Out of India (24 page)

Gandhi was at his ashram in Calcutta from where he spoke to a foreign newspaperman. ‘I have no message to give on independence,' he said, ‘because my heart has dried up.'

I watched my father wither a little, too. He was forced to witness the break-up of the unified Indian Army, the one disciplined organization that gave him hope for comity and understanding in the sectarian bitterness of the new India where partisans chopped up opponents with fiendish enthusiasm. Mountbatten, both dreamer and schemer, had hoped that the divided land – now India and Pakistan – would accept a common army, at least for a transitional period. A forlorn hope, torn to bits by both sides. Regiments with a history of 200 years and more, in which Afghans and Baluchis and Jats and Sikhs and Dogras and Rajputs and Bengalis and Tamils and many more had rubbed shoulders easily enough, were dismembered. Baluchis and Pathans and Punjabi Muslims marched north and west; Rajputs and some Bengalis and Tamils went south or east. Sikhs, across whose ancestral lands the partition went, knew themselves only to be Sikhs. Before, all had been colleagues in arms. Now they were rivals, potential foes, bearing the load of nationalism.

My father, anticipating the inevitable exodus of British officers, wanted to transfer to the British Army. But he was just over the permissible age limit, though he was not yet forty-four. I saw my parents working hard to turn their minds towards England, putting behind them the habit and expectation of their adult years. Plans had to be made for life in a far land they did not know. Prospectuses for strange-sounding English schools began to arrive in the post. I looked at pictures of sleek little manikins trying to appear happy in blazers and shorts. To me, they looked revoltingly complacent and tidy. My mother began to leaf through back numbers of
The Lady
, pondering what spot in the cloud-damped landscape of England might suit us best.

*

In the years of his retirement, when my father's recollection was suffused with the sunset glow of Indian
memories, I asked him what he thought of Karl Marx's opinions on the history of the Raj. He said he had never read them. Though he was a long-standing Labour supporter, my father drew political allegiance more from instinct and the heart than from social or political theory. In the General Strike of 1926, when he was a young lance-corporal in the Coldstream Guards, he had marched with his company to Victoria Park in Hackney, to the poor man's town in the East End of London. They settled in to stay, put up tents, dug latrines, posted sentries, looked steely and warlike. They had instructions to counteract ‘the forces of riot and disorder'. The exceedingly well-bred Guards officers, swishing their swagger sticks, seemed keen on a confrontation. The company was issued with live ammunition. Was it the intention to shoot fellow-countrymen? Strikers whose sin it was to ask for work and a living wage? My father's disgust stayed with him for the rest of his life. To him, politics was a simple matter of fairness and justice, and he needed no continental scaffolding of theory built by Marx on Hegel and Feuerbach. Despite his experience and reading my father had never quite overcome the innate anti-intellectual prejudice of the insular English.

But I looked up the passages from Marx for him, and out of politeness he read them.

‘Well, there's some food for reflection there,' he told me, ‘but it's all a bit beyond my simple mind. I'll give you my opinion, for what it's worth.'

He looked pleased to be asked, though he always affected the plain dumb common-sense of the man-in-the-street.

‘Marx was certainly right about one thing,' he went on, ‘when he points out, for example, that the rising standard of living in mid-nineteenth century England rested largely on the miserable starvation wages paid to Indian labourers. But I can't see much sense in the rest of it. This man does
not see
India
in his mind's eye. I can't get any feeling from him for the people, the landscape, the life. He reduces human beings to ciphers in a big theory. Marx thought that the older history of India, before the Raj, was contemptible. As far as I understand it, he thought India needed the Raj, to ripen the land into the capitalist mode of production, without which there could be no revolution of the people. So the Raj imposed a harsh discipline – a necessary pain – like a schoolmaster whipping a failing pupil. It didn't seem to matter if the schoolmaster was also vindictive and cruel.

