by Michael Foss
Mr Mitchell had the eye of vision but the daily grind of teaching seemed beneath the dignity of a headmaster. Most of our lessons were taken by Mr Jones, a middle-aged bachelor of great experience whose impassive face refused to be surprised by any foible of youth. He would rap the desk and quell even the most turbulent spirit with a stony, prolonged stare. Then the rebel would look down in confusion and Mr Jones would allow himself a fleeting grin, briefly revealing tobacco-stained teeth. He was a polymath who appeared to grasp the elements of all subjects, at least at our low level, and I wondered even then at his presence in this outpost of scholarship. Looking back I recall that he was an MA of London, not Oxford or Cambridge, and perhaps that had condemned him to colonial drudgery. Snobbery drove as many to India as did poverty. Or perhaps the spring of youth had carried him tumultuously to foreign adventure. If so, nothing of that rashness was apparent now. Was he content with his exile? For us students there was no way of telling. He gave nothing away. He served. That was enough.
We wore a uniform, prickly shorts, long socks, and gathered each morning for a communal prayer, eyes respectfully cast down before our undemanding Anglican God. The moment was more convention than worship and easily embraced Adi, our one Indian boy, who came from a rich Parsi family. He did not object and murmured his pieties with the rest of us. Though there were too few students for proper team games, hack-abouts on the bumpy grass were encouraged, loosely patrolled by the headmaster who permitted any sporting sin except swearing and loss of temper. Often we were called together for long hikes, where instruction was still mixed with recreation. We panted through dappled forest on steep hillsides with eyes open for unusual plants or geographical formations, or for the scuttering of some small beast in the undergrowth. Out of breath we paused at the clifftop, plucking guavas, while Mr Jones explained that from this height we could see exactly 109 miles in the direction of Madurai. He had worked it out by trigonometry, which seemed to me, having not reached that far in the textbook, a very smart magic.
In the evening, we sat at two long trestle tables, poking at sweet potato and mung beans and purple vegetables that we did not much like. Before bed we stripped in the dormitory and ran naked to the bare cement bathhouse where Indian servants filled small zinc tubs with hot water carried in old jerry-cans from an outside boiler. We splashed and larked, but once when the horse-play got out of hand Mr Mitchell beat the lot of us without distinction, incensed not so much by the mess (the servants would clear that up) but by the wanton waste of soap, which was an item provided for us from the school inventory.
*
The Hindu kingdom named after Vijayanagar, the ‘City of Victory’, one of the ancient realms of South India, had developed, bloomed luxuriously, then lay broken and abandoned on the south bank of the Tungabhadra River. After many years of neglect, the riot of exuberant monumental architecture lapsed in rural peace into a state of stones wrapped in the roots of banyan trees.
This old kingdom was the touchstone of southern Indian glory, the demonstration of what had been and the lament for what was no longer. The ruins were almost forgotten, but the story somehow entered, in a manner as fragmented and incomplete as the buildings themselves, into our dormitory tales. Where had these tatters of storytelling come from? Was it Adi the Parsi, a worldly and knowledgeable boy rather older than most of us, who had started us going? In garbled accounts after lights-out, in low voices while the scents of the Indian night drew us back from sleep, we went in search of the fabulous, perhaps with the same lazy drift and insecure geography with which the Arthurian knights had gone wandering into mystic country in their pursuit of Sarras and the Grail.
With wonder and inaccuracy we lost ourselves in stories of a city more extensive than the eye could reach, of temples so large and splendid that gods themselves could walk there at ease, of palaces with so many rooms that some were never visited or mapped, of an elephant house like celestial lodgings, of a king dressed in white silk with flowered embroidery encrusted with jewels who never wore the same garment twice. We spoke of riches and cruelty, of diamonds as big as a fist, of gold weighed by the half-ton, of criminals suspended by a meat-hook under the chin, of widows burnt abominably in the practice of suttee. We boasted, as if they were our own, of armies blotting out the ground with semi-naked warriors, of battle-elephants made drunk before fighting, of embassies escorted by 50,000 horsemen. Most of all, we whispered about women, beings almost unknown to us, but whose forms were beginning to break into our dreams, hopes and delirium. In ill-formed imagination we saw kings with too many wives and innumerable concubines, temples with thousands of dancing-girls said to give services of a lascivious kind that we could not as yet name. Night-long feasts and entertainments reeled through our minds where horses and elephants also danced and eunuchs discreetly threaded the throng with messages of assignation and love.
