A Writer's People (11 page)

He straight away, that very night, told his overtaxed palanquin men to take him back home. When he got there he sent for the hakim. The hakim came and said he could do nothing: the eater of the milk sweet was going to die in two weeks. And then—in this Indian story—the hakim simply went away, leaving the patient to order his affairs and deal with things as best he could. Two weeks later the patient died. For Rahman this death (so accurately foretold), almost more than the earlier cure, was a proof of the gifts and splendour of the hakim.

Rahman had earlier had a personal proof of the man's talent. It was at the time when they were exercised about the tortoise urine and the three earthworms. It was a Sunday afternoon and Rahman, a boy of thirteen, was playing with some friends in the doorway of his family house. Rahman's father and the hakim were sitting in the portico. Rahman's father called him. Rahman went and sat in front of them. The hakim held Rahman's hand, considered the boy's palm and forehead, counted and assessed the lines, and prophesied the boy's future. Rahman's father was awed. To have your future told
like that, by a hakim, was to be marked and blessed; and Rahman's father raised his arms to the sky and called on Allah in gratitude.

Rahman's India is full of this kind of wonder, where some men can go behind the play of events and study the workings of fate. The wonder of the seer follows the wonder of the healer; and in the background are the stupendous rituals of both religions. The effect is of an enticing, brightly coloured place where anything might happen; a man has only to let himself go. In Rahman's view of the world Satan led one astray; Allah rescued one. So the devout man was always protected, and never had to live with the consequences of his actions.

When he was seventeen, and in the middle school, in a hostel far from home, Rahman decided, with a friend of the other religion, the nephew of a temple priest, to run away. In the hostel he had to cook for himself. He hated cooking; it blighted his days; he couldn't get the peace of mind he needed to study, and he couldn't sleep properly. In this mood he went home for a five-day school break. He slept next to his father; it was their custom. He saw that his father was keeping a moneybag under his pillow; he found out that the money being guarded in this way, ninety-five rupees, was to pay the tax on his crops. About two o'clock one morning, when he thought his father was sleeping, Rahman stole the bag and went to join his friend.

There was a small Indian kingdom with its own maharaja and its own rules about fifteen miles away. That was where Rahman and his friend thought they should go. They ran
seven miles without stopping and came at daybreak to a village where Rahman had relations. They had breakfast and a bath there and later, telling Rahman's relations they wanted to have a look at the village, began to walk to the maharaja's kingdom. They got there at about half-past four. It was as magical a place as they expected. There was a hill, and behind the hill a fortress wall. The maharaja's palace was at the top of the hill and had a pinnacle of gold.

The city gates were open. They went in and Rahman says they found themselves in the land of their dreams. In Rahman's brightly coloured,
Arabian Nights
world anything is possible; and it is no surprise to him or to his reader that this land of dreams is just fifteen miles away from his family house. By the maharaja's orders the city has been decorated for this month, and a fair is in full swing, with booths and sports and games and a circus. Rahman has relations in this place too; so there is a house where they can have supper (Rahman's temple friend being given flour and pulses and his own pots and pans to cook his vegetarian food) and where they can sleep. In the morning they go out to explore the golden city. There are temples, mosques, lakes, a well-stocked zoo; and there is the maharaja's palace.

Near the gate to the audience hall they find—a Rahman touch—a holy man. He is sitting on the ground and writing. They go up to him, ask his permission, and sit beside him. They tell him, when he asks them, that they come from afar and are looking for employment. In Rahman's
Arabian Nights
world problems arise only to be resolved, especially if there is
a holy man about. And this holy man tells the two young men that the maharaja of the state is kind and generous to the poor. Every day at noon a cannon is fired; the maharaja can then be approached and petitioned; the sentry at the inner palace gate will stop no one.

