Smoke and Ashes

Forget not, that thou art born as a sacrifice upon the altar
of the Motherland.

Swami Vivekananda

ONE

21 December 1921

It's not unusual to find a corpse in a funeral parlour. It's just rare for them to walk in the door under their own steam. It was a riddle worth savouring, but I didn't have the time, seeing as I was running for my life.

A shot rang out and a bullet flew past, hitting nothing more offensive than rooftop laundry. My pursuers – fellow officers of the Imperial Police Force – were firing blindly into the night. That didn't mean they mightn't get lucky with their next round, and while I wasn't afraid of dying, 'shot in the backside while trying to escape' wasn't exactly the epitaph I wanted on my tombstone.

And so I ran, opium-fogged, across the rooftops of a sleeping Chinatown, slipping on loose terracotta tiles, sending them smashing to the ground and clambering from one roof to the next before finally finding shelter in a shallow crawlspace beneath the ledge of a low wall which separated one building from its neighbour.

The officers drew closer, and I tried to still my breathing as they called out to one another, their voices swallowed by the darkness. The sound suggested they'd separated, now possibly some distance from each other. That was good. It meant they were groping around as aimlessly in the dark as I was, and that for now my best chance of escape lay in staying still and silent.

Being caught would lead to some rather awkward questions which I preferred not to have to answer: such as what I happened to be doing in Tangra in the dead of night, smelling of opium and covered in someone else's blood. There was also the small matter of the sickle-shaped blade in my hand. That too would be difficult to explain.

I shivered as the sweat and the blood evaporated. December was cold, at least by Calcutta standards.

Snatches of conversation drifted over. It didn't sound like their hearts were in it. I didn't blame them. They were as likely to stagger off the edge of a roof as they were to stumble across me; and given the events of the last few months, I doubted their morale would be particularly high. Why risk a broken neck chasing shadows along rooftops, when no one was going to thank them for it? I willed them to turn back, but they doggedly kept at it, tapping in the blackness with rifle butts and lathis like blind men crossing a road.

One set of taps grew louder, a rhythmic presence drawing ever closer. I considered my options, or I would have done, had I been able to think of any. Running was out of the question – the man was armed and sounded so close now that, even in the dark, he'd have little difficulty in shooting me. Taking him on was also a non-starter. I had the blade but I was hardly going to use it on a fellow officer, and, in any case, with three of his colleagues in close proximity, the odds of eluding them were shrinking faster than a poppy at sunset.

The tone of the tapping changed, taking on an echoing hollowness as it struck the thin concrete of the ledge above my head. The man must have been standing directly above me. He too noticed the change in tenor and stopped in his tracks. He knocked at the ledge with his rifle, then jumped down. I closed my eyes in anticipation of the inevitable, but then a voice called out. One that I recognised.

'All right, lads, that's enough. Back inside.'

The boots turned towards the command, and for the longest of seconds stood rooted before finally climbing back onto the ledge. They began to move off and I breathed out, then ran a hand, still sticky with blood, over my face.

The voices receded and the rooftops returned to silence. Minutes passed and from the street below came shouts – English, Bengali, Chinese – and the sound of lorries starting up. I stayed where I was, shivering in the confines of the crawlspace, and tried to make sense of it all.

The night had started quite normally, though normal is, admittedly, a relative term. At any rate, tonight seemed no different from any other night that I visited one of the opium dens which pockmarked Chinatown. From my lodgings in Premchand Boral Street, I'd made my way south to Tangra by one of many circuitous routes, to a den I was fairly sure I hadn't visited for at least a month. This one was in the basement of a row of sagging tenements, entered via a dank stairwell at the back of a funeral parlour that reeked of formaldehyde and the proximity of death. It was one of my favourites, not for the quality of the opium, which was as bad as anywhere else in the city – one part opium to three parts God knew what – but because of the faintly Gothic aura the place exuded. Calcutta opium is best smoked ten feet below the corpses of half a dozen dead men.

I'd arrived sometime after midnight and the doorman had seemed surprised to see me. I didn't blame him, though it wasn't the shakes that unnerved him – he would have seen many a punter coming through the door with those symptoms. Rather it was the colour of my skin. Seeing an Englishman in Tangra wouldn't have been all that remarkable a year ago, but a lot had happened in the last twelve months. These days, with the police force stretched thin outside of the meticulously manicured confines of White Town, sahibs were hard to find in Calcutta after dark. Fortunately, though, in this part of town economics still trumped issues of race and politics, and upon sight of the fan of rupee notes I clutched in my hand, I was admitted without fuss or fanfare and accompanied down to the cellar.

