobody ever saw him eating.
They would sometimes visit the Maharajah’s second palace, Mau, which was a crumbling ruin on a lake. (“See, Mr Dickinson, that balcony – did Hamlet climb up there to visit Juliet, do you think?”) And then he would give the ruined palace to Goldie to keep in perpetuity, forgetting that he had given it to Morgan only two days before.
At night on a few occasions they were treated to a Miracle Play, danced and chanted by the resident acting troupe. The plays were often written by the Maharajah himself, and they usually portrayed some or other story from the life of Krishna. The troupe was funded from the royal treasury, and most of the actors were young and beautiful boys. His Highness never tired of watching them act out the themes of his spiritual devotions. But the little dramas were often incomprehensible and to Goldie this proved his point.
“You see,” he told Morgan. “It’s as I said. Everything comes down to religion, and it’s dull, dull, dull.”
“Religion is perhaps not the only element at work here.”
“What do you mean? Oh, yes, I see … but even that part of it is dull. A mixture of rapture and cowardice. No action, but all that quivering!”
Chhatarpur was where Morgan had to part finally from his friends: Goldie and Bob were going eastwards, and he was heading the other way. But religion also made it difficult to leave. The court astrologer was consulted, and bad omens were predicted for an eastward journey on a Monday. Bob and Goldie delayed in the end, but Morgan did not. He left on a Tuesday, which was unlucky for anybody travelling west, but he decided to take his chances.
* * *
He was soon to be in the company of another Rajah. He had arranged to meet the Darlings in Dewas, where they made a yearly Christmas visit to the palace. The ruler of Dewas State Senior was none other than Malcolm’s charge, the young heir to the throne he had tutored just five years before and with whom he had remained close friends.
His Highness Tukoji Rao III, now twenty-three years old, was a very different figure to his counterpart in Chhatarpur. He was both more serious and more light-hearted, not being plagued by inner doubts. He ate food with his foreign guests, unfussily, and his conversation was not exclusively about his soul.
Morgan’s first meeting with him took place in the most unlikely of settings. He had made his way by degrees, via Jhansi, Sanchi, Bhopal, Ujjain and Udaipur, to Indore. His next destination was to be Dewas, but meanwhile he was stopping with a Major Luard, whom he’d met through Goldie, and he’d been taken down to the club for a drink. He was introduced around and at the sound of his name, from an armchair nearby there sprang up a tiny, shiny little Indian man, wearing a turban, who grasped both his hands and twisted them delightedly.
“I am the Rajah of Dewas Senior,” he announced, “and you are Malcolm’s great friend. You are to call me Bapu Sahib.”
Only a very few clubs had started to open their doors to Indians, and then only to men of the highest breeding. Morgan was delighted, and suddenly he didn’t so much mind the depressing rabble of Englishmen eating chip potatoes and drinking whisky and soda.
Bapu Sahib was there, he told Morgan, to compose a telegram. It was a moment of crisis, and he was writing to the Viceroy.
“Perhaps you can help me with the wording,” he said. “I wish to convey my outrage and loyalty after the terrible incident in Delhi.”
Morgan knew, of course, what he was referring to. The white community had been speaking of little else for the past three days. At the official transfer of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi, a homemade bomb had been thrown into Lord Hardinge’s howdah as he rode in the procession. The mahout had been killed, but the Viceroy and his wife had escaped with only minor injuries.
The political reverberations from this incident were huge, and they moved out in concentric rings across the continent. Josie and her son were already in Dewas when Morgan got there the next day, but it was only when Malcolm arrived a little later that the news from the capital was freshened. Malcolm had been in the Punjabi procession, just ahead of the Viceroy, and was deeply shaken.
“It was terrible, Morgan, and it’s going to cause a lot of trouble. Already there are people saying revenge must be taken. I heard some talk, from top officials too, about turning the Tommies to fire on the crowd. And there are some who would, I can tell you.” When Josie and the other women were out of earshot, he added, “I also heard it said that it’s a pity Hardinge didn’t die, because then they could really have done something drastic. These thoughts are actually being spoken.”
“But not acted on so far.”
“No, but they might.”
The common perception was that the bomb had been thrown by a Hindu, protesting against the capital being moved to Delhi, a predominantly Muslim area. The outrage had happened in Chandni Chowk, not far from where Dr Ansari had his offices. Morgan could imagine how Masood would be lamenting – and there it was again, that inward turmoil, the double frontiers of loyalty.
He was depressed by politics, and by Indian politics especially. He couldn’t see through events to the people behind them, and felt he’d lost his way. He had a small breakdown just a few days later, while he was out for a walk with Malcolm and Josie, and they told him casually about some of the schemes and plots of the Maharajah of Gwalior, who was the Rajah’s uncle and rival. The information churned suddenly in his gut. They were under a soft evening sky at the time, walking up some gentle hills not unlike the Sussex Downs, but in an instant the very soil underfoot seemed hard and treacherous. There were holes in the earth, concealing scorpions and snakes; a crow flying overhead cawed with an awful, raucous voice, like the land itself berating him.
