English August An Indian Story Upamanyu Chatterjee Read online

  One

  Through the windshield they watched the wide silent road, so well-lit and dead. New Delhi, one in the morning, a stray dog flashed across the road, sensing prey. ‘So when shall we meet again?’ asked Dhrubo for the eighth time in one hour. Nor that parting was too agonizing and that he couldn't bear to leave the car, but that marijuana caused acute lethargy.

  ‘Uh . . .’ said Agastya and paused, for the same reason. Dhrubo put the day's forty-third cigarette to his lips and seemed to take very long to find his matchbox. His languorous attempts to light a match became frenzied before he succeeded. Watching him Agastya laughed silently.

  Dhrubo exhaled richly out of the window, and said, 'I’ve a feeling, August, you're going to get hazaar fucked in Madna.’ Agastya had just joined the Indian Administrative Service and was going for a year's training in district administration to a small district town called Madna.

  ‘Amazing mix, the English we speak. Hazaar fucked. Urdu and American,’ Agastya laughed, ‘a thousand fucked, really fucked. I'm sure nowhere else could languages be mixed and spoken with such ease.’ The slurred sounds of the comfortable tiredness of intoxication, '''You look hazaar fucked, Marmaduke dear.” “Yes Dorothea, I'm afraid I do feel hazaar fucked” — see, doesn't work. And our accents are Indian, but we prefer August to Agastya. When I say our accents, I, of course, exclude yours, which is unique in its fucked mongrelness — you even say “Have a nice day” to those horny women at your telephones when you pass by with your briefcase, and when you agree with your horrendous boss, which is all the time, you say “yeah, great” and “uh-uh.'''

  ‘Don't talk shit,’ Dhrubo said and then added in Bengali, ‘You're hurt about your mother tongue,’ and started laughing, an exhilarated volley. That was a ten-year-old joke from their school-days in Darjeeling, when they had been envious of some of the Anglo-Indian boys who spoke and behaved differently, and did alarmingly badly in exams and didn't seem to mind, they were the ones who were always with the Tibetan girls and claimed to know all about sex. On an early summer afternoon, in the small football field among the hills, with an immaculate sky and the cakelike white-and-brownness of Kanchanjanga, Agastya and Prashant had been watching (Agastya disliked football and Prashant disliked games) the usual showing off with the ball. Shouts in the air from the Anglos (which increased whenever any Tibetan female groups passed the field, echoing like a distant memory, ‘Pass it here, men!’ ‘This way, men!’ ‘You can't shoot, your foot's made of turd or what men!’ (Agastya had never heard any Anglo say ‘man’). He and Prashant had been lazily cynical about those who shouted the most and whose faces also contorted with a secret panic in the rare moments when the ball did reach them. Then some Tibetan girls had come together and taken out a fucking guitar. ‘The Tibs and the Anglos always have guitars,’ Prashant had said. Football had been abandoned. Then laughter and twanging. ‘It's the colour of the Anglo and Tib thighs,’ Prashant had said, ‘not like us.’ Agastya's envy had then blurted out, he wished he had been Anglo-Indian, that he had Keith or Alan for a name, that he spoke English with their accent. From that day his friends had more new names for him, he became the school's ‘last Englishman,’ or just ‘hey English’ (his friends meant ‘hey Anglo’ but didn't dare), and sometimes even ‘hello Mother Tongue’ — illogical and whimsical, but winsome choices, like most names selected by contemporaries. And like most names, they had paled with the passage of time and place, all but August, but they yet retained with them the knack of bobbing up out of some abyss on the unexpected occasion, and nudging a chunk or two of his past.

  A truck roared by, shattering the dark. ‘Out there in Madna quite a few people are going to ask you what you're doing in the Administrative Service. Because you don't look the role. You look like a porn film actor, thin and kinky, the kind who wears a bra. And a bureaucrat ought to be soft and cleanshaven, bespectacled, and if a Tamil Brahmin, given to rapid quoting of rules. I really think you're going to get hazaar fucked.’

  ‘I'd much rather act in a porn film than be a bureaucrat. But I suppose one has to live.’

