Staying On

Set in the early 1970s in Pankot, a fictional hill station in northern India, the novel follows the final days of Colonel Tusker Smalley and his wife Lucy, among the last permanent British residents remaining in Pankot more than two decades after Indian independence. The book serves as a coda to Scott's earlier four-novel sequence, The Raj Quartet, which depicted the last years of British rule in India.

The narrative opens with Tusker's death from a massive coronary at approximately 9:30 a.m. on the last Monday in April 1972. He collapses in a bed of crimson canna lilies at The Lodge, the small bungalow annexed to Smith's Hotel where he and Lucy have lived for ten years. Lucy is out having her hair done at the Seraglio Room, a salon in the adjacent Shiraz, a modern five-storey hotel whose construction has overshadowed Smith's declining compound. Tusker lies undiscovered for half an hour until Bloxsaw, the Smalleys' dog, begins howling from the garage. The noise disturbs Mrs Bhoolabhoy, the enormously overweight and domineering owner of Smith's Hotel, who sends her meek husband, Mr Bhoolabhoy, the hotel's manager, to investigate. Mr Bhoolabhoy finds Tusker dead in the flower bed with a letter clutched in his hand.

The novel then doubles back to reconstruct the morning's events and spirals outward into a richly layered account of the Smalleys' marriage, their relationships, and the social forces that have stranded them in post-colonial India. The letter in Tusker's hand is a curt notice to quit The Lodge, typed by Mr Bhoolabhoy on his wife's orders. Mrs Bhoolabhoy has secretly bought her way into a consortium of businessmen who own the Shiraz and a chain of other hotels. As part of the deal, Smith's Hotel and its grounds, including The Lodge, will be demolished. Mr Bhoolabhoy spent the weekend resisting the order to write the letter but was coerced by his wife's threats of divorce and hints that she knows about an adulterous encounter he had in Ranpur.

Through the perspective of Ibrahim, the Smalleys' Muslim bearer, or personal servant, the narrative reconstructs the household's tangled dynamics. Ibrahim, who has been sacked and rehired by the Smalleys multiple times, is dismissed again that morning, this time with actual pay, an ominous departure from the usual ritual. He delivers Mrs Bhoolabhoy's letter to Tusker's breakfast table as a final duty before departing with Joseph, the young gardener, to wait outside the Shiraz for Lucy.

A long flashback returns to approximately three months earlier, when Tusker suffered a serious heart attack. Ibrahim carried the unconscious Tusker from the bathroom to his bed and helped Lucy nurse him through weeks of convalescence. During this period, the garden deteriorated badly. Mrs Bhoolabhoy had sacked the old gardener and refused to replace him, exploiting a legal trick in the lease renewal that dropped her obligations for garden upkeep. Tusker, confined to the verandah, raged about the unkempt lawn. One night Lucy heard him crying through the bathroom wall, weeping about the garden and his helplessness. She comforted him, saying what does a little bit of grass matter so long as they are together. Ibrahim quietly withdrew.

The next morning Lucy tells Ibrahim they must mount "Operation Mali," a secret plan to hire a gardener without Tusker's knowledge. Mr Bhoolabhoy finds Joseph, a Christian orphan boy who had been sleeping in the porch of St John's Church. Joseph sets to work with quiet devotion, restoring the lawn and tending the canna lilies, while Lucy pays his wages through Ibrahim. The great puzzle of Operation Mali is that Tusker refuses to acknowledge Joseph's existence. Despite the gardener working in full view of the verandah, Tusker says nothing. Lucy says nothing either, and Ibrahim observes both their self-deceptions with fascination.

Meanwhile, a letter arrives from England containing a newspaper clipping announcing the death of Colonel John Layton, a retired Pankot Rifles officer. Lucy writes to his daughter, Sarah Layton (now Mrs Guy Perron), offering condolences to her and her sister, Susan. Sarah's warm reply introduces the prospect of a visitor: David Turner, a young academic interested in talking to English people who stayed on after independence. The correspondence triggers a crisis of awareness in Lucy. She realizes she does not believe in Tusker's recovery and could be a widow within a year, alone in a foreign country with no one of her own kind. She attempts to raise her fears with Tusker, and the confrontation escalates into an extraordinary monologue in which Lucy attacks him for his lack of ambition, for the rigid hierarchy of British India in which she suffered as a junior wife, for his refusal to return to England, and for the financial ruin of his disastrous years working for a commercial firm in Bombay after leaving the army. She accuses him of never producing the clear financial statement she has repeatedly requested. Tusker deflects with irreverent jokes.

The novel weaves through the weeks between Tusker's convalescence and his death, tracing parallel dramas. Mr Bhoolabhoy grasps that his wife's deal with the consortium means his position as manager will vanish; his brief rebellion collapses almost immediately. At St John's Church, the organ is secretly restored, but Mr Bhoolabhoy, who has devoted years as lay-preacher and warden, is the only one not told, leaving him feeling excluded from the one sphere where he felt valued. Lucy conducts elaborate imaginary conversations with the expected Mr Turner, revealing herself as a vicar's daughter who has carried a lifelong romantic ideal she calls "Toole," a figure rooted in a childhood memory of a young man at her uncle's country house. On Easter Sunday, Tusker surprises Lucy by suggesting they attend church, and he pesters Father Sebastian, a charismatic South Indian priest, into accepting a dinner invitation for April 24th.

On the Sunday before his death, Tusker and Lucy quarrel violently. She goes to the hotel for lunch and is publicly humiliated by Mrs Bhoolabhoy. That evening Lucy finds a note from Tusker, who has gone to dinner at the club, enclosing "the clear statement you asked for." The letter details their modest financial position and closes with Tusker's admission that he cannot talk about these things face to face, that he acted foolishly for years, and that Lucy has been a good woman to him. He signs it "Love, Tusker." Lucy goes to bed with the letter under her pillow, recognizing it as the only love letter she has ever received.

The next morning, the parallel narratives converge. Lucy leaves for the hairdresser. Mr Bhoolabhoy types the eviction letter. Ibrahim is sacked, delivers the letter, and departs. Tusker reads the notice, shouts about "the bitch," and collapses dead in the canna lilies. Dr Mitra, who happened to stop by to check on his patient, pronounces death. Mrs Bhoolabhoy reverses course, theatrically blaming her husband for not breaking the news more gently. At the salon, Lucy sleeps under the hair dryer, dreaming. She wakes to find the assistants watching her from across the room. Someone has told them.

The Lodge fills with well-wishers. Lucy manages them with composure, declining offers to stay elsewhere. She asks Father Sebastian about burying Tusker's ashes in the churchyard, in the spot Tusker once said had room enough for two. At 3:30 a.m. she wakes to find Ibrahim, Minnie (Mrs Bhoolabhoy's personal maid, who was once a young ayah, or nanny, for a British military family), and Joseph asleep by the dying fire, keeping watch. She decides she cannot cancel Mr Turner's visit because he is bringing a present for Minnie from Sarah and Susan Layton, a gift acknowledging Minnie's years of service that would mean a great deal in Minnie's life.

The novel ends with Lucy alone in the dark, addressing Tusker directly, frightened to be on her own "amid the alien corn," begging him to take her with him: "Oh, Tusker, Tusker, Tusker, how can you make me stay here by myself while you yourself go home?"