Death to the Landlords

Five

Malaikuppam: Monday Evening: Tuesday

« ^ »

They halted for lunch on a strip of sand beside a stream, just off the road, where they had a patch of shade from a clump of young coconut palms, and a wonderful view of the distant, convoluted blue heights of the Western Ghats, out of which they had come, and which, under a variety of local names and shapes, accompany the southbound road almost to the Cape. And in the afternoon they passed through Sattur, and remembered Mahendralal Bakhle, whose disputed lands lay somewhere in the neighbourhood. From Koilpatti they soon turned right, at Dominic’s somewhat hesitant direction, into a minor road, white as flour, climbing gently between paddy fields greener than emeralds, and tall palmyra palms, with the half-veiled blue complexities of the hills endlessly changing shape before them. And by the first downward swoop of evening they reached Malaikuppam.

It lay on a gentle slope, facing south-east, and the rice here had become a different strain, a hill-rice, the upland crop almost golden in colour, and in one field being cut. Groves of trees framed the village as they approached it. There was a pond on one side, and two boys were splashing along its edges, minding the water-buffaloes that wallowed in its coolness with their blue-black hides gleaming and their patient, placid faces as near expressing happiness as they would ever be. In one place they saw tobacco growing, its huge leaves shading from pale green to yellow, its stems five feet tall. It did not look rich country, but neither did it appear depressed or poverty-stricken; and yet life in rural India is commonly lived on a knife-edge of debt and destitution, and they all knew it.

There were women just gathered at their evening chore of drawing water from a big, stone-rimmed well on the dusty village square. One of the girls stood aloft on the four-foot-high rim, outlined against a sky turning to orange and gold, and the others handed up their brass pots to her to fill. Poised with thin brown toes gripping the stone, she dipped and raised the brimming pots, her anklets and bangles gleaming, and all her gestures were pure and graceful and economical, a lesson in movement. Larry halted the Land-Rover, and all the dark female faces turned to stare at them in candid curiosity, and laugh aloud in frank appreciation of their oddness and incongruity. It was a disconcerting experience which all the foreigners among them had suffered several times before. But when Lakshman leaned out and asked for guidance in fluent Tamil, the nearest woman approached willingly and cheerfully, and pointed them the way. Higher than the village. A little way uphill, and they would see the gates.

They saw the wall first, lofty and white, capped with crude red tiles, and it went on almost as far as they could see. Then they came to the gates, wrought iron gates that stood wide on a short, dusty drive and a broad central court, round which the various buildings of the household were grouped somewhat haphazardly, many of them having been added at different times. Everything was low, one-storeyed and white, and shaded with overhanging eaves; and the first buildings they passed were clearly the dwellings of farm-servants and household retainers, of whom there seemed to be a great many. Then there were buildings that appeared to be barns and store-rooms, all space around the broad open area of trodden earth that gave place, a little higher, to a paved court. The end of the vista was filled in by a wide terrace, with steps leading up to it, and crowned by a long, low, single-storey house, white-walled and red-tiled, a little like a ranch-house but for the strong batter of the walls and the shaping of the roofs. Over the tiles the ornamental bushes and fruit trees of a garden peered, and beyond was a grove of forest trees looking over the boundary wall.

‘Riches without ostentation,’ Patti said critically. ‘I sort of knew it would be like this. At least it doesn’t look English. Have you ever been in the Nilgiris, and seen all those dreadfully unsuitable houses that look like something left over from Queen Victoria’s jubilee, and are all called “Waverley” or “Rosemount” or “The Cedars”? You wonder whether you’ve slipped through a crack in space and time, and ended up somewhere quite different. At least this is rural India, not suburban Cheltenham.’

‘I was once invited to a Women’s Institute meeting,’ Priya said unexpectedly, ‘in Bangalore.’ Everyone turned, even at this vital and anxious moment of arrival, to gape at her in astonishment, the statement came so startlingly, not in itself, but from her. ‘I didn’t go,’ she said demurely, ‘I had an extra duty. I was nursing there then. But I would have gone, if I’d been free.’

