Night Train to Jamalpur(42)

Somebody had left a newspaper behind on one of the seats; it was not The Statesman. I picked it up, dividing the pages and giving half to Lydia. The first heading I read was ‘Another Snake Attack’. The battle of the men of Blakeborough & Sons with the latest krait was detailed, even though it had occurred three hundred miles out of town. The piece concluded:

Since the attacks have occurred at numerous locations, and since all the trains concerned in the attacks originated from Howrah, responsibility for the investigation rests with the Calcutta Division of the East Indian Railway Police. The investigating officer is Superintendent Christopher Bennett. At the time of going to press, no statement was available from the Superintendent.

The music had stopped; I looked up. The conductor of the band was holding a conflab with a trumpet player. I wondered whether Superintendent Bennett had read that article. It would take the edge off his enjoyment of the Debating Society dance if so. I looked over to Lydia, who appeared to be reading about the motion pictures being shown in town. Reported Missing was still playing at the Elphinstone, but I fancied The Adventures of Tarzan at the Tiger Picture House.

The programme of music had ended, but the band weren’t quite done yet. They struck up with ‘God Save the King’, a rather rusty version, and it did strike me that they had a cheek playing it, the King being so far away. I looked across at Lydia, and she was still reading, not standing for the King. But then again we were on the outermost chairs, not really included in the concert. Of those in the seats close to the bandstand, about half were standing, whether European or Indian. The others were walking away. But one man, I saw, was walking towards the bandstand from the direction of Chowringhee: Detective Inspector Khan. He was beautifully be-suited, and of all the many hats available to him he wore a Panama at an angle that was the opposite of rakish. The man’s life, I thought, must be like a hall of mirrors. As a C.I.D. detective, he was a prop of the empire, yet it was not his empire, either as an Indian or, still less, a Moslem. Perhaps he was not a practising Moslem, and certainly he wore Westernised clothes, but the few middle-class Moslems in Calcutta generally did dress that way, as far as I knew. In a way, he beat the British at their own game. For example, he was a sight more elegant than most of them, and better spoken. He almost had what was called an ‘Oxford voice’, but perhaps his real allegiances were apparent from the man who tailed alongside him: a Moslem servant in white skull cap. This servant carried a canvas kit bag over his shoulder.

‘God Save the King’ was in its dying strains as Khan came up to the bandstand. He paused, and for a moment I thought he was actually standing to attention for the King-Emperor. But in fact he was lighting a cigarette. Having accomplished this, he walked on, and it seemed to me that whether God saved the King or not was a matter of very little account to him. I pointed him out to Lydia.

‘That’s the C.I.D. fellow who quizzed me yesterday.’

‘Really?’ said Lydia, and she put down the newspaper and watched him for a while.

Something about her attitude made me ask, ‘What do you make of him?’

She said, ‘He’s heading for the stables,’ by which she meant the gymkhana on the maidan, the very place to which she and Bernadette would shortly be going. ‘He’s riding out,’ she said.

‘Riding out to where?’

‘Oh, come on, Jim, she said. ‘Riding out means riding.’

‘And the servant is carrying his tackle.’

‘His tack, Jim, his riding gear.’ She snorted once with laughter. ‘Tackle indeed . . . He’s not going fishing, is he?’

By now, Khan and his man were small in the distance, and the members of the band were picking up their music sheets prior to quitting the bandstand.


II

I had a kind of preview of the Debating Society dance before it occurred. At 1 p.m., I was sent by the wife to call Bernadette to tiffin. Walking through the lobby of the hotel, I heard the strains of what I suspected was ‘syncopated’ piano, which I followed downstairs to the music room of the hotel, where Bernadette and her good friends, Claudine Askwith and Ann Poole, were whiling away the hot afternoon. The door was half open, and as I approached it, the music stopped.

‘Claudine, you warphead!’ Bernadette was saying. She was holding on to Ann Poole, and had been dancing with her to the piano as played by Claudine Askwith, and evidently not played properly. Claudine struck up again, and Bernadette and Ann started dancing again, Bernadette counting all the while: ‘Two-ho step, two-ho step.’ Still dancing, Bernadette said, ‘Raju believes that all life is a dance of Shiva.’