Which left only A. S. Misra. One of Samad’s nephews, Rajnu, had written to him in the spring of ’81 from his Cambridge college, mentioning casually that he had found a book which might be of some interest to his uncle. In it, he said, could be found an eloquent defence of their shared ancestor, one Mangal Pande. The only surviving copy was in his college library, it was by a man named Misra. Had he heard of it already? If not, might it not serve (Rajnu added in a cautious P. S.) as a pleasant excuse to see his uncle again?
Samad arrived on the train the very next day and stood on the platform, warmly greeting his soft-spoken nephew in the pouring rain, shaking his hand several times and talking as if it were going out of fashion.
‘A great day,’ he repeated over and over, until both men were soaked to the skin. ‘A great day for our family, Rajnu, a great day for the truth.’
Wet men not being allowed in college libraries, they spent the morning drying off in a stuffy upstairs café, full of the right type of ladies having the right type of tea. Rajnu, ever the good listener, sat patiently as his uncle babbled wildly – Oh, the importance of the discovery, Oh, how long he had waited for this moment – nodding in all the right places and smiling sweetly as Samad brushed tears from the corners of his eyes. ‘It is a great book, isn’t it, Rajnu?’ asked Samad pleadingly, as his nephew left a generous tip for the sour-faced waitresses who did not appreciate overexcited Indians spending three hours over one cream tea and leaving wet prints all over the furniture. ‘It is recognized, isn’t it?’
Rajnu knew in his heart that the book was an inferior, insignificant, forgotten piece of scholarship, but he loved his uncle, so he smiled, nodded and smiled firmly again.
Once in the library, Samad was asked to fill in the visitors’ book:
Name: Samad Miah Iqbal
College: Educated elsewhere (Delhi)
Research project: Truth
Rajnu, tickled by this last entry, picked up the pen, adding ‘and Tragedy’.
‘Truth and Tragedy,’ said a deadpan librarian, turning the book back round. ‘Any particular kind?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Samad genially. ‘We’ll find it.’
It took a stepladder to reach it but it was well worth the stretch. When Rajnu passed the book to his uncle, Samad felt his fingers tingle and, looking at its cover, shape and colour, saw that it was all he had dreamt of. It was heavy, many paged, bound in a tan leather and covered in the light dust that denotes something incredibly precious, something rarely touched.
‘I left a marker in it. There is much to read but there is something I thought you’d like to see first,’ said Rajnu, laying it down on a desk. The heavy thud of one side of the book hit the table, and Samad looked at the appointed page. It was more than he could have hoped for.
‘It’s only an artist’s impression, but the similarity between-’
‘Don’t speak,’ said Samad, tracing his fingers across the picture. ‘This is our blood, Rajnu. I never thought I would see… What eyebrows! What a nose! I have his nose!’
‘You have his face, Uncle. More dashing, naturally.’
‘And what – what does it say underneath. Damn! Where are my reading glasses… read it for me, Rajnu, it is too small.’
‘The caption? Mangal Pande fired the first bullet of the 1857 movement. His self-sacrifice gave the siren to the nation to take up arms against an alien ruler, culminating in a mass-uprising with no parallel in world history. Though the effort failed in its immediate consequences, it succeeded in laying the foundations of the Independence to be won in 1947. For his patriotism he paid with his life. But until his last breath he refused to disclose the names of those who were preparing for, and instigating, the great uprising.’
Samad sat down on the bottom rung of the stepladder and wept.
‘So. Let me get this straight. Now you’re telling me that without Pande there’d be no Gandhi. That without your mad grandad there’d be no bloody Independence-’
‘Great-grandad.’
‘No, let me finish, Sam. Is that what you’re seriously asking us’ – Archie clapped an uninterested Clarence and Denzel on the back – ‘to believe? Do you believe it?’ he asked Clarence.
‘Me kyan believe dat!’ said Clarence, having no idea of the topic.
Denzel blew his nose into a napkin. ‘Troof be tol, me nah like to believe any ting. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Dat my motto.’
