The Last Candles of the Night. Ian Bedford
them to him.
“What are these for?”
“Promise you won’t read them.”
“I won’t read them. What are they for? They’re for Ragini, is that it?”
“You know where to find her.”
“You’re wrong. I don’t know where to find her. She finds me.”
“Then the next time she finds you,” said Anand – he was far from reconciled to his friend’s privileged access to Ragini, though he quite believed in it. He did not bother to finish the sentence. Philip accepted the pages. Poor Anand. He did not know his idol. She eluded them, of course she eluded them. She was elusive. She was not one to wait around on a bus for Razakars. She left as she chose. Philip could cite half a dozen of her disappearances but, beyond those instances, he had little more to reveal to Anand.
10
Where Ragini went when she vanished, by the rock of Bhongir – that, to Philip, was unimportant. He would meet her again.
But where, in all Hyderabad, did Anand go? Philip knew of one place. He knew there was a curious ‘hostel’ in the Old City, somewhere in Lal Darwaza. A place glimpsed by night. There Anand went from the bus station. The bus arrived late …
And Philip? Where did he go? Lying, now, fully awake in his bed in Gibbes Street, Philip knew no more of that night. The night had served its purpose, brought a man and a woman together. Nothing depended on where he went.
So many of his memories of Hyderabad, the ones he retrieved, were like that. Not that they were obscure, night-obscure. Some were flooded with light. But they were non-successive. No one thing led to another. He would find himself where he was, but with no idea, no idea in memory, of how he got there. Except for the night he arrived, at that terrible ‘palace’ with the mad dog, he could remember now no place in Hyderabad – and there had been many – where he laid down his head to sleep.
This practice of remembering was so novel to Philip that at first he had expected whole scenarios to unfurl around him, for as long as he stayed on deck. Sometimes this happened. More often, the past, like dough, like the surface of the waters, would close, leaving no sign it had ever been troubled.
Now he was remembering in earnest, the gaps daunted him. It seemed he had plunged, as swimmer, into Black Lagoon. A kind of peril lurked just out of his mind’s reach.
The night’s journey was over. He was walking, it appeared, by the river – but in broad daylight. Had he curled up all night at the bus station? Was this some different occasion? Gazing at the south bank of the Musi – as anyone must, who walked the north side – over the emerald-green flats to the battlemented walls of the Nizam’s city, he refrained from crossing the bridge. Like a wise child at Christmas, who reserves the best present for last, Philip in those early days had resolved not to set foot in the Old City, south of the bridges. He would do so in his own good time: when he was invited. For Philip was not a tourist. He was an office-holder in the Nizam’s administration. The Nizam, it was true, did not observe this capital distinction between the north and south sides. He resided on the north side, at King Kothi.
The Musi was prone to flood. But when it was not in flood, its bed afforded a tract of prime land, the most bountiful for yield in all the districts. Who owned this land? Whoever the owners were, they were nowhere in sight. An army of labourers, with huts and byres and animals, swarmed for miles along the ribbon of bright green – rice paddy, or lucerne – until the waters swept down on them without warning. As he turned away from the river, towards Sultan Bazaar, Philip heard a dull roar – not a wall of water but a primal force, all the same, or so it appeared at a distance. A few steps nearer and the roar began to disintegrate into ragged particulars, yells, clashes of metal, what sounded like gunshots as someone fired, presumably into thin air.
A Razakar rally. Dispersed voices blended into one rhythmic shout of a few syllables, repeated over and over.
Philip stood aside. Even as he did, the scene in memory changed into something else. Monsoon cloud filled the south and east. The streets now were patchily lit against the dusk. Every depression on the ground glittered with a month’s accumulation of rainwater. Advancing on him from the direction of the British Residency, a new procession took up the width of the street to Rain Bazaar. The procession showed in the twilight as if it were beamed from somewhere, a level shaft of uniform black heads and white garments. Policemen in their diagonally-belted tunics and diagonally-striped, paper-boat turbans strove to clear a way for traffic. The marchers, weirdly inoffensive and gawky, banners aloft, trudged beside their bicycles. No menace lurked in this procession. These marchers would burn nothing down. Could it be a Congress rally? Were these timid processionists, hustled by their cheerleaders – one with a stumpy leg – Anand’s constituency?
Fifty-three years had passed. Philip could not tell who the marchers had been. The Congress then was banned. Were they trade-unionists? Had the Nizam’s Railway – a not-for-profit institution (as it ought to be) – fallen behind in payments to its workers? Philip was baffled by the procession. It should have been easy, for him – it was a ‘modern’ procession. The ‘modern’ speaks for itself, even – or especially – among the sights and sounds of the decay of the old order. The ‘modern’ is most intelligible when it predicts ruin. But nothing, in Hyderabad, was intelligible in the usual sense. Hyderabad was a folly. It was, of course, destined for ruin. This did not make it more intelligible. All swept away now. How could it count, to anyone, if he were to recover those meanings, which no longer ‘meant’? What was the purpose of all those undisputed errands and unblinking procedures, the bazaars, the obscure crafts, the bewildering pageantry of holidays that arrived out of nowhere, the Abyssinian guard, the troupes of musicians in livery, the female armed warriors whom he had watched, in all their regalia but never on parade, lounging like ordinary shoppers on the stone benches of the Moazzam Jahi vegetable market? Why was a quarter of the population in triumphal dress? Was this the deceit of memory? How, if it was, could he correct a mistaken impression? And why should he care? History had pronounced its verdict on the Nizam. Wasted effort. An unjust social order. That order had vanished, like water-vapour, and nobody in India regretted it for one moment.
11
Philip, the Nizam’s office-holder, and world record headmaster for youth – he was twenty-three! – had others to report to, senior officiators whose jobs were no more secure than his own. They assembled in various places. Philip would appear at the most recent address – a pavilion, say, in the Residency gardens – to find that the venue had shifted. This time – this time? the time he returned on the bus with Anand? – he was directed to Osmania University, on rocky ground several miles to the north-east. Osmania University had been founded twenty-five years ago by the present Nizam, and was famed throughout India – so Philip had been told, and this was true – for its choice of language of instruction. Throughout India, university classes were held in English. But here, they were in Urdu. The textbooks were all translated. To some, this enterprise was quixotic, but in Philip’s small circle, everyone approved. Lessons were taught here in the mother tongue. Well, in a mother tongue. Osmania University, moreover, knew scholarship and, even in the estimate of the English, had housed famous persons. Besides local persons, a cast of international investigators had been enlisted by the new-leaf Nizam for his social reforms. Osmania had made a home a while back for the anthropology Professor C.H. von Furer-Haimendorf of London University. What a precursor.
The reform educationists took to these temporary lodgings with mixed feelings. They were far from the centres of intrigue. But they relished the place. They were housed now in the Arabic department. The Arabist scholars had been drafted en masse, it appeared, to duties of state elsewhere. Philip had never entered such a fine building. All was grey granite: high, elegant windows carved out of granite, granite staircases, a granite floor so fastidiously levelled and polished with hand-tools that you could see your face in it. You could read your expression. You could at least infer your expression. The melody of rote learning from the classrooms was a distraction: so too was the smell from the toilets, which was wind-borne, as there was sometimes a wind and the toilet doors stood open. But the work party were content.
“I