From Traude:
Great news: Thanks to SeniorLearn we've found a new home from which to resume our discussion of The Raj Quartet. My thanks also to you, previous readers, for your participation and input. A WARM WELCOME back to you. New readers are cordially invited and always welcome, of course.
⁋ At its apogee the British empire was the largest in history and India its most precious Jewel in the Crown. The first novel opens in 1942 when war raged in Europe; the Japanese had advanced into Malaya, Singapore and Burma, threatening to invade India. Ghandi had called on the British to "Quit India", and anti-British rioting had broken out in the fictional city of Mayapore, where the river forms a natural border between the British cantonment and the Indian part of town.
This is the backdrop for the impossible, hopeless, heartbreaking love story of Daphne and Hari. Then there is the story of Edwina Crane, the superintendent of a Protestant missionary school, and there is Ronald Merrick, the superintended of the Indian Police, surely one of the most loathsome villains in literarture.
⁋ The setting of volume 2, The Day of the Scorpion, is Pankot, a hill station where an Indian army regiment, based in Ranpur in the valley, spent the hottest months of the year. Both towns were located in a nominally independent princely state, the fictional Mirat, which sought to maintain its relative autonomy. The Layton family is introduced, their friends, and other new characters, all vividly sketched, for example Count Bronowsky, a White Russian emigré and adviser to the Muslim ruler of Mirat and, memorably, Barbie Batchelor, a retired missionary and former friend of Edwina Crane, who became the live-in companion of Mabel Layton, the matriarch, known as Mrs. Layton Sr., of Rose Cottage.
Ronald Merrick, now a Captain in intelligence. He becomes a room mate of Teddy Bingham who is engaged to Susan Layton. He is given 72 hours furlough and marries Susan in Mirat earlier than planned because they will be sent into combat. A rock intended for Merrick is thrown at the limousine carrying the two men to church, and it is Teddy who is wounded. Teddy dies in combat and Merrick is gravely wounded.
⁋ Volume 3, The Towers of Silence, is told essentially through the impressions, thoughts and perceptions of Barbie. When our discussion site disappeared in October, we had only 87 pages to review of its last part = Part 5 "The Tennis Court". I’d like to do so now.
⁋¶ Nicky Paynton's husband is killed in action. She plans to return to England where her two boys are in school and arranges to auctions off her belongings; the auction turns into a farewell party, which is attended also by Susan Layton, remarkably improved after treatment by a new doctor about whom the British community knows nothing.
Mildred, Susan’s mother, had told all that "the job of an RAMC analyst is not one which normally can be taken seriously". The bridge club friends have made up their minds about "the Jew-boy trick-cyclist" (!!). But their preconceived notions are shattered when they meet Captain Samuels who has come to pick up Susan. Isobel Rankin, wife of the area commander, interrogates him but he parries well.
A furious Mildred discovers that Sarah is pregnant and orders Aunt Fenny to take her back to Calcutta “to get rid of it”. Before leaving, Sarah says goodbye to Barbie in the hospital.
After her discharge, Barbie returns to the church bungalow. She packs up the apostle spoons and, with Clarissa’s consent, asks one of the rectory servants to take them to the Commander's House. An acknowledgement from Colonel Trehearne with an invitation to dine with him on Ladies' Night arrives the next month. She looks at her emaciated body and declines.
Another letter comes from the Mission in Calcutta, asking if she Miss Batcherlor would accept a temporary position in Dibrapur to fill in for the Eurasion teacher who is getting married -- Dibrapur, where Edwina had visited on the day of the riots. Barbie realizes that Sarah has visited the Mission while in Calcutta to plead for her without telling her so. Just as Barbie is about to tell Clarissa of the astonishing offer, Captain Coley, Mildred’s emissary and lover, comes to inform Barbie that her trunk must be removed from the Mali's shed as soon as possible.
The following day she hires a tonga-wallah, "an enclosed dilapidated man with a curved nose and predatory eyes, a starved bird with folded wings." The tonga is old, so is the bony horse. The gate of Rose Cottage is unlocked, the trunk sitting on the front steps. A man in civilian clothes stands on the veranda, looking down into Mabel's famous rose garden, all torn up and being turned into a tennis court. She challenges him and he turns around. It is Ronald Merrick.
The left half of his face is horribly disfigured by a violet burn mark, the left eye half closed, the left arm has an artificial hand. He has come to Pankot for fittings of the artificial limb at the hospital, and to Rose Cottage to see the Laytons who, the Mali told him, are in Calcutta.
