The Last Candles of the Night. Ian Bedford
but the disdain we feel!” – his temperate features were distorted by a sudden horror. “Sick. We become sick. We should not be so, but there is nothing in our culture to prepare us to confront these people. Some European scholars come, and they say, ‘This is India, just India. There is no reason to be ashamed of caste.’ Do you believe this? There is no reason to be ashamed of caste?”
“How can I be ashamed of caste?” said Philip, taking the question personally. Sukku’s expression in return showed him the insufficiency of this answer. But what could he say? How could he presume? A key was missing, and he strove to supply it. “I am not a Hindu, so I have no stake.”
“You accept caste?”
“No, of course I don’t accept it.”
“But you are not ashamed of it?”
“How can I be ashamed of it?”
Sukku had difficulty in fathoming this outlook. He paused for further explanation. When none was offered, he struck out on another path. “In India we are rich in variety. We are rich in variety, in this one thing. So many castes we have in India, so many faiths, so many languages, so many gods and goddesses, so many crafts, so many ways of life. So this is how I should regard my country? As a full-to-bursting museum? I have nothing in common with such people. They simply distress me. I like to associate only with educated people. But, what is the good of these?”
Philip was lost. “The good of educated people ... ?”
“What is the good of all these castes?”
“There is no good. There is no good,” said Philip, a trifle impatiently, having to exceed limits to declare himself.
“We should do away with caste. I myself believe,” said Sukku, with dangerous irony, but the irony was all in Philip’s head, “that we should do away with caste. I am a bit educated. This is not the common opinion. But the poor Hindu, the villager, he must live in the dust through necessity. He has no chance to form an opinion.”
“I’m sure he has one.”
“He has no chance to communicate an opinion.”
It was a time of afternoon when the angle of the sun’s rays caught the tinted-glass windows high over the capstone of the arched entry portal at Monty’s, briefly inflaming the room. You would think the kotwal would close this place down. Perhaps the authorities kept it on, allowed it to thrive, as an admonition to Hindu and Muslim alike, a kind of hell. Yet it struck Philip as a desirable place. The patrons of Monty’s caused no trouble. Comparing it with Sydney, with the pubs of Sydney, it was an improvement, at least pictorially. Only Sukku, with his tumbler of water, betrayed a discomfiture he owed to his thoughts, not to his surroundings. Philip resolved to cure him of it. “Think of the poor Khan Bahadur,” he said, “who must live in his palace through necessity – with its forty rooms. Isn’t a haveli a palace?”
“That haveli is a palace. The Khan Bahadur, why are you interested in him?”
“Can you guess?”
“You would like to meet him. Meet his wife.”
“As a fellow Australian … What did you say her name was?”
“You will find she is not so Australian,” said Sukku, withholding the name. “She has lived in Hyderabad too long.”
“But she’s young, isn’t she?”
“Young. She is young. She is junior. A second wife.”
“ ‘Junior’ does not sound young, it sounds infantile.”
“You are making a request. This may take time. I have many friends among the Kayasthas. They can bring you to the Khan Bahadur. But to ask him to dispose of his wife …”
“Dispose of her?” exclaimed Philip. He searched in vain for a hint of devilry in his friend’s features. All he intended was to meet the woman.
Just drop the matter. If Sukku would help, he would help. He had done so in the past. He had produced Anand, though with no thought of doing Philip a favour. He knew people, and to make this known he would produce people – where the case was relevant. This thought set Philip wondering about his own relevance. There were, in India, two people, Ragini and Anand, for whom he cared a lot. And he mattered to them. Philip could not have said why, but he did. But should these two matter to one another: or should one come to matter to the other, since one was enough … what would become of Philip? A go-between! There and then, he renounced all sociable designs on the nawab’s wife, and relieved Sukku of his obligation. Even so, to make sure it was there, he groped for Anand’s missive to Ragini, in his back pocket. Philip, a moral person, with strengths where you least expected them, would not read the letter. He would deliver the letter … It was gone. He had lost it, that wretched scrap of paper, and without even meaning to. All was saved. His spirits soared, until he remembered the other pocket.
Chapter Two. The Fort at Warangal
1
When Philip emerged from the back bedroom in Rockdale – this could be at any time of the morning – he would stand for a moment in the passage, striving to gauge by ear what was in store for him in the further rooms. ‘Back’ and ‘front’ were reversed in this house. The room he now occupied in fact looked over the street. There was a street door, but only tradesmen ever knocked at that door. Ever since Philip was a child, growing up in this house, so much of the daily action was concentrated in the ‘table’ room, the kitchen, the yard and the walled verandah (not to speak of the ‘geyser’ or bathroom which opened off the kitchen) that he had never doubted where the ‘front’ lay and would retain this orientation for all houses till his dying day, warped for life. Jenny, when she was brought to the house, having escaped this conditioning, did not make the same mistake. The two sometimes quarrelled about it.
Once he had learned, by overhearing, what to expect, Philip advanced from the passage through a dark room, which in his childhood had professed only two functions: ‘listening to the cricket’, pre-War, when the Ashes tests were on, and home entertainment on Saturday evenings. The men (and a cricket-mad aunt, the closest Philip had to a parent) retreated here for their dedicated purpose in summer, the only time this room was ever in use in daylight. When it all became too much for them they would adjoin to the yard, aunt included, to bat and bowl. His grandfather bowled slow lobs; he could leg-break a tennis ball. This room had contained armchairs, a radio and an upright piano. Every member of the household, Philip too, played and sang at the piano. They did so by family custom. His mother, who died with his father in a car-crash when Philip was two, was said to have been a gifted musician. Philip had nothing of that. He had taken lessons, but could not remember ‘practising’ the piano in this house.
His bedroom gave onto the passage. Two more, Jenny’s and a third, opened off the darkened room. The boy Philip had slept in the third – sharing it some of the time with an unmarried uncle. That room had held tall, glass-paned bookcases with his mother’s books. Now it was ‘Jim’s room’.
Philip proceeded to the ‘front’ area of the house. His hand rested on the doorknob. He was listening – one last precaution – for his daughter Nora’s voice. Some days she arrived early. When he could be sure the coast was clear, he turned the knob slowly and advanced into the room.
Jenny was seated at the polished-wood, hexagonal table with her back to him. Her visitors looked up before she did. What she now occupied was his grandfather’s place, not that she knew it – for the old, deal table was gone – facing the yard. Today’s circle of friends were ‘hospital’. Jenny was in no sense a hostess or home entertainer, but friends dropped in on her – often in the mornings, to avoid family, to avoid Nora, whose demands on her mother were exclusive. Here were her former workmates at the Kogarah Bay public hospital: the beloved former head nurse, and two much younger than Jenny, a nurse and an administrator who still worked there. In her mid-thirties, Jenny had been appointed Deputy Registrar at a wing of the hospital,