Out of India

by Michael Foss

  In his pocket he had Wavell’s dismissal and the last orders for British India.

  *

  Was it part of the VJ Day celebrations, the production of Macbeth that the British in Delhi put on? Proof that we too could go beyond bombast and uniforms and compete artistically with Fauji Dilkush Sabha, the Indian version of our ENSA troop entertainment, that was enrapturing native sepoys with lusty comedies and scenes from the Ramayana and the decorous litheness of dancing-girls? In any case, our theatricals were taken seriously, and my brother was chosen amid much competition to play the son of Macduff. For a while he was too preoccupied to quarrel, mouthing lines as he walked in tight circles around our bedroom floor. ‘Thou liest,’ he muttered, ‘thou shag-hair’d villain.’ It still didn’t sound quite right. I sat on my bed with my knees up, watching with something between jealousy and wonder.

  The performances were in the open air. The night I attended, clutching my mother’s hand, the sky was dark velvet, as soft as swaddling clothes, pinned with diamond stars. It was very warm; people were rustling programmes, fanning themselves, women lifting skirts from the clammy cling of the chairs. But my concentration hardly wavered. Entranced, I awaited the moment – Act IV, Scene ii.

  What was this? This was family, between mother and son. Survival was the issue. I listened carefully.

  ‘And what will you do now? How will you live?’

  ‘As birds do, mother.’

  ‘What! with worms and flies?’

  ‘With what I get, I mean; and so do they.’

  ‘Poor bird! thou’dst never fear the net nor lime, /The pit-fall nor the gin.’

  ‘Why should I, mother? Poor birds they are not set for. /My father is not dead, for all your saying.’

  I was amazed. Did this speak to us intimately? Then I was frightened, seeing my father, and yet not seeing him. No, no, this was nothing – play-acting – surely we would go on. Nothing had come to an end, despite the marching men, the fireworks, the frown on Father’s face, the dull steps, the irritability. Shortly, we would leave Delhi, sip no more the polluted water.

  Some part of me wanted to cry out, with the First Murderer, ‘Let it come down.’

  TEN

  Blue Hills of the South

  HISTORY IN NORTH India was beginning to be written in chapters of riot and violence. Dead bodies made brutal statements. Karachi, Poona, Cawnpore, Allahabad, other places less well-known, were turning into cities with too many reasons for tears. In Calcutta and West Bengal a Muslim-declared hartal, or general strike, met furious Hindu resentment. In two nights of communal convulsion, how many killed? A police estimate was 5,000. Such a press of maddened people, emotions raw to the nerve-ends, willing slaughterers with so many to kill.

  But this violent din reverberated far away from my young consciousness. Distant perturbations made no more noise for me than the movement of continents, the first winds of the monsoon, or the crumbling of empires. On the whole, we carried our own ease and security with us wherever we went. Calmly we stood on Delhi station under a cliff of luggage, waiting while a monster locomotive, with giant wheels and covered with a labyrinth of pipes and tubes, fussed itself into order, flooding the already foul air with a smother of steam and soots from low-grade coal. My father had been posted from Delhi back to his own Indian Army Division stationed in the Deccan. We were heading south.

  The south starts at the line of the Vindhyas, or thereabouts. Loosely connected ranges of hills, west to east, close off the southern peninsula from the great plains of the north, and here the Aryan invaders stopped. The plains of the big northern rivers gave them enough territory to chew on for a long moment of history. Later, the Aryans did penetrate through the breaches of the hills into the sea-girt triangle of the peninsula, going as far as the tip of Cape Comorin and taking Brahmanism, the vedanta and their characteristic caste system with them. And with the roll of time the Muslims followed them, dotting the southern land with Islamic kingdoms, principalities, robber baronies and pirate castles.

