A passage to India
Fielding doubted whether “everything ranged coldly on shelves”
could be improved. He was often struck with the liveliness with
which the younger generation handled a foreign tongue. They altered
the idiom, but they could say whatever they wanted to say quickly;
there were none of the babuisms ascribed to them up at the club.
But then the club moved slowly; it still declared that few
Mohammedans and no Hindus would eat at an Englishman’s table, and
that all Indian ladies were in impenetrable purdah. Individually
it knew better; as a club it declined to change.
“Let me put in your stud. I see . . . the shirt back’s hole is
rather small and to rip it wider a pity.”
“Why in hell does one wear collars at all?” grumbled Fielding as
he bent his neck.
“We wear them to pass the Police.”
“What’s that?”
“If I’m biking in English dress—starch collar, hat with ditch—they
take no notice. When I wear a fez, they cry, ‘Your lamp’s out!’
Lord Curzon did not consider this when he urged natives of India
to retain their picturesque costumes.—Hooray! Stud’s gone
in.—Sometimes I shut my eyes and dream I have splendid clothes
again and am riding into battle behind Alamgir. Mr. Fielding, must
not India have been beautiful then, with the Mogul Empire at its
height and Alamgir reigning at Delhi upon the Peacock Throne?”
“Two ladies are coming to tea to meet you—I think you know them.”
“Meet me? I know no ladies.”
“Not Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested?”
“Oh yes—I remember.” The romance at the mosque had sunk out of his
consciousness as soon as it was over. “An excessively aged lady;
but will you please repeat the name of her companion?”
“Miss Quested.”
“Just as you wish.” He was disappointed that other guests were
coming, for he preferred to be alone with his new friend.
“You can talk to Miss Quested about the Peacock Throne if you
like—she’s artistic, they say.”
“Is she a Post Impressionist?”
“Post Impressionism, indeed! Come along to tea. This world is
getting too much for me altogether.”
Aziz was offended. The remark suggested that he, an obscure Indian,
had no right to have heard of Post Impressionism—a privilege
reserved for the Ruling Race, that. He said stiffly, “I do not
consider Mrs. Moore my friend, I only met her accidentally in my
mosque,” and was adding “a single meeting is too short to make a
friend,” but before he could finish the sentence the stiffness
vanished from it, because he felt Fielding’s fundamental good will.
His own went out to it, and grappled beneath the shifting tides of
emotion which can alone bear the voyager to an anchorage but may
also carry him across it on to the rocks. He was safe really—as
safe as the shore-dweller who can only understand stability and
supposes that every ship must be wrecked, and he had sensations
the shore-dweller cannot know. Indeed, he was sensitive rather than
responsive. In every remark he found a meaning, but not always the
true meaning, and his life though vivid was largely a dream.
Fielding, for instance, had not meant that Indians are obscure,
but that Post Impressionism is; a gulf divided his remark from Mrs.
Turton’s “Why, they speak English,” but to Aziz the two sounded
alike. Fielding saw that something had gone wrong, and equally that
it had come right, but he didn’t fidget, being an optimist where
personal relations were concerned, and their talk rattled on as
before.
“Besides the ladies I am expecting one of my assistants—Narayan
Godbole.”
“Oho, the Deccani Brahman!”
“He wants the past back too, but not precisely Alamgir.”
“I should think not. Do you know what Deccani Brahmans say? That
England conquered India from them—from them, mind, and not from
the Moguls. Is not that like their cheek? They have even bribed it
to appear in text-books, for they are so subtle and immensely rich.
Professor Godbole must be quite unlike all other Deccani Brahmans
from all I can hear say. A most sincere chap.”
“Why don’t you fellows run a club in Chandrapore, Aziz?”
“Perhaps—some day . . . just now I see Mrs. Moore and—what’s her
name—coming.”
How fortunate that it was an “unconventional” party, where
formalities are ruled out! On this basis Aziz found the English
ladies easy to talk to, he treated them like men. Beauty would have
troubled him, for it entails rules of its own, but Mrs. Moore was
so old and Miss Quested so plain that he was spared this anxiety.
Adela’s angular body and the freckles on her face were terrible
defects in his eyes, and he wondered how God could have been so
unkind to any female form. His attitude towards her remained
entirely straightforward in consequence.
“I want to ask you something, Dr. Aziz,” she began. “I heard from
Mrs. Moore how helpful you were to her in the mosque, and how
interesting. She learnt more about India in those few minutes’ talk
with you than in the three weeks since we landed.”
“Oh, please do not mention a little thing like that. Is there
anything else I may tell you about my country?”
“I want you to explain a disappointment we had this morning; it
must be some point of Indian etiquette.”
“There honestly is none,” he replied. “We are by nature a most
informal people.”
“I am afraid we must have made some blunder and given offence,”
said Mrs. Moore.
“That is even more impossible. But may I know the facts?”
“An Indian lady and gentleman were to send their carriage for us
this morning at nine. It has never come. We waited and waited and
waited; we can’t think what happened.”
“Some misunderstanding,” said Fielding, seeing at once that it was
the type of incident that had better not be cleared up.
“Oh no, it wasn’t that,” Miss Quested persisted. “They even gave
up going to Calcutta to entertain us. We must have made some stupid
blunder, we both feel sure.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that.”
