The Last Candles of the Night. Ian Bedford
glimpsed the distraction before he did. A group of small boys, noting that even on Ugadi there were people inside, had ventured into the schoolroom. The instant Philip turned, they vanished. But soon there were more of them. They clustered undispersed, marking the presentation of something, a gift for the occasion: two dishes of payasam from the bazaar.
The head and only teacher was disregarded. She who presided at the desk was approached first. Tugged by three fingers to the doorway and out into the bright sunlight, Ragini exclaimed, “See how your pupils look after you.”
“These are not my pupils.”
“We’ll begin with them. In Telugu. I’ll hold my first lesson.”
The belt of the road where the school was – a cracked cement building, mystified and dignified by its purpose alone – was a precinct devoted not to schoolbooks and learning, but to cycle and auto machinery in small booths. One shop, in defiance of size, housed a lorry. These were hammering places. The only substantial building was being pulled down. For all the variety of notices in three languages – Brake Linings, Engine Repair, Motor Lubricants – the entire quarter was given over, so far as Philip had observed, to bashing and soldering and fender bending. But today this activity was at pause. It might even have been possible to hold a school lesson without percussion and backfire. The shop grilles – stouter by far than the shop masonry – were sunk by spikes in the earth and padlocked for good measure, a token of holiday intentions. Holiday structures had been wheeled into place: flower stalls, toy stalls, food stalls, an itinerant pile of chairs carried by human legs. From the pile two chairs were subtracted for Philip and Ragini. Ragini was as good as her word. She was about to teach.
How this situation was reversed – how they found themselves, once more, in the dark of the schoolroom – Philip was unable to establish. No one calamity forced their retreat, but a host of small events. As Ragini was addressing the children, a loftier audience – adult men and women – edged nearer. “Schoolteacher!” Philip looked up. All these were wellwishers. They had nothing to do with the school but respected its function and were delighted to interfere in its workings. He could handle Sri Sudhakar Venakataiah – who was always in the street – and, left to himself, he would have seen off an officious woman, unknown to him, who addressed Ragini in English as “Madam” and began to interrogate her, in good old unrivalled fashion which Ragini should have known was harmless. Instead, Ragini fired up. She answered question with question: “You are asking me what? For what purpose? You are a headmistress? At which institution?” The woman replied, “I am not a headmistress. I am not a schoolteacher. I am not a student. I am a person from Warangal, not a person from Bezwada or Madras Presidency. Hear me out. What is your business here? Why are you here? You are studying at which college?” Ragini responded with a flood of Telugu: her victory, or her mistake. While the two sorted things out, making them worse, the class of boys Ragini had assembled heard music in the distance. They were off. A band was playing. The pitch of the instruments – brass and woodwind, by the sound of it – wavered enticingly with the band’s approach. This might be the effect either of distance, of an unfamiliar musical scale, or of erratic timing. Philip rose in his chair to have a view of the uniforms. But before he could glimpse them Ragini had seized him by the arm and abruptly steered him back into the shadow and seclusion of his own school.
Once inside, she closed the door. Not the thing, in India, to close doors on onlookers.
“Won’t they object?” Philip was conscious, too conscious, of sexual mores.
“Object?” echoed Ragini, on whom this concern was lost. “The infernal woman, she thinks she knows everything about me. Where did she learn that from? – Madras Presidency! Do I look like a foreigner?”
“What did you say to her?”
“Nothing I hadn’t heard from you. What’s the phrase? I learned it from you. I told her, in English, to pull her head in.”
“That’s good, you need enemies, all you can get,” said Philip. “The kotwal, the jagirdars, the Nizam’s troops, the forest contractors and the Razakars are not enough for you. You bawl out onlookers on the street. They’ll come looking for you.”
“They’ve forgotten me already.”
Ragini spoke with a confidence Philip found absurd – and compelling. The woman in the street had known too much. She was right on the ball. Ragini, to be sure, did not hail from Bezwada, a town across the border, in now-independent India. Ragini was a local, raised in this district. But for two years, she had studied medicine at a Madras college. Why she had travelled to Bezwada, Philip could not say – but she had, if only to stay a month. And had abandoned her medical studies. Such was his impression. Something to do with the Andhra Mahasabha. Philip took stock of all he knew, all he’d been told by Ragini of her life. The woman in the street knew too much, though not so much as Philip. She knew nothing of Ragini’s sister, of Ragini’s village, Narayanaguda, of her home, called Tirumalai, of the illness of her father, and perhaps she believed – wrongly – that the Andhra Mahasabha was a Communist organisation. It was plain she knew nothing about the person herself.
Philip had never before shared a space with Ragini with the door closed, and no-one else in sight. He should pinch himself. He’d be mad not to savour the moment. But what he said was, “You should leave now. At once.”
“Please don’t know what’s best for me, Philip.”
“I’m aware you’re a will-o’-the-wisp. You can shimmy through roadblocks. But I saw the look on that woman.”
“You want me to leave.”
“How could I want you to leave?”
Ragini threw the door open. Not to depart, but to allay the intolerable heat in the room. The street noises moved in. She drifted along the walls of the room, to the alphabet chart which had claimed her attention in the first place. “A is for apple,” she intoned vaguely.
“You can’t teach school here, any time. They’d pick you up in no time.”
“I had had the idea,” she continued with her back to him, in a citation voice, as if she were reading it off the charts, “of taking you somewhere for Ugadi, to a place you’d like. That’s the Kavi Sammelan, where the poets gather. They read out their verse; it’s all in Telugu but what will you care, you’ll understand. Poetry is poetry in any language. Will I call for you? – oh, no, I’d forgotten. I’m not to show my face.”
“I’ll come.”
“Shall I arrange someone else for you?”
“No. I’ll come with you.”
She assented, a motion of the head. Dipping it sideways, in Warangal fashion, the opposite of a nod. It meant a nod. Glorying in his reprieve – he had dismissed her, but she refused to go – Philip returned the favour by addressing her wants, abruptly contriving her release from her ordeal of expectancy. “I did meet with Anand. Just as you hoped.”
“Still upset, was he?”
“He takes the blame. He’s hard on himself. You know what he’s like. He makes no excuses, he accepts his share of the blame, even when …”
“Even when someone else is to blame.”
“Did I say that? It’s the last thing on Anand’s mind, who’s to blame. Who’s to blame, who said the worst things. He wishes he could unsay his. I don’t say yours were the worst things.”
“So, your friend caught up with you. At Monty’s. I can’t say I’m surprised.”
“What does that mean?”
“Monty’s in Secunderabad. Isn’t that where you two forgather? Isn’t it an alehouse? – where the British get drunk? Let’s not talk about him.”
“Of course we’ll talk about him.” Philip was vexed, by the way she pretended to close down the subject – when Anand could talk of nothing else. “He was looking for me. I’m the one who drinks in an alehouse. I’m