by Michael Foss
The smart-looking Indian bawled at us to control our dog. But horrified though we were, my brother and I were helpless. No orders could penetrate that concentrated lust to kill. Then the owner of the spaniel took the chain for his own dog, which was lying uselessly over his arm, doubled it into a short length and taking both hands began to whip the bull-terrier with all his strength. The links of the chain bit into the brindled coat but to no purpose. The deadly jaws clamped the windpipe of the little dog until the life was crushed out of it and the limp body trailed like a half-discarded coat. Then the bullterrier was satisfied. It let go and lay quietly panting, registering no ill-effect from the blows of the chain. But we, the human spectators, stared at each other without comprehension, our blankness being an apology for our helplessness. After a moment or two I burst into sudden, racking sobs.
Two days later, in a soft and darkening evening, an Indian lady in a sari came into the courtyard of our hotel and called repeatedly for my mother in a voice rising hysterically. My mother came out onto the first-floor gallery that ran around the courtyard and stood clutching the rail, looking down at the lady below. My mother’s knuckles were white and she would go no further. ‘Yes, what do you want?’ she asked tentatively, though she surely knew the answer. Then into the lengthening shadows the elegant lady spewed a torrent of invective in which reasoned complaint in English for the murder of her dog was flooded out from time to time with spurts in Hindi and a confusion of barrack-room swear words. My mother was transfixed. The complaint she could understand. She had sympathy for the lady in the sari and would give her compensation. But the degree of passion seemed crazy, excessive. It betrayed her breeding. No dog was worth such a ridiculous show. My mother had no words to reply. The naked grief and hatred left her rooted with both embarrassment and fear. Her face was ghostly pale. Hardly ever had I seen her so bereft. After a while she turned her back and went to her room, gently closing her door on cries still wailing into a darkening world.
*
Then our schooling began at Bishop Cotton, and we were not spared the full British treatment. Deprivation, sparse rations, knees raw from compulsory games, the cold sneer of authority, learning driven by the ruler or cane. In shirts and shorts of tough cotton we submitted to a discipline dutifully preserved for us by generations of God-fearing mercantilists and soldiers. It was education by duress in the old hearty manner, fruition through blood and tears. Meekly, we accepted it and even gave thanks in chapel for the privilege of our pain. Our teachers promised us that it instilled what they called ‘backbone’.
This method, laying each boy under the burden of an oppressive group-psychology, tended to make us vulgar and coarse. Under instruction we were sullen, sly, ganging together for solidarity. ‘Please, sir, it was Mullins. We saw him. Jimmy gave him a whack and then Mullins threw the ball at him. It missed and broke the window.’ Collectively we hid behind circumstantial sneaking, giving time and place. Imbued with this herd instinct we found it easier to learn by rote. Every morning a sour-faced bachelor with a persistent cough took our junior class through the multiplication tables. We stood in a small bare room ringing with voices, and the chanted repetition had something like the effect of a mantra. Eyes almost closed we swayed slightly to the simple arithmetic. In a similar manner I could catalogue, in a sing-song voice and without mistakes, all the dates of the reigns of the kings of England. Now, I still remember most of that farrago (with some lapses), such is the force of heavy-handed imprint on a young mind. But what did I know of Chandragupta or Ashoka, of Akbar or Aurangzeb? Those names and their deeds were a blank to me. And Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh were labels without content, no more. Our God inhabited an austere Anglican chapel, though my brother and I, as Catholics, were conscientiously sent by car each Sunday to the RC Cathedral. That far was enough. Beyond that, the school washed its hands of us. To go whoring after the Scarlet Woman of Rome was a personal matter, a lapse in moral taste not very far from the worship of Shiva or Vishnu or Buddha. A superstition, a blot.