They wait outside the gate. At noon, as the holy man said, the cannon is fired. A bell rings; and the sentry who has been walking up and down outside the gate pushes it open. Another sentry appears and leads them to the hall of audience. The young men are ready to faint at the richness of what they find: the carvings, the silver chandelier, the carpet soft and smooth, the perfume. The maharaja's high officials and courtiers, splendidly attired, sit with their hands in their laps. The young men are led to the presence area. They put their palms together, in the proper suppliant gesture, and bow their heads. When the maharaja appears—he is not described—they kneel. The maharaja asks them to rise. Rahman is stunned by the radiance of the ruler's face and the jewels of his crown.

The maharaja—who does this kind of thing every day—is brisk and matter-of-fact. He asks what his petitioners want. Rahman says he wants to earn a living. The maharaja asks whether he can read and write. When he says yes, the maharaja throws (this is the word Rahman uses) a knife and a pen without a nib (clearly a reed). He asks Rahman to make a pen; Rahman does so and puts the reed pen and the knife on the ivory table in front of him. The maharaja examines the pen, writes something on a piece of paper, and asks Rahman to write his name and address on that piece of paper. Rahman
does so. The maharaja directs his secretary to make a note of Rahman's name and tells Rahman to come back on the following day at ten.

Rahman's friend, the young man from the temple, had no schooling. He was fat and sturdy, though, and the maharaja thought that a place might be found for him in the army. He too was asked to come back the next day.

So it had all been as the holy man had said. But Rahman and his friend never went back to the maharaja's palace with the pinnacle of gold and the glittering ruler. They had left too many clues with Rahman's relations in two towns; and now, unhappily for them, they were plucked from the land of dreams and taken back to what would have seemed the greyness of home. The kitchen fire was lighted there for the first time for three days. Allah was thanked, and Rahman's father fed the poor. (Always, in this account, the poor, the bearers of palanquins, perhaps, called out on these occasions from the encompassing shadows, and were religiously fed.)

I
T MUST HAVE BEEN
this easy escape from the school hostel to the maharaja's city and palace, his welcome by holy man and ruler, his vision of new possibility, that made Rahman ready, when the time came, to sign on for Surinam. There was another reason. His father wished now to “tie him down,” to prevent him running away again, and he thought, strangely, that the best way would be by getting the young man married. So at the age of eighteen Rahman was married. He didn't raise a murmur. He gives the event half a line, and doesn't allow it
to interfere with his narrative. “After the marriage ceremony and holiday I returned to school and resumed my studies in a sincere way.”

In the same passive way he allows himself, six years later, when the big occasion arises, to be led to the Surinam emigrant depot. He says at first, like many Indian emigrants, that he was tricked; but the narrative shows that he was more than half willing. Somewhere in his head there would have been a memory of a palace with a golden pinnacle and a jewelled ruler.

He doesn't leave India right away. He spends more than six months in the depots in Kanpur and Calcutta. He could have gone to a magistrate and said he had changed his mind; he could have written to his father. But for six months he is content to do as he is told, to move here and there, noticing only the quality of food he gets in various places. In the middle of this period of waiting he does write to his father; but it is only to say that he is going to Calcutta, and he gives no address. Just before he boards the ship he writes again; he tells his father he is going to the “island” of Surinam.

Fifty years later he writes of his actions, “Holy Allah had picked me out and I was destined to leave Hindustan.” It is his only explanation, and it fits his world view. In Rahman's brightly coloured India, Satan misleads, Allah in the end rescues. So a devout man is always safe. He has no idea where Surinam or South America is, and he really has no wish to find out. He believes that on the two-month journey by sailing ship he will never lose sight of land; this means, in effect, that he has believed that the brightly coloured land of India will
always be with him; there will always be protection of some sort.

But the plantation world of Surinam is grey. There are no rituals and festivals in the background; it is like the change that occurs more than halfway through
Uncle Tom's Cabin
. In the drab plantations, the drab unpainted estate houses with rusting corrugated-iron roofs, the drab barracks, there are strange illnesses, ghosts, mysterious balls of fire; but there are also African healers. A man from India has to make the best of this new world.

