It's a rainy day, and this one wrote itself
F. George MacDonald, Flashman and Empire (London: John Barrie, 2008)
You’ve got to think hard if you want to blackmail a man in his nineties. He’s past the age where reputation matters, and he’s certainly got no career you can ruin. It’s unlikely that anyone would care enough about his past crimes to put him in prison for them, and even death holds little terror to a man who’s spent the past twenty years cheating it just by being alive.
But when I said all this to the three men before me, they seemed strangely unmoved.
“We
have thought hard, General Flashman,” said the one in the middle. He was wearing one of those modern uniforms, the ones that fit loose and make you look like a lump of dirt; it’s a wonder that anyone wearing one could get the ladies’ attention. Maybe that was the man’s problem, although I doubted it: he was probably one of the priggish God-fearing types who used to infest the public schools and were now infesting the Imperial Party.
“No doubt a brave man like yourself could resist anything we might do to you,” he continued, and was that a trace of mocking laughter in his voice? “But we wouldn’t do it to
you. You’ve got a granddaughter you dote on, don’t you? A happily married, respectable granddaughter – but she’d hardly be that if some of her past peccadilloes became known. Some of her exploits are quite as spectacular as yours – more than enough to get her expelled from polite society, wouldn’t you say?”
“You bastard,” I said, and no doubt he was one, but what could I do? He’d found my weak point, and the list of names and dates he read off left me in no doubt that he knew the truth. I’d covered for a couple of Selina’s liaisons when she was younger, including a stint as Bertie’s mistress, and while he might not be so much of a much to high society, some of the others would. “All right, what do you want?”
“That’s better. No doubt you’ve heard about the troubles in India…”
“The ones your lot made, you mean?” I’m hardly one to cater to the wogs, but you’ve got to be polite about keeping them in their place, and if you aren’t, it’s only your fault if they don’t stay there.
He looked annoyed at that, but only briefly; he knew he was master, and thought it more important to get to the meat of the matter than take notice of my petty slights. “The point is, General Flashman, that you can speak Hindustani like a native, and that you’ve passed for one too. In Bombay, you’d be another bent old man in the market – no one that anybody would notice.”
“No one that anybody would tell anything to, either. No doubt I could give you excellent intelligence about the market gossip, and you’d know exactly which curry-wallah chases everything in a sari.”
“You’ve got eyes, man!” I could tell I was trying his patience, which was good fun but might not be the best idea while he held a list of Selina’s paramours in hand. “You can tell us what you see. And as for who you’d talk to, we have some ideas along those lines. We wouldn’t take the trouble of routing your tired old bones out else, would we?”
There comes a time when a coward must bow to the inevitable, and that time usually comes sooner rather than later. “Very well then. But I hear there’s a naval blockade around Bombay, and I’m sure I’d attract attention if I came waltzing in aboard a British warship.”
“Don’t worry. We’ve got it arranged.”
I’ve encountered the Madras regiments several times in my travels, but in all my visits to India, I’d somehow avoided the city itself. In February of ’17, aboard the corvette
Indomitable via Malta and Suez, I corrected the oversight.
I’d been made comfortable enough on the voyage, or at least as comfortable as a 94-year-old man at sea can be, but that ended when we got to shore. I wasn’t coming to India as a retired general, d’ye see, but as an old native servant returning to his country after years of faithful service in England. On the one hand, that meant no banquets with the governor and bankers – something I was happy to avoid, since the governor here was rumored to be an earnest and tiresome fellow – but on the other hand, it meant a filthy room above a dockyard tavern rather than a guest-house suitable to my station. The drinks were cheap and the girls serviceable, though, so I made do.
It was from the girls that I learned a bit of the local Dravidian chatter: I didn’t expect to stay around here long enough to need it, but you never know when something might come in useful, and it’s not as if you can
avoid picking up the jabber when a comely lass is whispering it in your ear. After a few days I felt brave enough to wander out a bit and take some air, which was heavy and oppressive like all southern air but far healthier than inside the drinking-den.