Exhausted by the mystery of a grandeur and an excess that seemed to me superhuman, I fell back at last into the relief of sleep.
Reality, I learnt later, was richer than dreams. Contemporary chronicles by Domingo Paes and Fernão Nuniz, Portuguese travellers who visited the great king Krishnadeva Raya at Vijayanagar in the 1520s, pictured a genial megalomania, a baroque extravagance, that outdid anything in Europe. Louis XIV, the Sun King, was a stammering princeling compared to Krishnadeva. This plump man with marks of smallpox on his face, wrote Paes, was ‘the most feared and perfect king that could possibly be’. He was a cheerful soul who drank a pint of sesame oil at daybreak, then lifted weights and wrestled and practised sword-play until the oil was sweated out of him. He had a merry disposition, but beware of his rage!
It was clear that this king operated on a different human level, raising up on the foundation of his absolutism a social, intellectual and moral structure dizzy in its extent, stupefying in the richness of its detail, and most daring in its claim to power over things of the earth and things of the mind.
Domingo Paes stood on a hill in Vijayanagar and could not see where the city ended. And who could divine the limits of the king’s wishes? Even the most ordinary of his desires, the thirst for conquest, seemed to stretch the possibilities of human accomplishment. When, in 1520, Krishnadeva marched against Adil Shah of Bijapur, and they met at Raichur on the bank of the Krishna River, the army of Vijayanagar numbered 703,000 infantry, 32,600 cavalry and 551 elephants. Numerous camp followers brought this host to over a million. Should we believe the reliable Nuniz? That was nothing, wrote the equally reliable Paes, at a pinch the king could raise even two million.
This was in the South Indian tradition, an ingrained way of glory. Former dynasties – Chalukyas, Pallavas, Pandyas, Cholas, Hoysalas, even the Muslim Bahmanis – with lesser means had still acted up to the hilt. ‘Accept this purse of gold,’ said an earlier king of Vijayanagar to a Persian ambassador, ‘since we may not eat together, this is the feast I give you.’ Largeness of the soul mattered. It was demonstrated by great works, great ambition, great display, great success, but also great waste and loss, and great falls. The mere human was expendable (the life of man, in any case, had but a short run), but acts and spirit endured. The courtiers of Bahmani wore jewels on the instep of their slippers, but the chances of their lives lay hidden in the hands of the sultan. The jewels still glint in the annals of time, the names of the courtiers are utterly lost.
Highlands School taught us well. I learnt much about England, though I lived thousands of miles away. I read Harrison Ainsworth and Rafael Sabatini, and knew something about Danelaw, and began my acquaintance with Euclid and my long battle with algebra (how strange that we were never told of India’s gift of the zero to the world of numbers). I kicked footballs here and there, and whacked a cricket ball cross-batted into the bushes of the hillside. I stood and held out my hand stoically when I had broken the rules, then jammed my stinging palms into my armpits, trying not to blubber. But something appeared to be missing from this education. In odd moments, when faced with the thundering verities on the bla
ckboard, I thought wistfully of the wild tales of Vijayanagar, so preposterous and heart-lifting, that stumbled mouth to mouth in the untrustworthy whispers of the dormitory.
Listening to them I, a boy of the Raj, grew into something more than an English boy. I became a participator, however remote, in a stranger, larger humanity.
