Exiled Conqueror

INDIGO--Christine Weston--Scrlbner ($2.50).

The white children of Amritpore played in the crumbling brick ruins of the old Fort among the ghosts of the French and English soldiers who had died there in the wars of the English for India. Sons and daughters of the veterans, they slept through the clamorous Indian night like little spiders in their webs of mosquito netting. They awakened to the sound of jackals, their minds filled with the Hindu verses that translate the cries of animals and birds into speech; to them the jackals said: One dead Hindu! Where? Where? Here, here, here! They rode their spirited, half-Arab horses through the cactus and lantana bushes, past the servants' quarters where the natives groaned and coughed, past mango groves and villages, over the fields of indigo where the native women smiled at them, the native children salaamed, and their path through the sown and unsown acres left a ripple like the wake of a ship.

Opiate Land. One of the children was Gisele de St. Remy. Gisele is one of the most tantalizing creations of contemporary fiction. She is also the most interesting character in this novel of extraordinary characters. Indigo is a novel about Europeans and English in India in the years before 1914. It is patterned on E. M. Forster's famed Passage to India and in some respects its inbred familiarity with Indian culture surpasses Forster's. The work of Christine Weston, who was born in India of parents who were also born there, it has something of the character of an enormous Oriental tapestry in which each thread is dyed and double-dyed to its right color and shade. In this setting, where the stars seem to explode the length and breadth of the powdered blue sky, where the parrots hang, drowsy with opium, in the poppy fields, Gisele seems less a character in a novel than a child who has stepped from the frame of the tapestry to live her own life outside its pattern.

She was lithe, golden-haired, exotic, mature at 15. Burdened and gifted with adult perceptions and childlike impulses, her adolescent headaches and awkwardnesses gave way to her "blue flowerlike glance" of both innocence and desire. When a hard, embittered middle-aged English engineer, "a hundred years older," took her brother and a friend on an antelope hunt, Gisele led the engineer away from the others, embraced him in the shadow of a tomb and tried to persuade him to take her away from India. When the English discussed Gisele, it was with a sense that she was destined for tragedy. When they talked of her before a wise Hindu lawyer, he said: "Were she one of us she would already be married, her life--her future, secured." When the others remained silent he added, "With us, beauty is never a problem. It is ... a treasure." Her tragedy is the most moving in Indigo.

Hypnotic Spell. Most of Indigo's 372 pages are given over to the complicated feud of Gisele's mother, the bitter widow of a French indigo planter, and the English colony of Amritpore--a war that reaches into the past (since Gisele's father had been the lover of the sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued Englishwoman who dominated the colony), and into the future (since Gisele's brother Jacques is befriended and made over by the English in a ceaseless attempt to win him and his precious talents to their side). The plots and subplots that are interwoven with this main theme are weakened by a dreamy inconsequentiality; they seem to evaporate in the hot dry air like figures of Indian magic climbing the thin rope of the story and disappearing. For the spell of Indigo is hypnotic.

Over the remote colonial past at the rim of empire, the war that is to break out at the end of the book hovers like a force more powerful than the will of the strong-willed characters. Long before it has broken out, obscure riots and inexplicably venomous slanders twist personal and social relations. Example: Hanif, Madame de St. Remy's servant (he is as dissolute as she is pious), returns from his sweetheart to find a group of men blocking his path. '"Do you spend the night beside the road, my brothers?' he inquired. . . . and for a moment they confronted him in a silence whose menace was unmistakable. . . . Then they closed in behind him. ... A short heavy stick flew between his legs and he fell face down on the road. They were upon him in a minute, and he gathered himself together with his head in his arms and his knees drawn against his stomach. . . . They tore his shirt from him and his trousers and beat him until the breath sagged in his chest and his head lolled helplessly in the dust. Then they withdrew a little and provided themselves with stones. . . ."

Narcotic Imagery. Indigo is so smoothly, written, and its atmosphere of strangeness and narcotic imagery is sustained so effortlessly, that readers may miss the violence of its incidents and the somberness of its message (that the conqueror remains a thwarted exile in the house of the conquered). Engineer Aubrey Wall, who will not seduce Gisele, but who kicks an opium-drugged servant to death, is one Englishman for whom the prewar burden of empire was too much. Examining the canals he had built, "his nervous system suffered a kind of accumulated shock, a reverberation of all the disappointments, dreams, hopes, despairs and resignations which had piled up during the year. Now loathing possessed him, loathing for the place, for the climate, for his work which he saw as a mere drop in this bottomless bucket of poverty, superstition and disease. . . . He watched rain drench the road and knew that everywhere humble people were praising the Lord as they paddled through the downpour. . . . But he was incapable of sharing in the jubilation of. these god-infested folk--their joys and their griefs were on too vast a scale for his participation."

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