Out of India (25 page)

When we left I managed to forget it, hiding it behind paper and rubbish at the bottom of a cupboard.

Early in January 1948 we left Bolarum for the journey north and west to the transit camp at Deolali where we waited to go to Bombay for the passage back to England. The camp was unpleasant, crowded and ugly, with rain-stained walls and tin roofs. It was a sluice through which India was being emptied of white faces, and time was too short for the maintenance and improvements that the camp needed. Besides, these were heart-stopping days in India, with the whole of the north in the tumult of partition. Five million people were uprooted, wanderers, looking for home. For us, there was no great hardship. The transients of the Raj endured a little discomfort, ordering their memories, more fearful of the future than the present.

We had booked our passage on the
Empress of Scotland
,
due to leave Bombay on Sunday, 1 February. We would make the short train journey to Bombay on the day before the ship sailed.

In the early evening of Friday, 30 January, a Hindu named Nathuram Godse, a skinny figure in khaki bush jacket and blue trousers, approached Mahatma Gandhi as the venerable leader walked from Birla House in New Delhi to the evening prayer meeting on the lawn. At a distance of about five feet Godse greeted Gandhi with the customary Hindu salutation – the raised hands joined together in the
namaste
. Gandhi, leaning as usual on the shoulders of his two grand-nieces, smiled and said a word or two, preparing to return the salutation. At that point Godse pulled a .38 Beretta from his pocket and fired three times, at a range too close to miss. Gandhi was hit in the chest, stomach and groin. He fell with his hands at head level, joined together in the
namaste
. He was carried into Birla House and died within half an hour, at about 5.40 p.m.

Next day, as we had arranged, we travelled by train to Bombay. Something had happened, to be sure, but as a young boy I was not aware of the grotesque enormity of the event. But all the adults made that train journey with heart in mouth. What appalling conflagration of ethnic and religious hatred might be waiting in Bombay, that ever-volatile city? In Bombay there was trouble and grief and mourning. But it was the stunned murmur of shock rather than the violent outpouring of rage, for the simple and telling fact was that the murder had been committed by a Hindu fanatic and not by a Muslim.

What could my parents feel except emptiness? The substance of their lives – all that brave commitment to a foreign land, that hope and expectation, that activity and adventure, that
fun
– all narrowed down meanly to a miserable retreat, glancing fearfully over the shoulder lest death was following. I too was in the grip of something
insupportable. I could not put a name to it. Grouchy and fretful I left with ill grace, feeling privately in the core of my being that India had failed me.

*

In later years, thinking about these events and trying to place them more justly in the history and the culture of the land, I concluded that India had two main effects on its conquerors and settlers: the power to disappoint, and the power to catch hold of the heart.

No one has expressed the sense of disappointment in India better than the Emperor Babur in the 1520s, and because of the charm of his personality and the keenness of his eye he is worth quoting.

‘Hindustan is a country,' he wrote in his
Memoirs
,

Warming to his indictment he lets loose some further salvoes.

So there you have it, and what would you expect in the land of such a people?

To underline this dismal catalogue of a hopeless and dreary state, the emperor's translators and editors, sound Indiamen of the Raj, added a sage footnote: ‘Babur's opinions regarding India are nearly the same as most Europeans of the upper class, even at the present day.'

But why did Babur not leave, this brilliant and effervescent Turkic chieftain, passionate about war and dominion but more passionate about life and love and the understanding of man? Towards the end of his life something strange happened. The truth is he could not escape India, and in the end he too became Indian.

It is a moving story. As his son and heir lay dangerously ill at Agra, Babur hurried to Humayun's bedside. He saw clearly that only his own sacrifice could save his son. Three times Babur walked around the sick-bed, saying, ‘I take upon myself all that you suffer.' From that moment
Humayun began to recover, and Babur declined to an early death at the age of forty-seven.

At last, India had caught him and taught him the great lesson of her history: to accept all, to forgive all, and to be resigned to the fate of all.

*

On the appointed day, undisturbed by riots, our ship left Bombay for the long trudge home on stormy seas. The war was over but the
Empress of Scotland
was still a troop-ship and delivered all the well-known discomforts of its kind. My brother and I were put in a long narrow cabin not far above the waterline. It had a single blurred porthole and a double tier of bunks down one long side. There were six of us in the cabin, two boys and four fairly senior officers ranked major and above.

The passage was rough. The ship bucked and thumped, the groaning plates seeming to echo to the drowned ghosts of the sea. A seasick major lay supine in a top bunk, too giddy to crawl into the air. I, too, was seasick, retching misery into a yellowing toilet bowl until I could heave no more. After a time the storms eased and the motion altered from short-pitched plunges of startling ferocity to a long easy wallow.

One morning, when I was at last able to stand in line in crumpled pyjamas, waiting to clean my teeth at the single basin, a colonel of unforgiving cheeriness, who admitted that he felt let down if he had not experienced ‘a good blow' at sea, saw me watching him at the basin. He spooned white powder into a glass and formed a fizzy cascade of bubbles.

‘Hallo, young man,' he beamed at me. ‘Feeling better now? Take my advice and start the day with Andrew's Liver Salts. That's just the ticket to get you going. You try it every day and you'll see you can't go wrong.'

Then in some profound sense I knew I was heading ‘home'. Good citizenship and self-reliance were based on
the superior action of the liver and bowels. India was a chapter I had closed. The ship went slowly on, pitching and grumbling as the wind picked up again. I was ready to be sick once more, Liverpool-bound.