‘Isn’t it marvellous?’ Patti said, gratified. ‘You know when the real imperial rot set in? When the British memsahibs arrived! The men were quite willing to learn the ropes and go quietly and discreetly native, and no one would have been any the worse for it. But once the wives were let in, and the families, and the damned establishment, it was all over. Everything had to conform to the home life of our dear queen, and everybody stopped learning anything about the home life of the native Indian, and profiting by it. It didn’t matter any more, it was just something to be brought into line. Which of course it never was. Thank God! You can’t just run around the world trying to teach other people respectability, when what that really means is respect for an Anglican doll in a crinoline!’ She caught Dominic’s eye, dwelling upon her consideringly as Larry brought the Land-Rover to a halt close to the terrace steps. ‘Yes, you’re right, I’m talking too much because I’m nervous. I invited myself here. I know it.’

‘You talked a blue streak of truth there,’ Dominic said honestly. ‘I wouldn’t worry about your rights and titles. This sort of caravansarai absorbs visitors wholesale. Come on, let’s go and find the host.’

They clambered out, shaking the dust out of their clothes self-consciously. Lakshman withdrew into the background here; this was no duty of his. It was Dominic who led the way up the staircase to the terrace, and crossed to the open door under the wide eaves.

And suddenly, none of them ever quite knew how, there was a young man standing under the lintel, waiting formally to welcome them. They had heard nothing; he moved gently and fastidiously, after the manner of his race and the code of his aristocratic line. But he had heard the Land-Rover arrive, and needed no other summons, being the punctilious host he was. Probably he had been listening for their engine for an hour and more, whatever he had been doing in the meantime. He stood quite still in the doorway of his house to welcome his guests, the least pretentious figure in the world, and the gravest, a slim, neatly-moulded young man in thin grey flannels and an open-necked white shirt, with short-cropped black hair that waved slightly on his temples, and a spark of something remote and touching, hope of companionship, recollection of gaiety, faith in the possibility of friendship, something intimately connected with England and the English, in his large, proud, aloof and lonely dark eyes.

‘I’m Purushottam Narayanan,’ he said, in a clear, courteous, almost didactic voice. ‘Everything’s ready for you. Do come in!’

The hospitality of the Narayanan household was absolute but not elaborate, the furnishings of the rooms comfortable but simple, and Indian style, like the dinner they presently ate in a large and rather bare room overlooking the terrace and the small, glimmering fires and lamps of the village below. Cutlery and some nine or ten dishes of various vegetables and curries were set out on a large table, and everyone on entering was handed a warmed plate and turned loose to charge it as he felt inclined. The host, attentive, grave and reserved as yet, told them what each dish contained, and added punctilious warnings where he felt the contents might be rather highly spiced for their tastes. Then they all sat down with their selections at a smaller table set in the window, and two servants hovered in the background, ready to offer replenishments at a nod from their master.

Afterwards the servants brought bowls of a creamy sweet made with rice, its surface covered with tissue-thin sheets of silver foil, which were also meant to be eaten; and fruit, in a bowl of water, and rich, strong coffee.

By this time they had exchanged all the courtesies, the host expressing his gratitude for their company and his pleasure in it, the guests their thanks for his kindness and their appreciation of all the thought he had given to their comfort; and still they were no nearer knowing whether his pleasure was personal or formal, his gratitude heartfelt, even desperate, or merely an acceptable phrase. He sat among them, cross-legged at one end of the long seat built into the window, talking intelligently about merely current things, such as the Indian scene, and their journey, and their intended onward journey, his large, unwavering dark eyes moving intently from face to face, and no gesture missing and nothing undone that could contribute to their well-being; but some inward part of him might as well have been, and probably was, a million miles away from them.

He was by no means a small man, being fully as tall as Dominic, though still a couple of inches short of Larry’s gangling height; but he was built in the slender South Indian style, with light bones and smooth, athletic flesh, and in repose he looked almost fragile; an impression reinforced by the refinement and tension of his face, which was clearly but suavely cut, without any of the hawk-likeness of Lakshman’s Punjabi features. The moulding of his lips was fastidious and reticent, the poise of his head very erect, even drawn a little back, as though in insurmountable reserve. And out of this austere countenance the melting southern eyes gazed doubtfully, withholding communication, even while he discoursed politely and plied them with favours.

