A passage to India
female relative he had in Chandrapore, and she had much to say to
him on this occasion about a family circumcision that had been
celebrated with imperfect pomp. It was difficult to get away,
because until they had had their dinner she would not begin hers,
and consequently prolonged her remarks in case they should suppose
she was impatient. Having censured the circumcision, she bethought
her of kindred topics, and asked Aziz when he was going to be
married.
Respectful but irritated, he answered, “Once is enough.”
“Yes, he has done his duty,” said Hamidullah. “Do not tease him
so. He carries on his family, two boys and their sister.”
“Aunt, they live most comfortably with my wife’s mother, where she
was living when she died. I can see them whenever I like. They are
such very, very small children.”
“And he sends them the whole of his salary and lives like a
low-grade clerk, and tells no one the reason. What more do you
require him to do?”
But this was not Hamidullah Begum’s point, and having courteously
changed the conversation for a few moments she returned and made
it. She said, “What is to become of all our daughters if men refuse
to marry? They will marry beneath them, or——” And she began the
oft-told tale of a lady of Imperial descent who could find no
husband in the narrow circle where her pride permitted her to mate,
and had lived on unwed, her age now thirty, and would die unwed,
for no one would have her now. While the tale was in progress, it
convinced the two men, the tragedy seemed a slur on the whole
community; better polygamy almost, than that a woman should die
without the joys God has intended her to receive. Wedlock,
motherhood, power in the house—for what else is she born, and how
can the man who has denied them to her stand up to face her creator
and his own at the last day? Aziz took his leave saying “Perhaps
. . . but later . . .” —his invariable reply to such an appeal.
“You mustn’t put off what you think right,” said Hamidullah. “That
is why India is in such a plight, because we put off things.” But
seeing that his young relative looked worried, he added a few
soothing words, and thus wiped out any impression that his wife
might have made.
During their absence, Mahmoud Ali had gone off in his carriage
leaving a message that he should be back in five minutes, but they
were on no account to wait. They sat down to meat with a distant
cousin of the house, Mohammed Latif, who lived on Hamidullah’s
bounty and who occupied the position neither of a servant nor of
an equal. He did not speak unless spoken to, and since no one spoke
kept unoffended silence. Now and then he belched, in compliment to
the richness of the food. A gentle, happy and dishonest old man;
all his life he had never done a stroke of work. So long as some
one of his relatives had a house he was sure of a home, and it was
unlikely that so large a family would all go bankrupt. His wife
led a similar existence some hundreds of miles away—he did not
visit her, owing to the expense of the railway ticket. Presently
Aziz chaffed him, also the servants, and then began quoting poetry,
Persian, Urdu, a little Arabic. His memory was good, and for so
young a man he had read largely; the themes he preferred were the
decay of Islam and the brevity of love. They listened delighted,
for they took the public view of poetry, not the private which
obtains in England. It never bored them to hear words, words; they
breathed them with the cool night air, never stopping to analyse;
the name of the poet, Hafiz, Hali, Iqbal, was sufficient guarantee.
India—a hundred Indias—whispered outside beneath the indifferent
moon, but for the time India seemed one and their own, and they
regained their departed greatness by hearing its departure lamented,
they felt young again because reminded that youth must fly. A
servant in scarlet interrupted him; he was the chuprassi of the
Civil Surgeon, and he handed Aziz a note.
“Old Callendar wants to see me at his bungalow,” he said, not
rising. “He might have the politeness to say why.”
“Some case, I daresay.”
“I daresay not, I daresay nothing. He has found out our dinner
hour, that’s all, and chooses to interrupt us every time, in order
to show his power.”
“On the one hand he always does this, on the other it may be a
serious case, and you cannot know,” said Hamidullah, considerately
paving the way towards obedience. “Had you not better clean your
teeth after pan?”
“If my teeth are to be cleaned, I don’t go at all. I am an Indian,
it is an Indian habit to take pan. The Civil Surgeon must put up
with it. Mohammed Latif, my bike, please.”
The poor relation got up. Slightly immersed in the realms of
matter, he laid his hand on the bicycle’s saddle, while a servant
did the actual wheeling. Between them they took it over a tintack.
Aziz held his hands under the ewer, dried them, fitted on his green
felt hat, and then with unexpected energy whizzed out of Hamidullah’s
compound.
“Aziz, Aziz, imprudent boy. . . .” But he was far down the bazaar,
riding furiously. He had neither light nor bell nor had he a brake,
but what use are such adjuncts in a land where the cyclist’s only
hope is to coast from face to face, and just before he collides
with each it vanishes? And the city was fairly empty at this hour.
When his tyre went flat, he leapt off and shouted for a tonga.
