Out of India (19 page)

Then one day I cheeked him too far. He collared me and rushed me to their bedroom and aimed a few brisk blows to my bottom with a long-handled hairbrush. Immediately, my mother came running, wild-eyed, tears springing forth to mix with my hot tears of anger. ‘How could you, you brute?’ she wailed, scooping me out of his perjured hands and slamming the door behind her. My father beat a retreat with as much dignity as he could muster. The family, always a puzzle to him, was another institution that did not meet his canons of rationality. Settling into his favourite chair he barricaded himself behind the yellow cover of another Gollancz crime novel.

We were waiting for something, all of us in our different ways. Some crackle in the air, some electric jumpiness, was stretching nerves. What was it? Naturally, grown-ups did not confide in young boys. And in any case my father was a man hemmed in by reticence and caution. He kept secrets between himself and the office. His way of doing things did not change, just became heavier and more deliberate. In better times he liked to sing and he had a good ear but a booming untrained voice – a barrelhouse baritone. He would set up a lusty bawling in the bath, humming tunes from Offenbach, or bouncing through the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan (he knew several of the Savoy Operas by heart). But now there was silence in the bathroom.

I got it into my head that the event towards which we were all stumbling was the victory parade for VJ Day – the celebration for the defeat of Japan and the final end to the war. There was a buzz of preparation through February into early March of 1946. Scaffolding for temporary stands
was going up along the length of King’s Way. My brother and I, living so close, were often on hand to keep an eye on progress and to get in the way of workers. The incomplete structure made a fine gymnasium for jungle leaps and swings. Tarzan was well-known to us and Johnny Weismuller, he of the royal mane of hair and the swelling pectorals, was our hero. The days were radiant, the weather as comfortable as it ever gets in Delhi. After our work-out we liked to strip, sometimes down to nothing, and take a plunge in the shallow ornamental ponds of the processional way, from which we emerged with hollering policemen on our tails, taking half-hearted swishes with their
lathis
discreetly to our rear, as if shooing petulant geese.

When the day came – 7 March – everyone agreed that it was a notable
tamasha
, a fine celebration. There, on the saluting base, was victory-through-empire made manifest. Viceroy Wavell, that blunt little warrior, with suffused face and massed medals held himself rigid for two hours of marching pomp, with tanks and big guns clanking by. Commander-in-Chief Auchinleck cast an affectionate eye on
his
men of the Indian Army, the dogsbodies of far-flung triumphs so unimaginably distant – in Mesopotamia, in the Western Desert, in Sicily and Italy, in Burma – from Dogra hill-village or Tamil seaside shanty. Later, sitting on the ground in the midst of soldiers and holding a folded chapati in his right hand, Auchinleck gave his troops their
burra khana
, their great feast.

In the evening fireworks invaded the heavens – haloes of light, starbursts, sky etchings, multicoloured washes of brightness flushing the monuments of Lutyens – ‘in the true Moghul style’.

Thus I remember it. But when I have read about it I see something extra, a more sombre picture. The fighting men marched but Congress boycotted the parade, holding a large counter-demonstration in the Old City. As rockets wooshed and zoomed around India Gate, rioters set the
Town Hall on fire; then amid the other explosions guns spat in earnest, and rioters fell dead or wounded. From the India Office in London the Pethick-Lawrence commission had flashed through orders for a rushed constitutional change that Wavell could not be trusted to carry out. Mountbatten, the smooth snake in the constitutional grass, had arrived in India and was biding his time, making the awe due to royalty, a breezy sailor’s charm and a compliant wife, work for him.

In his pocket he had Wavell’s dismissal and the last orders for British India.

*

Was it part of the VJ Day celebrations, the production of
Macbeth
that the British in Delhi put on? Proof that we too could go beyond bombast and uniforms and compete artistically with
Fauji Dilkush Sabha
, the Indian version of our ENSA troop entertainment, that was enrapturing native sepoys with lusty comedies and scenes from the
Ramayana
and the decorous litheness of dancing-girls? In any case, our theatricals were taken seriously, and my brother was chosen amid much competition to play the son of Macduff. For a while he was too preoccupied to quarrel, mouthing lines as he walked in tight circles around our bedroom floor. ‘Thou liest,’ he muttered, ‘thou shag-hair’d villain.’ It still didn’t sound quite right. I sat on my bed with my knees up, watching with something between jealousy and wonder.