There's a mutual careful appraisal. Barbie watches how Merrick handles the cigarettes and holds his coffee cup. In turn he watches her intently, the gloved hand supporting his chin. They talk about Barbie's plan to go to Dibrapur; about the transport of the trunk on the waiting tonga (which Merrick emphatically discourages), about Edwina's words in the letter she left behind before immolating herself :
"There is no God, not even on the road from Dibrapur"; about Lady Manners; Daphne; the child; about man-bap = “I am your mother and father”, the maxim of the British rulers; about Merrick's unshakeable conviction of Hari’s guilt.
Barbie opens the trunk, is surprised to find the butterfly lace shawl, takes out the picture (the same one Edwina had) showing Queen Victoria on her throne with angels overhead and representative Indians clustering at her feet. Barbie calls it the picture of the Unknown Indian and spontaneously presses it into Merrick's artificial hand.
Again Merrick warns the load is too heavy a load, the road too steep. But the trunk is loaded on the back of the tonga and roped. Barbie puts the butterfly lace shawl on her head and climbs up to sit next to the tonga wallah.
“The equipage moved slowly out of the compound of Rose Cottage. The valley lay under a thin blanket of cloud. The sun had gone in. The first spots of a chilly November rain. The tonga gathered momentum. The old man began to apply the brake. Once or twice the horse slipped. For some reason she wished she had the picture back. The rain was coming down harder. As they passed the club, a flurry of tongas was climbing up the hill and about to turn in there. The old man's hands were knotted in the reins. One of the other wallahs shouted an insult.
'Hold your tongue!’, Barbie shouted back. She began to sing.
Behind the equipage a peculiar light glowed on and off - winter lightning. Something troubled her. The lightning
brought it closer. It was Mildred's face, eyes hooded, mouth turned down, quirked at the corners; glass held under chin in droop-wristed hands.
The horse slid, stumbled, righted itself. It raised its tail. There was a smell of stable. The horse stumbled again. The old man jerked the brake harder. She thought she smelt burning. She glanced at him. His eyes at last were wide open. He looked at her for an instant before redirecting his own troubled gaze at the road ahead and at the trembling flanks of his old horse. There was Mildred's face again, just for the split second it took for it to dissolve and reform and become the face of the man who regarded her closely, chin in hand, thoughtful and patient, so purposeful in his desire for her soul that he had thrown away Edwina's.
She began to tremble. They were passing the golf course. People were running under colored umbrellas.
Sometimes, although rarely, these cold showers - penetrating the warmth of a Pankot November day - troubled the atmosphere and produced an imbalance, a rogue element of electric mischief that shattered the silence like a child bursting a blown-up paper bag containing flashes of paper fire.
There was just such an explosion now as the rickety old tonga entered he steepest part of Club Road. It blared across the valley, jerking alive the unliveliest members of the club, comfortably cushioned in upholstered wicker, and was accompanied by the brightest amalgam of blue and yellow light ever seen in the region. The horse screamed; its eyes rolled; it reared, thrashing the space between its hooves and the greasy tarmac and then achieved both gravity and momentum, dragging and rocking the high-wheeled trap with its load of missionary relics...
Barbie, covered in mud and blood, made it back to the rectory bungalow and said ‘I’m afraid there’s been some trouble at the junction. Perhaps someone could kindly deal with it. I have seen the Devil...’
The driver survived too. But the horse had to be shot.”
Coda.
In December 1944 Barbie Batchelor was admitted to the Hospital of the Samaritan Mission of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. She lapsed into silence, communicating in writing. Unaware of where she was, she sat at the barred window and watched big birds no one else saw circling in the distance.
She did not recognize the fair-haired visitor as Sarah but wrote on her pad “Birds”. The girl promised to find an answer and came back with it the next evening.
“The birds belong to the towers of silence. For the Ranpur Parsees”, and then wrote it down as if she thought Miss Batchelor might forget it.
Miss Batchelor wrote:Yes, I see. Vultures. Thank you.
She looked round the room, shook her head and wrote:I have nothing to give you in exchange. Not even a rose.
For some reason the girl put her arms around Miss Batchelor and cried. “Oh, Barbie”, she said, “don’t you remember anything?”
It was August 6, 1945
The date meant nothing to Barbie. No date did. The calendar was a mathematical progression with arbitrary surprises.
She took her seat at the barred window. It was raining. She cold not see the birds. But imagined their feathers sheened by emerald and indigo lights. She turned away and rose from the stool. And felt the final nausea enter the room.
She stood, swaying slightly ... padded slippered to the secure refuge of her bed and sat, leaning her shoulder against the iron head. She raised a questioning or admonishing finger, commanding just a short moment of silence for the tiny anticipated sound: the echo of her own life.
They found her thus, eternally alert, in sudden sunshine, her shadow burnt into the wall behind her as if by some distant but terrible fire.
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