Death to the Landlords

Six

Malaikuppam: Wednesday Morning

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They were up for breakfast at six, but Purushottam had been up for an hour and more by that time, first superintending the preparation of a supply of food for them to take with them, then re-typing the memorandum he had spoiled the previous day. He was a rapid but erratic typist, and by the time he was called to breakfast he had finished the job, and turned to arranging everything relevant in order, and tidying away everything irrelevant from sight. A quarter of an hour’s strenuous work after the Land-Rover had departed, and everything would be ready.

A dark-brown maidservant, too shy to speak, brought morning tea to Patti and Priya in their room. She drew the curtains, and there on the table beside Patti’s large bag were the two letters, ready stamped and labelled for air mail.

‘Purushottam will send them to the post for you,’ said Priya.

‘Oh, I’ll take them with me. We can drop them in a box in the first town we pass through. You got on to first-name terms with him over the maps, did you?’ she said carelessly.

‘No,’ said Priya composedly. ‘I just thought of him so. I have not called him so as yet.’

They dressed and packed briskly, forewarned by now of Larry’s strict time-keeping. In four hours or so they would be in Nagarcoil. Home, for Priya; and even for Patti, in a sense, home.

India had not quite grasped the vital nature of time to a western mind, and both the tea and coffee came rather late; but in spite of that, it was only just after seven o’clock when they all walked out to the terrace, and down the steps to where the Land-Rover waited. The servants had collected all the bags from their rooms, and waited to stow them wherever Lakshman indicated. Larry had the bonnet of the Land-Rover up, intent on the engine. Purushottam and Dominic found themselves standing together in the soft morning light, with nothing left to be done. They looked at each other and smiled.

‘Please give my reverences and regards to the Swami, if you should see him again before he finds time for me. Tell him I rely on him to smooth my passage with the state government. If they agree to let me do it this way, nobody in Delhi will raise any difficulties. I’ve thought about this ever since I got the news, in England…’

He had never felt alone or lonely in England until then; never until his widowed father died in his prime, and left to a virtual stranger – yes, however loving and bound, still a stranger – the estate he had tried to hold inviolate against the tide of events. Then in an instant he had known how Indian he was, and felt the tendons of his heart contracting and driving him back here, where he had been raised, where he knew every soul in the nearest three villages, every tenant for ten miles around, and felt for them as his father had felt, but had other means of expressing his membership.

‘No, before then, really. Ever since I began to grow up and think for myself, and not just as I was taught. We could be almost self-supporting here. They all keep two or three buffalo, the women take care of them, they want them for milk, and labour, and manure. Give us time, and we might have a dairy, too – not a huge affair like Anand, just a small district Anand. And we have smiths, good workmen, we could be the district tool-shop and repair station within a year. From that it isn’t so far to a small factory for specialist tools – why not?’

‘Why not?’ agreed Dominic. In India there is one factor which is never missing and never in short supply: manual skill of all kinds, prepared to copy anything, prepared to improvise anything, given the idea. Something not to be found in repetitive processes, production belts and modern organisation of labour.

The two girls stood a little apart, ready to get aboard when everything was loaded. They had done everything they had to do, and now there was nothing whatever to distract them from listening.

‘Do you really think they’ll buy the idea?’

‘I don’t see why not. They’ve been known to say that the co-operative is the hope of rural India, why should they back out on it in this case? And if the Swami and the Mission come in on it, that should clinch it.

‘There’ll be some tricky relationships to be settled, of course, what with hoping to bring in the small cultivators and the Harijan labourers on a fair footing, but that’s for the legal men to work out. It can be done all right, given the goodwill, and I do believe we shall have that. Just as long as they accept the idea in principle!’

‘They’d be crazy if they didn’t,’ Dominic said, ‘considering you’re offering to give them the central base, a good deal of equipment, all your land and pretty well all the capital you possess.’

