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 Page A

whose foundation in 1920 had done much to undermine the mission’s influence.
    The teacher at the Chillianwallah bazaar school whose pupils were all Indian was a middle-aged, tall, thin, dark-skinned Madrassi Christian, Mr. F. Narayan: the F for Francis, after St. Francis of Assisi. In his spare time, of which he had a great deal, and to augment his income of which he had little, Mr. Narayan wrote what he called Topics for the local English language weekly newspaper, the Mayapore Gazette. In addition, his services were available as a letter writer, and these were services used by both his Hindu and Muslim neighbours. He could converse fluently in Urdu and Hindi and the local vernacular, and wrote an excellent Urdu and Hindi script, as well as his native Tamil and acquired Roman-English. In Europe, Miss Crane thought, a man of his accomplishments might have gone a long way—in the commercial rather than the pedagogic field. She suspected him, because Joseph had hinted at it, of selling contraceptives to Christian and progressive Hindu families. She did not disapprove, but was amused because Mr. Narayan himself had an ever-pregnant wife, and a large, noisy, undisciplined family of boys and girls.
    His wife Mary Narayan, as dark-skinned as himself, was a girl he brought back one year from leave in Madras. He said she was a Christian too, but Miss Crane doubted it, never having seen her go to church but, instead, on more than one occasion, entering and leaving the Tirupati Temple. He said she was now twenty-five, which Miss Crane doubted as well. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Mrs. Narayan had only been thirteen or fourteen at the time Francis Narayan married her.
    Mr. and Mrs. Narayan lived in the upstairs rooms of the Chillianwallah bazaar school. Their children, three girls and two boys to date (apart from the one still suckling whose sex she had somehow never made a note of), sat on the front benches in the schoolroom and were, Miss Crane had begun to notice, virtually the only regular attendants. On Sunday mornings, Mr. Narayan and his two eldest children—one boy, John Krishna, and a girl, Kamala Magdalene—left the house in the Chillianwallah bazaar in a cycle-tonga driven by a convert called Peter Paul Akbar Hossain, precariously negotiated the water-duct down thecul-de-sac, crossed the Mandir Gate bridge, and attended the service at the mission church where Mr. Narayan also assisted with the collection. His wife, he said, had to stay at home to look after the younger children. Miss Crane took this information, too, with a pinch of salt. She wondered whether it might be interesting to stand outside the Tirupati Temple on a Sunday morning to see whether Mrs. Narayan’s absence from the mission church was due to the stronger call of Lord Venkataswara, the god of the temple whose image was taken from the sanctuary once a year and carried down to the banks of the river to bless all those from whom he received the prescribed sacrifice.
    But on Sunday mornings Miss Crane was otherwise engaged. She went to the service at St. Mary’s, cycling there rain or shine along the tidy, tree-lined, geometrically laid out roads of the cantonment, holding an umbrella up if the weather was inclement. Miss Crane’s umbrella was a cantonment joke. In the rains, reaching the side door, parking the Raleigh, she worked the canopy vigorously up and down to shake the drops from it. This flapping bat-wing noise was audible to those in the pews closest to the door, the pews on the lectern side of the church, whose English occupants smiled at the unmistakable sounds of Miss Crane’s arrival, much as years before other people in another church had smiled when Mr. Grant offered up his prayers.
    The other congregational joke about Miss Crane was over her tendency to fall asleep during the sermon, which she did with great discretion, maintaining a ramrod back and squared shoulders, so that only her closed eyes gave the game away, and even