  ‘Let's smoke a last one, shall we,’ said Dhrubo, picking up the polythene bag from the car seat. ‘In Yale a Ph.D wasn't a joke. It meant something. It was significant. Students thought before they enrolled. But here in Delhi, allover India’, Dhrubo threw some loose tobacco out of the window, ‘education is biding time, a meaningless accumulation of degrees, BA, MA, then an M.Phil. while you join the millions in trying your luck at the Civil Services exam. So many people every year seem to find government service so interesting,’ he paused to scratch his elbow, ‘I wonder how many people think about where their education is leading them.’

  ‘Yet you returned from Yale,’ Agastya yawned.

  ‘But mine is not the typical Indian story. That ends with the Indian living somewhere in the First World, comfortably or uncomfortably. Or perhaps coming back to join the Indian Administrative Service, if lucky.’

  ‘You're wrong about education, though. Most must be like me, with no special aptitude for anything, not even wondering how to manage, not even really thinking. Try your luck with everything, something hopefully will click. There aren't unlimited opportunities in the world.’

  They smoked. Dhrubo leaned forward to drop loose tobacco from his shirt. ‘Madna was the hottest place in India last year, wasn't it? It will be another world, completely different. Should be quite educative.’ Dhrubo handed the smoke to Agastya. ‘Excellent stuff. What'll you do for sex and marijuana in Madna?’

  Two

  By the fastest train Madna was eighteen hours away from Delhi, but of course the fastest train simply shrieked its way through it. As the train that did stop at Madna slipped out of New Delhi Agastya waved to his uncle and then locked himself in the toilet to smoke some more marijuana. His compartment had another traveller for Madna, an engineer in some thermal power station. Desultory train conversation began, and Agastya was soon asked to categorize himself.

  ‘Agastya? What kind of a name is Agastya?’ asked the engineer, almost irritably. He was a large unpleasant man, the owner of a trunk that wouldn't fit below the lower berths, but on which he wouldn't allow anyone to place his feet.

  ‘He's a saint of the forest in the Ramayana, very ascetic. He gives Ram a bow and arrow. He's there in the Mahabharata, too. He crosses the Vindhyas and stops them from growing.’

  The engineer looked dissatisfied, almost suspicious, as though Agastya had just sold him an aphrodisiac. He interrupted Agastya again, almost immediately, squeaking with surprise. ‘Excuse me, IAS? You are IAS? You don't look like an IAS officer.’ He eyed him doubtfully. ‘You don't even look Bengali,’ pronounced Bungaali.

  Agastya was only half-Bengali. His mother had been Goanese, a Catholic. He hardly remembered her, she had died of meningitis when he had been less than three. He was athlete-thin and bearded. He had no devouring interests, and until he came to Madna, very little ambition.

  Outside the Indian hinterland rushed by. Hundreds of kilometres of a familiar yet unknown landscape, seen countless times through train windows, but never experienced — his life till then had been profoundly urban. Shabby stations of small towns where the train didn't stop, the towns that looked nice from a train window, incurious patient eyes and weatherbeaten bicycles at a level crossing, muddy children and buffalo at a waterhole. To him, these places had been, at best, names out of newspapers, where floods and caste wars occurred, and entire Harijan families were murdered, where some prime minister took his helicopter just after a calamity, or just before the elections. Now he looked out at this remote world and felt a little unsure, he was going to spend months in a dot in this hinterland.

  The train was four hours late, they reached Madna after dark. A small tube-lit station, stray dogs, a few coolies, a man selling rusks and tea, a family of beggars arguing in an unfamiliar tongue around the taps. A sweating swarthy man came up to him and mumbled something. He smiled and said in Hindi, ‘
Will you speak Hindi, please. I'll take some time to pick up the language.’

  The man smiled, embarrassed, and asked in a harshly accented Hindi, ‘Are you Mr Sen, IAS?’ In Madna, ‘IAS’ was always to be attached to his name; it almost became his surname.

  In the jeep he realized how stifling it was. ‘Where am I staying?’ he asked.

  ‘The Government Rest House, sir,’ said the swarthy man from behind. He was a naib tehsildar, he had said. Whatever that was, Agastya had thought. ‘Accommodation for government officers is a problem in Madna, sir,’ said the man. For a year Agastya was to move from one room in a Rest House (a suite it was called, for some reason, and pronounced soot) to some other room in some other Rest House — homelessness of a kind.