But there was nothing indecisive about the face, and nothing to suggest that the part of him he kept private was not engaged at this very moment in furious and resolute activity of its own.

‘I must apologise,’ he said, when even the coffee had been cleared away, ‘for being such a poor host. I have been too preoccupied with this responsibility here, to which I’m not accustomed at all. Give me a few months, and when I have all this moving as I want it to move, then you must come again, and let me have more time to show you the countryside.’ Not a word of his father’s death and his own recall to take over the household; such family concerns must not be inflicted upon girl guests. ‘I realise that you have made your own plans, too, of course. But you will at least have tomorrow? You need not leave until the next day?’

‘No, Wednesday morning we’d planned on moving,’ Larry agreed.

‘And at what hour ought you to set out?’ For the first time he smiled, a little self-consciously. ‘I’m sorry, that sounds terrible. I would be happy if you need not leave at all that day, but you see, my father’s lawyer is coming that morning to help me clear up all the affairs my father left in confusion. He was ill for some time before he died, though we never realised how ill, and things were a little neglected, not to mention a law-suit he had with a cousin over a plot of land lower down in the plain. That’s why I have been locking myself in his office all day and every day, trying to get everything sorted out for when the solicitor comes. I would like to arrange my meeting with him for an hour that won’t inconvenience you at all.’

‘We ought to make an early start,’ said Larry. ‘We have to drop the girls in Nagarcoil, and then go on to Cape Comorin. I think we should say seven in the morning.’

‘Then I shall arrange for Mr Das Gupta to come at eight. I shall send my car down to Koilpatti to fetch him, after you have left. He drives, but badly, and our road up here is not good, he will be glad to have transport. Now we need not think any more about departures. You have tomorrow, and we can do quite a lot with that.’ He looked across at Dominic. ‘You will come out with me and have a look at the set-up here? I should be grateful. I have some ideas, but you will know better than I if they are practicable.’

‘I’m only a herald for the Swami,’ Dominic said, ‘he’s coming down himself. as soon as he can. But naturally I was hoping to get a look at things while I’m here, and let him have an outline of what you have in mind. There’ll be a good deal of ground to cover?’

‘We can put in all day on it, easily. Perhaps we could borrow the Land-Rover for the day?’ He turned to flash a sudden engaging smile at Larry. ‘And Dominic tells me – he mentioned it on the telephone – that you are a civil engineer, and have been working on an irrigation scheme up north. Is that right?’

Larry admitted it, without bothering to add that he feared for his plan’s survival.

‘Then you’re just the man we want! Please come out with us. You see, further up here towards the hills we have a small river which is a tributary of the Vaipar, and centuries ago there was a whole system of tanks built down its course, with earth dams. They’ve been out of use and overgrown – oh, three hundred years, I’d guess – but I believe it wouldn’t be impossible to reconstruct the whole system. With earth dams they were a poor risk in the rains – if the top bund went, the whole lot went, that’s why they were abandoned. But it wouldn’t be so difficult, with a little capital, to put in a more durable system now on the same line. Come with us, and see!’

‘Sure I’ll come, glad to!’ And Larry would have been willing and ready to launch into a whole technical discussion of the water situation in Tamil Nadu, and the possibility of harnessing more of the rivers of Kerala, on the narrower, better-watered west of the Ghats, to irrigate the drier plains on the east; but Purushottam diverted the flow. It was necessary to make plans, but as briefly as possible. Tomorrow they could talk water, and rice, and terracing, and the mysterious ancient tanks of Malaikuppam, the whole day long. Tonight they must devote themselves to making the girls’ stay here pleasant.

‘And for you, Miss Galloway and Miss Madhavan, I think we can arrange something more interesting. I hope I have done the right thing. Dominic mentioned when he telephoned that you had originally intended going to Kuttalam. It’s less than forty miles from here, so why should you miss it? My car will take you there tomorrow, if you would like that, and Lakshman will take care of you while we are busy. In the evening we shall all be together again.’