Even for the meekest of us, the straitjacket of our schooling chafed unbearably after a time. We had a sense that we were unnecessary prisoners bound by rules irrelevant to the continent we inhabited. In the daily life of children we knew more of India than our parents suspected. So in the breaks, and outside the set hours of lessons, we burst fizzing into the playground, drawn towards the scrublands and borders of native territory. We were bubbling like soda-bottles, and as likely to overflow. Sick of puritans with canes we wanted the loose, messy entanglement of India. We raided neighbouring fields and brought back poles for makeshift goalposts. We traded the blackest words we knew, in both English and Hindustani, with local lads who despised us for our feeble resistance to the iron bonds of our regimentation. In superior numbers we drove them off with stones and clods of dirt. Then peace was made and hands shaken with droll formality, and trade began in comics and sweets and pan and bidis. Occasionally, playfulness would erupt into a rough-house, and when we caught a laggard we kicked him thoroughly. Then tired of football or trading or fighting we retreated to the safety of school grounds and hurled ourselves into a favourite game. We divided into small groups, under the banner of either ‘Maratha’ or ‘Moghul’, and marked out our positions. The aim of this contest was to attack, gain and hold territory. It was a game that required much barging and wrestling, sudden jumps, swift movement, deceptive feints, strategic retreats. It needed both strength and cunning, big louts but also some smart brains.
Years later, when Marathas and Moghuls ceased to be just names to me, I looked back on these games as an unwitting initiation into the very Indian world of the Arthashastra. Kautilya’s ancient military treatise taught that subterfuge, treachery and guile, together with sudden and rapid movement, were the best principles of military strategy. I thought then of Sivaji, the founder of Maratha power, who in 1659, during a truce, welcomed the Moghul general Afzal Khan with an embrace, and in doing so stabbed him in the back with the blades of the bagh-nakh, the steel ‘tiger’s claw’.
*
I was ill again. Showing off on the rim of a steep gully I fell and dislodged a rock that tumbled onto my ankle and cracked a bone. The onset of complications forced me into hospital for a short time. It was a free and easy place, with laxity bordering on negligence. Like some marauding pirate, with my leg in full-length plaster, I hobbled into any ward that took my fancy, whatever the risk of infection. The Indian who looked after my room – I never knew if he was nurse, orderly or cleaner – showed me how to make a hairy rabbit out of a mango stone that had been sucked clean.
I left hospital with a family of these little rabbits and with a few scattered pockmarks; for though no one told me then, in hospital I had been exposed to, and recovered from, a mild attack of smallpox.
In India, as Sivaji knew and incautious Afzal Khan did not, it was wise to keep a careful look over your shoulder.
NINE
Victory
AFTER ONE TERM at Bishop Cotton we left Simla. But we were travelling too much. Journeys that had seemed in the beginning to be unusual fun were becoming wearisome. I wanted to settle down, but now we were on our way to Delhi. Where were we going in the huge and sprawling city? Leaving the railway station not even the tonga-wallah was quite sure of our destination, driving twice around Connaught Circus before he decided on the right exit road.
Delhi had a different air, more febrile and thunder-brewed than elsewhere; even a child could sense the change of mood. In the morning, I liked to watch my father shave. The bearer brought a tray with a cup of tea and a mug of very hot water. Sipping tea slowly my father discarded his dressing-gown, revealing the high wings of his thin shoulder-blades poking from a sleeveless vest. Soberly he carried the hot water into the raw cement hutch that served as our bathroom. Grubby morning light floated down from a high aperture that was more grille than window, flecking blotches of shadow over the ochre water-stains in the basin. As he made his methodical and unvarying preparati
on I watched from the doorway, chewing a finger. I liked to see the white snowdrift of the soapsuds vigorously swirled onto the face, and then the clean path cut by the safety razor as my father cleared a line of soap from his temple to his jaw. He kept his head up and made the skin tight by pinching with his forefinger and thumb the loosening drift of flesh over his adam’s apple. Then he steered carefully around the bristly bank of his moustache. There was something timeless and hieratic in his daily ritual. As he made his appearance trim, so he set his mind in order for the coming day. He wiped the excess suds from his face with a small hand-towel and straightened his long back, thrusting his dark, neatly combed head among the motes swaying in the weak rays of window-light. I thought he looked drawn – tired or despondent. I could not quite express it, but why so much weight and solemnity in such a simple ritual?
