The Last Candles of the Night. Ian Bedford
The bazaar shutters were down, but a few bare globes dangled from wires in places. Had he had his wits about him Philip would have seen, by their light, what the street traders were selling, and noted the excitement of the children, infesting the street at this hour. But he did not look about him. He had only one goal: to trace the music to its source, and return to bed. When he did return – from as far as the Hanuman temple near the train station – his servant had arrived. Bashir had pumped up the lantern and was brewing tea – tea-dust, Philip called it, but he drank it. On the table, resting on crinkled paper, were two mangoes, glossy and plump, one gold, one red.
“Who are these from? From you?”
“Today spring.” The servant, a Muslim, acknowledged the festival with his gift. He did not proclaim it.
Spring, they call it. Already, as Philip rode out, the temperature was climbing. The season was outlandish. How could there be spring flowers in a month hotter than the Australian January? But spring flowers there were. They were mostly cut flowers, strung in garlands or braided in the hair of girls, who were unusually scented in India. Philip dismounted and walked his bike. Women were scouring the house steps and pouring chalk patterns between thumb and forefinger in the dust. A boy on a step had a clutch of chickens, all different colours: red, sky blue, orange. Holidayers everywhere were wearing new clothes.
To persons, including foreigners, who were used to putting two and two together, it should have been plain that today was no ordinary day. If Philip failed to reach that conclusion, it was perhaps because no day in India, to him, was an ordinary day. They were all like this. Every day bore its own sign. There were days of the ritual calendar, days known to history, and all those days when nothing was afoot but something profoundly new to him was bound to occur: he had not yet divined the mystery, nor did he try to, of that boundless succession of unusual days. In December, his third month in Warangal, the few Muslim Shi‘a had taken out their ‘Ashura procession with whip scourges, paper tombs and the sight of blood. On a day in February, when the news of Gandhi’s assassination reached Warangal, rival groups marched in procession and heads were broken. Weekday and Saturday, holiday or no holiday, the police set up roadblocks and pursued fleeing villagers. Philip was quick to empathise – and not with the police! – but he kept out of the way. He was choosing no sides. He had a school to administer, a task baffling in itself. Warangal claimed to be a town but all this long main road proved to be, as it stretched from Kazipet station, by way of the Thousand Pillar Temple, to the ruined, marvellous 13th-century fort with its stone geese, was a string of rustic hamlets, steel telegraph poles and ponds of standing water. This sequence held the town together. But it varied in character from place to place and so singularly from day to day that even the most tranquil days seemed subtly and wholly unique and at variance with all the others, so nothing could be learned from them. Never the same secret twice.
This might explain why Philip arrived at his schoolhouse without remarking on its unusual desertion, except as an index of the lateness of others. Yet this could not be. Lateness never happened. The pupils, it was true, were often late, those that turned up. And the two assistant teachers had never arrived! But the three kitchen staff – cook, bearer, and kitchen-hand – an accountant from time to time, the peon who sometimes arranged pens and inkstands, and an infinite number of visitors, spectators, local identities, concerned relatives and others who attached themselves to the school, were punctuality itself. They were always to be found in advance of him, perhaps not all of them but enough to make a conference of every schoolday. Philip let himself in with his own key. He threw open the one window in the blackened kitchen and stood relishing the cubicle without its smoke. Then, seated behind the great desk, he surveyed the three rows of desks and forms – without yet knowing himself at a loss.
“I knew I’d find you.” It was Ragini. She spoke from the door. She refrained from entering the schoolroom, not out of diffidence but in order to hold him in her sights, in the longest perspective for as long as possible.
“And I knew you’d come.”
“You knew I’d come. Why is that, now?”
“I knew you’d want to ask.”
“Ask? What about? About Anand? You’ve gone to him, then?”
“I haven’t ‘gone’ to him.” Philip left his desk to be nearer. “I did travel to Hyderabad at the weekend, and of course I saw Anand. In fact he ran me down – at Monty’s. He’d been combing the town. He had a lot to say.”
“Yes, the more he has to say, the less he has to say. I’ve heard it. Please don’t tell me about it.” She eluded his approach and stepped into the room, deep into his own territory. “Why was I so sure you’d be here? You haven’t asked why.”
“I’m always here.”
“Where are your boys, then?” Ragini was inspecting the wall chart. “Today is Ugadi. It’s a public holiday.” With a fingernail, unlacquered and a little torn, she tapped the chart. “Since you’re teaching them English, why is the alphabet in Urdu?”
“The alphabet is in two languages.”
“English and Urdu. There is no need for Urdu. These children speak Telugu. Why are you teaching them two alphabets – neither of which they’ll need?”
“I’m teaching them one alphabet. ‘A is for apple.’ Apple in Urdu is different. It starts with an S, I think,” said Philip, who had barely noticed the small Urdu letters in the bottom of every frame.
“Why do you even know that?”
Philip decided to instruct his tormentor in some of the realities of his own position. He had gathered by now that he’d come to school on the wrong day. But the way with Ragini was to counter-attack. “I don’t choose the equipment, you know. This chart is professional work, it’s in three colours. It’s published by the Dar ul-Uloom. They write the text-books, which are in Urdu, and I work up the curriculum. If you want Telugu, you can teach Telugu.”
“How can I?”
“Because you have so much spare time, and you drop by so often … Some revolutionary! Always in the vicinity …”
“You’d like me to teach in your school.”
“Please do. If you want them to read and write Telugu” – there, he had her.
Ragini would have to think hard. “If your offer is sincere …” she began. She had mounted the stair to his desk and he took her in: a beautiful woman, erect and lithe in her marine-blue sari, her delicate features clouded by effort as she turned her thoughts to outwitting him. It was no part of Ragini’s condescension to decline a challenge. “If your offer is sincere, I will teach.”
“On Fridays. You’ll teach every Friday.”
“I’ll teach when I can. Those children will learn some Telugu, reading and writing. Don’t pay me. I’ll do this for love, the way I do everything for love.”
“You do, do you?”
“Yes, for love. Why, what do you think, Philip? Why do I do what I do?”
Instead of overturning her bluster, Philip viewed her with a kind of awe.
Was it bluster? To Anand, no part of it was bluster: he accepted, or swallowed, all of Ragini, her comings and goings, her insurrectionary boldness, her magical self-image. It was why she gave him no peace. Challenge her self-image – which Anand must have done, without knowing – and you opened a breach which he despaired of closing. To Philip was entrusted the work of repair; but he had no idea how to go about it on his friend’s behalf.
“There is a word ‘love’,” he said, “and I know what I mean by it. Do I know what you mean by it?”
So little concerned was Ragini with what Philip meant by love, or with what he thought she meant by the same word – she had moved on – that she left him beached, pondering her depths. And this was a man who had earned, at the very beginning of their acquaintance, the right, the licence to make fun of all Ragini held