Out of India (2 page)

This durbar of 1911 was the last great imperial occasion in India. The last inflation of the bubble before the pricking of nationalism caused that confident gas to leak rapidly away. The durbar spoke clearly and without embarrassment of old rapine, old strength, old moral blindness. But the Delhi it was aimed at, the witness of the
tamasha
, was no longer the old seat of ancient empire, the Moghul city so knocked about in the mutiny siege of 1857. It was now a place handed back to the puzzle and mess of ordinary life. It had become a ramshackle city where the ever-growing native population – Hindus and Muslims mixed and stirred among members of all the peoples of northern India – spilled out into a huge cock-crowing, donkey-braying, cattle-lowing caravanserai down on the stony bank of the Yamuna river. A place of shanties, godowns and befouled lanes made alive by the necessity and energy of poverty. That was the real Delhi. Durbar Delhi was little more than a theatrical back-drop, painted for the delusion of England. It was a stage-set that pretended to imitate the grandeur of the Potsdam of Frederick the Great or even the Versailles of the Sun King.

The durbar and its aftermath, which saw the New Delhi of the British Raj arise under the showy architectural hand of Edwin Lutyens, was England dreaming. It was too late for dreams. Sick of the malady of empire, the nationalist movement was beginning to kick India awake.

*

Looking back at the world of these photos I do not know whether I belonged to the betrayers or the betrayed. Have I turned in disgust from the tomfoolery of this transposed England, so fatefully placed under the wide kite-wheeling skies, where vultures rooted in dead bodies on the tops of the Towers of Silence? Have I, in a cricketing phrase beloved of British-educated Indians, ‘let the side down’?

Or have I been restrained, by timidity or training or perhaps some disability inherent in imperial genes, from
finding a worthwhile path in that great, muddled, dangerous, dazzling maze into which I had been born?

*

I was born in the British Military Hospital of one of those little northern hill stations, at Murree, where the families of the Raj took refuge each year from the summer heat of Rawalpindi. A couple of years before the Second World War, I was hastened into the langorous after-midnight hours of a July night by an Australian army doctor anxious not to miss the Bombay boat booked for his leave. For him, as for most of us, India, whatever it was, did not count as home. There was always a boat out that one could not afford to miss.

Just before the start of the war I too was on a boat, taken into exile to a land called England, reputed to be
my
home.

O
NCE MORE, WE were on a ship, all our family together, leaving Glasgow to return to India. When the inscrutable military had brought us back from India, despite the alarms of Munich and an impending war, my father had been assigned to a ‘course' in Northern Ireland. The aim of this course remained mysterious to him. He, a sunburnt soldier of a dry and withered Indian frontier, was sent under weepy skies to the foggy green fields around Belfast to mould territorials whose destiny still tottered between appeasement and Hitler. Trained to try to read the runes of a lawless wilderness, where bloodlust, treachery and a cheerful aptitude for guerrilla warfare had made life hot for all regular forces with a pretension to modernity and efficiency, from Alexander the Great to Emperor Babur and then onward to the Indian Army of the Raj, my father now found that the nice judgement demanded of him was to distinguish carefully between Paddy and Prod.

In an unguarded moment in the territorial Officers' Mess he had admitted that he was married to a southern Irish Catholic. In consternation, a friendly hand had led him outside. ‘For goodness' sake, man,' the local had whispered, ‘if you value your health in these parts,
never
admit to have anything to do with Catholics.' The instruction was not so much military as a lesson for life. But valuable though it was my father did not feel that it warranted a journey from India. Even after the declaration of war, when my father was impatient to get back to his regiment and anxious also to take his wife and two very young boys away from the whistle of bombs and the stringency of rationing, he was forced to study for a while longer the punctilio of religious difference ground out in sweat and blood over some two hundred and fifty years of extreme prejudice.

‘Perhaps,' my father told me later, at the start of more recent Irish troubles, ‘it was not so very different from the world of the Frontier.'

In the summer of 1940 he received orders to return with his family to India.

