[NARRATION - Unnamed
Narrator’s voice:]
[Exposition:] Sister
Ludmilla’s “obscure” origins (117) and her work in Mayapore
(119-121).
Her own and others' viewpoints about her are
recounted, including scandal that she wears a kind of nun’s habit
though she belongs to no organized religion, and the belief, in Mayapore of
1942, that “nothing of importance” was really known about her (118).
Paul Scott on the
Narrative "DEVICE" of the Raj Quartet:
"Use of The Writer - sometimes called The Stranger or The Traveller (according
to circumstances.) RARE APPEARANCES BUT ALLOWS FOR THE FLEXIBILITY
NEEDED IN THIS FOUR VOLUME HISTORY OF AN AGE AND A PERIOD.
"Interviews, letters, extracts from works or
accounts written or tape-recorded by THE CHARACTERS (who have been approached
for information) PLUS THE WRITER'S OWN RECONSTRUCTIONS.
"THE WRITER NOT PRECISELY ME. SO THAT I MANAGE TO
ACHIEVE DETACHMENT AS WELL AS INVOLVEMENT." (Scott, "Notes"
167).
"Sister Ludmila [Book Three
narration] Mixture of history and interview"
(Scott, "Notes" 167).
"There are three characters who speak their
recollections to a narrator who is really myself - Lili Chatterjee, whom
Daphne Manners was staying with; Sister Ludmila, a now blind old
woman who ran a refuge for the homeless and dying at the time of the riots;
and Robin White, who was the Deputy Commissioner for the district"
(Scott, "Method"
65-66; emphasis mine).
"The narrator is the detective who assembles
his clues in the form of recurring images gleaned from interviews,
depositions, and diaries, and presents his material frequently in
re-creations, as though he is coming to his information at the same time as
the reader. Aside from the facts, what actually happened that fateful
night of August 9. 1942, he seeks to discover the complex interplay of
historical events, class and race forces, and elements in human psychology
that share in the related tragedies" (Weinbaum
93).
[NARRATION -
Sister
Ludmila’s narrative - Interview #1 (121-137):]
Sister Ludmila is now blind and mostly bedridden.
She occasionally addresses the unnamed
Narrator directly: e.g. “It is not for this you have come” (121);
“But you have not come to talk about this. . . .
[THEME
- Scott's Theory of History:] "Your voice is that of a
man to whom the word Bibighar is not an end in itself or descriptive of a case
that can be opened…and closed….there is also in you an understanding that
a specific historical event has no definitive beginning, no satisfactory end .
. .” (125).
Sister Ludmila speaks of
this name "Sister Ludmila" that the Indians called her, and the
nun-style habit she designed and wore in Mayapore. She has had a close
relationship with God, who speaks directly to her (121-125).
[Exposition of Sister Ludmila's childhood:] In Brussels, her
mother’s money is refused by Roman Catholic nuns because it is “tainted”
(122). Then “suddenly I saw the truth!
How could I have been so blind? How
angry He [God] would have been with them [the sisters] for refusing the money
my mother had offered!” (123).
She alludes to the “Sanctuary,” where she did her work and is now
“permitted to stay, to live out my life in this room,” feeling now that
her blindness is a “blessing” (124).
Then she begins to speak
of Hari Kumar and Ronald Merrick
(125
– 137) . . .
[NARRATION - Sister
Ludmila - Interview #2 (137-158)
To the unnamed Narrator she says, “It is good of you to come again so
soon” (137).]
Sister Ludmila begins speaking of the
history of the Bibighar—which means
“house of the women” (138)—and the MacGregor
House:
“They are only one mile distant.
Not far, but far enough for a girl running at
night” (138). She
alludes to Daphne Manners' rape:
“…after that day in August 1942, the
names Bibighar and MacGregor become special ones.
They passed into our language with new meanings” (139).
[NARRATION] Sister
Ludmila recounts stories and facts of the Scotsman MacGregor—not just
the “European version of the tale,” but the Indian versions which “ring
truer, don’t they?” (140-141).
[THEME:] Sister Ludmila speaks of the “special
connection between the house of the singer [MacGregor House] and the house of
the courtesans [Bibighar]”:
between then “have flowed the dark currents of a human conflict, even
after the Bibighar was destroyed, a current whose direction might be traced by
following the route taken by the girl running in the darkness from one to the
other. A current.
The flow of an invisible river. No
bridge was ever thrown across it and stood.
You understand what I am telling you?
That MacGregor and Bibighar are the place of the white and the place of
the black? To get from one to
ther other you could not cross by a bridge but had to take your courage in
your hands and enter the flood and let yourself be taken with it, lead where
it may. This is a courage Miss
Manners had.”(142).
[THEME &
CHARACTER:] Sister
Ludmila’s interpretation of the relationship between the white English girl Daphne
Manners and Hari Kumar unfolds (142 &
following). Daphne’s initial
“powerful compulsion” mixed with “horror” of mixing white and black,
grew into love: “And then she rejected the notion of horror entirely,
realizing that it was no good waiting for a bridge to be built, but a question
of entering the floor, and meeting there, letting the current take them both.
It is as if she said to herself: Well, life is not just a business of
standing on dry land and occasionally getting your feet wet.
It is merely an illusion that some of stand on one bank and some on the
opposite. So long as we stand like that we are not living at all, but
dreaming. So jump, jump in, and
let the shock wake us up. Even if
we drown, at least for a moment or two before we die we shall be awake and
alive” (142).
[CHARACTER:] Sister
Ludmila views Daphne as having a kind of “wholeness I never had” (143).
She describes her impressions of Daphne and Daphne’s reaction to the
“dancing S[h]iva” (143).
