A Passage to India Read online

  Fielding sat down by the bed, flattered at the trust reposed in him, yet rather sad. He felt old. He wished that he too could be carried away on waves of emotion. The next time they met, Aziz might be cautious and standoffish. He realized this, and it made him sad that he should realize it. Kindness, kindness, and more kindness—yes, that he might supply, but was that really all that the queer nation needed? Did it not also demand an occasional intoxication of the blood? What had he done to deserve this outburst of confidence, and what hostage could he give in exchange? He looked back at his own life. What a poor crop of secrets it had produced! There were things in it that he had shown to no one, but they were so uninteresting, it wasn’t worth while lifting a purdah on their account. He’d been in love, engaged to be married, lady broke off, memories of her and thoughts about her had kept him from other women for a time; then indulgence, followed by repentance and equilibrium. Meagre really except the equilibrium, and Aziz didn’t want to have that confided to him—he would have called it “everything ranged coldly on shelves.”

  “I shall not really be intimate with this fellow,” Fielding thought, and then “nor with anyone.” That was the corollary. And he had to confess that he really didn’t mind, that he was content to help people, and like them as long as they didn’t object, and if they objected pass on serenely. Experience can do much, and all that he had learnt in England and Europe was an assistance to him, and helped him towards clarity, but clarity prevented him from experiencing something else.

  “How did you like the two ladies you met last Thursday?” he asked.

  Aziz shook his head distastefully. The question reminded him of his rash remark about the Marabar Caves.

  “How do you like Englishwomen generally?”

  “Hamidullah liked them in England. Here we never look at them. Oh no, much too careful. Let’s talk of something else.”

  “Hamidullah’s right: they are much nicer in England. There’s something that doesn’t suit them out here.”

  Aziz after another silence said, “Why are you not married?”

  Fielding was pleased that he had asked. “Because I have more or less come through without it,” he replied. “I was thinking of telling you a little about myself some day if I can make it interesting enough. The lady I liked wouldn’t marry me—that is the main point, but that’s fifteen years ago and now means nothing.”

  “But you haven’t children.”

  “None.”

  “Excuse the following question: have you any illegitimate children?”

  “No. I’d willingly tell you if I had.”

  “Then your name will entirely die out.”

  “It must.”

  “Well.” He shook his head. “This indifference is what the Oriental will never understand.”

  “I don’t care for children.”

  “Caring has nothing to do with it,” he said impatiently.

  “I don’t feel their absence, I don’t want them weeping around my death-bed and being polite about me afterwards, which I believe is the general notion. I’d far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children. No obligation, with England getting so chock-a-block and overrunning India for jobs.”

  “Why don’t you marry Miss Quested?”

  “Good God! why, the girl’s a prig.”

  “Prig, prig? Kindly explain. Isn’t that a bad word?”

  “Oh, I don’t know her, but she struck me as one of the more pathetic products of Western education. She depresses me.”

  “But prig, Mr. Fielding? How’s that?”

  “She goes on and on as if she’s at a lecture—trying ever so hard to understand India and life, and occasionally taking a note.”

  “I thought her so nice and sincere.”

  “So she probably is,” said Fielding, ashamed of his roughness: any suggestion that he should marry always does produce overstatements on the part of the bachelor, and a mental breeze. “But I can’t marry her if I wanted to, for she has just become engaged to the City Magistrate.”

  “Has she indeed? I am so glad! “he exclaimed with relief, for this exempted him from the Marabar expedition: he would scarcely be expected to entertain regular Anglo-Indians.

  “It’s the old mother’s doing. She was afraid her dear boy would choose for himself, so she brought out the girl on purpose, and flung them together until it happened.”

  “Mrs. Moore did not mention that to me among her plans.”

  “I may have got it wrong—I’m out of club gossip. But anyhow they’re engaged to be married.”

  “Yes, you’re out of it, my poor chap,” he smiled. “No Miss Quested for Mr. Fielding. However, she was not beautiful. She has practically no breasts, if you come to think of it.”