It was that night, I think, that one of the ladies – Nitharsha, if I don’t misremember – started murmuring to me in a language that I realized was Hindustani. “You are from Bombay?” she asked.
I sat bolt upright – far from an easy task at ninety-four, and one that gave me aching bones for hours after – and then realized that there was a perfectly natural reason for her to think that. I obviously wasn’t a Dravidian – they’re a far darker-skinned lot than the northern Indians, and I could never pass for one the way I could for a Rajput or Afghan – and my Hindustani had a trace of a Bombay accent. I’d learned it there, after all, as had the young lady I learned it from. So I calmed down and nodded.
“Are you going there?”
I nodded again, and she looked at me appraisingly. “It’s dangerous, but someone like you… yes, you might get there without being noticed.” It was touching, really: first the Imperial Party and now Nitharsha had far more faith in me than I did in myself.
“Are you going to Bombay because you
want to be there?”
Well, that got to the heart of the matter, didn’t it? The obvious answer, and the true one, was “no,” but I knew what she was asking. She wanted to know what side I was on, and was putting it in a way that wouldn’t get her in trouble if I turned out to be on the wrong one.
I could have given the true answer, and the conversation would have ended there. But one thing I’ve learned in eighty years of arrant poltroonery is to play along, so I said yes. The more fool me.
“Then I have a message for you to carry.” She pulled an envelope from the purse that lay beside her and closed my hand around it. “If you bring it to Nazir Khan, who has a jewelry shop on Meadows Street, he’ll pay you well.”
I promised I would, and after that, she switched back to Dravidian and the evening proceeded in the more usual fashion.
Three days later they came to get me – a couple of plainclothes men who sat down next to me in the small park down the way and suggested, in English, that we go for a stroll. They brought me to a back room in the local lockup – nothing but the best for old Flashy – and explained that they’d made the arrangements to get me to Bombay. One of them asked how I’d found Madras and whether the accommodations were to my liking, and I managed to refrain from getting in a fight I was too old to win. Instead, I told them about Nazir Khan, though out of the chivalry that only a coward who fears revenge can have, I left Nitharsha’s name out of it. [1]
“Nazir Khan, is it? Well done, Flashman! We were hoping to find out what he was up to, and here you’ve got a letter of introduction already!” The man unbent far enough to tell me that Khan had many business connections in Madras, and that he was thought to have a network of spies; if I were to deliver the letter and meet him, I might learn who they were.
Of course, that brought matters back to my entry into Bombay, which they assured me was to be effected that very night. I had some vague notion of a railway journey into Hyderabad, from which trains still ran to the areas the Congress controlled, but that was far too slow for the mandarins of the Political Service, or whatever they called it these days. After dark fell, they put me in a Black Maria and drove me past the station to a field where an airplane lay in wait.
“I don’t know who you are, but if you want me to do your dirty work in Bombay, you’ll turn around and drive back to the station. There’s no way you’ll ever get me in one of those…”
The rest of what I planned to say was cut off when my minder picked me up bodily, bundled me over his shoulder, and tossed me into the gunner’s seat. He took the other for himself and gunned the engines, and they were so loud as the machine took off that he truly couldn’t hear my screams. After a few minutes, though, I realized that my terror had changed to something so unfamiliar that it took me a moment to realize what it was: exhilaration.
It’s a function of age, I think. As you know, I’ve led a far more active career than I would have done if I’d been free to follow my inclinations, and at times, I’ve had no choice but to battle for my life. I daresay I’ve been in, and won, more fights than any other coward in Britain; I might even hold the world record, although there are obvious difficulties in comparing notes. And though I’d gone into each fight with stomach-churning fear, there came a time when I resigned myself to my fate, and each time I’d done so, I’d felt a sense of exaltation and freedom. Maybe now that I was ninety-four, and resignation to my fate was pretty much a permanent state of affairs, I could look on being a mile above the earth with the same equanimity. Maybe, with so short a time to go before I met my maker, I had become almost… brave.
