The Last Englishmen Read online

  Sudhin soon embarked on two projects. Parichay, a literary journal modeled on T. S. Eliot’s Criterion, first appeared in 1931. Parichay’s essays, translations, and reviews quickly became required reading for Bengali men of letters, each issue showcasing a sampling of that expensive hobby of intellectuals, critical discernment. What gunfighters were to the Wild West, it was often said, the intellectual was to Calcutta. Among the subjects covered were the fine arts, science, philology, history, philosophy, and, of course, Bengali and European literature. Sudhin’s second undertaking grew naturally out of the Friday night meetings of Parichay’s editorial board. This gathering became known as the Parichay adda.

  The adda was a Calcutta institution. It generally took place at a settled rendezvous at a fixed time. This might be a veranda, a rooftop, an office, or a street corner tea stall. Adda participants could be unemployed graduates or middle-class men with bookish interests. Women and children were scarce. In its purest sense, the adda was an ongoing conversation among strong and sparring personalities. Bengalis were less apt to converse than declaim, even on such abstruse subjects as the best bus to take to Beliaghata. “Ask a Bengali a question and you will get an oration,” one Calcutta denizen noted. “He sees all the world as a stage on which he has the star role and even an audience of one is a full house for him. As he gets into his stride you can see him becoming mesmerized by the stirring cadences of his own eloquence.” At the center of an adda was the addadhari, the sun around which all members orbited. For the Parichay adda, Sudhindranath Datta was that sun.

  In its first year the adda was held in the Light of Asia Insurance Company, where Sudhin worked as a clerk. In its second, it moved to Sudhin’s study. On the upper floors of Hatibagan one sat on mattresses covered with sheets. By the time the adda arrived in the large reception hall on Hatibagan’s ground floor, the hall was furnished in the manner of a London or Paris salon.

  Two enormous bookshelves that went all the way to the ceiling faced off at each end. Eliot, Joyce, and Pound were shelved alongside the Romantics, Victorian doorstoppers, French, German, and Russian writers and philosophers, Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung, but also Bankim Chatterjee, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Ram Mohan Roy, and, of course, Tagore. A lamp of frosted glass hung in the ceiling’s center, reflecting light off the speckled green marble floors. Waist-high wainscoting added to the atmosphere of intellectual gravity. When the adda was in session, Sudhin’s nieces and nephews were under strict instruction to be quiet, with the reward of leftover sweets if they were good.

  Anyone was welcome to attend adda. Even an Englishman whom Sudhin suspected was a Special Branch police informant was admitted, though he rarely contributed anything as he was too busy trying to keep track of who was saying what. Behind his back he was mocked as “De Sahib.” Though Sudhin secretly thought the man a jackass, he treated him with unfailing courtesy. Equally, no subject was off limits. At ease on any number of topics, Sudhin tended to progress dialectically from an “alternately” to a “therefore” and then, on the cusp of a conclusion, swerve to a “yet.” He would consider each question carefully, holding it up to the light, so that he might look at it from every possible angle. He then presented his conclusions with unassailable confidence.

  The more aggressive nationalists of the adda grumbled that Sudhin’s spoken English made him more sahib than babu. That lasted until they read his Bengali. Then they had to admit he wrote like a man who had studied nothing but Sanskrit. Though fluent in French and German as well as Sanskrit and Bengali, Sudhin was well aware that Bengalis delighted in a vocabulary and syntax drawn from the more voluble Victorians. In reaction, he chose his words with a poet’s caution.

  He took equally fastidious care of his clothes, which included as many beautifully tailored suits of English cut as blindingly white dhotis. Gandhi’s enthusiasm for handloom was alien to Sudhin’s more sybaritic sensibilities. And the Mahatma’s constant resort to a language of Christian repentance, or the way he would lead his followers in a cracked version of “Lead Kindly Light,” struck Sudhin as unutterably foolish. At the same time, Sudhin couldn’t help but be fascinated. Gandhi was the first to point out that in their willingness to cooperate with English rule, families like the Dattas had made a devil’s bargain and the rest of India had paid the price. However gently said, this truth, in tandem with Gandhi’s near nakedness, unsettled Sudhin the most. When he encountered khadi-clad Congressites on the tram, out of a sense of delicacy he would disembark before they could call him out on his tweeds.

