Dr Veraswami
Civil Surgeon of Kyauktada and Superintendent of the jail. He is the most passionate defender of the British Empire in the book, and the person it is about to destroy.
Membership of the European Club, and nothing that comes with it. He calls it a fortress impregnable: inside it no calumny can touch a man. He tells Flory plainly that he would never attend, only subscribe.
The book
At a glance
- Civil Surgeon of Kyauktada and Superintendent of the jail
- The highest-placed Indian official in the district
- Rendered with a hiss on the s's throughout — 'iss', 'ass', 'prissons'
- Essays with a moral meaning; Emerson, Carlyle, Stevenson
- A pious Hindu wife who refuses to meet Flory and hides when he calls
- Soft-hearted; every beggar in Kyauktada makes him a target
- Sedition first, then extortion, rape, torture, poisoning and eating beef
- From chapter 3 to the last chapter
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeDr Veraswami is a small, black, plump man with fuzzy hair, steel-rimmed spectacles and a badly fitting white drill suit, whose trousers bag concertina-like over clumsy black boots. He talks in an eager bubbling rush with a hiss on the s's, nips thumb and forefinger together when hunting for a word, and keeps a small library of essays of the Emerson–Carlyle–Stevenson type, because he likes a book to have what he calls a moral meaning. He is notorious for softheartedness, which makes him the target of every beggar in Kyauktada. He is also the only Indian official in the district senior enough for the club question to be about him.
The argument he has with Flory is the same argument every time, almost word for word, and it runs backwards. Flory says the Empire is a device for giving trade monopolies to the English, that the official holds the Burman down while the businessman goes through his pockets, and that all the law and order amounts to more banks and more prisons. The doctor answers with Clive and Warren Hastings and Dalhousie and Curzon, with roads and hospitals and irrigation, and with a claim about his own people that no Englishman in the book troubles to make: that he belongs, as an Indian, to an inferior and degenerate race. A thousand snubs from Englishmen have not shaken it. Flory's seditious opinions shock him and give him a shuddering pleasure, like hearing the Lord's Prayer said backwards.
He knows exactly how he can be destroyed, and says so before it starts. U Po Kyin will not attack him openly; he will libel him, and whether the libel is believed depends entirely on the doctor's standing with the Europeans. There is no question of proof or evidence. If his prestige is good he survives, and if it is bad he does not: 'Prestige iss all.' That is why he wants the club — not to use it, he insists, but to be a member of it. He would never presume to come. He would pay his subscriptions, and that would be privilege enough.
He is also the reason the novel's central friendship is not a comfortable one. Flory is ashamed every time it has to be admitted between them that the doctor cannot be received in the club because of his skin. The doctor never asks him to propose his name, and would have perished rather than ask; when Flory finally offers, the doctor's eyes fill and he takes both his hands and warns him off in the same breath, because U Po Kyin will now count Flory among his enemies.
How the book draws them
- How the book draws himShort, plump and dark-skinned, with round credulous eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles and short, tightly curled hair. Without the spectacles he is myopic and has to peer. In the riot his tie is torn off and the spectacles come through unbroken, which is the book's way of saying they are part of him.
- The drill suitWhite, badly fitting, and worn with clumsy black boots the trousers bag concertina-like over. He pops out of the house to meet a visitor like a jack-in-the-box, and argues with his plump white-clad back propped against the veranda rail, nipping thumb and forefinger together whenever he is hunting for a word.
- The standing jokeThe British Empire is an aged female patient of his. She is very low, he reports, with septicaemia, peritonitis and paralysis of the ganglia setting in; specialists will have to be called. He has enjoyed the joke for two years without tiring of it.
- The defence of the EnglishHe calls them the salt of the earth and torchbearers upon the path of progress, and holds that their civilization at its very worst is an advance. When Flory says the British brought the venereal disease they cure, the doctor claims the distinction back for his own countrymen: it was the Indians who introduced it.
- The hospitalRows of grey-faced men on sheetless charpoys, dogs said to eat amputated limbs dozing under the buildings, and a compounder who lives off selling the drugs because the Government pays him twenty-five rupees a month. The doctor knows nothing of that and fights the dust and the water supply on his own.
- The floggingsAs Superintendent of the jail he has to supervise a flogging or a hanging, and comes home with his face faded grey and doses himself with whisky. His faith in British justice does not falter after it.
- PrestigeHis clearest statement of how his world works: a nod and a wink will accomplish more than a thousand official reports, and every time Flory is seen entering his house the mercury rises half a degree.
- Beware of the crocodileHis name for U Po Kyin, delivered with a warning attached: he strikes always at the weakest spot. Flory laughs and asks whether crocodiles really do that. The book answers the question in chapter 24.
- In the riotHe is in the middle of the crowd trying to restrain it, and comes out of the last of it into Flory's arms with his tie torn off and his spectacles miraculously unbroken. He holds up a fist to show the damaged knuckles.
- What he does about the deathHe arrives too late, weeps with his back turned, and then swathes the body in a sheet and lies to the authorities with all his medico-legal skill so that suicide is not written on the tombstone. His only explanation: your master was my friend.
Dr Veraswami quotes
The official holds the Burman down while the businessman goes through his pockets.
If my standing iss good, they will not believe it of me; if bad, they will believe it. Prestige iss all.