Night Train to Jamalpur Read online

  I washed my hands and face. The sound coming from the thunderbox hole was like a complaining voice from the underworld. I pulled the chain, watching the silver whirlpool form and die on the tracks as soon as it had formed. You couldn’t say that Fisher was particularly guilty of what the wife called ‘colour prejudice’. He was prejudiced against every bugger.

  I stepped back into the shaking compartment. I stretched the sheet over the couch, and in doing so I knocked the cotton bag to the floor. There appeared to be something still inside it. It had struck me that the snake attacks seemed to have started at the same time as my arrival in India, but I did not believe the snakes could be connected to the Commission of Enquiry. The snakes were an attack on the railway rather than on those investigating the railway. Either way, I nudged the bag with my foot to make sure the ‘something’ was not something alive. I squinted inside, then fished out a rolled-up mosquito net: the kind you draped over yourself, like a shroud. I turned off the electric light; I retreated beneath sheet and net, and I commenced to sweat.

  I thought of our daughter, Bernadette. John Young had guessed right there as well. She was trouble.

  In her first week at the high school in York, she had been given the stick by the headmistress for laughing at a teacher, a Miss Brewster, who owned a motor car. Miss Brewster parked her car on the asphalt of the school yard, and it seemed that every time she climbed in, it sagged in the middle. The day after Bernadette had received her punishment, Miss Brewster had climbed into her car again; it had sagged again and Bernadette had laughed again, albeit this time outside the school gates. But she was given the stick for a second time, and that had confirmed her as a rebel.

  She had been such a sweet girl too, and – aged five or so – keenly interested in railways. Lydia would deliver her to me at the police office, on the main ‘up’ platform at York station, and we would wander about. She liked the steam from the locomotives – ‘train clouds’ she called them. She would be hypnotised by the sight of a train arriving, and when it had left the station she would be bereft, calling, ‘Come back, come back!’ The train never came back, of course, and I explained that there would be a very great smash if one ever did. So then she wanted to go and see where the trains lived – that is, the sidings. I would walk through the sidings with her, being one of the few men in York with a pass that allowed me to do that, and we would traipse along between the high wagons to the point where I became quite bored. But not Bernadette.

  One day I saw a fellow trying to break the seal on a wines and spirits wagon, and I ran him in – arrested him with Bernadette in tow. She wasn’t frightened but the bloke swore like blazes, and when I’d handed him over to the duty constable in the police office, and taken Bernadette off for her regular treat of an eclair at the station hotel, she pronounced: ‘I did not like that man.’ It had been an important day in her life, as when the car had sagged for the second time. She’d been down on police work ever since, and down on railways as well. As she grew older, she would join Lydia in recommending different jobs to me, something swankier or – what was her other word? – ritzier. Might I not be a lawyer, attending the Crown Court, where all the briefs were so dashing in their long black robes?

  In other words, she was on the way to being a snob, like her mother, but with not much sign of her mother’s social conscience. Bernadette had other virtues though. She was a spirited girl, and very kind (to anyone who didn’t stand in her way). One of her story books contained an illustration of a young girl walking in a ballet dress across the beautiful terrace of a country mansion; the girl held a little sparkling purse, and exuded a great sense of confidence and pride. The caption read ‘On a Birthday Morning!’ and that was Bernadette all over. That was just how she walked though our home village. She was blessed in some way that could not possibly last, so I was always on the look-out for signs of sadness and disappointment that might herald the start of a decline into the reality of the world.

  I spoiled her, I suppose.

  A flash of light came through the window slats; it threw five bars of light on to the compartment floor, and they commenced to move in unison over my bed, and up towards the luggage rack, where they remained for five seconds before being snatched away. We had passed another illuminated factory or insignificant station on the line to Jamalpur. I wanted to get to sleep before the single-line working, because if it was hard to get off on a moving train, it was harder still on a stationary one. But I couldn’t sleep.

  I thought again of Bernadette . . .