The city was full of rumours that we could not fail to catch. The name Subhas Chandra Bose hung in the air, meaning nothing to children, but causing long looks of consternation in adults. At morning coffee among the army wives, and with the early-evening tots of whisky, Bose’s name would suddenly spurt and flare, a dangerous ignition threatening some explosion. Bose himself was dead, killed very recently in a plane crash on the way to Japan. But three men (I learnt later that they were a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh, all officers in Bose’s revolutionary Indian National Army) were awaiting trial in the Red Fort, a few miles to our north in the Old City. Jai Hind – ‘Long live India’ – the rallying-cry of the INA, still produced a roaring in British ears. There had been mutinies in the RAF, ornery young flyers determined to get home to England as soon as possible, followed by mutiny in the Indian Air Force. Even now anger and impatience were fretting away the discipline on the Bombay ships of the Indian Navy. Bold graffiti appeared on the walls of the shore station HMIS Talwar: ‘Revolt Now’ and ‘Kill the British White Bastards’.
‘The natives are getting bolshie,’ a memsahib said, waving her cigarette under the nose of an Indian servant squirting soda into her whisky. ‘Oh, definitely. We’ll have to do something, you know, there comes a time when kindness just won’t wash. I hear that even the Auk is worried. He had to slap down one of those cheeky Congress babus the other day.’
And my father confirmed later that the Auk – the Commander-in-Chief Sir Claude Auchinleck – was indeed worried. That loyal, rugged, devoted soldier of the Raj, with forty years of Indian service and paternal towards all Indians, whom he admired and would have said that he loved could he have got the words out of his choked heart, was only an incomplete politician and the course of Indian history was raging beyond him.
My father was suffering too. He also loved India, and had not enough words to express it. He had been summoned to Delhi, to work in the military secretariat that was planning the whole future of the Indian Army. No one but a fool doubted that independence was coming, and coming soon. India in wartime had earned that, at least. The post-war election of a Labour government in England had waved the express from the siding of history, and Congress and the Muslim League in India had stoked the fire-box with madcap enthusiasm, despite the unresolved problems of the religious and ethnic divide. Gandhi, impish and unreadable, with weak hams and watery eyes, drove from one side of the foot-plate, Jinnah, a thin pillar of rectitude, from the other. The train was unstoppable. My father welcomed its arrival. He had always voted Labour (a rather astonishing thing in an Indian Army officer). He believed in self-determination, and he wanted justice done to India. He set to work, not unwillingly but conscious of inner pain, to dismantle the basis of his life.
*
The tonga put us down at the King Edward VII Hostel, a spare uncomfortable block with sharp edges somewhere in Lutyens-land, between Old Delhi to the north and an older Delhi in the south.
We were adrift in vast urban reaches, tumbled topography lying layer upon layer, formed and reformed by storms of history, but we were without a compass. Rock and river, red sandstone stiffening into marble, Hindu opulence metamorphosing into chaste Muslim, little temples buckling and sinking under the load of much bigger shrines or forts or palaces, and out of this urban humus odd and graceful features arising, pillars, columns, towers, minarets, giant walls, bulb-domes, tombs, heavy mosques as large as city blocks, the light tracery of a devotional building as small as a doll’s house. And ruins crumbling into further ruins, piecemeal structures with functions assigned and re-assigned according to conquests and masters and religions, then neglected, then forgotten, then re-invented, then abandoned, part of the detritus of the human hive, the workers ever busy, using, improvising, jettisoning, respectful to the past in some general way but not remembering just what was that bit of the past.
And between the ideal-city of Shah Jehan in the north and the ideal-city of the Lodi kings and of Firoz Shah in the south stood New Delhi, the lump of Anglo-India dreamed and engineered by Lutyens and his sidekick Baker to supersede the past, to out-shout the dynasties – Hindu or Muslim – and put the cap of worthy splendour on the colourful but disorderly raiment of a thousand years gone.