‘But that's all nonsense to me. I see this Marx as an authoritarian and a bully. A
mental
bully, trying to impose the authority of a theory, which may or may not have large elements of truth but had no place in it for the poor old Indian peasant. Now, I see the matter the other way round. I think that the Indian experience of the Raj was necessary to reform British imperialism, to temper the arrogance and stupidity of conquerors, and to teach us some democratic humility. All this wisdom, of course, came at a high cost to the Indians themselves.'

We were talking in a pub and it was my turn to get the beer. When I returned my father had a distant look in his eye. He was ready to sum up.

‘I took one big lesson from all my years in India,' he continued. ‘It seemed to me that the Raj, taken overall, was infatuated with India, as well it might be, considering the wealth of the culture, the wonderful variety of the people, and the contribution to world history. For me, and I was not untypical, India was one long love affair. Unhappily, as in most affairs of the heart, we members of the Raj botched it. The relationship went sour. We lacked sympathy and understanding. You may say that the Indians also had their faults. True enough. But it is not the job of a subject people to remedy the defects of the masters. We wanted too much and gave too little, not in terms of
administration or politics or economics where, I think, we did quite well, but in our paucity of imagination, our stuffy emotions and lack of heart. Another case, I'm afraid, of British constipation.'

I was surprised that my father, a reticent man, had let himself go to this extent. Yes, I thought, in India we were lucky, very lucky. We were dealing with peoples and cultures that let us off easily. They preferred to expend their venom on each other. We came out with relatively clean hands (in so far as a greedy and selfish empire can ever be said to have clean hands). I think they saw us as lame cases who needed a helping hand. Or were we rescued just by intelligent good humour? They saw our difficulties and limitations and it amused them to play along. I recalled a tale told by an Indian writer about Govind Pant, the Chief Minister of United Provinces. Pant, as a young lawyer, was returning to his village dressed in Indian clothes:

‘I met an English subaltern as I got out of the bus,' Pant related the story to Prem Bhatia. ‘Seeing me dressed in Indian clothes he asked me to carry his bags. “You didn't do that!” Yes, said Pant, and at the end of the job he gave me two annas. “Why did you do it?” Don't get upset, he said, I did it deliberately to prepare myself to throw the British out. Let me see how far they will go to humiliate us. The subaltern was a stupid young man – I didn't mind.'

Perhaps, in the final analysis, empires are stupid too. Just wait, and they will fall apart.

*

There was much to be done. We were leaving, so far as we knew for ever. Wooden crates for furniture were ordered, new trunks bought, stencils of addresses cut, household goods sorted and set aside, ready to be packed for early despatch. My mother and the servants were busy, but without enthusiasm.

My mother was weeding out old clothes, holding
garments up to the light, dithering over socks and shirts. Take them or leave them? What did it matter? Suddenly serviceable summer clothes were thrown on the discard pile. The flimsy clothes of India were no use now. England meant drizzles, cold winds, chilblains. Then she would hurry from the room, distracted, the job half done. ‘There you are,' she would mumble as we passed in the door. ‘Just leave those things, I'll come back to them. Now where was I?'

In the dismantling of the household my father was little help. External arrangements for passage and transportation were made through military offices. It was enough for him that he kept an eye on this bureaucracy. In the house, he did not care what stayed and what went. My mother had always chosen the household goods – the rattan furniture, the lamps decorated with the Aryan swastika that the Nazis later appropriated (in Sanskrit it means ‘well-being'), the stiff Indian carpets of factory manufacture and doubtful quality, the little felt numdahs, the Benares brassware, the dull wooden carvings, the vases and the knick-knacks. My father's domestic needs were slight: a comfortable chair, a well-placed lamp, a pile of books, a large ashtray, a modest store of beer. He ate what was put in front of him (so long as it was not too fancy), murmuring invariably, ‘yes, very nice, very nice,' in an abstracted voice. Then sometimes he looked down at his plate in surprise, wondering what he had eaten and if it
had
been very nice. He slept wherever a bed was placed and made ready, hurrying into oblivion for as many hours as he could manage.