  In its early years Parichay adda often began with local political gossip. Any mention of Calcutta’s proud son, the radical Congress youth Subhas Chandra Bose, always provoked debate. The waxing and waning of the Congress Party’s political fortunes were followed more dispassionately. And adda members generally paid about as much attention to European affairs as those in London or Paris literary salons paid to India’s, which is to say, not much. All assumed the silence of English writers on the subject of India’s subjugation merely illustrated how easily the ruling classes had kept the English intellect from meddling in English business interests. At adda, it was the Soviet five-year plans that were the most hotly debated. Indeed, everything about Soviet Russia fascinated those who hoped India too might free itself from feudalism and foreign rule to become a force to be reckoned with.

  Hassan Shahid Suhrawardy, one of Sudhin’s closest and most cosmopolitan friends, was both the adda’s resident Russophile and a ferocious anti-Bolshevist. After Oxford, Shahid taught English at the Imperial University of St. Petersburg: Alexander Kerensky had been his student. He took shelter from the revolution in Moscow, working at Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre alongside Maxim Gorky and the young Igor Stravinsky. Living for years in a ménage à trois with a Russian actress and her husband, he ignored family letters pleading with him to come home. On his reluctant return to Calcutta, he wrote on theater for Parichay, styling himself as a long-haired libertine and waxing volubly on French women, wine, and food. Both Scotland Yard and the Special Branch of Police followed Shahid closely, finding it impossible to believe that a man with such a villainous appearance was not a Bolshevik.

  Shahid could never be confused with his younger brother, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, though he, too, was a beautifully tailored Oxonian. A former deputy mayor of Calcutta with a gift for demagoguery, Shaheed was a rogue and a scoundrel, a “natural gangster, ready to dabble in strike politics and to make money and political capital out of the most exciting and disgraceful situations.” Political intrigue, often involving sexual blackmail, was the air he breathed. He had acquaintances from all walks of life and made good use of them. No sooner had he secured one political post than he schemed to find a better one. He once managed the feat of being vice-chancellor of Calcutta University and chief medical officer of the East Indian Railway at the same time. On his rare visits to Parichay adda, Shaheed was far less expansive than his brother Shahid, limiting himself to local politics. The Suhrawardy brothers agreed on only one thing: England had nothing to offer India. Nothing.

  Sudhin liked to mix seriousness with silliness, the parochial with the urbane. A monologue on classical metaphysics might segue into one on the significance of the moustache in Indian politics. A debate over the genius of Charlie Chaplin might devolve into a meditation on empire. But Sudhin had no patience for the suggestion that the Indian mystic Nagarjuna had anticipated Einstein’s theory of relativity. And he cut off in midsentence the proposition that the leader of the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion was hiding in the Himalayan foothills. While his interlocutor sat across the room puffing out clouds of smoke, a fixed expression on his face and a long silk chadder wound a bit too tightly round his neck, Sudhin would coolly take him apart, his long fingers tracing circles in the air, one eye closed, the other slightly open. Only the dreadful puns of a scholar of the swastika or the inanities of the adda’s resident Naziphile evoked Sudhin’s wide-eyed exasperation.

  Basanta Kumar Mallik took the same s
pot every Friday, his beautifully tailored but squat form rooted to a sofa in close reach of a plate of samosas or a selection of sweets from Dwarik’s, a legendary North Calcutta confectionery. A Sphinx-like smile hovered around his lips, as if he was ready to pounce on the first appearance of cant. After his father lost the family fortune and died of drink, Mallik had been sent to Oxford by the maharaja of Nepal to be trained in law. When the Great War broke out, he was stranded there, taking further degrees in philosophy and anthropology and running his own adda out of Robert Graves’s house in Boars Hill. In Calcutta he had vowed never to work on behalf of empire and was thus marking time until he could return to his beloved Oxford. Mallik-da had an elegant way of elaborating his theory of conflict. This theory had a near-universal application when it came to resolving differences. He never tired of using the adda to test its efficacy on warring intellects. Sudhin indulged him like a fond nephew.