The first drag of the first pipe was a deliverance, like the breaking of a fever. With the second pipe, the shaking stopped, and with the third, the nerves steadied. I called for a fourth. If the first three had been a medicinal requisite, the next would be for pleasure, setting me on my way to what the Bengalis called nirbōn – nirvana. My head rested on a pillow of white porcelain as the velvet veil enveloped my senses. That's when the trouble started.

From a thousand miles away came sounds: jagged and incomprehensible, growing louder and piercing the fog of my stupor. I screwed my eyelids shut against them, until a woman, one of the girls who rolled the O and prepared the pipes, was shaking me like a rag doll.

'Sahib! You must go now!'

I opened my eyes and her heavily powdered face floated into focus.

'You must go, sahib. Police raid!'

Her lips were painted blood red, and for some seconds the sight of them held my attention more than anything she might be saying. It was the sound of crashing furniture and porcelain smashing on a hard floor somewhere close by that finally began to break the spell. That and the hard slap across the face she gave me.

'Sahib!'

I shook my head as she slapped me again.

'Police here, sahib!'

The words registered. I tried to stand on legs shaky like a newborn calf. Taking my arm, she pulled me towards a darkened passageway at the far side of the room, away from the oncoming commotion.

She stopped at the threshold and gestured with her free hand. 'Go, sahib. Stairs at end. Up to back way.'

I turned to look at her. She was little more than a girl. 'What's your name?' I asked.

'No time, sahib,' she said, turning back towards the room. 'Go. Now!'

I did as she ordered and staggered into the blackness, as behind me I heard her trying to rouse another punter from temporary oblivion. I groped blindly, feeling my way along walls slick with moisture, the stone floor slippery underfoot and the air fetid with the ammonia stench of stale urine. In the distance a blue light illuminated a narrow, sagging staircase. My head spinning, I made for it. Sounds echoed down the corridor: orders shouted in English. Then a woman's scream.

I didn't look back.

Instead I lurched on towards the stairs and looked up. The exit was barred by a hatch, a little light falling in thin shafts between it and the floorboards. Hauling myself up the steps, I reached the top, pushed the hatch and cursed as the thing refused to budge. I shivered as a wave of fear swept over me. Wiping the sweat from my eyes, I tried to focus on the hatch's outline. There seemed no sign of a lock, at least not on this side. I took a breath and tried again, this time charging it with my shoulder. The hatch shifted a few inches, then fell back heavily. There was something on top of it. Something weighty. Behind me, the voices grew louder. Summoning what strength I had left, I charged the hatch one more time. It burst open, and suddenly I was flying through the air, momentum carrying me upward into a ruin of a room, its ceiling half gone and open to the moonlight. I landed hard on the floor, in a pool of something wet. Pulling myself up, I quickly shut the hatch and looked to weigh it down with whatever had been on top of it. Strangely there was nothing close by. Other than a body.

I stared at it. Not in shock – or anything else for that matter. Morphia deadens the senses, and I probably had enough of the stuff coursing through me to becalm a bull elephant. It was a man – or what was left of him. Chinese, judging by his cheekbones. The rest of his face, though, was a mess. His eyes had been gouged out and left on the floor beside him, and an old scar ran down the left side, from his hairline to his jaw. Then there was the small matter of the knife stuck in his chest.

Wooden crates, the type that tea is packed in, stood stacked next to a wall, their metal studs glinting in the blue light. I stumbled over to them and made to topple the topmost to the ground. Whatever was in it weighed half a ton. Nevertheless, I managed to shift it, inch by inch, until it overhung the crate beneath and gravity did the rest. It landed with a thud; the wood of one side cracked but remained thankfully intact. Lodging my feet against the wall, I steadily pushed it over the top of the hatch then slumped beside it in the hope that I'd bought myself a little time. I looked over at the dead man, lying there on his back, with the knife sticking out from his sternum like the lever of a Bell fruit machine. I assumed he was dead. That was a good thing. For me, if not for him. Then I heard his breathing – shallow, ragged and bloody – and I cursed. Any time I wasted tending to him diminished what little chance I had of escape. Judging by the amount of blood on the floor, he was already beyond saving, and there was little I could do, especially with Calcutta's finest raiding the place. Explaining to them exactly what I was doing, covered in the blood of a critically wounded Chinaman, wasn't a prospect I relished. Besides, the Chinese were a law unto themselves. What they did to each other was none of my business.

