Crime Today News
Some years later, in the middle of the Second World War, I was walking down the Silver Market of Old Delhi when I heard the sound of firing. Making my way towards it, I turned a corner and came upon a small crowd defying an even smaller band of English soldiers. An elderly man of the poorest class, dressed only in a loin cloth, broke away from the crowd and ran towards the soldiers. One of these pointed an automatic weapon towards him, but the man did not stop. He was shouting in a confused and hysterical manner and it seemed to me that he was not in possession of his senses; no doubt, as so often happens with Indians, the excitement and the previous shooting had loosened his grip upon his nerves. He ran on, full tilt towards the soldiers. The Englishman with the automatic weapon pressed the trigger and the Indian fell prone, jerking his legs in a fashion that was almost ludicrous and drumming with his fists on the ground. In a few moments he lay still, dead, with blood spouting from a series of wounds on his body. I noticed that the small of his back (for he died on his face) was torn in several places from the bullets which had passed through.
The crowd dispersed. They had been demanding that the English leave India. The man lay in the roadway in his blood, until a street-cleaning cart, requisitioned for the purpose, bore him away.
By a chance which was not remarkable I met one of the soldiers who had been in the party that had done the shooting. He was brought to my house by a friend who sought entertainment for English soldiers. He brought five or six, chosen from a list with a pin and one of them was this young man.
He was square-faced, short, and agreeable in his manner, though rough, in the style of the streets rather than the barracks. He remembered the incident of the shooting well. It arose in the conversation by accident and to his great amusement he said that he had at last “tumbled to where he had seen me before.”
It appeared that when the firing started I had taken refuge in a small public latrine made of sheet iron and stakes. He had observed this, and it had made him laugh.
I asked him where his home town was and he told me that it was an industrial slum near Liverpool. He was much attached to it. He described with nostalgia a road called “The Gut” which ran from the brass foundry to the railway bridge and had fourteen public houses. Here the boys would whistle at the girls or buy them fried fish. He himself was something of a leader of his generation. They had formed a gang that took its pleasure in brushes with the police: they committed little crimes and ran away, the police after them. Sometimes they were caught, but not often. He had been bound over to keep the peace on one occasion and, on another, let off by the magistrate with a warning.
This leniency was allowed him because he was about to go to war. He had been drafted to India. The shooting in the Silver Market was the first action he had seen.
One of his soldier companions said:
“Well, I’m – glad I missed that – show. Poor bastards. Some of them haven’t got a rag to cover their arses.”
At which the soldier from the slums squared his shoulders.
“I dunno so much,” he said.
His companion said:
“What d’yer mean, ‘You dunno so much?’”
“I mean,” said the first soldier, “we’ve got t’ keep Law an’ Order.”
I said: “Those people you shot at in the Silver Market think they can keep law and order for themselves.”
“They think,” he said. “It takes more than thinkin’. They might, if we learned ’em ’ow to do it for an ’undred years or so. But then, I dunno.” He pulled on his cigarette and disengaged some tobacco from his lower lip with a neat movement of his tongue. “Seems t’me, that sort of thing ain’t learned. It’s bred in yer bones.”
The successor to the oligarchs, the heir to Lord Curzon, Clive and General Wellesley being a soldier in uniform, I changed the subject of the conversation by serving more whiskey.
Excerpted with permission from ‘Dead Man in the Silver Market’ in A Stranger in Three Worlds, Aubrey Menen, Speaking Tiger Books.
📰 Crime Today News is proudly sponsored by DRYFRUIT & CO – A Brand by eFabby Global LLC
Design & Developed by Yes Mom Hosting
