The Iron Tiger

‘Ferguson? Where did you meet Ferguson?’

‘On the train from Calcutta. He was very kind to me. He wants you to call on him at the usual place before you leave.’ She smiled brightly. ‘It all sounds very mysterious.’

An invisible hand seemed to pass across his face and he smiled again. ‘A great one for a joke, old Ferguson. I shan’t be long.’

He left her there and hurried through the other room to the changing cubicles where he dressed quickly in a cream nylon shirt, knitted tie and single-breasted blue suit of tropical worsted.

When he returned to the office, Hamid was sitting on the edge of the desk, Janet in the chair beside him looking up, a smile on her face.

Drummond was aware of a strange, irrational jealousy as he moved forward. ‘I see Ali’s managed to make his own introductions, as usual.’

‘If I must be formally introduced, then I must.’ Hamid grinned down at Janet. ‘Jack was at one time a Commander in the Navy. He’s never got over it. They’re very correct, you know.’

He jumped to his feet and stood there waiting for Drummond to speak, a handsome, challenging figure in his military turban and expertly tailored khaki drill uniform, the medal ribbons a bright splash of colour above his left breast pocket.

Drummond sighed. ‘Trapped, as usual. Miss Janet Tate, may I present Major Ali Mohammed Hamid, D.S.O., a British decoration, you’ll notice. Winchester, one of our better public schools, and Sandhurst. Rather more class than West Point, don’t you think?’

Hamid took her left hand and raised it to his lips gallantly. ‘See how the British have left their brand on us, clear to the bone, Miss Tate?’

‘Don’t look at me,’ Drummond said. ‘I’m a Scot.’

‘The same thing,’ Hamid said airily. ‘Everyone knows it’s the Scots who rule Britain.’

He gave his arm to Janet and they moved out into the bright, hot sunshine. Across the square, there was a low wall and beyond it, the river, usually two miles wide at this point, but as always when winter approached, narrowing to half a mile or less, winding its way through endless sandbanks.

‘Is this still the Ganges?’ Janet asked.

‘Ganges, Light amid the Darkness, Friend of the Helpless. It has a thousand names,’ Hamid said as they strolled towards the low wall. ‘To bathe in her waters is to be purified of all sin, or so the Hindus believe.’

Janet leaned on the wall and looked down the cobbled bank into the in-shore channel at the brown, silt-laden water. ‘It looks pretty unhealthy to me.’

Drummond lit a cigarette and leaned beside her. ‘Strangely enough, it does seem to have health-giving properties. During religious festivals pilgrims drink it, often at places where the drains disgorge the filth of the town, but they never seem to suffer. Bottled, it keeps for a year. They say that in the old days when taken on board clipper ships in Calcutta, it outlasted all other waters.’

Down below at the river edge some kind of ceremony was taking place and she glanced up at Hamid. ‘Can we go down?’

‘But of course. Anything you wish.’

‘Not me,’ Drummond said. ‘If I’m going to see Ferguson before we leave, I’d better be moving.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s almost two o’clock now. I’ll see you back at the hotel at four.’

He moved away across the square quickly and Janet watched him go, a slight frown on her face. ‘I believe Mr Ferguson said he was in the tea business.’

‘That’s right,’ Hamid said. ‘Jack has an air freight contract with him. Ferguson usually comes up to see him once a month. He has a houseboat lower down the river from here.’

‘You said Mr Drummond was once a naval commander?’

‘Fleet Air Arm.’

‘He was a regular officer, then? He would have been too young to have been a full commander during the war.’

‘Quite right.’ The Pathan still smiled, but there was a slight, cutting edge to his voice, a look in the eye that warned her to go no further. ‘Shall we go down?’

They stood on the edge of a small crowd and watched the ceremony that was taking place. Several people stood knee-deep in the water, the men amongst them stripped to the waist and daubed with mud. One of them poured ashes from a muslin bag into a larger paper boat. Another put a match to it and pushed the frail craft away from the bank, out into the channel where the current caught it. Suddenly, the whole boat burst into flames, and a moment later sank beneath the surface.

‘What were they doing?’ Janet asked.

‘The ashes were those of a baby,’ Hamid said. ‘A man-child because the ceremony is expensive and not worth going through for a girl.’

‘And they do this all the time?’

He nodded. ‘It is every Hindu’s greatest dream to have his ashes scattered on the waters of Ganges. Near here there is a shamsan, a burning place for the dead. Would you like to see it?’

‘Do you think I can stand it?’

He smiled down at her. ‘Two years in Vietnam, you said. If you can take that, you can take anything.’

‘I’m not so sure.’ She shook her head. ‘India’s different, like no other place on earth. Ferguson told me that and he was right.’

As they moved along the shore, she could smell woodsmoke, and up ahead there was a bullock cart, three or four people standing beside it.

As they approached, she gave a sudden gasp and moved closer to Hamid. A naked man was lying on a bed of thorns, eyes closed, his tongue protruding, an iron spike pushed through it. His hair and beard were matted and filthy, his body daubed with cowdung and ashes.

‘A saddhu, a holy man,’ Hamid said, throwing a coin into an earthenware jar that stood at the man’s head. ‘He begs from the mourners and prays for the souls of the dead.’

There was nothing to distinguish the place from any other stretch of the shore, no temples, no monuments. Only the ashes of old fires, the piles of calcined bones and here and there a skull, glaring blindly up at the sky.

The people by the fire laughed and joked with each other and as the flames roared through the criss-crossed logs of the funeral pyre in a sudden gust of wind, she caught the sweetly-sick, distinctive stench of burning flesh and her throat went dry, panic threatening to choke her.

She turned, stumbling against Hamid, and beyond him in the water something turned over in the shallows, a rotting body, arms trailing, a grey headed gull swooping down, beak poised to strike.

There was immediate concern on his face, and unconsciously he used her first name. ‘Janet, what is it?’

‘The smell,’ she said. ‘Burning flesh. I was in a village called Nonking north of Saigon last year. The Viet Cong made one of their night raids and set fire to the hospital.’ She stared back into the past, horror on her face. ‘The patients, we could only get half of them out. There are nights when I can still hear the screams.’

She was aware of his hand under her arm and they were climbing rapidly up the bank, across a narrow stone causeway. Suddenly, they moved into a different world, a place of colour and light, scarlet hibiscus and graceful palms.

They walked through trees along a narrow path and emerged on to a stone, loopholed terrace high above the river, a couple of ancient iron cannon still at their stations as they had been for three hundred years.

Hamid pushed her gently forward. ‘And behold, said the genie …’

She gave an excited gasp and leaned across the wall. Between the sandbanks, hundreds of flamingoes paced through the shallows, setting the very air alight with the glory of their plumage. Hamid picked up a stone and tossed it down, and immediately the sky was filled with the heavy, pulsating beat of their wings as they lifted in a shimmering cloud.

He looked down at her gravely. ‘Back there, death, Janet. Here, life in all its magnificence. They are both sides of the same coin. This you must learn.’

She nodded slowly and slipped her hand into his arm. Together, they walked back quietly through the trees without speaking.

Beyond the old quarter of the town, Drummond moved into an area of stately walled villas and beautiful gardens, the homes of rich merchants and government officials. A narrow path, fringed with eucalyptus trees, brought him to the river bank again.

A red houseboat was moored at the end of an old stone wharf about forty yards away and Ferguson’s Sikh bearer squatted on the cabin roof. When he saw Drummond, he scrambled to the deck and disappeared below.