“Oh, do stop,” he implored them. “I don’t want to hate this country.”
In that moment, he felt he did. He hated India. It made no difference whether it was English or Indian, all human interaction was power; under the plumage and finery, people circled each other with poisonous intent. Every conversation jumped continually between subservience and rudeness, with no possible middle ground of genuine emotion.
In the morning, he felt better. History receded as the present took hold. He was staying in a luxurious tent pitched next to the guest house at the edge of a lake. In the still silver water, the reflections of flying cranes mirrored the real birds overhead. Baldeo was crouched down, singing, while he washed clothes. On the far side of the lake a series of small tombs mimicked the larger shape of the hill of Devi, which overlooked the town.
He walked up the hill a while later. It took less than half an hour to reach the summit. From there the whole tidy little town was visible, all its buildings and people and their doings mild and far away. Human divisions were reduced to their usual scale, minimal in the larger picture.
On the ground level, however, the divisions were more significant. He had heard from Malcolm, in his letters, about how Dewas State had been split into two branches, Junior and Senior. Bapu Sahib was Rajah of the Senior branch. It seemed that a previous Rajah, in the last century, had given his brother a share of the government, and this generosity had been extended to subsequent generations. When the British came, they had made the split official. Now the two kingdoms lay intertwined: one side of a road might belong to the Junior branch, while the Senior laid claim to the other. Each ruler had his own court, his own tiny army, his own palace, his own waterworks and tennis club, and the mountain of Devi had been divided between them, so that each might ascend to the summit by a separate footpath. For a time even the flagstaff on the top of the mountain had been jointly owned, with the flag flying exactly at half-mast.
It was surreal, fantastic – like no other kingdom Morgan had ever heard of. Malcolm had spoken of it as Alice in Wonderland, but for him it was more out of Gilbert and Sullivan: a quaint alternative universe where everything seemed accompanied by a tinkling piano. The Rajah of Dewas senior was merely a colourful character trapped in his own outrageous set.
* * *
Afterwards, he decided that his friendship with Bapu Sahib really began on the evening that His Highness hosted an Indian marriage celebration for the Goodalls, who were friends of Malcolm’s and also staying in Dewas.
Morgan was in his tent, dressing in his English clothes for the occasion, while Baldeo hopped around him, trying to snip his frayed cuffs. From behind a curtain a voice called, “May I come in?” and the Rajah entered with a handsome young courtier, carrying a pile of Indian clothes.
For almost an hour Morgan became the centre of attention, while Baldeo and His Highness and the courtier all dressed and redressed him. When he emerged, he was unrecognisable in white muslin jodhpurs, a white shirt, a gorgeous waistcoat, a claret-coloured silken coat, trimmed in gold, and atop it all an oversized Maratha turban. The other guests had been similarly dressed in Indian style. The Goodalls toiled towards the New Palace, not half a mile distant, on top of an elephant, while the others followed in carriages with sirdars in attendance, all of it surrounded by torches and a band playing lustily. At the palace they were treated to a lavish banquet, and then they went up to the rooftop for champagne and dancing. In the middle of all this, a message came from the Rajah’s wife, the Rani, that she wanted to meet them.
In his Indian travels so far, the wives and mothers of Morgan’s friends had all stayed invisible to him. In Bhopal, the only native state ruled by a woman, the Begum herself – despite his official introduction from Theodore Morison – had kept herself hidden. So he was especially touched by this unexpected midnight summons. The Rani was extremely lovely, wearing a filmy white dress. She had molten doe-like eyes, from which she stared at them in friendly fright as she clutched to the doorpost, while Malcolm tried out a few words of Urdu, in vain. The meeting lasted only a few moments before they retreated downstairs once more. Morgan would never see her again in his life.
His Highness pretended indifference for a while, but couldn’t sustain it for long. He leaned towards Morgan and asked, “You met my wife?”
“Yes, we did. She is very beautiful.”
He nodded to himself, in agreement or approval. “I am glad she sent for you,” he said at last. “I wish to make her modern, but she longs to remain wild. She is the daughter of the Maharajah of Kolhapur, you know, and the marriage was a good alliance. But I love her too.” Then he shook his head, and his love for her was evident in his tiny, happy-sad face. Morgan liked him very much in that moment.
* * *
For a little time, while he was in Chhatarpur and Dewas, Morgan had left the poisonous atmosphere of colonial rule behind. The princely states were like tiny enclaves, apart from the rest of India; although the British maintained control, their government was nominally Indian and the atmosphere that prevailed was unnatural. The English were loved and revered there, and Indian nationalism was an affront. It was a tender illusion, and for a while it had almost seemed real. But he was awoken rudely from the dream when he arrived in Allahabad.
Almost as soon as he got there, word reached him through Baldeo that Rupert Smith was on the far side of town, staying with the Collector. Morgan immediately went to see him, and was invited to stay on to dinner. Smith was by now a Junior Magistrate, not a post he was likely to hold in London. Brittle and oversensitive, he managed to seem both more and less at home in India than he did in England. Not unnaturally, they talked about Baldeo. Had he been a satisfactory servant? He had been excellent, Morgan replied; he’d given full satisfaction.
