“I have three, of course. PDL. Same as my father’s only the order is changed.
“That’s me all over. All the same elements as my father only the order is changed.
“I too believe in retribution and hellfire, but I want them now!
“I wouldn’t like you to think that I have spent my life obsessing about my poor father’s fate. I was only six when he died. To me, one day he was there, the next he wasn’t. Everyone talked about him being in a better place, but how a place could be better that didn’t have me and Mum in it, I could never fathom. As to how he got there, throughout my youth I was well protected from any real knowledge of what had actually happened. Certainly without him the place we were in seemed a great deal worse. My mother continued to work at the Mission. I don’t think she really had a wage, just the occasional subsistence level hand out. I expect it was the same for the rest of them. It was probably believed that any complaints about wage levels could be answered by pointing to the squalor and abject poverty around us and saying, ‘How can you look at that and still complain?’
“Myself, I don’t think Mother gave a toss about remuneration levels. I don’t even think she had any real interest in the Mission’s work. All she wanted was see me through to the age of independence then, with a sigh of relief, give up the ghost and go to join her lost husband, which is exactly what she did.
“It was after the funeral, in dribs and drabs, that Sister Angela told me the story. She had to support her own memory of events from a report she had written for the Mission Trustees at the time. It was couched in a curious mixture of Indian Civil Service jargon and King James Bible English. It went something like this.
“‘The comprehensive recording procedures installed at the Mission by the present writer acting on the excellent advice of CK Bannerjee (Bachelor of Law-University of Bombay) by the grace of God our legal officer, enable us to trace precisely the first appearance of the subtle serpent, Keating, on our premises. For it is clearly written in the Book of Visitors that he was a guest in our midst at tea-time on the fifteenth day of May in the year of our Lord, 1974, as testified by his own signature, HRS Keating.
“As her narrative unfolded, it took me some time to realise that this serpent she was talking about, the architect of all our woes, was in fact Uncle Harry.
“Not really my uncle, of course. But within a very short time of his first appearance at the Mission, that’s what I was calling him. I remembered him very well, and all my memories were pleasant ones. He was a merry, voluble man in his late forties, always willing to spend time with me and treat me to ices from one of the street vendors that my mother warned me against but whose wares I adored. (In fact I never had any stomach trouble all my life till I came to England and tried a Shepherd’s Pie out of a pub microwave.) I knew vaguely that he was some kind of writer and Sister Angela now confirmed that the fraud by which he gained access to the Mission was that he was gathering material for a book about the disenfranchised, destitute and often criminal classes that my father worked amongst. Certainly he had real creative talent. Often when his visits coincided with my bedtime, he would fill my head with marvellous stories of high adventure and wild excitement. These were a rare treat. Mother had no narrative gift and for Father any story that did not come from the Bible was so much factitious frippery.
“Curiously, it is Dad’s tales of Samson pulling down the temple, and the death of Jezebel, and the slaughter of the Benjamites, that remain with me while Uncle Harry’s marvellous stories have all faded. But at the time I waited like a drug addict for the next instalment.
“But the real evidence of Uncle Harry’s powers of invention lies in the way he took in my father.
“I think the trouble was – and Sister Angela confirmed this – that Dad believed his life was directed by God. When he asked a question, God answered it with the result that in decision he was incisive and in judgment, absolute. And for the twenty years of his adult life, this had worked.
“So when he asked God about Uncle Harry and he thought he heard God telling him Harry’s OK, that was it. In my father’s eyes, friends, and enemies, were forever.
“Thus when Uncle Harry came to him in a distracted state, he didn’t hesitate. The pitch was that Harry’s widowed mother who lived in the States was seriously ill and her only chance of survival lay in a new transplant procedure, which only one hospital in the country could offer. Harry was on his way to see her now. He had realized his assets and managed to raise most of what was needed to pay for the procedure. But he was still short, and though he would have the rest in a fortnight’s time when an investment bond matured, by then it might be too late.
“I can remember Uncle Harry’s distraction, though its alleged cause was of course unknown to me till Sister Angela filled me in. My reason for remembering was purely selfish. It was 19 May, my sixth birthday, and I felt I ought to be the centre of everyone’s attention.
“Not that Harry’s pretended agitation prevented him from bringing me a splendid present, a wooden locomotive big enough for me to straddle which made whooping noises just like the real thing when you pulled a cord.
“It might have been this generosity, plus of course the three initials, that made my father rise to the bait.
“ ‘How much do you need?’ he asked.
“ ‘Fifteen hundred pounds,’ said Harry.
“Now you should understand that the Mission finances were on a very hand-to-mouth basis. Only the big charities could afford to do national appeals in those days, and even they weren’t yet the streamlined corporate machines for extracting money from the public they have since become. So the Mission relied very much on local charitable donations and there was rarely much in the kitty. But just the day before, a rather dodgy local businessman had decided to spring-clean his conscience by donating a couple of lakhs of rupees. He’d been on the brink for a week or so, and the proposed act of charity had almost turned into a bazaar haggle with my father as to how much, or rather how little, would see him right with the Christian God. My father had probably entertained Uncle Harry with a description of the man’s hesitations. Finally the previous day, a threat of police investigation had made the vacillating villain decide he needed help from all the deities available and he’d turned up with the cash which was now in the Mission safe.
“How much cash?
“In sterling, about fifteen hundred pounds.
“Surprise.
“To my father this was evidence of God’s handiwork.
“To Angela, with hindsight, it was evidence of Uncle Harry’s brilliant opportunism.
“Dad, who had a key to the safe – why wouldn’t he? – gave Harry the money on the promise that it would be paid within two weeks. Harry left that night with protestations of eternal gratitude and the cash. Probably his gratitude was genuine enough, or does a con man simply despise his mark? Whatever, Uncle Harry and the fifteen hundred pounds quickly vanished from Bombay and our lives, never to be seen again.
“It evidently took my father a whole month to admit that neither was about to reappear.
“So that was it. A sting. Not a particularly big one in the grand scale of stings, though fifteen hundred was worth a lot more back then. The trustees of the Mission took it, if not in their stride, at least with the resigned philosophy of men long accustomed to dealing with humanity at its worst. They read Sister Angela’s report and, judging that chances of the police catching up with Uncle Harry were remote and of recovering the money non-existent, they decided it was better to hush the whole thing up rather than risk putting off other potential benefactors.
“So, all in all, an unpleasant experience which many men after the first shock might have treated as a rough but salutary lesson.