[Novel Excerpt] Spied.... and banned.
Scotland Yard doesn't like The War Of Indian Independence
This week’s excerpt is a continuation of last week’s. I’ve shared other excerpts of several incidents between when Tatyarao starts writing the book and the incidents of this week’s, but they often have very little to do with the book.
This week, Scotland Yard gets their hands on the book, and decide they don’t like that it’s getting written, and try to stop that from happening at all.
The excerpt
I went up to Tatya’s room as usual one evening, when I found his room unusually messy. It was typically annoyingly orderly and sparse, so seeing books and papers strewn about haphazardly on every surface was disconcerting.
“Did a typhoon come through here?” I said as I stepped gingerly in the gaps on the floor.
“I can’t find the chapter I just transcribed about the Siege of Cawnpore”
“Where did you last see it? Did you separate it from the rest of your manuscript?”
“It’s not such a big deal. I still have it in rough notes, and I can rewrite it neatly. But where could it have gone?”
“Maybe if we start cleaning up, it will show itself.” I said, putting books back on the shelves.
“No, no, maybe it’s among my clothes?” Tatya said, and began piling up clothes from his orderly closet onto the floor.
“Tch, tch, what are you doing? You couldn’t find an elephant in this mess.”
“It makes it easier to clean. I’ve been meaning to reorganize everything anyway.” Tatya said, throwing down more neatly folded shirts.
“Let’s check the meeting hall,” I said, eager to get away from this unholy mess, “maybe you left it there.”
“I checked, but there’s no harm in checking again.”
It wasn’t in the meeting hall. We checked every other public room, and even among the cushions on the sofa and chairs. It was nowhere to be found.
“Maybe someone borrowed it for a bit of lunchtime reading and left it in the kitchen.” I suggested.
“Oh, no, do you think Mrs. Carr put it in the fire?”
We rushed to the kitchen, to find Mrs. Carr poking the logs and kindling in a roaring fire with her long poker.
“Mrs. Carr, did you just—“
“You can’t leave papers lying around in the kitchen. That’s what I do with kindling.” She ordered, poking the fire with an imperious sense of purpose.
“It’s my fault, Mrs. Carr, but can you please please please check with me next time?”
“You boys leave a right royal mess for me to clean every day.” She said, waving her poker around.
“We won’t do that anymore, Mrs. Carr. You can hold me personally responsible. But it was a chapter in my book we’re talking about!”
“I didn’t use your papers as kindling. Long sheets just aren’t as good as little bits.”
“But you just said—“
“Just don’t leave papers lying around. It must be somewhere here.”
“Can you please tell me if you find it while cleaning?”
“This time I’ll make an exception.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Carr!”
“But be careful, next time it’s kindling.”
After we did another round of the house, and asked everyone if they had seen it, Tatya admitted defeat.
“I’ll just rewrite it then. It’s only a few pages.”
“It’s strange, though.” I said, “Where could it go? Has there been anyone new around?”
“I don’t know. Things are somehow strange since the 50th anniversary. We’ve had a lot of people coming and going since then. It doesn’t feel like the same house.”
I thought back to that day, when there was the suspicious young man with the Brownie camera.
All the room doors had been locked that night, hadn’t they?
“It’s just easier to write it again than search, I think.” Tatya said.
“Here is your book report, Sir Curzon-Wyllie,” Baskins said, placing a slim file on the aide-de-camp’s desk. He would have loved to throw it to the desk from across the room, but his position didn’t permit it.
“What book report?” said Sir William Hutt Curzon-Wyllie not even looking at Baskins.
“The boy’s book, sir. On the Mutiny.”
“Ah, yes, the boy. The boy’s book. It must have been a dry read.”
“No sir! It’s quite riveting. It’s just one chapter on the Siege of Cawnpore that our man inside managed to get, but it’s incredibly engaging. Poetic, almost.”
“Is it really?” Sir Curzon-Wyllie said.
“It didn’t feel like high school history, that much I can say. He is not really a historian. More like a poet.” Baskins said, “Which is what makes this a tad daunting.”
“Daunting. I’m sure then that we can catch it for factual inaccuracies, mire him up in lawsuits, rack up his bills.”
“Sir, the boy is a student of law.”
“Ah yes. Quite sharp, quite sharp he was, if I may say so myself. Yes, well, I assume he will soon be looking for a publisher?”
”Yes, I assume he will do so in his native Nasik.”
“Very well then, you know what to do.”
“I’ll let Magistrate Jackson know, sir.”
“Put the entire Bombay Presidency on alert, will you?”
“Including Aden, sir?”
“Are you looking to be posted there, Baskins? Because I can arrange that, you know.”
“No sir.”
“I notice some of the citations here are from the proceeds of the 1857 and 1858 Parliament. Did you notice that, Baskins?”
“I might have noticed, sir.”
“Doesn’t that worry you, Baskins?”
“Sir?”
“How did he get his hands on those, eh?”
“Yes, sir. That certainly is worrisome.”
“We keep our libraries a little too open, don’t we?”
“We do, sir.”
“Rectify that, will you?”
“Yes sir.”
Tatya entered the India Office section of the British Library. There were a couple of references he needed to cross check. He wasn’t sure if he had correctly interpreted the details of what had happened during the march to Delhi.
“Do you have a pass?” said the young man at the desk.
“Er, yes, of course,” Tatya said, reaching for the pass in his pocket. Where was Mr. Jenkinson?
“One moment, please, I need to check something. Please, wait right here,” the young man took away his pass to a chamber off the library.
A strange trepidation took over Tatya, but he brushed it aside.
The young man quickly returned, a pinched look upon his face.
“I’m sorry sir, but it appears your pass is now out of circulation.”
“What does that mean?” Tatya said.
“It’s uh, expired, that’s one way of putting it. It’s no longer valid.”
“But I was here just last week!”
The young man shrugged in reply. “I am so sorry, but I have no idea what happened there. But your pass is no longer valid. We’d be happy to have you back here when you have a fresh, valid one. Here’s a form you can use to apply—”
“There must be some mistake.” Tatya tried to learn what happened calmly.
“No, sir, I can assure you there hasn’t been a mistake. Your pass has been cancelled. Probably for some technical reason. I’m sure it must be an easy fix. Just try the India Office of Scotland Yard, maybe they might have more insight.”
Tatya’s face fell. He was never going to be able to enter that library again.
“Very well.” He said and left.
Endnotes
To infringe on someone’s freedom of speech, you don’t need to put them in jail for saying things. At least not to start with. You just slowly shut avenues they have to express themselves well. You make it hard for them to tell their story. And it can all happen through bureaucracy and processes and systems. That way, you can say “Everyone is free to speak, they just need to follow due process”. We get fed this line about how the answer to a book you don’t like is another book, but often, when you try publishing your own book, you suddenly find roadblocks in your way. If you don’t give up just then, as we’ll see our hero doesn’t, the violations get more and more blatant, until you’re being tried for sedition.
It’s quite short-sighted to think only the state can do this. It’s de riguer now to establish de facto monopolies on avenues of speech, and then use the rules surrounding them selectively to keep out those kinds of speech you don’t like. Heck, the state can control these private entities anyway, so it technically isn’t the state infringing on your free speech.
What can we do about this? I don’t know.