Night Train to Jamalpur(107)

‘You also stopped contending that new vehicles were required, and you wanted that to be a matter of record. You told me in Darjeeling that you had decided to make better use of the existing assets, and that a plan was in hand for improved diagramming of traffic.’

‘There was, and there is.’

‘But that is Dougie Poole’s plan.’

‘I did not say it wasn’t. But I accept that I pooh-poohed it when it was first presented, and I was too slow to give him credit for its virtues. Poole is a clever man, but he is . . . unorthodox.’

‘He rubbed you up the wrong way something rotten.’

Askwith winced at this, but I had delivered my last blow. I believed the man, or at least . . . I would give him the benefit of the doubt.


IV

This police statement requires that I recollect in accurate detail events occurring in a matter of seconds, events that went from being so much a matter of routine that I was hardly paying attention to such horror that I believe I ‘blacked out’, leaving only scraps of memory. But I will do my best.

I was travelling with my husband in a first class compartment of a train on the East Indian Railway. We had the compartment to ourselves, and we sat facing one another. The train was running over the main line from Calcutta, which I believe is called the ‘Grand Chord’. We were heading for the town of Asansol, where I had an engagement. As we approached a station that I later found out is called Khana Junction, my husband looked about for his newspaper, The Statesman, which he read every day. I said, ‘It’s still in your bag’, and he stood, and reached up to the luggage rack over the seats on his side. He got hold of his bag, and he fished about in it, saying, ‘I can’t see it here, did I leave it in the tonga?’ for we had taken a tonga from our hotel to Howrah station, and he had been looking at the paper then. We were both looking up at the luggage rack, and all I can say is that when my husband gave up his search, and turned back around, I noticed a snake on the floor by his feet. I assumed it must have come out from under the seat on his side. It was about three foot long, and black with white stripes. My husband saw it, and I cried out ‘Don’t!’ even as he lowered his right hand towards it. I shall never be able to account for this movement of his, but I believed he meant to grab hold of the snake behind its head as being the one sure way of eliminating the threat. Or perhaps he did not think it was venomous, but that I can’t believe since my husband has, of late, had a good deal of experience with snakes.

The snake lifted its head, and it bit my husband’s wrist. I screamed, and it was when I realised the snake would not let go, that it was showing the full force of its evil – that is when everything went black for me . . .

I lay aside the statement of Anne Kerry, wife of Colonel Kerry, who had been bitten at Khana Junction, on the Grand Chord, on 23 April, the day I had boarded the train to Jamalpur.

I eyed my own wife, who was sitting opposite. We too were rolling along the Grand Chord, and soon we too would be at Khana, and then Asansol, where she would be giving her talk to the women of India, or about fifty instances thereof.

The embroidered panels of our compartment were green, with a pattern of vines. The fan did not overexert itself, and yet, beyond the window slats, a mobile fire continually burned: King Sol was fighting to come in.

Lydia was sipping a soda and wearing her new reading glasses (which she would only wear in front of her family) as she worked on her speech. She’d got into rather a tangle with the idea of ‘co-operation’. Here she was, a representative of the British Women’s Co-Operative Guild (Yorkshire division), and she would be addressing a society of Indian women who would undoubtedly be keen on the Mahatma’s notion of non-co-operation. I had suggested that her theme might be the necessity of co-operating in order to bring about non-co-operation. But this had been a joke, because pursuing any such theme would probably have got her arrested. In fact, the message she was bringing from the Yorkshire Co-Operative Guild was that socialism could help Indians – Indian women especially – to fulfil the noble Hindu idea of Vedanta, or enlightenment through oneness. (Whether her senior colleagues in Yorkshire would have approved of this message had they known about it was another matter again.)

Bernadette sat next to her mother. She also sipped a soda, while reading a magazine called Mainly for Memsahibs. She was looking at pictures of hats. Earlier on, she had been reading Philpott’s Hindustani Manual, and I had watched her lips moving as she attempted to pronounce the phrase for ‘I have one elephant’. Prior to that, she had been asking me how ‘one’ would get from York to Oxford on the train. ‘There’s no direct service,’ I’d replied rather warily. Theoretically I should have been in a state of outright panic, since all the signs pointed to her having formed an alliance with some new young man, probably Indian, who was proposing to study at Oxford University. But the question of Lydia’s pregnancy continued to override such considerations. Bernadette did not yet know that her mother was pregnant.