A
BOUT THIRTY YEARS after I left India, in a disordered time of life, with decisions not taken and commitments unclear, I was tempted by two friends to go with them on a winter journey to the south of Spain. One friend had the use of a small bleak village house in the mountains of Andalucia; the other friend had the impressive but unreliable BMW car to get us there.

Some journeys are well-planned, others tempt fate. Ours was of the second kind. Three restless spirits, chafing against the time, set out at a whim. Within half an hour of departing, one December morning, the car broke down. We spent the best part of the day in and about a pub in the suburbs of South London. The place, on that chill morning, had a hopeless air of indifference and hard-bitten use. Two of us – the unmechanical ones – stared into long glasses of unpleasant beer, watching a barman spread grime over the floor with a filthy mop. Outside, in the alleyway, our car-owner and practical mechanic lay in the gutter putting a kind of jury-rig on the suspension of the BMW.

In late afternoon, way behind schedule, we dashed for the Channel port. The night-ferry from Newhaven, almost empty of vehicles and passengers, had the desolation of a mausoleum, a doomed space sweating with the cold salty drip of the sea. The cafeteria was closed, there was no hot water, the vinyl-covered benches on which we tried to rest were dank with clammy
condensation. In the French night the weather was raw and blustery. Claps of wind and sudden dark posses of rain pursued us down long avenues of poplars and pollarded limes. The car was uneasy to drive, fidgeting across the rumbles of the road. Two of us shared the driving, and the non-driver – an Irishman – made it his business to keep us awake. Tatters of wind-lashed cloud raced across a waning moon. The Irishman, lolling at ease in the back seat, regaled us with descriptions of stupendous meals, luscious dishes, gourmet feasts, august wines, whose names are only mentioned in whispers, drawn from subterranean cellars of eccentric oenophiles. We had not eaten for almost twenty-four hours. Even the saliva in my mouth had dried up.

Across France we hardly stopped, except for petrol and the slim makings of a picnic that we ate on the run. By the time we reached the Spanish border we were ravenous. At a truck stop, high in the Basque country, where the parking-lot was packed with the mud-stained lorries of professional truckers, we watched sombre men with brawny forearms, the knobby faces of gluttons and bellies like drums tear into mighty portions of meat or seafood washed down with many carafes of coarse red wine. Then they launched their rigs down mountain roads, trailers swinging across the centre line, and we followed gingerly, now sober and awake.

A wide landscape, with dwindling traffic, the engine-beat of the car steady and soporific. We fled south over the stubbled prairie of Castile. In our car the drivers were growing weary, washed out, lapsing into silence. The Irishman in the back had run out of stories. No more fun. Towards the end of the night we reached Madrid, plunging into a long tangle of city streets from which there seemed to be no escape. We had neglected to provide ourselves with a city map. A new system of relief roads had just been completed but was as yet without road-signs. There was no one to ask in the dead winter night.
Guessing our way we navigated past the same hulking, moon-splashed church three times before we punched clear from the web of the city.

Beyond the suburbs finally, in a huddle of roadside shacks, we saw a weak light in an early labourers’ bar and stopped for coffee and quick shots of anis seco. Outside, two patient mules snuffled at hay and scraped pensive hoofs on the gravel of the lay-by.

It was my turn to drive. The sun was struggling up, looking smudged and watery but for us the life-giving star that rescued us from night. The road ran straight south, like a thin scar across the full abdomen of Spain. The two passengers, hunched in awkward shapes, were at last rocked into sleep. I too was tired. The unvarying line of the road dragged at my eyelids. The murmur of the engine and the quiet drumming of the tyres made a lullaby. My head dropped, then shot up again with a monstrous charge of adrenalin jolting through my body. For a few seconds I had drifted into sleep and the car had slipped down the slight camber of the road into the wide, shallow ditch on the right. At 50 mph we jarred into the bottom of the ditch, bouncing over stones and rough ground, and then I was fully conscious again, wrestling the bucking steering-wheel to pull us back onto the road. In this hectic moment I over-compensated. The car spurted out of the dirt, a back wheel spinning, then gripped and dashed at an angle across the tarmac onto the wrong side of the road. In a second or two I regained control and had it straight, but when I looked up I saw, directly in my pathway at a distance of about two hundred yards, a big Pegaso truck charging upon us. I flicked the wheel to the right and accelerated. I saw the truck-driver in the high cab, his face a rictus of panic, standing on the brakes. Then the mudguard of the truck seemed to pass over our left shoulder and the truck went by with a roar of engine and a blast of air-horn that sounded like a dam breaking. In a
few seconds we were clear and alone in an empty winter morning.

As soon as I could pull off onto level ground I stopped and we all climbed out warily, leaving the doors open. The car-owner had some solicitous looks for his vehicle, then swung himself under the chassis to check for damage. The Irishman, looking bemused, was about to say something but thought better of it and lit a cigarette. I walked apart to urinate. Then I got into the back seat and lay down and we drove off without a word. I dozed for some time, only becoming fully awake when we stopped on the apron of a sharp new roadside restaurant, all blue-patterned tiles and Moorish arches and a long sloping red roof. Peeping in we saw it was closed and deserted, so we strolled in the mild sunlight and someone tried a joke about our memory of momentary horror.

Ahead, a broken line of hills, like a faint wash on a watercolour was just visible, and somewhere beyond that were the pewter seas of the Mediterranean. We gazed that way and I think the same thought was in each of our minds: ‘Despite bad omens the gods are with us so far. Fingers crossed that we get to the sea.’