The servants were touchy and despondent. A stern word to the houseboy sent him away snivelling. Even the older ones looked lost. They had worked hard to fit themselves for the service of the Raj, and for the best ones that service was not just a job but a calling, a vocation, often running in the family. It demanded tact, judgement, charm, a body of alien knowledge (the proper ranking of
guests, the correct fork for fish, the right temperature for red wine, the order of the medals pinned on a dress uniform), skill with a foreign language (English), honesty in a land where the little criminalities of bribes, baksheesh and back-handers were not unknown. Now these servants were about to be abandoned. Even the old hands went about with their heads down, not so much sulking but with the accusatory look of loyal followers who had been deceived.

In these days I lost sight of Rahul, our pal, the bearer's son. Was he lying low out of misery? Had he been sent back to the family village in the Western Ghats? Or was he merely hidden away, redoubling his effort for the exams that were now likely to be more important then ever to him and his family? He was the hope for the future.

I did not ask where he was because, after all, he was only the son of a servant, and I was the young sahib who had not yet learnt how to behave to a human, my fellow, my Indian brother.

*

Preparing for our departure we no longer went to school. Everyone was too busy to mind about us. We mooched about the house and compound, getting in the way. Our bicycles were gone – given away, I think, for they were strange machines of no value, cobbled together from many different parts – and we could no longer ride to the swimming-pool in Secunderabad where our school friends went. But we still, occasionally, had the use of the divisional general's private pool in Bolarum.

The monsoon had passed leaving a season of mild warmth. For some, it was even too cool to swim. But the rainy days had left all waters swollen and fresh. Just to smell it was invigorating. The small pool belonging to the general was in a slight bowl of the ground, cut off from the house by a thick belt of bushes and trees, many of which, in this season of growth, crowded down on the concrete
margin of the pool and overhung the water. A diving-board with frayed coconut matting projected from a steep bank at the deep end. From the board, giving a tentative spring or two, I looked down on the small green solitude of the water, the surface dull, dark, ominous under shadow, hardly reached by the sun except briefly around noon. No one else seemed to use the pool, at least not while we were there. The silence spread over us, as thick as the shade.

Suddenly taking courage in hand I dived into a hidden depth, flinging myself off the board in an act of faith.

*

By the side of the house, in the shade of big trees, Sami the bearer was painting stencilled addresses on the crates while my father was supervising him. They thought they were alone, though I could hear them clearly through the open window of our bathroom where I was enthroned on the thunderbox.

‘Colonel sahib,' Sami said in a low voice, ‘can you take me with you to England?'

‘No, Sami,' replied my unemotional father almost tenderly, ‘what would you do there?'

‘I don't know. Perhaps I could work for you. You could help me, you are my father.'

‘Unfortunately, it's not that easy. There are rules, you know. And you have your family. Times are difficult in England now, after the war. I don't know what I could do for you. Besides, my own future is uncertain. It would be wrong of me to tell you to go to England and then to find that you were unhappy or without a job and that I could not help you.'

‘Yes, Colonel sahib. Thank you, thank you.'

I peeked cautiously out of the window. Sami was immediately at work painting the stencils again. My father was smoking, seated on the corner of a crate. I do not know who looked the more sad.

*

At Christmas, my parents gave me a box containing a tin fort that had to be assembled in a complicated way, with slits and tabs that were hard to align. I was a difficult boy to please with presents, having no interest in toys and little in books, preferring to spend my time and energy on outdoor adventure. When I had put the fort together, with some ill humour, I saw that it was modelled on a Hollywood version of a Foreign Legion fort. It had sand-coloured walls manned by cut-out figures of soldiers in kepis with ancient, long-barrelled rifles. A tin French flag waved from the battlements. I think there was a camel or two in the background. With surly ingratitude I did not want this fort, finding it anachronistic and unreal, and in the circumstances painful to contemplate. It had nothing to do with the pressing moment of departure. It was also a reminder of sun and soldiers and the vastness of open land under permissive skies where almost nothing was forbidden the privilege of boyhood.