HELEN FORRESTER
The Moneylenders of Shahpur
To Dianne, with love.
CONTENTS
‘They’ll think I’m mad,’ muttered Dr John Bennett to himself, as he waited for the station porter to load his luggage into a tonga. ‘To come back to India, when so many Indians are trying to settle in the West. It won’t make sense to them, even though I was born and brought up here.’ He smiled wryly to himself. ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen …’
For over a year now, he had been thinking seriously of returning to India. He was bored by his job as lecturer in Asian Studies. He was tired of Liverpool, its cold, its dampness, its depression; he longed for sunshine. Suddenly, he could stand it no longer. He had his Air Force pension and some savings; he had no family. At the end of the 1949/50 university year, he packed up his books and joyfully took a boat out to India.
Now he stood unsteadily at the top of the imposing steps of Shahpur station, a thirty-four-year-old Englishman, whose war wounds in his legs ached abominably, and wondered if he would still be welcome; India had, after all, fought very hard to rid itself of the British, and it had had its freedom for only two years.
People pushed and shoved past, their luggage perilously poised on the heads of porters. Where once there would have been a number of white faces amongst them, now there was none. Amid the crowds of Hindus and Muslims, a fair sprinkling of Jains stood out, distinguished by their plain white clothes and their more sedate movements.
Looking across the railway lines,