by Michael Foss
‘I met an English subaltern as I got out of the bus,’ Pant related the story to Prem Bhatia. ‘Seeing me dressed in Indian clothes he asked me to carry his bags. “You didn’t do that!” Yes, said Pant, and at the end of the job he gave me two annas. “Why did you do it?” Don’t get upset, he said, I did it deliberately to prepare myself to throw the British out. Let me see how far they will go to humiliate us. The subaltern was a stupid young man – I didn’t mind.’
Perhaps, in the final analysis, empires are stupid too. Just wait, and they will fall apart.
*
There was much to be done. We were leaving, so far as we knew for ever. Wooden crates for furniture were ordered, new trunks bought, stencils of addresses cut, household goods sorted and set aside, ready to be packed for early despatch. My mother and the servants were busy, but without enthusiasm.
My mother was weeding out old clothes, holding garments up to the light, dithering over socks and shirts. Take them or leave them? What did it matter? Suddenly serviceable summer clothes were thrown on the discard pile. The flimsy clothes of India were no use now. England meant drizzles, cold winds, chilblains. Then she would hurry from the room, distracted, the job half done. ‘There you are,’ she would mumble as we passed in the door. ‘Just leave those things, I’ll come back to them. Now where was I?’
In the dismantling of the household my father was little help. External arrangements for passage and transportation were made through military offices. It was enough for him that he kept an eye on this bureaucracy. In the house, he did not care what stayed and what went. My mother had always chosen the household goods – the rattan furniture, the lamps decorated with the Aryan swastika that the Nazis later appropriated (in Sanskrit it means ‘well-being’), the stiff Indian carpets of factory manufacture and doubtful quality, the little felt numdahs, the Benares brassware, the dull wooden carvings, the vases and the knick-knacks. My father’s domestic needs were slight: a comfortable chair, a well-placed lamp, a pile of books, a large ashtray, a modest store of beer. He ate what was put in front of him (so long as it was not too fancy), murmuring invariably, ‘yes, very nice, very nice,’ in an abstracted voice. Then sometimes he looked down at his plate in surprise, wondering what he had eaten and if it had been very nice. He slept wherever a bed was placed and made ready, hurrying into oblivion for as many hours as he could manage.
The servants were touchy and despondent. A stern word to the houseboy sent him away snivelling. Even the older ones looked lost. They had worked hard to fit themselves for the service of the Raj, and for the best ones that service was not just a job but a calling, a vocation, often running in the family. It demanded tact, judgement, charm, a body of alien knowledge (the proper ranking of guests, the correct fork for fish, the right temperature for red wine, the order of the medals pinned on a dress uniform), skill with a foreign language (English), honesty in a land where the little criminalities of bribes, baksheesh and back-handers were not unknown. Now these servants were about to be abandoned. Even the old hands went about with their heads down, not so much sulking but with the accusatory look of loyal followers who had been deceived.
In these days I lost sight of Rahul, our pal, the bearer’s son. Was he lying low out of misery? Had he been sent back to the family village in the Western Ghats? Or was he merely hidden away, redoubling his effort for the exams that were now likely to be more important then ever to him and his family? He was the hope for the future.
I did not ask where he was because, after all, he was only the son of a servant, and I was the young sahib who had not yet learnt how to behave to a human, my fellow, my Indian brother.
*
Preparing for our departure we no longer went to school. Everyone was too busy to mind about us. We mooched about the house and compound, getting in the way. Our bicycles were gone – given away, I think, for they were strange machines of no value, cobbled together from many different parts – and we could no longer ride to the swimming-pool in Secunderabad where our school friends went. But we still, occasionally, had the use of the divisional general’s private pool in Bolarum.
The monsoon had passed leaving a season of mild warmth. For some, it was even too cool to swim. But the rainy days had left all waters swollen and fresh. Just to smell it was invigorating. The small pool belonging to the general was in a slight bowl of the ground, cut off from the house by a thick belt of bushes and trees, many of which, in this season of growth, crowded down on the concrete margin of the pool and overhung the water. A diving-board with frayed coconut matting projected from a steep bank at the deep end. From the board, giving a tentative spring or two, I looked down on the small green solitude of the water, the surface dull, dark, ominous under shadow, hardly reached by the sun except briefly around noon. No one else seemed to use the pool, at least not while we were there. The silence spread over us, as thick as the shade.
Suddenly taking courage in hand I dived into a hidden depth, flinging myself off the board in an act of faith.
*
By the side of the house, in the shade of big trees, Sami the bearer was painting stencilled addresses on the crates while my father was supervising him. They thought they were alone, though I could hear them clearly through the open window of our bathroom where I was enthroned on the thunderbox.
‘Colonel sahib,’ Sami said in a low voice, ‘can you take me with you to England?’
‘No, Sami,’ replied my unemotional father almost tenderly, ‘what would you do there?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps I could work for you. You could help me, you are my father.’
‘Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. There are rules, you know. And you have your family. Times are difficult in England now, after the war. I don’t know what I could do for you. Besides, my own future is uncertain. It would be wrong of me to tell you to go to England and then to find that you were unhappy or without a job and that I could not help you.’
‘Yes, Colonel sahib. Thank you, thank you.’
I peeked cautiously out of the window. Sami was immediately at work painting the stencils again. My father was smoking, seated on the corner of a crate. I do not know who looked the more sad.
*
At Christmas, my parents gave me a box containing a tin fort that had to be assembled in a complicated way, with slits and tabs that were hard to align. I was a difficult boy to please with presents, having no interest in toys and little in books, preferring to spend my time and energy on outdoor adventure. When I had put the fort together, with some ill humour, I saw that it was modelled on a Hollywood version of a Foreign Legion fort. It had sand-coloured walls manned by cut-out figures of soldiers in kepis with ancient, long-barrelled rifles. A tin French flag waved from the battlements. I think there was a camel or two in the background. With surly ingratitude I did not want this fort, finding it anachronistic and unreal, and in the circumstances painful to contemplate. It had nothing to do with the pressing moment of departure. It was also a reminder of sun and soldiers and the vastness of open land under permissive skies where almost nothing was forbidden the privilege of boyhood.
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,
that has few pleasures to recommend it. The people are not handsome. They have no idea of the charms of friendly society, of frankly mixing together, or of familiar intercourse. They have no genius, no comprehension of mind, no politeness of manner, no kindness or fellow-feeling, no ingenuity or mechanical invention in planning or executing their handicrafts, no skill or knowledge in design or architecture; they have no horses, no good flesh, no grapes or musk-melons, no good fruits, no ice or cold water, no good food or bread in their bazaars, no baths or colleges, no candles nor torches, not a candlestick.
Warming to his indictment he lets loose some further salvoes.
Except the rivers and streams that flow in their ravines and hollows, they have no running water of any kind in their gardens or palaces. In their buildings they study neither elegance nor climate, appearance nor regularity. Their peasants and the lower classes all go about naked. They tie on a thing which they call a langoti, which is a piece of clout that hangs down two spans from the navel, as a cover to their nakedness.
So there you have it, and what would you expect in the land of such a people?
The country and towns of Hindustan are extremely ugly. All the towns and lands have a uniform look. In many places the plain is covered by a thorny brushwood, to such an extent that the people of the pergannas, relying on these forests, take shelter in them, and often continue in a state of revolt, refusing to pay their taxes. In Hindustan, the populousness and decay, or total destruction of villages, nay of cities, is almost instantaneous.
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.
EPILOGUE
Where Am I Now?
ABOUT 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-cover
ed 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.