In truth, his relationship with Baldeo had become a wordless complexity at the heart of his travels. On the one hand, the servant was a great help, a companion who knew all the cryptic codes of India. On the other hand, he cheated Morgan continually, small amounts of money that mattered very little in themselves, but which required ritualistic scenes of confrontation and remorse. And he tortured Morgan with tiny requests that verged on being demands, pricking his conscience expertly. In Bhopal, for example, Baldeo had wanted a bolt of cloth with which to make a new jacket, having admired Morgan’s. This he had received, but then he wanted more cloth for a pair of trousers. Morgan had refused, because he liked Baldeo to wear a dhoti; it was simple and genuine, and he wanted him to keep it. But Baldeo had seen Goldie’s servant in trousers and had set his heart on them. The subtle, intense wrangling that had gone on over these trousers had been exhausting, and though Morgan had won, he felt somehow that he’d lost.
Though Morgan said none of this, Smith smiled knowingly at him, one eyebrow lifted, and smirked. “Beginning to understand how things work out here, eh?”
This line of conversation had continued at dinner. The Collector’s wife, Mrs Spencer, did not try to disguise her contempt for anything Indian. Purdah parties she disliked especially, but then she seemed to dislike everything on principle. Mr Spencer tried to blunt her edge at first, saying, “Oh, it’s not that bad, is it, my dear,” but then he lapsed into the frank admission that he despised the native at the bottom of his heart.
After a moment’s silence, Rupert Smith – perhaps aware of Morgan’s internal sigh – murmured, “I haven’t quite got that far yet.”
But Smith, Morgan thought, had got that far. So had almost every English official he’d met. It was awful. From practically his first conversation on board ship, he’d been aware of his own discomfort, which turned at certain moments into torment. So this particular evening became part of a general impression, a series of interactions with the English in India, in which his hosts and their friends were never less than generous and kind and welcoming to him, and yet he felt removed from them, watching from a great distance.
He could never live here, he thought. Not as these people did. Even if political affairs were never discussed, he experienced his remoteness from his white kin as almost a physical difference. This was a vigorous, outdoor world, full of sports and guns. If you didn’t join the club or play polo or shoot tigers or subdue barbarous tribes on the borders, you were immediately an unsound quantity; the more so if, like Morgan, you lived in your mind a great deal and wrote books. Of what earthly use were novels? How did they help anybody? No one had actually put the questions to him, but they had let him know, in their tone and their turn of phrase, that they found him not quite pukka.
What made it worse was that, although his sympathies were usually with the Indians, he couldn’t always like them more than he did his countrymen. Whatever he did, he was always to some extent a Sahib, and the room for antipathy was vast. On those scattered occasions when a true understanding was reached, he always felt disproportionately grateful.
Allahabad also offered him one such moment. He had already joined up the previous morning with one of Masood’s friends called Ahmed Mirza. He had met Mirza in London, where he had studied engineering, and they had liked each other in a tentative, careful way. Now, however, on the other side of the world, a curious closeness sprang up between them. They drew together with a strange, magnetic attraction, not entirely comfortable.
They arranged to meet again, and while they toured around the depressing fort, Morgan mentioned the Bathing Fair, which he was planning to come back to see. Mirza immediately suggested that they go out on the water. “We can bicycle down to the Jumna and take a boat,” he said. “We can row out to the Sangam. That is the holy joining place, where the Ganges and the Jumna meet. Then you will see the place without the millions of bathers, before you come back next time.”
Morgan said that he would like that very much.
“Perhaps you haven’t heard this,” Mirza went on. “But there is a third river also. At least, the Hindus like to believe it. At the Sangam, they say another river comes up from the centre of the earth.”
“Have you seen it?” Morgan asked, intrigued.
“No,” Mirza said sadly, then added, “it is not a real river, I think. It is invisible, unless you believe in it.”
Morgan was sensitive to metaphors and this idea took hold of him. As they were rowed across the sluggish green surface of the Jumna, hacking their way through thick weeds, it came to him that certain human relationships were like two rivers meeting, causing a third river to spring up. He had glimpsed it himself at exceptional moments.
But today, in the real world, they were having difficulties finding even a second river. An old man and a boy were rowing them, though they seemed too weak to contend with the oars. When Mirza challenged them, the man said crossly that it was a long way to the Ganges.
“Well, we want to go there,” Mirza said, but in English, so it wasn’t understood. To Morgan, he went on, “I am so miserable, living here. I don’t have a single friend of my own age. I grew up in Hyderabad, and then I lived those years in England, and now I struggle to find myself.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“It is the lodgings, you see. I can’t live with Hindus, because they won’t let me eat meat. I have tried to live with the Eurasians, but I hate them, and they hate me too. I am very much alone.” Suddenly wretched, he spoke harshly to the old man, who spoke back at length, gesturing over the water.
“What does he say?”
“That we are in the Ganges already.” He stared out fiercely towards the bank. “But we aren’t, he is lying, we are in the same river.”