Still...

Taking a breath, I crawled over to him. Making sure not to disturb the knife, I undid the buttons on his shirt and, retrieving a handkerchief from my trouser pocket, wiped the blood from his chest. There were two wounds as far as I could tell: the one in which the knife was stuck, and another, almost identical mark on the right side of his chest, but there could have been more. In the half-light and in my condition, he could have been missing an arm and I might not have noticed.

He tried to stir.

'Who did this?' I asked.

He turned his head towards me and tried to speak, but only managed a bloody gurgling.

'Your lung's punctured,' I said. 'Try not to move.'

It was sound advice. He should have heeded it. Instead he reached for the knife and pulled at it. I should have stopped him. The knife fell to the floor. Grabbing the handkerchief, I pressed down on the wound, trying to staunch a weak stream of blood, but knowing, even as I did so, that it was in vain. When you've seen the life ebb away from as many men as I have, you get a sense for these things, and within seconds he was gone. I leaned forward, put my ear to his mouth and listened for a breath, but there was nothing.

Behind me, someone was trying the hatch. Instinctively I picked up the knife and spun round. There were voices on the stairs below. It sounded like at least two of them were pushing against the trap-door, but the crate was doing its job and the hatch hardly budged. Nevertheless, I doubted they'd give up.

I turned and looked for an escape route. There were two doors. I chose one and ran through, into a courtyard bordered on three sides by the walls of two- and three-storey buildings. The fourth side, though, consisted of a single-storey wall topped with shards of broken glass. In its centre was a wooden door, which I assumed led to an alleyway. I was about to make for it when I stopped. This was a police raid – there were probably half a dozen armed officers on the other side, waiting to nab anyone looking to escape.

Instead I headed for a stone staircase that ran up one of the walls and onto the roof. One of the officers must have spotted me from a window as, moments later, a door on the roof burst open and officers were shouting for me to halt.

Declining the invitation, I'd run for it, and as I lay in that crawlspace, shivering, it was heartening to know I'd made at least one correct decision that night.

My thoughts returned to the dead Chinaman and to the raid itself. The fact was, there shouldn't have been one. With the city on the edge of anarchy and a mass of resignations among the native officers, resources were stretched to breaking point. The force simply lacked the manpower for fripperies such as raids on opium dens.

What's more, none had been planned. Of that I was certain. I knew because I made a point of stopping by Vice Division's offices on days when I was considering a trip to Chinatown. I'd even made a friend of its commanding officer, a man called Callaghan whose voice I'd heard earlier, calling his men back. Indeed I'd bought him many a drink, just so I'd always know when he and his men were planning an evening's excursion. On nights when a raid was on the cards, he was generally too busy to chat, and the atmosphere in the department would be electric. I'd popped by earlier in the day and the place had been dead, with Callaghan himself more than happy to indulge me.

And yet here I was, hiding from him and a lorry-load of his officers.

TWO

I waited.

Twenty minutes, which felt longer; staying there till the voices and the noises stopped. Eventually, my head began to clear and I crawled out and slowly stood up. Going back to check on the corpse was out of the question. Callaghan and his goons might have gone, but they'd have left men behind to secure the place, luckless local constables from the closest police thana, most likely. I didn't envy them. More than one native copper had had his throat slit in the dark in Tangra.

No, my first task was to get rid of the knife. I still wasn't sure why I'd picked it up. It certainly hadn't been through any urge to preserve evidence. The attacker's fingerprints might have been on it, but now so were mine. Maybe it had something to do with the shape of the thing: a blade, more bent than curved, about ten or eleven inches long, like the kind the Gurkha regiments had carried during the war, only with an ornamental hilt that was wrapped in black leather and inlaid with the image of a small silver dragon.