*

Today, when I think of the sea, it holds no particular terrors. Everyone of sense respects the sea, that latent danger, the shifts and swell of the water that suggest nothing so much as the bunching of titanic shoulders. Storms are always fearful, and the thought of drowning is a door I would not open, for that nether world is dark and ominous beyond conjecture. Yet I have good reasons to fear the sea.

*

Out of nowhere, I am standing on a deck. I am holding a hand and I can feel the edges of a precious stone set in a ring. I am not apprehensive. It is cold but not excessively so – late September chill – and I am dressed in warm stuff as for some trek or adventure, though what that could be in the depth of the night I have no idea. A long way below I can make out the black mat of the sea. It is heavy and stirs easily with a calm procession of small swells. The moon looks enormous in cloudless skies, making everything sharp and clear.

It is saying: Now, this is a moment not to be missed.

At a distance all around are friendly quiet shapes, familiar ships very like our own, as if a hand might casually pluck them from the bath at bedtime. Engines have stopped and I hear only the light slap of the sea at the water line. There is no song of the wind in the rigging, and the canvas covers on the lifeboats are as taut as a drum. I stand among adults as stiff as lead soldiers, as silent as sleep.

All this is the grammar of toytown, formal and static and emptied of emotion, so that even a child of three could begin to understand it.

Suddenly, in my memory, the scene has become animated with meaning and consequence, and I now realize that for the first time I was not only hearing but also recording the strange demotic language of life.

We had been brought to the deck, where we had been standing for some time, by dull thuds suffusing up from below the surface of the sea. What did they mean, those slow heavy bubbles of doubt and unease bursting out from unseen monsters? The sailors amongst us on the crowded decks knew those signs well enough. Most of the passengers guessed but hoped helplessly that this fate might pass them by. They were landlubbers, after all, without any commitment to the realm of the sea. From time to time, on a neighbouring ship that seemed uncomfortably near, a spurt of flame would flare and die, a match lit and extinguished with its work smartly done. Then one of the ships dotted around us would gradually tip and with a sad grace slip slowly away.

For us, what course would the officers of the night pick between hope and despondency? After an age of looking, the naval mind was made up. Orders were barked along the deck, petty-officers and ratings began to muster their crews. Seamen sprang to work on the lifeboats and on the lockers that held the lifebuoys and lifejackets, cutting through lashings, hammering padlocks from the hasps, ripping away canvas, clearing davits, working not
frantically but with enough clumsy urgency to suggest some slow but unstoppable calamity. Frustration squeezed the labouring bodies like a vice, as men lunged at tangled and fouled ropes, or were balked by corroded metal and layers of gummed-up paintwork. Lungs short of air blurted out in gasps: ‘Christ almighty, these bloody ropes!' ‘Kick the bastard, get it moving, damn you!' ‘Whoa, get a grip there,
don't
let it swing!' Then curses, oaths, dark-faced mutterings, pungent and repetitious, bewailing fate, maligning all the gods for this terrifying mess of life – the usual story.

Ropes stiffened by age and salt water resisted muscle power. Fingers were torn and bleeding. An axe was called for, then a line parted with a deadly twang and a shriek from a rusted pulley. Lifeboats partly cleared jerked in their davits, swinging unevenly, heeled at mad angles. The crowd on the decks stood by, frowning with worry and concentration. Young men volunteered to help but were turned back with brusque unfriendly shakes of the head. The seamen had enough to contend with already. Panic, if it were panic, was beginning to lap at the common expectation of the onlookers, like the damp creeping through the thrown-on slippers of the passengers, who now had to pull back from the rails at which sailors were bumping and cursing.

But no, it wasn't panic. The danger was not yet so extreme. We were facing adversity, not annihilation, and we were gathering ourselves for another display of fortitude. This was the year of Dunkirk, and the summer's evacuation from the beaches was strong in the memory. Our people knew what was expected of them. We acted now under the compulsion of our history and psychology. Was it any the less heroic to do so?

