Comic Coda to a Song of India

By Paul Gray

STAYING ON

by PAUL SCOTT

216 pages. Morrow. $8.95.

With the publication of A Division of the Spoils in 1975, English Author Paul Scott completed The Raj Quartet --a four-novel, 2,000-page saga set in India during the sunset of British rule. To the regret of Scott's many devotees, that seemed to be that: the last of the white sahibs and memsahibs taking their bows in a long, engrossing valedictory. Not quite. Staying On offers another look at a locale familiar to readers of The Raj Quartet. This new novel is less a sequel than a graceful comic coda to the earlier song of India.

The year is 1972, and Colonel "Tusker" Smalley (Indian Army, ret.) is ensconced at an out-of-the-way Indian hill station called Pankot. Unlike most of the British, Tusker never pulled up stakes. He and his wife Lucy, "the last survivors of Pankot's permanent retired British residents," coexist amiably with most of the natives--but not so well with each other. Tusker's irascibility has been honed by questionable health and the approach of his 71st birthday. Lucy, whose chief diversion in recent years has been local showings of Hollywood movies, has begun to feel that life with Tusker is not going to get much better. In approved silver-screen manner, she utters dramatic monologues to empty rooms: "Tusker and I do not truly communicate with one another any more... I can't hear what he is thinking and he does not hear what I'm saying."

Both are, in fact, a little dotty, to the delight of their native servant Ibrahim. Constantly being fired by the colonel and rehired by the Memsahib, Ibrahim cherishes Tusker's curses and colorful tirades ("I'll have both their guts for garters!") and repeats them to himself for days afterward. An unabashed Anglophile, he even admires the way his employers age. "The English," he thinks, "once they began falling physically apart, did so with all their customary attention to detail, as if fitting themselves in advance for their own corpses to make sure they were going to be comfortable in them."

Rippling Comedy. In the early stages of the novel, Scott plays the antics of his couple and their anomalous place in Indian society for laughs. The only threat to their continued self-imposed exile also seems comic. Mrs. Bhoolabhoy, the fat and temperamental hotel owner, is trying to evict the Smalleys so that she can raze the old building. With the timid and ineffectual Mr.

Bhoolabhoy as go-between, her plan seems doomed to endless frustration.

Yet what Tusker and Lucy are living through is a tiny version of the ex perience so central to The Raj Quartet:

Britishers are again being told to leave their place in India to the Indians. The rippling comedy in Staying On assumes an undertow that will pull Tusker down.

While he and Lucy carry on like stage eccentrics, Scott dexterously endows them with past lives and disappoint ments, a third dimension that turns the question of their fate into a matter of importance as well as curiosity.

Scott does not take sides, extract an anticolonial moral from his story or strain after tragic overtones. Such gestures would have shattered a work set so carefully in a minor key. But no one now writing knows or can evoke an Anglo-Indian setting better than Scott.

All of the past comparisons to E.M. Forster (perhaps inevitable whenever an English novelist takes on India) should by now be declared totally irrelevant to Scott. He has earned the right to be com pared to himself.

Paul Gray

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