Smoke and Ashes Page 12

  I shook my head at the absurdity of it all, and yet, if it was absurd, I was the only one who seemed to find it so. The Volunteers seemed to be taking themselves seriously, and from the discreetly positioned troops, it appeared the military was too. At street corners stood not the girls of the WAAC, but squads of hard-faced Gurkhas, rifles at the ready, impassively watching the crowds from under their wide-brimmed hats. They were a lurking, menacing presence, like lions stalking their prey, biding their time but ready to strike, ready to turn those white clothes crimson if ordered.

  I prayed it wouldn’t come to that, for all our sakes. The crowd was large, the largest I’d seen for months, and if it came to bloodshed, there was no guarantee that the only blood spilled would be native, nor that it would be confined to the Strand, or even to Calcutta. Because what the Englishman, its readers and the viceroy all failed to grasp was that neither the Congress Party nor its Volunteers were the threat. The actual danger was the dumb, downtrodden millions that made up the real India. For the first time, those poor, illiterate, voiceless masses who made up ninetenths of the population of this country were on the march, and if driven to anger, I’d no doubt that their sheer numbers could sweep every last Gurkha and Englishman from the face of the land, like Gulliver freeing himself of the shackles of the Lilliputians. In fact, they could do so whenever they chose to. The miracle was that, as yet, they hadn’t. Instead they held demonstrations and they prayed. That was fine with me. I was very happy that they preferred to protest rather than revolt – there’d be a hell of a lot of deaths, mine included, if they decided to do otherwise. The question was, why hadn’t they? If you believed the talk in the smoke-filled salons of the Bengal Club, it was down to the natural timidity of the native and his inability to stand against the white man, but during the war, I’d seen Indian troops charge headlong at Hun trenches through a lead curtain of machine-gun fire and club the bastards with nothing more than their rifle butts, so I could tell you, timidity didn’t come into it.

  It was something else, something in the psyche of these people, and though I didn’t know what that was, I was damn thankful for it.

  Surrender-not and I pushed our way through the crowds. At the front, not far from the mouth of the bridge, a makeshift platform had been erected, bedecked in the Congress colours of red, white and green, and draped with strings of marigolds. Beside it sat a mound of clothes, six feet high and several feet in diameter. On the stage stood a rather fat, bespectacled native, shouting into a heavy metal microphone with wires running down to two large black speakers and to what looked like an oversized car battery. The man, his sweat-covered face contorted in a grimace that could have graced the stage of the Theatre Royal, rattled off his words with the tempo of a Gatling gun, while gesturing bombastically, pointing a stubby finger heavenwards. It was an oratorical style often favoured by those who have precious little to say but are still intent on ramming what they do have down everyone else’s throats: a style heavy on sloganeering, designed to whip up the crowd and steamroller debate. The sad fact is, it works.

  He thrust a fist into the air and began chanting a rallying cry which the crowd soon took up. Many of them even mimicked his gesture. I wasn’t sure what they were saying exactly, but the last two words were clear enough. ‘Cholbé nã.’ It meant ‘unacceptable’, or ‘we won’t stand for it’. Bengalis used that particular expression a lot. Indeed, if there was one phrase that expressed the recalcitrance that characterised them as a people, it was ‘cholbé nã’. Sometimes it felt as if pretty much everything was unacceptable to them, as though they were defined by their antagonism to every bloody thing. But like the speaker on the stage, you always had the feeling that their rage was theatrical – manufactured for the benefit of those looking on – and it was never much of a surprise to soon find them merrily doing something which only moments earlier they’d decried as cholbé nã.

  ‘What’s he saying, Sergeant?’

  Surrender-not kept his eyes focused on the stage. ‘They’re protesting the military curfew.’

  ‘Would it hurt to be a little more specific?’

  He turned to me, his expression darkening. ‘He’s saying that this latest act by the viceroy shows that he is terrified of the power of the people; that British rule is a yoke around our necks and that anyone who collaborates in the enslavement of his own people is a traitor.’