The performances were in the open air. The night I attended, clutching my mother’s hand, the sky was dark velvet, as soft as swaddling clothes, pinned with diamond stars. It was very warm; people were rustling programmes, fanning themselves, women lifting skirts from the clammy cling of the chairs. But my concentration hardly wavered. Entranced, I awaited the moment – Act IV, Scene ii.

What was this? This was family, between mother and son. Survival was the issue. I listened carefully.

‘And what will you do now? How will you live?’

‘As birds do, mother.’

‘What! with worms and flies?’

‘With what I get, I mean; and so do they.’

‘Poor bird! thou’dst never fear the net nor lime, /The pit-fall nor the gin.’

‘Why should I, mother? Poor birds they are not set for. /My father is not dead, for all your saying.’

I was amazed. Did this speak to us intimately? Then I was frightened, seeing my father, and yet not seeing him. No, no, this was nothing – play-acting – surely we would go on. Nothing had come to an end, despite the marching men, the fireworks, the frown on Father’s face, the dull steps, the irritability. Shortly, we would leave Delhi, sip no more the polluted water.

Some part of me wanted to cry out, with the First Murderer, ‘Let it come down.’

H
ISTORY IN NORTH India was beginning to be written in chapters of riot and violence. Dead bodies made brutal statements. Karachi, Poona, Cawnpore, Allahabad, other places less well-known, were turning into cities with too many reasons for tears. In Calcutta and West Bengal a Muslim-declared
hartal
, or general strike, met furious Hindu resentment. In two nights of communal convulsion, how many killed? A police estimate was 5,000. Such a press of maddened people, emotions raw to the nerve-ends, willing slaughterers with so many to kill.

But this violent din reverberated far away from my young consciousness. Distant perturbations made no more noise for me than the movement of continents, the first winds of the monsoon, or the crumbling of empires. On the whole, we carried our own ease and security with us wherever we went. Calmly we stood on Delhi station under a cliff of luggage, waiting while a monster locomotive, with giant wheels and covered with a labyrinth of pipes and tubes, fussed itself into order, flooding the already foul air with a smother of steam and soots from low-grade coal. My father had been posted from Delhi back to his own Indian Army Division stationed in the Deccan. We were heading south.

The south starts at the line of the Vindhyas, or thereabouts. Loosely connected ranges of hills, west to
east, close off the southern peninsula from the great plains of the north, and here the Aryan invaders stopped. The plains of the big northern rivers gave them enough territory to chew on for a long moment of history. Later, the Aryans did penetrate through the breaches of the hills into the sea-girt triangle of the peninsula, going as far as the tip of Cape Comorin and taking Brahmanism, the vedanta and their characteristic caste system with them. And with the roll of time the Muslims followed them, dotting the southern land with Islamic kingdoms, principalities, robber baronies and pirate castles.

But all the time the south resisted in its own supple, subtle way, keeping its own Dravidian languages, being deliberately behind the times, doing things in its own backhanded manner. Five prohibitions, wrote the early lawgivers, distinguish the people of the south: eating with one who is not initiated, dining with women, eating food kept overnight, marrying the daughter of a maternal uncle, and marrying the daughter of a paternal aunt. Life was intimate, private, undemonstrative, convivial, encircled by old pacts and runes, hidden enough to make the southern historian wince at the paucity of his material. The story of the north was spectacularly well-documented by Aryan records; the ancient southlands were largely silent. So many ferments important to future civilization began in North India. By the time they had flushed down to the south they registered little more than a mild after-taste, accommodated with tact or with sensible resignation, accepted like the tropical sun on the backs of the native fishermen. Things that could not be avoided. The south countered dangerous and novel explosions in society with longevity, endurance, assimilation. The people were the root from which the peculiar variety of the Indo-Aryan stock grew. ‘The scientific historian of India,’ wrote one member of that fraternity, ‘ought to begin his study with the basin of the Krishna, of the Kaveri, of the Vaigai, rather
than with the Gangetic plain, as has been now long, too long, the fashion.’

Lacking facts the traveller to the south entered a world of murmurs, dreams, partial memories, conjectures, reticence, and finally silence.