‘Well, not quite all, you know. I’ve got some industrial stock and a bit of money my mother left me, I’m keeping that for insurance. But what do I need with a plantation establishment like this? My generation doesn’t want to live this way. I don’t really need any more, basically, than any man down there in the village – less than those who’ve got families to feed. I rather look forward to working my own passage on the same terms as the rest. Not that it will work out that way,’ he added honestly. ‘The name counts for a lot, and there’s no way of altering that even if I wanted to. I shall be voted in there somewhere among the management, I know that. And I shall enjoy it, too, making this district work for every soul who lives in it, more efficiently than it’s ever worked before. But at least I shall have to be voted in! If there’d been anyone left in the family but myself and one decrepit old great-aunt,’ he admitted, ‘it wouldn’t have been so simple. But there’s no one now to object if I choose to give away everything I’ve got’

He would not have said that so simply if he had remembered that the girls were only a couple of yards away; but he had forgotten them utterly, he was speaking only to Dominic, who already knew his mind.

The luggage was all stowed. Lakshman opened the door for the girls to climb aboard, and Larry shut down the hood, and drew breath to make his farewells.

‘You’ve been immensely kind to let us all descend on you like this—’

Patti, who had opened her shoulder-bag and was rummaging frantically in its tangled interior, suddenly exclaimed: ‘Damn! I knew I should leave something behind. Is the office open, Purushottam? I went and left my diary in there last night, I remember now… I must run and fetch it!’

‘I’ll go!’ he offered immediately, but she was already in flight.

‘No, I know exactly where I left it. I won’t be a moment!’ Back over her shoulder floated a long-drawn: ‘Sorry, everybody!’ She ran, the bag bobbing under her arm, all down the gently sloping court, little purls of dust dancing at her heels.

‘Just like a woman,’ said Larry philosophically, and glanced at his watch. ‘Oh, not so bad! Only eight minutes late.’

‘After some months in my country that’s extraordinarily good time-keeping.’

‘Look, you’ve got my address – let me know if you get started on the work here, and if I’m still around I’d like to be in on it.’

‘I shall be glad if you can! In any case, come again before you leave India.’ They stood and waited. Patti had vanished into the deep doorway of the distant office. Still they waited, and she did not reappear.

‘So she knew exactly where she’d left it!’ said Larry resignedly.

‘I’ll go and help her look,’ Priya offered.

She had taken no more than two or three steps away from the Land-Rover when there was suddenly a curious quiver that shook the outlines of solid objects, and made the earth seem to heave with an imprisoned and contained life of its own. Then a muffled reverberation like a great, smothered gust of air caused the shape of the office to bulge and quiver, the thatch lifted and lurched drunkenly aside, borne on a wave of dust, the splintered door sagged outwards and fell from its upper hinge, and from the windows at the rear two clouds of dust and debris billowed, dissolving slowly into air. The sound of the explosion was strangely deadened and contained within the yard-thick mud walls, but the blast came undulating like a snake across the earth, smoking with dust-devils, whipped at the folds of Priya’s sari and slashed her ankles with gravel. Her eyes were blinded, and the wind pressed against her, holding her motionless. She felt someone’s arm take her about the waist, and someone’s body intervene between her and the tearing force that assaulted her; and she clung with closed eyes to this sheltering body until the ravaging wind had spent itself and left them still upright. She heard someone’s voice saying, even before the sound of running feet began:

‘Oh, my God, my God, not again!’

And another voice, her own voice, saying, not entreatingly, but with fierce professional authority, as she looked up into Purushottam’s face:

‘Let me go! Let me go to her! This is my job!’

The office, when they groped their way into it through the dense fog of dust and the particles of paper, wood-splinters and debris from the burst thatch, was a scarred shell, windows and window-frames blown out and scattered over the kitchen-garden at the rear, where three terrified but undamaged children crouched screaming hysterically, the door a tangle of sagging planks, the floor deep in wreckage. What was left of the typewriter, a skeleton of torn-out keys and twisted metal, lay under the shattered windows. The desk, every joint ripped asunder, lolled against the wall.

They stumbled over the body of Patti Galloway as they fumbled their way blindly within, and at first they did not even realise what it was. Papers and dust covered her, she was a roll of matter powdered over with dissolution. Tatters of clothing draped her, once they brushed the dust aside, but she was ravaged and disrupted like a rag-doll torn up in a temper. Dominic retrieved one sandal from the far corner of the little room. The tight enclosure of this place had magnified the effect of the explosive far beyond what they had seen in the open at Thekady. And yet there seemed to be some things that were almost untouched, the soft, pliable things that blew in the wind and made no resistance, like the long, straight fair hair that slid fluidly over Priya’s arm as she raised the mangled head.

Patti was dead before they ever reached her.