‘He was the tickle in the sneeze, Archibald. It is as simple as that. I do believe that.’
There was quiet for a minute. Archibald watched three sugar cubes dissolve in his teacup. Then, rather tentatively, he said, ‘I’ve got my own theory, you know. Separate from the books, I mean.’
Samad bowed. ‘Please enlighten us.’
‘Don’t get angry, now… But just think for a minute. Why is a strict religious man like Pande drinking bhang? Seriously, I know I tease you about it. But why is he?’
‘You know my opinion on that. He isn’t. He didn’t. It was English propaganda.’
‘And he was a good shot…’
‘No doubt about it. A. S. Misra produces a copy of a record stating that Pande trained in a special guard for one year, specially trained in the use of muskets.’
‘OK. So: why does he miss? Why?’
‘It is my belief that the only possible explanation is that the gun was faulty.’
‘Yes… there is that. But, maybe, maybe something else. Maybe he was being bullied into going out there and making a row, you know, goaded, by the other guys. And he didn’t want to kill anyone in the first place, you know. So he pretended to be drunk, so the boys in the barracks room would believe he missed the shot.’
‘That is quite the stupidest theory I have ever heard,’ sighed Samad, as the second hand of Mickey’s egg-stained clock started the thirty-second countdown to midnight. ‘The kind only you could come up with. It’s absurd.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Archibald, these Englishmen, these Captain Hearsays, Havelocks and the rest, were every Indian’s mortal enemy. Why should he spare lives he despised?’
‘Maybe he just couldn’t do it. Maybe he wasn’t the type.’
‘Do you really believe there is a type of man who kills and a type of man who doesn’t?’
‘Maybe Sam, maybe not.’
‘You sound like my wife,’ groaned Samad, mopping up a final piece of egg, ‘let me tell you something, Archibald. A man is a man is a man. His family threatened, his beliefs attacked, his way of life destroyed, his whole world coming to an end – he will kill. Make no mistake. He won’t let the new order roll over him without a struggle. There will be people he will kill.’
‘And there will be people he will save,’ said Archie Jones, with a cryptic look his friend would have thought an impossible feat for those sagging, chubby features. ‘Trust me.’
‘Five! Four! Tree! Two! One! Jamaica Irie!’ said Denzel and Clarence, raising hot Irish coffees to each other in a toast, then immediately resuming round nine of the dominoes.
‘HAPPY FUCKING NEW YEAR!’ bellowed Mickey, from behind the counter.
Irie 1990, 1907
In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future?
– Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
11 The Miseducation of Irie Jones
There was a lamp-post, equidistant from the Jones house and Glenard Oak Comprehensive, that had begun to appear in Irie’s dreams. Not the lamp-post exactly, but a small, handmade advert which was sellotaped round its girth at eye level. It said:
LOSE WEIGHT TO EARN MONEY
081 555 6752
Now, Irie Jones, aged fifteen, was big. The European proportions of Clara’s figure had skipped a generation, and she was landed instead with Hortense’s substantial Jamaican frame, loaded with pineapples, mangoes and guavas; the girl had weight; big tits, big butt, big hips, big thighs, big teeth. She was thirteen stone and had thirteen pounds in her savings account. She knew she was the target audience (if ever there was one), she knew full well, as she trudged schoolwards, mouth full of doughnut, hugging her spare tyres, that the advert was speaking to her. It was speaking to her. LOSE WEIGHT (it was saying) TO EARN MONEY. You, you, you, Miss Jones, with your strategically placed arms and cardigan, tied around the arse (the endless mystery: how to diminish that swollen enormity, the Jamaican posterior?), with your belly-reducing knickers and breast-reducing bra, with your meticulous lycra corseting – the much lauded nineties answer to whalebone – with your elasticated waists. She knew the advert was talking to her. But she didn’t know quite what it was saying. What were we talking about here? Sponsored slim? The earning capacity of thin people? Or something altogether more Jacobean, the brain-child of some sordid Willesden Shylock, a pound of flesh for a pound of gold: meat for money?