‘It sounds perfect,’ said Patti dutifully. Too perfect, she thought, exchanging a glance with Priya, we’re being disposed of while the business men confer. And suddenly she would have liked to think of a way of piercing through that impregnable defence, that barrier of attentive politeness that fended them off so successfully and yet left them no ground for complaint. ‘I don’t suppose Inspector Raju would mind if we make a day-trip, Priya, do you?’

‘Inspector Raju?’ said Purushottam, drawing his fine black brows together in a frown of inquiry.

‘Oh! – I see Dominic didn’t tell you everything on the phone. So he didn’t explain how they came to acquire two girls as well as the original party. I’m sorry, I didn’t realise.’ But she had realised; how could Dominic possibly have put over that entire long story in the few minutes he had taken over his call from Thekady? ‘It isn’t such a pleasant story, I’m sorry now I spoke. We got mixed up with a police inquiry, that’s all, and we’re supposed to be on call if needed. But we shall be back here by evening. And I would like to go, very much.’

She knew, of course, that it could not rest there; once she had said so much, somebody had to tell all the rest, otherwise no one would have any peace of mind. It was Dominic who took on the job of filling in the gaps, since Purushottam was primarily his concern.

‘I didn’t go into it on the phone because the inspector was waiting, and time was precious. But I should probably have told you tomorrow in any case.’ Tomorrow again, when they would have got rid of the women, and have the whole day for their own concerns, thought Patti. But instead he told it now, briefly but accurately. Purushottam listened with close and shocked attention, and his brows levelled into a ruled line across his forehead. Once he looked at Priya, and not involuntarily or fleetingly, but a long, straight, piercing look, as though he saw her for the first time. In the face of his own overwhelming preoccupations, it was an achievement to have astonished Purushottam.

‘And you think there may be other Naxalite agents active in these parts? It wouldn’t be the first time, of course, there have been cases here before. A couple of them were picked up near the Nepalese border a week or so ago, so there doesn’t seem to be much of a limit on their movements. I’m so sorry that you had to go through an ordeal like that.’

Patti asked, with wincing curiosity: ‘It doesn’t make you wish you hadn’t come home? Or that you were in some different line, and not stuck with all this big estate? It’s such a vulnerable position once you’ve got a revolutionary Left with members prepared to throw away their own lives for a cause – like this man Ajit Ghose?’

He gave a brief, almost scornful heave of his shoulders, and his mobile lips curled in what was not quite a smile. ‘I’ve got work to do here, and I’m going to do it. I want to see this land twice as productive and twice as effectively run as ever before, and chalking up a substantial profit annually to prove it. I’m going to make two crops of rice grow where only one grew before, and where we’re already getting a thaladi crop of sorts, I’m going to boost it by at least fifty per cent. And I don’t want this to be a monoculture farm, either, I want banana plantations and some other crops, so that we can provide better than just casual work. I’m going to see this land paying and producing the way I want it to – or die trying. You know what it says in the Baghavadgita: Do what you must, and give no thought to the consequences. “But if thou wilt not wage this lawful battle, then wilt thou fail thine own law and thine own honour, and get sin.” ’

‘The trouble is,’ Patti said after a moment of silence, ‘the Naxalites probably quote the Baghavadgita, too, and I bet Krishna says exactly the same to them.’

The three of them came slowly down the long hillside together, to where they had left the Land-Rover parked in the meal-white dust at the side of the track. Behind them the ground rose in broken folds, and there were the sparse beginnings of the forests that proliferated, far above, into dense jungle. Before them the open, rolling land lay outspread, fields and groves and villages, threads of shrunken water, standing crops and grazing cattle. They walked alongside the almost dry watercourse, marking at each decline the ridges in the ground where once the bunds of the irrigation tanks had been, mysterious hummocks under the grass.

They were talking hard enough now, with animation and point. The tanks could, Larry was positive, be put back into operation at comparatively little expense, given ample and willing labour. And much could be done at the same time to level some of these bordering fields, and conserve water and soil by discreet terracing.

