by Jon Stock
“I’m a doctor here,” I said, nodding towards the medical centre. “Can I help?”
The man was in his thirties and wearing heavily pressed trousers and a clean striped shirt. Without any introduction he turned the card round to reveal four photos that had been crudely stuck down. At the bottom of the card was a piece of paper with some writing on it, one version in Hindi, the other in English. I had attended a couple of fairly gruesome post-mortems in England, but I had never seen anything so immediately shocking.
All four photos were of a child’s bloated corpse, no older than two. The neck had been slit, many times, and there were numerous incisions above the heart. But it was the child’s face that made me swallow hard. Both ears had been severed and the nose was gone. It wasn’t immediately obvious, but it also seemed that the tongue had been cut out, to judge from the bruising and injuries inside and around the open mouth. The boy’s eyes were open and intact, and the rest of the body, though distended, was unharmed.
The man let me absorb the photos before he started to speak in Hindi.
“I’m sorry, I don’t speak any Hindi,” I said, interrupting him. “I’m from London.”
The man looked at me, surprised. “Kya? Hindi nahi boltey ho?” he said.
“Nay,” I replied. It must have been confusing. I looked Indian, I was in India, but I didn’t speak Hindi, or Urdu, or Punjabi. Unperturbed, he stabbed his finger at the bottom paragraph. The handwriting was good and the English understandable. The boy’s name was Tinkoo and he had been abducted while playing outside his home in a village in Saharanpur district, northern Uttar Pradesh. His family had found his body a day later in the Ban Ganga river, a tributary of the Ganges. In his post-mortem report, the local doctor said he had drowned and his body had been attacked by fish. His family said he was offered as a sacrifice to Kali on the instructions of a local tantrik or witch doctor. He had been hung upside down and had his ears and nose slashed off, before his throat had been slit. Nobody had heard him scream because he was deaf and dumb. At the bottom of the card, underlined, was an appeal for an honest doctor: according to his family, the doctor who had conducted the post-mortem had been paid off by the tantrik, who had also bribed the local police.
“I can’t do a post-mortem from a photo. It’s not possible, nobody can,” I said, regardless of whether the man could understand me. I was thinking aloud, trying to order my thoughts. An image of Dutchie came and went. “I don’t know when these photos were taken, the time of death. It doesn’t look like fish – the eyes are still intact – and these injuries here, above the heart, are probably cuts, but I’m sorry, I couldn’t say, I can’t help you, I’m sorry.”
We looked at each other for a moment before I handed back the card. It seemed so irreverent, but I glanced at my watch and then at the gates.
“I’ve got to go. I’m late. Here’s my card,” I said, handing him one.
He looked at it a moment and then said, “Tantrik, angrez.”
“Angrez?” I queried, and he nodded.
As I walked in through the gates, I took a deep breath, thinking of the photos again. India had that ability to throw something at you that shattered all the parameters of normal, daily life: the deformed child suddenly at the car window, festering stumps for hands; a goods carrier on its side, steaming in your headlights; a fight between two cycle rickshaw drivers, one of them partially sighted, swinging wildly with a brick in his hand. I hoped the clinic was going to be straightforward.
*
The centre was so busy that I missed lunch, which was a good thing as I had little time to dwell on the photos and what, if anything, I could do about them. All I knew was that angrez meant Englishman in Hindi. After the last appointment cancelled, I decided to head up to Connaught Circus and have an icecream at Nirula’s, an indigenous fast-food chain that Tapash had recommended in preference to McDonald’s and its Maharaja chicken burgers. I sat upstairs, above the icecream parlour. The place was packed with local families and single foreign travellers enjoying Western fast food, Indian style.
The post had been delivered just before I left the medical centre and I had brought a letter with me from home. My father had been delighted when I first told him that I had landed a job with the Foreign Office. When I explained that I was being posted to Delhi, he had visibly paled. Unlike my mother, he had cut off all contact with India when he left Kerala, his birthplace, to live in Britain. In its suddenness, his departure had been like an amputation, except that later on he never tried to reach out and touch what had been taken. India had been replaced comprehensively by a country that grew and grew in his affections.
