Category:

There are three books at the bottom of the case, along with a piece of fabric folded into a tight knot. It's flowery and silky. She takes it out and unties the knot. The garment cascades out of its folds, releasing a scent of faded lilacs, perhaps, she thinks, sniffing it. It is a kimono, black and painted all over with gay yellow, blue, and red butterflies. It is a vision of joy, and she shakes it this way and that. The butterflies flit about her as she swishes the fabric around. His?

She gives him a quick glance. Is it her imagination or is his mouth slightly open now? She takes his pulse again, checks his breathing. Everything is normal. She returns to the books. One is A Passage to India, which she remembers nearly buying in a jumble sale at St. Mary's Cathedral last year, until a pair of used wellies in good nick got her spare coppers. She flicks it open and sees an inscription on the title page.

"Passionate orator." She puts the book down. Her first glimpse of the man who was now her patient had been at a workers' rally three weeks earlier. Jamie Doncaster, a friend she sometimes met up with for a pint after church, had insisted she come. "There's an Indian bloke speaking at the library. About oppression in his country. Reckon it can't hurt to hear another side of the story, can it? We Scots have ours, too. And we like to tell it whenever we can." That's what decided it. She hadn't met an Indian personally before but you saw them down by the docks, the dark-skinned Lascars with their sunken cheeks and dull eyes, huddling together, shivering under blankets, waiting for passage back to India. "First-class sailing guides, they are," a captain whose small ship did crossings to the Caribbean and back told them at the local pub. "Steady seamen in the worst storms at sea. But they've been used and chewed up. Now they're a liability." She'd felt the injustice of that, "used and chewed up," and thought no amount of churchgoing could bring decency to those who had none and had no desire to learn it. So she went with Jamie, expecting nothing.

She'd never seen the library hall so crowded before. It was the first evening event at the library since the bombings in March and it was probably because folks just needed an outing. It had been a frosty May; as the heaters sputtered on and off, people sat shoulder to shoulder for heat. Steaming breaths warmed the air. In the front row next to the lectern were fashionable men and women, dressed in suits and fine dresses and coats, looking as though they had come to a charity event. Behind them sat dozens of workers from the docks and shipyards, from the nearby woolen mills in Paisley and Bishopbriggs, some with their entire families in tow. Young and old packed the main floor of the library; the aisles, too, were filled with people, pressed against one another to make room for everyone. Her townsmen and -women, not one coloured face in sight, had come to hear what was going on in a country thousands of miles away from home. She felt proud that so many had shown up that evening. We Glaswegians may be a stoical, impassive lot, but we care about what's going on in the rest of the world, she thought, as her eyes turned from the crowd to the front of the room. The placard by the side of the dais bore the speaker's name: SHIV ADVANI, Barrister-at-Law. Beneath it, in red lettering, were the words "No free nation can afford to be indifferent to the fate of freedom anywhere on earth."

A tall middle-aged woman wearing a fur-collared coat and a Russian fur hat got up to speak. Her necklace of soft pearls gleamed softly in the fluorescent light. "I'm Grace Blackwell and I thank you all for coming to listen to our guest this evening. We all have worries on our minds. Some of us have lost our husbands, wives, and children in the bombings in March. We have still not recovered from our Italian neighbours and friends being rounded up as enemies by the British. The horrors of our time have sealed us off from the rest of the world. This young man is here to tell us about the true state of his country under British rule. We have been fed stories about how Britain has done marvellous things for India. But our guest comes to tell us that the British have hurt his country in ways large and small—damages that may never be reversed. It is a grim message, but we must hear it."

There was pin-drop silence as the thin young man walked to the lectern and began speaking. "Dear friends," he said. "I know this time was snatched from other important things in your lives—from domestic chores, from your children, from your families, from your shops and your farms. For making the effort to be here, I thank you from my heart." There were a few appreciative murmurs from members of the audience. She could see his humility had impressed them.

"We live in a time of great fluidity and great repression," he said. "The tension created by that condition is causing fundamental changes in the way we think and act out our thoughts. The energy generated within each one of us can be harnessed towards bad or good. In Germany, Hitler has found a way to tap into the fury of the country's population against onerous reparations placed on them by the Allies after World War One. He is directing it towards evil and the desire for extermination of the Jewish people and others he considers undesirable. Gandhi, on the other hand, has channelled the fury of his subjugated people towards a nonviolent march for freedom. Not with the guns, cannons, and muskets that have been aimed at us. But with the most powerful weapons in the world: the hearts, minds, and actions of a united people."

As his voice gathered strength, he spoke of his country, of how its natural resources—from cotton and silk, timber and steel, gold, silver, and diamonds, sugar and salt—had been seized and controlled to finance Britain's ventures in other parts of the world. He spoke of how villages, once self-sufficient, now relied on the British government for essentials like food, water, oil, and salt. He told them one million of his people had fought alongside the British in World War One, losing seventy-five thousand men in combat. They were out there now, in the fields of war, he said, along with the Allied troops. A volunteer army, over two million of them, fighting loyally to defend the British crown. But they were also fighting for their own independence, for that is what they had been promised in exchange.

When he mentioned the numbers of his people who had fought for the British, there were gasps from some in the audience. Few, if any, assembled there would have read or heard that the Indians were fighting alongside the British and their own Scotsmen in the trenches—they had only been told the Indians were an inferior godless race, and the white man's burden of civilizing these heathen races came at a heavy price.

Mairi listened as if to a new language. The speaker had a commanding voice. He believed his words—that was the thing about politicians, wasn't it? Half of them were hollow men, mouthing off without thinking about what they were saying. This man's voice was the voice of passion, of the future, of destiny.