Out of India (10 page)

Lands went by, looking from the deck no more than lumps and shadows – the point of Tunisia, Sicily, Malta. Then we kept south, past the low dun-coloured coasts of Libya and Egypt. Throwing pieces of stale bread to the escort of gulls I saw my first dolphins, a sign, according to the Polish sailors, of the very best kind of luck. But the Mediterranean, lacking the wilder chances of the ocean, seemed a dull enough place. What was history to a child on a boat?

At Port Said, where we anchored to await the canal pilot, we were assailed by a flotilla of bum-boats. From the profuse jumble of men and goods on the wharves, the long shallow boats knifed out into the harbour with their crews of bearded hustlers already yelling a fervent sales pitch. Paddling into the lee of the ship they bawled upwards to the faces lining the high decks, offering indiscriminately
things both useful and futile, with a few objects of real beauty amid the junk – rings and jewellery, etched bowls and long-necked copper jugs, pottery patterned in raw colours, glassware, small prayer rugs, carved wooden animals stylized in the manner of ancient Egypt, models of the Sphinx and the Pyramids, printed cottons and wool jellabas, framed pictures of old beast-headed gods copied from tomb-paintings. As the time passed the haggling grew more frantic. Our deckhands were laying out ropes and lounging by the winches, getting ready to ease the ship away. The opportunities were fleeting, and as the normal stock drew no more takers more intimate stuff was unveiled in a babble of many languages. With bold and hopeful gestures the vendors displayed condoms and dildos, and devices for private pleasures, and most explicit pictures of very peculiar couplings.

Then lines were dropped, the hooter blasted, and the propellers began to churn harbour muck. Yet the vendors still did not give up, but pursued with energetic strokes. As their boats fell behind, they were still waving rugs, or scarves, or shawls, or tasselled cotton robes, or pornographic wall-hangings.

Pushing my way between the legs of the adults and popping my head between the bars of the rails I could see that all this commotion was highly diverting. The passengers, whether eager to buy or not, hung over the rails with their mouths open. Nothing like this, I realized later, had erupted, so garish and blatant, into the grey disquiet of wartime England. They were shocked and glad to be so. This, after all, was the gate to the Orient about which they had certain secret expectations. So long as Western fundamentals were not completely outraged, cheeky indiscretion and mischief were permitted, under the heading of
exotica
. It was expected, even appreciated, that a journey to the East led to a loosening of the braces all round.

One after another in line astern the big ships entered the Suez Canal, as if shuffling slowly through a sea of sand. By our side, surprisingly close but far below, strings of camels often kept pace, swinging along with their tortuous gait. It looked like a new way of doing something even as old as walking. Then the ships threaded the Great Bitter Lake, members of a monstrous modern caravan, huge arks making so little stir that their wakes hardly ruffled the water.

*

When we reached Suez we stopped once more. The sunshine was bright and penetrating and the days began to get sticky before noon. In the morning the ship’s makeshift cinema was showing a Laurel and Hardy film. My brother and I were keen spectators, for in wartime England we had seen very few films.

In the midst of the performance there was a sudden commotion. A dim adult figure appeared behind us, whispering, ‘You two, come quickly. There’s someone to see you.’

Neither of us wished to leave. My brother slumped down in his seat and grumbled over his shoulder.

‘Can’t it wait? Look, we’re just getting to a good bit.’

Kids about us were biting their thumbs with excitement and having hiccups from laughter. But we were pulled out in a sulk. Then I saw the light flooding in through the broad open port where new passengers were making their way into the ship. I saw my mother standing just out of the eddy of the crowd, and next to her but not touching her was a tall thin man. He looked handsome to me, even though he wore the comical khaki shorts and the long woollen socks that soldiers wore in the desert. The bare knees of his long legs looked hairless and vulnerable. I noted the trim military haircut, carefully brushed with the parting almost dead centre, and on the upper lip the little clipped hedge of the moustache. He
was holding a cigarette in his left hand and something else in his right.

We gazed at this man, not sure what was expected of us.

‘It’s your father,’ said our mother in a quiet voice, sounding a bit resentful, as if we should have known him instantly.