After Independence, an event he never talked about, he studied to be a doctor. It was a late decision – he had previously been involved in politics – and he finally graduated as a mature student from the Trivandrum Medical College in 1956. Shortly afterwards he married my mother, also from Kerala, and they had moved in I960 to Edinburgh. He had been part of a second wave of Indians who had migrated to Britain after the war and who were generally better off and more qualified than the earlier migrants, most of whom had come from the north and west.
He had never returned to India. When I had occasionally asked him why not, he told me his Indian relations were all dead and his home was now Britain, or Scotland, whenever he was talking with a Sassenach. He drank whisky, wore a kilt on New Year’s Eve and could recite the whole of Burns’s “For a’ that and a’ that”. Almost all his friends were local Scots and he avoided the Asian community whenever he could.
From the day he had arrived in Edinburgh, where I was born, it was as if India had never existed. All traces of it were meticulously expunged from our family life. We were not the only family to suppress our Indianness to what now seemed a ludicrous degree. Perhaps it was a legitimate fear of racism (there had been race riots in Nottingham and London in 1958), but in those early years fitting in had meant being British – and, more importantly, being seen to be British, particularly in Scotland and Wales, where attitudes were more provincial than somewhere like London. At least, that had always been my father’s line.
It was only now, with thousands of miles between us, that I was able to look objectively at my father. We were very close and I had, I supposed, adopted most of his prejudices, particularly about India, without ever really questioning them. In the past we had talked around the country, united in an unspoken pact that it was irrelevant to our lives. My posting to Delhi was the first thing that had ever threatened to come between us. At times I resented India for that, at others I felt an exhilarating, rebellious sense of freedom.
His letter was full of medical gossip. My father was retired, but he had carved out an illustrious career in the unglamorous world of occupational medicine, specialising in radiation exposure. He had worked first for the government and later as chief medical officer for a number of private companies. The university had asked him to teach, he had also been a senior lecturer at the Institute of Occupational Medicine, and he had undertaken occasional consultancy work for the UK Atomic Energy Authority. He talked of a few heavy drinking sessions that I had thankfully missed, and hinted that he had started to use Viagra. As ever, he threw in a few interesting case studies, asking me what I would do (there was inevitably a trick of some sort), and quoted liberally from his latest letter to the British Medical Journal, in which he had brilliantly dismantled – yet again – the “Gardner hypothesis” which maintained that a radiation dose received by a father before his child was conceived might cause leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in the child. It was a subject we regularly agreed to disagree on, and I knew he had included it to provoke me.
His comments on my life in Delhi were confined to my job, the medical centre, the international availability of certain vaccines. I think it was the only way he could begin to accommodate what I was doing. That I was in India was wholly irrelevant. I was a doctor working overseas. End of story.
There should have been some profound psychologic
al reason for his almost anaphylactic reaction to India, some childhood scar that explained all, but I think he just preferred Scotland. It was as simple as that. He did once confide to me that he had spent some time as a student with the Muirs, a Glaswegian family of tea planters in Munnar, a hill station in Kerala. The experience had moved him greatly – he marvelled at their emphasis on health care, education, malt whisky – but it didn’t completely explain the shutting off, the denial.
He signed off his letter with “Come home soon”.
5
Later that day I sat at home trying to compose a reply to my father’s letter. Writing about India was much harder than I thought, particularly when you were addressing someone who had left it for good almost forty years ago. Was I trying to justify the country or to condemn it? There were the obvious points – the expected poverty, the surprising wealth, dust, heat, cows in the street, religion, pollution, sunsets and elections – and the way in which they were all taken to such extremes, but my father knew that and had chosen to reject it. Then there were the more unexpected things: being given Boomer bubble gum instead of small change, the man operating the automatic coffee machine (he took your money, put it in the slot and handed you your cup), finding your name, sex and age (why age?) on a printed notice on the side of your train.
