The Last Candles of the Night
Ian Bedford
[Lacuna]
2014
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Map of the Nizam’s Dominions, 1947
Chapter One. Incident on the Road
Chapter Two. The Fort at Warangal
Chapter Three. A Nawab’s Palace
Chapter Four. The Last Candles of the Night
Chapter Five. The Blackstone Dancers
Author’s Note on Places, People and Events
To Kalpana. To Kavita.
dilam be-dast-e-to murghi ast dar kaff-e tefli
ke na koshad, na gozaarad, na saazadesh qafasi
My heart in your hand is like a bird in the keeping of a child
Who neither kills it, nor cages it, nor sets it free.
—‘Ali Sher Nava’i of Herat
Hamen khabr hai ke ham hain chiraagh-e-aakhir-e shab
We have heard that we are the last candles of the night …
—Zaheer Kashmiri
Map of the Nizam’s Dominions, 1947
Chapter One. Incident on the Road
1
Now Philip was home for good, Jenny had to change. She was surprised by how little was needed. He prepared his own meals, but Jenny was always fully dressed when he rose, choosing a sari from the chest. In her forty-nine years in Australia, she had seldom left the house without one. But now she dressed for the house. He said nothing, appeared not to notice and no doubt she exploited the occasion, Philip’s re-emergence, for her own ends, and not to please him. Did Philip please her? She stood wondering. Wasn’t it forced, and strange, their indifference?
She stepped, one low step, over the cement runnel of the verandah into the yard, and followed the runnel to the drain with her pan. Nothing should be poured down the sink. For so long as she made sambar for the grandchildren Nora would object to the splashed mess held up by the grate: fragments of dhal and onion, nothing to perturb her or, in this house, she would be the first to say so. It was her house. There was no man of the house.
But there were men in the house, sojourners, one bright grandson, one, not-so-bright, former husband but if he chose to live with her now, it was his business. She declined to make it her business and Nora, on her visits, was meant to take her cue from her mother though she blamed him, detested him, wholly on her mother’s account who – for her part – felt nothing. Let him stay. It was Philip’s grandparents’ house, his own house, or had been, until he relinquished it: made over the deeds to his Indian wife, which was gracious of him. Her eyes fell on the dog’s plate, half-hidden by the nasturtiums. She did not bend but slid it, with her foot, a little deeper into the nasturtiums. There was no longer a dog.
Where would he be now? With Jim. They’d be yarning, that men’s word. She’d yarn, too, with Jim, for as long as he liked. But Jim never invited her to yarn, though he roomed here as her guest. He thought she’d produced Philip out of the folds of her garment for his entertainment. She could swear he even thanked her for Philip. A true raconteur, he called him. Events, it seemed, had made Philip a raconteur, though he had nothing to tell when she knew him. So the world had been kind. A fund of good stories, to amuse a grandson, that’s what he got for cleaving for fifty-odd years to a few hard posts in a distant country, making what she called dead water, an uninhabited pond of his life.
2
Jim brought his girlfriend home. It was a Friday. But Nora – Jim’s mother, and Philip’s surviving daughter – chose that and every Friday as a time to visit her own mother.
Not even Jenny had met Rhondda before. But wasn’t Philip meeting them all? – the whole family? – as if anew? – every time? It was an ordeal for him. There he sat, on the long side of the table, braving Nora, his eyes fixed on Jenny, who offered no protection. Just the three of them – since Jim, forewarned by Jenny, arrived late, after the meal. But Nora had stayed. Her presence threatened to spoil things.
“I’ll go,” she said. “Jim, this is your house. You prefer to live with your grandmother, but your mail still comes to me. Two of these notices are for traffic offences. Nice to meet you, Rhondda. Perhaps, one of these days, I can entertain you.”
But she did not go. As if it were her sole pleasure in life and she would not be torn from it, she sat beadily eying Philip. She saw this redhead had been brought by her son for his grandfather, to grace him on his pedestal. She would say nothing, but, all the more eloquent for saying nothing, she would continue to tax him with the lasting and unforgivable dislocation he had brought on their household.
Jenny directed her former husband: “Take this pair to your room. They’ve brought wine, drink as much of it as you like but we won’t have it here. Try not to make a noise.”
Philip led them off, Jim scooping nectarines from the sideboard. An hour later, Nora took her leave. Jenny appeared, once, at the doorway to Philip’s room. “I’m glad you all came. Good night.”
She lingered in the passage, half-captivated – despite her self-banishment – by the booming of a voice of yore. Not that Philip boomed. The booming was all in her ears. The Nizam, is it? He’s dredged him from nowhere.
Jenny was as little interested these days in the Nizam of Hyderabad as in any other topic in buried India. She was surprised and entertained, all the same, by her eleventh-hour discovery of how smoothly Jim’s calculations had worked. He’d played this beautifully. All Jim had known to begin with – and not from her: even this datum he had prised from Philip! – was that fifty-odd years ago the youthful Army Reservist and BA Honours graduate from Sydney University had woken up headmaster – no less – of a three-teacher pilot school in an outlying district of the Nizam’s Dominions. That was all Jim had, to his purpose. For a grandson with his imagination, it was more than enough. Philip, of course, had not stopped with Hyderabad. He had never looked back. For the next forty-odd years he’d climbed rungs. He took all the prized posts in education, including a head-teacher stint at the world-famous Mayo College near Ajmer. By the mid-’60s