To soothe him, Morgan started to share some of his own feelings. He too felt alone in India, he said; he found it hard to speak, truly speak, to either Indian or English. The latter especially, and the women in particular. There had been moments since his arrival, he said, where he had felt utterly unmoored from the world around him, as if he might drift off and float away.
“Yes, you have said it exactly,” Mirza said. “That is how my country makes me feel.”
They looked at each other for a moment, united in sympathy. Then Mirza became embarrassed, and spoke rapidly to the old man again.
Afterwards he told Morgan, “He says the Ganges is too strong, it would carry us away. And that it is too late now, we should turn back. He is a liar, we should not pay him any money.”
But the fight had gone out of him; they were already turning on the water. They moved without speaking through the twilight, mist half-obscuring the Ganges bridge, ducks honking mournfully overhead.
The next day, Morgan visited Mirza’s lodgings: two bare rooms, not quite a bungalow, miles away from his work. A sad kind of home. But although he understood his new friend, no third river sprang up between them. For that, understanding isn’t necessary; only deep affection is required.
* * *
He would be seeing Masood again in ten days. He was supposed to feel excited at the prospect, but his stay in Benares was unhappy. It was the most thoroughly Indian city he had visited, yet somehow he didn’t see it properly. The sadhus, the broken-down ghats, the burning bodies and the devotees at the river – all of it felt remote from him. His attention was elsewhere and nowhere, and his anxiety grew as the date of his departure drew nearer, though he wasn’t even sure what he was anxious about. He only knew that he wanted to be happy, but wasn’t.
At Moghulsarai station, on the way to Bankipore, he saw the following message inscribed on marble blocks:
Right is Might. Might is right. Time is money. God si love.
The words of the last statement lingered with him, losing their charm and taking on an unexpected significance. The reversed letters made you see the original idea differently. It meant nothing, really, being love. Love was felt, love was acted upon, or it meant nothing. That was the heart of the matter, and it was what his friend had never understood.
Masood came to meet him at the station. They greeted each other with unfeigned delight, and for a short while it was as if his Indian travels had only just begun. In the carriage on the way to his house Morgan spoke, a little overexcitedly, about everything he’d seen since they’d last parted – but he could tell that his friend wasn’t listening and he fell silent. The silence continued while they both stared out at the endlessly passing hovels at the edge of the road.
“I’m sorry,” Masood said at last. “I really was paying attention to you, my dear fellow.”
“I’m speaking too much. I haven’t had anybody to talk to in quite a few weeks.”
“I’m very tired. You must forgive me. I have been working hard.”
“That means business must be going well, at least.”
“I have a lot of clients, yes. But …” He gestured out of the window, at the low shape of the town. His face was twisted into an expression of despair.
In just a day or two, Morgan would begin to understand that expression better, and to have some sympathy for it. The view from the carriage was everything. That was it: Bankipore consisted of that road, fourteen miles long, with its fringe of dirty dwellings. Nothing else to it and no way out. Morgan borrowed Masood’s bicycle on one of his first mornings and tried, but there were rice paddies on one side and on the other, out of sight, the Ganges. It was like a huge hand taking hold of him when he did eventually find a way down to the bank: standing on black, smelly mud, staring out over the roiling expanse of water.
Masood’s house was bare and big and pleasant, and at first he hardly left it. The back windows showed a prospect of open space, though it didn’t extend far. That illusion could be reproduced from the roof, where you seemed to look down into green gardens on either side. Curiously, Masood had never been onto his own roof before Morgan found a way up, nor did he know that the turning beside his house led down to the water. Something in him had been blunted, or frightened, by his life here, so that he didn’t look too closely at anything.
“And the worst of it,” he declared, “is there’s no tennis. Except at the club, where they won’t let me in.”
He said it with a smile, but he may not have been joking. A memory came back to Morgan, from a visit to Oxford, of Masood prancing about in his tennis whites, performing for his admirers. He had always been a showman, at his best in front of an audience. Perhaps there were simply not enough onlookers here.
In just a few days, Morgan himself would be beset by boredom. Bankipore was horrible, and offered almost no distraction. He was here for only two and a half weeks, which felt both too short and too long. What would ever happen in this place? There was nothing to do, and very little to think about. The only open space was the Maidan, some distance down the road; between it and Masood’s house were the Library and the Law Courts. These buildings weren’t much better than the hovels that surrounded them, and on the dusty ground between them squatted litigants waiting for lawyers, while inside the courts, lawyers waited for litigants. That was the sole entertainment.
He was in touch with one Englishman he had known from King’s, but he preferred spending time with Masood’s friends. Two in particular became his escorts and companions. In the morning, while the rest of the household was still asleep, he would bicycle over to the house of one or the other, and they would accompany him for a few turns about the Maidan. Then he would return home for breakfast with Masood before he left for the courts or consulted with clients in his office. There were many hours spent alone in the middle part of the day, until evening and more conviviality came along.
One afternoon, while Masood was out, three young men came to call on him and were treated instead to Morgan’s company. He found himself holding forth to the visitors on politics: he spoke about English foreign policy and the complicated, contradictory interests of the Empire, emphasising that much of what Britain did was based on fear of Germany rather than hatred of Islam. The youths listened eagerly and when they left one of them delivered an effusive speech about their good luck in meeting him and how the Empire could go on for ever if it produced wonderful gentlemen like him.