  She had been given piano lessons from a young age, and she had stuck to them. In that triumphant year of her scholarship, she played the piano part in Schubert’s piano trio in B flat at the York De Grey Rooms, and it was a particular source of pride to the wife and me that the other girls – violin and cello – were both five years older. Then Bernadette had met Philippe Gregoire. She met him through her literature teacher, Miss Starling. Philippe Gregoire was a black man from America – New Orleans – and he had written a book about being a black man from New Orleans that had won a prize. As such he was a great curiosity in York, and Miss Starling had asked him to give a talk at the high school. Afterwards, he had played the piano in the assembly hall, and he had shown the girls how to play in a special dancing rhythm . . . rag time, it was called, and Schubert went right out the window after that. The girls and Miss Starling had loved it, and the one who had really taken to it had been Bernadette.

  She had been tipped off that American music was all the rage in Calcutta, and this had proved right. For Bernadette and her friends, the place was ‘jumping’. She had fallen in with the daughters of two railway officers, Claudine Askwith and Ann Poole, and they spent all their time playing American music on the piano or playing the records on the ‘gram’, and practising existing dances or – as if there weren’t enough dances already – making up new ones.

  Then we had all gone to the May Ball at the Six O’Clock Club. It was our second week in Calcutta, and even though still malarial, I was dragged there by the wife. The very top railway people were there, keen to hobnob with the near-the-top army officers and Indian civil service types who were the other principal guests.

  The dance was held in a regulation Calcutta mansion, standing in its own compound a little way north of Dalhousie Square. In the lobby, the sola topees of the arriving guests were stacked on shelves fifteen foot high, creating an effect of a sort of library of hats. Aside from the ballroom there were many anterooms, some set aside for ‘games’ and all with their squads of Indian bearers ready to serve glasses of the famous Six O’Clock punch. There wasn’t an orchestra but a ‘band’, which was something racier, and they knew the American dances. It had been immediately obvious to me that they would know them, because when Lydia and I entered the ballroom, the leader of the band, an Anglo-Indian who had a great deal of hair kept down with a great deal of pomade, was smoking a cigarette and talking to a selection of the prettiest women. The ballroom had opened out on to a veranda, and that opened out on to the gardens, where stood little colonies of basket chairs and tables, all bounded by a crumbling and picturesque brick wall, with little lizards darting all over it. Into this wall were set alcoves illuminated by Chinese lanterns. And those alcoves spelt trouble.

  Bernadette had slid away from us on arrival, and I believed she had helped herself to two glasses of punch before filling out her dance card. The filling out hadn’t taken long. She had been, to my mind, the prettiest girl in the room and it turned out that one man – or boy – had booked three dances. He was an Indian, one of only half a dozen in a room containing perhaps three hundred people. The rule of thumb was that no Indian could join a Calcutta club, save for a couple of the clubs that prided themselves on their open-mindedness, and so would admit one or two Indians (provided they were millionaires). You would see more Indians attending the dances, but even here they had to be something special, and this young fellow’s dinner suit was certainly beautifully tailored; it flowed about hi
s slim form in a way you rarely see. His patent shoes sparkled, and there was something sparkling in his lapel, too. It kept collecting the shimmer of the room and sending it out in a silver ray. It did so as he danced with Bernadette.

  The wife and I were not dancing, but looking on from the side. We had danced the previous: a waltz, and that had done nothing at all for my headache. It had struck me, in fact, that a waltz is malaria set to music.

  I asked about the silver ray.

  ‘It’s a diamond,’ said Lydia. She had met the fellow before at an earlier dance, and was now watching him intently. ‘He is the son of a maharajah, and he’s considered holy. Well, he’s a high Brahmin.’

  ‘Where did she meet him?’

  ‘At a game of musical chairs.’

  The wife was telling me this with a note of pride. I said, ‘You can’t have a railwayman’s daughter from York, dancing with an Indian prince.’

