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Night Train to Jamalpur(32)

By:Andrew Martin


Then they would sell it to a charmer, I supposed. You could cut a dash with a king cobra. All the ones I’d seen so far had used the standard sized ones. I wondered why they needed to stitch the mouth in the first place. To weaken the snake perhaps, demoralise it.

It was time for some hard facts.

I said to Deo Rana, ‘Do they know about the snake attacks?’

He talked to the snake men, and came back with: ‘Sahibs come. Buy snakes.’

‘Who?’

‘Not know names.’

‘They speak to these buyers; they sell them snakes. But they don’t know their names?’

‘They not sell. Their brother sell.’ He corrected himself. ‘Not brother . . . uncle . . . very bad man.’

‘Their uncle is a very bad man?’

‘Terrible man.’

More talk between the snake men and Deo Rana, who said, ‘Uncle is deaf.’

‘So the snakes are deaf, and the uncle who sells them is deaf?’

‘Yes, huzoor. Both deaf.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said.

A wind was getting up, bringing the dust cloud from the jute mill closer, and making the sleepy rattling of the goods yard seem further away. I felt myself to be a very small and unimportant part of India as I asked, ‘Does the uncle live anywhere?’

From what I could make out, he did not. Even so, he was ‘away’. This much I gleaned from the English-speaker, who then went into the trainlighting office, and came out saying, ‘We have photograph.’

He showed me a picture of an elderly Indian wrapped in snakes like Harry Houdini wrapped in chains. If he was not quite as wild and ragged as a sadhu, he was getting on that way.

‘When is he coming back?’

He would be back soon, and they would say where he could be found – in return, no doubt, for another twenty-five rupees. I was tired of the snake men; I was even tired of Deo Rana, who had promised more than he had delivered. Perhaps the snake men had heard of the Commission of Enquiry, and feared that a clean sweep was to be made of the railway lands. They would then be ejected from the railway lands. But not if they had something to offer the police. As we all stood in a semicircle in the hot, dusty wind, I gave Deo Rana one last question to translate: ‘Do they think their uncle’s customers include the man who puts the snakes on the trains?’

Deo Rana put the question, and turned back to me with the answer. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They think it.’





Chapter Four



I

As the sun descended towards the railway lands, I headed for the Railway Institute. I walked alone, Deo Rana having returned to Fairlie Place. The ‘Insty’ was the club for the Anglo-Indians, their home-from-home, but there was nothing official about that; any railwayman might drop in (except for the pure Indians, who had their own Insty). It happened to be the nearest source of cold beer to the house of the snake men. I also wanted a glimpse of the world John Young had inhabited.

The Insty stood within its own grounds, beautifully kept, with big flowers that looked wrong-coloured, as though painted by an over-imaginative child. A gardener, or mali, was weeding the beds. Two peacocks paced the garden. They did not bother to do their display for me, but the gardener salaamed, and I tried to do likewise back. I was not good at salaaming. I ascended the steps of the Institute.

The lobby was like an English church hall, with bunting in the rafters. Not only were there photographs of the King-Emperor around the walls, but other members of his family too. And there were pictures of trains, jumbled up with notice-boards on which advertisements were pinned: ‘Shalimar Paint and Varnish’, ‘Detachable Boiler Insulation’, ‘Thornycroft: Service Counts’, ‘Carbon Means Expense’. There were bookshelves, holding the Locomotive Journal, Railway Carriage & Wagon Review, the Railway Gazette; but also the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and stories like Robin Hood and King Arthur in Bumper Books – these to keep the Anglo-Indian boys on the straight and narrow.

Beyond the lobby was a long wooden corridor with more bunting, more photographs. I gave my hat to a butler and entered the corridor. The rooms off were indicated by little signs sticking out of the corridor, like railway signals. I could hear the sound of table tennis being played, and played well. It was one of the games the Anglos liked, along with darts, badminton, and housey-housey, which was their bingo – village hall sorts of games. The children liked to play hopscotch, or perhaps their parents made them play it, as being the right sort of game: un-Indian.

The corridor photographs showed mainly Anglo-Indians presenting each other with prizes at social occasions. Sometimes Europeans were involved, but not often. Indianness fluctuated amongst the Anglo-Indians just as the levels of drink fluctuated in the glasses they held. The young women were always beautiful – the older ones too, come to that. Their beauty detained me on my way to the bar, thirsty though I was. A young Tommy would come out to India, and get himself an Anglo-Indian girl. She was a prize to him because she was so beautiful; he was a prize to her because he was white. He would then enter the Anglo-Indian world, or he would if she had anything to do with it. Therefore she was like a siren luring him . . . But that would suggest there was something wrong with being in the Anglo-Indian world, and I did not believe there was anything wrong with it, except that the European snobs would look down on you, and try to keep you out of the top jobs, and imitate your ‘chi-chi’ accent behind your back.