A Fine Family: A Novel by Gurcharan Das Read Free Book Online Page B

tried their best to be fair. They tried to protect the weak from the strong and the honest from the dishonest. He could speak from personal experience in the courts about the lengths to which the lowest English judge would go to discover a fair solution.
    So what if they did not extend a hand of friendship as well? So what if they wanted to be
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sahibs! He would rather have their justice than their friendship. They were after all the rulers. He would rather be slighted socially than have to live with injustice. Perhaps it was a virtue for the rulers and the ruled to keep apart.
    Early in his career Bauji had learnt a lesson. An Englishman named Coates, who was the new City Magistrate, had befriended him and invited him to tea. He was a bachelor, new to the country, and not accustomed to the social barriers between the English and the Indians. Bauji was proud of the invitation, but made the mistake of telling his friends about it. Some of his friends, being full of envy, spread the news quickly, and it reached the Collector’s ears in a distorted form: that the Magistrate was taking bribes from the Pleader. As a result both Bauji and Coates got into trouble. But in the end a scandal was averted because the facts were otherwise. It taught them both a lesson, however. Curiously it also had the unintended effect of increasing Bauji’s practice. His new clients brought pockets full of cash in order to bribe the Magistrate. But Mr Coates, like most English officials, was an honest and a fair man.
    Bauji suddenly got up and went inside to change. When he reached the top of the steps above the courtyard, he paused a moment. He could see the minarets of the mosque beyond the Clock Tower, and the dusky horizon which merged with the trees of the Company Bagh. He felt a weightless quality in the air and was overcome by a majestic calm produced by the brilliant dazzle of the noon sun. He thought that the rains came and the rains went but the sun reigned supreme in this land. As soon as he was inside, a servant came to help him with his clothes and shoes. As he put on a starched loose muslin kurta, depressing political thoughts overtook him.
    ‘Would the British really leave India?’ he asked himself, echoing Chachi’s concern. ‘And if they did, what would happen after they left?’ Especially after Karan’s visit, he felt discomfort at the thought that his own sentiments might not be very nationalistic. ‘Are we ready to govern ourselves?’ he wondered. As a legal man his views tended to be moderate and he believed in evolutionary change. All forms of direct action were unpleasant to him. Would Indians be able to maintain the magnificent British institutions of law and order? For the past hundred years, people had got used to the peace brought by the British Raj. And peace was one of those things that people only noticed when it was absent. Could the Indians hold it together? We have competent people, but they are forever fighting with one another: Hindu against Muslim; Jat against Bhangi, the landed against the landless. The spectre of India breaking up haunted Bauji. Would the subcontinent, left to its own devices, he wondered, degenerate into narrow parochialisms? Again he was assailed by the guilt that many Indian conservatives felt. He wanted the English to leave, but he wanted their institutions to stay. He wanted a gradual transfer of power.
    The servant brought in his polished shoes and helped him put them on. Then he assisted him with his waistcoat. It was time to put on the turban, an important moment, so all political thoughts were suspended. He wore his turban in a particular fashion which he had acquired as a youth from a stylish judge whom he admired when he first set up his practice in Lyallpur. He made one, two and then three turns around his head with the starched white cloth. And it was done. The servant offered him a silk handkerchief and his gold watch. He glanced at the mirror as he was leaving and was