‘Ours isn’t a delta economy, we’re never going to get three crops off our ground. But we can get two, given these quick-maturing new hybrids the government are producing at Adutharai.’

‘We’ve been doing some work along the same lines ourselves,’ said Dominic, ‘in our own laboratory. And our situation isn’t very different from yours here. The Swami will probably bring Satyavan Kumar along to have a look at your land, as soon as he can. He’s the man you want on seeds.’

‘You know what we could do with most of all? Some sort of small, agriculturally-based industries. Something that will give a chance of steady employment, instead of casual. Capital isn’t going to be a problem so much. My father left a great deal of money. And you’ve seen my place – what do I want with all that accommodation? It will make central stores and offices, and there’s plenty of room to build more plant and workshops as we grow. And we’ve got plenty of skills, and some good, shrewd heads among the village councils. Three of the villages are bold enough and clever enough to come in from the start, two more will probably follow them in. The others will take a season or two to make up their minds, and all we’ve got to do to get them in is show an improved profit. Once they see their neighbours growing more prosperous, they’ll want to come in, too.’

They had reached the road and the Land-Rover. Purushottam stooped and took up a few caked fragments of the brown earth, and crumbled them in his fingers, frowning down at them thoughtfully.

‘I was very fond of my father, but I never did see eye to eye with him. That made me feel terribly guilty when he died, and I had to come home. Not that coming home is very easy, in any case, after living such a different life there in England. You feel a stranger here and an alien there. But I couldn’t live anywhere else than in India, not permanently, so the thing to do seems to be to settle down as fast as possible. Not by following up what my father was trying to do, though. That would be a thumping lie for me. He tried to hang on to every acre, you know – he was a good landlord, mind you, and what he felt was partly out of loyalty to his tenants, but he didn’t know how to change. He was a bit of a litigant by inclination, too, in his middle years, and there’ve been complications. Now I’ve got the clearing up to do, and I know what I want, and with the Swami’s help we may be able to strike an agreement with the authorities.’

‘His credit’s high, in the state and centrally,’ said Dominic, ‘and he’ll do everything he can, you can rely on that.’

‘I’ve no ambition to be a landlord, none at all, but I do want to see all this land being put to the best possible use and paying good money to everybody who farms it, and it seemed to me that a co-operative grouping was the best way. And if the co-operative does get floated, and will find me a useful job, I’ll be satisfied. I’m ready to plough as much as possible of my father’s money into the funds.’ He ran the fine brown dust through his fingers and let it sift to the ground. ‘Water’s the main need. Not much use looking for ground water here, though. Pity!’

‘Those tanks can be brought back into service,’ Larry assured him, ‘and once you’ve got your fields levelled, contour channels will cost you very little. You’ll get your water if you get your labour. And if they don’t make you chairman of the co-operative, there’s no gratitude or justice.’

Purushottam tilted his head back and laughed aloud. It was the first time they had heard him laugh, and it was a gay, impulsive, almost startling sound. Only now did they realise that something of the quality of defensive isolation had been banished from his eyes, and the pale, finely-drawn tension had left his features as the formal self-consciousness had been shed from his gait and gestures. It was an unobtrusive transformation, but a complete one. For these two or three weeks, since his homecoming to perform the son’s part at a funeral, he must have been the loneliest young man in India, and suddenly he had companions, even allies.

‘I don’t think I’m cut out for a chairman, somehow. I’ll probably end up as general dog’s-body and mechanic, like Dominic. Do you think I can keep up a household like mine on that? At least until we convert them all into agricultural workers?’

They drove back to the house in the early evening in high content, and the light grew rose-coloured in the sky to westward. Patti and Priya and Lakshman were home before them from Kuttalam, and the servants were keeping watch on the dinner with one eye and the courtyard with the other, waiting for the last of the company to return before serving the meal.

During dinner Purushottam made a valiant effort to keep the conversation general, and defer to everything the girls had to say; but once the big table was cleared it was not long before the large-scale maps came out to cover it again, and the men gathered round with heads bent seriously together, tracing the fall of the land and the course of the meagre rivers, and marking out the possible immediate scope of the new farm.