The smart thing to do would be to throw it in the Hooghly. Only the river was several miles away, I was covered in blood and I wasn't going to get far in my current garb. What I needed was a change of clothes. I set off across the rooftops scouring the vista until I found what I was looking for. Moving silently, I covered the distance in a matter of minutes, and was soon rifling through the articles on a washing line like a housewife examining the wares at Chukerbutty's Fine Clothing Emporium on Bow Bazaar. Hindus have a fixation with ritual cleanliness, not just of their bodies but their clothes too. That preoccupation seemed to have infected all of the town's other non-white residents too, and at any given time, half of Black Town seemed submerged in a sea of drying laundry. Picking out a shirt, I quietly slipped off my own and wrapped it around the knife. The shirt from the line was old, faded and a size too small, but I buttoned it as best I could and rolled up the sleeves. To complete the ensemble, I stole a black shawl, which the locals called a chador, and wrapped it round my head and shoulders like an old woman, then continued over the rooftops until I found a place low enough to jump down to the street. From there I headed north to the Circular Canal where, weighing down the knife and my shirt with a brick, I deposited the package in the black waters below, like a Hindu devotee making an offering to the gods. Then I set off west, stopping at a tube-well to wash my hands and face, before continuing the mile or so to the all-night tonga rank at Sealdah station.

As I walked, my head buzzed with only one thought. I had to find out why the raid had taken place. It couldn't be coincidence that a man had been murdered as Vice Division, without warning, launched its first raid in months on a den, just at the time that I happened to be there.

The clock in College Square read a quarter past three, and I was back in Premchand Boral Street soon after. I was early. Most nights it was at least 4 a.m. by the time I made it home from Tangra. I'd have laughed at the irony if it wasn't for the dead man I'd left lying back there.

Trudging up the stairs to my lodgings, I slipped the key into the lock. The apartment was in darkness. Nevertheless, I had to tread carefully. I shared my lodgings with a junior officer, Surrender-not Banerjee, and he was a light sleeper. His real name wasn't Surrender-not, but Surendranath. It meant king of the gods apparently, and like the names of many of the kings I remembered from my history classes, its proper pronunciation was beyond me and most of the other British officers at Lal Bazar. A senior officer had rechristened him Surrender-not. That man was dead now, but the name had stuck.

He knew of my opium habit, of course. We'd never discussed it but the boy wasn't an idiot, and in the early days he'd couched his concern in vague, open-ended questions as to my health, all framed with the sort of disappointed look a mother might give you when you came home from having been in a fight. Not that it had changed anything, and these days, he'd given up the questions, though I still encountered the stares from time to time.

The more pressing issue was our manservant, Sandesh. He too slept in the apartment, though generally on a mat under the dining table. He was supposed to sleep in the kitchen but claimed it was too large and that high ceilings gave him insomnia. Waking him was not normally a concern, for even if he did care as to where I was going most nights, he was mindful enough of his station never to voice an opinion on it. Nevertheless, seeing me wandering in dressed like a Spanish fishwife might just challenge even his monumental indifference.

I crept along the hallway to my room and once inside, locked the door. Light from a crescent moon bled in through the open window and fell like a veil on the furniture. The darkness felt like protection and, dispensing with the lamp, I removed the chador and pulled a crumpled pack of Capstan and a box of matches from my trouser pocket. I extracted a cigarette, lit it with shaking hands and took a long, steady pull.

In one corner stood my almirah, the large wooden wardrobe that was a fixture of most Calcutta bedrooms. With a mirrored panel inlaid in one of its two doors, the thing was unremarkable, save for the lockable steel compartment inside, which occupied a quarter of it and contained the few valuable possessions I owned, together with a larger number of more questionable ones. Placing the fag end in the old tin ashtray which sat on my desk, I stripped out of the borrowed shirt and, together with the chador, bundled it into the almirah's steel compartment before locking it again. The clothes would need to be burned, but for now this was the best place for them. With the evidence concealed, I sank onto the bed and covered my face with my hands as, on the desk, the cigarette burned down to nothing.

THREE

22 December 1921

The cup of tea on the bedside table was stone cold. Sandesh, as was his habit, had placed it there, probably several hours earlier. I extricated myself from the mosquito net, picked up the cup and threw the contents out of the window, waiting for the gratifying splash as the stuff hit the concrete courtyard below.

It was likely to be the closest I came to festive cheer. Christmas in Calcutta was an odd affair. While freezing for the natives, it was still never bleak enough for anyone who'd grown up in true British winters, and though the carol singers from the local churches, with their hosannas and hallelujahs, did their best to remind you of the joy of the coming of Our Lord and Saviour, Christmas with palm trees in place of spruce and Norwegian pine just wasn't the same.