One aspect of Delhi life that particularly troubled me was the proximity of abortion and ultrasound clinics. I had even seen a clinic in Saket advertising “Egg, Scan, Delivery, Abortion” all on one sign. It was a sufficiently medical subject to grab my father’s notoriously short attention span. In parts of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, I told him, writing fast, in case he got bored, the ratio of girls under ten compared to boys was down to 850 to 1,000. The pregnant wife of a first secretary had complained to me the other day that she had had to insist on not being told the sex of her baby. She was having a scan at a private hospital and it had been assumed that she would want to know.
I decided not to mention Tinkoo and his defiled, bloated body. Not yet. It would have given Father too much satisfaction. We had always been competitive, and in my mind accepting the posting to India – accepting the existence of India – was a challenge to him. Unlike in other challenges, however, I expected to be proved wrong. My father had lived here for the first forty years of his life and his decision to leave must have been suitably informed. He had known the country better than I ever would. If I drew different conclusions, I feared it would feel like an act of betrayal. A part of me didn’t want to question his judgment, to invalidate his life in Scotland, our life. But it was only a part of me.
A knock on the window disturbed me. It was the night guard, but I didn’t recognise him as he had only started this morning. The old guard had been sacked after one of Mrs Bakshi’s many alarms went off in the night and he had failed to rush to her rescue. He was the third night guard to be dismissed in a month. In his defence, he had said he thought it was a faulty car alarm, but Mrs Bakshi knew otherwise.
“You can’t trust these people, they are so lazy, isn’t it?” she had told me this morning. Far from being lazy, he was busy on the job with the Bakshi’s ayah, but I didn’t say anything.
“He was sleeping while a goonda might have been slitting our throats,” she had continued. “Aren’t you lonely at night?”
I had told her that it was hard to feel lonely when there were houses within yards of us on all sides, but she wouldn’t have any of it.
“There could be anyone hiding in the bushes.”
“Whatnots?” I offered, interrupting. “Insects?”
She looked at me with suspicion and then her face melted into an expression of warm solidarity, as if she had finally found an ally.
“Please turn on your garden lights at night.”
The guard was now indicating that there was someone at the gate. I went over to the window and he handed me a card through the grill: it was Jamie’s.
“It’s like Fort Knox around here,” Jamie was saying a few minutes later, as he strode around the empty, dimly lit hall. Something about his manner troubled me, the arrogance, his sureness of foot. Most of the house was empty, and his voice bounced off the polished marble floors. It had seemed silly to unpack. The High Commission had promised me every week since I arrived that I would soon be moving back onto the compound.
“I was told that chowkidars either let everyone in or no one at all,” I said. “There’s no halfway, no taking responsibility. Can I get you a drink?”
“Don’t you have a bearer?” he asked, smiling.
I didn’t smile back. “It’s the cook’s day off.”
“I’m joking,” he continued. “I’ll have a whisky. You should get more staff, though,” he said, looking around at the bare hall. “More furniture. A decent power supply. I hope you’re complaining.”
“I’m moving onto the compound any day now, so they say,” I said.
“And tell any woolly liberals who make a fuss about servants that you’re creating employment, which is true. It’s the least we can do if we’re living in their country. Mind if I smoke? I’ve been gagging for a stogie all day.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. I watched as he pulled out a large cigar and started to pick away at one end with a small penknife.
“Is there anywhere to sit around here?” he asked, looking hopefully through a glass door which led to the sitting room.