  He smiled too, but found a touch of bad taste in the reference to a lady’s breasts.

  “For the City Magistrate they shall be sufficient perhaps, and he for her. For you I shall arrange a lady with breasts like mangoes… .”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I will not really, and besides your position makes it dangerous for you.” His mind had slipped from matrimony to Calcutta. His face grew grave. Fancy if he had persuaded the Principal to accompany him there, and then got him into trouble! And abruptly he took up a new attitude towards his friend, the attitude of the protector who knows the dangers of India and is admonitory. “You can’t be too careful in every way, Mr. Fielding; whatever you say or do in this damned country there is always some envious fellow on the lookout. You may be surprised to know that there were at least three spies sitting here when you came to enquire. I was really a good deal upset that you talked in that fashion about God. They will certainly report it.”

  “To whom?”

  “That’s all very well, but you spoke against morality also, and you said you had come to take other people’s jobs. All that was very unwise. This is an awful place for scandal. Why, actually one of your own pupils was listening.”

  “Thanks for telling me that; yes, I must try and be more careful. If I’m interested, I’m apt to forget myself. Still, it doesn’t do real harm.”

  “But speaking out may get you into trouble.”

  “It’s often done so in the past.”

  “There, listen to that! But the end of it might be that you lost your job.”

  “If I do, I do. I shall survive it. I travel light.”

  “Travel light! You are a most extraordinary race,” said Aziz, turning away as if he were going to sleep, and immediately turning back again. “Is it your climate, or what?”

  “Plenty of Indians travel light too—saddhus and such. It’s one of the things I admire about your country. Any man can travel light until he has a wife or children. That’s part of my case against marriage. I’m a holy man minus the holiness. Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.”

  Aziz was charmed and interested, and turned the new idea over in his mind. So this was why Mr. Fielding and a few others were so fearless! They had nothing to lose. But he himself was rooted in society and Islam. He belonged to a tradition which bound him, and he had brought children into the world, the society of the future. Though he lived so vaguely in this flimsy bungalow, nevertheless he was placed, placed.

  “I can’t be sacked from my job, because my job’s Education. I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals. It’s the only thing I do believe in. At Government College, I mix it up with trigonometry, and so on. When I’m a saddhu, I shall mix it up with something else.”

  He concluded his manifesto, and both were silent. The eye-flies became worse than ever and danced close up to their pupils, or crawled into their ears. Fielding hit about wildly. The exercise made him hot, and he got up to go.

  “You might tell your servant to bring my horse. He doesn’t seem to appreciate my Urdu.”

  “I know. I gave him orders not to. Such are the tricks we play on unfortunate Englishmen. Poor Mr. Fiel
ding! But I will release you now. Oh dear! With the exception of yourself and Hamidullah, I have no one to talk to in this place. You like Hamidullah, don’t you?”

  “Very much.”

  “Do you promise to come at once to us when you are in trouble?”

  “I never can be in trouble.”

  “There goes a queer chap, I trust he won’t come to grief,” thought Aziz, left alone. His period of admiration was over, and he reacted towards patronage. It was difficult for him to remain in awe of anyone who played with all his cards on the table. Fielding, he discovered on closer acquaintance, was truly warm-hearted and unconventional, but not what can be called wise. That frankness of speech in the presence of Ram Chand Rafi and Co. was dangerous and inelegant. It served no useful end.

  But they were friends, brothers. That part was settled, their compact had been subscribed by the photograph, they trusted one another, affection had triumphed for once in a way. He dropped off to sleep amid the happier memories of the last two hours—poetry of Ghalib, female grace, good old Hamidullah, good Fielding, his honoured wife and dear boys. He passed into a region where these joys had no enemies but bloomed harmoniously in an eternal garden, or ran down watershoots of ribbed marble, or rose into domes whereunder were inscribed, black against white, the ninenine attributes of God.