But my newfound courage, if that was indeed what it was, didn’t last long. As the first rays of dawn appeared, ten hours and three refueling stops later, my chauffeur landed on a field a mile or two outside a town and unceremoniously ushered me out. “We’re in Congress territory now,” he said. “There’s a train station in that town, and if you get the first express, you can be in Bombay by nightfall.” Without another word, he swung back into the aircraft and took off in a roar of engines, headed back to Mysore and the fueling station.
I walked in the other direction toward the town, whose name I never learned, and as I did, the old fear returned.
Ah, Bombay. This was the city where I’d first met India in all its splendor, squalor and filth, and where I’d promptly been dragooned onto Elphy Bey’s staff in Kabul. That had worked out well enough for me in the end, but it had been a damned near thing, and I’d been sick with terror all the while. At least I wasn’t going back
there again.
Had it really been seventy-five years since I’d first set foot on Indian soil? I was going back to where it all began, and it seemed that I’d been along on every Indian adventure since: Elphy Bey’s disaster, the Sikh war, the mutiny. It had been sixty years since the last of those, and India had been at peace ever since: the jewel in the crown, a land of opulent rajahs and loyal soldiers. It was a land I’d come to like in spite of itself, or maybe in spite of
myself, and now all that was shattered because the Imperial fools didn’t know how to manage it.
Bombay was certainly a different place from the one I remembered. It was a city of smokestacks, streetcars and motor-wagons now, and if not for the blasted heat and the Hindustani lettering, the buildings in the center might have graced any English town. An English city might even have had nearly as many saris, right after the Great War when the Empire was in fashion. But there were still an abundance of cheap serais, and I took a room at one – bent old market-beggar or not, I
wasn’t going to sleep outside, and if I had to be discreet about who saw me in the mornings and evenings, then so be it.
In the morning, I went to find Nazir Khan. I cursed myself as I did, because visiting him hadn’t been part of my original plan. I’d intended to hang around the bazaars, pass on gossip and the occasional useless tidbit to my Imperial masters, take my stipend however they chose to give it to me, and wait for the day when either the war would end or I would keel over. But now that I’d followed where Nitharsha led, that was no longer an option. As I said, the more fool me.
Khan’s jewelry shop was easy enough to find: it was a posh store not far from the Stock Exchange and the banks. It still had a full display, despite the war. Evidently, there were still people in Bombay with money to spend – well, I suppose there are always war profiteers – or else the place was a front.
Nazir himself was a portly gent in his fifties, the very model of a wealthy jewel-merchant, and he had three stout fellows in front of the counter who took one look at me and prepared to give me the heave-ho. “I’m here from Nitharsha,” I cried, and that didn’t move them, but Nazir held up his hand and had them deposit me on the floor.
“Come with me,” he said; he helped me up and took me to a back room, where I gave him the envelope and he called for a boy to bring tea. “Kandan’s family got taxed off their land two years ago,” he said casually, indicating the boy, “and his sister starved, but I found him and gave him a job.”
Those of you who are familiar with my views on natives might expect that I reacted to that with a shrug, and it’s true that a few starving Indians more or less have never been a large matter to me. But I found that I
couldn’t shrug, not with the boy in front of me no more than ten years old and his late sister no doubt even younger. And this was an injury we had caused, rather than the normal vicissitudes of life for those unfortunate enough to be born wogs. It was…
unnecessary, a waste.
I didn’t answer, but Khan didn’t expect me to; he read while I sipped, and finally he nodded his head sharply and poured a cup for himself. “You’ve done good work, Mohan,” he said, for that was the name I’d given him. “Nitharsha has brought us some important news from the fleet. They’ve landed a new agent up north, no doubt to cause us trouble in our dealings with the Afghans. Now we know who he is, and where we might find him.”
That was all very well for Khan, no doubt, but what I wanted was to get my rupees and depart never to see him again. I’d find some excuse for not uncovering his list of agents, or maybe I’d just give the Raj some concocted names and let them run around trying to find them.
I raised the matter cautiously. “Of course you will be paid,” said Nazir – “part now, and part when you come back with the agent’s head.”
“With his
head?” I blurted. To say that the conversation had taken an unexpected turn would be a drastic understatement.
