Bart Moore-Gilbert - The Setting Sun

First published by Verso 2014
Bart Moore-Gilbert 2014

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-268-5
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-269-2 (US)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-646-1 (UK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moore-Gilbert, B. J., 1952
The setting sun : a memoir of empire and family secrets / Bart Moore-Gilbert.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-78168-268-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78168-269-2 (ebook)
1. Police misconduct India Satara (District) History 20th century. 2. Police India Satara (District) History 20th century. 3. Terrorism India Satara (District) History 20th century. 4. India History Autonomy and independence movements. 5. India History British occupation, 17651947. 6. Moore-Gilbert, B. J., 1952 Travel India. I. Title.
HV8249.S37M66 2014
954.0359092 dc23
[B]

2013037732

v3.1

This book is for you, Madeleine. Its no substitute for your grandfather, but it will help you to know him better.

We have to create our lives, create memory.

Doris Lessing, Under My Skin

So while, when I travel, I can move only according to what I find, I also live, as it were, in a novel of my own making, moving from not knowing to knowing, with person interweaving with person and incident opening out to incident.

V.S. Naipaul, Finding the Centre

Writing this book, Ive accrued debts to many people. First I would like to thank everyone I met in India who facilitated my journey and the researches on which it is based. Several are mentioned in the text, one or two with their names changed at their request. Without their friendship and help, there would be no narrative.

In the UK and elsewhere, many family members and friends helped by reading drafts and making comments, by providing information and photographs, or otherwise facilitating the progress of the text from uncertain beginnings. These include: Anthony and Pat Bicknell; Janice Biskin-Stanton; Bernadette Buckley; Patrick Gilbert-Hopkins; Keith Goldsmith; Anna Hartnell; Manali Jagtap-Nyheim (who provided invaluable help with translations from Mahratti); Ames and Lindsay Moore-Gilbert; Blake Morrison; Susheila Nasta (who published one extract from an earlier draft in Wasafiri); and Sanjay Seth (who published another in Postcolonial Studies).

My most important debts are to Francis Spufford, who provided huge support throughout and brilliant editorial interventions in early drafts. His sure feel for what was really at stake in the text and gimlet eye for what was redundant played a huge part in its final shape. And Leo Hollis at Verso responded with wonderful enthusiasm from the moment he received the unsolicited script.

Get up, Nigger, quick, Wilsons whisper rasps, dont wake the others.

The boy stirs reluctantly, flinching at the icy draught from the window above his bed. Next to him, he can just make out the beached bulk of Greenwell, the largest pupil in his year, snoring softly.

The Colonel wants to see you.

The boys instantly alert. Wilson, the head prefect, who sleeps on the floor below with the senior boys, has never acknowledged his existence before. His housemaster? Why? He jerks back the blankets and reaches for the dressing gown on his chair. It feels like the middle of the night.

In his study.

The boys too intimidated to ask questions. His mind churns over recent misdemeanors. No, hes already been called to account for those. Perhaps another prefect overheard him tonight, telling his tale, long after lights out. They often take turns. The boys generally reluctant to participate, even though he loves stories and theres no set formula to follow. It can be made-up, a summary of a film, anecdotes about their fathers work, or a commentary on a recent sporting event. He cant rehearse the plots of television programmes because his family has never owned one. Theyve only had electricity since he was eight. He loves football, but hasnt been here long enough to have mastered recent developments in the league. Hearing about Herbert Chapman, or Highburys record crowd, things his father has passed on from when he lived in England before the war, interests no one.

So when his turn comes, the boy usually talks of Africa, because thats what he knows. Often he speaks about the minder hes had since the age of four. Kimwaga can uncap a fizzing bottle of Pepsi with his back teeth, feather the boys arrows and locate wild hives by following the honeybird, which he answers with a special whistle. Its Kimwaga who gave him the elephant-hair bangle to keep him safe in England and which the boy never removes, even in the shower. Some of his schoolmates insisted it was plastic, until one day he put a match to one of the ebony-coloured filaments and the stink convinced them.

As the boy talks, he can almost smell the woodsmoke on Kimwagas warm black skin, see the dark eyes glinting above knobbly cheekbones, trace the crisped hair so different from his own. Its his favourite way of insulating himself against this freezing country where theres been no sun to speak of for half a year, where the birds all seem to be grey, brown or black and where hes had to learn endless rules, most of which make no sense.

Generally his classmates listen politely; but what he speaks of is so alien rescuing stricken hens from safari ants, greasing tranquillised hippos to stop their hides cracking when the pools dry up, having his Wellingtons scoffed by a hyena. Sometimes, sensing their resistance, he tones it down to make it more like what they know, to make himself more acceptable. Tonight two of them had talked about their pets mishaps. So he decided to tell of how one of the boxers got into a fight with a leopard.

Tunney had disappeared one afternoon, and came hobbling back at dusk from the direction of the nearby hill, gabled with great bald rocks and thicketed with thorn and cactus. Much of his right shoulder was missing, skin, muscle and sinew ripped away. The shiny grey cartilage and glistening bone beneath had made the boy want to vomit. It looked like one of the cheaper cuts hung outside the butchers stall in the village in central Tanganyika where they live. Tunneys joint, too, was already attracting the fat green flies that buzzed round the wedges of crimson flesh hanging from hooks above the counter or settling on the plates of marbled brains along it. The dogs blood smelled like warm brass. At first the boys father frowned, his brow knitting in the expression which withers the boy when its turned on him.

Hell be alright, he suddenly smiled, pinching his sons cheek. Dont cry, now. It wont help. Go and get some water.

When the boy returned at a run, bowl slopping, his father was fiddling in the green canvas medicine bag. As the dog lapped and lapped, he took out a squat steel hypodermic, attached the long needle and punched it into a phial. Clamping the boxers back legs between his thighs, his father squirted some liquid from the needle, before stabbing it briskly into the dogs haunch. Then, refilling from a different phial, he repeated the process. Both times Tunney yelped, but didnt struggle. His long tongue drooped, showing damp squiggles of gold and black fur wedged round his canines. While his father was gently cleaning the wound, the boy held Tunneys chest in his hands, willing the panting slower. When the dog at last flopped down on one side, the boy began to pick grey ticks from between his pets toes, rolling them like blobs of plasticine under the sole of his