Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut Page A

suggestion was answered with a solemn headshake.
    â€œYou can’t do that, I’m afraid. My mother keeps strict purdah. She sends you her blessings, but she cannot show herself before you.”
    â€œBut this is her house.”
    â€œEven so.”
    It took a moment for the smile to fade from Morgan’s face; it had seemed like a joke at first. He was in India now, and he would have to do as the Indians did. His gifts were despatched via Masood, and thanks returned to him the same way. In this house—and in some others he would stop in—the closest he would come to a female presence was the sound of soft voices in a neighbouring room.
    He hadn’t expected this, but then nothing was the way he’d thought it would be. When Masood took him that first morning to see the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College which his grandfather had founded, Morgan was taken aback. In England, Masood had spoken of it rapturously as a centre of scientific excellence, where the finest of Western thought could be taught in an Islamic atmosphere; it represented, he’d insisted, the most modern approach to education. Yet when Morgan saw it, there was nothing very modern or inspiring about the disorderly scattering of reddish, ugly buildings, none of which seemed to have a single telephone in it, so that messages had to be carried around great distances by hand.
    And there were other oddities, which for some reason had never featured in what he’d imagined. For one thing, though all the students were Mohammedans, wearing beards and fezzes, half of the teachers were foreigners. They seemed so stranded and out of place here, with their alien customs and their improbable accents, though they tried to pretend it was home. There were a lot of them, not only teaching at the college. At one moment he was rubbing up against a Kingsman, who was headmaster of the local school, or chatting to a German professor of Oriental languages; and at the next dining with a barrister called Khan, or discussing politics with a Persian professor of Arabic.
    The atmosphere at the college, he would come to realise, was highly charged. There was a great gulf between the Indian staff and students on one hand, and the Europeans on the other. The two groups seemed to mix compatibly together, but when he found himself alone with one or the other, the conversation changed. The English staff in particular lamented that they weren’t trusted here and seemed to live in fear that the Mohammedans would turn them out; the Mohammedans wrung their hands and declared that the Balkan War was the death-battle of Islam and asked why Sir Edward Grey should have been the very
first
to recognise Italian rule in Tripoli.
    In these conversations, Morgan was never exactly sure where his loyalties lay; he experienced a complicated inner conflict which pulled him one way or the other.
    â€œHow do you manage it?” he asked Masood, on one of those early days. For his friend had always been adept, he saw now, at crossing the social frontier between East and West. For all his nationalist rhetoric, he was very much at ease in European company, yet he could drop all his Occidental ways in a moment, as if they were a piece of clothing.
    â€œIt is a skill,” Masood told him. “Think of it as camouflage, in order to survive in hostile territory.”
    â€œWhat nonsense you speak. There are thousands of Indians who lack this skill, yet they survive perfectly well.”
    â€œYes, but they do not flourish. They are always nervous, always anxious. They don’t mix well with the paler types, can you not see it? Some strategy is needed.”
    â€œI am a paler type,” Morgan told him stiffly, “as you may have noticed. You have never needed strategy to survive me.”
    â€œCan you be so sure?”
    â€œDon’t joke, Masood.”
    His friend smiled—still rakish and handsome, despite a faint fatigue that made his face puffy. He took