  Glimpses of Madna en route; cigarette-and-paan dhabas, disreputable food stalls, both lit by fierce kerosene lamps, cattle and clanging rickshaws on the road, and the rich sound of trucks in slush from an overflowing drain; he felt as though he was living someone else's life.

  His education began on the first evening itself. The room at the Rest House was big, and furnished not like a room, but like a house. It had a bed, a dressing table, a dining table with four chairs, a sofa, two armchairs, a desk and chair, two small tables and a beautiful bookshelf. The room looked like the storehouse of a dealer in stolen furniture. ‘Why all this furniture? I don't need all this.’

  ‘Sir?’ With the naib tehsildar was a grey-stubbled sullen man, the caretaker-cook of the Rest House. He spoke Hindi with great reluctance. There were children at the door, in various sizes; all seemed to breathe through their mouths.

  ‘What's a sofa doing here?’

  ‘For guests, sir.’

  ‘No, take it away. Far too many things in here, I don't need all this. Can't you remove some?’

  ‘Remove some?’

  They did eventually, their faces and forearms tense with disconcertment. They called others for help. They dragged the bed under the fan. Agastya sweated, directed them in Hindi, and felt the mosquitoes. ‘Isn't there any insecticide that we can spray?’

  Vasant, the caretaker-cook, looked at him murderously over the back of a sofa.

  ‘Yes, sir, horrible mosquitoes here,’ smiled the naib tehsildar. They sprayed the room with Flit.

  Vasant brought dinner almost immediately after, on a tray. The naib tehsildar hovered at the door, never failing to show something of himself to Agastya, a shoulder, a shoe, a leg, and each portion of his body saying, There, I hope you continue to feel uneasy and strange. Dinner was unbelievable, the dal tasted like lukewarm chillied shampoo. The tang of Flit in his nostrils, he was awed by the thought of months in which every meal would taste like this. ‘Is this the usual way you cook?’ He finally communicated the question to Vasant through the naib tehsildar. Vasant said yes. Then the naib tehsildar said that the Collector had told him to tell the cook to boil Agastya's drinking water as there was endemic jaundice and epidemic cholera in Madna, and that he had already done so and that may he now take his leave, sir.

  Ten o'clock. Agastya was on the veranda outside his room. Around the tube-light wheeled a hundred different insects. The frequent plop of careless lizards falling on the floor. His room was one of two in a kind of cottage. The other room was silent, locked. Other similar cottages, and 200 feet away the large Circuit House. A few lights on in the compound, two jeeps outside the Circuit House. He was 1,400 kilometres away from Delhi, and more than a thousand from Calcutta, the two cities of his past.

  Before going to bed he lit an anti-mosquito incense stick under the table and rubbed mosquito repellent cream all over himself. He slept under a mosquito net, but the mosquitoes got him anyway. He surfaced, struggling, out of sleep thrice that night, only to hear the mosquitoes droning in the glow from the veranda.

  On his first morning in Madna he woke up feeling terrible (‘feeling fucked,’ he later wrote to Neera in Calcutta, ‘like the fallen Adam’). He found opening his eyes difficult, then realized that the mosquitoes had reached his eyelids too. Some start to the day, he looked at the wooden ceiling and said to himself, if your very first emotion of the morning is disgust. He looked at the mirror. Two red swollen spots on his right cheek, above the beard, one below his left ear. Calcutta's mosquitoes seemed more civilized, they never touched the face. This place has drawn first blood, he thought, wasn't elephantiasis incurable?

  He stepped out to ask Vasant for some tea. Beyond the veranda the other buildings were turning white with the glare. The sun seemed to char his head and neck. Eight fifteen in the morning and he could almost sense the prickly heat spring up on his skin.

  And yet this was late summer. The year before Madna had topped the charts, as it were, had been the hottest place in India. It had a few traditional rivals in the Indian Deccan but every year Madna's residents were almost always sure that their town and district would be hotter than those. In salutation (and to be fair, to avoid sunstroke), the residents tied a towel or a napkin over their ears and head at eight in the morning and took it off after sundown. Later he tied one too, quite enjoying himself, even getting himself photographed in his hood. And later still, he would think, that those who saw menace in an Indian summer, and called the sun angry and pitiless, and enervating, and words like that, merely reduced the sun to a petty anthropomorphic jumbo. Of course the heat did weaken the calves and dehydrate the head, but the sun, like so many things in Madna, was educative. It taught him the aphorisms of common sense: don't fight the processes of nature, it seemed to say; here, stay indoors as much as you can, if possible turn nocturnal. The world outside is not worth journeying out for, and any beauty out of doors is visible only in the dark, or in the half-light of dawn.

