The Last Candles of the Night. Ian Bedford

‘we’? You and Anand?”

      “Leave Anand out of it.”

      “The ‘we’ is you then. And why would you call me back? What business of yours is it? Why detain me?”

      “I didn’t mean to detain you. As if I’d detain you. I think I meant …” Philip lurched on, “I think I meant to accompany you.”

      Ragini rubbed her eyes. She touched her forehead. “This heat is bothering me. You’d suppose I’d be used to it, but I’m not.”

      “You heard me. I said what I said.”

      “And what was that?”

      Philip considered repeating his words over. He was unable.

      “If you mean to accompany me, Philip, accompany me to the bus station. I’ve clipped my cycle to the rack at the bus station. Will that be enough? Or do you mean to accompany me further?”

      “Further,” croaked Philip.

      “ ‘Into the valley of death’, I suppose you mean.”

      He was in a fix. And had placed Ragini in a fix. Yet the fix he was in was the fix he deserved, whereas in her case, her fix surprised her. It had come out of nowhere, and was evanescent.

      “Is there something you believe you can do? Do for me?” she said gently.

      “Not really,” said Philip humbly. “Just be with you.”

      “Be? How?”

      With her next words, Ragini’s tone changed. It held, now, an acid note, a mocking note, which did not seem to be meant for him personally but to outsoar him, leaving him neglected. “Shouldn’t you have asked for more?”

      6

      Asked for more! But he had not asked for more. He had stuck by Anand, stood up for Anand. She had nothing to reproach him with.

      Why had she come? After fifty years, why had she come?

      Philip lay where he was thrown – at the bottom of a well. He did not flinch or stir. In the house at Gibbes Street, Rockdale, there was no more he could do. At this point his memory – event-perfect, like a recitation – knew its limits and evaporated.

      As the slow pieces, the lumbering furniture of the room emerged into view – the bed, the window-seat and the armchair, which had caught fire from a radiator when he was nine and had had to be re-upholstered (he recalled its former pattern) – the schoolroom at Warangal could not have been further away. Yet the past of this room was more distant than the past of the schoolroom. Nothing, to Philip, was more inevitable than this room. It was his grandparents’ room. Now Ragini had appeared in this room! He stirred at last, and busied himself. He ransacked the kitchen for the tea-canister and made tea at the stove.

      He clung to this safe activity. He warmed the pot. He fetishised the brew. He avoided, and tried to discount, what he had remembered. He was surprised at the fluency of that memory, how surely and easily it had unfolded, haunted by foreknowledge, but withholding its rebuke till the end. Asked for more: but he had not asked for more. If that was her rebuke, it was a light one. Was her rebuke all there was? Or would memory plough on? Would the past return, or strive to return? Even if it did not return, would he seek it out? Would he seek to learn more? Was to seek more simple prudence, or an act of defiance, defiance of some power? What power? He did not know what power. There was a kind of foreboding. Nothing too bad, he hoped! Nothing that could not be forgotten – as it had been, for most of a lifetime.

      You defer a pain, you might not submit to a memory for a lifetime – but its vigour is intact.

      If that were true, there was pain you would never come to know. You would die hoarding it. You would hoard and deny this pain, put it off: you would die happy.

      7

      Why had she come?

      When names aren’t asked for – and Jim hadn’t asked for names – there can be no denial in refusing to give them. Jim had spotted no denial. But why refuse? Why disown Anand and Ragini? Something in memory would explain this omission. But why should he have to search, to belabour memory? Shouldn’t he just know? There was a kind of looming awareness – as if of a betrayal. But Philip had betrayed nobody. He had nothing to repent of and what dismayed him in that schoolroom episode – on the surface, at least – was no misdeed of his but the revelation of his insignificance, his absolute insignificance in their lives, in the life of India, and perhaps, definitively, in his own life – though he clung to his life.

      His want of importance, his thistledown unimportance and want of stake. The moment this secret was out, the life-force in Philip rallied to disprove it. Ask anyone in India, they’d have shown you a life teeming with accomplishment. It was only as he stood on the brink of a new beginning, a new and perilous beginning in his native country, that the fear of his inconsequence was borne in on him. It was this that brought Ragini: the emergency of the hour, his present crisis. He did not like to think of it as a crisis.

      As for the schoolroom, the event was over. Why, then, was it not over? What of other events?

      The image came to him of a road in the Warangal district. By that road Philip was voyaging, from Warangal to Hyderabad, for the first time since his appointment to his new job. It was December 1947 – long before March ’48, the event of the schoolroom. A bus, without driver or conductor, stood pulled over on the roadside. He, Anand and the rest of the passengers had been forced off the bus. The midday sun blazed.

      Philip and Anand were bareheaded. They stood with the others listening to an endless harangue – in Telugu, foreign to them both. Anand, though born and bred in the Nizam’s Dominions, hailed from the districts where Marathi was spoken. But he stood as if weighing every word.

      Philip, too, weighed every word. He weighed every pause, every gesture, for signs of a resumption of journey. Had he and Anand moved, inched their way, to the shade which was visible as an outline, a pattern of leaves on the bare ground, they’d have set off some fruitless commotion, endangering the passengers as well as themselves. All their fellow passengers were villagers. None were townsmen. And the party of ambush were villagers, or appeared to be. Philip wondered all the same at the remarkable difference in being, like a difference in human kind, between the two sets of villagers who otherwise resembled each other in every respect: poor, dark, scabby-legged. One party knew what they were up to, and the other did not. The gulf between them seemed all the wider because the gang or dalam, who had emerged in ambush from the bushes lining the road, were at such pains to close it. The orator and his free-strolling companions, like the bunched audience, endured the full heat of the sun. They did not seek the shade.

      “What’s he saying?” Philip contrived to whisper. One of the gang – there were only five – had noticed his tailored pants, his shirt with long sleeves rolled up and, above all, the boots, and was staring at him. Philip did not stare at this individual. The dalam appeared to be weaponless, and were far outnumbered; but there could be no thought of taking them on.

      Now the passengers were freed to disperse. They were not permitted to rejoin the bus, which was boarded one after another by members of the dalam, who may have wished to see for themselves what the interior of a state transport vehicle was like. Rather than move to the shade, the passengers, and the bus-crew as well, entirely to Philip’s surprise, trailed along the road. They reached the bend of the road and rounded the bend. They were not prevented. Philip and Anand joined the trek. One of the gang swung from the boarding-step of the bus and followed at a distance, keeping them in sight.

      “Why are they letting us go?”

      “They’re not letting us go. Where would we go?”

      Anand knew no more about it than Philip did. Once round the bend they saw, not far away, the booths of a market-village, which appeared to be thriving. “There’ll be a grain store,” Anand now decided, “and a telegraph office. They are taking a risk.”

      “Will you phone the police?”