The tall man cleared his throat. ‘Hallo, boys,’ he said in a voice that was embarrassed and too loud. ‘How are you?’

We said nothing but stood looking hopeless. The silence seemed to knot him up with shyness. He cleared his throat again and then thrust out his right hand.

‘Look,’ he said more softly, having got control of his voice. ‘I’ve brought you bananas. Take them. Please.’

A
MONG THE ACCOUNTS of the British in India, I have read that when the Jesuit Thomas Stevens, the first Englishman to write about the country, was approaching the shore of the Western Ghats in 1579 he met a succession of strange sights. First, he saw land birds he did not know far out at sea; then boughs of palms and sedges lying sodden in the water; then swimming snakes; and then ‘a substance which they call by the name of a coin of money, as broad and as round as a groat, wonderfully printed and stamped of nature, like unto some coin’. After these signs, the ship’s company, which was reduced to crumbs of hardtack and lacked any water, knew that a landfall was certain.

It is fitting that a counterfeit of coins was strewn along the path to India, a country so fateful for the wealth of England. Wealth is the chimera of history, waxing and waning with time. But we, arriving some 350 years later, were given no portents. Coming out of the night we strolled onto the deck in the morning and found Bombay already upon us.

To the left was the Gateway of India, a grandiose arch through which our passengers did not go.

From a distance it had a look of Marble Arch in London, and the implausibility of triumphal arches everywhere.
What reason could there be to go under that particular hoop for our voyagers? It would have been a form of bowing the head, an abasement or servility not likely to be found on the Polish
Batory
. Our ship was no imperial harbinger, no collector of tribute and salaams, but only an adventurer subsisting on the broken scraps of wartime. So we shied away from the ceremonial landing, going to starboard and easing into Bombay docks.

An appalling noise greeted us. Not just the customary clang and clatter of the dockside but an overwhelming racket of people. Was it human effervescence or something more ominous? How hard it was for the English to judge. In the worst moments of the Blitz, when the heavens spat bombs and buildings burst like balloons and St Paul’s was backlit by sulphurous flames, as if by the hand of Hollywood, the English went dumbly to their tasks, clutching quiet agonies to careworn breasts, celebrating escapes with wry grins and only an exhalation through the nose to show pent-up terror.

But this Indian cacophony? Even an inexperienced child had reason to see both effervescence and despair. The sun shone beautifully; the February heat was not yet overbearing; in the morning the air retained at least a memory of a breezy freshness off the Arabian Sea. On land, no sirens wailed. Coolies, barrows, rickshaws, tongas clogged the view, not vehicles in military blotches. This land was not at war. Yet there were casualties all around, with injuries as foul as war wounds. Rotted noses, blind sticky eyes, leprous skins, stumps, scars, twisted extremities. A grizzled skeleton swung himself forward at dizzy speed on rough crutches. A half-man, cut off at the thighs, propelled himself on a little wooden trolley with rag-wrapped knuckles. A bent woman pulled the edge of her sari over the earthquake of her face. Children gazed with sunken eyes as dark as mercury pools, their ribs fluttering like flimsy bamboo fences. Everything seemed in
furious motion, though when the eye stopped careering about and fixed for a moment on a single person, as likely as not one saw extreme lethargy or exhaustion being dragged around like Sisyphus’ stone.

*

After a while, boxed about with the bags and cases of travel, we made the first descent into the torrent of this life. Leaving Ballard Pier we could glimpse in the distance the startling architectural phantasmagoria of Victoria Terminus railway station. Going to the hotel we passed streets with surprising English names, decent avenues whose orderly colonial purpose was obscured or perverted by the rash or bloom of native enterprise. Vendors, hawkers, hustlers, beggars, loungers, the myriad homeless, all contended for space amid the press of so many thousand hurrying feet helping to make the money go round. In choked streets stenches and aromas chased each other. Garbage and sewage and stagnant water and decaying offal fought against spices and a strong flower scent and the pungent smell of cooking foods and the tang of woodsmoke. We went slowly, edging round pi dogs frantic with ticks and sores, and near-naked kids doing their ablutions in the gutter.