  But all the time the south resisted in its own supple, subtle way, keeping its own Dravidian languages, being deliberately behind the times, doing things in its own backhanded manner. Five prohibitions, wrote the early lawgivers, distinguish the people of the south: eating with one who is not initiated, dining with women, eating food kept overnight, marrying the daughter of a maternal uncle, and marrying the daughter of a paternal aunt. Life was intimate, private, undemonstrative, convivial, encircled by old pacts and runes, hidden enough to make the southern historian wince at the paucity of his material. The story of the north was spectacularly well-documented by Aryan records; the ancient southlands were largely silent. So many ferments important to future civilization began in North India. By the time they had flushed down to the south they registered little more than a mild after-taste, accommodated with tact or with sensible resignation, accepted like the tropical sun on the backs of the native fishermen. Things that could not be avoided. The south countered dangerous and novel explosions in society with longevity, endurance, assimilation. The people were the root from which the peculiar variety of the Indo-Aryan stock grew. ‘The scientific historian of India,’ wrote one member of that fraternity, ‘ought to begin his study with the basin of the Krishna, of the Kaveri, of the Vaigai, rather than with the Gangetic plain, as has been now long, too long, the fashion.’

  Lacking facts the traveller to the south entered a world of murmurs, dreams, partial memories, conjectures, reticence, and finally silence.

  For four days or so our railway carriage became our inviolable shell. We camped in there in a safe dimness, taking the measure of the world through the slatted blinds over the windows, opening the door only when it suited us. At night, the upper bunks, tipped up against the walls, were swung down and spread with bulky bedrolls in their stiff canvas covers. Meals were taken on the move. During leisurely halts at the larger stations the bearer, coming at a run from the back reaches of the train, was sent to bring tin tiffin boxes from the station restaurant. Sometimes, at a junction, the stop was long enough for us to climb down, shaking out cramped legs, and then saunter on to the restaurant. Afterwards there might be a moment for a brief stroll, sometimes bathed in scarlet sunrise, sometimes seeing dusk creep in under the wings of flying foxes. Walking about we knew that we would be called in time. The train would not depart without due warning to the white sahibs. And if haste cut short a meal, hunger was served at every wayside halt by a host of food-vendors clamouring against the windows, holding up trays of pan or roti or or samosa or bhaji, or slopping warm tea from urns into small bowls of clay. Then the engine hooted and the driving wheels slipped and gripped, long plumes of smoke or steam made ghosts of the still-shouting vendors, and slowly we were on our way.

  With Delhi and the north left well behind, the train twisted through the green gates of the hills, creaking up and down, and then loosened its stride onto the long sunlit spread of the Deccan, at one with its racing shadow, huffing and shoo-shooing just like a child’s toy, thumping on the indifferent railbed as if to a syncopation on the tabla drums. We swayed soporifically in the privacy of our carriage-caravan, voyeurs, fleeing uncommitted across the high table-land of boulder and scrub and hard-worked earth. We were drowsy in the heat of the day, sipping from a Thermos, napping, playing I-spy from the window, counting the varieties of rib-gaunt domestic beasts. At irregular intervals the wheel-note changed, registering a sudden alarm, a slow deep hammering indicating the beginning of a bridge. Then the train eased itself gingerly over the wide dirty waters of the Wardha or the Godavari or the Krishna or the Pennar, cautiously stitching bank to crumbling bank over the naked backs of river-folk sounding the buff current with poles and oars and nets.

  Abruptly, the tropical evening drained light from the sky. Then I slept wonderfully in the cradle of my bunk, as if rocked by the hand of the primeval nurse.

  At Bangalore we paused in our journey, resting for a couple of days in a transit hostel for officers’ fa
milies. In the large grounds, fat jungly plants overflowed the paths. Outrageous flowers were like splashes from the paint-pot of a tipsy god. In the dining-room, under a heavy, frayed punkah, rice was served rather than the thin breads of the north. Fruits new to me had thick horny skins, rough and blotched. Somewhere nearby a violin was being played in the South Indian manner, wailing up and down in tremulous slides, the sound strangely familiar but the musical matter utterly alien, like a human voice crying in unknown tongues. A mridangan drum gave a beat, small pebbles falling into the pool of a deep cave.

  The people were slight and short, a companionable height for a boy. Already the great raw length of the Europeans was looking out of place, the reddened, peeling skin and tow-coloured hair set off against dark faces, glossy black hair and smiles suddenly switched on with the clarity of electric lights.

  The sun seemed more concentrated, an unforgiving eye, glaring through folds of sticky heat. The south was welcoming us.