  If Madna had been Delhi, and the weather less hot, and if he'd woken up earlier, he would have gone for his run. He had been a competent long-distance runner in his college days. Running seemed to clear his mind and start the day well. But he returned to his room and wondered if he should smoke a joint. After all the jeep wouldn't come for him till eleven. While wondering he made one and smoked it anyway. Then he put on Tagore's Shyama on his cassette recorder and lay down to contemplate the room.

  He had to get organized, unpack properly and think a little, maybe smoke less, because there was something dangerous in smoking alone, and in an unknown place. The room was at least big, he liked that.

  High up on the wall facing him, amid the lizards, hung what he would later call the usual improbable Rest-House painting — a sunset, and water, and therefore two sunsets, a boat, a boatman in a Japanese conical hat, on the shore two trees, like giant mushrooms. As he went higher, he relaxed more, and grew more amazed, in an objective way, at the absence of imagination in the painting. He tried to visualize the painter, and couldn't. He thought, had the painter been brushing his teeth or bending over trying to get his cock in his mouth, or what, when he painted this one? There wasn't a single thought behind a single brushstroke. Irritated, he got up, climbed a chair and took down the painting.

  At the back, beneath the cobwebs and dust of years, he read, in ink turned brown, ‘Donated to the Madna Circuit House, my unwanted second home, by me, R. Tamse, Deputy Engineer, Public Works Division, 4 July 1962.’ Below this was a tremendous poem, again in brown.

  Away from my old life and my spouse,

  So many days at this Circuit House,

  Away from Goa, my dear home,

  On office work I have to roam.

  Now the painting looked different, and a little less ridiculous; this was the Goa of an imagination forlorn, not perhaps accustomed to creativity, but compelled to it by isolation. Suddenly Agastya thought that he could see Tamse better. He would be short, plump, but not worried at all about his weight, and therefore very slightly complacent, gentle, and not quite relaxed in the company of people like Agastya. In a room and place like this, certainly not given to marijuana or inventive masturbation or hunting for sex, Tamse, what would he have done. Perhaps many had convinc
ed him that he painted and wrote well; his father might have said, in the language of proud fathers, ‘You must always have these as a second string to your bow.’ Tamse had been lonely but had not given in, had recreated in his wilderness an image of home. Perhaps those mushroom trees and sunsets were a view from his window, perhaps boatmen really did wear Japanese conical hats in Goa.

  He turned the painting over and over, relating the brushstrokes to the poem. He liked ‘my old life and my spouse’; at least Tamse admitted to missing his wife, some others would have been shy of this. He was sentimental too, otherwise he would not have donated the painting. Despite the nullity of talent, it was still an attempt to share a mood and an experience. He smiled at the blue walls and thought, they just might grow on me too.

  A rapid but timid knock on the door, like the scurrying of some rodent. A small black man in the white khadi of a peon. He was Digambar, the peon attached to Agastya for his stay. ‘Here,’ said Agastya, ‘just clean this painting and put it back.’

  At eleven, still stoned, he went to the Collectorate to meet R. N. Srivastav IAS, Collector and District Magistrate of Madna, his mentor and boss for the months of training.

  Three

  District administration in India is largely a British creation, like the railways and the English language, another complex and unwieldy bequest of the Raj. But Indianization (of a method of administration, or of a language) is integral to the Indian story. Before 1947 the Collector was almost inaccessible to the people; now he keeps open house, primarily because he does a different, more difficult job. He is as human and as fallible, but now others can tell him so, even though he still exhibits the old accoutrements (but now Indianized) of importance — the flashing orange light on the roof of the car, the passes for the first row at the sitar recital, which will not start until he arrives and for which he will not arrive until he has ensured by telephone that everyone else who has been invited has arrived first. In Madna, as in all of India, one's importance as an official could be gauged by how long one could keep a concert (to which one was invited) waiting. The organizers never minded this of the officials they invited. Perhaps they expected it of them, which was sickening, or perhaps they were humouring them, which was somehow worse.