  It had been stupid of me to ask. His vagueness had been a cloak, masking the embarrassment of the truth.

  I checked my watch. It was now well after half past five and the sun hung low in the sky, its light reflecting on the river, turning the waters crimson and casting long shadows of a row of soldiers who stood silhouetted on the bank, rifles at the ready. The curfew was due to commence at six. We wouldn’t have to wait long to see just how objectionable the protesters found it.

  The man onstage fell silent. He dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief and then continued in a milder, almost reverential tone and suddenly a cheer went up from the crowd.

  ‘He’s calling the Deshbandhu to the stage,’ said Surrender-not.

  Dressed in a white dhoti and shawl and looking every inch the Bengali patrician, Das appeared from behind a screen and slowly mounted the stage. Shaking the fat man’s hand, he walked up to the microphone and waited for the applause to abate. Eventually, even the talking stopped and there was silence – something which in Calcutta was akin to a miracle, on a par with the loaves and fishes and water into wine.

  Das began speaking softly in Bengali, and Surrender-not commenced a running commentary.

  ‘He’s talking about “swaraj”,’ he said.

  It was one of Gandhi’s favourite words. It translated as self-rule, but the way he and Das used it, it meant commercial independence as much as it did political.

  ‘He’s saying that Indians are slaves today … That our economic slavery is greater than our political slavery … That India’s wealth ends up in the mercantile houses of London and the textile mills of Manchester and Leeds.’

  Suddenly Das caught my eye. He smiled, and as though for my benefit, effortlessly switched from Bengali to English.

  ‘From Manchester alone comes sixty crores, six hundred million rupees’ worth of cloth every year. Why should we pay six hundred million rupees of India’s wealth to the British? If a man spins his own cloth for one or two hours every day, at the end of the year he will find himself with all the necessities for his family.’

  With that he reverted back to Bengali, his voice growing louder, his tempo quickening, but his tone was different from the previous speaker. This wasn’t sloganeering. This was the speech of a thoughtful man, aimed at challenging one’s assumptions rather than steamrollering the listener into agreement.

  Ten minutes later it ended to rapturous applause. Das nodded to the crowds and descended from the stage. At the foot of the steps stood his young lieutenant, Subhash Bose, dressed in the uniform of the Volunteers and holding a wooden torch, its top crowned in an oil-soaked cloth. As though choreographed, an onlooker handed Das a lighter. He flicked it open and held the small flame to the rag. The cloth immediately lit up. Taking the torch from Bose, Das walked up to the pile of clothes and touched it to the base.

  For a moment nothing happened. Then a tongue of yellow flame emerged, lapping the fabric nearest him, and within minutes, the whole pyre was alight. Orange flames leapt high into the darkening sky, quickly reducing the pile to little more than smoke and ashes.

  I half expected the army to move in immediately. A nervous, kinetic tension seemed to pass through the Gurkhas. They looked ready to spring like greyhounds from their traps. The crowd sensed it too, but Das had timed his display with military precision. It was still some minutes before six, and the troops stood their ground, bound by the rules of the curfew. The fact that the demonstration itself was illegal had been conveniently overlooked by all concerned. As usual, the whole thing felt like a game where both parties agreed which rules applied and which could be discoun
ted. Rules, after all, were important. You couldn’t play the game without them, and fortunately the Indians seemed to love rules as much as we did. How else could you explain both races’ love of cricket, a game so insipid and with rules so arcane that it took five full days to play it properly and which even then, more often than not, ended in a draw? Indeed, at times it felt like the whole non-violent struggle was just some long-drawn-out Test match with us still doggedly at the crease and the Indians bowling all types of odd stuff at us out of the rough.

