The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) by Paul Scott Read Free Book Online

by pedestrians, clerks going back to work at District Headquarters after lunch in their homes, servants returning to the civil bungalows after shopping in the bazaar for vegetables; tailors on their way to measure a sahib or a sahib’s lady who preferred the work and the prices of the bazaar tailors to those of the cantonment tailor, Darwaza Chand; pedlars with boxes on their heads, farmers driving their buffalo carts back to villages in the plains north of the cantonment, women and children going begging or scavenging; and, occasionally, car-borne Europeans, a bank official or businessman, the District Superintendent of Police, the Station Commander, English and Indian Army officers in yellow-painted fifteen hundredweight trucks. Sometimes on these journeys she would see and nod to, but never speak to, the white woman—said to be mad—who dressed like a nun, kept a refuge for the sick and the dying and was called Sister Ludmila by the Indians.
    Miss Crane used the Mandir Gate bridge into the native town in order to go from her bungalow to the Chillianwallah bazaar school, a journeythat took her past the church of the mission and the principal mission school, over the bridge, past the Tirupati Temple, through narrow dirty streets of open shop fronts, past the gateway of the Chillianwallah bazaar itself where fish, meat and vegetables were sold, and into an even narrower street, a dark alleyway between old, crumbling houses, down whose centre ran an open water duct. The alley was a cul-de-sac. At its closed-in head were the high wall and arched gateway of the bazaar school. The gateway opened into a narrow mud compound where the children played. Stunted banana trees gave a little shade in the early mornings and late afternoons. The mud was reddish brown, baked hard by the sun and pressed flat by the pupils’ bare feet. Even in the wet monsoon an afternoon’s sunshine would dry and harden it to its old concrete consistency.
    The Chillianwallah bazaar schoolhouse was a two-story building with steps up to a verandah with shuttered balconied windows above the verandah roof. At least seventy years old, the house had been the property of Mr. Chillianwallah, a Parsee who left Bombay and made a fortune in Mayapore out of government building contracts in the 1890s. Mr. Chillianwallah had built the barracks in the civil lines, the Church of St. Mary, the bungalow presently lived in by the Deputy Commissioner, and—in a philanthropic fit—the bazaar in the native town. Still in the throes of that fit he presented the house in the alley to the Church of St. Mary, and until the mission built a more substantial schoolhouse in the civil lines, opposite the mission church, the house in the alley had been its only foothold on the shaky ladder of conversion. For several years after the building of the larger mission school in the civil lines in 1906, the Chillianwallah house and compound had been used by the mission as a place of refuge for the old and sick and dying but as the civil lines school became filled to overflowing with the children of Eurasians, and the numbers of Indian children attending fell away, the mission reopened the house in the alley for lessons in the hope of regaining the foothold they had virtually lost, and the old and sick and dying had some thirty years to wait for the coming of Sister Ludmila.
    The Chillianwallah bazaar school was now the second of Miss Crane’s responsibilities in Mayapore District. Her third was in Dibrapur, near the coal mines; her first the larger school in the civil lines, opposite the mission church, where in cooperation with a succession of English teachers whose qualifications to teach were more apparent than her own and whose religious convictions put hers to shame, she supervised thework of the Anglo-Indian class mistresses and taught mathematics and English to the older Eurasian and Indian Christian girls. From this school most of the pupils passed into the Government Higher School