dim, falling snow.
He had only to lift his eyes to see the mountains themselves standing silently in the distance beyond green foothills. They rose up like ramparts barring access to the great Tibetan plateau beyond, a forbidden kingdom jealously guarded by its protector deities. And, more prosaically, by armed Tibetan border guards.
As he stepped down from his pony, the spices and perfumes of the bazaar brought back to him vivid memories of his father. He remembered walking here with him, followed by their chaprasst, Jit Bahadur. And behind would come his mother dressed in white, carried in an open dandy on the shoulders of four impeccably dressed servants. That had been in the days when his father was stationed nearby as British Resident at the native court of Mahfuz Sultan.
Arthur Wylam had been an important man, appointed to his post by the Viceroy himself. The Wylams had been Anglo-Indians for three generations: Christopher’s grandfather William had come out with the Company just before the Mutiny and had stayed on afterwards as an ICS District Magistrate in Secunderabad. Young Christopher had been brought up on stories of the great Raj families the Rivett-Carnacs, the Maynes and the Ogilvies and had been told repeatedly that it was his duty, as it would one day be that of his own son, to add the name of Wylam to that illustrious roll.
Kalimpong had scarcely changed. The main street, a rambling affair of little shops, rang to the sound of hawkers and muleteers as it had always done. Here, Bengali merchants rubbed shoulders with little Nepali Sherpas and fierce-looking nomads from Tibet’s eastern province of Kham; pretty Bhutanese women with their distinctive short-cropped hair collected glances from young trap as making their first pilgrimage to Buddh Gaya; cheerful Chinese traders argued with sharp Marwari merchants and made a profit out of it. On a flat stone in the middle of the bazaar, a blind man sat begging, his eyes running sores, his fingers bent into an attitude of perpetual entreaty. Christopher tossed a coin into the upturned hand and the old man smiled a toothless smile.
Christopher’s father had always preferred the bustle and anarchy of Kalimpong to the stiff formality of Darjeeling, the British administrative centre some fifteen miles to the west. How many times had he told Christopher that, if he was to live in India, he must learn to be an Indian? Arthur Wylam had in many ways despised his own caste the Brahmins, the heaven-born of the Indian Civil Service and Indian Political Service for their insularity and prejudice.
The Civil List, with its tedious enumerations of precedence, the clubs
with their ridiculous rules of etiquette and protocol, the effective
apartheid that made even high-born and educated Indians outsiders in
their own country all had at one time or another drawn his wrath. His
love for the Indian people, for their languages, their customs, their
religions, their foolishness and their
wisdom, had made him an effective and eloquent intermediary ‘ between the Government of India and the various native rulers to whose courts he had been assigned. But his scorn for convention in a society riddled by it the way a chest of drawers is riddled by worms had earned him enemies.
1 Christopher left his pony at a stable and took his bags to a small t rest-house run by an old Bhutanese woman near McBride’s Wool Depot. The rest-house was noisy and smelly, and it teemed with energetic little Kalimpong fleas whose great-great-grandparents I had come to town in a particularly noxious sheepskin from Y Shigatse; but it was the sort of place where no-one would ask too many questions about who a person was or what he was doing in town.
i He could have stayed in the Government guest-house, a small dak-bungalow just outside town, complete with potted plants and f ice and servants. But that would have involved getting chitties in Calcutta and travelling as a Government official the last thing either Christopher or Winterpole wanted. As far as the Governt ment of India was concerned, Christopher Wylam was a private , citizen visiting the hill country merely to relive some pleasant childhood memories and recover from his wife’s death. If there was trouble and questions were asked, Mr. Wylam would not officially exist.
When Christopher came downstairs, the rest-house was in turmoil. A
party of Nepalese had arrived after a journey of almost three weeks
from Kathmandu. They had come to find work in
India, in the tea-plantations round Darjeeling. There were about a dozen of them, poor men in ragged clothes, farmers whose barley had failed that year, leaving them without enough food for the winter. They had come to the rest-house on the recommendation of a Nepalese trader whom they had met on their way, but now the bossy little landlady was telling them there was no room for so many.
There was little likelihood of the scene turning genuinely ugly such outbursts seldom went beyond words or, at the most, some harmless pushing and shoving. But Christopher felt sorry for the men. He had lived with peasants just like them in the past, and had travelled widely in Nepal: he could understand what it was that had forced them to leave their homes and families at this time of year to make such a hazardous and uncomfortable journey, carrying their provisions on their own backs.
What a contrast there was with his own journey to India.
Winterpole had arranged for Christopher to fly there in a Handley Page biplane by way of Egypt, Iraq and Persia. While these men had been trudging through snow and ice, buffeted by high winds and in constant danger, he had flown like a bird across the world, his worst discomforts cramp and a little cold.
He felt an impulse to intervene, but checked himself just as he was about to step forward. Instinct gave way before training: the rules of his trade said ‘do not draw attention to yourself, merge into the background and stay there, do nothing curious or out of character’. He had come to Kalimpong in the guise of a poor English box-wallah from Calcutta a trader down on his luck and desperate for a new venture away from the scenes of his failure.
No-one would give such a man a second glance: he was a common enough sight in the doss-houses of the big cities and the flop-downs of the frontier bazaars.
Christopher turned away from the shouting peasants and went into the rest-house’s common room. This was the centre of the house’s activities, where guests cooked their own food during the day and where those without bedrooms slept by night.
The room was dark and grimy and smelt of sweat and old food.
In the corners, bales of wool and gunny sacks filled with rice or barley were stacked up high. By one wall, an old man and woman were cooking something over a small iron tripod. Near them, under a greasy-looking blanket, someone else was trying to sleep. A fly buzzed monotonously as it toured the room, out of season, dying, finding nothing of interest. A girl’s voice singing came through the half-shuttered window. She sang in a dreamy, faraway voice, a Bengali song about Krishna, simple but possessed:
Bondhur bdngshl bdje bujhi bipine Shamer bdngshi bdje bujhi bipine.
I hear my lover’s flute playing in the forest;
I hear the dark lord’s flute playing in the forest Christopher imagined the girl: pretty, dark-eyed, with tiny breasts and hair pulled tight in long plaits, like the images of Radha that hung on the walls of so many homes. For a moment, he wondered what she was really like, singing in the alley outside as if her heart would break. Then he called out, breaking the spell of her voice, and a boy came.
“Yes, sahib. What do you want?”
“Tea. I’d like some tea.”
“Ystrang?
“No, not bloody ystrang! Weak tea, Indian-style. And get me a chotapeg to go with it.”
“No whiskey here, sahib. Sorry.”
“Then bloody get some, Abdul. Here,
take this.” He tossed a grimy rupee to the boy.
“Step lively! Juldi,juldi.”
The boy dashed out and Christopher leaned back against the wall. He hated the role he had chosen to play, but he played it because it made him inconspicuous. That sickened him more than anything that it was possible to be inconspicuous by being rude and that politeness to a native would have made him stand out like a sore thumb.
The fly buzzed and the girl’s voice continued outside, rising and ,
falling as she went about her chores. Not since his arrival in “
Calcutta had Christopher had time to sit and think. The journey had
