The Kipling File Page 4

  ‘He left me an orphan, sahib, an orphan. But who has ever won against fate!’

  ‘How is your family?’

  ‘As well as Allah has willed. Your servant’s wife, Rukhsana, never got over Muhammad Din’s death, although we have two more children. She is often crying. When I reproach her, “Gentlewoman, you have two other children to look after,” she stops snivelling, blows her nose into the edge of her dupatta and says, “You cannot understand. You never carried him for nine months in your belly.”

  ‘That is why elders have said that the intelligence of a woman lies in her heels. But enough from your servant. He has brought you Kipling Sahib’s papers which he used to throw away in the wastepaper basket.’

  He took out a roll of yellowing foolscap sheets tied with a string from the side pocket of a rough, long, loose, Kashmiri-style woollen robe and handed it to me. They were discarded drafts of some of Ruddy’s letters, which I have kept with me all these years. Along with his letters to me and the first drafts of some of his pieces for the CMG when I was its editor, they became part of what I call my ‘Kipling File’. Sometimes I have used the file to jog my memory and at others to let young Ruddy’s own voice tell his story.

  *

  On his return from the convocation function of the university, Ruddy insisted that we repair to the Punjab Club for a drink before dinner. He was in high spirits and during the short ride to the club he entertained me with an account of his afternoon,

  ‘Kay, you cannot imagine how a university of Oriental learning differs from an English one! Just imagine a brown-legged son of the East in the red-and-black gown of an MA. I had an irreverent vision of the common room filled with graduates in Mohammedan get-up. At the end, an excited bard began some Urdu verses composed in honour of the occasion. It was a tour de force of his own—but I am sorry to say he was suppressed; that is to say, they took him by the shoulders and sat him down again in his chair. Imagine that at Oxford!’

  I laughed at his vivid description but also felt disquiet at its lack of sympathy for the natives who are earnestly striving for an English higher education and wish to share in the fruits of our civilization. Not that Ruddy was devoid of all sympathy. A great writer—and Ruddy is certainly aspiring to be one of the greats—is marked by the extent and quality of his sympathy as much as by the acuteness of his perceptions and the power of his language. Ruddy’s sympathy for the British in India, especially those at the lower rungs of the society, such as the common soldier, is undeniable; it is much more limited in the case of the natives, where it is restricted to certain sections of the country’s population.

  Unlike his morning’s agreeableness, the club secretary was inexplicably reserved, almost formal, when we stopped at his desk on our way to the club veranda overlooking the lawn.

  ‘Did you have a good day at the CMG, Mr Robinson? Though without Mr Wheeler, who I hear has malaria, the office must be in a bit of a mess. Not that Mr Kipling will not try his best to keep the place running till Wheeler gets back in the saddle.’

  The smile he gave Ruddy did not even try to reach his eyes.

  Reclining on cane-bottomed armchairs on the veranda and sipping our whisky–sodas from heavy crystal glasses placed on the long arms of planter’s chairs, I observed that none of the four or five men who sauntered in for an evening tipple tarried long where we were sitting, as they passed us on their way to the bar. After a perfunctory greeting for Ruddy and a friendlier but brief chat with me about what had brought me to Lahore and from where, the men seemed to be in a hurry to leave. None of them invited us inside for a drink and to be part of the good cheer and jollity whose sounds reached us through the swinging half-doors that separated the bar from the veranda. I was surprised.

  We Anglo-Indians are some of the most welcoming people I know. Armed with only a few letters of introduction, one can travel from one end of India to the other and be received everywhere with frank and cordial hospitality, men taking it as a matter of course that the visitor should stay at their houses—never even asking him, but simply directing a servant to put the visitor’s baggage in such and such room.

  At first, I put the men’s evident coolness towards Ruddy to the usual lot of a newspaperman who, if serious about his profession, is bound to ruffle feathers in a small, tightly knit society that he is reporting on. Especially someone like Ruddy—young, ambitious, irreverent, and with a gift for words, which, if not tempered with sobriety, is bound to shock conventional sensibilities. Ruddy, as I discovered later when we worked together, also had a temper that made him prone to act first and then, rarely enough though, regret later. I have been witness to Ruddy throwing paperweights and, on one occasion, even an inkpot, when a peon entered his office without knocking. ‘Kharab-mijaj siyahi-sahib’—bad-tempered ink sahib—Nikka Singh, the Sikh who looked after the newspaper library, said about him when I took over the editorship of the CMG. I could imagine that sometimes he gave his temper rein in his newspaper pieces, coating some of his sentences with the sharp edge of sarcasm intended to wound more than to amuse.