My grandmother's mattress-maker had made the journey Rahman had made. He would not have had the means to tell me about India. He could think only about the biggest and most modern thing he remembered: the railway station. He would have been separate, culturally far away, from his children. He was as solitary as he appeared.

R
AHMAN, WHO WAS
never to lose his
Arabian Nights
idea of the world (essentially a child's idea), was born in 1874 in north-central India, a hundred miles south of the great city of Lucknow. Mohandas Gandhi, who was to change the face of India, was born in 1869, in Gujarat, seven hundred miles or so to the south-west. Gandhi was born to a view of the world that was dimmer than Rahman's, more earthy (no jewelled rulers, no palaces with golden pinnacles), though his people were much better off. He was born in a region of petty feudal states and his family were small-scale administrators of those states, moving more or less easily from one state to the other. It
comes out in an aside in Gandhi's autobiography that his father earned three hundred rupees a month, about twenty-five pounds. At one stage he moved from the state of Porbandar on the coast to Rajkot in the interior, a hundred and twenty miles away, a hard journey in those days: five days on a bullock cart. (Stagecoaches in England, in the great days, just before the railways, did ten miles an hour. To go back further, to ancient Rome in 80
BC
: Cicero, in his speech in defence of Sextus Roscius, speaks of fifty-six miles being done in ten hours by a relay of light carriages.)

In 1887, when he was eighteen, Gandhi finished high school in Rajkot. He went on to a college in another town. He found himself completely at sea; he couldn't even understand the lectures. The lecturers were good, he says; the trouble was that he was too “raw”: meaning perhaps that he was under-read and knew very little about the world. After a very unhappy term he gave up the college and came home to Rajkot.

There was a family council. A friend of the family advised that Gandhi shouldn't persevere with college education; it wasn't going to get him far, anyway; times had changed in India, and the most he could hope for with a college diploma, if he could get it, was a small administrative job paying ninety rupees a month. What Gandhi should do, the wise friend said, was to go to England and study law. The English law examinations were notoriously easy; seventy-five to ninety per cent of the candidates always passed. The course lasted three years; the total cost would be only three or four thousand rupees; and at the end there would be a glittering barrister's life.

For some reason—he doesn't say exactly why: it couldn't
have been only to get away from the bewildering new college—the idea of England (perhaps more than the study of law) excited Gandhi. He says it made him forget his cowardice. In the hope of getting financial help for his English venture from the government he went to see the British political agent at Porbandar, and he thought it was important to get there as fast as he could. He hired a bullock cart (twenty-four miles a day) for part of the journey, and did the remainder on a camel, though he had never before ridden on a camel. Wasted labour, pointless speed: in Porbandar Gandhi had the merest word with the political agent as the agent was going up a staircase, and he told Gandhi, more or less over his shoulder, that he was not qualified to go to England to study.

Gandhi wasn't put off; and he wasn't put off later by the religious objections of some of his family and caste to his crossing the black water. And yet he had very little idea of what he was going to. He hadn't read anything about England. It filled him with distaste—his own word—to read anything not a school book. He had never read a newspaper. He had no idea of the history of India. All that he knew of his own religion was what he had seen in his family. He had listened to readings of the
Ramayana
. From a family maid he had learned the virtue of repeating the name of Rama. He knew a few moralistic Gujarati plays. On certain festival days he had heard the Gita read aloud, but it had made no great impression on him. It is hard in India today, in a time of television and cinema and newspapers and constant political debate, to enter a mind so culturally denuded as Gandhi's was in 1887; nearly every apparently promising cultural beginning ends in a blank.

And yet he was in a fever to go to England. He rode over every caste obstacle. In his enthusiasm and blindness at this stage he was like Rahman eleven years later, in 1898, obstinate in his wish to go to Surinam (though Rahman fudges an important part of his story here, losing seven years, saying only of his Surinam passion, the many months in the disagreeable depots in Kanpur and Fyzabad, that he had signed up because he was bored by the routine of his life).