  Finally, there was the secret diarist, a clerk at an English firm that exported manganese and iron to Japan. The diarist regarded Sudhin with unfiltered respect. He rarely volunteered anything himself, and when he did it was merely to echo the general tenor of the conversation in progress. Otherwise, he made a great effort to follow its every twist and turn, both to avail himself of an opportunity for enlightenment and to immortalize Sudhin, the Suhrawardy brothers, the philosopher Mallik-da, and other luminaries in the pages of his diary when he returned home. Cartoons often accompanied his character sketches, with his subjects’ most distinctive features slightly exaggerated.

  Between Parichay, the adda, and his poetry, Sudhin lived the life of a man of letters. To some Sudhin was an anekantavad, a believer in the many-faced nature of truth and reality. Yet whatever face he turned to his benighted city, he knew that though he was born in Calcutta, were he to appear on Park Street without some menial occupation to justify his presence, he risked being slapped or kicked. Though he could trace his lineage to a time before the arrival of the British, he was unable to enter a Calcutta club except through the door reserved for servants. And should a white traveler require a railway berth in the middle of the night, he would be obliged to give up his own.

  This was another kind of nakedness, one that no beautifully tailored suit could completely hide. However well versed in European manners, literature, and laws, Sudhindranath Datta was forever marked by a melancholy truth: to the most philistine of Englishmen, he was yet another Bengali baboo.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Thrust Fault

  GSI Camp, Son River Valley, Mirzapur District,

  October–November 1929

  During his six-month furlough John Auden had been so consumed with the task of finding a wife that he had given India little thought. While he engaged in a number of flirtations in various European capitals, he had been unable to settle on anyone. Only when darkness fell at the end of his first day back in the field did the familiar sensations of camp life return. There was the same sound of crickets in the stillness, the same play of lamplight in the dak bungalow. Each evening Auden set aside his geological field notes and turned to the journal he’d begun during his stay with Wystan in Berlin.

  The most satisfying sound in the world, he began, was the sound of an unseen woodcutter in the forest at dusk. How different the Son River Valley of Mirzapur District was from the rounded sandstone uplands and Silurian slates of Howgill Fells. The Alps were as unlike the karst limestone bogs of the Yorkshire dales as the dales were from the vertical strata of Germany’s Harz Mountains. John wrapped himself in the memory of his furlough, not to ward off the loneliness, but to find the thread of his story.

  He reassured himself that Calcutta was not entirely without marital prospects. The “fishing fleets” would soon be arriving, bearing young women who had weighed the prospect of a life spent looking after aging parents against the chance to land an ICS officer worth a thousand pounds a year. They spent the winter months in a flurry of phaeton rides and picnics by the Hooghly, ending with the Christmas costume ball hosted by the vicereine. There were Sunday breakfasts at the Tollygunj, teas at the Bengal, and ballroom dances at the Saturday, Calcutta clubs commonly known as the Tolly, the Bally, and the Slap. Such women might at first appear to accommodate walls of taxidermied heads and tiger skin rugs, but once firmly enthroned, bachelor hunting parties gave way to white-gloved teas.

  Yet these women were pale imitations of the more glamorous ones John had seen in the society pages of the Tatler, expensive-looking women posing with expensive cars. Perhaps such women were a fantasy, he thought, but the mere possibility of them made him rue his station in an almost-but-not-quite upper class. After one too many teas overseen by Calcutta’s clutch of socially powerful memsahibs, John invariably returned to the sumptuously decorated bungalows on Karaya Road. These establishments, too, were overseen by superior mesdames, but when it came to hospitality, offered a more cosmopolitan mix. There were White Russians, Anglo-Indians, girls from Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong, and French Indochina. Dinner under the chandeliers, including a round of drink, was ten rupees. Girls were extra.

