The Last Candles of the Night. Ian Bedford
to deprive Anand of his dexterity as a social being. It was he – not Philip – who was made to look a foreigner in the land of his birth. ‘Student’ in India should be a thrilling word. Instead she treated him like a minor. Anand talked too much and risked making a bad impression on Ragini: while she, who spoke little, sublime in her silence, made on this freedom fighter an enormous and ever-growing impression.
9
A further police roadblock emptied the bus. One of the passengers, exasperated now beyond measure, quarrelled with a scared-looking constable in ragged uniform. All these police looked scared. Such an intimidated-looking corpus of armed men was rarely to be found and the three companions relished the sight, one with irony, one with his usual bafflement, and the third (Anand) with contempt. These were policemen? The dissident passenger, released from questioning and allowed to rejoin his family, relayed in a loud voice all he had been told, or had managed to infer.
Towering over them was a granite monolith, ghost-pale in the advancing twilight. The rock of Bhongir. “How can they be looking for Razakars?” said Anand. “No Razakar would dare to show his face in this ashram. Not even the police have the courage. I’m surprised they’re here!”
“Only by day,” said Ragini.
As if to confirm her view, the police were dismantling their dusk roadblock in extreme haste. They threw trestles and markers in the back of their lorry – which was, at least, freshly painted, with a legend in Urdu – and sped away. But a new setback followed. A bus tyre had to be replaced.
Philip knew of Bhongir. On his outward journey, from Hyderabad to Warangal along this road – in a sedan car carrying four English-speaking appointees of the Nizam’s Government – the mystique of the place had been impressed on his imagination. The town of Bhongir was only an hour’s drive from Hyderabad and was patrolled by armed police in the daylight hours. But at night they fled. ‘Fled’ was the word used to Philip without reflection by a Deputy Officer of the Advanced Education Unit and, as Philip now saw for himself, it could not be bettered. A prominent landholder of this region had distributed his lands to his tenants and dependent smallholders, in the Communist cause. Now these tenants, too, were Communists, without ceasing to work their lands. They were faithful till death. Not even firepower could dislodge them.
“Their arsenal should be around here,” said Anand, approaching the rock on foot, as the bus was made roadworthy. “The police raid houses, but it would take them a year to comb all the crevices of the rock. It’s not even defended.”
The approach was littered with boulders. A dense thicket was cleared in one place, allowing an easy climb. Stairs were cut in the rock, leading to a fort which, said Anand, the patrols occupied till dusk, and to no avail.
“Do the peasants keep guns?”
“Rifles. Like hidden treasure. But only they can find them.”
It seemed to Philip that Anand exaggerated the resourcefulness of the peasants, who could hardly be supposed to hide guns in an acropolis trampled by the police from dawn to dusk. Anand might well mock the abilities of the armed bands – the Communists – but he seemed to revere peasants. Was it because they kept to one place, tilling the soil and so constituting ‘the people’? But ‘the people’ was Communist propaganda. “Were there peasants in your family?”
Anand did not answer. The rock glimmered, suspended by the long twilight in the sky near at hand, almost in touching distance. Stately birds – the size of quail – waddled briskly and efficiently to cover under their very noses. They heard the crying, clicking and whirring without being able to detect which bird was responsible for which sound.
“We’ll go back.” Anand led the way.
The bus motor started up. “Where is she?” he exclaimed, as they stood in the headlamps.
“Climb on. She’ll be there.”
They had cut it fine. The bus tyre had been swiftly changed. The crew were in a hurry, and would have left without them.
“Someone is in our old seats.” Instead of dropping into an available seat and allowing Ragini to find them, as she’d done in the first place, Anand pushed his way down the corridor, stumbling over baskets and legs and peering into faces.
He appealed to a family to lend him its battery-torch. He shone it round the interior, and even – forlornly – on the side of the road.
He slumped beside his friend. Philip’s thoughts were beginning to run on the encounters in store for him. He was not sure where he’d spend the night: he was depending on people to meet the bus, but it would arrive late. Hardcastle would be there, but the quarters Hardcastle had at last found for him on his earliest visit were at Rock-Hill Palace, that is, at a distant outpost in a stony hinterland at three in the morning, with the doors locked and no-one about but a rabid dog on a chain. Hardcastle had seemed so sure of this place, where, he said, he knew the nawab. But there was no nawab. He had installed Philip on a chair on the verandah, patting down an already limp cushion as a token of comfort, and had welcomed him to Hyderabad with the gift of a half-bottle of Pondicherry brandy which he seemed disposed to investigate there and then. Philip recoiled in his seat at the memory of that awful night vigil which – never mind Hardcastle, whom his driver at last whisked away – was at that point only beginning.
Anand was meek and quiet. Philip made no bid to console him. In the dark, the bus lost speed. Again! The co-driver was fumbling at a loop of rope, which was all that held the door closed: but even he could not stave off the inevitable. Now the vehicle was quite still. Voices rang out. Could this be happening again? Someone boarded. Might it be a single, female passenger? No such luck. Dark shapes crowded into the aisle, rasping in hoarse voices, in Urdu. These men meant business. The foremost snatched the torch from Anand’s lap. He had failed to return it to its owner, or to switch it off. The intruders moved down the aisle which cleared for them at once.
Every face was scrutinised – so intently, thought Philip, as to make of it not so much a face as an artifact, a portrait. These men could distinguish a Rembrandt from a fake Rembrandt. They felt women’s ears, for gems or gold. But they issued no challenge. They left the bus: Razakars. Muslim vigilantes, banded like fugitives for the showdown. That showdown was yet some way off. When the Indian Army came – as it must – the Razakars would fight. In the meantime, they terrorised the districts. Their links with government were obscure, but certain. The passengers – a bus full of Hindus – had been lucky to escape them.
Anand’s silence was truly unnerving. It was he who had said even the Razakars would steer clear of Bhongir. They were two miles from Bhongir! Instead of apologising for his doomed insights, he was scribbling in a notebook, with the aid of the pocket-torch, which had been restored to him. Philip saw two possibilities. He could ask Anand what he was writing or, alternatively, he could remind him that the torch had been borrowed. He refrained from both.
The jolting of the bus on a bad road was not conducive to writing. But Anand persevered. “I wonder who those goondas were looking for?” said Philip, after a time, striving for philosophic distance.
“Well – she got away.”
To the mind of Anand, it appeared that he and the Razakars – shining their torches on the faces in the bus – had an errand in common. Both sought their Ragini, their all-in-all.
Here and there, as the bus travelled, unpredicted lights – lanterns in kitchens and workplaces, or on desolate hills – further mystified the darkness. Up front one of the crew, the assistant’s assistant, the poorest and most negligible person on the bus – but it was he who had run for the charpoy – broke for some reason into an arcane melody, in a voice as limpid and beautiful as Philip had ever heard. This lad was cheering them up, after all the inconveniences they had suffered.
“What does the song say, Anand?”
Anand broke off to listen. “Something about God.”
He resumed writing. He had filled the first couple of pages of a brand-new exercise book bought in Warangal to be a journal of record. Philip, who