“Oh, not literally, of course, but we do need to kill him.”
“I’m an old man…”
“You are, and I wouldn’t normally send you, but it’s important that as few people know of this as possible. You brought the message, so you know already, which means that you must go. Don’t worry, there are people on the way who will help you…”
So I was getting some of his agent list after all. Top-hole for me, and no doubt it would earn me a medal I had no use for, but to get it, I’d have to go to whatever godforsaken place this agent was in, and there was no way the Politicals would let me refuse. Speaking of which…
“Where is this agent, again?” I asked, though I had a sinking feeling I knew.
“He’s interfering with the Afghans, so of course he’s in Kabul!”
The less said of the trip to Kabul, the better. Nazir Khan brought me a third-class ticket on a crowded Indian train – I’d really had more than enough of being inconspicuous by now – and for three days it rumbled through Indore, Gwalior, the great Ganges and the Punjab. This was a roundabout route, but of course it couldn’t go directly – Rajputana was on our side, so it had to take the long way round. I shared cramped quarters with the usual assortment of peddlers, pilgrims, holy men, soldiers on leave and farmers returning from market: the bankers and professional men were in first class, and the shopkeepers and clerks in second. I also shared space with the livestock brought by the aforesaid farmers, and with the endless procession of boxwallahs who made their way through the cars with wares to sell.
And the people
talked. As an old man – more venerable even than they knew – I was called upon to tell stories, and in exchange, they shared theirs. It was their son off at war, or the elections, or the petty oppression they all seemed to have experienced under the Imperials: this one’s business taken without compensation when the salt monopoly was reinstated, that one flogged for attending a meeting, the other sacked from the civil service to make room for a white man, still another landing on the street when the factory where he’d worked was taxed out of business. Again, I found myself reacting differently from the way I was used to doing: it seemed as much a waste as what had happened to Kandan’s family, like killing a dairy cow for beef when you’d get milk for years to come if you took care of it. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s stupidity by those in power – it has a way of getting me nearly killed – and the mess the Imperials had made of things here was enough to make an old reprobate cry.
Suffice it to say that the train did eventually get to the frontier – past Delhi, through Amritsar (where everyone pointed out to me the site of the massacre that started it all), out to Lahore, Rawalpindi and finally Peshawar. It was there that I met Nazir Khan’s man, who shepherded me across the border.
Where Bombay had changed, the Afghan hills hadn’t: they were the same badlands where I’d been chased, ambushed, nearly tortured to death and almost caught in the slaughter of Elphy Bey’s retreat. No doubt there were still some people up there who remembered my name less than fondly: Afghans have very long memories. I was in a funk all the way to Kabul, so much so that I remember little of the passage.
Kabul
had changed, to my surprise: not so much as Bombay, but the streets had motor traffic and there was even electric lighting in the center. I’d heard that there was a half-civilized king here now who wanted to make Afghanistan into a real country – good luck with
that, your Majesty – and that he was the one with whom both we and the Congress were treating. And no doubt the negotiations were rife with twists and turns, because one thing about Kabul that was the same was the miasma of intrigue and treachery that hung in the air.
The question now was what part I would play in that treachery. I had a name – Maxton [2] – and I had a target. I could kill him – I could wield a poisoned dagger even at ninety-five (I’d had a birthday somewhere west of Jalalabad, not that anyone had celebrated), and the Politicals would never know it was me – and scurry back to the safety of Bombay. Or I could tell all, throw myself on his mercy and see if he could get me out through Persia. I’d have to be careful if I did the latter, because Khan’s men were surely watching and they’d take action if both Maxton and I came out alive, but the Politicals can work miracles – I know, because I’ve been one.
Dawn came, and I crept into the appointed place, still uncertain which option I would choose. I found the bedroom door and opened it silently, eyes scanning the room for the man who was surely there…
“Flashy!”