He did not at first find one, and he had also to dispose of his
bicycle at a friend’s house. He dallied furthermore to clean his
teeth. But at last he was rattling towards the civil lines, with
a vivid sense of speed. As he entered their arid tidiness,
depression suddenly seized him. The roads, named after victorious
generals and intersecting at right angles, were symbolic of the
net Great Britain had thrown over India. He felt caught in their
meshes. When he turned into Major Callendar’s compound he could
with difficulty restrain himself from getting down from the tonga
and approaching the bungalow on foot, and this not because his soul
was servile but because his feelings—the sensitive edges of
him—feared a gross snub. There had been a “case” last year—an
Indian gentleman had driven up to an official’s house and been
turned back by the servants and been told to approach more
suitably—only one case among thousands of visits to hundreds of
officials, but its fame spread wide. The young man shrank from a
repetition of it. He compromised, and stopped the driver just
outside the flood of light that fell across the verandah.
The Civil Surgeon was out.
“But the sahib has left me some message?”
The servant returned an indifferent “No.” Aziz was in despair. It
was a servant whom he had forgotten to tip, and he could do nothing
now because there were people in the hall. He was convinced that
there was a message, and that the man was withholding it out of
revenge. While they argued, the people came out. Both were ladies.
Aziz lifted his hat. The first, who was in evening dress, glanced
at the Indian and turned instinctively away.
“Mrs. Lesley, it _is_ a tonga,” she cried.
“Ours?” enquired the second, also seeing Aziz, and doing likewise.
“Take the gifts the gods provide, anyhow,” she screeched, and both
jumped in. “O Tonga wallah, club, club. Why doesn’t the fool go?”
“Go, I will pay you to-morrow,” said Aziz to the driver, and as
they went off he called courteously, “You are most welcome, ladies.”
They did not reply, being full of their own affairs.
So it had come, the usual thing—just as Mahmoud Ali said. The
inevitable snub—his bow ignored, his carriage taken. It might have
been worse, for it comforted him somehow that Mesdames Callendar
and Lesley should both be fat and weigh the tonga down behind.
Beautiful women would have pained him. He turned to the servant,
gave him a couple of rupees, and asked again whether there was a
message. The man, now very civil, returned the same answer. Major
Callendar had driven away half an hour before.
“Saying nothing?”
He had as a matter of fact said, “Damn Aziz”—words that the servant
understood, but was too polite to repeat. One can tip too much as
well as too little, indeed the coin that buys the exact truth has
not yet been minted.
“Then I will write him a letter.”
He was offered the use of the house, but was too dignified to enter
it. Paper and ink were brought on to the verandah. He began: “Dear
Sir,—At your express command I have hastened as a subordinate
should——” and then stopped. “Tell him I have called, that is
sufficient,” he said, tearing the protest up. “Here is my card.
Call me a tonga.”
“Huzoor, all are at the club.”
“Then telephone for one down to the railway station.” And since
the man hastened to do this he said, “Enough, enough, I prefer to
walk.” He commandeered a match and lit a cigarette. These
attentions, though purchased, soothed him. They would last as long
as he had rupees, which is something. But to shake the dust of
Anglo-India off his feet! To escape from the net and be back among
manners and gestures that he knew! He began a walk, an unwonted
exercise.
He was an athletic little man, daintily put together, but really
very strong. Nevertheless walking fatigued him, as it fatigues
everyone in India except the new-comer. There is something hostile
in that soil. It either yields, and the foot sinks into a
depression, or else it is unexpectedly rigid and sharp, pressing
stones or crystals against the tread. A series of these little
surprises exhausts; and he was wearing pumps, a poor preparation
for any country. At the edge of the civil station he turned into
a mosque to rest.
He had always liked this mosque. It was gracious, and the
arrangement pleased him. The courtyard—entered through a ruined
gate—contained an ablution tank of fresh clear water, which was
always in motion, being indeed part of a conduit that supplied the
city. The courtyard was paved with broken slabs. The covered part
of the mosque was deeper than is usual; its effect was that of an
English parish church whose side has been taken out. Where he sat,
he looked into three arcades whose darkness was illuminated by a
small hanging lamp and by the moon. The front—in full moonlight—had
the appearance of marble, and the ninety-nine names of God on the
frieze stood out black, as the frieze stood out white against the
sky. The contest between this dualism and the contention of shadows
within pleased Aziz, and he tried to symbolize the whole into some
truth of religion or love. A mosque by winning his approval let
loose his imagination. The temple of another creed, Hindu,
Christian, or Greek, would have bored him and failed to awaken his
sense of beauty. Here was Islam, his own country, more than a
Faith, more than a battle-cry, more, much more . . . Islam, an
attitude towards life both exquisite and durable, where his body
and his thoughts found their home.
His seat was the low wall that bounded the courtyard on the left.
The ground fell away beneath him towards the city, visible as a
blur of trees, and in the stillness he heard many small sounds. On
the right, over in the club, the English community contributed an
amateur orchestra. Elsewhere some Hindus were drumming—he knew they
were Hindus, because the rhythm was uncongenial to him,—and others
were bewailing a corpse—he knew whose, having certified it in the
afternoon. There were owls, the Punjab mail . . . and flowers smelt
deliciously in the station-master’s garden. But the mosque—that
alone signified, and he returned to it from the complex appeal of
the night, and decked it with meanings the builder had never
intended. Some day he too would build a mosque, smaller than this
but in perfect taste, so that all who passed by should experience