  Part 2:

  Caves

  Chapter 12

  THE Ganges, though flowing from the foot of Vishnu and through Siva’s hair, is not an ancient stream. Geology, looking further than religion, knows of a time when neither the river nor the Himalayas that nourished it existed, and an ocean flowed over the holy places of Hindustan. The mountains rose, their debris silted up the ocean, the gods took their seats on them and contrived the river, and the India we call immemorial came into being. But India is really far older. In the days of the prehistoric ocean the southern part of the peninsula already existed, and the high places of Dravidia have been land since land began, and have seen on the one side the sinking of a continent that joined them to Africa, and on the other the upheaval of the Himalayas from a sea. They are older than anything in the world. No water has ever covered them, and the sun who has watched them for countless æons may still discern in their outlines forms that were his before our globe was torn from his bosom. If flesh of the sun’s flesh is to be touched anywhere, it is here, among the incredible antiquity of these hills.

  Yet even they are altering. As Himalayan India rose, this India, the primal, has been depressed, and is slowly re-entering the curve of the earth. It may be that in æons to come an ocean will flow here too, and cover the sun-born rocks with slime. Meanwhile the plain of the Ganges encroaches on them with something of the sea’s action. They are sinking beneath the newer lands. Their main mass is untouched, but at the edge their outposts have been cut off and stand knee-deep, throat-deep, in the advancing soil. There is something unspeakable in these outposts. They are like nothing else in the world, and a glimpse of them makes the breath catch. They rise abruptly, insanely, without the proportion that is kept by the wildest hills elsewhere, they bear no relation to anything dreamt or seen. To call them “uncanny” suggests ghosts, and they are older than all spirit. Hinduism has scratched and plastered a few rocks, but the shrines are unfrequented, as if pilgrims, who generally seek the extraordinary, had here found too much of it. Some saddhus did once settle in a cave, but they were smoked out, and even Buddha, who must have passed this way down to the Bo Tree of Gya, shunned a renunciation more complete than his own, and has left no legend of struggle or victory in the Marabar.

  The caves are readily described. A tunnel eight feet long, five feet high, three feet wide, leads to a circular chamber about twenty feet in diameter. This arrangement occurs again and again throughout the group of hills, and this is all, this is a Marabar Cave. Having seen one such cave, having seen two, having seen three, four, fourteen, twenty-four, the visitor returns to Chandrapore uncertain whether he has had an interesting experience or a dull one or any experience at all. He finds it difficult to discuss the caves, or to keep them apart in his mind, for the pattern never varies, and no carving, not even a bees’-nest or a bat distinguishes one from another. Nothing, nothing attaches to them, and their reputation—for they have one—does not depend upon human speech. It is as if the surrounding plain or the passing birds have taken upon themselves to exclaim” extraordinary,” and the word has taken root in the air, and been inhaled by mankind.

  They are dark caves. Even when they open towards the sun, very little light penetrates down the entrance tunnel into the circular chamber. There is little to see, and no eye to see it, until the visitor arrives for his five minutes, and strikes a match. Immediately another flame rises in the depths of the rock and moves towards the surface like an imprisoned spirit: the walls of the circular chamber have been most marvellously polished. The two flames approach and strive to unite, but cannot, because one of them breathes air, the other stone. A mirror inlaid with lovely colours divides the lovers, delicate stars of pink and grey interpose, exquisite nebulæ, shadings fainter than the tail of a comet or the midday moon, all the evanescent life of the granite, only here visible. Fists and fingers thrust above the advancing soil—here at last is their skin, finer than any covering acquired by the animals, smoother than windless water, more voluptuous than love. The radiance increases, the flames touch one another, kiss, expire. The cave is dark again, like all the caves.