  *

  Our destination was the hill town of Coonoor in the blue hills of the Nilgiris. The problem of education had arisen once more. Needing something more regular than the episodes of eccentric or indifferent schooling in the north my brother and I were being sent to a boarding school in the hills for the children of the Raj, a small enclave of white boyish faces that studiously followed the pattern and ethos of the British ‘prep’ school. We British were always backing away towards some atavistic line of defence, some bolt-hole from which we could scan the territory in safety, without giving ourselves away.

  After the sudden glimpse of Bangalore, with all that I could surmise about a new slant to life in a new-looking country, the rest of the journey to the Nilgiris felt like a retreat. At the foot of the mountains, at Mettuppalaiyam, we transferred to the undersized train that made the 17-mile ascent to Coonoor. A little tubby engine struggled uphill, pushing a few carriages, each one as intimate as a closet, up the rack-and-cog railway. The effort looked incongruous, as if reluctant elephants were being shoved backwards into steep places where they did not want to go. From time to time the engine stopped and panted, breathing heavily out over the sharp-edged ghat and the pale, heated plain. At about 6,000 feet the train came to rest in a micro-climate so temperate and comfortable, so fanned by lazy breezes, that the British, preoccupied as always with the weather, could hardly stop talking about it.

  ‘Wonderful weather,’ was the greeting in the street, and with a sense of gratitude at finding such a thing in India, ‘yes, another lovely day.’

  At the head of Hulikal ravine the lower town and the bazaar huddled around Coonoor station, cramming into the niches of the hills. Hardworking rickshaws made the short climb to the upper town. Here the spacious eyries of the Raj, in stone or local brick, commanded the views like so many captains on the bridge. In this part of the town the sense of familiarity for the British was so pervasive that it must have been a work of the unconscious, since something more studied or deliberate would have stood out like a film-set. But this townscape had all the marks and tell-tales of a favourite old coat, form-hugging, weathered beyond fashion, noticed only in absence. Memsahibs in sensible laced shoes wore light cardigans against the morning air. Small pert dogs followed them on leads for a round of the shops. Sahibs buttoned tweed jackets and struck the hilly paths with stout walking-sticks. Vigorously they strode into town, enjoying once again the pleasure of a walk, having endured for too long the sweat-soaked, fly-pestered, foot-swelling weariness of the plains. Dropping down through the mottled shade of eucalyptus and Australian wattle they heard the town cooing to them, promising the warmth of memories and the safety of home, like a nanny presiding at the nursery tea.

  A shop window showed a row of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books. The barber’s shop displayed the proper candy-striped pole. A tea-shop served Huntley & Palmer biscuits. A poster for film-night at the Club offered Douglas Fairbanks in cutlass-wielding splendour. Sim’s Botanical Gardens respectfully solicited a visit. The ride by charabanc to Ootacamund was recommended. Sunsets seen from the mountain road were particularly fine.

  We had arranged accommodation a little beyond the upper town. Going by broad domed pastures of hummocky grass, looping around clefts and gullies thick with stunted trees, we followed a well-kept road bordered with heliotrope and fuchsia to the geranium-scented lawns of Uplands. Here the owner, Mrs Sharp-Smith, spun out her widow’s evening surrounded by the spoil and booty of a hundred years of tight-fisted imperial commerce, all packed into an elegant colonial bungalow. Amid the fabulous knick-knacks in silver and bone-china, the boule cabinets and the tapestries, the silk Persian rugs and the figures in marble or terracotta, the old matriarch surveyed her domain, propped against the many pillows of her daybed, feeling the after-warmth of successful enterprise flow in through the french windows from her wide acres beyond.

  At the end of the cascade of well-trimmed grass, under tall eucalyptus trees, stood a small square bungalow, converted from what used to be servants’ quarters. We were permitted to rent this little house.

  *

  The man was rubbing long bony hands. The flesh on his face was pulled back to the skull. His voice was hoarse and deep, suggesting the security of the grave.

  ‘Yes, dear lady,’ he was saying, ‘our syllabus is very carefully tailored to the needs of schooling back home. And my wife, of course, personally looks after the welfare of the boys while they are here at Highlands.’