  ‘On grounds of colour prejudice, would that be?’

  ‘On grounds they might strike up a romance, and that can only end in tears.’

  We watched them dance: the two were inexplicably of the same mind. Really it was like seeing a horse run or a dog walk – you couldn’t make out how it was done, which was perhaps why it was called the foxtrot.

  Lydia told me the young Indian’s name. His first name was normal enough: Narayan. The rest I couldn’t catch. She told me that, being the son of a raja, he was a rajkumar, and from then on he was referred to between us as ‘The R.K.’

  The dance came to an end, and the dancers became a milling crowd, with Bernadette and the R.K. milling within it. But then they disappeared. They would be in the garden – in one of the brick alcoves. I said to Lydia, ‘Shouldn’t we go and find them?’

  ‘I will in a minute. There’s no harm in a little spooning. She’s nearly seventeen, Jim, and while I know you don’t want to be here, the only reason you are here is because of her.’ That was true enough. We had been invited to the dance by the Askwiths on account of their daughter’s friendship with our daughter. We wouldn’t have made the grade otherwise.

  As the next dance began, I said, ‘She was booked with someone else for this one, and I can’t see her.’

  Lydia turned to me. ‘Jim,’ she said, ‘you’ve gone yellow.’

  ‘Don’t change the subject.’

  ‘You should go back to the hotel.’

  She escorted me back to the lobby, all the time telling me not to fret about the R.K. He was only one of many sons of one of many maharajahs. Were there not about fifty pages of them in the Calcutta Directory? And this boy’s father was amongst the smaller ones. He had only about a hundred and fifty square miles somewhere ‘up country’; Lydia didn’t know exactly where, only that you couldn’t get there by the East Indian Railway. The place was called Suryapore, and it was mainly forest, but there was some coal, and a quantity of ruined temples. The boy’s father, the Maharajah of Suryapore, spent a good deal of time in America. When he was in India, he was not entitled to a gun salute when formally received by the British and so, as far as the Indian aristocracy went, he was something of an also-ran. He was still worth a mint, however.

  The wife was in two minds about the R.K. She could see the dangers of an association, but did not want to display colour prejudice by warning the girl off him. She also admired his looks, his money and his social position. After talking over the matter the next day, I had taken it on myself to speak to Bernadette. She’d blown up as soon as I’d mentioned the R.K.; I’d got cross in turn, and pronounced the ban: she was absolutely forbidden to see the R.K.

  By my reckoning, she’d seen him three times since then, secure in the knowledge that her mother did not support the ban, as long as she was always in public when with him. It had been my fault to start with, of course. I ought not to have brought the two of them to India.

  Judging by the clattering of every loose object in the compartment, the Jamalpur night train had hit full speed. The young dancers of Calcutta had a word for this loose shaking and I could not at first call it to mind. But it came to me at length: ‘syncopation’, and the small satisfaction of recalling it allowed me to drop asleep in spite of all.

  V

  I dreamt of a snake that generally carried itself in the shape of the ‘and’ symbol: ‘ampersand’ I believed was the word, and this snake could open doors by coiling itself around the handles. It seemed to be trying to open the exterior door of my compartment, the one by which I would step down on to the platform when we arrived at our destination, but how could it do that while we were flying along at top speed? I then heard a sort of slow gunshot, and I saw the flare of the gun at the same time, but that couldn’t be right. It was the flare of other guns at other times that I had seen, but I believed the shot I had heard was real. I sat up and turned on the light.

  All was as before. The fan was still turning, I was still alive. No bullet had been loosed in this compartment, but the train was at a stand, and I somehow knew it had been at a stand for some time. I opened the sliding door to the dark corridor; I heard a noise from the left, but I turned right, and walked into a man lying on the floor. He was in his underclothes. I leant down. The corridor carpet was sodden with blood, the man’s underclothes likewise. The man was John Young. The sliding door of what had been his compartment was open, and he was half in and half out of it. A man was standing behind me. I turned – a European probably in his sixties in ghostly white pyjamas that stood out in the gloom. He was the oldish fellow I’d seen on boarding. He had come from compartment number three. He said, ‘What’s wrong with his head?’ and I saw what he meant: about a third of John Young’s head was missing. Fisher now came out of number four compartment in white cotton trousers and braces but no shirt. He had on his boots with laces unfastened. There was an expression on his face that was hard to interpret.