‘You cannot farm this land by smallholding, and that is what people here are still trying to do. The result is debt everywhere at the first monsoon failure, or the first blight, because there are never any reserves. It can only be made effective on a large scale.’

‘And with a diversified economy.’

‘Exactly. And we are not dealing with a silt-fertilised soil like the deltas, where even on a big scale hand-labour pays off better than mechanical methods. We have less to lose and more to gain.’

They called in Lakshman to view the land they had surveyed during the day, and left the two girls to the newspapers and the radio. Patti watched the hands of the clock slip slowly past the hour of nine, and asked Purushottam resignedly: ‘Have you got a typewriter, by any chance? If you wouldn’t mind, I should like to write a letter home. What with all the trouble at Thekady, I haven’t written for a while, and they do rather tend to expect them every few days.’

He jumped up remorsefully from the table. ‘I’m so sorry, we’re neglecting you terribly. Yes, there’s a typewriter in the office, but it’s a huge old table machine. I could have them bring it up here for you…’

‘No, really, there’s no need, if I can borrow the office for an hour or so. I won’t disturb anything there. It’s just that there really hasn’t been a chance until now, and my mother is the worrying kind.’

‘Of course, if you’ll be comfortable enough there. It might be quieter for you, that’s true, it’s right across at the edge of the yard. I’ll come down with you.’

She protested that she would find it, but he came, all the same. Above the beaten earth of the lower yard the sky arched immense and full of stars, the darkest of blues, and yet so clear that it seemed to have a luminous quality of its own. The low white buildings gathered out of the air whatever light remained, and shone faintly lambent, hollow-eyed with deep windows and doorways, with here and there the murmur of voices and the spark of a lamp. The office, as he had said, was the most remote of all the buildings, even its windows turned away from the yard which all through the day was the centre of activity in the household. It was thick-walled and not very large, one wall stacked high with cupboards and filing cabinets, a big desk set near the window. Both it and the typewriter on it were littered with papers and folders.

‘You were in the middle of something. I’m sorry!’

‘No, I’m nearly straight now. When Mr Das Gupta gets here tomorrow morning I shall be ready for him.’ He swept up the scattered papers and moved them out of her way, and whipped the current sheet out of the machine in such a hurry that he tore it. She exclaimed in regret, and he laughed. ‘It doesn’t matter. I left it so hurriedly this morning that I should have had to do it again in any case, I’ve completely lost the thread. It isn’t more than a quarter of an hour’s work, I’ll do it early in the morning.’

‘A lot of money certainly makes a lot of work,’ she said, so gravely that there was no offence in it. ‘Don’t you ever want to drop the whole thing and just walk out?’

‘I never walked out on anything yet. You can’t abdicate your responsibilities, whatever they are.’

‘No,’ she agreed, ‘you can’t do that. Krishna was right.’

Purashottam shook up the cushion to make the typing chair a little higher for her, and looked round to make sure the light was adequate on the carriage. ‘My father hated figures so much – on paper, that is, he was clever enough with them in his head – that he made this office right away in the corner by the kitchen garden to be free from distractions while he struggled with them. I’ve had cause to be glad about that myself now. You’re sure you have everything you need? There are stamps here, do take whatever you want.’

He left her to it; and only a few paces from the door she heard him break into a light, fleet run, so eager was he to get back to the plans for his super-farm. She sat down at the desk, and fed a clean sheet of paper into the machine, and began to type her letter home.

By the time Priya and Dominic came to look for her, more than an hour later, she had finished not one letter, but two, and was just folding the second into its envelope.

‘One to my grandmother in Scotland, too. They’re both edited rather radically – I could hardly tell them we were so close to what happened in Thekady, could I, they’d be having fits! There,’ she said, thumping down the flap of the envelope, ‘that’s duty done for the next two or three days.’ And she reached into her big shoulder-bag, which was slung over the arm of the chair, for her own store of stamps. She was glad it was not Purushottam who had come to fetch her back to the house; he might have been hurt at seeing her use her own stamps when he had offered her his, and she would have been sorry to hurt him.