No Country: A Novel (22 page)

Fatty-fatty Kriko-bloaty

Ate up all the ghee chapatti

His trousers split as he ate

Everything on his heaping plate!

All our friends knew it by afternoon, when Krikor left in tears in his brougham. He walked to school starting the next day. But the whole matter tormented me. The following week I sought Krikor out and shook his hand, but for a long time it was not like it had been before.

One morning over breakfast on our verandah, I asked my father, “Are we poor now?” He looked up from his newspaper, and considered my question.

“Poverty means different things to different people,” he said.

“What does it mean to us?” I persisted.

“We have this house and there is enough for your education, unless when you finish school you want to go to, say, Oxford. Well, if you wanted to,” he said worriedly, “if you did, I’d have to talk to Lahey and find out what we could raise from a mortgage.” Old Lahey had been Grandfather Padraig’s lawyer.

“So we are not poor?” I wanted a clear answer.

“Son, we have enough left to live on, comfortably. Just enough.” Then he added, “I am sorry about our horses, Son. You loved them.”

After a pause I told him of my jingle about Krikor. He listened gravely. But when I told him about my apology, he surprised me with an impulsive hug. It was not unusual for him to do so, but I knew this was special.

“I am proud of what you did,” he said simply. “I love you, Son.”

•  •  •

M
Y FATHER SPENT
the Great War reading stacks of newspapers.

At school, we started each day now, not just with announcements and a perfunctory prayer, but with something new. Our principal was an Englishman, Mr. W. H. Arden-Wood MA, CIE—an improbable name, my father had first claimed, until he checked for himself. Mr. Arden-Wood kicked off each morning with news of the war, followed by a sonorous prayer for our gallant boys—and a couple of former teachers—who were fighting against the Forces of Evil. When any of the boys brought in letters written by relatives from the war front, he read parts of it to the entire assembly, huffing with emotion, elocuting every precious syllable. Teddy Richard and Timmy Doyle, whose dads had joined up, brought in letters. They were even invited up on stage!

Soon senior boys like Dan Surita and the two older O’Brien boys enlisted. So did Tony’s dad the day after Tony’s tenth birthday. They came to our school in their uniforms, and everyone clapped. I wished I were old enough to enlist in the war—any war! But I knew how my father would view such enthusiasm for the British uniform. I dreamed of distant battles, holding actual guns, marching to the kettle-drums, cheered by crowds.

“Anybody who doesn’t join is a coward and a rotten egg,” said Tony, beaming. I picked a fight with him, knocking him flat behind the school gym. I felt no better for it. His dad had gone off in his new uniform, while mine sat at home reading about it. I wanted him to
do
things. “Someday soon I will grow up and be that kind of man,” I decided fiercely.

One late April morning, almost a fortnight after my eleventh birthday, my father rushed into my bedroom and woke me. I rose eagerly, expecting him to hold out some unexpected gift—probably from Uncle Rafe. But what he was holding in his hand was the
early newspaper. It was a Bengali paper, not
The Englishman
or
The Statesman
. His hands were shaking in excitement.

“It’s beginning to happen,” he said, hoarse with emotion. “It has begun to happen in Ireland! None of the English papers mentions this. On Easter morning, there was an uprising in Dublin. The most important buildings in that city have been taken over.”

“Is Ireland free now?” I asked, caught up in his unexpected excitement.

“The leaders were rounded up and imprisoned by the British soldiery,” my father conceded, “but the Uprising has begun.”

“But Baba,” I was confused, “didn’t you say that all the British soldiers were fighting Germany?”

“Aye,” he said, “but it must be the Protestants and the Constabulary.” I waited for him to explain.

“Among the leaders are Pearse, Connolly, MacDonagh, and McBride,” he recited from the Bengali newspaper. “One of them is a schoolteacher. Another is a poet.”

“Is that a good thing?” I asked doubtfully. “Don’t you need soldiers for a fight?”

“It is the common people,” chuckled my father in a transport of delight. “Oh, Son, what a grand time it is for Ireland!”

In the following days, my father waited eagerly for news of the uprising, which remained stubbornly absent from the English papers. Then, two weeks later, we came to know from the Bengali papers that McDonagh and McBride, Connolly and Pearse had been executed by the English after hasty courts-martial. I remember my father reading those names out to me. Here in Calcutta, my father wept for his Irish dead. I did not know how to comfort him.

•  •  •

I
WAS GETTING
used to my father’s unexpected reactions as he read the morning papers. He insisted I eat a good breakfast—though he would only drink cup after cup of fragrant Darjeeling tea. I remember how I relished puffy luchis or parathas with aloo and subzi greens, while in the summer I ate mulled oats with cool homemade curd and honey.

This morning at the end of October 1917, he could barely wait to tell me the news, reading out bits from the papers, his tea growing cold in his cup. He exclaimed that one of our allies, Russia—I knew it by its pale blue spread on our schoolroom map—had withdrawn from the war and was caught up in a Revolution.

“Will we have a revolution?” I asked hopefully, “At least an uprising like Ireland?”

“Ahh,” he said, as if that was an answer.

In the last few months, he had talked to me of many battles. The grown-ups had been certain it would be over by the first Christmas. Even the papers said so. From my school history texts, I thought that battles happened quickly and decisively: Hastings, the battles at Plassey, Waterloo, Lepanto, Philippi . . . But this war was going on and on.

Three days before that Christmas, Tony Belletty’s dad returned without a leg but with an army pension, which he complained was smaller because he was an Anglo-Indian. “Same size as his brain,” commented his sister Mrs. Mildred Noney. Two weeks later, Dan Surita came back. He never left home now, wheezing around in his bedroom. His cousin Teddy Richard told us that he had been gassed.

Some months later, when the Great War did finally end, I had turned thirteen. We heard the boom of the ceremonial cannons
at Fort William barracks. Anglo-Indians like Mrs. Lahey and old Mr. Noney, whose sons had joined the forces in great numbers, fought and died, were not invited to the great ball.

“Almost one and a half million Indians have served in the British armed forces,” said my father, “in every grim theatre of the war. All of India provided food, money, munitions. Forty-three thousand soldiers died on the battlefields. Many more returned without limbs or with permanent injuries, and limped back to their homes, mainly in the Punjab, or Rajputana, or Coorg, some witless, shambling and shell-shocked.”

“So what did
we
get from the war?” I asked him, puzzled. “Didn’t we think of this before?”

“Well,” he began, “the Indians now know they fought white men. They also know the British Crown would have tumbled without the colonial gift of their lives and limbs.”

“That’s all?”

“It’s a lot, Robert. We learn slowly.” He sounded rueful. “But now our Indian Congress leaders, who had been regularly thanked throughout the war for their support of the British, are asking for something. Like Ireland”—he smiled—“Home Rule.”

“Will the English give it to us?”

“Shouldn’t there be a difference between giving and taking, Son?”

We were interrupted by a knocking at the door, and I knew that Tony and Krikor had come by for our afternoon game of cricket. But what happened then remains with me even to this day, for I was struck by what my father said, and the power of stories became suddenly clear to me. There we were, three boys with their bat and ball, when my father began to tell us the oddest story of give-and-take, and how an entire regiment of the finest Irish
soldiers disappeared from India. We stood rooted to the spot, all thoughts of cricket gone for the moment.

Tony and I were avid collectors of cards from cigarette boxes depicting soldiers of all the British regiments. We knew that the Connaught Rangers from Ireland had fought in all the wars for two hundred years, and right after the Great War had been posted in Punjab.

“They heard from their relatives and comrades returning from furlough about the goons called Blacks and Tans perpetrating atrocities against their families. Now that Free Ireland was about to become fact, these soldiers laid down arms. They considered themselves Irish, not British! At the local bazaar, they bought three swaths of coloured cloth, and local women sewed them into the Irish tricolours. They refused payment, for their sympathy lay with the young Irish.”

My father paused, relishing the moment. “That very day, the first Irish flag was raised on Indian soil.” The authorities tried to gag the English papers, my father had told me later, but he had gathered the news from the small vernacular papers which dodged under the fence, reporting the story at the risk of closure.

“But what about the English? What did they have to say?” Krikor wondered aloud. “Yes, what did they do?” Tony burst out.

“Plenty, boys. Two battalions of Seaforth Highlanders were sent in full battle gear.”

“Were the Irish killed?”

My father shook his head. “A bloodbath was avoided because Father Livens, a Catholic priest, stood before them, ready to be slaughtered with them. Jim Daly, a young Connaught Ranger, averted certain massacre by pacifying his comrades and negotiating with English generals. He was given word that no soldiers would be executed.”

Baba sat back and added with satisfaction, “News had reached the provisional government in Dublin, which insisted on the return of the soldiers.”

“And the English agreed?” asked Tony incredulously.

“It was a case of give-and-take, Anthony,” said my father, “well, give-and-take of a certain kind.”

“What do you mean, sir?” Krikor broke in.

“The British authorities disbanded the regiment. Its colours were sent off to a great house in Boyle . . .” My father paused. “Close to Sligo from where my father came.”

“Then it all ended well,” I was relieved, “the English gave the Irish troops their freedom.”

“Give-and-take!” said my father, “True, that is what they gave. What they took was Jim Daly’s life. He helped keep the peace—and the only Irishman executed.”

“No!” we cried out.

“Yes,” said my father. “He led the negotiations and obeyed English law—and was punished like Daniel O’Connell eighty years ago. Jim Daly was only twenty-two.”

“Who’s Daniel O’Connell?” asked Krikor.

“That I’ll tell you another day, I promise,” added my father. “Jim Daly defiantly whistled ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,’ his regimental tune, on the way to execution, then was buried in a corner of the prison.”

But even that was not the end of the story!

“Jim Daly had been shot—but he lived on, in a manner of speaking,” said Baba. “Odd stories have percolated through India: A scrawled writing appeared high above human height on the prison wall:
Seamus Dailigh,
the Irish spelling of his name. Local farmers swear that late at night someone wanders the perimeter of the jail whistling that tune.”

The stories of England, Ireland, and India keep getting tangled up, I observed. My friends could not wait to repeat the story at school. Krikor made a fortune buying up all the available Connaught Ranger cards, which the cigarette companies stopped printing. He let Tony and me choose the two best ones as keepsakes. I still have them. The rest he sold to the highest bidders at school and on Elliot Road.

I had realized that no one else’s dad told stories like my father. And it turned into a strange moment in my head, as if I was outside myself, observing us, and the picture became a permanent sepia memory of a growing boy sitting with his friends and his father in a book-lined room with old comfortable chairs, talking in a room redolent with the aroma of tea and tobacco and old papers.

It was a picture that was to return unbidden to my mind, again and again, in my unquiet years, an anchor in troubled waters.

•  •  •

I
WAS BEGINNING
to enjoy my jousts with my father about politics and history, learning to argue with him and weigh his words. Although we Anglo-Indians lived where few Englishmen set foot, jealously keeping to their own enclaves, they were ever-present in our conversation.

“Tony’s dad says that the English with very little education and no experience get salaries many times more than Anglo-Indians. Is that fair?” I wanted to know

“It isn’t,” countered my father, “but Indians make even less for the same work, and they hate
us
for that.”

As I digested this, my father added, “You do know, Robert, the English in India—especially those who were born here—first
called themselves ‘Anglo-Indian,’ but dropped the term when we of part-Indian blood began to lay claim to that name? By 1910 or so, they switched to calling themselves ‘European.’ ”

“But weren’t all the Europeans soon at each other’s throats, using their new inventions like machine guns and poison gas?” I was discovering the pleasures of irony.

Many Anglo-Indians—our next-door neighbor Mr. Theodore “Badbreath” Nolan, for example—tried so hard to be English that they pretended not to understand Bengali or Hindi, affecting the pidgin which Europeans condescended to use with servants.

I had noted disdainfully that there was a flourishing business in skin bleachers among Anglo-Indian ladies like Mrs. Rosie Demeder, who never dared to come out under the sun. And I remember one baptismal party, after Tony’s cousin Emily was born. The venerable biddies were craning their heads into the cradle, breathing together over the tiny mite. There was a lot of anxious checking behind the ears—for that’s how they guessed at the future complexion of the babies.