  In the midst of his reverie on his romantic prospects, John suddenly recalled the question his analyst had asked him at the close of their final session that past June.

  “You are not giving up analysis simply because you think you are doing the right thing, are you?” Margaret Marshall had asked him. “Not just because of an idea?”

  And with that, the sense of peace conveyed by the sound of woodcutters deserted him and doubt once again tightened its reins.

  If the nineteenth century had been all about piling up one scarcely credible heroic exploit after another and never stopping to ask why, the twentieth century thus far seemed to be all about sitting down and taking apart one’s motives. Instead of thrashing through the jungle, battling fevers and hostile tribes in search of the source of the Nile, these new adventurers searched for themselves. This was a different sort of wilderness and required a different set of tools. In Paris, Margaret Marshall had ended John Auden’s first formal session of analysis by saying that his candor posed a great difficulty. Honest patients were hard to treat. This was partly because honesty obscured the most important truths and partly because such patients usurped her role by trying to analyze their own behavior. Margaret insisted that she alone could determine his motives.

  Why did he want to climb Everest?

  “It is a mythical future admiration that you want,” she pronounced. “The present and the analytical work required for this result you ignore. Without regard for the present you will be unable to achieve anything.” She then compared his two attitudes.

  “You expressed dislike of being loved simply for having a handsome face. But you court worldly admiration for some hypothetical achievement. Isn’t there a contradiction here? You should wish to be liked simply for yourself.”

  “Of course I would wish to be liked simply for myself,” John replied impatiently. “But what exactly is this self if it is not connected with some action? Should I just sit around all day in Paris cafés?”

  Their sessions took place in Paris cafés.

  “That is taking it too far. You would not be yourself if you sat all day in a café.”

  When they were back on the street, Margaret asked him if he was enjoying his analysis.

  “Very much.”

  “Wystan answered in just the same resentful manner,” she said, sounding pleased.

  It was Wystan who recommended that John see Margaret Marshall. Margaret had pronounced Wystan’s libido perfectly normal and so he imagined she might fix John, too.

  “What is it that draws you to the mountains?”

  “I feel safe when I am isolated and unobserved. I feel most alive and most sane when I overcome my terror and conquer what at first seem to be insuperable difficulties.”

  “You must project this feeling of safety and sanity into the long moment of your existence,” she said. “You must avoid relying on others to prop up your idea of yourself. Only w
hen you have achieved such independence will you discover a capacity to love others.

  “Think out the importance of George Mallory to you,” she had said in parting.

  It hadn’t taken long before the question of whether he would return to India at the end of his furlough or commit to a serious and extended treatment took over. The faint hope that the Dalai Lama might allow passage of a new Everest expedition argued for his return. Against this there had been the question of his health and personal happiness. After several days of discussion John decided he would give up India.

  To celebrate the laying to rest of his Mallory fantasy and the real beginning of his analysis, they had spent an evening in a mad round of Paris nightclubs. They hit Le Felice first then another club on the rue Sorbonne. There, Margaret had turned to face him as they danced and asked him if he felt he had made the right decision.

  “Of course, yes,” he said.

  But once again John had been annoyed. Thinking back on it three months later, it struck him as an unnecessary question; on the order of, do you love me? He had turned away to watch Margaret’s husband dance with another man. By three in the morning he’d been ready to turn in. As often happened when he was tired, a reaction set in.

  It had been partly a reaction against the entire world of Paris nightclubs and the louche people in them. But it had also been brought on by the vision of an utterly marvelous girl in pajamas heading to the lavatory in the hotel hallway.

  Others have what they want, he thought, why shouldn’t I? Though Margaret had been kind, her constant harping on their growing intimacy had irked him. She was twelve years older and he wasn’t at all sexually attracted to her. He’d been so thoroughly miserable the next day, a Sunday, that he went to the Marshalls’ flat to tell Margaret he had decided to return to India.