It was only afterwards that Morgan reflected, with amusement, that everything he’d said had sounded credible only because he happened to know a little more than the young men did. And yet there was something about the exchange that reassured and pleased him. If people could only sit down together and speak – or perhaps more importantly, listen – then many intractable problems might disappear. Everything of significance in his own life had come about through the simple act of open-hearted conversation.
Yet that could be the most difficult thing in the world. Sometimes the better you knew somebody, the more impossible any real talk became. That, at least, was how it felt to him. Here he was, in the home of the man he loved, on the other side of the world from his own constricting life, and what truths could be spoken between them? They talked about food, or the weather, or problems of justice, but they didn’t speak about anything that mattered. Everything was jest, or chatter, or deflection, and all the while the days were passing.
Of course, some important things were said, though more by accident than design. There was the moment, for example, when Masood mentioned that he thought he’d made a mistake by going into law and that he was considering a change.
“But to what?” Morgan asked.
“I am thinking of education. It is a very necessary field.”
“Of course, but you’ve spent years, studying in England …”
“Yes, yes, but the time wasn’t wasted, whatever happens. I have met you, apart from anything else. Just look – here we are, six years later, sitting together in India.”
Morgan couldn’t help himself; he was overcome with pleasure at the words. It did seem miraculous that an appointment to teach Latin in Weybridge could have carried him such a distance. The talk about Masood’s career became forgotten.
But it was followed by another conversation, possibly the very next night, when Masood mentioned casually, as if it didn’t matter, that he thought he might marry soon.
“Oh?” Morgan said. A bolt of pain fell cleanly through him, then vanished into the floor. “Do you have somebody in mind?”
There had been no women evident, not even in their idle chatter.
“Yes, yes,” Masood said impatiently. “You remember in Aligarh, you met my friend Aftab Ahmed Khan, we had dinner together …”
“Yes,” Morgan said vaguely. There had been so many dinners, so many meetings …
“I am considering marrying his daughter.” As if there had been some objection, he added, “These things are arranged here in India. We do not pretend to follow the English example. Our tradition is different.”
“By this time, I should hope I know that.” And both of them laughed and put the subject away hurriedly, as if it were somehow shameful. But the thought of it kept Morgan awake that night and it was the first thing in his mind when he woke the next morning.
Masood getting married; a door closing deep inside somewhere. He could be miserable if he thought about it too much. Though it wasn’t as if it came as a surprise. Marriage was inevitable here, far more so than in England; he’d known it would happen one day.
Still, he struggled to contain a sensation of rising dismay. He was at the midpoint of his time in India: three months behind him and three in front. Nor did his friend seem troubled by that fact. There had been no mention of seeing one another again. And when Morgan brought it up, Masood waved the matter away.
“I am very busy, my dear chap,” he said. “You see how my days are. Of course I would love to travel around with you, but I don’t know how it’s possible. Not at the moment. But the next time you come – certainly then, oh yes, we’ll tour about and I’ll show you everything. Oh, I look forward to that hugely.”
“The next time. When will that be?”
“I don’t know, Morgan, that’s up to you. But you’ll come back, of course you will. Now we’re not going to be depressed, are we, and spoil our happy days together? That would be too dreary.” And he went off, singing a ghazal, to shave before work.
In the end, Bankipore seemed to fall past him, so swiftly did his stay run out. And his memory of it afterwards was filled with Masood’s friends, rather than Masood himself. As the days converged on his departure, his anguish rose invisibly, not uncoloured by resentment. Why had he come here – to India – at all?
* * *
And then there were the caves.
“I have organised a little expedition for you,” Masood mumbled at him on one of his last mornings, as they took breakfast together on the roof. “Before you go to Gaya, I think you should see the Barabar caves. I am sending you with a friend, and you will have a picnic breakfast.”
“That is very kind of you,” Morgan said, “very kind,” but his teeth clinked painfully on the edge of his cup. “Are they wonderful, these caves?”
“Oh, yes. Famous caves.” After a moment he conceded, “Well, they are not so wonderful. But you should see them.” And after a further pause: “I have arranged an elephant.”
Morgan, staring down into the complicated trees, tried to be impressed by the elephant.
The last day was the worst. Time seemed to swell, becoming waterlogged with emotion. He thought he would get through it all right, but then in the middle of the night, when they’d said goodbye, his sadness had become too big and he’d gone back through to Masood’s room and done what he’d done. The attempted kiss, the pushing away, the tears: all of it had shamed him deeply, so that he couldn’t consider the memory too directly. And he had taken those feelings – of sadness and longing and shame – to the caves with him the next morning.
It was true: the caves were not so wonderful. They were small, with almost no ornamentation, no visible history. And they were spread out so far, in such a remote place, that he found himself retreating afterwards with a low, persistent headache and his deep melancholy unassuaged.