  I now know that Lahore’s Anglo-Indian society’s antipathy towards Ruddy was more than a reprisal for his youthful cockiness and hot temper. The men running the business of the Empire, many of them more than a decade his senior, believed Ruddy had no respect for the proper order of things, that he was slyly disrespecting them even as he professed his admiration for their work. I have heard people using phrases like ‘boor’, ‘cad’ and ‘acts above his station’ to describe their distaste for Ruddy.

  And not only words. There was the time when the club secretary had to calm down a visiting colonel who was bent on thrashing Ruddy because of a rude remark he’d made on the Indian Civil Service, and one ruder still on the colonel’s girth. No one had come to Ruddy’s aid when he was kicked down the front steps of the club by two lawyers, whose mounting irritation as he kept butting into their conversation with witticisms was visible to everyone but Ruddy. Or perhaps it was visible to him, too, but it acted as a spark for further provocation, more a fire to be fanned than doused. Ruddy, though, was (or pretended to be) blithely unaware of the feelings he aroused in Lahore’s small Anglo-Indian society. When I gingerly alluded to the fact of other members of the club not being especially warm towards him, he said, ‘That is because some of the chaps haven’t forgiven that I work for our rag. They are still upset that the CMG had at first opposed the introduction of the Ilbert Bill in Westminster depriving Anglo-Indians of the legal privilege of trial by white European judges in special courts, but then abruptly changed its tune in a lead article from the editor’s pen.’

  I remembered the turmoil the bill had caused in our own community in Allahabad two years ago. With the exception of my family and two or three professors of Allahabad University, the Anglo-Indians were appalled at what they called an ‘example of Gladstonian folly, nigger judges trying white women in open court!’

  ‘That evening, the day after Wheeler’s leading article appeared,’ Ruddy continued, ‘I was loudly hissed at when I entered the dining room of the club.

  ‘“What’s the joke? Whom are they hissing at?” I asked my neighbour at the table.

  ‘“You,” was the reply. “Your damn rag has ratted over the bill.”

  ‘I was still none the wiser. True, I had glanced over the offending “leader” before putting the paper to bed the previous evening, but had failed to grasp its meaning.

  ‘“You young ass!” said one of the more kindly disposed members. “Don’t you know that your paper has the government’s printing contracts?”

  ‘I did know but had never before put two and two together. So you see, Kay, it is more the feeling against the paper than my person that continues to linger in a couple of members.’

  Not knowing better, I believed him.

  We ordered another round of drinks. Over a whisky–soda, Ruddy was the best of company, bubbling with delightful humour as he regaled me with racy stories about the goings-on in Lahore soc
iety. But even then, a couple of his stories made me uneasy. Without being fully aware of it at the time, I sensed that their malice suggested the presence of a sadism that came to the fore in later years in some of his stories such as ‘The Moral Reformers’, in the collection Stalky & Co. In this story, the pleasure taken by our master storyteller in the bullying, beatings and cruelty of adolescent boys in a British boarding school is palpable. Ruddy may well be the greatest writer of short stories in the English language as some critics aver, but I am repelled by the gusto with which he describes, in salivating detail, each one of the tortures inflicted by Stalky and his friends on the two boys, even if they are bullies. The tortures range from ‘head knuckling’ to putting a match to one of the victim’s thin-haired first moustache of youth, ‘fluffed off in flame’, and the burnt stumpage then rubbed away roughly by Stalky. And each time, as the gagged and trussed boys writhe in pain and helplessness, they hear Stalky intone, ‘The bleating of the kid excites the tiger.’