For a child, all these were not marks of squalor or backwardness or oppression. They were the cause of excitement – a catch in the throat. Suddenly a stubborn lock was sprung, a new door flew open, the young mind reeled with possibilities and revelations. The city was ablaze with shape and colour. A helter-skelter of crazy building – towers, spires, turrets, domes, columns, statues, balconies, porticoes – mad bits and pieces that I later knew to be Renaissance or Palladian or Gujerati or Moghul or Persian. Or, making the eye dizzy, buildings voluminously Victorian, overshadowing all the rest, as if drugging the city with the fatuous rhodomontade of empire. All this made a child’s heart jump, seeing what looked like a
wonderful, convoluted joke, beyond understanding but not enjoyment. The sunlight leapt from domes and windows and tiled walls. Particles of dust in the dirty air began to shimmer. We were dazzled by the assault on the senses, and then glad to hurry into the high cool lobby of the hotel.

A big fan turned lazily with a weary electric hum. A man in a tightly wound turban and a crisp white cotton tunic, in style and length rather like a frock-coat, awaited us solemnly. Suddenly his serious brown face was slashed with the brilliant white of his smile. He raised his hands to breast level in the attitude of prayer and briefly bowed his head. Then he addressed my father.

‘Ah, sahib,’ he said with great enthusiasm, ‘I have for you jolly good rooms. On second floor, best front place,
gussul khana
adjacent. Very pleasant, tip-top view. You see this way Museum, that way University. And maidan, very green and nice. Also, you see sky, happy breeze and peaceful sleeping at nighttime.’

He clapped his hands, then with frowning dignity gave instructions in a native tongue to a small lithe lad, hardly bigger than I was, who seemed to double as bell-boy and porter. The little fellow seized upon one of our lighter travel bags, indicating indignantly when we tried to help him that he would fetch the rest later, and though it was a struggle for him he insisted on leading the way up the stairs. As we followed up the elegant curve of the broad steps, with rusted iron banisters on our right, I puzzled over this English I had just heard, and snatches of which I had caught on the dockside and in the street. This language was mine, but not quite mine, misted and veiled with hints and shades that made me, even then, smile with surprise – not because I felt that what they said was in any way
wrong
, but because of its novelty. It seemed like an extension of English expression, nicely elastic, not an impediment.

At the head of the stairs we found that our rooms were
on the first floor, not the second, and at the back, not the front. The bathroom was not ‘adjacent’ but a short way down the hall. My father, experienced in the ways of India, did not complain or demand changes. The rooms we were shown were tall and dim and quiet, the quieter for being at the back, away from the busy road. Ornate iron bedsteads were anchored like galleons on the green sea of the tiled floor where numdah rugs with simple, childlike designs also floated. Long louvred shutters led onto two dangerous-looking balconies. The view beyond the shutters was not airy maidan nor the great swelling dome of the Museum, but the fading yellowish wall of a house across the alleyway. Tinkles of family laughter and smells of home-cooking punctuated our days, filtering in through the louvres.

*

‘Do take the boys out,’ said the wan voice, as feeble and shaky as a new-born kitten, ‘they’re making such a
row
.’

My mother did not like the big city, with the heat and the noise, and so much evidence of the scars and sores of Indian life. Her Indian world had been, and would be again, the lazy life of the Raj in a military cantonment. And after four years in England she was finding it hard to acclimatize to the sweaty heat of Bombay. But we were stuck in the city for a week while my father awaited his orders. Nothing much to do, for any of us, morn to night. My mother went shopping, slowly, with wet patches spreading in the armpits of her frock and tendrils of fair hair growing dark with sweat at the back of her neck. She had to buy hot-weather clothes for the family, loose cotton garments and sandals and hats against the sun. Looking for good buys – it seemed to be an article of faith among the British, when shopping among Indians, that prices were to be beaten down so that every purchase became a bargain – she wandered in the maze of bazaar streets to the north of Crawford Market, taking a bearing on the golden pinnacle
of the temple to the mouthless Mumba Devi, poking among the blind cubby-holes of the Bhuleshwar Market. She returned to the hotel drawn and tired, dragging her feet into the darkened room. She lay down with a damp towel over her eyes, counting the throbs of her headache.