Sister Ludmila then begins to recount events from the evening
of the rape, when Daphne came to see her at the Sanctuary after seeing
Edwina Crane at the hospital (143).
When Daphne left on her bicycle at dusk, “I felt that she was going beyond
my help,” just as Sister Ludmila had felt about Hari Kumar when Ronald
Merrick had taken him away that day months before (144).
[NARRATION:] This leads Sister Ludmila to add
details to her earlier narrative of the day of Hari’s
arrest (146-148), then her narrative skips again to the evening
of Daphne’s visit.
That night, Ronald Merrick came looking for Daphne, and in retrospect
Sister Ludmila believes that her responses to Merrick’s questions were a
“betrayal of the boy” [Hari Kumar] and contributed to setting “a tragic
course of action” in motion (149).
[THEME &
CHARACTER:] Sister Ludmila’s reveals her interpretation of the
relationship between Hari Kumar and Ronald
Merrick, who “had long ago chosen Hari Kumar, chosen him as a victim,
having stood and watched him washing at the pump, and afterwards taken him
away for questioning, to observe more closely the
darkness that attracted darkness in himself.
A different darkness, but still a darkness.
On Kumar’s part a darkness of the soul.
On Merrick’s a darkness of the mind and heart and flesh.
And again, but in an unnatural context, the attraction of white to
black, the attraction of an opposite, of someone this time who had perhaps
never even leapt into the depths of his own private compulsion, let alone into
those of life or of the world at large, but had stood high and dry on the
sterile banks, thicketed around with his own secrecy and also with the
prejudice he had learned because he was one of the white men in control of a
black man’s country” (150).
[NARRATION &
CHARACTER:
Sister Ludmila skips forward to
her last visit with Daphne Manners, after the rape:]
“She was pregnant” and Sister Ludmila is struck that Daphne has “the
calmness of a beautiful woman” (150). Daphne
does not know where they have taken Hari, who was “arrested, that night of
Bibighar, with some other boys” (150-151).
Daphne “will go through” with the pregnancy, refuses to abort her
baby though for the European community, especially other white women “To get
rid. . . . To tear the disgusting embryo out of the womb and throw it to the
pi-dogs,” as Sister Ludmila heard a white woman say, seems an
“obligation” (151). To such
people, Daphne had become “’that Manners girl’” (151).
[THEME &
CHARACTER:] Sister Ludmila observes the irony that white women were
attracted to Hari Kumar—though he called himself “invisible to white
people,” he had “not noticed the way the white women eyed him,” but only
the way “they pushed past him, or turned their backs…” (152). Sister Ludmila intuits that Hari Kumar still had “a
terrible longing to into them, to become again part of them, because of their
Englishness, because England was the only world he knew, and he hated the
black town on this side of the river as much as any white man fresh out of
England would hate it. Hated it
more, because for him the black town was the place where he had to live . .
.” (152).
[NARRATION &
CHARACTER:]
“But
Kumar is another story, isn’t he? One
that you must come to,” Sister Ludmila tells the unnamed Narrator (152).
Sister Ludmila offers some help by mentioning Hari’s best friend in England,
Colin Lindsay (152)—of whom she learned on “a
second occasion” when she saw Hari Kumar drunk.
She calls Hari an “Englishman with black skin who in Mayapore became
what he called invisible to white people” (152)—though not invisible to
white women, or Daphne Manners, or to Ronald Merrick (153).
[NARRATION &
CHARACTER: Sister
Ludmila’s narration then shoots forward, adding more to the story of her
last visit with pregnant Daphne, when she came to
say goodbye before leaving Mayapore.]
To Daphne, Sister Ludmila confesses that her response to Ronald Merrick
the night of the rape has “been on my conscience” (153), and she tries to
“unburden” (154) but Daphne cannot help Sister Ludmila “unburden”
herself “Of blame, of guilt, of treacherously saying to Merrick: Perhaps she
has called in a Mrs. Gupta Sen’s [Hari’s aunt which whom he lives in
Chillianwallah Bagh]” (155). Sister
Ludmila believes that she unintentionally put Hari in Merrick’s mind by this
remark, and opened up a way for Merrick to punish Kumar, “who he had already
chosen, chosen as a victim. For
Merrick was a man unable to love. Only
he was able to punish. In my
heart I feel this is true. It was
Kumar that Merrick wanted. Not
Miss Manners. And it was probably her association with Kumar that first
caused Merrick to look in her direction.
This is the way I see it. And
there is another thing I see” (155). This
other thing is that Daphne had made love with Kumar (if not on the night of
the Bibighar affair then some other time), believed she carried his child, and
seems in a state of grace during her pregnancy.
[NARRATION & THEME:]
Sister Ludmila links Edwina Crane and Daphne Manners because both refused to
identify their assailants, and earned the criticism--hatred in Daphne’s
case--of the European community (155-156). She denied them “public revenge,” “they got no
trial”—though the British Raj needed no trial or proven guilt to lock up
Kumar and send him away to years in prison (156).
Sister Ludmila tells the unnamed Narrator the story “that was finally
accepted by all the gossips of British Mayapore as the unpalatable truth,”
and she attributes the story’s [biased and therefore unreliable] source to
Ronald Merrick (156-157). Most of
British Mayapore was intent upon destroying Miss Manners in 1942, and might
have succeeded, Sister Ludmila thinks, except that Mayapore is also “an
Indian town” and Indians remember Daphne Manners, and tell her story,
differently. Out
of the Bibighar affair, to Indian Mayapore “at least one thing emerged”:
“That Daphne Manners loved them. And
had not betrayed them, even when it seemed that they had betrayed her”
(158).
