The Pledge by Howard Fast Page A

a city where for months the streets have been littered with the bodies of men and women and children who have died of starvation, and you know damn well that Limey general was lying. This famine could have been broken, and it’s one of the biggest stories out of this war, and I’m going to write it.”
    â€œYour orders will be cut tomorrow. You are not wanted in this theater. Don’t think for a moment that your dealings with Ashoka Majumdar and Professor Chandra Chatterjee have gone unnoticed. Professor Chatterjee is a local subversive with a long record, and as for Majumdar, he is a communist organizer with a prison record. You have behaved and spoken witlessly, and now you’re paying the price.”
    â€œMajor,” Bruce said softly, “have you ever stopped to reflect on the fact that on this great subcontinent, four hundred million people are being held in subjugation by the British, with nationality set against nationality and religion against religion?”
    â€œOn that point, Mr. Bacon, let me just note that they are niggers without any talent to govern themselves. They should thank God for the British.”
    â€œI have nothing else to say to you!” Bruce snapped, getting to his feet, turning on his heel, and leaving the room.
    There was no jeep waiting to take him home, now that the sun was well up and beginning to bake the street. In this climate, it was quite proper to hold that “mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” After ten steps, his shirt was moist and sticking to his body. He walked along the streetcar tracks, the shortest way to the palace, staring morosely at the lines of old, rotting buildings that lined the street, the stucco peeling off their stained fronts. Rickshaw drivers came trotting by, trying to entice his patronage, but he hated to ride in a rickshaw, finding the sensation both degrading and humiliating, a small, lean trotting man become an animal and pulling him in his little carriage, as a trotting horse would. Hal Legerman had argued with him on this point. “They have to live,” Legerman insisted. “We pay them five times what the Limeys do — at least, that’s how I tip them.” Still, he could not be at ease riding in a rickshaw. Like Legerman, he kept a pocketful of pice. He had calculated that in Calcutta, there was a beggar or a street family every fifty feet — in what the British called “the glorious city of palaces.” One night he had lain under his mosquito netting weeping; and told himself sourly, the following morning, that such empathy came out of the guilts conditioned by washing machines, Ford cars, and packaged cereals. Yet in all this filth, there was a frantic effort by the population to be clean, washing themselves endlessly in dirty, polluted water. Why did his thoughts always come back to this? The moment he set foot in America, this world would cease to exist, and, as he vaguely hoped, it would no longer trouble him. Why not? It didn’t trouble his American colleagues; and his British colleagues, and the British officers who hung out at the press club for the cheap American drinks and who upheld the gentility of their clan by proving to Bruce that one could use the word fuck at least five times in the average sentence — well, they felt Calcutta to be one of the prime glories of the Empire, an absolutely pukka place to be stationed.
    At the palace, Bruce showered and changed his shirt — for another nongovernment issue that his mother had provided — and then, hearing a voice shout his name, went downstairs to answer a telephone call. It was Legerman calling, and he said he wanted to talk to Bruce, very important, but he didn’t want to come to the palace. Would Bruce meet him at the old Cricket Club in the Maidan, the park. Did Bruce know where it was?
    â€œI think I know where the Cricket Club is.”
    â€œOutside, there are some benches, shaded.