  The oldish man said, ‘I heard a noise.’

  ‘You would do,’ said Fisher, indicating the body. ‘He’s been bloody shot, hasn’t he?’

  Behind Fisher, two sleepy-looking Indian servants were emerging from compartment five.

  The oldish man half turned towards Fisher. ‘Before that. I mean from outside.’

  I said to nobody in particular, ‘How did the shootist get into the carriage?’

  I stepped over Young’s body, and went into his compartment. I turned on the light.

  ‘That’s all the dabs on the switch messed up,’ said Fisher, who was standing in the doorway. But I was not so concerned about fingerprints. It was more important to get the lie of the land. The compartment was much as I’d seen it when talking to John Young, except that his bed had obviously been slept in; or at least lain in. I looked down again at the body. His suit coat had been thrown over his lower legs, and the pocket book had been thrown down on it. Ten-to-one that was now empty of money, but it ought not to be touched.

  ‘Dacoits,’ I said.

  ‘You going to open that?’ said Fisher, indicating the door leading to the outside world. I unlocked it, and it swung open, disclosing the wide blue Indian night, the sound of a million crickets, and a smell like the interior of some great, hot barn. Under the blue light of a quarter moon, I saw an Indian on a stationary horse – might have been five hundred yards off. There were two other Indians on horses a few hundred yards further off again, and they were waiting for him. As I looked at the nearest man, he turned his horse and began riding away towards his fellows, going along the top of an embankment crossing a network of dried-out paddy fields. He was a raggedy-looking man in white; his thin arse went up and down like the ticking of a clock.

  ‘That’s bloody nice, isn’t it?’ said Fisher.

  Behind Fisher, a uniformed Indian leant into the compartment from the corridor. ‘What has been going on here?’

  ‘Oh, good of you to turn up,’ said Fisher.

  The Indian was in white with a red turban and a wide leather belt around his waist. A long stick was wedged into the belt. He was a ‘watch-and-ward’ man,
part of the force that guarded the trains. Fisher indicated the Indians riding away towards the horizon. ‘There you are, pal,’ he said. ‘Throw your bloody stick at them, why don’t you?’

  The corridors of the train were not continuous. It was therefore impossible to get from one carriage to another while the train was moving. The watch-and-ward man had entered by means of one of the two doors leading down from the carriage at the ends of the corridor, and that was obviously how the dacoits had got into the carriage, and they had done so, of course, while the train was at a stop, or slowing to a stop.

  I jumped down from the compartment; the dirty track gravel hurt my bare feet. The Indians were now gone from sight. I looked up at the outside of the compartment door. It was splintered near the lock. So the bandits had tried to come in to John Young’s compartment this way before moving to the end door. I walked three paces over the track ballast, and looked up at the outside of my own, locked exterior compartment door, and my heart beat faster as I saw that it too was splintered. If anything, it was in a worse state than John Young’s door. They’d tried to get into my compartment as well. I walked further along: none of the other compartment doors showed signs of any damage. All the doors looked high up from down on the ground with no platform, but you’d have no trouble getting at them while sitting on horseback.

  Fisher had jumped down from John Young’s compartment, joining me on the track ballast. Behind him came the watch-and-ward man, and another watch-and-ward man, for they always worked in pairs. Fisher commenced to light a Trichinopoly cigar.

  I said, ‘What stopped the train?’ and it was the second watch-and-ward man who answered: ‘Signal, sahib.’

  We were at the single-line working, the site of a predictable stop, and any stopped train was a target for dacoits.