But despite their ordinariness, the caves lingered in him. He carried their hollowness inside, their negatively asserted shape. In Bodh Gaya, in the sunken garden where the Buddha had supposedly attained his enlightenment, he was less stirred by the prayer flags and the pilgrims than the memory of a glassy smoothness under his fingers, and that echo.
That echo. It played in his head at unexpected moments, repeating certain sounds and making nonsense of them. But could you remember an echo? Memory itself was like another kind of echo, everything duplicating endlessly, in shadow versions of itself.
Something had happened between Masood and himself, he felt, in the caves. Which was nonsense, because Masood hadn’t even been present. Though that was exactly the point. That was what everything between them had come down to: Masood still abed, while his friends, Agarwala and Mahmud, were at the station to see Morgan off. And wasn’t that always the way of it? Hadn’t his association with Masood, under the elaborate filigree of language, hadn’t it always been about this deferment, this selfishness, this veil drawn over the obvious truth, which was that Masood simply did not care enough? Morgan could not look at the possibility for long, but at least he could look at it, and over the coming days he took it out and hurt himself with it at particular moments when he was alone. He had always been slow to comprehend his own feelings, and it came only gradually to him how disappointed he was. He had hoped for a great deal in making this journey and none of it had come to pass. Now he was left with time and an immense amount of space, and nobody else to keep him company.
In the weeks that followed, Masood, bewildered or lazy or unable to help himself, continued in his apparent indifference. The promised letters did not arrive. Morgan wondered: would they ever see one another again? And would it matter if they didn’t? His mood, which seldom left him, was like being under the sea, in aquamarine light. However bright or loud your surroundings, you were somehow always alone.
Even in the middle of the vastest tide of humanity he had ever seen in his life – at the Magha Mela, the Bathing Fair in Allahabad, which Rupert Smith had invited him to – he felt profoundly singular. He was in a tent again, pitched in the middle of a mango grove. Nearby, the crowd seethed. A million people, Smith said. It was like a small nation, in which certain details could suddenly become apparent. People praying to idols with frighteningly painted faces. A sadhu hanging over a fire, his head in a black bag, being pushed back and forth by another sadhu. Long lines of pilgrims, waiting to have their scalps shaved, except for the one lock by which they hoped to be pulled to heaven. Their shorn hair piling up, to be taken to the water.
For the most part he watched it from an observation platform, astounded at this epic display of faith. The scene was especially remarkable in the early evening, when the air was blurred with dust and smoke, and people became like tiny animals crawling on the bottom of the sea. The junction of the two rivers kept changing overnight, according to how the Ganges wandered in its bed. This must have been the reason that he and Mirza had been unable to locate the spot, yet other people now were finding their way.
His journey had lost some of its velocity by now, though its form continued to hold him. He went on to Lucknow, where the Residency, the site of the Mutiny siege, had been preserved as a museum, through which he stumbled by the light of a golden afternoon. It was very still and weirdly beautiful, the wide, garden-like spaces with their bougainvillea and bursts of orange creeper, shaded by tall banyan trees, and then the broken buildings, punched and pocked with the marks of cannon balls, looking like much older ruins already. In one place the besiegers were only the width of an alley from the residents, whose presence still trembled on the air, in the form of heat ripples rising from the ground.
He fled from them, back to Agra, Muttra, Aligarh. It was a measure of how much he’d seen that Aligarh, and the college, now seemed like a place where relations between the races were good, even kind. He went to call on Masood’s mother, who still would not see him in person. But Mirza had coached him in the right words to convey. Give my salaams to Begum Sahiba and say that I have been at Bankipore and that Masood is very well. All true, of course; but he began to wonder whether his entire Indian visit might not dwindle to those bare facts.
Injury had transformed slowly into anger, inseparable sometimes from the landscape he was travelling through. He had begun to voice this emotion in letters, in a way he’d never done before. You can now go to hell as far as I’m concerned … These words, to Masood! You didn’t work at law, you don’t write anyone letters, you can’t even stop yourself getting fat by taking proper exercise. Soon you’ll be too slack to trouble to keep your friends and will just drift about making casual acquaintances with the people you find handy. I do think that is beastly of you.
Such sentiments would have been inconceivable just a few weeks before – to say nothing of signing off without love, which he now pointedly did. Love was still there, of course, but to refrain from declaring it was a declaration in itself.
* * *
In the first half of his journey, everything had seemed to fall past him at dazzling speed; nothing was still or fixed. But now that Masood was behind him, the end of his stay had become visible in the distance. All of this would finish. The world that he was passing through was not so new or shiny any more; it had taken on solidity and weight.
He found himself noting little moments, or particular people, with an eye to using them later. He didn’t really know what he would do with them; only that they were part of a fabric he’d begun to weave. His mind was especially receptive on a return visit to the Darlings in Lahore. He had enjoyed his previous stay, but it was only now that he fully appreciated how unusual the Darlings were in British India. Every week there were several gatherings involving a mix of Indians and Europeans, and at an evening party Morgan met an elderly gentleman, whose name made an impression. After the party ended Mr Godbole strolled with him through the public gardens, discussing ragas. Different scales were applicable to different times of day, he told Morgan, and to illustrate the point Mr Godbole sang to him a little in C major, which was appropriate for the evening.
