The Midnight Palace - Carlos Ruiz Zafon [12]
Despite the humorous echoes of its name, the Chowbar Society was as select and strict as any of the clubs that filled the Edwardian buildings of central Calcutta, emulating their London namesakes; their elegant lounges, where members could vegetate, brandy in hand, were the birthright of the British male elite. Our surroundings may have been less splendid, but our aim was far nobler.
The Chowbar Society had been founded with two firm objectives. The first was to guarantee each of its seven members the help, protection and unconditional support of the others, in any circumstance, danger or adversity. The second was to share the knowledge each of us acquired, so that we could equip ourselves for the day when we would have to face the world alone.
Every member had sworn upon his own name and honour (we had no close relatives to swear by) to observe those two objectives and to keep the society a secret. During the seven years of its existence no new member was ever admitted. I lie. We made one exception, but to write about that now would be to get ahead of myself …
Never was there a society whose members were more united, and whose oath carried such weight. The Chowbar Society was nothing like the clubs for wealthy gentlemen in the West End, for none of us had a home or a loved one to go to when we left the Midnight Palace. It was also very different from the ancient student societies in Cambridge, because it did admit women.
So I will begin with the first woman who pledged her oath as a founder member of the Chowbar Society, although when the ceremony took place none of us (including the person I’m alluding to, who was nine at the time) thought of her as a woman. Her name was Isobel and, as she said herself, she had been born for the stage. Isobel dreamed of becoming the successor to Sarah Bernhardt, seducing audiences from Broadway to Shaftesbury Avenue and leaving the divas of the newly formed cinema industry unemployed, both in Hollywood and Bombay. She collected newspaper cuttings and theatre programmes, wrote her own plays (‘active monologues’ she called them) and performed them for us with great success. Most outstanding were her sketches about a femme fatale on the brink of the abyss. But, beneath all the extravagance and melodrama, Isobel possessed – with the possible exception of Ben – the best brain in the group.
The best legs, however, belonged to Roshan. Nobody could run like Roshan, who had grown up in the streets of Calcutta under the tutelage of thieves, beggars and all kinds of other specimens from the jungle of poverty that flourished in the newly expanding areas to the south of the city. When the boy was eight, Thomas Carter brought him to St Patrick’s and, after a few escapes and returns, Roshan decided to stay with us. Among his many talents was that of locksmith. There wasn’t a lock on earth that wouldn’t yield to his skill.
I’ve already spoken about Siraj, our specialist in haunted houses. Leaving aside his asthma, his pale complexion and poor health, Siraj possessed an encyclopedic memory, particularly when it came to sinister stories about the city, of which there were hundreds. For the ghost stories that enhanced our special evenings, Siraj was the researcher and Ben the narrator. From the ghostly rider of Hastings House to the spectral leader of the 1857 mutiny, including the spine-chilling episode of the so-called black hole of Calcutta (where over a hundred men suffocated, after being captured in a siege at the old Fort William), there wasn’t a tall tale or gruesome incident that escaped Siraj’s archives. Needless to say, for the rest of us his passion was a cause for great joy and celebration. Unfortunately, however, Siraj had an almost unhealthy adoration for Isobel. At least once every six months his proposals for a future marriage – which were invariably refused – triggered a romantic storm within the group that