Christmas aside though, the city had grown on me. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that, in its own way, Calcutta was as flawed and dysfunctional as I was: a city built in the middle of a fetid Bengal swamp, populated by misfits all struggling to survive against the odds.

Surrender-not was long gone by the time I'd washed, dressed and made it through to the dining table. He'd always been an early riser, but these days I'd rather formed the impression that he left early in order to avoid having to talk to me. Sandesh entered and wordlessly placed breakfast and a copy of the day's Englishman in front of me. From the creases on the paper's front page, it looked as though Surrender-not had already gone through it. I pushed it to one side and began to pick at a lukewarm omelette liberally sprinkled with chopped green chillies. I'd little appetite for food these days, and, thanks to Mr Gandhi's antics, even less for the news. The country was a powder keg, and had been so ever since the Mahatma, as his followers liked to call him, had asked Indians to rise up in a frenzy of non-violent non-cooperation, and promised that if they did so, he'd deliver independence before the year was out.

Of course, Indians are gluttons for mysticism, and the sight of the man in his little dhoti was enough to persuade them to do just that. Millions of them – not just the parlour-room revolutionaries of Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi, but the ordinary folk, the farmers, peasants and factory workers from ten thousand towns and villages across the length and breadth of the country – had heeded his calls to boycott British products, resign from government posts and generally cause a bloody nuisance. You had to hand it to the little man; he'd taken the Congress Party from a talking shop of lawyers and turned it into a movement of the people. Co-opting the masses – that had been the Mahatma's masterstroke. He'd told them that they mattered, and they revered him for it.

The Bengalis of Calcutta, always eager to stick two fingers up to the British, had taken it upon themselves to lead the charge – not that there was much charging to be done, seeing as how the Mahatma's preferred modus operandi was to get his followers to sit down and refuse to move. What's more, as a means of protest, it seemed almost tailor-made for the Bengali psyche, which was predisposed to causing maximum inconvenience while doing as little as possible. Striking was in their blood, so much so that you'd be forgiven for thinking that many of them only turned up to work so that they could then go on strike.

Not so long ago, our city had been the capital of British India. If we'd hoped that moving the centre of power to Delhi might lessen the capacity of Calcutta's native population to cause trouble, we'd been sorely mistaken. They'd reacted to the Mahatma's call with their usual zeal. Students had walked out of universities and schools, civil servants had resigned and government institutions were picketed. Most worrying, though, were the resignations from the ranks of the police force. It had started inconsequentially – a few native officers handing in their badges on principle soon after Gandhi's call – but later, with the mass arrests and jailing of protesters, and amid mounting pressure from families and communities, the flow had increased steadily.

The situation in the city had gradually worsened. One might have expected law and order to improve, given the emphasis on peaceful protest, but the Mahatma had unleashed forces that he couldn't control. Not all of those fired up by his words seemed quite as keen on non-violence as he was. As the months had passed, passions had risen, and there had been sporadic attacks on whites, Anglo-Indians, Christians, Parsees, Chinese and just about anyone else suspected of being less than euphoric about the prospect of an independent India. And the Imperial Police Force didn't have the manpower to protect everyone, even if we had wished to. For that was our dirty secret. The fact was that the powers that be rather welcomed the attacks. Anything that punched a hole in the Mahatma's sainted aura was seen as a positive, and attacks by his followers were the perfect pretext for a crackdown. The plan might have made sense on paper – indeed the viceroy and his coterie in Delhi seemed to approve, but they might as well have been sitting in London or, for that matter, on the moon, given how far removed they were from the realities of what was transpiring on the streets. With tempers fraught and jails full to bursting, such a crackdown didn't seem quite so sensible on the streets of Calcutta.

Word had it that the viceroy, never the most steadfast of men, favoured a compromise, but a number of stiff telegrams from Downing Street, and no doubt a few stiff gins too, had served to bolster his resolve, and in the end he hadn't yielded an inch to native demands. Now there were barely ten days to go before Gandhi's year was up, and with the discipline of even his most ardent supporters wavering, the hope in high places was that if we could weather the storm for another fortnight, the Mahatma's whole peaceful protest movement might collapse, taking his credibility with it.