The old gentleman was not, in the end, especially memorable, though his name did linger behind him. It was perhaps usable if bestowed on a minor character, a walk-on part that nobody would remember. But the trouble with Mr Godbole, and all the other bits and pieces he was gathering, was that they remained loose strands – little pieces of talk, or momentary impressions gleaned in passing – with nothing to knot them together. In writing his previous novels, there had always been something at the middle of the narrative, a thickening into solidity, around or over or through which the story had to pass. Everything would lead up to it, and then everything would lead out of it again. Without that obstacle in his way, he couldn’t even begin. But although his mind had been preoccupied with his Indian book for quite some time, he still had no sense of what that central density might be.
Well, it would come or it would not come; that was all. If the Big Event didn’t show itself to him, there could be no book, nor did he think the world would be much poorer for it.
In the meanwhile he remained a traveller, and India continued to strew events and places in his path. In Delhi, Malcolm had arranged another meeting with Bapu Sahib for him. Morgan was very keen to see His Highness again, who had begun to loom in his mind as the Indian he knew and liked best after Masood. No sooner had he located the royal party than Bapu Sahib ran up behind him and put his hands over Morgan’s eyes; this happy greeting set the tone for the two days of his stay.
His Highness was there – with the Rani and their child, his brother, the Prime Minister and sixty-five attendants, all of them staying in the same hotel – to attend a Chiefs’ conference. On his last day in the city Morgan accompanied him while he made official calls. When his duties were done, Bapu Sahib became boyish and boisterous, bouncing delightedly on the cushions. The royal carriage took them into the city, where they chanced to meet his brother and other members of the court who had been shopping. The squabbling, noisy, happy party – ten of them – pushed into the carriage too, along with their mound of purchases. Morgan found himself between His Highness, who was adorned with a large pale-yellow turban, and his brother with a purple one, the doctor in a red Maratha head-dress opposite, while nearby lolled a secretary who appeared to be wearing an orange cup and saucer, next to the court buffoon, who held a wheezing elderly pug on his lap. Outside the carriage hung the coachman, an attendant, a footman and a groom. As far as Morgan could tell, nobody in the street paid them the slightest bit of attention.
This ride put him in a good humour again, and it lasted all the way through Jaipur, which he disliked, and Jodhpur, which he did not. Mount Abu cheered him further, with its valleys and trees and temples, and it was in almost victorious mood that he arrived in Hyderabad, far to the south. After a few days, when he moved on to Aurangabad, he was nearing the end of his time in India; he could feel it all closing on a final, finite point.
Morgan had scarcely arrived at the dak bungalow when Saeed, Ahmed Mirza’s younger brother, swept up in a flurry to take him off and he was settled instead into quite the loveliest quarters he had seen in this country: a large hall divided into two by exquisite blue arches, its side open to a garden of trees whose presence crowded into the house. The air was heavy with the smell of flowers. Before he slept each night he went out to look at the house from the other side of a rectangular tank, full of fish, and the sight reminded him of the Loggia de’ Lanzi in Florence.
Saeed and his housemates – a Municipal Inspector and yet another barrister – lived in an ugly dwelling in the yard, and on his second night they all ate together, and afterwards shared a hookah and conversation. They recited poetry to one another in Persian, Urdu, Arabic and Greek, and talked about astrology and the shortcomings of Englishmen. It was a clear, calm evening and for a moment Morgan had the impression that he had been carried back in time, to one of his early visits to Masood in Oxford, when everything was still new between them.
He had known Saeed a little from London, but this young man had grown very dashing since then. He was a Munsif, a Junior Magistrate, and Morgan visited the courts with him on various days. In the sub-judge’s room, he observed a civil surgeon giving evidence in a case of murder, while a punkah-wallah, a superb, bare-chested, sculpted youth, in whom graven idol and flesh became one, fanned them rhythmically, pulling his rope impassively as Atropos.
It was becoming clearer to Morgan that his novel might turn on an incident of some kind, which would play itself out in a courtroom. The idea was connected to his experiences in India generally. Most of the educated class of Indians he’d met – Masood and his friends – were barristers. On the other hand, many of his English acquaintances worked for the Indian Civil Service and had been employed as magistrates. He had found himself very exercised in Allahabad when he’d gone to watch Rupert Smith presiding over a court in session. Smith himself had already been marked in Morgan’s mind as the embodiment of a certain type, but now the setting had taken hold of him too. It had become more and more troubling to him, in a personal, discomfiting way, that these two classes – the finest minds that each side could offer – seemed to regard each other with suspicion and contempt. The Indians felt that they were abused and mistreated; the English officials said that the educated Indian was a drop in the ocean and meant nothing. Even justice, it seemed, was cracked down the middle.
This crack, this deep divide, would run through his book. Two nations, two distinct ways of doing things, were in endless friction with each other. And it was everywhere obvious. The conflict was in him and around him, and wanted to be worked out on the page.