ELEVEN
In Churchill’s House
LORD RAMA, IT was well known, had visited this site on the bank of the Musi, in the days when the river ran free and many gods roamed the land. Some miles to the north and east, in the scrabble of calcareous rock and lowering boulders, was the hill of Kadam Rasul which, legend had it, bore an imprint of the Prophet’s foot. Midway between these holy places was the camp of the interlopers, the 20 square miles of the Secunderabad cantonments where, since before the days of the Mutiny, the soldiers and the allies of the Raj kept watch. They were always in readiness, and among the stratagems they used was the trick of the old game: divide and rule. In those days they could discern the face of the enemy, ever-changing though he was. But now, it hardly mattered who was friend and who was foe. Well-wishers and implacable opponents alike were agreed on one thing, and the message was clearly understood. It was time for the British to let go. There was no longer any room for the Raj between Lord Rama and the Prophet Mohammed.
*
In the cantonment village of Bolarum, on the outskirts of Secunderabad, my father had been assigned a house in which Winston Churchill had once lived. That was in Churchill’s swashbuckling military days, in the early years of the twentieth century, when the Raj was set for the long haul, and young Churchill carried forward the interests of empire on his own jaunty shoulders. I saw a photo of him from this time – the cavalry officer’s glad-rags, the insouciant chubby face beneath a regimental topee canted at a provocative angle. The face wore that expression later to be so well-known, the look of cheerful belligerence that was almost a smirk. He was surveying the imperial territory around him and approved it as right and well-founded and set to endure.
His house in Bolarum – now our house – also looked built to survive. It was a large granite bungalow, designed in what seemed to be a modification of Scottish baronial style. Two short wings flanked a massive central portion rising like a bold forehead over a long curved verandah. The roofline of rough-cut stones had a look of crenellations and defences. It was a cool, commodious house, rooms with shuttered windows and high ceilings shady against the sunlight, set well away from other houses in about half an acre of grounds. In the front were flowerbeds and a driveway of swept earth; in the back rank grass and low scrub under a few droopy trees cut off the bungalow from the servants’ quarters in the far corner – a row of small hutches in cracked and weather-stained plaster, like discarded boxes for old shoes. Beyond the granite gateposts of the front entrance, holding their discipline against the wild embrace of the bougainvillaea, across a quiet unpaved road, the open space of the maidan began. This gave way to a golf course, not much used but always carefully tended, with the sandy ‘browns’ (the turf was too coarse and sparse for proper ‘greens’) as closely combed as regimental haircuts.
Then, beyond this, at some undefined point, demarcation became blurred. The shape of the present, with its insistent political and economic plans, faded into the ancient elements of the countryside. Sight strained against a vast expanded sky that gave the eye no place to rest, no surety of an end.
When the cooler months came to the Deccan we travelled from the Nilgiris to rejoin our father in Secunderabad. The family was united, but in what sense, and for what end?
The trappings and authority of his command imposed a routine upon my father. Military orderliness kept uncertainty at bay. In the morning his staff-car arrived at seven, before the heat of the day. His tall thin frame, doubled over the bloomer-like khaki tropical shorts, eased into the back seat, and then my father left without fuss or comment, as he had been doing all the years of my young life. He returned at lunch but soon retired for a siesta, lying in pyjamas under the old wheezing fan (my father was an excellent sleeper, with a smoker’s tendency to snore). In late afternoon he went back to his office to round off the working day. The burden was not very heavy. When he bathed before dinner, often I would hear his croaky baritone bouncing out of the tin tub.
Dinner was the important family moment in the day, almost formal, for which we boys were expected to be on good behaviour, washed and combed and with our buttons done up. The table was laid on white linen, our napkins rolled in silver rings. Beside each place was a Japanese lacquered finger-bowl, deep glossy black with a gold interior. Sami, the bearer, had changed from his working day-clothes into full formal dress – long white tunic with a broad cummerbund in the regimental colours, pugree and stiff white turban again showing the regimental colours. The house-boy – the chokra – carried the trays of food a dozen paces from the little outside kitchen (no more than a hut on blocks with a cooker fashioned from two cubes that had been kerosene cans) to the small back verandah. This was Sami’s domain, where my father’s boots and shoes lay in a row and his Sam Browne belt hung on the wall, all buffed to a mirror-like finish. In the corner, below the full shelf of glasses, the bulky GEC refrigerator kicked suddenly into a spasm of throbs.
