He bought a ticket to Banaras. He was almost weeping at the counter, and the plerk looked at him strangely.
On the train he offered the remnants of his bottle of whisky to a young man who happened to be awake in the compartment. The man shook his head. Maan looked at the sign near the alarm handle – To Stop Train Pull Chain – and began to tremble violently. By the time he got to Banaras, he had gone off to sleep. The young man woke him up and made sure he got off.
‘I’ll never forget your kindness – never –’ said Maan, as the train steamed off.
Dawn was breaking. He walked along the ghats, singing a bhajan which his mother had taught him when he was ten years old. Then he went to the house where his fiancée lived, and started battering on the door. Those good people got alarmed. When they saw Maan there, they became very angry: they told him to go away and not to make an exhibition of himself. He next went to some people to whom he had lent money. They were not keen to see him at all. ‘I’ve killed my friend,’ Maan told them. ‘Nonsense,’ they replied.
‘You’ll see – it’ll be in all the papers,’ Maan said, distraught. ‘Please hide me for a few days.’
They thought it a wonderful joke. ‘What are you doing in Banaras?’ they said. ‘Are you here on business?’
‘No,’ said Maan.
Suddenly he could bear it no longer. He went to the local police station to give himself up.
‘I was the man – I –’ he said, hardly able to speak coherently.
The policemen humoured him for a while, then grew annoyed, and finally wondered whether there might not be some truth to what he was saying. They tried to telephone Brahmpur but could not get through. Then they sent an urgent telegram. ‘Please wait,’ they told Maan. ‘We’ll arrest you if we can.’
‘Yes – yes –’ said Maan. He was feeling very hungry. All he had had that day was a few cups of tea.
Finally the police got a message back that stated that the younger son of the Nawab Sahib of Baitar had been found seriously wounded on Cornwallis Road in Brahmpur, and that the principal suspect was Maan Kapoor. They looked at Maan as if he was mad, and arrested him. Then, in a few hours, they handcuffed him, and put him on the train back to Brahmpur under the escort of two constables.
‘Why must you handcuff me? What have I done?’ said Maan.
The station house officer was so tired of Maan, so annoyed with the needless work he had caused him, and so exasperated by his latest and most ludicrous protest that he wanted to beat him up. ‘These are the regulations,’ he said.
Maan got along better with the constables.
‘I suppose you have to be very alert in case I escape,’ he said. ‘In case I break free and jump from the train.’
The constables laughed good-humouredly. ‘You won’t escape,’ they said.
‘How do you know?’
‘Oh, you can’t,’ one of them said. ‘We keep the key-holes on top, so that you can’t open the handcuffs by striking them on – well, on those window-bars, for instance. But if you want to go to the bathroom, you should tell us.’
‘We’re very careful about our handcuffs,’ said the other.
‘Yes, we unlock them when they aren’t in use. Otherwise the springs can get weak.’
‘Can’t have that,’ said the other constable. ‘Why did you give yourself up?’ he asked curiously. ‘Are you really the son of a Minister?’
Maan shook his head miserably. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, and went off to sleep.
He dreamed of a vast and varicose Victoria, like the one in the portrait in the dining room of Baitar Fort. She was removing layer after layer of her regalia and calling to him enticingly. ‘I have left something behind,’ she was saying. ‘I must go back.’ The dream was unbearably disturbing. He woke up. Both the constables were asleep, although it was only early evening. When the train approached Brahmpur, they woke up by instinct, and delivered him into the hands of a party from the Pasand Bagh Police Station that was waiting at the platform.
‘What will you do?’ Maan asked his escorts.
‘We’ll take the next train back,’ they replied.
‘Look us up when you are next in Banaras,’ one of them said.
Maan smiled at his new escorts, but they were much less inclined to humour him. The mustachioed Sub-Inspector, in particular, appeared very serious. When they got to the police station, he was given a thin grey blanket and put in the lock-up. It was a small, cold, filthy cell – a barred room with nothing but a few pieces of jute on the floor – no straw or mattress or pillow. It stank. In place of a toilet there was a large clay vessel in the corner. The other man in the cell looked tubercular and was drunk. His eyes were red. He stared in a hunted way at the police and, when the door clanged shut, at Maan.