To this day – granted, it hasn’t been so many days since it happened – I don’t know how I managed to stay upright. The voice came from
behind me, and I turned to see that my early-rising target wasn’t in the bedroom at all. I wondered where he knew me from, and then the name came back to me: we’d been in the Basotho wars together. You never know where you might meet an old friend, but I’ll tell you this: it’s always the worst possible time.
“This is capital!” he went on. “I’d heard you were in Bombay, and I was going to send you a dispatch there, but here you are, and I can give you the news in person! Pour yourself a
shomleh – there’s a pitcher on the shelf, and some whiskey to improve it with – and we’ll catch up! Oh, this is capital!”
I poured. If there’s anything worse than whiskey and watered yogurt with mint, it’s
plain watered yogurt with mint, but I needed that drink.
And Maxton kept talking. “There’s someone in Bombay, you see, who’s been sending money to the king’s courtiers to sway them against us. I just found out who it is – who
she is, if you can believe it. Now, when you go back to Bombay, you can get her, and… “
“Wait a minute, Maxton,” I answered urgently. “Nazir Khan thinks I’m working for him, and he sent me here to kill you. I wasn’t going to do it, of course” – when Flashy lays it on, he lays it thick – “but if I go back to Bombay with you still alive, they’ll know something is up.”
“But you
will kill me, of course! You’ll bring out a bloody shirt as proof of the deed” – he splashed chicken blood on his shirt – “and I’ll disappear. A few days from now, I’ll surface again, with another name and a disguise. But in the meantime, you’ll be back in Bombay, and the dastardly Aishwarya Rai will come a cropper…” [3]
I didn’t like it. Even in disguise,
someone would recognize Maxton in his resurrected form, and word would get back to Nazir Khan. But I hardly had a choice, did I? Maxton wouldn’t send me to Persia no matter how much I pleaded, and I could hardly kill a man thirty years my junior who knew why I’d been sent. And besides, the picture he showed me, so that I’d recognize Miss Rai when I saw her, was stunning. Ninety-five or not, I’d go to Bombay to see that face – hell, I’d have thought hard about going back up to the Ghilzai before refusing.
And so, three days later, I was at the Peshawar station again, with another third-class ticket and another mission. Sometime between there and Bombay, I’d have to decide what side I was really on…
Editor’s note: The last of Flashman’s memoirs ends here. The papers on which it was written were found behind a desk in a seedy Bombay serai when it was demolished in 1923. It is assumed that Flashman’s imposture was discovered and that he was slain by the lovely Indian agent he had gone to meet. But his body has never been found, and for years afterward, there were rumors of an aged gnome in an inland Marathi village who spoke every language known to man and who died, at 103, in bed with two of the village matrons.
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[1] Nishartha’s identity cannot be precisely known; it is almost certain that she didn’t give Flashman her true name. It is possible that he encountered Lakshmi Sehgal, who was highly placed in the Congress intelligence network in Madras during this period and who later used
Nishartha as the title of a novel based on her wartime experiences.
[2] George Maxton was an accomplished political officer during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working in South Africa during the Basotho Gun War and in Burma, Siam and Southeast Asia during the years leading up to the Great War. He is known to have been in Afghanistan during the early 1900s, helping the reformist Habibullah Khan consolidate his power; his whereabouts for the next decade are unknown, but he resurfaced in Kabul during the early stages of the Indian War of Independence. He is believed to have been killed sometime in 1918, possibly by an Indian spy.
[3] Aishwarya Rai (1882-1975) was one of the Indian Republic’s most famous spies. Born to a middle-class family in the Bombay Presidency, she joined the Congress at eighteen and won a scholarship to study at Lady Margaret Hall, reading English and returning to become a Congress orator and speechwriter. When war broke out, she was taken onto the staff of the interim government and discovered that she had a talent for intelligence-gathering. She is believed to have coordinated the Republic’s successful effort to obtain free passage through Afghanistan, and to have thwarted several attacks on the food and water supply during the later stages of the war. She was an accomplished athlete and personally took the field during many of her missions. A number of movies have been made about her exploits, most of them fanciful; she herself never wrote any memoirs, leading a quiet life after the war and telling anyone who inquired about her wartime experiences to “watch the films.”
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