  My father had returned to soldiering in the Deccan. We were about to join the attenuated little flock of sixteen boys, the boarders at Highlands School. While the headmaster, Mr Mitchell, was reassuring my mother with a tour of the premises, I was trying to take stock of our new situation.

  The school was poised high on the long slope of Tiger Hill. The low building was designed in the familiar colonial style, with light, airy rooms opening straight onto a field of rough-cut grass. The world appeared to slope away from the school, the eye tumbling off the steep escarpment and floating free over the plains far below. Oblivious to the view a small group of boys was horsing around on the grass, riding piggy-back and trying to unseat each other, like medieval knights in the lists. These boys eyed us newcomers without enthusiasm. So far as I could see, there was only one Indian boy in their midst.

  There was a melancholy about the place – an abode of vanishing memories. The numbers in the school could never have been large, the buildings were too small, but now the whole school – the few boys and the fewer staff – sensed a tailing down, approaching a rick in the smooth flow of England’s destiny. Dwindling band though we were, Mr Mitchell did his best to leave us undismayed. He spoke much of ‘us’, meaning the whole history of the British in India. He would not demean the ‘natives’ – certainly not, excellent people – but in all honesty what was there in the Nilgiris before ‘we’ came? The pastoral, tattooed Todas with their buffalo-haunted rituals, or the shy, magic-wielding Kurumbas of the woodlands? A few lonely forts, part of a defensive line formed by Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan? A Roman coin, they say, was found in Ootacamund.

  All that changed. Tipu was defeated and killed at Seringapatam in 1799, and his kingdom passed into the possession of the East India Company. Lowland Englishmen, forever seduced by mountains, climbed into the hills, in search of flora and fauna, and remarked on the sweet balm of the climate. Mr John Sullivan, the Collector for the Company at Coimbatore, arrived in 1819. Perhaps he saw the hillsides of Strobilanthes in bloom, a vast and vivid blue that drowned the hills and then died, as they did once every seven years. He became an enthusiast and propagandist for Nilagiri – the ‘Blue Mountains’ – of the local tribes. In 1827 a sanatorium for the Europeans of the Madras Presidency was established at Ootacamund, a few miles uphill from Coonoor. This became the chief town of the mountains. Governor Lushington himself began to take a keen interest. ‘It will be the glory of Mr Lushington’s government,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘without extravagant hyperbole, that he introduced Europe into A
sia, for such are his improvements in the Nilgiris.’

  No one questioned what Europe was doing in Asia in the first place. And as to the improvements, ‘just look around,’ said our headmaster, gesturing grandly in every direction. Out of ‘our’ sense of responsibility, and hard work, came a worthy legacy. Look at those very extensive tea and coffee plantations on the lower slopes of the hills. The cinchona trees, the source of quinine, introduced from South America under the patronage of Sir Clements Markham. Berkshire pigs established and successfully crossbred with a Chinese variety. A Western stock of horses raised at Masnigudi, to the joy of the local hunt. Low-grade gold-bearing ores mined in the 1880s (a dubious enterprise leading to the boom and bust of a speculative bubble). A cordite factory at Wellington. More cheerfully, and with greater profit, four breweries established in the towns of the hills, and one distillery at Aravanghat. Even the ever-present eucalyptus and wattle trees were a gift from the Raj, being introduced from Australia to replace forests denuded by the great building boom after Governor Lushington had done his work.

  But most dear to Mr Mitchell’s heart was Ootacamund, queen (as people told each other much too often) of India’s hill stations. The litany of its rich features brought a smile to the headmaster’s face: Government House, St Stephen’s Church, Charing Cross, the Civil Courts in redbrick gothic, good old Spencer’s store, the Club (where the game of snooker was invented) and the Gymkhana Club, Fernhill and Aranmore (the summer palaces of maharajahs), and the stuffy old mansion of the Nizam of Hyderabad. On the fringes of the town, in invigorating mountain air, were the polo ground and cricket field in Hobart Park, and the golf course sharing Wenlock Downs with the followers of the Ootacamund Hunt, ardent pursuers of the tricky hill-jackal with hounds brought specially from England. Even the tall surrounding peaks of Doda Betta, Elk Hill and Snowdon, each over 8,000 feet, were somehow blessed, standing watch above carefree and glorious Ooty.