The Last Candles of the Night. Ian Bedford
’90s. That was Philip. He had taught school to poor tribal boys and girls, to the sons of Rajput chiefs and to a generation of trainee administrators and scholar-officials. Except for wrongs done to him, recent wrongs, these achievements of a foreigner in India were all he ever wanted to talk about – though, heaven forbid, not to Jenny. He bored people stiff. But now listen to him. Jim, and his redhead, had him tamely eating out of their hands, neglecting his grand achievements and fuddling on about nawabs and princes, ‘vanished supremacies’, Razakar diehard militias and his personal exposure to the squalor and violence of the last days of Hyderabad, as if youth would never end.
Jenny tiptoed from the passage. She left the stage to Philip. What she’d have overheard – had she stayed – was Philip’s account of the Nizam, based wholly on report, since he had never set eyes on the Nizam. “I once thought I had. It was the week I arrived. I was taken in a motorcar to the palace, for felicitations after my job interview. When I say the palace, the Nizam in fact was hidden away in King Kothi. Quite a plain building, King Kothi, but the palace I saw: I can’t remember it from the outside, but the rooms were magnificent. Polished wood tables, gilt mirrors to the ceilings, velvet roped curtains; there was an elephant who plodded in circles, so a lift could ascend one floor. I watched this elephant. I stared right into the lift, which was a wardrobe. Stiff tunics and pajamas on wood frames. People were everywhere, men with vast beards, mischievous-looking boys who had nothing to do but handle things and, I was told, Abyssinian slaves: they weren’t slaves, but they were black as night. Display cases without glass panes: you could reach right in. A room full of sabres. I waited a long time in an ante-room, crowded with bearers, slaves, regimental servants or whatever they were, in my grey wool suit from Lowes. I felt like a shopwalker at David Jones. Then a stout, formidable man entered the room. His step was so mountainous and alert, though a trifle slow, that it had to be him. Who else could it be? I was thoroughly prepared for the Nizam, I was braced for him; but, of course, this wasn’t the Nizam but a person with crossed ribbons over his tunic, sleeves with gold braid, a turban with a crest or a kind of stiff quill, like a hoopoe. His boots were tooled leather, like they once made in Queensland for Aboriginal rodeo-riders. There was no doubting the majesty of his appearance, but, as I say, it wasn’t him.”
“Who was it?”
“The Vicar al-Umra Bahadur. I bowed to him, but that wasn’t protocol.”
“Will you show how you bowed, how low you bowed?” said Jim, but Rhondda reproved him: “Other people know how to bow. You may not.”
“The Vicar al-Umra. A distinguished person, but so they all were. He had nothing to do with me.”
“Then why was he there?”
“Why was he there? You’re asking me why he was there? He belonged there. He walked those rooms. The Nizam had his court, all the great noblemen had their courts. His was one of them.”
“Did he speak to you?” said Rhondda. “You must have had dealings with someone.”
“Mainly Englishmen.”
Rhondda turned up her nose at Englishmen, but Jim was alert. “Who were those? Part of the reform team?”
“The reform team. Health, tribal welfare, education. I was education. A very low-level appointee, but they were glad to have me. There had to be appointees at all levels. They were honeycombing the State with schools and schoolteachers. They were running out of time.”
“What month was this?”
“The beginning of October. The good weather.”
“But already, in August …”
“You’re right, August ’47. The date of Indian independence. August was behind us. India had had her independence, but not all the states had signed up. Hyderabad was the grandest of them – and the last. That’s why I say, they were running out of time.”
“You saw what was coming.”
“I saw what was coming, but it was a new job.”
“Yes, I quite understand new job,” said Jim, who had not yet had a job: he was a final-year undergraduate in architecture at the same university as his grandfather so long ago. Rhondda, too, studied architecture. When they were not studying architecture, they studied each other.
When Jim studied Rhondda he sometimes saw the need for a lesson that would take her a little out of herself, help her along. He had proposed his grandfather to Rhondda as this kind of lesson. A twofold lesson: he proposed his grandfather both as a kick-start to the imagination and as a historical prototype of himself, though he was none too sure of the resemblance, of what, besides blood, united them. “Wasn’t it rather more than a job?” he said.
“What would you call it?”
“I don’t know what to call it. I want to know what you call it. Your school in the jungle, your magical observation-post at the heart of events – when all was new. When India was a new country.”
“An old country.”
“However old it may have been,” said Jim, “in 1947 India was a new country. It was brand-new to everyone, not just to you.”
“I was in Hyderabad. Hyderabad was an old country, and it was not going anywhere.”
“That’s what I mean. The perfect location. Inside and outside India at the same time. You stepped into India, and found yourself in Hyderabad. You stepped, as you thought, into a bold new Republic, and found yourself in a feudal state tottering on its last legs. You bowed to the Vicar al-Umra.”
“I thought I owed him that courtesy.”
“The last Mughal state,” enthused Jim. “Like the last unicorn – if it ever existed.” Jim laughed, believing he knew how to engage Philip. Have him with his back to the wall, defending something. Of course Hyderabad existed.
“So that’s what you think. I was poring over the last Mughal state?”
“No, the state fell apart. You stayed on. You survived that state.”
“I was employed there. Where else would I go? Where else in India would I go? The Nizam’s Government gave me the job. Nobody else was appointing headmasters my age.”
“You stayed on in Hyderabad for the sake of a job!”
This was what Philip had said, or appeared to have said, but Jim had sounded the wrong note. Philip was unsmiling. Something about staying on? About the job? It made him seem venal, perhaps? – a time-server? To correct that impression, and to entice Philip to tell more, Jim proceeded to fill in a scenario, the complete breakdown of civil society. “Peasant revolution, invasion by the Indian Army, lifts worked by elephants, always something to see and do up to the last moment – and beyond that moment … You must take us through everything that happened …”
“What’s this? Time travel?”
There was nothing indulgent about Philip’s retort, and Jim and Rhondda saw at once that by laying it on thick about something, whatever it was, the last Mughal state, they had overlooked a vital ingredient of this proxy journey of theirs into the past. They had neglected the character of the man before them and his stake in his own past. He was Jim’s grandfather. In the society of his family he would wonder – was entitled to wonder – what there was to be interested in besides him.
3
Philip was jarred – shaken – by their entwined assault, by the presence of the young woman. When they left, the house was profoundly quiet. Jenny kept to her room. A mantle clock somewhere – an heirloom he could not recall, but it may have been ticking away in the house since his childhood – made itself heard, stumbling eerily as if it were lost.
You stayed on in Hyderabad for the sake of a job!
I stayed because Anand was in trouble, as simple as that. I stayed because Ragini stayed.
I might have responded in a word to Jim, to Rhondda: