No Country: A Novel (23 page)

“Not as fair as their Rosemary, now, is she?” whinnied old Mrs. Sadie Lahey, the lawyer’s wife.

Her friend Mrs. Bella Murphy, who sported a yellow hide, preened and said smugly, “Nooo, but then
she’s
the one with my grandfather’s looovely Irish skin.”

Widow Maher, their neighbor, chimed in dolefully, “But look at poor Derek and Joanie Dorsey . . . neither of their children got Joanie’s pearly skin . . . they just had to be as brown as Derek.”

“Oh, but they change so, the peachy darlings. There’s hope,” consoled Mrs. Lahey.

“Noooo, not with those two, there ain’t no chance, looove,” pronounced Mrs. Murphy.

Smothered under generous rouge, Tony’s deaf great-aunt Mrs. Mildred Noney, clutching her mended leather bag, now blared to the cement floor in what she thought was a thoughtful whisper, “Think ’bout Georgina Flynn,
baba
! Brown as a muddy boat she is, and her Mervyn’s no lighter, but their daughter—Esther,
not
Liz—oooh, she’s got looovely brown hair, and such a complexion, white as seashells.”

And here old Mrs. Noney reverently raised her milky eyes at the ceiling and bellowed, “And
blueblue
eyes.”

Her voice rose at this dramatic moment. “Very next year Georgina has Liz, the spitting image of her Mervyn. Thick black hair a tangle of corkscrews and skin brown as a Burma cheroot. Poor Georgina!” She delivered her final line with tragic satisfaction, “Such hopes she had after pretty Esther.”

“But,” I broke in, unmindful of my manners, “does all this matter, Mrs. Noney?”

“Oh shoosh, boy, shoosh yourself”—she glared—“you with yer whitey skin and hazel eyes!”

Soon after that came the news that Pam, Badbreath Nolan’s daughter, had been asked for marriage by an English clerk known to everybody, for some reason, as “Jelly” Carberry, and he was taking her away to that land of fantasy—England—to live in some suburb of Manchester. They spoke as if Pam had been beatified. The letter and photographs she sent some months later were studied like autographed copies of the Ten Commandments, with sighs about how beautiful “Home” looked in the dim black-and-white background. Sammy Brent’s parents talked wistfully of saving and going there some day.

Yet what Home was it they spoke of, I have wondered for years now—generations away from a land that would not claim us as its
own—while we spurned that other inseparable darker-pigmented part of ourselves, an undeniable sepia? All the while we were continually aware of the subject soil we trod on. We were marooned on islands of our making, discussing fairness of skin, but never reaching for the awesome idea of fairness—Justice and Freedom—my father would say wryly, for that would surely bring us face-to-face with our own darker brothers, the Indians, who were also without liberty.

I remember how, even in my childhood, I had begun to understand that there was one more liberty that we had taken away from ourselves, every time we comforted ourselves that we were by the merest, but unmistakable, shade of paleness separated from our masters. All of us, except for rare exceptions like my father, prided ourselves on being irretrievably separate from our native Indian kin, especially our first Indian mothers, naming all our babies after long-dead European antecedents, but never
ever
giving them names chosen from the darker side of our ancestral beds.

What would we Anglo-Indians do, I began to ask myself, if a time came when the world forgot to scrutinize the exact text of our skin? Would we go Home, wherever that home might be? Would we remain here in India? And if that time came when the world did not care a whit about our hue, nor whisper comparisons about it, would our children in their innocence and unblemished courage seek out and mend our truncated identities, connecting the brown and the white, seeing equal worth and sweetness in both?

We did have one secret reason to rejoice; perhaps it was Nature’s way to celebrate hybrid splendour that made our Anglo-Indian women the most striking, with the most comely features, and almost without exception the most graceful dancers. Europeans always prowled about them, but seldom for marriage.

Oh, but no one was like the girl I was to meet when I turned eighteen. She was a fatherless student, come recently from Bombay, supported by a foundation scholarship at La Martiniere for Girls, our sister school. Her name was Estelle O’Brien Thompson.

I will someday be able to speak about her. Not yet, not yet.

•  •  •

A
FTER
M
ATHUR CLEARED
the dinner plates, my father would light his pipe and linger over coffee, wanting to chat into the night. Sometimes he spoke of Grandfather Padraig and his time. During one such evening and another story about Padraig, I interrupted him, unable to hold back a question that had long troubled me. How was it was that my grandfather, who succeeded in so short a time—enough to acquire a fine brougham and horses in Calcutta, a grand house east of the Esplanade on Elliot Road, and who had given a princely sum for the starving of Ireland—never revisited the land of his birth?

“I doubt he ever went back to visit Ireland,” my father offered tentatively. “If he did, he never mentioned it to me.”

“You’d tell me if you went on a long journey, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” conceded my father, “but if he went, it would have been long before I was born,” adding something that he had never told me before. “He did disappear from Calcutta for a few months once. Exactly when or where he went—to Burma or Ceylon for trade, or whether he visited Ireland—Declan never did say.”

“Who?” I asked, completely puzzled.

“Declan Clooney, the sailor-man,” explained my father.

“Why would Grandpa Padraig tell
him
?” I could barely contain my disbelief, for I had once seen the man: old toothless Declan who wandered in his head, scratched his sorry shrunken body all
day long, gibbering that the Loreto nuns were trying to poison him in the sailors’ sanctuary near the Kidderpore docks where he had made final port with other codgers. Until Declan died, a few years ago, my father used to visit him, usually before Christmas. A charity case, I had always thought. Why would the great Padraig have paid any heed to that rambling footling fool, drooling with the drink and dropsy and three degrees north of senile?

“But he was barking mad!” I protested.

“He was all that at the end, poor fellow,” my father said gently, “but Robert, he brought me clever Chinese toys from the Moluccas. He also talked to me about my grandmother Maire Aherne. A great beauty, he said. He also mentioned my father’s best friend Brendan McCarthaigh. I told you all those stories, Robert, remember?” I nodded.

Then he added, “My father never talked about all that to me. He also remained hardfaced to the English till his dying day. He even seemed to have resented the English tongue itself.”

“That’s an impossible quarrel,” I declared.

“That’s very Irish,” he chuckled. “He spoke Bengali, Hindustani, Farsi fluently, and he never used the English language if he could help it.”

“But
you
—you don’t hate the language?” I asked in confusion.

“That’s because I fell in love with all the books. My father would buy them in great numbers. It was as if English reading and English speaking were at odds in his head.”

“He was broken in half inside himself?” A strange picture was beginning to paint itself in my head. “Do we all get broken inside?”

“Sooner or later,” he said, pausing momentarily, “in different ways, perhaps. But we need to keep the pieces from destroying each other.”

“And Grandmother Kalidasi? She spoke English?”

“She never learnt. She never needed to.”

“Why do you not speak of her as much—when we are these two parts—Irish and Indian.”

“Not that broken, I hope, Robert,” said my father. “We call ourselves Irish just as we call ourselves by my Irish father’s surname. Your grandmother Kalidasi melted like sugar in our lives. Her life is a part of us. She even made angry Padraig love this world again.”

“Speaking Bengali?”

“Haan,”
he said, changing over to Bengali as easily as drawing breath.

“May I look at that book, please?” I asked in Bengali.

Handing me his large folio book of Irish landscapes which he had purchased recently, he said, “
Robert baba, dekho ki shobuj desh.
See how green that land is.” Then turning to a page, he murmured wistfully, “I have often wondered if my father had walked just here, or had ever passed by any of these places, if any of these rocks and trees were part of what he missed sorely.”

•  •  •

I
T WAS THE
fifth of April 1919, and my fourteenth birthday just around the corner. In this season the
kaal baisakhi
storms, with their thunderclaps and forked tongues of lightning, descend suddenly in the afternoons and cooled everything down, but that particular year the air had grown heavier and hotter each day. My father and I, like many others in our city, were trying to sleep on our bare terrace, tossing fitfully on camp-cots under a great staring moon, when we heard a rattling at our gate.

“Telegraph man, sir!” the man in khaki bellowed from below,
shaking the chain and padlock on our gate. When my father padded back to the terrace, his face was somber.

“Your Uncle Rafe has died suddenly,” he said, “in Punjab. His lawyer writes that he has already been buried, according to his instructions.”

“He has left me his house in Amritsar,” he muttered, and then, as if announcing a calamity, “and he has gone and left his motorcar to you.”

“Oh yes!” I cried, springing up in excitement.

“Robert,” chided my father, who thought my excitement unseemly. But no one else I knew owned a motorcar.

“I will go to Niall Lahey’s law office on Waterloo Street tomorrow. He will write up something lawyerly to send back so that the house can be sold off,” said my father, already sounding burdened by details.

“Will this make us rich again?” I wondered aloud.

“I doubt it. Rafe spent pretty freely on his luxuries and wom—” He broke off, then added, “The house is modest, in the old part of the city. And what else can we do but sell off that absurd machine? You will have that money on your eighteenth birthday.”

“Oh Baba, no . . . please, please,” I pleaded desperately, “I want to keep it.”

“Well, it is like you are asking for a pet, Robert,” countered my father, a smile breaking over his face. That smile gave me hope, and I decided to play my trump card.

“It is the last gift from the only other blood relative I knew in my life,” I said.

“Eh?” My father seemed completely stumped.

“Please, Baba,” I added gravely.

“Oh dear,” he said, relenting, “but it is at the other end of
India. I’ll need to take the train. Then I can get that house sold more quickly.”

“Take me with you, Baba. The Easter break is almost here anyway,” I said.

“But if we are unable to get someone who can drive back that contraption . . .” he demurred, weighed down by the enormity of the venture.

I knew what would appeal to him. “We will drive down the Grand Trunk Road back to Calcutta. No other father and son that I know have done this. We will see India together. Remember you told me how Sher Shah had built that historic road in the sixteenth century, and showed it to me on the map. Kipling’s Kim traveled on it!”

“Ah yes,” he said, brightening at that memory.

•  •  •

A
FEW DAYS
later, legal papers in hand, and having secured permission from my school to add a week’s leave to the upcoming Easter break, we were on our way, clip-clopping in a rented carriage over the pontoon bridge across the river to Howrah Station’s red terminal.

We had to press through the milling crowd to the waiting train. Spying the First Class coach for Europeans, I pressed my face against a window to peek inside. Between the green tasseled curtains parted at the middle, I took in the dark wood paneling on the walls and the velvet cushions lying on the creamy leather seats.

“Come, Robert,” my father called out, leading me to the Second Class compartment where the red-shirted coolie slid our suitcase under our seat. Two wide wooden benches faced each other,
while two others could be hinged down to sleep another two, but so far only a portly Bengali had joined us, and he promptly occupied an upper bunk and went to sleep.

The train lurched as the engine tugged, and I insisted on sitting by the barred window, unwilling to miss anything in my excitement. My hair was gritty with specks of soot by evening. Our compartment had a small enamel washbasin, and I rinsed my face in it.

The express train raced through the green valley. After a few hours the Ganges receded from view, and the earth turned brown and dry. We rattled past small stations, towns and villages with their little temples and the occasional mosque with its quaint green dome, and sometimes, ruined forts on distant hills. Railway attendants brought us our food in covered trays, but outside, flies moved like motes. I understood why the European carriages had curtains and glass panes.

“Try the chicken,” Baba insisted, and it was delicious: This was the famous Railway Curry. The vegetarian Hindu stared balefully at what we were eating and did not come down, but noisily ate puffed rice and yogurt in his perch from a small tin and went back into hibernation. I went reluctantly to sleep when it grew dark and there was nothing more to see.

By the end of the second day, I wished I could take a cool bath. I had never slept so heavily or so long, possibly because of the swaying carriage. My father shook me awake the following morning. The train was at a station. Next to him stood a dapper Sikh gentleman in an elegant linen suit, a red tie, and turban.

“Sat sri akaal,”
he greeted me.

“Son, this is Mr. Amrik Singh, Uncle Rafe’s lawyer,” my father said, making introductions. “Amrik-ji, this is my son, Robert.”

We had arrived: Amritsar, where my car was waiting for me!

•  •  •

“T
HE CITY IS
badaa
tense, Aherne sahib,” commented Amrik-ji as we made our way out of the station, which was crowded with troops bristling with guns. “Let’s get away from here
ek-dum
,” he added.