So this unspoken mass-history seemed to make even small children stoical. Did we feel it in our bones, my brother and I, a sort of perverse rectitude, a good behaviour
far beyond our years and quite alien to frightened children? There we stood quietly, in a quiet crowd, clutching our mother's hands. I could not see our tall father but no doubt he was in his proper place, for this was an orderly event. In any case I was small and hemmed in by legs. From my low level I had a view of naked ankles, bare feet thrust into slippers, gym-shoes, unlaced army boots, polished brogues, even court shoes with improbably giddy heels. Looking up a little I saw nightdresses with pretty frills peeping below the hem of bright dressing-gowns, striped pyjamas tucked into boot-tops, the jacket of a battle-dress buttoned over an evening shirt with a wing collar, a long scarf in school colours wound around an old woman's neck. Men were unshaven, with the smudged look of interrupted sleep; women patted unkempt hair, or hugged a winter coat tight above the slinky material of nightclothes. For us children, all this was neither comic nor monstrous. Caught by the sobriety of our surroundings, we thought it an unusual prelude leading to some unknown grown-up ritual. Some enactment, we felt with more interest than alarm, was about to begin.

The big moon radiated a calm light, clarifying even the smallest movement, making it look weighty and deliberate. We watched, holding a collective breath. At a distance, another ship was foundering. Then somewhere below our feet, in the bowel of our ship, there was a crump and a slight shudder. Then an intensified silence. An effervescent flurry of small bubbles popped out of the crack between the hull and the ocean, dancing in moonlight. The jolt shook the doubt from the face of the crowd. Now we knew for sure, the worst expectation was realized, but the knowledge gave a certain courage.

The fate of the ship was now decided, but the percussion below had led to no sudden appalling consequence and the discipline held along the decks. After a while there seemed to be a hardly perceptible tilt to the hull. Only the
now furious action of the crew warned of the inevitable denouement.

A rush of feet, shouts of authority, flushed faces under naval caps waving blue sleeves circled with the rings of their rank. A young officer's voice choking on an embarrassing squeak. Sailors cutting into the crowd on the decks like handlers at a cattle-drive, rounding up nervous groups, heading off the lost or the maverick. Distortions bawled over the loudspeakers of the public address system, barely comprehensible – ‘Calling Muster Station G', ‘Officers' wives and dependent children', ‘Starboard evacuees', ‘Remember your lifeboat drill'. The whirr of electric motors, wire screaming off the drum, lifeboats plunging downwards and banging brutally into the water. People getting hastily into lifejackets, puffed as turkey-cocks, the bulging canvas of the jackets soiled by water-stains. Rope ladders flung over the rails, uncoiling like strange probosces. Bosun's chairs swinging out into space.

My father was gone. Sometime in the stir and haste of the moment he, with other adult males, had been led away. Was there some logic applied to quitting a ship that decreed the break-up of families? I could not understand this dividing of our paths. Now more than ever I needed that tall figure, that paterfamilias. I renewed my grip on my mother's hand. We – ‘wives and dependent children' – were herded to a bay in the deck-rail where a bosun's chair hung out from a cantilevered steel beam. How did one connect that skimpy canvas contraption on the end of a rope with the necessity of escape and safety? Anxiety made my brother's face look strained and white in the moonlight, startlingly white, but he would not cry. My senior by a couple of years, he felt an elder's responsibility. He had a boil on his bottom. As for me, if only I remained clutching my mother's hand I was secure.

A lifeboat was bobbing below, too close under the hull
to be seen from the deck. Oars splashed awkwardly in inexpert hands. Male voices rose from the lifeboat, unnaturally hearty, ringing with false confidence, contradictory voices used to command but well out of their element now. A woman climbed over the rail and set herself gingerly on a rope ladder, descending very carefully until only her fastidious wrinkled forehead was above the deck. A child was quickly tied into the bosun's chair and dropped from sight like a stone.

In the mild night the evacuation was going quickly and smoothly but the plates of the ship were groaning and the stern was beginning to hunker down like an exhausted dog.

‘Hurry, for goodness' sake get a move on,' came a voice from below, ‘or this damn boat is going to squat on us. Double up the kids in the canvas chair.'