The Last Candles of the Night. Ian Bedford
not all cruel and murderous.”
Anand gave up for now. He bowed faintly over his matched hands, to show he despaired of Philip. A shallow explosion, a burst tyre or motor exhaust noise, reached them from a distance. Then came a second; then two more. His few weeks in India had made Philip all but impervious to auto sounds. But Anand was alert. “Those were shots.”
Already the square was shaken up. The stall-keepers and stall patrons stood their ground, but the bus passengers were scurrying on the spot like disturbed ants. The crew, alarmed for their vehicle, had taken off in the direction of the shots. “We’ll all go. Or shall we stay here?” Philip darted a swift glance at the women’s bus. The same still faces. The mid-afternoon stillness reigned as before, with one difference: a puny gramophone, whose turntable had been revolving unnoticed in a stall, was now audible. Someone had had the patience to rig a loudspeaker.
“You go.” Anand mimed his own fixity, his face and hands motionless, his feet planted. Philip inferred that neither Anand, nor anybody in his right mind in this part of the world, would go where police were. Unless, of course, they had a bus to retrieve. It might have been sensible for Philip, too, to remain where he was, yet, for reasons unclear, to set out in the wake of the bus crew seemed right to him. It was somehow a test of him. He might do some good.
8
Anand let him go. With Philip occupied, he retrieved full authority over his person. He slipped the leash of Philip’s imagination, and thought and acted as himself.
Philip would come to no harm. No-one would shoot Philip, not because he was an Englishman (he was not) but simply by the law of averages. Anand watched him to the bend of the road. The moment he vanished, Anand sought the company of his male fellow passengers and began to speak with them, not in their native Telugu but in the language, Urdu, of which even villagers in the Nizam’s Dominions had a smattering, Anand less than most. He often corrected Philip’s Urdu, so had not wanted to expose his weak skills to Philip. Yet he was desperate to converse, to learn something.
He had barely got started when Philip reappeared. He arrived at the double, with an out-of-breath, badly shaken colleague whom Anand identified as a fourth member of the bus crew, who had stayed with the bus. Philip did not approach, but waved. The two vanished into a shop on the near side of the square and emerged soon after carrying a not-so-light object, a charpoy, kept aloft over their heads by arm-muscle power. This load had already descended on the head of the exhausted messenger.
They started back the way they had come. “A man is dead,” suggested one of the passengers, but Anand heard himself correcting him. “Perhaps he’s alive. Perhaps he is only hurt. Leave it to the bus-crew. We have no reason to stir from this place.”
“If it is a baghi,” said another passenger, speaking in Urdu for Anand’s benefit, “they will let us go. We will reach Hyderabad by evening. If it is police …”
“Better a baghi shot than the police,” said Anand, profaning his own opinion. These men were not sure. Not knowing who Anand was, they would not show their hand. So it had been for him through the whole of Telengana.
“At least we will soon have India,” he said. His statement was received in perfect silence.
But these people were Hindus. They couldn’t want the Nizam. Was it the baghi they wanted? Anand’s gaze slid along the walls, from slogan to slogan. He read, in Urdu, jumhuriyat, ‘democracy’. What did the word mean, to them? The word was accompanied, everywhere, by the hammer-and-sickle. It could not mean what his mentor, Swami Ramananda Tirtha, or the Congress high command thought of as democracy. Who would want this jumhuriyat? A few commissars. This answer, which might do for Russia, was perhaps not adequate for the Communist Party in Telengana. Anand was out of his zone. There were few, or no, Communists in the Marathi-speaking districts, from which he came. But all over Telengana the villagers scrawled, or allowed to be scrawled, fierce messages on their walls. These dirt-poor villagers looked forward, or appeared to look forward, to their jumhuriyat, and perhaps they knew, better than he did, what they would make of it.
When Anand, at his party’s request, visited the badlands, he dropped by Philip’s school. He had met Philip, not in Warangal, but in Hyderabad. Because Philip was an absolute stranger to India he had accepted a job, out of sheer ignorance, which he would never have been offered in his own country. He did not know the half of it. Not knowing the half of it, his role, as Philip saw his role, was a benign one. It was amazing to find such a school, in such a place, run by such a person. Who went to it? Who sent their sons (there were no daughters) to Philip’s school? Philip of course had no idea. The question had not occurred to him. Anand looked in at the school and sat down on a form. He did so as Philip’s guest. But if Philip came to Marathwada, would Anand receive him as a guest? He would not. Not because his family was poor, and not because Anand, the only son, was a graduate and his mother doted on him, and Anand lapped it up. Friends were one thing, family quite another. He did not want Philip to meet his father and had not the least intention of introducing him to his unmarried sisters.
The afternoon wore on. Those male passengers who had straggled were reabsorbed, by a collapse of will, into their bunched family groups. Anand toured the stalls, gulping soda-water out of bottles, all with a curious glass-marble stopper, and relieved himself under a distant tamarind where a goat was tied. In this market were carpentered booths and brick grain-storehouses, but no ‘shops’. He could not find where paints were sold. The idea had crossed his mind – though it would be folly – to replace some of the wall messages. So great was his frustration, and a kind of dejection, that he’d have started a bonfire if he thought the blaze would bring India any closer. Far loftier to be thrown in gaol, as a satyagrahi, than to tour these alien districts as a Congress ‘observer’ – only to court criminal arrest with a paint-brush in his hand.
Reprieve at last. The bus appeared, two figures leaning from the pole at the boarding-steps. One was the boarding-team assistant and the other was Philip. The families climbed aboard. Philip now vanished down the bus, saving a seat for Anand. His rushed forays into the aisle, his lively expression, his impatient bodily attitudes were enough to convince Anand, boarding slowly behind a family redistributing its luggage, that he had a tale to tell. Unlike an infant, Philip did not bawl it all out at once. He crafted his story. He led Anand through the chain of events, his return visit to the market to snatch a bed, his pounding his way – unable to communicate with his fellow Samaritan – back to that hold-up point in the road. Philip had anticipated a body, but the scene was all chaos and action, the police with their service rifles diving into the bush and emerging without a prisoner or trophy of any kind unless, thought Philip, they had someone in the cabin of their lorry. He tried to peer in, but his companion took fright and prevented him. The bus crew reclaimed their bus. The police posse was called in from the bush. They sped off in the direction of Warangal. It was only then that Philip thought he spied blood on the ground. “Either they wounded somebody – and he got away, or he did not get away …”
“We’ll suppose he did,” said Anand, to put an end to the matter.
The bus was in motion. Philip would not be hushed. He implored Anand to inquire of the bus crew, but what good would that do? The crew, too, had been late on the scene. Their only witness, the assistant who had run for the charpoy, spoke nothing but Telugu and had slumped over a luggage rack in exhaustion.
“I know I saw blood. I do hope they escaped, but who were they? Pulling over a bus in broad daylight. I call that foolhardy.”
A voice chimed in. “Listen who’s talking!”
A woman’s voice. Philip whirled round. He could see nobody.
Anand located the speaker, seated so plainly on the seat behind them.
She was a young Hindu woman, a little bedraggled in her green cotton sari but so absurdly beautiful that Anand forgot to draw breath.
“Philip, you’re surprised it’s me.”
“Ragini. You’re here. How did you join the bus?”
“I was