  On the stroke of six, and flanked by a couple of Volunteers, Das walked back onto the stage. He addressed the crowd in Bengali, but this was instruction rather than speech. The Congress Volunteers in the crowd rose and headed towards the approach road to the bridge. There they sat down and linked arms, as a number of white-clad men joined them. If the troops were going to make their move, now was the logical time, and I got the impression that was what Das was expecting, and possibly hoping for. A nervous hush fell over the crowd, a wave of electric anticipation. Agonising seconds ticked by, but the Gurkhas remained rooted where they stood, their faces expressionless. Impassive as rock. I hadn’t managed to spot the officer in charge, but whoever he was, I saluted his common sense. This protest of Das’s was only significant if we took his bait and chose to make it so. If we ignored his provocations, the crowd would eventually disperse of its own accord. After all, with sunset upon us, the temperature would soon drop like a stone, and cold was the one thing guaranteed to destroy a Bengali’s resolve faster than that of a Frenchman in a wine cellar. All we really had to do was sit tight and wait.

  Of course, Das knew that as well as I did. I looked over to him and hoped to see at least a flicker of doubt in his eyes. Instead he radiated confidence, like a general surveying developments on a battlefield that were unfolding exactly as planned, and for the first time since I’d met him, I realised I’d underestimated him. Abruptly, his tone changed and he spoke some words in Bengali. The crowd in front of him rose to their feet. And then, slowly, Das began to sing, and within seconds he was joined by hundreds more voices.

  ‘Hell,’ said Surrender-not. It wasn’t like him to swear. ‘“Vande Mataram”,’ he said, ‘“Hail to the Mother”.’

  I knew the song – we all did – even if we didn’t know the words. It was the unofficial anthem of Free India, and was banned, of course. Singing it was punishable by imprisonment – quite rightly in my opinion, if for no other reason than it sounded terrible. A kind of lamenting dirge that set the hairs on the back of your neck on end.

  I thought back to Das’s words earlier that day.

  ‘It is our job to provoke a reaction …’

  And as provocations went, ‘Vande Mataram’ was a damn good one.

  Ever since 1905, when Lord Curzon had tried and failed to split Bengal in two, the song had resonated as a rallying cry among Bengalis, and had a political significance which was impossible for the military to ignore. The irony was that in the last fifteen years, the only place you’d have heard it sung without fear of punishment was in the ranks of the military, specifically on the battlefields of the Western Front. There the powers that be had been only too happy to turn a deaf ear to Bengali regiments singing it as they’d charged Hun trenches. But that had been a different time and place. Here and now the response was different.

  Das had grasped something that I was only now realising. You could ignore provocation only so far. After that, lack of action made you look weak.

  Das and Gandhi had grasped something else too. They’d understood the fundamental fragility of our position – that our control of India depended upon force of arms, and that when recourse to violence was your only card, sooner or later you had to play it.

  Whether it was the song, the cloth burning, the blatant disregard for the curfew or a combination of all three, the military had been pushed too far. There came a shrill whistle and then the Gurkhas fell upon the crowd, renting the air with the screams of civilians as a hail of blows from their lathis rained down on backs and shoulders.

  To one side, flashbulbs popped, betraying the positions of reporters, and a contingent of troops immediately headed towards them. They had to be foreign press. The local English-language papers wouldn’t print such photographs, for the simple reason that their readers didn’t want to see them. As for the native-language papers, most had been closed down or had their assets seized for contravening the statutes of the Press Act, and those that remained knew better than to risk such reckless action.

  Within minutes the troops had reached the foot of the stage where Bose was frantically ordering his volunteers to link arms. The Gurkhas broke through them as if they were no more than a paper chain and climbed the stairs, making for Das and his two assistants. The microphone toppled to the ground sending an earsplitting shriek from the speakers. Screams went up from the crowd. Around me, troops were busy hauling demonstrators towards the waiting paddy wagons, and up onstage, it looked like Bose and Das, their arms held firmly behind their backs, would soon be joining them.

  The Gurkhas began manhandling Das down the stairs. Beside me, Surrender-not moved to intercept them, but I pulled him back. Breathing hard, he turned and stared at me with an anger I’d never seen before.

