I couldn’t bear having the piss taken out of me. Remote and evil things happened all over the globe; the blackness in Europe spread eastwards and down into the Balkans. People died and cities burned. In England, there was no Gestapo, only broken sleep and patched underclothing, and lorries rolling throughout the barricaded night. I didn’t care! War is strange: it throws people all together and yet it isolates them from each other. Behind a uniform you can be very impersonal. Even a knee-trembler is generally a solitary gesture against loneliness.
Now I was sick with loneliness again in Kanchapur. How long, oh Lord, how long to the next knee-trembler?
With the taste of the beer and the quarrel with Wally Page still on my tongue, I walked towards the far end of the town, past a row of drivers, each sitting almost motionless in his frail carriage behind a withered horse. Every carriage burned a dim light, every driver called out to me – lazily, coaxingly, seductively – offering to take me where I wanted to go. I didn’t know where I wanted to go. Behind the last tonga, half-hidden by tree-shadow, stood a quiet young man. He now stepped forward quickly to my side, grasping my arm with his warm brown hand. His face was heavily pockmarked and he wore a white shirt hanging over blue shorts. A serious-looking young man. With an air of spiritual inquiry, he asked, ‘Why you are walking, sir? You like nice lady for fornication?’
I looked round. Only the tonga-wallahs were within earshot, and they had surely heard it all before.
‘Where is this lady?’
‘Woh, sir, she right close by! Two street only, very near, very nice place! She lie for you now, sir, very pretty. You can come with me look see, sir – just come look see!’ He spread his fingers wide before him, as if to show how open and above-board everything was, her legs included.
‘What’s she like?’ Were we talking about a flesh-and-blood woman?
He could have looked no more serious had he been describing the CO’s daughter. ‘She very lovely girl, sir, pretty face and hands, and body of fine shape and light colour, very very sweet to see.’
‘I bet! What age is she?’
He held my wrist again. ‘You come – I take, and if you no like, no bother, doesn’t matter one litter bit. I t’ink you will like, sir, you see – very nice girl, same many years as you and entirely no ageing in the parts of the body!’
In this broken language of courtship and the fragrance of the evening was something irresistible. Morally pure, my arse! With my heart hammering as if I were already on the job, I said, ‘Okay, just a dekko.’
Of course she would be an old bag …
‘Once you see, sir, you like! Making you much excitement.’
So I delivered myself up for the first time into the hands of the treacherous Indian. Once he saw that I was his, he wasted no more words, moving back among the trees with a gesture that I was to follow him. As soon as he stopped speaking his mottled English, he seemed much more alien, and I went in constant expectation of a cosh on the head.
I had to pursue him down a side lane between two shops, where it was doubly dark and stinking. Narrow though the lane was, people stood there in the blackness. A man called softly to my man, and was answered. A hand slyly felt me as I passed. Even then, on that negligible venture, I was taken by an impulse to dive deeper into this morass of living, to sink into the warrens of India, to disappear for ever from view of all those who had claims on me.
The side lane curved and led into a back street – a street very different in atmosphere from the main one. The main street had a sort of artificial cantonment order to it. This one was narrower, busier, more foetid, less easy to comprehend. This was the real thing, clamorous. We moved into its streams of people, women gliding, porters proceeding at a slow trot, animals going at their own pace. Nobody took any more notice of me, following my man as in a dream, than they did of the sacred cow ambling among the little stalls or the men on ricketty balconies above us, gobbing betel-juice down into the gutters below. The acrid odours, that whining music, reinforced the lustful images in my head. Surely people like this must be at it all the time!
My young man spoke to a boy. The boy said something quickly and went darting away ahead, through the miscellaneous crowd, running as if a tiger was at his heels. My sense of adventure grew; I imagined knives being sharpened for me.
‘Where is this place you’re taking me?’
‘Very soon we come, sir, very near.’
At a corner, a huge deodar was growing. It was difficult to make out in the night and confusion and conflict of shadows. We dived down a side road and from that into a dark, sweet-smelling court. I paused in its black mouth until poor yellow lights gleaming in upper windows allowed me to get my bearings. There was an old tree here, immensely twisted, fainting in the arms of twisted old houses. Silent men were sitting huddled under the tree, smoking – at first I took them for goats, until I made out their cigarette-ends, which glowed intermittently with their breathing.
My young man tenderly clasped my wrist again, perhaps as much feeling my pulse as detaining me.
‘Lovely girl, sir, waiting for you here with sundry embraces, just now, sir, in this room close by.’
Again a whispered word with a half-seen stranger, as we stepped between pillars supporting a balcony or a roof, pushed past a stable containing an animal of some kind (I could hear it moving restlessly), and came to a door. In the wall beside the door, a tiny candle burned in a candle-sized alcove. A faded blossom lay beside the candle, while night insects hovered round the flame. The door was slightly open.
‘Come in, sir, come in!’
The young man pushed the door wider. I could not make out the interior at all, so dimly was it lit. Hesitating on the threshold, and still being able to hear the movements of the animal we had passed, I imagined at first that I was looking into a stable, with a high wooden partition barring most of the space. There seemed to be no furniture. Two or three people – including a boy who might have been the boy who ran on ahead – were standing waiting in the dimness. One of them called out huskily in an Indian tongue.
As my eyes grew used to the light, I made out a face near the ceiling of the interior, staring down at me through ironwork at the top of the partition. At that moment, one of the people in the shadows lifted up an oil-light, so that the watching face took on detail.
How could I describe it? Even next day, it was like a face in a dream. Its dark liquid eyes and its mouth, the black hair neatly gathered back, were common property of millions of Hindu girls. Yet the excitement and imagined danger of the circumstances were so intense that I felt at once I knew her character: pitiful, pliable, timid, passionate. Her face was naked to me in the light.
While the light was still brushing shadows of bars across her face, she became an individual for me – my first foreign woman! Was this the girl they had brought me to? Then I loved her. Sex I wanted, but far more than that I wanted love!
It seemed that my young man was having an argument with the people in the room – for it was a room, and the girl was looking down at me between the bannisters of a wooden staircase. In the delay, she and I stared across at each other.
As we stood there, a wash of brilliance swept round the court outside. It picked out the senile old men and the doomed tree, then lost them in shadow again. Pillars, vines, decaying houses, stable – then the beams of light swung and caught me on the threshold of the room. I turned. As I did so, my young man pushed me from behind. I was outside, in the court again, and felt the door slammed behind me. I heard a bolt clatter home. Two MPs with truncheons jumped out of their jeep and ran towards me.
It