  THREE

  I met other members of the Kipling family at dinner that evening. Lockwood presided at the head of the table. Ruddy and I were to his right and the women to his left. Lockwood’s leonine head and grey beard gave the impression of a far bigger man than belied his small and pudgy frame, now partly hidden by the table. The contrast between mother and daughter, who sat across me, could not be more striking. Alice Kipling, née Macdonald—as she immediately let me know by mentioning a letter she had received that day from her sister Louisa, Ruddy’s godmother, who was married to Stanley Baldwin, now a rising star in the Conservative Party and widely tipped as a future prime minister—was a handsome woman struggling to hold on to her vanishing youth. Of medium height, Alice must have once been as slender as her daughter, Trix. The passage of years had thickened her waist and forced her to wear long-sleeved dresses that hid the sagging flesh of her upper arms. Her dark-brown hair was showing the first signs of grey. The expertly applied makeup, with delicately pencilled eyebrows that drew attention to what was her best feature, her expressive grey eyes, could not disguise the ravages that years of exposure to the Indian sun had wrought on her looks. As with most Anglo-Indian women of her age, in spite of a desperate recourse to lotions and creams, the Indian sun had gradually but inexorably sucked out the moisture from her skin, leaving it sallow, with the beginning of creases around the eyes and the corners of the mouth, their arcs more deeply etched around the throat.

  After that first remark, Alice took little part in the conversation during dinner. I was uncomfortable with her protracted silences and sought to draw her out but was answered with monosyllables. The one exception, when she came alive, was when I complimented her on the quality of the food. My praise was not the insincerity of a courteous guest but heartfelt appreciation of the delicious meal we were being served. The food was a welcome departure from the Anglo-Indian tradition, also followed in my own family, where roasts of chicken, pork or beef dominate the menu and heavy brown sauces are created by thickening a ready-made curry powder with flour and adding it to a base prepared by frying onions, garlic and ginger in ghee or animal fat. At the Kipling table, even the classic mulligatawny soup tasted better. As did the main course of Lancashire hotpot, the lamb casserole with sliced potatoes on top, here enhanced with chillies, cardamom, clove and peppercorn and accompanied by numerous side plates of chutneys, dried banana, Bombay duck, chopped onions and hard-boiled eggs.

  ‘The difference is the curry powder. It is freshly made, not the premixed stuff from tins, which most Anglo-Indian housewives believe is superior. Our khansama has strict instructions never to use ready-made stock and to always grind the spices fresh, each time,’ Alice informed me before she again withdrew into a brooding silence.

  The family seemed accustomed to Alice’s shifting moods. Her self-chosen exile from our company did not seem to affect the flow of conversation at the table. Ruddy has described his mother as ‘all Celt and three parts fire’. What I experienced on that first evening with the family was the remaining part, the fire doused, the ashes wet. It was only in subsequent meetings that I saw Alice’s other side, vibrant and alive, animating any conversation with her ready wit and repartee. It was a delight to see her agile mind at play, although at other times the same mind could take on the texture of a sodden rag. Even then I wondered how the family, especially her husband, coped with her unpredictability. I must admit that I also found the extent of Alice’s self-regard trying. Ruddy’s mother certainly thought well of herself. There was no doubting Alice’s genuine love for poetry and music, and she did have a fine singing voice. But to believe yourself to be a gifted poet and someone who could well have been a professional singer on no more evidence than the strength of your passion for the two arts? As if the intensity of your feelings and the immediacy of your response is sufficient proof of your talent?

  And Trix? Ruddy’s three-year-younger sister who had been back in India for a year now? Petite and slender, with surprisingly full breasts, she had just returned from her evening ride and changed into an off-white frock after her bath. Her oval face with the flawless peaches-and-cream skin, which some young English girls are blessed with, was still flushed from the exercise and the cold bath. Escaping from a bun coiled high at the back of her head, tendrils of damp, silken hair trailed behind an ear on to a long neck, begging for strings of pearl to encircle it. Content to listen to her father and brother as they agreed or jousted with each other, she rarely interjected her own opinion in their discussions. Yet she was fully present throughout the dinner conversation, her luminous grey eyes seeming to deepen or pale in colour according to every passing emotion that flitted across her open face.

  It had taken only a few minutes to leave me smitten, and I tried to keep my eyes from flying in her direction and furtively drinking in her beauty, fearful that one of my hosts would notice.

  During the day, Lockwood had had problems with the carpenters working to finish the extension to the museum. Normally a gentle, even-tempered man, reputed to be tolerant to a fault, he must have been provoked beyond his limits.