For four days or so our railway carriage became our inviolable shell. We camped in there in a safe dimness, taking the measure of the world through the slatted blinds over the windows, opening the door only when it suited us. At night, the upper bunks, tipped up against the walls, were swung down and spread with bulky bedrolls in their stiff canvas covers. Meals were taken on the move. During leisurely halts at the larger stations the bearer, coming at a run from the back reaches of the train, was sent to bring tin tiffin boxes from the station restaurant. Sometimes, at a junction, the stop was long enough for us to climb down, shaking out cramped legs, and then saunter on to the restaurant. Afterwards there might be a moment for a brief stroll, sometimes bathed in scarlet sunrise, sometimes seeing dusk creep in under the wings of flying foxes. Walking about we knew that we would be called in time. The train would not depart without due warning to the white sahibs. And if haste cut short a meal, hunger was served at every wayside halt by a host of food-vendors clamouring against the windows, holding up trays of
pan
or
roti
or or samosa or bhaji, or slopping warm tea from urns into small bowls of clay. Then the engine hooted and the driving wheels slipped and gripped, long plumes of smoke or steam made ghosts of the still-shouting vendors, and slowly we were on our way.

With Delhi and the north left well behind, the train twisted through the green gates of the hills, creaking up and down, and then loosened its stride onto the long sunlit spread of the Deccan, at one with its racing shadow, huffing and shoo-shooing just like a child’s toy, thumping on the indifferent railbed as if to a syncopation on the tabla
drums. We swayed soporifically in the privacy of our carriage-caravan, voyeurs, fleeing uncommitted across the high table-land of boulder and scrub and hard-worked earth. We were drowsy in the heat of the day, sipping from a Thermos, napping, playing I-spy from the window, counting the varieties of rib-gaunt domestic beasts. At irregular intervals the wheel-note changed, registering a sudden alarm, a slow deep hammering indicating the beginning of a bridge. Then the train eased itself gingerly over the wide dirty waters of the Wardha or the Godavari or the Krishna or the Pennar, cautiously stitching bank to crumbling bank over the naked backs of river-folk sounding the buff current with poles and oars and nets.

Abruptly, the tropical evening drained light from the sky. Then I slept wonderfully in the cradle of my bunk, as if rocked by the hand of the primeval nurse.

At Bangalore we paused in our journey, resting for a couple of days in a transit hostel for officers’ families. In the large grounds, fat jungly plants overflowed the paths. Outrageous flowers were like splashes from the paint-pot of a tipsy god. In the dining-room, under a heavy, frayed punkah, rice was served rather than the thin breads of the north. Fruits new to me had thick horny skins, rough and blotched. Somewhere nearby a violin was being played in the South Indian manner, wailing up and down in tremulous slides, the sound strangely familiar but the musical matter utterly alien, like a human voice crying in unknown tongues. A
mridangan
drum gave a beat, small pebbles falling into the pool of a deep cave.

The people were slight and short, a companionable height for a boy. Already the great raw length of the Europeans was looking out of place, the reddened, peeling skin and tow-coloured hair set off against dark faces, glossy black hair and smiles suddenly switched on with the clarity of electric lights.

The sun seemed more concentrated, an unforgiving eye,
glaring through folds of sticky heat. The south was welcoming us.

*

Our destination was the hill town of Coonoor in the blue hills of the Nilgiris. The problem of education had arisen once more. Needing something more regular than the episodes of eccentric or indifferent schooling in the north my brother and I were being sent to a boarding school in the hills for the children of the Raj, a small enclave of white boyish faces that studiously followed the pattern and ethos of the British ‘prep’ school. We British were always backing away towards some atavistic line of defence, some bolt-hole from which we could scan the territory in safety, without giving ourselves away.

After the sudden glimpse of Bangalore, with all that I could surmise about a new slant to life in a new-looking country, the rest of the journey to the Nilgiris felt like a retreat. At the foot of the mountains, at Mettuppalaiyam, we transferred to the undersized train that made the 17-mile ascent to Coonoor. A little tubby engine struggled uphill, pushing a few carriages, each one as intimate as a closet, up the rack-and-cog railway. The effort looked incongruous, as if reluctant elephants were being shoved backwards into steep places where they did not want to go. From time to time the engine stopped and panted, breathing heavily out over the sharp-edged ghat and the pale, heated plain. At about 6,000 feet the train came to rest in a micro-climate so temperate and comfortable, so fanned by lazy breezes, that the British, preoccupied as always with the weather, could hardly stop talking about it.