Absolute Friends by John le Carré Read Free Book Online

black hair freshly plaited down her back, she bends double at the roadside, bare feet pressed together as she chokes over her folded arms.
    The boat leaves Karachi in darkness and stays dark all the way to England because the Major has become ashamed of his face after seeing it printed in the native press. To hide it from view he takes his whiskey in his cabin, and food only when the boy presses it on him. The boy becomes his father's minder, keeping watch for him, making sorties, vetting the ship's daily newspaper in advance for toxic matter, sneaking him on deck for furtive walks before daylight, and in the evenings while the ship changes for dinner. Lying on his back on the other bunk, secondary-smoking his father's Burmas, counting the brass screw heads in the teak ribs that arch across the bulkhead and listening now to his father's ramblings, now to the chug of the ship's engines, or puzzling his unfulfilled way through Rudyard Kipling, he dreams of Rani, and swimming home to what his father still calls India.
    And the Major in his anguish has much to say on the subject of his adored, abandoned India, some of it to the young Mundy's ear surprising. With nothing more to be gained by pretending otherwise, the Major declares himself mortally disgusted by his country's connivance in the disastrous Partition. He heaps curses on the rogues and idiots in Westminster. Everything is their fault, right down to what they did to Ayah's family. It is as if the Major must unload his own guilt onto their shoulders. The bloodbaths and forced migrations, the collapse of law, order and a central administration are a consequence not of native intransigence but of British colonial disrespect, manipulation, greed, corruption, cowardice. Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy, against whom the Major until now will hear no evil, becomes in the fume-soaked atmosphere of their tiny cabin the Jackass. "If the Jackass had moved slower on Partition and faster to stop the massacres, he'd have saved a million lives. Two million." Attlee and Sir Stafford Cripps fare no better. They called themselves socialists, but they were class snobs like the rest of 'em.
    "As for that Winston Churchill, if _he'd__ been allowed to have his way, he'd have been worse than all the other buggers put together. Know why, boy? Know _why?__"
    "No, sir."
    "He thought the Indians were a pack of fuzzy-wuzzies, that's why. Flog 'em, hang 'em and teach 'em the Bible. Don't you ever let me hear you say a good word for that man, d'you understand me, boy?"
    "Yes, sir."
    "Give me a whiskey."
    The Major's burst of heresy may have its intellectual limitations, but its effect on the impressionable Mundy at this crucial moment in his life is of lightning. In a single flash he sees Ayah standing with her hands clasped in horror, with all her murdered family lying at her feet. He remembers every filtered, unclear rumor of mass murder followed by mass revenge. So it was the British then--it wasn't just the Hindus--who were the villains! He relives the jibes that as an English Christian boy he was obliged to suffer at the hands of Ahmed, Omar and Ali. Too late, he thanks them for their moderation. He sees Rani and marvels that she sufficiently overcame her disgust to love him. Ejected from the country he loves, caught in the twilight of puberty, dragged night and day towards a guilty country he has not seen but must now call home, Mundy undergoes his first exposure to the radical reappraisal of colonial history.
    The England that awaits the young Mundy is a rain-swept cemetery for the living dead powered by a forty-watt bulb. A gray stone medieval boarding school reeks of disinfectant and is ruled by boy quislings and adult despots. Number Two, The Vale weeps and rots as his father cooks inedible curries and pursues his purposeful slide into degradation. There being no native red-light quarter in Weybridge, he retains the services of a flighty Scottish housekeeper named Mrs. McKechnie who, aged