Night Train to Jamalpur(17)
‘You can find me any day of the week, Noel, in the running men’s mess at Howrah.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ said Fisher, and the man dragged the door shut and departed.
It was now my turn to eye Fisher. As I did so, he lit a Trichinopoly cigar, and I believed it was to cover his confusion.
There were now chimneys among the palm trees, for we were approaching the Calcutta suburbs. Soon we would come to the sidings and godowns of the railway lands of Howrah, where many strange freights could be seen: the occasional elephant, or opium in special vans . . . but opium was packed and transported only when the weather was right.
Peering through the venetian slats, I saw goods yards, goods sheds, coal yards . . . women carrying coal in baskets on their heads; a tender waiting to receive coal with a ladder up its side. It was the easiest way to carry things – on your head. We ran past the two godowns and adjacent foreman’s bungalow that had been burnt. That had been a famous scandal of a few weeks before my arrival, an outrage that had been put down to the ‘Ghandi volunteers’.
Fisher did not leave off reading until we came under the roof of Howrah, whereupon he stood up and, reaching for his sola topee, said, ‘Will your man be waiting for us?’ I gave a nod, and we climbed down.
Howrah station smelt of past burning, like the ash pan of a dead fire – that and curry, of course. The light was the colour of dark gold. The sea of people swirled us past ‘Refreshment Room, European’; ‘Refreshment Room, Moslem’; ‘Refreshment Room, Hindu Vegetarian’, among other refreshment rooms. We showed our privilege passes at the gate, and came to the circulating area. Unfortunately not even the air was circulating, let alone the people. All around the booking offices, the shops, the tea and cake stalls, Indians were sitting or lying down, waiting. They liked waiting.
As we approached the ticket gate, I began looking out for ‘my man’.
I had a Gurkha police sergeant – a havildar – assigned to me, name of Deo Rana.
Many of the best of the railway police constables were Gurkhas. Major Fisher had been offered his own man, but he’d found him ‘a bloody clever dick . . . so he can go off and mutter behind somebody else’s back.’ I thought the true reason was that he didn’t want anyone observing him closely, and finding out what he was really up to.
Deo Rana was a slow-burning fellow, good in a scrap I should imagine, and yet thoughtful with it. He spoke Nepalese, which was his native tongue; also Hindustani, some Bengali and some English. But he usually kept silence: his face habitually carried about as much expression as a block of wood, and when I spoke to him he would rock his Chinese-looking head from side to side, as though saying ‘no’, refusing my remark. By this, he didn’t mean ‘no’; he might even have meant ‘yes’, and whether this was a habit with all the Gurkhas or just Deo, I could not have said.
He’d been warned of our arrival, and he waited at the ticket gate, as I walked up with Fisher in tow. Making a brief bow, Deo Rana lead us to towards a police tonga waiting specially for us
As we climbed up, I said, ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard, Deo, but a fellow was killed on the train on our way out.’
‘Killed how? Snake?’ (Because he’d heard of the snakes like everybody else.)
‘Lead poisoning,’ said Fisher, lighting one of his bloody Trichies.
‘Shot,’ I said, by way of translation.
Deo Rana asked, ‘Indian? English?’
‘Blacky-white,’ said Fisher.
‘And how is?’
‘Napoo,’ said Fisher.
‘Sahib?’
‘Bloke threw a seven.’
‘Seven?’
‘He bought the bloody farm, didn’t he?’
‘Explain please.’
‘Don’t you understand English, man? He’s copped it; dead.’
A bit later, when we were stopped in the traffic on the Howrah Bridge, Deo Rana spoke again: ‘I hope it was one criminal, sahib, shot by police.’
I told him the victim seemed to be far from a criminal, and I gave him all the data we had.
I then looked out through the slats of the tonga window. Only the rickshaw-wallahs could find their way through the block – stick men, they were, whereas their passengers were almost always large Europeans, lying like so many giant babies in so many giant prams. I heard the bleating of a motorcycle horn. A native police team was coming up, weaving through the tongas and motors: sergeant and inspector, both in white, and with spikes on their sola topees.
On finally gaining the east bank, we turned right on to Strand Road. At the Armenian Ghat, thoughtful-looking Hindus stood waist-deep and fully clothed in the khaki-coloured water of the Hooghly River. A big ship was coming, just passing the High Court. They would have to open the bridge for that, and the blocks would be bad for hours after. The ship hooted, making a boom that had in fact seemed to be there all along, a combination of the rattling tongas, ticking rickshaws, roaring motors, street trader cries – a perfect headache of din and dazzle. The traders were all along the Strand pavements: mostly one-man outfits, a dirty umbrella to keep the sun off, an upturned crate with maybe oranges on top, maybe candles or home-made cigarettes. In York, all these blokes would be counted ‘doubtful traders’ and closed down by the council. I looked at them with a kind of morbid fascination. If those chaps could shift a matchbox or a candle every half hour, then perhaps, depending on what they charged . . . but then I would see their women, and their babies rolling in the road before them, and I would abandon the speculation as hopeless.