I opened the door, gesturing for him to enter, and then fixed us both a whisky in the kitchen. When I returned, he was sitting down on a sofa lent to me by Frank and Susie, his feet up on a chucki, a low circular grinding board. It had been converted into a glass-topped table by a furniture shop in Haus Khas village, where I had bought it on my second day in Delhi. I put the whisky down on it, next to his suede brogues, and then the bottle, which I had brought in from the kitchen on a small cane tray I had bought at the Assam State Emporium on the same day. I took the tray away again, feeling like a bearer, and sat down on the top of two marble steps that separated the sitting room from a dining area. Jamie continued to pick away at the cigar, humming to himself, occasionally pulling at the end with his teeth. He glanced up, catching me watching him.
“It’s called a coheba,” he said, holding the cigar like a paper dart. “After the CIA tried to kill Castro with an exploding cigar, he decided not to take any chances and employed his own roller. These are what he made. The best stogie money can’t buy.”
“I’m sure you haven’t come all this way to talk about cigars,” I said, suddenly resenting his presence, wishing he would remove his feet from the chucki.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’d travel a long way if someone was really interested.”
There was a pause in our conversation, a missed beat, which unsettled me more than it did Jamie. What was he doing here, anyway? Eight o’clock on a Sunday evening?
“Frank and Susie,” he began, answering my question. “Friends of yours?”
“They’ve been very good to me,” I said, taking a large sip of whisky.
“Completely troppo, aren’t they?”
“Troppo?”
“Tropical. Gone native. Donned the turban.”
“They’re big fans of India,” I said.
“That’s one way of putting it. Not so keen on Britain, either.”
“No?”
He shook his head, leant back and blew smoke high into the air. I watched it swirl under the central light, which was flickering faintly, underpowered by an overworked generator.
“Frank was a very active member of the Communist Party of Great Britain,” Jamie said. “A long time ago, admittedly, but it’s one of the reasons he left in the end. He was frustrated by their waning influence. I think the number of times the police brought him in also had something to do with it.”
The police? Jamie wasn’t describing the Frank I knew. I thought back hastily to our last meeting, his comments on the nuclear tests. Armchair CND, perhaps, but not the sort to bother the police.
“He seem
s harmless enough to me,” I said, trying to process the implications of the whole conversation. “Is there a problem?”
“You tell me,” Jamie said, switching his gaze suddenly from the ceiling to me. I turned away from his eyes, watching more smoke eddy in the dim light.
“I went round there for dinner on Friday,” I said.
“I know.”
How did he know? “His son had been very sick.” “Listen, Raj, being a doctor out here is meant to encourage others to drop their guard, not your own. He’s a no-no, okay? A security risk, a neg-vet as the Americans say, just the sort of person you spend time with when you’re working for me, only I didn’t know. Not until I heard later.”
“Who from?”
“Does it matter?” he said, pausing. It must have been Ranjit, all those questions about my job at the High Commission. “Did you know Frank’s applying for Indian citizenship?”
“No, I didn’t,” I replied, getting up to pour myself another whisky. I glanced at Jamie’s glass, which was empty. He held it up, rocking it from side to side as if he were ringing a bell, gesturing to a bearer.
“I’ll be honest with you, Raj.” He had sat back in the sofa, half lost in the smoke and weak lighting. “We have no idea where his sympathies lie. I just don’t want you relaxing with people like him. Not now, not when we’re about to embark on something so sensitive.”
“What exactly are you saying? That I shouldn’t see him again?” I asked, reluctantly filling his glass and taking my own back to the step.
“There are a lot of interesting expats in Delhi, that’s all. I know it’s tricky at the beginning, the first six months can be hell, but you’ll meet a lot of good people out here. I’ll see to it, personally.”
Jamie let himself out shortly afterwards, taking his coheba with him, though not its smoke, which lingered long after he had gone. I hadn’t told my father about my extracurricular duties in Delhi. If I could have picked up the phone there and then, talked to him, I would have told him that I regretted ever having got involved. It had been a decision taken with the best patriotic intentions, at a time when I was excited at the thought of working for the Foreign Office. Now I was wondering, too late, what my real motives had been. It was almost as if I had done it to shore myself up against India; another line of defence in case she had begun to pull in the night.