  ‘We have to do something,’ he shouted above the noise.

  I placed a restraining hand on his chest. ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ I replied. ‘You try to stop them and they’ll arrest you too. It’ll mean the end of your career – those Gurkhas will probably break your jaw for you too.’

  As several soldiers ripped down the red and green bunting from the stage, others hauled Das and Bose to a waiting military van. I watched as the Congress tricolour fell from the stage and was trampled into the dust under the boots of the soldiers and the feet of the fleeing crowd.

  ‘I want you back at Lal Bazar, Sergeant. That’s an order,’ I said.

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Find out what’s happening with Ruth Fernandes’s post-mortem.’ I turned and began to walk away from the scene.

  ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t you coming?’

  ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ I said. ‘First, though, I need to go to Alipore.’

  FOURTEEN

  There was a large, red Hispano-Suiza parked at the end of Annie’s drive. It wasn’t a car you often saw on the streets of Calcutta, partly because it was Spanish, and partly because it cost more than a Rolls-Royce; and while I’d never seen it before, its presence felt as unnerving as discovering a shark in the Serpentine.

  I wasn’t entirely sure why I was back here. Maybe it was a desire to make sure she was all right, but then again, maybe it was hope that seeing her might cleanse my mind of the sight I’d just witnessed, of Gurkhas falling on unarmed civilians.

  The front door had been repainted and workmen were busy traipsing through the house, I assumed putting the finishing touches to the repair of the broken window. Once more Annie’s maid, Anju, led me through to the drawing room; she seemed in better spirits than the previous day.

  ‘Whose car is that?’ I asked as we traversed the hallway.

  ‘Mr Schmidt, sahib,’ she said breathlessly, as though he were the pope.

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  ‘German?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no, American.’ She beamed.

  ‘Even worse.’

  She opened the door to the drawing room and ushered me in. At the window stood a tall, blond chap with a moustache on his face and a drink in his hand. He wore khaki trousers with turn-ups and creases that looked sharp enough to slice bread, and a shirt the whiteness of which was matched only by that of his ridiculously perfect teeth.

  ‘Memsahib will be down shortly,’ said Anju.

  Preceded by his cologne, the man walked over and proferred a manicured hand.

  ‘Schmidt,’ he said by way of an answer to a question I hadn’t asked. ‘Stephen Schmidt. And you are?’

  ‘Wyndham,
’ I said, warily shaking his hand. ‘Captain Wyndham.’

  ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance, Wyndham. Miss Grant’s mentioned you.’

  ‘She has?’

  ‘Yep. Said you were a policeman. I’m glad you’re here. I wanna know what you’re doing about the attack on the lady.’

  ‘You mean the broken window?’

  ‘That’s right. I hope you’re here with good news.’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  Schmidt shook his head as though I’d disappointed him on some fundamental level. Or maybe it was that I’d simply confirmed his low expectations of me.

  ‘You need to catch those responsible and throw the book at them. I want them prosecuted to the full extent of the law.’

  The truth was that I’d done very little – actually nothing – about the attack on Annie’s house. After she’d turned down my ill-considered offer of posting a constable at her door, I’d had more pressing matters to deal with – not that I was about to tell Schmidt that.

  ‘We’re on the case,’ I said. ‘And rest assured, we shall throw the book at the guilty party. Maybe even two books.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, pulling out an engraved silver cigarette case. ‘Make sure you do.’ He opened it and offered me one.

  ‘What brings you to Calcutta?’ I asked, accepting it.

  ‘Business,’ he said, extracting a lighter.

  ‘And what business would that be?’

  ‘Tea,’ he said with a flourish. ‘I supply two-fifths of all the tea consumed in the northern Midwest.’

  ‘Is that a lot?’ I asked. ‘I’d rather been under the impression that you Americans preferred dumping the stuff in Boston harbour to drinking it.’