  Only the wall of the circular chamber has been polished thus. The sides of the tunnel are left rough, they impinge as an afterthought upon the internal perfection. An entrance was necessary, so mankind made one. But elsewhere, deeper in the granite, are there certain chambers that have no entrances? Chambers never unsealed since the arrival of the gods. Local report declares that these exceed in number those that can be visited, as the dead exceed the living—four hundred of them, four thousand or million. Nothing is inside them, they were sealed up before the creation of pestilence or treasure; if mankind grew curious and excavated, nothing, nothing would be added to the sum of good or evil. One of them is rumoured within the boulder that swings on the summit of the highest of the hills; a bubble-shaped cave that has neither ceiling nor floor, and mirrors its own darkness in every direction infinitely. If the boulder falls and smashes, the cave will smash too—empty as an Easter egg. The boulder because of its hollowness sways in the wind, and even moves when a crow perches upon it: hence its name and the name of its stupendous pedestal: the Kawa Dol.

  Chapter 13

  THESE hills look romantic in certain lights and at suitable distances, and seen of an evening from the upper verandah of the club they caused Miss Quested to say conversationally to Miss Derek that she should like to have gone, that Dr. Aziz at Mr. Fielding’s had said he would arrange something, and that Indians seem rather forgetful. She was overheard by the servant who offered them vermouths. This servant understood English. And he was not exactly a spy, but he kept his ears open, and Mahmoud Ali did not exactly bribe him, but did encourage him to come and squat with his own servants, and would happen to stroll their way when he was there. As the story travelled, it accreted emotion and Aziz learnt with horror that the ladies were deeply offended with him, and had expected an invitation daily. He thought his facile remark had been forgotten. Endowed with two memories, a temporary and a permanent, he had hitherto relegated the caves to the former. Now he transferred them once for all, and pushed the matter through. They were to be a stupendous replica of the tea party. He began by securing Fielding and old Godbole, and then commissioned Fielding to approach Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested when they were alone—by this device Ronny, their official protector, could be circumvented. Fielding didn’t like the job much; he was busy, caves bored him, he foresaw friction and expense, but he would not refuse the first favour his friend had asked from him, and did as required. The ladies accepted. It was a little inconvenient in the present press of their engagements, still, they hoped to manage it after consulting Mr. Heas
lop. Consulted, Ronny raised no objection, provided Fielding undertook full responsibility for their comfort. He was not enthusiastic about the picnic, but, then, no more were the ladies—no one was enthusiastic, yet it took place.

  Aziz was terribly worried. It was not a long expedition—a train left Chandrapore just before dawn, another would bring them back for tiffin—but he was only a little official still, and feared to acquit himself dishonourably. He had to ask Major Callendar for half a day’s leave, and be refused because of his recent malingering; despair; renewed approach of Major Callendar through Fielding, and contemptuous snarling permission. He had to borrow cutlery from Mahmoud Ali without inviting him. Then there was the question of alcohol; Mr. Fielding, and perhaps the ladies, were drinkers, so must he provide whisky-sodas and ports? There was the problem of transport from the wayside station of Marabar to the caves. There was the problem of Professor Godbole and his food, and of Professor Godbole and other people’s food—two problems, not one problem. The Professor was not a very strict Hindu—he would take tea, fruit, soda-water and sweets, whoever cooked them, and vegetables and rice if cooked by a Brahman; but not meat, not cakes lest they contained eggs, and he would not allow anyone else to eat beef: a slice of beef upon a distant plate would wreck his happiness. Other people might eat mutton, they might eat ham. But over ham Aziz’ own religion raised its voice: he did not fancy other people eating ham. Trouble after trouble encountered him, because he had challenged the spirit of the Indian earth, which tries to keep men in compartments.

  At last the moment arrived.

  His friends thought him most unwise to mix himself up with English ladies, and warned him to take every precaution against unpunctuality. Consequently he spent the previous night at the station. The servants were huddled on the platform, enjoined not to stray. He himself walked up and down with old Mohammed Latif, who was to act as major-domo. He felt insecure and also unreal. A car drove up, and he hoped Fielding would get out of it, to lend him solidity. But it contained Mrs. Moore, Miss Quested, and their Goanese servant. He rushed to meet them, suddenly happy. “But you’ve come, after all. Oh, how very very kind of you!” he cried. “This is the happiest moment in all my life.”