* * *
Home was beginning to loom ahead now, not only as an idea but as a fast-approaching reality. In just one week he would be boarding the ship at Bombay. Because it was on his mind, he mentioned England more than usual in conversation, and it sparked an outburst from Saeed.
He and Morgan were riding on horse-back to see a nearby Maratha village. It was evening, and Morgan had an upset stomach from a banquet he’d been treated to the previous night. He’d fallen off this same horse a day or two before, but thankfully the animal played no tricks today. Instead it was Saeed who was fretful and skittish.
“What do you English imagine?” he cried. “That you will rule us for ever? Do you not know that already your days here are ending? Clear out, you fellows! The Raj and you will be defeated. It may be fifty or five hundred years, but we shall turn you out.”
His face became quite distorted with fury. It was a sharp-edged, nasty little moment, which Morgan was glad to leave behind. As they rode on and a happier conversation resumed, he thought: he hates us. He hates us far more than his brother does.
Their friendship had become fraught, as every one of his Indian friendships seemed to in the end. Even so, by the next day the difficult talk was forgotten as Saeed accompanied Morgan to visit the caves nearby at Ellora. On the way they stopped in Daulatabad to visit the hill-fort. This unlovely creation had the power of impregnability: one entered across a bridge that spanned an excavated moat, and then ascended a spiral tunnel through the hill. From the very summit, above all the guns and fortifications, the Deccan plateau simmered bleakly in the heat.
Saeed flung a stone over the edge as they went back. He said, “When I look down on walls I thought big below, I despise them.”
For his part, Morgan thought, what should I do with such a kingdom? The temptation to power had no purchase here, not for him. People like Saeed wanted to rule, but they didn’t seem to know what that involved. It was a great labour and a great burden, he had glimpsed that in the last weeks. Power both amplified and diminished those who wielded it.
After lunch they walked around the outside of the moat, stepping carefully through a rocky landscape that baked and shivered in the sun. The heat and immobility and silence were preparation for what awaited him at Ellora in the evening. He had been to so many forts and temples and shrines and tombs over the past six months that he didn’t believe he had any reserves of awe left. But the Kailasa cave, seen in the last bloody rays of the sun, amazed and astonished him.
Cut out of a single vast rock, it was a temple complex with many levels and galleries and courtyards, covered in sculptures and friezes of an arresting intensity. The shrine at its heart, built around a gigantic lingam, made impression enough, but what stayed with Morgan afterwards were some of the animal images, charged with spiritual hostility, and the terrifying blank indifference of a goddess while she casually inflicted cruelty. He returned alone at sunset, and again the next morning. By now he had made up his mind that the inspiration behind the Kailasa wasn’t godly, but diabolical. Many, many hands and years had made this place; it gave expression to three different kinds of religious thinking. Nevertheless, whether Buddhist or Hindu or Jain, the caves did not exude a good feeling. They weren’t beautiful, and their grandiosity was of a frightening kind. They had been carved as shrines to an ancient and primitive fear in people; they had certainly touched that place in him.
He found himself thinking now about those other caves, in the Barabar Hills far to the north. He had returned to them often in his imagination, like a hard hollowness at the centre of his journey. They were nothing like Ellora or the Kailasa, of course; they were vacant and smooth, without idols. Nevertheless, they had become larger and more numerous in his mind, more perfect in their emptiness.
They could be made significant, he thought, even if the reality had been disappointing. Those caves could be touched, he saw now, with some of the dread and darkness he’d felt in Ellora. He didn’t need the busy, alarming carvings, nor the scenery or the scale. No, absence and silence were his material … broken only by that echo.
He had it now, he thought. What he had been searching for till now: the heart of it, the central, engendering event. Something happened in the caves. He knew that much, at least. A terrible incident, a crime of some kind. But when he tried to focus on what it was, it became unclear, all of it retreated from him. It had been too dark to see properly; the echoes had been confusing …
* * *
Saeed was wholly his friend again when he came to the station to see him off. The Station Manager had to delay the train by ten minutes while they went through their farewells. Hung ceremonially around the neck with three garlands of jasmine and marigolds, Morgan was abashed, honoured and inadequate all at once. “But I have no gift for you,” he murmured. “And you have been so kind …”
“The accounts of friends are written in the heart,” Saeed told him, smiling, as he stepped back to watch the train depart. It was a line Masood might have spoken in one of his more insincerely lyrical moments. But Morgan liked Saeed, and really had wanted to thank him properly. In any case, he would be able to buy some confectionery for him in Bombay.
Though, as it happened, he couldn’t. India was to finish for him in confusion. The boat, he discovered, was leaving twelve hours earlier than he’d been told, and there was no time for anything that he’d planned – to visit Elephanta island, or eat mangoes, or buy cakes for Saeed. He couldn’t even repack his luggage properly. It was all he could do to make the ship, and he wasn’t sufficiently collected even to feel the loss as the shoreline receded behind him.
In the end, after everything that had happened and all the people that he’d met, it was only Baldeo who stood at the quayside to watch him go – ageless, inscrutable Baldeo, whom he did not hate after all; no, not in the slightest. They waved to each other just once, without apparent emotion, and then the intervening distance grew greater and their futures cleanly diverged.