Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

‘We understand the West better than any of you civilians,’ Arjun liked to say. ‘We know how the minds of Westerners work. Only when every Indian is like us will the country become truly modern.’

Meals with Arjun’s friends were boisterous events, accompanied by ‘lashings’ of beer, loud laughter and a great deal of acerbic joke-making, mainly by the officers, at each other’s expense. This they described as ‘ragging’ and most of it was good-natured. But there was an occasion once when the flow of the meal was ruptured by an odd little incident. Seeing a dish of hot, steam-puffed chapatis, one of the officers said, in a loud, derisory ‘ragging’ voice: ‘Hardy should have been here: he’s the one who really loves chapatis . .’ These words, apparently innocuous, had a startling effect; the noise died abruptly and the officers’ faces turned suddenly grave. The lieutenant who’d spoken changed colour, as though in acknowledgement of a collective rebuke. Then, as if to remind his friends of the presence of outsiders — Dinu, Manju and Neel, in other words — Arjun loudly cleared his throat and the conversation turned instantly to another subject. The interruption lasted no longer than a moment and passed unnoticed by everyone but Dinu.

Later that night, Dinu stopped by Arjun’s room and found him sitting in bed, with a book against his knees and a brandy in his hand. Dinu lingered.

‘You want to tackle me, don’t you?’ Arjun said. ‘About what happened this evening?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was nothing really.’

‘All the more reason to tell me. .’

Arjun sighed: ‘It was about a good friend of mine, Hardy. Odd to think he wasn’t even here.’

‘What were they talking about?’

‘It’s a long story. You see Hardy was in a row last year. It’ll sound idiotic to you. .’

‘What happened?’

‘Are you sure you want to know?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hardy’s a sardar ,’ Arjun said, ‘a Sikh — from a family that’s been in the army for generations. You’d be surprised how many of the chaps are from that kind of family. I call them the real faujis. Fellows like me, who have no army connections, are the exception. .’

Hardy had grown up at the battalion’s depot in Saharanpur, Arjun said. His father and grandfather had both served in the 1st Jats. They had joined as private soldiers and worked their way up to the rank of Viceroy’s Commissioned Officer — which was the highest an Indian could rise in those days, somewhere between an NCO and an officer. Hardy was the first in his family to join the army as a commissioned officer, and he’d set his heart on getting into the 1/1 Jats. He used to joke that his dream was to be called ‘Sahib’ by his father’s old colleagues.

But between the lives of officers and the other ranks there was a difference that Hardy had not reckoned with. The other ranks were served Indian food in their messes, prepared according to the precise dietary prescriptions of their various religions. The officers’ mess, on the other hand, served ‘English’ food — and the trouble with Hardy was that he was one of those chaps who, no matter how hard they tried, simply could not get by without his daily dal-roti. He dutifully ate whatever was served in the mess but at least once a day, he’d find a pretext to leave the cantonment so that he could eat his fill somewhere in town. This was a commonplace enough occurrence among Indian officers, but Hardy crossed an unseen line: he started visiting the other ranks’ messes. He enjoyed these little visits: he’d called some of the men ‘uncle’ as a child and he assumed that they would afford him the same indulgence and affection that he remembered from the past. They would keep his visits a secret, he thought. After all many of them were from the same village, the same extended family. Many had known his father.

It turned out that he could not have been more wrong. Far from being pleased at serving under Hardy, his father’s old colleagues were deeply offended by his presence in the battalion. They were of the first generation of Indian soldiers to serve under Indian officers. Many of them were uneasy about this: their relationship with their British officers was the source of their pride and prestige. To serve under Indians was a dilution of this privilege.

A day came when the battalion’s Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel ‘Bucky’ Buckland, recommended that Hardy be given command of C Company. So far as the company’s NCOs were concerned, this was the last straw. Some of them knew Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland well; they had served with him for many years and it was part of their job to keep him informed about the happenings in the unit. They formed a delegation and went to see him. They told him: this boy, Hardayal Singh, to whom you’ve given charge of C Company, his father is known to us, his sisters are married to our brothers, his home is in the village next to ours. How can you expect us to treat this boy as an officer? Why, he cannot even stomach the food that officers eat. He steals secretly into our messes to eat chapatis.

Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland was deeply disturbed by these complaints: it was impossible not to be repelled by the murkiness of these sentiments. If there was an implicit self-hatred in trusting only your own, then how much deeper was the self-loathing that led a group of men to distrust someone for no reason other than that he was one of them? Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland gave the NCOs a sharp reprimand: ‘You are living in the past. The time has come when you will have to learn to take orders from Indians. This man is the son of your former colleague: do you really want to shame him in public?’

The NCOs held fast, despite this berating. In the end, it was the Lieutenant-Colonel who had had to yield. There had always been an unspoken compact between the men and their English officers: on certain matters it was understood that their wishes had to be taken into account. The Lieutenant-Colonel was left with no choice but to send for Hardy — to tell him that his appointment couldn’t go through just yet. This proved to be the most difficult part of the whole affair. How were the charges to be explained to Hardy? How does a soldier defend himself against the accusation of being, as it were, a covert chapati-eater? What does this do to his self-respect?

Lieutenant-Colonel Buckland dealt with the situation as tactfully as anyone could have, and Hardy emerged from the interview without showing any visible signs of discomfiture. Only his closest friends knew how deeply he’d been wounded; how hard it had been for him to face those NCOs the next day. And, of course, the army being a small, tight institution, word always got around and from time to time even friends would say the wrong thing, just as they had that night.

‘Do all of you face this then?’ Dinu asked Arjun. ‘Is it hard for you to be accepted as officers by your own men?’

‘Yes and no,’ Arjun replied. ‘You always have the feeling that they’re looking at you more closely than they would if you were a Britisher — especially me, I suppose, since I’m just about the only Bengali in sight. But you also have a sense that they’re identifying with you — that some of them are urging you on, while others are just waiting to see you fall. When I’m facing them I can tell that they’re putting themselves in my place, crossing a barrier that has become a great divide in their minds. The moment they imagine themselves past that line, something changes. It can’t be as it was before.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m not sure I can explain, Dinu. I’ll tell you a story. Once, an old English colonel visited our mess. He was full of tales about the Good Old Days. After dinner I happened to hear him talking to Bucky — our CO. He was huffing and puffing and blowing through his whiskers. His view was that this business of making officers out of Indians would destroy the army; everyone would be at each other’s throats and the whole thing would fall apart. Now Bucky’s just about as fair and decent as a man can be and he wasn’t going to put up with this. He defended us stoutly and said his Indian officers were doing a very good job and all the rest of it. But you know, the thing of it was that in my heart I knew that Bucky was wrong and the old codger was right.’