The Last Candles of the Night. Ian Bedford

cares?”

      “Of course there is Mr P. Hardcastle, the Director of Public Instruction. Your boss. He likes a drink too. It’s all right, I approve of Hardcastle.”

      “You approve of Hardcastle!”

      “You’re all trying to help, but at the last moment. All these good people were appointed to help, but at the last moment, to clean up the act – you too.”

      Philip offered no defence.

      But his conjecture was sound. It was Ragini who abandoned the topic of drink and returned to Anand. “If he thinks I insulted his Swami, I’m not interested in his precious Swami. His Swami is in gaol. So why isn’t Anand in gaol? It’s not hard for a Congress Party worker to find himself in gaol. All these Gandhian tactics are ridiculously easy. All you have to do is appear in public, you offer satyagraha as they call it, and the Nizam’s police will throw you in gaol. If Anand so believes in his Swami, why isn’t he in gaol in Gulbarga along with the rest of them?”

      “They can’t all be there. Somebody has to stay out of gaol.”

      “And that somebody is Anand.”

      “They’re chosen. All the satyagrahis are chosen. Don’t you understand party discipline?”

      “Anand runs away. He bolts to Sholapur in India when his fright becomes too much for him. In and out of Hyderabad,” said Ragini, who appeared to be enjoying herself; she must have been: for none of this was true. “That’s some brave Maratha. He says he’s a Maratha, but his hero Shivaji would be ashamed of him.”

      “Anand’s hero is not Shivaji. Anand’s hero is Gandhi, who has been assassinated. Anand belongs to a party with inspiring leaders, but with very few rank-and-file workers in Hyderabad. He has always pointed this out – to you too. He’s not a leader. He’s valued for his time and his work. Anand is not important enough to go to gaol.”

      “You’re so right about ‘important’.”

      “Anand has never turned his back on anyone. He’s the most courageous person I know.”

      “Do you have many courageous people, in Australia?”

      “Anand is fighting the Nizam, just as you are.”

      Anand this, Anand that. In doing his best for Anand, Philip believed he might even be falling into a trap. She was laughing at him. Seeing how far he’d go for Anand. He was about to enlist in the joke, when she placed that interpretation of his firmly out of court. She passed beyond bounds. “I think he’s a disdainful person.”

      “Disdainful? I haven’t found him disdainful.”

      “And why would you? What would he find to say about you? It’s me he despises.”

      “Oh, I hardly think so.”

      “Let’s not talk about him. If I’m an enemy of India, let me remain so and Anand can do battle for India. ‘To right social wrongs’. And what are these wrongs? So proud he’s in Congress. Did you know his Swami met Patel in Delhi? There’s the man to right social wrongs. There are all kinds in Congress. I believe it was their own people who got rid of Gandhi.”

      “It was Hindu communalists. It was Godse.”

      “And do you believe there are no Hindu communalists in the Congress? Anand doesn’t think so, but they’ll do for him too – and for his Swami.”

      “He speaks well of you,” said Philip. That sounded so mild – but it was true. Ragini should listen.

      “So he does. Do you know what he says? That we’re comrades, and we should sleep together. I don’t mind sleeping together – that’s with a comrade. He’s heard me say this. But Anand and I are not comrades. You do not say of a comrade that she poses as a friend to her nation but she’s really the enemy. That she’s working for Moscow – just because he hears me say ‘the people’. I should say ‘India, India’ more often. It would make no difference to what I do. That’s what he wants of me, this comrade, to mend my tongue.”

      Philip listened in wonder. He was exercised by ‘sleeping together’, but there was more to trouble him. “What Anand said to me was …”

      “He says I’m marvellous. I know, he says it to me too. He has all these birds for me, good and bad. When he’s not calling me a peacock – the bird with the tail: not a peahen – when he’s not telling me I strut and show off and glory in a poverty not my own … that’s what he says … when he’s not telling me I’m a spy and instructing me to leave his country and claim exile in Moscow, I’m Anand’s forest kili – his parrot. You’ve seen those green parrots? – not the tame ones. I’m Anand’s vanakili. What does he want with a vanakili?”

      “His ‘wild bird’. He calls you this. And he’s right.”

      “Oh, you think so? He’s right about one thing. Our compact is off. Whatever he thought was ‘on’ between us.”

      “You can’t mean that.”

      “You haven’t heard him, Philip. He says I’m the daughter of a landlord. Well, so I am. Does this mean I’m working for the landlords? According to Anand, I must be. That’s his logic. He tells me it’s Marxist logic. I suppose he thinks: ‘isn’t she the one who’s a Marxist? Here’s sauce for the goose’. I am not a Marxist. I’ve never read a word of Marx. I’m a poor forest kili. Anand himself would not take one step into the thick of the forest, not where I go.”

      And Ragini lost herself in the wall-charts – for her, the only distraction in the entire room.

      Philip, having stood stock-still, now found himself wandering. He corrected the angles of all the chairs behind the boys’ desks and surveyed the teacher’s desk, on its dais, from the floor. That dais reached the wall and was Ragini’s proud eminence, as she scanned the charts – stalling, she must be! He gave her time.

      She did not use the time. She stepped down abruptly and crossed, without warning, to the open door. There she turned. Stranded among his pupils’ desks, Philip called helplessly – it was all that came to him, “You don’t ‘strut’. He’s wrong.”

      “Who says I strut? Oh, Anand.”

      “How can he have got you so wrong?”

      She was on her way out, but she lingered. She had sensed nothing odd, though Philip, artless in his admiration, was distinctly aware that he had put his foot in it. What was more, he was unable to stop. “I think you alarm people.”

      “I what? I alarm people?”

      “They misunderstand you.”

      In the silence that followed, Philip improved on this insight. “People are afraid. Not of you, but for you. They can’t live up to you. And they can’t save you. Anand is typical. He knows you’re the daughter of a landlord but he sees you vanish into those dark forests, and he asks what it’s for. I don’t say I understand you. I’ve heard you explain. Injustice. Murder. What’s done to village women by the forest contractors. I’ve seen you armed. That day you stepped into the clearing and you were carrying something heavy, a bolt-action rifle. But the police have Bren guns.”

      “I was not carrying a rifle.”

      “We don’t know how to call you back.”

      Even as he spoke, Philip was visited by the notion that he was so far out of his world, and out of his depth, that his grandparents, cousins, classmates and his former girlfriend would not have recognised him. If words of his were somehow to be recorded, and circulated among them, they’d bawl with one voice: this grandchild, apple of our eye, prize student and disloyal lover, is raving. What police, what forests and what Amazons with rifles? Is there such a country? Some woman has swept him off his feet.

      Ragini had her question. “Who is