“Exactly what Mr. Heaslop tells me,” she retorted, reddening a
little. “If one doesn’t worry, how’s one to understand?”
The host was inclined to change the subject, but Aziz took it up
warmly, and on learning fragments of the delinquents’ name
pronounced that they were Hindus.
“Slack Hindus—they have no idea of society; I know them very well
because of a doctor at the hospital. Such a slack, unpunctual
fellow! It is as well you did not go to their house, for it would
give you a wrong idea of India. Nothing sanitary. I think for my
own part they grew ashamed of their house and that is why they did
not send.”
“That’s a notion,” said the other man.
“I do so hate mysteries,” Adela announced.
“We English do.”
“I dislike them not because I’m English, but from my own personal
point of view,” she corrected.
“I like mysteries but I rather dislike muddles,” said Mrs. Moore.
“A mystery is a muddle.”
“Oh, do you think so, Mr. Fielding?”
“A mystery is only a high-sounding term for a muddle. No advantage
in stirring it up, in either case. Aziz and I know well that
India’s a muddle.”
“India’s—— Oh, what an alarming idea!”
“There’ll be no muddle when you come to see me,” said Aziz, rather
out of his depth. “Mrs. Moore and everyone—I invite you all—oh,
please.”
The old lady accepted: she still thought the young doctor
excessively nice; moreover, a new feeling, half languor, half
excitement, bade her turn down any fresh path. Miss Quested accepted
out of adventure. She also liked Aziz, and believed that when she
knew him better he would unlock his country for her. His invitation
gratified her, and she asked him for his address.
Aziz thought of his bungalow with horror. It was a detestable
shanty near a low bazaar. There was practically only one room in
it, and that infested with small black flies. “Oh, but we will talk
of something else now,” he exclaimed. “I wish I lived here. See
this beautiful room! Let us admire it together for a little. See
those curves at the bottom of the arches. What delicacy! It is the
architecture of Question and Answer. Mrs. Moore, you are in India;
I am not joking.” The room inspired him. It was an audience hall
built in the eighteenth century for some high official, and though
of wood had reminded Fielding of the Loggia de’ Lanzi at Florence.
Little rooms, now Europeanized, clung to it on either side, but
the central hall was unpapered and unglassed, and the air of the
garden poured in freely. One sat in public—on exhibition, as it
were—in full view of the gardeners who were screaming at the birds
and of the man who rented the tank for the cultivation of water
chestnut. Fielding let the mango trees too—there was no knowing
who might not come in—and his servants sat on his steps night and
day to discourage thieves. Beautiful certainly, and the Englishman
had not spoilt it, whereas Aziz in an occidental moment would have
hung Maude Goodmans on the walls. Yet there was no doubt to whom
the room really belonged. . . .
“I am doing justice here. A poor widow who has been robbed comes
along and I give her fifty rupees, to another a hundred, and so on
and so on. I should like that.”
Mrs. Moore smiled, thinking of the modern method as exemplified in
her son. “Rupees don’t last for ever, I’m afraid,” she said.
“Mine would. God would give me more when he saw I gave. Always be
giving, like the Nawab Bahadur. My father was the same, that is
why he died poor.” And pointing about the room he peopled it with
clerks and officials, all benevolent because they lived long ago.
“So we would sit giving for ever—on a carpet instead of chairs,
that is the chief change between now and then, but I think we would
never punish anyone.”
The ladies agreed.
“Poor criminal, give him another chance. It only makes a man worse
to go to prison and be corrupted.” His face grew very tender—the
tenderness of one incapable of administration, and unable to grasp
that if the poor criminal is let off he will again rob the poor
widow. He was tender to everyone except a few family enemies whom
he did not consider human: on these he desired revenge. He was even
tender to the English; he knew at the bottom of his heart that they
could not help being so cold and odd and circulating like an ice
stream through his land. “We punish no one, no one,” he repeated,
“and in the evening we will give a great banquet with a nautch and
lovely girls shall shine on every side of the tank with fireworks
in their hands, and all shall be feasting and happiness until the
next day, when there shall be justice as before—fifty rupees, a
hundred, a thousand—till peace comes. Ah, why didn’t we live in
that time?—But are you admiring Mr. Fielding’s house? Do look how
the pillars are painted blue, and the verandah’s pavilions—what do
you call them?—that are above us inside are blue also. Look at the
carving on the pavilions. Think of the hours it took. Their little
roofs are curved to imitate bamboo. So pretty—and the bamboos
waving by the tank outside. Mrs. Moore! Mrs. Moore!”
“Well?” she said, laughing.
“You remember the water by our mosque? It comes down and fills this
tank—a skilful arrangement of the Emperors. They stopped here going
down into Bengal. They loved water. Wherever they went they created
fountains, gardens, hammams. I was telling Mr. Fielding I would
give anything to serve them.”
He was wrong about the water, which no Emperor, however skilful,
can cause to gravitate uphill; a depression of some depth together
with the whole of Chandrapore lay between the mosque and Fielding’s
house. Ronny would have pulled him up, Turton would have wanted to
pull him up, but restrained himself. Fielding did not even want to
pull him up; he had dulled his craving for verbal truth and cared
chiefly for truth of mood. As for Miss Quested, she accepted
everything Aziz said as true verbally. In her ignorance, she
regarded him as “India,” and never surmised that his outlook was