The Last Candles of the Night. Ian Bedford
should it matter to them that I stayed? However did I allow them to pull me in? India is a world in itself – more than a world – but why talk about Hyderabad in the first place?
Was it because the boy was so keen? He pictured himself where I was, and he wanted to know more. He’d like to adventure, as every boy should, at his age … In my day, it was the army, the Second World War. I missed out on active service. Was it because the war ended? I can’t recall why. Young Jim would have liked to be me, or so he imagines, he’d have liked to set off. To hell with his studies, says he; but he won’t set off, because of the girl. She’ll keep him beside her, and I can see, at a glance, just what the temptation is. She’s gorgeous.
I was wrong to give in. I must have been addled, or bewitched, to talk about Hyderabad, even to think about Hyderabad, for the first time in God knows how long.
Jim’s questions had perturbed him.
In this room near the street, once Philip’s grandparents’, not even Jim, its last occupant, had improved by much on a layout a hundred years old. There was no longer a queen-size bed with a doll and ornaments in the centre of the room but the wallpaper, the pictures, if not those of Philip’s own childhood, were twice Jim’s age. What had stayed his hand? Could it have been the window-seat, with its oak carpentry and immovable ‘lid’? Or had Jim been one of those children who refrain from inhabiting their room but colonise the rest of the house? That would explain why Jenny, for all her ruthless house-piety, left an unsorted pile of gadgets, pennants and sporting equipment at one end of the verandah, none of them girls’ toys. Jim was born here; then he came to live here again, while his sister Vinta, nine years younger, kept to her mother’s house. Wasn’t that usual? Or was it unusual? Wasn’t it a tradition, in this family, to live with the grandparents? Or was that just boys? Philip had had no sister. There were too few children to test it out.
That night, Ragini appeared to him. He had fallen asleep planning his next day’s interview which was fixed with a curriculums expert from a church school enterprise, a person trying to get religion on the agenda.
He woke to the impression that someone was in the room, someone was prowling the room – yet not this room! – scanning its properties, the lie of the land, but without touching anything, concealing an interest. He knew as he stared that it was not this intruder who had wakened him but his shame or error in declining to speak of her, to the two who wanted to know everything. Declining to speak of her existence, and of another’s existence. He had done nothing wrong but the woe of the omission – like a tune he could not get out of his head – woke him at last in exasperation, not his exasperation but the exasperation of a woe, which had sent its personal messenger.
4
But about Ragini, there was nothing woeful in the least. She roved – still without addressing him – the empty schoolroom, empty of pupils and occupied solely by the teacher, who had mistaken a holiday for a working day.
Ugadi. The day was Ugadi. Amazed at his recall, Philip sat up. The light switch was at arm’s length. He flooded the room with light and the wraith vanished.
He again slept. But in less than an hour – perhaps at once – he awoke to the lit room: wine-glasses, tumblers, an ashtray for the nectarine stones, and his day clothes where he had left them, the pants neatly folded. The bachelor, widower or discarded husband entertains in his room.
He resembled all three, but least of all the second – for Jenny was alive. Had he been willing to move, he’d have tiptoed into the corridor to reassure himself of her presence, her snarled breathing. Jenny would be there.
He lay in the dark. For half a lifetime, he had not encountered that image. He had thought of Ragini, year in, year out, but always, so far as he could, in the abstract and he had never thought of that day, the event of that day, jubilant Ugadi, the first day of the Hindu New Year in Warangal District. The first calendar day of the year, of the impossibly hot month of Chaitra (March–April), a day when nobody went to school. But on this occasion the schoolteacher went to school.
The 76-year-old Philip had a long day ahead of him. He showered and changed, unrested. These assignations he kept were like job interviews. Yet surely job interviews were behind him! He had completed his life’s sequence of interviews, in India, twenty years ago, always with success. The would-be benefactor he now met in his home suburb of Rockdale was far more of a job applicant than Philip himself. His need was the greater, and Philip saw at once that the scheme he’d cooked up, to interest state schools in Comparative Religion with Philip as the Hindu – but why not a real Hindu? – was doomed to fail because its planner would strike the Education Department as he struck Philip, as far too eager, and – professionally speaking – as pert and small, not powerful enough. Now if it were Hillsong … But what would Hillsong want with a Hindu? – even a Caucasian Hindu who at sixteen years old had taught Christian catechism at the West Botany Street Methodist Church a mile down the road. Philip’s collaborator was a born-again, word-of-flame Protestant evangelical – though an unsuccessful one – who had lost audience, and was obliged to bring other people into his project. He was doing his best to sound ecumenical. “Now let me hear what you think.”
“What I think is that two are not enough. We need to involve more religions.”
“But that’s what they have now. More religions. In a secular programme – which is what they have now – all the religions under the sun are allotted one period a week for religious studies.”
“You want more than one period.”
“I want this in the Higher School Certificate. I want to make Comparative Religion into a core subject. Is that how you think of Hinduism, one forty-minute period a week?”
This strategist – Keith Ball was his name – was as disappointed in Philip as Philip was in him. But he refused to let him go. He detained him, bid fair to restrain him, he all but implored him – yet without respect. Philip regretted he had no watch. He must travel to Merrylands for his next appointment. He peered around Keith Ball’s head. There was the municipal clock on Bryant Street, another old timepiece, once as familiar to him as life itself.
Why had she come? There had been years, time and to spare, for her to come. Why now? He asked this of Ragini as if she were the agent, as if it were her doing. But Ragini was not the agent. The 23-year-old woman he had glimpsed in the early morning dark exploring blackboards and turning over equipment in a schoolroom of 1948 harboured no intentions and was not even a real person. If there was a summons, it was Philip who had summoned Ragini. If anyone was the agent, it was Philip himself – then which part of him? It was no conscious part. Philip, when all was said and done, did not believe in breaking himself into parts.
Keith Ball was recasting his entire project there and then. “I should take a back seat. I should let you draft the submission and, I’m sure you’re right, we do need other religions. You decide what they’ll be. I’m sure I can squeeze Christianity in there somewhere.”
Philip took in none of this, but he sensed an emergency. Keith Ball was in trouble.
Why step into Hyderabad after all those years?
He was conscious of furious paddling on his own part. He remembered that Warangal Ugadi, though not much of it. It was a day he’d outlived. He’d outlived that day; there were others, too, he had outlived, had contrived to forget, fifty years and more without loss. It would be no advantage now to remember them. It was possible still to avert his mind, and he set out, actively, to do so, as if safe distance, a horizon, could be attained once and for all. Then, suddenly, he gave in. He would abandon that tactic. Face it and let it go.
An hour later, Philip was advising a party of Indian undergraduate students in the distant suburb of Merrylands. They had no paid work and were neglecting their studies. He really believed he could be of use here.
5
A holiday. Philip should have known. He was wakened that morning, not by the pre-dawn prayer from the mosque amplifier, but by the Hindu suprabhatam, projected at three times the volume of the Muslim prayer and (his watch showed) well before five. Just