  ‘Doors don’t come up properly to the jambs. The windows are never straight. There is no finish in the roof. The floors and plinths are badly put down and timber is wastefully misused without any increase of strength. Native hinges and locks and ironwork, generally, are all abominations. There is no correct rabbeting, mortising, mitring, dovetailing or joinery of any sort and this disgusts me a good deal. The very keys on the railway lines seem as if they had been hammered in by a man who did not know which end of the hammer he ought to use. Everything here is kutcha, raw, unfinished, slack and wrongly jointed and built. Everything is just as an English workman would never turn it out.’

  As someone who always saw two sides of every issue, Lockwood immediately sought to temper his outburst,

  ‘Can you understand it, Mr Robinson? These are the same people who excel in metalworking and woodcarving. I have collected some wonderful examples of works of native craftsmen for the museum. The attention to detail, the imagination and exquisite craftsmanship in these pieces are equal to that of any other people in the world.’

  ‘Perhaps because they value their crafted pieces more than the doors and windows of their houses? I have noticed that in a race that has so little concept of time, where unpunctuality is a norm, every religious ritual in a temple or mosque still begins at the dot of its prescribed time. Religious occasions are important, the others are not.’

  ‘Don’t make excuses for them, Kay,’ Ruddy joined in. ‘We will never understand the natives unless we become like them, think like them. Can an Englishman ever apprehend the inconceivable filth of mind the peoples of this country are brought up on right from their cradle? Realize the views—one-tenth of the views—they hold about women, and their absolute incapacity for seeking the truth as we understand it? People who cannot fathom that the opposite of truth is a lie, not another form of the same truth. People who cannot think in terms of either/or, cannot reco
gnize contradictions in what they say. The gulf that lies between the two races in all things is immeasurable. If we are honest we will admit that all of us are prone to despise the native and, except in matters of trade, to have little or nothing in common with him. Now this is a wholly wrong attitude of mind but it’s one that a Briton who washes, and doesn’t take bribes, and who thinks of other things besides intrigue and seduction, most naturally falls into. When he does, it’s goodbye to his chances of attempting to understand the people of the land.’

  ‘Now, Ruddy,’ Lockwood, ever seeking to be balanced, said, ‘you are right about the native being different from an Englishman. But that is why we are here. To narrow the gulf between us by giving them the benefit of an English education. I see the result in my own school where we teach them to first see before they can draw, paint or sculpt. The cow and the bull are sacred to Hindus; why then are cattle forms so vaguely seen by the Hindu artist? Because there is too little observation of nature and the world. The native mind dwells in a cloud cuckoo land full of imaginary forms, a jungle never penetrated by the light of fact or reason. But it can be educated and thus changed, to be more like ours. The natives who go through our education system are now beginning to care for accurate statements of fact, whether in a literary, scientific or artistic sense.

  ‘Although I must say that I will regret the extinction of the winged horses and other creatures of fantasy in their art,’ Lockwood added.

  The bearer, a strapping young Pathan in white livery, scarlet cummerbund and starched white turban tied Peshawar-style around a skullcap, with one end hanging down the back almost to the waist, silently cleared the table. The dessert was a delicious steamed ginger pudding, which I much prefer to the obligatory bread pudding served in most Anglo-Indian homes. Ruddy was not yet finished.

  ‘Pater has always been an unregenerate optimist,’ Ruddy addressed me. ‘First, when he says “native”, who does he mean? The Muslim who hates the Hindu, the Hindu who hates the Muslim, the Sikh who loathes both, or the semi-anglicized product of our Indian colleges who is hated by Sikh, Hindu and Muslim? Do you mean the Punjabi who will have nothing to do with the Bengali? The Maratha to whom the Punjabi’s tongue is as incomprehensible as Russian to me? The Parsi who controls the whole trade of Bombay, looks down on all other natives and ranges himself on all questions, as an Englishman? The Sindhi who is an outsider, the Bhil or Gond who is an aborigine, the Rajput who despises everything on God’s earth but himself? Which one of all the thousand conflicting tongues, races, nationalities and peoples between the Khyber Pass and Ceylon do you mean? There is no such thing as “Indians”. You may rest assured that if we didn’t hold the land, in six months it would be one big cockpit of conflicting principalities.