When Sami served the food, a solicitous ghost at the table (I had grown used to servants), I recall now the competence and quiet dignity of the man. He had worked hard in the service of the Raj. To be bearer in the family of a senior officer was his reward. He had no conception of inferiority, nor of disloyalty to India. Did he think of himself as ‘Indian’? He told me once that he was from the Western Ghats, on the edge of the Deccan. Most likely a Maratha. But I see now just a man proud of his place, his skill, his experience. Deftly he judged the demands of the dinner, that the main dish should not get cold while the soup was being drunk but should be kept warm on the charcoal hot-plate on the back verandah. When he served, a plate with a crest was placed just so, with the crest four-square under the eye. When he moved he was there, and then he was gone, bare feet with slippers kicked off by the back door making no sound on the matting of the floor. If there was laughter at table at some childish crack – I was something of a little comedian in those carefree days – I saw Sami turn quickly away to hide a grin. He would never be impertinent, but he was human, and he spoke excellent English.
The dinner, of course, was firmly British. Nothing to set the gastric juices running. Soup, thick or thin, but generally brownish in colour; chicken, or an egg dish, or a piece of tough meat; vegetables with potatoes (no rice); fruit, or a custard pudding. Only in the matter of vegetables and fruit were the infinite resources of India brought into play, lady’s fingers or aubergine or sweet potato or dal sneaking in cautiously in the place of sprouts or cabbage. After dinner, my mother liked an English chocolate, its surface under the wrapping turning ashy grey in the tropical heat.
After some months in Bolarum, when Sami’s son Rahul had taken us in hand and shown us something of Indian ways, my brother and I supplemented this stodgy fare with spicy Indian messes eaten with fingers and folded chapati in the lee of the cookhouse or squatting on the beaten earth in front of the servants’ quarters. I noticed then that the leftovers from our family table, however plentiful, were thrown to the dogs and chickens.
*
The ladies had come to the house. Some of them I knew by sight – Bunty and Audrey and Halcyon and Begum. It was the mah-jong morning and my mother’s turn to entertain. The ‘girls’ (for so they often called themselves) were in good humour, lighthearted and casually dressed in slacks or sporting clothes. One wore a loose, colourful turban, fashionable in Hollywood films, another wore jodhpurs and boots ready for an afternoon’s riding. Only Begum – lovely, dark-eyed, slinky Begum, young wife of an Indian officer – was carefully dressed in a sari with her face made up to show off her striking features.
My mother was excited. This was her moment. She had discussed the shape of the morning with Sami, giving her order
s, her voice rising at the anxious points. Was the silver coffee-pot polished? And the sugar-bowl? The best china cups, naturally. Biscuits, of course – a good selection from the big round tin. Cigarettes? Make sure both the silver and the sandalwood box were well-filled. And have sherry and glasses ready in case the session went on to lunch. Wear the cummerbund, the regimental colours look so nice. And no need to keep popping in, we’ll tinkle the bell if we want you.
Though I knew nothing about mah-jong I liked to watch it very much. So long as I was quiet I could stay in the background nibbling a biscuit and pretending to read. But the game had my attention. The pattern of play looked rich but obscure, and the pieces were so handsome. My mother had a fine old set in ivory, with bold Chinese characters. When the game began the contest looked complicated to me, both cunning and free-spirited according to the pressures. Sometimes a lady would lounge back in her chair, almost dreaming, cigarette smoke drifting into narrowed eyes. Then one would pounce, springing forward intent upon some artful strategy. Mostly, I kept my eye on the pretty Indian lady. ‘O gosh,’ she would say with a radiant smile when things were going well, and in sticky moments, ‘My dear, so aggravating.’ From time to time she smoked, puffing nervously, as if caught in a naughty act. I noticed she would say ‘Blighty’ for England.
Bets were made in tiny amounts – annas not rupees – just to keep the play slightly daring.
In the pauses for coffee social events were co-ordinated and intently anatomized.
‘On Saturday there’s the cocktail party at the General’s house. I take it that we’re all going?’
‘They say some Indian big-wig is expected – such a bore really – and of course one hardly knows what to wear on those occasions. A pretty dress might look too frivolous – we’re all on our best behaviour now! – but formality is so dull.’