We were placed among these heavy swells and sea-changes but I hardly saw them, the evidence of time being for the most part below the horizon of a boy’s interest. My father was taken up with the business of empire, working long hours on plans that knocked him breathless, with his career abruptly against the wall. My mother, left alone in our ground-floor quarters, doors wide onto rank grass and the hopeless complication of the Delhi skyline, did not go out if she could help it. She had no curiosity about history or its local tangles, no architectural sense, no interest in antiquities, no particular feeling for Hindu or Muslim culture. Even less thought for Sikh or Jain or Buddhist or Parsi. She was fond of small pretty things – material and jewellery and carving and glassware and rugs and Benares brass – and would admire them if brought to them, and even buy a specimen if it were offered for a slight sum. But she would not willingly stir for anthropology, history or art, and preferred the minimum of movement even for shopping. The climate, of course, was rough on fair-skinned Northerners with freckles, if they were reckless with sunlight.
After breakfast, the bearer came for household orders, standing with a kind of alert humility while my mother made her list. With a wave of the hand she conjured up some simple tasks and dismissed him with a brief nod, hardly noticing his departure, cracked brown heels padding below the stiff whites of his servant’s clothes. Then she was free, but for what? Food or meals were no bother to her, since we ate in the hostel dining-room. She retreated to the intimate world of army wives, a sorority held together, as far as I could see, by cigarette smoke and loud laughter and the minute investigation of petty scandals. These gatherings were leisurely affairs, well-coiffured heads thrown back in the long chairs, feet at rest on a pouffe, a cheerful tinkle of ice. From the outside it was hard to see where the fun lay. Children were not welcome – in fact definitely an encumbrance. ‘Off you go now,’ my mother would say impatiently, when we weren’t at school, ‘I can’t have you squabbling and making a rowdy mess in here. You can see I’m busy.’ Could I see that? In the mornings, it seemed to me, she was taken up with events I did not understand. In the afternoons she slept a little.
So we went out, eagerly and with a superabundance of energy given to the young by the blessing of sun and heat. For us, life in India was lived out of doors. Freedom for the body, released from the tightness of four walls and hardly restrained by the weather, allows a certain freedom in the mind. There was so much strange stuff to note – humans laying out the accumulated wares of their consciousness. My view, I think now, came to be all the wider for my life in the open, more embracing, more pregnant with evidence for a future understanding; for of course the order of history was not clear to me at that time. Nor did I look systematically or dutifully. The vision of the young is not adjusted for sightseeing or the guidebook. But as Delhi was brimful with so many adventures left by megalomania or artistic genius, I could not avoid the brilliant onrush of powerful im
ages.
The hopeless jumble of these stored images: the wild vital human pulses of street-life on Chandni Chowk surging through the Lahore Gate into Lal Qila – the Red Fort – and there transformed into the great running rhythms of Moghul architecture, pure energy transmuted into the purity of noble order; the vast emptiness of the courtyard of the Jama Masjid – the Friday Mosque – lording it over the suffocating sprawl of the Kinari and Chawri bazaars, and the nostril-clenching stench of the Fish Market, offering the peace of prayer for the hagglers and bruisers of commerce; the partial greeds and desires, the race for the winning-post, reconciled on the knees with head touching the earth before the Oneness of Allah; the long urban journey south from Old Delhi, the modern road effacing time, making a blankness of the past out of which arise only the melancholy of tombs, of Lodi kings and Moghul emperors, meandering back to the tall graceful minaret of the Qutb Minar from where the historical cry of the muezzin celebrated victory over the Tomari Rajputs and the first enduring triumph of Islam in India, the conqueror Qutb-ud-din raising his memorial buildings on the remains of many Jain and Hindu temples with the help of Hindu craftsmen and the use of Hindu motifs. The present recapitulating the past.
And then after 800 years, with the revenge of time, Independence Day, through the intervention of the British, gave the city back to the Hindus. The British Raj, too, left its mark, which a child of the Raj, residing in the Edward VII Hostel only a few hundred yards from the King’s Way, could not help but notice.
I see now in my mind the long triumphal route from the Viceroy’s mansion on Raisina Hill to India Gate. The sweeping away of historical clutter in favour of a new imperial vision. I see now the monumental masonry, rhetorical, overblown but powerfully evocative, lonely amid wind-drifts of tarmac bordered by the slight scum on the waters of the ornamental ponds. In my imagination I feel the heaviness, the gravity, of it all, but I see no people. It was a gift to vacant space, that should have been populated but was not, by a new imperial order in India.
